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Transcript of The Muse - An International Journal of Poetry 1.1 (June 2011)
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ISSN 2249 2178
Chief Editor
Pradeep Kumar Chaswal
Editors
Dr. Mohammad Arif Deepak Chaswal
The Muse- An International Journal of PoetryPublished online at www.themuse.webs.com
Copyright The Muse 2011
The MuseAn International Journal of Poetry
Volume INumber IJune 2011
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The Muse-An International Journal of PoetryVol.-1 Issue-1
June 2011
Copyright notice
Copyright. The Muse, 2011
No contents of this journal can be used without the written permission of the Chief Editor
of The Muse-an International Journal of Poetry.
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN):- 2249 2178
Cover/design
Deepak Chaswal
Al Beck
Disclaimer
Opinions and views expressed by the poets/writers are not necessarily those of the editors. Thecontributors were advised to submit original and unpublished (both print and online) poems/researchpapers, if any contributor violates the condition he/she will be responsible for the consequencesemanating thereof.
While information presented here was believed to be accurate at the date of inclusion, nature andcircumstances are changing constantly. The Muse-An International Journal of Poetry does not acceptliability for any decisions made or actions taken on the basis of this information, text, images, andother content.
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June 2011
Contents Page No.
Editors Note 7
Poetry 9-72A. D. WinansILLEGAL 9SIGN OF THE TIMES 9
Alan LindsayStriation: Lines in the Sand Cliff 10Your Name 11
Benjamin MyersPOEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE 12
Carrie AllisonDrive to Catechism 13
Dalel SarnouA Lullaby of Hatred 14A scar of you 15
Hal OLearyFree Verse 16
Judith PrestTelegrams From God 17Why Poets Are Late for Work 18-19
Linda ApplebyIn the Beginning 20Snowball Fight 20
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Mike J GallegherBookends 21Interlude 21
Raj VatsyaSlow Consumption 22Exile of Autumn Leaf 22-23
Sam EisensteinComa 24-25
Valentina CanoCold War 26
Adam BogarFOUR HAIKU 27
Anca VlasopolosThose Never Written 28-29
Boghos L. ArtinianThe Unknown Snipers 30The Cardiologist 30
Chris TanasescuA Man Consists of Sun 31
Devreaux Baker
Re-inventing Language 32-33
Hugh FoxMOZART 34YOUD THINK 34NOT A THOUGHT 35
Kathleen Spector
Will You Go 36
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Michael D. SollarsRelative Constellations 37-46
Paul Lobo PortugesStones from Heaven 47-48
Richard Oko AjahBlack Eagles of Dark Forest 49
Shradha KamraThe Door...... 50
Victor W. PearnLiving Inside Confucius Wall 51Natural shape 51
Adrienne WolfertStreet Lamp 52Point of View 52
April AvalonFrom The Heart 53Madness So Sweet 53In Lines 54Life 55
Carl ScharwarthDeath of The Past 56
Christina MurphyDown to the rivers of gold 57
Gale AcuffFountain City, Tennessee, 1964 58
Jennifer C. Wolfe
Flower Child 59
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Kenneth PoboPOMPEII 60DINDIS ALLERGIC ATTACK 61
Michael Lee JohnsonHookers on Archer Avenue 62-63
Philip A. EllisOur Children 64-66Married Life 66-68
Rebeca SaraFour Haiku 69
Thomas ZimmermanA Glimpse of the Tragic Vision 70
William John WatkinsMORTAL/MARTIAL/MARITAL WOUNDS 71-72
Research Papers and Essays 74-103
Joseph PowellPET TREES & DANCING BAY PONIES 74-96
Felix NicolauHow Dangerous is Digital Literature? 97-100
Byron Beynon''The Welsh-poppy flame of the sun''A Tribute to Raymond Garlick (1926 - 2011) 101-103
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Book Reviews 105-111
Book review of Al Becks Curiositys Cushion by PradeepChaswal 105-108
Book review of Millie Niss City Bird by Joel Weishaus 109-111
E-Interviews 113-121
An E-Interview with Hugh Fox by Pradeep Chaswal 113-116
An E-Interview with Al Beck by Pradeep Chaswal 117-121
List of Contributors 123-135
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The Muse-An International Journal of PoetryVol.-1 Issue-1
June 2011
Editors NoteThe Muse-An International Journal of poetry is started with the vision to become a
storehouse of quality contemporary poetry and representative criticism on poetry. The aim
and scope of the journal is global and universal as it strives for welcoming poems, criticalarticles, book reviews and essays on poetry from every nook and corner of our planet. Forour maiden issue we have received large number of submissions from USA, UnitedKingdom, Ireland, Australia, Poland, Hungry, Algeria, Nigeria, Romania, Russia, China,Philippine, South Africa, Lebanon, India and the list goes on. We are overwhelmed by theresponse.
We extend our special thanks to Professor Hugh Fox and Professor Al Beck for theirinterview and warm cooperation in this regard. We are also indebted to Dr. Felix Nicolau forRomanian translation and dm Bogr for Hungarian translation of our press release. We are
thankful to Phillip A. Ellis and Chris Tanasescu for circulating our press release in the literarycircles of their respective countries. We are also grateful to poets, critics and reviewers whohave sent their works for our maiden issue.
For the last one month our team has been busy in finalizing the June issue. Now June 2011issue ofThe Muse-An International Journal of Poetry is before you. Read and enjoy.
Cheers for poetry!
Cheers for life!
Editors
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POETRY
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ILLEGALA. D. Winans
She sits alone in her small hotel room
six months pregnantforced to give head for soup and breadno heat, one wash clothe, one towelone urine-stained washbasinan immigrant without a visaan illegal caught in a legal trapshe gets upheads for the doorhears the night manager whisper whoresuspended in silence floatingface down in the bowels of theAmerican dream.
SIGN OF THE TIMES
A. D. Winans
Market Street onceThe queen of the cityNow a gaudy whore
Worn with time
I pass the Hamburger PalaceThe home of the ninety-nine cent burger
Its doors closed down
Its windows streaked with grime.
Inside streaks of mustard and ketchupOn the counter
A crushed soft drink cup
Lies in dirtA paper napkin floating ghost like
On the back of the wind
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Striation: Lines in the Sand Cliff
Alan Lindsay
Those parallel erosion lines the river made in the sand cliff centuries ago
remain somehow in the delicate wallwe could pull it down
with just our hands: a loud yell, an avalanche; yet there it stands
undisturbed except where dogs and swimmers have dug dry sluices in the form
still it stands; its ageless indifferent triumph over the infernal patience of gravity
remains. I try so hard to find some cause for wonder in this
elaborate breastwork, these years of patient labor this
abstract aeolian rushmore of lines that are
just therevariegated, beautiful, evenly spaced parallel lines
like type on the page of the cliff, like lines of graffiti
the river wrote in the soft wall as slow centuries
of water evenly receding drew themselves along, as time does,
as water does, informing us with the infernal patience of gravity,
informing usplease give me your handinforming us of nothing
we did not already understand about time and about water and the pull of the earth
about forces so delicatelike the forces of sound in a wordso delicate
you do not feel them, no, you cannot feel them
work.
