By Annie Newcomer:
The Flapper Press Poetry Café features the work of poets of all ages from across the globe. This week, we are happy to feature the work of Sandy Feinstein.
Sandy Feinstein has been writing for more than 50 years. Skipping over the early decades in New York, the high points have been opportunities to write and teach in many places: Denmark (1989–1990) and Syria (1998–1999) while on Fulbright awards; Bulgaria as a guest instructor; and across the United States, from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, to UCLA and off to Southwestern College in Kansas, and, now, for almost twenty-five years at Penn State Berks, where she has taught a variety of subjects, including creative writing.
Her poems respond to the literature she teaches and to the places she has explored. During the last 30 years, her poetry has appeared in Slant, Columbia Poetry Review, XCP, Facture, Blueline, Connecticut River Review, Poetry South, and Gyroscope, among many others, including collections and anthologies. Her chapbook, Swimming to Syria, was published by Penumbra Press (2021). She also publishes fiction, creative nonfiction, and scholarly articles.
We reached to Sandy to talk about her work and inspirations.
Please Meet Sandy Feinstein!
Annie Newcomer: Sandy, welcome to the Flapper Press Poetry Café. You are a professor. Our educational institutions are in the news so much these days. Does this make your role more difficult or give you more opportunity to highlight your purpose? Will some of the changes in academia impact the availability of poetry classes and/or the way professors teach poetry?
Sandy Feinstein: Interesting question. Having taught full time since 1980, I have firsthand experience with the changes in English departments: I was interviewed to teach Renaissance literature for my first position, and students enrolled in the course. Still, it was those same students in 1980 who asked me to offer a creative writing workshop; and while interest has waned in early literature, it is still robust for creative writing. I have not, though, abandoned early literature: I just integrate readings into the other kinds of courses I teach, even into creative writing courses. I’ve written about using sixteenth-century poetry to teach creative writing in Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom, edited by Anna Leahy.
AN: Often, for the fans and an audience, it seems to me that people imagine a start and a finish to any activity. For example, the play begins when the curtain rises and ends where it is lowered. A game starts at the whistle and ends on the last play. A concert starts with the first note and ends with the last note played. However, in reality, actors and musicians show up hours before their event to warm up. Imagine athletes on the fields before the Super Bowl or any other sports competition. So my question is this: How do you prepare your students to enter a poem? What warm-up exercises do you use with them in your classroom?
SF: Whether to prepare them to read or to write, I often have students respond to journal prompts that can be as simple as "formulate a question about the reading." The prompts may then become more challenging, asking students, for example, to rewrite the work in another form (e.g., if a poem, then in a short fiction; if a short fiction, then in a poem). If the poem is in Middle English, I might ask them simply to underline all the words they know. I’ll also have students read aloud—both the original works and those they created from them.
AN: I often hear that the writing life is a solitary one. How does your relationship with your students impact your own writing? Or does it?
SF: I wonder if I have deferred retirement partly because my writing is so dependent on interactions with students. Students elicit all kinds of poetic responses from me, one of which I mention in the back story that follows this interview; another, below, was written 15-plus years ago for another thesis student (she became a best-selling romance writer).
It’s Not as if I Didn’t Warn you
(that you’d be used)
The mythology’s all there:
Muse bites rival for perfect lines,
pointed nails write bloody verse.
Yes, of course, they look peaceful
lined up in togas on ancient vases,
Clio with her right hand raised,
mouth agape, silent stare.
She’s stopped mid-slap
at Calliope’s liberties, voiceless,
screams at Erato’s disregard.
Look closely at the urn,
reds and blacks that blur the smirks.
Epic takes history in great big gulps,
spits back just what works;
Lyric sings untrue loves
the short and long iamb
In spiro: I breathe. Incubus
or succubus, both steal souls.
Parasites strip meat from bone.
It’s what they do. Guiltless,
I, too, feed on what I find.
AN: In the publishing world, editors tend to be looking for the next best original poem. Do you think this causes poets to move too quickly, churning out poems and collections? In chess, if a player "moves" their piece too quickly, they often regret the move. Do you ever wish that the literary world might "linger" over students' and poets' work and not push productivity?
SF: Interesting. I wish I agreed that editors are looking for the “the next best original poems.” I think maybe we binge-write partly because we have to, whether anyone is paying attention or not. Some of what we write may not be ready to send (I can say that even about the ones below, because they were written this year, and I more typically hold on to work for awhile before I send it out).
AN: Why do you love poetry? And please share a little about your writing process with our readers.
SF: These are gigantic questions. I can only begin to answer them in the space available.
I love poetry for its sounds (“I wake to sleep and take my waking slow” [Roethke]), and where I am taken that I never imagined possible—at least that’s how I felt about “The Waking” as a college student. I love poetry for the ways it tells stories, somehow bursting the constraints of form and rhyme and meter (Chaucer’s narrative poems, Marie de France’s lays). I love that a poem can be small and evocative (Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”) as well as huge and provocative (Milton’s Paradise Lost). I love the voices. The music. The mystery.
