Thirteen Blackbirds Poetry

My poem First Place in Goodreads Poetry Contest

2012-01-30T11:34:00.001-08:00

I have just been notified that my poem, "Signs of Impermanence" has won the Goodreads Poetry Contest for February. It will appear in the next official Goodreads newsletter going out to 5 million subscribers. I will post the link when it is out.

Finalist for "Best Book Award"

2012-01-07T12:00:00.000-08:00

My book, "What Looks Like an Elephant" has been shortlisted for "Best Poetry Book of 2011" by the Independent Literary Awards: one of five finalists, with the winner chosen by a panel of judges in mid-March. Click here: Indie Awards

Finalist in Poetry Competition

2011-11-03T13:00:00.000-07:00

So happy to hear today that my poem was selected as a finalist in the Aesthetica Magazine Creative Works Competition. The poem will be anthologized and is still in the running for the competition with the winner to be announced upon publication in December, 2011. Aesthetica is a hip British/US Journal with over 60,000 readership. Click here: Aesthetica

Unfastened

2011-10-07T08:18:00.001-07:00

.

Autumn wind, its pummel, barreling down streets,
carrying me. Leaves battling to hang on like small
children being led to bed, never unclenching.
What is there before them but uncertainty?
Are we that different, not willing to stay young?
In the early morning mixture of calm and rustle
I awaken alert to the unreal, piqued for the unnatural.
Something simple grows more significant, unseats
moorings, rips off hinges creaky from underuse.
Into amber wind, unreleasable numinous stream,
fly my seven soaring senses. Looking down, if only
to find where I once lived, little house, gray
shingles, so many closed windows.

.

Recent Poem Acceptances

2011-10-04T18:00:00.000-07:00

Chiron Review-- September, 2011
Valpareiso Review-- October, 2011
Cortland Review-- December, 2011
Evergreen Review-- Next Issue (early 2012)

Storm on a Sunday

2011-08-30T18:30:00.000-07:00

.
The ever-present impatiens
meld to one solid color, every photon
releasing either platinum or pink, and soon
the pink will be platinum. I too am molting color,
bleeding all wavelengths off into the periphery.
Where are the reds and purples and lime greens?
Aquamarine against lilted yellow sky?
The wind slips through cracks unbundled:
ineluctable soup of dream, an old dog barking
inaudibly with its own way of saying gray,
light gray, and the long perfect note of white.

.

Recent Reviews of "What Looks Like an Elephant"

2011-08-28T06:41:00.000-07:00

Here are a few links to some recent reviews of my new book, "What Looks Like an Elephant," Lummox Press, 2011. I'm also reprinting the Pedestal Magazine review below. Please click on any of below:

Pedestal Magazine Review, August, 2011

Poets and Artists Review, July, 2011

Boston Area Small Press Review, May, 2011

Interview: Poetic Asides

To order:
From Lummox Press

From Barnes and Noble
From Small Press Distribution

******************************************

WHAT LOOKS LIKE AN ELEPHANT
by Edward Nudelman

Review by Grady Harp in Poets and Artists:

Edward Nudelman is a poet of importance. It is likely that at some point in his career he will be at least short listed for Poet Laureate, so able is he to find those fragments of imagination, question, fear, doubt, and need for definition that poke temporary holes in our lives, leaving us with a choice of persistent uncertainty or a good guffaw as camouflage. Reading Nudelman’s succinct poems is not unlike studying cells through a microscope, something Nudelman likely has spent time doing in his day job of cancer research – watching what appear to be normal cells metamorphose into altered forms, becoming villains to life as our bodies know it. Perceptions and explanations, cognitive transient thoughts piqued by momentary changes, looking at the expected and finding paradoxes, and in the end putting all of these experiences in the finely carved frame of humor and the time erosion of memory – all of these aspects are in this collection of erudite yet warmly recognizable Gileads of poetry.

An aspect of Edward Nudelman’s poems that this reader finds particularly appealing is his ability to communicate a thought in a one page poem that minutes to hours to days later calls the reader back to re-think the message first accepted:

ARRIVAL

A flood light decants through a side window.
Who can tell a gnat from a mosquito, unless
blood is spilled? Outside, a dog wants in.

A bus pulls up to its last stop, a boy gets off.
It’s a long walk home; but he wants to walk.
Nobody here remembers the Vietnam war
but they will not easily forget this one.

An astronaut is returning from another planet.
It’s late, but everybody’s ears are piqued.
Everything’s looming, everything’s on hold,
including Wednesday evening’s bridge club.

Halfway through the night, a worried
mother finishes her second book in two nights.
The dog is allowed to come in and checked
for ticks. The stove is left on for heat.

Moods of such ignored magnitude find their way into most all of Nudelman’s poems – that and humor and other conundrums. In the very elegant NOCTURNAL we can excerpt a few lines (space here does not allow full recreation): ‘I’ve written a poem on the death of my father/ and another on the birth of my granddaughter./ Both poems contain the same words in different order./ And both possess the capacity to shock me.’……’Have you ever considered walking backwards to work?/ Watching your house grow smaller and smaller/ until finally you can’t remember the color of shutters./ Have you ever thought about remodeling your mind?’ And in the midst of humor and challenges to look twice at first perceptions he is also able to step back and write simply a pure poem:

LAST REQUESTS

A hawk’s view of a field in the last hour of light.
To understand limitless reach, a concept
withheld from those who are not birds.
To differentiate ocean from water, space
from enclosure, to stretch out over expanding
coldness and remain insulated, cradled.
To ride a tornado without feeling dizzy.
Slide down an elephant’s back.
Go to the dentist just for a thrill.
Disavow self-preservation and envy.
Denounce consumption, apathy, rancor.
To see both the end and the beginning
simultaneously, and embrace both.
To rest in hope, my own diminishing.

Edward Nudelman slyly takes a cupful of science and a dollop of humor and a soupçon of philosophy and stirs that and more into some of the finest poetry being written today. Science. Art. There really is no division.

Pedestal Review, August, 2011

The Pedestal Magazine > Current Issue > Reviews >Edward Nudelman's what looks like an elephant

what looks like an elephant
Edward Nudelman
Lummox Press
ISBN: 978-1-929878-91-8

Reviewer: Bob Grumman

Poets, like painters, thus unskill'd to trace
The naked nature and the living grace,
With gold and jewels cover every part,
And hide with ornaments their want of Art.
True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.

So what if I'm the ten thousandth writer to quote the above passage from Pope's "An Essay on Criticism." So what if he, the epitome of a formal poet, would not seem, on the surface, to have much in common with Edward Nudelman, whose poems in what looks like an elephant don't even rhyme. I happen very much to admire the Pope passage. I also believe Nudelman has more in common with Pope than he doesn't, in spite of his not being the technician Pope (brilliantly) was.

