All posts by jennifer

You can now buy my poetry collection ‘Grace Notes’ from Salmon Poetry!

Grace Notes, Publicity & promotion, Rescued poem, Salmon Poetry
Cover of the book Grace Notes: Giving Voice to Gráinne Mhaol, Ireland’s Pirate Queen by Jennifer Liston. The design features bold, swirling brushstrokes in shades of blue, green, and purple, with touches of red, resembling an abstract painting of ocean waves. The title and author’s name are overlaid in white and gold text, with the publisher, Salmon Poetry, noted at the bottom. This Alt Text was generated by ChatGPT.

It’s finally here!

Ennistymon-based Salmon Poetry has published my poetry collection, Grace Notes. It will be launched at the Allingham Festival in Ballyshannon on Friday 8 November. I’m really looking forward to launching this baby into the world. It’s been a long time in the making.

Grace Notes is a collection of poems that express fragments of the life of Grace O’Malley/Gráinne Mhaol. The Gráinne compositions place Gráinne at different points in her life and also situate her in a mediaeval past and a borrowed future via her dreams, or aislings. Interspersed with these compositions are ‘rescued’ poems. I chose 17 texts connected to Gráinne – a selection of factual or fictional biographies of her and a small number of contemporary historical texts – from which I rescued 50 poems.

Isn’t the cover gorgeous? Salmon Poetry’s Siobhán Hutson Jeanotte designed it. I requested that it wouldn’t feature the usual pirate queen image bandied around whenever Grace O’Malley is illustrated, and Siobhán did a wonderful job with an abstract image that suggests movement and sea and waves without hitting us over the head with them.

You can buy the book directly from the Salmon Poetry website. They ship worldwide!

Daily rescued poem for April 2018: poem titles and links to each one

Rescued poem

For the month of April 2018 I wrote a rescued poem every day and published it over at jenniferliston.com.

I enjoyed the daily discipline and challenge. The resulting 30 poems are mostly dark and/or sinister and/or cryptic. They make for interesting reading.

I’ve listed each poem here, with a link to it. At some stage I’ll probably reorder the titles into another poem!

I’d love to hear what you think; please let me know in the comments, here, or over at jenniferliston.com.

 

1/04/2018
Don’t leave
Read it here.

2/04/2018
Notes of ruin
Read it here.

3/04/2018
strange terrible things
Read it here.

4/04/2018
What the photographs said
Read it here.

5/04/2018
The gods at breakfast, darkly
Read it here.

6/04/2018
When the dead listen
Read it here.

7/04/2018
Syringe of forgetfulness
Read it here.

8/04/2018
knock-knocking
Read it here.

9/04/2018
Wish
Read it here.

10/04/2018
disconnected
Read it here.

11/04/2018
empty girl
Read it here.

12/04/2018
Strange thoughts and stranger friends
Read it here.

13/04/2018
The book of cats
Read it here.

14/04/2018
Take me to you
Read it here.

15/04/2018
ten thousand lamps yet everywhere is dark
Read it here.

16/04/2018
What she was to me
Read it here.

17/04/2018
The small round room of recollections
Read it here.

18/04/2018
Bravura
Read it here.

19/04/2018
how inevitable, the silent despairing
Read it here.

20/04/2018
The blight of yet another moment
Read it here.

21/04/2018
Lure of the lakes
Read it here.

22/04/2018
They called her ‘the girl with the hair’
Read it here.

23/04/2018
end note
Read it here.

24/04/2018
Cello
Read it here.

25/04/2018
I remember a caring Lord
Read it here.

26/04/2018
When a word is a bullet
Read it here.

27/04/2018
Sometimes life is dreaming an idea
Read it here.

28/04/2018
In the arms of an instrument
Read it here.

29/04/2018
You shall never be alone, he said
Read it here.

30/04/2018
the words of a last toast insist that large fortune is laughter, love and nice wine
Read it here.

Taking constraints to the next level: a new rescued poem every day in April 2018

Rescued poem

For national poetry writing month (NaPoWriMo) I’ve written a poem a day in April each year from 2012 to 2015, but in 2016 I needed to concentrate on finishing the PhD and last year I had a little break. So now I’m back in the write-and-publish-a-poem-every-day-in-April saddle.

This year I decided that I would write and post a rescued poem daily: there’s nothing quite like putting on a straitjacket, then trying to do cartwheels!

I’m posting them over at http://jenniferliston.com. Please visit, and I’d love to hear what you think about the poems via the comments.

Rescued poetry featured on Jacket2

Publicity & promotion

I’m absolutely thrilled that the delightful Jerome Rothenberg has featured my rescued poetry on Jacket2, a leading online journal that offers commentary on contemporary poetry and poetics. You can read it over here.

He says:

Her procedural poetry, as presented here, adds significantly to the line of such poetry in modern and postmodern writing — in both her poems and poetics. The idea of the “rescued poem” is indubitably her own, and a further collection of poems as examples will shortly be gathered as a book.

Jerome is an eminent American contemporary poet who started his career as a translator of poetry. He is also a highly regarded poetry anthologist, editor and poetic theorist. One of the most well-known anthologies for which he is responsible is the beautiful Technicians of the Sacred, a collection of poetry and incantations from indigenous peoples around the world.

You can read more about Jerome on the Poetry Foundation website.

Thank you so much, Jerome.

UPDATE: I was very sad to hear that Jerome died in April 2024. A great loss to the poetry world.

