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Ruminations - David Ruekberg, Writer Press "Enter" to skip to content

Instead of Claws

David Ruekberg 0
Deer tracks mark the powdery snow out back and in front. They don’t often come up so close to the house, but it was cold outside last night, 15 degrees. A stretch of cold after a stretch of unusual warm for February. How do they keep warm? Worse is when it's freezing rain, and they huddle under any shelter they can find—bare thorn trees down by the creek, hemlocks on the hill, the cold wet soaking their backs, layers of fat still no match for the soak that mats their fur. Birds fluff up their feathers to create a down coat. Some huddle in nests with others, trading places through the night from the cold outer shell of the ball of bird they make in towards the toasty interior. Shivering warms them, the vibrations making friction between their own tissues, but it burns up a lot of energy. They wait until late morning to flock to our feeders, until it’s a few degrees warmer and they can wait no longer to restock their stores. Evolution has done the best it could to help them survive, but evolution is not intelligent, not purposeful. It works by subtraction: if your genes haven’t delivered the right combination of attributes to get you through cold nights and long droughts, you're done, you’re dropped from the equation. The ones who happen to survive through some lucky combination of alleles or mutation make it. People mistake Darwin’s notion of “survival of the fittest” for “survival of the most brutal." Fit doesn’t necessarily mean physically strong. The human species, like other apes, like dogs, have succeeded through cooperation, language being one of the most important tools of that function. Elephants can run faster, hear better, and rip up big trees out of the ground way more easily than we can. Bears have claws and bats have echolocation. But we have advanced language skills and ingenuity. We get farther as a group of people, a tribe, a town, a civilization, by collecting, preserving, and passing down a set of instructions for how to survive: what foods to eat and which to avoid, how to build a better shelter, how to make a cart move easier with wheels than by dragging, how to burn material to run engines that can do the work of a hundred men. We collect that wisdom in books and libraries and now the Internet. Now we’re at the crisis point of our civilization. We’ve consumed so many materials and burned so much of them that we’ve created the conditions for cataclysmic change that threaten us and all species, in addition to the privations we’ve perpetrated on nature to cause the extinction of almost nine-hundred species in the last five hundred years. That rate is due to increase fantastically—between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the background rate—if we don’t change the way we live. We can make that change the same way we got to this point, by cooperation and ingenuity. I don’t believe people are strong-willed enough to do what we need to do on an individual basis. Look at the trouble people have sticking to a diet. But we can use one of the best tools of civilization, government, to guide us towards the behavior required to succeed. A government can say, “You can’t dump toxic waste in a canal that runs next to people’s homes.” It can create the conditions for businesses to build and manufacture in a way that supports health, rather than the wealth of a few mercenary capitalists who care mainly about power rather than health, about their own well-being over the well-being of those they live among. We already have the technology to swiftly make a transition away from a fossil fuel economy and towards one that runs clean and cheap. Government is the parent who can restrain the unruly child who threatens to burn down the whole house. It is the ultimate mechanism of cooperation. [caption id="attachment_2514" align="alignright" width="300"] One of several decorated rocks that appeared in my neighborhood during the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown. (Click to enlarge.)[/caption] That’s not the perfect analogy, as we are the ones who empower government, which isn’t the same relationship as children have to their parents. In reality, it’s up to us to tell government how we should be governed. Unlike some who see government as an interference (except when they want government to make it more profitable to run a business), I have always seen the primary purpose of government to be to save us from ourselves. We use it to act as the prefrontal cortex to rein us in when the amygdala is screaming at us to fight or flee. Instead, the message from the forebrain is, “We can do this.” My way of accomplishing both goals—working to save life on earth as we know it, and to enlist the help of government to accomplish that, is to be an active member of Citizens' Climate Lobby. But there are many ways. What's yours?      

Poetry reading with the Jon Randall Octet

David Ruekberg 0
I hope you can join me for a concert with the Jon Randall Octet. The Octet is a professional-level jazz band playing a variety of jazz tunes, from old standards to world music to out-there jazz. Jon has invited me to read three of my poems from Hour of the Green Light as introductions to three of the tunes. I've heard the band a few times, and had the special pleasure of getting to hear them up close in rehearsal for this concert, and every time it's been a true pleasure to experience their high-quality performances. I hope you can make it!  

