MARY MACKEY IN "CHAPTER ONE" SERIES

 You are invited to read Mary Mackey's contribution to our "Chapter One" series! You can visit HERE!

EILEEN R. TABIOS IN "CHAPTER ONE" SERIES

You are invited to read Eileen Tabios' essay on titling poems, the latest installment in our "Chapter One" series! Available HERE. Here's an excerpt:

"... much of my job as a poet takes place before I begin any poem. My job is to educate myself on as many topics as possible, engage in a wide variety of experiences, hone my skills at observation, and meditate over the significance of a variety of events—not for writing a poem but by being better in the world through a basking in experience. All this knowledge and experience are filed in my brain as raw material for when I finally write the poem, e.g., the information on Negros Occidental which had marinated in my mind for three decades. In the actual creation of the poem, I trust in having filed enough mental material for the poem to access as it chooses.

Obviously, the more content there is in that mental file, the better the poem is served. I recently noted in an interview that as a poet I believe in education for education’s sake for avoiding cliches and sourcing new metaphors. As an example, for no particular reason besides education, I learned about black holes, specifically that if one is able to witness the phenomenon, one would see objects falling into those holes in falls that seem never to end. The idea of a permanent falling resonated with me and came to be included in several poems."

STEPHEN PAUL MILLER in "CHAPTER ONE" SERIES

You are invited to read Stephen Paul Miller's astounding and moving remembrance of poetry days revolving around a single-sheet poetry journal that he used to mail out to readers and which ended up attracting some of the leading artists and poets of the later latter half of the 20th century. You can see the article at

https://marshhawkpress.org/stephen-paul-miller-the-poetry-mailing-list-poetry-beyond-borders/

POETRY FLASH REVIEWS MARY MACKEY

Congratulations to Mary Mackey whose new book, CREATIVITY: WHERE POEMS BEGIN, received a spectacular review in Poetry Flash! You can see entire review HERE, but here's an excerpt:

POET AND NOVELIST MARY MACKEY'S Creativity: Where Poems Begin is both effervescent and analytical. Her new book serves as part memoir, part guide to the "inner poet" in her readers, part wisdom literature; but ultimately, Creativity resists easy classification or precisely limited function, and that resistance is a virtue. Mackey writes: 

Poetry chose me; I did not choose it. Call it an involuntary act of creation, a constantly surprising connection between self and non-self, a movement from seen to unseen and back again. Call it at its best moments the movement of an adult mind back to the radical innocence and vision of the very young child who sees, not only the reality we all share, but all those unnamed, unclassified parts of reality we learn to overlook as we grow older.

Mackey celebrates the work of involuntary creation, of paying close attention to the details of existence while irradiated by promptings from uncanny sources we recognize only by intuition.

CHAPTER ONE SERIES' ARCHIVE

By popular demand the essays that inaugurated Marsh Hawk Press' "Chapter One" Series is back online at

https://marshhawkpress.org/chapter-one-oct-2018-december-2021/

You are invited to peruse!

DENISE DUHAMEL ON COLETTE INEZ

In the latest contribution to Marsh Hawk's "Chapter One" series, Denise Duhamel shares her experience with Colette Inez and the lesson she learned about "paying yourself first" as she learned to become a poet. You can read her contribution HERE.

MARSH HAWK PRESS WELCOMES WILLIAM BENTON

We are delighted to announce our newest release: William Benton's LIGHT ON WATER: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1972-2022. Mr. Benton is a distinguished poet who began his career as a jazz player.

“What most distinguishes the poetry and makes it entirely individual is the manner in which, over the course of any given poem, there is a sense of “motion” in the transitions from phrase to phrase, line to line, a shifting of planes, between image or observation and the abstract, which seems to me unique to the practice of this artist."

-August Kleinzahler