Sean Thomas Dougherty
@SeanLemonhead
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Books with BOA Editions, Jacar Press, NYQ Books, Paterson Prize, WCSU MFA Mentor, Medical technician, caregiver, disability rights advocate, Loyal Cavs fan.
NW Pennsylvania, USA
Joined September 2021
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Amazing how this tiny poem from The Second O of Sorrow has traveled and been translated into many languages through the years. And it all began with Todd's generous post.
I don’t need to read any more think pieces about whether or not poetry matters. How about this short poem from THE SECOND O OF SORROW by Sean Thomas Dougherty.
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Folks leaving twitter confuse me. As artists we spend our lives working inside oppressive systems. My country is such a system but we don't run away. Twitter is just a system. It also has tools to make liberatory room. Block, connect, keep making this our space. Ours to make.
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You can publish books for decades in the small press. You can hustle, hand to hand. Read in bars and art centers, a few schools. Drive. No fame. No big prize. A little side bread. Nothing more or less. But along the way
to rare folks who find your words, you shall be Beloved.
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I want to start a literary cafe bakery and call it Pulitzer Pies.
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I've been carrying this poem by Jeffrey McDaniel around in my pocket.
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I love questions in poems, like "how far away is your happiness?"- Malena Morling. What are some of your favorite questions you've read in a poem?
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A poem "when I listen" from my just released book The Dead are Everywhere Telling Us Things. Selected by Nikole Brown and Jessica Jacobs for the Jacar Press full-length poetry prize.
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Having doubts? Stop. Write a few words at a time. Write. One sentence. A few lines at a red light. For real. A page when the kids are at school. A page on lunch break. That's all it takes. Poetry happens in the seams of life.
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They say poetry doesn't sell, but if you sell 500 or 1000 copies of a book of poetry and those people really read your work, get down to it so it means something to their life? That's a fucking miracle. I mean who really gets you in your personal life? I have like two people.
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How timely and important this old poem by Peter Pereira feels lately. Take care.
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Some of the first Poetry yard signs installed across Erie County today for my official Poet Laureate Project
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I've never been in APR or Poetry, never was accepted to Breadloaf, Sewanee, never got an NEA or an agent etc and YET I have 20 books, headlined at over 100 colleges and festivals. Never forget the places we think we need to publish or be part of to be a writer you really don't.
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I'm honored to announce the great poet Paul Guest picked my "Death Poem
#5
" as winner of the $1000 James Hearst Poetry Prize, sponsored by the US's oldest literary journal the North American Review.
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I think how I've grown the most as a poet is I read so much. And I go for walks. I walk through the neighborhoods along Lake Erie. I listen. I spend an entire day with one poem, like knowing one's own block. Poetry is the art of close reading, and going for walks.
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Does your family read your work? The funny thing with poetry is no matter how accomplished and lauded one gets, your work will still be ignored by nearly everyone not a poet! But you will go on, writing down beautiful secrets in the dailyness of your own life.
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I have a new lyric poem about my med work, a kind of love poem in many ways, in the full glossy issue of Poetry East alongside former US poet Laureates Billy Collins and Ted Kooser. Also Alice Friman, Judith Harris, Maura Stanton, Matthew Murrey, and so much more. My poem:
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Do you have writers you didn't like that you've come to love? Decades ago, l wasn't a fan of Mary Oliver. Now as I near 60, she speaks deeply to me and I teach her. As you get older, don't be surprised if the writers you hated when you were young are the ones that keep you alive.
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One of the greatest small poems ever:
Advice by Naomi Shihab Nye
my friend, dying, said do the hard thing first.
Always do the hard thing and you will have a better day.
The second thing will seem less hard.
She didn't tell me what to do when everything seems hard.
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I wish poems for everyone. Poems in factories and hospitals. Poems on clouds. Poems on trains. Poems on past due bills. Scribble our poems on warrants, and leases. As Jeffrey McDaniel wrote, imagine a world where we can "pay for groceries with words."
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Do folks teach sonnets? A first question I often ask my grad students is do they write sonnets. Terrance Hayes, Allison Joseph, Jacqueline Saphra, Dianne Seuss, Hannah Lowe. Soon Oliver de la Paz's new book. So many lifetimes to turn in 14 lines. We live in a sonnet rennaisance.
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Remember Jack Gilbert was nearly 70 when he published his finest book The Great Fires. And he was 80 when Refusing Heaven was released. What's the rush? Hear the slow rain. What notes is it playing? This wet August light. Make what ink of it and the trees.
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Things I gave up on: Pushcart: nominated 50 plus. NEA: 10 rejections. Breadloaf: applied 8 years in a row. McDowell: rejected 6 times. Things I got: Best American. Fulbright. Paterson Prize. Dodge Festival. Trust me, in the end what you didn't win won't. Mean. Shit.
