Category Archives: Poetry

Meet Our Contributors: Q&A with Wallace Lane

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Wallace Lane is a poet, writer, and author from Baltimore, Maryland. He received his MFA in creative writing and publishing arts from the University of Baltimore in May 2017. His poetry has appeared in Little Patuxent Review, The Avenue, Welter and is forthcoming in several literary journals. Jordan Year, his debut collection of poetry, was released in May 2017. Wallace also works as a teacher with Baltimore City Public Schools.

Wallace’s poem, “Groceries,” appeared in LPR’s Summer Issue 2018 (available for purchase at this link). He read “Groceries” and two other poems at our issue launch in June (video below).

Q: You majored in criminal justice, then went for an MFA and now work as a teacher. Just from reading your bio, there seems to be a consistent social justice theme, but one that’s taken you in a few different directions. Could you share a little about your path?

Honestly about three years ago I would have cringed at that question, just based off the distance between a criminal justice degree and an MFA. But now it’s now one of the questions I’m most anxious to answer. As a first generation college student, I had no clue of what to major in at college. I knew it had to be something where I would profit financial gain but also something I would enjoy during the pursuit. And quite honestly, nothing at all stood out to me, not even criminal justice (I knew I would never proudly wear a law enforcement uniform, no offense to anyone). But the aspect of mentoring youth and juveniles stood out to me and that’s mainly why I chose to major in criminal justice my junior year of undergrad. From there I went to work in several juvenile center detention centers and schools. And I must say it’s the hardest work I ever done. I witnessed first-hand how kids were profited off of in a corrupt criminal justice system and how it was, in many ways, preparing them for a life designed for them to depend on some corrupt system of some sort. I was 23 years old at that time. I saw enough death and pain growing up. I knew I could do more to help the youth somehow so I started to create an exit plan. I STARTED TO WRITE POETRY. I always loved poetry. I start writing poems in middle school and I had a dozen composition notebooks of poems in high school. I even took creative writing classes while pursuing a criminal justice degree. Somehow my falling in love with poetry all over again led me to pursuing my MFA degree. The rest is history. It’s a lot of twist and turns in my journey but I love it. It inspires a lot of people and encourages the youth and even adults to pursue their passion and never be afraid to try new things. I’m grateful for that.

Q: When on your website you describe Jordan Year as about “what it means to live and survive in Baltimore City,” I remembered Ta-Nehisi Coates, who writes about his own childhood in Baltimore in Between the World and Me. I don’t think Coates does any poetry, but has he influenced your writing in any way?

I’m rooting for black excellence. I’m rooting for anyone from Baltimore. Anyone who is attempting to bring light and hope to a city like ours. Especially artist and writers who love this city. We are the pillars of culture here. But as far as Between the World and Me, it was definitely a narrative I drew inspiration from when I began drafting my manuscript. I enjoyed how Coates presented a harsh reality to his son while intimately taking him and us (readers) on a journey through his life. That was my goal when writing Jordan Year–to tell two stories in one, my journey of growing up in Baltimore City but also the reality of people in my community who often get overlooked. I didn’t want to sugarcoat anything or leave anything out, you know? And that’s why I can appreciate books like Between the World and Me and so many others because of the transparency in the narrative.

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Meet Our Contributors: Q&A with Natalie Illum

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Natalie Illum is a poet, disability activist, and singer living in Washington, DC. She is a 2017 Jenna McKean Moore Poetry Fellow, recipient of a 2017 Artists Grant from the DC Arts Commission, and nonfiction editor for The Deaf Poets Society literary journal. She was a founding board member of mothertongue, a women’s open mic that lasted fifteen years. She used to compete on the National Poetry Slam circuit and was the 2013 Beltway Grand Slam Champion. Her work has appeared in various publications and on NPR’s Snap Judgment. Natalie has an MFA in creative writing from American University and teaches workshops across the country. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter as @poetryrox, on her website natalieillum.net, and as one half of All Her Muses, her music project. Natalie also enjoys Joni Mitchell, whisky, and giraffes.

Natalie’s poem, “Reset,” appeared in LPR’s Summer Issue 2018 (available for purchase at this link). She read this and two other pieces at our issue launch in June (video below).

Q: Thank you for coming to the launch earlier this month. Before we get into your work, can I ask if there was one reading that struck you in particular?

I really liked Tracy’s piece and the form of the work she was reading. Several of the readers had a theme of clothing that felt really vibrant and necessary to me. And in some way I think we all touched on family as a theme.

