Quintessential Listening: Poetry Online Radio Presents Serena Agusto-Cox

0:05 Live from Washington, D .C., it's Quintessential Listening, poetry online radio. Now, here's your host, Dr. Michael Anthony Ingram. and welcome to the program. Tonight, my very special guest is Serena Augusto Cox. Serena, how are you? I'm good. How are you today? I'm quite well. I'm so glad you're with me. Well, I'm happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Yes. Well, let's begin this journey. My very first question to you is, what is poetry? Yeah, that's a very big question. I've given it a lot of thought. um i bear with me this is going to take a little bit i think i think of poetry as someone you've lived with your whole life you know when you get in that comfortable relationship and you think you know someone and then all of a sudden they surprise you that's what poetry is it's that it's that emotional journey that you take with the word and the mind Like, you can write a poem and you think you know what it's about, and then suddenly, through the editing process, you realize, oh, it's not actually about that.

1:33 Oh, wow. So yeah, that's my analogy for you. Oh, I've never had anyone describe it that way before. That was perfect. Now, that's one that I'm going to remember. Well, thanks. I gave it a lot of thought. It's a broad question. It is a broad question. And you answered it perfectly. Why is it important? Why is poetry important? Well, I would say that it's important because, like the person that you live with that changes and surprises you, it keeps you on your toes.

2:16 It makes sure that you're alive. It explains things that have happened to you that you may not have processed at the time. It takes others on a journey with you. It communicates with others and you can create this sort of dialogue on paper or even like between poets, like poets responding to poets. It's a living, breathing thing, just like the rest of us. Have you written this down? I mean... No, I haven't read anything. And for Marshall, for poetry, I mean, it's incredible. Oh my God, it will be a fantastic article. It really, really would be. It really would be.

3:01 Well, maybe I'll pitch it. Yes, you should. I'm serious. I'm serious. What are some of the predominant themes of your work? Now that's a question that poets probably have ready answers for. My poetry is very all over the place. For the chapbook I'm working on, the themes are a lot about gun violence in America and how harmful that is not only to the people it actually harms and their families, but to society as a whole. And how we as a society can get away from that violence towards love, and to sort of, what's the word I'm looking for here, evolve ourselves and those around us so that we're not killing each other over stupid things or things that have really temporary hold on our lives, if that makes sense.

4:01 It does make sense. Yeah, so that's one. And we live in an area where there's a lot of gun violence. Yes. I can understand that. All right, but please continue. Yeah. Yeah. So as a mother, that's an important issue for me. I have a young daughter and son violence is very disturbing to me when children are involved. Yes. The other themes are usually grief, dealing with being a mother, a working mother, balancing, you know, all of those things and still being true to yourself as an artist. There's a lot of that that goes on. But I also like to play with language. So sometimes I have just a little bit of fun with poems and create sort of characters. Like, you know, I took my mother's dog and created a superhero out of him in a poem and wrote some haiku. And, you know, those turned into funny snowmen kind of poem. So I sort of like dabble in a lot of different things. All right. Well, without further ado. Please share a poll. Well, in in accordance with the gun violence theme, I'm going to start with one city, one heartache from my chapbook.

5:18 And it started with the inspiration of a Chicago Tribune article about a Halloween shooting in which a seven year old girl was shot. One city, one heartache, Chicago under heavy fire, a city sinking into a river. A bumblebee buzzes street, hoping for candy. Trick or treat, she falls, swatted down. Harsh words batted, bullets flying, boys with beaks, a broken bee in their wake. Critical, turgid flowers floating in the river. Thank you. Wow. Very powerful. Yeah, those stories really really get to me when I receive them in the news or hear them on TV and it just starts me writing Well, let me ask this question then.

6:11 How does a poem begin for you with an idea? Maybe that's it a form or an image? Yeah, it's sort of a combination of things If it's a news story or something I've seen in the paper that really grabs my attention, it's usually the story itself or, you know, the theme that comes out of that. Other times it could be I'm walking and I observe something unusual and I'll just write that image down and later it becomes a poem. And then there's the 3 a .m. news I like to call it. where I'll be sleeping and I have to get up out of bed and write in my notebook whatever line has come to me in my sleep and my husband could tell you it's really disturbing because I'm just like in the bathroom with the light on writing down in my little notebook. But yeah, and then those become poems as well. So it depends. Like my mind is just sort of always looking for something to talk about. Alright, very nice. You know, all great writers have great writing influences.

