SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JASON MYERS

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HOTEL ORPHEUS
By Jason Myers

Rain, Eurydice, more rain.
It seems these mountains are married
to cold, damp clouds. I’ve known
no sun here, where you are
not. I sit by this window
and peel the skin from a pear.
Darling, I needed to see you
and now I see rain, hotel porn.
Somebody sent chrysanthemums,
some roses, an orchid. They smell
nothing like you. My nose is wasted
on onions and cilantro’s summer noise.
I won’t cry any more. I won’t wake
in the middle of the night and reach
for the phone to call you.
This rain, how it seems to seethe
like water hissing from the lips
of the kettle, begging one more dance
with Darjeeling. I watch the news
of India, a 70-year-old couple killed
in their hotel room. Didn’t Dickinson say
the world was made for lovers?
Well, she died alone and this pear
tastes like salt. O little town
with your shut-down steel factories,
build me a ship, there is a river
I need to cross with waters so dark
dawn looks like night and my own name
is sung on the waves like a curse.


Today’s poem originally appeared in AGNI, and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.


Jason Myers grew up in western Maryland, and graduated from Bennington College. He received his MFA from NYU and has also lived in Berkeley, California and upstate New York. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, he currently lives in Atlanta, where he recently received a Master of Divinity degree from Emory University


Editor’s Note: Don’t look back. The unheeded warning that left Eurydice in Hades and Orpheus destined for his own darkness in the world above. But to be human is to look back, and that is what Jason Myers grapples with and succumbs to in today’s poem.

One of the things I love most about lyric poetry is its concern with the same themes humans have been struggling with since before the invention of the oral—let alone the written—word. We have all looked back, despite our best efforts to restrain ourselves.

Beneath the layers of time, of progress, of modernization, there is little difference between the heart of the musician poet who sought to retrieve his lost love from the depths of the underworld and the heart of the man sitting alone in a hotel room in a steel town. Both men know to their cores what Myers means when he says, “there is a river / I need to cross with waters so dark / dawn looks like night and my own name / is sung on the waves like a curse.”


Want to see more by Jason Myers?
Cortland Review
Conjunctions
B H Journal
Terrain.org

Albert Herter

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Magic and the Link Compliment of the Borromean Rings in America

by Albert Herter

 

A salvo

The Lacanian want-to-be-analyst in America is not unlike John the Baptist who when asked to identify himself said ‘I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness…’  There is a wildness in the cry of those who cannot be but amateurs (in the sense of lovers and without financial benefit) but on the other slope we have the fate of a tamed and harnessed Lacan, in the stable with all the other thinkers waiting to become usable in American universities, servicing the humanities.  One receives a credential with a sigh of defeat.  But despite this wildness the amateurs would like to contribute to the edifice being constructed across the Atlantic, and in South America.  Eventually we would like to build on New York bedrock. 

Marie-Hélène Brousse, during the Paris-USA Lacan Seminar at Barnard College this past September, said that when Lacanian analysis comes to the States it falls flat.  Only in the Arts, specifically directors such as the Coen Brothers, Tarantino, etc., is Lacanian analysis alive and well.  It is alive in so much as it is ‘subversive’ and ‘creative’.  This is in fact my own history, coming from an arts background and education, I found Lacan through a gallery.  I now belong to a reading group that is currently reading Miller’s address to the congress and the group consists primarily of musicians.  There is a dearth of ‘men of letters’ here, no symbolic fortress to support us.  As Lacan already noted during his sojourn in the States – there is a deficiency in the symbolic.  We are adrift in a soup of imaginary phosphorescence, bursting, oozing, continually reconfigured.  No wonder the Health Care Industry compensates with an obsessive reliance on statistics and categories- that makes everything appear impossible.  So this is the field one wishes to practice Lacanian analysis on.  An amorphous threat of litigation is pervasive.  As far as I understand, the bare minimum in order to practice legally is a two-year social worker program.  In some senses two years is not a long time, but in terms of an ethics of desire it is a very long time.  Presumably one learns more than how to call the police if the patient mentions suicide but still.  I considered making analysis my art practice.  At one point I investigated what sort of credential a fortune-teller requires. Perhaps we are the new magicians. W.H. Auden wrote ‘To believe that a world of nature exists, i.e. of things which happen of themselves, is not however invariably made.  Magicians do not make it. ” Just as the Imaginary after the Symbolic is not the same, Magic after Science would not be the same.  One need only conjure up the image of CERN, the 27 km circumference circular tunnel located 100 metres underground with its 2,400 full-time employees searching for the God particle to get a sense of the desperate need to make nature cough up another signifier.

