poetry – Page 11 – Andrew Careaga

Friday Five: recent reads

Five things that caught my eye recently:

Inspiration in a flash (or fifty). Read some of the stories selected for the Wigleaf top 50 2024 longlist of flash fictions. Congratulations to the authors who made this list!
The century’s 100 best books, according to the New York Times (gift link).
How to doomproof your reading. Good stuff from Junot Diaz’s StoryWorlds Substack.
Happy five-year anniversary to one of my favorite online poetry journals, Sparks of Calliope. And in case you missed it, here’s my April 2024 Friday Five interview with editor Randal Burd.
Enjoy this collection of summer-y poems by Mary Oliver, William Carlos Williams, Derek Walcot, and others, courtesy of Maya C. Popa.

Image via Pexels.

Thirteen Ways of Hearing a Cicada (a poem)

Thirteen Ways of Hearing a Cicada

A rare dual brood emergence of cicadas is happening this spring, and it will not happen for another 221 years, according to entomologists. These insects can create sounds that often hit 90-100 decibels, which is louder than a hair dryer.

“The Year of the Periodical Cicadas,” The National Institute of Food and Agriculture, United States Department of Agriculture, March 26, 2024

The first parties emerge

Like scouts, inspecting the land.

You hear a whir, a hiss, the sound

Of one winding a mechanical clock

Or a music box.

A small intrusion

Into the noises of mid-spring:

the chirping robins, yodeling cardinals,

hammering woodpeckers.

Friday Five: Q&A with novelist and poet Melissa Powers

‘The best poems are those that don’t really end.’

Continuing our tribute to poets during National Poetry Month, today’s Friday Five is with Melissa Powers, a poet, novelist and non-fiction writer.

Melissa is an award-winning author whose work has appeared in Common Boundary, American Literary Realism, The Quest, Midwest Poetry Review, Writer’s Journal, and Cave Region Review. Her books include The Outsiders (2006), an instructional guide on the novel; Afterthoughts (2012), a collection of poems; and three works fiction, including two young adult science fiction novels, Spark and Surfacing (Amazon, 2012, 2014) . Her awards include the Springfield (Missouri) Writer’s Guild Grand Prize for Poetry (1998), the Johnson Memorial Grand Prize Award — League of Minnesota Poets (2003), the William Stafford Award — Washington Poets Association (2009), and the Writer’s Journal poetry contest (2011). She holds an M.A. from Missouri State University and was a college English instructor for more than 25 years at Drury University, Missouri University of Science and Technology, and East Central College. Currently, she is a student success specialist/writing tutor at East Central College, a freelance academic editor specializing in dissertations, theses, journal articles, and book projects, and a staff writer for The Phelps County Focus newspaper. Melissa’s recent poetry can be found on the Facebook group Melissa Ann Poetry.

Friday Five: Q&A with poet and ‘Sparks of Calliope’ editor Randal Burd

‘I try to make poetic observations that tie in to our common humanity.’

On this, the first Friday of National Poetry Month, I’m pleased to introduce readers to Randal Burd, a fellow Missourian whose second book of poetry, Memoirs of a Witness Tree, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books. His first book of poetry is a self-published work titled Leaving Home: Discoveries and Reflections of a Once-Sheltered Heart. An educator, freelance editor and writer, and genealogist, he also is the creator of the “journal of poetic observations,” Sparks of Calliope. His poetry appears in numerous print and online journals (partial listing). Learn more about Randal and his writing on his website, The Edge of Memory.

Friday Five: literary Easter eggs

Some literary morsels to entertain, inform, and possibly inspire.

On this Good Friday, as we enter Easter weekend, here are five literary morsels — little Easter eggs I recently hunted down to pass along for your reading and listening pleasure. May they provide some amusement, entertainment, and even inspiration.

13 Ways of Looking at Socks is one poet’s “meditations on something so deeply mundane that we rarely think about it until we reach into the sock drawer and it’s empty or just sad and disappointing and now you have to do laundry.” The author, Mary Roblyn, wrote it as a riff on Wallace Stevens’ 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. In Roblyn’s case, she accompanies her writing with relevant photos.
“Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” We’ve all heard that old saying, right? Writer B.J. Novak (he of “The Office” fame) takes it literally in this short audio piece, which he and actor Aasif Mandvi read to open a recent episode of the podcast Selected Shorts (highly recommended for fans of short fiction). The story is from Novak’s book of short stories, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories.
Vermilion Cliffs is a lovely piece of micro fiction by Allison Field Bell, published in Fractured Lit, the online literary journal devoted to flash and micro fiction.
“Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly/My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,/Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily/Soft-scented in the air for yards around;” — begins Claude McKay’s poem/meditation “The Easter Flower.”
Here’s the pitch, baseball fans: Some of the greatest books about sports are also about so much more. Just in time for the opening of baseball season, Keith O’Brien, the author of a book about one of the game’s greatest tragic figures, Pete Rose, gives us Greek Tragedy in the Bottom of the Ninth: On Baseball’s High Literary Drama. Play ball!

Photo by Laurentiu Iordache on Unsplash