how's our process going for everyone?

Hi all,
Please let us all know how you're finding this process so far. Especially in terms of timing: for our first round, we submitted poems one month and then spent the next month commenting on each other's work. Is this too much? Too little? Would you prefer to submit a poem AND submit comments all in one month? Would love to hear your thoughts about this and about any other part of the process you'd like to share about. Much thanks!
Kasey

Shannon's December Poem

Dear All,

This is fresh paint :). It's the first poem I've written since turning in my thesis. Any suggestions for improvement would be most welcome! And a brief note, I'll be at my final MFA residency from January 2-14. I will try my best to comment on poems during this time but will write comments after I get back if need be. Thanks for your patience.

Survival, or Letter to a A Lover

What was hard at first

became less so over the years. This slow

releasing of self: of trusting again. 
It's like snow melting on a window pane.

Like a blue checkered table cloth that finally,

finally allows itself to sag onto the floor.

The smallest pull unravels it all.

After years of erecting barriers, sealing

foundations, putting plastic on the windows,

I’ve become so tired: it’s grueling

to keep the world out. But don’t you see,

my dear, that all the body wants

is to take it all in? Together, let’s unglue

the hinges, take in the aches:

yes, the grease, sugar plums, and

the rust, too. Lean in closer: taste

the browning sugar on my tongue—

and later, perhaps this memory

of a fleeting sweetness will be

enough to sustain us both.

Ethel's December Poem

Hello All,

This is a new poem, and any feedback you have is welcome.

Thanks!
Ethel

Main Street

There were things you just had to survive.

There were shiny things in your heart.

They were personal until they weren’t

because they burst onto the scene singing

because they made their way onto subway

platforms, boxcars,

because they kept on going

even after the lights went out

in your little home and on porches

all over America

so small you may have imagined them.

Anyway, for now we’re here

standing outside in the rain

two travelers

and what is it we seek

and who have we come to know

after all of these years, knocking?

Charlotte's December poem

All thoughts/suggestions/comments very welcome! Looking forward to reading and commenting on all of your poems. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday.

Illyria

At dawn a charm of finches fighting

in the privet, swooping low over spilled seed,

wings tazzing the grass, rustling like folding
newspaper, like time. All morning the rowdy

flutter and chirp, both presence and absence.

Ask, who can command this coming? They flash

over the roofs of thought, twittering into

the emptiness, the weather of what’s gone.

You think, one more small thing could break you.

And what would that look like? Relinquishment,

spent under the covers while all else continues:

dawn pales over and over, and with it the birds

argue bitterly, scritching at the sill. Each month

building an edifice in the body, a sculpture of hope.

I thought when finished it would break into flight.

The radio calmly lists losses: houses, lovers,

glaciers, coins. Impossible to hold everything.

Outside the magnolias burst their velvet buds,

cluster in thick pink clouds then fall

and slick the ground with sweet rot. Tomorrow,

let it happen: shipwreck, crumpling, sink.

Could you be brought back to yourself

by the journey of the ordinary missing? After the storm,

sit up against the pillows in the doomed light

and look outside. See the parcel of brown linnets

visited by an exotic, her breast snow white,

head splashed with yellow and blue. She is

washed up, unrecognized as herself. She knows

nothing of the posters on every tarred

telephone pole searching for the lost cockatiel,

please call if you have seen Edmund. Best bird ever.

She asks, what country, friends, is this? She whistles

a new world, sings a snatch of jingle, a jazz lick.

She alights in the thicket and speaks her name.

italics: Nancy Willard, Larry Levis, poster in my neighborhood, Shakespeare

Charlotte's intro poem

Planet Nine

Even Neptune is too close.

The noise the stars don’t make

wakes me in the night. I turn to look  

at who isn’t following, my spine prickling.

Could I love you?

Circling in the fathomless, icy dark—

 distant eccentric perturber.

Look down. You’re the echo in the cave,

    the bottomless fissure in the rock.

Stalker, recluse, bully, black sheep,

jealous of even fist-sized spheres:

cloudy-blue blown-glass paperweight,

bruised clementine,

softening in its dimpled skin.

Dargie's December Poem

Hi friends,

It's been such a long time since I've workshopped anything, I'm not totally sure what kind of feedback I'm looking for.  I guess I'll just say that I'm working on a first book MS, that I'd like to eventually publish, so I'm trying to make these poems as strong as possible.  Whatever that means!  If there's something working, let me know!  If there's something that feels loose or dead or unhelpfully unclear... let me know!  Thank you, very excited about being with you.

IN KANSAS THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING FLYING THROUGH THE AIR

​A lone glove. Clumps of cottonwood fluff.

Geese in a snowstorm.  On Valentine’s Day,

a foil heart balloon, swept free and rising. 

Great spools of dickcissels

unending along the highway;

a thousand birds in mesmerizing undulations as far as the eye can see.

In the fall, huge billowing dust

along the interstate.  At first you think fire,

then spot the farm truck trundling down the gravel access road. 