7:18 Who's some of yours, and what makes them great in your eyes? Oh, there are so many. I guess as a kid I would have said Frost, because I'm from New England. You can't be a New Englander without knowing Robert Frost. But then I discovered Robert Blake, I think. No, that's not the right name. Blake's poetry. the songs of innocence and experience and those things. And I was reading a Norton anthology in college and there was like actual drawings that he did. And I thought they were so fascinating. I was like, he's a poet and a drawing artist. Like, that's amazing to me. And then, you know, later on, as I read more contemporary poets, I would say a lot of A lot of them are from immigrant stories like Wang Ping and her My Name is Immigrant is very important to me because she tells the stories of immigrants who have come to this country and struggled and some of them have died in that struggle. And then you have people like Josef Komunyaka who I read in a Vietnam War and Literature class and I just love the way that he has such musicality and imagery in his poems. And they always create this image that you think it is, and then by the end of the poem, you're like, oh, it's something bigger than that. But I also like people who play with the genre a lot, like Claudia Rankin and Arissa White. They expand the poetry genre,

8:53 creating memoir out of it, creating like political speech, those kinds of things. And then some of my other favorite poets are like Jadim Hall Gailey, who writes a lot of sort of speculative fiction type poetry where there's this sort of apocalyptic world or where in a comic book and the characters are alive and breathing. So I sort of read a whole wide range and I find that fascinating because there's so much out there. It's like fiction. You can pick up a fiction book and think you know the story and you don't because the writer has some other take on it. So it's almost like that. You know, here's the million dollar question for you. What favorite poet do you wish would be your mentor? Oh, wow.

9:44 Could have been my mentor. Geez. I don't know. I mean, my mentor in college was Fred Marshawn and he was a Vietnam War poet and one of the first conscientious objectors. And he was a great teacher. I've also worked with Melanie Figg a lot on different courses, but I would have to probably say Janine Hall Gailey only because I admire her poems so much, the imagination in them. I would just love to take a class with her and have her mentor me. It would just be fascinating to me because her mind works in such a different way from mine. Like it's so fantastically based, whereas mine is more morality based. Okay, sounds good. Please share another poem. Sure.

10:32 I'm going to share an older poem that I wrote a long time ago when I was a very young poet and very concerned about what actually is this poetry life. It's called Sacrifice. Sacrifice. The voice screeched above the river like a new strangled finch. Sunny weather couldn't placate her writer's mind. It whipped and swirled like a viper stalking prey, ran her ragged as she balanced on a unicycle in busy Central Park. The white makeup streamed, black teardrops on her skin. The muse had taken hold of her mind.

11:16 Trapped, her arms stiff against the wall. The crowd gathered through dimes and nickels in her hat. They faded, her mind stilled, an undisturbed pond. She placed a change in her pocket, dragging toward the apartment, the cardboard under the bridge, the dark tunnel of her muse, her spiral notebook with ink -scrawled lines of poems, fingers smudged and dying on her shriveling, shivering lips. Thank you. Wow. I want to allow that one to sink in. That was beautiful. That was a very dark time as a poet. I was not sure that the poetry life was going anywhere. Yes, I can understand.

12:05 Well, speaking of going anywhere, what was an early experience where you learned that poetic language had power? Oh, boy. That's a good question. I guess a lot of this stems from my Nana when I was younger. She basically fed me books. As a kid, I was allowed to like peruse the facts and pick anything I wanted and one day it was William Shakespeare's Macbeth of all things. And I did not understand anything that was going on at the time because I think I was like maybe 10, maybe 11, I'm not sure. But it was the language, it was the way that he said things that I was like... Oh wow, you can talk like this and people like, you know, will listen to you. Cause you know, Shakespeare is this famous guy. Like, so then it sort of got me on this journey of, okay, well maybe I should start writing those things.