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Your Name
Alan Lindsay
A whisper of mist, the plunk of the rain: the sound
invades the heart, shivers a universe, urges
love and fear like two dull leaves
huddled in a seed feeling the ache
for moisture heat and air open to live
in the warmth of the sound; at the sound of the name the heart-
seed anchors, strains to the notes; the hearts
shell breached at last by the damp
osmosis of the sound, of the chant, of love, my love,
your name, my love, is wetness is rain is the whisper
in wind bursting in play. Come, my love
at last, today, find me in the dark with the pulse
of your flesh. I will hear the air shiver away
as you pass, I will whisper the sound with my hands.
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POEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE
Benjamin Myers
This is the line;
its existence is
an onion; its shape
is time; this is no
longer the line; it is
inevitably the body
which is either child
or memory; incarnation
humming the heat
from stomach;
nothing is
ending.
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Drive to Catechism
Carrie Allison
I am trapped,
strapped in.
I am speeding
in the dark,
a bullet spinning
into the void.
I grip the sides
of my seat,
eyes squeezed.
My mother
beside me
drives, careening
into the rain,
eyes glassy
and empty,
a dolls eyes.
I mumble
freshly memorized
commandments
while the cage
around me
hurls out of control,
dark and long,
the barrel of a gun.
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A Lullaby of Hatred
Dalel Sarnou
Hatred has grown within me,The growing of horns around Thee.
All those nights I cried desperately
Grab me to the chagrin, to the sea
Of tears, of groaning, of remorse.
I regret my way having lost me in pieces
I was there like a blossom in prairies
Happy in liberty around me love roses
Hitherto I smell those Sapin breezes
Yet, you stand in my way as a dark mountain
Of hatred, of anger, of fury with no reasoning
Torment, you're but a heart that is long stoning
Life is a lit that lambently lights loosely
And Death is but darkness that dooms desperately
Between Life and Death, our souls are hanging fearfully
Dread moments come to us with a wake up call suddenly
To tell us about an absurd morrow replete with tears badly
Crooning the morrow would scar in you every ain smoothly
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A scar of you
Dalel Sarnou
I know not why these words fly away out of me
Know not why my voice starts now shivering
And I cant remember but the tears of bloods on me
Remember the dreariness of the pain Im still feeling
You came into my life with your cant and hypocrisy
To crash it over and over and over, never stop hurting
The presence of your shadow in my life smothers me
And you, like a ghost, keep on wearing, jeering and fearing
Ill always suffer that scar of you in me and my history
Worse than a nightmare, than a horror, youre being
Beg you to go away; on me you never have mercy
All you do is pour salt on my hurt and deepen my scar.
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Free Verse
Hal O'Leary
Let not there be a doubt, I am averseTo everything they choose to call,free verse.
For me, it has become the devil's curse
On poetry, and making matters worse,
It's naught but prose.
In dictionaries, metric is most used,
Along with rhyme, (the terms are often fused)
To tell us verse should never be confused,
Or ever used withfree. We're not amused.
Give us repose
If we are free to do most anything,
And all our words, we do not choose, but fling,
Then lyricism loses all its ring,
And though we write, we do no longer sing.
I do propose.
Although it's true we cannot close the door
On charges that we live in days of yore,
It's time to claim, as we have done before,
Free Verse? An oxymoron, nothing more.
With that, I close.
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Telegrams From God
Judith Prest
poems are liketelegrams from God
snaking like lightning
down through clouds
bubbling up
from the depths
flashes of light
bursts of steam and spark
from the core
from higher places
rearranging
molecular structure
revealing
the genetic code
of the soul
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Why Poets Are Late for Work
Judith Prest
Im sorry I was late, but
the dam broke and I was
swimming upstream
in a torrent of words.
Im sorry I was late, but
I discovered a poem
trapped in a pocket of light
and I had to rescue it.
Im sorry I was late, but I
got impaled upon a particularly pointy
thought shard
and it took some time
to remove it to the page.
Im sorry I was late, but
I took a wrong turn and
got tangled
in a thicket of images.
Im sorry I was late, but
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I was herding
a cluster of
furry black poems
and you know
how long that takes in the dark
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In the Beginning
Linda Appleby
Stars had not begun to shineWhen you took your place in the firmamentWater had never turned to wineAbraham had yet to pitch his tentHis sons and daughters glimpses in his eye
And the moon bowed down in recognition of a starAnd the silence swam like tearsNo wise man had ever walked so farIn the beginning of years of years
When the word became flesh, a breathing avatar
So sing of the holy ages while you waitAnd play the flute, like KrishnaSince God is man and dead is hateAnd show the thousands where the loaves and fish are
Snowball Fight
Linda Appleby
It was too cold to writeTil the new moon put a stop to it
Cutting a crescent in the black skyThat was ice
Each twig wrapped in white furBreath like a steam train pouring a living mist
Layers of it, there were
A sub-layer of iceA coat of frost
Snow made in the image of manTwo primitive balls, some sticks, a scarfHe challenges nature in a snowball fight
Who is the boss?The silhouette of the tree marks the horizon
The sun shines through the clouds
Winter of the soul
Where the heart hibernatesRound as a dormant mouse
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Bookends
Mike J Gallagher
Four and ninety years apart, stand my bookends,an uncle, now grown old, a grandson, not yet two.
Between them, stacked, are tales of war, none won,of nations born and great empires undone;
stories of romance, of broken hearts,joy of births, painful deaths;dispersal of our island race,
the blooded drag of clan's embrace;weariness of a world worn down,hope of a world cheerily young.
Distanced by an ocean, a disparity in age,
my bookends could now, and ever after,our cares and worries soon assuagewere we to share their laughter.
Interlude
Mike J Gallagher
Drop your pen, give in,draw close to the windowwhence comes the sound.Out there in the smogof a damp April eveningA mistle thrush singsof pleas and urgings,of broody cluckingof soaring joy.Maestro mockingmy empty page.
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Slow Consumption
Raj Vatsya
Dripping from teeth of hungry wolves
sporadic memories flow, drift
ingest, digest
life juices dissolve
slowly
Masquerading as friends
leeches attach
sanguine beads drip, flow
slowly
Every debt imposed, self-imposed
increased as paid
slowly
Exile of Autumn Leaf
Raj Vatsya
For meagre remuneration
palpitated her tiny heart, lungs
feeble muscles toiled
wrestled smidgens off air
offered bounty in gratitude
Needles pierced skin
day after day
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sun imbibed green of flesh
little by little
Of use no more
autumn leaf could be taken out
and shot
Merciful tree sent her
in permanent exile
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Coma
Sam Eisenstein
He rememberedthe screech of tiresa vein pulsing in his head
Comforting soundof many rubber wheelsthe smell of exhaust
An immense expanseof jeweled crystalhe shared with ghosts
His wife, the childrenparents herding sheeptall buildings collapsing
Foul tastesfar back in the throata cough not completed
Inner dialoguewith world figures
Cosmic peace
All languages hisand instant transportto distant destinations
From deep underwaterthe crystal began ascentannoying his inner ear
Then: frighting
the hosts of figureswho fled in a crowd of bubbles
The container began to meltrather than shatteryet left shards
Embedded in skin, groinbody's outlying partsunused to sensation
He groaned musicallymimicking sheep bleating
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in a lost meadow
He saw faces above himeager for languagea telling pointed finger
They watched his eyesfor signs of recognitionbody's coherent movement
As the crystal womb meltedthe mouth of his wifeswam into his sight
Opened to her smileof familiar wrinkles
appealing irregularities
His heart leapedto meet her lipsand form his own
She said then clearlyI'm your daughterall that's left
With that he knewhe had traveledwith light speed
Over years in whichhis wife had stumbledand fatally fallen
He now bitterfully awareknew this awakening
Came too latefar from any homehe could know
He willed reentryto a fully reconstitutedmany-faceted crystal
Into which he fledwith the relief
of finality
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Cold War
Valentina Cano
The attention he paid her
was a sliver of fingernail,
a knife blade in the light.
