

I’ve traveled through numerous “writers’ groups” at various stages of my writing life. Early on, when I was low on the "confidence-in-my-writing" ability and was boxing myself into saying I only had enough skill to write short pieces (poetry and short-short stories), I found myself in a very relaxed group, one that was not so tuned in to strict writing goals and offering specific critique. One of our members actually did self-publish in the non-fiction realm, but most sessions were social gatherings, garnished with lots of good food, laughter, and general comments. I was OK with the dynamic at the time because I met some good people and did glean some advice that I would use later. Also, the writing I was doing at that point was mostly in journals, and it was more warm-up writing instead of serious writing.
Looking back from where I’m at today, my writing needs now would not have been met satisfactorily with a critique group like my first one. And the groups that I’ve been to within the past 5 years reflect how I’ve grown both in my writing skill and the ability to listen to my inner writer’s wisdom. I don’t limit myself anymore and have discovered that it is important to know the right time to allow your "group" to read your work and offer their comments.
Sometimes you can do more harm than good to your story (and psyche) even if the criticism you receive is constructive. Understanding this has helped me trust myself when doing final edits. I have a short story I’ve re-written 16 times, adapting each version to the critiques given to me by members in my group. Finally, I became so frustrated and confused about the central ideas and characters of my story that I threw out all the critiques and decided I would only listen to my own opinions for the time being.
Currently, I am in the process of polishing revision number 17 and have gone back to my original story-line and main character (Well, hello!). Now, I will only show a select few of my writer friends this re-discovered story, and only when I am certain the writing is done well and I am satisfied. I am still part of a writers' group, but I use more discretion now when I present my stories for critique.
Susan Girolami Kramer is Newsletter Producer for Rose & Thorn Journal. She wears many hats at her job as a Communications Specialist and at home on her off-hours. She’s a photographer, fiction and poetry writer, editor, and publication designer. She has won several awards during the last two decades for her photography and recently held a display at a local gallery. By day, she writes articles for an Association’s newsletter; by night, she taps into her more creative writing skills. Susan lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with her husband, son, and pug, Truman.
Reviewed by C.L. Toups
Kristina Marie Darling’s latest poetry collection, Night Songs, reminds readers of what they have always known inherently—that music is the universal language. The poems here pulsate, and the harmony of their phrasing underscores the ways in which music moves us, lives inside us, radiates from us, and connects us. Everything is sound, even the silences. With sublime technical mastery and lyrical astuteness, Darling devises the basic notes of her linguistic scale of images: night, cello, teeth, moon, bird (canaries, in particular) harp, dust, clock, blue, window, hall, curtains—all arranged and rearranged in prose poem compositions that strike just the right chord.
Some of the most striking images are those in which light personifies music’s radiant quality: the luminous cuff links and uncanny whiteness of a cellist’s shirt, a throat likened to a lantern, and the light of a woman’s hair turning to constellation as she croons Tosca. This is music personified—a living, breathing entity. Darling is also able to capture the nuanced rhythms that reside in everyday movement: the tap of a painter’s brush, the hushed fall of velvet stage curtains, the shudder of beveled mirrors in their frames, the tick of a death watch beetle. Music is a collage of sound found almost anywhere.
With the advent of records, radio, the amplifier, over-dubbing, auto-tone pitch adjusters, and the marvel of the IPod, the creation and experience of music has become synthesized, removing listeners farther and farther from its original source. Darling ponders this disconnection and its affects in very unique ways.
In the poem, “The Musician Considers Modernity and He Sighs”, the reader glimpses the musician’s lament of mechanization:
The city has turned into a mechanical city, he observers one morning, a tiny ballerina
spinning inside a glistening box. Beyond the window, his wife seems adrift under the
trellis’s dank foliage, her steps measured with a strange precision. And even the chain
on his wristwatch rattles with diminutive elegy. But when the moon rises that
evening, every radio fades, and the streetcars vanish like wooden birds retreating into
a great unique clock. The discotheque holds its breath in deference.
In the poem “The New Conductor”, an old opera house has been turned into a discotheque:
. . . but no one bothered to
remove the velvet curtains, the gilt cornices, or the great plaster cherubs above each
doorway. When the musicians arrived, dressed in sleek tuxedoes and blue silk ties, only
the building’s smallest embellishments seemed familiar.
Music is organic—Darling reminds us—always reinventing itself while still retaining its fundamentals. And like its kindred spirit, poetry, we hear the echoes and influences of the past with each new transformation and interpretation. Darling’s poems celebrate this process but at the same time also give way to elegy for what is altered in the execution.