There is a magician in England named Derren Brown who is ‘a performer who combines magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship in order to seemingly predict and control human behaviour, as well as performing mind-bending feats of mentalism’.  He is essentially a cognitive behavioralist suggesting actions to weak-willed volunteers.  In addition to his stage show he has a series where he exposes frauds who claim to speak to the dead or heal the sick.  He keeps company with men like Richard Dawkins.  What I would call the missionaries of science- Brian Greene, Daniel Dennett.  The prevalent magic of today is the magic of suggestion, hypnotism, nudges. Algorithmic magic. Everyone knows that the birth of psychoanalysis was tied to the renunciation of hypnosis.

 

Rogue analysis, Black Market analysis

The practice of Lacanian analysis in America is irredeemably political, at least for the foreseeable future.    

Ego psychology fit very well within the American program of forging individuals, harnessing their desires to the wagon of capitalist growth. A positivism and naivité which wanted to know nothing of lack or castration.  The New Yorker reports that Freud has finally landed on Chinese soil and will hopefully work the same magic, to reinvigorate the engine of endless expansion.  The article asks ‘Does psychoanalysis have a future in an authoritarian state?’  It tells about the suicides of workers at Foxconn factories, which make iPhones and other electronics, and a series of murderous attacks on young children by middle-aged men. According to The Lancet, nearly one-in-five-adults in China has a mental disorder, as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  As regards the USA, perhaps Lacanian analysis has no relevance to a country that has not yet experienced a sort of ‘historical narcissistic disaster’.  Which has not yet been truly occupied.  And it may yet be awhile before the ground is fully prepared.

A certain school of thought in physics ends in the many-worlds hypothesis.  One can see in the movie ‘Source Code’ what sort of philosophy this leads to.  Never mind that in this reality you are a war veteran without an abdomen or legs, in another reality you get the girl.  In effect it feeds the fantasm, till it balloons up and competes with the real.  Thus the proliferation of gadgets which are auxillary components to amplify the imaginary and the symbolic.  The real erupts with actual combustion.  Soon it will be our symbols that will be under cyber-attack, our databanks.  What will the ordinary psychotics do when their phones, which are their true supports, are taken away?

I have been enamored with a video since university, which is called “Not Knot” that was made under the direction of Bill Thurston who is at UC Davis and is one of preeminent topologists in the world.  It is essentially a guided tour from Euclidian 2 space into hyperbolic 4-space, specifically a rhombic dodecahedron.  This space is defined by the Borromean rings taken as an axis. Every knot or link, with some simple exceptions, emits hyperbolic spaces.  I will just say that Roger Penrose used to admit a bias towards hyperbolic space in terms of the actual universe i.e. that the cosmological constant was negative.  In fact the rings are shrunk down and disappear to infinity ‘where light can never reach them’.   Perhaps psychosis can be thought of as a flirtation or proximity to the pure zero of the ring.  The neurotics float about in the more or less flat and uniform areas defined by the extremes of the rings.  The idea of the link compliment is a way of deriving one world from the three of the Borromean ring.  There is such a thing as One. This Borromean ring also has some similiarities to Penrose’s twistor (one can see the three rings in the twistor pictured above) which Edward Whitten, one of the premiere string theorists has since taken up with the hope that it may provide an escape from the proliferation of dimensions string theory has required in the past.  Could one say that the knot is on the side of being and the space defined by the knot is on the side of existence?  The videos narrator says the space around the knot is just as real as the knot itself and asks the question ‘What is life like in a space with a single line missing, or in a plane with a single point removed?’