Little Theatre Poetry Series: An Evening of Poetry and Music

David Ruekberg 0
Join me for an evening of poetry and music at the Little Theatre in Rochester, NY. I will be reading from my second book, Hour of the Green Light, as well as new work from my Little Coffins manuscript. The evening begins at 5 pm with Eastman School of Music jazz trumpeter Mike Kaupa. At 5:30 WXXI classical music director and host Mona Seghatoleslami will introduce the featured poet. The featured reader for the evening is Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose. I will be reading with seven other guest poets, including Albert Abonado, Melissa Balmain, Larry Berger, Jessica Cuello, Jonathan Everitt, Jennifer Maloney, and Almeta Whitis. Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2014). She teaches courses in Women in Literature, Women in Popular Culture, Female Iconicity, and Girls Studies. Her chapbook Imago, Dei won the 2021 Rattle Chapbook Poetry Prize. Guest poets will read for about five minutes each. Notable guest poets include: Many thanks to Bart White for curating The "Little" Poetry Series!

Little Theatre Poetry Series: An Evening of Poetry and Music

David Ruekberg 0
Join me for an evening of poetry and music at the Little Theatre in Rochester, NY. I will be reading from my second book, Hour of the Green Light, as well as new work from my Little Coffins manuscript. The evening begins at 5 pm with Eastman School of Music jazz trumpeter Mike Kaupa. Around 5:30 WXXI classical music director and host Mona Seghatoleslami will introduce the featured poet. The featured reader for the evening is Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose. I will be reading with seven other guest poets, including Albert Abonado, Melissa Balmain, Larry Berger, Jessica Cuello, Jonathan Everitt, Jennifer Maloney, and Almeta Whitis. Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2014). She teaches courses in Women in Literature, Women in Popular Culture, Female Iconicity, and Girls Studies. Her chapbook Imago, Dei won the 2021 Rattle Chapbook Poetry Prize. Guest poets will read for about five minutes each. Notable guest poets include:
  • Albert Abonado is the author of Jaw, an NEA fellowship recipient, and a recent winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series award. He and Jonathan Everitt host the bi-weekly New Ground Poetry open mic.
  • Jessica Cuelo won the 2022 Eugene Paul Nassar Prize from Utica University and the 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize.
Many thanks to Bart White for curating The "Little" Poetry Series!

