Hey everyone! Here is a link to one of Shane Koyczan's poems that I will be presenting on on Wednesday. He is really a great poet, I recommend checking it out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltun92DfnPY

Response to Ramona Ausabel:

Ramona Ausabel struck me as significant in a number of different ways. Her candid nature was very appealing, since it made me realize her life path more clearly. Her funny, lively personality didn't exactly line up with what I imaged her to be like based on her surreal writing and magical realism, but appreciated how she frankly discussed her writing process as the weird inner workings of her own mind. The thing that struck me most was her discussion of the revision process. I thought her way of portraying the revision process as part of the reward is something I could work into my poem about the body as a piece of text. By treating the revision process as a loving reward, I could re-frame revising of the body in my poem in order to alleviate some of the tension between the goal of the poem and the subject matter, while still making it better. I have a hang up about revising, and I thought she had a lot of great things to say about that also. It sounds so devastating to throw something away that you've worked on so hard, but her take on just reframing it as part of the process is something I would like to work on in my revisions. I also just loved hearing her read. It was a delight to be inspired to read her books by her, the writer herself. Her treatment of wealth in the excerpt of the food she read out loud was both sort of melancholy, as well as deliciously extravagant. I look forward to reading more by her.

A cool poem I found in Guernica Magazine -

Migrant Is Not a Metaphor

By Cynthia Dewi Oka
or the burning of possible sanctuaries.
Though where he emerged, blue-skulled,
gowned by his mother’s aloe, a canyon lifted
its eye to the sun. He shouldn’t have been.
Like wolves in the white-faced room or
everywhere power makes insignia
of the gaping body. But it happened,
to trombones of light and the villainous
dream of the river. He is there now, fierce.
I was wrong to believe he was a message,
a hand wiping away steam from the mirror.
At first, there was only night and day
and the animal cries of the city. One told time
by the number of spoons collected to calm
the various hungers. Rain, sugar, sleep—
at times the movements of a father like wind
through bamboo leaves. The only bamboo
of course, is in his bones. Outside: a pristine
grid of fountains and pine needles, sky-
scraping ambition, broken young bears
in scrubland marked for development.
Inside him weather is building. Roses erupt.
A migrant learns to love as mothers do,
by trying and trying again. On the opposite
bank, there are men bending tenderly
over their infants. From this distance
their teeth are pennies in the bellies of fish.
And he is real enough to bend in similar
fashion, to coax breath out of brass
and the republic of stalactites. His skull is not
the earth anymore. In the morning he greets
its howling with a glass of milk, soap
under his chin, the monsoon of his lungs.