13:08 And I found a book of cheats and I started writing a bunch of odes. And that was just like, and they were odes to like my friends, like ode to Sarah, ode to, you know, Jen or whatever it was. And they were not good poems, but it was fun to experience and try to write those words and be like, hey, I wrote this poem about you. And they would read it and they would be like, oh, thank you. So it was kind of one of those things where I kind of fell into it by reading first and then writing after. All right. You made the statement that they were not good poems. What is a good poem? And I know it's subjective. I know it's subjective. What's a good poem? Well, I'm gonna say this in my way. It's just that I personally am not a rhyming poet and those poems were rhyming poems and the rhymes were just very predictable and just they were bad Okay, like they didn't speak to the subject at all. It was just to make the rhyme happen But now it's more writing the poem with purpose It's, I know I have this thing to say. I know I have this, you know, thing that I need to get out.

14:25 And how can I do that in image and language in a way that's going to say what I want to say in a poignant way and not be muddled? If that makes sense? And not make rhymes for the sake of making them. Right, right. You are the perfect guest. Do you teach classes too? No, I don't. Why not? I don't know. I just don't, I guess. I'd take a class from you. Well, thank you. That's a compliment. Does writing energize or exhaust you? It depends on the day. Some days it's very energizing. But on other days, it's the poem that decides whether I'm energized or not. Like, if a poem is going really well and I know where this is going and I know what I'm saying and I know that everything is working in the poem, well, when I hit a roadblock, that's when the energy just starts to be like, I'm going down here. And that's when I know I have to put that away, leave it in a drawer, and look at it later.

15:40 Okay. Well, look, let's take a brief break, and we'll be right back. Sure. I am Michael Anthony Ingram. I'm here with Serena Augusto Cox, the wonderful Serena Augusto Cox. Please share another poem. Sure. Speaking of fun poems, I'm going to read this poem about my mother's dog who's a Shih Tzu. It was published in the Plague Papers, which is a digital online journal. It's called Superhero. My mother dotes on her Shih Tzu. He has snow mittens and more coats than I do, but

17:13 our neighborhood cats run naked. Bearing the cold, chase mice and run wild. Cats revered in Egypt, captured as sculptures in the 18th century with mischievous smiles and clothed in capes like superheroes. Molded in bronze, cats come out centuries without corrosion, true to themselves, fiercely independent and loved for it. Thank you. Please read another. I'm enjoying it so much. Please read another. Okay, I will. I'm gonna read a poem. Well, it's sort of like, it's like an homage to my daughter. It was published in Mother's Always Right. It's called A Poem to Save Us. A poem to save us. When you were small, I wondered what they all do. What if she never grew another inch? Would she be a petite Emily Dickinson with a large vision constrained by her small world, or from below reach further, striving for more? I've dreamed a World War Z reality, where she'd be overlooked, living long, making the call. She'd set the world right, blaring her freedom trumpet. like the fireworks exploding on the page, a poem to save us from ourselves.

18:45 Thank you. To you, what are some of the most prevalent ingredients that go into this concoction that we call a poem? What goes into the makeup of a poem? Oh, wow. What's the recipe of a poem? Yes. First, I would say human condition. And that can be something that has happened to you, an experience, an emotion, a moment of time. It could be any of those things. So once you have the human condition, you can start to build a world of imagery that speaks to that condition.

19:29 And then once you have that imagery in your mind, you carry that through the poem in a successive way. So you can start with Let's just say trauma, for example. So you start with a trauma, and then you create images around that trauma, and you build from there to explain how that trauma has shaped that human condition, and what maybe you can even learn from that, or you could even leave that open to the reader to decide on their own. That would be my best example of a recipe. All right. You know, they say that to see the world with complete honesty, one should look to comedians, artists, and poets. What do you think emerges naturally from your work? Oh, gosh.

20:12 Um, hmm. What emerges naturally? Probably imagery most. Mm -hmm. I have a little trouble with the whole evolution of the condition sometimes. The poem kind of gets solved in the middle. Okay. All right, all right. I've even heard editors tell me, your first dance is great. Your last dance is great. What's going on in the middle? So there is that. I mean, it's just one of those things. Some poems come out really great the first time, and then others, I just have to work on them a lot harder. Well, you know, you made a statement earlier about poetry being like a living creature. Yes. Some poets claim that a poem is like a living creature. Once it's out there, there's not much you can do to correct or improve it, while others edit meticulously, not needing much from the original draft form.