Miller ends his rumination at the congress on Oedipus at Colonus, which was Sophocles last play written when he was eighty-nine years old and only performed four years after his death.  The Peloponesian Wars between Athens and Sparta had persisted for twenty-five years at the time the play was written.  It was a tribute to his birthplace.  Fitzgerald’s commentary reads ‘Oedipus has indeed endured his suffering with courage, but it is not until he has acted, and acted as the agent of divine justice, that the passionate man is fit to embody and to symbolize human divinity.’  ‘His rage and sternness in his last hours are the means of an affirmation.’  In New York we wondered if this was the harbinger of the end of psychoanalysis proper.

Andreas Economakis

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“Moon Fish”
(photo by Andreas Economakis ©2012)
  
THE LETTER B

when you find yourself avoiding
the letter b in your address book
when your heart feels a foot deep
in heavy liquid
you catch yourself 
alone on the couch
unable to move on
though its been 2 years
cracked pieces on the floor
pissed off at yourself
needing a sorry,
what a sorry ass you are
drowning your thoughts
in booze and work and books
and mindless little things
that no matter what
don’t let you escape
you’re forever in a loop
you reach out and touch the image
and it repeats itself
ad nauseum
ending with the ugly part
until you find yourself
on your couch
looking for an answer
to a question that was never asked
an answer that was never given
a hand that was never held
lips that moved away
eyes that turned to ice
a song you miss hearing
and you ask yourself
why
must I be like that
why
can’t I be like the rest
why
must I be like the rest
and you sit
and wonder
what would it have been like
and you find yourself unable
to escape from yourself
for one minute
a prisoner of the past
in a future already written
wanting so bad to say
I love you.
 
-Andreas Economakis
 
This piece is part of a collection of words on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life. The author is not a poet.
 
Copyright © 2012, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.
 
For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.
 
 

Elias Khoury’s Little Mountain

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By Karim Abuawad

Written by the Lebanese man of letters Elias Khoury, Little Mountain (al-jabal al-saghir 1977) is a novel set during the early phase of the Lebanese Civil War, a war that lasted from 1975 to 1990. Paradoxically, the civil war in Lebanon has had a tremendous impact on Lebanese literature as it generated an unprecedented number of new works which were influenced by it, so much so that the civil war has been characterized as the “midwife” of the Lebanese novel.

The appearance of these novels about the civil war, which were written from the perspectives of those who fought the war as well as those who were devastated by it, is now considered to be a threshold for the start of fully fledged experimentation in the Arabic novel, or, to put it in generic terms, from the realist mode to the experimental one. Although this experimentation in form can be traced back a decade earlier, to writers such as the Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani (especially his formal experimentation in All That’s Left to You), it is with appearance of these civil war novels that this mode of experimentation became normalized, or more accepted. Therefore, Little Mountain has come to occupy a special position on the trajectory of the Arabic novel’s development. Given that the century-old Arabic novel is a relatively new form within the much larger Arabic literary tradition, the importance of this movement from the more or less traditional realist mode to the experimental cannot be understated.

In an essay entitled “After Mahfouz,” Edward Said describes Little Mountain as the first departure from the style of novelistic writing that dominated the Arabic novel for much of the twentieth century. While it is an overstatement to claim that this novel is the “first departure,” I think the general gist of Said’s characterization is accurate in that it symbolically points out (as the title of the essay suggests) that Khoury’s novel marks the break with the realist style which the Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz had mastered, or even perfected, as some would have it. Writing about this break that he locates between Mahfouz and Khoury, Said says that “from this perspective Khoury’s work bids Mahfouz an inevitable and yet profoundly respectful farewell.”

* * *

It would be somewhat misleading, however, to say that Little Mountain is about the Lebanese Civil War. A more accurate way to describe it would be that it centers on the experience, told from hindsight, of an individual who gets implicated in this most horrible of wars. The novel tells the story (or to put it more accurately, the ramblings) of a fighter who has chosen to join the ranks of the fiddayyin, a group comprised of Palestinians and their supporters which fought in the civil war, despite the fact that this group fought against the Christian militias which were supposed to protect the interests of the minority to which the narrator belongs. Right from the outset, we come to understand the novel’s main narrator as someone out of place, as someone who positions himself outside of the locality to which he was assigned by virtue of being born in a certain neighborhood and to a certain family.

