Romantic poetry – Page 2 – As It Ought To Be

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ORIT GIDALI

Posted on October 19, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

KOHELET
By Orit Gidali, Translated by Marcela Sulak

I, Kohelet, was king of Jerusalem,
I really was.
Treading over a thousand flowers on my way to the white bed
where my wives waited to remove the crown from my head–
made of marzipan in the biting of sweet tongues–
my silk rubbing against their silk, my flesh would choose among
them, and my flesh was already sweet in their flesh.
Kohelet, I held a thousand women
and I didn’t have a single one
I could recognize by smell
or by her skin or her feet,
her steps as she walked away from me: David’s lament.
Her steps toward me: his song.
I am Kohelet, Solomon,
my linen is the mystery of shrouds
and my bitten crown is above me.

קוהלת

אני קוהלת מלך הייתי בירושלים
באמת הייתי
דורך על אלף פרחים בדרכי למיטה הלבנה
שם חיכו נשותי, שהסירו את כתר ראשי
העשוי מרציפן בנגיסת לשונות מתוקות, משיי
מתחכך במשיין, והייתי בוחר מתוכן לבשרי,
ובשרי כבר מתוק בבשרן.
קוהלת החזקתי אלף נשים
ולא היתה לי אישה יחידה
לזהות את ריחה
ועורה ורגליה
צעדיה ממני: קינת דוד
צעדיה אלי: שירתו
אני קוהלת שלמה
סתרי תכריכים של סדיני
וכתרי הנגוס מעלי.

(Today’s poem originally appeared in The Bakery, was published in the collection Esrim Ne’arot LeKane [Twenty Girls to Envy Me] (Sifriat Poalim, Tel Aviv, 2003), and appears here today with permission from the translator.)

Orit Gidali is an Israeli poet. Her first poetry collection, Esrim Ne’arot LeKane [Twenty Girls to Envy Me], was published by Sifriat Poalim in 2003. Gidali is also the author of Smikhut [Construct State] (2009), and the children’s book Noona Koret Mahshavot [Noona the Mindreader] (2007). She is married to poet Ben-Ari Alex, and is a mother, writing workshop facilitator, and lecturer in the Department of Communication at Tel Aviv University.

Marcela Sulak is the author of two collections of poetry and has translated three collections of poetry from the Czech Republic and Congo-Zaire. Her essays appear in The Iowa Review, Rattle, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University, where she is senior lecturer in American Literature.

Editor’s Note: Kohelet is the original Hebrew name for Ecclesiastes, one of the Writings that comprises a portion of the Hebrew Bible. The book is an autobiographical account of Kohelet’s search for the meaning of life and the best way to live. Kohelet introduces himself as “son of David, king in Jerusalem,” and is therefore sometimes believed to be Solomon. This book, however, was written anonymously and is believed to have ben penned late in the 3rd century B.C.E., while Solomon’s reign was circa 970 to 931 B.C.E.

In today’s piece the poet associates Kohelet with King Solomon and explores the notion that “heavy is the head that wears the crown.” To get to his marriage bed the king must trample a thousand flowers. He has “held a thousand women” (Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines and may have had an affair with the Queen of Sheba), but “didn’t have a single one / [he] could recognize by smell / or by her skin or her feet.” His wives remove his crown from his head—perhaps an allusion to his wives’ polytheism which influenced Solomon and displeased God—and at that his crown is “made of marzipan” and therefore vulnerable to “the biting of sweet tongues.” In the end he is left shrouded in mystery with a bitten crown.

