Tag: American Poetry

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JOHNATHON WILLIAMS

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By Johnathon Williams:

ANNIVERSARY SONNET

We fought all night, all morning, so I treat
myself to breakfast down at Common Grounds,
a Fayetteville thing to do. A regular pounds
the dregs of a Bloody Mary, and the heat
at 10 is already too much. It’s all
too much: the water bill, my promises,
her steady, undefeatable love. She says
no change can fault the way she feels or call

to question time — now thirteen years. But time
is the whole problem, its relentless march
away from that high school lunchroom, the boy
taunting the poor retarded kid in line
and her calling him out. Jesus, the arch
of her back. Her fists and hair. My shame and joy.


SOLILOQUY TO THE PEEPHOLE OF APARTMENT 9
         with lines from Ovid and Goethe

The night is slipping away. Throw back the bolt.
I’ve no excuse, no right, no hope to soothe
these midnight consternations. Yes, I’m married:
She’s sleeping six doors down — you met last Tuesday.
You borrowed our detergent in the laundry.
And when she left to lay the baby down,
you and I, we sat, not talking not moving
our breath alone to meter that conspicuous
lack of manners and the half-inch remove
of your arm from mine. I’m sorry. I know
I shouldn’t be here, but you were reading Goethe
(Goethe in a laundry mat, who does that?)
so I’ve come to say I do not know myself
and God forbid I should, I’ve come to say
a useless life is an early death, I’ve come
to say this morning I went for a run
around the lake. It was still dark. And mist
swallowed my whole life every dozen paces.
Have you ever done such a thing? Have you
watched your own breath condense, take shape, then clear,
rejoiced in that unleavened vanishing?
You’re thinking man is made by his belief,
thinking love can do much but duty more,
thinking how long you leaned your knee on mine.
The night is slipping away. And Goethe dead.
The night is slipping away. Throw back the bolt.


(Today’s poems previously appeared in The Offending Adam, and appear here today with permission from the poet.)


Johnathon Williams works as a writer and web developer from his home in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He’s a founding editor of the online magazine Linebreak and the co-editor of Two Weeks, a digital anthology of contemporary poetry.

Editor’s Note: Every now and then, as a reader, you simply fall in love with a poem at first encounter. Today’s poems had me at word one. Is it their effortless way of manipulating and conveying narrative? Is it that they speak to those shameful hidden human thoughts, urges, and actions that haunt many—if not all—of us? Or is it those instances of language that still the world for a moment? “the water bill, my promises, her steady, undefeatable love” “Jesus, the arch of her back. Her fists and hair. My shame and joy.” With love at first sight, the answers are not important. You may simply indulge.

Want to see more by and about Johnathon Williams?
The Morning News – Poem, “Leveling Up”
The Morning News – Article, “A Taste for Flesh”
Pebble Lake Review, “Conversations With Imaginary Women”
Pebble Lake Review, “Dirge”
The Rumpus, “Single Lane Bridge”
Unsplendid, “Sapphics for a Dead Porn Star”

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ROBERT FROST

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THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.


(This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1923.)


Robert Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. (Annotated biography of Robert Frost courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Editor’s Note: Every once in a while it’s good to look back to the traditions and literary greats that are the roots of modern American poetry. Today is one of those days.

A class I TA for recently did a close reading of today’s poem. It was one of the best close reading experiences I’ve engaged in to date, and it inspired today’s post.

We began with the reading the poem appears to offer on its face, the idea that choosing the road less traveled in life is the better choice. On a second reading, and after hearing the poem read aloud by Frost, students offered that the poem has a tone of regret. Finally, after much debate, the class reached a consensus that the speaker in the poem is looking toward an unknown future, knowing only that one day he’ll see the choice he made in taking one path over the other as the choice that made all the difference in his life.

I see genius in the very fact that a reader might garner one meaning on a cursory reading, that the poem might then inspire debate among readers, and that, in the end, the group might conclude that the poem was always meant to be open to multiple interpretations. After all, when we look into our own future and contemplate what we’ll one day say when recalling our past, what do we really know at all?

