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Susan Allison
Down by the Riverside Ways
Laura Altshul
Searching for the Northern Lights
Bodies Passing
Looking Out
Victor Altshul
Singing with Starlings
Ode to My Autumn
Srange Birds
Ina Anderson
Journey into Space
Jake Anderson
Homeless Souls
Carol A. Armstrong
Everything WaitsTo Be Noticed
Emily H. Axelrod
Passerby
Don Barkin
That Dark Lake
Houses
Marge Rogers Barrett
CALLED The Making and Unmaking of a Nun
Al Basile
Tonesmith
Sherri Bedingfield
Transitions & Transformations
Caitlin Blackburn
another beginning
Lary Bloom
I’ll Take New Haven: Tales of Discovery and Rejuvenation
Polly (Laszlo) Brody
At the Flower's Lip
The Burning Bush
Stirring Shadows & new work
Bob Brooks
Unguarded Crossing
Miriam Brooks Butterworth
Just Say Yes
My Felonious Friends

Lull Before the Storm
Katharine Carle
Divided Eye
The Uncommon Nativity of Common Things
Michael Cervas
Inside the Box
Captivated
A Wilderness of Chances
Even Here

Karen J. Ciosek
Navigating the Poet’s Sky
Ginny Lowe Connors
Barbarians in the Kitchen
The Unparalleled Beauty of a Crooked Line
Toward the Hanging Tree
Jeanne Weston Cook
Stunned by Illumination
Melissa Croghan
Cliff Walk
Jane D'Arista
The Overgrown Copse
Kathleen Dale
Rescue Mission
Nancy Daley
How Much of Love
Brad Davis
OPENING KING DAVID
Cheryl Della Pelle
Down to the Waters
Catherine DeNunzio
Enough Like Bone to Build On
Anne Magee Dichele
Waiting for Wisdom
Ankle Deep and Drowning
Babara DiMauro
Celestial Conversations
Danny Dover
Tasting Precious Metal
Jeff Dutko
Beyond the Margins
Susan KõDõ Efird
Seventy-Two Labors

Cora M. Ekwurtzel
Such Nonsense Indoors
Priscilla Wear Ellsworth
Rutted Field of the Heart
Charles B. Ferguson
Flounder In: Fishers Island Sketches
Kate Fetherston
Until Nothing More Can Break
Carol Gabrielson Fine
A Tilted World
Steve Foley
A Place at the Table
Harper Follansbee, Jr.
In the Aftermath of Grief
Anne Carroll Fowler
The Case of the Restless Redhead
Tom Gannon
Food for a Journey
Reportings
Barbara Germiat
Look, the Silence
Jessica Gigot
Flood Patterns
Jonathan Gillman
My Father, Humming
Sarah Glaz
Ode to Numbers
Nicholas Giosa
This Sliding Light of Day
Dick Greene
Explorations
Ingrid Grenon
Simply This
Lorence Gutterman
Small Circles of Time
Joan Joffe Hall
In Angled Light
Nick Harris
Learning to Love
Marye Gail Harrison
Full Face to the Light
Doris Henderson
Full Face to the Light
Joan Hofmann
Coming Back
Kevin Hogan
My Ríastrad
Deming Holleran
Gypsy Song
Betsy Hughes
Forest Bathing
Douglas Hyde
Footnotes
Sara Ingram
Sounds of House and Wood
Bob Jacob
Perspective: Hospice Poems
Lee A. Jacobus
Wildcat on the Shoreline
Brooke Herter James
The Widest Eye
Sping Took the Long Way Around
Cecelia D. Johnson
Oh Days of Happy Memory
Joel F. Johnson
Where Inches Seem Miles
Marilyn E. Johnston
Silk Fist Songs
Weight of the Angel
Arlene Swift Jones
God, Put Out One of My Eyes
Joan Kantor
Shadow Sounds
Phyllis Beck Katz
All Roads Go Where They Will
Migrations
Les Kay
Kilco Co

Margaret Keane - Sister Marie Michael Keane
Love Like This
Jim Kelleher
Quarry
Mick: A Celestial Drama
Elizabeth Kincaid-Ehlers
Seasoning
How Do I Hate Thee
Tricia Knoll
How I Learned To Be White
Alex Kochkin
From Nought Anew
Judy Kronenfeld
light lowering in diminished sevenths
Joan Kunsch
Playing with Gravity & new work
Pam Lacko
Laughing in the Face of Cancer
Susannah Lawrence
Just Above the Bone
Kenneth Lee
Sweet Spot
Lake Effect

 

Ann Mirabile Lees
Night Spirit
David Leff
The Price of Water
Depth of Field
Mary Leonard
The Sweet & Low Down
Gregory LeStage
Small Gods of Summer
Hope Is a Small Barn
Suzanne Levine
Haberdasher's Daughter
Grand Canyon Older Than Thought
Rebecca Lilly
A Prism of Wings
Light's Reservoir
Tom Mallouk
Nantucket Revisited
Srinivas Mandavilli
Gods in the Foyer
Nancy Manning
What Glues Us Together
William H. Matchett
Airplants
Lois Mathieu
Snow Raining on Glass
Laura Mazza-Dixon

Forged by Joy
Rennie McQuilkin

Private Collection
The Weathering
Visitations
A Quorum of Saints

Dogs
North of Eden
Afterword
The Readiness
Seabury Seasons

Love in a Time of Lament: An Alzheimer’s Memoir
A Momentery Stay
The Prevalence of Mystery
Transformings
James B. Mele
Dancing in Eurynome’s Shoes

Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely
Letter from Italy, 1944
Simple Absence
Dawn E. Morrow
The Habit of Hope
Susan T. Moss
In from the Dark

John Muro
Pastoral Suite

Victoria T. Murphy
In Defense of Worms
Marilyn Nelson

The Meeting House
Patricia Horn O'Brien
When Less Than Perfect is Enough
Lana Orphanides
Searching for Angels
Jim Pearce
Slant Light
October's Gallery
Paul Petrie
Paul Petrie: The Collected Poems
Garrett Phelan
Outlaw Odes
Mollie Pilling

Journeys
Pit Pinegar
The Physics of Transmigration
Curt Plaskon
Life: Still the Greatest Show on Earth
Norah Pollard
Lizard Season
Death & Rapture in the Animal Kingdom
Report from the Banana Hospital
In Deep
Wanda S. Praisner
Sometimes When Something Is Singing
Bruce Pratt
Boreal
Diana M. Rabb
Listening to Africa
Ellen Rachlin
Until Crazy Catches Me
Permeable Divide
Geri Radacsi
Tightrope Walker
Jarold Ramsey
Thinking like a Canyon
Kenton Wing Robinson
The Water Sonnets
Kenneth S. Robson
Big Dipper
Chivas Sandage
Hidden Drive
Jean Sands
Gandy Dancing
Close But Not Touching
Peggy Sapphire
In the End a Circle
Maria Sassi
Rare Grasses
Jane Schapiro
Let the Wind Push Us Across
Ellen Hirning Schmidt
Armed to the Teeth
V. Jane Schneeloch
Turning Over Leaves
Elizabeth Schultz
The Quickening
Vera Schwarcz
Chisel of Remembrance
Ancestral Intelligence
The Physics of Wrinkle Formation
Paul Scollan
Liberty Street Hill
Unaccounted For
Bagful of Bags
Alexandrina Sergio
My Daughter Is Drummer in the Rock 'n Roll Band
That’s How the Light Gets In
Old is Not a Four-Letter Word
Myra Shapiro
12 floors above the earth (poems, 2012)
Richard Shaw
The Orchard House (poems, 2019)
Joan Seliger Sidney
Bereft and Blessed (poems 2014)
Karen Silk
Somewhere a Bird
Gretchen Schafer Skelley
A Wheel in a Wheel (poems, 2011)
Gail Moran Slater
At the Edge (poems, 2023)
Jocelyn Sloan
Geisha
Lisa Sornberger
Returning Light
Linda Spock
Lifelines
John L. Stanizzi
Ecstasy Among Ghosts
Sleepwalking
Dance Against the Wall
Seth Steinzor
To Join TheLost
Ann Anderson Stranahan
Window On The River
Bernita Woodruff Sunquist
Across the Divide
JoAnne Taylor
Knit Together: An Orphan’s Spiritual Journey
Elizabeth Thomas
From the Front of the Classroom
Karen Torop
Fire in the Hand
Parker Towle
This Weather Is No Womb
World Spread Out
Edwina Trentham
Stumbling into the Light
Theresa C. Vara
Through Salt and Time
Gerda Walz-Michaels
Stone Walls
Kirsten Wasson
Almost Everything Takes Forever
Rhett Watts
Willing Suspension
Allen C. West
Keeping Night at Bay
Mame Willey
On the Irreversibility of Time
Barry L. Zaret
Journeys
When You Can't Do Any More
Geraldine Zetzel
Traveling Light

 

Edwina Trentham’s Stumbling into the Light

 

1. Consider titles—of the book, of its three sections, and of individual poems such as “The Way the Dark Opens Out into Light,” “Falling,” and “Stone.” Look at the titles of your own poems and find one that might be more suggestive, simpler, or less obvious.

2. For you, how do the book’s epigraphs relate to it? What epigraph or epigraphs would you choose for a collection of your own poems? Try ordering a group of your poems for a chapbook of 15-25 pages.

3. Consider line breaks when reading the poems in Stumbling. In what ways do those line breaks help to add meaning, interest, or resonance to the poems? Find one line break you find particularly interesting. Now go through one of your own poems to see if different line breaks might improve it.

4. Do you consider “Beach Song” a fitting first poem? How do you interpret the last five lines of the poem? (Note: a “waterbottle” is a sort of “sea grape” found less often these days than when the author lived in Bermuda .) Now try writing a poem in which you and one or more people in your family are pictured in a pose that typifies relationships and situations in the family, or a poem in which you guide us to a place that was especially important to you as a child.

5. What clues lead you to an understanding of the situation in “Photograph”? (Note that the photograph in question is the one that appears at the beginning of the book’s first section.) Try writing a poem based on a photograph of you as a child, perhaps pictured with one or more members of your family. See if you can imply more than you state in the poem, perhaps some sort of family dynamic.

6. It is interesting to look at “The Short Way to the Beach” from at least two points of view: a) its relationship to the book’s title and overall theme, and b) its use of form. What is the essence of that form? You might want to read a formal translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Robert Pinsky’s, for instance) to see a rather famous use of the form. Do you know what it is called? For another use of the same form, read Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Now try your hand at this form, perhaps in a poem that describes a child’s perilous journey, short though that journey might be.

7. Consider the ending of “Souvenir” in which a “gentle sway of blue” vanishes “into the flowered meadow.”What, for you, is the psychology of the child’s act?What leads you to that interpretation? Try a poem of your own in which a child (perhaps you, perhaps not) performs an act inspired by the same sort of feeling present in “Souvenir.”

8. “My Father’s Heart” is breath-taking in its combination of strong emotion and strict form. It is good to read the poem at first without attention to its form, then allow that form to become more evident on additional readings. How would you define the form? Now compose a poem of your own using the same structure, perhaps a poem in which you depict a relationship with one or both parents.

9.  In "Solace," the author uses another strict form--a canzone, which repeats five end words in a complex pattern--as a way of exploring her father's life in the context of a scientific theory.  How does the use of this form enhance this exploration?  How does the author vary the end words and what is the effect of that variation?  Think about a scientific theory that connects in some way with your own experience, and use that as a metaphor to explore your experience. If you are feeling adventurous, read about canzones. Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms, edited by Philip Dacey and David Jauss, has a clear explanation of the form and some good examples. Now try writing a canzone.  You might want to keep in mind that forms like this one often lend themselves more easily to story-telling than to philosophizing, although like all rules about writing, this one is made to be broken.

10. The sonnet is another form used frequently in Stumbling, although the author favors loose sonnets marked by slant rhyme and syllabics (in which each line contains the same number of syllables), rather than meter and full rhyme.  For examples see "The Summer I Decide Who I Am" and "Snake Song." Some poems of  fourteen lines, also in syllabics but without a strict rhyme scheme also have the feel of a sonnet, as in "The Way the Dark Opens Out into Light" and "The Harbor."  What is gained by the different uses of the sonnet form in these poems? Try writing a poem in free verse. Then revise the poem into fourteen lines, then into syllabics, and then into slant rhyme, following either the English or Italian sonnet rhyme scheme. How do these revisions change the poem?  (For a survey of sonnet forms, slant rhyme, etc., web-search “Poetic Forms.”)

Joan Joffe Hall’s In Angled Light

 

1. “The Envelope” (p. 17): What is the envelope? Is it one thing, or many? What is the role of the sun in this poem? What are the qualities of light in the poem?

2. “Driver’s License” (p. 57): What do you think of the ending of this poem? Does it fit the rest of the poem? Are there serious elements in this very humorous poem? If so, what is the effect of balancing humor and seriousness?

Try writing a poem (or story, essay, letter, dialogue…) in which you describe some particularly frustrating experience. Consider mixing the humorous and the serious, and see if you can incorporate a general truth in your writing, as Hall does at the end of “Driver’s License.”

3. In “Autumn Roads” (p. 65) Hall juxtaposes seemingly unrelated ideas—the arrival of fall and the Roman invasion, cracked acorns and cracked skulls. In fact, her poems are full of abrupt changes or contradictions. Find some other examples. Do they work?

Write a poem in which the first section moves in one direction, and the second section in a completely different direction. This could mean a shift in style or form, or a chance to explore an issue on which you are divided; for example, two sides of the self might address each other as in a debate or dialogue.

4. “Red” (p.59). Usually it is a small thing that brings back memories of our childhood, in this case an abundance of red cars (and, later, an abundance of black-and-white television ads). What brings you back to your childhood or to a time when the world seemed very different? Concentrate on specific details that are personal to you. Draw connections between memory, the world you lived in, and the things that trigger memory involuntarily.

Write a poem describing a memory and what triggers it. Remember to involve the senses, presenting details of what you saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted.

5. Consider Hall’s thoughts on children and parents in poems such as “Seed Sack” (p. 7), “Parenthood” (p. 8) “The Aperture (p. 9),”Conversations with the Dead” (p. 14), “Kansas, Sunstruck” (p. 16), “Envelope” (p. 17), “Red Moon” (p. 26), “Fowl” (p. 45), “Matthew at Thirteen” (p. 47), “Our Last Winter” (p. 49) and “The Pool” (p. 50). What elements do you find in the poet’s attitude toward children and parents? Do you see any ambivalence or contradiction?

Try composing a poem in which you reveal your own attitude(s) toward a parent, a child or a sibling, perhaps focusing on a single incident or a series of related incidents. Bear in mind that ambivalence is often the hallmark of truth and that it is usually better to be specific, to show rather than tell. Don’t be afraid of anger. Or of love.

6. After reading “A World Infested by Potential” (p. 4), write about a childhood event or series of related events arousing strong emotion in you—fury, joy, frustration, jealousy, regret, love…

8. Read the series of love poems on pp. 31-44. What sorts of attitudes towards love and lovers does the poet reveal? Do you agree with her?

Try writing about a) an apparently slight “love-moment” which speaks volumes, as Hall does in “You Out There” on p. 33 orÊ b) about a rendezvous, as in “Raspberries” (p.31) and “Grass” (p. 38). Another possibility: write about a lust or a crush, as in “Courting the Muse” (p. 34) and “Crushes” (p. 37). Or write a letter/poem to a lover, ex-lover or would-be lover, as Hall does in “Letter to Japan” (p. 44). Good writing is always honest writing. Whatever you write, try to be as honest and forthright as all of these poems are.

9. “In Praise of Swimming Pools” (p. 51). Here, Hall delivers a eulogy concerning one of her favorite sites. Do the same for a place or thing you relish.

10. Write a “persona poem” as Hall does in “Weddings” (p. 83)—that is, a poem in which you speak in the voice of someone else. Assuming another’s personality and voice, as Mark Twain did in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and J.D. Salinger in Catcher in the Rye, is a good way to get out of a writing rut or undo writer’s block.

11. In “Gradually” (p. 97), Hall may be writing about an ex-husband. What makes the poem so moving is the degree of empathy it shows. In a poem about someone who may have hurt you or with whom you have had a falling out, see if you can achieve the same sort of empathy by imagining yourself into the life of the other person.

12. What do “Driving” (p.99), “Turn” (p. 100) and “Ice Cream Cones” (p. 102) tell you about the poet? Do other poems in the book show a similar quality or qualities?

Write a poem in which you describe behavior in yourself that typifies you. It is probably best to focus on a particular incident or pattern of incidents.

13. “Still Life” (p. 104). Write a poem in which you or someone you describe is “released from the slicing of time” and exists for a moment “between what was and what will be.”

14. What role do diamonds play in “Swimming through the Perseids”? What would you say is the theme of this poem?

Write a poem with a similar theme, perhaps one describing an event from your own life.

15. “Amy Lowell” (p. 109). Poems like this based on the lives of literary, artistic or cultural celebrities—people who have lived “on the edge”—can allow a writer to explore the sort of extreme behavior or startling event that throws light on the true nature of life. Try writing such a poem, perhaps doing some research to bone up on the life of a celebrity who intrigues you.

Pit Pinegar's The Physics of Transmigration

 

1. This is one of those rare poetry collections that reads like a novel. Each poem builds on the one before it, so we urge you to read the book straight through, from start to finish. In the end, it will be interesting to consider the ways in which the title might be construed.

2. “Setting the Record Straight” (p. 13) is, in one respect, a “catalogue poem” in the tradition of Walt Whitman. You might want to try your hand at a poem that catalogues a variety of things or events. How about a “how do I love (hate, fear…) thee, let me count the ways” sort of poem?

3. “Intimacy” (p. 17). Just as this poem begins with a quotation that the poem contradicts, you might compose a poem that begins with someone’s statement then takes issue with it. The statement might be a saying of a parent or teacher, a line from a song, something overheard in conversation, etc. It should be a statement that infuriates you or rouses some sort of strong emotion. Let ’er rip. 

4. “Light” (p. 18). Try a poem in which you describe the early stages of a love when all is bright and shiny, perhaps a first rendezvous or meeting, a first getaway, etc. Play with the possibility of sustaining a metaphor, image or theme, just as Pinegar plays variations on the theme of Light.

5. There are many ways of rendering a portrait. In “Portrait” (p. 20), Pinegar can’t get past the beloved’s eyes, because he once said, remember us this way—/to your last breath. Think of a portrait you would like to write. What specific memory (or memories) and details intrude on the rendering of your portrait—making it both spectacularly true and not a whole picture?Ê Consider writing a portrait of someone you care or have cared about: parent, grandparent, child, friend, lover, spouse, et al.Ê Consider writing a whole gallery of portraits.

 6. “Where There’s Smoke” (p.30) is an example of the use of synesthesia to create unexpected images. Imagine describing sound visually or what music might feel like. If you could hear color, what would it sound like? Write a poem in which your senses respond in unexpected ways to the world around you.

 7. Pinegar writes about the power of imagination in poem after poem—the power of imagination to heal, to transform, to create a new reality by imagining it first. Look at “Imagination” (p. 31), “Before the Longing” (p. 52), “Your Death” (p. 54), “Distance” (p. 72), and “December’s Dying Light” (p. 79). Consider how imagination functions in each poem, how it shapes the poem, how imagination might also shape the life of the poet. Try writing a poem in which you must imagine something—the presence today of the mother or father, sibling or child who died many years ago; the child you didn’t have; the path you didn’t take.

 8. The reader may not always be able to make the distinction between what Pinegar calls imagination and what she might call metaphysical reality. In many of the poems in the second section of the book— “3:00 a.m.” (p. 67), “Arrival” (p. 70), “The Distance Between” (p. 71), and “Explanations” (p. 74), for instance, her interpretations of mystical events, seem literal. Pinegar would say that most of us have what amount to mystical experiences, and that we dismiss them (or shroud them in silence) because they defy logic and explanation, because we are afraid we will be thought crazy. Try writing about some experience you cannot explain in any conventional and/or scientific way. Or write about why you cannot write about it. If you do not believe or remember, try imagining such an experience and what that might be like.

9. The Physics of Transmigration is a love story, but it does not follow the usual prescriptions that Hollywood and the media generally set forth, since the love she describes does not end neatly with “and they lived happily ever after” and since she asks questions that we are not accustomed to asking: What if love is not so much about what we receive but about what we learn about our own capacities to love?Ê What if love is a multi-faceted adventure of the spirit? What if love always enables us to be more loving, as long as loss or fear of loss doesn’t cripple our capacities to be generous? Try writing a poem about what a “lost” love, a recalcitrant child, an impossible family member, a former close friend taught you about your own capacity to love. Make an effort to write your way past whatever barriers you might have constructed to mitigate the pain of loss or disappointment.

 

Norah Pollard's Report from the Banana Hospital

A few thoughts....     

When I was first called upon to give poetry readings, I would often preface the poem by explaining—rather defensively—that the poem was true.  It happened.  I could prove it.  Part of the reason for this habit was my misguided notion that, if the poem were true, the audience could not criticize it.  For how can you criticize the truth?  I was dumb, of course.  You can criticize the art of a poem.  In fact, feel free to criticize the fact of it, too, if it's boring, or tasteless, or boring. Or boring.

The other reason for telling the audience my poem was true was because my poems are true.  I've tried writing poems about paintings or about subjects suggested by books on writing, but they have always been bad poems.  They come out sounding flat and composed.  And I don’t get the “high” from writing them. If it's someone else's idea for a poem, I’m like a toad attempting to suckle a mourning dove. I can't adopt it.  Once I tried writing a play, and all the characters sounded like the same person—me.  They were all talking to each other, and it was like one actor holding forth in front of one of those  department store three-angled mirrors. Same person, different angles. Boring as hell.  I might be a narcissist—all this writing about myself and my life—but I rather think it's that I lack the ability to invent.  I can paint a real scene or recount a real situation, but I can’t create.  I record.  I transcribe my world.

Sometimes I condense or combine the literal truths. In the title poem, “Report From the Banana Hospital,” I have changed two names. Also, Dr. Grimakis is a combination of a nurse and a doctor (who, hopefully, have found new careers). Sometimes I have added a detail, like the hooker's little dance at the end of the poem.  But she did say what I wrote down she said.  Milton was there.  And the beautiful Cuban pianist.  And Henry.  I did take the bus home because I had no money. I did do a stint in the looney bin. I did have to fend off Milton. I did, I did, I did.

I wrote "The Banana Hospital" because I wanted to record that experience in my life. I keep a diary (day-to-day stuff), and I keep a journal (ideas, opinions, observations), and I write down any dream that might provide me with a helpful insight if only I could figure it out.   I have a writing compulsion.  One morning a few years ago, public radio hosted an interview with a man who spent his time recording his life—every minute of it in minute detail—so that he no longer had time for anything else.  He wrote and wrote and wrote, with no time to live or work or even think too much.  This sounds humorous, maybe, but the man obviously had a sickness.  I warn myself about this, so I won't end up in the booby hatch recording how many swallows of coffee it took me to get down how many little blue pills at what exact time in the a.m. and what the weather was doing when I swallowed them.

Anyway, all this is to say that "The Banana Hospital" is true, critique it as you will.  When I finally got through the depression—five years after it had begun and about a year after my hospital stay—I felt a messianic zeal to educate the world about depression.  While I was depressed, both a relative and one friend suggested that I enjoyed my pain.  Another told me I must "Get over it."  And I see how a healthy person could want to say these things to someone who seems to refuse to see that life is so beautiful.  What I was wanting to do after I came up out of the darkness was to climb up on a soapbox and give a speech.  But what would I say?  And to whom?  Describing depression and despair is impossible because despair and depression are indescribable.  Even the great William Saroyan in Darkness Visible could not capture it.  Several years later I decided to make a record, a poem about my hospital stay. I decided to make it humorous so that it would be palatable, and also because it was humorous. (I can see Woody Allen being me.)  Friends have told me I did not succeed in this, but I rather think that is because they know me and feel bad about the whole affair.  I think if it were about someone they didn’t know, a fellow named Ralph Roisterdoister, say, they might grin now and then. 

I guess if I did get to make my speech about mental illness now, I would tell people that the cruelest adage in the world is, "God does not give you more than you can bear." Because, of course, some folks are given more than they can bear.  And they crack up, or swallow ant traps with a quart of gin, or murder the plumber.  It's not a character flaw that we do not prevail at all times.  Everyone has a breaking point.  Everyone.  And so we must have compassion and tenderness for those who break. And if you want to point to a person who’s been through hell and has come out of it intact, and if you are inclined to say, “But, see!  He bore what got dished out,” remember that he has just had not reached that circle of hell that would break him.

There.  See.  I would be a terrible mental health speech giver, because beyond saying that everyone has a breaking point and therefore we should be compassionate towards those who have reached theirs, I have only this to say:  The human spirit is an incredible thing.  It can subsist on so very little.  It can come back from the dead.  It can also leave you absolutely.

Wandering back to my theme of True Poems, "Lucy Dancing" and "The Seal In the Wave" are the only "untrue" poems in the book, though the men in "The Seal in the Wave" are certainly men I have known.  And the seal is living with me now.  I don't know where "Lucy Dancing" came from.  A true aberration.  Do I contradict myself?

So my poems are a selective record of my life and what I've seen.  My depression lasted from 1978 to 1983.  It was in 1983, at the age of 43, that I started writing.  I wrote, in part, because my fine therapist had said that the dreams I wrote down for him were well written, and that made me feel I could do something beside make a plausible meatloaf.  And I wrote in part because coming out of the blackness into the blindingly beautiful world made me want to write and write about it, in terms both black and bright. 

 

 

Rennie McQuilkin's Private Collection

 

Many of the images which inspired the writing of these poems are well known and can be found on the internet. Others are unknown and can be found here.

"Sugar Shaker" led to "War News" (p. 49)

 

"Rose Garden Statue" led to "Moving Mother" (p. 51)

 

"Katchina Dancers" led to "Solstice" (p. 65)

 

 

"Mack's Manger" led to "Getaway" (p. 81)

 

"Ghost Ranch Amphitheater" led to "Ghost Ranch Amphitheater" (p. 68)

 

"Eleanor Skating" led to "The Invitation" (p. 84)

 

 

"The Phoenix" by Norah Pollard led to "Work in Progress" (pg. 86)

 

Rennie McQuilkin's The Weathering

Ginny Lowe Connors on Barbarians in the Kitchen

 

A NEW POEM (November, 2011)

 

Dust

1.

The Old Man in the Mountain
came crashing down one night
and lay tragically in bits of rubble
that rangers discovered at dawn.
At the base of the mountain, shards and dust.

And he’d been really something.
Signs on the road near Franconia, New Hampshire
used to say Old Man Viewing a quarter mile ahead.
There were plenty of old men
at the Walmart and the VFW
but the signs insisted so cars turned off

and people stood around looking dutifully up
at the craggy mountain’s weathered face.
They clicked their cameras, picked up postcards,
felt they’d been somewhere, seen something
remarkable, made of stone.

My own father never got a chance
to be an old man. His hair never thinned.
He never developed a wattle or those brown spots
that crop up on the back of people’s hands.

They say he’s ashes now
but that box of dust has nothing to do
with the man he was.

During his life he accumulated
many neckties he disliked wearing
and a dozen cheap pairs of flip flops
that said, You can relax now.

And a Purple Heart and the 1949 edition
of the Encyclopedia Britannica
and a wife who wished for a washer and dryer
instead of reference books.

Now they’re both dust.
How can anyone believe that?

I try to imagine they’re both within me
but the truth is, I don’t know,
I just don’t know where they’ve gone.

2.

The vacuum cleaner man
convinced us of our disintegration just last week
when he used his appliance to suck up
layers of dead skin from the mattress.

He spread gray residue on a sheet of paper—
thin dusty flakes of what we were yesterday
or last week or the night Marty tried to explain
how the normal is always drawn
perpendicular to the surface of reflection.

I still don’t get it.

The salesman showed us
what feeds on us, the dust of us—
mites that look like hairy potatoes
with claws and fangs
when they’re magnified 1,000 times.

I almost bought the vacuum cleaner
but I thought, thirty years from now
or twenty, or ten—what will it matter?

What feeds on us is dreams
and if they look like alien invaders
when they fall away
maybe that’s how the process works.

So I didn’t buy it, can you blame me?
I turned instead toward the kitchen,
ate a dozen fresh cherries, licked the juice
from my fingers. This is life,
I said to myself as I spit out the pits.

 

THOUGHTS ON THE POEMS IN BARBARIANS IN THE KITCHEN

 

FIRST MEMORY

Author’s Note: This poem really is about my earliest memory: I must have been two or three years old. I had climbed up onto the sink in the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, taken out my mother’s lipstick and was trying to apply it to my own face when my grandfather caught a glimpse of me.  He probably mistook the lipstick for blood and rushed forward to rescue me.  Large and alarmed, he was a frightening figure.

What interests me about the memory are the themes of beauty and transformation and their link to danger.

Writing: What are some of your earliest memories?  They are sure to have emotional power.  Select one and try writing about it.

 

WORMS

Reading: Does the child narrator’s misconception about the origins of the worms she sees after a rainfall reflect anything about her attitude toward life?  How does her attitude differ from that of her friend?

Writing: If you are looking for a topic to write about, think of some of the misconceptions you had when you were very young; put yourself back in that frame of mind, and see what kind of writing results.

 

HOOLIGANS

Reading: Notice that this poem begins with an open window and ends with an open door.  Why do you think Connors structured it that way?  Which parts of the poem are in the present and which parts are in the past?  (How often we travel from the present to the past and back to the present, with sometimes a side trip or two into the future.)

 

LEGACY

Reading: What kind of legacy has the narrator received? 

Writing: Think about family legacies and try writing about what you have received.  If you are a parent, what kind of legacy do you think you are passing on?  What legacy would you like to leave?

 

WE ARE CIVILIZED

Reading: What is the significance of the title?  How does this poem relate to the previous one (“Legacy”)?

Writing: It’s a special challenge to write about the things that are not said, the actions that are about to happen, the things unseen that influence what is shown before us, all the borderline area between two states…but this is powerful territory.

 

HUNGER

Reading: Try to imagine what might have happened to the woman in the poem before the scene described and how it has influenced her approach to life.  When she encounters the bear, she is afraid of it and yet there is an instant in which she recognizes some kind of kinship with it.  What could this woman and the bear possibly have in common?

Writing: Try writing a poem about what comes either before or after the events related in “Hunger.”  Or write your own poem about an unexpected encounter with an animal.  Think about what the animal may represent.

 

ENTERING THE FOREST

Reading: What might the forest represent?  If you are familiar with the motif of the Hero’s Journey in mythology or classical literature, you might try comparing it to the journey in this poem.

 

THE TURN

Reading: Much of this poem is about sleeping and dreaming.  What else is it about?  What is the significance of the first two stanzas?

 

THE SWIMMER

Writing: This is an active poem.  List all the verbs in it.  Think of a scene or event you would like to write about.  Start by making a list of possible verbs to use.  Then write your poem.

 

BARBARIANS IN THE KITCHEN

Reading: How does this, the title poem, relate to the theme that Connors states is the impetus of many of the poems in this book?  (In the Afterword she talks about the intersection of wilderness and civilization as an inspiration for much of her writing.)  What is the source of the narrator’s ambivalence as she tries to get her children to interact in ways that are more acceptable?

 

A RELATIVE STRANGER

Reading: Have expectations, spoken or unspoken, conscious or unconscious, ever interfered with your ability to relate to someone else? 

 

TRACKING THE BEAR

Reading: What kind of journey are this mother and son taking?  What’s going on in the last two lines of the poem?

Writing: In this poem, the boy is compared to a bear.  Think of a person that you would like to portray; what animal could represent him or her?  If you want to write about someone, try working out the animal comparison and weaving it into your poem.

 

DAUGHTER, SIXTEEN

Author’s Note: This poem was written as I observed my daughter practicing leaving.  As college and then adulthood loomed closer and closer, she practiced distancing herself from us.  I had to practice the same thing.  But when I looked at her, I saw someone terribly young, beautiful and vulnerable; thus the spring imagery. 

 

MY SON TURNS TWENTY-FOUR

Reading: What would the poem be like if it were written from the son’s point of view?

Writing:  Take a poem or story you are familiar with and retell it from a different point of view.  It would be interesting to take a piece you yourself have written and rewrite it from an alternate point of view.

 

A HUSBAND’S REFUGE

Writing: What is your refuge?  What about the people around you?

 

NO OTHER LIGHT

Reading: What is the tone of this poem?  There are several polarities in this poem; for instance, intimacy and separateness.  What other polarities do you notice? 

 

AMONG THE HALF-GROWN

Author’s Note: This poem is dedicated to the students and staff of Sedgwick Middle School.

 

ANTHONY AFTER SCHOOL

Reading: Compare and contrast this poem with “Barbarians in the Kitchen,” “My Son Turns Twenty-four,” “Seizure,” or any other poems in the collection that seem to connect to it in some way.

Writing: This poem relates a failure in communication.  The narrator meant to give one message, but it is not what came out.  Have you ever had a similar experience?  Or can you imagine one?  Write about what you said and what you actually meant to communicate.

 

LOST, LEFT BEHIND, DISCARDED

Reading: Compare and contrast this poem to “Among the Half-grown.”  Especially consider tone.

 

ANOTHER SCHOOL SHOOTING

Reading: In most of Connors’ poems, she uses standard punctuation.  Why do you think she eliminates all but the final period in this poem?

Writing: This poem is a persona poem.  You might find that writing in the voice of your subject is an effective way to find greater understanding of the person.

 

PIERCED

Reading: According to the poem, what is the girl battling?  What is the mother’s response?  Does this poem remind you of anyone you’ve met?  Do you think the poem oversimplifies the mother, the daughter, and the situation? Compare and contrast this poem to “A Relative Stranger.”

Writing: Connors uses this poem and “Another School Shooting” to try to begin to understand some young people who have made negative choices.  Think about the people or situations that worry or mystify you.  Write for understanding.

 

GIVE ME TOMORROW

Author’s Note: This poem is dedicated to soldiers of every nation, of every time…and also to those who fervently work toward a more peaceful world.

 

PRESENT AND IN AWE

Reading: Relate the poem to its title.

 

THE WEIGHT OF BUTTERFLIES

Reading: What kind of stories are mentioned in this poem and why do people need them? If you were to paint a scene from this poem, what would it look like?

 

ODE TO SKUNK CABBAGES

Writing: Pick something common, something ordinarily overlooked: dandelions, chairs, or shoe laces, for example, and write a poem of celebration or appreciation on this topic.

 

GIANT BLOB OF SLIMY FLESH REMAINS UNIDENTIFIED

Reading: How would the poem be different if the slimy blob were identified?

Writing: Where do writers get ideas?  The world is full of them.  This poem and the next one in the collection (“Rare Albino Tiger Escapes”) are based on news accounts. When you read or hear the news, make note of interesting items that could become the basis of a poem.

 

RARE ALBINO TIGER ESCAPES

Writing: Think about that part of yourself that could be symbolized by the tiger in this poem.  What would happen if you let it out?  Write about it.

 

THE GREAT CIRCUS FIRE

Reading: This is a true story.  What keeps it from being a simple recitation of the facts; what makes it a poem?

Author’s Note: The question above is one I struggled with while writing the poem, and I’m still uncertain about my degree of success or failure in transforming this true, tragic event into a narrative poem.

 

COWS STOP TRAFFIC IN WEST HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT

Writing: Do you delight in the absurdity life offers so abundantly?  If so, think of some examples and use them as a basis for writing.

 

AFTERWORD

In the Afterword Connors talks about an overriding theme that resonates in many of her poems: the intersection of wildness and civilization and the tension between the two.  Identify the poems that you think most relate to that theme and explain why or how they relate.

John L. Stanizzi

 

A New Poem (crown of sonnets)

 

 

A CROWN FOR MEGAN


1.

This is the crown that I will give to Meg
so when she's in her bed alone at night
worried about the drug-bugs that just might
crawl beneath the skin on both her legs,
she won’t try to breath them in or lug
the weight of her loneliness, that heavy freight,
through fears about the sun hiding its light.
And though she’s scared, she emerges from that smog
and tries to live where sadness doesn’t rule.
When night rears up its dark she sees them come,
that rag-tag bunch that delivers all her pains.
Yet in the morning she will be at school,
and I will show her what her poem’s become;
a crown for her to keep for when she reigns.

2.

This crown’s for her to keep for when she reigns
over the losses that made her family numb.
Reading Robert Frost allowed her to come
to a greater understanding of the chains
that shackled her gram and gramp when the insane
came down on them. Her gramp would just play dumb;
his grizzly heart was broken and now a glum
and bitter hush were all that would remain.
You weren’t allowed to say his oldest son,
Megan’s dad, hung himself one day.
It never happened, her grandpa would maintain.
Later in this poem there’ll be a gun;
for now let’s say that Megan has a way
with grace and warmth in spite of all the pain.

3.

With grace and warmth, in spite of all the pain,
Megan tells me how her grandma dipped;
she moved to Cuba to escape the crypt
her home became when her son was slain
by a noose he fashioned out of plain
clothesline rope. And shortly after Gram skipped
she would return to edit the family script.
Megan recalls her grandma in the rain
outside her school after she had her “dream”;
her broken son came back as Megan’s kin,
reincarnated as Megan’s brother, Gage.
With wisdom, Megan says it was a scheme;
her gram had come to steal her brother then;
she tells me with a smile and childish shrug.


4.

She tells me with a smile and childish shrug
that Grandma’s voice was sand and nicotine.
But Megan found a way to become queen;
it was with wisdom earned there in the fog.
Her gram went mad; impossible to jog
her with reality. She was obscene,
so Megan taught herself to be serene.
They told her not to move without the thugs
they called the “guards” who stayed with her at school;
they even had to wait inside the lav
in case her grandma sauntered in all smug
and tried to take her away from all these fools.
Megan let herself pretend to have
a life in which the king would not be drugs.

5.

A life in which the king would not be drugs;
this was what she thought of when she cried.
She thought about how anger can collide
with sadness. And although the evening’s rags
of clouds were drawn to moonlight where they’d lag,
the shattered light of nighttime would subside,
and in the warmth of daylight she could hide
from herself and all the demon slugs
that crawled beneath her bed and waited there.
There were lots of things she just could not control,
like learning that her youngest aunt was slain
and dumped behind a building. Then despair
would bust her into pieces or eat her whole,
and leave her battling urges to find a vein.

6.

She leaves those battling urges to find a vein,
and takes a moment to think of the saboteurs
who threw her aunt away. Meg knew for sure
that once again her gram would not maintain,
that she’d come back from Cuba with a plan;
her gram would let insanity’s allure
take the broken truth and make it blur
her senses ‘til she knew that she had seen
another resurrected child come back.
Grandma saw her daughter in Megan’s face,
and that was why she went to school again…
to get her child, to get things back on track,
and vanish into Cuba without a trace,
straightening out a life she couldn’t contain.


7.

Straightening out this life she couldn’t contain,
and listening to her heart’s own indecision
didn’t mean she’d live with some illusion
that the whackness of her past wouldn’t weigh
her down. That thought about Montego Bay
was the only future that she would envision--
get out of tasteless C-Town, its derision.
She’d like to find a place where she could stay
without the past….but what about that gun?
Emotionless, she paints a garish scene;
at times, she says, it’s enough to make her gag.
Danny took the ‘Vette out for a run;
the gun was on the seat of that machine;
he looked down and calmly took a drag.

8.

He looked down and calmly took a drag
from a butt out of a pack left on the seat,
then took his brother’s ‘Vette out on the street
one last time. The gleaming, spinning mags,
the speckled, metallic blue; this was Meg’s
daddy’s ‘Vette, and Uncle Dan would meet
his brother soon, joining the elite
society of men who needn’t brag;
they quietly decide and then they go,
and that’s what Danny did that August day.
He found a cliff. He launched the ‘Vette. He fired.
Megan tried to understand this, though
it felt so much like she had been betrayed.
At times, she tells me, she is very tired.

9.

At times she tells me she is very tired.
He shot himself while he was in mid air.
My father’s car, she says without despair,
though in a subtle way I know she’s wired.

But then she puts it away as an acquired
experience of hers. And whether it’s fair
or she got burned, she doesn’t really care.
It is what it is. It’s the way that things transpired.
There are also times when she can be unclear,
like when she says they had to move out west
because some punks in town wanted them dead.
She wasn’t flip or bitter or austere;
it’s what they had to do, another test
that left her family hanging by a thread.


10.

With Megan’s family hanging by a thread,
small town threats had spooked them pretty good,
so that’s when they decided that they should
probably split – she never said they fled.
They had to move was really all she said.
So it was off to Palmdale where things would
turn really bad real quick when in the hood
her brother dissed a boy and then he bled.
They battered in his head with a cinder block,
then talking smack, they left him on the street
to die. But Roy had managed to survive.
And Megan says it was real shock--
his face all scarred from where he had been beat.
It’s just a miracle that he’s alive.

11.

It’s just a miracle that they’re alive
after all the crazy drama and the rush
of graduation. Then the holy hush
of another sacrifice involving five
of her friends and their cross-country drive.
Rumor was they were trying to get in touch
with the father of the driver. They would push,
driving for days, with hopes they would arrive
sooner than the six days they were told
that it would take to make a trip this long.
What kept them moving? Adrenaline and desire.
Teddy didn’t look, he casually rolled
into the U-turn, listening to a song,
a tale about some pain or some desire.

12.

A tale about some pain or some desire--
she tried to come to terms with such loss.
Teddy didn’t get the car across.
There was a crash, the cars a metal pyre,
a mid-west intersection full of fire.
She loved each of them, but now, because
she couldn’t put this dark event on pause,
the cars came together in a dire
and horrid crash, erasing the lives of four
of the boys. Megan reeled with grief
and disbelief, knowing there was no creed
that she could pray, kneeling on her floor.
Here she was, staring at the thief;
and once again she must take the lead.


13.

And once again she must take the lead,
and figure out a way to carry on,
to turn her back on the cards that she has drawn.
She finds a boy she thinks can fill this need.
She falls in love with Joey and with weed.
They take away her pain. She’s less withdrawn,
even though she knows he’ll soon be gone.
His lawyer says it’s best for him to plead
guilty to the charge. She’s really scared,
but she’s in love with him and she will wait.
His lawyer says that he’ll get 3 to 5.
She thinks of all the love that they have shared;
these three months have truly got her straight,
and she’ll show us, by example, how to live.

14.