As fascinating as the midrashic element of today’s piece is, it is the vibrant and lyrically explicit language that brings the scene to life. The beauty of the lyric is itself almost biblical: “my silk rubbing against their silk, my flesh would choose among / them, and my flesh was already sweet in their flesh.” It was no small effort on the part of the poem’s translator, Marcela Sulak, whose original work was featured on this series last week, to translate today’s poem from Hebrew into English while still maintaining elements of rhyme, meter, and lyric beauty. This is a piece as rich in English as in the original Hebrew, and which carries as much depth and beauty in both languages.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: SAGE COHEN

Posted on September 7, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Sage Cohen:

WHAT’S WRONG WITH

making love to your
husband who no longer

lives with you the night
before you leave for your

weekend retreat just
because he, having

agreed to overlap your
early departure to care

for your small son, appears
in the bathroom naked

and erect as you sit steeping.
What’s wrong with slipping

under the lifted wing he has made
of the covers, against the breastbone

of the bird your two bodies make.
What’s wrong with finding him

more beautiful at this distance:
lens adjusted to the immediate

taste of his tongue that has become
its own language since leaving you.

What’s wrong with taking him in
the way you would a galaxy

on a moonless night, this
pattern you have traveled by

dipping its cup
and spilling light.

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

Sage Cohen is the author of the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World from Queen of Wands Press and the nonfiction books Writing the Life Poetic and The Productive Writer, both from Writer’s Digest Books. She has published a variety of articles on the writing life in Writer’s Digest magazine, Poet’s Market and Writer’s Market. Sage holds an MFA from New York University and a BA from Brown University. Visit her at pathofpossibility.com.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem artfully masters the element of surprise. Surprise in the story, in the words, in the phrasing. It makes beautiful what is socially censured and forces us, from the title onward, to question and to reconsider what is acceptable at the individual level. And as it asks us to rescind judgment, it delights in a lyric as delectable as the “sin” in which it engages. “What’s wrong with slipping // under the lifted wing he has made / of the covers,” it asks, and then leaves us to ponder the “taste of his tongue that has become / its own language since leaving you.”

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: PAUL NEMSER

Posted on August 10, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

MEETING YOU AFTER CHERNOBYL
By Paul Nemser

The last frozen day had come and gone, and we were
sleeping in the elbows of trees in the elbow of a town,
our sutures all sunken together as if we shared one wound,
as if we had climbed from a single pit

like a race of dinosaurs grown from a fused lump of eggs
that had slept in valley ice for three shifts of the North Star,
as the leaves undecorated the last few branches
which were skinny as bat bones or the bones of a squirrel.

There were cattle blotched with waning alphabets.
And there were eyes that had seen too many lights,
so we didn’t recognize the wells
we had drunk from all our lives, nor

the creek that flowed with clothes and flesh,
nor the seeds brought from all over the countryside,
from knived sacks in waterlogged barns, from pods
trembling on grotesque grasses.

We talked to each other until we could not talk.
It was gobbledygook, was joy, nothing to remember:
We would not be overrun like ants by a larger horde of ants.
The darkness would not come closer.

A dog would lift its howl to where the wind left
the tablecloths—crumpled, clawed up, drying in the sun.
A phalanx of trucks that had jostled our vertebrae
would sound like bubbles in a bottle.

I never missed you so much as waking from that sleep.
And I dream of you now lingering barely below ground,
all your twenty fingers warbling together as on flutes.
My pores open to you as to rain.

Years give way to lakes of white dust, to unyielding dirt-land.
The snouts of oxen stain pale as marble
when the beasts haul blades through the hardness that remains
of what decades ago had been garden.

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

Paul Nemser’s book, Taurus, chosen by Andrew Hudgins as winner of the 2011 New American Poetry Prize, will be published by New American Press in November, 2013. His chapbook, Tales of the Tetragrammaton, will be published by Mayapple Press in summer, 2014. Nemser’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Blackbird, Fulcrum, Per Contra, Raritan, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife Rebecca and practices law in Boston. Some of his family came from Chernobyl.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is one of those thoughtful, emotive, beautiful lyric poems that better expresses itself than I ever could. Some days the poems just speak for themselves. Are you listening?