Want to see more by and about Robert Frost?
Hear “The Road Not Taken” Read Aloud by Robert Frost
Poets.org
The Poetry Foundation
Famous Poets and Poems

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: SARAH SHELLOW

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by Sarah Shellow:

FULL MOON IN THE SUBURBS
For Gary Snyder

The full moon announces itself to this night
a specter chiseled by branches and leaves.
And the honeyed air loiters in the dark particles of day’s exhaustion,
remembering the difficult work of re-creation. 

How this suburb longs to be wild with the neighboring woods,
with slatted moonbeams drawn across its forested face. 

But these shiny lit facades of houses startled by street lamps
give us no place to
obscure ourselves.

Return, to masted quarry,
Reach, through obstructing leaves,
and feel the lick of this moon’s silvery tongue
cool your cheeks
hot from running
home.


DAY’S LINE OF REASONING

funny: The purple feather on my dash flew out the window. What do I know?

                  1. television:

                  The spicebush swallowtail caterpillar has false eyes

               you cannot tell when it is walking away 

               2. grocery:


               A bar code swiped

               identifies a package by its

               contents


               Who is there?



The cotton in my ears must have arrived in my sleep. I couldn’t hear by morning.


By midday, curious, the silence was louder than the noise of petals falling.


Dreamed pieces clack and slide in auricular tubing against hammer, anvil, stirrup


noise

no one can hear

but me


I took my knowing

down by the river,

washed it, and let it go


3. she hung in silks across my path

tangled and free,

like me,

not you.

me.


breakfast: it was too late to eat dinner, so I ate breakfast.


no margarine


               4. a sunrise.



(Today’s poems appear here today with permission from the poet.)


Sarah Shellow lives in Bethesda, Maryland. Her short fiction, short stories, and reviews have appeared in The Pitkin Review and The Atticus Review. She was a critical commentary editor for The Pitkin Review and presently serves as an associate editor for the Potomac Review. She has taught creative writing for sixteen years to third grade through graduate-level students, and she works as a literacy educator for first-year public school teachers at Center for Inspired Teaching in Washington, D.C. She blogs at http://www.sarahshellow.blogspot.com.

Editor’s Note: When I sought out a submission for this series from Sarah Shellow, she sent me a wide array of poems. I read and re-read them. I vacillated. There were so many things I loved in each, yet each was so different. Should I share the more traditional poem or the more experimental? What do my readers want to be exposed to? In the end, I decided her work, and your eyes, deserved a sampling of both ends of the spectrum. With “Full Moon in the Suburbs,” the poet shares something more familiar in its style and use of imagery, and mirrors the layout and language of the poem with the subject matter itself. In “A Day’s Line of Reasoning” she treats us instead to an exploration of the other, in both the way the poem interacts with the page and in the varied, sometimes nonsensical narrative. I think, for a reader, it is important to be exposed to both, and that it is particularly interesting to see how one poet’s work can encompass such vast and varying planes.

Want to see more by and about Sarah Shellow?
Sarah Shellow Official Blog
The Atticus Review

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: BILL RECTOR

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BLACK BAG
by Bill Rector

Where, William Carlos Williams,
are your patients?

How in the world, the words,
did you escape

them? Erase
them? In

stanzas succinct
as prescriptions

wouldn’t a few
more fit? Between curved

blades of obstetric
forceps, the book of birth

and death certificates?
White as the door

are they still
there? Waiting

on the heart’s rapid knock,
the hoped-for answer?

Why is your first name
also your last?


(Today’s poem previously appeared in The Offending Adam and appears here today with permission from the poet.)


Bill Rector is a physician practicing in Denver whose poetry has been published in a variety of journals, including Field, Prairie Schooner, The Denver Quarterly, and Hotel Amerika. His book, bill, was published in 2006 by Proem Press.

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is dedicated to Jenny Stella, who, like Dr. Rector and William Carlos Williams, shares her life with both poetry and medicine. Having been at once a poet and a lawyer, I understand what it is to live a life that is both shared and divided in this way. Jenny Stella and I have spent many hours contemplating what it means to inhabit two demanding arenas in life; how an artist can give themselves fully to a professional practice, and how a professional can give enough of themselves to their art. What today’s poem explores is where the medicine itself shows, or does not show, its face in poetry.