Q: You have a lot of experience reading in front of others. How do—if they do—audience and setting change the poems for you as you read them? Did anything like that happen in Columbia?

I definitely tailor my sets based on my audience, especially if I know it is a more family-friendly event. Because I knew the poem you were publishing, I tried to base my selection on that tone. I also really wanted to try out the shark series of poems that I’m currently working on. So when I have readings of late, I bring those to see how the audience receives them. I got a lot of positive feedback from the audience in Columbia, both on the poem in the journal and a particular poem called “Predatory Logic.” So I’m very happy about that—when poems stick with people, especially in a larger featured reading.

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Meet Our Contributors: Q&A with Faye McCray

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Faye McCray is an author and essayist whose popular essays on love, life, and parenting have been featured in My Brown Baby, For Harriet, Madame Noire, Black and Married with Kids, and other popular publications. She is the editor-in-chief and cofounder of Weemagine, a website devoted to celebrating and inspiring all children and the people who love them. Faye is also the author of a collection of positive affirmations for children, I am loved! By day, she is an attorney and married mother of three boys. She is also a master’s in writing candidate at Johns Hopkins University. You can find Faye on the web at www.fayemccray.com.

Faye’s poem, “Virgin in Harlem,” appeared in LPR’s Summer Issue 2018 (available for purchase at this link).

Q: I notice you’re a Hopkins writing student (which makes me happy because I’m a Hopkins grad). Did “Virgin in Harlem” originate as a class assignment? If so, how did it change through the publishing process?

That’s awesome! I just finished my first year and I’m taking one class at a time! I feel like I have a long way to go. I actually wrote “Virgin in Harlem” a few years ago before I started at Hopkins. Over the years, I have become a hoarder of writing prompts. I find them and stash them away for an uninspired day. The prompt that inspired the poem in LPR was to write about freedom. I immediately went back to a time when I didn’t feel so free. It sort of just collected dust on my computer until one day I was reading old files and I thought, “This isn’t that bad.” I revised it and submitted it.

Q: I’m seeing the child narrator in “Virgin in Harlem”—watching the dancers, holding her mother’s hand, embarrassed of herself, wanting to be free—and thinking there’s some connection inside of you to Weemagine and I am loved! Yes, no, I’m crazy?

Wow. That’s a really great observation. What inspired “Virgin in Harlem” and what motivates Weemagine and I am loved! are definitely connected. I am still very much in tune with that little girl in “Virgin in Harlem”—afraid of everything but wanting to experience so much! I think my passion for working with and inspiring kids really stems from my desire to encourage that enthusiasm. It’s hard to build up the courage to step into your identity as an artist. I enjoy helping kids see the possibilities.

Q: Your email signature (if I’m allowed to share this) includes this line of James Baldwin’s:

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.

Out of curiosity, do you remember when you first read that? And does it mean something different to you now than it did then?

Wow… it’s been there for a while! I probably added that to my email signature before I fully understood what it would mean to me, so what it has meant has absolutely evolved over time. Now, it is a reminder not to shy away from the tough stuff. I’ve learned that readers can pick up on dishonest work. They know when you aren’t telling the whole story… when you’re afraid to tell the whole story. Recently I wrote an open letter to my son that was published in the Huffington Post. Initially, I kind of danced around race because I was afraid to alienate the diverse HuffPo audience. The editor loved the letter but immediately picked up on it. She encouraged me to go there. To talk about the fears unique to me as a black mother of black sons. I did and the reception was amazing. My goal is to be brave in my writing. If it doesn’t make me a little uncomfortable or a little emotional or even a little scared, it probably isn’t worth revealing.

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Meet Our Contributors: Q&A with Tracy Dimond

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Tracy Dimond co-curates Ink Press Productions. A 2016 Baker Artist Award finalist, she is the author of four chapbooks, most recently To Tracy Like / To Like / Like (Akinoga Press, 2018). She holds her MFA in creative writing and publishing arts from the University of Baltimore. Find her online at tracydimond.tumblr.com and on Twitter @snarkysyntax.

Dimond’s poem, “Landscape / Landscape / Land Escape,” appeared in LPR’s Summer Issue 2018 (available for purchase at this link).

Q: You have a chapbook titled To Tracy Like / To Like / Like and a poem titled “Landscape / Landscape / Land Escape.” Is there a word for this sort of wordplay?