#Thankful
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In honor of the first day of autumn, the last title section from my Jacar Press Full Length Book Prize collection.
#poetry
#poetrycommunity
#jacarpress
#WritingCommmunity
#BookTwitter
#AutumnEquinox
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Writing really is magic. We remember the places we've lived, the people we've lost, and who we were long before we became who we are--and out of the shards of memory our dead continue to live, as if they never left. With a few words written, like a spell, we give them breath.
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I must have read this poem by Marie a thousand times, so much I suspect the grief it carries is part of the griefs I've carried gone and returned and return again, as it does in this life. What we carry. As we must. If we choose to live.
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People who bash twitter are cracked. I'm a pretty well know US poet but I live in a small working class city nowhere near somewhere. Here I get to regularly talk to and hear poets in India, Australia, NZ, Oman, Dublin and all over Ireland, the UK, Nigeria. It's fucking amazing
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Call this sacrilege but i believe in ruined books. Books are meant to be shared. Books should be dog earred and pages turned not put on a shelf forever like a precious bauble. My greatest joy has been to sign a book that is spine bent, nearly falling apart, from so much love.
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This poem. This. Poem. By Andrea Gibson.
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There is no rush in poetry. I put a Selected poems out with BOA before I was 50. But my best poems came after. And after 60? Philip Levine and Adrienne Rich. Patricia Smith and Dorianne Laux, Komunyakaa and Gilbert, and so many more wrote their most moving poems.
#poetrytwitter
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Those days I want to stop writing, I go for a walk. I drink coffee in a public place. What is left to say to the page of the air? An old woman at the bus stop wears a sentence like a boa. I watch the sky. Even the clouds are hieroglyphics.
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Poetry is hard work but can be ecstatic: I try to teach my students making as/is an ongoing act that extends far off the page and into and out into the daily world. It is collecting. Noticing. Gathering. A few words. Something heard. A slip of memory. Shards of verbs.
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I often wonder how much we make depends on small random things. If it rained today. If a finch sang. If decades ago, our lover suddenly knocked, and their blue raincoat slumped to the floor. Perhaps this life is stitched with chance, and art is our astonished applause?
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When a new book of poems enters the world there is no sound. No parade. Poems don't get parades. Maybe something soft like spring rain. But far from view there is a seed that imperceptibly starts to sprout inside us.
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Singer/ poet pairs. I will start: Kate Bush and Anna Ahkmatova. Your turn.
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I"ve read this poem a thousand times over the years as my dead grew. It will carry me till I go too:
What the Living Do by Marie Howe.
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And for those folks who say there are too many poets and too many books of poems? I say there aren't enough. There are never enough. How could there be? To sing the human pain and blessedness of every passing day.
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My runnerup prize winning poem of fathers and sons and aging in the latest Blue Earth Review.
#poetry
#poetrycommunity
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I don't know, maybe if I'm honest poetry doesn't do anything, maybe just a pause amidst the cruelty and only for the few. But even so, if that were true, I can think of at lot worse ways to have wasted my life.
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My twitter feed this week was full of poets and writers saying they don't like haiku, football, various novelists, 20th century iconic poets, and multiple regional food items. Some advice: I really don't give a fuck what you don't like. But I might appreciate what you love.
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After I give a reading, during the Q&A I often get that question: "what is something one can do
to be a better poet?" And I say, with utmost sincerity:
"Read Lucille Clifton, the rest will work itself out." Happy birthday Lucille!
@boaeditions
#LucilleClifton
#poetrytwitter
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Happy to announce I've been named the 7th Poet Laureate of Erie County, Pennsylvania, population 270,000 in Northwest, PA. This is a government funded position awarded in an open competition. My project is to establish a poetry trail, a series of poetry boxes across the county.
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I don't write everyday. I write at work sometimes on the back of med forms. I wrote a poem on my arm. I write when the kids are out. I don't write the rest of the week. I wrote yesterday. I might not write next month. Then I wrote 20 pages. Then I watched TV until April.
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Poetry is born in aloneness--a word as a seed underground, to hide before blooms. And then there you are in that room, scribbling your furious flowers.
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I never feel more poet than in autumn. Maybe its the transitory in all its color. It's the season I swallow the world, I might not write much but what I write is different, the intensity of it. The melancholy? The ache? Is there a season you feel the world more as a writer?
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Some days I wish they had part time walk in mental hospitals, you know you could just check yourself in for the day, get a bunch of valium, sleep in a white room, then they let you out in the morning no questions asked, a bit stoned, eating daylight.
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Today the young poets are worrying about getting their books published. The old poets are worrying about falling on the ice as they push the rusty cart through the slush and how the wheels make a sound like grinding glass or the sound that light breaks.
