My Year in Writing 2023
December 6, 2023
Now is the time, between my birthday and the end of the year, when I take stock of my year in writing. This year, which culminated my sixtieth trip around the Sun, has been a pretty productive year.
Here are some of the highlights:
Barzakh Magazine accepts essay, “Açorianidade & the Radiance of Sensibility” just after Xmas! (Published in January)
Reading of Berkshire Writers in Housatonic; read the first chapter of Falling Up. (January)
Guest writer @ Margarida Vale de Gato’s Eco-poetics Masters Class, Universidade de Lisboa via Zoom (January)
Alfred Lewis Bilingual Reading Series, FresnoState PBBI(part of the PBBI-FLAD lecture series 2023), Co-curators: Diniz Borges and RoseAngelina Baptista; Poets: Alberto Pereira, Sam Pereira, PaulA Neves, Scott Edward Anderson, and RoseAngelina Baptista (February)
Guest lecturer, Universidade de Lisboa, Professora Margarida Vale de Gatos’ class on American Literature in person. (March)
Guest speaker, Universidade dos Açores, Ponta Delgada, Professora Ana Cristina Gil’s class, in person. (March)
My essay, “STUDIO LOG: THE TOM TOM CLUB’S “GENIUS OF LOVE,” A MEMOIR AND EXPOSITION IN 18 TRACKS,” lost in the 2nd Round of the Marchxness battle of “One Hit Wonders” to Adam O. Davis’ essay on “In a Big Country” by Big Country. (March)
Installation of my poem. “River of Stars,” on Poetry Path at Ryan Observatory at Muddy Run, and presentation with Michele Beyer (a teacher inspired by my conversation with Derek Pitts in November 2022) to write poetry with her class. (April)
Interview by Francisco Cota Fagundes published in Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-American Letters and Studies, XLVII, as part of a special issue devoted to Celebrating Portuguese Diaspora Literature in North America. (Spring)
Guest lecturer, University of California at Santa Barbara, Portuguese literature class, Professor André Corrêa de Sá. (June)
“Love & Patience on Mt. Pico” (essay) published in The Write Launch (July)
“Through the Gates of My Ancestral Island” (essay) published in Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature (July)
“Orpheu Ascending,” a review of Orpheu Literary Quarterly, volumes 1 and 2, translated from the Portuguese by David Swartz, published in Pessoa Plural—A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies, Issue 23 (July)
Seeing—Reading—Writing: Transforming Our Relationship to Language and Nature: A Workshop with Ryan Shea and Scott Edward Anderson at The Nature Institute, Ghent, NY (July)
Creative nonfiction mentor, Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program, mentored two students. (July)
“Birds in the Hand: The Berkshire Bird Observatory’s Impassioned Ben Nickley” (article) in Berkshire Magazine. (July)
Poetry booth, “Zucchrostic poems,” at West Stockbridge, MA, Zucchini Festival (August)
Two poems in Into the Azorean Sea: A Bilingual Anthology of Azorean Poetry, translated and organized by Diniz Borges, published by Letras Lavadas in São Miguel and Bruma Publications, Fresno State. (August)
Meet & Greet at The Book Loft in Great Barrington, MA. (Sept)
“Berkshire Brain Gain” (article) published in Berkshire Magazine (Sept)
Dedication of Binocular telescope at Ryan Observatory at Muddy Run and poems by Ada Limón and Gabe Catherman installed on Poetry Path. (October)
Visited Praia da Vitória on Terceira Island, Azores, birthplace and boyhood home of Vitorino Nemésio. (October)
Participated in Arquipélago de Escritores in Angra on Terceira Island. (October)
Met António Manuel Melo Sousa in Ponta Delgada with Pedro Almeida Maia (see related entry below) (October)
Guest lecturer, Fresno State, Professor Diniz Borges’ class on Azorean Literature, presented “Becoming Azorean American: A Diasporic Journey,” (lecture). (October)
“António Melo Sousa, Letras de canções e outros rascunhos – uma apreciação” (review) published in Grotta: Arquipélago de Escritores, #6. (November)
Recorded an episode of “Solo Creatives of the Berkshires” for CTSB-TV, Community Television for the Southern Berkshires, presenting and reading from several of my books. (November)
“Get ‘Hygge’ With It: Cozy Spots and Comfort Food in the Berkshires” (article) published in Berkshire Magazine. (December)
“Seeking My Roots Through a Painter’s Eyes” (essay) published in Revista Islenha, Issue 73, in Madeira, Portugal. (December)
Habitar: um ecopoema, Margarida Vale de Gato’s translation of my book, Dwelling: an ecopoem, gets mention in Paula Perfeito’s Entre-Vistas blog. (27 December)
What a year! I am exceedingly grateful to everyone who has supported my writing over the past year. As Walter Lowenfels wrote, “One reader is a miracle; two, a mass movement.”
