NEXT WEEK!
Friday, September 21, 2018
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
Launching my author website
I've launched an author website in support of my new book
CLOUD OF WITNESSES
https://janehertenstein.com/
Monday, September 17, 2018
Dream Delivery Service
You are a slightly graying slightly paunchy poet on a
bicycle in the hours before dawn, riding the city streets under arc lights,
steering around potholes, in varying weather. Sometimes coyotes run beside you
until they weary or veer off. This isn’t a dream.
You began out of an existential desperation to find meaning,
or maybe to lose weight, or to vie for fame in the treacherous academic world:
publish or perish. It’s hard to stand out.
So you drop out and climb aboard an ’85 bicycle with a frame
size too big for you. Everything, and I mean everything, you might possibly
need for the next 30 days goes into a pair of panniers and a seal line bag.
You cannot escape your depression or pedal fast enough to
leave yourself behind.
But once in a new town you set up shop. For ten hours a day
you compose dreams—an annoying woman at the Poetry Foundation called you out,
saying they were in fact poems—you cycle out dreams as if they were miles and
then in the early hours of morning you deliver them, 40 – 50 miles per day,
every day, because not for one second do your subscribers stop dreaming. Then
it’s back to the coffee shop and the keyboard and the sombiescent experience of
channeling the dreams of others.
When do you sleep, oh Poet Dreamer?
Check out the work of Mathias Svalina of the Dream Delivery
Service. I heard him speak at the Poetry Foundation: Off the Shelf, where he
inspired poets and cyclists.
Follow him n Instagram and Twitter—because you literally
will exhaust yourself following him
Thursday, September 13, 2018
Wisconsin, state of grace
Memoirous is about memories and using memories to tell
stories.
Memories are also unreliable. We unintentionally leave
things out or embellish. Sometimes the more accurate memories have the ring of
truth to them. What seems to resonate the most are universal experiences where
readers can exclaim: Hey! The same thing happened to me!
Sometimes we end up just giving life and words to the
mundane and everyday.
A few years back I picked up a small “poetry” book by Kyle
White. It isn’t exactly poetry but more a hybrid of observations, comments,
essays, criticisms, and poetry. There is line variation. This book is
monumental in its scope: Wisconsin.
I know, that line made me laugh too.
It is about bundling up in snowsuits. Walking home with your
cheeks stinging. Snot crusting inside your muffler. It is about the horror of
returning to a normal schedule after Christmas break.
Kyle White employs everyday memories in crafting Wisconsin: river of grace. Coming from
the sister state of Illinois and maybe from just being a kid, I can relate to
the book, Hey! The same thing happened to me!
A young boy in his bed, the dark cold mornings, having to
get up for school. You feel like you are at a dead end. No hope. Then! You
remember the next school holiday: Casimir Pulaski Day!
I also enjoyed the piece about the number of times the
writer had been run over—either by bikes or cars, by his family and friends, or
taken out back behind the stands and beaten up by a bully. We are left with the
writer’s memories as well as our own.
The stuff of life.
Monday, September 10, 2018
How to craft a simple, mundane flash by making a list
An example of how to craft a simple, mundane flash, make a list
Little-Known Facts about People
BY JOE BRAINARD
Did you know that Kenneth Koch's wife Janice used to be
an airplane pilot? Once she had to make an emergency landing
on a highway.
When Kenward Elmslie was a kid he wanted to be a tap
dancer. Did you know that Kenward's grandfather was Joseph
Pulitzer?
Kenward once told me that Jane Russell is a dyke.
Andy Warhol wanted to be a tap dancer when he was a
kid too.
D. D. Ryan wanted to be a ballerina.
Did you know that Pat Padgett was Ted Berrigan's girlfriend
for years before she married Ron?
Ron Padgett and I were in the same 1st grade class together
in school in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Ron's father, Wayne, was a notorious bootlegger in Tulsa
until Oklahoma went wet.
A few years ago Ron's father got divorced and married a
beautiful Las Vegas showgirl younger than Ron's wife Pat.
Did you know that Bill Berkson was once bat boy for the
Yankees?
Ted Berrigan married his wife Sandy after having only
known her for five days.
Did you know that the first poems John Ashbery ever had
published were published in Poetry magazine under the name of
Joel Symington?
Did you know that Bill Berkson was on the "1oo Best
Dressed Men" list of 1967?