21:03 What is your take on it? I think that depends on the poem. It's poem dependent. Let's put it this way. An editor asked me to contribute poems to the Love is Love anthology for LGBTQIA and teens. It's an anthology that all the money raised goes to the Trevor Project, which helps teens not see suicide as a solution. And when I wrote those poems, they came out of me naturally and I did very little editing because I was passionate about the project and I was passionate about what I wanted to say. When it comes to things that are broader calls from journals, for instance, like when I wrote poems for the This Is What America Looks Like anthology, I wrote a series of poems. But they only accepted one from that series for their anthology. And I think it's the best of the series, and they selected the right one. But it was, I had to go through those drafts of the other ones in the series to get to that one. To get to what I really wanted to say. And some poems are just like that. I'm a combination. Sure! The next one I'm going to

22:33 read is called Death of a People. It's printed in Broadkill Review. Death of a People. Ash of mountains, silt riverbed in tows, rain pelting my bare back. I emerge from jungle, bright light, orange glow, thick air chokes, unable to speak, my eyes blink, water, voice vacant. uncontrolled burn, charred vocal cords on tape, language stolen by fire, museum aflame, heritage lost in a breath, my people disappeared over time, stored in cobwebbed fire traps. Thank you. Tell me more about that particular piece. I want to hear about all your pieces actually, but that particular one stands out. Yeah, this one actually also stems from a news article about the Brazilian Museum fire in 2018 in which taped languages of tribes were lost to the fire and that the museum itself had neglected some of its maintenance and these people had already lost these languages and there was an effort to make sure that they were stored and kept and saved and that that heritage would not be lost. And due to this, you know, unforeseen circumstance, that's exactly what happened, is that they lost that language forever. And it's gone. Wow. And you're right, once language is

24:10 gone, it's hard to... hard to replace it. Yeah, especially when no one speaks it anymore. Yes. Wow. Please share another poem. Sure. I'm going to try to read the poem. I tried to read this poem once and couldn't do it, so we'll see how it goes. It's about my grandmother. She passed away at the time that I wrote this poem. In Portuguese, we called her Vava, which is sort of a English -Portuguese version of grandmother. The poem's called Pergola and was published in Virgin. Pergola.

24:56 I never grew out of cookies and milk. I grew in. Someone reflective, not out loud. Even behind the smoke, I saw wheels turn and wondered, where had you gone? Perhaps it was the oceans of your youth, a brave island against the rough Atlantic, where the Portuguese language carved out its own beauty. through a face and a knitted family. Your arms glide through the pool like you slice tomatoes into salad. How light cut through the grapevine pergola. That trip we took together to the Azores opened my eyes to the backbone you were. A set of vertebrae to hold a family strong. A woman with many joys taken at all hours after siesta with coffee and cake in the midnight talking hours. laughter that woke me with a smile.

25:49 I knew then what I realize now, like the smoke we fade, dissipate into the atmosphere, touching brief lives, impart advice, grace that layers beneath a foundation on which I stand, wavering in this morning. Thank you. That was beautiful, Serena. I'm glad I actually read it without crying, so hey, that's a plus. Yes. Yes, that was beautiful, Paul. Do you think that you were meant to be a poet? Well, here's a funny segue to that. So I've always written, since I can remember my Nana, who is not Nana in that poem, but a different name. She gave me a typewriter when I was, I think, seven or eight, and she just sat it down at the kitchen table, and she said, go ahead, write whatever you want. So I just started writing stories. So I started as a fiction story writer.

26:43 And I was writing stories about moving to the Big Apple and becoming this famous writer. But then... Wow! Wow! I want your childhood! Wow! What I didn't realize at the time is that typewriter was her typewriter. And when she passed and I got to keep it, I found inside the pocket, because it was a travel typewriter, that she had written poems. herself. So until she passed and I had received that typewriter, I'd never, I, you know, I wrote poems. I, you know, I would send them and, you know, whatever. And I did go to school writing poetry and, you know, I had a lot of seminars on it and things like that, but I'd never considered what I meant to be a poet until I saw that she had written those poems and they were stuck inside that pocket of that typewriter.

