Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Joy Harjo, Claudia Rankine, Ocean Vuong, Elizabeth Acevedo, Terrance Hayes, Frank O’Hara, Audre Lorde, Allen Ginsburg, all poets who have enhanced the canon of American writing with their writing and their diversity. Have you read any of them? Which ones have you tried? Which diverse poet is your favorite? What poem do you like that you can share with us?
Did you know that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. believed deeply in the power of voices, especially voices that had been ignored, dismissed, or pushed aside? That belief matters just as much in literature as it does anywhere else.
The literary canon is not a fixed monument. It is a living body of work that grows stronger, more truthful, and more beautiful when it includes diverse authors and perspectives. American literature is incomplete without the poets and writers who reflect the full range of American experience. Reading these voices does not diminish the canon. It expands it, strengthens it, and makes it more honest.
It may seem as if diverse authors exist on the margins of literature, but they don’t. They are central to it. They shape language, challenge assumptions, and help us see both history and the present more clearly. I have enjoyed so many authors who are so different from me, especially when we count the wealth of male writers we read in school. They are all wonderful writers, and I am also glad school now includes more writers who look like me, as well as writers who look like my daughter and my friends.
So today, as we celebrate Dr. King, let’s also celebrate the voices that widen our understanding of who we are. Pick up a book. Read a poem. Listen closely to someone, anyone, different from you, or simply listen to someone in need. How can you share your light?
On a slightly off-topic note, I was visiting my sister this weekend, and we each chose a stand up special to watch that is a pretty new special. I chose Mohaned Elshieky’s special No Need to Address Me, and my sister chose Marcello Hernandez’s special American Boy. Both were incredibly funny. Comedy benefits from diversity too.
I am happy for this day. Hurray for Dr. King and his marvelous legacy. Hurray for all poets. And hurray for a literary world that makes room for all of us.
~Dianne
Dianne Pearce is the chief editor and bottle washer at Current Words Publishing, and the half-cocked imaginer behind Old Scratch Press and Instant Noodles. Pearce loves helping writers realize the dream of having their work published. I mean she is really crazy about doing that for some reason. To that end, to join in the fray, to look at the thing from the other side, to stand in another’s shoes, and all of those things, she is fully expecting and promising to publish her first collection of poetry, In the Cancer Cafeteria, spring of 2026. Please don’t hold your breath. For very long. Happy 2026!
I’m working on bringing out my poetry collection this year, and I thought I’d share one of my poems with you. For the past year I’ve been traveling with my little sister to her cancer appointments. Luckily I do not have cancer, but I am cancer-adjacent, and that has its own challenges. When I want to say worrying things, when I read case studies, which I do, when I am by myself as she naps through a treatment and I wait, when I drive in and out of West Hollywood alone, sometimes in the threes and fours in the morning depending on treatment time, and I ruminate, I try to put it on paper, rather than on my sister. I’m also a clothes lover and a people watcher from back in junior high with my then boyfriend and bestie Joe Perna. We called ourselves the fashion police in 7th grade, like we were such good dressers. Joe and I observed details, and made guesses based on what we saw. In general the thing I am most curious about is the lives of other people. I think I am (possibly) overly empathetic, and I imagine stories for strangers all day long. I also tend to notice the small things happening around me. As I sit and wait for my sister, or drive alone, or struggle to make small talk (as I do without cancer! I have never been good at it), my brain is humming away wondering about people, and making stories to go with them, and wondering if their cancer is curable and how it will all play out. Most people I see only once, even though we go the same time and day quite often. It is my curse to want to know everything, and to never be able to know, purely because I am a nosy so-and-so. When cancer comes to town your ability to be quiet in the never-knowing is mightily tested.
I also don’t want this to be a totally maudlin book about being upset about my sister. I don’t want it to be a book about my sister. Though I love her dearly, her story is hers, and I don’t want to steal it, which would add, in my view, insult to injury. It’s important when you write about real-live people who are not famous people that you be considerate and kind. I am not able to do that when talking if a joke comes to mind. If I think of something funny about something you’ve said or how you look, etc., it’s coming out unfiltered, that second, and I’m going to laugh. Yeah. Kind of a shitty trait, but what do they say, “At least all the trauma made me hysterical.” Yup. But when I write about anyone who I will see again, it is important to me to serve my needs while not disregarding theirs. There are compromises. My sister may not want me announcing she has cancer, for example, but she has told the people in her life, and I need to be able to discuss it too, so she loses that bit of control, just another thing cancer steals, privacy. For that she has to allow me the book as a coping mechanism. Sorry sis.
