Local Lyrics featuring Belinda Manning

August 24, 2020 Samuel Fine

Local Lyrics hosted by John Wojtowicz appears on the 3rd Monday of each month. In it, John features the work and musings of a local poet.

“I wrote my first poem for a high school English class. That was almost 55 years ago. It was also during a period of unrest. It was the first time I actually heard myself. Writing for me is a spiritual practice. It grounds me. It allows me access.”

Belinda Manning

Finding Our Way

It is the elders who understand
the correlation between the life’s lyrical melody
and the beat of the drum that calls us so perfectly
into existence.

Almost effortlessly they walk to the front
of the battlefield of justice
…alone...
Refusing to beckon us to follow.

But the children of tomorrow
Have heard the melody and
felt the beat of the drum
and been bathed in truth.

And they take their place.
Knowing the way forward
Because it belongs to them
It is in that space… in that moment

Where the past bows to the present moment
laying truth on the ground;
the evolution will begin
and our hearts will be changed forever.

Q and A

How would you describe your poetic aesthetic?

My writing is a part of my spiritual practice, so there is a spiritual element to it.

Do you find the place you live reflected in your work?

The place that I currently live is where I have lived for at least 50 non-consecutive years of my life. So, more than any other place, it rests in my bones. Even when I am not intentional about including some physical element in my work, it finds its way there. For me, every place that I allow myself to be fully present informs who I am and how I express myself and interact with the world. My relationship with my physical environment is as important as the relationships I have with individuals. Although I have lived briefly in a number of places, they don’t hold the same imprint as this place I call home. Even where I travel in my imagination and dreams, they usually have some of the same energetic similarities with my current environment, and when they don’t, I know it is an experience I will have—soon. The other thing I should mention is that having continuity of place gives me a vantage point from which to observe the dynamics of change and how communities respond to it. How things come together and fall apart only to re-form. There is a sense of art to it all.

In addition to poetry, I enjoy the art of storytelling. As a result, some of my poetry lends itself more to spoken word. For me where I live holds my origin story. It served as home to my grandparents—where my great grandparents would visit—and my parents. So there is generational memory that my body holds. When I am most fortunate it will reveal itself and allow me to place it on paper, or in some other form of art.

Is the current climate of our nation impacting your writing?

During this period of global unrest, I find myself retooling for the road ahead. I constantly question: What are the things that nourish me? What keeps me whole and helps me to operate at my higher self? What are those life-giving skills I need to practice and how do I give them personal definition so that they have meaning for me? I wrote my first poem for a high school English class. That was almost 55 years ago. It was also during a period of unrest. It was the first time I actually heard myself. Writing for me is a spiritual practice. It grounds me. It allows me access. Over the past few months my writing has defied the “butt in the seat” discipline required to produce a product. It sometimes has no intention other than to appear on a piece of paper. There are thousands of them, and notebooks too. One day I may take the time to go through and organize them. They are in piles all around my house. Everywhere. The value of writing most of it is not to produce anything, but to just put the words on paper where they can breathe, so I can breathe. Words that I need to see, written in a way that I can hear myself, unobstructed by the chaos and noise of the world surrounding me.

You are both a practitioner and wonderful instructor of Yin Yoga. How does your practice influence or flow into your poetry?

As I said earlier, writing for me is a spiritual practice, Yin and contemplation are two other spiritual practices for me. Many of my Yin classes are a manifestation of what comes up for me in contemplation. Remember those notebooks and pieces of paper I talked about laying around my house? Some of them become points of contemplation and then find their way into the poetry of my classes. They offer a point of focus for me, my students and our practice together. For me there exists an agreement of mutualism between the three practices.

Covid-19 has created a challenge for taking part in the arts but you have really embraced the virtual platforms available. What was this transition like for you?