Want to see more by and about Bill Rector?
Proem Press
Bill Rector is Poetry Editor of The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine
Buy Bill Rector’s book, bill

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JILLIAN WEISE

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HERE IS THE ANGER ANDREW ASKED FOR*
by Jillian Weise

when he gave me the latest issue of P-Queue.
“I want the poems where you’re angry,”

he said. I read the magazine and I can tell
I’m not his type. What a luxury it must be

to not need sense. It must be like you already
have your civil rights and at least one friend

to call when your leg dies, except wait . . .
your leg never dies, does it?

Your leg never loses a charge. Last week
a girl, fifteen, in Abercrombie & Fitch

was thrown out because she has cerebral
palsy and her sister went in the dressing

room to help her try on a pair of jeans and
that’s against store policy.

If I wanted to write the poem for P-Queue,
I’d write it like this—

a dressing room / a girl / a sister
a try on / a messed up / thrown out
() () () () () () () () () () () () () () () ()
with Fitch / in against / its clothes
Abercrombie body / of was to
help her

–and while I agree the last line is not bad,
is that because it makes sense?

And do you think I’m naive for wanting
store policy change through poetry?

If not change, then just one electrical socket
attached by wire to one charger glowing

green attached by wire to one girl’s leg
(it doesn’t have to be my leg)

in at least one poem in the English language?
Look. The girl with her leg plugged in.

She’s in a poem now. She must exist.
The girl from the Abercrombie news clip

is not that store’s type. Maybe because
that girl never existed in a poem.

She hasn’t been poetry’s type. But I’m not
angry, Andrew. This isn’t anger.

This is a debate. I didn’t get angry until
I read just now in P-Queue this poem

by Divya Victor:

“When the thighs are taken away, one is stumped. One can only / totter away; a stumbledum, a tumbler brimming with demand. / Dimly, one is the witnesses to an / uroboric outpour of bored / bodies. Herein, the harkening of the sound of knock-kneed,
one-legged pirating of a floor plan drawn to the scale of the / bourgeois body.”

Andrew—What is this? Did you pick it?
Am I a stumbledum? Will you ask Divya

if she thinks I’m a stumbledum? Here is this
from Divya’s Artist Statement

on the site Just Buffalo: “To write poetry
[…] is to accept our responsibilities of

making possible positive change.” Is this
positive change, Andrew? Divya?

_____

* This poem was accepted for publication by Andrew Rippeon while he was editor of P-Queue. He discussed the poem with Divya Victor who wanted to write a response. Months later, the poem was dropped for publication.


Jillian Weise is the author of the poetry collection The Amputee’s Guide to Sex (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and the novel The Colony (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press, 2010). Her work was selected for the film series Poetry Everywhere, produced by PBS and the Poetry Foundation. Her essay, “Going Cyborg,” appeared in The New York Times. Recent work is forthcoming in the anthology Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Occasionally, she makes movie poems. (Today’s poem originally appeared in the first issue of the brand new journal Catch Up and is reprinted by permission of the poet.)

Editor’s Note: Recently I’ve been thinking about poetry that is doing something larger than itself. Poetry that matters beyond its beautiful language, music, and imagery. Today’s entry in this series is just such a poem. With “Here Is the Anger Andrew Asked For,” and the background and dialogue that have become a part of the poem itself, Weise is speaking up and out for what she as an artist and a human believes in. Her politics about disability, and her disagreement with some other poets about the use of degrading imagery around disability, become a part of the life of the poem itself. By pushing onward and getting the word out there about her battle, Weise is using poetry to reach off the page, beyond the world of art, and into a larger, more meaningful dialogue.

Want to see more by and about Jillian Weise?
The Colony
The Amputee’s Guide to Sex
Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ANTHONY SEIDMAN

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TRANSMISSION
By Anthony Seidman

A jungle, a small jungle, the size
of a hummingbird-heart or crab-nebula
witnessed through an Arizona telescope the girth
of a blue whale’s lungs; a jungle
only I can hear: its rustle of fronds, ant
mandibles scissoring leaves which
will raft phalanxes across the river
and into the bush, ox-carcasses scattered and
picked to the bone; a jungle with its thunder
as rain clatters on the canopy
covering this page; a jungle,
no larger than a toddler’s tooth,
yet teeming with beetles, rills,
spider-monkeys, irritable tarantulas, termites;
it is a jungle I taste in the manner
a boy extends his tongue in a snowfield,
and flake lands on tongue’s tip and
twilight is like voices reverberating
through amniotic fluid into an embryo’s sleep;
a jungle I savor as fruitful, fluvial, tang of lemon,
lifetimes of salt, a fountain of milk,
a tributary, the blossom of a wet dream;
this jungle which you too
apprehend, like a man smelling lust
in the pores of a female flushed with estrus,
the way a woman tastes the stiffened nerves
in a boy awakening to puberty like
fanged fish flitting through warm currents–
this, the jungle I bequeath you. It is the genius
jungle, the genus jungle, the shaman’s feather,
and the word’s ovulation. It is the only
jungle that matters. The emerald
flash between two immemorial nocturnes.