Not that I'm saying Nudelman, or any other free-verse practitioner (as I occasionally am myself), just tosses words together. I love what he achieves with his conjs in the first stanza of his "Shape of Sorrow":

Conjunction of stars
and cards
conjured from far-flung
worlds of chance

And all those r-consonances, and the "ar"-rhymes, how the poem then integrates the sound of the s in "measured" and the c in "oceans”! While I feel that Pope always brings his poems' content up to the level of their technique, I feel that Nudelman, on the other hand, manages to elevate his technique to match his content.

I think what the two poets mainly have in common is a sharp, highly rational understanding of human beings as well as a precise ability to communicate that to their readers, with only the subtlest of ornamentation, albeit Pope is a lot less sympathetic to the people he depicts than is Nudelman. I can't think where, for example, Pope ever directly empathized with anyone as desolated by life as the subject in "Shape of Sorrow," who has:

…measured
the distance and found
oceans between you
and relief

You've argued away
all good in a last threshing
of meaning, settled
for a darker hope
and a deeper pit

and every reason
to crawl into.

Okay, maybe I've overdone the Pope/Nudelman comparison. Perhaps it's just the fact that the preceding poem, for example, seems to so exactly exemplify "What oft was…felt rather than thought, but ne'er so well express'd; Something whose truth convinced at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind" that I couldn’t resist mining the comparison. But Nudelman, like Pope, is uniquely able to milk commonplace subject matter, as when treating the domestic relationship in "Privileges," which begins, "She meant to tell me yesterday that I would be losing/ some privileges. I am not being told on the way out/ the door, so I can brood on the consequences as I walk…to my workplace."

Perhaps I’m stretching again: Pope turned the quotidian into something epic in The Rape of a Lock, if only comically; In “Privileges,” Nudelman practices a contemporary matter-of-factness. Pope's wit is at the expense of others, Nudelman's at his own. I like the Pope passage too much to drop my comparison completely. Plus: contrasts are as revealing as comparisons!

But I'm going to dismiss Pope now in order to focus entirely on Nudelman. It's no accident that the title of his collection concerns the elephant of the blind men unable to coherently make a whole of it, for a major theme of the collection is the difficulty—sometimes laughable, sometimes deplorable, but sometimes wonderful—of pinning down existence or consummately defining it. Nudelman's background as a biologist widely published in his field (cancer research) informs and strongly affects his poetry, distinguishing it from the work of most of his contemporaries. "Linear Equations,” his book's introductory piece, may be as good as any of his poems, universally integrating the notions of fusion and fission, as well as what might be called a certain Macbethianism:

Graph the sun's fall as a function of a gnat's perception
of time. Are there only a hundred suns in a gnat's life?

. . .

Graph all the molecules in the universe
as a function of size: its integral is somewhere between
one and infinity, but not the middle number.

And there's the final line: "You should be dead, but you aren't. Graph that." Variations on this outlook are present in several other poems, including the book's final piece, "Last Requests," which ends, "To rest in hope, my own diminishing” (i.e., the diminishing of both his hope and himself), and an earlier piece, "Turtle Soup," which concludes:

Sometimes at night I see shell-less turtles
massing on the edge of my bed;
shriveled heads and wrinkled bodies
reminding me of what's to come.

(Note: this sort of (highly effective) lunge into surrealism/dream-vividness is common in Nudelman's work.)

Nudelman can be happy, too, as in "Streaming," when he depicts himself splicing a gene: "…going on momentum/ and the lure of giddy surprise./ I'm in a biochemical sweep/ across an unchartered cosmos." And later in the same poem:

I'm air, water, fire and spirit.
I can't hear the pump whine.
I can't feel my tired feet.
I can't even imagine failure.

(Note: that's just how I felt at one point as a critic while writing this!)

Nudelman can lyrically transcend any laboratory, too, as is evidenced in "Gorilla Flower":

A breach reveals a purplish bud
as pristine as the snow surrounding it.
Maybe it landed in August, or fell off
an iris gliding across four backyards.
It might have dropped from a bird's
feather or it could have been there all
along, beating its pretty regal chest
in the vast white jungle, just as you do
when only the impossible matters
and only the impossible happens.

In his "Ephemeral," he probably reaches the peak of his lyrical concern with mortality and whatever it is for which we search in this life:

The garden's lamp-lit outline
beckons. Air chills as flowers
conspire against inevitability.
Is it June or winter beginning?
What is wind but a carrier?
Whether lavender or icy flecks,
ten years, twenty years, a hundred
life-times crammed onto a leaf's back.
Just as these roses brighten,
trillium bend over and drop off.
Aren't the bees after just one thing?
So too, we're here nosing
for something sweet, a heavy
remnant, a single drop of nectar
as volatile, as permanent.

I could easily quote ten or twenty more specimens of this poet's work, but I think I've quoted enough. For more of Nudelman, you'll have to buy his book. It won't disappoint you.

.

New Appearances/Poetry Journals

2011-08-02T04:56:00.000-07:00

Poems accepted this last month into three poetry journals comprising first appearances for me:

Chiron Poetry Review
Criterion Poetry Review
Valparaiso Poetry Review

Review of My Book in "Poets and Artists"

2011-07-26T15:21:00.000-07:00

Review appears in July issue of Poets and Artists (online). Click HERE for direct link.

'Reasonable Doubt: Now bring on the ghosts.' The world of Edward Nudelman, July 22, 2011
By Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States)

Edward Nudelman
Publisher: Lummox Press (To order: click here
PubDate: 6/27/2011
ISBN: 9781929878918
Binding: PAPERBACK, perfect-bound, glossy color covers
Price: $15.00
Pages: 114

Edward Nudelman is a poet of importance. It is likely that at some point in his career he will be at least short listed for Poet Laureate, so able is he to find those fragments of imagination, question, fear, doubt, and need for definition that poke temporary holes in our lives, leaving us with a choice of persistent uncertainty or a good guffaw as camouflage. Reading Nudelman's succinct poems is not unlike studying cells through a microscope, something Nudelman likely has spent time doing in his day job of cancer research - watching what appear to be normal cells metamorphose into altered forms, becoming villains to life as our bodies know it. Perceptions and explanations, cognitive transient thoughts piqued by momentary changes, looking at the expected and finding paradoxes, and in the end putting all of these experiences in the finely carved frame of humor and the time erosion of memory - all of these aspects are in this collection of erudite yet warmly recognizable Gileads of poetry.

An aspect of Edward Nudelman's poems that this reader finds particularly appealing is his ability to communicate a thought in a one page poem that minutes to hours to days later calls the reader back to re-think the message first accepted:

ARRIVAL

A flood light decants through a side window.
Who can tell a gnat from a mosquito, unless
blood is spilled? Outside, a dog wants in.

A bus pulls up to its last stop, a boy gets off.
It's a long walk home; but he wants to walk.
Nobody here remembers the Vietnam war
but they will not easily forget this one.

An astronaut is returning from another planet.
It's late, but everybody's ears are piqued.
Everything's looming, everything's on hold,
including Wednesday evening's bridge club.

Halfway through the night, a worried
mother finishes her second book in two nights.
The dog is allowed to come in and checked
for ticks. The stove is left on for heat.

