Spouses: Poem by Miriam Sagan

A few days after the 4th, but still relevant. From my book of poetry START AGAIN (Red Mountain, 2022). This is an earlier version than the published one, a bit harsher and I’m in the mood for it.

Spouses

“What’s that noise?” the wife asks the husband
even after so many years

night noises, raccoons, and the Federal Government
are his problem to solve.

It’s not late, before midnight
“Firecrackers?” he speculates

although it sounds like gunshot
and we’re just blocks from the capitol building

where armed men show the threat of force
against our governor.

That sounds straightforward,
but really I don’t understand

what they want
other than to bully us with a supposed right.

But probably the husband is correct,
It’s midsummer’s night, and America’s birthday

a few weeks away
although frankly I’m not sure

this country of mine
deserves much of a party.

Much later, towards the witching hour
skunks head home and spray

through our bathroom window
that opens on the narrow alley

that creatures use to cross.
The thrashers are sleeping

in the blossoming cholla bush,
not once in all these years

has the invisible neighbor’s orange cat
manage to catch a bird

in all those cactus needles.

Three Questions for Maya Janson

1. What is your personal/aesthetic relationship to the poetic line? That is, how do you understand it, use it, etc.

My relationship to the line is largely intuitive, which requires that I feel my way through the poem, trying to look and listen in order to know what’s called for. There often seems to be some secret (to me) mechanism at work in each poem, something that drives the way the line wants to be handled. I don’t know in advance what this is, nor how the poem will ultimately look on the page, so there’s a lot of messing around, trying out different line lengths and playing with enjambment, though too much of the latter and the poem begins to wobble. At the same time, I like to at least occasionally use the line as a sense-making unit, that is, breaking at a place that allows a natural phrase or an interesting cluster of words to stand alone, in order to be highlighted. Generally I find myself appreciating the orderliness that happens with a more unified line in each poem, enjoying the visual effect of lines that end more or less at the same point on the page.

2. Do you find a relationship between words and writing and the human body? Or between your writing and your body?

The sitting at a desk part of writing happens in short bursts. It’s not only restlessness that drives me outdoors but something akin to wanting to aerate the poem with the breath of the larger world. There’s something physical needed, sometimes in the initial generative part of any given piece and most especially in the revision process. There’s a power in putting one foot in front of the other while working the poem out in the head. I think this might have to do with finding the music of the lyric, using the body to pound out the sound patterns. There’s also the encounter with the worldly elements, being blown about or rained on, and other-worldly elements too, that brings a fullness beyond my one small life into the poem. Basho, the Japanese poet known for wandering, is said to have spoken of his walking and poem-making as conversations between a ‘ghost and a ghost-to-be’.  I too like to situate myself on that continuum.

3. Is there anything you dislike about being a poet?

By any measure, to live a life that allows me to write poetry marks me as one of the fortunate few. To have something that brings me joy and sorrow, in one small package—again, how lucky! Without poetry as a lens the world would be a little less colorful. And still, even after many years of doing it, I’m sometimes surprised to find myself writing poems and identifying myself as a poet. As a child I read only fiction and imagined growing up and writing stories. I didn’t begin reading poetry until I was in my early twenties, and then it was only because my best friend was a poet. Once I started writing poetry however, there was no going back. While there’s not much in the way of regret, there is much that is oddly quirky about the practice that places it outside mainstream ways of thinking/talking that sometimes, in certain circles, I feel reticent about claiming. This is especially true when it comes to sharing my poems with people who don’t read or write poetry, more so with those who confess to not liking or understanding poetry.  How to explain the weirdness of the poetic obsession? Mostly I don’t even try.
***
Bio
Maya Janson’s first book, Murmur & Crush, was published by Hedgerow Books. Her poems have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies and she has received fellowships from MacDowell and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she has worked as a lecturer in creative writing at Smith College and as a community mental health nurse.Her newest book, “On The Mercy Me Planet” has just been published by Blue Edge Books.

To order:
https://itascabooks.com/on-the-mercy-me-planet/

Poem by Phil Geronimo

Willian in Chelsea Blue

How hard was it to live
In that tanned leathered skin you wore as a defense
Against the power of the hauntings in your head
The pints of Importer’s vodka you would hide and ingest
The hours you spent watching the same sit-coms
The tranquility of their perpetuity
The endless cycle of their safety
An escape from the pain that was never to be named
A war of scarred pasts that could never be won
Your flooding the house with the toilet
Bouncing your head off the wall in a blackout
Enduring the soul’s escape
The dark sentence of the ghost’s plague
The unknown names in a file of hate
And now, you are no longer my condemnation
You are no longer singing the praises of English League football
Willian breaking open in the midfield to feed Costa
Like the Latter Day Saints feeding us in our lean days
How you fell back into the warmth of their spirit
Into the arms of their natural calm
As they helped carry you across the Great River
Into the final solace of God