(“Transmissions” originally appeared in The Bitter Oleander, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)


Anthony Seidman is the author of six collections of poetry, including Where Thirsts Intersect (The Bitter Oleander Press), Black Neon (Pudding House Press), and the artist’s book The Motel Insomnia, created with French artist, Jean-Claude Loubieres, and published by AdeLeo Editions of Paris, France. His poetry, short fiction, essays and translations have appeared in such publications as Pearl, The Bitter Oleander, Nimrod, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Poetry International, and in Latin America in Newsweek en Español, La Jornada, Critica, La Prensa of Managua, Nicaragua, the University of Guadalajara’s Luvina.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is as thick as the jungle it shares with us. Words, hard consonants, alliteration, and images have to be cut through with the mind’s machete to trek along this rich track. Your reward? The Congo, the Amazon, the jungles of Papa New Guinea. A jungle that can only be seen under a microscope; a jungle that reaches the far corners of the universe. Be patient, be persistent, be adventurous. Seek, and you shall find.

Want to see more by and about Anthony Seidman?
Out of Nothing
Big Bridge
Scythe
White Print Inc.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MARTIN CAMPS

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MOSQUITOES
By Martin Camps

Mosquitoes do not die of hunger.

There is always a leg for them

an arm or a deaf ear to their hungry voice.

You will never see the aged corpse of a gnat.

They only know about violent death:

of a body burst by a slap,

by a discharge of light or by air poisoning.

They will sink the day they find out they can

walk on the water.


(“Mosquitos” appears here today with permission from the poet.)


Martin Camps has published three books of poetry in Spanish: Desierto Sol (Desert Sun, 2003), La invencion del mundo (The Invention of the World, 2008), and La extincion de los atardeceres (The Extintion of Twilight, 2009). Has is the recipient of two poetry prizes from the Institute of Culture of Mexico and an Honorable Mention in the Bi-National Poetry Prize Pellicer-Frost in 1999. His poems have been published in The Bitter Oleander (Pemmican Press), Alforja, and Tierra Adentro, among others. He answers all email at markampz@hotmail.com.

Editor’s Note: Martin Camps is among my all-time favorite poets. His work never ceases to be breathtaking in its form, its function, and–especially–its sound. The way Camps plays with language appears, in some ways, to stem more from his Spanish-speaking roots than from an experimental poetry slant, and the effects simply blow me away. And then, of course, in all his poetic brilliance, he concludes with an epic end-line.

Want to see more by and about Martin Camps?
Email markampz@hotmail.com to buy his books directly from the poet for $6 each.
See an alternate version of today’s poem: Mosquitoes
Peticao a NASA
La Belleza de No Pensar

Pas de Deux on the High Wire

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Photo credit: dadcentric.com

For Chelsea and Maz, whose wedding last weekend prompted me to dust this off.
And for Patti.

Pas de Deux on the High Wire
by John Unger Zussman

One Saturday, in our twenties,
We put up the tightrope.
Eyed it warily.  No sweat,
We reassured each other.
Piece of cake.

At first, we could barely manage
A few quick steps on the rope,
Stretched taut, inches off the floor.
We’d push out tentatively,
Teeter, recover, flail, step off.
Laugh nervously, try again.

No instructor, no mentor,
Just the trying, and ourselves.
Slowly we learned to center our balance,
Arms extended, touching lightly for support.
The posts grew higher, year by year,
And our moves more intricate.
We took tumbles, gathered bruises.
When one wavers, the rope jiggles,
Endangering the other.
Once I toppled from eight feet.
She came too. It took years
To recover.  The scars
Remind us how we learned.

