Tag: Poetry

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

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LI-YOUNG LEE

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By Li-Young Lee:


THE GIFT

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.


FROM BLOSSOMS

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.


Today’s poems are from the book Rose (BOA Editions Ltd., 1986), and appear here today with permission from the poet.


Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese parents. In 1959, his father, after spending a year as a political prisoner in President Sukarno’s jails, fled Indonesia with his family. Between 1959 and 1964 they traveled in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, until arriving in America.

Mr. Lee studied at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Arizona, and the State University of New York, College at Brockport. He has taught at various universities, including Northwestern University and the University of Iowa. He is the author of four books of poetry and one memoir and has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards.

Editor’s Note: At his recent reading with Peggy Shumaker and Amber Flora Thomas (held in New York’s Poets House and sponsored by Red Hen Press), I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear Li-Young Lee read. Not only to experience this performance, but to shake the poet’s hand and tell him how much his words have meant to me, how his poems above all others have been a vessel for me in my grief.

Between my father’s passing and seeing Mr. Lee speak I read Rose cover to cover, perpetually weeping. When tears would not come to me, though I felt the need to express them, it was this book that opened me up and enabled release. I cannot read Lee’s simple, sincere, and elegant poetic contemplations of the loss of his father without becoming one with him in his grief, and in so doing becoming one with my own, as I must.

Lee’s words and thoughts paint themselves into the mind’s eye like the most finely-crafted calligraphy. Simple beauty that defies the painstaking art required to make it. “O, to take what we love inside, / to carry within us an orchard.” I can scarcely conceive of a poet who better exemplifies what poetry ought to be.

Want to see more by Li-Young Lee?
Buy Rose from Boa Editions Ltd.
Poets.org
Poetry Foundation

The Possible Is Monstrous: A Book Review

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The Possible Is Monstrous: A Book Review

by Okla Elliott

[The following review originally appeared in The Southeast Review.]

The Possible Is Monstrous
by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (translated by Daniele Pantano)
Black Lawrence Press, 2010
ISBN 978-0-9826228-1-0
$17.00

Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt was born in 1921 and died in 1990, meaning he saw WWII, its direct aftermath, the entire Cold War, and the advent of post-modernism. His work can generally be described as experimental, philosophical, and political, with themes that reflect the major world events and European cultural concerns during his lifetime. Dürrenmatt is best known as a playwright and a novelist, but his nonfiction and poetry are equally impressive. Unfortunately, Dürrenmatt’s poetry, which incorporates the historical events of his lifetime as well as philosophical meditations on those events, has been largely unavailable to English speakers—until now, that is.

Given its relative obscurity, most non-German speakers are unfamiliar with Dürrenmatt’s poetry. He is a frequent practitioner of the longer poem, and The Impossible Is Monstrous offers us a sizable sampling of these. What is most impressive about Dürrenmatt’s longer poems is how he maintains movement and breath in a way that makes the poems feel much shorter, despite their weighty subject matter and length. He writes occasionally in rhyme and meter, with the majority of his poems being in free verse. A shorter poem exemplary of his overall style is “Dramaturgic Advice,” reproduced here in its entirety:

Don’t give us any profound talk
Don’t add to the mystery

It’s not the word
Create a shape

Three men at a table
What they say is not important

They want to do right
But the dice are cast

Who boards the wrong train
May run back in it
But arrives where he didn’t
want to go

Here we have the lyric-philosophic tone Dürrenmatt uses in several other poems in the book. We also find another common theme in the book—theatre. Several of the poems are choruses from plays that can be read as stand-alone works, and Dürrenmatt discusses theatre as an art and his own particular theatrical works. Done differently, this could be a weakness, but the way Dürrenmatt handles it only adds to the reader’s pleasure. As we see in “Dramaturgic Advice,” the poem is not limited by its interest in theatre but rather made larger and more interesting, made to carry extra meaning(s) because of it. It is a poem about life, but with that title, it becomes a poem about art, representation, and meaning-making as well.