27:41 What about that made you say yes? I was meant to be a poet. I don't know, there's some kind of connection to that typewriter and those, yeah, and those poems that she wrote that she tucked away and showed no one that maybe say, I've been writing and showing them to no one. What can I do that's different than what she did? And that to me said, you need to be a published poet. There's something there. And then later on, I think it was maybe five, six years ago. We have Finnish relatives in Finland. And I found out that one of her cousins is actually a published poet in Finland. Wow. Yeah. So I think there's something there. Wow. Just knowing that your poems are published and you publish quite a bit.

28:38 Does knowing that your poems are published and out there in the world validate your being a poet or are you content knowing that they're out of your system? I don't think it validates me as a poet because I think it's somewhere inside I've always known that I am because I can't stop writing it Okay, but having them out there and people reading them. I sort of I consider them my little babies of change So I'm thinking that maybe when people read these poems that will give them pause to think about things in their everyday lives and change things that they're doing that could cause some of the things in my poems to occur. Your thinking process is so clear to me. It's clear as a bell. Well, thank you. I'm glad. Sometimes I'm not so sure I'm clear to myself, but that's okay. I can listen to you. Like I said, you're a walking infomercial for a good life. Oh my goodness. Please, please share another poem. Sure. I'm going to share a poem from Virgin. It's called Schoolyard Game.

30:00 Schoolyard Game. One. Huddled. Still too many of us for the old oak to hide. We wait. Silent. Tap, tap, tap our shoulders. Giggles erupt. Two. Crouched under the desk. Knees up, heads down. We have to remember. Be still. Be quiet. Cover our faces. Shade drawn. Three. dashed were a scatter of birds looking for home base running fast evading capture freeze when touched now we're living statues for in schoolyard games where the criminals are our own and pop guns shoot real lead tiny chest heaves until our bodies lie still outlined in crimson thank you Do you have a writing group or a community of writers?

30:59 I do, actually. Well, tell me more. It's a group of us who are in the Gaithersburg area. I think one of them has been on your show. That's Kristen Fariot. Yes, Kristen. Yes. And she's having her book launch party today for Escape the Lost. Yay, Kristen. All right. Congratulations, Kristen. And we also have Luther Jett, who's also a well -known poet in the area, and Lucinda Marshall, and Eve Burton, and Fran Abrams, who's also a polymer artist. She had some fascinating work. She would be awesome to be on your show. Okay. Yeah, we have a great little group of poets, and we share our work with each other, and workshop it, and we just have a good time. All right.

31:47 Share another poem. Well, I'm going to share the second one from Virgin. It's on a similar theme as to the last one, so we'll stick with the theme here. It's called Bully Archer. Bully Archer. One, staccato hammer passed around, echoed taunts reverberate down linoleum halls. In crouch, one third hide behind lockers, empty classrooms, books. Two, rush. herd of cattle, corral just ahead, the waiting teacher, dogs nipping our heels, growls, howls, shaking student limbs and skin, cower and wait. Three, bully bowman's arrows outside of class, see their arrows bounce and fall, a chink grows, eventually the bull's eyes hit, scars to bury, fester, internalized guidance, deadly archery of the heart. Thank you. Here's a question with a very large scope. What does being creative mean to you? Being creative. I guess it's really just part of who I am. I can't not do that. I think I would be a very sad person if I couldn't. Like if you took all this pen and words and paper, I would be like, I don't know, sitting in a corner somewhere. so but um

33:18 so you are a true writer you've been writing since birth you know what i'm saying you've been writing i know what you're saying yeah i've been writing i also write and edit for my day job too so it's kind of just who i am Completely different thing than poetry, but, you know, it's just part of who I am. I don't think I could do anything else. There was a brief moment of time in my life where I wanted to be a lawyer. And then I said, yeah, no, I can't do that. I can't sit and argue with the laws of the nation all day. Well, with that in mind, what do you want your poetry to do and where do you want it to go? What do I want my poetry to do? You've been writing all your life. What do you want it to do? I want it to create a dialogue that moves society in a better direction. I want a humanity that is less segmented by hate and discrimination, and I want more love. in the world. I would love to see more acceptance of others. You may not agree with what they're doing with their lives, but it is their lives. Let them be. My Nana once said to me, you know, treat others as you would want to be treated. And I use that every day.