She’ll show us, by example, how to live
for peace in spite of all the hurt she feels.
After dark, with Joey, she will steal
away, and head out to the local dive,
which, in C-Town, is at Paulie’s grave.
They’ll nurse their buzz until they start to heal;
the truth in front of them seems so unreal.
They’ll party there as if he were alive,
cranking up the tunes and lying there
on the hood of some old clunker Joey bought,
ripping it clear and looking with a grin
up at the stars. And even when the glare
of lights on top of cruisers has them caught
she’s living on the strength she has within.

15.

This is the crown that I will give to Meg,
a crown for her to keep because she reigns
with grace and warmth in spite of all the pain.
She tells me with a smile and childish shrug
of a life in which the king would not be drugs,
and leave her battling urges to find a vein,
straightening out a life she can’t contain.
She looks down and calmly takes a drag;
at times, she tells me, she is very tired,
her family barely hanging on by a thread;
It’s just a miracle that they’re alive.
It’s a tale about some pain and some desire--
and once again she will take the lead
and show us, by example, how to live.

Michael Cervas's Inside the Box

  

1.  Why might the poet have chosen to begin his book with the poem "Geology" (p. 15)?  Why is "plate techtonics" an apt metaphor for poetry itself?  For memory?  What other poems in the collection suggest "plate techtonics" of their own?

2.  What major themes and motifs characterize the collection of first poems in "Local Geography"?  Consider carefully the titles of each poem. 

3.  How does natural imagery—mountains, stones, brooks—shape the poet's early poems in "Local Geography"?  What does the imagery suggest about the speaker of these poems?  About youth?

4.  The poems in "Local Geography" all seem to be about coming of age. What images of youth and innocence are juxtaposed with images of awakening sexuality and maturation?

5.  In "Choosing" (p. 30) the poet carefully repeats several words, images, and phrases.  How do these repetitions link each moment in the
poem?  What is the overall effect?

6.  Pick any one poem and analyze the line breaks.  Why does the poet choose to end and begin his lines with certain words? 

7.  Many poems have a shift or a turn, moving the poem effectively from observation to reflection.  What poems have a clearly identifiable turn? Is this turn toward the end of the poem, in the beginning, or somewhere in the middle?

8.  The poet seems especially concerned with stolen moments and seconds, snapshots of time preserved delicately through verse. Why is poetry, in particular, an effective means of capturing these moments?  Select several poems from the collection and discuss the ways in which the elements of poetry—figurative language, imagery, diction, line breaks—work to underscore the importance of a particular moment in time.

9.  Look closely at the four poems about the sport of squash: "Sunday Morning Squash" (p. 45), "The Grip" (p. 46), "The Serve" (p. 47), and "Inside the Box" (p. 48).  Why does the poet find squash a particularly "poetic" game?  How do these poems inform our understanding of the book's title, Inside the Box?

10.  What kinds of things does the poet lament in the third section, "Lament"?  Is there a tension between reality and expectation?  What also might the poet be suggesting about progress?

11.  In the poem, "On Getting from Here to There"  (p. 69), the poet asks: "What will we discover then, when our journeys are complete?"  But he seems more concerned with the nature of the journey than the destination. What examples does he give of journeys he seems to cherish?  Why might these journeys be better, compared to the faster, modern means to ends?

12.  Why might the poet have chosen to end his entire collection with the poem "Fire" (p. 102)?

Geri Radacsi's Tightrope Walker

  

 

1. Ekphrasis can be defined as a verbal representation of visual images. The Oxford Classical Dictionary says it is “the rhetorical description of a work of art.” Horace, born in 65 B.C., and a leading Roman poet, in Ars Poetica expressed the ekphrastic ideal of giving voice to painting and had as a principle, ut picture poesis, “poetry as a speaking picture and painting as mute poetry.”

The earliest examples of ekphrastic poetry focused on utilitarian objects such as goblets, urns, vases, chests, cloaks, weapons and armor, and architectural ornaments.

Select an ordinary object, a kitchen knife, a dog’s leash, an IPod, a hammer, mirror, clock, lamp, remote control. Write a self-contained description or interpretation of this thing. Write a poem where it is possible to “insert” the description in an appropriate place.

2. Note how this poetry collection is structured. How do the title and last poem, “Tightrope Walker” suggest an overriding theme? How does Idyll relate to Cold Rain and in turn to Tightrope Walker? How do the three sections present a progression of thought and overall arc of this book’s theme?

3. Historical background research was done by the poet in writing poems grounded in such art masterpieces at Matisse’s “Dance,” “American Gothic,” John Singer Sargent’s “Portrait of Madame X” and the famous photograph “Migrant Mother, 1936.” How can historical details create nuances in a poem?

Select a painting or photograph (not necessarily a celebrated one), and write a poem in which you not only use close description drawing on all the five senses to produce evocative imagery, but also invest the poem with a “history” either factual or invented. (Study Madame X for its sensual details.)

4. Consider the “persona” speaking in “Migrant Mother (Part I)". What’s the point of view, tone, attitude of the speaker? Find a photograph taken on a special occasion (birthday, anniversary, holiday festival, vacation) and write a persona poem drawing from one of the people pictured. What is this person thinking, feeling, hiding? Make the voice distinctive enough to resonate with ironic meanings.

5. Notice the difference in voice, attitude, and outlook of the two mothers speaking in Part I and Part II of “Migrant Mother.” Select a picture of your mother, and write about her qualities from different perspectives: of yourself, a sibling, her brother/sister, her husband, co-worker.

6. Consider the “persona” speaking in “Neferiti’s Missing Eye.” How would you describe this individual’s tone, characteristics, goals, and fantasies? Assume the role of a painter or sculptor and, write a poem in which the artist/speaker directly addresses the subject or model being transformed into an art form. Try experimenting with two opposite tones of voice; for example, the speaker could be in love with the model in one poem and be angry at the model in another version.

7. Look at “Sonny on Trumpet in the Quarter” and how it melds musical and personal themes. Select a musical form (classical, jazz, rock ’n roll, be-hop, hip-hop, rap, whatever). Taking the artist’s point of view as your favorite song is being performed, write a poem showing how it feels to bring the music to life. Use images that transform the music into words.

8. Online there is a useful site to look at some 40 ekphrastic poems accompanied by images. Ekphrastic Excursions is found at the site: http://www.dwpoet.com/poetassign.html It is the creation of Prof. David Wright of Wheaton College and contemporary as will as classic poets are represented. Include are W.H. Auden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hayden, Lisel Mueller, Frank O’Hara, W.D. Snodgrass, Wislawa Szymborska, and William Carlos Williams.

For an exercise, look at Randall Jarrell, "The Bronze David of Donatello" and compare and contrast that poem with “The David” in this collection. Consider such questions as how the poets have responded to the figure in the sculpture, the history, re-creation of the art through verbal means. What is the point of each poem? Is it the same as the work of art? What’s the point of view of the narrators?


9. “Einstein, Man of the Century” was inspired by a Time magazine cover. Depict your own Man or Woman of Any Century in an ekphrastic poem. The subject could be a revolutionary figure, such as Ghandi, Madame Curie, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Therese, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, or some other historical/political/literary/scientific giant. Look closely at minute details in a picture of the subject. Now decide on an approach you will take as poet to write about this subject. Some ideas: give voice to the subject through a “persona”; use the image/photograph to examine personal issues; conduct a narrative conversation or interview with the subject (what questions would you ask your subject?).

10. Art sometimes provides strong reactions. Look at “Woman in the Waves (Ondine).” Select a painting of your choosing and write a poem focusing on what feelings it elicits. What details in the artwork trigger them?

11. Various sources agree that the “original” classic ekphrasitic poem was a description of Achilles’ shield in the 18th book of Homer’s the Iliad. Some noteworthy historical examples of ekphrastic poetry are W. H. Auden’s “Shield of Achilles,” Keat’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” and William Carlos Williams’, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” More contemporary examples include Sylvia Plath’s “Colossus,” and Robert Hayden’s “Night Blooming Cereus.”

Study some of these poems for their ekphrastic elements. Try writing a poem using the form of one of these poems, but just for fun argue with the poet you’ve read and present an opposite stance in your poem.

12. Some paintings hold the viewer at a distance, spreading an entire panoramic scene, while others present a close-up of a subject. Consider how “Rainbow” uses both these techniques. Describe details of the panoramic vs. central focal point in the poem.
Write a poem from the eye of a camera that zooms in and out on details, then focuses on one facet of a person (mind, heart, pulse at the temple. eyes) or of an object (a string on a violin, the thorn on a sweater, the whistle of a teakettle) to discover a meaning in the progression of the narrative.

 

Steve Foley's A Place at the Table

 

Additional poems composed since the book appeared:

 

 

SMOKE

While his dad snores away
in his shit-brown vinyl recliner,
I follow him up the flaked metal ladder
to his apartment house roof.
First to enter the hinged opening,
he reaches back down,
grabs me by the wrist to pull me through.

We’re backed against the worn brick chimney,
late June sun banging off the scorching tar,
the whole idle summer stretching out before us.
He opens one hand,
shows me the two unfiltered Camels
he’s lifted from his dad’s dresser,
slides a match book from his jeans
and strikes us up.
Having done this lots of times,
he doesn’t cough when he inhales,
doesn’t fumble for a grip
that seems unstudied,
doesn’t have to look
to know it’s time to flick the ash.

He’s a different twelve than I am,
doesn’t listen to his mom,
doesn’t tell her where he’s going
or what time he’s coming home.
He’s the twelve girls look at,
older girls, taller,
girls who spend their time in front of mirrors,
liking what they see.

When the Camel burns down
to where it hurts my fingers,
I don’t show it,
can’t let him see
that I don’t know when to stop.
He stands, stretches,
skips a stone at the tangle of antennas,
flips the lit butt to the side yard below,
not knowing that twelve will be as good for him
as it’s ever going to be.

 

A MURDER OF CROWS

4:52.
caw caw
caw caw
cawcawcaw

The first assault,
not too close yet,
probably at the Morris house
or the Calderas’,
but it won’t be long now.
They know it’s too hot for me to close that window
within reach of this bed.
They know I teach high school,
that for ten months of the year the alarm blares at 5:20,
and so, for me,
July means sleep.

4:54.
Here already,
quicker than yesterday.
The first one’s found its lawn spot
and is sending out the calls,
each maddeningly the same:
caw caw
caw caw
cawcawcaw.

Over and over
it yammers, gets answered at some distance,
yammers once again
as though it had thought of something new to say.

My wife’s undisturbed sleep-sounds behind me,
I forego another time check with my unpillowed eye,
catalogue, again, some remedies that failed:
felling the pines that once lined our property;
mowing repeatedly, lower than low;
spraying fox urine under our three Rose of Sharons;
pounding a pole into a soft spot of grass
before setting on top a rubberized owl,
its half-attached head nodding when there’s wind.

The cacophony expands,
others, apparently, having staked out a yard patch,
the responses, now, no longer
resounding from other neighbors’
but from twenty feet away,
amid shadows our house would be throwing
if it wasn’t too early for the sun.
caw caw
caw caw
cawcawcaw.

The ceiling fan strains to comfort me
as I kick the sheet off,
tug it back up,
kick it off again.
Okay, this time I’ll start in the Midwest.
The capital of Nebraska is Lincoln.
The capital of Kansas is Topecaw
caw caw
caw caw
cawcawcaw.

At the window now
I see them all,
some stock still,
others milling like early arrivals at a yard sale,
the kind who pound your door
before you get the chance to set anything up.
I turn to face the bed,
the hallway beyond.
How can she still be sleeping!

Before I know it I’m through the kitchen,
down the steps to the attached garage,
shoeless, shirtless,
wrenching irons from my golf bag,
slinging open the door,

when from my right
a shrieking,
an inhuman keening in my neighbor’s back yard.
It’s Ella Tuttle on the dead run,
seventy-five if she’s a day,
nightgown hiked above her knees,
pruning shears glinting in the first ray of sun,
hell bent for the swarm.

 

THE YEARS SPEAK THEIR MESSAGE TO MY MOTHER

We will allow you the story
of how you’d walk home alone
through Hartford’s winter streets,
your late shift over at the telephone switchboard,
husband stationed in the Texas desert,

how you’d speed up at the dead spots the streetlights couldn’t reach,
long-legged strides gobbling the distance
from side street to side street,

how you’d see three, maybe four cars tops
clunking along the avenue that much after midnight,

how you’d turn onto Colonial,
no feeling left in your fingers and toes,
thud open with your shoulder the apartment house door,
head directly for the coal bin,
for the shovel in the corner
that you’d need to stoke the fire
so you could make it through the night.

Yes you can have that story,
but we’ll soften your bones so you’re unable to straighten,
unable to stride with more than a shuffle,
unable to lift a thing bigger than a spoon,

and we won’t allow you to remember
who you’ve told your story to.

Parker Towle's This Weather Is No Womb

 

 

Every book is the very best the author can create at one point in time. Mine represents thirty-five years of pretty steady study and Engagement in the craft of poetry. It is my unofficial New & Selected collection.

How do you approach a book of poems? I study the cover art which may be very pleasing in itself. I encounter the typography and overall production somewhat passively, I must confess, then advance to the back cover or fly-leaf blurbs. It’s nice to learn the names of certain friends of the author, and some knowledge of the contents may even be acquired. Biographical material about the author may be of interest, depending on our critical tendencies.

Next it may be well to scan the author’s book credits, poem acknowledgements, other prefatory material, epigrams, and notes to individual poems, perhaps, compiled at the end, so as to be oriented to their location and content once the actual reading begins.

Some readers may sample poems in the various sections of a volume. Being locked into narrative tendency, I find it best to start at the beginning. Infrequently I start at the end and work backwards. This may be out of laziness or contrariness. With more lyric poems it may matter very little.

Those obsessed by puzzles, games and mystery novels may try to figure the reasoning behind poem groupings in the sections of the book and the naming of these sections. They may or may not succeed. It probably will not matter. The groupings may be to some extent outside the author’s (or even the editor’s) consciousness. Like the poems, like our children for that matter, we do not own the books we write. They pass through us, but they belong to the world for better or for worse.

Typical of physicians and pedagogues, perhaps, I’m lecturing when I should be provoking my audience into thought. Well here’s a question: is poetry dead as some literati claim, I suppose, because it doesn’t fill stadiums? No, say others: it is taught more and better than ever before, and written more as well.

What makes poetry novel and irreplaceable in the creative arts? It follows tradition. “Old Friends” and “”Spring at Town Hall Bridge” are two examples. Yet new forms are created; see “Variations on a Riff by Eubie Blake, Dead Age 100, 1984.” More importantly, poetry expresses itself physically, a literary form steeped in sound and beat like music, but carrying the richness of human language and meaning. With great concision it conveys mystery and surprise. It liberates imagination from the shackles of story. These features will be found in prose fiction, memoir and biography as well, but there is something uniquely primordial in poetry that will never be attained in any other form. Poetry will live on as long as language survives.

I offer “Biking Remembered,” “The Architecture of Nine-Eleven” and “Mount Mansfield, Age Eight” as highlighting physicality, surprise and imagination respectively. You will find many more examples in this book. They are yours. Hopefully, they will touch you, and above all please.

Bruce Pratt's Boreal

“What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.” Soren Kierkegaard.

According to the Kierkegaard’s definition, I am not a poet. I am a relatively happy person, in fact, more so than I have been at many times in my life, and am writing more poetry now than at any point save for my late teens when I churned out reams of stream of consciousness prose and poetry without stopping to consider whether or not it was any good. Still, “when in doubt go dark, and if still in doubt go darker;” has long been my fiction mantra and has been known to find its way into my poetry.

It is also fair to say that I am a bit of an accidental poet, as I devote more of my time to short fiction. This has led friends and students to ask me whether I consider myself a short story writer who writes poems or a poet who writes short stories. I answer honestly that I am at a loss to see what the difference is. All writing is a mixture of ego and inspiration tempered and humbled by grinding hours of revision and doubt. One per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration, as the saw goes. Be the task an op-ed piece, a short story, a poem, or essay the process, from what Richard Hugo calls the initial “triggering” to the final draft, if there is such a thing, is a solitary slog.

My friend, the songwriter and novelist, Bill Morrissey, points out that a musician may get ten or fifteen years to gather enough good songs for a first album, honing them over time in the clubs and bars while discarding the duds and polishing the gems, but once the album is released, faces the daunting task of creating another dozen songs in the next year for the follow up recording. In my twenty years in the music business, I averaged an album of new material about every five years—two to three songs a year if you spread it out. A poet who manages only two or three poems a year risks being forgotten between books.

For me, songs came in bunches, and I find that poems and stories do as well. What is important to me is to always have work in progress, regardless of the genre. I may work on new poems and stories the same day, or on revisions of each almost simultaneously. My greatest fear is to have nothing in the works. That is why I get up early most days—the more hours the more opportunities to discover some “triggers.”

I find the prose and poetry processes to be similar. The main difference is that short stories begin with a character or characters, while poems spring from smaller moments, more concise visions. In this way poems tend to come to me like stream of consciousness or interior monologue, one spark leading to another.

Poetry gives me an outlet or opportunity that contemporary fiction allows me less frequently, and that is to explore lyricism. Contemporary poetry embraces vocabulary with a fonder zeal than contemporary short fiction. One need only read the vacuous slice of life prose that clogs the pages of the few national rags that still print fiction to see what I mean. For every wonderfully crafted William Trevor story in the New Yorker there are a half dozen dreadfully, self-indulgent, “frozen moments” of what is alleged to be an insightful look at contemporary life. It bores the hell out of me.

Working on poetry makes me a better fiction writer, more concise, more evocative, and from fiction I have learned the importance of structure, which, I believe, improves my poetry.

Lately, I have been trying to put to good use some advice I learned from Baron Wormser. He says that he often reads poems that seem unfinished, as if the poet were content to get enough of the job done to get on to the next thing. An emptiness is left behind. I am endeavoring to learn how to stay with the task to the end. This has sent me back to the poets who engaged me when I was in my teens and twenties: Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Blake, Whitman, Hardy, Yevtushenko, Frost, as well as to contemporary poets: Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Dennis Nurkse, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Ted Deppe, Jack Driscoll, Leslie Ullman, Betsy Sholl, Terrance Hayes, Brian Turner, Gerald Costanzo, Shara McCallum, Carolyn Forché, Kurt Brown, and Laure-Anne Bosselaar, to name a few. I have also been floored by John Stanizzi’s book Ecstasy Among Ghosts, which you can order right at this website.

In short, I am delirious to be here and grateful to Antrim House for allowing me into such a grand and accomplished family.

A new poem:

SHOES

My dog gets as excited
about shoes as Imelda Marcos,
not to chew on them
as a puppy might, but
because he believes,
regardless of the hour,
that the appearance of shoes
is a sign that perhaps,
slave to his chosen pace,
I am preparing to accompany him
on a long walk up the ridge,
where he can smell the world
and mark it with his urine,
or that someone is about to arrive
whose crotch he can sniff
so he can assess if they
are someone he’s met before,
or that he is about to be let out
to chase red squirrels
he can never catch
or to bark at a bear he realizes
is more than his equal.

Sandals, boots, flip-flops,
even a pair of socks,
can wind him in to a frenzy
of panting and tail-wagging
the way the right high heels,
on the right woman’s feet,
attached to the right woman’s legs,
can send a middle-aged mind careering
into reveries that widen the eyes,
rev the heart, and incite him
to suck in his gut and cheeks,
gestures, when seen from afar,
are as ridiculous
as the sight of my dog
leaping at a pair of old sneakers
dangling from my hands
as I prepare to wander
down the driveway
to see if the mail has come. 

Jocelyn Sloan's Geisha

  

This is a portrait of Jocelyn Sloan painted by Ann Scoville when she and her husband Pete Scoville were in Rochester during the 1940's, when Pete was affiliated with the University of Rochester:

 

.

 

And here is a letter Jocie Sloan wrote to the editor-publisher of Geisha, during the days when he and she traded poems at 1250 East Avenue. In it are some interesting stories about her youth, and of course the spontaneous style of the letter is very Jocie.

 

Bob Jacob's Perspective

 

I have noticed that some people shy away from the word "hospice" because of what it represents to them. Yet in reading to literally thousands of hospice patients and their family members over the past seven years, I have learned that they are filled with love and sometimes humor. Many openly share that love and hard-earned wisdom in the poems presented in Perspective.

The poems also provide an inside look at hospice life, in particular the work of nurses and volunteers. Hopefully this poetry collection will help attract others wanting to further that remarkable work, which is repeated at hospice locations everywhere.

The following are some new poems not contained in the book:

REQUEST

Propped against pillows,
extremely thin and frail,
motionless except for
her pale blue eyes which
follow my approach
to bedside to ask
if she would like to
hear some loving words,
and as I lean in close
a barely heard yes.

I read "Just For Today,"
a poem which prompts us
to ask God's blessings
and mercy one day at a time.
She nods, whispers, "Beautiful."

Sensing one more poem
might be her limit
I read six lines by
Raymond Carver ending
with his fulfilled wish
To call myself beloved,
to feel myself beloved on the earth.

I lean forward to hear
her soft words say,
"I used to stand in front
of a mirror and ask for that."

I gently hold her hand
as she catches her breath.
"I was married to an alcoholic,
but couldn't take it anymore.
Divorced him 20 years ago.
Haven't seen him since."

She closes her eyes, sighs.
I ask if I may kiss her. "Yes."
A soft kiss to her forehead.
She smiles.


THE SECRET

The street I was raised on
in Queens, New York City
was an arrow going nowhere,
a street of laborers, and
blue collars making the rent
for two story railroad flats.
Not a car in sight in 1940.
Elevated trains, subways a way of life.

We children in Public School 108
understood life's basic foundation.
You want something?
Go earn the money for it.

The lucky ones like me had
aunts, uncles, grandparents
within walking distance,
always there, human bricks,
their lives a constant struggle,
but their arms always open.

And therein lies the secret
which I had to learn
but is now totally understood
after traveling the world,
owning small cars, big fancy cars,
small houses, big houses,
even a lovely inn:

To love and be loved.
Everything else is just wrappings.

Jim Pearce's Slant Light

 

Since this is a seminar, I will treat the following as a lesson on where the poetry in this book came from. The only point that I am trying to make is that we should see clearly, within ourselves, the wellsprings from which our poetry comes. So I share what I have always known are the roots that form a basis of my approach to life and poetry.

I grew up in an affluent suburb of Toledo, Ohio, but I have few remaining ties.

If you should ask me where my spiritual home is, I would have to say the vicinity of the Ohio Valley around Steubenville. This is where both of my parents came from and where some members of my family still reside. It is the location of the “Erwin Place”—my grandfather’s farm. From time to time poetry was quoted at the supper table along with discussions of politics, etc. One time I mentioned that I was studying Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” in high school and my grandfather could quote the key portions of it. Likewise, I remember a long conversation that my mother, grandfather and I had that stretched to 2 A. M. It ended with the two of them quoting “Gray’s Elegy”, “Horatio at the Bridge” and other old jewels of English and American poetry.

But home for me is not a place; it is who and what. Home is my wife, Janet, my family (both biological family and married-into family) and my old friends: some still here, some gone from sight.

Finally, it is in the words of the English language that I find a lasting home. I revel in the sounds, cadences and the rich tapestry of my language: the golden lode of flexible, free form, always changing everyday language of America.

At 72, I know that the souls I hold so close and I, myself, will soon travel down the swift river. But by this river I plant this book showing that I was here, that I loved life and mainly saw the light that dwells in its admitted great darkness. From my parents and other family, I also see it in a somewhat jaundiced or slant way. Here I lay my analysis: usually not of me or my feelings but of what I see in life and how I see it (always analyzing says my wife).

Part of what I talk about above is the subject of the book’s first two poems: “The Erwin Place” and “Words”. The poems following are as varied as a paint store. A number reflect a great joy in the material world around me (i.e. “New Milk”, “Drinking Glasses”, “Outcrop”, “Arioso”, Andromeda” and “Nightsong”). Some are about children and growing up (“Pockets”, “Rain”). Others are whimsical or slant views of the ordinary things in life (“Certainties”, “Leadership Skills”, “Medicine Cabinet”, “California”, “Cathedrals”). Still others are deeper, dark poems about major questions in life (“Birdfeeder”, “Funeral Parlor”, “Wand”). Finally, there are poems that reflect the darkness and injustice of life (“Empire State Building”, “Hart Island”, “The Summer of 1939”) and those that come out of times of personal pain (“Ad Astra”, “Winter Woods”).

All of these and others are a gift from inside me to the reader.

Joan Kunsch's Playing with Gravity and new work

 

Here are some scribbles for a seminar-in-progress, though in my opinion I sound like a ballet teacher pretending to know something about being a poetry teacher. I think that whatever I do in poetry is instinctive, not knowledgeable.

I know what it feels like to abandon myself, to get lost in the reading aloud of a poem – mine or someone else's that I believe in and love – and can capture an audience, but I don't know what to say about making that process happen. I have to let it possess me.

I want to help others to get closer to poetry, but can only say this: read and write constantly, don't miss anything that goes on around you, observe with energy and put your whole imagination into whatever you are doing. Help others to find something of themselves in what you are doing. And re-write, make your poem more direct, try to omit anything that is not strictly necessary. Often the renovation of a draft is as exciting a process as the initial writing, or more so. In order to rewrite, we need the gifts of distance (in time, from the first draft); of an editor or two whom we trust deeply; and
of time, enough time to plunge ourselves into the writing and forget other influences and circumstances of life.

About translations… Translating poetry comes almost more easily to me than translating prose. Perhaps that's not explainable – just a sense of the magical non-practical!
I have never studied translation, but came to it as though it were inevitable, a part of my life's joy. The construction of individual words in Norwegian seems poetic all by itself. Some examples: "aa undervise" (to teach) literally means “to show wonders”;
"skinnhellig" (sanctimonious) literally means “skin-holy"; and “uransakelig" (unsearchable) is derived from the same root as “to ransack.”

Interrelationship between dance and poetry: The best dance is cleared of all unnecessary movements. There is a clear line, a certain momentum, an elegance (unless the role calls for other qualities). Likewise in poetry, all unnecessary words should be eliminated to dart straight to a mood, a moment, a relationship, a revelation. I believe that poetry is the highest form for use of language, and dance is the highest form of human movement. As a choreographer, I have not often produced a ballet based on words without music; however, "CantaNeruda" was one such work, premiered in New York City and also performed in Binghamton, NY.

Interrelationships among dance, poetry and music: Robert Browning's poem "My Last Duchess" had appealed to me for a long time as a source for choreography when I heard a piece of music that showed me scenes from the ballet-to-be, and also showed me how
the young Duchess died, and what happened after her death.

 

NEW PHOTO AND POEMS FROM JOAN

NIGHT BLIZZARD

For Ilana and Moshe Siman-Tov

Night blizzard
horizontal in its seventh hour
hurtles north to south.
Captivated for an instant
around a streetlamp
snowflakes whirl
as though suddenly onstage
in a spotlight: tiny white dervishes
in a tarantella spell ~
broken when gusts whip them
headlong, further, deeper
into darkness.

In a parallel dream or memory
it is night in Istanbul.
From a small restaurant balcony
two friends gaze out
over a plaza, where
in pools of light
beneath the lamp posts
white-robed dervishes whirl
a prayer spun through the night
by humans in harmony
with snows and with planets.

 

POSTCARDS HOME

(from Oslo, March 20, 2105)

Reflected on rain-glistened paving stones,
lamplights of old Norway
seem to float on their posts
along an allee
lined on either side
with slender bare trees.
Close together, evenly spaced,
the lamps and leafless limbs
watch over my return
to Oslo, saying ~~
Welcome back,
it's heavy luggage you're pulling,
but here it is Spring
and more dancers are waiting
for you.~~
A Nordic breeze
makes windows on a distant hillside
twinkle as pinpoints
and I know
this is another
homecoming.

 

IMAGINING ALASKA IN ADVANCE

Up before first light
I manage to
stand still and pray
before springing out in leggings
and goose down under chill clouds
to face a new landscape.
Today adrenalin replaces breakfast
because the dog team is waiting
with yips and whimpers of trekking joy.
As six Huskies bound forward
the sled leaves the ground.
I grab for the seat ~ (no handles here!) ~
and hang on with frozen mittens,
snow-goggled and suddenly
soaring on this ride
out and up. It is now
one can be sibling to spruce
and the daytime moon, now
the glaciers are family members, soon
wolverine and bear might appear.
Brewed over a bonfire in snow,
java runs like black lightning
through the veins.
A Howleluia tonight:
Aurora Borealis.



 

 

 

 

Polly Brody's The Burning Bush & At the Flower's Lip

These are the most significant elements that influence my writing: a sense of connection with, and understanding of the natural world, and the numinous kinship I discover between "science" and poetry. I frequently draw metaphors from the world of nature. Attributes of its fauna, flora, and the dynamic interplay of life with environment provide me with subject matter directly, but also with imagery that I use in poems having focus elsewhere.I am not an urban poet, because that is not my habitat. My writing stays within the frames of reference that are real to my own experience of them. I am not a "feminist" poet, and one will only infrequently read a political poem among my collections. This is not to denigrate any of the preceding, but only to say that my passions lie elsewhere. What reaches deep into me is: the poignancy of transience, the excitement of nature's inventiveness and profusion of expression, the mutability of all beings, myself included, and the implications of relationship.

In this poem, I find a conjunction between science and poetic celebration:

ONE ATOM FROM GREEN

Leaves unfurled within my veins
when I first learned the properties of chlorophyll:
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen
configured 'round a ring
whose center is magnesium.
This society summer-dances
along every twig,
springs in tussocks,
spreads platters green on ponds
for frogs to squat upon,
is harvested by vegetarians everywhere.

Yet replace that atom
central to each ring--magnesium,
with one of iron
and conjure hemoglobin--
the pigment running red
in us.

 

REVIEW OF THE BURNING BUSH from THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY (Spring, 2007 (Vol. XLVIII, No. 3)

from Polly Brody's Stirring Shadows and new work

From The Comstock Review

Other Nations (Wood Thrush Press, 1999) is Polly Brody’s excellent first collection. Its content centers around the poet’s “other career” as a biologist and ranges around the world she has traveled and visited during her life. Her second book, The Burning Bush (Antrim House, 2005), is a collection of essays and poems exploring the natural world in lyrical language and luminous vision. And her stunning third collection, At the Flower’s Lip (Antrim House, 2007), is filled with sensual, yet spiritual, poems which focus on the natural world. Amid poems of tree and flower, we watch a marriage unwind, a new lover tease desire from river, wind, and flower. And we are caught up and transformed by these earthy, transcendent poems that glory in the beauty of our natural world and our responsive, desirous bodies. Bravo! Now we have Stirring Shadows (Antrim House, 2009) with its poems recounting the darker side of the world and its peoples. She relates and contrasts these to the wonders of the natural world. She is a true visionary and a strong necessary voice in the poetic world.

 

MORE SAMPLE POEMS

Arlington National Cemetery

His ashes, urned,
rest upon a sturdy catafalque.
Three sober youths stand alongside,
each facing, across this bier,
another like himself, dress-uniformed.

Outstretched between them,
the flag held taut—
not the slightest tremble when
twenty-one volleys crack the air,
not the slightest tremble when
Taps floats from an invisible bugle.

A senior officer at the bier’s head
begins the fold. First triangle
pressed lovingly upon his chest.
Triangle in-folded again,
again and yet again upon itself.

His white-gloved palm strokes
smooth each slightest wrinkle—
his gesture, a tenderness for all
who lie here, and will lie here.

The stretched flag glides slowly
from the hands of young Marines
into that grave, gathering triangle.

Borne to the widow
as if it were a child,
the swaddled flag
from bended knee, offered up.

 

Nagyanya and Nagyapa*

Spring candles flicker on our table
and I see again those mornings:
Mother combing lichen-gray
falling to Nagyanya’s waist,
coiling the hair in one braid at her nape.
Patient under daughter-in-law’s comb,
Nagyanya broods into whatever space
dreams before her.

Refugee in our American kitchen,
she recalled sour cream veal paprikas
and exquisite tarts of apricot and prune;
yearned for paper-thin palacsinta
stacked with sweet pot cheese and yellow raisins,
while her hands smoothed crocheted doilies
over our maple table—doilies I watched
unfurl their twined hearts and paired doves
from the white thread wound past her fingers.
She spoke of aunts, uncles, cousins gathered
at a Circassian walnut table
furnished with crystal, antique silver, and Sabbath candles.

I see again the tent stretched at noon
over our guest room four-poster,
and my old, otherworld grandfather, Nagyapa,
lie down within that magic shroud,
resting his congested heart
while the tall, oxygen cylinder clicks time.

Sitting with me in sunlight grown mild,
Nagyapa fabled their lost home:
Sunday drives with coach and two—dappled grays—
matching strides past neighbors waving,
peasants lifting caps, past vineyards—
Count Esterhazy’s Tokay grapes kept safe
by grape-guards armed with rock salt.
Nagyanya wore a wide-brimmed hat,
silk shielding skin white as pear blossoms.
As he spoke, the paper on his knee,
Nagyapa’s finger stroked thick, black arrows
mapping World War II’s advance on Europe.

Spring 1945—resurrected light
was mellow on our kitchen table.
My father and his father listened
to words of revelation from London.
Nagyapa leaned forward,
hands folded one over the other
on his shepherd’s crook cane.
Nagyanya rocked in her chair,
hearing her son translate ashen discoveries,
the living dead.
She put her finger to a fabric lozenge
on the face of our domed, wooden radio,
felt the speaker’s breath vibrate....

*Nagyanya and Nagyapa fled Hungary—1938

 

 

NEW WORK FROM POLLY BRODY

Now two years into my eighties, my body is clearly telling me I am no “spring chicken.” Arthritis in hips and low back murmurs constant low-level discomfort, which is quite a bit more than low level when I first rise from bed in the morning. I feel like the Tin Woodsman, needing a shot of oil. My mom lived until she was eighty nine. As she entered her eighties, she fretted over the changes she saw in her physical appearance: skin becoming wrinkled instead of firm (she called it prunish) and the appearance of spider veins on her slender ankles. She retained good eyesight all her life, but became increasingly hard of hearing in her last fifteen years. She resisted wearing a hearing aid. Indeed, I don’t wonder that the one she eventually purchased was an enemy rather than ally: why is an instrument made that has controls so tiny, and battery replacements so miniscule that arthritic fingers are unable to manipulate them? Mom and I were buddies, only twenty years apart in age. She lived in a country home and loved the world of nature. She and I were birdwatchers; often we strolled together through the nearby groves and meadows. We both delighted in the spring return of warblers, oriole, and tanager. Each April, we both sought to hear the clear ringing song of the Louisiana Waterthrush.


I dedicate these two poems to my mother.

Benediction

I walk once more with you, mother,
along this dirt road
thirty years familiar,
skirting pasture and woodlots.
The in-your-face maples
have lost grip on scarlet and flame.
Oaks bring out vintage burgundy,
distillation so deep, its reds
seem to glimmer into black light.
Preceding us, a progression of flushes--
juncos and whitethroats disturbed
from breakfast on poison-ivy berries--
and we slow our pace even more
than your arthritis demands,
so their alarms may be muted.
Then you stop.
About us, the small bustle of birds.
Pish-pish, pish-pish you whisper,
and they come up from bushes, weed margins.
Between us a prayer suspends,
ambiguous as cobwebs not yet defined by dew:
May you go like this,
flutter of downy woodpecker at your breast,
ruby-crowned kinglet's d-jeet in your ear.

 

Mother’s Gift

In this world until three days past eighty nine,
Mother’s aging body taught my eyes
the undeniable companion of longevity:
how under arms, the skin assumes soft pleats
like ripples receding tide leaves behind on sand bars;
how venous tributaries spider-web the ankles
and larger, blued traceries climb the calves;
how the jaw’s firm contour loosens;
how hair’s silver fox pelt whitens and thins,
and most of all, how the belly pouches out.

My mother’s mother died of cancer before
my mother reached her thirties.
That early death foreclosed the years
that might have taught this daughter
the natural wisdom in age’s runes,
so as her body slackened and skin grew prunish
Mother fretted and fumed.

Now my once-taut integument pleats, sags, pouches,
and lavender stencils my ankles.
Yet, recalling the beloved flesh of the woman
who bore and raised and loved me,
I stroke with tenderness my lumpy varicosities,
and kindly pat the crone’s tummy
that I now own.

 



Cheryl Della Pelle's Down to the Waters

In the quiet of winter, I had the opportunity to take an eight-week poetry workshop with seven other ladies. We met weekly at St. Michael's Church here in Litchfield. Jennie Mathieson, the pastor, kindly opened her doors to us and joined in the workshop as well. The thrill of writing new work was evident each week. Everyone embraced the assignments with enthusiasm and we all could barely wait for our turn to share. We were given prompts by Nancy Miller, our facilitator, such as "death", "work", "surprise", etc. along with sample poems by other writers to give us a bit of a push. Winter's drear seemd to disappear and wa-la! it is April already! Winter writing is a perfect way to celebrate the new year, new life and to give the winter blues a kick! Here is some of what I wrote:

PARTY TIME

Just when winter has quelled you
and you stop knowing the word surprise
an icy wind blows all night
bringing to a half-buried raspberry patch
three mylar balloons
half-collapsed
that have escaped the party
like naughty children
hopped up on cake.

 

WHAT COMES FROM DARKNESS

Under snow slowly melting
subterranean ovules
in a dream-state
held in suspension
in the mind of the earth
become restless.
Flowering is the thought.
A germ of light
sends a signal down
then up
then sideways
cracks open a winged seed
dormancy breaks
rambunctious
roots spring out
in the quiet pitch
obey the moon’s pull
while days lengthen like golden ribbons.
Above-ground glory
owes everything to the darkness
to watery time
and this unruly upward surge.

 

WOODLOT MANAGEMENT

Truman Capote said work
not love is the most beautiful word.
With that in mind
I order a darling, a dream
Japanese pruning saw
from a high-end tool catalog
and count the days
like falling leaves
until the box appears
on autumn's doorstep

Packaging litters
the linoleum floor
and there inside the ravaged box
lies the perfectly conformed casing
like a hard exoskeleton
with a dangerously honed saw
red-handled and ready ensconced
which I unsheathe and lock into position
all 7 inches of blade bearing its teeth
dying to bite into limbs
and fell straight-backed saplings.

I fold the blade back,
click it into the case
and clip the saw onto my belt.
I head for the woods
like it was my birthday,
cut like butter across the grain,
know the backwards pull
is the one with the most cut,
let the tool work for me
a woods woman on the trail
who needs to make fire
before dusk.

Brad Davis, OPENING KING DAVID


Regardless of your belief system, be it religious, philosophical, scientific, or idiosyncratic, we live in a world that at times affirms our beliefs, at other times grinds them into grits. Which I prefer with cheese and topped by an egg fried in bacon grease, over-medium.

Heck, if we're honest, we ourselves, from time to time, carry on our own arguments with the things we believe, even though for x number of years we have built lives based on those very beliefs. My four Antrim books constitute a loose but disciplined conversation between what is (I hope) an open mind, my mind—a mind shaped by particular experience and beliefs—and the Psalms, a text regarded as sacred by at least two of the world's religions, Judaism and Christianity. A text I grew up reciting or chanting in hundreds of religious services before I chose to stop attending them.

In a way, my entire 150-poem Antrim sequence is an extended ekphrasis, a long poem reflecting upon and turning attention back to a singular collection of art: 150 really old, Middle Eastern song lyrics-in-translation (I cannot read Hebrew) for which we have lost the original tunes. More important than how to classify the sequence, the three-year process of drafting the poems—from Psalm 1 to 150, a poem a week—allowed me hear, learn, quarrel with, and be formed by those texts all over again.

Whatever you may believe, likely there's a tradition of art, literary or otherwise, that has evolved from the essential elements of your belief system. If ever a muse summons you to take up a disciplined conversation with the "sacred" art of your world/life view, I hope you do it. Here's how I approached the task, beyond setting the goal of a newly drafted poem per week. I commend the approach as a potentially fruitful methodology, whether what you end up writing is an extended sequence or a brief lyric.

Because an encounter with the sacred (whether the Upanishads or Origin of the Species or Dr. Seuss or Leaves of Grass) summons all of who we are to the encounter, I decided to lump my "all" into three "horizons" on which I would try to establish simultaneous attention and then bring that attention to the drafting process; the horizons being 1. my skin and all that moves therein (the good, the bad, the ugly); 2. my surroundings (natural, cultural, relational, situational); and 3. the ineffable mystery represented by and revealed in or through the sacred art.

The weekly process would begin on Sunday mornings with silence. Having marshaled my all (albeit never altogether wholly), I would then engage the week's Psalm, reading it slowly and, in the first day or two, again and again, journal in hand. I ruled out no possible direction for the emerging new poem. I worked with whatever I could collect by midweek and composed from the mess of imprecise thoughts and images something I could return to later when the drafting was done. Sometimes a poem's connection to its triggering Psalm was evident; other times, well.... On the best of weeks I'd have a draft saved before going to bed Friday night so I could give the project a rest on Saturday. Then on Sunday morning I'd drop into silence and begin again.

As a method, this may not work for you. Heck, reading the poems of the sequence you may conclude that it didn't really work for me either. On the other hand, the discipline was extraordinarily valuable. It not only carried me over a major midlife career change but served to return me to the beauty and struggle of my faith. Which, really, is not such a bad thing.

 

 

 

Marilyn E. Johnston's Silk Fist Songs and Weight of the Angel

SILK FIST SONGS

The primary genesis for Silk Fist Songs was losing a beloved father and older brother within a year and a half of each other, at age 88 and 57, respectively.

In 2001 the Towers fell, 2002 my father fell.and so began a year’s agonized deterioration of old age, heart failure, emphysema weakening him to a shrunken, emaciated fighter conniving, inwardly raging, and suffering against his own decline. He died exhausted in May 2003 five years ago.

While Dad sickened, the world outside swirled with anthrax scares, terrorism threats, and build-up to the Iraq war that staggered and demoralized us. At this time, my brother, Ken, a postman, hard-working father of two draft-age sons, suffered an intense recurrence of hereditary Crohns, an intestinal disease that had first flared up in (and almost took his life after) his tour in Vietnam in the late sixties. He steadily worsened through all of 2003 and 2004. Later, he was diagnosed with cancer. He died tragically of Crohns and colon cancer in December 2004.

Writing has been my “stay against confusion” since my post-college stumble into adulthood. My family was often subject matter. It was a bewildering corporate world I entered in 1973 and I was not ready. As a young person, writing helped me make a refuge and to negotiate the long process of developing a self against the pressures of an organization which simultaneously alienated yet, bizarrely, worked as a ground for much needed self-growth. I had to see myself challenged and mastering life. Writing poems was a way of strengthening and hearing my own voice. For twenty years, I wrote mainly with no audience but the silent witness in beloved books. When I left Cigna in 1991, I searched out other local poets and conferences and entered an exhilarating world of real life writing souls.

