Tag: American Poetry

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

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

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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

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JOAN LARKIN

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AFTERLIFE
By Joan Larkin

I’m older than my father when he turned
bright gold and left his body with its used-up liver
in the Faulkner Hospital, Jamaica Plain. I don’t
believe in the afterlife, don’t know where he is
now his flesh has finished rotting from his long
bones in the Jewish Cemetery—he could be the only
convert under those rows and rows of headstones.
Once, washing dishes in a narrow kitchen
I heard him whistling behind me. My nape froze.
Nothing like this has happened since. But this morning
we were on a plane to Virginia together. I was 17,
pregnant and scared. Abortion was waiting,
my aunt’s guest bed soaked with blood, my mother
screaming—and he was saying Kids get into trouble—
I’m getting it now: this was forgiveness.
I think if he’d lived he’d have changed and grown
but what would he have made of my flood of words
after he’d said in a low voice as the plane
descended to Richmond in clean daylight
and the stewardess walked between the rows
in her neat skirt and tucked-in blouse
Don’t ever tell this to anyone.


“Afterlife,” from My Body: New and Selected Poems, published by Hanging Loose Press, copyright © 2007 by Joan Larkin, appears here today with permission from the author.


Joan Larkin’s Legs Tipped with Small Claws, a twenty-poem chapbook, is just out from Argos Books in April 2012. My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2007), received the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award. Her other books include Housework, A Long Sound, Sor Juana’s Love Poems (translated with Jaime Manrique), and Cold River, recipient of a Lambda Award.  She edited the ground-breaking anthologies Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry with Elly Bulkin and Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time with Carl Morse. Larkin received the 2011 Shelley Memorial Award as well as the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, awarded annually for distinguished poetic achievement by an American poet. She has taught poetry writing at Sarah Lawrence and Brooklyn College, among other places, and currently teaches in the Drew University MFA program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.

Editor’s Note: With a few strokes of the pen, Joan Larkin gives us a world. She sketches for us a picture of her father—his religion, his death, and his philosophies on life, while effortlessly guiding us through the labyrinth of human relationship, painting for us a relationship between father and daughter throughout youth, life, and even after death. I am reminded of those artists who are able to paint masterpieces on the head of a pin. It takes a poet who is a master of her craft to convey such a story, riddled with so much emotion and conflict, and containing so many rich layers of life, death, and the spaces between, in the way Larkin does so breathtakingly in “Afterlife.”

Want to see more by Joan Larkin?
Joan Larkin’s Official Website
Argos Books
Hanging Loose Press

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: HANNAH FRIES

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By Hannah Fries:


BUT SEE

how an orchid is made to look like sex, or
            specifically, like the tachinid fly
                        who has landed on a leaf to flash
            her private parts in the sun, opening
and closing so the light
catches. No wonder her hapless mate
            must ravish the flower whose petals
                        are extended wings, barred yellow
            and red-brown, stigma reflecting the sunlight.
Some orchids dance. Some reward
a bee with priceless perfume that lures
            sweet attention. So what if I sweep up
                        my hair to show my neck, so what
            if someone begins to kiss it?
Consider the bowerbird, jewelling
his nest with sapphire. Ask the two snakes braiding
            their muscled lengths. See how God is in love
                        with sex, and how we are made
            in her image! Like a lovesick ungulate,
haven’t you forgotten to eat for weeks?
Have you heard the barred owls scream
            all night? Seen fireflies flashing their silent sirens?
                        The woodcock spirals higher and higher, then
            plummets in sharp zigzags, wind
whistling through his wings like a song
(Song of Songs: honey and milk
            under your tongue).
                        Nothing, after all, is solid—atoms flying
            in all directions, ocean currents plunging
into themselves. Why not two bodies
by firelight, stunned by their bare
            skin, their own flickering sudden
                        perfection? No hellfire here.
            When galaxies collide, there is no wreck,
no blazing crash of suns and moons. Just
a rushing together, a folding in—
            and a heat beyond orchids—
                        birthing, baptizing heat.


“But See” originally appeared in Terrain.org, and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Hannah Fries lives in western Massachusetts, where she is associate editor and poetry editor of Orion magazine. She is a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and is the recipient of a Colorado Art Ranch residency. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Drunken Boat, Calyx, The Cortland Review, Terrain.org, and other journals. She also serves on the board of The Frost Place—a Robert Frost Museum and poetry center in Franconia, NH—and on the organizing committee of the Berkshire Festival for Women Writers.

Editor’s Note: A comment on this poem (on Terrain.org) reads, “and now I feel like I need a cigarette and maybe a shower.” Amen! What a fierce, unabashed exploration of the sexual in nature, and of humans as creatures of that same nature. Fries explores sex against the Puritanical backdrop inherent in this country, as something that should be accepted and celebrated rather than demoralized. “See how God is in love / with sex, and how we are made / in her image!” Today’s poem is a little Ellen Key, a little Darwin, a little Anais Nin, and all revolutionary. Even at a time when little shocks the sensibilities, Fries uses poetry to take the reader one step out of their comfort zone and into the wild world of the natural.

Want to see more by Hannah Fries?
Hear Hannah Fries read “But See” and hear/read her poem “Descending Killington Peak” on Terrain.org
Orion
The Frost Place
“Pygmalion’s Girl”
“Love at Formel’s Junkyard”

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: SUSANNA LANG

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REMEMBERING
By Susanna Lang

             What has kept the world safe . . . [has] been memory.
                                                                                   — John Hersey

But we forget, don’t we?
Not what happened, but the thickness of it.
The rough edges of the table
on the café terrace, moisture
beading on your glass. The way the woman
who would become your wife
kept pushing her hair off her forehead.
The sound of a cicada spinning to its death on the sidewalk,
a papery sound, like someone thumbing through a book.