Like I said last year, I feel like I’ve been blessed by a mass miracle this year!
Visions Coinciding: Celebrating Elizabeth Bishop’s Centenary
December 5, 2011
Elizabeth Bishop photo from Louise Crane Papers, Beinecke Library.
As readers of this blog know, 2011 marks the centenary of Elizabeth Bishop’s birth. I’ve been trying to celebrate it in as many ways as possible and get to some of the events throughout the year, as well as visiting her grave in Worcester, MA, and promoting her work on this blog and on Twitter by using #EB100.
Last week I attended Visions Coinciding: An Elizabeth Bishop Centennial Conference, organized by NYU’s Gallatin School and the Poetry Society of America.
The conference featured interdisciplinary responses to Bishop and her work, including a slide show and talk by Eric Karpeles exploring rarely seen images of Elizabeth Bishop and a screening of footage from Helena Blaker’s forthcoming documentary on Bishop’s years in Brazil.
The screening was followed by a discussion moderated by Alice Quinn, editor of Bishop’s posthumous collection Edgar Allen Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments
Day two featured two lectures on Bishop’s relationship with Art. Peggy Samuels gave a fascinating exegesis of Bishop’s interest in and influence by the work of Kurt Schwitters and William Benton displayed slides of Bishop’s own paintings, sharing his insights on their context in modern art.
Jonathan Galassi moderated a lively discussion with the editors of recent collections of Bishop’s poetry, prose and correspondence, including Joelle Biele (Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker
All this was followed by a reading by NYU Gallatin students who each read a Bishop poem and one of their own by way of response and, finally, a star-studded lineup of contemporary American poets, including John Koethe, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Mark Strand reading poems by Bishop.
Poet Jean Valentine read Bishop’s translation of Octavio Paz’s “Objects & Apparitions” with the original read by Patrick Rosal. Maureen McLane read from her creative work-in-progress “My Elizabeth Bishop; My Gertrude Stein.”
This week is the opening of Elizabeth Bishop: Objects & Apparitions at the Tibor De Nagy Gallery in New York. The show comprises rarely exhibited original works by Bishop, including watercolors and gouaches, as well as two box assemblages inspired by the work of Joseph Cornell.
The exhibition also includes the landscape painting Miss Bishop inherited and that she wrote about in “Poem,” which begins
About the size of an old-style dollar bill,
American or Canadian,
mostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays
-this little painting (a sketch for a larger one?)
has never earned any money in its life.
Unfortunately, I’m going to miss the exhibit of her papers at the Vassar College Main Library, From the Archive: Discovering Elizabeth Bishop, which is on view until December 15th.
But there’s still time to celebrate Bishop’s centenary — until her 101st on February 8, 2012.
Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic by P.B. Rage
I like to listen to music when I’m making pizza. Loud music, usually cranked up as high as my computer’s external speakers will allow.
Last night, it was Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” which recently celebrated 20 years in the collective listening consciousness.
My 15-year-old son wandered into the kitchen while the last song (the hidden track), “Endless, Nameless,” filled the kitchen with sonic noise.
“What the heck is that?” he asked.
“Nirvana,” I answered, although I always thought that track sounded more like my old band Active Driveway than the rest of Nevermind.
“What’s so great about them?” he asked. I switched to the opening track, their breakthrough song “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
“Yeah, that is good,” he admitted. Then we talked about how Kurt Cobain committed suicide.
“Shotgun.”
He wanted to know why he did it. “Sometimes geniuses are so troubled they can’t cope with the pressures of life.”
Then I told him that a friend of mine, Peter Boyle, also killed himself with a shotgun five years before Cobain. Peter was an artist, too, deeply troubled — tortured even — and, like Cobain, addicted to heroin. Peter shot himself in the barn at his family’s farm; he was 37 years old. Cobain was 27. I won’t go into the significance of those ages, but you can read more here.
Peter was an amazing artist who worked in a very unusual medium: sugar. In fact, he wrote the book on blown and pulled sugar sculpting techniques, which came out the year before he died. His work had just been featured in a show, ”The Confectioner’s Art,” at the old American Craft Museum (November 1988-January 1989) in New York.
Peter tried to kill himself at least once before, that I knew about, while trying to quit heroin cold turkey. I intervened that time and suffered with him through a long night of his own personal Hell.
I wrote a poem about Peter and his suicide a some time later called “The Cartographer’s Gambit.” I changed the subject from a sugar sculptor to a cartographer; I’m not sure why, but it seemed to work.
