Amy King's Blog

I'm honored (& floored) to find that my poem has been published in the New York Times today!

Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift

In honor of Taylor Swift's birthday today, Friday, December 13th (she's 35), the Times selected 13 poems from the anthology that was just published on December 3rd (INVISIBLE STRINGS: 113 POETS RESPOND TO THE SONGS OF TAYLOR SWIFT) - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo...


The Taylor Swift Poetry Quiz

Famous poets (tortured or not) have taken inspiration from Swift’s music. Can you match the poem to the song?

By Jennifer Harlan

Taylor Swift is many things: a pop superstar, a business mogul, a cat mom. But before all of these, Swift is a writer, transforming the delights and heartbreaks of her life into music. In the new anthology “Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift,” edited by Kristie Frederick Daugherty (Ballantine, $26), various writers — including Pulitzer winners, best sellers and poet laureates — pick up Swift’s baton, each taking one of her songs and alchemizing it into an original poem. We’ve selected 13 of them here, at least one from every era.

Can you spot the Easter eggs and figure out which song inspired each poem?


Match the poem with the Swift song - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...


It’s Taylor’s birthday!


In honor of the occasion, we’re giving away 13 copies on Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

Poems in the Times -

Teri Ellen Cross Davis, “Tempered”

Diane Seuss, “The Lucky One”

Ilya Kaminsky, “Of Flight"

Kelli Russell Agodon, “In Wonderland, We’re Surprised/Not Surprised to Learn the Chamomile Tea Tastes Bitter”

Christopher Salerno, “SINCE YOU CAN’T SPELL DISASTER WITHOUT DESIRE”

Naomi Shihab Nye, “The Williams”

Amy King, “Lessons Learning”

Dean Rader, “Creation”

Stephanie Burt, “the much-maligned swiftie considers her options”

Joy Harjo, “ON THE STAIRS”

Andrea Gibson, “Perennial”

Tess Taylor, “IF I COULD TELL HER WHAT I KNOW NOW”

Aaron Smith, “Letter That You Never Read”

Thanks much to Kristie Frederick Daugherty!


P.S. Before the rise of Christianity, Friday the 13th was a day to celebrate the goddess.

Menstrual cycles: The average number of menstrual cycles a woman has in a year is 13.

Lunar cycles: The average number of lunar cycles in a calendar year is 13.

Day of the Goddess: Friday the 13th is considered the Day of the Goddess, a day to honor the divine feminine and the cycles of creation, death, and rebirth.

Goddess Freyja: Freyja is the goddess of love, sex, and fertility, and is associated with Friday the 13th.

Feminine energy: The number 13 is considered to have powerful feminine energy. Friday is the day of Venus, the planet of love and creativity.

Please check out my latest pandemic-inspired essay on poetry and capitalism at Jacket Magazine -

EXCERPT:

Poetry is a low-stakes celebratory game in the larger machinery we inhabit, and for that reason, despite a part of our industry’s desire to run in sync with capitalist values, to don the yoke of capitalism, in the fullness of time, poetry is also one of the least likely of the arts to be read and revered for who was published in what prestigious publication.

I do not pick up a Cesar Vallejo poem and decide it isn’t meaningful because it never made it to whatever the hottest venue was in Paris in his last years. Vallejo had escaped government persecution in Peru, was occasionally destitute, often depressed, and died in Paris in poverty.

Continued at Jacket Magazine - http://jacket2.org/commentary/two-essays

Amy King’s irascible and incantatory sprawlfest, The Missing Museum, which won the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Prize (a fact which alone makes it the Heavyweight Champ of World Poetry as that year’s TS Prize anointed literal dozens of books of astonishing breadth and beauty as finalists and semifinalists), begins with a one-poem prologue/manifesto, the beautiful, frustrating “Wake Before Dawn & Salt the Sea,” which reads like a sonnet that refuses to restrain itself to quite the syllables required and yet still manages to convey precision and restraint, and which tells a reader everything about poetry: explicitly, that it is useless, it is fuckworthy, it is love; implicitly, it is the only choice that can be made by this glib, driven, passionate, jaded speaker, or anyone with any intelligence and heart. It is a warning and a dare: “We are not edges of limbs or the heart’s smarts only.” It is a fitting introduction to this book of poems that, as it demands, wrestle and make love, and which unsurprisingly leave the reader breathless, dazzled, exhausted, and slightly bruised.

