 Red Room Writer Profile
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Kathryn Stripling Byer's Blog
October 13, 2009
- The new Poemeleon is up, one of the more interesting online poetry zines, out of California, at www.poemeleon.com. This currrent issue takes as its theme that thorny subject, Gender. The editor, Cati Porter, has done a fine job of presenting the material and Poetry Ed., Maureen Alsop, is a fascinating poet with a couple of collections to her credit. I'm delighted to have several poems ...
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October 7, 2009
- Aretha's Hat: Inauguration Day 2009 is a unique collaboration between two poets who have been friends since meeting at a workshop with A. R. Ammons thirty-one years ago. After hearing Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day," on January 20, they decided to write their own Praise Songs, beginning with an American Indian inspired "sky chant." Over the next wo months ...
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August 5, 2009
- Writers are supposed to be obsessed. Obsessed with words. Images. Dreams. The brush of silky wind across their inner arms, their thighs. The last light on leaves. The pokeberries hanging from their brances out side my window, pendants ripe for the picking, beckoning to be put in a poem about late summer in the South.
But first I have to clean up the barf one of my four dogs just ...
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August 3, 2009
- Having been asked to respond to any missteps that might have been made with the publication of my first book, I'd begin by saying that as a poet, I find it hard for me to answer this question in great detail. THE GIRL IN THE MIDST OF THE HARVEST was an Associated Writing Programs Selection, chosen by John Frederick Nims, and published by Texas Tech University Press; we never really expected huge ...
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May 27, 2009
- Can anyone identify the movie in which this miraculous little dog saved the day, and just at the last minute? If you can add the stars' names, that would be most impressive. This was the first Bollywood movie I saw, and I became an addict. Thank you, Tuffy
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May 11, 2009
- This Saturday I attended the Blue Ridge Book & Author Showcase in Hendersonville, NC. Honorary Chairman was Robert Morgan, an old friend from my MFA days at UNCG and author of many books of poetry, fiction, and prose, among them GAP CREEK, an Oprah selection. This event reminded me yet again of how important it is to bring writers and readers together on a regular basis. Good for the ...
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May 4, 2009
- What could trump reading a wonderful novel by a great novelist? Well, reading with a dog draped across your lap. Here is our Lord Byron in lapdom while my husband reads Amitov Ghosh's THE SEA OF POPPIES. He's been a huge Ghosh fan since he read SHADOWLINES. This novel is thumbs up, too. Lord Byron does not need to read any novels. He knows all he needs to know. Our old dog Arjun ...
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April 29, 2009
- On this next to the last day of National Poetry Month, here's a poem by my friend Isabel Zuber, who has published a novel SALT (Picador) and several chapbooks of poetry
Craft
Move the thread
she did tied a
thousand, thousand
knots, chains, flowers
What do you
make I said
A snare Oh I
thought it was lace
She held it to her face
What do you think
lace is anyway
-- Isabel ...
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April 28, 2009
- Quite a few years back I began a short story from the viewpoint of a young mountain girl "taken advantage of," as we say, by one of the timber "cruisers" sent into the southern Appalachians to scout the best stand of forest to be clear-cut. As in Ron Rash's novel Serena, these timber companies brought ruthless exploitation to the mountains. The story never made its way to completion, but the ...
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April 17, 2009
- Yes, I've been checking the Academy of American Poets daily poems for National Poetry Month and finding them, well, lightweight. So, I've spent the rest of my reading time discovering the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Nazim Hikmet, and the 20th century Iranian poets translated and discussed in Fatemeh Keshavarz's RECITE IN THE NAME OF THE RED ROSE: Poetic Sacred Making in 2th Century Iran, and ...
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April 12, 2009
-
Ivy, Sing Ivory
1
Like women, the dogwoods go nowhere
and wait for their season, the sun coming back
like a sea-roving laddie. By May Day
the ground will be white with their fare-thee-wells
no man will heed, his boots grinding
a path through the leaf mold. Such pretty things,
Mama said, touching the ivory lace
of my wedding clothes. What good are they
to ...
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April 11, 2009
- Our poem-tag began the day after Inauguration Day. Since both of us had been underwhelmed by the Inaugural Poem, we wrote our own, sending our poems to each other, and then we started riffing from each other's work. Our riffs took us in unexpected, sometimes bizarre, and emotionally moving directions. We drew it to a close last week with poems that pulled us back to Obama's inauguration. ...
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April 10, 2009
- Easter has always been my least favorite holiday. Easter Sunday meant clothes more than anything else. New dress. Hat. Gloves. Shoes. Being eyed by everyone in the congregation. Or feeling that way. When I married, I spent Easter with my husband's parents, and going to church on Easter Sunday was de rigeur. The sermon was usually the same one I had heard a year or two before, and the ...
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April 8, 2009
- Exploring a poem's sound through scansion is not "crap," as Marilyn Kallet has recently called it. It's simply another tool with which to examine that large or small "machine made of words" as William Carlos Williams described a poem. Maybe if more poets paid attention to rhythm and what a writer calls "the ghost of meter," we'd not have so many talky, prosy, flat poems boring audiences and ...
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April 8, 2009
- Southern Poetry Review has been so much a part of so many poets' lives over the past 50 years that it's hard to imagine the universe without it. When I was a student in the MFA program at UNC-G in the '60s, I was introduced to the journal and to its founder Guy Owen. Owen was an instructor in the program for one semester while I was there.
After his death, SPR, as we called it, moved to ...
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