Five years ago, writing and mourning merged into “one art,” as Elizabeth Bishop says they do in her poem on the art of losing. I’d come back from a hospital or home visit with my father or brother teeming with overwhelming emotions triggered by seeing them in an ultimate way, under the aspect of eternity. Each moment together started to feel like the “last time.” Just being with them, I would live through a poem. I had to write it, save it, study it. I saw their essence in a phrase, a hand gesture, a reminisence. Memories haunted me; images, patterns from the past came to the surface to be relived.

Sometimes, unprecedented honest moments happened between us. Insights I could barely handle. Looking back on this now, I see it was a process of letting go, of reckoning up unfinished understandings. I needed to try to understand them before I could ever relinquish them (if I have). I also had to understand myself.

In this process, the past poured out like opening Pandora’s box: childhood, teen-hood, coming of age, love and marriage. What kind of girl was it that my husband found in 1966 when he met me? How did I get that way? How was I formed? By whom? Who was I now? Who would I become, without these men in my family, their supportive and challenging presences and voices? I felt I had to re-bond with them on some new footing.

“Life must be lived forwards, but it must be understood backwards, ” said Soren Kierkegaard. I lived backwards into time, wrote constantly, often in tears. A passionate momentum carried me. I searched memories, old photos, pulled out poems written long ago, revised them in light of the now wrenching experience of loss. Mourning has been the process of building a work of art that I hope is a testament to my love as well as a claim to my own character.

These compilations I drafted became the core of the book that Rennie McQuilkin helped me finish.

 

WEIGHT OF THE ANGEL

Over the years I’ve written many poems about my mother. In my forties, when I was attempting to shift from a long career in insurance to a life in poetry, I felt an inner clash. I was fighting her unspoken rules of “don’t risk, don’t delve, don’t be too different.” Poetically this drama began to coalesce around my mother’s vast, long-time collection of knick-knack “angels.” Symbolic totems, to me. One theme they suggest might be what Virginia Woolf called “the Angel in the House,” a name for a particular kind of ideal of perfect womanhood dear to the Victorian Era of which my mother (born in 1922) was a daughter. I wrote many poems trying to come to grips with this ideal, taking its measure, its full "weight" as legacy, both in terms of its hampering burdens and its positive gifts.

What follows is a series of thoughts on particular poems, accompanied by ways of approaching those poems and possibly using them as springboards for your own writing.

1. “The Cornflower Blue Dress” began with looking at old photos and being spun back into the past. This poem recounts a brief and subtle drama with two forces clashing in silence. Can you characterize each force and the nature of their conflict? What does the final image call up for you in your life? Review “Angel Walking.” It too began with a photo. How is it different from and similar to “The Cornflower Blue Dress”?

Idea for writing: Review old photos. Notice the clothes you were in. What were the subjective feelings of being inside those clothes? Describe those feelings and relate any memories that come back to you.

2. “Coffee,” “On Being Washed,” and “Crocheting” all hinge on step-by-step actions of a simple task. In each poem, what can you intuit about the inner character from the depiction of actions? What is revealed about the child/observer watching and selecting the details? What implications of relationship reverberate beyond the task at hand?

Idea for writing: Make a portrait or self-portrait by describing the step-by-step operations of a daily task. Include details that can be seen as idiosyncratic to the particular doer. Close observations may allow you convey the essence of someone.

3. “Grandma’s Solo” and “Of Sunday Gone” employ the form of dramatic speech using a character’s own voice. Intuit all circumstances out of which Grandma is speaking her “solo.” What conflict is at issue? Weigh her last words, “It’ll only be for a little while.” What meanings hover there, some known to the woman speaking, some not? In “Of Sunday Gone” what is the speaker’s immediate problem, state of mind, understanding of her state and coping strategies? How do your sympathies fall, facing each of these dramatic speeches? Each is actually a speech-within-the-poet’s-larger-speech. Discuss this “ventriloquist‘s” own speech in “Critical Monologue of a Daughter.”

Idea for Writing: Invent a dramatic monologue, employing words and style of voice from someone in your own life or from history. Let a one-sided conversation imply the circumstances of the scene, setting, and situation. Let the reader intuit the “players,” the emotions, and the problem guiding the content and delivery of this speech.

4. “Extra Gentle Tonette” is one of many poems that is written“in situ”—that is, it relocates a self in a place in the past and describes all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and muscular pressures involved in the experience. How many senses are drawn upon in this poem? Do the images conjure insights about the experience and the characters?

Idea for Writing: Put yourself back in a physical place and describe an experience there using details from as many senses as you can. Allow the reader to relive it with you and primarily let the sensory images speak for themselves.

5. “Odd Girl Out,” “Admission from Nowhere,” and “Love’s Way”: each poem turns on an intense emotional confrontation after long repression, wherein one character directly challenges another. In each poem, define the oppositions coming into stark encounter. How does each confrontation resolve? Can you think of similar “show-downs” in your own life?

Idea for Writing: Narrate an intense emotional “one-on-one” in your own experience or imagination. Use third person narration, or narrate by directly addressing the other party—and follow, as you choose to, the stages of the show-down to the resolution or non-resolution reached.

6. Many poems present close description of an object: “High School Theft,” “Ceramic Figure,” “Hip Hop Tree,” “Brother’s Accordion,” “Cross-Over Locket,” and “Her Bonica Rose.” Discuss the details and meanings each object holds. What part does each play symbolically within the larger themes and narrative progression of this book?

Idea for Writing: Find an object around the house, new or possessed many years. Describe it in detail. Let broader associations of the object flow out of the physical description, minimizing direct statements of its meaning.


7. Some poems depict an outing of two or more characters, e.g., “Shopping Trip” and “Antiquing.” Apart from the ordinary backdrop of his or her life, a person may suddenly be seen in a new light, under eternity, so to speak. How does the daughter’s view of the mother undergo a change in each of these poems? Pinpoint the details of the setting and actions that carry awareness of a new vantage.

Idea for Writing: Have you witnessed or felt a similar transformation in a new setting with someone? Let details of the setting carry the discovery of a perspective change.


Elizabeth Thomas's From the Front of the Classroom

In the act of teaching, I am also a student – ready to learn, to experience new ideas, to meet new people. This is one of the thrilling aspects of my work as a poet and educator. It is also part of my creative process. Many of the poems in the book From the Front of the Classroom were inspired by young people I’ve met along the way.

I joke with students and tell them – “More than being a poet, I am a supreme eavesdropper and people-watcher. I’m lurking and listening, always ready with a pencil and paper.”

“Will you write a poem about me?” they often ask.

Again, many of the poems in this collection are a response to that question.

“My Muse” is my favorite poem in the book (at least today it is). It started as a 10+ page free-write. I could have gone on much longer, but at that point the poem was beginning to make itself known. In the classroom, I frequently jot down comments the students make and included many of their voices in this performance piece.

I often use it in the classroom as an example of what the “art of eavesdropping” offers and enjoy giving it as an assignment – “Go out into the world (take the bus, sit in a café, go to the park during lunchtime) and listen. Then write.”

Ellen Rachlin's Until Crazy Catches Me

 

RELATIVITY


Sometimes the sun takes hours to shut down;
I go slower.
In that expansion of a celestial tilting,
I go slower.

The Milky Way pushes its light years hulk
once around
each several hundred million years.

From birthday to ceremony,
season to remembrance,
time alters its spaces.

And the ducks cross Canandaigua Creek
as they did when I was ten,
counting them in their single line.



Each verse of "Relativity"contains a distinct element of thought/information leading to the unstated point of the poem, each proceeding in a connected separateness to the next. The series starts with the fiery enormity of the visible sun and moves to the known but invisible hulk of the galaxy, then to the pedestrian nano event of days and repetition of seasons, and on to the ducks in a row crossing the inconsequentially named Canandaigua Creek. Relativity occurs in the presence of the line of ducks with the light years pushing their hulks across the infinite universe.

 

 

RADISHES IN CHILDHOOD


My neighbor has no children;
she finds things to do.
No one at my house misses me.
This afternoon we plant radish seeds
between her cold-frame box
and the cellar door.
We dig up dots of earth
and crush them into powder.


Will the seeds disappear and never grow?
Seeds need rain, but I'm afraid
of rain when it rattles
my attic bedroom window
and lands just short of me.
It seems okay to do without rain,
but she explains rain matters
and how to make do
with what you have
as you grow.

 

Simplicity and clarity are the essential elements leading to statements of complex truths in poetry. I tried to incorporate in that little story of planting radishes the various and opposed conditions of bland fact, of loneliness, of fear, of magic and of love.

 

 

TRAVELS

Pain waits atop its web; its prey can’t unravel.
Bad luck crosses each path, even an open field.
Grief meanders ahead; ill fates become sealed.
Pain waits atop its web. Pray you can unravel
a bandage, a row, a knot, a myth, or a battle.
The careless and the wise trip pain’s sentinel.
Pain waits atop its web; its prey can’t unravel.
Bad luck crosses each path, even an open field.

 

The triolet form (in which a key line is repeated three times) works well for communicating one point. The form proves that what is true combines all the clarity of what is brief and the complexity of what is obscure. “Travels” is about the fear of bad luck finding one despite all caution. The best one can do is hope to survive the inevitable collision with disaster.


 

 Jim Kelleher's Quarry

I sometimes think I wasted my life trying to write poems. I wonder are the poems good enough to justify what I didn't do with my time and talents. I think I would have been good in a number of professions. And helpful.

Then I think I have been provided a certain grace, or solace, to bear with all else life brings, providing I honor the gift I think I have. Viz., keep trying and the waters of the sea will remain parted. It's certainly too late to turn back now, and at least I have stories to tell. The trick is: don't look behind you, and especially, don't look sideways.

EASTER PSALM

You who send the gray geese high
answer all my questions why.
And if at last I cannot know
please let me too, let go --
but give me time so that I may
complete my work, if not today,
then another day. Let my sorrow
fade far away, tomorrow.

David K. Leff's The Price of Water

A PROSE POEM MANIFESTO

The time has arrived to . . . break down the barriers of form between prose and poetry. – Walt Whitman


At first blush, the term “prose poem” seems an oxymoron, a concept at war with itself. After all, every schoolchild knows that poems are arranged in musical stanzas and prose is built of paragraphs. Prose is, after all, prosaic, while poetry strives for the sublime. For many, prose poems may appear queerly hermaphroditic.


Of course, since the second decade of the Twentieth Century a fine body of American prose poems has grown, including those of Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Robert Bly, Robert Hass and James Tate. Even journal entries of Nineteenth Century luminaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and H. D. Thoreau have been rediscovered as prose poems. But not until Charles Simic received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for The World Doesn’t End did prose poems begin to gain the attention and respect they deserve, at least among cognoscenti.


No doubt it appears impertinent for a self-taught tyro to discourse on a topic that has been carefully scrutinized by distinguished scholars and great poets. I risk doing so only because direct and specific inquires have been made by friends and readers for whom the concept of prose poems is perplexing. While individual works must stand on their own without embroidery, it seemed I owed some general explanation to those who have graciously taken the time to read my work.


Prose poems might well be called paragraph poems in contrast to verse where line breaks are a distinctive feature and a form of punctuation. Prose poems can embrace all the devices of traditional verse—consonance, alliteration, rhyme, metaphor, simile, and rhythm—but in a format where the sentence rather than the line is the basic building block. Like traditional poems, they can be musical and contain a startling density or high specific gravity of sense, imagery, and sound. Prose poems also share with verse an economy of words and compression of simple observations to arrive at universal truths.


Since Charles Baudelaire initiated the genre in 1862 with Petits Poèmes en Prose, many poets and critics have advocated prose poems as an avant-garde instrument for overthrowing the conventions of verse. My purpose is quite contrary. I write prose poems because they provide an opportunity to present poetry in a way that more directly speaks to the widest range of readers by using a framework with which they are comfortable. “People generally do not run for cover when they are confronted with a paragraph or two,” Tate observed.


Prose is the daily bread of written communication. We read sentences and paragraphs wherever we turn our attention—from advertisements to newspaper and magazine articles, whether on paper or online. But too often we forget that even mundane writing or speech has a euphony that the pen or tongue expresses unconsciously—like a divining rod finding veins of water. Prose poems fully ripen familiar language into a shape that provides wonder, discovery and resonance.

I believe in poetry that is equally welcome in barrooms and classrooms. What better way to infect people with poetry than to embed its music and spring-loaded thoughts in the ordinary format most people use every day?

 

Kenton Wing Robinson's The Water Sonnets

I begin with a line from Flann O'Brien, that greatest of Irish novelists and newspapermen: ”When it comes to poetry readings, I've always sympathized with an acquaintance of Myles na gCopaleen's, who, upon finding himself at a verse speaking bout, 'hurried outside and tore his face off. Just that. He inserted three fingers into his mouth, caught his left cheek in a frenzied grip and ripped the whole thing off.' Thus is monotony defeated and dolorousness assuaged …”

As one who not only has attended poetry readings but is guilty of reading his poems in public, I understand the impulse. But I don't plan to stop. Perhaps because I labor under a delusion common to my species: that I am not a bore. My poems, I may flatter myself, will amuse, provoke, delight, beguile and shock. (I will now put down my thesaurus.) And, after all, those who attended my readings were complicit in their predicament. Nobody herded them there.

I bring this up because I am now the proud father of my first book of poetry, a slender volume published by Antrim House and titled The Water Sonnets. And I will be introducing it to the world at a book release party at the Hygienic Art Galleries in New London.Which is apt, as many of the poems owe their settings to New London and the region, and many are reflections on my curious occupation: newspaperman.

Still, having written in happy obscurity for nearly 50 years, this feels a bit presumptuous, like one of those dreams where you find yourself strolling down Bank Street in your pocketless skin. I did not write my poems for this. In fact, even if I were never published, I would write still. It is a kind of sickness, this love of words, this need to shape them into small and intricate machines that you hope might live and breathe on their own.

It's wonderful to be - at last - a book. But poetry only lives in the human voice, and a book of poetry is a dead letter until you open it and read from it aloud. And so, I will be reading from and signing copies of my book at the Hygienic, and you, dear reader, are invited. If, however, you should come and feel the urge to tear your face off, don't say I didn't warn you.

Lisa Sornberger's Returning Light

Thank you for visiting my page here. Working on this book has been a terrific experience, giving me lots of joy and a deeper understanding of how to convey experience and emotion through language. I’ve been writing since I was a young teenager, as a way of working with the tumult that teenagers live! It came to me as naturally as singing, plus I grew up in a family that encouraged reading and respected language and the arts. "Write poems, but train to do something practical so you can get a job!”

I was inspired by some of my favorite singer-songwriters, such as Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon, CSNY, plus the Beat poets, Sylvia Plath, and Erica Jong, to name a few. Some of the poems in this collection are brand new, some are pieces I began many years ago, but never really “finished” until push came to shove and I was ready to meet the opportunity of writing a collection. Joni Mitchell once said, “I write my sorrow, and I paint my joy.” Writing poems has always been a way for me to deal with sorrow, and transcend it. I hope readers can relate to the themes and emotions in the poems, and, ultimately, get a feeling of clarity, resolution, and joy in the process of reading them.

Thanks to my editor and publisher, poet Rennie McQuilkin, for understanding my vision, and sharing his abundant gifts for language to help me fine-tune the work so I could say what I wanted in the best way possible. And to my husband, John, who is so very kind and smart (plus handsome, just a bonus-ha!), yet still fun. He brings me happiness worth singing about! Also to Sandy Mastroni, the painter whose work graces the cover.

 

INTERVIEW WITH THE NEWS HUB

I last talked to poet Lisa Sornberger (The Huffington Post) in 2013 when Gathered Light, her memorable collection of Joni Mitchell's poetry was published.
With the devastating news of Joni's poor health high on the media's agenda, I catch up with the Connecticut resident who describes poetry as "a constant" in her life. Member of the Thread City Poets, Sornberger's publications include A chapbook (2004), Stone and Feather (2008), Returning Light, and the 2013 Gathered Light: The Poetry of Joni Mitchell’s Songs (Three O’Clock Press). Here Lisa talks about Joni, her love of poetry and Sally Taylor's inspirational global art project "Consenses."

Q We first talked when Gathered Light, your stunning compilation of Joni Mitchell’s poetry came out, how is that going?


A It is a joy to hear just how much people like it. What do writers want, really, other than to know that their words were understood and received as intended?
To quote Joni from Jericho, "It's a rich exchange. It seems to me It's a warm arrangement." That was the main impetus behind the book too…to let Joni know that her words were received as the poetry they are and what impact they have had and continue to have, on so many people, with an added focus on the way Joni’s creativity sparks creativity in other writers…In Gathered Light, I loved reading each contributor’s take (Jon Andersen, Ravi Shankar, Larry Klein, Wally Lamb, on whatever poem they chose to write about. The book is still being printed and sold, along with Kindle copies. Oddly, the publishers keep all of the profits from Kindle copies, and more. This was a labour of love for us, we didn’t do this for money, rather it was our way of giving something but had a good dream of sharing with all of the contributors. looking back, there are many poems that I wish we’d also covered. Just such an abundance of Joni’s gorgeous writing to choose from. At times, I wonder if I could have approached things differently, interviewed contributors with a set of questions that brought more focus on the poems themselves, balanced with what they meant to, or how they impacted on others. Still, I’m very happy with the way it turned out, as is John, my co-editor (and husband). And for Joni’s saying “You done good, girl”, after initial misgivings.

Q How did the idea for Joni’s book come about?

A It came to me almost fully fleshed out on the first day of the year in 2011. Think the seeds were planted deep years ago, and finally grew at the right time. It’s a gift I won’t forget, as was the support from so many directions, including my family, writers group, friends, some of Joni’s friends, contributors. And to have the blessing of Joni presenting her words in the format of poems, as she intended them to be presented on the page, was and is a dream come true. Amazing what can happen sometimes when people come together with loving intent and gratitude.

Q You must have been worried when Joni’s bad health was in the news, are you in personal contact with her at all?

A Honestly, I felt shocked and terribly worried that Joni must be in unbearable pain, despite the best of care. Linda Grant wrote a piece in the Guardian that addresses the feeling of devastation around Joni’s illness most eloquently.

Q Tell us about your own poetry.

A Poetry has been part of my life since adolescence. I wrote a chapbook in 2003. Then, I had the opportunity to do a full-length collection with Antrim House and to work closely with the publisher and now CT Poet Laureate, Rennie McQuilkin. He is incredible person, poet, and publisher, and has created a press that has given many fine New England poets the chance to publish high quality books. As far as illustrations, I photographed a man and a woman sitting on a rock (Joni line quoted here) at Watch Hill, Rhode Island, for my chapbook cover. Right time, right place. And I used a picture of a painting I love called “Moongirl” by Sandy Mastroni for the cover of my book “Returning Light”. Brings me back to Joni’s stunning self-portrait on the cover of Gathered Light, which, despite color distortion and chopping, is still a thing of beauty. I love it when pictures and words kind of magically come together.

The most recent project to spark my creative interest is Consenses, the beautiful and inspired project birthed by Sally Taylor. I was lucky enough to be able to participate in Chain#9 last summer. What I love the most about CONSENSES is the way creativity and interconnectedness are celebrated, as artists spark off each other’s work, collaborate in many mediums, contribute to a larger vision, though each artist only gets to see one link in the chain for inspiration. Very inclusive, no artistic ego nonsense involved. It is well worth a visit to the exhibit at Martha's Vineyard, and if that's not possible, see the website: http://consenses.org/press-kit/.



Vera Schwarcz's Chisel of Remembrance

 

AMAZON.COM READER REVIEW

A Beautiful Journey, April 20, 2009
By Sarah Glaz


"This book of poems brings together the elements of a rich and multilayered life--the poetic story of a beautiful journey. The journey begins before the poet was born, "among the Jewish dead," in WWII Europe of her grandparents and parents, and winds its way to a timeless place of contemplation "where this world meets the sefirot above." In between, the reader is rewarded with glimpses of Vera Schwarcz's complex present--her deep commitment to her Jewish identity and religion, her knowledge of and interest in Chinese culture and history, her artistic activity as a poet, and her scholarly activity as a historian. Her poems, masterfully and intelligently, weave the disparate trends of her life and interests into a beautiful tapestry.

The book was handsomely produced by Antrim House. Its cover by Rose Sigal Ibsen, another Romanian born artist with interest in Far East art, with its warm colors, sunflowers, and hints of Hebrew and Chinese calligraphy, offers a prelude to the poetry within. The invitation is unmistakable, in Vera's words:

I work silk and wool, embroider
time. Life is short, art is well armed
for lasting....

The queen of periwinkle, daisies, trillium and wart
Invites you to sojourn among her colors.

I love this book and highly recommend it to anyone who loves poetry.

 

 

Susan Allison's Down by the Riverside Ways


As to the title:

I once spent an evening in Ibis Books with musicians who mostly lived in the neighborhood. It was the first time many had played together. Out of the repertoire of shared songs was “Down by the Riverside/A’int Gonna Study War No More.” Everyone in the room sang along, even the ones who were usually too cool to do something like that.

It was 1990 and the Gulf War was ramping up. A bumper sticker with “This scud’s for you” was on a truck across the street, and yet here was a roomful of people, a diverse crowd, down by the riverside, singing they ain’t gonna study war no more.

No one knows who first wrote the lyrics to that traditional Gospel song, but it is distinctly American, and historically compelling. The title of my book is part tribute to the song, and the ways of folks who live by it. It was a psalm we were singing.

I could have simply titled the book, Down by the Riverside. But no, seems I had to futz with it. And then I actually found myself down by the river sideways and found the cover photo and a new angle on the book.

As to the book:

I have climbed up and down around Middletown for close to thirty years. I am not the same person I was when I arrived. I wrote boxloads of poetry over this period of time, and I praise Rennie for selecting a good batch and making sense of it. The collaborative editing process was extremely helpful for me and allowed me to focus on a few themes. There are rivers, birds, and riverbirds in these poems. There is my growing family. And there is this town.

I once made a book called Birds of Middletown, in which the birds are people. Some of those poems are in Down by the Riverside Ways.

The poems in this book represent a selection made between poet and editor. The selection was added to and trimmed much in the way I edit my own poems. The poems look back over a period of time in one place. They do not represent all of my poems of this period or of this place.

As to my own writing:

I have written in various poetic forms since I was 6 years old. My first influences were Edgar Guest, Dr. Seuss, E.B.White, and Mother Goose.

I began to study poetry as a forced act in public school in Louisville, KY. I loved the poems and argued with teachers except for Mr. Hall who stands out as a good teacher who also told me I was a good poet in 7th grade. Mrs. Woodruff was another.

I began to study poetry at Wesleyan, primarily of so-called “Third World” poets. I was pleased to get into Annie Dillard’s competitive class but did not stay that semester. At one juncture I created an English/Poetry major, but my interest at that time was Africa. Still, back then, my friends and I actually read poetry and circulated our books around. Adrianne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Nikki Giovanni, Sonya Sanchez, Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Pablo Neruda are some that I remember. Since college I have continued to read poets, but more recently I have been listening to poets.

Poetry readings are things poets go to. For years I heard many poets at Ibis Books and then The Buttonwood Tree. I also traveled to other venues to hear poets. Some I became enchanted by, including Tony Connor, Jayne Cortez, Victor Hernando Cruz, Stanley Kunitz, Donald Hall, Josef Komanyakaa, Kate Rushin, Paul Beatty, Ngoma, John Basinger, Roy Lisker…I can say too that they have all influenced my writing.

I use poetry and poetry uses me. I use poetry as if it were the tonic to my miseries; I cannot sleep until I have read or written a poem to construe sense and/or emotion from what I often find inscrutable in experience. Poetry uses me when a poem stubbornly comes to me fully formed and I must find the time to write it down. It is not always convenient. Often I wonder where these poems come from, the ones just half existing somewhere, demanding to be written, and think they have only chosen me as an unwitting medium.

I usually write my poems in stages. Often I am inspired by something and I find time for an initial write. Some poems come to me with forms that I have to decipher. After the first write I’ll work on a poem sometimes for years, chiseling away, adding content, subtracting content, turning things around…tightening the meter, releasing the meter…ad infinitum. It is a great relief to have a bound copy to place these poems into and give them a rest.

As to being a poet:

When I was young it occurred to me once that I should live my life in service to my poetry. It was a decision I later regretted, but it gave me plenty of material. It was only a matter of time before I learned that this was a difficult if not impossible proposition, as much as trying to make a living off of poetry.

I am grateful to Rennie for collaboration. It often takes another poet to look into all the gismos to see what’s working and what is not. And we had fun! I am also honored to be among so many fine poets at Antrim House Books.


We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

—William Butler Yeats, "Anima Hominis," Essays (1924)

Ingrid Grenon's Simply This

 

RUMINATIONS OF A WRITER

 

Writing poetry in 5th grade: what happens when no art classes are offered in school!

Later in the year, during the winter, when the darkness crept in early to steal the day, Mr. Allen caught me writing poetry when I was supposed to be studying geography. Since I was attending afternoon sessions, it got quite dark in the winter, as we didn’t get out of school until about 5:30 PM. I usually sat and looked out of the window after the advent of darkness. I thought seeing he headlights from the passing cars and the lights on the street was sort of magical.

I had taken an interest in Haiku poetry, and I wrote about what I saw and entitled the poem, “The Town.” I was so absorbed in counting the syllables to make it a true Haiku that I didn’t notice the teacher watching me until it was too late I had obviously been caught.

“I’m sorry, I’ll put it away,” I said, apologetically, hoping he wouldn’t tear up my creation.

He reached down and put his hand on my arm. “Wait,” he said. “Let me read it.”

I thought I would really be in trouble. “I said I was sorry,” I stated.

“It’s OK. That’s really good. Poetry. You know that’s really good,” he smiled. “You saw all that looking out of that window didn’t you?”

“I’m sorry.”

“No. It’s OK. That’s really good.” He smiled.

“It’s Haiku,” I said meekly.

“I know. It’s good. You’re not in trouble. Try to study your geography, OK?” he asked. He didn’t tell me, he asked me. I always studied my geography after that, and Mr. Allen never had any more problems with me.

***

Poetry followed me to college

Standing in my dorm room I glanced over at my typewriter. It was sitting innocently on the desktop that the college had conveniently provided, sort of nestled in a corner amongst papers and a few books. It had been my mother’s, as she had purchased it in 1967 for some reason or other, but not being the studious sort she had left it in a closet to gather dust for a few years. That’s when I came across it and claimed it for my own. I had actually been quite surprised that she allowed me to keep it, and it had been my own trusted companion ever since. Now it was 1980. Both the typewriter and I were beginning to show some wear.

I looked at it again. Words come out of that, I thought. Hmmm. Words. Words of wisdom? Maybe I could use this device to extract some knowledge from somewhere not usually accessible. What if, somewhere deep inside my psyche there is something like Carl Yung’s collective consciousness from which I could try to draw some answers? What if I could tap into some creative flow of knowledge, or at least delve into a portion of my brain that has up to this time been underutilized? Maybe I could crawl out onto the edge of my perceptual reality and get a glimpse from another realm of consciousness, or maybe I’ve been taking too many psych classes and I’m starting to get weird.

No matter, I thought. I had nothing to lose. I sat down at the desk and pulled the typewriter away from the corner where it had been sleeping. I placed my fingers on the keys and played a few notes.

Hi
What’s up?
Help
Why?
I don’t have all the answers.
Nobody ever has all of the answers.
I’d be happy right now if I just had a few answers. Can’t you just give me a few?
Won’t work.
Why?
Part of the value of the answer lies in what you had to go through to get it. If I give it to you it won’t be yours anymore.
Frustrating.
Perhaps. One gains knowledge by seeking answers.
I know life is a journey.
Yes.
Can’t I get just a little help? Can’t you put the wind to my back and help me along just a little, so I can find my answers more quickly?
If life is a journey, be mindful that getting to the end quickly might not be a good thing.
Scary.
The answers you seek are already there. Don’t look to others for them, search instead inside yourself.

Well, I certainly got a lot to think about. I looked down at the typewriter still sitting on the desk before me. Then I re-positioned my chair and looked at it again. It certainly appeared inanimate, but something had just breathed life into it. I set my fingertips onto the keyboard again and attempted to play something else melodious, but only came up with bad notes. Huh. Whatever it was is gone. Nonetheless, I felt as if I had just had a chat with a wise parent, and it made me feel better and much more confident. Then I placed my fingers on the keys once again. Suddenly I wasn’t in such a hurry anymore.

Tired of rainy weather?
It will pass.
Sick of waiting in line?
Can’t wait ‘till this day is over?
It will pass.
Hoping this poem will end?
This space?
Waiting,
Like life,
Will pass.
It will pass.

 

A CHILD'S FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE WISCASSET SCHOONERS, 1964

It was a sweltering hot summer afternoon, as hot as it can get in Maine, and my parents, grandparents and I were heading home on U.S. Route 1 after being at a clambake in Boothbay. I was quite unhappy as I disliked seafood, especially clams and lobster, and wasn’t having a good day at all. On the ride home I had refused to talk and was staring out of the rear window of my parents Ford. That’s when I first saw them. . .

“Ships! Look at the old ship!” I exclaimed suddenly. “Look! Look!” I screamed, gazing longingly at the Luther Little with her tall masts and rigging still attached, imagining ghost sailors might emerge from the fo’c’sle at any moment.

“Quiet down,” my mother scolded, ineffectively, while my father cast a deprecating stare in my direction.

“Look! Look!” I continued to yell, and then, “Stop! Stop! I have to see the ships!”

“Let her see the old schooners,” my grandfather replied. “What harm can it do?”

Rather than allow a four year old to bounce and scream uncontrollably in the back seat my parents likely assumed it would be better to indulge me.

I couldn’t take my eyes off them----it was as if I recognized them. There was the smell of low tide, a hot summer breeze, seagulls and the schooners against the backdrop of Sheepscot Bay in Wiscasset. Finally my parents pulled me away and tossed me into the backseat of the Galaxie 500, my head hanging out of the window, longingly staring back as the car sped away. I watched the schooners disappear but never forgot them. I knew they were important, but I didn’t know why.


Photos of Wiscasset Schooner/s featured in the poem "Wiscasset Schooners"

 

 

The author with friends, the "haunted saddle," and wood

 

 

 

 

Elizabeth Kincaid-Ehlers' Seasoning

Don Barkin's That Dark Lake

 

REVIEWS OF THAT DARK LAKE


A LYRICAL SPIN:
Don Barkin's That Dark Lake opens up the gloom

The New Haven Advocate
Wednesday, November 18, 2009, by Donald Brown

The pervasive feel of Connecticut poet Don Barkin's first collection of poems, That Dark Lake (2009, Antrim House, located in Tarriffville, Conn.) is of a life lived in New England, trying to wring grace from a landscape at times harsh and from social interactions that tend to be attenuated.

Barkin grew up in New Hampshire, which is fitting since his poems, in their formal precision and introspective nature, might make you think of the great American poet forever associated with New Hampshire, Robert Frost. Frost was the preeminent poet of eloquent nature and laconic people, insisting that poems should have a formal pattern even when most of his contemporaries embraced various kinds of experimental verse.

That traditionalism lives on in Barkin's work, though it's clear he's also absorbed the other point Frost insisted on: American verse should sound the way Americans talk. Barkin has an enviable knack for marrying metric regularity with the rhythms of speech. His poems sound natural, which is why they are all the more effective when you realize they conform to formal patterns.

Frost famously said writing unmetrical verse was like "playing tennis without a net," suggesting that such a practice would be slightly ridiculous and pointless. Barkin isn't as vehement about form, but says it keeps his poems from flying off into more chaotic areas of thought and feeling.

But it's also the case that with poems so small and spare, full of perceptions about aging ("In Middle Age," "A Reunion,") and missed connections with others ("Our Marriage," "The Descent," "Out of Work") and self-conscious tales of parenting ("Evensong," "Sliding") and at times rueful, at times awed interactions with nature ("Upstream," "No Longer Tempted by Greatness"), the form leavens what might otherwise seem too much a slice of life, with views too baldly self-critical or diminished.

The tightrope walk of form gives weight to the feelings in the poems. While many of the poems here register a gloom familiar to New Englanders, there is a sense of mastery in the lines themselves, of getting the upper hand on one's own dark side by thinking of all "that made you suddenly quietly glad / for what you'll only just have had."

Frost was praised as a poet of philosophical consolations often found by contemplating nature and its creatures without undue romanticizing, but most of his critics point out there is a darker sense always lurking in his poems, an allowance that, no matter how precise our command of language and our human environment, there is something "other" in nature that has no sympathy for us.

Barkin's poems seem to accept that less hospitable world as a given of nature and of human nature. It then becomes the poet's task to find some point of acceptance or satisfaction, often through humor and a sense of scale.

Barkin, as a poet of quotidian life in 21st-century America, isn't making epic or visionary claims. He's putting a quietly lyrical spin on life with what might be considered a down-sized aesthetic, which is to say his poems, when I first heard him read at Yale's McDougal Center a few weeks ago, resonated with local realities.

Imagine Frost alive today and living as a family man, school teacher and poet in suburban Connecticut. Might not he sound a bit like this:

 

Nothing More to Say

 

I remember last fall when the first frost pricked the lawn,

I let my mower run for an hour in the shed

until it shuddered and quit, the last fumes gone

to heaven, the engine as good, or bad, as dead.

It roared and sputtered and even sobbed the way

people do when they have nothing more to say."

 

 

IN THE SEA’S GREY SUIT: THE POETRY OF DON BARKIN
(Brianna Marron, The New Haven Review, March 23, 2010)

The misty mountains that grace the cover of Don Barkin’s That Dark Lake suggest what lies within this collection of poetry. It also bespeaks the atmosphere that pervades the sensibility of this New Haven poet. Barkin’s work is divided into four sections, each with its unique character, which at times creates a dissonance that can be either welcoming or off-putting by virtue of their congruity. The energy that underwrites the collection, modified, as it were, by that darkness, is evident in poems like“Eighteen”:

In Springtime
a young brook
throws the whole mountain
in an uproar.

It crashes through the rocks
like a blind man in a hurry.
Its froth leaps
like a stallion’s spit
in terror of the bridle.

Don’t get upset.
Think of the day
when you’ll smile
a little sadly
as the brook disappears
in the sea’s grey suit.


At the age when in Western society, a child becomes an adult, Barkin captures the cusp of that transition through the liquid metaphors of “brook” and “froth” and “spit,” whose vigor dissipate into the grey stream of adulthood. In this respect, many of Barkin‘s poems bear the linguistic stamp of modernists like William Carlos Williams, who could capture and even subjugate readers’ hearts and minds with a few, simple words.

Sometimes Barkin constrains this rare prowess by letting stringent rhyme schemes tie down his lyrical, even chaste gems of insight. Fortunately this is not omnipresent, and many of the poems reflect the sincere, almost affable ambience, of That Dark Lake as a whole. The collection delves not just into human emotion but the everyday bustle of life. Experience serves as root and cause of all artistic experience in the world, that “lonely hour of the single light bulb,” as Barkin frames it. Consider such lines as

In the weight of the great trees on the lawn,
In the timid, curving love
Of the tree limbs on the bright grass,
They can see that really
Nothing ever goes anywhere

or

In middle age you smell the end
The way you smell the snow …

Paradigms of innocence possibly lost suffuse Barkin’s voice. In the smallness of things lies the greatness of reality, of Being itself. And yet, the collection is domestically minded enough to grasp the solace offered?—?as this collections offers?—?mental creature comforts: a good book to pick up after a day of “rush[ing] off, then com[ing] back…walking in too fast” and listening to the “office women” gossip. It’s a book meant to slow you down, to remind you that “out there / water flows somewhere / and the quiet people rule.”

 

 

POEMS NOT IN THAT DARK LAKE



Ode to Ambition

Ambition, you cocksucker,
how many men have you wrecked
wearing out their delicate nibs
with the furious weight
of your wish to “write in stone”
your passing remarks on the frail paper
of their lives, fluttering leaves
that will never decorate a tree again.
Still you lean with your grunting weight
desperate to rut into being
a line of kings “stretching out
to the crack of doom.”

 


Ode to Rte. 6 West-bound

The roadside grasses quiver in
a wave of air where cars have been
like knots of comets howling by,
too loud to hear the grasses sigh
as sleepers sigh when nightmares shake
them cruelly up but not awake.
The cars themselves are in a spell
and travel back and forth pell-mell,
trumpeting a new age
of information, speed, and rage.
Such sleek machines are bound to bring
a springtime sweeter than the spring.
The grass blades bending in a gust
all-hail them on their way to rust --
and then again the road is still,
with just a whiff of oil and will.

 

A Graveyard Tale

“Father”, “Mother”, “Susan” -- three
worn headstones in a row,
but bright spring grass where there should be
a husband or a beau.

She’d feared that as their child she
would be the last to go
and sleep beneath a stone marked “Me.”
A fever took her though.

 

Comrades

You are always advancing
while I am in constant retreat.
It’s only in the barracks
that we two comrades meet.
Sugared with your triumphs,
your dreams should all be sweet.
Instead, your sleep seems frenzied
by terror or defeat.
It seems as you inspire me
to answer reveille,
you must have someone gutless
beside you while you flee.

 

At the Edge

You can’t take your eyes off the boy slumping
in the monstrous chair being wheeled
backwards into the college gym --
the way you stood in that roped-in field
gaping at the canyon’s rim
and imagining yourself jumping.

 

A Religious Illusion

The school bus driver had gotten down
to take his hand, and thus he was led
to his mom at the curb. I guessed his frown
meant a tummy ache or an aching head.

And though the soul, I knew quite well,
is fanciful, abstract, unreal,
when I glanced backward out of Hell,
hers perched behind the steering wheel.


The Park

Nothing makes me feel as alone
as crossing paths with someone on her phone.

Why is it she can’t see that she and I
are bride and groom beneath this sheet of sky?

 


The Persistent


He swims every day all year,
wading in from any beach
wherever he happens to be -- glistening
resort or grimy port-town,
remembering the heft of the tide
and where the bottom dropped off.
His plunging hardly leaves a ripple.
The water wants to bear him up
and he passes through it graciously
as a congressman or a widow.
You lose him for a frightening while.
Until he appears clambering
onto a rock you hadn’t noticed
sticking up, so far away
he seems almost to be standing on air.

 

To a Teacher

"First, do no harm," they warn all new physicians.
But it's harder than they think
and discovering they're death as diagnosticians,
a few will take to drink.

Teachers too. For even at seventeen,
that girl still chews her hair,
and though she turned her nose up like a queen,
your scolding drew a tear.

Though teaching texts are careful not to use
the word that like a charm
(not "skill" or "grip" or "a talent to amuse")
can steer you clear of harm,

whatever clever lesson plans you make.
It's "love," for Heaven's sake.


The Conversation

I love young women with minds like hounds.
They go seriously, they follow the scent
alone from one place to the next.

The way that she looked down at her lap
and went on about the things she’d learned
of the honest minds of children and birds.

Her shyness and mascara -- like a runner
whose legs overtake one another
and by passing in one place strike fire.

 

The Long-Married

Although they sometimes look like longtime chums
who’ve vowed to be a team whatever comes,
they’re lovers so far down the road they seem
one traveler against the sunset’s gleam.

 

A Peaceful Cemetery

She took her final illness in her stride,
her obit crowed. He researched heart disease
and spoke at meetings right until he died --
not just in the States but overseas.

They once wore faces puckered with concern
about so many things, and then just one.
Past that now, they seem content to turn
their pale, pitted faces to the sun.

And losers, too. He stank and lived alone,
and something from the past amazed his face.
Yet every day he got up with a groan
and struck out like a pilgrim for this place.
But that boy drove here fast, too wild to think
of waiting for disease or age or drink.

 

 


The Four Seasons

Summer, slummer, dumber, glummer.
Fall, shawl, pall, bawl.
Winter, stinter, tinter, glinter.
Spring, wing, fling, ring.

 



A Poem for Her

He lounges on the porch
smoking and breathing night air
lazily like picking wild blueberries,
leaning his head
against the dark heads of the trees.
She comes out. Her eyes are nearly
smiling their wide, inky smile.
She wants me to come in (he thinks) --
she thinks I'll stay out here
away from her all night, forever.

Then he thinks of the dream
she did not remember dreaming
this morning at breakfast:
A bespectacled man in a dark suit
and rich tie -- a physician,
has gone to Heaven.
A quiet place like his hospital,
far from the chatter
of his two small daughters.
Then he remembers – he’d also dreamt
and forgotten:
A thin woman in a housedress
drifting low, like a torn dark cloud,
over a small boy asleep
in a big green field.

He does not want to go in!
The trees are his brothers
-- in their dim tossing heads
you can see anything.
A beautiful poem -- still just
a dim tossing of leaves,
A woman, her face hidden by leaves,
silent and glowing though like a bowl
of bright yellow pears in autumn.

Only, now her arm is warm on his arm.
It reminds him of something
-- a small animal with dark bright eyes
that hunts in the dark.
He feels comforted
to think that she hunts him in the dark.
Maybe they will go in now
and talk all night
and fall asleep,
their lips nearly touching,
many things still to say.

 

Three Days of Rain


The darkness yesterday felt queer.
But now the sky's a mindless blue
as if God played at peek-a-boo
to taunt us with our guilty fear

that He could leave us all for dead
the way He did in Noah's day,
when clouds rolled in at dawn to stay
like sealing a tomb in lead.

Though now the clouds have exited
and left me blameless under blue,
I’d rather know what Noah knew
about our cloudy sense of dread.

As I know clomping gloomily
down the cellar stairs sometimes
in dungeon darkness that my crimes
have finally caught up with me.

As having woken up my wife
with my heavy gallows tread
on the staircase up to bed
I know He means to spare my life.

 

Why She Went

I remember staring in a haze
at what she'd left me in a vase
-- wildflowers, now dead days
and only one still at its height.
Until one day in rain-dimmed light
I saw their colors, though no longer bright,
were more intense, as if to show
the life another man would know
with her because I'd made her go
-- the darkest gold, the deepest blue.
Shaving now, I smile into
crinkling eyes that say, You knew
way back when you held love at bay
you’d blossom in your own way
like wildflowers in their dark array.

 


On a Daughter Gone Abroad


Peeking in her room I see
she really has gotten free,
and all her selves, remembered ones,
fill my mind like scorpions.

I should have showed her tears when I
stood at that gate and waved goodbye.
Though there are reasons not to cry
and thinking of them kept me dry.

