A Motley Vision » Payday Poetry

Payday Poetry: Cricket by Philip White

Wm — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 20:39:28 +0000

And with this, we’ve exhausted the Payday Poetry submissions except for a couple of FOB Bible poems that we’ll get to at some point. So if you have a bit of free time here in the lazy days of summer, poke around the internet (esp. Dialogue and Sunstone) and come up with some new submissions.

Title: Cricket (so what you do is click on this link, click on search inside, and click on First Pages)

Poet: Philip White

Publication Info: The Clearing (Walt Mcdonald First-Book Series in Poetry); 2007, Texas Tech University Press

Submitted by: Tyler Chadwick

Why?: Tyler says: The link is to Amazon’s “Look Inside!” page for White’s first collection, The Clearing. “Cricket” is the book’s first poem (just click on the “First Pages” link) and establishes the main theme of the book (as I understand it): that the dead don’t come back, but that tragedy and death can be life-affirming, something signaled in “Cricket” by the poet’s heightened experience with the senses, especially hearing, which allows him to connect in some way to the past and to live/feel deeply in the present.

Wm adds: also see Margaret Young’s AML blog post on The Clearing.

Participate:

All Payday Poetry posts so far

Click here to fill out the Payday Poetry form

Here’s the link to the spreadsheet so you can see what’s already been submitted

Here’s a link to the kick off post with a list of possible sources

Payday Poetry: Your Luck Is About To Change by Susan Elizabeth Howe

Wm — Fri, 14 May 2010 19:39:49 +0000

Payday Poetry returns with a poem about the end of the year and thoughts of all that could go wrong and some surprising but approachable imagery.

Title: Your Luck Is About To Change

Poet:Susan Elizabeth Howe

Publication Info: Poetry, December 2002

Submitted by: Tyler Chadwick

Why?: Tyler says: “For this line: ‘marriage spicy as moo-goo-gai-pan.’ Oh, and for the dinosaur nativity. (Read it. You’ll see.)”

Participate:

All Payday Poetry posts so far

Click here to fill out the Payday Poetry form

Here’s the link to the spreadsheet so you can see what’s already been submitted

Here’s a link to the kick off post with a list of possible sources

Payday Poetry: Moses and Aron by Will Bishop

Wm — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:21:13 +0000

I think we should celebrate the free-ebook-ing for ebook week of the Fob Bible by featuring a poem from it. So here it is:

Title: Moses and Aron

Poet: Will Bishop

Publication Info: 2009, The Fob Bible, published by Peculiar Pages

Submitted by: Theric Jepson

Why?: Th. writes: “.

If Will and I weren’t both Mormon, I don’t suppose I could give this poem as heavily a Mormon reading as I do. To me, this is the Mormon Moses and the Mormon Aaron. It will be fun to discuss why.”

Participate:

All Payday Poetry posts so far

Click here to fill out the Payday Poetry form

Here’s the link to the spreadsheet so you can see what’s already been submitted

Here’s a link to the kick off post with a list of possible sources

Payday Poetry: Marking the Lambs by Kimberly Johnson

Wm — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:18:14 +0000

I’ll be honest — I chose this poem for this week’s Payday Poetry because I wanted to reward Tyler for answering the call when I made the plea for more submissions last month. But I also like the poem itself: the staccato pop of it and the focus on the meaning of marking.

Title: Marking the Lambs

Poet: Kimberly Johnson

Publication Info: Slate, Nov. 21, 2006

Submitted by: Tyler Chadwick

Why?: Tyler writes: “Johnson is a poet that doesn’t shy away from the grittiness of mortality. ‘Marking the Lambs’ is evidence of that, and that even in the grit (of farm work and language work), we can approach transcendence and depth of feeling. The poem is accompanied by an audio file of Johnson reading the poem.”

Participate:

All Payday Poetry posts so far

Click here to fill out the Payday Poetry form

Here’s the link to the spreadsheet so you can see what’s already been submitted

Here’s a link to the kick off post with a list of possible sources

Payday Poetry: Philistina by Danny Nelson

Wm — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:25:03 +0000

This is a deceptively simple poem best read in the context of the entire project (The FOB Bible). It’s seems a bit underdeveloped in isolation. And yet it still accomplishes what many of us seem to be working on these days — a riffing on scripture that asserts both literalism and metaphor or fable-ness. That underscores the essentialness of historical, familial struggles turned in to literature to people of the Book (Books?). At the very least, it extends the network of personalities that we engage with when we read the Bible, that are in some sense part of the history of Mormons (and people of other faiths as well). Even more — and here you should probably just skip down and click through and read the very short poem itself — it slyly points to the way in which sing-songy, rhyming (bad) poetry is employed by Mormons for didactic means and shows how its a double-edge sword and a two way street.

And again: so far, Theric is the only one who has submitted anything. Spend 15-20 minutes this holiday season and dig up something good for us. Or I’ll be forced to start posting more of my slammin’ rhymes. And nobody wants that.