Three poems in Sixfold and What That Is

David Ruekberg 0
Yippee, three of my “little coffin” poems are up at Sixfold, an online journal that has a unique publication model. Founded by former Crazyhorse editor Garrett Doherty, Sixfold doesn’t select work for publication the way any other publisher that I know of does. Those of you who are writers know how arduous it is to get published these days. The field is crowded. Thanks to the Internet there are more places publishing fiction and poetry than ever, but it seems that there are also more writers seeking to get published, probably due to the ease of submitting, and to the so-called “proliferation” of MFA programs.[1] I’ve written a bit about my process for sending out poems in “Five Poems Up at Bloom,” so I won’t repeat all that here. But one mysterious part of the other end of the process is how work gets chosen for publication. Somewhere behind the emerald curtain of the coveted journal is a staff of readers who select from the slush pile what will see the light of day and what dies in the recycling bin. One hopes that the readers’ standards are high, that their choices are objective, and that only the best work gets published. But what constitutes “best” and how realistic is it for every human being to be completely “objective”? I’m pretty sure even the most scrupulous editors are susceptible to taste, and to some extent that’s okay. That’s why we writers are expected to become familiar with the publications we’re submitting to, in order to gauge their “aesthetic.” But you know the old saw, de gustibus non est disputandum (“there’s no accounting for taste”). Many of us writers know that the front line of readers who encounter our work are often undergraduates. Not that young folks aren’t capable of refined judgments of good writing. In fact, I’m often in awe/jealous of many contemporary college students for how well-read and perspicacious they are. Then again, I remember myself in college, and how far I’ve traveled since then in terms of my perspective on what makes good writing, both in terms of craft and content. And the milieu in which they read is different as well. They’re not looking for the next William Stafford or Sylvia Plath. They’re post-Postmodern, focused on identity, more skeptical of the canon than ever. Doherty has attempted with Sixfold to create an ultimately democratic selection process. He has sidestepped the problem of a staff of volunteer or minimally compensated readers and their slightly better compensated editors who know better than their readers. Work is chosen for Sixfold by its readers; more precisely, work is chosen by the writers submitting fiction and poetry. Here’s how it works. You go to the website, upload six of your best poems or one short story, and pay a five dollar entry fee. The fee goes towards prizes for the “best” short story and poem, and presumably towards publication costs and compensation for the editor.[2] Then you are randomly grouped with five other writers, and you rate their work by rank by a given deadline. Six poems, six writers: hence the name “Sixfold.” But your manuscript is read by many more than six people. Doherty’s explains it all: In round 1, 6 writer-voters compare your manuscript (and everyone else’s) to 5 other manuscripts, rank-voting them as Best, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th. (Each manuscript is compared to 30 others by 6 different readers.) Each manuscript’s voting score average is averaged and compared to all others, and then the highest-voted one-third of manuscripts advances to the next round. Round 2 manuscripts go on to receive 18 readers and 90 comparisons, and the highest-voted one-third advances to round 3. Round 3 manuscripts receive 54 readers and 270 comparisons. Each manuscript completing round 3 is read and rank-voted by 78 different writer-voters, with a grand total of 390 comparisons to other manuscripts. (https://www.sixfold.org/howitworks.html) It sounds flawless, but I’ll offer three caveats to excited potential submitters. First, your readers are other writers, some of whom may be desperate to become published and burst from anonymity into full-fledged acclaim as the next Hemingway or Robert Frost. But desire is not a prerequisite to talent. It’s probable that the readers ranking your work are even more susceptible to taste than journal readers who have been vetted by editors with a proven track record. It’s possible that their idea of a good poem is a step above a Hallmark greeting card. It’s possible that they don’t even read your poems, or don’t read them carefully, although they’re expected to leave comments justifying their ranking. (I doubt that all of these comments are assessed by an editor for integrity, but maybe they are.) Second, you are at the mercy of your readers understanding the process. In my case, I don’t think they all did. When I read some of the comments on my work, it appeared that some of the readers got the ranking system backwards. A “1” is supposed to be the highest, and “6” the lowest. But when I compared positive or negative comments to the scores, it was clear that a few readers got them backwards, which affected my total score. Fortunately, I was saved by another anomaly: if fewer than four people vote on your manuscript, you automatically advance to the next round, rather than being punished by lazy readers. In my case, in the first round only one person voted on my work, and she gave me a 4. (Really, 29 people did not bother to rate me?) After the final round I ended up placing 15th, the cut-off for publication.  