Now we run, hand in hand, from peak to peak,
Skyscraper to skyscraper, triple pirouette,
Grand jeté, entrechat huit. I partner her
In a deep penché, the tip of her pointe shoes
Balanced on the narrow wire. It is exhilarating
And marvelous. We are confident until,
In middle age, we look down. Then we seem
Unbelievably, foolishly precarious.

Just us two. No children, families distant,
A few friends gazing up from below.
We are working without a net. It is glorious,
Yet there is always the premonition
Of the inevitable gust of wind.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JUDITH NEWTON

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LAST QUARTET
By Judith Newton

In the end,
you would no longer hear your music—
you, whose rooms had been alive with it,
whose life was Late Quartet.

I think of you and I remember Beethoven
in a Berkeley house,
the light from quiet windows
heightening the patina of well used surfaces,
ferns, like green swords,
piercing the heart of the afternoon,
and, through the swelling turbulence of the strings—
the counterpoint of intellect
serenely resonant at its labors.

To forgo your music was, for you, the worst farewell,
to live in silence, a dark prelude to what you knew would come.
I think of you in the end—a holy man despite yourself—
bearing your body’s discord with deliberate grace,
and with a tremolo of acquiescence
closing off the sweet vibratos of this world.

I think of you, in this after moment,
when the tone arm lifts, the record ends,
and Late Quartet
still dilates the impassioned air.
(“Last Quartet” appears here today with permission from the poet.)
Judith Newton lives in Kensington, CA. She is the author of several books of nonfiction and is completing a memoir: The Joys of Cooking: A Love Story. She is a food columnist for the iPinion Syndicate, and is completing a book of poetry entitled Poetry for the Immune Deficient.

Editor’s Note: Judith Newton’s poems go straight to the heart of what it is to deal with with loss as the one left behind. I was just talking about this with a dear friend of mine who suffered the loss of his partner, and, like Judith Newton, wrote his way through his struggle. I dedicate today’s post to my friend, who knows what it is to endure loss, and who is in tune with the music inherent in life and death.

Want more by and about Judith Newton?
The Joys of Cooking – A Love Story
iPinion
As It Ought To Be

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: SEAN KARNS

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CUTTING DOWN THE PROPERTY LINE
By Sean Karns

1. Tire Swing

He hacks at the thicket, grabs hold
of the blackberry canes,
bloodies his hands;
blackens them with juices.
He looks at his hands,
sees labor: a future in tearing
down. There are children swinging
on a swinging tire. He wants to join them.
He feels a stare; his father sits
on the porch; it’s mid-day and hot.
The yard is dry grass and dirt.
He feels the thorny sting
to take away
what is in the house
that keeps him hacking.
There’s a silk scarf
his mother left under his pillow.
The tire swing creaks.
A swing that creaks
like a deranged mosquito
singing in his ear.
They swing, seeing
how far the lake.
He rubs the blackness
from his hands,
looks at the house, its tilted porch
and chipped paint.
The dark tree-line
and forgetting the clink
of the doorknob.

2. Woods

He goes farther into the woods;
his father stares—
faces in the bark of every tree.
He wants to drop a match
on the everywhere leaves.
And then the twisting
of the bronze door knob.
He hides his face with the scarf
from the footsteps and the black
polished boots under the bed.
He gathers the sturdiest tree
limbs he can pull
with his thirteen years of strength.
With a hatchet, he cuts the limbs
into logs and hammers
them around a tree.
He stole rope
from his father’s work-shed.

3. Fortress

He peeks out of the hollow
of the oak tree.
He slips on the dewy ground.
His father’s dream-weight
pushes down on him. He swipes the mud
from his lips. The insects
sound like the twist
of a door knob. So do the branches
falling. He throws
the rope over the tree limb,
dollies up his scarf, hatchet and hammer.
There’s no higher place
for him to throw his rope.

 

(“Cutting Down the Property Line” previously appeared in Mayday Magazine and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)

Sean Karns’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cold Mountain Review, Folio, Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, Mayday Magazine, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

Editor’s Note: There is a weight to the aural nature of the words in today’s piece that alludes to a corresponding heaviness of subject matter. A narrative poem, the story is not neatly laid out for the reader, but instead consonants become palpable, and the story oozes from the language, thick like syrup forcibly drained from a tree deep in the woods.

Want more by and about Sean Karns?
Mayday Magazine (1)
Mayday Magazine (3)
Sean Karns reads his poem “A Rural Weekend”