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: THE BAAL SHEM TOV

Posted on July 27, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

TWO SOULS
By the Baal Shem Tov

From every human being
there rises a light
that reaches straight to heaven.
And when two souls
that are destined to be together
find each other,
their streams of light flow together,
and a single brighter light goes forth
from their united being.

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

The Baal Shem Tov: Rabbi Yisroel (Israel) ben Eliezer (d.1760), often called the Baal Shem Tov, was a Jewish mystical rabbi. He is considered to be the founder of Hasidic Judaism. (Annotated biography of the Baal Shem Tov courtesy of Wikipedia, with edits.)

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is a quote from the Baal Shem Tov that gives rise to the age old question: What is poetry? If poetry is beautiful lyric that speaks to the human condition, that considers love with eloquence and a care for words and ideas, today’s quote is most certainly that. Today’s post is dedicated to my husband, with whom I am beginning a journey as a “united being.” May we shine brightly together from our single light.

Want to read more by and about the Baal Shem Tov?
Wikipedia
Jewish Virtual Library

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LYNNE KNIGHT

Posted on July 6, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

Photo by Matt Phillips

AGAINST ORDER
By Lynne Knight

Tear the line into pieces.
                                                                                                    Open it out:
                          Let silence be
                                                       part of all that must be
said.
I can’t.                                                                                   I can’t.
It looks so disorganized. I want
to move it like furniture
back into place.
It’s a curse, your obsession for order,
my lover says, wanting me
                                                                                             wild—

So, to justify myself, I point out
that light in the night sky
may be traveling, but the stars stay
where they are.

Or do they?
What if some night Cassiopeia
fell apart,
splashed down like water?

What use the well-appointed bed,
the vacuumed rug,
the alphabetically arranged books
if a star came splashing down
like water, fiery water,
burning everything in its path?

All my molecules about to scatter—

just the thought of it makes me clutch
the sheets, press myself into the mattress—

but ah, the wonder of it, to be
moving inside my lover’s
arms then, any second bound
to explode—

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

Lynn Knight‘s fourth collection, Again, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2009. Her previous collections are Dissolving Borders (Quarterly Review of Literature), The Book of Common Betrayals (Bear Star Press), and Night in the Shape of a Mirror (David Robert Books), plus three award-winning chapbooks. A cycle of poems on Impressionist winter paintings, Snow Effects (Small Poetry Press), has been translated into French by Nicole Courtet. Knight’s awards include a Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, an NEA grant, and the 2009 RATTLE Poetry Prize. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Editor’s Note: The desire for order and the need to control. So tempting. And yet, what control have we in the face of nature? In the face of love? We can try to keep this life as tidy as we like, but what use are our efforts in the face of a falling star? From the macro to the meta, today’s poem takes us on a wild journey through the mind of a poet who struggles against the wild, only to succumb to the wonder of what is beyond her control.

Want to read more by and about Lynne Knight?
Official Website
Sixteen Rivers Press Author Page
Poetry Society of America
Verse Daily
Connotation Press Author Page

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LYTTON BELL

Posted on June 29, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

Photo by Robert Sanders

JANE’S HEARTBREAK YARD SALE
By Lytton Bell

Who sells used sex toys at a garage sale?
I knew I had to pull over
as soon as I saw that table full of dildos
just to hear this woman’s story

A whole bed was for sale
and a claw-footed bathtub
a motorcycle, a large stack of books
lingerie and ten photo albums
Photo albums?
Leafing through, I could see that they were all
happy couple love photos:
their trip to Hawaii
backpacking through Europe
mountain climbing in Tibet

And I shouldn’t forget to mention all of the love notes
three huge cardboard boxes full of them. I picked one up:
I stood outside your window for hours last night
while you were sleeping
hoping you would feel me there, and pull open the curtain

