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Welcome to the Antrim House Seminar Room. Click on the appropriate
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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.”) |
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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. |
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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. |
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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.
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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.
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Ginny Lowe Connors on Barbarians in the Kitchen
A NEW POEM (November, 2011)
Dust 1. The Old Man in the Mountain And he’d been really something. and people stood around looking dutifully up My own father never got a chance They say he’s ashes now During his life he accumulated And a Purple Heart and the 1949 edition Now they’re both dust. I try to imagine they’re both within me 2. The vacuum cleaner man He spread gray residue on a sheet of paper— I still don’t get it. The salesman showed us I almost bought the vacuum cleaner What feeds on us is dreams So I didn’t buy it, can you blame me?
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. |
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A New Poem (crown of sonnets)
A CROWN FOR MEGAN
This is the crown that I will give to Meg 2. This crown’s for her to keep for when she reigns 3. With grace and warmth, in spite of all the pain,
She tells me with a smile and childish shrug 5. A life in which the king would not be drugs; 6. She leaves those battling urges to find a vein,
Straightening out this life she couldn’t contain, 8. He looked down and calmly took a drag 9. At times she tells me she is very tired. But then she puts it away as an acquired
With Megan’s family hanging by a thread, 11. It’s just a miracle that they’re alive 12. A tale about some pain or some desire--
And once again she must take the lead, 14. She’ll show us, by example, how to live 15. This is the crown that I will give to Meg, |
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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 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)? |
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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.
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Steve Foley's A Place at the Table
Additional poems composed since the book appeared:
SMOKE While his dad snores away We’re backed against the worn brick chimney, He’s a different twelve than I am, When the Camel burns down
A MURDER OF CROWS 4:52. 4:54. My wife’s undisturbed sleep-sounds behind me, The cacophony expands, At the window now Before I know it I’m through the kitchen, when from my right
THE YEARS SPEAK THEIR MESSAGE TO MY MOTHER We will allow you the story how you’d speed up at the dead spots the streetlights couldn’t reach, how you’d see three, maybe four cars tops how you’d turn onto Colonial, Yes you can have that story, and we won’t allow you to remember |
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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. |
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“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 Sandals, boots, flip-flops, |
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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.
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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, I read "Just For Today," Sensing one more poem I lean forward to hear I gently hold her hand She closes her eyes, sighs.
The street I was raised on We children in Public School 108 The lucky ones like me had And therein lies the secret To love and be loved. |
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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. |
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Joan Kunsch's Playing with Gravity
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 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! 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. |
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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 Yet replace that atom
REVIEW OF THE BURNING BUSH from THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY (Spring, 2007 (Vol. XLVIII, No. 3)
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Polly Brody's Stirring Shadows 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. |
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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
WHAT COMES FROM DARKNESS Under snow slowly melting
WOODLOT MANAGEMENT Truman Capote said work |
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Brad Davis, OPENING KING DAVID
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.
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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.
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.
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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.” |
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Ellen Rachlin's Until Crazy Catches Me
RELATIVITY
The Milky Way pushes its light years hulk From birthday to ceremony, And the ducks cross Canandaigua Creek
RADISHES IN CHILDHOOD
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.
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.
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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 |
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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
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?
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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. |
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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. |
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Vera Schwarcz's Chisel of Remembrance
AMAZON.COM READER REVIEW A Beautiful Journey, April 20, 2009
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 The queen of periwinkle, daisies, trillium and
wart I love this book and highly recommend it to anyone who loves poetry.
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Susan Allison's Down by the Riverside Ways
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. 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: 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. |
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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 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?
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
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REVIEWS OF THAT DARK LAKE
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 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 It crashes through the rocks Don’t get upset.
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, or In middle age you smell the end 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
Ambition, you cocksucker,
The roadside grasses quiver in
A Graveyard Tale “Father”, “Mother”, “Susan”
-- three She’d feared that as their child she
Comrades You are always advancing
At the Edge You can’t take your eyes off the boy slumping
A Religious Illusion And though the soul, I knew quite well,
Nothing makes me feel as alone Why is it she can’t see that she and I
To a Teacher "First, do no harm," they warn all new physicians. Teachers too. For even at seventeen, Though teaching texts are careful not to use whatever clever lesson plans you make.
I love young women with minds like hounds. The way that she looked down at her lap Her shyness and mascara -- like a runner
The Long-Married
A Peaceful Cemetery She took her final illness in her stride, They once wore faces puckered with concern And losers, too. He stank and lived alone,
He lounges on the porch Then he thinks of the dream He does not want to go in! Only, now her arm is warm on his arm.
Three Days of Rain that He could leave us all for dead Though now the clouds have exited As I know clomping gloomily
Why She Went I remember staring in a haze
I should have showed her tears when I It’s just that breathing this dead air and that the floor that loved her junk
Home Improvement “I g-guess I’d run a length of p-pipe downhill. “If we were tools,” I mused, “what would
we be?” “And my wife’s a trowel covering up mistakes Expect poison from standing water, warned Blake.
She’d flung her cigarette I guessed a broken heart, Hearts that I once broke And now I had to ask
A thousand years ago or so
Filling my windshield suddenly -- down snowy roads as I wended
Dreams have all the answers Though when you wake and feel But somewhere deep within that in the morning hour
I remember playing ball as a little boy I remember Easter when I was only five. I don’t know when I got this Eloise. But nowadays I only want what’s new.