This, of course, comes as no surprise to those familiar with King’s work. It is uninterested in evenness and regularity. It is adroit and sharp and scream-y (often in literal caps) and rampaging. You don’t disgorge a poem entitled “PUSSY PUSSY SOCHI QUEER PUSSY PUTIN SOCHI QUEER QUEER PUSSY” because you are trying to lull your reader with luxe, calme, et volupté. And yet King’s work is for me memorable because, amid all those sharp blades and swears, her light step is frequently, unavoidably beautiful, with lines that you want to lick until they melt: “SHE WRITHED IN THE SEA BESIDE ME.” This kind of lubricious sonority makes you wonder if King needs handlers to get out of readings unmolested lest enthused listeners try to lick her. Not that this is what the poem is angling for; it just seems to be a by-product of the relentless courage and curiosity with which this work confronts, well, everything. Some examples of “everything” include sex, drugs, drinking, love, war, writing, belonging, identity, America, myth, ordnance, New York, social media, string theory, stop and frisk, writing, love, war, sex, depression, violence, self-doubt, art, politics, and even a subtle jibe at New Jersey that makes those of us allegiant to the Apple swell with pleasure and with the wistfulness of missing it.

If, however, you are not familiar with King’s work, I refer you to the two excellent and complementary reviews of this book on Goodreads, which I found during errant Googling when wondering where to begin this review. They are disonnant but symmetrical, being both written by older white men called John A. The first John A., himself a writer, is pithy: he gives five stars and repurposes a couplet from King’s book into a description of it: “”My, how her reach has grown./Like gunpowder aches in the calyx’ eardrum.” It’s coy but certain praise. The second John A. begins by calling the author “Mrs. King,” which will demonstrate to you that he lives on a planet I call Getmedafuqout, and continues with: “This is a pretty good collection. I heard chiefly about King through her University status as a professional feminist…”

…I can’t even be irritated by this characterization because I’m too busy being delighted by its unintentional hilarity and re-reading the piece “A Woman Is an Act” in light of its status as screed of the Professional Feminist: “You don’t even know/you’re falling into what you build,/made of what you fuck,/guilt for pleasure,/ how you capitalize and see the others of us/through the pores of such efforts…” O John the Second in your omniscient banality, meet Amy King and her quiverful of zingers, each line making an arrow sing; she is both adroit and trenchant, a sad contrast to your plodding paternalism (“an excellent effort,” finisheth John). And yet notoriety as a Professional Feminist, if King has it, seems to fit. The Missing Museum closes with an all-caps poem that forges rough chains of its claims and concerns, saying, among other things,

YOU CAN’T GIVE UP PUSSY IF YOU WANT TO LEARN.
THAT WHICH WE FEAR LOVES US BACK AND CAN TEAR US APART.

I’M NOT HOLLYWOOD. I’M NOT A BEAUTIFUL BOUNTY.

I OCCUPY SPACE.

O Reader: in this gorgeous and terrible moment, the space occupied is called you.

Enjoy.



Amy King is the author of the poetry collection, The Missing Museum, co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. King also joins the ranks of Ann Patchett, Eleanor Roosevelt & Rachel Carson as the recipient of the 2015 Women’s National Book Association Award. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is currently co-editing with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She is also co-editing the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.

