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
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.
Rewriting
For My Thirty-third Forty-fifth Birthday
Four times ten has run
around the globe. Along the way
she picked up five more:
a gull winging to fortune,
a wasp buzzing villainy,
a blond crested hawk surveying the increments,
two mourning doves in flight
The companions, with sails blazing,
frequent glassy seas, blue-green mountains.
Poem to Myself the Day I Edit the Past
Remember to watch fire
as it burns
between the fibers of a log
that layer above crisp orange embers,
its flames breathing through
the saw’s cuts that slant perpendicular
to the sequence
of the tree’s narrow years.
ORIGINS: “Lucifer Falls, New York” by Amy Nawrocki
Snow days always make me nostalgic, and stumbling on this “origin story” about a distant summer makes me long (strangely enough) for the waterfall and gorges and the snakes of summer. This is from JMWW Literary Journal’s blog, July 2013
In today’s ORIGINS, Amy Nawrocki talks about the inspiration for her poem “Lucifer Falls, New York,” which appears in the summer 2013 issue of jmww:
Three months before the wedding, my husband and I found my wedding band in a jewelry story in Ocean City, repacked the car and headed north to the Finger Lakes of New York state, country of Riesling and pungent artisanal cheeses. The campsite was crowded, bright and hot, but at night we roasted corn on the cob, popped toasted marshmallows with raspberries into our mouths and sipped on cream sherry. Eric and I are avid hikers, so in between wine tasting and lake cruises, we strapped on the boots and took to the gorges and waterfalls outside Ithaca.
The hike took us in and out of pine forests, to the top of the falls, a look out to the valley below. Though elsewhere the…
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New Year’s Eve
truant clocks shapeshift
like lamppost bulbs—following
time’s ascent: evening
Stoked
The moon’s fingernail
scrapes a far away gazer’s
thoughts, breaking open
her mind, freeing a thousand
love songs stoked with lunar dust.
Perspective
hold a horizon
lengthwise, like a pencil, like
a white pine sapling
Lost and Translation
I found these poems sandwiched between the pages of The Hand of the Poet: Poems and Papers in Manuscript, a beautiful volume of drafts and redrafts from poets like Julia Alvarez and Philip Levine, Robert Frost and Allen Ginsberg. At the time, I knew this would be an appropriate place for this little copied and folded mini manuscript. Luckily, I found it again.
The tanka was published years ago in Modern English Tanka, and I can’t remember how my little cricket song was translated into Russian, or how I came across Jefi-Jun’s version. Lost, then found. 
Amy Nawrocki 