Showing posts with label Barbara Schweitzer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barbara Schweitzer. Show all posts

Monday, March 14, 2011

Poem for Monday


No. 24
-Alyn Carlson
Collage using silkscreened paper, thread and ephemera.

No. 24
-Barbara Schweitzer
Long she had held the image in her head,
able to live shuttered and craven years
because she kept it fueled and safe unsaid,
held near, as far away as unshed tears.
Names written in unfamiliar hands, she
parsed and stored inside as if stolen gems
she might finger in the quiet of sleep,
the one room of dreams she kept clear for him.
While freed prisoners might tell of fierce relief
when cells open and air floats unbound,
for her a straight back chair, an assortment of fruit
became invitation enough for brazen hope
to reposition the earth and uproot
her,  graciously as socks turned inside out,
giving her back to what she was all about.

No. 24
-Pat Hegnauer
Little time to sit in a kitchen
full of canning, baking, and stewing,
teething baby bawling in her cot.
A cook’s heart must cultivate itself
when gardens want water and weeding.

Victuals are a woman’s overlord
demanding measured concentrations.
The table’s a meadow to be plowed,
planted and gathered three times daily
while tuckered men chew, drink, and smoke.

Art and poetry are from the Ekphrasis show now up at the Hera Gallery.
This show is a joint effort between the Hera and The Origami Poetry Project.
The OPP places free tiny books of poetry throughout RI. It's a wonderful
show where words and pictures come together.



Wednesday, March 10, 2010

I Love Barbara Schweitzer's Words

Barbara Schweitzer is the author of 33 1/3: Soap Opera Sonnets, cited in The Providence Journal as a favorite book for 2008.  She has twice been the recipient of Merit Fellowships from the RI State Council on the Arts for poetry and has won numerous other national prizes including the Galway Kinnell Poetry Prize and Midwest Writer’s Center Prize.  Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and on WRNI’s “This I Believe” program as well as in literary journals and anthologies, print and online.  Her plays have been produced locally in RI and MA and have been finalists or semi-finalists in national competitions including the Louisville Ten Minute Play Contest.  Her play Sub-Zero was  published in The Writer’s Circle Anthology.  She is co-founder of the Origami Poems Project, a Johnny Appleseed approach to distributing free poetry in pocket-size origami books throughout RI.  She lives in northern RI and maintains a private practice in psychotherapy in Providence. 

Can you tell me about your latest body of work? Lately I’ve been engaged in our Origami Poems Project.  Begun as a prompt I gave to the poets in a poetry workshop, the origami books caught fire.  They are a full volume of poetry printed on a single sheet of paper then folded, origami style, into a book perfect to carry around in your pocket and read all day. Forty five volumes are now being distributed in plexiglass boxes and ziplock bags on telephone poles throughout RI. Lynnie Gobeille and Jan Keough orchestrate the distribution, and the books are free for the taking.  Free poetry! For real. And the books surely will win the Guinness Book of World records as The Book With The Smallest Carbon Footprint.

What inspires you the most lately? Lately, I’ve adapted the origami poems style to Cyjoe Barker detective stories.  Cyjoe Barker solves her murder mysteries in five chapters only, a feat only an origami detective can accomplish!

What was your first memory? The smell of a root cellar at my great grandparents’ house in Sugarcreek, Ohio. Earth. Onions. Potatoes. Grass.  I am still dizzy from it as I write these words.

Can you describe the best thing you saw on your last walk? (run)  A pair of cardinals flinging themselves with rapture into the bare arms of forsythia. One bright red male. One tempered female.

What are five things that would happen in the perfect day of work for you? 1. The sound of the keyboard steadily click, click, click. My fingers would feel the command of my thoughts. 2. Fragrant breezes (sweet spring morning) would waft from the open window beside me. 3. The room would sparkle. The air would wave with sunbeams. The tables would be dusted. 4. Birdsong. 5. The sculpture of words on the page would thrill me.

Can you describe the best pair of shoes you've ever owned? Oh, shoes! Why love shoes so much? My favorite pair of shoes must be the red sandals I put on in NYC when I was 25 years old. They had wooden high heels, and I walked the streets day and night that day and night with them on. I still remember the way the city looked and felt under them. The feel of wooden heels.  (But then there have been so many more I’ve loved as well.)

What are you doing this weekend? (March 13-14) My entire weekend is focused on the Towers’ All You Need is Love II Sunday, March 14, 1-5PM, a love fest for poetry and the arts at the historic Narragansett Towers in Narragansett, RI. On the ocean. The Origami Poems Project poets will be there along with featured reader Tom Chandler.  Poets, artists, musicians, actors will gather to celebrate their work.  Wine and chocolate galore, thanks to the generous merchants of the area who believe in LOVE and ART. Is there any difference between the two? 

- Photo of Fresh Origami Poetry Books on the Line, courtesy of Origami Poems

Monday, March 8, 2010

Poem for Monday

no. 92
-Barbara Schweitzer
 
Have you seen how colors boast distinctions?
Greens shout themselves into gay petals.
Tulips bend over backwards, bleeding tinctures
into desiccated snowdrops, metal-
toned like the earth itself. Past tense flowers
will bloom to death, and here, spring erupts, not
kind, but bossy in that way of empowered
voices just finding air, or –  love –  wobbly
as peonies at first, but then outstretching.
But, oh, let’s not compare love to spring again.
Fertility must have other more fetching
images to hold. Layers of rock, sane
thoughts, beach sand, gray horizons, purple, pink?
There is solidness to love, too, I think.
Photo of Providence Parking Lot Wall by Paul Clancy