I approached her as she sat by the cash box
wearing a pair of oversized pink sunglasses
So, this is everything he ever gave you? I asked her, trying to be nonchalant
She nodded
I was going to light it all on fire, she told me
But what’s the point?
True, I replied, not sure what else to say
She seemed so peaceful about it. Almost happy

Just then I noticed a pile of cds:
Jane’s Joy Ride Mix
Jane’s Taking a Bath Mix
Mix for Jane for When She’s Feeling a Little Blue
And one called
In Case of an Emergency, I LOVE YOU
It was sealed with yellow CAUTION tape
and had obviously never been opened

Can I buy this? I asked her
$3.50, she said
I gave her the money and put the cd in my car
and cried and could not open it

(Today’s poem originally appeared in Rattle , where it was a 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Lytton Bell has published five books, won six poetry contests and performed at many California literary venues. Her work has appeared in over three dozen journals, web sites and e-zines. She lives in Sacramento, California. Lytton earned a poetry scholarship to the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts in 1988, where she studied with Deb Burnham and poet Len Roberts. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1993. Feel free to send Lytton an email at lytton_bell@hotmail.com.

Editor’s Note: Clear, narrative, and heartbreaking. Lytton Bell has a knack for relaying the real. What a fascinating moment, the intersection of these two lives, and how breathtaking the way their shared story speaks to us all.

Want to read more by and about Lytton Bell?
Poetica Erotica
Buy Nectar as an eBook from Amazon
Buy Body Image from Amazon

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: SPRING!

Posted on May 4, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

New York’s Jefferson Market Garden in full spring bloom; the editor enjoying the same.
Flower photos by Sivan Butler-Rotholz. Editor photo by Frank Ortega.

Poems & Excerpts For Spring:

For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

– Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)
Atalanta in Calydon (1865)

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough.

– A.E. Housman (1859–1936)
A Shropshire Lad (1896)

The month of May was come,
when every lusty heart beginneth
to blossom, and to bring forth fruit;
for like as herbs and trees bring
forth fruit and flourish in May,
in likewise every lusty heart
that is in any manner a lover,
springeth and flourisheth in lusty deeds.
For it giveth unto all lovers courage,
that lusty month of May.

– Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471)
Le Morte d’Arthur (1485)

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King.

– Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
No. 1333 (c.1875)

(Today’s poems are in the public domain, belong to the masses, and appear here today accordingly.)

Editor’s Note: Why? “For winter’s rains and ruins are over,” and the trees are “hung with bloom[s] along the bough.” Because “that lusty month of May” is here, and there is “[a] little Madness in the Spring.” Because everywhere I turn there are bright colors, sweet sights and smells of spring blossoms, and new life overtaking what was once the winter earth. Because it is spring! Nature is putting on her party dress and blessing us with glorious, beautiful spring. And what better way to welcome this lovely season than with poetry?

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: HEARTWRECKS

Posted on February 23, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

FROM HEARTWRECKS
By Nicolas Destino

RESURRECTION

Back in the city they were erecting the moon every night with ropes, pulling, as everything needed to rise to reverse what fell. In an upstate kitchen, amid the languid, flat dough, they got the news that there would be no more bread, not until the moon was back up and pulling of its own accord.

INDIGENOUS

Miraculous to be part of the snow globe with the penguins on the icebergs and the icebergs with the cold shock and miraculous to be inside the dome with the curvature of the dome and the penguins’ head and the cold shock far from the city where this is not taking place and to be apart from the towers and a part of interiors with the curve of the moon made from clay.

SLEEP THERAPY

Things like giraffes, that’s all, and catalogue items, ordinary things; driving in the snow in the repetitive shapes of snowflakes, and things like fruit markets and police activity activating the amalgams of scriptures inscribing all the checklists that qualify a city, but the real story is the flashing number right in a waiting room, outside of which people have held doors in restaurants for strangers, or have stolen their pocketbooks or parking spaces, or have let doors slam on strangers, but the real story is that I would give up all these dirty thoughts for healthcare.