In fact, in the final round my average was the best among the other contenders for the $1,000 prize: 2.65 out of 6. But because my scores in the first two rounds were 4 or above, I placed last. Let me not crow about my excellence too soon: several of the readers were confused about the scoring system, scoring me high when they meant to score low, and vice versa. More about that in a bit. Finally, speaking of lazy readers, don’t submit here if you’re one of those. It’s a good deal of work. I tend to be a little obsessive with feedback and left extensive comments, generally about 300-500 words per submission. I guess it’s the English teacher in me. Several readers gave me similar comments, but most offered about 150 words or fewer, sometimes just a couple of sentences, occasionally nothing. Another benefit of this approach is that you can get some helpful feedback from these comments. Even if it stings, I appreciate thoughtful and sincere feedback. It helps make me a better writer. For example, one reader wrote, “A part of me wants to suggest there is too much here, tighten it up, but then again, I do like what is there, even though they run a little long.” That’s always a valid criticism when assessing poetry, and others have made the same comments on my “little coffins” in workshop. A legitimate concern is whether or not I’m padding lines to make them adhere to the constraints of the form. Reviewers have worried that, as difficult as it is to compose in this form, it would be harder for me make revisions, but I assured them that, as I had worked hard to get my ideas into the right number of characters once, I could do it again. This is the same problem one faces when writing a conventional sonnet or syllabic verse, so it’s not that unique. Sometimes the feedback is not so helpful. For instance, “You touch on some poignant themes and truths here, and you use strong imagery. I feel you're not quite letting go, perhaps a bit self-conscious. Could you explore your inner world deeper, without thinking about the reader too much?" The last point is worth considering, although it is important to think about the reader. That’s where craft comes in. But what does the reader mean by “letting go”? I’ve worked hard to move away from my poetry being a form of vomiting my personal issues onto paper, trying to craft my concerns into a form that is both specific and has a universal application. Another commented, “I really tried to be open-minded about your experiment, but these poems are impossible to read. My eyes kept crossing, trying to follow a line without slipping into the one just above or below. It’s like a cruel optometry test!” It makes me wonder how this reader handles reading fiction or the news. As I mentioned earlier, then there’s the issue of understanding how the ranking works, which really just requires reading the directions. One reader wrote a very long positive comment, beginning, “Wow. This is amazing, first of all, your format and your overall concept of little coffins, which fascinates me…” and ending “Incredible thought process you have going on there! I wish you the very best of luck in the contest. You deserve recognition.” And then she gave me a 6, the bottom of the heap. Another meant to rank me lowest because he said I hadn’t adhered to the page limit of six pages of poems. In fact, the guidelines state a maximum of five poems of up to ten pages.[3] Although I thought Doherty’s instructions were clear enough, perhaps some people just aren’t good at reading them. Does the same problem exist with submission readers for other publications? One hopes not. But maybe. I’ve heard several writers (and even editors) say they’ve submitted the same pieces to the same publications in different years, and a piece that was rejected during one submission cycle was accepted during another, simply because it was read by a different reader it in the first round of cuts. Well, there you have it. If you’re a writer seeking to be published, and you’re willing to suffer possible misinterpretation and misunderstanding of guidelines by amateur readers, it might be worth your time to check out this venue for your work. If you do make the cut, Doherty publishes your work in several formats: on the Sixfold website, in print, and in various electronic formats (PDF, e-pub, Kindle). You might even have a shot at the $1,000 prize. In fact, I had read and rated the work of the winner in my round, Winter 2022. I had ranked it rather low, and my top vote had been on the poems of the thirteenth place writer. As Rosanne Rosanadana used to say, “It just goes to show you, it's always something. If it ain't one thing, it's another.” Which is just another way of saying de gustibus non est disputandum. [1] The term “proliferation” is a popular descriptor for the increasing number of MFA programs in the US, but I appreciate Sonja Livingston’s defense in the Guardian article: “’I love the idea that so many people want to make art,” she said. “I don’t worry about too many artists in the world.’” [2] I have no qualms paying five dollars to support this venture, especially considering all the work Doherty does to organize this process, get the finished product into a handsome printed and electronic form, and fund the website. Not to mention the bi-annual prizes in two categories. There’s no advertising on the website or in the journal. [3] Fortunately, it worked out, because the reader also mistook the ranking system and gave me a 1 instead of a 6. She later realized her error and made the effort to apologize by contacting me through my website. The damage was done, but in my favor. In this instance.

