My poems can make a difference!

Poet Bio: Richard Cándida Smith is a historian with seven books exploring the social and intellectual history of modern art and literature in the United States. He recently retired from the University of California, Berkeley. His newest book, Improvised Continent: Pan Americanism and Cultural Exchange, will be released in the fall from University of Pennsylvania Press. A recent a short prose piece, "Art Is a Confrontation with a 'Me' That Needs Improving: The Beginnings of the Noah Purifoy Foundation", VOCA Journal (November 2016), can be found online at http://journal.voca.network. It is a personal reflection on creating a trust to preserve the work of an assemblage artist working in the desert east of Los Angeles. Richard says of the connection between his writing as a historian and as a poet, "Poetry allows me to work with a different kind of archive, one where the raw materials are stored inside me instead of in a library. I usually feel that when writing, any kind of writing, is going well that I am discovering realities that seem so new and fresh that they could not have possibly already existed inside me. Reconfiguration is a better word than discovery for what happens with poetic exploration. Writing allows me to reconfigure the confusion that seems to define my most immediate relation with the world into a picture in my mind that could be called thought. At least a form has taken shape inside my mind. If I preserve it, the thought can be shared and may generate other, probably very different thoughts in other people. All a gamble. The process of discovering meaning by reconfiguring the ineffable is pretty much like trying to draw with water on a scorching hot day. Images, the beautiful ones no less than the ugly and banal, start fading away before they are finished."

Your support gives me vital inspiration as I write for thirty days this month.

Tupelo Press provides the canvas, I bring my words, accompanied by other fine poets, writing thirty poems in thirty days, all ours to edit and submit as we wish. 30/30 poems have been taken by over 90 journals and featured in over 40 published chapbooks, all so Tupelo Press can keep publishing exquisite and diverse voices that might never be heard otherwise.