Poems Out from the Workshop!

Thanks so much to JMWW Journal, Loch Raven Review, and Wayne Literary Review for publishing four poems of mine in Fall 2024.

Wayne Literary Review out of Wayne State University published a poem written in the 2022-2023 time frame, but the remainder of them date back one or two decades to the first draft.

While “How Far, Two Stars,” is based on work from 2005, most of that was revised out, so it is mostly new.

To check it out, click on the titles below:

HOW FAR, TWO STARS

WHISTLER’S SKETCHBOOK: COME SEE WITH ME

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

Sand Mandala & New Publications

Thank you to the editors of The Potomac Review (Maryland), Main Street Rag (North Carolina), California Quarterly (Calif.), SurVision (Ireland), and Compass Rose Literary Journal (D.C. / online) for 2024 publications of my poetry! I appreciate it.

This poem, “Sand Mandala,” appeared the Summer 2024 issue of Main Street Rag, a poem close to my heart, because unlike some of my work, autobiographical. While I don’t usually reprint, I shall here with irregular formatting as I cannot style it correctly through Web design:

Sand Mandala

As our June afternoon becomes

sweaty becoming laughs becoming plans

becoming children’s tugs, why not

whistle these steps into a dance?

Why not mold our circumstance to craft

mementos out of colored sand

as joy peacocks us to parade

or we huddle for some storm to end?

I’ll touch this question into a path

before let go—and the sand rivers home.

Tibetan monks from the Dalai Lama’s compound in India came through Baltimore, Maryland again this summer.

It was the first time I’ve seen them since the beginning of the pandemic. The above mandala was completed from sand on a Sunday at the cusp of the transformation-back ceremony. I was blessed to attend it. I also attended a morning meditation led by three monks from the traveling cohort alongside my teenage daughter. What could be better!

Cheers, in gratitude,

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

What I’m Reading: Jhumpa Lahiri, Maggie Smith & More

The heat of summer has hit Maryland. Oppressive, it’s feels just right. I have noticed the grass has stopped aggressively growing, which it did all June. Together we are baking and making our way in a slower cadence. Of course, time for summer reading! I am reading these gems right now:

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri (Vintage 2024)

You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith (Simon & Schuster 2023)

Crossing the Tape (poems) by Michael Salcman (Spuyten Duyvil 2024)

The River Is the Reason (poems) by Meredith Davies Hadaway (Word Tech 2011)

Rumi’s Little Book of Life: The Garden of the Soul, the Heart, and the Spirit by Rumi (trans. Maryam Mafi & Melita Kolin) (‎Hampton Roads Publishing 2012)

I just finished Maggie Smith’s hybrid text memoir about her life during and just after divorce, combined with a bird’s eye view of her life as a working poet and concerned mother, her hopes as an adult, plus her ascent into national recognition, all jumbled together. Composed of vignettes of one to two pages, notes to self, vows and questions, and sparingly, the occasional poem, Smith’s shared self-exploration is a moving account.

Smith’s husband is a college playwright and adult lawyer, she reports, so the book explores what it means for them to live out different sort of dreams, including him being the breadwinner, maybe abandoning writing (though that is at most implied), and Smith becoming increasingly engaged with literary events and teaching gigs as the marriage frays. These days, Smith’s poetry career, and now prose too, has taken off. It provides the income that did not exist during the marriage, which is a poignant arc of the memoir evident in the events, though the point is not emphasized.

What is explored here? Love, betrayal, parenting in divorce, the writing life, how it all happens, what to make of it, how to feel about it. Smith’s collage notebook of a memoir has the atmosphere of both breezy open window and echoing water well.

It has occurred to me — with Tolstoy’s fictional memoir is on my bed stand (“Childhood Boyhood Youth”) and waiting for me to read into the middle section — whether Smith’s hybrid format can really equal heartfelt realism exemplified by Tolstoy in depth of detail, compared to entertainment and surprise. Maybe it does not have to. Smith’s book also is not a tell all. Rather, it’s insightful, self-reflective, searching, and at times, gregarious and fun.

I also am one story away from finishing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories: ineffable and poignant tales from an esteemed writer who now lives in Italy. I remember her first two books, but have not kept up with her oeuvre. Lahiri can write about the mundane in meticulous yet effortless detail and with tremulous resonance.

If someone else told you one of her stories at a dinner party, you might scoot off bored. In her hands, you travel to Italy, enter other people’s lives, hear the bird outside or see the watermarks stain on a used glass, while diving into universal humanity, to arrive back in your chair. Wonderful.

While less dramatic in Roman Stories than the great Irish short story teller William Trevor, her elegant simplicity like Trevor gets at the heart of people’s lives, each unique and intricate, though none of them here would, on the street passing by, catch your eye. If a future society asked, What was it like for an average individual including non-Italian immigrants to live in colossal Rome in 2010-2024?, these stories would be a historian’s treasure trove.

Michael Salcman and Meredith Davies Hadaway are Maryland poets that write delicate work. Salcman’s Crossing the Tape takes place in his ’70s, and does so with range, grace and his usual cosmopolitan insight. Divided into five sections, there are ekphrastic poems, poems on war and social violence, plus poems on intimacy, everyday living, and aging. Recommended. Salcman is moody, wise, intelligent, erudite, and caring; he deserves a national audience.