Kelsay Books Poetry Reading: Where Is the River Called Pishon?

David Ruekberg 0
On December 17, 2022 I enjoyed reading with a crew of other Kelsay Books poets, including Daniel Lusk, Jennifer Freed, Rita Maria Martinez, and Paul Bone, among others. I’m reading three poems from my first book, Where Is the River Called Pishon? - the title poem, “Winter Solstice,” and “The Poplars of August.”   [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVNEB5bLk3E?start=645&w=560&h=315] I had a whole blog post written telling you the story of my publication journey with Kelsay Books, but I realized it would be of no interest to anyone, so I’m sparing you. If you really want to know all about it, let me know and I’ll send you an email. Otherwise, enjoy the poetry!

Getting Unstuck Poetry Workshop (in person)

David Ruekberg 0

 

Writer’s block: Is there such a thing? William Stafford’s solution: Ignore “high standards” and get into action. Expecting every draft to say it all is a lot of pressure. Instead, exercising our writing muscles every day can help prepare us for when the big poem needs to be born.

In this poetry workshop we’ll explore ways to move through fear and doldrums. Criticism—especially from the worst critic of all, one’s self—will be banished in a kind but firm manner. We’ll spend a little time discussing ways to get unstuck, produce a piece of writing, and go home with some strategies for getting unstuck again.

Register at Writers & Books . You will receive a Zoom link from them before the workshop.

This two-hour workshop is in-person at Writers & Books, Rochester, NY.

Please contact me if you have any questions.

Little Coffins

David Ruekberg 0

A few years ago I started a writing project called Weather Report, about internal and external weather: the changing landscape of my spiritual evolution/dissolution, and global warming. It seems like a lot to roll into one ball, but you understand that one can't really separate the environment from what one is.

However, this post is not about that collection, which languishes in various slush piles. The lack of attention did cause me a brief period of despair and self-doubt, but against or despite or irrelevantly to my will, I found myself working in a form I call "Little Coffins." In about a year's time I found I had written about 45 poems mostly on purpose which I collected into a new manuscript I'm calling Marble and Rasp.

The name I gave the form doesn't so much have to do with my despair and self-doubt as with the shape of the poems: They appear in a rectilinear layout created by using a monospaced font and the same number of characters per line to create a poem that is right-justified without tracking or kerning. That's one reason I call them little coffins. They're boxy (most of them; see below). In terms of craft, the form puts pressure on the ideas, a little like a sonnet, but without a rhyme scheme, meter, or length constraints.

The first time I heard of this form was thirty years ago in a poetry workshop at Writers & Books, our literary writing and reading center in Rochester, NY. The instructor told us he had spent a week with another poet holed up in a house in the desert just writing. One day they challenged each other to only write poems that were completely justified on both margins. They were doing this on typewriters. I think he presented it to us in the same way Stephen Dunn once explained his tendency towards tercets--as a “compositional strategy.” At the time I thought it was a dumb idea.

In January, 2021 I went out for a winter day’s walk. I sometimes compose out loud while I’m walking, recording on my smartphone. I was looking at the clouds and the crust of snow outlining the suburban landscape and the dendritic trees against the atypically blue Rochester skies and the poem “Emendation” sprang out of my mouth. The next morning I typed it up, and wholly by accident the way I broke the lines they were almost perfectly right-justified. So I tinkered with the poem to make them align. Then I remembered the dumb exercise and laughed.

That June, attempting to protect my garden from marauding woodchucks, I accidentally caught a rabbit in my Havahart, and the next day her kitten. “Object Lesson” sprang out all of a piece, aligning on both margins with only minor tinkering. After sending it off to my writing group, I dismissed it as a lark. In September I wrote, “Object Constancy,” and something in the poem seemed to beg to be crammed into this form. I think it was the way they had a recognizable structure: introduction, development, conclusion, but without obvious logical hooks. Then “Slot Canyon” emerged, kind of on purpose, and I was off.

Fortunately, I have the advantage of a word-processor rather than a typewriter, which makes it a lot easier to edit. I realized after sending out “Emendation” that it might drive editors crazy to make my fonts accord with theirs. I realized this form would require composing in a monospaced font (like what you had on old typewriters, and which “Courier New” imitates) so that everyone (author, editor, typesetter) agreed about line length. I had typed up “Emendation” in Garamond, my preferred font, so it took some editing to make it conform. In fact, it was one of the hardest poems in this collection to align, since I had really liked it the way it was. But writers get used to merciless revision.

When I get stuck for the right line length I refer to the Thesaurus, and the site RhymeZone.com, which has a filter to let me search synonyms by word length, but most of the time I have to fall back on my own ingenuity to get not only the right number of characters in a line but also the right words.

I call these poems “little coffins” partly because of their shape, and partly for the reason suggested in the line from “Object Constancy”: “Words are shadows that mime shadows on a wall,” a twisted allusion to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. There’s the ideal reality, then there’s our perception of reality, then there’s our expression of our perception, three degrees removed from the ideal.

Towards the end of the manuscript some of them have a ragged last line. I'm not going to say why here. If it ever gets published maybe you will come up with a theory if you read it.