Stranded: Poem by John Macker

Stranded by John Macker

for Gary Snyder

It’s 3:28 p.m., I’m just another writer at a snowed-in
airport between teaching gigs waiting for the jet to de-ice
and take me to somewhere in the Upper Midwest.
At this moment, some of the dead in here are still breathing,
I’ve been elected president of this last bar in the terminal
and the polar express is taking no prisoners. Our ipads
are beaming us up, some reservation for the harshest climate on
mother earth has been made for me in my absence.
Absinthe is one of the magic words I repeat for complete
strangers until they realize I write verse in America. I try to
tell the children high on lack of sleep and adrenaline,
they’re going nowhere fast. Like a carnivore, I rip to
shreds snippets of conversation I’ve overheard like:
everything that happens in Milwaukee stays in Milwaukee
until it happens here. I smile to myself: that was a good one
and fire up a celebratory joint until I’m told by two lone
gun men to extinguish all smoking materials, fasten my
illegal smile and recall the last airport poem I read where the
poet wrote: most of my work, such as it is, is done.
Well, Gary, easy for you to say. I look out onto a frozen
silent wasteland that was once the tarmac: my loitering
has become a sacrament; my stillness, the void.

3 Questions for Nate Maxson

1. What is your personal/aesthetic relationship to the poetic line? That is, how do you understand it, use it, etc.

It’s changed over time but I think of a single line in a poem as being almost like a frame in a film, one motion on the way to a larger object. Or maybe a gear in a machine: each one has to be crafted so that it both stands on its own and so that it moves the entire thing forward. If it’s too concerned with the micro then you end up being too clever for your own good but if it strictly exists to serve the rest of the poem then it can probably be recycled into another line with minimal hurt.

2. Do you find a relationship between words and writing and the human body? Or between your writing and your body?

That’s a difficult question for me because I don’t necessarily write poetry-of-the-body but there is a connection. I draw a distinction between the spirit and the body and the former features more into my writing than the latter. However when I write too much I get physically ill, fever and exhaustion which to some extent I tend to interpret in a somewhat romantic manner which is admittedly a little ridiculous. Maybe it’s the tension between the body and the spirit that makes poetry happen, like the Smiths lyric “does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?”

3. Is there anything you dislike about being a poet?

About being a poet? I like being a poet. It’s being a person that vexes me. I mean, I don’t like the non-place that poetry has in our society right now where all art gets compared to poetry but actual poetry gets left by the wayside. In that way, poetry existing is an act of resistance.

***

Nate Maxson is a writer and performance artist. The author of several collections of poetry, he lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

 
The Distance

All the chimneys in this town are expelling their defiance
Constantly against the unmeasured winter
But there are no fireplaces down below
Such simplicities go against the contract
Only smoke here
Because to labor in oblivion/ is to birth an oblivion
Pure blue chemical tidal light: to labor with oblivion/ to burn a green candle
For a pure nothing, a hollow black pomegranate
We would give our meager light
How’s that for a hymn?
I’m new to this industry
But I’m quickly learning
That all original thoughts are reduced to sand and then to glass and then fertilizer
And so on and so on
What do we have left, when we sweep away the crumbs from the table?
 
This disintegration can be either a threat or a mercy
I leave it in your hands, my familiarity: a feather for your instrument
 
(Where have I heard it before?
Silver bird singing to young ears/ I should no longer be able to eavesdrop on such delicacies)
Where the distance backs into itself and each end of the uroboros thinks the other one is a ghost
Where the cold blooded and the shy congregate quietly for Sunday school
:
The dreamland archipelago 

Are You An Introvert or An Extrovert–In Your Poetry?

I’ve read José Angel Araguz for what is now many years–and his essay below asks a fascinating question. Emily Dickinson would be the classic introvert, particularly compared to Walt Whitman. But what about you and me? I’m a sociable introvert. But I think my poetry is usually extroverted. Fun to think about.