34:46 Like I don't treat others or I try not to treat others in a bad way or to make them feel bad. Because I don't want to feel bad myself. No one does. No one wants that. So, I think if anything, if my poetry can bring some kind of thinking back into the world where we critically think about our actions daily, maybe even hourly, I mean, I don't know. Just in a way that makes society actually a society as opposed to, you know, an us versus them. situation, which is what a lot of the world is right now. Well, it's funny, that's usually one of my questions. What do you see as being the role of a poet in modern -day society? And I think you answered it. Anything else you'd like to share with that? The role of a poet in modern -day society? Yeah, I think the role of the poet is to talk to the condition of humanity and whether that is to, like my goal is to help people see a better path. It doesn't necessarily have to be that, it's just poets can just speak to what they see and shed light on what they experience and bring light to other situations that maybe people are not aware of and that poem says it's like an aha moment like oh there's someone like me out there or wow I never knew anyone felt like that you know kind

36:18 of thing. What kind of advice would you give to an aspiring poet who's afraid to write? Who's afraid to share his or her work? Why not? Tell me more. Why not? Why? Your voice is important. Your voice is unique. It should be heard. It does not matter who you are. You have something to say. You have a brain. You're thinking. You're acting. You're experiencing. You're out in the world. You're interacting. You have things to say. Your voice is important. And your interaction with someone may not be seen by that person the same way that you see it. They may not understand that your perspective is different. They might not understand that what they said hurt you.

37:03 They might not understand that what you said inspired them. There's a lot of things that we do daily that we don't realize has a reverberation to those who we talk and interact with. One story I'll share with you is I met an author. She claims to not be a poet, but if you read her fiction, she's a poet. I'm sorry. Beth Kappar is a poetic prose writer. That's what I'll call her. And when I met her the very first time at a book expo, she inscribed my book to the poetess. And I will never forget that. to the pulpit test.

37:48 Wow. Yep. Yep. I will never forget that. That's a chill through me. Yep. Wow. Let's take a brief break and we'll be right back. Okay. Irina Augusto Cox, and I'm having a fantastic time. I'm enjoying so much listening to you share about your art and craft. I'm so amazed. And I want to thank you for taking the time out, you know, to be with me. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. All poets have several words that come up over and over again, words or sentences that they just can't help but using at work. What

39:20 are three of your absolute favorite words to use? Oh, gosh. Favorite words to use? That's a tough one, because I try not to use the same ones all the time. Well, I will say that there is one word that I do use, and the word is balm. Balm? B -O -M -B? Yes. B -A -L -M. Balm. Oh, balm, balm, okay. Yes. I do use that word quite a lot, and I... find it a very soothing word okay okay i use that word in a lot of soothing ways i guess or try to be soothing right now you working on a chapbook or you finishing chapbook or you working on chapbook you're working on chapbook i haven't i haven't mostly done there's some gaps there's some rearranging that needs going on maybe a couple new phones But it's going, it's a slow process because I do work full -time and I do have an elementary school daughter on a few swim teams and keeps us all very busy.

40:29 Okay, I understand that. If you had to convince a friend or colleague to read your chapbook, what would you tell them? I would tell them it is a chapbook about addressing gun violence in a way that's going to speak to the heart of everyone. At least I hope. Yes. That topic is very important to you. Yes. Yes, it is. Wow. Please share another poem. Sure. Well, since we've talked about my daughter quite a bit today, I will read a poem from Mom Egg Review for their pandemic parenting issue. and it's called In the Distance. In the distance, my lonely child marched into an age of social distance, six inches between her and her friend, a digital letter across oceans. Squeezy hugs, tag, games turned to closed -door sessions, doll drama on YouTube, scavenger hunt viewed.

41:43 Alone, child shouts at her parents, cries in an empty room full of toys, books, and ghosts of sleepovers. March us back to birthdays when friends shouted, told secrets behind doors, giggled, and ran hand -in -hand through screen doors. Thank you. You're a poet, and you know it. What have you learned? What has surprised you most about being a poet? I used to think it was very solitary existence because I wrote a lot by myself.