Think of the man who returns
a year after the five-day war
in which his house was burned.
What’s left of it
still stands on the corner, so he can search
among the black and crumbled stones,
the splintered table legs, for the photo
he didn’t expect to find—
photo of a woman, her hair swept back
in a style no one wears anymore. He’d forgotten
that she used to wear her hair that way,
as he’s forgotten the stretched feel of his skin
in the heat of the flames he watched from across the street,

though he’d tell you that’s the one thing
he would remember forever.


“Remembering” originally appeared in Terrain.org, and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Susanna Lang’s first collection of poems, Even Now, was published in 2008 by The Backwaters Press. A chapbook, Two by Two, was released in October 2011 from Finishing Line Press, and a new collection, Tracing the Lines, will be published by Brick Road Poetry Press in fall 2012. She has published original poems and essays, and translations from the French, in such journals as Little Star, New Letters, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Green Mountains Review, The Baltimore Review, Kalliope, Southern Poetry Review, World Literature Today, Chicago Review, New Directions, and Jubilat. Book publications include translations of Words in Stone and The Origin of Language, both by Yves Bonnefoy. She lives with her husband and son in Chicago, where she teaches in the Chicago Public Schools.

Editor’s Note: Ah, memory, that fallible arena. You love, you lose, you swear you’ll always remember, but in the end, memory is unreliable. It is a heartbreak inherent in the human condition. With today’s poem, Susanna Lang artfully captures the longing to retain memory, and the grief over its inevitable loss.

Want to see more by Susanna Lang?
Susanna Lang Author Page for Even Now at The Backwaters Press
Buy Two by Two from Finishing Line Press
Tracing the Lines (forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press, 2012)
Susanna Lang Official Website

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JOHN MCKERNAN

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By John McKernan:


MY GREATEST CRIMES

Were at the Walt Whitman Birthplace
Near Huntington Long Island
Where I walked impudently across the lawn
With its large sign
DO NOT WALK ON THE GRASS

Where I ignored the small warning
DO NOT ENTER
In front of a shed
Full of hand tools & power mowers

Inside which lay chunks
In cool sunlight
Of bright green sod
One of which I snatched
And stashed in the trunk of my car

All of which I planted
At different places
Around my yard here
In West Virginia
Driving away I stopped my car
And picked bunches

Of dandelions beside the road
If I had seen a lilac shrub anywhere
I would have ripped
It from the earth with my bare hands


“My Greatest Crimes” originally appeared in The 2River View 16.2 (Winter 2012), and appears here today with permission from the poet.


John McKernan—who grew up in Omaha Nebraska in the middle of the USA—is now retired after teaching 41 years at Marshall University. He lives—mostly—in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press. His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Journal, Antioch Review, Guernica, Field and many other magazines.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem appears simple and yet is layered with rich folds of complexity. You might contemplate what it means for a home of Whitman’s to require one to refrain from walking on the grass, and then find yourself swept away by McKernan’s extremely subtle but highly adept witticism. The poem reaches its climax with man imagining himself on his knees ripping lilac from the earth, envisioning a oneness with nature that Whitman himself would have championed.

McKernan is a master of the art of subtlety in the poem. One only has to look closely and think actively to appreciate the genius of McKernan’s craft.

Want to see more by John McKernan?
Buy Resurrection of the Dust on Amazon
Read a selection from John McKernan Greatest Hits (1969-2001) on Google Books
Find many of John McKernan’s poems online

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: AMBER FLORA THOMAS

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MAGICIAN
By Amber Flora Thomas

To the conjurer of rabbits out of black hats, the escapist
down to his final act of vanishing beneath fifty pounds of chains,
you are born. To his legacy of tricks and Houdini-style
metamorphosis just waiting to spin out

into the San Francisco morning, where delivery trucks
back up to doors, caution lights sending yellow
like a heartbeat against the night.

He puts his hand over your mouth. Are you
the fire-eater? You come direct from the illusionist
to catapult from the black raft of his blessing.
The infant devotion: eyes newly open

believe the world: murky, against the white walls
ambient motions. You’ll play a charmed rodent, and disappear
beneath his black cape. Another feat of possession.

Another vat of bottled smoke. He loosens knots,
saws the box open, rips a red scarf from his sleeve.
The silk becomes a dove becomes a rabbit
and the cages hide in the floor.


Today’s poem is from the book The Rabbits Could Sing (University of Alaska Press, 2012), and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Amber Flora Thomas was born and raised in San Francisco, earned her BA at Humboldt State University, and earned her MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The Rabbits Could Sing (University of Alaska Press, 2012) and the Eye of Water (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. She has taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Dominican University of California, and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Editor’s Note: I was introduced to Amber Flora Thomas when she read with Peggy Shumaker and Li-Young Lee at a Red Hen Press reading held in New York’s Poets House. When she introduced today’s poem, she told the following story. Her parents were hippies living in San Francisco’s Haight district in the 1960’s and 1970’s. When Thomas was born, her father was asked to indicate his occupation on her birth certificate. He wrote “magician.” A child of San Francisco hippies myself, I couldn’t help but laugh. My father, too, would have enjoyed this. Listening to Thomas read this lyrical poem wrought with finely-chiseled images, I was transported to world—at once real and magical—conjured from thin air by a father for his daughter.

Want to see more by Amber Flora Thomas?
The Poetry Foundation
Buy The Rabbits Could Sing from University of Alaska Press
Buy Eye of Water from University of Pittsburgh Press