Another thing to note, as I assume most people who read this blog are authors: you have to be careful where you put your work before you publish your book. I am publishing my book through OSP, so I can put this poem here, and OSP will not disallow it from the book. If another publisher was publishing my book, they might not be happy for me to stick a poem out in public on a blog. They may or may not be happy for me to publish a poem somewhere in advance, because that anthology or lit mag where the poem is published may hold rights that conflict with the publishing company then using the poem when publishing my book. So there’s that. You have to be careful. You can always post a question here, and one of us will try to answer it. In fact, I’ll run a monthly post that offers a chance for you to ask questions, and reminds you that you can do it.
This book has a theme that runs through the whole book. Some collections do have a theme, but often the theme is that all the poems are written by the same person. The theme in my book is cancer, but, more drilled down, my reactions to cancer, my observations on the cancer experience, which I am holding together in the idea of the cafeteria at the clinic. People who are going through cancer as patients or support are often in the cafeteria as a place to stop being wrapped up in the cancer events and procedures. It’s the downtime place, and, because of that, people drop their masks a bit there. I am not telling anyone’s secrets as much as I am interpreting what I see, which changes the observation from what it is, to what I see. There is much intrusion from observers, so don’t worry that I am revealing anyone’s truths besides my own.
I have trouble tapping a poem with my scepter and declaring it complete. I expect many poets are the same. Sometimes a poem comes out almost fully-formed, but most still have growing and shrinking to do.
I write longer poems. I write narrative poems. I tend to write personal poems. Sometimes my poems are true, and sometimes they are true in the sense that they are true, for me. That doesn’t mean they would qualify as legally true. If the person was a brunette, and brunette doesn’t work, guess what, red hair is what I am going to write.
This poem, “Pink Dress,” is pretty much done. I will say it is an uncorrected proof here, as I may change it a bit before it hits the book galley. But it feels good to me as it is, and I was able to read it aloud to myself without having major anxiety, so I feel like it is okay.
The OSP group has become my friends as well as my colleagues, and, based on schedules and etc., we often ask each other to look at each other’s work. That’s part of the deal with this collective. So far I have shared some of my writing for this book with Robert, Anthony, Gabby, and Ginny. I cannot express how much I have appreciated them and their taking the time to give me really helpful, kind, and actionable feedback.
Here, without further ado, is one of the poems destined to be released later this year in the collection, In the Cancer Cafeteria.
Pink Dress
Her pink dress is too tight too short the old sneakers don’t go hair twisted up and split two rolls of mussed-up teddy ears.
He is all belly under his big and tall polo up top tangled hair needs a brush run through but beard is spun silk. He is the one who gets up moves around paces because he’s in the cancer cafeteria and who doesn’t pace?
She doesn’t. She smiles at the screen in her hands.
Whenever he gets up he runs his finger down her bicep. Her chubby thighs twitch back at him against the tight pink hem. The dress is a mini I can see her cotton crotch and I don’t tell her because each time he slides his finger down her arm her smile goes wicked at the corners for a second as her thighs twitch call and response and it’s not my song to sing.
I shut up I pretend I don’t see.
When he manages to sit his chair is up against instead of across from his long tangled curls try to nestle under her neck wheedle around her earlobes. I can’t tell for certain who is victim who is victim support. Some secrets are not for me to know.
He needs to move again gets up abrupt clumsy all the other chairs tables reach for his legs stepping around best he can into the hall gazing in confusion at the baby grand sitting there playing “Wichita Lineman” by itself from 1968 a year him and his girl know only as a number, and not real.
He stares at the piano rocks on his heels in his shoes as he has rocked since he was five years old knees bend out to the sides a boy just learning how legs work walking through a day’s same endless agenda treatment, wait, consultation, wait, scan, wait.
Head nodding at Jimmy Webb’s F major D major he tries to find his way to the tune gives up, moves back to her comes in for a landing finger trails down and up bare meaty skin. She ripples in response. Appearing now on all her bare places languishing goose pimples long only to be released to go home so two may unzip the tight pink dress together.
Dianne Pearce is the chief editor and bottle washer at Current Words Publishing, and the half-cocked imaginer behind Old Scratch Press and Instant Noodles. Pearce loves helping writers realize the dream of having their work published. I mean she is really crazy about doing that for some reason. To that end, to join in the fray, to look at the thing from the other side, to stand in another’s shoes, and all of those things, she is fully expecting and promising to publish her first collection of poetry, In the Cancer Cafeteria, spring of 2026. Please don’t hold your breath. For very long. Happy 2026!
Alan Bern is more than just the author of DREAMS OF THE RETURN—he’s also one of the founding voices of Old Scratch Press, a collective born from a group of terrific writers with a deep love of traditional and hybrid poetry, prose, and art. As a retired children’s librarian and cofounder (with Robert Woods) of the fine-press publisher Lines & Faces, Alan has long pursued the merging of word, image, and place.
In DREAMS OF THE RETURN, he turns his lens to Italy—in particular the South—bringing to life landscapes both storied and luminous through his own photographs and through classic Italian poetry, delivered both in its original form and in his own translations. The journey is lyrical, immersive: it’s not merely a travel guide, but a portrait of longing, place, memory, and beauty.
And that’s something Alan does beautifully—his artistry weaves together what he’s done throughout his life: poetry, prose, photography, memoir, all fueled by a love for Italy. Within the OSP community, he is known for “photo-poems,” a daily practice in which images and language overlap, inviting the reader to travel with him across geographies and inward, into self.
In addition to poems and photographs, DREAMS OF THE RETURN also includes intimate personal essays that layer history, memory, and lived experience. In “The Good One,” for example, Alan recounts a walk through Naples’ Quartieri Spagnoli with his friend Marco. What begins as a conversation about Jewish philosopher Don Isaac Abravanel and the sacred geography of southern Italy turns into a heartbreaking encounter with a community altar for “o’ Bono”—a young man accidentally killed during a New Year’s Eve celebration. Through this story, Alan reveals how place, tragedy, resilience, and human connection are intertwined in ways both profound and ordinary.
A true perfectionist, Alan (pictured left) worked closely with his good friend, Peter Truskier, to ensure that the photos selected would sparkle in the book just like the locations did in real life.
DREAMS OF THE RETURN is, in effect, another way Alan invites us to travel: through light and verse, through time and place. It’s a book to savor—start with a wind-soft sun, ruins, olive trees and history; consume it slowly with pizza margherita and red wine; linger into the evening with the sweetness of roccoco napoletani and an espresso kissed with Sambuca. You can order a copy of your own here:
Clearly the owner of that journal is not doing a good job of compiling her collection because on her journal is a slice of orange she is attempting to dry out, three crystals, and a paintbrush. The book is open and written in with a pencil, not good for preserving writing as (being a teacher for one-zillions years I can tell you) pencil smudges overtime to become indecipherable. She’s also got a pile of vintage mail (definitely older and already been mailed to her, to someone), which is deliciously tantalizing, and reading is much easier and more fun than writing.
Who is this mess of a woman? That’s a stock photo, but it could easily be my desk, with a few dozen highlighters and yesterday’s coffee added to the milieu.
It’s difficult for me to have a clean desk, no lie there. It’s difficult for me to spend time cleaning my desk, and not because I am not a neat person, but because I push my own things back. In fact, though I think of myself as a generally nice and “in a good mood” sort of person, I can get snappy when I feel tooo squeezed out.
I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.
JRR Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)
What a great bit of writing that is!
So I have made the bold assertion that I will publish my collection of poetry through Old Scratch Press in 2026. There. I said it to the group, and now I said it to you. I swear I’m gonna do it. I am going to occasionally clean my desk, and push in some room to get my collection together by pushing other things back (other things probably being sleep! Ha!). I just took on a new tutoring student, a few pro bono editing projects (my daughter’s school has a non-profit component to it, and I donated some editing to the auction, and it got bought!), a half dozen or so sample edits, in addition to the regular amount of edits, which is many hundreds of pages per month, and I signed up for a singing course with a friend, have a relative needing assistance for cancer treatments, a teen in need of a lot of “staying on track” help with school work and she is also involved in some theater projects her dad or I need to be the transportation for (and, in general, making sure she eats, remembers her glasses, etc.), and a business to run and a home and family, in addition to trying to squeeze in a daily run. I would love to run well enough to participate in a 5K, and I have been thinking of joining a thing in my neighborhood where I could get a running trainer. Of all of those things I am doing there is nothing I do not want to be doing, except for wishing my relative didn’t have cancer, of course. One friend had told me recently she was stepping back from a project, and I had anticipated it about four months earlier, actually, and I completely get it. My relative, who is staying with me this week and last for her treatments, woke up today and told me she is spending the last few days she needs to be local for her tests at a friend’s because she needs a change of scenery. I had expected that too, and I had prepared a to-go coffee for her before she woke up. However I have a HS friend on FB who is every bit as engaged in politics as I am, and worried about the general state of what we see as the slide into authoritarianism, and another HS classmate said to him, “We liked it better when you just wrote about your kids and scouting. You don’t have a lot of chapters (she actually wrote chapters!) left; don’t waste them on this.” and I could not agree less. Age, chapter of life, has nothing to do with wanting to accomplish things and caring about things outside of ourselves, so, no, I do not think he should stop fighting the good fight. Yet I feel that I do have an understanding that we literally cannot do it all, and don’t want to, and I respect it, and think it is a good thing, and I flatter myself that I am especially good at reading the room, and can see when change is coming. But, I’m not good at, “No.” I’m not good at giving up on something I’ve begun, even if it does not realize my own dream. It’s an obstacle because in order to publish one of my many projects, I assumed I would have to come up with a good, firm, “No.” And I simply can’t. So I have decided instead to come up with a good, slightly quavering, “Yes.” I’m outing myself that I am going to put my damn book out. I am saying it, and affirming it, and treating it, as much as possible, as a done deal. I think if I normalize it, the way I normalize all the other things, I will simply do it because it has a due-date, or a do-date. Both!
And so, here is my question to you:
If you have been writing short stories, short non-fiction, flash, poetry, for some time now (I’m not going to say I’ve been writing for decades, but at least since the synth-pop craze and the resurgence of skinny ties (the best kind of ties)), how do you choose what to include, and what to leave behind, resting, forever lost in a permanent dream state in the “my writing” file on your desktop? Though the synth-pop craze wasn’t what I would describe as a serious time in the world, I was a serious writer; I took myself very seriously, and I think that “me” has somehow stuck around, and I judge that writing to be more profound, when in reality for pretty much all of us our early writing is awful. I remember writing a poem laden with love and portent that was about a page long and contained only the word “baby” written over and over again in different combinations with possessive pronouns and a few sappy adjectives. Songs, when sung, can add meaning through cadence, tone, etc., but, with that “baby” experiment I learned that mere words on a page cannot do that. It was a piece of absolute dreck. I do not regret deleting it!
So, those old pieces hold special meaning for me, but most are not very good (I confess I still think some of them are genius!), and almost all are not even remotely relevant to who I am now. Though I am still a whiny liberal with a moral bent, and that still is there, even in the new pieces.
And this is it, my one chance to publish my poetry, to put it out there in the world. When I was in my MA and MFA programs I knew who the “it” poets were in the world of poets who published, and I wanted to join them, to earn their respect. And as I tried I very much felt borne farther away from them. Primarily by life circumstances and that inability to say no, that pushing back of my own things, more than anything else. And that very much was a tell (an inadvertent behavior or mannerism that betrays) that I didn’t belong among them. Writers who are successful (and success looks different for a poet than a novelist, or self-help book author, etc.) almost all have a modicum of selfishness that allows them to push things away that don’t serve them, and also leads them to self-preserve. They’re not going to be dumb enough to share their “baby” poem with their thesis advisor. Selfishness belongs on the seven deadly sins list, IMHO. But success almost needs it, like a plant needs water, to survive.
So, for better or for worse, committing a deadly sin or not, I am going to get this thing done as if it is not even my thing, so I will not be being selfish; I will simply be doing another job on the list.
But, again, I have this question: if you could put together a collection of your writing (or publish one of your novels, if you write long-form) how do you choose? How do you group? How do you look back over your body of work and say, “This goes; this doesn’t?” And if you could have your book published next year, what would you want on your cover, and why? While working with OSP one thing that has continually surprised me is that the authors seem to know what the cover needs to be. How in the heck….?
So, what about you? Would you know? I’m super curious to hear! Drop me a comment below!
Recently Robert Fleming was nice enough to get Old Scratch Press booked on Like a blot from the blue. Robert Fleming, Gabby Gilliam, Anthony Doyle, Alan Bern, Virginia (Ginny) Watts, and I showed up. I gave a little information on Old Scratch Press; Gabby gave some information Instant Noodles, and Anthony and Ginny read from their new books. Being there and presenting to an international audience was a fantastic opportunity for us, and the folks there were great.
What I liked even more were the other people who showed up.
I’m going to guess that there were about 30 people who showed up who were not us, one of whom was Fin Hall, the blot-in-chief. It was clear that many of these folks had been attending regularly for quite some time. One at a time, in turn, based on when they signed up, Fin called on each person, and the author read 1-3 poems, depending on length.
When I was in my twenties and thirties, which, sadly, I am not any more, I used to read at LIP (live, in person) open mics all the time, and I would often have to hang in until midnight to get my chance. Usually these were held in bars in Philadelphia, or in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I did my best to dress as “punk rock” as possible, and my general aim, if I’m honest, was to get laid. It’s frankly shocking how few times that happened, when that was clearly my intent. I usually had on a mini skirt and was showing cleavage, but, in truth, people who knew me then told me then, and will reiterate the very same thing today, that me punked-out and showing cleavage was, somehow, still giving Julie Andrews when what I was going for was Grace Slick. Ah well.
In any case, the thrill of reading, and the thrill of possibly getting lucky, and the location (always bars) also meant that, in all likelihood, by the time they got to me on the sign-up list, I was hella drunk. I was a smoker (Benson and Hedges 100s back then), but because I was also a poser: at those events I came with a pack of Dunhill Blue.
Waaaay too expensive to smoke all the time, but on open mic nights I always stopped at the news agent’s (Philadelphia had news agents!) to get a pack beforehand.
A few times/year the venues would ask me to be the featured reader, and I think that was because I was also volunteering with a little Zine called Magic Bullet (run by Andrew Craig, wherever he is today), which I had quite a few publications in, and, who knows, maybe I was good.
I was working my way through an MA and then an MFA from my twenties into my thirties, and my professors seemed to think I was good, as well, and I won the student awards each year, so maybe. When I read at the school events I was not drunk, but neither was I nervous, perhaps because my professors made me feel gifted.
And then, sometime around the end of my last degree, life took a turn. My very long relationship went very south. Another relationship pooped too quickly, and flamed out just as fast, and I remember I felt, while I was still prolific as a poet, that I had somehow lost at life. I wanted, you see, to become a published poet and a professor, and a spouse, and a parent, and I wanted all four things to work out perfectly, and just none of them did.
My life, then, became a series of edits. If it didn’t work to have the man with the red hair, then cut him from the piece, and write in another man, one with cheap beer on his lips. It was so time-consuming to send out work, one poem here, and one there, through the mail, keeping track of where it went, and keeping a lookout for the SASE to bring it back, and seeing if it was in decent enough condition to be mailed back out again, and I remember for awhile I was printing on onion skin to save money (who knows what that is?), and digging up the two dollars or eight quarters to send the piece of onion skin back out, and waiting for the SASE again to return, and each time writing a letter of introduction, sometimes including letters of introduction from my professors who were consistently and kindly encouraging. I remember two of them, who seemed to think my writing was the bee’s knees, were flummoxed that my poems weren’t getting entry, but maybe the long narrative style went out with Wordsworth. And life became more about driving from 9-5 job to college job to relationship, to moving out, to moving over there, to trying again, to keep on trying, to being, frankly, trying.
Little by little, returned SASE by SASE, edited dream by edited dream, the writing dribbled to a stop. Drip, drip, dr—
It was so quiet in my head.
Well, in the poetry part of my head at least.
And a decade and a half ran through my fingers.
And then I started writing again. Not only poetry, and not the plays I wrote in my twenties, but fiction, and memoir, which is, I guess, what this is.
I found myself in a place where the place, the locale, was so small and local, it felt small enough that I dared to go to a reading again.
But over the intervening years something just awful seemed to have happened. When I showed up to read at the open mics, even when I went with friends, I could not make it through a single poem without devolving into tears. And maybe there’s a reason for this shocking behavior, and maybe there isn’t, but it seems as inevitable to me as hair going grey, and as unavoidable as the red dot from a sniper’s gun in one of those movies with snipers.
And yet, at the simple evening with Blot from the blue I felt encouraged. The readers were great, and seemed normal (for the most part… I mean, poets, right?), and kindly, and on Zoom my head is no bigger than a Cerignola olive, so I am going to say I felt safe. I think it would be quite okay to join in, and I asked him later, and Fin said yes, folks can join. And folks could mean me, or you.
And use this email to express interest likeablotfromtheblue@gmail.com.
And if you show up, be a goooood listener first, and a good reader second.
I’m not much of a drinker these days, so if I show up it will probably be very sober, and there hasn’t been any nicotine in these lungs for a long spell. I will, however, be caffeinated. And that’s at least something. The poem I am thinking of reading has some sound effects in it, which is probably ill-advised. But after I read, and make whatever sort of a fool of myself I am destined to be, I can write a new poem: Pearce With Her Pants Fallen Down.
Nadja often finishes her posts with a writing prompt, so here is me, stealing that excellent idea:
Think of an “edit” you made in your own life, by choice or by force. How did it work out for you?
Or
Have you ever read at an open mic? Write a flash memoir piece describing your experience.
OLD SCRATCH PRESS 