It’s just that breathing this dead air
reminds me someone once fussed here
before that mirror making straight
what God made kinky out of hate,

and that the floor that loved her junk
is bare beneath a desk and bunk.
Still if you find such pining thick,
you’re right. And love’s a dirty trick.

 

Home Improvement

“I g-guess I’d run a length of p-pipe downhill.
You don’t w-want water rotting out your sill.”
Not much gets past the censor of John’s stutter
unless a buddy’s got a puddling gutter.

“If we were tools,” I mused, “what would we be?”
My wife had brought some beers to him and me.
“Like, you’re a level.” I meant his steady eye
that kept his cellar and his humor dry.

“And my wife’s a trowel covering up mistakes
her hopelessly unhandy husband makes.”
Well, I was never sent to Boy Scout camp
or watched my dad rewire a broken lamp.

Expect poison from standing water, warned Blake.
I went to get a shovel and a rake.

 


Road Rage

She’d flung her cigarette
out the window as she tore
past me in her car
with her pedal to the floor,

where it glowed an instant more
although the road was wet
like a fallen star
that hasn’t burned up yet.

I guessed a broken heart,
and though she made no sign
her fury made me feel
she thought the fault was mine.

Hearts that I once broke
shone coldly overhead.
Their light had just arrived
from stars I’d thought long dead.

And now I had to ask
if from across the years
someone had hurled her claim
for loving in arrears.


Nieces on the Beach

A thousand years ago or so
they wheeled down the beach
in a glittering of cartwheels.
I didn’t think they could possibly reach
the hunched toes of boulders at the end.
Since then, one has teetered into
an early marriage, while the younger
is still wheeling free as a spare tire
that will go into a lazy spin and
fall on its face in a dead clap.
Pierced by their parents’ divorce,
pierced by his drug use, pierced by her
platinum resolve to get on with her life.
Plus all the usual confusion of youth.
We fly all day to see them at Christimas,
hugs and grins, but nothing
so perfect as that sparking fire-wheel
of arms and legs and sunburst
of flung hair. One was as lank
as a thoroughbred, the younger thick
and springy as a pony. They did reach
the end of the beach, and the calendar flipped
to a new year, and kept on flipping
in time with the rush of the frothing tide,
then this Christmas quit with a wintry scene
of snow, blue light on snow,
woods, and a snowy path somewhere.

 


The Moon and Me

Filling my windshield suddenly --
naked as a lady's bottom
and yellow like a leaf in autumn,
the moon this morning followed me

down snowy roads as I wended
my way to work -- where I made bold
to tell someone. And when I’d told,
or since I’d told, our romance ended.

When I was young, I’d try to think
a pretty girl had glanced my way.
She may have, too. I couldn’t say.
But where I should have dared a wink,

I’d knit my busy brow and frown,
daring her to look again.
Those girls were wed to other men
whose suns came up, whose moons went down.

 


Dreams Have All the Answers

Dreams have all the answers
and know just what they’re doing
Like ballroom dancers.

Though when you wake and feel
Pursued by their suing
They’ll seem unreal.

But somewhere deep within
Your heart will still be ruing
that secret sin

that in the morning hour
has kept you safe from wooing
like a wall flower.


My Old Stuff

I remember playing ball as a little boy
and pounding its pocket hard as a heavyweight
-- not a real glove, more a toy,
but it bore my blows as happiness, not hate.

I remember Easter when I was only five.
The snapshot shows us hunting chocolate eggs
in Henry’s yard. It felt good to be alive
and running like the wind on little legs.

I don’t know when I got this Eloise.
The cover is half-torn, and someone drew
with a crayon on page two. But I loved how she’s
forever finding naughty stuff to do.

But nowadays I only want what’s new.
And nowadays there seems much less to do.


Around the Corner

The small black boy
in his school clothes
with his toy backpack
is waiting for the school bus.
His mother, a lummox
with a furious face,
holds hands with her phone.

When my car comes toward him
taking the tight turn slowly
he raises his small face,
and his eyes rise above
the morning pout of his mouth
like the pearl of a moon
over grim docklands.

All the stars in the sky
glimmer in the dark cores of his eyes.
His warm bed. Last Halloween.
The foggy forms of grownups last night
talking nonsense in the lit kitchen
out beyond the dark sun of the TV
and the mesmerized moons of
him and his brothers.

A stranger with a squinting face
is steering with difficulty through the turn
in a car that as small as a calf
beside the big cow of his bus.
A small man on a grand planet,
the boy stands watching as a shooting star
burns to nothing as it slides by
on its way into the dark.

 

Jean Sands' Gandy Dancing

I am sometimes asked why I chose an odd title like Gandy Dancing for my book. Well, for one thing it’s the name of the title poem. But where did that name come from?

“Gandy dancers” is a name given to men who worked on the railroad. Some research says they were nicknamed after the tools they used that the Gandy Corporation made. Other research disputes that as myth. Whatever the truth, in our neighborhood the hundred or so men who worked the rails were called Gandys. Their presence terrified my mother and the other women nearby on our country road a mile from the railroad station.

I was a little girl when we moved into the house my father built in Newtown. It was quiet there, the kind of quiet where all we heard was the sound of crickets and birdsong. It was the 1940’s and only one or two cars passed our house each day on a road now so busy with traffic that backing out of the driveway is dangerous.

I remember a pretty blonde teen named Cynthia walking past our house when the Gandys were walking to the package store at the junction of our road and Rt. 25. Cynthia swerved into our yard and Mom ran out and called her into the house. There also was nothing funny about our next-door neighbor Jewel hanging wash from her back porch and a Gandy who was lying underneath it making a crude remark. Jewel ran back into her house, locked the door, and phoned my mother and Wilma, another neighbor. Once again, we were all terrified.

When Mom said stink and breath and big hands and touch she was warning me, a little girl, to stay away from the Gandys without saying rape or other words that weren’t said back then. She was scared and nights were the worst because my father was at work. The Gandys would sit on our porch drinking from their bottles, singing and cursing until they fell into a stupor, so she kept the bedroom light down low in an effort to “hide.” She read stories to me and my imagination flourished. Did I actually think of circus clowns? Who knows? That’s where the poetic voice comes in. I do remember that the men’s faces were often streaked with dirt and soot and that I had met Emmett Kelley before our move to Newtown. As a child I wanted a joyful life but that’s not what I got, and I didn’t get happy circus clowns in my adult life either. I got the stinking drunk, one of the men in the second half of the book. The Gandys are a metaphor for all the men who impacted my life in negative ways.

 

REVIEWS OF GANDY DANCING

 

 

 

 

Alexandrina Sergio's My Daughter is Drummer in the Rock 'n Roll Band

 

 

TO HEAR SANDY SERGIO PERFORMING ON YOU TUBE click here.

 

Sandy Sergio is a Poet in her Soul
by Nancy Thompson
(from the December, 2009 issue of Glastonbury Life)

Over the years, Sandy Sergio has been a teacher, wife, mother, and the head of two major nonprofit organizations. In her soul, though, she’s always been a poet. Ms. Sergio, whose father was Scottish and mother Irish, was raised in a family that was immersed in poetry and literature. “My mother could recite almost any poem written by an Irish or British poet,” she said. Often, her mother mixed those poems in with fairy tales and other nighttime stories.

Ms. Sergio grew up in Wethersfield and attended local schools until her junior year in high school, when her family moved to Hartford and she finished high school there. “I always wrote stories and essays,” she said, adding that she won first prize in the state for a humorous essay when she was 14. She earned a teaching degree from the Teachers’ College of Connecticut, now Central Connecticut State University, and wrote a lot of poetry while there. “It’s my worst nightmare that one of those magazines will resurface somewhere with all that young angst for all the world to see,” she said with a smile.

After graduation, Ms. Sergio taught English in Rocky Hill, first at the junior high school and later at the new high school. “I loved it,” she said of teaching. She fell in love with David Sergio, the music teacher down the hall, and the couple had four children during the next several years. There’s Stephen, “the adored big brother,” and younger sisters Gillian, Stacy and Lauren. She thought about returning to teaching when they were older, but decided not to. “I couldn’t figure out how to return to part-time teaching and keep track of all those teenagers,” she said.

Instead, she accepted a position as executive director of a fledging organization known then as the Glastonbury Mental Health Group, now InterCommunity Mental Health. “It was a very exciting organization,” she said. “It was founded by two families with young adults with serious mental illness. There weren’t enough community resources.” The families realized they needed someone to head the organization and offered the job to Ms. Sergio. “I was hired, not because I had a shred of experience with mental health, but because I was very active in the community and had a lot of contacts,” she said. “I established an office staffed by trained volunteers. We had a referral service and offered some public programs.”

At first, the organization operated from Ms. Sergio’s home, but before long the group realized it needed an office, preferably someplace “very Glastonbury,” she said. They rented space in the Welles-Chapman Tavern and sponsored programs with titles such as “Understanding your adolescent.” “We downplayed the other elements,” she said. Inter-Community Mental Health, now based in East Hartford, established a mobile after-care clinic for chronically mentally ill people and has continued to offer programs for clients and their families. “I feel that was a really good thing I did in my life,” she said. In 1986, after 10 years there, Ms. Sergio thought it would be good to find another job and was hired to head the Hartford Courant Foundation because, she said, of her experience with non-profits and her ability to see what they could accomplish. “It was a wonderful job,” she said. “I got to know all the great people in Hartford’s non-profits.”

She retired as she approached her 65th birthday and soon after joined the Thread City Poets in Willimantic. “It meant driving 45 minutes on Route 6, but it was worth it. They’re my major writing group,” she said. “A writing group is important. You can try out something and hear what people say about it.” She’s also a member of the Connecticut Poetry Society. After a good bit of work, the self-described “card-carrying old lady” called Rennie McQuilkin, owner of Antrim House, a publishing house in Simsbury, and founder of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, to ask about the possibility of publishing a book of her poetry. She said she chose Antrim House because she admires the way they publish “well crafted, artistically done” work by New England poets that is “written to be read, understood and enjoyed.” Mr. McQuilkin told her to submit five pages of poetry. “Then I had to wait,” she said. When the call came, it was good news.

Antrim House recently published Ms. Sergio’s first book, My Daughter Is Drummer In the Rock ’n Roll Band. It’s a compilation of more than 60 poems grouped into three sections, “Old Lady Gone Bad,” “To Dare Love,” and “All That Remains.” The first section features such titles as “Ring Ding Girl in a Linzertorte World,” “You Will Be Notified When We Have Located Your Luggage,” “Old Lady Gone Bad” and “When Wearing Purple Isn’t Enough.” The second section includes “Honoring My Mother,” “Forgiving My Mother,” “Near Encounter with a Queen,” and “I Never Know Whose Sister Is A Lesbian.” The final section, more serious than the first two, includes “Memento,” “I Read of Your Death,” “My Sister’s Wings” and “The T.I.A.”

There are some autobiographical elements — one of Ms. Sergio’s daughters actually is the drummer in a rock ‘n’ roll band — but she cautions readers not to read too much into the poems.“This is not autobiography,” she said. “Don’t think this is my memoir.” Mr. McQuilkin, who worked with Mr. Sergio on the poetry collection, said he met her when she was working at the Hartford Courant Foundation. “She was enormously supportive of my organization, the Hill-Stead Museum’s Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, which was co-sponsored by The Hartford Courant,” he said. “When she retired from the foundation, I followed her with interest in her new role as a fund-raiser for Curbstone Press. At that point, I didn’t know her own poetry and didn’t realize that her interest in poetry was far more than a professional one. It was, indeed, an intensely personal interest, for Sandy is a superb poet in her own right.” He described the book as “a delicious mixture of mood: the sad poems contain moments of wry wit, and the richly humorous poems contain deeper undercurrents.” He added, “This is a book for all seasons of the heart.”

Since the book’s publication, Ms. Sergio has gotten several invitations to read her poetry and talk with readers. “I love to visit, love to talk with people about their ideas of poetry,” she said. “I feel that poetry is a form of communication and I don’t want to talk to myself.” She also enjoys being on stage, especially with her husband. “I like to perform. I enjoy reading and I’ve been told I do it well,” she said. “And I have the advantage of David, who likes to perform with me.” When they perform together, Mr. Sergio plays piano, interspersing tunes with his wife’s reading. The effect is stunning.

When she’s not writing poetry or performing it, Ms. Sergio is a gay rights activist and a member of the Glastonbury Coalition for Sensible Growth, a community group that focuses on development in the north end of town. She encourages others to try their hand at writing poetry. “Everybody doesn’t have to be Wordsworth,” she said. “There are different levels of success and quality. But if someone is serious about it, there are ways of learning and getting better.”

 

Here's a Sergio poem that says what she's about as a poet:

 

Go, little book,
out of this house and into the world…
...stay out as long as you like…
and talk to as many strangers as you can.

from “Envoy” by Billy Collins

 

Here’s what I can tell you about my poems.
I’ve written them, sent them out into the world,
hope they will not embarrass me in public
(clean handkerchief, minimal gravy stains),
that they will indeed speak to strangers
and, most of all, that the strangers will speak back.

I write about those things that arrest me,
cause me to mull or giggle or weep;
about scraps of old conversation
that have taken up residence in my brain,
about unfinished business,
mine and that of others.

I count on the poems to be emissaries.
I don’t let one loose unless I’m pretty sure
it will make friends,
be welcomed with a grin or tear
or guffaw of recognition.

Thus I would not suggest laboring to parse my collection
in an attempt to discern the poet’s “meaning.”
Rather, I hope readers, both kind and critical,
might ask of any of my poems the age-old question:
So what have you done for me lately?

 

Jake Anderson's Homeless Souls

Nancy Daley's How Much of Love

Dick Greene's Explorations

 

To read Dick Greene's marvelously opinionated opionions on poetry, visit his blog at www.greenefuse.blogspot.com.

 

Some Early Reviews of Explorations

Richard Trousdell, professor of theater, University of Massachusets, Amherst: "I just received your beautiful book. How wonderfully designed it is, that splendid cover, your picture with the poem on the back, the type face so elegant, the whole thing just speaks of your spare, eloquent style. I can't wait to dip into it more fully and frequently, but its very appearance speaks for you wonderfully. I'd certainly see to it that the Times Literary Supplement gets a review copy. Meanwhile, sincere congratulations on a marvellous accomplishment."

Frank Basler, business consultant, Bridgeport, Connecticut: "Thank you again for you book of poems. I read one or two each morning and am loving them!"

Connie Wanek, Duluth, Minnesota, poet and winner of Library of Congress fellowship, among other prizes: "Thanks so much for your book, which came in the mail a few days ago...I'm enjoying the poems very much."

Adele Bloch, Manhattan neighbor of my daughter: "Your father is a wonderful poet: his imagery is vivid, tactile and imaginative, his sense of nature and of the passage of time most evocative. Your father’s opus sits between Goethe and Victor Hugo whenever I don’t reread it. It has a multilevel appeal.” "

Katharine Hazen, poet, Northampton, Mass.: "What a perfectly beautifully made little book, I've never seen a lovelier one, everything is done right. I should learn a lot from the simplicity and directness of the poet's voice."

David Davies, a friend from my international development days: "A sparkling and insightful collection of wise and witty words."

"I read your book of poems the other day and was full of wonder at how much you've captured of my life." "

Your book may be a hidden treasure. If you can get a review or two, you may be overwhelmed with sales."

Madlyn Smith, Dartmouth College faculty wife, I keep your book on my bedside table. They are all so good but I do have favorites.."Polished Stones,""Memorial Day" (could be Hanover), "Silver Is the Color of My True Love's Hair," and more, more, more!!!

Betsy Loughran, author, Belchertown Massachusetts. “I haven't thanked you properly for your book. It arrived just as I was in the last throes of getting my book to the publisher… But still I'm best at the poem a day. Two that I read this morning were "Life and Death" and "Pullman Memories." I agree that life is more interesting than death...So thank you. I will enjoy dipping into the book with my morning coffee for the next several weeks.”

 

Credo

I like and try to write poetry that’s clear and accessible and evokes for the reader the feelings that inspired the poem. I don't care for cryptic, obscure or highly ambiguous poems or poems in which the feeling is buried under layers of intellectualization. I subscribe to Wordsworth’s dictum “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Like most aphorisms, this exaggerates, but the core connection of poetry with feelings is true for me. For my taste, too much contemporary poetry subordinates feeling to intellectual display.

For the most part I have favorite poems rather than favorite poets, but some of the poets I particularly like are Antonio Machado, Ferlinghetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane, May Swenson and Tony Hoagland. I also particularly like a series of poems called “County Lives” by the Irish poet and novelist Dermot Bolger, and Rilke’s Duino Elegies, not a model of accessibility but extremely evocative. Similarly I like Eliot's early poems and the “Four Quartets,” also not particularly accessible but wonderfully evocative, but I don't like ‘The Waste Land,” which I see as disjointed and unnecessarily obscure. And I like early Pound, but not the Cantos.

A few of my favorite more or less well-known poems, in no particular order: James Merrill's "164 East 72nd Street," Auden's “Look stranger at this island now,” Browning's “Home Thoughts from Abroad,” Hopkins’ “The Windhover,” Donald Hall's “The Name of Horses,” Bertold Brecht's “Concerning Poor B.B,” Dylan Thomas's “Fern Hill,” Elizabeth Bishop's “At the Fishouses,” and even more her less well-known “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore.” Maybe that'll give you an idea of my tastes, or maybe it'll just confuse you, but you will find, if you don't already know, that all these poems combine clarity with feeling.

 

Favorite Quotes

“The art of poetry is not to say everything.” Servius Maurus Honoratus, 4th century Roman grammarian

"Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: 'memorable speech.' " W.H.Auden

 

A Few Provocative Opinions

We consider some poetry great not despite our inability to understand it but because we can’t understand it.

Poetry critics love the cryptic. It gives them something to interpret.

Writing poetry is so popular because it’s the only form of writing in which you’re not likely to be widely criticized for incomprehensibility.

Poetry is the only form of writing in which ambiguity is considered a virtue.

The dominant mode of contemporary poetry is studied incoherence.

Contemporary poets devote a good deal of intellect to making their work incomprehensible.

If poetry that can mean something different to every reader is good, isn’t the ultimate poem a blank sheet of paper?

There’s an arms race among contemporary poets to see who can be the most arcane and solipsistic.

Poetry today is a form of intellectual machismo.

Contemporary poetry seldom delights. Reading it is more often a form of forced labor.

The trouble with much poetry today is that it tries too hard to convert emotional experiences into intellectual ones, and succeeds too often.

Contemporary poetry, like serial music, has alienated its audience. It represents the triumph of theory over experience.

With post-modernism they’ve squeezed all the joy out of poetry.

It isn’t the form that makes a poem. It’s the feeling.

The essence of poetry is feeling. All else is ornamentation.

The problem with contemporary poetry is that it’s become an academic discipline.

Beware the poetry-academic complex.

Many contemporary poets think they live in a gated community. Actually they live in a ghetto, and have locked themselves in.

Exaggeration is one of the most common faults of bad poetry.

It isn’t rhyme that makes a poem.

Some poets hear music in their heads. In others’ you’ll hear the grinding of gears.

Poetry is the art of the implied.

In poetry, connotation is everything.

Taste in poetry is like taste in food, essentially arbitrary.

Ultimately what we like or dislike about a poet is his worldview.

Poetry is a narcissistic business.


Doris Henderson's What Gets Lost

 

Dreams have always played a vital part in our lives and in our culture. Ancient peoples didn’t have to be told about immortality. They knew absolutely that there was life after death, having had lengthy conversations with their dead relatives, who appeared to them in person – in their sleep, of course. What better time for a ghost to get your full attention?

I was told, as a child, that ghosts were just a figments of the imagination. But figments can be powerful. Sometimes they come back even when we’re awake. The year I retired, I attended a seminar given by Olympia Dukakis and three other actresses about the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who was held prisoner in the land of the dead, escaped, and returned wiser and stronger. I was in my feminist heyday, and the seminar was life-enhancing. But all the while I could hear the voice of my disapproving mother, a very conventional lady who had passed on more than a decade before. My poem “Haunted,” the longest in the book, relates this experience. It begins --

“Sometimes she comes up and sits on her gravestone
(which is conveniently located on the back of my head)
and tells me I’m spending too much money on trifles,
like this seminar on goddess spirituality.
It infuriates her that she sat there cutting out coupons
for forty years to save money on beans and tomatoes
so I can spend $700 listening to actresses
talk about some goddess rising from the dead.
What sacrilege! .......”

But we love our dead mothers, even when they berate us. The relationship never really dies. The poem ends –

“My mother’s breath is still in the room, but softer.
She is walking me to school on that first day.
We are holding hands.
Now we are kneeling
near the little pond behind the house.
She is digging dandelions for salad.
The smells of earth are all around us.
I can feel the sun on my bare arms and legs,
the cool grass on my bare feet.

God, how I miss her.”


Looking back at What Gets Lost, I realized that about 25% of it is “dream poems.” Dreams have a logic all their own. Strange things happen which we cannot control. They mirror our real lives, but with unexpected turns, often express feelings we didn’t know we had. Getting in touch with what’s happening in our heads at night can be vital in writing a poem, creating a work of art, or solving a complex problem. But how to catch these visions before they disappear? Some excerpts from “Dreamscapes”:

“Try to remember every small detail,
the geography in which the dream unraveled,
the shapes of walls and how the light played on them,
whether these are people you have seen before
in different guises, or whether they are native to this dream.”
--------

“Sometimes it is impossible to remember, upon awakening,
exactly where you are, because the world has changed
in the hour of your dreaming. And the place
where you’ve just been is so much more interesting:
a dungeon with smoke-stained walls,
and open scaffold over a thousand-foot drop,
a parallel universe where even the birds transmogrify.
You must wake up slowly from such a revelation,
or it could lose itself completely among your shoes
lying in the corner, the papers scattered by your bed.

Picture the room in which you fell asleep, then slowly enter it.
Your life maybe changed forever, but no one has to know.”

Some dreams are so crazy that you laugh at them afterwards. But your dreaming self takes the events quite seriously:

CHORES

I really should have done something for Marielle,
she'd come such a long way to see me.
But she got here so early, I had to put her
on a back burner, with all my other duties.

She was riding around town on a bicycle,
looking young and healthy, waiting for me to finish.
Marielle was always athletic.
She could have passed for thirty-five,
but everyone knew she was seventy-three.

I was driving from place to place,
taking care of obligations, in the old green
car that belonged to my mother-in-law.
I'd promised to take good care of it for the duration.

My last visit was to Cynthia.
I had trouble finding her apartment.
I was having trouble finding everything that day.
I parked the car in this vast garage
and when I came back, it was gone.

I kept walking through the place, looking
in the same nooks and crannies over and over
like a crazy person, even in spaces
much too small for an automobile.

That old green car was as big as a prehistoric turtle.
I couldn't stop looking.
Finally the garage man sat me down to tell me it was gone,
since I couldn't come to that conclusion on my own.

I‘d walked before and I could walk again,
but how would my mother-in-law feel about this?
(She must be 100 years old by now.)
I’d have to get the police and report the car as stolen.

Just then Marielle came by again on her bicycle,
and I could see she was having a hard time.
It seemed she had lost one of her legs,
so riding that bike must have been a chore.

The prosthetic didn't fit very well,
was held in place by a giant magnet.
She’d gone for hip surgery, and somehow
her leg got transplanted onto another patient
by mistake. The doctor said he was really sorry;
he'd had a busy day and was multi-tasking,
a thing he didn't usually do.

My cell phone rang, and I knew
it would be my mother. She had just moved
into town and I hadn't seen her in years,
but the green car and Marielle's leg
were preying on my mind.
I let it ring.

Maybe I could sue that nice garage man
for losing my mother-in-law's car.
It would be a start.

Peggy Sapphire's In the End a Circle

Seth Steinzor's To Join the Lost

 

An open letter from Professor Regina Psaki, 12/24/11:

Dear Mr. Steinzor,
When you wrote in the summer to ask for my reaction to *To Join the Lost*, I was 6000 miles away from my office and hence from the copy of your book that you so kindly sent me. I flew back to Oregon and picked it up in September, read it while teaching Dante this fall, and am re-reading it in transit back to Oregon for the winter term. So while I do seem to be in my own randomly decelerated (or at least off-cycle) universe, I've been thinking of your book though I put off answering your query about what I thought of it.

But for the record, I love it. You had me from the first, or maybe the second, strophe. Of course Dante the poet is to readers what Virgil was to Dante the pilgrim, but you telescoped those two moments into a repeat journey through the changed landscape of inferno in a way that is both familiar and surprising. I enjoy how the narrator, knowing Dante’s poem, is surprised by some of Dante’s putative reactions, as the pilgrim is by Virgil’s. I love the changes you ring on the affection that grows in the Comedy between Dante and Virgil. And I enjoy the interleaving of different moments of the poem, as your grandfather / Cacciaguida figure coming in “out of place,” or the Geryon figure, or the unseemly but compelling quarrel.

Often I give students the option of modernizing the inhabitants of a canto or a circle; you (like Sandow Birk) make excellent use of immediately recognizable figures like McCarthy and McNamara, Stalin and Hitler, or anonymous but recognizable characters like the pedophile in Canto V. You do a brilliant job too of modernizing some of the sufferings and horrors; I love the juxtaposition of original Dante (souls confessing to Minos) with the more mechanized system suitable to the sheer volume of souls to process. And the sci-fi / fantasy image of the anus mundi, and the white-hot genitals attached to nondescript bodies indistinct from their surroundings. What underlies those single clever, delicious moves is a deep sense of both the continuities between the Middle Ages and the present, and the alterities of event, circumstance, and conception.

But I’m making your book sound servile to the poem, an inside joke invented as a parlor game for Dante maniacs. Of course it isn’t. Writing compelling narrative poetry is no small accomplishment, especially these days, especially with this weighty monument anchoring the verse. Your verse form, your registers, your vernacular, are strongly independent; you make Dante answer you and us; your descriptive ability is engrossing and astonishing. To say that I see much of Dante’s technique in it (and many of my favorite moments in the poem) is to pay the highest compliment; loving the poem as you clearly do, you’ll understand that. And as you mention in the notes that you came to know Dante through his poem, you let the reader know you. You describe yourself as an agnostic Jewish Buddhist American; I'm just a big old atheist plain and simple, one for whom Dante's complete cosmology / theology / poetics makes sense of the world even when I cannot share his belief.

I’m going to be thinking and talking about your book with students and colleagues for a long time, and I can’t wait to see the next installments. I’ve already dog-eared the pages of favorite passages. Some are favorites because they are beautiful adaptations of Dantean tropes: “In northern Maine and Minnesota, I’ve seen golden-brownish halos veil the rumps and flanks of moose.” “A dozen might ring around you, reader, and still this page would hide its letters.” Some are lapidary in the way you come to terms with the role of Beatrice in the poem, and of women in general: “You know how my religion flows from my love of a woman as from a clear spring.” “But you—I mean, your age—perceives more broadly what is flattened when a man denies what’s due to women.” I love the transparency of “I learned at last that this place lays claim to us all because we are born desirous and ignorant beyond renunciation or denial.”

So thank you from my heart for sharing your work with me; I will be looking forward to the continuation, not yet mentioned on Antrim House's website.

 

Review from SEVEN DAYS

Sin City
Poetry review: To Join the Lost
BY AMY LILLY [05.19.10]


To Join the Lost by Seth Steinzor, Antrim House, 216 pages. $23.

Dante’s Divine Comedy — that poetic tour of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise written in the 14th century — never seems to get old. The latest proof is the new video game by Electronic Arts, Dante’s Inferno.As in the poem, the game’s Dante character and his guide, Virgil, travel down through the nine circles of Hell, hearing sinners’ stories and witnessing their horrifying punishments. But — this being a video game — Dante is armored like a Greek warrior and can choose to absolve the shades or slash them to bits. If that raises your literary hackles, you’ll appreciate another, rather different, Dante-inspired release: the book-length poem To Join the Lost, by Seth Steinzor of South Burlington. This achingly personal, contemporary version of the Inferno is both truer to its prototype and more daring.


Preserving Dante’s structure of 34 cantos, Steinzor’s unrhymed but rhythmical poem is spoken by a poet named Seth. (It takes some guts to invite comparisons between the Tuscan bard’s poetic voice and one’s own.) Like Dante’s character-self, the middle-aged Seth finds himself lost in a murky, obstructed landscape at the poem’s opening. All is despair until out of the gloom steps Dante — the Florentine poet, that is — who, 700 years after penning his own tour of Hell, has become a guide. Some updating is immediately apparent. Seth is no late-medieval Christian but a “Twentieth Century secular Jewish Buddhist” — a fact that augurs some interesting discussions of religion in this entirely Christian-imagined underworld. Dante, for his part, sports a red fleece ski hat and an “itchy looking undergarment” beneath his Franciscan robe. (Images of Vermont flavor Steinzor’s poem, just as Dante infused his with details from his native Florence.) Together, the two poets head through the gates of hell — uncapitalized in today’s secular world — to that place “where all is lost.”


There is rich narrative potential here: Think of all the souls who have been added to hell’s population since Dante’s time, or how the City of Woe’s architecture may have changed over the centuries. Consider the insights another living visitor might add to Dante’s 14th-century observations, which were often hampered in the poem by fainting spells. Steinzor indulges in these opportunities with the finesse — and humor — of someone who has read the classic closely and lovingly. The gates, for example, have taken a beating: Only the first three lines of the famous nine-line inscription over the lintel remain. (Steinzor leaves them in the original Italian, as if Seth were encountering an artifact.) Nietzsche, it seems, knocked down the rest when he barged through.


James Joyce makes an early, droll appearance as one of the virtuous pagans once confined to Limbo. (Denizens of Limbo have been released by the modern era’s lack of religious belief. They now roam about and hold literary soirées.) Realizing Seth is breathing, Joyce is prompted to reveal how he regards his academic fans: “May you [Dante] be luckier in your followers / than I have been in mine, a bunch of idolatrous / stylesnatching gaseous vacant ismists!”


Other reconfigurations are less humorous. Charon has become unequal to the task of ferrying souls below, “there being too many bound for hell from your sweet century,” as Dante explains to Seth. These days the “scuffling throng” streams down a tunnel like commuters who, with “eyes downcast, sink as smoothly as if they were riding / an escalator.” Minos no longer reigns over the sorting process, flinging souls to their appropriate punishments; now a kind of corporate office does the job. (See sidebar.) The river Styx is now practically an ocean, which Dante summons Gandhi to part, Moses-like. The walls of water on either side of their path hold a “cataract of names” — “Mao, Mussolini, Tojo, / Pol Pot” and so on — that causes an “appalled” Dante to comment, “There once were shallows in this place where lesser / evils soaked their feet.”


Much of the poem, in fact, is a commentary on our modern era’s disproportionate tide of evil. Suicide bombers stagnate in pools like mangroves “pickling their roots.” The oversized heads of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush form a totem pole down which Seth and his guide clamber to reach “hell’s lowest foundation.” That puts the trio a mere step away from Hitler. But, as in Dante’s poem, many other sinners Seth encounters are figures from his personal past, like the man who molested him in a public showerhouse at a state park beach. Canto XXII introduces readers to an unnamed resident of Warringham, Vt., who skimmed profits from a dummy corporation he started ostensibly to care for mentally disabled children. Seth was his prosecutor. (Steinzor has worked for the last 25 years for the state of Vermont as a lawyer and criminal prosecutor, among other positions.) Ultimately, Steinzor’s poem is not merely a rewriting of Inferno — the kind of exercise given to undergraduates in which they’re asked to consider who would populate Dante’s hell today. It’s both a paean to Dante’s unendingly enthralling vision and — given Seth’s visceral, even hotheaded emotional reactions to each shade — a personal meditation on humans’ transgressions against one another.

And, while Steinzor recapitulates many of Dante’s unforgettable images — murky, boiling pools from which faces and fists eternally erupt; lines of sinners plodding backward, their heads rotated to face over their buttocks — his poetry enhances the journey with succinct, striking language. A lot of sensory ground is covered, for example, in the single verse pair, “We rose from fetor to the fresh stinks of a / hardpan beach in clotted darkness.”


How Steinzor portrays the end point of Seth’s tour — Satan’s lair — is a feat of imaginative wit readers will have to discover for themselves. One can only look forward to To Join the Lost’s companion volumes, promised on the back cover, in which Dante will lead Seth through Purgatory and — phew! — Paradise.

From To Join the Lost

[Dante:] “Nowadays, the majority find their spots
in hell by more modern means.” A row of desks
horizon to horizon striped
the slope below us. Behind each one, a chair;
and on the chair, a formless darkness,
featureless, uneasy as smoke, whose sluggishly
moiling margins shimmered dimly
as black velvet, crumpled, dimly shimmers.
Only they and nothing else
came close to gleaming in that place. We strolled
the line, and here and there at random
we paused to watch a process repeated ceaselessly
everywhere along it. A square of
friable dirt at each station spontaneously
mounded, puckered, farted forth a
human figure. “Here’s the anus mundi,
the place the tunnel you saw ejects them.”
So my guide. And each one, catching sight of
what roiled just across the table,
landed startled, graceless, stumbling, twisting
ankles, raising protective forearms,
staring straight ahead in horror.
This one grabs the table’s edge
with stiffened arms, with lowered head and voice
dribbles his sorry stream of story;
while that one flings her elbows wide with shrill
defiance; another earnestly
explains, or sobs for pity, howls his anger,
spews her spite — all fixing their gaze on
or shifting it away from (but always back to)
or grimly altogether avoiding
the blank that receives their words. Then on each desk
a stack of paper forms appears.
The pages fill with what they’ve said as if,
approaching the horror in the chair,
the words fell dead and dropped. A smell of sweat
like stale socks fills the air. And now
the final plea, demand, request or curse
is uttered. All around the babble
presses in. Leaf by leaf, with a sibilant
rustle, the pages rise and fold and
coalesce, huge and vulturine, and
clasp their talons around the neck and
flapping lazy wings they carry the drained
and unresisting figure away.
Oh, the efficient long lines of them!
Trailing to so many points on the horizon,
dividing half the sullen sky.

 

FRONT COVER DRAWINGS BY SETH STEINZOR

  

  

  

 

Joan Kantor's Shadow Sounds

There is much power in simplicity and, in my poetry, I work to capture moments of emotion and awareness directly and succinctly. Though the first draft usually comes quite easily for me, I spend a great deal of time crafting and paring down the language. My work intentionally plays to the senses, especially the visual. To effectively touch the reader, I emphasize color and texture (“The Potter’s Hands” and “They Will Be Watching”), as well as rhythm, sound, alliteration and internal rhyme (“She Was,” “Chance,” “They Will Be Watching,”and “Friday After School"). As I have in “Worlds Removed,” “The Potter’s Hands” and “Friday after School,” I use the actual visual placement of words on the page to emphasize and/or echo movement and positioning in the poem.

I find my inspiration in personal experiences (“I Only Saw The Stars,” “She Was,” “The Potter’s Hands”); in stories I’ve been told (“World’s Removed”); in the news (“They Will Be Watching”); in the natural world and especially in the world of art (“Through Brussels To Breughel”). I am first and foremost an observer. I have a passionate love of the visual arts and nature. I have been known to spend hours exploring one painting and then writing about it or using it as a jumping off point for a poem. I find a sense of spirituality in the natural world, and I embrace detail of color and texture as well as metaphor in poems such as “Autumn Marsh,” “Late September” and “River Rodeo.”

I experience life very intensely: the joy, the sadness and all of its confusion. What I'm striving to do primarily with my poetry is to use the power of language, in an accessible way, to share this intensity and in that process, make a deep human connection.

 

I'm including this poem about my mother, wishing it had been created in time to be included in Shadow Sounds. It was written out of my realization that parts of the past had become blurred by the sadness of the present.

I Only Saw the Stars

for Mom

I’m sorry
I forgot
who
you were

Recent memories
dimmed the past

While Daddy was excitement
fear and fun

you were safe

While he criticized
you praised

He was the chaos
you stood behind

He
was the stars

You
were the sky

 


My father has been such an important part, not only of my book, but of my whole creative process, that I really wanted to include these photos of him.

 

The writing of poetry has allowed me to work through my relationship with this most influential person in my life. When I first began writing, I was filled with mostly negative thoughts which gradually morphed into an awareness of a deep love and appreciation for this charismatic and very flawed individual.

This same process is helping me “see” other relationships much better.You just never know where the writing is going to take you. May I suggest that you choose a person in your life with whom you’ve had a complicated relationship and just start writing down your thoughts. These thoughts can be in the form of single words, lines or phrases; it doesn’t matter and it doesn’t have to be pretty, just true. Walk away from and come back to these words, adding and/or changing as the mood strikes. It’s sort of like making a collection from which you can later pick and choose, piecing together the parts to create a poem. Don’t labor at this; just let the words flow out of you and trust in what comes forth. The first poem will make you think even more and will perhaps give birth to future poems as you explore the person and the relationship with internal language. In my case, sometimes months or even years have gone between these sorts of poems, but I usually get inspired to delve further into the “poetic relationship” each time I reread the original poem.

For me, writing is a very visual experience. I often feel that there’s a paintbrush, not a pen, in my hand. I’ve been told by art teachers that drawing is not about fine motor skills but about seeing, “having a good eye." I feel strongly that this is what good poetry is all about. When I’m out in nature, or anywhere for that matter, I bring my internal camera, especially the zoom lens. Of course, I see the gestalt, but I’m always looking up close, for color, texture, smells… I often end up zooming in more than once on what I’ve already zoomed in on. There are so many layers that we usually miss. I sometimes get a little bit carried away, seeing colors in things that nobody else seems to see. But it works for me and my work, and that’s all that matters. It’s key to trust in your perceptions.

May I suggest that the next time you go for a walk, and it could even be in your own backyard, you bring along a pen and paper and your internal camera and that you consciously look at things differently. If you see something interesting, don’t just look at it head on. Walk around it, look under it, touch it, breathe deeply and ask yourself if there’s more than initially meets the eye. Also, sometimes something that at first appears to be ugly, upon closer perusal is actually intriguing if not even beautiful in its own special way. There’s interest and beauty in the underbelly! It’s about opening yourself up to the possibilities. Also, don’t forget to look up and down, not just straight ahead. Try to imagine how something might appear to a bird or other animal with their different perspectives. SLOW DOWN!! I do most everything at a very fast pace, but when I’m out in nature, I very purposefully try to slow down so I don’t miss anything. Write any thoughts or observations down and save them. It’s fun to develop a poem from even a brief description of something you’ve experienced in nature, which is always ripe for metaphor.Here's a recent example of my own:

 

Seaweed Cycle


Watch Hill, Rhode Island


Dainty
ridged patterns
thin rippling lines
of black
and bright green
slippery strands

wave echoes
on a firm
wet slope
of sand

strewn
with rocks
footprints
shells

momentarily far
from
the smack-crashing
sounds

the fizzling
spread
of foam

the reach
of water’s
lace edge

 

 

One of my favorite inspirations for poetry is art. Bring a pad and pen with you the next time you go to a museum, not just an art museum. Take notes on paintings or objects that interest you. Try to imagine what the artists and their subjects might be thinking, or you might want to put your own spin on an interpretation of what you see. Even better, “befriend” a special work of art and become a regular visitor. You will see something different each time you visit. I did this with my poem about Breugel’s "Kermess." I paid weekly visits for over a year until I actually felt that I was able to “crawl into it." This same technique can be used right at home. Find a favorite work of art, piece of furniture, etc. and seek out its nuances and its meaning to you. Just put those thoughts into words on the page.

Here's that poem about Bruegel's "Kermess":

 

Through Brussels to Bruegel


Each week
a magnet pulls me
to the Museum of Ancient Art

past lacy architecture

guiding me
’round gothic spires
down cobbled paths
and through the doors

right into the painting
of carnival

where I slip through cracks
on dark glossy paint

seeking out
red-orange-green
wicked deeds

lascivious dancing
and ale

gambling
feasting
and brawling

animals mingling with men
people in trees and on rooftops
enthralled by the scene

I’m watching the devil cavorting
near saints

dreading
the magnet’s release

 

For me, there’s been a certain abandon and risk-taking in the creation of poetry. I’ve even had the gall to invent new words when I just couldn’t find the right one. I highly encourage this; there’s something exciting about contributing a new word to the English language. I’m sure that there’s another small child out there who’s also “knobbledy legged”. When you can’t find just the right word, then the one you’ll create probably IS the right one. Once again, trust in it.

Don’t worry about the making of the poem; just go with the flow. It can be, but doesn’t have to be, a lofty or wrenching experience. There’s much honing and crafting that’s gone into most poems that you’ve read. But they all began simply with spontaeous words placed onto the page. You can work with them, rearrange, add, subtract or just put them away and save them for another day. But first you have to begin the process by tuning your inner eye and collecting your thoughts.

Now go and experience the joy of creativity!

Mollie Pilling's Journeys

I have gone south…I mean really south, as in South America. Uruguay is my new country and Latin America is my new continent. It is a very inspiring place for writing and I am working on a manuscript that was on the shelf for three years while I was across the river from Antrim House caring for thirty-eight teenaged girls…but that is another book altogether.

The poem “Book Exchange” was written the night of my very first reading from the book Journeys. It was held at the Avon Free Library, and I was very encouraged by the turn out and the warm reception from the audience. David Leff was there and kindly offered to join me for a light supper at Abigail’s after the reading. I gave David a copy of Journeys, and in exchange he gave me his book of poems and photographs, Depth of Field. Once back home in my Westminster apartment the buzz of my debut was beginning to wane and I opened David’s book and literally fell into his beautiful poems. That moment inspired the poem I wrote that night. It was one of those rare occasions when the words simply flowed onto the page. I felt so fortunate to have met David and exchanged books with a famous local poet.

The poem “What God Gave” was written the morning before I was launched at the Buttonwood Tree in Middleton. I had been on weekend duty at school and Sunday I had been assigned to drive a van of students to the local church. At noon, when I should have been preparing my program for the 3:00 launch, I was compelled to write a new poem instead. I started the program with this new poem – even Rennie had not seen it – and after the reading a number of folks from the audience shared their own stories about a Catholic education. It was a great connection.

“La Corrida” is a poem wherein I am attempting to justify the cultural importance and my own fascination with bullfights. Friends accuse me of being bloodthirsty, but visiting my son in Spain over the years, I have grown to love the spectacle and pageantry of the corridas. Hemingway was inspired by them, too, and wrote a whole novel about bullfighting. There is indeed something almost mystical about Death in the Afternoon.

Book Exchange

for DKL

In a Grey Goose haze I fumbled for keys
in a too-small purse,
the sweet salt of oysters still stinging my lips
and I smiled,
embarrassed to seem so awkward,
a cliché,
under bluish bright lights in the parking lot.

