AL FILREIS ON "CHAPTER ONE"!

You're invited to read Al Filreis' contribution to Marsh Hawk's "Chapter One" project, "Notes toward a pedagogy of ModPo." You can see it HERE, but here's an excerpt:

Whenever I write these days about poetry I express an intense interest in the poem, poem by poem and poetic project by poetic project. Yet what comes through is an even keener concern about collaborative interpretation generally, about our uses and misuses of—and recently our panics over—the technologies that make such collaboration possible at a large scale. Pondering the origins of the interests that have made ModPo—a free, non-credit, open online course—possible, I realize that I am seeking to connect such a social or civic mode of reception with the supposedly difficult, putatively opaque poets and poems I admire and as an educator feel a strong instinct to share (and which I have presented in college classes and open public forums for forty years by now).

MARSH HAWK REVIEW, SPRING 2023

 You are invited to read/view the offerings in the new Marsh Hawk Review!

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!