This challenge has not been majorly difficult. After I allowed myself permission to grieve what I had lost and was losing, I began to discover what I had gained. I lost access to much of the human touch and socialization that I live for and, I am learning to lean in to other ways of developing and maintaining relationships and intimacy with other human beings. One major gain for me has been access. I have attended classes up and down the West Coast and places in between. I have attended conferences that would never have been accessible to me had it not been for the virtual world. I have seen performances of Opera at the Met and the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival without leaving my home, which at times has presented physical hardships. I was also able to participate in 48 Blocks AC, attend many of the offerings and actually taught a class in Memory Doll Making. I intend to expand my use of the technology by offering free Zoom classes in Yoga, Doll Making and whatever else I am able to come up with. I am also going to reactivate my Blogs. I actually discovered that these platforms were designed for people like me: curious, social, unfinished, physically challenged seniors who recognize they have more to give and a responsibility to give it away.

Where can we find more of your work or participate in your practice?

Currently, I teach Yin Yoga live on Monday evenings at 7pm on the Leadership Studio’s Facebook Page.

Instagram: @belindamanning6355

Blogs: Phoenix Rising & Conversations... with Dad

Click bold text for links!)

I spent most of my “working” life in the corporate world and as a volunteer in the non-profit sector. After my retirement, I found myself bathing in the healing power of art. In addition to writing, I have worked with hot glass, fusing and lampwork. I have cycled my way through the art of bookmaking, polymer clay and doll making. Both my photographic and mixed media arts have received awards.—Belinda Manning

Catfish” John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he serves his community as a licensed social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured in the Philadelphia based Moonstone Poetry series, West-Chester based Livin’ on Luck series, and Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM. Catfish John has been nominated 3x for the Pushcart Prize. He has been a workshop facilitator for Stockton University’s Tour of Poetry at the Otto Bruyns Public Library of Northfield and will be facilitating a haiku workshop at Beardfest Arts & Music Festival at the end of August. Recent publications include: Jelly Bucket, Tule Review, The Patterson Literary Review, Glassworks, Driftwood, Constellations, The Poeming Pigeon, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. Find out more at: www.catfishjohnpoetry.com

Local Lyrics featuring Joel Dias-Porter

July 20, 2020 Samuel Fine

Local Lyrics hosted by John Wojtowicz appears on the 3rd Monday of each month. In it, John features the work and musings of a local poet.

The East Wind

rising and falling

the voice of old mother

Joel Dias-Porter

How would you describe your poetic aesthetic?

I think the whole point of having an aesthetic is that it speaks for itself. I do try to reproduce the effects of music on the page and I love playing with structure and structures, obviously my aesthetic also reflects a lot of the poetry I’ve read and admired over the course of my life.

What does your process look like when that all-possible-blank-page is in front of you?

Not a process person and while it appears to be of great interest to many writers I consider conversations about it to be mostly a waste of time. I sit down, play around and try to have fun. That’s it. If I get a poem, I get a poem, If I get a line, I get a line, my goal is just to enter the Temple of Logos and worship for a few.

You often incorporate references and allusions to music (specifically jazz) in your poetry. How does music influence you and your writing style?

I reference a lot of music, R&B, Jazz, Hip Hop, Cape Verdean music, etc. I think one of the great intellectual failures of Western Academic production is that there still is no coherent Theory of Euphony, although millions of words have been devoted to metrical prosody (much of it nonsense when it comes to English). So I created my own and some of its tenets are borrowed from the way I think music works.

You’ve placed first in the National Haiku Slam and second in the National Poetry Slam. Do you have to put yourself in different mindset for writing haiku vs free verse?

I write in many forms, both received and bespoke and it’s all just poetry to me. Sometimes a poem starts out one way and ends up another way. I just try to do whatever produces the best poem.

Do you know which form you are going to use before you set out to write the poem?

I write in a lot of forms so generally speaking no, but I can usually feel if a poem is best suited to a Japanese short form like Haiku or Senryu.

You often post haiku you’ve written in response to current events on your Facebook page. I really loved the one you wrote in response to the confrontation between riot police and the peaceful violin vigil for Elijah McClain. What are your thoughts on poetry as news and the opportunity to respond to events poetically in real time via social media?