Title: Philistina

Poet: Danny Nelson

Publication Info: The FOB Bible, 2009

Submitted by: Theric Jepson

Why?: Th. writes: “.

I hope you appreciate that I am limiting myself to one poem per poet included in Plain and Precious Parts. It’s not easy. I picked this one because it was a poem even my father, not a famed devourer of poetry, latched on to immediately and has told many people about. He has brought it up in conversations. I think it’s new point of view gave him equal parts fascination and sadness.”

Wm adds: I do appreciate it. I also appreciate the comment on the new point of view — that’s something that literature can give us that other forms of discourse can’t (or at least can’t in quite the same way).

Participate:

All Payday Poetry posts so far

Click here to fill out the Payday Poetry form

Here’s the link to the spreadsheet so you can see what’s already been submitted

Here’s a link to the kick off post with a list of possible sources

Payday Poetry: three poems by Michael R. Collings

Wm — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:20:58 +0000

Michael R. Collings is a man of letters in the classic sense — a critic, poet, teacher, editor, bibliographer and lecturer. He’s written many poems dealing with specific Mormon themes, but much of his work seems to not be readily accessible online. Here are three poems that provide a good introduction to his work, which often relies on striking images from the natural world, a tumbling of words, and a creeping sense of something looming (sometimes horror, sometimes other things). Enjoy. You might also find this 2004 Pepperdine magazine feature on Collings and his work interesting.

Also: some good poems have been submitted so far, but we’re light on work from the Dialogue, Sunstone and Ensign archives. If anybody is in the mood to go digging for hidden treasures, I’d much appreciate it.

Title: Tornado Weather; Memorial Day, May 1954; and MEADOWLARK

Poet: Michael R. Collings

Publication Info: Maverick Magazine, July 10, 2004

Submitted by: Theric Jepson

Why?: Th. writes: “.

Collings is one of my favorite Mormon poets and these are the only three I know of online. Any one could be fun to discuss.”

Participate:

All Payday Poetry posts so far

Click here to fill out the Payday Poetry form

Here’s the link to the spreadsheet so you can see what’s already been submitted

Here’s a link to the kick off post with a list of possible sources

Payday Poetry: “The City of Joseph” by Clinton Larson

Wm — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:43:03 +0000

This is the first official Payday Poetry post (the prior one was more to set the stage) so it seems only fitting to feature something by Clinton F. Larson. Yes, something by Eliza R. Snow or Emmeline B. Wells would also be in order, but I’m going with Larson since he is one of the major, early figures in the modern era of Mormon letters which is AMV’s main focus.

Title: The City of Joseph

Poet: Clinton F. Larson

Publication Info: Ensign, 1984

Submitted by: William Morris

Why?: Because it exhibits Larson’s best and worst (or most difficult) tendencies. Because it’s such a core Mormon theme. Because of phrases like “in the spell of prophecy” and “the whisper of the wagon wheels” and “if not Zarahemla, Deseret.”

Participate:

All Payday Poetry posts so far

Click here to fill out the Payday Poetry form

Here’s the link to the spreadsheet so you can see what’s already been submitted

Here’s a link to the kick off post with a list of possible sources

Payday Poetry: The plan and LDS poets in the New Era

Wm — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:56:37 +0000

Inasmuch as the crowdsourcing of Mormon short stories available online (e.g. Short Story Friday) has been quite successful, the time has now come to extend the same efforts to poetry.

Here’s a list of possible sources to get things started — if you have additional sources, link to them in the comments section or e-mail me at my first name AT motleyvision DOT org and I’ll update the list. Individual authors and various and sundry publications may have isolated stories here and there — entries to the form don’t have to be from the list below.

POSSIBLE SOURCES:

Dialogue — A Journal of Mormon Thought (Archives of vol. 1-38)

Sunstone Magazine archives

Segullah archives

The Friend archives

New Era archives

Popcorn Popping archives

Weber Studies archives

BYU Library Digital Collections (I’m not going to break them all out, but there may be creative writing master’s theses, stories from the 19th and 20th century Mormon publications collections, etc.)

FORM:

Click here to fill out the Payday Poetry form

Here’s the link to the spreadsheet so you can see what’s already been submitted

Thanks, and I hope that all of you will participate. A few folks have been doing all the work for Short Story Friday. I know there are some AMV readers with a special interest in poetry by or about Mormons — point us to your favorites.

And now to kick things off:

In 1975 the LDS Church publication for teenagers — The New Era — published an article called Mormon Poets Talk about Their Craft featuring an thoughts from Arthur Henry King, Clinton Larson, Elouise Bell, Richard Cracroft, Emma Lou Thayne, Carol Lynn Pearson, John S. Harris and Elder S. Dilworth Young. Pretty impressive line up there. What do you think about what they have to say?