Moods of such ignored magnitude find their way into most all of Nudelman's poems - that and humor and other conundrums. In the very elegant NOCTURNAL we can excerpt a few lines (space here does not allow full recreation): 'I've written a poem on the death of my father/ and another on the birth of my granddaughter./ Both poems contain the same words in different order./ And both possess the capacity to shock me.'......'Have you ever considered walking backwards to work?/ Watching your house grow smaller and smaller/ until finally you can't remember the color of shutters./ Have you ever thought about remodeling your mind?' And in the midst of humor and challenges to look twice at first perceptions he is also able to step back and write simply a pure poem:

LAST REQUESTS

A hawk's view of a field in the last hour of light.
To understand limitless reach, a concept
withheld from those who are not birds.
To differentiate ocean from water, space
from enclosure, to stretch out over expanding
coldness and remain insulated, cradled.
To ride a tornado without feeling dizzy.
Slide down an elephant's back.
Go to the dentist just for a thrill.
Disavow self-preservation and envy.
Denounce consumption, apathy, rancor.
To see both the end and the beginning
simultaneously, and embrace both.
To rest in hope, my own diminishing.

Edward Nudelman slyly takes a cupful of science and a dollop of humor and a soupçon of philosophy and stirs that and more into some of the finest poetry being written today. Science. Art. There really is no division. Grady Harp, July 11

Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project Summer Poetry Institute for Educators 2011

2011-06-14T17:18:00.000-07:00

Here is the schedule for the best five days you'll ever spend in the poetry world:

LINK FOR CONTACT INFO: click here

Favorite Poem Project Summer Poetry Institute for Educators 2011

IMPORTANT NOTE: the readings and seminars by the stellar poets in the project are open to the public (Robert Pinsky,Louise Glück, Heather McHugh, Carl Phillips and Maggie Dietz) -- but not the discussions, lesson developments, all the stuff the teacher-participants do, so if you're not involved formally, you can still drop by for these amazing readings!

S C H E D U L E O F E V E N T S

All events will take place in either Boston University’s Sargent College (SAR), 635 Commonwealth Avenue, or in the School of Education (SED), around the corner at 2 Silber Way. Optional continental breakfast will be offered each morning in the lobby of the SED beginning at 8:15 a.m.

Room Assignments for Discussion Groups:

Lisa Llorente’s group (elementary), SED 259  Lee Indrisano’s group (middle school), SED 250
Karen Harris’s group (high school), SAR 101  Susan Moran’s group (high school), SED 709

MONDAY, JULY 11

8:15 a.m – 9:00 a.m. SED Lobby
Continental Breakfast & Coffee

9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. SAR 101
Welcome and Introduction:
Robert Pinsky

10:00 – 10:20 a.m. Facilities Tour

10:20 a.m. – 10:40 a.m.
Morning Break

10:40 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. SAR 101
Favorite Poem Video Screening
and Discussion with Maggie Dietz

12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Lunch Break

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Introductory Discussion Groups

2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m. SAR 101
Seminar with Carl Phillips

3:20 p.m. – 3:45 p.m.
Afternoon Break

3:45 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. SAR 101
Poetry Reading: Carl Phillips

4:30 – 6:00 p.m. SED Lobby
Welcome wine & cheese

TUESDAY, JULY 12

8:15 a.m – 9:00 a.m. SED Lobby
Continental Breakfast & Coffee

9:00 a.m. – 10:20 a.m.
Discussion/Lesson Development

10:20 a.m. – 10:40 a.m.
Morning Break

10:40 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. SAR 101
Seminar with Maggie Dietz

12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Lunch Break

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Discussion/Lesson Development

2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m. SAR 101
Seminar with Heather McHugh

3:20 p.m. – 3:45 p.m.
Afternoon Break

3:45 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. SAR 101
Poetry Reading: Heather McHugh & Maggie Dietz

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13

8:15 a.m – 9:00 a.m. SED Lobby
Continental Breakfast & Coffee

9:00 a.m. – 10:20 a.m.
Discussion/Lesson Development

10:20 a.m. – 10:40 a.m.
Morning Break

10:40 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. SAR 101
Seminar with Robert Pinsky

12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Lunch Break

1:00 – 2:00
Discussion/Lesson Development

2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m. SAR 101
Seminar with Louise Glück

3:20 p.m. – 3:45 p.m.
Afternoon Break

3:45 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Poetry Reading: Louise Glück
& Robert Pinsky
THURSDAY, JULY 14

8:15 a.m – 9:00 a.m. SED Lobby
Continental Breakfast & Coffee

9:00 – 10:00
Wrap-up Q&A/Discussion

10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Discussion/Lesson Development

12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Lunch Break
**Box Lunch Provided**

1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Discussion/Lesson Development

FRIDAY, JULY 15

8:15 a.m – 9:00 a.m. SED Lobby
Continental Breakfast & Coffee

9:00 – 10:30 SAR 101
Lesson Plan Presentations

10:30 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.
Morning Break

10:45 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. SAR 101
Teachers’ Favorite Poem Reading/
Evaluations

Review of My Book in Boston Small Press

2011-05-20T05:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to a review of my book in Boston Area Small Press, a great site for New England poets (Ibbetson Street Press, Doug Holder). Find it here by scrolling down about halfway: click here>

"Whose Cries Are Not Music," A Review and Interview with Linda Benninghoff

2011-05-15T12:15:00.000-07:00

“Whose Cries Are Not Music” by Linda Benninghoff , Trade Paper, 6X9 . Lummox Press (PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733-5301)  108 pages; ISBN: 978-1-929878-95-6 Publishing Date: Feb. 2011 TO ORDER: SEE VERY END OF THIS ARTICLE

In Linda Benninghgoff’s first major collection, “Whose Cries Are Not Music,” we find a collection of poems cohesively assembled from her experience, spanning rivers of varying topics and ideas with facile dexterity. I found myself reading each section and not wanting to stop, to be led into her rooms of picturesque silence, cries of warning and fear, and finally, to be unhinged by poetry that relates on many levels.

If I had to typify these poems, I’d say they try to elevate the mystery of our finitude through shared events in both nature and human experience, a kind of confrontation that only poetry does best, and well-aided by her unadorned speech which carries enough heat to power through this tough territory. There is little doubt Benninghoff’s poems aim to bring the abstract into focus, as though a human eye were trying to understand what only a bird can see.

In the book’s opening section there are poems about her mother, going for chemo, deer, rest vs. unrest, rain , sickness, the sea, and so on. And throughout these early poems, we find a palpable sorrow that comes from the speaker’s awareness of mortality. This is culminated in the poem ‘Do The Dead?” which is really a cleverly-constructed series of open-ended questions. “Do the dead stop and rest, or do they continue?” the speaker asks, as figuratively posed as it is honest and blunt. And I find this to be a general theme in the book, one that seems to progress throughout the book: from sorrow and pain through acceptance, and then finally hope. This is typified in the spare poem, “Rain” which begins:

Count rain on my fingers?
It is too fine,
like each column of pain-

and ends with a superb image of a swan on a lake, coming up after a dunk, ‘her neck arched/orange bill shining,’ as if to say, how effortless and beautiful is this overcoming.