Rudy Burckhardt once dated Miss Vermont of 1938.
Donald Droll is in some way related to Daniel Boone.
Frank O'Hara once told me that what he really wanted to
be was a concert pianist.
Did you know that Harry Mathews started out to be a com-
poser? He studied at the Juilliard School of Music.
Edwin Denby was born in China.
Anne Waldman's father wrote a book called Rapid Reading
Made Simple.
Tom Veitch's father writes Christmas card verse.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a fashion designer, a
minister, and an artist.
Peter Schjeldahl's father is very famous in the plastic area.
He discovered the new lightweight plastic used in Bufferin bottles.
Soon he hopes to open a contraceptive factory in Red China.
Did you know that Bill Berkson was once on I Remember
Mama?
D. D. Ryan went to see The Boys in the Band with Jackie
Kennedy just a week before she married Onassis.
John Ashbery was a quiz kid.
Kenneth Koch once won the Glasscock Award.
Did you know that Ron Padgett has blebs on his lung
which may explode at any moment? They have exploded twice
already.
Tina Louise once sang "I'm in the Mood for Love" to Bill
Berkson over London broils at P. J. Clarke's.
Did you know that Ted Berrigan did his thesis at Tulsa
University on George Bernard Shaw?
Did you know that the Katz Tumor is named after Ada
Katz who discovered it?
Edwin Denby once performed in Berlin's "Wintergarten"
billed as "Der Amerikanische Grotesktaenzer Dumby."
Yvonne Burckhardt was the backstroke swimming cham-
pion of Connecticut for one week.
When I lived in Boston I used to panhandle on the street
where all of the art galleries were, and I got my cigarette butts
from the urns in front of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Did you know that Ted Berrigan's first book of poems, A
Lily for My Love, was published by the Lenox Bar in Providence,
Rd. Island?
Greta Garbo once called Bill Berkson her ice cream man.
I once went to a "come as your favorite person" party as
Marilyn Monroe.
Did you know that John Ashbery once worked in a cherry
canning factory?
Joe Brainard, "Little-Known Facts about People" from The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. Copyright © 2012 by Joe Brainard. Reprinted by permission of The Library of America.
Source: The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. (Library of America, 2012)
Friday, September 7, 2018
Cloud of Witnesses--ready for pre-order NOW
“The stars and black sky closed over me. I was not Pip with the hope of great expectations, just an eighth grader looking for a lucky break.”
Roland Tanner is looking for a benefactor, someone to rescue him from his family, the sorriest characters he’s ever met: a sister who works at the Curl Up and Dye salon, a brother who takes motors apart in their front yard, a grandmother who flashes him the evil eye from her ragged vinyl armchair, and a father who keeps him at arm’s length. Tested as gifted, Roland gets bused from his poor, rural home to the middle school in town, where his new classmates only see him as a hillbilly.
He is desperate to reach out beyond the power lines that crisscross the hills surrounding the family’s trailer in southeastern Ohio. Yet he’s afraid to step outside of himself to ask Patty to the dance, to stand up for his Muslim friend Hassan, to see that his father loves him. It’s only when he realizes he’s in charge of his destiny that Roland accepts the cloud of witnesses—the saints and sinners all around him—that his future is whatever he makes it.
Age range: 10-13
Grade level: 5-8
234 pages
Fall 2018 publication | $8.99
ISBN 978-1-7320276-2-6 print
ISBN 978-1-7320276-3-3 ebook
Grade level: 5-8
234 pages
Fall 2018 publication | $8.99
ISBN 978-1-7320276-2-6 print
ISBN 978-1-7320276-3-3 ebook
Wednesday, September 5, 2018
What I remember most
What I remember most about my Scanlandia bike ride from
earlier this summer:
Crossing the mountains
Crossing fjords on ferries
Impossibly high bridges
Moose meat stroganoff
Long, slanty light
The sun
Wishing for the sun to come out
Wishing for the sun to go down
Winding down on switchbacks, thinking
this could be
the last day of my life
Mostly what I remember is the fear
a knife-edge,
precipice-inducing fear
the awful
feeling you get
when
lost
when
there are no maps
when
no one knows your name
and you speak an entirely different language
the fear that drives you to make a way when there is no way,
a fear that
numbs you into submission, to accept
that things might not go right, but no matter what you have
to keep going
the kind of fear that creates
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