Genève/Geneva Chao is the biracial, bicultural, and bilingual author of one of us is wave one of us is shore (Otis Books | Seismicity Editions), and Hillary Is Dreaming (Make Now Books). Chao is the translator of Gérard Cartier’s Tristran and, with François Luong, of Nicolas Tardy’s Encrusted on the Living. Chao’s forthcoming manuscript is called émigré.

Woodland Pattern - The Missing Museum
https://woodlandpattern.wordpress.com...

Amy King’s workshops and critiques are as intelligent and intuitive as she is. She’s introduced me to conceptual ideas that seem at first complex and perhaps over my head—but the way she breaks them down and incorporates them step by step into fun and challenging exercises makes them so accessible that I find myself pondering and using them in my own poetics again and again. I’ve worked with her several times, and I highly recommend Amy’s teaching style—learned yet lucid, erudite yet playful. She’s a joy!

—Jenn Givhan, 2015 Winner NEA in Poetry

What’s amazing about Amy is, unlike so many other great poets, she’s also a great teacher, a true facilitator of other people’s visions. Amy has a range of techniques to guide you through the entire arc of the creative process from the first germ of inspiration to your final edit, but the support Amy offers doesn’t just confirm what you’re already doing. She will shake you up, jolt you out of your comfort zone and challenge you to confront the personal limits you’re stumbling over in your writing. Her prompts will immerse you – literally, with all kinds of media – in new ways of seeing, thinking and making connections, and her responses to your work will help you re-frame how you think about your writing. I always feel that Amy holds my work to as high a standard as she holds her own, yet her critiques reflect her sense of what I’m trying to accomplish; she’s sensitive and generous in that way. I don’t think teaching is just a day job to Amy. She brings the same ethic and commitment, the same way of connecting she explores in her poetry to her work with her students.

—Justine el-Khazen, Brooklyn-based poet & creative writing instructor at Eugene Lang

I have collaborated with Amy King on several publishing projects — the magazine Esque, and the PEN Poetry Series — and we’ve also taught together at Naropa University, The San Francisco Poetry Center and Slippery Rock University. Amy has taught me so much about teaching poetry and fostering fruitful, kinetic student interaction. At Naropa, we lead a workshop on “The Trans Cyborg;” from Fernando Pessoa to Tamiko Beyer and Nicki Minaj, Amy activated the group with generative readings and viewings, and insightfully helped along students’ work with critique and exercises like “Write your own personal mythology” and “Interlace fingers / interlace lines into a hybrid poem.” Co-teaching this class was a lesson to me as well on how poetry can pass between poet-teacher and poet-student, and how empathetic, radical, disciplined engagement leads to breakthroughs in poems and poetics. As a teacher, Amy accepts nothing less. Amy was also an essential reader and editor for both of my books of poetry, and a valued poetry journal co-editor who confidently made micro and macro editorial and curatorial decisions to the benefit of every poem she was entrusted with. I recommend her as a teacher and editor without hesitation — you are lucky to have a chance to travel a while with her.

—Ana Božičević, author of Stars of the Night Commute and the Lambda Literary Award-winning Rise in the Fall

Whether you are writing about the intricacies of daily interactions or incorporating broad topics from science to philosophy to politics, Amy King’s got you covered! She writes from the street but not from a blank slate – in fact, from a broad intellectual background. Her prompts are rich in detail and suggestibility. She provides extensive supporting material and recommends a cornucopia of relevant poetry to inspire you. Her feedback is direct, insightful, and incisive but does not foreclose your options for finding your own route to improvement.

She inspired me to write my first prose poem!

—Mary Newell, Ph. D.

In 35 years of teaching Creative Writing and literature courses at the University of South Alabama and having served as Alabama’s Poet Laureate from 2003 -2012, I have never know anyone who gives a more thorough and helpful critique than Amy King. She is an outstanding poet who uses her experience to offer insightful comments and suggestions thatare encouraging and yet honest when it comes to rewrites. I have taken a couple of Amy’s courses just to have her astute feedback. It is a privilege to be in a class of Amy’s, take part in challenging and exciting exercises. and learn new ways to look at writing poetry.