Dürrenmatt’s free verse poems—their tone, underlying music, and content—come across wonderfully in Pantano’s translations. Pantano also solidly handles the much more difficult task of translating formal verse. For example, in “O World of Men and Murders” (a 50-line poem), the first four lines “O Welt der Männer und der Morde, / Voll Schmach, voll Haß, voll grauser Tat, / Hinunter schlingt jetzt deine Horde / Der Hölle Maul samt deiner Saat” become in English “O world of men and murders, / Shameful, hateful, full of grisly deeds, / Hell consumes your hordes / Along with your seed.” Pantano has changed the rhyme from ABAB to ABCB, which is a good compromise between doing excessive violence to the content in order to retain all of the form or getting rid of the formal aspects entirely and merely doing a prose translation. After those opening four lines, he abandons this tactic for most of the poem (though there is an occasional off-rhyme), and then ends the translation with the same rhyme replacement move. He therefore begins and ends with strong hints of the rhyme in the original and has occasional reminders throughout the poem, yet he does not lose anything by way of content. In another poem, “To Unchain Man’s Chains,” Pantano cleverly orders the syntax of his English so as to have the word “chain” (or some variation on it) end seven of the twelve lines of the poem. Dürrenmatt’s original has six of the twelve lines end with the German equivalent of variations on “chain,” though his poem is more structured and every line has a rhyme (in the pattern ABAB ACAC ADAD). Pantano has, therefore, more or less used the same tactic here again. He retained the word repetition/rhyme so as to reproduce the general effect of the poem, but he didn’t slavishly chain himself, as it were, to the poem’s form, thus allowing him also to reproduce the content more faithfully. And since it is a dual-language book, if you can even just sound out the noises of the German, you can get the exact original music from the German, and then you have the English for the literal meaning.

The inclusion of the German alongside the English also increases the book’s value as a scholarly text, and that’s not the only aspect that makes it useful in this respect. The Possible Is Monstrous also includes a short scholarly essay by Peter Rüedi (also translated by Pantano) on Dürrenmatt’s poetry, as well as a longish editor’s note on his poetry. There are also three pages of end notes to help readers not familiar with German or Swiss literary figures, works, cities, etc. All of these scholarly aspects, none of which are intrusive on the reading of the poems themselves, make the book ideal for the classroom or for research on Dürrenmatt’s poetry (of which, thanks to this volume, there can be much more).

In the final analysis, Pantano has done both scholars and lovers of poetry alike a service with this (long overdue) selection of Dürrenmatt’s best poetry, and his translations are accurate, generally excellent, and, I predict, destined to become the standard English versions. The book is well designed and printed, adding another nice book (as object and as cultural product) to Black Lawrence Press’s growing list. The Possible Is Monstrous is worthy of serious attention and should be in every academic library and on every poet’s bookshelf.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: PEGGY SHUMAKER

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BEYOND WORDS, THIS LANGUAGE
By Peggy Shumaker

The morning I was born
                       you held my hand.

The morning you died
                       I held your hand.


What’s left
                       to forgive?



Today’s poem appears in Gnawed Bones (Red Hen Press, 2010), and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Peggy Shumaker is Alaska State Writer Laureate. Her most recent book of poems is Gnawed Bones. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. She’s at work on Toucan Nest, a book of poems set in Costa Rica. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop. She is founding editor of Boreal Books, publishers of fine art and literature from Alaska. She edits the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press.

Editor’s Note: I recently had the extreme pleasure of seeing Peggy Shumaker read with Amber Flora Thomas and Li-Young Lee at New York’s Poets House, at an event sponsored by Red Hen Press. It was one of the most moving and charged readings I’ve attended, and Peggy Shumaker delivered a deliberate, thoughtful performance. Today’s poem was recited from memory—Shumaker’s eyes locked with the audience—and tears ran down my cheeks.

On my way into the world, my father held me. On his way out, I held him. This was a gift. Being a reader and writer of poems is also a gift; an entry into shared experience, an outlet for the personal.

Want to see more by Peggy Shumaker?
Peggy Shumaker Official Website
Purchase Gnawed Bones from Red Hen Press
Read, Watch, and Listen to Peggy’s work online

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: BONNIE ARNING

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DEATH LONG DISTANCE
By Bonnie Arning

The night you died I tried to find a sign
of your passing. Something obvious:
dry leaves swept up in a dust devil, a spider
the red of your hair. It was you

who taught me to make a bird by hooking my thumbs
and inching apart my fingers. Fitting then,
how your doctor should use that motion
to mimic the tumor as it swooped across your back.

We sent you to die twelve-hundred miles from
your stone bird bath and the chiropractor
who never left his wife for you, hooked
to a mechanical bed scribbling journal entries like,

today I ate an apple and felt my hair sprouts
shift and glow. I should have called—I should have
asked a nurse to hold the phone to your ear
while I sang shantih shantih shantih in a soft voice.

Why didn’t I have the courage to tell you, death
is no betrayal—die when you want to. The chemo,
the injections, the amputated leg: you did it all
for us. Instead of going to your service

I should draw faces on the foam heads
that hold your wigs. I should draw your face
in eyeliner all over my room. Come back—
the trees here are hungry for your ashes.