Marking the patch on your jacket: EMT
I thought - you might rescue me
if you were on call and I called for you.
You crushed me in a hug
that pressed the air out of me,
and then I breathed you in.

Back home I fell into your poems
lost in the windswept images of your words
caught in the eye of a broad-winged hawk.
I fell and fell through window frames and
skyscapes
Skimmed snowy fields,
beaches and junk heaps.

I lingered on sad regretting poems and
stopped at each vivid image, flickering with lights
like a magic lantern,
the pages slipping and riffling through
my fingers
in a Grey Goose haze.

 

What God Gave

Intimacy is a word quite new to me.
We had simply called it love.
Growing up in my preparatory convent for girls
just over the old brick wall from Georgetown University,
we may as well have been in another century --
in another land.

The playing fields, the old slave cabin, the cloister, the Odeon
with its waxy smell drifting up past tall colored windows.
The chapel with the tightly carved wooden grill behind which the
nuns sang their haunting chants, the smell of incense that
transported us to a religious ecstasy as the priest so tenderly placed
the host on our quivering tongues. Body of Christ.

The cloistered nuns who taught us were a mystery to be solved.
We would test them, try to trick them out, plumb them.
Sister Cecelia was an old soul. She taught us Biology.
When a bold girl asked, "Sister," standing, as we always had
to stand, to ask or answer, "Sister, what is a hickey?"
We held our collective breaths. Even silly Patty
pursed her lips tightly in anticipation of the answer
to what was clearly meant to be a trick question.

"My dear girls, God has given us so many ways to express and share our love.
Our bodies function in such a way as to give a sort of pleasure
that can only be described as a taste of the heavenly joy pure souls
experience at the Resurrection. This sort of kiss is sometimes called a love-bite."
We shivered in our seats." A physical expression of love, such as this, is only
one of the many blessed aspects of the partnership of marriage'," she paused,
"and, is only shared within the bond of Holy Matrimony."

Today when I see one of my lovely young students walking through
our halls wearing his football jersey and his delicate confidence,
I smile to notice, just there, between the feather of his hair and his earlobe,
an almost heart-shaped bruise.

And I think, "God has given us so many ways."

 

La Corrida Goyesca

Near Giza, not far from the sharply pointed pyramids and
the ruined sphinx, is a blocky worn structure, a very early
pyramid tomb with a wide door leading to an underground
chamber.

There, in polished red granite vaults, are the mummified bulls.
Revered, the sacrifice of the bulls is depicted in wall paintings
and bas relief over and over through the
Valleys of the Kings and the Queens.

The cult of the bull spread through the ancient world and
scenes carved in Penthelic marble below the cornices of the
Parthenon show priests and attendants tenderly leading the garlanded
bull to the altar, a sacrifice to the gods of Olympus.

Down the road, in the museum, Lykethos vases are scratched
with those scenes and with paintings of athletes vaulting and
leaping, grabbing the bull by its horns - the same bull that
they saw in the constellations.

Ancient Romans, on their altars, led bulls with gilt horns to be sacrificed.
Zeus, as a bull, stands in marble as he carried Europa over the sea
to seduce her. Or in the havoc that emerges from a single block of marble
depicting the punishment of Dirce tied to the bull.

In the small town of Ronda, set into the gorge of Serrania
is the jewel box of the first bullring, built for the Corrida Goyesca
in 1785, native son, Pedro Romero became the first matador.

There, behind a tall wooden gate, within the sandstone walls of the ring of
Tuscan columns, is a chapel where matadors pray to the Madonna
to bless and protect them; and Goya's etchings and
drawings of the pageant are displayed.

There are those who would do away with the practice,
the tradition in Spain, of the corridas, but the pageantry
and skill has won me.

A lone man in sequins, stockings and ballet shoes dancing
with danger, waving a cape, alone in the circle, face to face
under an afternoon sun, is celebrated in Plazas de Toros in
Puerto Santa Maria, Sevilla, Madrid, Cordoba, and Granada.

It is true that the bull dies in the end with the coup de grace
of a long sharp sword and he is ceremoniously dragged
off the stage of red sand by a chain wrapped around his horns
behind a team of mules and motley clad cowboys snapping whips.

It is true that this is a blood sport. There is blood.
But from the moment that bull sets his eyes on a man,
and responds to the graceful arch of a pink cape,
I hold my breath.

The circle of the ring is packed with Spaniards who follow the
matadors like modern day rock stars and know how many
times they have been awarded an ear or a tail by strict judges.
They remember the gorings and deaths and it is no small matter.

The passes and moves, the flounces and turns, are choreographed
in tradition and the brave matador may fall on his knees, stare the
beast in his eyes, feel the rank breath on his face and all is still.
The judges have been known to pardon a bull, to spare its life.

The horns of the orchestra blare as a young matador faces a new bull
and the dance starts again; the bull charges the barriers and
fifteen hundred pounds of muscle and bone scrapes his foot in the sand,
as if to say, Let's get on with it and we will see who is boss!

But when the red cape comes out, we know that the business is near.
The sword is taken from a leather sheath and props up the horizontal
cape as the ballet continues and the bull is mesmerized by the many
turns and ole's as a crowd cheers the beauty and bravery of the lone man.

And then, with finesse, it is done and the white hankies wave to the
judges to sway the vote for the favorite and the toreador circles the ring,
bowing and waving, as ladies' fans, hats and flowers sail down.
The horns blare once more and the prize of ears held high.

A country needs heroes and tradition and blood.
In Sienna the Palio, in Britain the Steeplechase, the fox hunt
running with the hounds, and we have our deer hunts
and bear hunts and boxing, and, of course,

We have our wars.

Death and blood in the afternoon in the pursuit of machismo.
But in the ring, the strategic dance between man and beast
that is steeped in the tradition of goyesca color and pageantry and
the ancient fascination with the bull, somehow seems worthy.

 

Tango Criollo

Hands lightly on the shoulder, eyes locked and
feet moving smoothly into staccato steps and slides
seemingly disconnected from the hips

two steps back, two steps forward, pause and
then forward once more. Lead and follow.

The anticipation of the meeting was prelude
a brief exchange - short, detailed messages
teased and promised. The promise of a dance

A promise of shared words, images, hemispheres.
the promise of a full moon reflected on the watery streets

The sensuous overtones of tango and space closing
the logistics of the number on the bus, the crossroads
Murillo and Commedia Divina - evocative illogical names

The lilting sounds of bandoneón and rhythms of tango
exploring the movements, playful and dangerous

Rio de la Plata rough and relentless running along the Rambla
our feet move smoothly through the staccato steps and slides
seemingly disconnected from our wills into the embrace

The promise of the meeting was not the only promise to be kept
the music played on and the dance unfolded

There is a grace in the fumble to shed inhibitions and strangeness
the dance dips and lowers onto the bed and the tango extends
to tangled limbs and bedclothes and exploring rhythms

we knew it would be this dance in this place on this plane
we knew it would be this night in this town on this street

Tango is at once a little gentle and a little rough
steering backward and forward, a turn to the side and pause.
A trip to the interior and a promise of return to tango.

The music fades. The dancers disengage. Hands rest lightly.
A door opened and you stepped through and decided to dance

 

 

Moving from Simsbury to Uruguay in 2011 offered an opportunity to experience a new continent and new culture. Montevideo is a small city compared to the booming Buenos Aires just across the Rio de la Plata. Beyond the city limits are flat plains of grazing beef cattle, sheep and small independent farms. Uruguay is the bottom of the world. The Southern Hemisphere, and, yes, the water spins differently down the drain!

Now, after four years, I am returning to the United States and although I have no real home or roots there it will become a place to rest, to write and to rediscover a different lost continent after thirty five years of teaching all over the world.

These poems are from a manuscript that includes poems in sections: From the Rambla, City of the Moon, Farmington River Valley Songs, and Journey ‘round my World.


The Magic Tears


for Gabriella in Granada

 

I held you this morning and you left some tears
on my shoulder: droplets on my pajamas.

When you realized, you tried to wipe them off,
but I said – “No, these are magic tears.
Tonight when I sleep these tears will give
me dreams of you.”

The days we spent together in the sun,
walking hand in hand on the stony footpaths
of your city of the moon.

I will dream of batidos fresas and spilled Cola Cao
and lunches at our favorite restaurants along the river.

I will dream of watching a bright balloon swing into
the trees and free itself to float high up, disappearing
into the dark blue sky – a tiny glint winking down
at us as it turned toward the sun.

I will dream of your face bent over, intent on a drawing
or spellbound, mesmerized by a film, or calm and drifting
into sleep after creating a zoo in the shadows on the wall
by your bed.

I will dream of your look of triumph after you climb to the
highest point on the jungle gym, or mischievous grin,
pleased that you have transported every toy to the top
platform of the climbing frame and sit like a princess
emptying your boots of stones.

I will dream of the sweet chime of your voice calling my name
and the tight squeeze of your hug and the soft kisses brushing
my cheek like the flutter of mariposa wings.

I will dream of games and carousels, face paint, brushing your
hair, buckling your shoes, zipping your jacket, looking for just
the right type of chicle and laughing; there was a lot of laughing!

I don’t recall what made you so sad this morning, but I want to
thank you for anointing me with those magic tears that allow me
to visit you each night in my dreams.

 

 

Honeybee

A honeybee joined me for tea.

Is he curious about the brand of honey
I am spreading on my bread, trying to find
out if the nectar has been gathered from his
own rosemary hedge?

After sampling the edge of my cup and dipping
a toe into the honey on my knife
he headed for the window and measured
its height and width like a glazier, dancing at the corners.

No way out.

I feel too distracted to simply allow his exploration.
Sensing his frustration, I worry he might become
desperate and erratic; might mistake my hand
for a place to offer his life – his sole barb.

I know I can crush him.
But it is not his fault I left my door open
to allow the scents and breezes
from my garden to enter;

nor that my honey must have lured him
off his flight pattern toward flower or hive.
He is an innocent bee going about his bee business
and he stumbled into mine.

I take a jar and capture him against the pane.
I slip a piece of paper covered with my scribbles
between the pane and the bee and carefully,
carry my buzzing glassed-in-prisoner to the door.

Holding the jar at arm’s length I pull back the paper trap;
he hesitates – then takes the chance - flies off
to the nearest rose to catch his breath.
I close the door and miss him already.

My tea is cold, but now I have a poem.

 

 

Pica Flora

Emily used the metaphor of a mail train from Tunis,
but to me they are light iridescent clockwork toys
dodging, dipping, stopping, sipping, blurred in motion.

The jasmine vine is dense and winds through
the curved bars of my window,
The blooms are opened and spill a heady scent into the air
like a siren’s call to these nimble voyagers.

First there is one – then wait – another, or is it a third?
A flash of rose and blue with a streak of green and yellow.
The jet-bead eyes and delicate rounded face punctuated
by the epee, fine-pointed long needle –

the straw that draws
sweet nectar in a second before moving on to another
and then another glorious fleeting distraction
and a miracle of movement, efficiency and grace.

The whirring is audible; the vision ethereal.

Suddenly they are gone.

The southern summer sun bakes the
terrace stones and the shade under the
lintel of my bay window retreats.





 

 

 

Paul Scollan's Liberty Street Hill

 

Liberty Street through the Rear View Mirror:

Thoughts and Reflections

 

It wasn’t until my early 20’s that I started writing poetry – most of it “nature poetry”, some of it self-indulgent, most of it bad. But it was a beginning. It took a while for me to realize that the world didn’t need any more poems about daffodils, live oaks or fringed gentians. Besides, isn’t nature’s beauty found in cracked brick ("Factory Town") and befouled statues of soldiers? And then there were the poems of doubt and angst from self looking for self. Not what any reader needed (or wanted) – more cries from the chasm.

Life’s demands prevailed. I moved on to do other things. Years passed with marriage(s) and family. With the world getting to be too much with me, I went back to writing as respite, as a rest-stop on the uneven climb up the craggy ridge.

My poems are rooted in memory through the basking light of imagination. I see memories evolving with the passage of time, needing fresh translation, always reaching for something more, for greater meaning. I often look to the mundane and ordinary ("Snapple Bottle," "Love Note in a Plastic Ring") as a jump-off to another place. I don’t always know where I’m headed. That’s the adventure.

I believe that all poetry is a form of story-telling. Even lyric poems are stories; they’re narratives coming from the tortured web of yearning and desire.

I write about my fears as enemies with whom I wish to make my peace ("Slaying the Dragon," "Anxiety"). There’s something very liberating about it – the whole idea of creating distance from what bedevils me and finding new perspectives on it pulls me in unwanted directions, yet challenges me to overcome.

I write about people. I lean toward writing about the unsung, the overlooked, the strays wandering outside our marked boundaries. There’s so much to learn from what makes them so tenderly human in spite of the differences, and perhaps because of them. Empathy makes it possible to slip inside another’s skin, to listen in on the interior dialogue. I discover parts of myself through these encounters; they jostle my set notions, give me humility, help buoy up a soul drifting too close to the rocks ("Pipes Calling," "Aggie’s Office Visit," "Doomed from the Womb," "Neighbor Dorothea").

Some recollections haunt, sadden, move or mystify. I hang on to them, store them away for later perusal. What was it I really saw or heard? Was there a convergence of people, place and time that goes beyond coincidence ? A mystery yet to be understood? ("Bridie," "Neighbor Helene’s Visit").

“Life’s too important to be taken seriously,” said Oscar Wilde, one who knew sorrow and pain. Poetry doesn’t have to be hand-wringing in stanza form. It begs for a chuckle ("Little Jimmy Grayson," "Salute to Harry Coons"). Irony and humor are close bedfellows.

I have been working on my second book and would like to include a few poems that exemplify some of the above.

 

Only a Mother

A side-street lot all cracked tar,
as well a meadow of thistle and chicory
in a drunk’s stagger of standing purple
to the loading dock and back;
a red brick-face corridor that takes the eye,
as well the parting sun’s backboard mural
in a patter of shadow on a scaffold;
a row of windows from a soot-smudged eave,
as well the keepers of fast-slipping scenes
of haystack clouds riding one behind the other.

This town, no better no worse than others,
now a matter of how to scrape it up,
swab it clean, cover open lesions
and cauterize its giant tattooed thighs,
so say the people, the people in charge.
It’s the over-grown kid gone wrong –
that only a mother could love.

 

The Swan and the Counselor

I could swear
her eyes glistened
as she started telling
the story of the swan
flying low over the bridge
she crossed that morning,
how a wing glanced the top
of the tractor-trailer cab
in front of her, went hurling down
to a sprawl across two lanes,
a peculiar whiteness widening,
neck curved to a question mark,
wings clasped in prayer
to passing cars in their racing pace.


Her voice, it grew husky and cracked,
breathing stopped – opening
a gap a truck could drive through.
In a blink, discomposure
powdered over in a flutter
of her dragon-lady lashes
as she gathered up her swagger,
snapped back to tattooed Lulu,
the lady I knew so well
in the vale-of-tears room
where I did my armchair voodoo.

Lulu was back,
and Lulu blurted,
That dumb-ass bird
needed a co-pilot – me.

 

Cowboy Boots

To his podiatrist, the foot’s host of afflictions
is the primate’s price for standing erect,
the shoe the negotiator with terra firma,
so no wonder his shock
when Sal, his oddball late-fifties patient
with bad feet from diabetes,
bent over with osteoarthritis,
got so upset on being advised
to find sensible orthopedic shoes
more befitting his malformed feet,
and for God’s sake give up the cowboy boots,
so what his love for western apparel
head to toe, and his collection of fine hats
and boots (never saddled a horse, he’d bet).

Just as well suffer,
thank you very much, Doc;
this is my reason for living,
but you wouldn’t even try to understand.

Wrong. He did try.

 

Norah Pollard's Death & Rapture in the Animal Kingdom

Suzanne Levine's Haberdasher's Daughter

 

Poetry Primer

 

Keep it simple

Write what you know

Show don’t tell

Think story

Read aloud

Lighten up, see below i.e.

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen….

From “Sonnet” by Billy Collins


Arlene Swift Jones' God, Put Out One of My Eyes

Mary Leonard's The Sweet & Low Down

The Sweet and Low Down is a series of poems that touch on both the sweets and lows of life. Each poem evolved out of a personal moment or a bit of language. Some tell stories I heard or know, and others emerged after looking at art, color chips or listening to music. My husband took the photograph on the front cover. It is of an avocado shed in Israel's Carmel Mountains, the area that just had the terrible fires. The photo makes the shed look like candies or something from a children’s poster. But it is a painted corrugated tin shed. I think the photo too suggests the sweet and low downs of life.

David K. Leff's Depth of Field

DOUBLE VISION: MIRRORING WORDS AND IMAGES

Ut pictura poesis – Horace


Poetry is rarely accompanied by images. Memoirs, histories, and sometimes even novels include illustrations of various kinds. But beyond the cover or a frontispiece, only line breaks and the soft gray rhythms of a typeface add visual effects to poetry. Save for coffee table volumes, internet sites and the occasional artsy anthology, poetry books typically confine themselves to words, even though ekphrastic poems about painting or sculpture may reveal an author’s love of visual arts. Rarer still is the poet who illustrates his own work, the most notable exception being William Blake, whose enchanting Songs of Innocence and of Experience was published in 1794 with lavish and intricate hand-colored copper-plate etchings surrounding each poem.

Certain poets do possess pictorial talents. Allen Ginsburg, for one, was an inveterate shutterbug. His photographs with lyrical and sometimes elaborate captions were the subject of a scholarly exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. during 2010, yet the prints never found their way into his many volumes of poems.

Both an ekphrastic urge and comparisons of verbal and visual work from before Horace’s time to the present demonstrate myriad synergies between the art forms. Perhaps the taboo over pictures in poetry originates in a belief that images are distracting or that poetry and images ought to stand on their own. But if poetry is an art revealed to the ear in time and painting addresses the eye instantaneously in space, as Eighteenth Century German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing maintained, their coupling suggests a potential partnership offering readers an enlarged universe for imaginations to roam, a kind of unified field theory of cognition.

Poetry need not circumscribe a picture and images don’t have to hamstring linguistic power. If both beckon with sympathetic stories that go beyond merely explaining one another, the verbal and visual can engage in conversation strengthening and reinforcing their
messages. As James Agee said of Walker Evans’ photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, “they, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative.”

Regardless of whether a picture is worth a thousand words or how many megapixels go into a sentence, image and language resonate, are amplified by their presence together. Marriages of words and pictures are part of our daily experience in the prosaic realm of newspapers, magazines and advertisements, both in print and online, where captions, articles, and taglines are the common companions of photographs. The combination confirms, as British art critic John Berger put it, that “images of art . . . surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us.”

Some of the poems in this volume were inspired by photographs recently taken and some of the images were sought for a poem. In a few cases, inspiration for the written work and the snap of the camera shutter occurred simultaneously. One poem is specifically about a photo I took decades ago, an exercise I can only describe as self-ekphrastic.

Photographs and poems are both a distillate of an artist’s way of looking. Looking is a choice, and it’s a truism that we tend to see what we look for. But what we observe and how we perceive also depend on the tools we use inasmuch as they provide a rubric for observation. Whether it’s a camera, hunter’s shotgun, binoculars, fishing rod, or pen, experience bends to the implement at hand. With my Nikon I’m more likely to find visual juxtapositions of texture and light. A shotgun turns acuity toward minute and often invisible signs of animal life, while binoculars lead into the distance. Fishing rods attune me to movement—of water, insects and aquatic life. A pad and pen result in more contemplative outlooks drawing connections among diverse objects and phenomena.

Whatever my capacities, I’m a better writer when I leave my camera behind, a better photographer when I forget about my notebook and pencil. At the same time, I understand the world more fully when I see with both.

Sherri Bedingfield's Transitions & Transformations

Nick Harris' Learning to Love

 

Nick Harris writes in a variety of forms. Here are two recent short stories:

 

THE WELL

I came to a well. I was thirsty and in need of water. The aperture was made from rocks that looked old as I felt. They were rough, bonded with cement and supported me as I leaned over to view down the shaft. I could see water that reflected meekly the sun that shot down from above. The heat felt like arrows flung from a chariot as it raced across the desert. If I listened carefully, I could even hear the wheels grinding the dust but it was only the wind that blew past my sunburned ears. Otherwise, it was silent.

“Hello,” I called down into hole to gage its depth.

My voice was lost as it bounced down the stony walls as if it were falling. I immediately felt a sense of vertigo and stepped back. The archer above continued its assault and the sweat popped in glistening beads from my skin then running down in mocking rivulets. It rolled into my eyes, clouding my vision as I looked around for a pebble to throw into the orifice that now menaced me from below. It clicked innocently against the sides of the well as it descended. It would never again know the dry desert breeze, submerged in the mud at the bottom. I pitied it and yet knew that at the edge of any abyss I too was in danger. Who hasn’t felt the urge to throw themselves off when measuring a precipitous drop. It is as if some vile creature whispers in the ear to fall and one has to grip the edge much as a baby resists the drop through the birth canal while the viscosity of life calls it into existence. But, though a baby enters the light, the darkness below was calling me into certain death.

I was, by now, desperately thirsty with no means to extract a drop and the sun pierced my exposed skin. I sat down, leaning against the stones. I cursed the well and the glistening eye of water that stared blankly up into the sky. My alienation was complete. I’d ventured into the desert to seek a better understanding of myself and now found that I was not worthy of my own company. I was weak and, instead of a hidden inner resource, found an empty carapace through which a dusty wind now blew, chiseling my bones and desiccating my mind. Instead of an oasis, there were dunes of doubt and here I sat unable to plumb the depths for a drop of moisture. My wife and children were just a faded remembrance. Had they forgotten me? The wasted landscape said, yes. Nothing mattered out here but for that elixir, that life-sustaining blood of the earth that now rested too deeply to retrieve. I was now called upon to reach deep into my withered mind to gain an advantage over the bleak and baked circumstances that had encompassed me – no, that I had freely entered. A snake shuttled across the dust followed by another. Was the first one prey to the other or, perhaps, a potential mate? Would she eat him after copulation as in some species of insect? I imagined jaws opening upon head and working down towards tail. There would no doubt be a period when the tail of the eaten would remain hanging out of the mouth of eater as the snakes were the same size. The predator would be exceedingly vulnerable as it slowly digested the skin, flesh, and bones of the prey.
I stood up, the only sentient creature in the world. I knew that I would die, forever chained to this well. I walked around it and my eye caught sight of a small vine that had struggled from the dry earth to climb up the side of the well. On the tip of one of the tendrils that caressed the stones in a desperate embrace, were four blooms. They were red and yellow, the colors of my nation’s flag and had oriented themselves towards the unholy sun. They bobbed slowly in the breeze.

“The roots,” I thought, “must run very deep.”

The roots must have been many times longer than the vine itself. They must have gone deep following the shaft down to drink of what I was denied. They were beautiful, the little blooms, shaped like trumpets. What wonderful music they made in my wilting mind and I smiled. Like this little vine, I clung to the well.
The sun was tilting towards the horizon and soon the stars, those desert stars so famous in myth and fable would shower me with light that was millions of light years old. What I would be seeing were stars that for all I knew no longer existed. And in billions of years, our sun would begin to burn out, expanding in the throws of death to swallow the earth. The earth would become a desert like the one I inhabited now but there would be no vine with read and yellow blooms and the well would be dry. The universe was expanding exponentially but even it would reach its limits and would contract again, returning to its womb until the pressure of that grain of super-matter exploded again and the universe was recreated. The blooms bobbed in mute agreement as if they knew what I was thinking. Some kind of bird circled above me, slowly riding the hot air as it rose off the parched land. I had followed a faint trail to the well and now I determined that I would follow another that led off towards a range of distant hills. It was from there someone had carefully brought the stones for the well. But I would wait until night. I could not choose to live, but I could choose not to die here. I rooted myself, temporarily, next to the small blooms and waited, the stones of the well supporting my weary body.

 

THE DEATH OF JUNE MERRIMACK

 

The church had been built as an afterthought. It was attached to the subdivision like the “amen’s” at the end of Father Domenici’s Sunday prayers. He was a third generation Italian-American who had taken to the Church partly out of a fear of women. He was close to them and yet his mother had been a force for which he had few defenses. She had taught him to tie his shoes but also to fear her. She would readily cuff him when his less-than-noble attributes shown through in his childhood behavior. Thusly, he grew up fast, only slightly resenting his mother. Her churlishness and his father’s absence had set him on a path in which he sought out acceptance through obedience. He was only partly obedient to his fear. The other part was his need for love. It was not that his mother didn’t love him, but that she was single and had to split her time between her work and his five other siblings. She had little time for tenderness though he always tried to show her what she couldn’t show him.

He was the youngest with five sisters. They would tease him for his slightly bucked teeth and he was heavier than most of the other kids at school. When he had decided to commit his life to God, the pounds had dropped off like so much guilt. As a child, he wanted to please his sisters and had gone out for every sport practicable, given his weight. But he was never a good athlete and this only brought more shame to and recriminations from his sisters. He was soundly beaten in wrestling and feared standing naked before matches to be weighed. As he walked out to the mat in his singlet, he felt the eyes of the crowd on him and imagined he could hear the whispers. His coach later told him that he was on the team only as a joke, a kind of cartoon character that brought levity to the rest of the team. They enjoyed watching him lose.

He, as a result, poured out his feelings that no one would understand into journal after journal. He would write until his hand cramped. He avoided masturbation and this was the closest approximation that he allowed himself. As a result, he felt attracted to and, at the same time, tormented by the nubile creatures that surrounded him at school as well as home. Every so often his sisters got a hold of one of his journals though they weren’t so petty as to not return them. But that would only be after exercising their glee amongst each other. Once, they reported the contents of a journal to their mother and were soundly cuffed themselves for being childish. They never did that again and Domenici was eternally grateful to his mother.
His family had not been particularly religious and he, as a child, had often wondered what it would be like to be a girl. This was not an obsession, just a curiosity that further complicated his relationships with girls and later women and that would incline him towards celibacy. The Church welcomed him as if he were its lover. And he was. He loved the Church with every cell in his body and his Masses were filled with a pathos he was sure rubbed off on his parishioners. So when June Merrimack died, his requiem had been one fit for a queen. He had loved her with an affection he imparted to few women but as a polio survivor, she also knew what it was to suffer. And, she had been there every Sunday through his ten years at the Napa Valley parish.

“She may have only had the use of one arm,” he had said at her funeral, “but she lived to hold Christ up high as if she had the strength of Prometheus himself.”

He was fond of Greek mythology.

“And though bitterness could have fed upon her soul, like the eagle upon Prometheus’s liver each and every day, she was renewed by God’s love. When the fire of love fades from your hearts, remember June who, with the strength of a Titan, brought light into our lives. She has parted from us, yes, but lives on in our hearts just as the flame of this candle,” he gestured to the table beside him which held several candles, “lights this very room.”

* * *

As the line of cars snaked down the highway to June’s burial, a brush fire had broken out on the median and the dry Azalea bushes were all aflame. It was a thirty minute drive to the new veteran’s grave yard. Jim, her husband had been in World War II and so June could be buried for no cost. Jim, when his time came, would be buried next to her. When they arrived, the wind was blowing. It was early October and unseasonably cold. The family and others gathered in the small tent on the grounds of the new grave yard. There was no landscaping yet and various bulldozers and other machines rested nearby. Dust filled the air and the tent shook with every breath of wind. Father Domenici kept his words brief and a few others, including June’s daughter-in-law got up to speak.

“She was a generous soul,” she said, “and she would talk to strangers as if they were old friends. June loved everybody.”
The wind blew her hair awkwardly and she looked about embarrassed. Soon June’s casket arrived on the back of a pick up truck and was rolled into the tent on a sort of gurney. The wind kept moving the gurney and several people had to keep it from rolling out of the tent. Flowers were laid on the casket that just as quickly blew off and then it was rolled back onto the pickup and driven away to be buried. Mourners made beelines for their cars and began the long trip back through the flaming azaleas. The traffic was horrendous and it was as if hell had descended upon earth. For the time being, June was forgotten by all but Father Domenici. As he drove slowly home in his Subaru Forester, he looked out upon the flames.
“What hath God wrought,” he thought.

He thought about the woman with the withered arm. Something had withered within him by her passing. He was more interested in life than he was in death. He rarely thought of his own mortality, entranced as he was with God’s love. It shined on his life with the magnanimity that his mother was not able to afford. It was unconditional, or so he thought. The requirements of his religion, the traditions and rituals, were to him a small price to pay for the sense of security they instilled in him. In fact, he liked them. He liked being in control. He imagined it was similar to dancing, though he had never danced with a partner of equal grace. He liked holding people’s hearts and minds in his soft hands. It was a control he never had growing up. He not only held June Merrimack’s soul, but she gave it up to him with a willingness that was almost sensual. And, though she was older than him, he felt a certain passion towards her that he couldn’t quite describe. But now, she was gone, at least in the physical. He tried to feel her presence as he drove past the burning azaleas. Then, it was as if they spoke to him; you have given her the keys to heaven and blessed her passage; you have performed the work that you were ordained to do; you, and no other could have comforted her family and friends and it was your steady and loving hand that integrated life and death into one seamless wave that now breaks gently on the tranquil shores of their grieving; they are better for her passing and, as in all things, there is a lesson to be learned: live well, die well.

* * *

Back in the rectory, Father Domenici pulled a bottle of wine from within his desk. He always drank from a silver goblet he’d gotten at seminary in Rome. He filled it to the rim. His eyes were tired and watery and still had a bit of the dust from June’s burial in them. He was glad his words had been so consoling on this cold, windy day of sorrow. With evening, the wind had died down. He drank deeply from his goblet remembering the youthful camaraderie of his fellow seminarians in Rome. It was there that he learned of all the variations of Italian wine and now he considered himself quite the connoisseur.
“In vino veritas,” he thought taking another gulp.

He remembered meandering through the streets of Rome on his Vespa, swallowing the thick air that came off the River Tiber. Surrounded, as he was, by thousands of years of history, he felt his life as palpably as he had the grip of fatalism which had oppressed him as a youth. Sometimes at night, he would dream of Mother Mary, always clad in a clean white robe and she would welcome him into her home and feed him bread, always bread. And it was good, tasting slightly of juniper and rosemary. He would watch her as she refilled her oil lamps that cast smoky shadows. The floor was always strewn with white and gray feathers and her light tread appeared to be as if she were walking on air. There was never anyone else there and they never spoke. He wanted to kiss her and wash her feet but her silence kept him seated cross-legged in the corner on the softest fleece of a sheep.

He put Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring into his small CD player. As he listened, tears formed in the corners of his eyes and then began to roll down his thin cheeks. The dust of the day was washed out and he felt renewed by both the wine and his tears. He had always been prone to tears in the face of beautiful music. It was his own genius reflected in the music that made him cry and though he had no musical talent, he knew it was his words that sang. He took his bible from the drawer and without looking at it, recited the Twenty-third Psalm out loud: “He restoreth my soul…Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

His lips lingered on these final words and he wiped his eyes with a large handkerchief drawn from his back pocket. He liked the feel of the pages between his fingers. He poured another cup of wine. June had been a small woman and though she had one withered arm, she carried herself erectly. He had often seen her face alone among his flock. To be honest, her penetrating gaze upon him had at times comforted him and at others disquieted him to his very core. And yet, having learned the skill of introspection, he felt that she was in some way placed among his parishioners to aid him in his search for eternal truth. She forced him to look inward as he stood before them, exposed as Christ had been exposed upon the cross, exposed as he had been as a young wrestler waiting naked to be weighed. She had seen something in him of which he was not even aware, he thought. He was still not quite sure what it was. As their eyes would meet he experienced a fleeting sensation of insecurity and then, as if willed by God Himself, he felt the strength of his Father’s, the Lord God’s arms wrap about him. His voice would rise up out of him across the crowded pews unto eternity itself.
He sipped more delicately at his wine this time and reached for his blood pressure medication. Swallowing a pill, he felt fortified as if he would live forever. He would die an old and happy priest. He was tired now.
“I will just lie down for a moment,” he thought reclining onto his office sofa.

He closed his eyes. His mother would have been so proud of him. He always sensed that she was oppressed by a guilt born of his father’s early death. He missed her now.

As the music ended on his CD player sleep came to him, the kind of sleep one sleeps after a long and fruitful day. He meant only to lie down for a few minutes. His handkerchief slipped from his grasp onto the floor. The empty bottle of wine by his lamp cast a translucent shadow against the far wall and from the wall of one of his arteries a small piece of plaque loosened itself. As his heart beat, it traveled up through ever narrowing passages towards his brain. He was dreaming an odd dream. He was young again in Rome. He stood in St. Peter’s Square and in his hand, a note. He was reading the words written in a woman’s hand over and over again. But they were in Italian and he didn’t yet know it well enough. He thought he knew what it said but he couldn’t be sure. There was a slight breeze that riffled the paper as the shadow of the obelisk moved across the crowded square. The obelisk had been silent witness to the Apostle Peter’s death and now rose up in his dream as if touching the white cumulus nimbi that wandered over a marine-blue sky. Death, in its many forms, had now taken the shape of a great stone monument. So much of it lay beneath Fr. Domenici’s feet as well. So many martyrs had died, and for what? What testimony do bones have? He had built his life on bones and yet through him these martyrs lived. They would live in his words and his communions and his parishioners. They would live in June Merrimack until she was bones too. Then there was a gust of wind and the letter fluttered from his hands into the crowd and soon, under their hundreds of milling feet, but not before his eyes caught the words ti amo scrawled at the bottom. I love you, they said.

 

AND HERE IS AN INTERESTING SERIES OF POEMS SHOWING THE REVISION PROCESS AT WORK

 

Black Wing


On the shore while I was walking,
I heard an ancient voice.
It was the raven talking who said,
“You never had a choice.

Remember this and this defend:
to Nature’s will we all must bend.
The shore is more than land and sea.
The beginning is the end.

So fill it up and stock her well
and heed the tolling of the bell
for out at sea upon the waves,
you cannot hear the warning knell.”

I fell down to my knees and said,
“I have so much I want to do.
Last night I dreamt that I was dead
before my life was through.”

The raven wrapped me in his wing
and slowly spoke once more.
“As long as you have wings, my boy,
you need not leave the shore.”

So up we soared into the sky
then down again we’d dive,
two ravens who were quite alive
beyond the ocean’s roar.


I’m a member of a poetry group called the Greenwood Poets. They had a variety of comments on the first of the trilogy, one being that it was amorphous and hard to understand. They suggested that the narrator had been tricked into leaving the shore after he was told that, “As long as you have wings, my boy, / you need not leave the shore.” They suggested that the Raven was a trickster as in Native tradition. The Raven seemed to be saying that the boy could avoid death and then lured him off shore, “…beyond the ocean’s roar.” I had to remedy the otherwise positive message of this poem that I had intended (“…two ravens who were quite alive…”) with the new darker notion suggested by my peers.


An Ode to Death


On the bank while I was walking,
I heard an ancient voice.
It was Death talking who said,
“You never had a choice.

Remember this and don’t pretend:
The bank is more than land and river;
The beginning is the end
and life’s a fickle giver.”

I fell down to my knees and said,
“I have so much I want to do.
Last night I dreamt that I was dead
before my life was through.”

Death who smelled foul and rank
slowly spoke once more.
“Life begins at the bank.
Here, take an oar”

So off into the gray-green mist
we rowed the frail craft,
a stygian barque that death had kissed.
“Welcome home,” he laughed.


In the second piece, it followed then that the Raven was actually Death who lured the boy into the River Styx as it was the boy’s time to die. But, instead of a blissful afterlife, the boy was eventually taken to Hades with the promise that, “Life begins at the bank” of the river. He even helps to row the boat and in this, implicates himself in his own fall. The naïve boy realizes too late that it is not life but his death that has begun.


The Creator


On the shore while I was walking,
I heard an ancient voice.
It was the Raven talking who said,
“You never had a choice.

Remember this and don’t pretend:
To Nature’s will we all must bend.
The shore is more than land and sea.
The beginning is the end.

So fill your boat and stock her well
and heed the tolling of the bell
for out at sea upon the waves,
you cannot hear the warning knell.”

I dropped down to my knees and said,
“I have so much I want to do.
Last night I dreamt that I was dead
before my life was through.”

The Raven wrapped me in his wing
and slowly spoke his lore.
“As long as you have wings, my boy,
you need not leave the shore.”

So up we soared into the sky
then down again we’d dive, but
when I looked, the shore was gone;
the trickster was no more.

“Help,” I cried, but no one heard -
not a single fish nor bird.
And the wings I had, turned to shells
as the angry ocean stirred.

Into the ocean, down I fell
as flightless as a stone.
“You flew too high,” I heard him laugh
to the ocean’s tolling bell.

The third poem takes a more philosophical position that life is fraught with perils. The Raven tricks the boy again by luring him with the seeming position that life can be eternal but this time, the boy is more responsible for his own demise by seeking the impossible and knowing the unknowable. He is, in essence, punished for trying to avoid mortality. In this poem are echoes of Icarus.


Phyllis Beck Katz's All Roads Go Where They Will

 

On my desk, I keep a quote by Stanley Kunitz which best expresses why, in my sixties and seventies, I have turned from scholarship to the writing of poetry:

The poem comes in the form of a blessing —‘like rapture on the mind,’ as I tried
to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry
to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live,
therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of life.

This, my first book, is the product of many years of reading and teaching poetry as a scholar and of 15 years of writing my own poems. My graduate work in Classics centered on Greek and Latin lyric poetry; and the voices of Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sappho, Catullus, Horace, Ovid, and Vergil have helped to frame my own work, as have the great English, American, and world poets. I think of my present work as the offspring of a long tradition, and I believe that becoming a poet myself is the natural evolution for one who has for so long had the voices of past writers in her blood and bones, her DNA.

For a long time I thought and wrote in iambic pentameter, and I experimented with many poetic forms, but free verse, where I choose the form of the poem to suit the meaning/message of the poem, works best for me. My collection is divided into seven arbitrary sections, but all are inter-related. “Generations” is built on family experiences and on stories of friends and leads naturally to “Voices of the Poet” and “Voices of the Wild.” The artworks that inspired me in “In The Galleries” explore the relationship between the voices of poetry and art; “To Green Again” looks forward to “Losing” and to “Lessons” and back to the previous sections. Throughout, I have tried to stay in the worlds of feeling and experience, of observation of the worlds around me, that ring true for me and that I hope will touch my readers.

Poetry has metamorphosed from object to subject for me, in that it sustains my emotional and my intellectual life: in the creation of a poem I find challenge and solace. I love the process of losing myself in the writing of a new poem, of finding the right words and images, of shaping its beginning and ending. I’ve learned to revise and revise! Throughout, I have continued working with and reading other poets on a daily basis. This daily conversation has helped me immensely in the development and maturation of my own poems.

In my book, the section entitled “Voices of the Poet” is preceded by an epigraph from "Ars Poetica" in Jorge Luis Borges’ collected poems. I want my art to both mirror my face and to reflect yours:

At times in the evenings a face
Looks at us out of the depths of a mirror;
Art should be like that mirror
Which reveals to us our own face.

 

 

Miriam Brook Butterworth's Just Say Yes

Bob Brooks's Unguarded Crossing

Gretchen Schafer Skelley's A Wheel in a Wheel

Katharine Carle's Divided Eye

I want not only to be read; I want to be understood. I would like to give my readers a tip in appreciating my thoughts, because my book is a story, not simply a collection of poems. It’s the story of a mother and daughter connection, rivalry and the resolution of the friction and misunderstanding that existed between them.

The key to the story starts right at the cover. My thesis is that the cover portrait, painted by my mother, is a likeness of me. She may have done this at a sub-conscious level, for she had created a pastel of me at 12 which bears a remarkable likeness to the fully adult face one sees on the cover.

The Foreword is an exact reproduction of the artist’s statement on the back of the 18” x30” oil. It states her interpretation of her painting. She based her inspiration for the painting on a biblical quote: Matthew 6:22. Her title for the painting is "If Thine Eye Be Single."

The Prologue, next, is my answer to my mother’s challenge. Two poems tell the reader about some of my forebears, while in the next section are poems of identity, adventure and family connections/relations.

My hope is that the reader will become acquainted with the author’s life, so that by book’s end, you, the reader, will understand something of the poet’s emotions.

Michael Cervas's Captivated

THE EYE HAS IT (Review by Brian w. Ford)

Along Route 9 west of Boston is a sign advertising two establishments in a nearby strip mall: "Feng Shui" and "Chucky Cheese." I've passed it half a dozen times, always with an internal chuckle, and thought about making a poem or essay out of it. But I'm not Michael Cervas; I don't have his eye or his passion for making poems of what he sees.

I'm particularly reminded, by this sign, of one poem in his new collection, Captivated. The poem is called "The Darkest Hour." An instructional video created for the drivers of school buses leads him in the tedious darkness of watching it to Saul on the road to Tarsus, to Genghis Khan at the outset of his journey to empire, to the candle-lit dark of a table where a relationship is about to begin. At a certain moment of dawn or early evening, the narrator of the video says, "the road will be dark" — a warning Cervas turns into a promise. Whether it's the promise of day or the promise of night doesn't seem to matter to the poet; his own setting out can begin anywhere and lead anywhere, always following roads both wholly his own and immediately recognizable when they've been pointed out to the reader.

Cervas's own experience, from the house on Thorn Drive outside Pittsburgh where he grew up to the nuns who taught him to the squash courts of the school where he works, informs the collection from beginning to end. The opening poem takes place in the woods near that boyhood home, the final, title poem takes place in the landscape, three hundred years ago, of the school where he teaches. The interior landscapes, however, from the boy's mingled sense of safety and fear to the memories and regrets of a son and father and lover to the responses of a European traveler, range across the universe ("Sun and Moon, and Stars") and into the "omphalos" of ancient Greece, Delphi (in a four-part poem of that name). And always one sees because he saw, and thought, and found words.

Cervas is capable of wild humor (as in "Super Sex Breakthrough"), deep, private tenderness ("On Living in a City Not Far from the Zoo"), and the wonders of world history ("Journeys"). Always what one is struck by most, whatever the subject and whatever turns a poem takes from where it starts, is the eye for this painful Eden we inhabit in all its cryptic freedom.