—Sue Walker, Publisher Negative Capability Press
Retired Professor of English, University of South Alabama,
Poet Laureate of Alabama 2003-2012


I'm the Man Who Loves You

PRAISE FOR AMY KING’S POETRY

“Rarely have the nude and the cooked been so neatly joined” as in Amy King’s I Want to Make You Safe. If “us,” “herons,” and “dust” rhyme, then these poems rhyme. If that makes you feel safe, it shouldn’t. Amy King’s poems are exuberant, strange, and a bit grotesque. They’re spring-loaded and ready for trouble. Categories collapse. These are the new “thunderstorms with Barbie roots.” —Rae Armantrout

Amy King’s poems seem to encompass all that we think of as the “natural” world, i.e. sex, sun, love, rotting, hatching, dreaming, especially in the wonderful long poem “This Opera of Peace.” She brings these abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living: “Let the walls bear up the angle of the floor,/Let the mice be tragic for all that is caged,/Let time’s contagion mar us/until spoken people lie as particles of wind.” —John Ashbery

Amy King’s mercurial poems capture the instability of cultural, sexual, and poetic identity. In the circuitry of her illuminated, incongruous, but somehow perfectly apt details, ‘the alien befits us.’ With a nod to Gertrude Stein and Fernando Pessoa, as well as cameos by Frida Kahlo, Maya Deren, and Claude Cahun, Amy celebrates ‘the roles’ of women even as she redefines them, telling us: ‘I put on my long black dream/to live among my female brothers.’ Playful, provocative, and frenetically lyrical, this is metamorphic poetry for our times. —Elaine Equi

I love Amy King’s smile in photos of Amy King, Amy King’s exuberance and looping, bashing panache (flamboyant manner, reckless courage) in the poems of Amy King, I’m going to say Amy King every chance I get in this blurb to make you think “I gotta read me some Amy King,” especially if you’re “looking for anything/that will pull the cork, boil the blood/of displeasure,” as only the poems of Amy King can in the world in which Amy King is King (and Queen). —Bob Hicok

The first poem I read by Amy King was “MEN BY THE LIPS OF WOMEN” and it struck me with a force I had previously felt on encountering masterworks by Lorca and Dylan Thomas. I won’t live long enough to see if her poetry will continue to equal the magnificence of theirs, but the fact that she achieved it once (at least) proves to me it could. —Bill Knott

Smoke n’ hott, these poems emerge as … audible diamonds that cut, where Rock is King & candor disarms paranoia. or, in King’s case, downright dismembers it: Forgive me, I am the final/ seminary soul to check your shape/in the dress of that embalming line, Passengered adeptly under the influence of Lorea, Neruda maybe, (Buried by midnight/ I am a Warm/fly in amber.) the reader wants to shout, GO DUENDE!!! —Jeni Olin

“‘I’m portable. My mind travels / the verse and valleys of whole people’ says the poet. Correct! Readers of this book will discover their own memories. They will melt in them, amazed, lullabied, dramatized, shocked that they exist. Amy King is a true bard. —Tomaz Salamun

Vulnerability, fragility, and anxiety are all flushed out into the open here and addressed with such strong sound and rhythm that we recognize a resilient, defiant strength within them. King puts relentless pressure on forces seemingly beyond our reach and, in bringing them closer, exposes their own vulnerable centers. This is a poetry equally committed to language as a tool with social obligations and language as an art material obligated to reveal its own beauty. King’s language does both magnificently. —Cole Swensen

I Want to Make You Safe

BOOK REVIEW: THE MISSING MUSEUM BY AMY KING
Reviewed by Emma Bolden

The Missing Museum
Poems by Amy King
Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2016
$14.00; 114 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1939460080

In February 2012, the Russian feminist punk/performance art/protest group Pussy Riot staged an act of protest against the re-election of Vladimir Putin. Between services at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a Russian Orthodox church destroyed by Stalin and rebuilt in the 1990s, the women entered and walked up to the altar, jumping and jabbing their fists in the air. Filmed footage of the performance was included in the music video for their song, “Punk Prayer: Mother of God Drive Putin Away.” The song implores the Virgin Mary to “banish Putin” and “become a feminist, we pray thee.” Although Cathedral guards removed the group in less than a minute, three group members were arrested, charged with hooliganism, and sentenced to two years in prison.