No one would have known
the silence held warm syllables
in its folds, no one could
have seen the reflection of
crinkling fire in his veiled eyes.
She did.
The lapping waves
made of stillborn notes
froze her feet,
clutching her attention,
pinning her down.
His breath pooled about her.
His skin a beam of
turbulent light,
a kaleidoscope of clouds.
She walked by him.
He drew back
and released her into
the afternoons gray shell.
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FOUR HAIKUdm Bogr
blunt opposition:sharp blades of shivering sunbeamschipped by pathway-dust
xxxxxxxxxx
flame-sphere-lit skyflux of blustering lightrayscrimson sun-onsetxxxxxxxxxx
pine in shine-sweepnothing save the sun and she:Pinea-privacyxxxxxxxxxx
tick-tack of time stops:near the distance, a sharp blur.parallels X-ing....
xxxxxxxxxx
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Those Never Written
Anca Vlasopolos
at my mothers cutting board i
learned what came first
or rather what came inextricably
together
the hen my mother dissected for at least
three of our dinners
meat being so very dear
held deep inside her a pouch
of eggs like amber beads
going from penpoint to almost full size
so when i too go
should there be reason to cut me up
will all these bottled
stored
nearly forgotten
poems
i didnt write
bunch up
like hen eggs clusters of hanging grapes
or line up
neatly
a string of maiming
debris
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waiting to be sheathed
into perhaps
unlikely
pearls?
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The Unknown SnipersBoghos L. Artinian
I will never know
how many times snipers had had me
clearly in their view,
yet for some reason had refrained
from pulling the trigger
to let me cross the green-line
twice a day, in fifteen years
of civil war.
For that kindness many thanks
to the unknown snipers!
The CardiologistBoghos L. Artinian
Clad in a Hippocratic gown,And effecting a compassionate frown,
He is half plumber,Half electrician,Busily thriving
On clogged vesselsAnd bizarre circuits
That envelopeA muscular pump!
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A Man Consists of Sun
Chris Tanasescu
Aman consists of sun
light if hes a vegetarian
(its the photosynthesis
that fed the leaves he lives off)
and time if he eats meat,
the two biological clocks
clashing inside as the eater
and the eaten dance in the dark;
a woman is made of moon
stones if she drinks only spring
water as tides of masculine seas
suck in the river of her sashay
and public places, when drinking
the new wine of her wedding.
The solstice approaches the city,
steamy beams enter
the foliage, and the homes of relatives
where we nod keeping time
Dont breathe, any extra beat?
This worlds no contraceptive.
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Re-inventing Language
Devreaux Baker
Tell me something I havent heard before
How bridges in Paris are rusting bolt by bolt
and rivers are tired of their secrets
How night loves to wash your body
Empty words from out of your pockets
and rearrange stars if you have to, but tell
me something you have never told anyone
How the object of your desire never sleeps
and your heart is made of glass that shatters
each time you break bread with your father
Tell me how you invite transgressions into your bed
and slip knots around the waist of afternoon
so twilight never leaves your side
Weave syllables into a net that stretches
from the flea market on the outskirts of this city
all the way into the back alleys of your childhood
then speak to me in the language of your birth
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so I may finally understand the things lost to me in translation
and hold them in my hands like saltless tears
or small fires burning in wilderness
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MOZARTHugh Fox
Dying at thirty-five, at thirty-five I would
have still been teaching at Loyola University inL.A., never have moved to (MSU) Michigan,never have gone to Brazil and met wife #3,30+ years with her now, six kids with mythree wives, my granddaughter Beatricesbirthday today, four years old, party at ourhouse, this Jewish couple from Ann Arbor,him from Montreal, her from Russia, theirdaughter, Caroline, just hitting four last
week, another couple, friends of my daughterAlexandra, Beatrices mother, with a cute littleblondie daughter, Marylane, him from England,the wife from Chicago...kids and presents, allthree wives there...Mozart, how did he everwrite so much in so few years?
YOUD THINK
Hugh Fox
Youd think Id be used to it by now,
May first, the whole world around me
flowering-greenig, old stuff by age 79,nicht wahr? , but its still miraculous
for me, as if I were age five again,
oak trees that live hundreds of years,
sleep and reawakening, why shouldnt
I have eight hundred years of
seasonalization?
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NOT A THOUGHT
Hugh Fox
Beatrice, 4, the Phi Betta Kappa Sorority doll-
legs, even my mother back fifty years ago
in Highland Park, my father retiring at seventy-five,
Elizabeth Tayhor, Queen Victoria, even myself
a year ago not really multi-dimentionally what
mortality-dimensionalizing was coming down the
road.
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Will You Go
Kathleen Specter
Ask me to uncover the bones of my blue twinWho was drowned in poisoned air,To separate the real from the something elseLike oil on waterHe was taken to the death baths,Saw the light of unlighted visions;Tears have long since soaked the salt from my eyes.
Now that my grief has grown old with meThings go through my mind when I cant sleep:
The cold rain; the wind as we were made to dig his grave;My father weeping beside me, falling to his knees,Struck in the head with the butt of a gun.I wake with an image like a beating heart,The mirror on the wall showing a face hardly mine, hardly not mine.Face of a man who tries to forget he is living.
My waking is haunted by listening, but to what?The spaces between notes, something
More damning than silence browning the photographOf a boy that could be me or him.
In this life I am frightened of wakingTo the cold walls, water-stained ceiling,And smokestacks belching black against the sky.Our fathers tears are gone, as is the darknessIn which I lost you, brotherUnderstand I am trying to go onWithout history.
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Relative Constellations
Michael D. Sollars
Nocturnal, inarticulate murmur;
Is this the moment before or after?
The long awaited toll of the clock,
The long duration between seconds,
The time when the kookaburra bird,
The crows inconsequential cousin,
Ludicrously laughs aloud as the sun dies;
Not quite yet, as first falls across the room,
A whisper
A murmur
A rhythm
A drone
A moan of paralysis.
A new droning, almost imperceptible,
Fills the silence above my bed,
Trapped within the interval of a moment,
Sings from above, like the lost nightingale,
Wind tip toeing across hedge rows,
Its voice whispers, without wavering, but hypnotic.
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High overhead,
Rafter hung,
The image races, blurred;
Aeolus bladed,
Arms extended,
Sinister slayer;
His blades strike me
As three arms at first, and then only one in a whirl,
Turning and turning in the collapsing room,
Round and round spin the fans blades,
Ancient or antique, styled with porcelain grommet,
Artful crystal blades, spinning back the contours of time,
Counterclockwise, against times march, overhead.
Still hum, blank filled, incoherent, indistinct,Crawl cocooned memories,
Of what? I know not, at first at any rate;
Greek chorus or chaos, Im uncertain.
Stepless somnambulist, sleep I;
Still, at first, none, not one thought,
Mind milling about across empty mental miles;
Suddenly then thoughts leap free,
I succumb to times snare, prey to the memory hunter lodged inside,
Evanescent hues played by hums and hymns of ethereal worlds.
New night canopy now stretches vast overhead, yard by yard,
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Webbed by silver glow, distant luminescent essences,
Multitude of star points, devoid of design and meaning.