Yesterday I glimpsed movement in the milk-fire
of your rough-cut healing crystals. Energy
in the palpitating ribbon of distant heat. Wasps
swarm and ride each wave. You—

swarm and ride each wave.


(Today’s poem originally appeared in 2River View, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)


Bonnie Arning is a poet from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Currently she is pursuing an MFA from the University of New Mexico and acts as the managing editor of Blue Mesa Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Cream City Review, Gargoyle and 2River View.

Editor’s Note: My father passed away on February 26, 2012. I had found, and loved, this poem before my father took to his deathbed. Having taken a bereavement leave from this series, upon my return this feels like the right poem for reentry.

Today’s poem reminds me of the many blessings inherent in my father’s passing. That, despite living 2,500 miles away, I was able to be at his bedside in hospice, to coddle and love him on his way out of this world as he did for me, so many years ago, on my way in. That I was able to sing in his ear and tell him, over and over, how loved he was, that “death is no betrayal—die when you want to.”

Bonnie Arning, in her beautiful, simple words and aching truths that emerge from the depths of grief, has shared with the world a poem that allows for communion within a space where communion can feel both critical and unfathomable.

Want to see more by Bonnie Arning?
Blue Mesa Review
2River View

The Jackpot

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The Jackpot

by Letitia Trent

The monogamous are like the very rich. They have to find their poverty. They have to starve themselves enough.
-Adam Philip

We are too flush

our bosky hedge funds
are fecund—
we calculate the slow
growth the return

but let’s try to poormouth
again I’ll be Cinderella
pre-slipper and you
be a cockney starveling

we’ll settle
in the slums together
hold struck matches—
our barren grate

won’t bloom—
against our fingers
where they have purpled
in December

we’ll wolf cold
casseroles of aspic and crackers
afterward still famished

we’ll shake off our
poor white delicates
and glut until surfeited see

how easy
it can be—the slow slide
soft as
a rummage sale t-shirt—

when you have nothing else
to say take me
into your alms
and mean it?

***

Letitia Trent has had work appear in the Denver Quarterly, The Black Warrior Review, Fence, Folio, The Journal, and Blazevox, among others. Her chapbooks are Splice (Blue Hour Press) and The Medical Diaries (Scantily Clad Press). Her first full-length poetry collection, One Perfect Bird, is available from Sundress Publications. She was the 2010 winner of the Alumni Flash Writing Award from the Ohio State University’s The Journal and has been awarded fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center and the MacDowell Colony. She writes film review for the blog Bright Wall in a Dark Room. The above poem is included in One Perfect Bird and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: RICHARD HOFFMAN

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INVENTORY
By Richard Hoffman

What I have given to sorrow,
though I have poured out
all I am again and again,
does not amount to much.

One winter’s snows.
Two loves I could not welcome.
A year of mostly silence.
Another man I might have been.


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


Richard Hoffman is author of the poetry collections, Without Paradise, Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award, and Emblem, as well as the short story collection Interference & Other Stories, and the celebrated memoir, Half the House. He teaches at Emerson College, and currently serves as Chair of PEN New England.

Editor’s Note: After more than two years as the editor of this weekly series, this past Saturday I neglected to feature a poet here for the first time. I was caring for my ill father, and the rest of the world slipped away from me for a few days.

It is difficult to come to terms with sorrow, but the act and art of poetry can function as a medium for shared experience. Today’s poem is both an outlet and an entry point for communion, a masterful confession that can read like an entry in the reader’s own diary.

Want to see more by Richard Hoffman?
Richard Hoffman’s Official Website
Janus Head
“What Good” in Solstice
“Fruit in Season” in Solstice
ThoughtCast

The Itch

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Published by New American Press (2008)

The Itch

by Miriam N. Kotzin

On certain summer afternoons
when shadows stretch across the lawn
and deer come out—five doe, one fawn—
a distant wood thrush pipes his tunes.

The deer have come to graze on grass
and eat some apples from the tree.
There’s fruit enough for them and me—
the wood thrush song like opal glass.

But not all afternoons are filled
with ease. Some days all song is stilled—
by what? Perhaps I do not hear,
attending only to what’s near,
distracted, itching to be thrilled.
But air born song cannot be willed.

***

Miriam N. Kotzin teaches at Drexel University where she also co-directs the Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing. Her work has been appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Shenandoah, Anemone Sidecar, MAYDAY Magazine, Frigg Magazine, and Boulevard. She is the author of the poetry collections Taking Stock; Weights & Measures; and Reclaiming the Dead. “The Itch” was first published in Boulevard, appears in A Handbook of Poetics Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised an Expanded (4th edition), and is in her forthcoming collection The Body’s Bride. It is reprinted here with permission from the author.