Lorence Gutterman's Small Circles of Time

Charles B. Ferguson's Flounder In: Fishers Island Sketches

Pam Lacko's Laughing in the Face of Cancer

Jim Kelleher's Mick: A Celestial Drama

This book started with one prompt from a mentor, to write a persona poem. And that poem, was, I thought, different (for me) and maybe an all right poem. The problem was, one poem led to another. Another poem, another character. Soon I had eight characters demanding time and space, including Yogi Berra, whom I had to put on the bench (sorry, Yogi). These characters took control of my life. They carjacked me and took me to the West Coast, to Heaven and Hell, to places I barely remembered. Places I did not want to remember. And then another teacher said, “These are not persona poems – they are a novel in verse.” Well, she’s an eminent scholar, no one argues with her, especially moi. The next problem was: the voices in the novel became so loud, so insistent, they required a stage. Which entailed writing the damn book again, with directions and props. This from someone who never wrote a play before, and it probably shows. Except the characters all seem pretty happy with it. Maybe this is the best I will ever write because Mick and his crew allowed me to express all of their feelings, and I wasn’t writing about me (I think) so I didn’t hide or withhold anything. What I like most is they have their individual voices, their style. Of course this could mean I am a legitimate multiple personality psychiatric case. I’ve been called worse. The second thing I like most is the blurb which says this a drama of American voices. Because I always thought that’s what a poet should do: speak for people. And if they take him over like a burning bush and channel through him, okay.When the words explode from your soul like popcorn, maybe you’re doing okay. Okay, okay. The story works when the writer gets out of the way.

Jeff Dutko's Beyond the Margins

How do I write about what I’ve already written? Enough already -- I’ve been through that hell and back. Ah, but you’re just about to open my book as if newly discovered. So, I suppose, this collection of poems would benefit from a certain amount of smoothing out at the edges and some untangling of its hair. Let’s start with the visual poem on the cover. I wish I could lay claim to that, but the artist is my wife’s cousin, Erin Casioppo, and she can’t or won’t tell us anything more about the work than what we can uncover for ourselves. Good for her. With my little eye and imagination, I see a boat rocking deep at sea with passengers who have found their way overboard. This became the inspiration for the poem, "General Education and Others" (and the original title of the book). After reading the poem, you’ll notice I turned the passengers into the kids I teach, special education students in a private school setting. As I have watched the students float in the mystical water, a few things have become apparent to me: I have no ability to save them, my desire to “save” them has waned, and I’m not entirely sure they are in need of saving anyway. The more I thought about this, the more I understood that this metaphor extended beyond my teaching experience and informed my writing experiences. The kids I work with need “saving” as much as they need standardized testing. What they really need is an appreciative understanding that everything isn’t meant to be understood and that which isn’t understood can be just as easily admired. As I wrote these poems, both the ones directly related to my teaching community and those only nuanced by the interactions I have daily with special needs students, I tried to capture an essence of something I only tangentially comprehend and let readers come to conclusions that suit their own exigencies. Maybe that doesn’t help one bit, but maybe it will help to understand that I also believe poetry is about finding a truth, then perverting it with lies until they contradict each other enough to cancel themselves out, uncovering the original truth wrapped in a new light. In any case, I hope you enjoy and find the time to comment. In the meantime, here’s something new:

 

Since We’ve Last Talked

Since we've last talked
I have lied
have bathed in
the sweet juices of lies

I have sinned
and did not ask
forgiveness

I have partaken in taking too much
I have not given
not given enough

I've blasphemed gods and mortals
Have enjoyed listening to
the blaspheming of myself

I have loved myself
in ways only one can
Loved myself too much

I've spoken out of turn
Turned a deaf ear

I have punctuated poetry
both properly and improperly

I have gently tossed pebbles
I knew the tongue of the air
would lather into immovable boulders

Have torn the wings off
of things that otherwise might fly
Poked holes in cocoons

Blown the candles
out of caves you might
otherwise have crawled out

I have ached with want
Wanted without ache

But I said I would come back
And yes, here I am

Elizabeth Kincaid-Ehlers's How Do I Hate Thee?

Kathleen Dale's Rescue Mission

 

Kathleen Dale's work has been included in the anthology Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai, published by Future Cycle Press, in remembrance of the one-year anniversary of Yousafzan's shooting by the Taliban. Click here for the press release: The book is available on Amazon, and all profits go to the Malala Fund for the education of girls. In addition, a .pdf version is available on the Future Cycle website.

 

THOUGHTS ON A FIRST DRAFT

When asked what his favorite poem was among all those he has written, Ted Kooser smiled and responded, “the one I just wrote.” And so it is, I suspect, with most writers—basking in that glow we get (a bit like falling in love all over again) before we take our most recent creation to our writing group, before its flaws become apparent. And so I am succumbing to the temptation to share with you a draft of a poem I have just written, though I know it will still undergo revision, especially after I take it next week to Judith Harway, Louisa Loveridge-Gallas, and Bill Murtaugh—my writing group of many years. I suspect that there remain major problems with the line organization.

But I thought it might be an interesting draft to share because of how it came about. Several elements that had been occupying my mind and imagination for several weeks suddenly coalesced in a dream that woke me at 4:15 this morning, and I knew I had to write it down before I could get back to sleep.

Like many others, I suspect, I have been fascinated by the recent, so far unrepeated, experiment suggesting that neutrinos can move faster than the speed of light. If the experiment is successfully repeated, it would make time travel more than theoretically possible. I knew that I wanted to include that reference in a poem, but also knew, from past experience, that starting to write “about” something dooms it to fail. So I was just waiting to see where it might “fit.”

I have also been cleaning closets and unearthing all sorts of “time capsules” from my three grown daughters’ lives, including a note crayoned in green from one four-year-old stating: “Mom, keep out foR the Rest of the yeaR. “

So those two recent events apparently worked together, and with others, in a dream, the first result of which is below. Having just completed my second chapbook, I was elated early this morning finally to begin something new, something different. But just now, re-reading it in the clear light of noon, I see that I’m still writing about the same damn thing I’ve always written about and this time even stole one of my completed book’s best lines!

Well, I guess many artists have lifelong obsessions with the same subject matter—and maybe the subject, in the end, isn’t the most important thing.

I am happy to participate in Antrim House’s seminar space, and wish I were in Connecticut with many of you to attend the many interesting events taking place near you!


The Transgression of Mothering


You are almost grown
and in another country but
in my dream, in stealth,
I am cleaning your room.

I am a guest, and your friends
and roommates are everywhere
and music is playing and plans
are being laid. You love me

but don’t really know
what to do with me now
that I’ve come. You are a blur
of motion and I sit in a corner

watching all the life surge round
til I cannot stand it and start to clean
the bedlam of your room.
Just to straighten, I tell myself,

just to sort things into piles. But
before I know it, I am stripping your bed,
finding the stash of stuffed animals
under the dingy sheet and making them

sit in rows. With deep pleasure
I collect all the dirty shirts and socks
and when everything is matched and arranged
I look for a broom, a mop.

But the ground-in grime of many youths,
of many years, is too deep for me.
Even if a cleaning instrument suddenly appeared,
all it could do would be to scratch

the surface. So my eyes
strain to find some order in the chaos
on your dresser—the feathered
jewelry, the scarves, the ashes

from spent incense, and I almost
miss it—so cleverly and
unintentionally camouflaged:
the tiny white owl

on a dais
in front of the ashes
of sandalwood—
and I recall how

my mother’s friend once
laughed in the doorway of
my room, saying it looked
like someone had torn

a girl apart in there.
And she was right.
Came a time when
the girl I was had to be

torn apart before
the one I would be
could put the pieces back
the way she wanted them.

So even in my dream I knew
what I was doing was wrong:
even as I continued to clean, I wondered
what else I had done that was wrong,

even as I remembered L’Engle’s
Wind in the Door, and how
we’d read it together, how
the siblings had travelled

back through mitochondria
back through the infinite
generations of mothers to set right
what was threatening the present,

the two of them treading through the depths
of the mother’s cells, holding hands
as they do in fairy tales, and how
they had faced down the one great

monster of the past responsible
for what had been broken,
had re-named things, set things right
before they made a perilous return.

And though I am alone, here,
in this dream, I would gladly
travel back to your childhood,
or mine, or all my grandmothers’,

to set things right, if only I knew
what totem needed to be appeased,
what sacrifice to burn before it
(and if I knew its true name),

if only some faint neutrino from the future
weren’t whispering to me in this dream,
waking me up,
warning me against transgression.

Kirsten Wasson's Almost Everything Takes Forever

Carol A. Armstrong's Everything Waits To Be Noticed

Ann Anderson Stranahan's Window On The River

POEMS FOR CONSIDERATION

 

CAPTAIN KANGAROO


Faithful Companion! My good morning
friend, calm navigator of my kitchen sea:
four children have I trusted to your watch,
full sixteen seasons have I sailed with thee.

Outflanked by Muppets, greying, stout, less
holy thou than Fred; yet in your hour of grace
you kept the world without, my world in place.
The planet lurched, the Beatles rocked, young
men refused to die, or died; assassins stalked.

Still, Dancing Bear held steady to the waltz
and we kept counting carrots, made mistakes,
(no more nor less than Presidents), learned
that nothing can stay black and white for long,
and, like the little engine, changed our song.

Now fare thee well, dear Captain. Sails aloft!
Bluff guardian, observe my brood: their hour
has come. The oldest honks the horn; the
youngest turns to go, and turns you off.

They have become bionic, all on their own
transformed as creatures capable and wise —
no less remarkable than this machine
whose electronic maze can rearrange
itself each day into your face, coming

as comfort, like the breakfast sun:
changing and as constant as my young,
elusive and as lasting as the tears that turned me
from Today to laugh, as Mister Moose let
loose the ping-pong balls across the years.

 

 

TAKE ONE MATURE BIRD, PLUCKED AND SINGED


Trying to buy myself comfort
I stop for a can of chicken soup.

Eight different chicken soups to choose from
and I’m in the middle of a nervous breakdown?

Chicken Soup with Noodles:
a long limp line this may go on forever unfinished

Chicken Soup with Curly Noodles? Lots of little indecisions.

With Chicken Soup and Rice I might swallow
some grain of truth

whereas Chicken Broth sounds hollow.

Toss out the Chicken Soup with Vegetables:
my salad days are over. Too much trouble —

and better, better altogether to forget the thought of
Cream-of-Chicken-Soup-with-Mushrooms:
I’ve had a dream about my brain buzzed up in the Cuisinart.

Chicken Soup with Dumplings?
Lies heavy on the heart....

Best, by far, to stick with Chicken Soup

and

Stars

waiting at the bottom of the pot.

 

 

INSPECTING THE PROPERTY


We thought we wanted to buy the land
but first we had to see it: six hundred acres
more or less, almost a county mile, all of it withheld,
a mystery, gripped by the deepest snow in memory;
there was nothing to do but ski it. So we set out,

reaching our poles to the sky, so knapsacked
and knickered even our shadows looked Nordic.
We skimmed white meadows that might grow our hay,
flew over fences that would keep the cows out,
slid down to the creek to consider the
trout, caught in a wide net of ice.

Our skis as thin as the legs of deer, as fleet,
as elusive — we were graceful and foolish
by turns: gliding, sweating, racing the sun,
or falling in desperate splashes, freezing,
insulted, beseeching the land to let us pass,
making a deal with our muscles

until our tracks stretched clean and long;
I could feel the soft fat melt and drip into
my socks, imagined my thighs growing tight
and lean, thought even my teeth had grown tough
enough to snatch off some bark from the trees,
to break bread with the elk, who watched

above our heads. We bit, instead,
into a peanut bar, chewy, brittle as the bark;
and drank a little can of beer, sprinkling some
on the snow, baptizing it with our name,
laying impermanent claim
to what might lie below —

just as some small animal had left proprietary drops
around what appeared to be a feathery sapling, ankle high,
that we had brushed with our wooden wings —
realizing only as we left our land
that it was the top of a Christmas tree,
its presents buried until the spring.

 

 

INVERSION


Close, together again. Cause for rejoicing.
Except there is not enough air in this place:
I try to fill my lungs, you grow blue.
At night I watch you sneak to the window.

When I came back, I thought I brought
enough sun to burn off these damp drifts
of your imagining. The cheerful weatherman
keeps saying continued clear, and never
mentions a pollutant. But I cannot see
across the river and neither one of us can breathe.

 

 

LOST LABRADOR

I hadn’t thought the dog would leave again, lost
only the day before, found, hauled home to sleep
on the kitchen couch, in a long smile of a dream:
friendly police, my face, biscuits at homecoming.
But coming in late last night I heard an absence

and she is gone when I wake to the sound of guns
blurred in the small rain. Duck hunters. They
come before dawn from the city, camouflaged
in silent boats, don’t know we sleep above their
blind. Our riverbank is their preserve. I wait

for the next shot, think of the dog, wonder
if she waits, taut, down on the lowland
in the muskrat brush, if her careful mouth
is tired of snatched stuffed animals, old
racquet balls nudged from the hedge, wonder

if she tastes the dripping weight of feathers. How
much blood does blood remember? I hear the gun.
Has she sprung, pulled on to the steely water,
yellow shoulders churning in the fog, is she
swimming toward the echo of that shot?



Margaret Keane - Sister Marie Michael Keane's Love Like This

Mame Willey's On the Irreversibility of Time

Jarold Ramsey's Thinking like a Canyon

--from "Writing: the Sidelong Glance"

Trying to prepare, very late at night, for a high school visitation the next day--"poet in residence" (for three hours)--I find that, in fatigue, I have scribbled "Why I Am, and Who I Write." Spoonerized echo of George Orwell's famous essay; but I like it, the unconscious tendering a clue, perhaps. "Why I Am"--the Question of Questions, not to be asked directly in poetry, any more than I can know the sun by simple direct inspection; rather, cut across it from a thousand angles, glance at it sidelong, triangulate it like a mad navigator, poem after poem. "Who I Write"--who leading why, as art can sometimes lead necessity; all those possible voices to discover and play with, familiar words turned at a thousand odd angles to each other.

"But why do you write?" Flannery O'Connor's unblinkingly honest answer was "Because I'm good at it" (her literary-society listeners no doubt aghast before such self-confidence). "Well, what else? You're not Flannery O'Connor." --I guess I write poetry to make things more real--familiar, forlorn, and taken-for-granted things, including the people we carry along with us. And to celebrate them. William Carlos Williams' lovely expression of this: "As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly, so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight."

"Well, well, what else?" --It is recorded in my family that as a child I beat my hard little head against walls. Why? Because it felt so good when I stopped--ah, but the hammering felt pretty good, too. It depended on the wall. Proposition: head-beaters often take up the writing of poetry. . . . .

No wonder the Greeks imaged the source of poetry as a Parnassian spring. The most mysterious thing in nature, a spring, especially here in the dry range country of Central Oregon where I grew up. Where does all that bright water come from, underground; through what dark veins and conduits? What distant rainfalls feed it, that it should brim and overflow so avidly, even in drought? And why does it choose to issue forth here?

That riddle the boy Tolstoy posed for his brother: "Try not to think of a white bear." It may well be that the poor brother went mad, trying, or else took up poetry (or both). For me, the riddle describes with great exactitude what it feels like to be writing poetry. The mind deliberately divided against itself; the great hairy brute of Meaning glimpsed, and yet restrained, avoided, put off, glanced at sideways, until imagined and given poetic form. And like as not it turns out to be, not a polar bear, but a preening crow, or a rumpled bed, or the frown of a child . .

 

Marye Gail Harrison's Full Face to the Light

Diana M. Raab's Listening to Africa

Judy Kronenfeld's light lowering in diminished sevenths

For reviews of Judy Kronenfeld's light loweering in diminished sevenths, see:

"Three from California," by Kristen Rae Anderson, printed in Alehouse Review, No. 4, 2010. http://rebeccafoust.com/Alehouse.htm

Review by Cecilia Woloch, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer, 2009)

Review by JoSelle Vanderhooft, The Pedestal, Issue 48, 2008.
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=2842&fl=1&title=Light%20Lowering%20in%20Diminished%20Sevenths&author=Judy%20Kronenfeld

 

Here is what the author has to say about the book:

 

light lowering in diminished sevenths is an elegiac collection, dedicated to the memory of my parents. I think my theme has always been mortality—and death as “the mother of beauty,” to steal again, as I do in “The Emperor and Empress of Ice Cream,” from Wallace Stevens. As Billy Collins says, when you major in English, you major in “death”! My intense awareness of the shadow always hovering at the edge of our lives became that much more intense as I watched my parents grow old and die. I think the intensification came, in part, from the fact that they were Jewish immigrants from Europe, and took with them in their deaths, an entire cultural reality and way of being, especially since, as a totally assimilated American daughter, and a Californian for decades, far removed from the New York of my childhood, I contain so little—in some ways—of what they were. They moved to California in their old age and—as I say in a personal essay published a few years ago—they became, with their still-thick accents, “old world icons” at the temple they joined in their retirement leisure, to which I or my family very occasionally went as their guests; they were an “adorable ethnic kupie doll couple.” When they died, all of that vanished; my more than thin tie—through them—to any cultural practices at all—snapped.

That intensification also came from my having been an only child, a child who had once lived in incredibly close proximity to their lives and emotions, and in the very fervid hothouse of their lavish attention to and expectations for me; they were the universe for me, our tiny nuclear family (undiluted by any siblings who might have constituted a children’s culture opposed to the parental) seemingly eternal. That family was eternal, too, because death was never talked about or planned for--as I say in another personal essay. It was “an untouchable topic, like sex. Perhaps if it were not thought of or discussed, it would never happen.”

My father immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1934, the year after Hitler came to power; his older sister’s family was later killed. I knew this, but we virtually never discussed it when I was growing up, and my father did not know exactly where they died. Some years ago, on a trip to Berlin for his job, my son visited the Jewish Museum on a whim and discovered a book about the Jews of Duisburg, Germany, which listed every member of my father’s family, including the rarely mentioned eldest sister, her husband and children; my son photographed and emailed the pages. It was viscerally shocking to see those names I had never heard, along with my would-have-been aunt Paula’s and uncle Max’s, starkly linked to the dreaded places: Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz. Now, ever more consciously, I think of my father and mother’s long American lives, and my own being here, as miraculous historical accidents. But I wonder if, subliminally, I absorbed a sense of this with the very Bronx air I breathed as a kid.

Finally, since we are what we can remember, since memory is what constitutes us, creates our very sense of self, my awareness of the fragility of our selves, as well as of the entire histories we contain within us, was radically increased—mainly in an experiential and visceral, rather than an intellectual or philosophical way—by my widower father’s long descent into Alzheimer’s in the years before his death, which, as an only child and partial caretaker, I got to witness in the most intimate of ways. Ironically, his history was lost twice over because I could not share with him—because he could not absorb (or were he able to absorb it, bear)—the information about his sister’s family I now had.

My poetic “project,” as the current lingo goes, has always been to reach other human beings, on a very ordinary level—not, I hope, at all ordinary in language, but “ordinary” in terms of communicating—across the boundaries of fear and reticence—those human responses to our brief lives that I sense, in my heart, we share. While every person’s version of these experiences is shaded by their particular culture and the particular variety of that culture their families embody, I fully believe in that link. My task has turned out to be—as Cecilia Woloch says in her Calyx review of light lowering—to re-member my family, and to imagine and deeply feel, through that remembrance, the sorrows and joys of other families. The Fanti my anthropologist husband studied in Ghana pour libations to their ancestors so those ancestors are in some sense present at all important events. The Dia de los Muertos, the household shrines in many Asian homes, and in ancient Rome, all attest, as do countless other cultural practices, to that human need to re-member. To use a metaphor JoSelle Vanderhooft used in her review in The Pedestal: these poems are my stones laid on grave-markers; these are my pebbles commemorating my beloved (and even not so beloved) places and people, my past.

 

A NEW POEM (published in Miramar 3, 2015)

The Dark


I rose at 2 A.M., as I often do,
as our ancestors have been said to—
after their first long nap
starting at nightfall—rising to pray
or talk, back when people spent
more hours under covers, bastioned against
the unlit cold. Half asleep, I walked past
the empty guestroom in my dark house, the door
partly closed, wanting, I thought,
a cool glass of water. How miraculous
it was that my bare
feet could find the path
to the kitchen and not stumble
on the dog or the rug or the jutting
bookcase in the hall; how comfortable
this dark was, how dear, a squared off
compartment of the great dark sweeping
its tide across the globe. And I also thought—
or, felt, really, as I passed,
that something about the angle of the door
seemed purposive, that someone unknown
could be sleeping in that room, which had
briefly housed—after the children left—the various
long dead: friends or uncles and aunts, or my mother
and father, their chests peacefully rising
and falling.

Maybe I wanted to invite in
someone, some flimsy
flitting ghost for whom
the room would be a kind of ballast.

I poured my water from the pitcher
in the fridge, that cheery welcomer—
like parents putting on the yellow
porch lights for their kids’ safe entry
late at night—and drank it while my eyes
began their readjustment to the dark,
then tip-toed past the open door—not quite yet
disappointingly familiar.


Kenneth Lee's Sweet Spot

Kate Fetherston's Until Nothing More Can Break

Barry L. Zaret's Journeys

Ann Mirabile Lees' Night Spirit

WHAT IS POETRY?

When something important happens, whether it’s happy or sad, good or bad, many people want to share their experiences with others. If they are artists, they paint a picture. If they are composers, they write a new piece of music. If they are poets, they write a poem, which is like writing a song without any other tune than the music of the words.

Poetry is like all other arts – painting, music, story-telling – it’s a carefully crafted building. To please you, a poem must invite you in through the front door of its opening lines with the music of its sounds and rhythm, the fascination of its images. Something about the poem has to tickle your fancy.

Once you have entered the front door, the lines of the poem that follow must make you feel welcome. The words and images must be ones that give you a feeling of connection and attachment to the poem. Whether a poem is happy or sad, or something in between, it must help you understand and appreciate the story or idea that the poet wants to communicate.

This never happens with all poems for all people. Just as some find old master paintings or Beethoven symphonies boring, and other people find abstract paintings or musical compositions meaningless, none of us are going to like all poems all the time.

If inviting doors are rare, don’t be discouraged. Keep looking for friendlier ones. Somewhere, unexpectedly, one will open and fill your heart with admiration, and sometimes, delight.

 

NEW POEMS


A Simple Truth

after Philip Levine

There’s something that the healthy
cannot truly grasp until Time
sneaks up on them with its bonds
of small ailments and large ills:

The greatest pleasure in life
is to have your body automatically do
whatever you ask whenever you ask,
whether it’s to drive a car,
design a space ship, write a poem,
whistle the melody of Hayden’s
horn concerto in D major;
or climb stairs, walk miles,
make the bed, shovel snow, or
concoct a pot of pasta sauce
with tofu and Portobello mushrooms.

As friends of many years
crash into their bodies’ limits
and unwillingly vanish
into darkness from which
they will never return, you
wonder how your exit will play out –
fast, slow, painful, peaceful?
With family for comfort, or not?
And when your mental sun shines
despite the grief, you marvel
that your luck still holds.
You turn to your own body
and say, “Thank you.”


Newton’s Law of Gravity, Amended

Maybe Newton had it right for physics
when he said, “every particle of matter
in the universe attracts every other particle,”
but did he have it right for the physical?

Are you and I not particles in the universe
that swirls around us to infinity?
Yet when I see your face each day
I want to run the other way!
Newton says the force of our attraction
is directly proportional to the product
of our masses. Multiply your weight by mine,
and the attraction between us should be divine.
But it’s not. So please, do me a favor
and move far, far away!

I’ve done what you ask.
Although it was no easy task,
I moved far, far away.
Does that help? Newton said it would
because the force of our attraction
is inversely proportional to the square
of the distance between us. Think of that!
The square of ten miles is one hundred.
Is that far enough? No? You’re still
not happy? What’s that you say?

Newton was on the wrong track.
I miss you. Please hurry back.
I find that distance
makes the force grow stronger!

Patricia Horn O'Brien's When Less Than Perfect is Enough

Chivas Sandage's Hidden Drive

 

An enlargement of the cover image from Hidden Drive, showing the mechanism of the box car siding in detail. For more of Nance Van Winckel's artwork, click here.

Kenneth S. Robson's Big Dipper

Ginny Lowe Connors' The Unparalleled Beauty of a Crooked Line

 

Ginny Lowe Connors has been writing some very exciting new work. Here is a sample: a poem that appeared recently in Hill-Stead Museum's new journal, Theodate:

THREAD

after Katsushika Hokusai

 

Bowing down to the huge wave off Kanaqawa

the fishermen look like spools of thread.

Ancient idea, life as a thread,

the fates ready to scissor it short in an instant

or years from now. His life hung

by a thread—stilted prose in a cheap novel

but the sharp, small snap that will break it

hovers in the reader’s mind. A poor man

leads a threadbare existence, but Gatsby,

lonely in the theater set of his life, wanting

to believe he was rich, tossed shirt

after silken shirt on the bed.

The fishermen in Hokusai’s Great Wave,

what of them? Not one seems as individual

as the towering wave with claws of foam.

And yet, spooled into themselves

these 200 years, the fishermen ride toward us.

Maybe that’s what life is: dollop of courage

painted over fear, a disappearance

into the self, that long ride, blue

thoughts, white—then a reappearance

in the strange tapestry of another’s mind.

 

 

To read another of Ginny's recent poems featured on "Your Daily Poem," click here.

John L. Stanizzi's Dance Against the Wall

For a splendid interview with John L. Stanizzi, go to http://www.combustus.com/13/john-l-stanizzi/

 

Myra Shapiro's 12 floors above the earth

Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely's Letter from Italy, 1944

 

It's no easy feat, but Sarah Meneely-Kyder and her sister Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely have transformed family tragedy into a work of art.

"Letter from Italy, 1944," is an oratorio commissioned by the Greater Middletown Chorale that tells the story of their father's service in World War II and the disastrous effects it had on his life. Using her father's letters and diaries, along with her own memories, Fitz-Hugh Meneely, a poet from Guilford, captured his agony in words; Meneely-Kyder, a Grammy-nominated composer who lives in Lyme, set the words to music.

"Letter from Italy, 1944" will have its world premiere on Sunday, April 28, with the 80-voice Greater Middletown Chorale, five professional soloists and a full orchestra, at Middletown High School's Performing Arts Center. A compact disk of nine of the songs that comprise the oratorio is included in Fitz-Hugh Meneely's recently published book, also entitled "Letter from Italy, 1944." The oratorio itself is a work comprised of 24 choral and solo pieces.

Fitz-Hugh Meneely first wrote a poem about her father in 1978, but it was only after her mother gave her his papers in 1997 that she began to focus on telling his story in verse. When Meneely-Kyder read one of Fitz-Hugh Meneely's first poems about their father, she was so moved by it that she set the words to music. After she heard baritone Chai-lun Yueh in recital at Wesleyan University in Middletown, where Meneely-Kyder is a piano instructor, she knew she wanted him to perform the resulting song. In 2003, the song was nominated for a Grammy.

Nearly a decade later, Meneely-Kyder gave a CD of her compositions to Joseph D'Eugenio, the artistic director of the Greater Middletown Chorale. The following year, he programmed two of her songs for the chorale's holiday concert. On a visit to Meneely-Kyder's home in Lyme, D'Eugenio heard the recording of Chai-lun Yueh singing the song she had written about her father. Shortly after, he approached Meneely-Kyder about doing a major project combining her music with Fitz-Hugh Meneely's poems. The oratorio is the result.

A neverending war

John K. Meneely Jr., a graduate of Yale and Yale medical school, returned from service in World War II in April of 1945 a changed man. An expert skier, he had served as a doctor with the Army's legendary 10th Mountain Division, the soldiers on skis who had fought in some of the roughest terrain in Italy. One of Fitz-Hugh Meneely's poems, "Riva Ridge," takes its title from some of the division's most famous actions, the battles for that Italian summit.

During the war, Meneely's psychological discomfort had been clear to some of his fellow soldiers. A close friend had confided to Meneely's wife Delia that he was not sure Meneely was going survive the conflict emotionally, even if he survived physically. Often Meneely returned from the front in tears.

"Doctors saw the worst of war and they were often helpless to save lives," Fitz-Hugh Meneely observes.

The end of the war did not end Meneely's torment. Five years later, he was hospitalized for emotional collapse and even after he returned to his family near Albany, N.Y., he continued to receive outpatient psychiatric care for the rest of his life. He practiced medicine, he taught medicine and he medicated himself with increasing reliance on alcohol in addition to the heavy doses of barbiturates prescribed to treat his anxiety. Eighteen years after returning home from the war, he committed suicide.

Meneely's legacy

Fitz-Hugh Meneely, now retired after a 20-year career with FEMA, used to call herself a "lunch hour" poet. That's because she used her lunch breaks, along with evenings, to polish poems for her poetry group. She is member of the Guilford Poets Guild and has read from her work in Madison and New Haven and at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme. She says she cannot remember a time when she did not want to be a poet; she wrote her first poem for a magazine in elementary school. It was called "Big and Small," and as far as Fitz-Hugh Meneely can remember it began, "Some things are big; some things are small."

Meneely-Kyder said that by the age of 4 she knew she wanted to be a composer.

"I was already extemporizing compositions," she says.

When she was a senior at Goucher College, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performed a composition she wrote for an independent study project. She has won Yale University's Rena Greenwald Memorial Prize for piano composition and has received grants for ongoing work from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.

Meneely-Kyder says the composition of "Letter from Italy, 1944," often cut into a good night's sleep.

"I would hear orchestration, sketches; it's all very evanescent. I had to get to the studio. I can't tell you how many all-nighters I had," she says.

Working together posed no problems for the Meneelys, whom the chorale referred to collectively as "the sisters."

"We were like two peas in a pod, I have total respect for Nan, and she has a musical background," Meneely-Kyder says.

The true value of the cooperation was not simply in the technical production of the score, but rather in the understanding it brought to both sisters about their father and his suffering.

"I submerged shock at the time of the suicide," Meneely-Kyder says.

"It has brought about a deeper love for my father - and my sister," Fitz-Hugh Meneely adds. "The writing was cathartic. I didn't realize it was happening but I was doing a lot more crying, but I was not anguished."

For the members of the chorale, performing the work is an equally moving experience.

"The better we know the music, the more emotional it becomes," notes Rick Holloway of Chester who sings with the group. Rick's wife Pat, another chorale member, focused on how "Letter from Italy, 1944," touches everybody, even those who do not fight in military conflicts.

"The universal experiences that are behind the work can't be denied - every family in America has been touched in some way by the wars we have fought," she observes. "I think the power of music to bring out all this emotion can be part of the healing process for the singers themselves, and hopefully through the singers and musicians, for the audience as well."

 

 

JOHN MENEELY WITH HIS FATHER, WITH MEMBERS OF HIS 10TH MOUNTAIN DIV. UNIT, AND AFTER WW II

 

John K. Meneely, Sr. w/ John K. Meneely, Jr. at 2 months (left), and at 2 yrs., 1917 (right)

John on porch, 1923 (left), John K. Meneely, Jr. and John K. Meneely, Sr. on Beach at Cape Cod, 1926 (right)

 

John at Graduatin from Yale Medial School, 1941 (left), John and Delia Fishing (right),

 

John Meneely at Kiska (left, John and Fayette Mosher, Italyl, 1945 (right)

 

John and Louise Henrick, Italy, 1945 (left), John in medical helmet (right)

 

Field Hospital, Italy, 1945 (left), Dr. John K. Meneely, Jr. in his post-war office (right)

 

 

 

JoAnne Taylor's Knit Together: An Orphan’s Spiritual Journey

Karen Silk's Somewhere a Bird

Jonathan Gillman's My Father, Humming

Norah Pollard's In Deep

Rebecca Lilly's A Prism of Wings

Gregory LeStage's Small Gods of Summer

 

FOR A COMMENTARY BY THE POET CONCERNING THE PUBLICATION OF HIS BOOK AND HIS YEARS AT OXFORD UNIVERSITY, click here.

 

REVIEW BY DANA ELDRIDGE IN THE CAPE CODDER (9/1/13)

We recently became aware that the son of a close friend has a touch of the poet in his psyche - actually more than a touch. Poetry usually leaves me with a sense that the author is somehow in touch with otherworldly senses; they see something not seen by ordinary mortals. But to my delight, this young man showed in his work (particularly, for me, the poems about the Cape) a side of poetry that touched me where I can relate. I can recommend his new book highly.

One of the gems in the little book is called “Drifting the Bay”, a selection I particularly liked. I hope you do as well. It speaks to the up-coming fall:

Past the summer’s end, I drift the bay

away from the changing waters and the day

that plunge and cool below the season’s flow.

The imperative is chronic, true and slow.

Delicate aster blossoms and salt marsh hay

bend in the ebb, and tentacaled flowers sway

to paralyze their drifting and pendent prey.

Quahogs bed, eels ribbon towards the Sargasso

past the summer’s end.

Scallops propulsing up the river array

acres of intent. I just float to display

my assent, while the jellyfish flamenco

and fencing blue crabs feint, jab, and know to go.

Distant fathoms pull, but I resign to stay

past summer’s end.

How easily I relate to that poem. Gregg is relating thoughts that I too have felt quite strongly and often. He relates them with a fluency that is both refreshing and somehow inclusive. I all but felt wet after reading this. I like drifting too.

The book is called “Small Gods of Summer” (www.antrimhousebooks.com). Author, Gregory LeStage, is a lifelong summer inhabitant of East Orleans.

Multi-generations of the LeStage family have come to their homestead on Pleasant Bay’s obliging waters, Gregg’s three children being only the most recent generation. His works plainly speak of an easy familiarity with our natural world and the waters that surround us and as such, are a delight to peruse.

Alexandrina Sergio's That's How the Light Gets In

Cecelia D. Johnson's Oh Days of Happy Memories

Tom Mallouk's Nantucket Revisited

REVIEW FROM ICONOCLAST #110 (February, 2014)

Poems from the New England shore depicting subtle changes of light, sea, and sand -- and the birds, fish and mammals who call the coast home. Against that backdrop, humans become interloping witnesses and minor participants. The endless waves of a timeless sea stir us with their prayer-like ability to inspire and soothe us. The photos are well chosen, matched with some poems. The book is consistent in its themes.

 

REVIEW FROM THE MAHON ABOUT TOWN NANTUCKET NEWSLETTER, August 12, 2013

Poems of a Natural Order: Seascapes and Landscapes by Tom Mallouk
Ryder Ziebarth

By happenstance this past June, I met poet Tom Mallouk at the Nantucket Book Festival. Although I had volunteered to write a series of author interviews with participating writers for local publication, Tom wasn't on my writerly radar screen at the time. I am happy to say he is now.

Tom's first poetry collection, a chapbook entitled Nantucket Revisited and published this year by Antrim House Books, came to my attention via my Bookfest weekend guest, Lisa Romeo, who also happens to be an experienced memoirist, and my writing mentor.

Lisa writes and hails from New Jersey, and Tom, who washes-ashore to Nantucket each August from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, were chatting like long lost pals in a corner of the Atheneum, after an author lecture. Lisa and I were meeting to cruise the "Authors Under The Tent", in the library's garden. But she couldn't wait and had beaten me to it earlier in the day. Among her local finds were Tom and his chapbook, the nomenclature given to a small literary paperback book such as the one he recently had published.

Lisa introduced me to her new friend, a psychotherapist with an unwavering passion for poetry, and told him briefly about my involvement with the festival and how she and I knew each other. Without a second's hesitation, Tom handed me his book and said "You can keep this, if you'll review it for me."

I blinked a bit. I love poetry - the rhythms, the cadence, the structure of the sentences. Poetry reminds me of the many layers of paint on a canvas that create a picture. And although I personally love to write picturesque prose, I know virtually nothing scholarly about poetry. I know what I like and what I don't like, the lines that can make me feel the instant sting of hidden tears or the crush of emotion in the center of my chest. But sometimes, I feel absolutely nothing.

Lisa, always the encouraging mentor and friend, prompted me to take the challenge, and Wyn Cooper, another guest poet and panelist of the Bookfest gave me this advice: 'Just tell us what you like. There doesn't have to be a reason for it."

Here is what I discovered after reading Tom's book: I don't just like his poems about Nantucket - I love them.

This slim book is fat with 36 pages, 21 poems and 9 photographs and has found a place on my bedside table probably forever (or at least when I am extra homesick for the island.)

Here's a sample, one of my favorites for the images it conjures. It is also the title piece, "Nantucket Revisited:"

"I've wobbled through the sandy ruts to the edge of the bluff, this rusted bike tipped on my hip.
The Ocean luffs like gray-green sheets and I see
The light green of a sand bar and the darker green
Of the trough between the bar and the breakers."

I've pushed that bike, through that deep, hot sand! I've seen that clear sea-glass like water! The poem evoked in me the memory of the sweet scent of Rosa Rugosa, sounds of gulls squawking overhead, and the pucker after eating a sour blackberry picked along the way.

This passage, from "Morning Prayer," is accompanied by a black and white photo of a lone swan, gliding on a still water surface and takes my breath away:

"In first light, fog muffles the tentative
Tweets of birds, lies amid goldenrod,
Thistle, and reeds like ethereal snow, obscures the view of Hummock Pond
And renders Ram pasture an act of faith."

There are lines so vivid ("Close to shore, a wave curls its lip...") and so distinctly Nantucket ("Plovers peck furiously at the sand just beyond the surf's reach") and so resounding ("Fly line cuts the crisp morning air, its whistle woven in the waves lapping at the hull.") that it is hard not to put my hand to my chest and lament the fact that I am writing this from my year-round home in New Jersey.

For me, Tom's poetry puts all the beauty and the essence of Nantucket in perfectly wrought sentences and lays them gently, softly, one by one, on the paper. His love affair with the island began in the late 70s, and he has been happily held hostage by the Gray Lady ever since. These poems reflect his visits from 1973-2013, capturing the changes in landscape, both natural and man-made, that he has observed during that time.

Tom and his wife, Eileen, rent "Snow Goose", a cottage on Hummock Pond every August. It is there he continues to render scenes of landscapes and seascapes with a sharp eye for finely wrought detail, penning them in a hand as fine and steady as a plein air artist.

"In my poems, I try to capture the essential-ness of Nantucket. That "something immutable," Tom said. "Though houses are falling in the ocean, which I see as a metaphor for all the changes from my first years on island until now, Nantucket has retained her spirit."

It's that visceral, timeless beauty which Tom has collected between the covers of this book. Clearly, the poems offer us a glimpse of his interminable love of the place, which, I think, many of us share.

 

Rennie McQuilkin's Visitations

Sara Ingram's Sounds of House and Wood

Review from The Day (New London, CT):

 

AMY J. BARRY, Special to The Day

 

Deep River native Sara Ingram of is one of those boundlessly creative people. She is a dancer, choreographer and storyteller, and although she has been writing poems for many years, she's just recently published her first book of poetry, "Sounds of House and Wood."

In 2012 Ingram's job of 25 years as a public school teacher of the gifted and talented was eliminated and so newly retired, she found she had the time to start putting together a collection of poems she'd written years ago and poems she was currently composing.

A former editor at Globe Pequot Press in Guilford, she attended the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, Suffield Writers' Conference, and the Frost Place to hone her work.

Her book is filled with a rich tapestry of poems reflecting on love, childhood, a long marriage to her husband Peter, self-discovery, the seasons - especially the raw beauty of winter in New England - the natural landscape and the structures built upon it, life's spiritual ponderings, humorous anecdotes, and questions about those that came before us.

Ingram says she doesn't think it's so much the rhythm of dance that she picks up in her poetry but that "there's a big connection to having been able to study with lots of different people throughout the years who are artists in their fields. There's clarity, honesty, how you really feel, and most people I've worked with are of the 'less is more' school, so they've influenced a conglomeration of my life experiences."

Ingram has been described as "a tough searcher for truth who revels flinging convention to the wind."

"I do believe I'm trying to be truthful with how I feel," she says. "My poems are shorter than many poets, I try to work more with imagery."

Ingram says her favorite poet is Dylan Thomas and favorite poem by him is "Fern Hill," which has had a major influence on her work.

"I adore the beginning and ending (of "Fern Hill") and I think it might sum up my life, too. Modern poets I'm fond of are Mary Oliver; I like her Buddhist underpinning and simplicity. And Marilyn Nelson, our Connecticut Poet Laureate-I like poems that reveal African-American history."

Ingram says she tends to write more in the winter when it seems OK to hibernate.

"Lately, I've found my self becoming inspired in parking garages," she says. "Perhaps it is the limited view looking out that gives a perfect frame or focus…I admire Japanese haiku, leaving the reader with an unusual image or contradiction."

Books have played a huge role in Ingram's life.

Her mother was the Deep River librarian from 1949 to 1980 and her grandmother was the town's librarian for 25 years prior.

"I began shelving books, helping out in sixth grade," Ingram says.

"My mom read to me and encouraged me to memorize narrative poems," she says. "I continued doing this and acting them out as storytelling events as a member of the Connecticut Storytelling Center and the Connecticut River Poets," which, she notes, are currently writing poems to complement each exhibition at the Florence Griswold Museum.

Ingram doesn't plan to do a traditional reading at Essex Books but present her poems in more of an acted-out storytelling fashion.

"I've been super lucky in finding work and mentors who supported my love of literature and theater," Ingram says.

 

Review from Hearsay, Fall 2012, Volume 20.2 (by Rosalind Hinman)

Congratulations to longtime CSC member Sara Ingram on the publication of her first book of poetry, Sounds of House and Wood, released by Antrim House Books in July of this year. Sara is a life-long resident of Deep River, Connecticut, and her poems are New England through and through, as deeply rooted in its seasons and landscape as are the beloved trees that surround her home.

So many of the poems tell stories, little vignettes: of her childhood, her marriage, her journeys to self-discovery, the beauty and severity of New England itself. “The Butterfly Quilt,” tells of the quilt sewn for her mother’s wedding, later to become a special, caring luxury to enwrap a sick child, and finally hers to surround herself with warm memories. “On May Day and Mothers” finds her mother introducing her fourth-grade daughter to the May Day tradition of “flirting”! This poem and several others –“Harpooner’s Advice on Poetry Composition” and “Puritan Ethic” to name a couple – are delightfully humorous.

Winter is the season that appears again and again, with its monochrome greys of trees and sky, its endless white snow; “My heart harkens to the / plain face of winter. / Puritan maid: / no frills, no color, no falsity.” And then the occasional, soul-stirring sight of a cardinal: “I drink / tomorrow’s hopes / from your flash of red.”
Harsh winters mean endless hard work, and the hilltop on which they live becomes almost a character: keeping the snow sufficiently cleared, lugging the necessaries up the steep hill, her memories of being pulled in a little sled behind her father’s snow-blower as a child and then, years later, with her husband. “This winter we climb the hill / once, twice, too many times to count. Our gloves wrapped around bottles, / books, mail, we backpack / supplies to our arctic post. . . So many Januaries / we have shared.”