42:32 Yes, okay. And then I sort of fell into this workshop group and I realized it's really not as solitary as you think. You have to find your your community your supportive group who are willing to read your stuff when it's like really rough and Be honest like be honest about well This isn't working like you need to do something here or like even suggest something that might work better I mean you may not take their suggestion or you may twist their suggestion for something else it depends but When you have that community and you can Because, like I said, poetry is a dialogue between you and the reader. Those are your first readers. Those are the readers that you trust with your raw draft. And they're the ones that are going to help you see the flaws that you're not seeing and help you to hone that poem into the best that it can be. But I could say... Serena, I have the hardest time with feedback because I poured my heart into that poem and now somebody wants to cut it off and destroy the good parts of it. Well, this is the thing.

43:51 This is the thing about feedback. This is what I learned from Fred Marshawn at Suffolk University is you workshop a poem, you read your poem, and anyone who gives feedback will tell you one good thing about your poem that they loved and one thing they think you can fix. Now, you may not agree with everything that they say, and you may not agree with anything that they say, and that's okay, too. You just have to not take it personally. It's their reaction to your work. And then that reaction is something that will be in the back of your mind, and eventually, even if it's not right that moment, you'll say to yourself, well, if they're having that reaction, maybe others will, too. Maybe I should take a second look. So sometimes it's not so much immediately fix it as Take that time to digest. Think about what they're saying. You can just let it sit for a bit. And then you might see, oh, you know, they might be right. And it might not even be you take their suggestion at face value. You might just tweak something else in the poem and then it works for you. OK. You know, the publishing process itself can be brutal. Brutal. Yes. What are your thoughts on? OK, this is going to come from advice from another awesome poet. His name is John Sibley Williams. I took an online course about poetry submissions to magazines. And if he ever offers it again, and you'll see it on Facebook or on his web page, or if you subscribe

45:21 to his newsletter, definitely take this class. It is so helpful. OK. Basically, he has a completely different approach than most people. Most people want to read the magazines and target specific ones. Now, I personally write themes all over the place most of the time and collections take a longer period of time for me to put together because I'm so all over the place. So for me, this method works. You choose the top tier ones that you want. That you would love to be in and then you find some magazines that are mid -tier Whatever you want to call them and then some of the sort of I don't want to call them low -hanging fruit But you know the ones that you know some of the magazines seem to publish just about anybody. Let's just put it that way and you submit your poems and you know you're gonna have to read the guidelines to make sure everything fits and all of that, but You submit your poems to as many magazines as you can find that you really would love to see your work in, whether it's because it has a great artistic look to it or it has poems like yours or there's themes that they have that are similar to your work, whatever it might be. And you just send out like 20 submissions of the same poem. Make sure they accept simultaneous submissions because some don't. I try to avoid those because I just can't wait seven months for someone to decide. But and you make sure you simultaneously submit to

46:53 a bunch of journals your poems and then you just wait and Someone will pick it up It may not be that top -tier journal that you really really want to be in But it'll be published and people will see it and it'll be online and you can share it and it'll get a wider audience just by that Wow Yep, and it's good advice. Yeah, and you can create a spreadsheet you know, if you're as organized as I am, or as he is, because he's way more organized than I am, and you can write, okay, I went to this journal, these are what I submitted, this is the date I submitted it, and then, you know, you can move them to the rejection tab as they're rejected, and move them to the acceptance tab as they're accepted, and it's just a process of, you know, elimination, basically. But if it's rejection, rejection, rejection, that hurts the system. Yes. Well, okay. I have a story about that as well. So in college I submitted quite a lot of poems and I had a little bit of success and then I got a ton of rejections. Tons and tons and tons.

48:01 So I stopped submitting for 20 years. 20 years? I stopped submitting poems. Yeah. This this was 20 years of wasted time Because What I realized in that 20 years was I had still been writing but they were sitting in the desk No one was looking at them. No one was seeing them. They were nowhere except with me, which is fine But I didn't want to be my Nana I didn't want to hide them in the drawer and the envelope and all that I wanted them out in the world so I picked up my internet and went back to work.