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do you revisit old poems? Sometimes I read my books from decades ago and think, who was that man? with a young man's world view, how silly of me, and now I'd tell it different. And then I do. How our point of view shifts and grows and changes over a lifetime.
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Most poets aren't sages or prophets. Most of us are just average folks, working long hours to pay the rent, writing between shifts, groceries, laundry, bad weather, appointments, and sheer exhaustion, yet still trying to give back to the world with precise words.
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Today I got paid to teach Lucille Clifton which is kind of like getting paid to teach folks how to pray. How a poem prays.
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Sometimes that sadness you think you've been drowning in is really a current carrying you across the deepest river.
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I edited my poem for weeks and it became better but it lost something too I can't quite explain. So I go back to an early version and hold it up, and see it with more value, see that this is the poem, its edges all ragged and tattered, flapping like a lunatic in the duende wind.
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I think the danger for us poets is self pity. I'll never be in Poetry, I'll never be in APR, I'll never be interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR, I'll never read there or that person got that job etc. But as artists we can control what we do: which is to make things.
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Have you written a "Self Portrait as" poem? OR what are some of your favorite "Self Portrait as" poems? I'm a longtime fan of this form and always looking for new ones. Any online links appreciated. The 100 Self Portrait poems Spaar edited is terrific too.
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Damn just this morning I was posting things from my first poetry professor of decades ago Charlie Simic and now a friend told me he is dead. Simic just died. I feel like an orphaned poet.
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You live long enough as a poet, you lose entire support networks, those 90s journals, those first 2000s online journals, editors and mentors die, scenes burn themselves out, and you just have to go on writing, with faith and kindness, still dedicated to this difficult art.
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The Sweater by Gregory Orr
I will lose you. It is written
into this poem the way
the fisherman’s wife knits
his death into the sweater.
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I confess poetry I practice like a religion. When I read a poem it is like reading scripture. But it is more powerful because another human wrote it. What is God but the human voice?
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"No: how was your trip? No: congratulations or glad it went well or I missed you. I didn’t feel missed as a person, I felt missed as staff. My invisible labour was made painfully visible when I left the house. I was needed back in my post."
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Jealousy and envy is like a wasting disease for an artist. I know a lot of bitter poets. But why did you get into the arts? For an award? A teaching gig? Or was it for wanting to say the way you felt as you stood looking at how sunlight hit the side of a brick building?
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Honored to have a wee poem in the big new issue of Stone Canoe, alongside such fine work by Wendy Stewart, Michael Waters, Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer, and so many more.
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The young poets always think Poetry needs saving, but years pass, and they come to realize it was Poetry
who saved them.
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"Yes it is impossible,
therefore it will take a little longer."
Paolo Lugari
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It makes me sad when poets sound like sports pundits: so concerned with who is better, best, won what etc. But I say which is better: the wind or the rain, sunlight or moonlight? The mountain, or the river? The one in the end we will all cross.
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Of course poetry is art, but I've always sided with the poets who see poetry as more than art, something closer to.... praying.
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I love poets like Dorianne Laux, Patricia Smith, Carolyn Forche, Sharon Olds, their poems exist so very much in the world, often in the intimate spaces of life. And so reading them I experience in my life many lives and learn. Not just about art, but about being alive.
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Is landscape important to your work? A sense of place? So much so it feels like metaphor. Do you have a certain flora or fauna that appears? I'm obsessed with crows and cranes, egrets and old factories, the shine of autumn fields. Hospitals. The great lake's mussle-strewn shores.
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"Poetry is an act of communication only complete upon reception." I can't remember who wrote that, but it taught me to believe in my reader, to imagine my reader, in revision practice being your reader, that stranger out there who needs your work.
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As I near 60 I see so many poets I knew stop writing. So many gave up. So many dead. Why? The world, as Rukeyser wrote, says no at every step to the artist. How many times were we not generous? It must begin with us. To go on together, side by side, singing.
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I love clear poems. But some days I distrust clarity. I like poems that keep something secret too, like a city at night. We all keep something. The poem is a key we give to a stranger to turn and open the locked door in our chest.
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I decided in 2022 not to submit to journals. Crazy right? And some sort of long anxiety has lessened. No looking at my Submittable account five times a day. No feeling less than. Sometimes we must remove the "professional." Sometimes to write well we must first breathe.
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Does anyone else write on scraps? For decades I've written lines on any old medical form, junkmail envelope, or post-it. Or my wrist. Then collage them together. A way to still write when running beween day care & groceries & shifts. I have near whole books composed this way.
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Would poetry readings be way more fun if we turned off the lights and handed out glow sticks
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every time I feel the urge to just quit poetry, to work and care for those I love, watch basketball, I feel so relieved and less anxious, but then I'm walking down the street and I hear someone old singing from a high porch or an odd bird and suddenly here comes another poem.