This, of course, is never spelled out explicitly in the novel. We come to understand the precarious position of the narrator (who is never named) from the choices he makes and from his decision to affiliate himself with one group over another. To put it succinctly, his position is based on affiliation rather than on filiation. The difference between the two, of course, has great implications to the formation of the self as this makes such formation reliant on an ethic of movement or becoming rather than on that of being. Crucially, these decisions are never explained ethically or ideologically. While they certainly have these elements built into them, they are part of an underlying scheme rather than part a manifesto-like, simplified explanations.These choices come to define the narrator’s private narrative as well as the larger narrative that he chooses to become part of. In a situation such as a civil war, choices are not a luxury, but a necessity.

In “After Mahfouz,” Said discusses some of the crucial aspects of Khoury’s style vis-à-vis the formation of selfhood. “Style in The Little Mountain” he writes,

is, first of all, repetition, as if the narrator needed this in order to prove to himself that improbable things actually did take place. Repetition is also, as the narrator says, the search for order—to go over matters sufficiently to find, if possible, the underlying pattern, the rules and protocols according to which a civil war, the most dreadful of all calamities, was being fought. Repetition permits lyricism, those metaphorical flights by which the sheer horror of what takes place…is swiftly seen and recorded, and then falls back into anonymity.

The point Said makes via the narrator about repetition is quite illuminating. For him, repetition is not the opposite of order. Rather, repetition is a search for order in a situation in which order is obliterated by a chaos that has become part of the mundane, everyday reality. The paradox Said points to shows us that even in the chaotic form that Khoury creates, there is an underlying desire to seek an order that could possibly mitigate the traumatic experience of the individual. From this standpoint, the traumatized subject constantly seeks a fleeting order even when the subject appears to do anything but seek such order.

To illustrate some aspects of the style that Said mentions here, it might be useful to start at the beginning. That is, to start with a passage that appears in the first few pages of the book, and which gets repeated time and time again throughout the loosely connected five chapters of this novel. In fact, the constant repetition of this passage also illustrates the hyper-episodic narrativity, or the utter inexistence of causality, in this novel.

Spoken by the main narrator, the passage gives us crucial clues about the style in which the novel is written, but, more importantly, about the narrator’s choice of affiliation. He says:

Five men came, jumping out of a military-like jeep. Carrying automatic rifles, they surround the house. The neighbors come out to watch. One of them smiles, she makes the victory sign. They come up to the house, knock on the door. My mother opens the door, surprised. Their leader ask about me.
–He’s gone out.
–Where did he go?
–I don’t know. Come in, have a cup of coffee.
They enter. They search for me in the house. I wasn’t there. They found a book with Abdel-Nasser on the back cover. I wasn’t there. They scattered the papers and overturned the furniture. They cursed the Palestinians. They ripped my bed. They insulted my mother and this corrupt generation. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there. My mother was there, trembling with distress and resentment, pacing up and down the house angrily. She stopped answering their questions and left them. she sat on a chair in the entrance, guarding her house, as they, inside, looked for the Palestinians and Abdel-Nasser and international communism. She sat on a chair in the entrance and they made the sign of the cross, in hatred or in joy.
They went out into the street, their hands held high in gestures of victory. Some people watched and made the victory sign.

From the repetition of the sentence “I wasn’t there” we come to understand two key notions about the way the self is constituted in Khoury’s novel: chaos and absence. The self is first and foremost constituted by absence, an absence that is not complete, but rather an absence from its designated place. We should remember that the narrator is never named, and this perhaps is the ultimate absence, an absence from one’s own narrative. Such elision cannot be taken lightly as it highlights a crucial choice on the part of the novelist, a choice to make out of an absence a disfigured and incomplete presence.

Thus, the only thing that is captured of this narrator is a chaotic and disfigured narrative about an incomplete, incoherent life: episodes from a sheltered, confused childhood in the predominantly Christian neighborhood known as “little mountain,” episodes of street fighting without an apparent objective or justification, and finally a short episode about the fighter’s time in Paris where he goes to be treated of his wounds.