RIP Jerome Rothenberg: born 11 December 1931, died 21 April 2024.

Read Jerome Rothenberg’s obituary in The Guardian here.

 

…naked stream…

Rescued poem

This little rescued poem is the first in a new rescued poetry project I’ve just begun — but, more about that in a future post when I’ve completed some rescue missions and I’m ready to report!

I rescued this poem from two books by Irish author Edna O’Brien: Some Irish Loving (p 251) and Mrs Reinhardt and other stories (p 122).

In the Grainne Mhaol project which I worked on for three years, I topped and tailed rescued poem titles with ellipses so that poems were clearly identifiable as rescued rather than ‘organic’ Grainne narrative poems. (You can read more about that project over here: How a pirate queen helped me become a doctor.) I’m still not sure what I think of the aesthetics of ellipses, but will continue to use them for now. Each rescued poem title is simply an excerpt of a few words or an interesting-sounding phrase from the poem itself.

…naked water…

I lay down by naked water.
I thought I was alone.
A tender fawn walked by, then turned
to meet my eyes. He said:

“Forget your sweetness, little one.
Forget your blush, your glow.
Sins of stone shall haunt your heart,
your flesh will shame you sore.”

Morning in a dress of light
girl in shoes of brown
mountains cold and wild and still:
stream that drank me down.

little people of IKEA

Rescued poem,

20150405_IKEA_2015_catalogue

I rescued this poem from seven ‘blurbs’ combined from the 2015 IKEA catalogue.

As always, the important distinction between my rescuing process and other process-based approaches such as ‘finding’ poems is that I do not select a complete phrase or sentence; after I transcribe the text I jumble it so that all the words are in random order, and then I choose words as individual building blocks. The resulting rescued poem is usually quite surprising, then, because I take the words out of their original context and impose my own creativity on them, combining them to give a new twist – as is the case with this little rescuee.

little people of IKEA

even the tiniest children are complicated
up and down in a million moments
these unique little freaks
play
explore
dream
lost in worry-free space
home in happy safe place
ideas become needs
become want want want
getting and giving
getting and giving
high on make-believing every day
hide in giggling sleep every night

and you think
you can stack time
in smart storage
but that’s not the way
it seems to play out
and one day
the world takes these
not
so
little people
away
away

The conscience-stricken spirit

Rescued poem, ,

This rescuee is from The Celtic Twilight by W B Yeats (p 9) and The History of the Town and the County of the Town of Galway (1820) by James Hardiman (p 65). It’s the first one to have a bit of a conversation going on.

The conscience-stricken spirit

The spirit standing in the doorway
had an infinite, heavy sadness to it;
a weight of troubles from another world.

Is you dead, I says.

    What thinks you, he replied.
    When I was living my enemies took power,
    destroyed my castle, my kingdom.
    What I feared more than anything else came to pass:
    terrible misfortune on the land,
    winds of damage turned families and visionaries to peasants,
    pleasure of music and poems a memory,
    a place whose masters have no heart
    an earth whose heavens are foregoing…

He seemed kind, strong.

    They are so distant from me, said he, neither day nor night,
    time nor words, make me feel that…
    If you would talk to… if you would…

His voice began to fail.

They see me as half-mad, I says, queer as a copper shilling.
Talking to you, about you, is no wise things for me.

So I has written this down
I is no mystical person, I is already damaged,
lodging in this place
longing to trim my own winged mind.

Before a name

Rescued poem,

This short but intense poem is getting its first airing here. I rescued it from two books by Miranda Green: Celtic Goddesses: Warriors Virgins and Mothers (p 77) and The Gods of the Celts  (p 35).

Before a name

Silver horses run on alien lands
guardians of gold hands and Ireland’s stories;
vigorous, the king of wood and word,
sexual, the bride of stone and roots.

Mortal is the waterbird, believing
that rivers shape-shift, carrying divine
spirits to a savage transformation,
to a form that forced a human birth:

crushing meaning; giving them a name.

She is all, and night is just

Rescued poem,

This is an unusual rescue-ee in that the source texts are two poems by William Wordsworth: ‘Lucy Gray’ and ‘Daffodils’. (I usually rescue poems from prose, not poetry.)

The result is definitely influenced by how well I know both poems.

She is all, and night is just

Sound never looks this lonesome.
She wandered, small,
overlooked, scarcely there.
She was inward, broken,
dancing vacant
on solitary wild.
Night was tossing
the wretched daffodils.
She danced, wanton,
chanced a glance
at lantern moon
shine sprightly golden
reached downwards beside
on milky snow.
She gazed wide at lonely heaven
and through sparkling
stars tracked waves of twinkle.
She danced, pensive,
yonder mother mountain
a steep, stormy rise homeward.
She danced, wept,
her footmarks lost,
never to be seen.

 

Freeze frame

Rescued poem, ,

I rescued this poem from My Life in Advertising by Claude C Hopkins (p 205) and The sea by John Banville (p 143).

Freeze frame

Summer afternoon pocketing thunderous idleness in the dark.
Erotic encounter
covert kiss
black-and-white screen
flickering
fading
ghosts of desire sitting in pitch-dark intensity
for hours,
manic fumbling,
twitched satisfaction
deprive primal intensity;
confinement
reputation,
balls for breakfast
conscious phantoms lurch
from joy to grey
approve to disreputable
filled fingers to wanton waste,
picture-house main feature to forgotten poverty.