Three weeks ahead of the official release date for The Comet’s Tail, my research poster about writing the memoir was a winner at the Universtiy of Bridgeport’s Faculty Research Day event. Thanks to the judges, the dean and faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences for their support. Get your copies from Little Bound Books. 
Read Local Author Fair
Join me and 17 other authors from Connecticut at the Read Local Author Fair. Saturday, March 24 from 11-1:00 at the Riverfront Community Center, 300 Welles Street, Glastonbury, CT 06033. I’ll be there with copies of The Comet’s Tail: A Memoir of No Memory (in advance of its official release date!) as well as Reconnaissance, Four Blue Eggs, Literary Connecticut, A History of Connecticut Food, and A History of Connecticut Wine. Come out and show your support for local authors. In the meantime, follow my poetry progress with Tupelo Press and support Homebound Publications.
Poems for Snow and Spring
I can’t believe it’s already day 12 with Tupelo Press and my 30/30 project. Have you been keeping up with all 96 poems? That’s 96 poems (8 poets for March x 12 days, so far. . . ) and more to come.
Follow us into spring. Tomorrow promises more snow. Find the poems inspired by these pictures. Sponsorships and donations still welcome! While you’re feeling generous, order a copy of The Comet’s Tail: A Memoir of No Memory Because writing matters and so does supporting those who bring it to you, get yourself a tee shirt and Stay Wild!
Poems for Sunday
Day four of thirty with Tupelo Press.
Click away. (NOTE 30/30 is an ongoing project, so my participation in March has finished. Enjoy this month’s work and support Tupelo Press)
30/30 Day 1
March 1st.
Join me and seven other poets who will be writing 30 poems in 30 days. Here’s the link. Check back tomorrow for Friday’s posts.
Thank you to all our supporters. Click to sponsor me
This may sound easy. It isn’t.
“A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses [her] feeling through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t.”
E.E. Cummings (or e.e. cummings as he preferred) wrote this advice to a young poet, and my poetry teacher shared it with me when I first started writing. After 27 years, it’s still not easy, but I can’t stop, and starting next week, I will write one poem a day for 30 days.
I’ll be participating in Tupelo Press’s 30/30 project, and joining over 175 poets who’ve committed to writing 30 poems in 30 days. Four poets will join me for March, and I’m excited to get started.
We’re all inviting family, friends, and colleagues to sponsor us. It’s not a competition, but we’re all raising money for Tupelo Press, one of the best independent publishers in the country, and a great supporter of poetry. But I need a little more than a retweet or Facebook Like. Support my efforts with a donation.
https://tupelopress.networkforgood.com/projects/47224-amy-nawrocki-s-fundraiser
By sponsoring my 30/30 efforts, you will send me vital encouragement and help the Tupelo Press continue to put more poets into print. Here’s why it matters:
- Independent literary publishers are mission-driven—they focus on publishing literature.
- Independent literary publishers provide access to the voices of entire communities.
- Independent literary publishers produce over 98% of poetry being published each year, and the majority of literature in translation and works of fiction by emerging writers.
Your sponsorship can be at any level; no amount is too small or insignificant.
- For a donation of $10, I’ll send you a personized origami box, designed with one of my poems.
- For $15, I’ll dedicate a poem to you.
- If you can support me with $30 (just $1/day), I’ll send you a signed copy of either Four Blue Eggs or Reconnaissance.
- For a donation of $60 (2 dollars a day), I’ll send you a signed copy The Comet’s Tail: A Memoir of No Memory before its April 10 release date.
- Customize your donation. Birthday coming up? Need a wedding poem? New baby coming? Retirement? I’m in.
Tupelo Press is a prestigious non-profit press, for seventeen years their mission has been to publish new voices. They are giving my work some exposure, which is sometimes hard to come by.
“If,” continued cummings, “at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.”
I’m very lucky indeed to have had such great support throughout my writing career. Keep it going and kick off March with me. I’ll post my first poem in just over a week. Follow my progress.
