How I Write: A Round Robin Blog Tour April 3, 2014 I want to thank my friend, Catherine Staples, for inviting me to participate in this year’s poetry Round Robin. Catherine is not only a gifted and award-winning poet, but she is also one of the most generous-minded connector-of-poets I have ever known. Here’s the way this blog tour works: Writers are asked to respond to four questions about their writing process and what they are working on now. This is my response to those questions... What are you working on? I like how the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz answered this question in an interview once. In response to the question, “What are you working on right now?” he said something like, “I am trying to get out of the way of my own voice.” It seems to me that this is what we are always trying to do as writers: trying to grow technically by taking on new work thematically. My debut collection of poems, The Lame God , which won the 2013 May Swenson Poetry Award, allowed me to assume the voice of a grieving parent when a child has been abducted and murdered. This work of putting on another individual’s skin was extremely difficult – and yet, I am now discovering, perhaps not as difficult as it is to craft poems wearing one’s own skin. My new collection of poems, tentatively titled Natural Law , explores the intersection of our natural lives and our regulated lives – the unexpected collision between 21st century codes that we label as taboo and that only two generations previously were labeled as liberation. I am also buttoning up for submission an educational memoir called Beginner’s Mind that celebrates a remarkable educator and recommends a philosophy of teaching that, in turn, recommends a philosophy of life. Excerpts from Beginner’s Mind can be found on my webpage. How does your work differ from others of its genre? Ezra Pound often advised T.S. Eliot to leave questions of difference and likeness to the literary historians. Busy yourself with the writing, Pound advised his poet friend, and let the literary historians busy themselves with where — or if — you fit in. I think I’ll listen to Pound and leave it at that. Why do you write what you do? I agree with poets such as Paul Valery and Yevgeny Yevtushenko: I don’t believe that, as poets, we get to choose our subjects. I think, more often than not, our subjects choose us. Poets, like artists of all kinds, are observers of the world; what we bear witness to is not necessarily what we would have selected – and not necessarily what we already know how to relate back to the world. With regard to this latter point, the poet is always challenged to find new techniques and forms for “mastering” — which is, of course, really “serving” — her subject. How does your writing process work? E.B. White wrote his most human and profound essays at his kitchen table, while his children romped about below. Socrates taught some of the most universal and permanent lessons about how to live a decent life, while walking with his students through the over-populated and bustling city of Athens. Regarding poetic process, I would have to say that mine is a combination of kitchen table and daily walks. I drum out lines in daily walks of trochees and iambics and tend to actually craft them at a tiled kitchen table in the most central of all rooms in my home. M.B.

Award Winning Poetry - 1978 From the book "Advantages of Believing" Beginner's Mind We have been together in Buddha’s gentle rain for days. Our robes are soaked through. I try not to long for things as your palm unwinds under my chin. You speak to me in the simplest language, Have a cup of tea. I sense your compassion but my ears are filled with water and the incense unnerves me. You cup my ears and whisper, Rozan is famous for its misty, rainy days, and, The sky is always the sky. I believe you, though I am not surprised. Perhaps the exchange should not be this intimate. The shadows near my eyes and across your shaved head make us tired and ordinary. You are an old man with dry lips. Perhaps your middle sags as you smooth my hair, my hair that was just so. Copyright © 1978 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Williams College Archives, 1978 Published in the author's book Advantages of Believing , 2015. Previous Next