Process, for me, is far less mysterious than the wonder of a completed poem that works. When I teach creative writing, I do the assignments I give my students. When I’m not teaching, I prompt myself with calls for work—like Flapper’s; or I simply sit still and stare out a window and describe what I see; or I respond to what a friend has written in an email. The hybrid piece, “A How to Guide to Navigating the Writerly Straits” (in Precipice: Writing at the Edge) began as a series of email exchanges with my friend and coauthor, a brilliant writer of creative nonfiction who expressed diffidence and frustration, among other things, about writing. Here are a few verses from one of my responses to a prose interlude of hers that asks, “What’s the point?” and ends with the killing of “dreams” (Keysha Whitaker):
Work with what you got
Too much time and space and dreams expire
Victims of too much light—breathless productivity indeed.
Anatomize dreams
On a schedule.
Here it is
(the things I do for you)
First things first. Start small. One word following another.
Ideas are strictly conceptual.
A paragraph is a project without baggage.
It’s the rewriting I find most challenging, the having to admit something doesn’t work as a poem—but did work as a way to get one written.
AN: I remember the first time my work was ever accepted for publication. I had just finished swimming my laps on a Sunday morning and after getting into the car to check my cell phone, I read the message, "We love your work. May we publish 'My Red Shoes'?" The light shone through my windshield, and even if it hadn't been a sunny day, I think I would have remembered sunshine. I was so happy. Can you share a moment that for you was your "sunshine" happy poetic experience?
SF: Hmmm. I suppose being read unexpectedly provides such moments for me. So, when the staff assistant first sent me a note about the poems included on a list of faculty accomplishments, I was deeply moved that she had clicked on the url to read them and then took the time to send me her thoughts about them; before she left her position, she wrote a poem for my birthday that I still have pinned to my office bulletin board.
AN: Sandy, ask yourself a question that I didn't ask and that you "need" to answer and then share both the question and your answer with us.
SF: I’m not sure there’s ever been a question I felt the need to answer; asking questions of myself is more typical. The question is easy: Why did you agree to this interview? The answer, less need but inevitable: I hoped it would make me think of something to write.
AN: So did our interview lead to another poem?
SF: Yes, it did! I wrote a poem in the morning before I sent off my responses to your questions.
AN: Thank you for spending time in the Flapper Press Poetry Café with us today, Sandy. What a delight. Now is the time for me to ask you to share three of your poems with their backstories with us. We wish you everything wonderful and hope that you will check back in with us in the future.
I was teaching creative writing last semester, in particular a work that students tend to misread—"For Hettie," by Amiri Baraka (written and published as LeRoi Jones), a revelation to me as a high school student (love poems could be funny?) The poet was alive then, and Hettie grew up not far from where I lived. I would never have written this poem, however, were it not for the Flapper Press Contest.
For Us, As If
We could be serious,
reverent with rhyme
and Shakespearean diction
not talk like we talk
about how you are not
like me
though we are both right-handed
when either of us grills
the bagels with eggs
NO, NOT THAT WAY
even to fold your shirt,
and explain
in storied clauses
elongate, interrupted,
circumlocated
sleeves
turned back again.
Damned, if we both
don’t still get it done.
Oh, what’s to understand
after a period?
Grammatical end
to one sentence
though another begins
with spoken or unspoken
impatience,
just to get to
whatever it is
misunderstood as
having a point
and not the telling
serial commas
maybe dashes
punctuating
how we show
again and again
that we are
who we are.
"Congress of Carnivores" is another poem your contest prompt elicited. It's the first narrative poem I've ever managed to complete—a form I love. The author and poem to which it responds is Geoffrey Chaucer’s "Parliament of Fowls" (the Middle English "foules" is pronounced fools). It was likely written to celebrate a wedding, though it is also political commentary; and it may be the first "Valentine's Day" poem. His "Parliament" is among my favorite poems, one that I have managed to include even outside of early literature courses (my field): the last four years, I have taught this poem in a course I co-teach with a molecular biologist.
Congress of Carnivores
I had taken a walk along the creek
Sun bright, yet few but birds appeared,
Or, rather, I should say, there was a jangle
Of tweets, calls, cries, head banging,
That last I assumed from a woodpecker.
It’s rare when I can identify who’s who
With all color drained from back lighting,
And the sun was right in my face, behind
Tawny small feathered bodies,
And rarer still when I know their voices.
With Daylight Savings time two days past,
It felt almost warm, early as it was, a time
When I’d just as soon still be dreaming,
Maybe reading, but certainly not out
Before the church bells call to matins.
I’d voted weeks ago, sent in checked
Boxes, sealed in two envelopes, dated,
And signed, and wondered if I should
Have waited, dropped it off myself,
But then how to justify being absentee?
“Are you ki-ki-ki-kidding?”
Jolted me from my thoughts
(Had I been talking to myself aloud?)
“Wha-wha-what” did she say?
“N-n-n-no im-im-importance.”
Were they talking to me?
I looked up. The trees now
Skeletal, their fallen leaves
Replaced with rows and rows
And rows of birds.