Still as stone, dumb to thought,
I stare perplexed at the night ceiling,
The fan continues its incomprehensible murmur,
And the poet finds only the much forgotten of the least learned;
Stellar names lost, lights extinguished.
The Seven Sisters of Platinum Pleiades, hunted eternally by Orion,
Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Pegasus, Orion, Virgo, Phoenix, Andromeda, Cassiopeia,
Once ago familiar constants,
All fallen forever from memory, gone beneath the horizon to dark sleep;
Even my own Libra lost,
Her scales tipped toward oblivion.
Suddenly a horn bellows, followed by a chorus call of new stars;
Curious clusters of brilliant sparks strike the firmament
Born beneath but eternally risen;
Orphic tablets beckon, pull at me,
As the new stars demand to be named,
Christened anew,
Celestial constellations, birthed for forevermore,
All dated deaths;
They belong to me now, and I to them,
Twelve new signs, twelve sad losses;
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Beckon! The horn demands.
Stop! No more, I scream.
Who is it again blows his thunder horn?
The bright Child Warrior, Blake, fallen in February frost,
Stands uniformed anew in immortal blue,
The deepest and truest of all blues;
First and always son,
Birthday, wedding, altar candles,
All blown out by one who handles,
But evermore a glowing sun.
Now takes his proud post as nights brightest star,
Seraph, the firegiver, stargiver;Those among us await his nightly artful creation,
Lighting first one signal fire and the next,
Until all heavens leap ablaze.
Horn trumpets another note of the ages!
Roll call commences, constellations ballet onstage, one by one
Past names and new stars, Milky Ways amphitheatre
All of magnitude and minitude, bright and dim, answer:
Young Brother, dull red, fallen to March madness,
Friend of boyhood, blue-white gem, defeated by Aprils melancholy,
Serious Scholar, yellow-white globe, undone by Mays menaces,
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Volatile Genius, red giant, succumbed by Junes Jester,
Virgin Goddess, azure blue jewel, caught by Julys cancer,
Pedant Professor, bright crimson flame, harmed by August angst,
Uncle, doomed by Septembers chance shot, appears dim in the wests low sky
Childhood friends with forgotten names,
Orphaned by Octobers perchance, sparkle anew in mild milk clouds,
Imposter, dull dwarf, destroyed by Novembers neurosis,
Silent Searchers, blue-rich twins, succumbed to Decembers dread,
Physician, harvest orange fireball, dealt the January joker,
Deeper in infinitys far dark fathoms lie other lights,
Incalculable numbers, clustering about,
Configuring artfully, forming vast arrays;
Poets proud, Sarah, Sylvia, and Anne,
Yes, the Three Graces, still rowing toward home.
More distant, beyond the skys faint harbor lights,
Painters Palette, sweeping, spiral galaxy filled with visionary whirls,
Brushed by Van Gogh, Greco, Crevel,
Daswanth, Rothko, Bugatti, Watanabe;
Novelist Nebula, nearly visible, unite
Constellations Crane and Hemingway,
Mishima and Kawabata, Pavese and Mayakovsky;
Even more remote and farther lie oldest fires,
Burning Antigone, Ophelia, Juliette,
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Loyal Daughters, now Celestial Sisters.
A lost voice, echoing from Times vault, whispers:
A crowd flowed over London Bridge,so many,
I had not thought death had undone somany.
Still suspended under Aeolus racking wind, bedridden within the infinite duration ofa lingering moment; sudden thoughts crystallize out of the void like springs late snowflakes
and overpower the memory gather; a child clutches his small fingers around a new Christmastelescope, as he trudges off alone, bound to a cold December night hilltop; refracted lightilluminates the cosmic scene; no father appears, even long after the sun and moon are lost tothe west; double, double toil and Hubble trouble manifest in the scopes mirror; gravity failsas the boys dreams drift skyward, riding on the wings of the bird boy, only soon to fall whenthe switch of the dreaded earthly force is flipped back on.
Apparitions shadow, always guarded by light and dark, suddenly shouts: He who
gained a telescope, only to lose the world.
The same boy, and later man, feverishly searches dreams through imperfect, evenwarped lenses. Love and death circle as twin stars, mistaken as one perfect sphere. Then hespies sights fault: processional ritual observed as apparition of ecstasy and beneficence,followed by focus of cruel certainty, and finally ultimate aberration, maleficent flaw.
But then I pass with fortune like ordinary light through the polished prism glass andemerge from my prison resin; gutter gulag and guillotine guilt decanted; my hidden colorsspraying apart like royal ribbons.
The figure comes clearer, a self stranger running and running, miles and marathons.He races for the horizon, only to find it receding step for step. The moon floats in flight. Buthe is slowed and then staggered in his steady steps as he wonders for what, the to and fro. Hedeserts the oval track for longer, drifting elliptical roads.
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No, I shout, tossing thunderbolt back,
Against an onslaught of mean memory;
But recollections argue forward,
Seeking existence at their own peril.
Leave me, free me;
An instant of clarity rushes me,
Four elements, thats all, no more;
Do away with the periodic chart;
Slice, dice, cut with Ockhams razor;
Theres Fire, hot sundae eucharist topped with grace,
Theres Air, trailing clouds of worry do I come;
Then water, water, here and there, but nowhere;
And Earth, meadows of melodies, mountains of misplay;
Restless trance, slumber silence,
On a pillow of plucked powder down.
Conflicted again!
Troubling letters cluster together like teammates for a yearbook memory. ROYGBVlean shoulder to shoulder. What does it spell? I must have known once. The thing and theforest of symbols once held meaning, but I have lost the lighted intersection where roadsmeet. I have drifted too far from center, and now any certainty of orbital return becomes evenmathematically incalculable.
The poet, a grave figure at times, a grave digger at all times;
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No Wood of Thorns
Impresses those outland spherical souls,
To be fed on by harpies;
Try instead,
Queen of Thorns
Garden of Thorns
Path of Thorns
Rain of Thorns
Veil of Thorns
Nest of Thorns
Crown of Thorns.
The play of the spheres, commences,
Orchestra performers,
Planetary measures, cosmic scales,Music of harmonious performance,
Strings of violins, notes of flutes and clarinets;
Cornets and trombones, drums and cymbals,
Flood one ear and the other;
The Dark Queen constellation rises;
Dignified by deliberate gait of grace and grandeur,
She moves unchecked across the sky,
Through space and moment, one to the next;
Vain queen of beauty,
Gentle and alluring,
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Wearing seductress smile;
Her luminous ascension darkens others,
Silences all galactic song;
Scent of lavender trails her gown,
Clothed in soft cotton crimson, a nuptial shroud;
Hair adorned with peacock jeweled crown;
Beckons with emerald stone, eyes the tinge of tomorrow,
Commands the earthly board, dispatches piece by piece,
Angel of sweet sleep and lullaby lies;
From high above, far beyond the Queen,
The Mover of all moments and movements,
Stirs and waits without impatience,Desiring no thought,
To consider and reconsider,
For visions or revisions.
From sovereign seat, the Mover sees:
Clockwise grind the cutting blades,
Slicing air, trimming time,
Cleaving young, slitting old,
Chopping this, slashing that;
Measure once, cut once,
Across mortalitys mark.
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In the room, discords demon brother clamors,
Dissonance threatens near and far;
Louder, closer drones disquiets din,
Dispatching harmony, harboring destiny;
The way appears, milky and ethereal,
Vast clouds of friendly sky-lined lights,
Starsteps back.