The small black boy When my car comes toward him All the stars in the sky A stranger with a squinting face
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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
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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 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, from “Envoy” by Billy Collins
Here’s what I can tell you about my poems. I write about those things that arrest me, I count on the poems to be emissaries. Thus I would not suggest laboring to parse my collection
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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." 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." 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.
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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 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. God, how I miss her.”
“Try to remember every small detail, “Sometimes it is impossible to remember, upon awakening, Picture the room in which you fell asleep, then slowly
enter it. 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 was riding around town on a bicycle, I was driving from place to place, My last visit was to Cynthia. I kept walking through the place, looking That old green car was as big as a prehistoric turtle.
I‘d walked before and I could walk again, Just then Marielle came by again on her bicycle, The prosthetic didn't fit very well, My cell phone rang, and I knew Maybe I could sue that nice garage man |
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Seth Steinzor's To Join the Lost
An open letter from Professor Regina Psaki, 12/24/11: Dear Mr. Steinzor, 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 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.
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.”
From To Join the Lost [Dante:] “Nowadays, the majority find their spots
FRONT COVER DRAWINGS BY SETH STEINZOR
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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 Recent memories While Daddy was excitement you were safe While he criticized He was the chaos He You
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
wave echoes strewn momentarily far the fizzling the reach
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
past lacy architecture guiding me right into the painting where I slip through cracks seeking out lascivious dancing gambling animals mingling with men I’m watching the devil cavorting dreading
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! |
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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 Marking the patch on your jacket: EMT Back home I fell into your poems I lingered on sad regretting poems and
What God Gave Intimacy is a word quite new to me. The playing fields, the old slave cabin, the cloister,
the Odeon The cloistered nuns who taught us were a mystery to be
solved. "My dear girls, God has given us so many ways to
express and share our love. Today when I see one of my lovely young students walking
through And I think, "God has given us so many ways."
La Corrida Goyesca Near Giza, not far from the sharply pointed pyramids and There, in polished red granite vaults, are the mummified
bulls. The cult of the bull spread through the ancient world
and Down the road, in the museum, Lykethos vases are scratched Ancient Romans, on their altars, led bulls with gilt horns
to be sacrificed. In the small town of Ronda, set into the gorge of Serrania There, behind a tall wooden gate, within the sandstone
walls of the ring of There are those who would do away with the practice, A lone man in sequins, stockings and ballet shoes dancing
It is true that the bull dies in the end with the coup
de grace It is true that this is a blood sport. There is blood. The circle of the ring is packed with Spaniards who follow
the The passes and moves, the flounces and turns, are choreographed The horns of the orchestra blare as a young matador faces
a new bull But when the red cape comes out, we know that the business
is near. And then, with finesse, it is done and the white hankies
wave to the A country needs heroes and tradition and blood. We have our wars. Death and blood in the afternoon in the pursuit of machismo.
Tango Criollo Hands lightly on the shoulder, eyes locked and two steps back, two steps forward, pause and The anticipation of the meeting was prelude A promise of shared words, images, hemispheres. The sensuous overtones of tango and space closing The lilting sounds of bandoneón and rhythms of
tango Rio de la Plata rough and relentless running along the
Rambla The promise of the meeting was not the only promise to
be kept There is a grace in the fumble to shed inhibitions and
strangeness we knew it would be this dance in this place on this plane Tango is at once a little gentle and a little rough The music fades. The dancers disengage. Hands rest lightly.
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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, This town, no better no worse than others,
The Swan and the Counselor I could swear
Lulu was back,
Cowboy Boots To his podiatrist, the foot’s host of afflictions Just as well suffer, Wrong. He did try.
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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. |
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David K. Leff's Depth of Field DOUBLE VISION: MIRRORING WORDS AND IMAGES Ut pictura poesis – Horace
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
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. |
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Nick Harris writes in a variety of forms. Here is a recent short story.
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. “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.” 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. 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 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
Remember this and this defend: So fill it up and stock her well I fell down to my knees and said, The raven wrapped me in his wing So up we soared into the sky
Remember this and don’t pretend: I fell down to my knees and said, Death who smelled foul and rank So off into the gray-green mist
Remember this and don’t pretend: So fill your boat and stock her well I dropped down to my knees and said, The Raven wrapped me in his wing So up we soared into the sky “Help,” I cried, but no one heard - Into the ocean, down I fell 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.
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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 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
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 sinned I have partaken in taking too much I've blasphemed gods and mortals I have loved myself I've spoken out of turn I have punctuated poetry I have gently tossed pebbles Have torn the wings off Blown the candles I have ached with want But I said I would come back |
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Kathleen Dale's Rescue Mission 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!
I am a guest, and your friends but don’t really know watching all the life surge round just to sort things into piles. But sit in rows. With deep pleasure But the ground-in grime of many youths, the surface. So my eyes from spent incense, and I almost on a dais my mother’s friend once a girl apart in there. torn apart before So even in my dream I knew even as I remembered L’Engle’s back through mitochondria the two of them treading through the depths monster of the past responsible And though I am alone, here, to set things right, if only I knew if only some faint neutrino from the future |
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Jarold Ramsey's Thinking like a Canyon --from "Writing: the Sidelong Glance" |
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