I tried to find out who that instructor was. For some reason I thought it was Campbell McGrath, but he responded to my email very politely and firmly that he had no idea what I was talking about. After discovering The Meadow in the Vermont home where I was sitting Fitzie, Anni MacKay and Doon Hinderyckx's Tibetan Terrier, it seemed sure that it was James Galvin who told the story of the typewriter exercise. I wrote to what I thought might be his email address, but either I was mistaken, or he ignored me, or something came up. At any rate, I still don’t know who it was for sure.

So far I've gotten one of these published. It's currently the second poem in the collection, "Weaver" (below), which I initially wrote in Ross White's September, 2021 Grind which was published in The Orchards Poetry Review. They weren't able to use a monospaced font as I had hoped, due to layout constraints, but were able to approximate the effect by manually adding spaces.

The Orchards happens to be published by Karen Kelsay, who also runs Kelsay Books, which published my first book, Where Is the River Called Pishon? A coincidence, I'm sure. Thanks to Karen Kelsay and the rest of the staff at Kelsay Books and The Orchards!

Getting Unstuck (redux)

David Ruekberg 0
Once again I'll be teaching my "Getting Unstuck" poetry workshop...or I should say "twice again." Once online this summer, and once in person in the fall. In the summer course I'm expanding to an online four-day course, two hours each, hosted by the Syracuse Downtown Writers Center. Because it's online, you can attend from anywhere. It runs from 6 to 8 pm for four Mondays, July 18 to August 8. Registration closes July 15 (but why wait for the last minute?). I'm also reprising the original two-hour workshop (which I've taught both live and virtually) in person at Writers & Books in Rochester, NY on Saturday, September 24, from 10 am to noon. In the two-hour workshop, we'll consider Stafford's strategy for getting unstuck, and review some others, as well as trying a fun exercise intended to loosen up your writing mind. In the eight-hour course, we'll do the same, and try some additional exercises, as well as discussing on-going strategies for "getting unstuck." Although the focus will be on poetry, these strategies may apply to many kinds of writing. In all of my workshops, I regard participants with respect, curiosity, and a sense of humor. I hope to help you broaden your expectations about what writing "should be," and take you from wherever you are to a little further down the road. Here's my blurb on the course. Writer’s Block: Is there such a thing? William Stafford’s solution was to ignore “high standards” and  “get into action.” Exercising our writing muscles without fear of “doing it wrong” helps prepare us for the moment when the “big poem” wants to be born. In this workshop we’ll play with ways to move through the doldrums and dread, including journaling, experimenting with forms, collaborating, and more. You can find more registration information about the online eight-hour class and the live two-hour class in my event calendar. I hope to see you there!

Getting Unstuck workshop (4 Mondays, online)

David Ruekberg 0

Writer’s Block: Is there such a thing? William Stafford’s solution was to ignore "high standards" and  "get into action." Exercising our writing muscles without fear of “doing it wrong” helps prepare us for the moment when the “big poem” wants to be born. In this workshop we’ll play with ways to move through the doldrums and dread, including journaling, experimenting with forms, collaborating, and more.

Although the focus will be on poetry, strategies for "getting unstuck" apply to all manner of writing. 

Meets four Mondays, July 18 through August 8.

Registration deadline: Friday, July 15

Tuition

  • YMCA of CNY member = Free!
  • Syracuse Downtown Writer's Center member  = $60
  • Non-Member = $80
  • Register by phone with a credit card by calling (315) 474-6851 x380.
  • If you must pay by check, please call first to reserve your place, then return your form with check payable to "YMCA" to:
    • The YMCA’s Downtown Writers Center, 340 Montgomery St., Syracuse, NY 13202

 

Poets for Ukraine Benefit Reading

David Ruekberg 0

Join us in raising money to provide humanitarian aid and medical relief to injured Ukrainians. Listen in as local poets (including me) read selections from Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of emerging and established Ukrainian voices charting what it means to be in a state of war and how it affects the poetics of a country. Sonya Bilocerkowycz, author of On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine, kicks off the evening with introductory remarks. All contributions go to RocMaidan.

Buy your books at Ampersand and join the conversation. 30% of your purchase of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine will be donated to RocMaidan.