In Atchison today, a chemical leak—let’s call it a release.

Sulfuric acid and sodium hypochlorite

combine to create a chlorine cloud.  Citizens shelter in place. 

Inside the college bars and the one pho joint,

the TVs are all playing basketball. Oil droplets from the fryers

glow in the television’s purple flicker.

A ground fog materializes in spring, so thick the traffic app pings to warn me.

I slow and dip into its blinding shimmer

where the highway passes through its depressions. 

Leaving home in the mornings, I fix myself in space

by the airborne twin posts of my commute’s departure gate: 

The coal plant’s vast steam, to the north, and the phosphorus plant's thinner trails, to the east.

I note them both; I steer off along the interstate.    

Vasiliki's December Poem

This poem is the reworking of a recalcitrant poem that went through many drafts, was put away, and then taken out recently. It began as "Five Elements" a Chinese acupuncture reference. Like Claire, I wonder: does it make any sense? And also, I would appreciate any comments re:
If you were to give the poet one suggestion about how to make the poem more fully itself, what would that be? 

Thanksgiving, North Carolina (aka Wood and Metal aka Five Elements)

I am metal you are wood
we would wed
our words:
betrothal
has a nice ring to it

(smoke ensorcelled the non smoker)

I am wood and you are metal
magnetized, demagnetized
wood and metal
demand word and mettle

not to settle for the commonplaces
“of course” “naturally”

when dinner is fast
a feast of thrown elbows, lapsed pieties
a taking stock of developments
in shipbuilding, oil excavation, stainless steel

wood and metal, wood and metal

the tongue wagged
the laggard heart tapped out
rejoinders: rejoin, join, regain joy

my undeclared declaration:
politics is proxy if your issue
is your issue
(I push my chair away from the table)

excuses of the apolitical
do not fly--
further fodder for folderol

there is a steep and airless unrelenting wilderness out back
Father Time lurks there, along with Green Man
barometer is falling, not reassuring

I tried, later on trod tired together with you
into a meadow full of yellow leaves
our slow swirl impeded
any orderly progress from summer to winter
 

Claire's December Poem

Like Kasey's, this too is a "wet paint" poem (maybe we should call ourselves the WetPaint Poets!?). As I am prone to overwriting, I tried playing around with a more fragmented form to see if I could break that habit. I guess I am wondering, at this early stage, if it simply makes any sense!? Thank you all for making such a safe space for such a new poem!

FUNERAL IN ALEXANDRIA (working title) 

Once they slid you inside the wall    white marble marked
with your name and dates    the mourners stood

in a consoling knot    I craved a more private grief    

Petals from exhausted roses fell    a pink skittering down chapel steps  

in a freshening breeze    Afternoon threw down both winter
shadows and illumination:    whitecaps on dark-grey sea

pristine skullcap on the Muslim caretaker    He startled me

sidling from behind a mausoleum    practiced at preying on distress

with a tap of a dirt-covered finger to his cheek    asked

for a bousie     a kiss I granted in the spirit of baksheesh   

Take good care of my father-in-law    my lips brushed onto

his sun-rough skin the silent words:    he is yours now

All around us a landscape of jagged stones    broken crosses

their Christs stolen and sold     despite glass shards glinting

atop the high cemetery walls and    in the weird light cast

by this gathering Mediterranean tempest    a brilliance of loss.

Kasey's December poem

Hi all,

This is a very new poem, and I don't think it needs much feedback as of yet, so feel free to be brief. I'm going to ask for only positive feedback at this point, since it's at the wet paint stage. I'm always interested in the question of what's at stake, so if you feel moved to answer that one regarding this poem, please do!

Thanks, everyone (and happy holidays),
Kasey

P.S. I'm working very slowly on a series of litanies, of which this is part.

Litany (Somehow)

Under the windowsill a few strands

of old spiderweb move

& move, & though I can’t

feel the air moving, it must be, & though

I can barely see the snow, it’s falling now,

gauze & slant, & for once

I don’t want to say it’s like

anything else: just snow, singular

& pure, & the woods, too, the winter-stripped

trees revealing their simplest selves. I’ve read

they talk to one another, somehow, through nets

of roots blooming where we can’t see. Somehow trees,

lichen, stone. Somehow my hand, this pen, & blood

again this month, though sometime soon it will

cease. Bleached winter grasses at the field’s edge

before bricks & oaks rise up, & how

I love the borders best, weeds by the side

of the road silvered & sharpened

in headlights. Somehow Lucinda Williams’ song

“Side of the Road,” & how its words

understood the way I would love you even before

we met. The things we know

before we know them. Somehow snow, still, even

now, making its essential silence which is

a kind of sound. & somehow my young mother

driving home decades ago & hearing for the first time

“The Sound of Silence” on the radio, before

it was famous, before I was born—listening

& then turning into the driveway & turning

off the engine, opening the door of the car & the door

of the house & finding

my father waiting there & saying to him

I just heard the most beautiful song.