Benninghoff draws on a rich, yet otherwise ‘ordinary’ vocabulary in her descriptions (read this as compliment!). She doesn’t overwrite, and she doesn’t over-describe. Yet she places the reader in the midst of a scene and then allows the logistics and parameters of the images to speak further into her developing themes of sorrow and isolation. There is considerable coverage in this collection given to past episodes, impressions and life-stories which are no doubt told in autobiographical form. Nowhere is this more evident than in the poems devoted to her father, and one entitled “Evening With My Father" especially impressed me with its dichotomy presented: the quest for love and belonging, alongside the stark reality of separation. The poem begins:

Last Tuesday I played tennis with him.
We slapped balls easily.
His voice sounded friendly,
As if we had done more
than face each other
strangers across newspapers...

Here is a familiar theme which Benninghoff develops not as an argument for advancing communication or sensitivity-training, but as a catalyst for yearning and remembrance. Thus, the ambiguity of the situation is supplanted by the stark images contrasting through time, and the poem succeeds in providing an underpinning for love and regard in the midst of bewilderment, typified in this taught stanza:

We were not quite friends that night,
but I thought of the blue room,
where I was six or seven
and my father told me stories
of salmon caught in California rivers
and bear fur left on trees...

For Benninghoff, loss is seen as something not to be ignored. Not stoicism, but an opportunity to observe and remember. To take in what has transpired for what it is, and to take on the difficult task of sorting out the collateral damage.

But alongside grappling with conflict comes insight and understanding, a finer focus which these poems seem to provide. In the title-poem, “Whose Cries Are Not Music,” we find the speaker giving ear to the sounds of geese,

the cry of wild birds
who can make only one sound
and put into that sound
wing-beat, empty marshes
clouds and their quest
for home.

But the poem develops and slightly turns, as the speaker remarks on these evocative sounds which remind her of a child who has no words, just an inconsolable cry, ‘as if everything must begin in pain.” And the poem then becomes confessional in an unpretentious way, and we are led into a solemn recognition of the value of pain, insofar as it can enlighten:

I can spend my whole life
healing it,
but find in the end
that love itself contains pain
though I do not give up feeling it…

The poems in this collection, though varied and presenting a wide spectrum of impressions and images, nevertheless point the reader toward a common theme. Thus Benninghoff, in a book which contains some poems written many years ago and herewith reworked, makes her case for the solemnity of life, the value in living well and the beauty, if not triumph, of dying well.

From “In Dying” referring to the ‘piebald hills’ where only birds sing praise, we find this made plain:

“Don’t I always turn back
To you when I am ill
Or alone,
Like a dancer remembering
The dance?
The Husk comes away from the seeed.
Don’t we in dying
Reveal who we are.

Linda Benninghoff’’s “Whose Cries Are Not Music” is not only a collection of poems that will offer comfort to the bereaved and a connection to anyone who has suffered through a great loss, but perhaps also raise up the spirit of the most inured amongst us to look beyond darkness into flickering light.

A FEW QUESTIONS FOR LINDA:

1. What do you like to do when you’re not writing poems? What interests you? What delights you?

I live in back of a state park and I like walking through there, noticing the wildlife, the chipmunks, rabbits, deer and birds. I like to feed the birds in winter, and learned the names for the different birds that came to the feeder: the junco, the tufted titmouse, the chickadee, the cardinal, the jay. We also have hummingbirds. I love rabbits, and when they start coming to my yard in spring, I feel in the presence of something wonderful, something spiritual.

I walk, I swim. I used to go windsurfing before I had a hernia operation and I used to go sailing. Being part of the ocean is important for me. Currently I live near the Long Island Sound. When I lived in Baltimore I sought out the Chesapeake to go swimming in. I delight in nature. I like to do nature photography, though I haven’t gotten that many great photos. I have photos of deer and photos of a chipmunk—but the chipmunk is too small to see.

2. When did you start writing poetry? When did you feel it was something you wanted to do seriously, and what went into that equation?

I started writing poetry at about age 17 or 18 when I was introduced to free verse. At this time I took a course with Jean Valentine, who introduced me to Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and poets in the anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us. I had written rhyme before but now began writing free verse prolifically. I didn’t try to get published. I was really interested in writing fiction. I spent many years writing novels and short stories. I didn’t feel they were good enough to publish. I didn’t get good feedback on the fiction from teachers and professors and friends, as I did on the poetry. I began publishing some poetry and fiction in a small magazine in Philadelphia when I was close to 40 years old. Then I began attending the Long Island Poetry Collective and sending my poems out.

The feedback I was getting on my poetry turned me around—it was so much better than what I got on my fiction. I sent to The Missouri Review and the online editor there told me they were talking of nothing but my poetry. I didn’t have a problem publishing poetry, not like with the fiction. It was then, with the encouragement of some friends, that I went into poetry seriously, although I’d been writing it most of my life.

3. What kind of poetry do you read? Which poets set you on fire?

My favorite poet is Theodore Roethke, a teacher introduced me to him when I was 14. At that age I was too young to appreciate him, but when I grew older I appreciated the language, the imagination and feeling. My favorite poem was “The Lost Son.” I also, for a period, read Emily Dickinson regularly every night. I review contemporary poets and have come across some I really love: Penelope Schott, whose skill with language is amazing. I also love Julie L. Moore, for her appreciation of nature and her insight into the human spirit. I also like Karynna McGlynn—I think I spelled her name properly. Her language is something I strive to reach but can’t.

4. How do you write a poem?

I write my poetry mostly haphazardly. I will sit down and begin to write without knowing what I am going to write about. A word or a phrase comes into my mind. Often the words are about the reverence I have for nature. Sometimes they are about my close friend Mary. I don’t know really know where I’m going with the poems, but, almost magically, they come out well. Sometimes my family and the people closest to me don’t understand them, but sometimes they do. The hardest ones get published, despite my family’s criticisms. I want to emphasize that this not a deliberate, planned, conscious method of creation. It is totally unconscious.

5. What do you want your poetry to accomplish?

I didn't plan to accomplish anything with my book; I was just
writing poetry to express my feelings. Maybe I wanted to immortalize
some moments, some places in nature and some people. I think I wanted to provide some understanding of what it is to feel lonely or to suffer a loss. Poets have done this before. Thomas Hardy did it, in a great way. Yet every poet is different. Hardy is melancholy. I am not--nor self-pitying. In the last section of the book I look at death as a sort of crossing over. This is the "dream" we are living, and death is the "dream" to come.

6. Tell us a little about the effort that went into this book? How long did it take to put the manuscript together? What were areas of difficulty for you in the process? Areas of fulfillment?

My initial manuscript was not clear and got rejected. A poet I knew read the manuscript and pointed out the sections of the manuscript that were not clear and suggested adding poems and changing section headings. Now it is so clear that even a person who does not read a lot of poetry can understand it. I think making it clear so even the average reader could understand it was the most fulfilling part of the venture for me.

7. This is a collection of poems full of feeling, and many of the poems riff off of elements of the senses and derivative impulses from nature, perceptions of cold, the sea, the snow, birds, and of course, death. Tell us a little about what you’re trying to do here, how allusion to the physical points toward and elicits feelings of pain, loss, loneliness, suffering.

I have always felt my thoughts echoed in nature, when I am walking or sitting by a window looking at the trees and the yard. I think this is a notion common to Romantic poetry—the idea that nature reflects our feelings—but I, a modern poet, have carried it on. The poem “Canada Geese” has been characterized by some of my friends as a poem about depression. Other of my poems about the physical world offer hope: “Whose Cries Are Not Music” offers hope. Many of my early poems were very hopeful, but as I grew older the poems began to voice loss. The physical world is still there accompanying, beside me. Rabbits seem to be emissaries from a better world, bearing good tidings. The deer bring beauty, but as I grow older and begin to write about them, it is endangered beauty.

8. The book opens with a magnificent poem entitled, “Snowy Winter,” where the speaker talks with an unidentified person wherein a confidence and trust has obviously been sewn. The poem deals with the longing for underpinnings, rest, and I suppose, a way to identify with one’s own struggles as well as enter in to the difficulties of those we love. In the poem we find the following lovely closing stanza:

The creamy snow extends even to the water,
Where there are wrinkles and marks
-frozen over
from Lloyd to Cold Spring Harbor.
The curving gulls
keep saying the words you spoke,
yet there is no food for them here.
They rest in the empty air
hungry like me,
as I search
for the prints of winter birds.

What interests me in this poem is the playing out of personal pathos in the context of a dialog, or at least, the poem deliberately wants to include the un-named party as a participant or witness in the speaker’s travail. Please tell us what you mean by, ‘The curving gulls keep saying the words you spoke, yet there is no food for them here.” Do the ‘words’ refer back to an early statement in the poem about ‘worrying about the future,’ and how much of the poem and the book turns on this notion of trying to sort out and prepare for what is to come?

Yes, the words about my friend taking care of me, both in a physical and emotional sense, that gave me such a sense of security so that I didn’t have to worry about the future, are spoken by the curving gulls when I am separated from her. I keep trying to return to that moment of trust, but life has carried us away from each other. It is portrayed in the poem as neither of our fault, just something that happened. The gulls are hungry for food, I am hungry for the closeness I had with that person, my friend. This is a poem about loss and also loneliness. I think I made the speaker’s loneliness palpable with the snow that extends even to the water—the coldness of nature in this case, which reflects the speaker’s own inner emptiness. And the gulls rest in “empty air.”

9. Are you working on another collection of poems? Do you have a theme for your next manuscript?

I started working on a chapbook with poems that I did from Molly Fisk’s poem a day class. A lot of these are poems about the seasons, winter going into spring, and spring actually happening. People have told me the new poems are lighter, and I think they end with more hope than Whose Cries Are Not Music. That is one of the reasons that I want to put them out, because they provide some hope that answers some of the questions raised by the longer book. They do not go into as much depth, however, and are mainly nature poems.

10. If you could give any advice to young, aspiring poets, what would it be?

Write for yourself and read. A lot of my friends who want to write don’t read, and that is the most important thing. If you don’t like the poetry you are reading, find poems that help you find yourself. If you write to express your feelings: that’s okay, that’s like me; if you write to paint a situation, an injustice, or a history, that’s okay too. Write as often as you can and don’t lose the habit. Write a lot before you try to publish.

HOW TO ORDER LINDA'S BOOK:

Just click on this direct link to her order page at Lummox Press:

LUMMOX PRESS ORDER PAGE

IMPORTANT LINKS

2011-03-13T06:27:00.000-07:00

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My Youtube Channel with promo videos for my new book: click here While there, please subscribe, more videos to follow

To order, "What Looks Like an Elephant" ($15) go to my Ordering Page at Lummox Press: click here

Please find links to my recorded poems on right hand panel of this blog. Let me know what you think! I'm always interested in your responses!

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What looks like an elephant

2011-03-03T15:24:00.000-08:00

...not a question, but the title of my first full-length poetry book, which I'm excited to announce is in production at Lummox Press, with a scheduled released date in late March. The book contains over 80 poems dealing with ambiguities and paradoxes in experience, especially how impressions of certainty and doubt affect everyday life. I've tried to call on influences in my vocation (I am a cancer research scientist in my other life) as well as child and adolescent memories, and hopefully mixed in some humor and poetic metaphor.

Great Pre-Order Offer:
Lummox Press has graciously provided for a pre-sale discount of 20% off the list price, which is $15. Not bad for over 110 pages, including a nice, tight, 'perfect-bound' binding, glossy color covers and an introduction by April Ossmann, former director of Alice James Books. And for a limited time, we're offering author-inscribed copies at no additional cost (publisher will follow-up advance orders by email). You can easily order by going to the Lummox Press website, where my ordering page may be found:

To order: click here

Thank you sincerely for considering my work. Edward Nudelman, Beverly, MA. And here are a few examples from the book:

Turtle Soup

I. Anecdotal/apocryphal

Turtles, like madmen and walnuts,
have hard shells that hide soft heads.
Have you ever seen a turtle smile?
Turtles hum under a chitinous shroud.
Baby turtles assemble in lines on logs.
Adult turtles rarely move, except to eat.
Our friend’s twenty-year old turtle
has spent two decades floating
in a metal pan, sleeping every other year.

II. Experiential/metaphorical

I was walking my dog along a pond
when she bolted in for a swim. An alarmed
passerby scolded me with the story
of a snapping turtle that pulled her miniature
poodle under. My dog weighed over sixty
pounds, but the thought of her in turtle jaws
so unnerved me, I could barely respond.
Sometimes at night I see shell-less turtles
massing on the edge of my bed;
shriveled heads and wrinkled bodies
reminding me of what’s to come.

Fizzle

Leave the grand hall, arms
at your side, head down and to one side,
knowing all was said that needed to be said.
Let the rain glide down your back.
Let people move aside and spirits step forward,
vanity and praise devour themselves.
All striving and hustle, let fizzle to dust.
You might have wanted more, or felt
you earned more; but now you lay it all down
in one small, unadorned stanza, without glitter.
Let poets howl. Let them roar. The car is cold
and the windshield weeps from the inside,
your writing hand’s stuck on the shift.

******************

Praise for "What Looks Like an Elephant":

BLURBS (4)

1
Edward Nudelman’s delicious use of math and science language and metaphors combined with his sense of humor and seemingly limitless curiosity; his capacity to surprise the reader with juxtapositions and acute observations: “His face leans into the cold window,/nostrils pressed against glass leaving/transient marks with every expiration”(from On the T, Near Park Street); and the sheer loveliness of so many lines: “fish released deep into gray sea with krill,/blind and anaerobic, nothing to breathe/but sheer grace through green gills” (from The Quitter), make this a book to re-read, to share with friends and family, and to return to for inspiration, discovery, comfort, and fun.
−April Ossmann
Poet, independent editor, and former director of Alice James Books.

2
Few poets can steer between generosity and insight or aphorism and wonder with ease, but Edward Nuddleman's book is one of those rare books. He makes the intangible tangible. He turns afterthought into deep thought. Above all, he unpacks certainties into reasonable doubts. This is a keen book and a special one.
−David Bespiel, Poet, The Book of Men and Women, 2009 (Named 'Best Poetry of the Year' by The Poetry Foundation), past poetry reviewer Washington Post, NY Times.

3
Edward Nudelman’s poetry revitalizes life. Time passes quickly but reading these poems is to be awakened alive in the moment.
−Grace Cavalieri
Water on the Sun, Bordighera Poetry Award, Pen Center Best Book List

4
Edward Nudelman’s poems remind me of electrical outlets. You put your finger in one, it gives off a jolt; you move onto the next one. They’re about machines, shadows, visions, calculations, nuts, babies, fingernails, ghosts, ‘buzzing warnings’ and the surprisingly subtle difference between being on and off. In short, they’re philosophical but enjoyable. I recommend the book.”
-Aaron Belz, PhD
Poet, professor (English); Lovely, Raspberry. Persea Books. 2010. The Bird Hoverer. BlazeVOX books. 2007. Plausible worlds. Observable Books. 2005.

BIO

Edward Nudelman’s first book of poetry, "Night Fires," was a semifinalist for the Journal Award ("The Wheeler Prize) given by OSU Press in 2009. "Night Fires" was published by Pudding House Publications in 2009. "Casting the Nines," an anthology of nine poets with nine poems (PHP, 2009) honored Nudelman as one of nine selected poets contributing poems. He received a Pushcart Nomination in 2009. Some of his poems have been recently published in Poets and Artists (Oranges and Sardines), Ampersand, Syntax, The Atlanta Review, OCHO, Mipoesias, Plainsongs, Tears in the Fence, fourW, Floating Bridge Press, The Orange Room Review, The Penwood Review, The White Leaf Review, Adagio Verse Quarterly, and others. Nudelman is a noted cancer research biologist with over 60 published papers in top-tier journals. He has published two widely read books on an American illustrator, Jessie Willcox Smith (Pelican Publishing, 1989, 1990). A native of Seattle, Nudelman is currently working and living just north of Boston with his wife, Susan, and their Golden Retriever, Sofie

Two New Poems in Chiron Review

2011-02-26T13:18:00.000-08:00

I'm really excited to receive word that two of my poems have been accepted into Chiron Review, a great print journal which has published many, many poets greater than myself (including Charles Bukowski). They happened to choose the poem which has the line taken for my title in my upcoming book, "What Looks Like an Elephant." Poems accepted: "Linear Equations" and "Another List of Intangibles." Just sent first set of proofs for book back to Lummox Press. We're nearing the finish line!

My First Full Length Poetry Book to be Published by Lummox Press

2010-11-01T05:29:00.000-07:00

100 pages, perfect bound. About 85-90 poems. Released early 2011. The publisher will offer signed copies as well. Look for more details as we get closer to launch date.

Featured in Poets and Artists

2010-07-31T04:24:00.000-07:00

Two new poems, a mug shot, and even an author's brief explication in the new issue of POETS AND ARTISTS. Just click here: Poets and Artists (p.38)

Two New Poems in Mipoesias Journal

2010-07-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

On page 7: [click here]

Poem in Poets and Artists

2010-02-19T10:32:00.000-08:00

Poem just published in Poets and Artists (Oranges and Sardines).
Page 126
Find it here: Poets and Artists

"Sea Trails," by Pris Campbell, A Review

2009-11-16T07:38:00.000-08:00

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This is the latest installment in the "Poet Series," a Thirteen Blackbirds feature which presents contemporary poets, their work and impact on the poetry scene. To view all articles in the "Poet Series," just click on the button in the right column at Thirteen Blackbirds.

Pris Campbell’s new book, Sea Trails, is a visual and evocative account of a six-month adventure down the Atlantic coast in a sailboat retelling in poetry what prose could never accomplish. Published by Lummox Press in 2009 (100pp, perfect bound, glossy color covers), the book counterpoints original sea-logs with verse constructed years later. “This wasn’t a traditional poetry book,” Pris confesses, as she recounts pulling together log notes 30 years after the fact. In the foreword, she recalls the ambivalence and irony of taking to sea with a man referred to as R, in the throes of a failing relationship. The poems found in Sea Trails are every bit a part of this tenuous sway in and out of hope and sorrow as they are a sweeping canvass of sea life and adventure. In “Small Craft Advisories,” a poem that describes the peril of an impending storm, it’s not hard to see this push-pull, especially in the closing two lines: “Our boat peels back her hull, reveals inner scars./ My heart laid open, she already knows mine.”

Sea Trails succeeds in giving the author a rare view of two worlds, coincident, colliding and told through one voice. You get the feeling you’re on the boat in rough waters, or lazily creeping into a harbor at dawn. But you also find commonality in shared experience, the nadir of triumph alongside the growing sense of something coming to an end. It’s this thread of sadness mixed into the experience of being at sea that gives the poems life as well as originality. Nowhere is this more clear than in the tiny poem “Crabbing,” which so aptly portrays in sparse verse and metaphor the dysfunctional relationship of the two mariners:

Crabbing

He still catches me
With the same old line,
The worn bait.
Just as I see light,
He nets me again.

Is Sea Trails to be thought of as a catharsis? Perhaps. There is a dominant theme here of lost love, and the author readily admits to the reader that she wasn’t entirely ‘out of love” at the time of setting sail. Yet, a closer reading of the poems provides ample evidence of personal triumph and overcoming. In “Sea Speak,” we have a poem that openly confesses what the author has learned from the sea: "how to lay down a trot line", "haul hungry crabs"; "that fish gasp" and "sea grass cries," and that "heaven is right here in these blue waters." More importantly, to give credence to her soul’s most important unction, she has learned, “how love of the sea can rush right through you with the wind, until your heart is translucent with joy as intense as pain."

42 poems, log entries, sea notes, technical descriptions, Sea Trails has much to offer, not only for the ruddy sea-farer, but also for landlubbers and poetry neophytes. What is compelling in these poems is the consistency of voice, the sensual and calming verse with easily identifiable themes, descriptive accounts laid down alongside deep-seated emotional stress and an almost real-time resolution poetically shaping in front of the viewer. The net result is something quite beautiful and alluring.

SOME QUESTIONS FOR PRIS

Have you’ve seen a recent upswing in your inspiration to write poetry or would you say that your interest in writing has sustained over many years?

I can’t say I’ve felt a recent upswing. If I were to make a painting of my creative swings, it would be a landscape filled with hills, valleys, mountain peaks, gorges, and deserts mixed in-between. Sometimes I feel as if I’ll never write again. Nothing comes, then suddenly a faucet opens. Images appear. A sentence runs through my mind and I know a poem is trying to be born. I love it when that happens.

Who are your favorite classic poets? Favorite modern poets?

I think I’ll always love Alfred Noyles. I memorized The Highwayman when I was 14 so I could recite it to myself anytime I wanted. Carl Sandburg is another. His language moves me deeply. From "The Backyard"…

Shine on, O moon of summer.
Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,
All silver under your rain to-night.

What a beautiful image. Almost haiku in nature. Others are William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, Pablo Neruda, T.S. Elliot. I could go on. Modern poets? Harder since the list is even longer, but I love Sharon Olds, Anne Sexton, Lucile Clifton, Li Young-Lee, Rebecca McClanahan, Maya Angelou, so many of the underground poets. I like honesty tied in with a big dollop of outrageousness in the poets alive today. I like daring poets. Courageous poets. Gentle poets, too. If I start naming contemporary poets I know personally and love, I’m bound to leave someone out.

Who or what inspires you to write your poetry?

The best answer is that I honestly don’t know. Sometimes a chance comment. Other times the fragment of a dream or perhaps a memory. Something that happens during the day. I don’t consciously say ‘Now I’m going to write a poem about that’. The birthing of a poem usually surprises me, so ultimately speaking, from my psychologist’s shoes, I would say that something below my level of conscious awareness begins communicating with me and I take it down. I’m sure you’ve heard novelists comment about their characters taking on a life of their own. It’s much like that with my poems. I try not to control the poem too much in that early stage. Later comes the time for pruning out the excess, rewording to say better what I want to say, working with meter and other poetic devices that may enhance it.

What helps you write poetry?

Patience and courage. My fear of what people would think hampered me in my earlier writing, especially with some of my more sexual poems. When I could let go of that, my poems improved. The patience comes in waiting out the ‘desert’ parts of the landscape and not trying to force a poem for the sake of writing one.

What is your ‘goal’ or aim in your writing?

Ultimately it’s to write my truth. I also like it when my poems resonate with others, when a person can say that he or she can relate or can see something through different eyes because of my poems. One of the most rewarding kinds of feedback I’ve gotten from Sea Trails is when non-poets write to tell me they loved it. Of course I like for my poet peers to like my writing, too, but it’s wonderful to be part of bringing an interest in poetry back to a more general reading population.

PRIS CAMPBELL BIO

Pris Campbell’s full-length book of poetry with accompanying log notes, Sea Trails, was published in the fall of 2009 by Lummox Press. Abrasions, her first poetry book (perfect bound, published by Rank Stranger Press) now has only a limited number of copies left. A chapbook with Tammy Trendle, Interchangeable Goddesses was published by Rose of Sharon, a press run by S.A. Griffin, editorr of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and David Smith. Pris’ latest chapbook, Hesitant Commitments, was released fall of 2008 by Lummox Press in its prestigious Little Red Book series. Pris has many poems appearing excellent poetry journals such as: Chiron Review, Main Street Rag, The Cliffs: Soundings (print), Boxcar Poetry Review, Empowerment4Women, In The Fray, Blackmail Press, Peshekee River Poetry, Limestone Circle (print), Poems Niederngasse, Erosha, The Smoking Poet, Remark Journal,The Wild Goose Poetry Review, Main Street Rag (print), Thunder Sandwich, The Dead Mule: An Anthology of Southern Literature, Rusty Truck, Short Stuff, International War Vets Poetry Yearly Anthologies (print), Small Potatoes, MiPo Quarterly, MiPo Weekly, OCHO (print) Dakota House, Verse Libre, Tears in the Fence (a U.K. print journal), The Oregon Review, MindFire, Passage Through August, Simply Haiku, Haigaonline. Moonset (print), Sketchbook , Ink, Sweat, and Tears and several other journals. Her poem in the spring 2007 issue of Boxcar won the Peer Award for the issue and has been nominated as one of three by that journal for a 'Best of the Internet' Anthology. Pris has three Pushcart Prize Nominations 2008/2009.

IMPORTANT LINKS TO CHECK OUT (active links)

To order Sea Trails, click here: Lummox Press
To view Pris’ popular blog, click here: PoetInspire
Link to Pris reading from Sea Trails click here: Sea Trails Reading (video)

Nominated for Pushcart Prize

2009-11-11T04:47:00.000-08:00

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I've received word my Poem, "Two Sides of Self," was just nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize. Here's a link describing the award: The Pushcart Prize and here's a link to the poem, published in the April 2009 issue of the Shine Journal (click here).

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Poems in OCHO

2009-11-06T04:40:00.000-08:00

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My poems, "Dialectics of Reason and Doubt," (p17) and "Dark Thoughts That Illumine," (p44) just appeared in the latest edition of OCHO. If you look closely at the cover, my mug is pictured along with some other poets, painted by Didi Menendez, editor and publisher (middle, first row). Click here to view OCHO: link to OCHO

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Another Review for "Night Fires."

2009-09-28T13:22:00.000-07:00

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From Troubadour 21, Writers and Artists in the 21st Century. You can find it here: TROUBADOUR REVIEW OF NIGHT FIRES

ALSO

Review in Oranges in Sardines. Click Here
Once in the magazine, go to page 30-31 (review actually on page 28-29)
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Casting the Nines

2009-09-11T11:02:00.000-07:00

Well... nine, nine, o-nine just passed, and with it one of the most innovative poetry projects in years. Casting the Nines is a nine-poem-by-nine-poets chapbook on the topic of the number nine (what else?), released by the nine poets on nine, nine, o-nine to nine strangers with the sole instruction to read the poems and pass it on to eight other individuals. Each poet dated and inscribed the first line and all subsequent readers have a place to sign and date and pass it on. The chapbook's concept was invented, designed, improvised and published by Jennifer Bosveld of Pudding House Publications . A call for submissions was made and poems selected by Jennifer to appear in the book. I had a great time giving "Casting the Nines" to street walkers in Cambridge, MA on a beautiful evening with my wife Susan and Golden Retriever Sofie. I think it was a good move having them come along... so much solicitation nowadays, everyone's pretty wary, but nothing so disarming as a two-year old Golden. I had two opening lines: "Do you like poetry?" and "I'm a published poet." The first worked much better (I wonder why!!). Apart from nearly getting a ticket by Cambridge police for an illegal lane change on the ride over (hey, it seemed legal to me)... everything went smoothly. After the snappy retort, "No, I hate poetry," one couple insisted I read my contribution out loud ("Ninth Curl of the Helix), which I did with a great result. The gentleman no longer hates poetry and said he would read the book with great interest. Lots of other stories, but bottom line, it was a great idea which seemed to resonate with folks. Pudding House is thinking of following this up with a much larger endeavor involving the free dispersal of a much larger number of poetry books and going with interesting and provocative themes. Stay tuned!