Other than repetition, I haven’t encountered a word for it. Most of what I learn comes from reading and learning with the ear–I am influenced by the work of Claudia Rankine, Dorothea Lasky, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Gertrude Stein. Stein especially uses repetition and slight sound changes to create a newness of understanding in her work. I love listening to recordings and getting lost in the sound. Lasky will repeat or rephrase lines to create a feeling. There’s something about Rankine and Shaughnessy that circles back, and then moves forward. If there is a formal term for these techniques, someone should write it in the comments.

Q: In this artist statement you write that you “interrogate the role of the female body and what it means to have chronic pain in my poetry.” That struck me because I hadn’t noticed chronic pain when I first read your poem. I re-read some lines with a new sense of what might be behind them, like this one, “A billboard / screams Go outside and live! Thank you for the / feedback.”

I wonder if that could be part of the point – it can be so easy to miss the pain others suffer beneath the surface. But when we’re aware of that possibility, it creates a new empathy within us. Or I’m totally off, which would be quite normal?

Possibility in new understanding may be why I write poetry. I pull from things I read and overhear to create a feeling for the reader. Saying “this hurts” doesn’t connect in the same way a specific experience does–I’m trying to communicate the physical cost of having a body. Everyday things like advertisements on billboards, in a new context, can create new understanding. They set a tone for how we frame the world, whether it’s accepting or pushing against a role. I hope the unusual syntax that can be used in poetry illuminates how unnatural and imbalanced social constructs are–so we can talk about how to change them.

Q: How did pain become such a topic for you?

It’s always been a part of my life. That sounds so dramatic.

I started swimming seriously at a young age. The sport is built on repetition and refinement, like ballet. Zadie Smith wrote in Swing Time, “Elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain.” Swimming for hours, staring at a black line in a chlorinated pool, is physically and mentally painful, but feels special when the strokes look effortless in competition. I’ve ingrained that sort of struggle–feeling pain, but hiding it–in my writing.

More literally, since my teens, I’ve had intense pain with my period. I’ll be pretty specific here because I’ve seen other women open up or go to the doctor after hearing someone else’s story. By my mid-twenties, I would spend a month (usually feeling some version of awful for at least 2 or 3 weeks a month–if you’re counting, that gives me about a week of feeling OK) with a low-grade fever and sweating from the pain of cramps, probably throwing up. Time is critical when you’re in cycles of pain–you know it’s coming, you have to prepare, you hope it’s different this time. My concerns had been dismissed so often by doctors that I had convinced myself I was being weak. It took until 29 to find a doctor that said, and then confirmed with surgery, that the amorphous pain is/was endometriosis. It’s a travesty that chronic illnesses, especially autoimmune illnesses characterized by pain and experienced by individuals with female reproductive organs, are dismissed. I’m still navigating how I write about my experience in the broader context of illness and disability in writing.

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What’s To Like? Derrick Weston Brown’s “Bruuuuuh…”

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George Clack is a board member of the Little Patuxent Review. In this post, he shares one of his “Staff Picks” from the Summer Issue 2018 (available for purchase at this link).

At the Little Patuxent Review’s Summer Issue launch reading on June 2nd, Derrick Weston Brown blew me away with his reading of his poem “Bruuuuuh or When Brothers Debate Black Panther in a Safeway Parking Lot: A Found (Overheard) Poem.” It’s a poem that feels as if it wants to be performed but a work that also offers the pleasures of a close reading on the printed page.

Virtue #1: authenticity, the ultimate literary value for me. It’s the writer’s ability to make me believe in his story, his setting, his tropes, his you-name-it. Call it the art of the real. To my ancient white guy’s ear, this poem pulses with authenticity. Brown creates this effect primarily through an old reliable technique, putting the vernacular—or, as some might say, the language of the street—to use for some serious fun.

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Meet Our Contributors: Q&A with Anthony Moll

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Anthony Moll is a poet, essayist, and educator. He holds an MFA in creative writing & publishing arts and is completing his PhD in poetry & Queer theory. His chapbook about the melancholy of the modern workplace, Go to the Ant, O Sluggard, is available from Akinoga Press. His debut memoir, Out of Step, won the 2017 Non/Fiction Prize from The Journal and will be available in July 2018 from Mad Creek Books.

Moll’s poem, “A Jumpmaster in DuPont Circle,” appeared in LPR’s Winter Issue 2018 (available for purchase at this link). He read this poem and other work at our issue launch in January (video below).

Our Summer Issue 2018 launch is on Sunday, June 3, at 2 p.m. (information on our events page).