48:46 And now in the last, what, three, four years, probably since 2015, I started really doing them periodically. I guess I've had quite a lot of success just by using John Sibley Williams' method. Really? Yeah. Serena, I want you to teach a class. I don't know about that. I'm not sure I'm qualified, but you know. Yes, yes, you are. Yes, you are. Qualifications are relative. I want you to teach a class, and how can we make this happen? I don't know. I think you're great. I think you're great.

49:33 Well, thank you. Please share another poem, please. I'm going to share some lighthearted, funny haiku I wrote long ago. I think these were published in 2003, somewhere around there. Okay, so I'm just going to read the two haiku and then I'll, then you can see what that's like. Negative 20, frozen tears on my eyeball, the wind swept you out. And the second one is white skin concrete head, red nose chilled with wind, stubborn. glued to you. Thank you. I like those. What do you like about writing haikus? I love writing haikus because they're so short and it forces you to think about every word that you choose. It forces you to distill what you want to say in so few words. It's Fascinating to me how much you can say in those three lines. Now that's true. Hadn't thought about it like that, but you're right.

50:46 How much you can say. Share another poem. Share another poem. We've got time for maybe two more. Okay. I will read one of these poems from the Love is Love anthology for LGBTQIA and teens. And you'll probably hear the word the balm. Okay. especially since it's called The Balm. Okay. The Balm. Love is like a balm. Covered the burn of hate, and aloe's clear glaze swiped over skin to cool. When aflame, it's hard to imagine that the smoke would die out, the embers would no longer glow, but the cracks are fissures with deep red cores. hard to ignore when you're bleeding.

51:37 That blood stains, darkens with time, but the searing pain stays, a memory never lost to age. Imagine your arms as they curl around your shoulders, envelop you, fold you into child. You're brought back to innocence, a time when hope was nameless and the bomb was everywhere. Thank you. I have left you speechless. Yes, you have. And that's rare. I know you've got one more poem for us, but I want to ask this question before we continue.

52:24 What do you hope readers get from encountering your poems? What do I hope they get? I don't want to say enlightenment because that's too big of a word and a too big of an ass. Okay. A moment of pause. A moment of pause. Interesting. Tell me more about this moment of pause. It's a moment of pause in their life where they're left thinking about, what did I just read? Like, what is the overarching theme here? What is this really about? And what does it say to me? What can I take away from that? It's sort of a moment where they are engaged with the words without reading them. They're just pondering them as they think about what they just read. Okay. Alright.

53:22 One more poem. Okay. I'm going to close with the This is What America Looks Like anthology poem since I wrote so many drafts of this poem. Alright. And it's called America Is. America Is, my immigrant father who shares his horticulturist spirit. An aging American who saw both his parents succumb. With each pass of the John Deere, he leaves a bit of the past in each flower, bush, and edged bed. A wake that can be scooped, mulched, remembered. The humming machine echoes, drowning out the songbirds who call spring bring forth new life under the clouded sun. His hands weathered as the ocean would batter any wooden boat filled with American ancestors halfway home. Thank you.

54:21 My goodness, I'm getting tongue -tied today. Maybe that means it's time to close. It's past my bedtime. That's what it is. Well, the last thing I want to ask you is what's next for you creatively? Next for me creatively? I'm finishing this chapbook if it kills me. No. Okay. But other than that, probably the next thing would be to work on a larger collection. I mean, I've been writing long enough. I should have enough for one of those. Well, I think you're absolutely wonderful. Well, thanks. You've got a new fan.

55:06 You're welcome back on my show anytime. Once your chaplet is complete, if you'd like to come back and talk about it, you can. Just let me know. I want you out there in the world. I want you sharing your craft, your gift with the world by teaching classes, workshops, you name it. You've got what it takes. I just want to celebrate your spirit. Well, thank you. I would be honored to be on the show again. I've had a great time. Well, thank you. Well, to our listening audience, good night. And as I share every week, let poetry reign. You have just listened to the quintessential listening poetry online radio podcast with your host, Dr. Michael Anthony Ingram. Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher, and make sure to catch our next episode.