Thank you. It’s mostly about self-care for me personally, although I love the fact that I can instantly “publish” and share early forms of my poems this way. Poetry is part of how I process the world and the whole Elijah McClain situation hurt me very deeply, in part because it appears he was on the spectrum.

Your family is from the Cape Verde Islands and you sometimes utilize Portuguese-Creole words in your writing. Are there other ways you incorporate your roots into your writing?

All the ways, my brother, all the ways.

Bentu Lestri
Ta subi ta kai
vos di Mai Belha

The East Wind
rising and falling
the voice of old mother

Where can readers find more of your work? Where can we buy your books?

I don’t have a book. I post most of my Japanese short form poems on Twitter (@diasporter) because there’s a community of those poets there and it lets me leave a contemporaneous record.

Joel Dias-Porter, born and raised in Pittsburgh, served in the US Air Force, and after leaving the service became a professional DJ in the DC area. In 1991, he quit his job and began living in homeless shelters, while undergoing an Afrocentric self-study program. He competed in the National Poetry Slam, finishing second place, and was the 1998 and 1999 Haiku Slam Champion. His poems have been published in Time Magazine, The Washington Post, Callaloo, Antioch Review, Red Brick Review and the anthologies Meow: Spoken Word from the Black Cat, Short Fuse, Role Call, Def Poetry Jam, 360 Degrees of Black Poetry, Slam (The Book) and many others. He has performed on the Today Show, in the documentary SlamNation, on BET and in the feature film Slam. The father of a young son, he has a CD of jazz and poetry on Black Magi Music, entitled LibationSong.

Catfish” John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he serves his community as a licensed social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured in the Philadelphia based Moonstone Poetry series, West-Chester based Livin’ on Luck series, and Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM. Catfish John has been nominated 3x for the Pushcart Prize. He has been a workshop facilitator for Stockton University’s Tour of Poetry at the Otto Bruyns Public Library of Northfield and will be facilitating a haiku workshop at Beardfest Arts & Music Festival at the end of August. Recent publications include: Jelly Bucket, Tule Review, The Patterson Literary Review, Glassworks, Driftwood, Constellations, The Poeming Pigeon, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. Find out more at: www.catfishjohnpoetry.com

Local Lyrics featuring Stephanie Cawley

May 18, 2020 Samuel Fine

Local Lyrics hosted by John Wojtowicz appears on the 3rd Monday of each month. In it, John features the work and musings of a local poet.

“I’m finding myself most wanting the company of many poets I already know and who, in ordinary times, it would be no miracle to spend time with … I’d honestly trade a chance to lay in a meadow with Emily Dickinson for it.”

Stephanie Cawley

from My Heart But Not My Heart

Does your mouth go wreath
when you want warmth?
Do you say fallen instead of
fallow? Does your tongue get stuck
in the gap between is and was?
There is an actual shrinking.
List all the animals you can.
Echo back these fifteen words.
You are a thin glass of water.
You are a cold wind and a field.
Don’t make them a story.

Q and A

How would you describe your poetic aesthetic?

I aspire to being a poet who is not loyal to any singular aesthetic, style, form, or mode of writing. I hope to continually reinvent myself, to find the forms and modes that a given subject or project requires and to always remain interested in trying something new with my work. I guess that is a kind of aesthetic or tendency in and of itself, though! And all that said, I recognize that I’ve been pretty dedicated to the prose poem and to poetry/prose hybrid forms for quite some time now. My first book My Heart But Not My Heart is an extended sequence that is mostly prose; I have a chapbook A Wilderness that is almost all prose poems; and my second book Animal Mineral will contain prose poems, a kind of lyric essay, and a long poem that rewrites a short story by Clarice Lispector, in addition to some standalone poems.

If you could spend the afternoon with one poet living or dead, who would it be and how would you spend your afternoon?