Hadaway’s 2011 The River Is the Reason is themed around the ways of rivers, which is fun way to craft a book for the reader. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Hadaway writes sparingly and exacting as might early William Carlos Williams if alive today. However rather than crowded and urban New Jersey, the atmosphere here involves the open space, rivers and breezes, and the broad sky of Maryland’s eastern shoreline. I had the pleasure to see her read recently, and she identifies herself as an environmental or ecological poet, observing with care more than loudly political. Recommended.

Click on their names to find out more about Salcman and Hadaway.

Maryam Mafi & Melita Kolin’s translation of timeless Rumi poems hits the spot. It is my second time dipping into this collection. Stunning stuff.

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

Glad to Review DISEASE OF KINGS by Carlson-Wee

My review of Disease of Kings (Norton 2023) is live at HEAVY FEATHER REVIEW, since April 11, 2024, and linked below. I also had the pleasure to see Anders Carlson-Wee read from it sometime earlier, including the attention-grabbing opening poem of the collection, in Baltimore at the HOT L reading series.

He’s quite the performer, and these poems sing both on the page and in the reading of them. The collection’s worth the gander and meander!

To read the full review, please do: Click to the HEAVY FEATHER REVIEW here.

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

Big Tech & Big Addiction

Are iPhones the new cigarette?

I have found myself struggling with checking my phone too often and specifically my email too often through the phone during April 2024. The pull of this product, yes our cellphones are tools but also products, has caught up to me.

In other words, rather than reach for a book, I reach to check my email again. This over-checking is laughable because like most, I get less and less interesting emails. It’s full of more and more announcements from any store or web site that’s snagged it during some past visit or purchase, and never loses track of it, so it seems. The occasional chance of something notable and new is a huge pull if I’m near my cellphone.

Technology companies these days portray themselves as horizon-gazing thinkers, cool disruptive innovators, or know-it-all mega-millionaires, but they also are designers of addictive products. Their phone products, email products, social media products, Twitter and Tic Toc products, all feed into the human questions: What’s next? What’s happening now? Who, what, and where?

Are iPhones the new cigarette?

Social media as well as iPhones are not that much older than cigarettes were when they were advertised widely, used in movies and widely modeled, and probably even promoted as healthy.

Well of course, I can do something about it. It’s called self-control. I often leave my cellphone in my house mail box when I come home, so I can be more at home when home. This said, it’s stayed in my pocket recently.

The poet William Carlos Williams said, “The pure products of America go crazy” in his poem, “To Elsie.” One way to read that phrase is to recognize the tsunami of hype surrounding sellers who sell you out. Time for higher ground.

I miss the peace of reaching for a book, even the quiet boredom yielding to entering a book’s world. As poet Emily Dickinson said, “there is no frigate like a book.” That sentiment could become history. The electronic age is upon us, one predicted by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media. Al Gore wrote about it in his own way, from the perspective of democracy, in his 2007 book, The Assault on Reason.

Are iPhones the new cigarette? It’s also just beginning.

Stay safe,

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

Reading Roundup

Of the collections of poetry relished in 2023 and earlier this winter, I very much enjoyed Luke Stromberg’s debut, THE ELEPHANT’S MOUTH (Kelsey Books), Mag Gabbert’s full-length debut, SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS (Mad Creek Books), Diana Whitney’s second book, DARK BEDS (June Road Press), and Tony Hoagland’s posthumous collection, still humorous yet poignant and piercing, TURN UP THE OCEAN (Graywolf).

I also revisited and found still compelling Philip Schultz’s FAILURE, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Stephen Dunn’s LOOSESTRIFE, and Li Young-Lee’s ROSE, among many others worth savoring, in 2023.

David Hinton is a translator of Chinese poetry whom I have been happy to discover. I just finished a selection of Tu Fu translated by Hinton. I am now reading Hinton’s translation of Chinese poet T’ao Ch’ien, AD 365- AD 427, and titled, The Selected Poems of T’ao Ch’ien (Copper Canyon). Wonderful.

For more on Hoagland, I reviewed TURN UP THE OCEAN at the Loch Raven Review, linked here.

I also reviewed Mag Gabbert’s SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS at the Heavy Feather Review linked here.

What’s next? Well, I am reading through Robert Bly’s anthology, NEWS OF THE UNIVERSE: poems of twofold consciousness (Sierra Club Books 1980), which I came across in a sort of casual and random fashion, and . . . .

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

Braiding Voices: A Collaborative Generative Workshop on March 9, 2024

If you are in the Delmarva area (Maryland, Delaware, Northern Virginia) and also a writer, the Eastern Shore Writers Association is holding their annual one-day conference for writers at Chesapeake College in Wye Mills, Md., on Saturday, March 9, 2024.

The conference runs about five panels simultaneously across genres and attendees choose what they wish to attend. Last year, I presented as well as attended, like this year, and it was a great experience.

See here: https://www.easternshorewriters.org/

In the morning, I will be teaching a generative workshop on using collaboration in poetry. Here’s the detail:

Workshop Description: Come blend your artistic voice with someone else or the world’s chorus! Join noted poets G. H. Mosson and Marcus Colasurdo, the co-creators of two collaborative chapbooks, as they employ a fun exercise from improv theatre and explore the concept of T.S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” to frame and prompt collaborative writing!

It should be fun. Hope to see you there.

Cheers,

For more: http://easternshorewriters.org

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com