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Stones from Heaven
--for the children of Haiti
Paul Lobo Portugs
"What crime what sin had those young hearts conceived
That lie bleeding torn on a mothers breast...
The human race demands a word from God." --Voltaire, " Poem on the LisbonEarthquake" (1775)
the flesh of the city blends its blood with the dust of earth's grave
the devil quake broke the bones of their beds with its terrorist bomb
they could see the day light of death in the beaten air
feel it in their prayerful souls as the some time glad day sun fell
into forever's darkness and all the all reeked with the ashes of fear
where is the loving God of married hallelujahs?
all the poor man's houses falling falling "amid the deepening gloom"
into a tomb for sons of promise and green daughters
their pleasure and pain drowned in a ghost of tears
lost like raindrops on the grey face of the bottomless ocean
vanished like the passing shadows of stories in the imagination of clouds
why oh darkened God of stones God of the Word God of Heaven?
in the once bright light of a schoolyard's promise silence now bleeds
where young eyes yesterday shouted from their books a belief in tomorrows
now the living dead carry their bodies with loving worms
on the gallows of their bent backs wander the veins of the beaten streets
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chanting horror's verbs black angels mourning the flesh of graves
where is the open hands of God the prodigal Father?
they lie down forever in the weather of their sorrow with the innocent dead
weep for the seed of their breathless children in the blood lit city of gospels sorrow
no glad to be home families no wined friends with hope's holiday songs
no loving child's prayers or whispered shut eye no sweet good nights
no these good soldiers of Jesus' hosannas are the inspired blind no more
to the womb of endless night no to the forsaken God of their brambled loins
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Black Eagles of Dark Forest
Richard Oko Ajah
Black Eagles of the evil forest
Are the brides of feathers,
Blessed with pacy paddles
For transport into high rocks
Where their sacred treasures
Are cloaked like black gold.
Black Eagles of the dark forest
Are clothed with rubber clogs
Whose snazzy skins are nourished
With its preys blood and body
Killed to satisfy their SisypheanInstincttheir luxury.
Black Eagles on High Rocks
Who scream like a woman in travail and
All corners of our commonwealth penetrate
Through with lustful eyes which are
Deadly weapon for mass destruction
And escape-route to their hunters
Aim
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The Door......
Shradha Kamra
I pass by here
unbiased each day
to feel you closer
until its gray.
with no other way
to unlock the door
neither the recourse
nor the roar
i put down my desire
to take this side
to stand at the door
to look inside.
As I turn around
Forwarding back
again to recover
the complete lack,
with still moves
and running eyes
I suddenly stop
and once more rise.
I turn around
to the previous side
to stand at the door
to look inside.
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Two poems
Victor W. Pearn
Living Inside Confucius Wall
A few have lived here before
in peace and harmony,
where moonlight still shines
brilliantly orange in Octobers haze
And along Gu Lou street you may
hear the clomp, clomping, sound
of old horsespulling tourists
to and from the Confucius Temple.
Here there are intricate
roof patterns and those
ancient eaves, built to overlap
fill in space, as if sky and eaves
were loverstouching over and
under.
Natural shape
tyrannosaurus rex
crouching
head twisted to the right
ferocious jaws
stretched open
his unyielding body
prepared to pounce
a landscape rock at jining university
an igneous stone
clouds change shape
form a temporal wispy illusion
transparent mist
in moonlight
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Street Lamp
Adrienne Wolfert
The street lamp
distances the moon,
stars dont stand a chance.
Night , the siren,
sings our false voyages.
Point of View
Adrienne Wolfert
At the bottom of the lake
the drowned watch
looks like a fellow species
to the incurious fish.
Scholars sift the sand, discover
each civilizations grave atop the other.
Eternitys the name we give
the casual castaway of what is over.
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From The HeartApril Avalon
I'm here in the corner, devoured by cold,My little ribbed shell hides a desperate sigh,It holds an enigma for you to unfoldUntil I'm asleep to your breath's lullaby.
My soul is rushing beyond the extremes,Revealing the vibe that is hard to appease,But once you discover the door to my dreams,My consciousness lives through a moment of peace.
Whenever my lips start exploring your skin,They bleed unexplainable bitter remorse -My poison leaves stains, and it feels from within,But lips ever sealed do appear much worse.
Madness So Sweet
April Avalon
Pearls of fantasies shine in the waters of hopeThat February turned tears to.We will certainly free weakened hands from the ropesIf wonder is all that we do.
Let us build a small ship as a shelter-to-be
And paint it in colors of spring.It is madness so sweet to spend life on the sea;I will turn to a siren and sing.
In the song of my heart that will beat twice as fast,Your own inner voice will reveal.Reminiscence I'll crave is for ages to last,I'll gift you a moment to steal.
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In Lines
April Avalon
Invisible scars.
The blades of your hands.Repeating old lines of my own.The well-hidden sense.The hopeless romance.The eyes that could gift me the dawn.
The days go by.Three months till July.
Love, listen, I'm honestly strivingTo perpetuateMy fortunate fate,Still learning the art of surviving.
But I am too weak,Frail fingers do seekA chance to entwine for a moment
With yours, then lose holdAnd feel this strange cold,Indulge in a beautiful torment.
The same tragic theme.I've reached the extreme.It seems I'll be waiting for agesOf riddles and signs,
Of love fixed in lines,Of counting papers and pages.
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Life
April Avalon
The words I hardly figure outAnd all our mornings are about -A cigarette, tea flavored menthol,The train, the underground noise...And then - in turn: your eyes, your voice...
A warm embrace, so quick yet tender,So evanescent, yet desired,The lurking verses, eve-inspired -
A perfect mix, and I'll surrender.You'll leave around half past five...That's it. And, well, it is my life.
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Death of The Past
Carl Scharwath
Enlightened moon an abortion of nighttime creation,
cries energy in summers final luminance.
Grave yard headstones manifest elongated shadows.
Cement souls embedded in the humid grass,
the distant, lonely house exhales the past.
History impregnates the air through tiny stucco cracks.
Curb adorned in one broken old television set,
the future anchored in its rusted satellite dish
No one ever dies here anymore, where have they gone?
Displaced suburbia manifests abandoned dreams,
a neighborhood raped in shuttered factories.
Polluted smoke replaced with the whiteness of lonely clouds
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Down to the rivers of gold
Christina Murphy
Down to the rivers of gold
in autumn light once green
with promise, we will bring
our hearts to the fading season
of youthful light lost in regret
Everything heads to conclusion:
carefree, unaware, and gripped
in dying; it is the passage, the weight,
the hearts burden of knowing loss
and the souls requisite of forgiveness
Better dreams shall hold us soft
in the mercy of remembrance
the green to gold, the gold to silence
the currents of the river moving us on
to the changes that hold our fate
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Fountain City, Tennessee, 1964
Gale Acuff
At the end of her street is a dead end,
Grandmom says. I want to see it, I say.
There's nothing to see, she says.I want to
see what nothing looks like, I say. She laughs
but I don't know why. I want to hit her
for laughing at me, for laughing at all,
whatever the reason.Don't make me mad,
I think, but I don't say it because she
might not take me to the end to see what
an end that's dead can do and I'm not brave
enough to go there by myself. Maybe
when I'm a little older. I'm 7
now, not a baby, but not a grown child.
We're walking and holding hands, or she holds
mine. If she lets it go it will fall to
my side. I'd hold hers back but I'm afraid
of her, I'm not sure why, maybe because
she's so old. She can't walk very fast. I
could break free and run ahead. I'd hear her
calling me. I'd probably ignore her
and see what the dead end looks like all by
myself. I'd be a man then. Like she is.
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Flower Child
Jennifer C. Wolfe
I saw the creased white business card
Lying in the sand of the parking lot:
It looked as though it had been run over
By tires immersed in fresh tar.
Flowers and Friends, its name stared
Up at me in neat, black letters.
I stared at the card, mesmerized by
Thoughts of childhood zoo conservatory trips.
As a summer wind rifled through my hair,
I pondered how long it had been,
Since someone had arrived at my doorstep,
Holding flowers clenched in their hand.
My last bouquet had been an apologetic,
Rumpled assortment from the local supermarket;
It reminded me of yellow dandelions
Intermingled with pink cake frosting roses.
I thought it looked somewhat pricey,
Especially when lovelier wildflowers
Could just have easily been picked
Along the side of the road for free
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POMPEII
Kenneth Pobo
Your beauty is like a calendar
with August missing. When I said
if youre late again, Ill stuff you
in a pre-digital TV, drop you
in the Delaware River. You
were on time. Oh hairy-toed one,
oh hairy toad one, I called you darling
just when a horse from a farm
in the long ago showed up at my door.
You didnt say it back. I waited
for a century to crumble
like the gardenia I pinned on
my prom date. Youre cold
and Im Pompeii sniffing
a smoking mountain.
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DINDIS ALLERGIC ATTACK
Kenneth Pobo
I order bisque in a posh
Michigan Avenue restaurant,
forget to ask is lobster in it,
I cant breathe,
my eyes squeeze shut,
Im going to pass out,
in the ambulance
some woman holds my hand,
saysjust hang in there,
honey, just hang in there.
I become a code, a quick blast
of fix. Some say that in
a near-death moment
we see ourselves rising
toward the light. I saw nothing.
When breath returned,
my lungs were two
planets circling the sun,
both full of life.
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Hookers on Archer Avenue
Michael Lee Johnson
Late evening, early morning,
I search the night for whores,
young, bloody with desire.
Night streets are silent streets
except for hookers and their Johns.
One wants the dart of groins
the other green eyes in dollar
sacred treasures-
snatch the wallet, a consecrated craft.
Both hit the streets quickly
satisfy needs quickly.
Im an old buck now rich with memories
more than movement, still talk, take porn shots,
with a peeking eye, snoop around
department store corners,
and dumpy old alleyways.
My hair is gray, my teeth eroding,
thoughts toward prayer
A.M. Catholic Mass,
then off in early morning
to the mailbox, a lethargic walk,
I pick up my social security check-
comforts my needs.
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Evening settles into bed time
with a western romance novel,
ambushes, excitement,
old transgressions stretch
and relax.
No desires, homage
to the day, to the night.
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Our Children
Phillip A. Ellis
Though you are not fertile,
these poems are our children,
and, as we settle them into bed,
and as we bring them to rest,
you will kiss each one good night
and retire to my arms.
But you are not here with me,
and these poems are all crying for you,
as if you had never been,
and, like an infant monkey
clinging to galvanised wire,
to a mother that never calms,
they are clinging to my knees and plead
to mefor you.
As I try to lay each one in bed,
and as soon as one is settled,
those who had gone before climb out
and come crying to me.
They will not sleep and dream.
I do not know what to do with them:
they will not be calmed.
They cling to me, who am but wire,
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and they seek a succour that cannot come,
and they seek a comfort I cannot give,
and I am alone as you are elsewhere,
and I am as one sorrowing
for a wife who will not return,
for a wife who will not come home,
for a wife who will not take up these children
into her arms,
and lead them into sleep and dreams.
And, as we settle them into bed,
and as we bring them to rest,
you will kiss each one good night
and retire to my arms.
I am alone with them;you are away.
I am alone with them;
you are a waiting researcher,
marking in records the poems that will cling to me,
marking in records the poems in a misery
that your ears cannot hear,
and that my ears cannot forget.
I am alone with them;
and you are away.
Though you are not fertile,
these poems are our children,
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and, as we settle them into bed,
and as we bring them to rest,
you will kiss each one good night
and retire to my arms.
But you are not here with me.
Married Life
Phillip A. Ellis
We are the couple brought together, writing
these poems, with first one line, another line
turned on its head, the way an ox would plough
along one line then turn, return
the way it came. And, writing these, I wonder
whether such oxen ever felt a sense
of peace, and cooling muscles once the work
had ended, whether they found satisfaction,
relief, an oxen sense of purpose, almost
meaning to life. You need your rest? Then rest,
O ox: your work is well, and done, and finished.
But if these lines were lines of sonnets, maybe
iambic sonnets, not free verse, then maybe
your hands would hold the rhymes, all predetermined,
ready to broadcast through the furrows, scattered
by hand the way the seeds of other ages
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were scattered, sowed. And maybe, in these sonnets,
the sense would swell and fill the lines with shoots
so cleanly green and fresh, the earth itself
would seem to sing the sonnet's sensibility,
seem to announce the poetry itself,
with a wine's voice. I think the oxen dream
of such a voice, so sweet, so honeyed, rippling
encouragement when ploughing furrows, first
one way and then another, then, at end,
O ox: your work is well, and done, and finished.
And would you guide the ox that ploughs our land?
With me behind it, making sure the plough
itself will never turn, and leap and break
the line the furrow makes within the soilwe turn over. I know this, know that something
about us, making us as one together,
a singled team, that toils and works the soil
together, sowing seeds so shoots of green
can rise and grow to fruitful wheats we harvest,
with some to feed the oxen, some to sell
and some to sow again, until the end
when we will never sow again, our children
inheriting our toil, our legacy
until at last the line is dead, the soil
is also dead and barren, sun like one
who withers with a look of anger. Would you,
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knowing this, guide the ox at all? Or would
you take your leave and, breaking my heart, leave me
with fields unploughed, the oxen lorn, heartbroken
and yearning your fair voice? I can't believe
I'd want to live, or even shift the plough
along the furrows, only allow weeds
to rise and grow upon the fields until
they fell to entropy at last, the poems
forgotten, rotting, dust, and nothing more.
.................................
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Four Haiku
Rebeka Sra
lips of petal bride
kissed into purple berries
by springtime sunlight
+++
hovering white faith
silken prayers in the wind
cherry blossom
+++
twirling flowers
carry dreams of captive bird
on winged winds back
+++
metallic light-twang
pale Sun dressed in fumes, rolling
above the winter road
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A Glimpse of the Tragic Vision
Thomas Zimmerman
How serious it seems: the universe
so multiform, a zillion-petaled bloom
of clashing forces, ocean to immerse
and drown each spark of thought, enormous room
with furniture too big to reach to sit
and rest upon. So we assert ourselves:
heroic anagnorises will knit
our strands of fate. Some books upon our shelves
affirm it. Goat-song. Tragedy. To lives
to suffer. And to die. The art we make
portraying this ennobles us and gives
us bittersweet release. Rebirth. Just take
Osiris, Dionysus, Christ: the grief
of death and joy of life beget belief.
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MORTAL/MARTIAL/MARITAL WOUNDS
William John Watkins
First wounds go deepest
clear to the heart and that
thrill of mortality,
"God! I will not survive this,",
this Other,whose death
means more to me than mine!"
but even first wounds close,
and open, over time.
At first the bleeding is profuse,
the pumping of the heart is clearly seen,
life spurts and squirts
wetting everything within reach
before the dozen natural forces that congeal
blood into clot, scab, scar
begin their unseen irresistible work.
Sometimes, the wound's so wide
the flow so copious and continuous,
it dies of its own exuberance
before anything can be done to stabilize it.
Others knit and seem to heal,
mature toward scar and even skin again
until trauma breaks them open one time more.
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Always when it does, there is the hesitation,
the numbness that creeps slowly into pain
and the first weeping drops before the flow again,
sometimes with the first wound's thrill,
but never with the first's velocity.
Those that have gone all the way to scar a dozen times
split easiest from the unexpected blow,
bleed least, close quickest, do not turn
gangrenous, necrotic, terminal.
The broken open scar lasts longer,
means more than the superficial heal,
the surface close that leavesunsuspected abscesses,
cancerous pockets that open only to the grave.
Crosshatched with scars, we find
even wounds have their life cycles
and the years reveal
for all its pain, the wound,
however battered,
better than no wound at all.
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RESEARCHRESEARCHRESEARCHRESEARCH
PAPERSPAPERSPAPERSPAPERS
ANDANDANDAND
ESSAYSESSAYSESSAYSESSAYS
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PET TREES & DANCING BAY PONIES
Joseph Powell
Professor
Dept. of English
Central Washington University
As a college student, I remember a pivotal moment in a class taught by a novelist and
critic. He asked this question: Where do you go for truth--religion, science, philosophy,
novels, psychology? Of course, truth is contextual, personal, multi-layered, elusive, but its
an intriguing question, especially as a speculative topic in a literature class. I was a
psychology major at the time with the uneasy suspicion that psychologys answers were too
easily packaged. My response to the truth question for the last thirty years has been poetry
(though its clear to me now that literature operates on its own system of elisions, of tried and
tired metaphors as reductive as a syndrome). I feel that poetry has revealed more about the
exigencies of life and death, of hope and dread, of love and hate, of men and women, of race
and reconciliation, and the poignant articulation of what it means to inhabit and embrace a
world weve damaged. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that poetry can render men more
amiable, more generous and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapors of the little world of
self (28), and for me, this has been true. By writing poetry, I have been invited to see
beyond those dull vapors and the confines of the self. Wallace Stevens shows us that
perception is necessarily personal, and the apprehension of otherness is the beginning of
empathy, of global awareness, of humanity. For years poetry has been my way to understand
the human condition, especially its dark underside. Poetry has been a vital tool in shaping my
relationships, my delights and sorrows.
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Others have expressed their allegiances to this art form in similar and emphatic ways.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in hisBiographia Literaria when discussing Shakespeares
depth and energy of thought that Poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human
knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, and language (19). Matthew
Arnold is more guarded about the broad influence of poetry, but his estimation of its power is
similar: If it is said that Goethe professes to have in this way deeply influenced but a few
persons, and those persons poets, one may answer that he could have taken no better way to
secure, in the end, the ear of the world, for poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive,
and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance (161). Of course,
most high praise for poetry comes from poets who have felt its effects profoundly. However,
for most people in America, the word poetry cant even be said without an imaginary or
literal eye-roll, the suspicion that somebody is wearing pink underwear and might want you
to touch it. The prejudices against poetry have a variety of causes and effects often
pronounced by people who ought to be more amiably disposed to its charms and uses.
Unfortunately, poetry and sentimentality seem to be intertwined like those two snakes
suggesting a pharmacy. It is difficult to disassociate one from the other because fiction
writers and comics and other glib social commentators rather enjoy the embrace. In
nineteenth century America, there was a demand for sentimental poetry which made its way
into popular magazines and could be snipped out and put into a frame and hung on a kitchen
or an outhouse wall, into poetry anthologies, into inspirational books, into the emotional
lexicon of the age. In his weirdly eclectic collection of favorite passages from a multitude of
books, Ralph Woods includes in hisA Treasury of the Familiara large sampling of extremely
bad poetry which had tickled his fancy. He also includes fine poems by Keats, Blake,
Coleridge, and Gray, but generally the choices are blushingly sentimental. The two poems
chosen from Emily Dickinsons work are mediocre and project platitudes her startling mind
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was not prone to. Woods makes them worse by giving them his own sentimental titles. The
first is #919 in her Complete Poems:
If I can stop one Heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain
Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in Vain. (433)
He uses the 1924 version of this poem published in Martha Dickinson Bianchis The
Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Bianchi eliminated the capitals and added punctuation,
but Woods went even further in his editing. He titles it Helping The Handicapped, which
fatuously narrows the poem, and he changed unto to into and the his to its. The
poem has a fainting robin problem, is overly general, and presents a kind of stereotype that
Dickinsons poems generally avoid or at least grapple with more completely. In her
introduction to the book, Bianchi saw the fainting robin as a synonym for the universe
(viii) which makes the robin reference a little more likeable but still quite a stretch, but seeing
the robin as the handicapped is beyond absurd, besides misrepresenting Dickinsons work
and being patronizing to the handicapped. The second poem he calls Chartless which
cozily endorses a God and heaven that many of her other poems do not. This lack of taste in
a reader and editor who thought of himself as extremely well read, who wanted to preserve
his intellectual garden which he had tended over his lifetime, was probably common at the
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end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. And it is not uncommon today; for the
book is still available and has gone into three printings.
The sentimental public image of poetry includes both poems and poets. Thedemographics of poetry changed after the advent of Romanticism where peasant poets were
celebrated as natural geniuses who tapped an inner resource without much learning, and some
highly educated poets hankered for the uncomplicated emotional directness of peasant poets,
sentimentalizing their wise simplicity. In one sense, this was a good thing. It opened up
poetry to everyone, encouraged many people to find meaning by writing and reading poetry.
Yet there is a difference between those who use poetry to find or construct meaning and those
who use it merely to illustrate the trite blessings of conventionality, of the status quo, of
religious dogma. In a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Robert Frost described the act of
composing a meaningful poem: A poem is never a put-up job so to speak. It begins as a
lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to
begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness. It finds its thought and
succeeds, or doesnt find it and comes to nothing. It finds its thought or makes its thought. I
suppose it finds it lying around with others not so much to its purpose in a more or less full
mind. (22). The process he describes here is generally not how sentimental poets compose;
their language is merely a fulfillment of what they already know and feel. There is no
discovery, no thought hunting for its meaning; they generally are not driven by doubt, by
contradiction, by a need to understand their own complexities. Any writer worth reading
examines the conflict between received reality and the way the writer has experienced it.
Helen Vendler wrote that writers can betray themselves as artists, and their art itself by
papering over the actual with the agreeable or the socially enjoined (283), and novelists are
just as prone to this betrayal as poets are. Or perhaps poets are even less prone to it because
there isnt a commercial incentive to write the sentimental and stereotypical for readers who
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enjoy having their own prejudices confirmed. Poetry books rarely make much money for the
poet or the publisher unless they are written by famous people, and these books are generally
sentimental like the poems of Suzanne Somers or Jewel. Poets who write with an
inspirational or religious agenda may be able to find a publisher and an audience, but only
within a narrow group looking for that kind of validation of their own sensibilities.
Historically, the poets job was more elevated that it is today. Plato has Socrates say in
theIon that poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally
possessed (33); when they compose poems they are divinely inspired and lose their reason.
Similarly, in The Republic, he finds poetry a little dangerous because it feeds and waters the
passions instead of drying them up (51). He also says that poetry is a higher thing than
history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular (60). He excludes
poets from his ideal republic because they keep us in touch with the baser parts of our
psyches which reason cant quite conquer; poetry is thus a threat to a free and virtuous ideal
society. It is quite clear in The Republic that Platos grudge against the popularity of poetry
in Greek society is an attempt to make a little more room for philosophy and philosophers. In
our culture, both poets and philosophers have been banished to butler for the rich and famous
and are kept in slim padded rooms.
Although Albert Cook tells us in his edited version of Shelleys A Defense of Poetry
that this defense was a mode of argument practiced in the schools and given as assignments
to schoolboys, it is clear both from Philip Sidneys Defense and the tone of Shelleys that
both poets are concerned about the cultural lack of respect that poets and poetry gets. At the
beginning of his Defense, Sidney complains that the highest estimation of learning
[poetry] is fallen to be the laughingstock of children (5), and later in the essay, he says that
poetry. . .is among us thrown down to so ridiculous an estimation (8); he then goes on to
show how important poetry was to all incipient cultures, that it was the way each culture
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preserved its rituals and history, whether oral or written. He feels that poetry was the first
light-giver to ignorance and first nurse whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed
afterwards of tougher knowledge (4), and its present state of disregard and abuse is rather
ungrateful. In Sidneys day, there were religious critics who picked up Platos argument
about poetry corrupting its audience and turning people away from the Ideal or God. Sidney
felt compelled to respond, but assumptions about the virtuous aims of poetry have remained
fairly consistent from the Greeks to present. In his letter about The Divine Comedy, Dante
wrote to his patron that the role of poetry is to remove those living in this life from the state
of misery and lead them to the state of felicity (82). That is a tall order, but the use of poetry
as a teaching tool, as a vehicle for our edification and happiness, has a long history.
In the age of reason before romanticism, Shakespeare described the poets activity in A
Midsummer Nights Dream as:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. (5.1.7-12)
Here, the poet is a kind of inventive prophet who looks comprehensively at the world
and synthesizes what he sees until he creates something, a shape out of nothing, and gives it
local context. The modern reader would read fine coupled with frenzy as an oxymoron
which suggests an acquired and refined taste that controls the wildness inherent in
possibilities. However, in the 16th century, poetic frenzy was a common Neo-Platonic term
among poetry critics; in the introduction to Sidneys Defense, Lewis Soens notes that this
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frenzy is the poets ability to perceive supernatural and ideal truth (xx); it also has a
religious connotation and seems indistinguishable from the inspiration which created the
Psalms (xxii). It is a synonym for inspiration, but the sense of frenzy as temporary
madness was also current in the 16th century. For Shakespeare, the poet tries to align the
ineluctable need for religion with the baser facts of our existence; he tries to reconcile the
irreconcilable; he submits to the tension and yet must yoke the opposites together to create a
form, to give it a location and a name. The resultant poem is a marriage of alien forces
requiring a superior will and imagination. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that . . . the test of a
first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time,
and still retrain the ability to function (69). Shakespeare clearly assumes that its the poets
job to do this.
In the midst of the Romantic Movement, Shelley was enthusiastic about the role of
poetry in the world: It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers
of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words.
They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive
and all penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its
manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of
an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon
the present. . . . Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world (46). This is a
grandiose claim, and the works of superbly talented poets today which are full of the electric
life which burns within their words cast little light to mainstream culture; they are more
unacknowledged than ever, and the legislation they sponsor would hardly light a match.
Yet it is partly because of the Romantic revolution that poets become idle dreamers,
purple recorders of nature, self-absorbed fools who oversimplify and have a dull disdain for
the history of ideas, not to mention work itself. In The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel
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Hawthorne writes that the fishes went gleaming about, now turning up the sheen of a golden
side, and now vanishing into the shadows of the water, like the fanciful thoughts that coquet
with a poet in his dream (164); here poets are idlers beside a pond bewitched by
metaphorical fish as they slide in and out of view, not knowing which to choose because they
are all so lovely and golden. Hawthorne is doing the real work while the poets are dangling
grass stems from their teeth as they dream in the sun, (or the saloon in this case), afraid of
real fish in real ponds. His use of coquet is particularly revealing. It literally means a
flirtatious man, and its connotations suggest to trifle, dally. Its French root is derived
from coq suggesting a cock, and the Latin word coco meaning to cackle. Poets are
dreamers and triflers, dalliers who like to make a lot of noise with a sexual agenda.
This image has persisted among prose writers into the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries with various degrees of snide generalization and rather nasty caricature. InNew
Stories from the South, The Years Best, 2003, Mark Winegardner published a story called
Keegans Load that satirizes two poets: one is a fraud, the other is real, yet they are
both rather ridiculous. The story is a satire of academe, so one would expect most people in
the story to be frauds in some way. However, the poets are presented in the most grossly
stereotypical and lopsided terms. Of course, poets can be objects of ridicule like other people
involved in a somewhat odd vocation or occupation, but it is exceedingly rare to find even
casual references to poets in anything but derogatory terms. Furthermore, in these
persistently Romantic times, there is a need to separate the poet from the poem, to place the
value on the product and to de-emphasize the biographical oddities or social quirks of some
poets. I know this sounds New Critical, and knowing something about biography and
historical context is useful and sometimes necessary, but often this extra effort is used to
excuse bad writing.
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However, there are plenty of poets who still prefer to make sense, who see their work as
naming their local habitations, who struggle with aligning the spiritual world with the
mundane.
Winegardners poets can only write about themselves in the most stubbornly literal
way; their thinly veiled autobiography is self-indulgent and tasteless. His academic poets are
charlatans who are self-absorbed, have no sense of audience, no sense of cultural propriety,
are opportunists, and, like children, love the sounds of their own voices. He reserves his most
savage attack for the fraud poet who couldnt be more inane, and of the hundreds of
academic poets Ive known, he resembles none of them.
Winegardners fraud poet trembles at commencement while reciting his occasional
poem about a Charlotte shopping mall developer to whom we were giving an honorary
degree (287); his occasional poems were a blend of the earnestly literal with enough
mystical babble to kill an adult horse (301); his Poetry Reading Voice [was] stilted, self-
conscious, in awe of its own profundity (288); his books came out from a vanity press and
the last one from the press of a former student who printed it in his parents basement (290);
many of his students seemed honestly to mistake Keegans incoherence for depth (290);
Keegan tries to get the fiction writer to recommend his novel to her agent, finally gets his
student to publish his book, then tries to nominate himself for the Nobel prize; he reads poem
after poem at his third wifes funeral, saying some poems were written for her but were
recognized as coming from books that predated her, and he had copies of the poems that he
read at the funeral available after the service. A writer responds to Keegans novel by saying
I just blurted out the truth: that he needed to revise the whole thing, with an eye toward what
a stranger might find interesting (297). We get the feeling that this is Winegardners main
point and advice to all poets. However, the qualities of the fraud poet in Winegardners story
are only slightly inflated characteristics of those found in the American public consciousness.
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A fairly recent novel on the best seller list was Lief Engers Peace Like A Riverwhich had a
few compelling characters but generally pushed a romantic version of the West and was
occasionally infatuated with its own sentimentality. The young girl in the novel loves to
write rhymed verse and later becomes famous for it with s