What’s Poetry Got to Do With It?: Introversion/Extraversion

musings by José Angel Araguz

Episode 7: Introversion/Extraversion

In this episode I explore ways that the terms introversion and extraversion can be used as a lens with which to read poems.
The Introvert/Extravert Lens
The terms introversion and extraversion were first significantly put into use by Carl Jung and later popularized by personality tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type indicator. From there, popular culture has redefined the terms over time. In general, an introvert is someone who is more reserved and leans toward solitary behavior, while an extravert is seen as someone who is outgoing, talkative, and energetic. As with any set of categories, the terms are not strict; rather, it is best to consider them as making up two sides of a spectrum on which everyone exists leaning one way or another to varying degrees.
One of the things that helped clear this up for me was seeing how the terms played out in regards to recharging one’s energy. If at the end of the week, you look forward to going out and socializing, and actually come back from said outing recharged, you might be an extravert. Conversely, if you go out on the same outing and come back exhausted, no more recharged than when you started, you might be an introvert. Seeing my introverted tendencies as me meeting my needs (and not necessarily my being antisocial) did worlds for my understanding of myself as an introvert. It also helped me empathize with my more extraverted friends and see them as meeting their own needs as well.
For further clarification (and fun!), Buzzfeed has several quizzes and lists that can help you find out if you are more introverted or extroverted.
Inner & Outer Worlds
To return to Jung, his original concept of the terms had him regarding people as either focused on their inner worlds and thoughts (introverts) at the expense of losing touch with their surroundings, or focused on the external world and being active in it (extraverts) at the expense of losing touch with themselves.
One poet whose work reflects the complexity of the introvert-extravert/inner-outer world spectrum is Emily Dickinson. Due to having lived a life of isolation, Dickinson is often written off as an introvert. Lines like the following would in fact help make the case:
The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—
The draw of these lines is how they take concrete things (brain, sky) and push them for the abstract meanings they imply. While on the surface the poem appears to be making a case for mind over matter, so to speak, a deeper reading shows something more akin to mind within matter. In one stanza, Dickinson does the poetic equivalent of pulling apart two strong magnets to show what lives between them.
In another poem, Dickinson does a reversal of these moves:
A sepal, petal, and a thorn
Upon a common summer’s morn—
A flask of Dew—A Bee or two—
A Breeze—a caper in the trees—
And I’m a Rose!
Here, the poem travels from the abstract act of naming physical things to the speaker announcing/becoming a rose. A sign of the transformation begins early in the second line in the form of sound, specifically the “z” sound (summer’s, breeze, trees, rose). As the poem develops, this sound travels parallel to the transformation implied in the words, and becomes its own physical presence, especially if read aloud.
In these two poems, one can see how the inner and outer world engage and impel one another, never cancelling each other out. In a similar way, one’s introversion never cancels out extraverted tendencies and needs.
Final Thoughts
Usually my introverted tendencies would have me continue with examples, ruminating over other poems and unpacking what I find there. I am going to push myself to look outward, however, and invite readers to share their thoughts in the comments regarding introversion and extraversion. I also encourage you to, in your writing, push past whatever type you see yourself leaning towards. If you write mainly about inner impressions, take a walk or describe the physical world around you. If you write mainly about the physical world, start with rhetoric or abstract thought. In either case, you might find yourself reflecting your true nature in a new and surprising way.

***

https://thefridayinfluence.wordpress.com/

http://www.cincinnatireview.com/blog/whats-poetry-got-to-do-with-it/whats-poetry-got-to-do-with-it-introversionextraversion/

Poem by Hannah S. Wiseheart

June 1907
                                                  For Phebe Durham Patterson 1871-1909
 
 
She sits rocking by her open gauze-framed window,
looking into summer night,
her head tilted, listening,
for her theatre of dreams, longing for lighter lungs.
In her white lap of soft worn muslin, a hairbrush.
She picks it up and begins,
strokes from scalp to ends trailing the floor.
Outside, tiny blinking fireflies and constant sister moon
float in darkness,
illuminating garden and fields beyond.
Her sightline is distant, even at dusk,
following a starlit stream, water sounds feeding her ears.
She sighs a faint smile, remembering herself as a light young thing.
 
Her small son pads in, pauses, whispers “Mama?” bringing her back.
.
She sighs a faint smile, remembering herself as a light young thing,
following a starlit stream, water sounds feeding her ears,
her sightline distant, even in at dusk,
illuminating garden and fields beyond.
Floating in darkness,
outside tiny blinking fireflies and constant sister moon.
Her strokes from scalp to ends trailing the floor,
she begins, picking up a hairbrush from a soft lap of white worn muslin,
longing for her theatre of dreams, for lighter lungs,
her head tilted, listening.
Looking into summer night,
she sits rocking by her open gauze-framed window….…
 
© Hannah S Wiseheart,  January 2017
 
This poem introduces the forthcoming book by the same author:
Looking for Phebe: Uncovering a Nineteenth Century Woman’s Hidden life
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Three New Poems by Kenneth P. Gurney

Silver

A cigarette flicked at responsibility
from a passing car window
skids across the roadside sand and gravel
to come to rest upon the slope of an ant hill,
not far from my booted foot
and the dry buffalo grass 
that creates wind-driven whorls
around a faceless quarter
without a band of lesser metal
visible from a sideways angle.

***

Just Thinking

If all the people of the world died overnight,
all the American buffalo left in the world
would have to relearn how to be true buffalo
and how to migrate north to south and south to north
along the great plains that would eventually return to grass
from fields of modern wheat and corn.
That is if the American buffalo ever figured out 
that they do not belong all year in mountainous places 
like the Tetons and Yellowstone.