Narration in Little Mountain, then, is always an organizing principle, regardless of the form (or lack thereof) it takes. In Khoury’s novel, the principle of chaos or chiasmus (depending on the generosity and patience of the reader) becomes the device through which the self makes sense of itself as well as of the incoherence in the midst of which it happens to be.

Notes:
Khoury, Elias. Little Mountain. Trans. Maia Tabet. New York: Picador, 2007.
Said, Edward. “After Mahfouz” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KATHERINE LARSON

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STUDY FOR LOVE’S BODY
By Katherine Larson

I. Landscape with Yellow Birds

The theories of Love
have become tremulous and complicated.
The way snow falls or Saturn revolves
repeatedly around some distance
where space is nothing
yet still something that separates.

Never mind time. Caterpillars
have turned the fruit trees
into body bags. The children paint
the mandibles of fallen ones with
silver meant for nursery stars.
Without the immense responsibility
of sympathy, these small deaths
are nothing more than
artifice. Like a single magnolia
in a cut glass bowl
we have no idea where
our roots went so suddenly.

II. Architecture in Ruins

Third floor of the doll factory,
ferns suck carbon
and sharper chemicals from air
near the women working.

They’re hunched over tables
of warped wood.
Half of everyone is painting
eyes and lashes on porcelain heads, the rest
are threading hands to sleeves.

Outside in the courtyard
a smattering of doves rise.
Have you ever wanted to
kiss a stranger’s hands?

III. Gardens Without Bats or Moss

Gauguin writes to Theo van Gogh that in his painting he wants to suggest
the idea of suffering—without ever explaining what kind.

IV. In Stone Archways

The light is spilt green milk, which is languorous
as the red monkey Gauguin painted

by the brown body of Anna
the Javanese. At the Chinese Market

I buy two red teacups and a can
of coconut milk. I think—

Gauguin wouldn’t know
how Anna loved that monkey

and sang to him late at night.
Everywhere the sea screams

at me. A great pink slab of octopus arm,
beside it, babies seasoned in orange spices.

Such symmetry! Surely they swam
through the night like thirsty

flowers. I think you had it right
when you said love is the mathematics

of distance. Split like a clam on ice,
I feel raw, half-eaten. I rot

in the cold blue of the ego,
the crushed velvet of Anna’s chair.


Today’s poem is from Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press, 2011) by Katherine Larson (copyright 2011 by Katherine Larson), and is reproduced by permission of Yale University Press.


Katherine Larson is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize. She lives in Arizona.


Editor’s Note: Katherine Larson’s poetics lie in the fertile crossroads of poetry and science. Inner discovery gives way to the biological, micro gives way to macro, and so on until the reader finds herself woven into a web of language and imagery. At once disorienting and familiar, the end effect is appreciation of the natural beauty artfully wrought. Galactic leaps are made between concepts as large as space, time, and love, while each giant stride is written on the small space of the heart. “[S]pace is nothing / yet still something that separates. / Never mind time,” Larson posits, concluding that, “I think you had it right / when you said love is the mathematics / of distance.”


Want to see more by Katherine Larson?
Buy Radial Symmetry
Poetry Foundation
PBS

Button

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Button

by Maggie Smith

It’s the 50s. You wear your dark Levis
cuffed up six inches. You have a cowlick.

There is a birthday party you won’t attend
after a bad haircut. Your mother says,

Button, it’s not the end of the world.
But the weathervane says, Button,

the end is near. It says the sky’s gone
yellow with twisters. Small white stars

are invisible all day, but you hear them
chatter like teeth. Button, they say, why

not play with the others? Look at them,
having a fine time. But you wish the devil

on the neighbors. You wish them nothing
to pin the tail on. You wish the children

snatched up in the funnel, paper punch
cups still in their hands. The devil won’t

call you Button. He says if you must
be haunted, at least be unashamed.

***

Maggie Smith is the author of Lamp of the Body (Red Hen), Nesting Dolls (Pudding House), and The List of Dangers (Kent State). She has received fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Ohio Arts Council, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She blogs for The Kenyon Review and works as a freelance writer and editor. You can find her online at www.maggiesmithpoet.com.

[The above poem appeared in Lamp of the Body and is reprinted here by permission of the author.]