This is a hybrid event held at Writers & Books, 740 University Ave Rochester NY and streamed via Zoom.

Masks and proof of vaccination are required for on-site attendance. 

Hybrid Event | Click here for tax-deductible tickets @ $10, $15, $25

Getting Unstuck Poetry Workshop (in person)

David Ruekberg 0

 

Writer’s block: Is there such a thing? William Stafford’s solution: Ignore “high standards” and get into action. Expecting every draft to say it all is a lot of pressure. Instead, exercising our writing muscles every day can help prepare us for when the big poem needs to be born.

In this poetry workshop we’ll explore ways to move through fear and doldrums. Criticism—especially from the worst critic of all, one’s self—will be banished in a kind but firm manner. We’ll spend a little time discussing ways to get unstuck, produce a piece of writing, and go home with some strategies for getting unstuck again.

Register at Writers & Books . You will receive a Zoom link from them before the workshop.

This two-hour workshop is in-person at Writers & Books, Rochester, NY.

Please contact me if you have any questions.

Writing Forward Together: Write-A-Thon

David Ruekberg 0

On Saturday, April 2, I’m participating in the first-ever Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writer's Center Write-a-Thon. I’ll be writing from sun-up to sun-down! If you sponsor me, your money will go to a good cause: the YMCA subsidizes $2 million in free or reduced memberships and program scholarships every year!

As a thank-you for your support, I will give you one of the following:

  • a free signed copy of one of my books, or 
  • a poem written for you, a cause you support, an idea you believe in, or a prompt of your choosing (printed on handsome paper, suitable for framing)

BONUS! BIG HUG next time I see you! (optional)

Click here for more info, and to donate. Thanks to those who already have. We're getting closer to our goal!

Image & Sentence: Poetry workshop (8 weeks) (online), register by April 20

David Ruekberg 0
if the doors of perception were cleansed

Image is often thought of as a picture in the mind, although any sensory experience counts. Ezra Pound defined image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” It’s the flash of epiphany—what makes us go “Ah!”

And yet poems are made of sentences, or parts of sentences--one word after another. In this class we’ll look at the way words, lines, and sentences prepare the way for moments of increased awareness. Through discussion and brief written commentary you will observe how poets as diverse as John Keats, Yehuda Amichai, Brigit Kelly, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and others wrangle with this interplay.

Participants will generate new writing and discuss it in workshop in the same way we discuss published work: noticing how it’s working, rather than “fixing” other people’s poems. First rule of workshop feedback: Respect.

Meets eight Tuesdays, April 26 through Tuesday, June 14

Registration deadline: April 20

Tuition

  • MCA of CNY member = $150
  • Syracuse Downtown Writer's Center member (and members of other YMCAs) = $116
  • Non-Member = $155
  • Click here to view the catalog.
    • Payment directions are on page 4.
    • Registration form is on page 6.
  • Register by phone with a credit card by calling (315) 474-6851 x380.
  • If you must pay by check, please call first to reserve your place, then return your form with check payable to "YMCA" to:
    • The YMCA’s Downtown Writers Center,
    • 340 Montgomery St., Syracuse, NY 13202

Nightcap Reading at Writers & Books Literary Conference

David Ruekberg 0
Please join me and four other fine writers as we cap off a day of talks, workshops, and readings at Writers & Books' Virtual Literary Conference. Enjoy poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms by Makalani BandeleSarah FrelighAnastasia NikolisDavid Ruekberg, and Holly Wren Spaulding. The conference theme "Taking Care in Writing, Publishing & Building Community" addresses the question, "How do we carve out purpose, chart a meaningful course, through troubling times that don’t seem to end?" The keynote address will be presented by Kwame Dawes, speaking on Literary Citizenship. Access to this reading is included with your purchase of a conference pass: Early Bird Rate: $195 (valid through January 13) | January 14 – 23: $225

Poetry reading: Versed in Line: Prose

David Ruekberg 0

Join me and Central NY poets as we present our prose poems, hosted by the Cayuga Museum of History and Art. I’ll be reading from my most recent book, Hour of the Green Light, and from Weather Report, a work in progress. Click here to read more, and view on Facebook or Zoom.