The second half of Night Songs focuses on word collages, found texts, and erasures, the arrangement of which mirrors the process of composition itself. Darling’s verse in this section makes creative re-use of not only her poems from the first half of the collection, but the text of a Victorian music appreciation guide. What is most intriguing about these poems is the way Darling is able to illustrate the diversity of meaning and feeling that is elicited from the changing, but repetitive patterns of her own words as a way to resemble the same patterns which define music. Notice the differences in the treatments below of the poem “Ennui” and its erased version:
You walk past a crystal decanter glistening near the harpsichord. Since our guests left
for the ocean, with its dark enclaves and its low mumbling, the lakes have done
nothing but rain. And our dim halls become more cavernous with every evening.
When I ask why the rooms buzz with damseflies, you merely nod your head. The
shutters blow open and closed. Our parlor hums like trees shifting before a storm.
You left for the ocean
mumbling
When I ask why,
the shutter blow open. Our parlor before a storm.
In this way, Darling creates a kind of phonautograph of her own by transcribing the qualities of sound to a visual medium.
Reading Night Songs is a study in musical and linguistic acoustics and the natural harmonics of life. It is an active and interactive experience, and in an age when music seems to be more about a packaged product than the art of creation itself, Darling provides a venue for readers to reconnect with the true source of sound.
Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University, where she received both an undergraduate degree in English and a master's degree in American Culture Studies. Several chapbooks of her work have been published, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006) and The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006). A two-time Pushcart nominee, her poems appear in such journals as Gargoyle, Cider Press Review, Illya's Honey, and Janus Head: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Her literary essays and book reviews have also been published in The Gettysburg Review, The Boston Review, Shenandoah, The Colorado Review, New Letters, Pleiades, and other periodicals. Awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Centrum Foundation, the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, and the Prairie Center of the Arts, as well as scholarships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and Colgate Writers Conference. She currently studies philosophy at the University of Missouri and hopes to pursue a doctorate in English Literature.


This is the second installment of Roses & Thorns interview with Louisiana State Poet, Darrell Bourque.
Darrell Bourque is Professor Emeritus in English at University of Louisiana Lafayette. He is the author of five books of poems: Plainsongs, The Doors Between Us, Burnt Water Suite, The Blue Boat, and Call and Reponse: Conversations in Verse (with Jack B. Bedell). He has two books forthcoming: In Ordinary Light: New and Selected Poems (2010) and Holding the Notes, a chapbook commissioned by Chicory Bloom Press (2011). He served as Poet Laureate for a brief time in 2007-08 and then again in 2009-2011.

that at last they had plenty to eat,
that the land was cheap
and the china unbroken
and outside the tent where they slept on the dirt
clumps of violets grew wild in the ruts.
From state to state she followed fast,
teeth clamped tight to the trail behind him.
He could have sworn she’d leashed him with a spell.
And so at last he changed his name.
V to b, k to c;
he sank through the silt of traveling strangers
She was lovely on their wedding day,
the lace cap like frost on her black hair,
black eyes bright as broken glass.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But after the dancing and shivaree,
when the Bohemian band had picked up their brass
and ambled home over the hills,
when the slender sliver of moon
had thickened to a coarse white eye,
his bride laid her docile guise aside.
Of course, he never admitted it,
big Bohunk plowman that he was—
rotten and sweet.
Ripeness thickened in the air. The apples
fell faster than the pigs could eat, each heavy branch
trailing its tip on the ground
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The boys scooped apples by the barrowful,
brushing away the cider-drunk bees
and hauling the fruit off to three spreading cairns
that simmered and softened in the heat.

