Gingerhaze, via The Hawkeye Initiative  

“Created in December of 2012, The Hawkeye Initiative uses Clint Barton as well as other male comic characters to illustrate how contorted and hyper-sexualized women are commonly drawn in comics.”

I’ve never out and out declared how much of a comic geek I was (and still, to a certain extent, am). Love this initiative. 

Caits Meissner— What Do My Poems Matter, Anyway? Confronting Art’s Place in the Hierarchy of Need.

Amen.

I’m thinking of that moment a young upcoming artist, in a conversation about work, spoke of teaching/facilitating/mentoring from a disdainful stance, as if it weren’t real work. That irked me for a long, long time. A strong artist doesn’t necessarily make for the best facilitator. And although there’s a long-standing model of poets working as teachers and educators, not everyone wants to teach. Indeed, there’s something to be said for earning a living beyond your art, of making sure you stay connected with and alive to a world beyond the classroom, beyond the everyday endeavour of making words work. But we all have something to learn. And I’ve learned so much from the young poets and students I’ve worked with. I’d like to think that there’s a decent body of people, young and not-so-young, who’ve gained something valuable from the time they’ve spent working with me.

My work is about making things, about changing perspectives, about building bridges between disparate ideas and states of being, about alchemy, transforming things. Part of that work happens on a stage, or through the pages of collections and anthologies. Part of that work happens in school rooms and workshop spaces, transforming the silences in people’s mouths to things that need to be said, or rather helping those people to find their own brand of alchemy, so that they can do these things for themselves. They’re different forms of work— the stage more focused on the individual “I” (even if only as a conduit for a poetry that can be claimed by the listener), the workshop/class necessarily less so— but, for me, they stem from the same root. A poetry capable of affecting real change. Yes.

Maggie Dubris

Of course, that doesn’t mean you don’t have anything to learn from anyone else. Always, the balance between your own vision and the wisdom of others who’ve already trodden similar paths. Consider Bruce Lee’s model: take instruction from masters so you can forge your own way…

Maggie Dubris, interviewed by Ali Liebegott for Believer Mag

http://believermag.tumblr.com/post/50096754461/image-by-shary-boyle-interview-with-maggie

This resonates. I was recently asked, by a host just before a gig, if I could have any long-dead poet in the audience, who it would be. Response? I blanked. Completely. Brain scrabbled for an answer and offered up Langston Hughes. It was a nice question to be asked: unexpected, challenging in the best way. Kept me on my toes.