In addition to being a writer, Sara is a dancer and choreographer, and there is a fine rhythm and musicality to her poems. Many are lyrical and legato, but one at least, “Dad’s Small Change,” choppy and staccato and – a rare instance – rhymed. The effect here is to create a vivid image of this man who has lived through some hard times and knows the value of keeping anything and everything that might come in useful sometime.
These are poems to read and read again – and also to read aloud. Appearing mostly simple at first glance, they have a depth that reveals itself upon further acquaintance, as they begin to glow in the mind. As Sara says in “Writers Conference Aubade” – with something of a sigh at having been told more than once! – “Guess what/ Each word counts.” And in these poems, they really do.

Despite her wide travels – and there are poems set in Japan, Geneva, France – Sara’s heart brings her back to her home. These are love poems: to nature in all its variety, to Peter, her husband of many years (beautifully captured in many poems, but especially in “The Perfect Birthday Present”), to her parents and to God. Living her life where she does, her physical connection to nature is very present. When scraping and painting the old walls of the house that her grandfather built for Sara’s mother, his daughter, and her new, Brooklyn-born husband, Sara realizes she is the last of the family to do this task and senses the life in the wood itself: “These boards know how to drink and sing. . .these 1940 boards / speak of forests and greenery. . .they whisper board to board, and reaffirm their / promise to shelter the occupants of the / little white house in the green green wood.” For the book’s epigraph, she chose a quotation from Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” and several of her poems have similar elegiac echoes; contrasts of permanence and immutability with evanescence and temporality.

This lovely, slim book is a perfect fit for a backpack and can be carried along on a hike or a bike, ready to be taken out when a comfortable resting spot is discovered and enjoyed beside a brook or under the shade of a spreading tree.

Vera Schwarcz's Ancestral Intelligence

 

REVIEW OF ANCESTRAL INTELLIGENCE

by Professor Guo Jian, Department of English
University of Wisconsin, Whitewater


V
“Words Have No Word for Words That Are Not True”

I.
Where thought could not be free,
Death was a more welcome companion.
. . .
Only sages are willing martyrs
For mind’s unfettered reach.

These are lines from the American scholar-poet Professor Vera Schwarcz’s rendition of a poem by the eminent Chinese scholar-poet Chen Yinke in memory of his mentor, friend, classical scholar-poet Wang Guowei who committed suicide in 1927 in the face of the rush advancement of modernism and the rapid decline of classical culture. In the midst of deep sorrow for his friend’s tragic end and knowing full well Wang’s great scholarly accomplishment in many areas, Chen singled out his friend’s dedication to truth and freedom as his everlasting legacy, as he wrote at the end of Wang’s epitaph: “Independence of spirit and freedom of thought,” as Wang’s life represented, “will last with heaven and earth and shine with the sun, the moon, and the stars.”
This was also the principle that Chen shared with his mentor, and he, in turn, made his own life a testimonial to this principle. Well versed in a dozen languages and generally acknowledged as China’s leading historian of his time, Chen received in 1953 the new communist regime’s invitation to serve as head of the Institute of History in Beijing. Chen’s response was astounding: as a condition to accept the invitation, he asked that he be excused from all political study and from following the officially endorsed Marxist perspective in historical studies. His demand fell to deaf ears, of course, and he chose virtual exile as a history professor in a university thousands of miles away from Beijing. And, for the remainder of his life, he dedicated himself to an “unofficial” biographic study of the late Ming Dynasty courtesan Liu Rushi who killed herself in the wake of the Manchu invasion. Many of his fellow historians were puzzled; they even deplored his effort as a waste of enormous talent. Only in hindsight, years after Chen’s death, they were beginning to see the connection between his intensely personal interest in a prostitute of long ago and his deep respect for the great scholar-poet of his generation Wang Guowei.
Chen decided to live on, a harder choice in the repressive Mao era than Wang’s and Liu’s for final release in the past. As his physical sights gradually failed due to reticular degeneration, his mind’s eye remained open and sharper than ever. He became China’s blind seer, or, as Professor Schwarcz called him, “China’s Tiresias,” foreseeing the increasing ravages of culture and persecutions of innocent people in communist China, including his own tragic end in the brutal hands of Mao’s Red Guards. He wrote on the eve of the Cultural Revolution in a poem which Professor Schwarcz rendered with the title “History’s Rubble”:
This they call
Being human!

Condemned already
a thousand times,
my crime?
I write.

When I can steal an hour
from shouting crowds,
I seek solace in poems
by a courtesan who killed
herself when dynasties
collapsed, when heaven
and earth traded light,
leaving unspeakable darkness.

I’d climb divine heights
to gaze on history’s rubble, find
a sheltering mountain, gentle
leave-taking from worldly cares,
the voice within the silence.

The “voice within the silence” is made of quiet and stubborn words of his The Unofficial Biography of Liu Rushi; it also flows from the sad music of a series of classical style Chinese poems that Professor Schwarcz recreated in English in her book Ancestral Intelligence. These poems, never intended for publication during Chen’s life time and now elegantly rendered in another tongue, speak the pains and sufferings, the deeply private thoughts, and ultimately the courage and integrity of a great scholar-poet. They also reveal the truth of history as history is felt and lived by a sensitive human being and speak to readers across linguistic barriers and across “broken time” (a phrase Professor Schwarcz used in her book on Chinese and Jewish cultural memory) about the tragedy of humanity as well as the enduring human spirit during a time of cultural decay and historical darkness.

II.
In the beginning was the Word (a rather inadequate English rendition of the Greek “logos” in Scripture). In the essentially secular Chinese culture, in which the agnostic Confucian humanism and the transcendent Taoist naturalism complement each other, and in which a written language consisted of logographs has lasted since its invention, the word is intricately combined with history, without one, without the other. The fabled inventor of logographs, Cang Jie, was the historian for the Yellow Emperor back to whom the Chinese trace their ancestry. History for the Chinese is Word made flesh, at once a story of the past tracing an ancestral line and a revelation of the future like a mirror. The spirit of the Word embedded in original Chinese logographs seems to be what Professor Schwarcz means by “ancestral intelligence.”
In early 20th century during the New Culture Movement, a radical intellectual trend was set going against traditional culture, and against classical-style language and the four-thousand-year-old Chinese writing system as well, blaming both the culture and the language for China’s backwardness of the past few hundred years and calling for the elimination of logographs. The surgical procedure on the writing system, however, did not start until communists took power. With the support of Chairman Mao Zedong, the Chinese authorities issued three batches of simplified Chinese characters in the 1950s and 1960s to replace traditional characters as a first step towards completely abandoning logographs and adopting a Romanization system. Even though a writing system with simplified characters has become reality due to the government’s forceful implementation, which distinguished the writing system used in mainland China from the traditional one used in other Chinese-speaking regions like Taiwan and Hong Kong, the project of eventual Romanization appears to be a failing, and perhaps already an aborted, program.
What has the simplification of Chinese characters done to China, to the Chinese cultural imagination, and to China’s modernization project? This is the question many intellectuals ask. Professor Schwarcz answered this question with her beautifully imagistic logograph poems in the second section of Ancestral Intelligence. Each poem is a meditation on the contrast between an original logograph (printed in a fluid and elegant classical zhuan style between English lines) and its simplified counterpart (in its dull and rigid block character form as commonly used today). Rather than aiming for etymological accuracies (of which debates among scholars never end) in her reading of the logographs, Professor Schwarcz focuses on evocative implications and visual beauty that embody the ancestral intelligence and rich cultural imagination in contrast to the impoverishment in all counts in their simplified forms. As a result, each of these poems bears witness in all its concreteness to the desiccation and degradation of culture in Mao’s China that ended with a Cultural Revolution leaving behind it a vast cultural wasteland. Meanwhile, these poems also pay homage to an ancient language that Ezra Pound once said has to STAY poetic.

 

Reprinted from the March/April 2014 issue of World Literature Today

Vera Schwarcz
Ancestral Intelligence: Renditions and Poems
Antrim House

In this surprising collection of poems, Vera
Schwarcz interprets the life of Chinese historian
Chen Yinke (1890–1969) and laments the
changes imposed upon traditional Chinese
characters throughout history. Both parts
of this compilation illustrate how language
simultaneously experiences and protests
political and personal hardship. In doing so,
the author weaves her Romanian identity into a
universal one.

 

Reprinted from an American Association of University Women Posting

IN SEARCH OF AUTHENTICITY

July 17, 2013

Maybe it was her offhand mention of a few of the languages that she is fluent in, or her dogged enthusiasm for finding truth in her research, or all of it together that swayed me: Vera Schwarcz is an impressive AAUW alum. With a keen ear for “what lies between languages” and the belief in “language as a life raft in times of historical confusion,” Schwarcz is a scholar in search of authenticity.

Currently the Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies and director/chair of the Center for East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University, Schwarcz was a 1988–89 American Fellow. The fellowship, the first of several prestigious awards that she won early in her career, enabled her to “carve a more independent and authentic path of scholarship” and to feel “authorized as a woman, a scholar … to be an expert” in her field. “As a member of the very first group of American exchange scholars to China, many doors opened to me for research and publication. The AAUW fellowship brought great prestige and time for me to explore many voices, including poetry,” she said. Nuance of language and truthful historical inquiry have been salient themes in her research and writing over the years, and she is always “alert to what cannot be said in words,” an awareness that still does not seem to preclude her skillful articulation.

Initially a religion and French literature student at Vassar College, Schwarcz ultimately shifted to Chinese after participating in a seminar on Chinese history with Indian writer and philosopher Raja Rao.

I switched to Chinese studies because I still admired the cultural revolution and Mao Zedong. It took another decade of language study and China travel before I began to seriously interview Chinese intellectuals — survivors of atrocities that I still write about. They taught me to challenge my own previous understanding of China, or my truth of history.

This month sees the publication of her latest work, Ancestral Intelligence. The book delves into the culture of contemporary China and explores the work of mid-20th century Chinese poet Chen Yinke.

In Schwarcz’s field of study, what was true yesterday may not be true today. For her, one of the challenges of teaching and writing about Chinese culture and history is the need to admit, as the expert, “I don’t know.” In admitting uncertainty, however, Schwarcz proves her dedication to sharp critical reasoning and veracious research. She advises young scholars to “maintain a strong inner, personal life. Keep the strength of will to pursue the unconventional.”

Looking back on her professional career, Schwarcz strongly believes that when it comes to balancing family and work, “books get better, deeper, wiser if they come from an anchored place in one’s personal and intellectual life. … [It is necessary to] keep a space in one’s life that does not come from the academy.” In other words, find a way to go after the things that you believe are important, and do not be afraid to pursue them to the fullest.

As a longtime supporter of AAUW, Schwarcz continues to help empower women to pursue rigorous academic paths, just as she did. We are proud to have her as part of our community and look forward to her upcoming book.

This post was written by AAUW Fellowships and Grants Intern Lauren Byrnes.

 

Rebecca Lilly's Light's Reservoir

Comment from Kirkus Reviews:

LIGHT'S RESERVOIR
Lilly, Rebecca
Antrim House (78 pp.)
$16.00 paperback
ISBN: 978-1936482511; July 1, 2013


BOOK REVIEW

A poetry collection that considers the splendor and significance of wildflowers. Lilly’s previous book (A Prism of Wings, 2013) was a collection of haiku on butterflies. Here, the poet focuses on wildflowers with the same attention to detail that made her last collection a success. Lilly has also published additional
books of poetry and two books on philosophy. In the introduction, she explains that she suffers from depression, but in wildflowers, she was able to find a consistent, lovely thing to look for everywhere, to focus and ruminate on, in order to ind beauty in life and some sense of peace. This explanation enhances her work. The collection includes more than 100 haiku, each marked with a number in a sketched wildflower. In a few words, Lilly captures the minute details and extraordinariness of the flowers, as well as how they point to expansive internal and external truths: “The sheer drop—on rock / face below, meadow rue still / blooms; I’m not too late” and in another, “Intense grief dissolves / to numbness, longing: too small / to witness—miterwort.” Her metaphors could have been clichéd, but the poet adds her own satisfying, observant twist; e.g., “Pass to essence from / the personal wood sorrel’s / dark pink-veined petals.” Her attention to detail is obvious in her diction and her consideration of the reader; she helpfully notes the type of flower she is considering in every poem. In addition, the supplemental material adds interest. Plates with colored sketches of various wildflowers appear in the middle of the book, and the backmatter includes the scientific and folkloric significance of all the mentioned blooms. The time and care that went into this notable collection is clear.

Muses on small natural objects but produces big ideas.

 

Anne Magee Dichele's Waiting for Wisdom

Jim Pearce's October's Gallery

William H. Matchett's Airplants


Jeanne Weston Cook's Stunned by Illumination

Joel F. Johnson's Where Inches Seem Miles

KIRKUS REVIEW (Jan. 21, 2014)

Rich, compelling lyric poetry that bores beneath the decorum of civilization, revealing the elementally human beneath.

Few writers are able to use juxtaposition and irony as frequently and consistently and with still-startling results as Johnson does in this penetrating debut. Like his most obvious, almost overshadowing, influence, James Dickey, Johnson accomplishes this through meticulously rendered detail, a knack for subjecting his characters to psychologically trying situations and an evocative sensuality that usually prefigures loss. Most of his major themes and techniques appear in the opening poem, in which the child narrator describes with disarmingly counterintuitive, yet accurate, metaphors the inexorable rise of floodwaters: “a puddle that grew wide on the kitchen floor then / covered it, absorbing the hall and climbing, / as an old man would, or a toddler, the steps.” Beset by diluvial apocalypse and the ceaseless cacophony of “the yipping, frantic dog,” Mamma frets instead over social obligation: “My god, Gardiner, the violin. We left Phoebe’s violin. / You have to go get it, Gardiner. It’s a rental.” Under such pressures, the father reacts instinctually and violently, “raising the window, / the dog struggling in his hands, squeaking and gnashing at him” before “flinging the dog out”—a shockingly vicious move that nevertheless re-establishes calmness. Most of the remaining poems play on variations of these same themes, whether the context is a pas de deux between a rattlesnake and the startled hunter who decapitates him, then weeps, or the young spectator who can’t bear to watch the eroticized sawing-in-half of the magician’s assistant. Whoever they are—man, woman, child, Shakespearean character or Audubon’s gifted but overlooked assistant—Johnson’s narrators are insightful, quietly desperate, honest and driven by wild appetites. For instance, in an appealing panegyric to cigarettes, one narrator concludes, “I’m no more addicted than a word to its meaning. / Saying you’re addicted makes it sound like / you don’t want one. / But I do. / I want every one. / Every one I can get.” Johnson’s poems always sound as if they’re telling the truths that we can’t usually bring ourselves to admit. Ultimately, it is both high praise and mild criticism to note how strong the Dickey influence is here, for in the best of these poems, Johnson rises to such heights, but his own distinct voice never fully emerges. Even so, this is one debut not to be missed.

Tender yet jarring, cerebral yet visceral.

Pub Date:Oct. 1st, 2013
ISBN:978-1936482573
Page count:90pp
Publisher:Antrim House
Program:Kirkus Indie
Review Posted Online:Jan. 21st, 2014

Phyllis Beck Katz's Migrations

 

"Emily Dickinson's Gorgeous Nothings," a new poem by Phyllis Katz, has received the 2014 Oberon Poetry Contest award. The poem will appear in the Fall issue of Oberon, and she will participate in a reading from that issue in late September on Long Island.

 

 

FOR AN INTERESTING CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR, click here. AND FOR ANOTHER, click here.

 

 

SELECTION FROM A LETTER OF COMMENDATION BY SYDNEY LEA, VERMONT POET LAUREATE, 12.3.13

Dear Phyllis:

I want to thank you for the gift -in every possible sense of the word- of Migrations... If I seem a bit slow in my acknowledgment, it's only because I wanted to read (and, as it turns out, re-read) the wonderful collection before responding.

The book is not only wonderful poem by poem but also as what the French call a well-made book: it has a trajectory and a coherence that are enviable.The over-riding metaphor of the garden and gardening is deftly and subtly handled, and I find myself, as I go through the poems seriatim, moved, amused, comforted, saddened and enlightened, sometimes within the compass of a single entry. Brava. Brava indeed.

I am taken back to the births of five childen, say, by "Out of Fire," and to the labor(s) preceding. Needless to say, I was a mere observer, but even observation assures me ofthe accuracy of your rendering. A woman feels devastation, even "ruin" and lifelessness ... at which point this incredible miracle bursts onto the scene!

I am uplifted by "Morning," the joy available --if we will let it be-- in the flow of the ordinary. Similar uplift derives from "Rehearsal of Bach's Cantata ...."

The "Suggestions for a Long Marriage" are excellent suggestions.

I could go on and on, but will stop by saying that that "Mirror Image" poem about floored me: I look about at all my grown children, all of whom are still young enough that, happily, I suppose, they can't foresee all that the poem foresees. That is a real beauty ...among many beauties.

Rennie McQuilkin, whom I have never met, deserves all manner of praise from so many quarters, in this instance not only for choosing Migrations but for producing it so splendidly.


Thanks again,

Syd Lea

 

COMMENTARY FROM EDWARD SELIG

"Of all the many good poems in Migrations, the one I like the best is Nestlings, where the varieties of declamatory stress and rhythm against the underlying meter create dramatic (and, in context here, ominous) compression. It's a bit like Gerard Manley Hopkins, but in a minor key. Nature red in tooth and claw threatens even the human toddler, whose parents had better catch and hold him fast. I also like "Union Village Dam," which reminds me of Frost's "Directive"; "Chickadees," which belongs with Frost's sonnet "Never Would Birds' Song Be the Same"; the Dylan Thomas-ish "Weather Report"; the Yeatsian "Mirror Image and Changes" (cf. his "Wild Swans at Coole"); and "Tenacity" (Frost again, in spades). [Her] stuff is in the traditional mainstream, to which [she] adds [her] own individual, reflective and refined voice."

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Much of my working life has been spent in university and high-school teaching. It was while teaching in the MALS program at Dartmouth that I met Donald Sheehan, long time Director of the Frost Place in Franconia and taught four courses in ancient and modern poetry with him. Out of our first class together in 1995 came a poetry workshop, I organized with Deming Holleran, one of our students in the course. The workshop, Still Puddle Poets, continues to meet monthly. We have published two Still Puddle books of poems. Teaching with Donald Sheehan, a remarkable man, who sadly died two years ago, rekindled my love of poetry, and I have now retired from active teaching so as to have time to write. A man of great spiritual strength, he always asked poets at the Frost Place to “find the unique beauty in another’s work,/ to value it as if it were our own . . . .” (See “Elegy for a Good Man” in my first book All Roads Go Where They Will, 2010, Antrim House).

I continue to be nourished annually at the Frost Place Conference on Poetry, and at workshops held each summer at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.

My new book Migrations is a collection of poems that are part memory and part meditation. The poems focus on life’s many changes and on the challenges of aging. I’ve just written a new poem on the theme of aging; it is unpublished:


Falling Time

We fatten for the cold, the way the swarms
of goldfinches empty our feeders each day,
the way the bears are tearing apples from the high
branches in the old orchard to stuff the flesh
beneath their fur for the empty months. We stock
our freezer, our pantry, barricades against
those icy roads, those drifts of snow to come,
when we stay in and hibernate until the melt and mud.
We stack our woodpile like beavers who pile
sticks deep below the surface in their ponds
to feed their winter home below the ice.
Last stragglers to board the waiting bus,
the oak leaves are hanging on, and soon only
the persistent beeches, branches still full
in early March, will remain, as if they were
the stubborn elders we’re becoming, clinging
to life, determined not to fall. The carmine
red of the swamp maples, yellowing
sedge, rusty tinges on the marsh grass,
are painted anew each year on our minds’
canvas, unfading until time slows
and our weary pulse slows, staggers, stops.

© Phyllis B. Katz

Rhett Watts' Willing Suspension

Jane D'Arista's The Overgrown Copse

NEW POEMS

 

82nd & York

 

Open to a day in April,
windows facing south
frame the front of a room
where chairs circle a table and
a carved bookcase and worn sofa
sit against opposite walls.

On the table, a bowl of tulips,
wine and long-stemmed glasses
wait for friends who will walk up
five flights to reach this floor
where a phonograph plays
sonatas for violin and piano.
One child naps in the next room—
another is on the way.

The happiness found here
is as ordinary— as special—
as the pattern sunlight spreads
like a rug on the bare floor.

 

 

On Buster's Bike


Jacksonville, FL, 1937

 

I hung on by the backs of my knees
from the handlebars of Buster's bike,
riding down a dirt road
past houses I could see
from my grandfather's grocery store
to where it ended in a town
of unpainted shacks and narrow paths.

It was hot and growing dark.
Fires mixed smoke with odors
of cooking and boiling clothes.
People stared as we passed and
someone said, "Ain't no
white child been here before".
I was afraid to say what
I wanted to say: "I'm almost five
and Buster takes care of me".

Buster put me down and carried
a bag to one of the shacks.
Then I saw his mother was there.
She took my hand and began
to walk me back the way we had come.
Later, one of the wash women
told my grandparents what had happened.
Grandma wanted to fire Buster
but Granddaddy said no.

Until he joined the army
when I was ten, Buster
delivered groceries after school
and kept an eye on me
playing hopscotch and jacks
with my cousin and her friends
under the Chinaberry tree.

But even now that time
when I was five comes back in dreams—
I'm on a road I do not know
in a place I've never been, standing
outside, wanting to go in.

 

 

Moments


Moments one wants to arrest—
to hold something seen, said
or felt before it dissolves—
are gifts offered to all
by timeless works of art—

an ancient Chinese poem sounding
the movement of boats in the dark;
rituals of mystery and fear
painted on a wall in Pompeii;
a cry of love and loss
embedded in the line of a play
or sorrow carved in fragile wood
on the face of the Magdalene.

But now, among the thousands of images
that each day record
this or that stop in time,
few are more than casual comments—
moments belonging to others, not to me.

Mine came suddenly today— the feeling
that I, like the woman I saw
crossing the road below my window,
had stepped into the rest of my life.



Joan Hofmann's Coming Back

Joan Seliger Sidney's Bereft and Blessed

Paul Petrie's Collected Poems

FROM "GREAT POETRY TO EXPLORE ON PINTEREST" (internet website):

"This recent publication is a genuine event -- great poetry by an outstanding modern poet." --Mary George

 

 

FROM THE BLOG PAGE OF SYDNEY LEA

Wednesday, May 21, 2014


On the late Paul Petrie

At the post office this morning, I found a card signifying that I had a package too big for my little box. It came from a woman named Sylvia Petrie, with a return address to a town in Rhode Island I didn't know.

The parcel was heavy, and when, full of curiosity, I opened it, I was surprised to find a heavy volume, the Collected Poems of Paul Petrie, published by Connecticut-based Antrim House, founded by the gifted and indefatigable poet and– what? poetry missionary?– Rennie McQuilkin.

What a handsome volume it is, and how gracious of Petrie's widow (a painter and printmaker whose cover image is part of the collection's beauty) to send it my way!

Mrs. Petrie had written a very cordial letter, and with it enclosed a copy of one I had written to her late husband many years ago, in which I praised his 1984 volume, Strange Gravity. (The author had sent it my way immediately upon publication, as an unncessary but welcome thank you for having published some of its contents in New England Review, whose editor I was at the time.) I spoke in my note of the collection's wonderful mixture of "deftness" and "grace." By that, I am quite sure I meant how taken I was by this writer's capacity to use both the most constrictive sorts of formal verse and free verse with equal agility and to equally moving effect.

I mentioned too that I was pleased by his gift of the book to me, because, "as I'm sure you know, it can get lonely in the House of Verse, especially when, like yours and mine, that house is located out of the usual way for 'career advancement.'" I was vain enough to imagine, that is, that by being ambitious for my own work, as Petrie clearly was for his, rather than for its promotion, I might produce verse that followed its own star, that I needn't get hung up on being a star myself. Paul Petrie, clearly, was not obsessed with reputation; and yet he consistently produced writing that was, to my mind, far superior to that of many contemporaries who were, at least in their time, more celebrated.

Petrie's collected poems, as I say, make a large volume, and I won't pretend at ten o'clock in the evening of the very day when I received it that I have managed more yet than to browse around, which I have done at some length and with the constant, sure sense that I found myself in the presence of genuine mastery. In due course, I intend to go cover to cover, more than seven hundred pages worth.

And all this for free. Mrs. Petrie mailed me a book whose cover price is $40, and I paid not a cent. Let me, however, assure readers that so far as I have seen, both from prior collections I knew and from what little I have gleaned from this one, the volume is worth every penny of that and you'll do well to buy it.

I am grateful to Sylvia Petrie, and grateful that the world of letters included her husband's canon, into which I give the merest glimpse by reproducing a poem chosen more or less at random.

The Great Depression

Mid-day, mid-week, and father
stretched on the living room couch,
half staring up, half dozing–

and my aunt in the spare room weeping
behind closed doors
with harsh, convulsive sobs.

Consultations– late-night whispers–
two voices, tense with the clinking
of nickels and dimes, the computations of need.

Long lines edging the streets;
workmen loitering, begging
like off-beat Santas with black

stubble beards;
and in the factory on Livernois
the army of the great drill presses
hanging on air.

More stews, more ham-bone soup
laced thick with rice,
and waking long past midnight,
the whir of the sewing machine
stabbing into my sleep.

More hand-me-downs, more quarrels,
more fights at school–
Something hanging over the house
like a huge black veil–
at whose edges we played.

 


A LIFE IN WORDS by Elizabeth Rau

University of Rhode Island Alumni Magazine, May 22, 2015

 

Paul Petrie died listening to his poems. At the hospice in Providence, his wife, Sylvia, and their children took turns reading aloud at his bedside. Groggy from morphine to numb the cancer, the poet and former University of Rhode Island professor could still hear the song of his verse.

Always the hilltops take me,
and always I go—
over the slight green rise at the end of fields,
over ridges of blue
distance—and on—where to—none know.

The end came on Nov. 9, 2012, at the age of 84 and a short two months after he had been diagnosed. Sylvia wondered how she would go on, her world so entwined with Paul’s they had moved as one through 58 years of marriage.

The book, she says, saved her. She spent a year helping to edit his poems, which he had arranged just as he wished them published before he knew he was dying. The fruit of her devotion is The Collected Poems, a vast and beautiful 754-page love letter to life.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Levine called the poems astonishing, and Paul a writer of boundless energy: “Considering how little attention the poetry reading public—if there is such a thing—gave his work, his 70-year commitment was both miraculous and heroic.’’ And the poet Guy Owen, referring to one of Petrie’s earlier books, praised the poems’ sheer music: “The phrases that go on ringing and singing in the ear! My God!’’

The collection also tells the story of the Petries’ journey, from their courtship as young students in Iowa and travels in Spain, to Paul’s three decades of teaching at URI and happy family life in South Kingstown, where Sylvia still lives. “We were lucky,’’ she says. “We were so close.’’

He grew up in a blue-collar family in Detroit. His father worked in the press room of a newspaper and was an alcoholic with “eyes puffed and drinkshot,’’ which weighed heavily on the young boy. To make money, Paul delivered papers on his bike and worked in car factories, “Filing in through the low-arched gates/past the long vast looming buildings—/Spare Parts, Assembly, the gaunt/ Foundry’s mouth—and on/to Pressed Steel.’’

As a teenager, he dabbled in poetry writing, but he didn’t start to write in earnest until he arrived at Wayne State. Eventually, he landed at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with Robert Lowell, among others, and earned his doctorate in creative writing.They met at a table of graduate students in the cafeteria—Sylvia, a lively brown-eyed artist fresh out of Wooster College in Ohio, and Paul, a tall, lanky thinker with blue eyes and a mop of black hair. The poet asked the painter to go to a classical music concert. They fell in love quickly—and deeply. There were long walks by the river, Rogers and Hart in the music building, kisses in her room. Six months later, they were married:

Moon through the window look more lightly
upon my dear love’s breast.
Touch her with silver fingers, moon,
caressing and caressed.

The young couple and their cat, Goya, spent a year in Spain, then returned to America in time for the birth of their first child, Phil. They settled in Nebraska in a town called Peru, where Paul taught writing and celebrated the pleasures of fatherhood: “Like birds that tumble on the October air/ we roll upon the floor, unraveling joy/ like balls of colored twine. Against my face/ his face is soft and warm.’’

Paul joined URI in 1959, and although he enjoyed teaching, his shyness sometimes made it challenging: “Dry-mouthed, quick-beating heart/ I stand at the dark threshold/ of eyes/ and, smiling/ turn the knob.’’ His reward was sharing the “music, music, music’’ of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth.

Two more children came along—Emily and Lisa—and days in the orange-doored Peace Dale house by the woods were filled with laughter, Bach and Brahms, and readings of Paul’s poems. On Sundays, he’d watch his beloved New England Patriots. Sylvia pursued her painting and printmaking, even collaborating with her husband on two hand-printed books.

“I was a slow poke,’’ she says. “He was the worker.’’ On writing days, he rose early, ate a bowl of cereal and drank a glass of milk, put on his down jacket for extra warmth and went back to bed. He wrote, usually in a spiral notebook, until noon. He always wrote lying down.

He was haunted by the march of time and death, the only certainty. Yet he didn’t let it wear down his enthusiasm, his sense of awe at being alive. Death, in Paul’s words, purified all living things: the “wintry theatricals” of branches, “half-shut buds of flowers,’’ the crow as “one black, heroic period in a world of flow.’’

The goldfinches outside his door were fed well. His family was a source of inspiration. In his poem “The Outsider’’ he watches from afar through “black-limbed trees” to the lighted windows of his house. Sylvia is setting the plates; the children are darting in and out at some unruly game; the dog is prancing behind.

I shall run to those yellow windows and hidden peer in—

I shall wrap them in silken handkerchiefs
like dolls—

I shall sit all night in the moon,
weeping—

weeping

for the past.

He retired from URI in 1991, but that didn’t slow him down. He was as productive as ever, adding to his canon of ten volumes of poetry and more than 400 poems in 100 literary journals, including The New Yorker and Poetry.

His illness was swift. A stabbing pain in his side brought him to the doctor. There were X-rays, and straight talk. Nothing could be done. The cancer had spread too far.

The night he died Sylvia read her favorites aloud, and then it was time to sleep. She lay down beside him. The room was dark. There was no gasping for air, no thrashing. His passing was peaceful.

“He was a wonderful man,” she says. “I think he felt almost a calling to praise life by ‘sounding the illicit heresies of joy.’ ’’ As expected, that philosophy surfaces in his work, “Poem for Joy.’’

“Page 649 in the book, stanza 5,’’ says Sylvia. He was a boy, singing as he rode his bike—hands free!—in the rain. Neighbors stared. The earth groaned. He sang louder, “both loud and clear,’’ until, through sheer force of will, he soared, “and the sea shrank back as he made the world.’’

Kenneth Lee's Lake Effect

Victoria T. Murphy's In Defense of Worms

Danny Dover's Tasting Precious Metal

 

"AN ENCHANTING BOOK BY POET DANNY DOVER"

from The Herald of Randolph

 

Poet Danny Dover of Bethel keeps a notebook into which he jots down thoughts, overheard phrases, fleeting concepts, or even snippets of dreams. And although many of those phrases never leave the notebook, others inspire poems.

“I sometimes think about an idea for days, or months, or even years,” Dover observed this week, in an interview shortly after the release of his first full book of poetry— “Tasting Precious Metal,” by Antrim House. (His chapbook, “Kindness Soup, Thankful Tea,” was published in 2006.)

Dover says his poems work better when he lets a poem lead him where it wants to go instead of when he deliberately tries to steer the poem to a specific conclusion. But after that instinct-driven poem is on the page, Dover takes charge. From that point on, he fine-tunes every single thought, word and line. He edits his poems “endlessly,” he says, sometimes for years, until the poem feels fully realized on all levels.

“I look at a poem that I’m writing as if it’s a piece of sculpture. First I get the rough shape of it, and then I sand and polish, sand and polish. Towards the end, every word has to fight for its life, to make sure the poem is concise and clear.

“I look at every syllable, for the sound and resonance of each line. I listen to the rhythm and cadence. I want the lines to naturally flow and roll off the tongue. I even look at the shape of the poem on the page. I do all of this, but I also want the poem to actually have something worth saying.”

Dover’s poems, in “Tasting Precious Metal,” reflect on the lessons and processes of loss and relationships, on the passage of time, on privileges of being alive, on issues of the heart, and on the universality of our lives.

His poems are not only beautifully written, but also packed with energy. They vibrate with physicality: the words first a lyrical dancer fluidly moving to soothing music, then, moments later, a muscled gymnast doing double somersaults in the air. Throughout his poems, Dover turns the stones of life over to see what is on the other side of each. And the gifts of what he finds there aren’t always predictable.

Poems in “Tasting Precious Metal” that enchanted this reviewer were many. They included poems such as: “Nothing is Lost,” “Cigarette,” “Recipe for Relaxing with Men,” “Virgin Mary,” “Shopping Days,” “Jesus of Comcast,” and “Letter to my Nose.” Occasional mysteries occur in Dover’s poems, such as the mention of “Herbert” in the poem “NYC 1956.” Even though the reader is not told who Herbert is, such small moments of mystery in Dover’s poems feel like the chime heard from a Tibetan singing bowl in a room just out of sight. Those moments in his poems merely remind us that life resonates with happenings we’ll never fully comprehend.

Many Chapters

“Tasting Precious Metal” is one more chapter for Dover in a life that has included many chapters, from hitchhiking through Ireland to being a master pattern maker for Vermont Castings, a dulcimer maker and a photographer. He’s also played in the contra dance band, “Smash the Windows” and mastered the arts of surveying and of piano keyboard technology (Dover recently rebuilt the Steinway concert grand for Chandler Center for the Arts).

And, as a result of many trips he has made to Nepal, Dover has worked closely with two Nepalese children—Urche and Neera—to create life opportunities for them that they would not otherwise have had.

A Vermont resident since 1973, Dover and his wife Mary Swartz still live in the converted schoolhouse on Camp Brook Road that they purchased in 1978. As a student, Dover had not even liked poetry when assigned to read 18th-century poets, but he found himself smitten with the art form when he discovered the writings of contemporary poet Gary Snyder. That early discovery changed the path of Dover’s life forever.

“Tasting Precious Metal” may be purchased at The Three Bean Café in Randolph, the Norwich Bookstore, Sandy’s Bakery in Rochester, Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, or on line at antrimhousebooks.com.

Melissa Croghan's Cliff Walk

Alex Kochkin's From Naught Anew

Elizabeth Schultz's The Quickening

Wanda S. Praisner's Sometimes When Something Is Singing

Susan T. Moss's In from the Dark

 

NEW WORK

The following is a new poem that that will be available in the June, 2015 issue of After Hours. "Ambiente" is based on experiences I had last fall during three glorious weeks of travel in Spain where history, mystery and art (among other things) are interwoven to produce a complex culture with fascinating texture. This poem is hopefully going to be in another collection I am working on about the theme of literal and metaphorical journey.

 

Ambiente


What I know of Spain is espadrilles,
tapas, rainbow-colored tiles, its
chronicles of civil war and religious
purges – a place where voices

curl upward from café chatter
toward my unshuttered window
and the ghosts of Cervantes, Lorca,
Jimémez whisper their poetry

under a full moon competing
with clacking bells from
hallowed churches on narrow
cobbled streets squeezed

between stone buildings
with hanging marigolds
and bird cages amid neatly
pinned laundry two floors above.

I also know of Miró’s quest
for perfection with the fewest
brush strokes, Goya’s
Black Paintings,

flamenco’s clap, stomp and strum,
ripening oranges scenting
the Mezquita of Córdoba,
Barcelona’s salt air

and seduction of rioja tinto
sipped in twelfth-century walled
cities like Hondarribia or Granada,
where the Alhambra looms

over the Albayzin, its dark rooms
weaving into more rooms with corners
of intrigue and hidden spaces,
inscrutable like my dreams.


Deming Holleran's Gypsy Song

Katharine Redfield Carle's The Uncommon Nativity of Common Things

Nicholas Giosa's This Sliding Light of Day

This Sliding Light of Day - Collected Poems by Nicholas Giosa

(Book review by Carol Lewis)


In This Sliding Light of Day, acclaimed physician/artist/poet Dr. Nicholas Giosa gifts the reader 135 poems that collectively represent an epistle of universal appeal. Motivated by the language of art and music, faith and science, literature and mythology, as well as of hope and humanity, the reader is propelled through its eight chapters with a hint of humor, more than a sprinkling of pneumatic wisdom, and an abundance of love. A category finalist in the 2016 Eric Hoffer Book Awards, This Sliding Light of Day is authentic, gracious and compelling.

Its title could have been How to Live by Love - A Do-It-Yourself Retreat. It is a study in living and dying; it invokes both the human and the divine spirit in a shared circle of love that holds many treasures. Dr. Giosa invites us to join him in his journey, and to recognize our own “transfiguration from shadow to substance”(“Shadow and Substance: a Journey Within” - p. 172) as we discover that “we are the sum of all our days” ( “Burnt Norton, Revisited” - p.144).

Suffused with the literature of Genesis, Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Hieronymus; the music of Mozart, the voices of children, warbling of birds; the art of Rossetti, Rodin, Van Gogh, Michaelangelo; and the achievements and symbolism of numerous historical and fictional characters all cited in Giosa’s well crafted poems, this book could present itself as a course in fine art. This Sliding Light of Day is divided into eight sections; they shine upon our purpose here on Earth - in a word, love. In his poem, “Instructions for the Last Hour” - (p. 214), the author speaks to this purpose - acknowledges a sweet foretaste of death and heavenly redemption in the music of Ave Verum Corpus;

“For the ear, a brief allowance:
perhaps the Ave Verum Corpus, a nocturne,
or an adagio of quiet praise or prayer.


and forgiveness as he remembers ,

“Finally, let me recall once more the faces of those
that bore me, loved me, shared my time,
saw past the moments of my lapsed humanity.”

From “Supplicatio ad Incipiendum” (a prayer for beginning life in this world) to “Motorcade to the Cemetery” (a wish for ending life in this world), his poems are filled with images of God and creation. In every chapter, he hides a “whispered shred of hope” for the reader to cling to, sometimes urgently, often surreptitiously;

“Reveries without rude awakenings?
A revelation as to what might have been
had we followed the road not taken?
A whispered shred of hope, for as yet
unanswered prayers?”
- “The Autumnal Wayfarer” - p. 200).

We identify with all who are “pondering, note-taking, back-seat companions” to Time, who transports us from our conception to passage;

“And so it seems, Time measures the miles, the hours,
the twists and turns of country roads we journey on,
as it abides the musings, the trails and daydreams
of a pondering, note-taking, back-seat companion.”
- “Meditations, Route 1, Maine” - p. 136.

The significance of the chapters in this book are unlike the ‘matter’ in “Whither Diogenes” (p. 92); they do not “neglect the fatal, final scene” that truly matters. Giosa’s sequencing of the eight parts of his book provides the “mis-en-scene” from line one for the “memento mori” in the poem’s ending, so that the attentive reader may follow a clear path. Within the pages of This Sliding Light of Day, imprinted with desire, fear, human failings, grief, nostalgia, love and truth, we follow the thread of hope. Hope as the other side of despair, as in ‘Prelude’, the only chapter with a single poem, prefiguratively entitled “Symbiosis”. We might interpret this ‘one-poem chapter’ as the Creator’s thought before the creation. The seven parts that follow appear to lead the one who shares the creation to a glorious realm of one’s own choosing. As written in the dedication, we are launched on a journey, and are let be …

Chapter two - ‘Gatekeeping’, is a family genealogy of sorts. Chapter three, ‘This matter of Being’, raises the question of man’s purpose. Chapter four, ‘Lamentation and A Prayer’ is an exploration of the duality of the human soul as in the opening line of “To Emily” (p. 81). Chapter five explores ‘The Seven Acts of Man”, and ruminates on our identity - “Keep me from anonymity!” (“Vanity of Vanities” (p. 97). The heading of chapter six, ‘In Praise’, touches upon the transiency of life on earth, and our gratitude for that life. For example, in “Orchestration for the Day” - p. 112,

“With allegro con brio
seize morning’s first light,
when shadows are long
as possibilities at a beginning;
when dawn scales up the cliffs of night
and begins renewal’s song.”

and when child-like, “get on with the renewal as they sing…a paean to the passing hour” (“In Passage” - p. 126.) ‘Reflections’, the title of chapter seven, takes stock of life as it has been lived thus far; “Do not chafe at what dwindling days may yet remain; accord each hour its proper place, its proper name.” (“This Realm of Time” - p. 147). The eighth and final chapter, ‘A Cadence of Age’ offers a way to accept the end of life as we know it, by acknowledging that the only thing constant is change, and best achieved in silence, because it is also suggests the value of listening, of the sound of quiet.

This extraordinary literary work invites us to be ‘in communio’ - entwined as DNA, opposite sides of the same coin, both alpha and omega - symbiotic entities, members of the same body that represent hope and despair, sorrow and joy, sinfulness and redemption. For those fortunate enough to receive its lessons with open minds, it will carve memories of ‘leaning’ on the supporting ‘canes’ (“My Father’s Cane” - p.11) of fathers, mentors, fellow poets, and other inspiring entities. Therefore, I humbly encourage readers, as the recipients of the wisdom offered here, to continue the theme of Nicholas Giosa’s glorious book of poetry, and remember to love well while we live - and when ‘this sliding light of day’ (“But Soon” - p. 30) becomes a silent night, make that leap of faith. “In this manner let us reap, in this manner let us pray” (“Leap of Faith” p. 37). With humor, excitement and hope, our last offering in the book’s final poem is reminiscent of Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, whose fictional character, the Caterpillar, confuses Alice (who is constantly changing) upon asking the question “Who are you?” Indeed, This Sliding Light of Day offers insight into our own answer to this question, so that we may, “with emergent new-found wings of ratifying lepidopteran fancy, let the final exodus be made.”

Lana Orphanides' Searching for Angels

Victor Altshul's Singing with Starlings

KIRKUS REVIEW (April 30, 2015)

Altshul (Stumblings, 2013) brings a gentle wit and a multifaceted view of human existence to his second poetry book.