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One of the hardest things for my students to learn to hear is "this feels done." Like if I'm not marking it up they feel cheated. They've been so conditioned to accept constant critique. But I learned long ago maybe a poem is never done, but it's often done enough.
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Ars Poetica
You reach a certain age,
& you have written
all these elegies,
& you think you’re done,
but the dead
keep coming.
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Nothing makes me hate poetry more then submitting work, hustling for gigs, all the "work" writers do to eat. But nothing makes me love poetry more than simply reading it. When I open a new book for the first time it is like falling in love for the first time all over again.
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In the middle of the world reeling from the death machines I offer you a tree.
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Do you begin knowing or unknowing? I rarely sit down to write a poem, or a story, or an essay. It begins with a sentence, and in it is the beginning and the end, long before I can even imagine the rest of its sound and shape. A kind of linguistic DNA, hiding its body and blooms.
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I never get tired of talking up Lynda Hull. She died at 39 years old. I published the last poem she wrote in my journal Red Brick Review in the 90s. I often grieve the poems she never wrote. Who is the poet you grieve who did not get to write the poems we need in this world?
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What I've always found beloved is poetry's long path. No urge for a big first novel. Our morbid culture loves dead young poets. But poetry is earned and honed by decades of reading and listening far from the limelight, trying to decipher the every changing choreography of birds.
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A poem from my book The Dead are Everywhere Telling Us Things, selected by Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs for the Jacar Press full-length poetry prize.
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When I was young I was ambitious and scared that nothing I wrote was good. But you get older you forget about good or bad. You read and read and read. You follow the rails to some far singing. You study the sky. You've dedicated yourself to language and that becomes everything.
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Poets too often eat each other. I've never understood it. There are much better dishes to be had.
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Happy birthday to the great Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi, born this day in 1207.
"I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?
Look at your eyes. They are small,
but they see enormous things."
Trans. Coleman Barks.
The Essential Rumi.
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Some days the writing isn't the writing: it's getting the laundry done, or sitting in a dark room, or feeding the kids lunch, or napping with the dog. A few daily words attach themselves to you, and not today, but tomorrow, or the next they will fall off you and become sentences.
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Happy Birthday to the great anarchist writer Ursula K. Le guin.
"You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."
The Dispossessed
Ursula LeGuin
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And if you never won a prize for poetry, it means nothing. Did you give yourself to your art? Did you study those ancient words? Did you read and write and work in your spare time? Can you recite for friends? Then you have lived well, and given, and that is much reward.
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This
A poem "when I listen" from my just released book The Dead are Everywhere Telling Us Things. Selected by Nikole Brown and Jessica Jacobs for the Jacar Press full-length poetry prize.
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What voice has carried you lately? A book? A band? The wind? A friend? Tonight, I heard my daughters hanging out, just being sisters together: their shared laughter I hope will carry them across any river.
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What do you want in your poems before you die?
Gratitude to Charles Kell for including my answer in the Ocean State Review alongside Noah Falck, Jesse Lee Kercheval Rick Barot, Joe Hall, Jami Macarty, Ellen June Wright, Joseph Lease, and many more fine writers.
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How do you celebrate the the arrival of your 20th book? You make a bowl of shrimp and cheesy grits and eat beside it: humbly, and quietly.
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I think of Whitman asking what is the grass nearly every day I say what is the rain? What is a cloud? What is the wind? What is a bicycle? A balloon? What is this hole in my chest or is it a wound, filling and refilling with the world's beautiful everything?
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Is there such a thing as "success" in poetry? A grant? A teaching gig? A certain press? Readers? A big award? To write the greatest poem ever? To speak to God? To honor Whitman? Dickenson? Hafiz? Brooks? To start the revolution? To make something "new?" To be Beloved?
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It might sound looney or corny but I've long lived by the idea that when we write, when we shape and share language into art, it helps tilt the cosmos towards the good.
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Happy official Publication Day for Death Prefers the Minor Keys published by BOA Editions
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Who will sing for the average dead? Not who died young or spectacular--but by diabetes, or my friend Hank by heart attack at 53. All the ordinary folks with fatty livers at the local diner. Who will remember them? Who will write their odes and elegies?
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Charles Simic on the prose poem
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don't let the gatekeepers ever get you down. Do your work. Study your art. Good work finds its audience. Trust me, I live nowhere near somewhere in Erie, PA and for years I just kept my head to the page, worked, wrote when I could, and the world listened. They hear you too.
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Of course there is Andrea Cohen's "The Committee Weighs in" with its devastating last line volta:
"I tell my mother
I’ve won the Nobel Prize.
Again? she says. Which
discipline this time?
It’s a little game
we play: I pretend
I’m somebody, she
pretends she isn’t dead."
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