Poets and Poems: Jen Karetnick and "Organ Language"

A grandmother’s jewelry. A heavy rainfall. The fruit in a pina colada. A soccer game. Accompanying a parent to a medical procedure. Waiting for biopsy results. A can opener. Grief. Riding in the car with your sister. Gardening. A frog. Cicadas. Arthritis. The neighbor who calls you by the wrong name. 

What all these disparate things have in common is that they’re familiar. common, everyday. They’re so familiar that we often forget them or overlook them. 

 

In the hands of poet Jen Karetnick, however, the familiar and the common become something else. She reaches into her own childhood. She considers the experiences of her own children. She looks at the life she’s living now. The subjects are largely what we know as experiences common to all of us, but Karetnick shows us how the familiar will also indicate something deeper, something more profound. That’s the heart and soul of her new collection, Organ Language.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Night jar – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Planted – poem by L.L. Barkat at Every Day Poems.

 

“You, Andrw Marvell,” poem by Archibald MacLeish – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Poetry Club Tea Date: The Pershing Hotel – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Do You Hear Birds? – poem by Elizabeth Wickland at Rabbit Room Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Jen Karetnick and "Inheritance with a High Error Rate"

I’ve read several of Jen Karetnick’s poetry collections over the years, and I’ve come to expect an expert eye for image and metaphor. With five poetry collections, poems published in a host of literary journals and magazines, and several prizes for her work, you would expect her to know how to use words and language. Yet she always manages to go beyond the expected, with images that intrigue, challenge, sometimes jar the mind.

 

Her latest collection, Inheritance with a High Error Rate, does not disappoint. Whether she’s writing about a deceased brother, the symphony of a tropical storm, selling a waterfront home in Miami or 10 things you don’t know about the city, or being followed by @Death on X (formerly Twitter), she surprises and delights with how she makes sense out of marrying two very different ideas or words together.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Be Mindful – poem by Paul Wittenberger at Paul’s Substack.

 

Poetry Prompt: How Does Your Garden Grow? – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Sonnet 98 by William Shakespeare – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Ocean as Metaphor: “The Crossing Over” by Jen Karetnick

My earliest memory of the ocean is the salt smell. My family lived in New Orleans, and we took a short vacation to Biloxi, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. What I remember is walking in wet sand, my mother holding my three-year-old hand attached to my three-year-old self, listening to the white birds overhead, and smelling salt. The water was green, stretching forever into the distance. The ocean was an event, an experience, and a painting. 

Later I would come experience the ocean as a playground, a place to investigate in the shallows, a source of shells and fish and strange creatures like jellyfish better avoided. Once, when I was 17 and right out of high school, the Atlantic served as a kind of bedroom, as friends and I slept the night on a beach near Cape Kennedy in Florida. Much later, traveling to Europe or Hawaii, the ocean became flyover territory, something to get across to reach a destination.

Reading the 21 poems of Jen Karetnick’s new collection The Crossing Over is to find all of these metaphors of the ocean and more.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Jen Karetnick: Pondering the Often Invisible

Publishing a collection of poetry is a big deal. Publishing two books of poetry with different publishers within a span of four months is a huge deal. And that’s exactly what poet and writer Jen Karetnick has done.

In May, Winter Goose Publishing published Karetnick’s American Sentencing, a collection of 71 poems that generally address the subject of illness. Karetnick dedicated the collection to “those who suffer from chronic, invisible illnesses” and to “their physicians and caretakers.” The title contains a kind of irony – we in America are known for our “problem-solution” outlook on life and our discomfort with illness and disease that stubbornly resist categorization and treatment. Shouldn’t a pill or surgery fix everything?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poetic Voices: Jen Karetnick and E. Kristin Anderson

We find all kinds of things to write poems about, like food, and cheese, and the rock star Prince. At least, we write about food and Prince when we are really writing about something deeper.

Jen Karetnick is a poet and author who has written (and co-authored) books about food, like a recipe book for mangoes, entitled to no surprise, Mango. Food is an important part of our lives, for more than the obvious reasons of sustenance and survival. Food is part of culture, for good and for ill.

In Brie Season: Poems, Karetnick has assembled some 60 poems which are ostensibly about food, but go deeper into the culture that frames what we call food and the human emotions that come into play.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.