After the American election of 2016, Pussy Riot warned Americans to prepare themselves: Trump’s presidency, they predicted, would resemble Putin’s in ways that many Americans might not even be able to imagine. In a December 2016 interview, Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova told New York Times reporter Jim Rutenberg that it was “important not to say to yourself, ‘Oh, it’s O.K.’ [ . . . ] in Russia, for the first year of when Vladimir Putin came to power, everybody was thinking that it will be O.K.” It isn’t safe, Tolokonnikova continued, to trust that America’s institutions will protect its citizens and their freedoms, as “a president has power to change institutions and a president moreover has power to change public perception of what is normal, which could lead to changing institutions.”

Pussy Riot’s work serves as a frame for Amy King’s riotous, rapturous, and radical fifth full-length collection, The Missing Museum. I mean “frame” quite literally: a passage from the poem that shares part of its title with the first section of the book, “PUSSY PUSSY SOCHI PUSSY PUTIN SOCHI QUEER QUEER PUSSY,” is printed on the back cover. “I HAVE A WITCH-CHURCH HAND,” the speaker declares in the poem, “& / PUSSIES RIOTING A PUTIN PRAYER / ON A NATION OF PEOPLE.” Just as Pussy Riot composed the clarion call of an iconoclastic culture countering Russian authoritarianism and repression, so too does Amy King’s work spur, capture, and curate the artifacts of a burgeoning resistance movement in the United States.

Also like Pussy Riot, King’s use of the term “pussy” serves as a shibboleth for revolutionary feminism, reclaiming a term used as a slur against women—and, as the 2016 release of Access Hollywood footage shows, one often linked linguistically to sexual assault and rape. Through reclamation, feminists empty the term of its misogynistic implications, empowering themselves by taking ownership of the language of the oppressor. Now, “pussy” has become a common part of the American vernacular, wielded by women fighting to preserve their fundamental rights to control their own bodies and speech. Likewise, Pussy Riot’s music carries great meaning for the American resistance and for the poems in this collection, which serve, in many ways, as a museum preserving the gathering motion of resistance.

Unlike many museums, King’s isn’t a collection of evidence of an unchanging monolithic culture. Instead, the book protests the very idea that any culture or subculture is, was, or ever will be stable, static, and homogeneous. King’s poetry sweeps through cultural references from surrealist painter Leonora Carrington to soul singer and activist Nina Simone to pop singer Lionel Richie. The sheer breadth of references in King’s work echoes the idea that no culture is singular or stationary. The disparate works—songs, paintings, poems, acts of civil disobedience—of all of these artists cross through the collection as separate but equally essential works and workers of culture. As King writes in “You Make the Culture,” “The words become librarians, custodians of people.” If any representation of a culture is to be accurate, she continues, it is to involve movement: “I will walk with the sharks of our pigments / [ . . . ] until we leave rooms that hold us apart.” Inclusivity, and the ability to envision all groups in terms of belonging, is essential, as lines near the end of the poem show: “Nothing comes from the center / that doesn’t break most everything apart.”