Heartwrecks: In this debut collection, musical notes, paint pigment, and lives of the heart converge in fantastical worlds of invention. Nicolas Destino’s adventures through relationship, music, and visual art revitalize the lyric and re-imagine the ordinary.

Nicolas Destino’s work has appeared in The American Poetry Journal, The Bellevue Literary Review, Barge Journal, 580split, 322 Review, and others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Goddard College, and his first full-length collection of poems, Heartwrecks, was released by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2013.

Editor’s Note: Nicolas Destino’s Heartwrecks is one of the best and most original books of poetry to be published in recent memory. The poet himself has said, “These are not poems” because these vignettes are so imagistic, visual, and painterly that they are more akin to waking dreams than to the written word. Not only does the poet embrace the visual and painterly, but Heartwrecks is rife with musicality and deeply interested in the language of music. The book also contemplates urban life, marriage, partnership, natural disasters, weather, and life as seen from within the curved glass of the snow globe. All of these concerns are wrought from the finest materials, the poet’s masterly handle on the lyric guiding the reader through an incredibly deep, thoughtful, stunning, humorous, and intensely pleasurable book of poems that ought to be read from start to finish. And then again. And then again and again.

Want to see more by Nicolas Destino?
Nicolas Destino Official Website
Buy Heartwrecks from Sibling Rivalry Press
Buy Heartwrecks from Amazon

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JEHANNE DUBROW

Posted on January 26, 2013 by asitoughttobemagazine

By Jehanne Dubrow:

EROS AND PSYCHE
Sculpture by Antonio Canova, 1787

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

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of four poetry collections, including most recently Red Army Red and Stateside (Northwestern UP, 2012 and 2010). Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. She is the Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House and an assistant professor in creative writing at Washington College, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Editor’s Note: There are some days when I can’t help but think, “This is a damn good poem.” Today is one of those days. Today’s piece is rich and multi-layered. A poem which functions like Pandora’s Box—which it references—letting its good and its bad out with each lift of its carefully wrought lid. There is love and there is death. There is the threat of violence and the reality of violence. And all of this is enrobed in visual art—in painting and sculpture—and then again in a reportage style that nearly conceals the poem’s confessional nature. There are beautiful moments of lyric: “and both of them gone marble;” “Bodies make a space for gods to intervene,” and there is the myth which informs the piece like a hidden puppetmaster who knows exactly when to remind us of the strings. Dubrow even gets away with using the word “butterflies,” proving herself a powerful enough master of her craft that she can get away with what most of us cannot. This is a damn good poem.

Want to read more by and about Jehanne Dubrow?
Author Website
Poem on American Life in Poetry
Poem on Verse Daily
Poem on Poetry Daily
Reading on NPR

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: STEPHANIE BRYANT ANDERSON

Posted on December 15, 2012 by asitoughttobemagazine

sba

SOMETIMES THE BLOOD GOES COLD
By Stephanie Bryant Anderson

My sleeping bones live, like snow on snow,
I hear them speak: another day, another night.

Another. Another.

Sometimes
(in the hours that you’re gone)

the blood goes cold.

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

Stephanie Bryant Anderson lives in Clarksville, TN, and is pursuing a Bachelor degree in English and Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry. She is currently shopping for an MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her work has been published widely in both print and online journals; she has recently been nominated for Best of the Net, twice for the Pushcart Prize and storySouth Million Writers Award. Stephanie is one of the founding and managing editors at Up the Staircase Quarterly. A few of her publications include The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Connotation Press, and THRUSH Poetry Journal. She is currently working on her first full-length poetry manuscript.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem brings us love and longing through the haunted lens of the otherworldly. There is something of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale in Bryant Anderson’s lyric, in “sleeping bones” that “live, like snow on snow.”

Want to read more by and about Stephanie Bryant Anderson?
Stephanie Bryant Anderson’s Blog
Up the Staircase Quarterly

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