My very best,
Amy Nawrocki
One poem a day . . . for 30 days
I’m excited to be part of Tupelo Press’s 30/30 project. I will be joining 173 poets who committed to this daily practice of shaping words on the page. It’s not as easy as it sounds. I look forward to pushing myself. I start March 1st.
If you write or read or just want to try to make the world a better place through art, please support my efforts. Fundraising supports Tupelo Press and helps me stay motivated. Writers need readers: make poetry a part of your March.
Insomnia, debunked
From Four Blue Eggs (2017 Homebound Publications), a poem that has had quite a journey, from a notebooks sketch more than 25 years ago to a small but central kernel excerpted in my forthcoming memoir, The Comet’s Tail: A Memoir of No Memory.
In My Sleeplessness, I Hear an Opera
In the beginning, I hear the darkness.
I am crowded by the soprano’s knowlege
of body rhythms. I see I E flat cry.
And then the light bulbs begin to sprout, one
by one, by the side of the stage where all
the Presidents line up in order.
I know them by their thunderous tenors,
because when eyelids magnetize I do not
sleep. After that I pretend that I lay
in a coffin, my arms folded like white
linen in a closet oddly fitted
to the size of my body. I smell cedar.
But all this time I have been wondering
if my eyelashes have learned how to sing.
I’ll be reading from Four Blue Eggs and other works at Byrd’s Books in Bethel CT, on Friday, May 18th at 7:00 for part three of Byrd’s Spring Poetry Series.
Workmanship
Thanks to the Connecticut Poetry Society for posting my poem “Building a House” in their “members’ poems” link (see menu bar under “MORE”). You’ll also find tributes and contest information. Join today and help support the written and spoken word.
Building a House
by Amy Nawrocki
On our usual walks, mud gushing
into hiking boots and creeks humming
in quiet trickles, we stop to marvel
at beavers’ work: trees taken down
by fierce teeth, graveyards of stumps
constructed like missile heads. I think:
what careful precision there is in the shreds
of bark wisped in circular piles.
While no clear path is laid to water,
we know they are building dams–
secret tunnels under the silted lake.
There is no doubt—this is work.
Swimmers always, one beaver, intent
on warning us away, slaps the water
with his tail. Instinct and survival
feed his business, not vanity
the way we piece together a room.
Unable to fathom the carefulness, the absolute
technicality of such workmanship, I tell you
how humble I feel, too dumbfounded to believe
these little creatures and their craft. You hold
out your hands to show me how big a beaver is–
bigger than I think—and we carry on
down the path into the car and back
to the house we have built together.
As our house begins to fail,
tiny spaces crack the floor and stairways
and break down the fiber of wood.
When the insulation begins to peel away,
we fight, busy as beavers, to keep it
together. We grit our teeth, burrow
into walls, and cart the hard parts away
with jagged teeth and leather tails.
Escaping the hook
I’m looking forward to an upcoming post-Christmas family reunion. Here is one of my favorite poems from Potato Eaters, my first chapbook from Finishing Line Press. The photo, too, is one of my favorites, found in an attic box years ago. That’s my mother, on the right, and two of her brothers on the left.
Click the yellow BUY NOW button found at the bottom of the page (or this link) to order a signed copy.
Fishing with My Brother
My brother, who is prone to nosebleeds
hasn’t the efficiency to heal wounds;
on his left arm burn marks permanently
blister. His chin bears the scar of the second
fall on the steep hill below the house.
You can’t get any better than that
he says, pushing the fishing line
into my face. Of all the fish ever
to swim in this pond or that, this
one decides to end life on a hook,
its flesh torn and gaping. We
could take a lesson, learn when to give
up, when to know enough is enough.
He throws the fish back. How did he become
so elemental? How did he know
the average heart cannot drown
itself too deep, forgetting its purpose?
I want to tell him walk a bit with me
and we’ll cry to the birds who nest by us
in the fairy tale. He’ll listen, I hope.
I can’t wait to see him plant fields, discover
electricity, and cut a strong path
through jungles. But there will be time for that.
Nine times out of ten, it is speed
that breaks us; we grow too fast
trying to fly, or escape the hook.
Amy Nawrocki 