As the title indicates, one of the throughlines of this collection is the observation of nature—an earthy, figurative framework that gives the poems a common theme. The linked concepts of mortality, memory, sex, and cycles of death and rebirth run strongly through every poem, including those that borrow language from other fields, such as “Vodka Blues,” a rueful examination of a martini gone wrong. These topics give the collection an overarching viewpoint—that of a man reviewing his life. Despite a handful of poignant regrets (as in the affecting “Entreaty,” which keenly portrays his inadvertent role in the killing of a horse), the narrator appears to find the sum of his life to be on the positive side of the ledger. Readers who enjoy the work of Robert Frost—who’s quoted at the opening of this slim compilation—will find much to enjoy in Altshul’s work, as they have several points in common, including the recurrent stanza structure, the use of natural imagery, and the New England setting. However, Altshul leavens his work with a frankness about sex that Frost couldn’t get away with, and he often uses precisely placed profanity and a quick, gentle wit that always points back to himself as a figure of fun. “Patience,” for example, shows the narrator preening over his erudition while getting his facts wrong, and “Samarra, the Sequel” demonstrates how being helpful to the Grim Reaper can backfire. Warmly humanistic without wallowing in sentiment, wise without being world-weary, and readily tipping his authorial hat to his influences (including John Donne and Wallace Stevens), Altshul celebrates life by acknowledging its inevitable end.

Readers who appreciate a warm poetic voice would do well to dive into Altshul’s quick-witted, gregarious work.

 

AN OBSERVATION AND TWO NEW POEMS

Here are some verses I've coughed up since Singing with Starlings came out. I think they competently illustrate the emotional immaturity of their creator. In both he seems determined to take on the biggies– to prove his sexual superiority over Socrates, Shaw and Jesus, and in an epiphany of immense self-satisfaction, to make a preposterous show of octogenarian potency. In the first he castigates one of the lions of twentieth century American literature over the question of ownership of of a novel's characters after publication.

My analyst would cite these expostulations as evidence of unresolved oedipal conflict. As he has been dead for fifty years, no one will be the wiser.

My most trenchant observation about the writing of poetry is this: after finishing every poem I am convinced that I will never be able to write another.

 

Caddy


Faulkner told us she'd become a whore.
Where he got this notion who can say?
He may have loved her, but I loved her more.

I don't know what he had to do that for
I don't know why he had to have his way.
I don't know why he said she was a whore.

I loved the brave and soft in her, the core
of sweetness, goodness, life and light of day.
He may have loved her, but I loved her more.

When your story ends, you shut the door.
You have finished modeling your clay.
She's no more yours to tell me she's a whore.

She's mine now, Faulkner. I am rich, you poor.
I love what you can never take away.
You may have loved her, but I loved her more.

You gave her to me Faulkner; I'm not sure
the goodness of your gift can quite outweigh
the baseness of your claim she was a whore
You may have loved her, but I loved her more.

 

Smug


A juiceless shrew with toothsome sneer,
Xanthippe declined the weary
sputtering of the inquiring Socratic member;
and Shaw, for all his verbal flame,
had his desiccated epistolary fill
of rectitude with a high-born dame,
elegance of ample flesh
left to shrivel in a November chill;
and is the Magdalen virginal still and fresh?
The four biographers of our lord perhaps
left no juicy bits for us to remember,
and those pious quattrocento chaps
swept her off to a lower corner
of the canvas, while all the mourners
had only eyes for him– poor Magda left them cold.

So scold
me for showing off some biologic bounce,
if you should feel so inclined,
but I would like to announce,
as I settle into November’s uncertain mind,
that I delight in the retention of a life
of nether thrills of a propulsive kind,
and noisy thrum with rumpled, scrumptious wife



Curt Plaskon's Life: Still the Greatest Show on Earth

Miriam Brooks Butterworth's My Felonious Friends

Anne Carroll Fowler's The Case of the Restless Redhead

This book took 40 years to come to fruition. My beloved grandmother, and my namesake, was murdered in her bed by burglars in 1976, in Falmouth, Maine. The crime was almost random, though the killers had a very tenuous connection to my grandmother’s house. But mainly it was a crazy, drunken event.

My grandmother lived in a fairly secluded family compound in an upper-class neighborhood. And she was what the newspapers persistently called “a noted socialite.” Her death was a fearsome public event; if this crime could happen here, was anyone safe?

The perps were eventually caught, after much bungling by various police departments. My mother and I attended the entire trial, a painful, compelling, and ultimately satisfying experience. But very strange and haunting.

I actually began to think about writing a book of poetry about my grandmother’s death 7 or 8 years ago. From the Attorney General’s office I received a thick packet of crime scene photos, witness and police statement, autopsy reports and other related material. At the Maine Historical Society I was able to read many letters that my grandmother wrote home to her father when she was in college, and then as a young married woman in Cleveland. I learned about a part of her life that I’d known nothing about, and incorporated what I learned into the book.

Writing Restless Redhead presented many challenges. One was learning how to transform primary sources ( the police reports, my grandmother’s letters) into poetry. Another was imagining my way into her life, and death, at a level I’d never achieved before. And then, trying to imagine my way into the lives of the perps and the actualities of the crime. I had my memories of the trial to draw on, as well. I achieved a level of writing I’d long aspired to; my grandmother’s story drew that out of me.

The greatest challenge, of course, was emotional. Every time I read the poems¬–of course I have read them countless times both in the writing and revision(s) process and in the editing, and proofreading–every time, I cry. The pain, not only of loss, but of the hardships of my grandmother’s life, is now deeply engraved on my heart, and this book is a tribute to her courage, her elegance, and her strength, even as she confronted her killers and her death.

Left: the author's grandparents, c. 1964; Right: Nancy and Ben Holt, c. 1929, my mother Sally, and her brother Benjie who died shortly after this picture was taken..

Parker Towle's World Spread Out

Les Kay's Kilco Co

Harper Follansbee, Jr.'s In the Aftermath of Grief

NEW POEMS

Copyright ©2015 by Harper Follansbee, Jr

 

Global Warming

It’s been one of those springs
everyone hates.
Just enough sun to make people
who live for lying on the beach
believe it’s summer in May,
at least until the rains arrive,
dashing their hopes
as the clouds hang low for days.

By June the vegetation
has taken over,
and the worshippers of Ra
wish they could turn on the AC,
a sure sign summer has arrived,
so they could head for the coast,
top down and music blaring.
But the damned rain just won’t
quit as basements flood,
mildew spreads like measles
and merchants shake
their heads the way they did
last winter after all that snow.

Polar bears have abandoned
the North Pole and are walking
the streets of New York,
interlopers from some ancient
northern realm where cathedrals
were built in the shape of icebergs,
each with its own rose window
portraying Odin, Fyorgyn
and Thor in various stages
of repose. The bears are
gentle creatures that prefer
everything they drink “on the
rocks” and frequent sushi bars
where they carefully disassemble
their meals, leaving trails
of rice littering the floor
as they depart the premises.

During the day they collect
in air-conditioned lobbies
of banks and businesses,
hoping a new Ice Age
will descend through elevator
shafts serving as conduits
from their frozen version
of heaven to a new land
of ice floes and dams
where seals wait patiently
on sheets of ice in the East River
like canapés at a cocktail party.

During the night the bears
loll in the Central Park Reservoir
looming above the water like
gigantic ghosts. The recent
deluge has made the water
much cooler, but nothing so
cold as the North Pole
even with the ice cap gone.

The influx of bears has caused
tourists to flock to New York
as if it were some sort of urban
Yellowstone. No incidents have
been reported yet, as the bears
carry tranquilizer guns
and laminated permits
swinging from around their necks,
allowing them to move unfettered
about the five boroughs.

A real estate tycoon, running
for office and posing as an
environmentalist, has contracted
with all the sushi bars in the city
to supply each bear with a weekly
tab. But the unrelenting rains
continue, and the beaches remain
empty while restaurants all along
the eastern shore from Long
Island Sound to the Bay of
Fundy have closed their doors.
Merchants from Manhattan
to New Brunswick shake their heads
in bewilderment, muttering,
“It’s just one of those springs.”

 

One Magnificent Simile

In “Sonnet 18” William
Shakespeare claims that
he can make his beloved
immortal by comparing her
to a summer’s day in a poem
that will last forever.
Pure egotism, but he did it!

 

Of course, I didn’t appreciate
my editor’s suggestion for ending
a poem I had treasured for years.
He lopped off the last three lines,
recommending a verb
and an adverb – “writ large” –
in the midst of a line
I would never use.

As an alternative, I devised
a clever allusion to the Wizard of Oz
blathering through a microphone
from behind his gold-hemmed
green curtain about the excellence
of my poem.

My editor vetoed that.

Finally, I conceived
of a magnificent simile,
comparing my poem to a “burner
scrawled across a pristine wall,”
a “burner” being an elaborate
piece of graffiti so vibrant
it burns itself right off
the spray-painted brick.

While my poem is equal
to all of that
and more,
the simile didn’t fit with
the rest of the poem,
so I vetoed it
myself and put it here!

My editor was right!
I wonder if he worked with Will.

 

The Semantics of Surrender


As I sit on the front lawn on a morning late in May
And look out at the trees dressed in their eager
New leaves and the flowers and shrubs bursting
And full of themselves, I ponder pruning and mowing
And cutting the brush in the field, to say nothing

Of uprooting the morning glories the previous
Owner allowed to run rampant, the woodbine
And mare’s tail, American bittersweet,
Honeysuckle, mugwort and creeping Charlie,
Their names so endearing I hesitate to defend
Decades of cultivation against their burgeoning
Hordes set to ascend the front wall
Like Germanic tribes poised to conquer Rome.

“Let them come,” I say, from my perch peering down
The hill at May apples and day lilies,
Bull thistle, wild raspberries and cinnamon fern.
“They can have the place,” this citadel
Where I have labored so long to keep them at bay:
The lawn and gardens edged against the invasion

Of crabgrass in August, or chickweed, common
Purslane, spotted spurge and hairy galinsoga
Staging an earlier onslaught in June. What’s
Here they could possibly want? I wonder
Looking up through the branches of a black walnut
Towards the sky, listening to the song of a mourning
Dove serenading his mate: such a sad soliloquy
Signaling the beginning of life, not its end.


Carol Gabrielson Fine's A Tilted World

Laura Altshul's Searching for the Northern Lights

Gerda Walz-Michael's Stone Walls

Paul Scollan's Unaccounted For

Michael Cevas's A Wilderness of Chances

Tom Gannon's Food for a Journey

Review from Notre Dame Magazine

 

Food for a Journey, Tom Gannon ’60 (Antrim House).

Life’s mutable moments sparkle in this autobiographical journey of poems. The former priest, teacher, lawyer and associate editor of America magazine, who turned to painting and poetry after his retirement from a long-standing law career, here captures images of life’s many scenes: the Italian grandmothers of his South Philly neighbors timidly retreating to the kitchen, the dying football coach receiving Communion and the immigrants hunting scrap metal in the trash of suburbia.

V. Jane Schneeloch's Turning Over Leaves

Emily H. Axelrod's Passerby



Although it is a dreary November day, close to Thanksgiving, I am filled with appreciation for the small miracles that occur each day, perhaps more so with a heightened awareness of the struggles that surround us, close to home and worlds away. Those small gifts are there to be seen and noticed in a mindful moment, plucked like ripe fruit on the bending tree.

It seems to me that as poets our métier is to see differently, and to share a our perspective in our poems. For me it is a visual process, painting with words until the mood and scenes of memory come alive and carry with them an impact beyond what was once my experience alone. It is a strange alchemy we are engaged in, sorcerers with words, mad scientists stirring cauldrons of nouns and verbs to create the unique explosive effect.

What a gift to be engaged in the process, and through Passerby to be able to share it so easily with others.

[The following is a poem written recently by Emily Axelrod. It demonstrates her strong visual orientation and her love of the "small miracles" mentioned above. RM]

Fog

Near another ocean
I walked home from school
preoccupied with friends’ gossip
as the fog rolled in
over rows of stucco houses.
By late afternoon the same soft air
cloaked our street games, and at night
we huddled on the warm pavement
still radiating the noonday sun
while the oldest boy told ghost stories,
so easy to believe when foghorns
sounded low-throated warnings
far out at sea.

The fog is making a strong bid
to shroud the island in damp oblivion;
with prevailing winds from the east
it’s only a matter of time.
Rocky outcrops that lie at the surface
gradually disappear and familiar waypoints
on the nearby shore merge into a grey sea
with no horizon.


Kevin Hogans's My Ríastrad

 

"The photo is of Kevin Hogan and his faithful dog Ari - short for Aristotle. It's a lovely reminder of the relationship the author has shared with dogs, and animals in general, throughout his entire life.

His poem "A Lovelier World" from My Ríastrad is a testament to what this relationship can produce when the right dog adopts the right poet!"

Here is a recent poem by Kevin entitled "American spring":

Jessica Gigot's Flood Patterns

Maria Sassi's Rare Grasses

Garret Phelan's Outlaw Odes

Theresa C. Vara's Through Salt and Time

Vera Schwarcz's The Physics of Wrinkle Formation

Anne Magee Dichele's Ankle Deep and Drowning

Priscilla Wear Ellsworth's Rutted Field of the Heart

Srinivas Mandavilli Gods in the Foyer

Marge Rogers Barrett CALLED The Making and Unmaking of a Nun

 

A talk by Marge Barrett at the Montana Book Festival:

"How I Approached the Spiritual in my Memoir, Called: the Making and Unmaking of a Nun"


I grew up in the ‘50s on the plains, in a small town called Marshall, close to the Iowa and South Dakota borders. I grew up with physical and psychological space all around me, in a family of seven children, with a father of poor Irish descent from the small town of Glencoe, Minnesota, and a mother from the tiny town of Ghent, Minnesota, where her Belgian mother and German father had to escape from after the Depression. When I was a junior in high school, my family moved to St. Paul. After high school, I entered the convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, a French order, on the campus with the University of St. Catherine in St. Paul. After five years, I left the convent to answer other important calls.

My story is a personal story, but also a broader story of immigration, of the typical American movement from rural to urban centers, of upward mobility, of the buried roots of the ‘50s lively exploding in the ‘60s in the Midwest, the fly-over heartland of America.

It is also a spiritual story. It begins:


I have called you by name; you are mine. – Isaiah 43:1


In late winter of 1963, my senior year at Our Lady of Peace High School in St. Paul, our class went on a silent, three-day retreat. We didn’t speak to each other. We didn’t chatter going home after school, and at home, we didn’t converse with our families—a herculean task for teenagers. We truly tried to focus inward.

I remember sitting on a gray metal folding chair, on the last day of the retreat, a Friday afternoon, with the sun pouring in the windows of the school auditorium. Those enormous windows reached to the ceiling. Light streamed in, as it did in the paintings of the angel appearing to Mary the Blessed Virgin, asking her to be the Mother of God. I was sitting in the middle of long rows of girls, listening to the Retreat Master. His words echoed in my head: “You were put on earth to make a contribution; God wants you to give something back; this is God’s purpose for your life. He saved us and called us . . . Now you belong to Him . . . ”

And, suddenly, I knew. Knew that God had chosen me. I wanted to cry out, “No. Not me. Why me?” I didn’t want to be chosen, but there it was. He had called me, and what was I going to do? I couldn’t say no to God.


Why I couldn’t say no to God becomes the central story question. I asked myself other questions: How had I got here? Why did I listen to the call? I aimed for a full, rounded view—genetics and environment, history and culture—I examined the physical places where I grew up, my Catholic education, my family. I was also searching for an anchoring, for roots, for a sense of myself. The influence of my childhood was of utmost importance in the making of me, who would become the nun and the ex-nun.

My parents were models of good parenting; raising kids with initiative, creativity, grit, able to work hard to achieve goals, to contribute to their communities. My parents had high expectations for their children. In their own lives, they had overcome poverty, prejudice, personal challenges, loss.

Spirituality is tied in with my folks in both subtle and overt ways. For example, they instructed us in the beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church for sure, but their instruction was much more centered on loving as a way of life. At one point, I tell about my mother’s reactions to her overwrought daughter, who after hearing the story in school one day of our Lady of Fatima appearing to shepherd children in Portugal, believed that the Blessed Virgin Mary was going to appear to her.


How could I tell Mom that the Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven and Earth, was going to appear to me? Probably right here in the living room.

I hid behind the couch. I needed to plan in private. I figured I’d kneel down when she appeared, say, “Hello, Holy Mary.” I’d kiss her hands, place mine in prayer, fingers matching up. Would Mary speak? In Portuguese or in English? If in Portuguese, would I suddenly understand it? Another miracle? Would she wear the blue gown, the white veil, the tiara of gold or the crown of jewels? Would she smell like violets or roses or lilies of the valley? Would Mom know Mary was here? The living room would be transformed. The bright, bright light could even ignite the sofa and chairs and tables. I would have to scream “Fire!” Everyone would wake up.

Mom stopped ironing, looked up, said, “Margaret, come on out from behind the davenport.”

But I couldn’t come out. I couldn’t tell. I crouched in the corner, knees to chin, waiting. It grew later and later.

Finally, I peeked out from my hiding place. Mom was now working on my school uniform, my navy jumper, the black iron under her reddened hand smoothing out the white crumpled emblem of Our Lady.

“Mary’s going to appear to me like she did to Lucy,” I blurted out. “What?” Mom said. “Mary’s going to appear to me like she did to Lucy.” “Oh. . . ,” she said. Then, “Don’t worry. You’ll be all right.” She didn’t offer any advice, just continued ironing until very late. Finishing, she came over and took my hand. “Let’s go on up, honey, I don’t think she’s coming tonight.”


My father was a man of faith. One description from the book:


Irish and Catholic, Dad believed. I never understood his deep, constant faith. He lived his religion quietly, steadily, without fanfare, never acting pious or self-righteous. He never made us kids walk his holy path. Because he was so kind and likeable, we willingly hiked along with him, imitating his gait and gestures, trying to live as large and lovingly as he did.


Dad lived the Golden Rule. Another description from the book:


He can be standing, or sitting, or walking, or smoking, but what he’s always doing is looking directly at others in the scene, leaning in toward them. Paying attention to them. He had a genuine interest in everybody he met. He asked questions about their lives. His intellectual curiosity was fed by all the ideas he learned through communicating with them. Listen. That’s what he did. Not out of politeness. He really wanted to hear what they had to say. People loved him for it. I wanted to be like him.


“Giving back,”(You were given much!) a concurring theme from my upbringing, also meant the calling of taking care, particularly of my sister Patty with Down syndrome and my bother Tom with mental illness beginning in his twenties. Along with my parents, they became other leading characters of the book—and spirituality is certainly tied in with these two also. My sister Patty knew my mother died before anyone told her, and at the moment of Patty’s death, we heard a rustling of hundreds of birds flying out of bushes around her group home. I also wrote about my deceased father being with me, watching over me, in a major car accident. There is a slight veil between the living and the dead. My brother Tom, who had a life not unlike Job, lived a courageous and giving life, witnessed by the many folks who commented on his death. One such remark:


“‘Great soul’ is the perfect description for him. With all his burdens, his first concerns were always for others. Can’t think of a time when I ran into him that the first question wasn’t ‘How’s the family?’ or ‘How are you?’ He was just a terrific person, and everyone who knew him will be very sad when they hear he’s gone.” (When I received this email, I thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Over-Soul,” how Emerson believed humans come from the biochemical stuff of which we have been made, and how we should look to ourselves and each other because God is living in everyone’s mind. While one part of my mind recalled Transcendentalism, however, another sang soul song titles: “Soul Man,” “He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin’,” “You Lost the Sweetest Boy.”)


Entering the convent, of course, was an important step of my spiritual formation, especially living the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience at the time of great religious upheaval in the Church with Vatican Council II and with social and cultural turmoil. I grew up in the convent.


Now I realize the importance of “forgetting your people and your father’s house.” In order to truly grow up, we must set out from our homes, from what our mothers and fathers wanted us to be or do, to find our own callings. The Gospel call, again and again, is to leave home and family. The opening cover of the reception booklet, “Live in My Love,” and the ending, “And Love Is My Answer,” is the essence of being called. I believe I am still answering this call of Love.


I grew up in a family of love and then became my own loving woman in the convent. Leaving it, I was ready to fall in love; to marry, divorce, and re-marry; to have children and grandchildren; to teach and write.

“I like to be connected,” I say in the book. I wrote about sensing the presences of early Native Americans in a state park in Marshall and of Babi Yar in Ukraine, a site of the Holocaust, which has always been a deep concern of mine. At one point in Called, I stated:


“I was shocked by institutions I had believed in. I brooded over the lack of action by the Catholic Church. How could a spiritual, moral entity choose not to help millions of innocent, suffering people? How could it not witness their deaths? I was on my way: to challenge this institution while becoming a nun—involving myself by doing right by it—and much later, by becoming a none—belonging to no established church.


But traveling in Ukraine a few years ago on a mission to preserve ancient manuscripts, I realized I was not finished with my spiritual journey.


On a gray, misty, cold day, we got off at the last stop and walked out of the Kiev subway station into a large park, eventually finding the “Valley of Death,” where the Nazis executed more than one hundred thousand people. I stared down into the huge ravine, silently mouthing words from Yevgeny Yeytushenko’s poem “Babi Yar:” “Here all things scream silently / and, baring my head, slowly I feel myself / turning grey . . . ”

Suddenly, my hair stood on end. There was a dead man—a present-day dead man—lying at the bottom. Crumpled, head over chest, wearing something like a tattered lumberman jacket and worn boots, he looked like a large puppet. My husband ran down the side of the ravine and then up the other side, calling out, “Margaret, we have to notify the authorities.”

Standing on the rim, aware of the rain dribbling into the muddy chasm, the habitual beliefs of my childhood instantly surfaced. Surprising myself, I prayed. I prayed for this man who had joined thousands of others. I prayed for all those who had died, crossing over from darkness into light.

Bernita Woodruff Sundquist Across the Divide

Susannah Lawrence Just Above the Bone

Ginny Lowe Connors Toward the Hanging Tree

 

Toward the Hanging Tree is suitable for use in secondary school classrooms. Below is a small sampling from a Teacher's Guide that is available free from the author. To request a free Teacher's Guide, contact the author at ginnyloweconnors@gmail.com.

Reading and Discussion
Oral Reading
Toward the Hanging Tree is an ideal book to use for expressive oral reading. There are many approaches to take. Students can be assigned roles and read the poems that are in the voice of the person they have been assigned. Many students will be more comfortable if they can read their part in advance in order to prepare. Some poems are in multiple voices. Examples of these include the “gossip poems” in the voices of Goody Taber, Goody Abbot, and Goody Wright, as well as the Mercy Lewis poems and “John Willard’s Test.” The final poem “Echoes” is in no one’s and everyone’s voice, as it consists of fragments from previous poems. The recurring poems that include the goodwives Taber, Abbot and Wright do not make it clear where one woman’s voice ends and another begins. A small group might be assigned to determine how to break their poems up into three voices.
Reading and Discussion
After reading certain poems, students might be asked to write down the questions they would like to ask the individuals in the poems. These could form the basis of a discussion. Or certain students could research individuals included in the book, and take on their roles. Others could interview them with their questions. On the next page you’ll find some questions pertinent to each section of the book.

Discussion Questions
Discussion Questions: January-February, 1692
Magic and fortune telling were not considered appropriate activities for good Puritans. What did the girls do that went against this prohibition?
What did Tituba do that contributed to the perception of wrong-doing?
How would you describe Abigail Williams?
In the general community, as anxiety heightened, what are some of the signs people felt might be associated with witchcraft?
What do you wonder about as you read?
Witches were thought to be disciples of the devil. They agreed to go over to his side when they “signed the devil’s book.” As you read the poems in this book, look for references to the devil, to sin, and to witchcraft as a sign of evil forces fighting to take over the good people of Salem.
Discussion Questions: March-May, 1692
What does Betty Parris make of her exile from the community? Could there be other reasons why she was sent away?
Reverend Parris feels that he is besieged by “enemies without and within.” Who or what are these enemies? What pressures is he reacting to? (If you want to find out more about Reverend Parris and his status in the community, this is a good link: http://www.tulane.edu/~salem/Samuel%20Parris.html)
Why do you think that Tituba confessed to witchcraft? Was she really a witch? And why was she a likely target of those looking for someone to blame?
What do you wonder about as you read?
Discussion Questions: June-August, 1692
Goody Wright, Goody Taber, and Goody Abbot are fictional characters. Why do you think the author included them in this book? How do they help readers understand the events of Salem Village?
What were some of the feelings of Thomas Parris, and how do you know?
Do you think there was any connection with John Willard, the constable’s, refusal to arrest more suspects, and the accusations that soon landed on him—that he was a witch?
What do you wonder about as you read?
Discussion Questions: September-November, 1692
Which poem in this section surprised you the most? Why?
Contrast the reactions of Reverend Parris with those of Israel Porter to the events that are tearing Salem Village apart.
Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Cloyce, and Mary Esty were sisters. At the time of the witchcraft hysteria, each woman had her own family. What were these women like? What happened to them?
What do you wonder about as you read?
Discussion Questions: December, 1692 and later
Each poem in this short section provides some information about the last months of the witch hunt. Discuss each poem.
What do you wonder about?
Discussion Questions: Directory of Names
Was this section useful? Why or why not?
After the book is finished
Look at the writing prompts. Most of these could also be used as discussion questions.
Arthur Miller wrote a play called The Crucible about the events in Salem. He wrote it early in the 1950’s, and many people believe one reason he wrote it was as a way to comment on the McCarthy hearings that were going on at that time. It was a time when people were afraid of communism, and many powerful people accused other Americans of communism, discrediting them and making it hard for them to find work. Can you make any connections between the Salem witch trials and other historical, or even current, events? Explain.


Written Responses to the Book
Here are some writing assignments related to Toward the Hanging Tree.
1. Read the poems relating to one of these characters and write a paragraph telling what you know or can guess about this person. Use details from the poems to support your answer.
• Tituba
• Abigail Williams
• Rebecca Nurse
• Thomas Parris
• Reverend Samuel Parris

2. After reading their poems, contrast the attitudes of Francis Nurse and William Good, each of whom was married to someone accused of being a witch. Use details from the poems to support your answer. Why do you think they reacted so differently?

3. Write a persona poem (see persona poems) in the voice of someone affected by the witchcraft hunt.

4. Imagine you are one of the individuals who survived the witch hunt. You can select one of the “afflicted girls,” someone who was accused, a family member of someone involved, one of the magistrates, etc. Now imagine that it is 1702, ten years after the first accusations. Write a letter giving your thoughts about what happened and how you feel about it now.

5. In the poem “Israel Porter Observes,” he seems unsympathetic to the afflicted girls, who accuse others of witchcraft.

Martyrs or impostors, it’s hard to say,
but they seem a bit too fond of their own
notoriety.

• What does he mean by this?
• Do you think the girls were martyrs, impostors, or something else? Give support for your answer.


6. The book begins with an epigraph by Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn (right after the Table of Contents).
• What is the purpose of an epigraph?
• Explain how the epigraph by Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn relates to the rest of the book.


History and Research
Toward the Hanging Tree gives an idea of what the witchcraft hunt must have been like for some of the people involved, but it does not attempt to be a complete history of this terrible time. The best kind of research is based on questions that YOU have, related to this topic.
• Perhaps you want to know more about some of the victims. Only a few of them were included in this book. Here is a good site that tells about some of the people who were accused of witchcraft. Use it as a starting point. You might want to select one person and find out all you can about him or her.
http://historyofmassachusetts.org/salem-witch-trials-victims/
Other individuals worthy of research might be Reverend Parris, Cotton Mather, Annie Putnam (Ann Putnam Jr.), one of the magistrates, or Governor Phips (sometimes spelled Phipps).

• Other people in the colonies were accused of witchcraft. In one poem, Reverend Hale mentions Margaret Jones, a woman in the Massachusetts Bay colony who was executed for witchcraft. In Connecticut, Alice (sometimes spelled Alse) Young was hanged in Hartford. Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith were also hanged. As were others. This all occurred decades before the Salem trials. See what you can find out about early “witches.” Here are some links to get you started.

http://historyofmassachusetts.org/margaret-jones-first-person-executed-for-witchcraft-in-massachusetts/
http://www.history.com/news/before-salem-the-first-american-witch-hunt/

• What were the religious beliefs of puritans and were their attitudes toward witchcraft and the supernatural shaped by their religion? Finding out more about this can help you understand the mindsets of people in Salem Village and surrounding communities. Here is one place to get some basic information on the topic.
http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schooladventures/salemwitchtrials/life/religion.html
The possibilities for research on topics related to Toward the Hanging Tree are endless. Your library should have some books that will be helpful. Librarians are nearly always helpful!
Field trips to Danvers & Salem
Although the “Salem Village” where most of the events of the witchcraft hunt took place is in the community now known as Danvers, Massachusetts, the nearby town of Salem has capitalized on its name and has many witchcraft-related tourist attractions. As the witchcraft hysteria of the late 1600’s spread, it affected people in many of the surrounding communities, but Danvers and Salem are the best places to visit to learn more about this part of history.
In Danvers here are the most important places to visit:
Memorial Wall and Monument: quotes from the trials are included on the memorial.
Rebecca Nurse Homestead
149 Pine St., Danvers, MA 01923
Phone: (978) 774-8799
open May-November
July & August: Wednesday-Sunday 10AM-3PM
September: Saturday & Sunday 10AM-3PM
Guided Tours begin at 10:30, 11:30, 1:00 and 2:00 and last 40 minutes to an hour.

In Salem there are a number of commercially operated historical tours which can be found online. Some attractions include:
Salem Witch Museum
19 1/2 N Washington Square
(978) 744-1692
https://www.salemwitchmuseum.com/
They present a dramatization of an event and guided exhibits about past and present interpretations of witchcraft.

Witch History Museum
197-201 Essex St.
(978) 741-7770
http://www.witchhistorymuseum.com/witchhistory.html
Live presentations and tours

“Witch House,” the home of Jonathan Corwin, who was a magistrate at the trials
310 ½ Essex St.
978-744-0180

Memorial near the Old Burial Ground

Notes
As you use the book and the guide, you may want to jot down notes to remember for next time.


 

A Reviewer’s Guide to Toward the Hanging Tree: Poems of Salem Village

by Ginny Lowe Connors

Ginny Lowe Connors and Antrim House Books present this guide as a convenience for reviewers.

Toward the Hanging Tree: Poems of Salem Village
Antrim House Books
ISBN: 978-1-943826-10-0
paperback 96 pages
https://antrimhousebooks.com/connors3.html

Media contacts:
Ginny Lowe Connors
ginnyloweconnors@gmail.com
Rennie McQuilkin
eds@antrimhousebooks.com

The poems in this book are in the voices of people who were involved in the Salem Witch Hunt. Individuals listed here are
followed by the page numbers of poems relating to them.

Among the First to Be Accused
Tituba (14, 30, 39,78)
Sarah Good (and daughter Dorcas) (26)
Sarah Osborne (29)
Bridget Bishop (32)

Among the Afflicted Girls (Accused others of witchcraft)
Abigail Williams (6, 8, 13, 67)
Betty Parris (7, 24)
Annie Putnam (4, 22 40)
Mercy Lewis (31, 53)

Among Others to Be Accused
The Towne Sisters:
Rebecca Towne Nurse 44, 45, 46, 50)
Mary Towne Esty (53, 54, 63)
Sarah Towne Cloyce (56, 60)
John and Elizabeth Proctor (37)
Giles and Martha Corey (65, 72, 73)
John Willard (51, 52)

Among the Bystanders
Three Gossips: Goody Abbott,
Goody Taber and Goody Wright (18, 54, 76)
Thomas Parris (10,28, 49, 58, 74)
Israel Putnam (47, 69, 73)

Ginny Lowe Connors is the author of two previous poetry collections: The Unparalleled Beauty of a Crooked Line and Barbarians in the Kitchen, as well as a chapbook, Under the Porch, which won the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize. Connors also runs a small poetry press, Grayson Books.

 

 

(from the Newsletter “About Towne” )

Inside Salem Village: A Review of Toward the Hanging Tree
Written by Ginny Lowe Connors
Reviewed by Elizabeth Hanahan
As family historians, we are always trying to go beyond ”bare bones” facts to discover the people behind these facts. For our immigrant ancestors, William and Joanna Towne and their children, we know many of the facts surrounding their lives and their involvement in the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692. Numerous books have been written detailing the events leading to the trials. Many aspects of these events and their aftermath have caused this tragedy to continue to resonate as the subject of books and films three hundred and twenty-four years later. A mention of Salem has become synonymous with the costs of intolerance, prejudice and unreasoning fears. For a clearly articulated explanation of why these events have never been allowed to fade into obscurity, see Emerson W. Baker’s A Storm of Witchcraft. Professor Baker will be the featured speaker at our banquet in Providence and will have copies of his book available for purchase. He has also been actively involved in the Gallow’s Hill project which has led to the identification of Proctor’s Ledge in Salem as the site of the executions, so the publication of Ginny Lowe Connors’ Toward the Hanging Tree this summer is particularly timely. Copies of her book will also be available for purchase in Providence.

Toward the Hanging Tree is a book of poetry. Considerable research went into the preparation for this book, but instead of recounting factual information in a poetic format, Ginny has distilled her historical knowledge of each person into poems presented in the voices of the individuals involved. Beginning in January-February, 1692, we are able to follow the victims, accusers, family members, villagers and even the hangman, among others through that dark year. Closing the book as the story ends, we are left with a sense of who these people were and a better understanding of the complex relationships and issues involved.

Ginny, formerly a colleague, has been a friend for many years. While not a Towne descendant herself, she has always displayed considerable interest in the people of Salem Village, a frequent topic of conversation at our summer get-togethers when I became active in Towne Family Association following my retirement. When I read early drafts of some of the poems, I was impressed by her ability to present each person’s voice authentically. Nothing prepared me, however, for the impact of the book once it was assembled chronologically. Rather than a collection of poems on a single topic, the book became a cohesive story, one which any descendant of the witchcraft hysteria, young or old, will find thought-provoking. TFA member and Danvers historian, Richard Trask, had this to say after reviewing the book: “This is a never-before attempted, delightful collection of poems relating to the entire story of the Massachusetts witchcraft outbreak in 1692. Through Ginny Lowe Connors’ poetic artistry merged with a solid research of historic facts, we glimpse the human heart’s response to terrifying events.” This is a book well worth adding to your collection.

 


Rennie McQuilkin A Quorum of Saints

Geraldine Zetzel Traveling Light

Marilyn Nelson The Meeting House

Suzanne Levine Grand Canyon Older Than Thought

Ina Anderson Journey Into Space

BROOKE HERTER JAMES The Widest Eye

LAURA MAZZA-DIXON Forged by Joy

Don Barkin Houses

Jane Schapiro Let the Wind Push Us Across

Victor Altshul Ode to My Autumn

Miriam Brooks Butterworth Lull Before the Storm

Cora M. Ekwurtzel Such Nonsense Indoors

Al Basile Tonesmith

Barbara Germiat Look, the Silence

Allen C. West Keeping Night at Bay

Ellen Rachlin Permeable Divide

James B. Mele Dancing in Eurynome's Shoes

 

Words on Paper: Piece of my Mind #3

I have forgotten most of what I used to know about poetic theory and the ideologies of the literary movements of the last four or five hundred years. I had a good laugh over the slapstick absurdities of Deconstructionism; otherwise, I have not bothered to keep up with the airy notions of the latest bullshit that seems to inform and inspire so much of the lethally boring poetry that is published these days in the likes of those Best American Poetry annuals and the journals that feed their voracious appetite for sterile exercises in the inane. Despite time’s erosive effect on my memory and on my ability to stomach the vacuous, there is one aesthetic principle I still have a firm grip on: Shakin’ your ass ain’t dancin’, and poetry ain’t just words on paper.

The most common compositional technique employed by those contemporary poets considered by critics, and most editors alike, to be relevant and serious practitioners of the art
these days seems to be to simply throw words at the page, just as some abstract artists throw paint at the canvas. Even though the vast majority of abstract paintings of any style fail to rise much above the aesthetic level of wallpaper and linoleum patterns, party napkins, or window curtains, etc., it is still possible to argue for their validity as art without betraying one’s intelligence by trotting out the erudite hallucinations of art critics for evidence. Once you strip abstract paintings of the fashionable clothing of foppish pretensions to profundity, these things all still have a visual appeal that on some level of consciousness satisfies a certain something in us. It is a good deal more difficult, however, to argue for the artistic merit of a poem that is the verbal equivalent of an abstract painting. Color and line and pattern elicit a response in the viewer that is largely subliminally affective in its quality. The viewer of an abstract painting may drag a suitcase full of notions about what art is or isn’t to his experience of it, but the medium of paint itself adds no baggage to his burden. Words are a whole other ballgame. The syntactical and semantic freight of words cannot be so easily off-loaded by the mind. We expect the words of a sentence to be a path that leads to a place we can make sense of. Poetry of the sort I am talking about usually only leads us down blind alleys and leaves us intellectually stranded there. This kind of poetry does not take the reader anywhere that makes sense because the poems are fundamentally random acts of disjointed, sensationalized expression, semantically barren fields of images, tropes, and statements in which the sole communicative objective is to be as flamboyantly eccentric as possible.

This jaded, innovation-obsessed, bourgeois aesthetic reduces language itself to a form of pornography. It is little wonder that it also results in a poetry that is arrogantly unconcerned with the reader and devoid of anything that might be likely to truly interest or concern a genuine, living, breathing human being; in a poetry that is, more often than not, impenetrable by the understanding of an honest, sober mind, no matter how well-schooled it might be in the art of reading a poem. Readers have a right to expect to be rewarded intellectually and/or emotionally for reading a poem; they should not be punished for it with a supercilious and contrived abstruseness. I couldn’t say by what process it became a habit among some circles of the poetry community – editors, critics, and poets alike, writing teachers, and some readers for that matter –to consider obfuscation to be a hallmark of poetic excellence. One gets the sense the thinking among these people is that if the reader can have a good idea of what a poem is about without studying it for hours and hours, if not, a lifetime, then the poem is a failure. Could that possibly be the reason why the audience for poetry has shrunken to the point where it consists of hardly anyone but an incestuous circle of poets and literature professors?

I blame all this on the various theories that boil down to the asinine notions that a text only means what it means to the reader or that the writer can claim no sovereignty at all over the meaning of his text.* If that were actually true and if writers honestly believed it was true, no one but a complete, frigging idiot would ever bother to sit down and try to write anything. Poets who affect a cynicism, or, at least a deep suspicion, about the power and the authenticity of poetry and of language itself really piss me off. I don’t know why people so easily lose sight of the fact that the words sophistication and sophistry have the same root and were in the past synonyms! Poetry that lacks the faith in language and the intellectual courage necessary to shoulder the burden of bearing the truths of existence into the hearts and minds of readers is not worth reading or worth writing. It is just words on paper.


* It never ceases to astound me that the literature professors who preach this philosophically chic but bankrupt tenet of contemporary criticism fail to appreciate the absurdity and the hypocrisy of their doing so. If that theory could ever be proven to be a scientific fact, then all the literature professors would be out of business, wouldn’t they. Highly intelligent people are often not very smart.

**********

Mad Dog Serves Notice to Postmodernist Poets
After Reading Best American Poetry 2010 & 2013 &……..

If it were up to me, I’d put you all up against the wall
And have you shot for your atrocities against poetry.
It is clear you have no idea how vapid you sound
As you strut your glib cleverness down the dead page
With all the risible phoniness of some runway model bimbo.
You are badly mistaken if you think your tedious flights
Of idle fancy are bold acts of the imagination.
Yes, risking absurdity on the high-wire of art
Is part of the poet’s trade, but getting into bed
With inanity is quite another matter.
Word puppets are not poems, and talking to your hand
Is not artistic expression. You make as much sense
As someone driving the wrong way down a one-way street.
I cannot fathom who you imagine you reader is.
What makes you think there could be even one human being
(Aside from yourselves and maybe your doting mothers)
Anywhere in the entire universe who would be truly interested in,
Or, who could care a dried dog turd about, this lint
That you have picked out of the bellybuttons of your minds.
You might get a smug, self-congratulating nod
From the cognoscenti hip to your tres sophisticated school,
But honest folks are bound to think you think they’re fools
To expect them to believe your stuff is anything but a hoax.
If you were as smart as you like to think you are,
And not so poorly read, you would have gotten it
Through your heads by now that the avant-garde
Have not had a truly new idea since Aristophanes.
Your gratuitous experiments with form and technique
Are nothing unique. It’s all been done before.
They only pander to the bored bourgeoisie’s pathetic addiction
To any half-assed thing that seems new and different.
No would ever guess from these sterile exercises
That you have ever lived a moment as real persons in the real world.
There is no blood in the veins of this stuff,
No passion, no ache, no awe, no joy.
There is no flesh and bones to it or any real brains.
A poem to you is nothing but a game, a game you play
With yourselves, a kind of solitaire with words
With solipsistic rules that serve your aimless ends.
I’ll never know what inspires you to try to pass off on us
Such mindless fluff, but don’t blame me if I entertain
The suspicion that your souls are empty holes,
And that’s why you really have nothing to say.
If you want to risk the Furies wrath and desecrate
The temple of the sacred Muses, that’s your business;
Maybe you can get away with killing poetry,
But there will be a price for wasting so much of my time.
I don’t know yet how or the day, but you’ll pay for boring me to death!


Jean Sands Close But Not Touching

Rennie McQuilkin Dogs

Rennie McQuilkin North of Eden

Barry L. Zaret When You Can't Do Any More

Gregory Lestage Hope Is a Small Barn

Laura Altshul Bodies Passing

Sarah Glaz Ode to Numbers

Lois Mathieu Snow Raining on Glass

Alexandrina Sergio Old is Not a Four-Letter Word

Tricia Knoll How I Learned To Be White

Norah Pollard Lizard Season

Rennie McQuilkin Afterword

Linda Spock Lifelines

Karen Torop Fire in the Hand

Richard Shaw The Orchard House

Rennie McQuilkin The Readiness

Victor Altshul Strange Birds

Brooke Herter James Spring Took the Long Way Around

Betsy Hughes Forest Bathing: Shinrin-Yoku

Rennie McQuilkin Seabury Seasons

Laura Altshul Looking Out

Paul Scollan Bagful of Bags

Douglas Hyde Footnotes

Tom Gannon Reportings

Nancy Fitz-Hugh Simple Absence

Michael Cervas Even Here

John Muro Pastoral Suite

Larry Bloom I’ll Take New Haven: Tales of Discovery and Rejuvenation

Lee A. Jacobus Wildcat on the Shoreline

Catherine DeNunzio Enough Like Bone to Build On

Caitlin Blackburn another beginning

Karen J. Ciosek Navigating the Poet's Sky

Dawn E. Morrow The Habit of Hope

Barbara DiMauro Celestial Conversations

Susan KõDõ Efird Seventy-Two Labors

Nancy Manning What Glues Us Together

Ellen Hirning Schmidt Armed to the Teeth

Gail Moran Slater At the Edge

Rennie McQuilkin Love in a Time of Lament: An Alzheimer’s Memoir

Rennie McQuilkin A Momentary Stay

Rennie McQuilkin The Prevalence of Mystery

Rennie McQuilkin Transformings

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