Here is my poem, “The Cartographer’s Gambit”:
In the spindrift,
he outlines an island
for which there are no visas—
whose mapping is all too delectable,
whose charting is measured intensity.
Along these shores,
he conjures ochre bluffs, which resemble
well–turned ankles, the cleft of breast in a covescape,
and hillsides of amber light.
These are things he brought to life on paper, restless for rescue.
The uncharted territory
still gleaming in his eye—
a coastal mystery.
He lumbers, cools with the injection.
The seaboard nearly finished, dry land
his last frontier.
He reads Celine as open waters dry,
the cold spring chills him, he smokes a cigarette.
Deep within his blood, a fine line beckons—
with perfect geography.
Outside, the air is perfumed,
with a scent of powder.
Starlings prattle above him,
black, iridescent, oxymoronic:
a thousand triangles
of gun metal
fusing a jade sky.
Their opacity blinds him to reason.
Unable to move latitudinal or long,
he measures the scale of possibility,
sights his compass on true north and,
as the needle riddles the vein,
he dashes the coast with blue.
(In memoriam: Peter T. Boyle, 1952-1989)
–Scott Edward Anderson
FilmPoems by Alastair Cook
July 17, 2010
I recently discovered the work of photographer and filmmaker Alastair Cook through Anon Magazine (we both appear in Anon7). He wrote about a project he calls FilmPoem, which are short films he’s made based upon contemporary poems.
“The combination of film and poetry is an attractive one,” writes Alastair. “For the poet, perhaps a hope that the filmmaker will bring something to the poem: a new audience, a visual attraction, the laying of way markers; for the filmmaker, a fixed parameter to respond to, the power of a text sparking the imagination with visual connections and metaphor.”
His project reminds me (in spirit if not in style) of some films I made in Super 8 back in the mid-1980s — I called them “cinepoems” — two of which were shown at an independent film show at Cleveland State University in 1985. One was based upon Kenneth Patchen‘s “I Went to the City” and the other was called “Through the Glimmerglass (And What We Saw There).” (I really should digitize those films and make them available.)
I have always been fascinated by the combination of film and poetry and it’s great to discover Alastair’s work. Here is his film “Adrift,” based upon a poem by the fabulous Juliet Wilson (whose work also appears in Anon7):
Adrift from Alastair Cook on Vimeo.
My poem “Indwelling,” Animated
June 25, 2010
A few years ago, my friend the designer Jan Almquist, who was teaching a course at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, asked if one of his students could use a poem of mine for a video project.
Jeremy Collinson chose “Indwelling,” a poem that is part of my ecopoem sequence called “Dwelling.” The poem originally appeared in the University of Pennsylvania’s literary journal, CrossConnect. Here is the animated video, a filmpoem, if you will of my poem “Indwelling”:
A number of the poems from my Dwelling sequence have been published. You can find a sampling here.
And here is the text of the poem:
Indwelling
Shooting stars cross a city night sky. In the moment
before they fall, think about dwellings,
houses made of brick, stone, and wood—dwelling and indwelling—
miracle keeping matter together, from imploding or inverting.
How dwellings become a city, interdependent.
How stars become a night sky, suspended.
(Late fall, nearly winter, fog-caul warms night air through inversion.
The meteor version of life heads straight to the matter of our bed.)
What holds up the sky holds each one of us, too—
as we move against one another in this taut, elastic field,
warming with each movement, causing little inversions
all around us, and shooting stars—
there goes another.
–Scott Edward Anderson
How to read poetry
May 26, 2009
Want to know how to read poetry? Treat it like you’re sampling perfume, says my friend Molly Cantrell-Kraig:
“It’s like an expensive fragrance: the high notes are what registers first, but as the fragrance adapts to the person’s chemistry and with time, the fragrance develops dimension and a fuller sense of itself.”
In other words, try first letting the poem envelope you with its sounds and its images. Sit with it. Come back to the poem and read it again, this time paying attention to how the poem makes you feel. Pay attention to the nuances in your reading, the patterns that emerge, the sense that emerges. And, finally, how does the poem change the way you look at the world?
In How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, Edward Hirsch writes, “We activate the poem inside us by engaging it as deeply as possible, by bringing our lives to it, our associational memories, our past histories, our vocabularies, by letting its verbal music infiltrate our bodies, its ideas seep into our minds, by discovering its pattern emerging, by entering the echo chamber which is the history of poetry, and most of all, by listening and paying attention. Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.”
C.S. Lewis suggested that “the true reader reads every work seriously, in the sense that he reads it wholeheartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can.”
A poet dreams of such readers.
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Scott Edward Anderson
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