I haven’t spent an afternoon with any person other than my partner in about two months now, so I’m finding myself most wanting the company of many poets I already know and who, in ordinary times, it would be no miracle to spend time with. I’d love to spend an afternoon with my poet friends, maybe writing together, or reading poems to each other, or maybe just sitting outside having a drink. Right now, I’d honestly trade a chance to lay in a meadow with Emily Dickinson for it.

Is there anything unique about your process? Do you have any advice for writers struggling to find their voice?

I don’t know if it’s unique, but my writing process relies a lot on intuition. I generate work by dropping in to a space where I’m as unconscious about what’s happening on the page as possible, freewriting, writing while looking out the window, sometimes incorporating elements of chance or outside inspiration (eavesdropping, observation, grabbing bits of text from another book, drawing a tarot card). Then I come back later (sometimes much later) and read and shape and refine and rearrange and remix and apply structure. I am trying not to think of that second step as “cleaning up,” but as a process of reflecting on and bringing more intention into a work.

In your new book, My Heart But Not My Heart, you write about your experience with grief. Did you have a specific strategy when traversing the line between the personal and universal?

Writing the book began with a need to document and make space for my personal experiences of grief in the aftermath of my dad’s sudden death. It feels like American culture is pretty uncomfortable with death and with real grief, so writing this book became a way to make space for thoughts and feelings that felt unspeakable and unbearable in my daily life. I don’t really believe in universality or in striving towards it, but I did find myself curious about how my individual experiences connected to others’ experiences and connected to other bodies of knowledge. I wanted to try to understand what was happening to me, so I found myself turning to philosophy, neuroscience, and other cultural texts about grief and depression, which then made their way into the writing.

In this book, you seamlessly move between prose and poetry. Can you tell us a little about the decision not to box yourself into one form?

The book began with the sections that are in prose, which I started writing around the one year mark after my dad died. For that first year after he died, I was in graduate school, and I muscled through continuing to write kind of musical, lyrical poems, but it felt like I was going through the motions. Then, eventually, it felt like I couldn’t bear to write like that at all anymore, like I couldn’t approach my actual experiences with that kind of writing. So, after a while of not really writing at all, I started writing into a Word document in prose. I didn’t think what I was doing there was “real writing,” writing that would become anything or that anyone else would ever read, but it was the first time I felt able to actually arrive on the page. I wrote into that document every day for about a month, and then showed a bit of it to my teacher and mentor Dawn Lundy Martin who told me this was my book and that I had to keep writing it.

When I began to shape the book manuscript, I knew that by then I did also have some more “poem”-type pieces that were in conversation with the prose, so I spent a long time playing with order and structure before arriving at a kind of architecture that holds all these pieces together. It felt right, for a book about an experience of grief, for there to be aspects of the form that felt disorienting (the shifts between poetry and prose, the fragmentation, the pieces that occupy different parts of the page) and aspects that evoked an enduring sameness (the long prose sequences).

Where can readers find more of your work? Where can we buy your books?

You can get My Heart But Not My Heart right from my publisher Slope Editions (slopeeditions.org), from Small Press Distribution (spdbooks.org), or from Bookshop.org. You can also buy it from Amazon, but you shouldn’t! Even setting aside Amazon’s horrific labor practices, for small press books like mine, if you buy from the press or from indie retailers, more of your dollars will go back to support the press, which runs on a shoestring budget and volunteer labor. I also have a chapbook A Wilderness which you can get from Gazing Grain Press (gazinggrainpress.com). I also have work in various print and online journals which you can find links to on my website stephaniecawley.com.

Stephanie Cawley is a poet from southern New Jersey and the Director of Murphy Writing of Stockton University. She is the author of My Heart But Not My Heart, which won the Slope Book Prize chosen by Solmaz Sharif, and the chapbook A Wilderness from Gazing Grain Press. Her poems and other writing appear in DIAGRAM, The Fanzine, TYPO, The Boston Review, and West Branch, among other places. Her next book Animal Mineral will be out from YesYes Books in 2022. Learn more at stephaniecawley.com.