Saturday Newsletter: April 2, 2022

A note from Caleb

Hello and happy April! Here in California we are hoping for April showers, though the May flowers would just be a bonus!

We are now a week removed from our last writing workshop of the winter session and officially looking ahead to our spring session of classes, beginning April 23rd. For more information on spring session sign-ups, scroll down to the classes and events section. In the meantime, please visit our Youtube channel and watch some of the terrific individual readings and playlists from the winter session, like Emma's from the Stone Soup workshop on Automatic Writing, below.

To kick off April, I want to provide a brief analysis of Music Lover by Selene Wong, the April issue's delightful cover image. Simply speaking, this painting is fun. The colors are vibrant, the subject is whimsical, and the slanted perspective of the piece highlights its jazzy, musical feel. The painting sets the tone for all of the issue's prose, poetry, and art, but perhaps for none better than Sevi Ann Stahl's rip-roaring poem "Roo's Song."

Reading the poem, and now sitting down to write about it, my mind is racing—like Roo, the poem's subject—with excitement. The poem's first line "The fur blurr enough slow to know it's her"—indeed the poem itself—is resemblant of the ecstatic energy of Lewis Carroll. Sevi could have easily opted for the grammatically correct "blurry" and gone on to write a good, maybe even great poem, but instead she takes a risk and elevates her poem to a masterpiece.

To begin, "blurr" is in and of itself playful—it is literally the effect of playing with language. "Blurr" also rhymes with its preceding word, "fur," as well as the final word of the line, "her," the effect of which is a whirlwind of rhyme that further connotes playfulness. Then, on top of creating an unusual rhyme structure, the chopped off syllable of "y" allows for a bounding rhythm to enter the poem. But what is truly brilliant is that all of of these complex formal choices work together to enact the simple content of the poem: a happy dog running through its neighborhood. I could go on about other delectable phrases in this poem, like "underbrush / or meadow of our yard," or "wishing of being a car," and attempt to contain their bursting energy long enough to analyze them, but to do so would take away from the poem's brilliance. Noiseless pleasure? No, this poem is so good, so coursing with the youthful juice of life that I want to "sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world" so that strangers may know the pleasure of "Roo's Song" by Sevi Ann Stahl.

For this weekend project I want you to do two things. First and foremost, I want you to enjoy yourselves. Be free! Run wild! Enjoy the beauty of nature that surrounds you. But, whatever you do, if you can, try and do it with a near reckless abandon; that is, do whatever it is you're doing for the sake of doing it, rather than as a means to an end. (In this case, try and forget that it's a part of the weekend project!) Then, when the weekend and the fun is over, try and recapture what you did and the feelings that came with it through a painting, a poem, a work of prose—anything!

Loudly from the rooftops of the world,