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: BRUCE WILLARD

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PERENNIAL
By Bruce Willard

I was tired of wanting,
tired of morning,
tired of the way the ocean waits
for the sun to set.

I was tired of thawing,
tired of spring.
Tired of hoping
bulbs would rise.

And when they did,
I was tired of the longing
sexual smell of the earth,
so expectedly ugly
and eager

that there was nothing
left to want.



Today’s poem originally appeared in AGNI, and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Bruce Willard’s poems have appeared in African American Review, AGNI Online, Harvard Review, Mead Magazine, Salamander, 5 A.M. and other publications. His new collection of poems, Holding Ground, is due out from Four Way Books spring of 2013.

Outside of his work as a poet, he works in the clothing and retail business. He is a graduate of Middlebury College and received an MFA from Bennington’s Writing Seminars in 2010. He divides his time between Maine and California.


Editor’s Note: Lyric poetry has a rich history that stems back to the very origin of the craft. Its success depends upon musicality, on meter and sound. The subjects it explores—love, life, death, sex and sexuality, lamentation, divine invocation, suffering and joy—are the same today as they were thousands of years ago. These themes are explored because they resonate with what make us human, evoking emotion and reminding us that life experiences are shared. Today’s poem thrives in the lyric, comprised of sounds that recall song, and communicating the inner workings of man that are as unique as they are universal.


Want to see more by Bruce Willard?
Mead Magazine
Project Muse
Connotation Press
Tupelo Press

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: PARTYKNIFE

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From PARTYKNIFE
By Dan Magers

Dr. Rob asks me to visit his open house
to pretend I want to sublet his apartment.

One room is a closet where the Dr. sleeps.
The other room he sublets to rich foreign kids
enrolled in MBA programs.

Look at this water pressure! I’ll pay anything! I say.

These are hallways? I’ll pay anything!

Tamaki isn’t returning my calls right now.

I hoard boundless energy into this exact spot.
I made the mistake of telling Mom about her.

I saved her last voicemail:
I did some stuff with construction paper,
talked to my roommate, and ate some bread.



Today’s poem is from Partyknife (Birds, LLC, 2012), and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Partyknife is a debut book of angry, funny, sad poems from the banal seeming yet hyper-mysterious Sink Review and Immaculate Disciples Press founder Dan Magers.

The poems range from gleeful haywire to broken despair. Stoner wisdom and vulnerable transcendence alternate throughout as the speaker drinks vitality from life and longs to hold onto his identity and a band called Partyknife, a band he may or may never have been a part of. Partyknife is not a memoir, but stands as the last will and testament of the poet’s 20s living in Brooklyn, New York. (Description of Partyknife courtesy of Birds, LLC.)


Dan Magers’s first book of poems, Partyknife (Birds, LLC), will officially publish in June 2012. He is co-founder and co-editor of Sink Review, an online poetry journal as well as founder and editor of Immaculate Disciples Press, a handmade chapbook press focused on poetry and visual arts collaborations. He lives in Brooklyn (and on twitter).


Editor’s Note: You know when you move across the country to New York and your mom worries that you’ll fall in with the “wrong crowd”? And you think your mom is crazy because you hang out with POETS, for God’s sake. Who is less likely to cause trouble than POETS?! Enter Dan Magers. The poet your mother warned you about.

I wrote this Editor’s Note without knowing which of Dan’s poems I would be sharing today. Because, well, MY MOTHER READS THIS SERIES. My choices included a poem that discusses buying beer for underage girls and a poem about memories of shitting on a coke mirror. I’m sorry, Mama.

But here’s the thing. The other day I was at a coffee shop in Brooklyn and ran into a poet friend. When I asked him to keep me in the loop about whatever was on his poetry radar for the summer, he told me to read Partyknife, by Dan Magers, just being released by Birds, LLC. I had seen Dan read several months ago and remembered I found his stuff funny, so I made a mental note. I went home and logged into my facebook to find that like 27 of my friends had changed their profile pics to the cover of Partyknife. Then the thing pops up on friggin’ PEN. Not even officially released yet, and this book is everywhere. Of course, I see Dan Magers gave PEN a poem they wouldn’t be afraid to show their mother…


Want to see more by Dan Magers?
Buy Partyknife from Birds, LLC
Partyknife official book trailer on Youtube
“Making Up Bands in Your Brain While High,” a review of Partyknife on VICE

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: NICOLE STELLON O’DONNELL

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MOTHER-IN-LAW
By Nicole Stellon O’Donnell

Maybe it was my skirt, like yours,
or my hair, curls tangled
with youth.