Award Winning Poetry - 2025 Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group 2024 Writing Contest - 3 of 3 - Ethos, Logos, Pathos Ethos Because we are different from our dogs that leave their scent on white fence posts; the raised hind leg, the pioneering boast. Because we stand upright, wonder at vaulted ceilings, songs in frescoes: A lifeless man sculpted in plaster and paint, lifting his flaccid hand to – what? An animating touch, a spark, self-understanding? Or a patriarch called to brave a flood, reclining like a Roman river god, not from too much wine, but from such a familiar forgetfulness of our limited time. Because we build pyramids with steps: discernment following the climb. Logos Because Athens never really fell. A radiant vase unearthed; centuries of burnt clay covering its storied face: a ring of epic battles – centaurs, half-man half-beast at the throat of a cool- headed Greek. The choice still the same: Nature untamed or the compass calibrated? The watchful peeling back to the urn’s Attic shape – not with landscape trenchers, but dental picks. Precision tools. A slow-moving, pointing trowel, a sieve. Because of the mindful coupling of powdery pieces: specs of gold from a goddess’s shield, a warrior’s bones too brittle to touch. The true story so reliant upon a delicate brush. Pathos Because the healer is the wounded one. Chiron, casualty of friendly fire, Heracles’s poisonous arrow: Sentenced, in his immortal state to a life of unfathomable sorrow – A perfect medic for the would-be hero: Jason, adrift at sea, until a centaur more adrift steels him: Push on, pass up the Sirens, regain a stolen throne . Asclepius, protégé, healer celebrity, and yet so alone – except for the healer more alone: Chin up, the physician’s heart cannot be helped; tend to your soul . Achilles, fed innards of boars to awaken a warrior core; to quiet his ego: bear marrow. Because for the life worth remembering the cure is an errant arrow. Copyright © 2024 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Azure , Vol. 8, March, 2025. Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group's Fall 2024 Writing Contest - First Place. Other poems in collection: "Is there a Final Exam?" and "Plan B". Editor's comment: I enjoyed the steady strain of brilliance and the profound sense of wisdom that runs through each poem, well-delivered through narratively evocative language and clearly intentional choices in poetic form! To cloak modernity in a sense of magic is difficult to do, and yet I feel your poems do so in a very useful way. I hope our readers find in these pieces the impetus for an examined life. - Sakina B. Fakhri Previous Next

Index Previous Next Winner of the 2005 Annie Finch Prize On Recognizing Saints As if to find new icons for her life or as if - piece by piece - to dismantle mine she scans our purchases too consciously. Flips through a magazine I'm embarrassed to be buying. Studies its regimen for shapely thighs, asks me - because she's heard - if drinking wine is good for nursing. The shift from idle chitchat to appeal. Camille, her nametag says. Camille of olive skin and violet nails with long metallic tips, who flashes her lover's sucking marks like her stigmata. Camille who isn't showing yet - but like Crivelli's virgin martyr Catherine, peers sidelong at me and leans decoratively against her register as Catherine did against her studded wheel. So clearly Catherine that I want to look away - or kneel. And yet, Crivelli would have framed her differently: a martyr tucked away with other martyrs in a predella of muted colors, quiet suffering. None of this heart-to-heart - this girlfriend talk that brings to mind a string of small petitions and makes me say my part. . Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the Annie Finch Prize, 2005. Judge: Margot Schlipp Published in The National Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2005.

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Award Winning Poetry - 2011 Winner of the 2011 American Poet Prize 1-800-THE-LOST The weight of the receiver in my hand: the down bird in my palm first lifting you. The counselor’s words: rehearsed, a burlesque bland. The shift in time, the shift to looking through her lens: today you are just one of two hundred lost. My eyes fix on our bright fence. I say your name, but you are no one new – caught in an ancient book that she’ll condense. I want her to discuss you in the present tense. I want the gods to stop pretending love calls the departed home. We called you with our various loves, had hope, hovered over still fields; made wind like the gods do before they come unhinged, let their rage loose on an unresponsive yield. Fields gone deaf and dumb; unshaken, fruitless ground, unmoved by a neighborhood of mothers who left their own to find you – tables, like mine, set. I want the gods to swallow their prayers whole. Choke up my child like the Olympians – a girl, unbruised by her journey down their throats. I want her at my table: fruit, alms that the gods, I see, can give or take – balm for the irritations I caused, or they caused; gifts between us or perhaps among themselves – a girl that they’ll barter away. I’m here. And I’m willing to talk, or trade. Copyright © 2011 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the American Poet Prize for 2011 Published in The American Poetry Journal , Spring 2012. Previous Next

Hestia, protector of missing children, you with soft oil dripping ever from your locks, come now into this house -- draw near, and withal bestow grace upon my song. ― Ancient Greek prayer. Award Winning Poetry - 2008 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award - Special Merit Museum Hestia, protector of missing children, you with soft oil dripping ever from your locks, come now into this house -- draw near, and withal bestow grace upon my song. ― Ancient Greek prayer. Historical pieces, these things of yours: a deflating ball, a bike not on its kick, but propped against a garage wall; a crestfallen lacrosse stick. Tours have come through as if walking the way of the cross: neighbors with pasta, a friend to awkwardly drop off a borrowed dress. Police with their pens and pads making calculations. A press release for the missing, accosted kidnapped, or dead; your photo, a ghost of a soul you had. Musee de Beaux Arts for the ambushed, the dispossessed, for guardians, who did not guard our watch, conservators of hellish thoughts, thoughts too wretched for talk. Prayers in place of a fight we would have fought had you called out. But what, after all, can our prayers do except repeat prayers from the past, and that surely God knew. Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award Special Merit. Published in The Comstock Review , January 2008. Previous Next