After all, culture is the product of changeable, mutable human beings who, King argues in the collection’s prologue, “Wake Before Dawn & Salt the Sea,” are more action than object: “Our limits may not be expandable, but before you say, / ‘Blood and sinew,’ remember you’re making a mistake. / We are not edges of limbs or the heart’s smarts only.” As such, a worthwhile life is a life beyond “noise,” beyond “dying full of money but no one will give a shit, rich asshole.” To be stationary, to live untroubled while following the American exhortation to gain money and power without examining the dangers this philosophy poses or the system purporting this philosophy, is anathema to progress. The poem ends with a couplet that brings to mind Herman Melville’s enjoinder at the end of “Art,” in which he calls for a fusion of opposites within the self and between the self and the heavens. “Be somebody,” King implores of us, “be one who wrestles and make love to the dark / that is your deepest part, the uselessness of love and art.” The idea that the most beautiful things we as human beings bring to the light—beauty, love, art—are utterly useless comes as a shock, especially as it also comes at the end of a gorgeously-wrought poem serving as the collection’s prologue. The location of these lines creates the same kind of shock as the location of Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” in an Orthodox cathedral. Both performances don’t just shock: they shift. The juxtaposition of lyric and location creates a moment in which the mind bends, allowing disparate realities to coexist.

King calls upon the work of the Surrealists to illustrate this juxtaposition. In “And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur,” a poem named after a painting by Surrealist Leonora Carrington, King writes of the need to move beyond accepted meanings, “to grow branches / between worlds on the backs of nurtured equations.” She calls for us to “[s]ay another elsewhere. Open the broom, sick with sorceries.” In “Pussy Riot Rush Hour,” King speaks of a woman traveling the Lexington Avenue Line while “hitting / herself, buck up head heavy against / the number 5 train downtown.” She describes her “self-infliction” as “a cause / that brings us away from our senses.” Here, King references Arthur Rimbaud, who called for poets to transform themselves into “seers” through a “long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.”

King’s collection carries out Rimbaud’s call through the velocity of its juxtapositions, racing through shifts in voice, structure, theme, and tone, sometimes within the same poem. In “Understanding the Poem,” “this world is anything but a poem” —and then, in the next line, “This world is this, this world is poem, and I am unusual today, at least.” The frenetic movement of King’s work—from popular culture to high culture, from Georgia pines to New York streets, from all-caps alert to expertly-groomed almost-sonnets—recalls the cry of Baudelaire’s soul to travel “Anywhere, anywhere, as long as it be out of this world!” The speed and span of juxtapositions in the collection reveals what is missing from museums: movement, derangement, change.

By this dynamic derangement of our assumptions about culture, King’s museum reveals what culture really is: an ever-changing multiplicity of perspectives that cannot be carved into different, disparate wings. The narrative of culture as a series of singular, separate factions and philosophies leads to the violence of othering and violence against others. In “Perspective,” this moves beyond theory to a matter of actual life and death:

When I see two cops laughing
after one of them gets shot
because this is TV and one says
while putting pressure on the wound,
Haha, you’re going to be fine,
and the other says, I know, haha!,
as the ambulance arrives—
I know the men are white.

At the end of the poem, King asks us to wrestle with questions about this narrative, about the curation of our culture, essential for the survival of our nation and ourselves.

Who gets to see and who follows
what script? I ask my students.
Whose lines are these and by what hand
are they written?

In that 2016 New York Times interview, Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova herself echoed this idea: “‘You are always in danger of being shut down,’ she said. ‘But it’s not the end of the story because we are prepared to fight.’” With her work and words, King shows her readers how to join the fight.

Emma Bolden is the author of medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press 2016) and Maleficae (GenPop Books 2013). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Pinch, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Her honors include a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA and the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. She serves as Senior Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly.

http://losangelesreview.org/book-revi...

The Missing Museum

Make my Twitter day - @amyhappens

Slaves to Do These Things

I was pleased to find Nancy Bevilaqua's review of Slaves to Do These Things today!

Thanks for engaging the work and for thinking about poetry overall, Nancy!

Read it here -

The perfectly natural questions "But what is the poem about?" and "What does this mean?" can be both frustrating and very useful to a poet. My own response, over time, has become, "What does it mean to YOU?" [Click to continue!]