I’d never seen so many birds,
Except maybe in a Hitchcock movie,
But those were only one species,
Ominous ravens, then vicious gulls
Trained to be bloodthirsty.
Here there were so many more,
A mixed flock of flesh eaters, true,
But also nut and muck consumers
With various peckers of various poisons.
All seemed to be looking down at me.
“Uh, did you say something,”
I ventured feeling foolish.
It was hard to tell who laughed loudest,
The kingfishers or the woodpeckers,
Small fry gulpers and grub grubbers.
“The question,” gargled a stately heron,
“Is who should be eaten? We say
Fish, frogs, turtles, and maybe you-mans,
But not us, not, not, not us,
Not that even they could manage me,”
They, apparently, were the circling,
Dipping, perched kites and hawks,
Osprey and falcons, owls and eagles.
There were turkey vultures, too,
But they seemed to draw less ire.
“They do only eat the dead you know,”
Sing-songed as if I were totally clueless,
And I was torn, wanting to show
What I knew, then realizing
The wisdom of just nodding, “yes.”
I was beginning to realize
That there might be more to these calls,
Or, that they knew more of their kind,
Maybe of mine too, and I was curious
About their strange songs and weird calls.
Quite soon the bald-pated eagle
Gulped his preference to fish, then added
“There are those better eaten than not,
And that’s what we’re here to do—
Consider who”
“Who,” offered a great horned owl
Not moving a muscle but rotating
Its head around to each bird, no matter
How big--and me, too, it seemed.
“Who’s exempt? Not even my kind.”
Nut eaters huddled, forming a phalanx.
Robins and wrens shuddered,
As a nuthatch inched down an oak
Stopped and declaimed, “someone’s
Got to eat the nuts, and it should be we.”
Were they looking at me?
Not much time to wonder
If I could be mistaken for a nut,
For the worm eaters trilled
At a warbler who warbled
“It’s well past time to get out of here,
How could you forget that it’s we
Who consume slippery sycophants.
Well, fine, we’ll just take our leave
And migrate, the sooner the better.”
Confused and confusing feathers
A-flutter, all singing their lines
No matter who listened,
And it seemed as if they thought
I, or my kind, might serve as a worm.
Swallows and swifts skittered
At flies, as if what they are
Speaks for itself. Thinning the ranks
Of the lord Beelzebub’s liars
Catching them quickly going upstream.
But what of those wounded
I wondered, would they be prey?
“If they can still swim,” quaked a duck,
“Or take flight” added a goose,
“They can stay alive in our flock.”
But what if a call is halting,
With songs all mixed up,
Was my next thought in the midst
Of this gabble, to which the wood
Was atwitter with tut, tut, tuts.
“Not all of us sing. Not all of us
Call. Some of us go high,
Others go low, and then there are
Those who go every which way.”
(And they still get a mate)
“It’s the fox in bird’s feathers
Who’ll do whatever it takes
To seem like your friend,
Even flatter your voice
So he can take a big bite.”
I couldn’t muffle my laugh
At these birds knowing their lore,
But my sudden guffaw
So much louder than thought
Scared the wrens from the brush
And then they all flew up
Leaving me to wonder who won,
Who lost to the circling hawks.
"Andante, Allegretto, Presto" was written as a spur—to write. I am presently supervising a creative thesis, and the student, who is quick to write when we co-author, has been sluggish at turning out chapters. When I pointed that out to him, he said it was easier to write in response to a work already started (I tend to take the lead on co-written works). The student's thesis combines creative non-fiction and drawings, so I started writing poems related to his subject—birds—hoping I wouldn't have to send them his way as motivation, but I'd still have them in reserve if the need arose.
Andante, Allegretto, Presto
the creek’s tempos along its border of wild
growth: this year’s hatchlings full winged--
one on gray stone anchored, its vessel
to survey dark bodies below.
Fish I can’t see swim too close, undulate
movement like line casts, the lure
to long beaks, one quick motion
almost audible, then still again.
Flushed from the verge by me,
wings unfold
mark the beats in the catch
of a breeze, rise a few feet.
I watch a shadow, listen
for atonal notes, a warning voice
in the air,
beauty reimagined.
Annie Klier Newcomer founded a not-for-profit, Kansas City Spirit , that served children in metropolitan Kansas for a decade. Annie volunteers in chess and poetry after-school programs in Kansas City, Missouri. She and her husband, David, and the staff of the Overland Park Arboretum & Botanical Gardens are working to develop The Emily Dickinson Garden in hopes of bringing art and poetry educational programs to their community.
Annie helms the Flapper Press Poetry Café—dedicated to celebrating poets from around the world and to encouraging everyone to both read and write poetry!
Presenting a wide range of poetry with a mission to promote a love and understanding of poetry for all. We welcome submissions for compelling poetry and look forward to publishing and supporting your creative endeavors. Submissions may also be considered for the Pushcart Prize.
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1. Share at least three (3) poems
2. Include a short bio of 50–100 words, written in the third person.
(Plus any website and links.)
3. Share a brief backstory on each submitted poem
4. Submit an Author's photo and any images you want to include with the poems
5. Send all submissions and questions to: info@flapperpress.com
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