Maybe it was the way we both raised
our hands to our lips in surprise, or the girl
in me you had watched come up as you raised
only sons. Something the same in us
led you to warn me.

Leave him before he kills you,

you whispered a week before the wedding,
brush frozen in my hair, as still
as the pins on the dresser.
Our eyes locked in the mirror.

I gauged your tone, the stillness
of your fingers on the back
of my neck, the set of your lips

and turned my eyes down to the mirror’s handle,
silver, black patina broken by prints.

His father…

you started, moving the brush again,
stroke and pull.

His father,

you repeated, breath weary
with the storm that threatened
every night until his liquid disappearance
shamed and freed you.

I know,

I said and thought of your boy, gray eyes,
his smooth promise, our planned escape

I weighed the mason jar,
its cool contents, the burn in the back of your throat,
my youth, the boy in him, the man not yet born,
and I stayed.

Mother-in-law, I took you at your word,
but it took me twenty-one years to do it in.

I know now what you knew,
my own boys newly men.

In one I see the promise
liquor and time washed away.
In the other I see their father, your son.
I would warn a woman against him,
my own boy, tell her to leave.

Our skirts would rustle, my hand
would freeze on the worn handle of the hairbrush.

She would meet my eyes,
gauge them, and then she would look away.

And I would smooth her hair,
pin it up, and ready her for dinner.



“Mother-in-law” is from the collection Steam Laundry (Boreal Books, 2012), and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Nicole Stellon O’Donnell is a poet and essayist who lives, writes and teaches in Fairbanks, Alaska. Her first collection, Steam Laundry, was published by Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press, in January 2012. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Dogwood, The Women’s Review of Books and other literary magazines. Her work has been recognized with an Individual Artist Award from the Rasmuson Foundation. This summer Literary Mama will begin publishing her monthly column about Alaska, getting outdoors and raising girls.

Editor’s Note: Nicole Stellon O’Donnell’s debut collection, Steam Laundry, tells the story of Sarah Ellen Gibson, a woman who followed her husband first to San Francisco and then to Alaska during the gold rush. Stitching together a history from nonfiction and fiction alike, O’Donnell pieces together a life from letters, documents, photos, and the depths of the poet’s own imagination. The poems in this book tell the story of a woman otherwise lost to history, and poems such as today’s selection bring to life a character as rich and haunted as the real life Sarah Ellen Gibson, if not more so.

Want to see more by Nicole Stellon O’Donnell?
Nicole Stellon O’Donnell’s Official Website
Literary Mama
Extract(s)
“Canzone Basking in the Pre-Apocalypse” in Dogwood
Nicole Stellon O’Donnell on KUAC

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: D. H. LAWRENCE

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

By D. H. Lawrence:



SELF PITY

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.



Today’s poem is in the public domain, belongs to the masses, and appears here today accordingly.


David Herbert Richards Lawrence (1885–1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. Lawrence’s opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile which he called his “savage pilgrimage.” Lawrence is now valued by many as a visionary thinker and significant representative of modernism in English literature. (Annotated biography of D. H. Lawrence courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Editor’s Note: As I am wont to do from time to time, today I am inclined to indulge in the poetry that came before, which has so heavily influenced contemporary poetry. What strikes me when I go back to certain works of yore is their ability to speak directly to the heart of matters that remain extant today, namely to those aspects of the human condition which remain unchanged. Today’s poem speaks to the propensity to engage in self-pity, comparing the human animal to an animal better equipped for suffering. We are reminded in these four lines that the power to shift our perception lies within us. A striking little poem and a mantra for rising above the tendency toward melancholy within one’s self.

Want to see more by D. H. Lawrence?
DH-Lawrence.org
Poets.org
The Literature Network