Q: You said at the launch that this was your third try submitting poems to your friend and our editor, Steven Leyva. Can you say something for our readers about the persistence required for publishing?

Yeah, at the launch reading I mentioned how even though the editor of LPR is a close friend of mine, I twice had poems rejected from the journal before this poem was accepted. For readers worried about rejection, I think this demonstrates two (sort of conflicting) ideas:

1) Rejection can be an act of love—to have a piece rejected that isn’t yet ready can be a good thing for writers submitting their work. In the long run, I’d rather have a smart editor say no to a piece that isn’t yet done than to have work with my name on it out there in the world when it isn’t yet fully polished. BUT,

2) Editors have their own tastes and biases too, so writers really need patience if they’re going to find the right home for their work. Sure, in some instances that work might not be ready, but there are also cases in which a writer is submitting solid, well-developed writing that just doesn’t fit an editor’s taste, a publication’s literary aesthetic, or an issue’s vision/theme.

One of the skills that writers need to develop (and continually recalibrate) is the ability to determine when one needs to keep looking for a home for a piece, and when one needs to pause and turn back to revision.

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Meet Our Contributors: Q&A with Wendy Mitman Clarke

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Wendy Mitman Clarke’s poetry has been published in Rattle, Delmarva Review, and Blue River Review, and it will appear in the spring 2018 issue of Blackbird. She won the Pat Nielsen Poetry Prize in 2015 and 2017, and her poem “The Kiss” was a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her nonfiction has been published in River Teeth, Smithsonian, Preservation, and National Parks. Her novel Still Water Bending was released in October 2017. You can read and view her work at www.wendymitmanclarke.com.

Clarke’s poem, “Beachcombing,” appeared in LPR’s Winter Issue 2018 (available for purchase at this link).

Q: What’s the name of the form you use in “Beachcombing.” Why did you make that choice?

A: This form is a pantoum. I was really intimidated by form at first, but I learn so much from it. I’m intrigued by the paradoxical way it makes you more flexible, stretches your thinking and your effort, and often takes the poem to a place you didn’t expect or perhaps wouldn’t have gone at first. In this case, the repetition that this form required worked to establish the kind of rhythmic movement of waves upon a shoreline, and so the form complemented the poem’s setting and topic perfectly. I also think it’s fantastic that a form as ancient as the pantoum can so beautifully illuminate a subject that’s so vital in our contemporary world.

Q: Your poem begins with a statement from UNESCO about plastic killing marine animals. What’s the relationship in your writing between literature and social/environmental causes?

A: So many things are happening in our world today that demand that we bear witness and raise our voices, it can be overwhelming. I felt the need to prioritize. I have spent my whole life on the water, have sailed tens of thousands of miles and have been in some really remote places. Everywhere I have found plastic. My daughter and I are avid beachcombers, and yet with every perfect shell comes a disposable razor or a toothbrush or a tampon applicator or a little round ball from a deodorant dispenser or a mylar balloon, or just tiny, colorful, indiscriminate bits of plastic. It doesn’t biodegrade, and fish and birds and whales—anything that lives in or near the ocean—ingest it in some form. Without our oceans, we as a species and as a planet are dead. People don’t understand that with every choice they make for their convenience, they are killing the oceans and the animals that depend upon them—ourselves included. Plastic straws, plastic coffee cup lids, plastic water bottles—it’s ubiquitous and pervasive and it has to stop. I hope if I focus my writing on trying to make people more aware of issues like this, perhaps I can do my small part to help our natural world and the animals and organisms with whom we share it. The Lorax had it right: Someone has to speak for the trees. Also, artists like Chris Jordan—whose work “Midway: Message From the Gyre” absolutely shatters me—inspire me to raise my voice through my writing.

Q: You seem to write everything—poetry, nonfiction, fiction. What got you into writing?

I have been writing since I can remember. I come from a family of voracious readers, and writing was always valued in my family. My dad could recite things like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by heart, and at every Christmas or major family event like a wedding, he would write a poem to commemorate it. I had an amazing English teacher in high school—that one teacher you worship and for whom you want to excel, and after a I wrote a short story about a post-apocalyptic world, he encouraged me to pursue more creative writing. My nonfiction writing began when I was in college with a semester left to graduate and the urgent need to find a job. I started working as a reporter at my hometown newspaper, then was hired by The Associated Press, where I really learned the value of brevity, accuracy, and efficiency in writing. Eventually I shifted into magazines, and that’s where my nonfiction really was able to stretch.

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