Index Previous Next Featured in Verse Daily - 2024 Afterlives Only faces in little boxes now; blinking and peering into a starless space, not knowing what to do except perhaps, wave. Our host asks each box: What’s new with you? We talk, in turns. We share the virtual part – meaning the essence . It’s lovely. How this half-body huddle forces us to talk; how we conform, like grafted stalks, to a new light source. Dante insists our afterlives will be the now eternal. I study my husband’s framed face unselfconsciously. No one can see me gazing at our years. My sons, I see, have become men whose eyes are equable and clear. Time lapses freeze, in pixel images, expressions like true selves they made as toddlers. On TV, the Pope delivers the Mass to empty seats. How alone he looks – in spite of the live stream. No pilgrims, no Vatican City festooned with flowers; only police to hold the barricades. And yet, the numbers say, more watched and listened to the liturgy than ever attended. On sofas that sag, on laptops, in drive-thru caravans for bread and wine. An insistence on right seasons if only to prove we are different from our dogs. We hear a whistle too. . Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Art s , Issue #1, Fall 2020. Featured in Verse Daily ® with permission, 2024.

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Metamorphoses, 2019 Prev 9 Next DELIRIUMS At first one hears the wings with their veiled whispers then the feathers obscured by pearls and satins Murmurs of silk mutineers in a whirring of desire verses, delights sonnets and deliriums of lilies shattered DELÍRIOS Primeiro escutam-se as asas no seu rumor velado depois as plumas turvas de pérolas e cetins Gemidos de seda amotinados num zunido de desejo estrofes, deleite sonetos e delírios de lírios estilhaçados Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in Metamorphoses , Fall 2019. Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

Index Previous Next Teaching the Tragedies They see how lightly tragedies begin: old friends approach, trade jokes, then ask the whereabouts of someone else. Inconsequential chit chat. I know by training what to think: invoking absent ones; that's nature out of balance. But I stay quiet and watch my best take turns reading aloud. Premonitions, prayers, misgivings all uttered much as we ourselves utter such things without implying real belief in astral influence or providence. In the mutilated versions that Restoration audiences knew finding the art in grief was just the same: the principal requirement of loss. Then, all the afterthoughts of obvious but distant analogues. This morning's work is metrics - harmless stuff, except for one: a girl whose lovely throat warbles what ought to be our longest vowels - our sad approach. I make her try again, knowing she'll have to do the rest herself. . Copyright © 2002 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in The Southern Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2003.

Award Winning Poetry - 1974 Winner of the Emerson College Original Poetry Award On Rewinding I have been told that by wish and will I fell from His sheep- wool pocket into one dame's arms; and that was birth. I have been told that angels bowl; heaven opens up when the tenth pin rolls. I have been told of cloud-grazing mares— and twice it has rained cats and dogs. I have been told that Saint Peter saw a vision. I have been told that truth may be measured by the shade of one's tongue or the length of one's nose—and twice I have doubted my countenance. I have been told when 'neath the cornered quilt that the sand- man would alight and wave his sack of sleeping dust over my last Hail Mary. I have been told that woman is infamy; man sin. And I am the issue of both. I have been told to accept His rites and wrath. Yet, I have heard over grace and gossip. from bible and book, of womb-wrenching pain, of breached and blue-born, of original sin; and that was birth. I have heard of atmospheric pressure and tropical cyclones; and that was Hurricane Ann. I have heard that fishermen like their wine and all have visions. I have heard that the truth made Socrates stutter. I have heard that some men never sleep. I have heard that opposites attract (and gather ye rosebuds while ye may) I have heard that doubt is the stepping stone to knowledge, and knowledge is the end of man. I have heard too little of too much. And still as green as County Cork, I have but fingered man's seven selves. Copyright © 2017 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in the Spring 1975 issue of The Emerson Review . M.B., Weymouth North High School, Massachusetts, October, 1974 Contest judge - Charles Simic . Previous Next