Maybe they have some ancestral memory 
locked behind those thick skulls
of grazing along the Delaware river
and by the gulf in the Florida panhandle.

***

Equal Rights

Leon dreams John Wayne shooting him
through the head
at eight hundred and seventy two yards
with a Henry rifle—
not a Winchester,
not a Spencer,
not a Sharps.

Only John Wayne in a Hollywood movie
could make that shot.

Last night it was Humphrey Bogart
with a snub nose thirty-eight,
up close and personal
to liberate an encaged black bird.

The night before that, Errol Flynn
on the Santa Fe Trail
on horse back, at a full gallop,
with a Colt revolver.

Leon prefers his death dream
bullet passing through his skull
to be fired by some anonymous source,
not his black and white Hollywood heroes
garnered from too many hours 
watching Turner Classic Movies
with a twelve pack and two bags of chips.

Maybe tonight it will be sharpshooting Annie Oakley
as played by Barbara Stanwyck
who splatters his brains across Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders.

Kenneth P. Gurney lives in Albuquerque, NM, USA with his beloved Dianne. His latest collection of poems is Stump Speech (2015). He started up the poetry blog Watermelon Isotope. His personal website is at kpgurney.me.

Post-Truth by Megan Baldrige

Post-Truth by Megan Baldrige
 
 
The Truth went out for a long walk,
after the humidity
of two presidential conventions
exhausted her.
She got lost in a Florida suburb,
evaded alligators,
almost didn’t make it home ,
safely.
 
But return she did,
unrecognizable.
Was it the slight Russian accent?
The shades that shielded
her bruises from our inquiring eyes?                                                                                                 Was she the victim of the brawl
or was she the vanquisher, the bully?
No one knows.
 
We could see her beauty had faded:
graying skin,
hair tinted orange,
peeling nose–from new sunburns,
new earphones pulled tightly over her ears,
so she couldn’t hear
the swirling cacophony
surrounding her.
 
 
No one wants to take selfies
with the Truth,
anymore.
She so lifeless–
even her former friends
refuse to recognize
the Truth.
They’ve renamed her: Post-Truth.
 

Poetic Process by Miriam Sagan

Poetic process isn’t always easy to engage with, no matter how long you’ve been writing. Mine changed in startling and unlooked for ways in the past year—and surprisingly it took me quite a while to notice.
Last October I was at Wildacres in the Smokies, working with my daughter Isabel Winson-Sagan. She taught me to do suminagashi—Japanese style marbling, which works as a kind of mono print of ink on water. In the week there, we worked at full throttle. I wore all the poems that appear in our collaborative book Spilled Ink.
Then, I didn’t write another poem for five months. This is unusual, as I try to write about 8 poems a month—even if they are bad, or off the cuff haiku that don’t quite work. I like to keep warmed up.
Instead, I was working on a novel, The Future Tense of River, entranced by the fun and difficulty of getting the first draft underway. I started another project, 100 CUPS OF COFFEE, a mix of poetry and prose, but the poetry was diary-like, not meant to stand alone.
In the spring, I had a horrifying “oops” moment. I wasn’t writing poetry. I was as startled as if I’d suddenly realized I hadn’t brushed my teeth in five months.
Experience has taught me not to panic about writing, so I figured—hey, just write some poems. I started, and these poems were really different. They were long and skinny (a form I’d been soundly criticized for as a Freshman in college and have avoided since.) They had no capital letters—something I usually think ill of. And they had very little punctuation. This last bit I’ve had to re-think, as editors keep asking for it.
They feel fast, impressionist, associative. They need one solid pass or draft. If that doesn’t work, they don’t seem revisable, I just throw them out. I can do detail edit, but the shape is fixed for good or ill by the first draft.
It’s kind of scary, but they seem to work just like mono printing or suminagashi.
I don’t know what to call them, but I’m writing a lot. And publishing. Editors seem to really like them, and most acceptances are coming in batches. Sometimes the poems cluster, or seem to make one larger poem. They might be a sequence, a book, or something else completely.

Here is an excerpt from a group just published in Apricity—a lovely e-zine.

the red neon SANTA FE
on the top of the Gothic Revival
railway building
across from my hotel room
on a rainy night in
Amarillo, Texas—
my love for you is pure,
an unusual
thing in this world,
and I’m perfectly happy
with you in my bed,
and although
the news of another poet’s
fame made me jealous
I count myself lucky
to not be translating
out of my native tongue.

Check out the rest at http://www.apricitymagazine.com/literary-submissions-1/2016/10/15/untitled?rq=Miriam%20Sagan

And do explore the magazine—http://www.apricitymagazine.com/. They are reading submissions and emphasize the visual arts, as you can see here: