Tag: Poetry

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KIRUN KAPUR

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ANTHEM
By Kirun Kapur

Love begins in a country
Where oranges weep sweeter
And men piss in the street;

Your hands are forever
Binding dark strands
In a plait. Your mother’s

Childhood friend has steeped your skin
In coconut oil, tucked her daughter beside you—
All night the room is a womb, live with twins.

Heat’s body presses every body. Sharp chop
Of your uncle’s cough clocks the hours; your sister’s
Washing, the rush of your thoughts. Morning is nine

Glass bangles hoisting sacks of sugar
From the floor. I’m not talking
About a place, but a country;

Its laws are your mother, its walls
Are your dreams. The flag it flies
Is your father waving away.


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


Kirun Kapur grew up in Hawaii and has since lived and worked in North America and South Asia. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, FIELD, The Christian Science Monitor and many other journals and news outlets. She has been a poetry fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and McDowell Colony. This year, her work was awarded the Arts & Letters/Rumi Prize for Poetry. She lives in Massachusetts, where she is the co-director of The Tannery Series.


Editor’s Note: Today Kirun Kapur shares with us a beautiful lyric poem, replete with images you can nearly smell and touch. The dialogue between title and text is poignantly framed with the poem’s raw and honest conclusion.


Want to see more by Kirun Kapur?
AGNI
Beloit Poetry Journal
Beloit Poetry Journal Poet’s Forum
Crab Orchard Review
Clapboard House

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

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

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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: EYES, STONES

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                                   Cover illustration of Eyes, Stones: Threshold, by Kate Quarfordt


FROM EYES, STONES
By Elana Bell


LETTER TO JERUSALEM

To hold the bird and not to crush her, that is the secret. Sand turned too quickly to cement and who cares if the builders lose their arms? The musk of smoldered rats on sticks that trailed their tails through tunnels underground. Trickster of light, I walk your cobbled alleys all night long and drink your salt. City of bones, I return to you with dust on my tongue. Return to your ruined temple, your spirit of revolt. Return to you, the ache at the center of the world.


YOUR VILLAGE

Once in a village that is burning
               because a village is always somewhere burning

And if you do not look because it is not your village
               it is still your village

In that village is a hollow child
               You drown when he looks at you with his black, black eyes

And if you do not cry because he is not your child
               he is still your child

All the animals that could run away have run away
               The trapped ones make an orchestra of their hunger

The houses are ruin        Nothing grows in the garden
               The grandfather’s grave is there        A small stone

under the shade of a charred oak        Who will brush off the dead
               leaves        Who will call his name for morning prayer

Where will they—the ones who slept in this house and ate from this dirt—?


HOMELAND: A FABLE
             Michalya

They are the trees and we are the birds.
The birds have conquered the trees.
Now we’re saying to the trees:
We were trees before you were trees.
And the birds are saying: Well,
you’re birds now. You’ve been birds
for a really long time. And
you’re shitting on us.


Today’s poems are from Eyes, Stones, published by Louisiana State University Press, copyright © 2012 by Elana Bell, and appear here today with permission from the poet.


Eyes, Stones: In this debut collection, Elana Bell brings her heritage as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors to consider the difficult question of the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

The poems invoke characters inexorably linked to the land of Israel and Palestine. There is Zosha, a sharp-witted survivor whose burning hope for a Jewish homeland helps her endure the atrocities of the Holocaust. And there is Amal, a Palestinian whose family has worked their land for over one hundred years—through Turkish, British, Jordanian, and now Israeli rule. Other poems—inspired by interviews conducted by the poet in Israel, the Palestinian territories, and America—examine Jewish and Arab relationships to the land as biblical home, Zionist dream, modern state, and occupied territory.
(Description of Eyes, Stones courtesy of ElanaBell.com, with edits.)


Elana Bell is a poet, performer, and educator. Her first collection of poetry, Eyes, Stones was selected by Fanny Howe as the winner of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award and was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2012.


Editor’s Note: I would like to present today’s post to you as a love story. Imagine one day a young poet sees a post come across her facebook news feed announcing the winner of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award for poetry. Imagine this young poet loves Walt Whitman and wonders what sort of poet wins such a prestigious award. Imagine this young poet follows a link to the poem “Letter to Jerusalem,” reads the poem, and knows her life will never be the same again. Such is the power of poetry, I propose. I read the words “the ache at the center of the world,” and knew I was forever changed.

“Letter to Jerusalem” inspired me to dedicate an entry in this series to Israeli-Palestinian Peace Poetry. Through community—an idea crucial to the existence and flourishing of poetry—I reached out to Elana Bell and began a correspondence. This led to my featuring Elana on the series, and our friendship, which grew out of my unending awe of and respect for this immensely talented and dedicated artist, resulted in my attending the book release party for Eyes, Stones this past week in Brooklyn.

What I witnessed at the book release party was no less than true genius. Elana Bell has collaborated with theatrical, musical, and dance artists to transform Eyes, Stones into a performance piece of unrivaled beauty. The book itself, now officially released by Louisiana State University Press, is a heartbreaking work of true art in its own rite. This is a book that everyone should read. Poets, artists, performers, lovers of poetry, and those dedicated to bringing about peace in the middle east should read this book. But so, too, should Palestinians and Jews alike, no matter their political stance, because this is a book crafted to inspire and bring about peace. This is a book meant to open eyes, minds, and hearts, and I, like Elana Bell, hope that this is a book that will change the world. In its newest incarnation as a performance piece, Eyes, Stones has the ability to speak to new and greater audiences, and with my whole heart I look forward to seeing this work reach the far corners of the earth.

When selections from the live performance are available in video form, and when dates are announced for live performances of the work, I look forward to sharing the work of Elana Bell again, in yet another format, and continuing my dedication to promoting one of the most important pieces of political art of our time. It is an honor to share with you today the release of Eyes, Stones, and to feature the poem that made me fall in love and changed me forever.


Want to see more by Elana Bell?
Buy Eyes, Stones from Amazon.com
Elana Bell’s Official Website

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