Review of My Book, "Night Fires" by O & S

2009-08-02T05:53:00.000-07:00

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Oranges and Sardines, one of the top poetry journals with a print and online platform, has just reviewed my first book of poems, Night Fires. I hope you can stop by their site and read it. After you go to their site, click on the page advance arrow at the end of the page sequence and the review is on pp. 28-29.

Click here: Oranges and Sardines' review of NIght Fires.

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Just Received Copies of My First Book of Poems

2009-06-18T16:43:00.000-07:00

Just received author's copies of "Night Fires," from my publisher (Pudding House Publications), which was a semi-finalist for The Journal Award (2009), also known as the "Charles B. Wheeler Prize." This is an annual competition to select one poetry maunuscript for publication, sponsored by OSU poets. I'm elated with the printing and the cover art. They did a great job. There are 30 poems in the book, a sort of reflection on early events and circumstances that were important to me in my childhood and early adulthood. I hope I was able to provide a different look at what are no doubt common and perhaps identifiable themes. You can order the book directly from the publisher for $10 (not including postage): Pudding House Publications/ 81 Shadymere Lane/ Columbus, OH 43213, or find it at their website: http://www.puddinghouse.com. I also am offering, on a first-come, first-served basis, inscribed copies from my own pile sitting in the study. If you want to reserve a copy, just email me at: enudelman@msn.com and/or send $14 (postpaid) to Ed Nudelman/125 New Balch St./ Beverly, MA 01915

Here's one of the poems from the book:

Matinees

My father abandoned me.

Left me for hours
with the Saturday morning weirdoes
on Pike Street to watch gorilla
movies one after another
while the poker star
went upstairs following smoke
or downstairs or across the street.
God knows where he went
to play his cards.

When he finally returned
I’d be on a swivel-chair
next to the popcorn machine

where a pal from his war
made sure I was discreetly
sequestered, cool and dry
and bleary-eyed.

When I got home, the smoke
from my cigarette-laced clothes
still reeked. And worse,
the gorillas kept on dying.

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January Poem of the Month by Grace Cavalieri

2009-01-23T07:53:00.000-08:00

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What I Won
by Grace Cavalieri

The sack dress was in style then
with a single strand of pearls.
The sack dress was designed to see
the body move lightly beneath.
That's why I wore it to my first poetry
contest in Philly,
leaving my four-month old at home.
Of course my husband had to
drive, as nervous as I was
so he waited in the car all
day while I sat in the big room, first time out
since I found my mother
dead and then had a baby two weeks later.
My husband stayed all day in that
car in the snow. I won first prize about
wanting my mother but
it was said much better than this,
as you can imagine, to win first.
It even began with notes upon a phantom
lute, although The Poet
said what do we know of lutes now?
But what did he know of
walking into her bedroom and finding
her a pale shade of lilac.
That just goes to prove I guess I was talking
about the wrong thing in the poem,
and The Poet was surely on to something.
I have to say I looked wonderful,
gaunt with grief and colitis, 1956,
hurrying across the street
where my husband was waiting to take me home,
the first wrong victory in my hand.

Explication
by Edward Nudelman

“What I Won,” a poem by Grace Cavilieri, takes us through experience’s strongest gift, memory, to illustrate how something sought (such as a poetry prize) can fade and lessen in importance in the face of sweeping grief or hardship. Grace provides us with a very specific account traveling with her husband to a poetry contest, with fear and trembling, allowing the seamless movement of the poem to inform us, and herself, of what really matters and what is supremely valued.

The title of the poem, as well as the first few lines, draw attention to perhaps a physical object or prize that might be won. The speaker is dressing for an important event and is taking matters very seriously (‘sack dress in style’, ‘pearls’, ‘designed to see the body move lightly beneath’). Her anxiety over having to go to Philly (we are not told from which city of origin, but the assumption is that it was a fairly long trip) is couched in ambivalent terms. We’re told her husband had to drive (‘as nervous as I was’), but we’re not told if her fears were directly related to having to read, or something quite different, such as an emotional issue or even a physical impairment.

Nearly midway through the poem, however, we learn the crux of the speaker’s difficulty in which she exclaims: “first time out since I found my mother dead and then had a baby two weeks later.’ We find several lines addressing her husband’s loyalty and the speaker’s obvious regard for his willingness to come alongside her in her travail. The speaker will return to this important aspect of support and care later in the poem.

The poem seems to turn, midway, on the phrase, “I won first prize about wanting my mother…” said abruptly and perhaps sarcastically, with the qualifier, “but it was said much better than this… to win first.” Here the speaker is organizing thought around the ambivalence of winning something obviously of importance (poets live for this), while at the same time having to deal with a devastating loss. The close proximity of her mother’s death, the birth of her child, and the poetry contest all mix in to add dynamic suspense to this poem.

The second half of the poem deals with a fictitious poet, referred to as simply, The Poet, and interestingly given a male gender (perhaps to distinguish from a metaphor of the speaker interacting with a mirror poet, or self, though this could still be true). The speaker uses this device as a sounding board to discuss with us the poem which she presented at the contest, which began "with notes upon a phantom lute." While this appears to be a reference to her mother’s death, it could also stand alone as a metaphor for the evanescence and changeability of joy or peace (the lute being a reference to that which could supply either). The speaker goes on to tell us that The Poet asked, "what do we know of lutes now?” What can good things do for the grief-stricken? How can nice words, sleep-aids, poetry awards assuage the pain of loss? In addition, one could ask, how can poetry itself help? The Poet wasn’t there, and so he can’t identify with what happened (the speaker implies, 'But what did he know of walking into her bedroom and finding her a pale shade of lilac’).

The conversation heightens near the end as the speaker goes back and forth rehearsing her arguments before the anonymous Poet. In a moment of either self-effacing doubt or monumental clarity, the speaker throws up her hands, saying: "That just goes to prove I guess I was talking about the wrong thing in the poem, and The Poet was surely on to something.”

The ending, comprising an extremely personal and vulnerable introspection, provides the reader with what they need to take this poem into their world of experience. We find a tired, worn-out, ill person, ‘gaunt with grief and colitis,’ ‘hurrying’ back to her husband who will take her home and continue to love her, even if at that moment she holds in her hand the very emblem of the conflict and dissonance expressed in the poem: ‘the first wrong victory.”

“What I won” is a strikingly intimate poem that lets the reader experience along side the speaker revealing aspects of her emotional life, if only from a snapshot event on one day in Philly, in 1956. It is a poem of love and constancy as much as it is self-discovery. We are privy to the evolution of understanding in the speaker’s heart. What becomes of value necessarily diminishes that which never had value. But much remains. Throughout the poem the speaker is careful to remind us that her husband not only accompanied her, but brought her, waited for her, and finally took her home. The speaker doesn’t ask for sympathy in the loss of her mother, presented as fact. The poem could have gone down that road and reproduced a thousand similar themes. Not that the crystallization of what really matters is not vividly presented here. But the power and excellence in this poem lies in the understated values of love and companionship portrayed, hard commodities to find in this world; but once found, sufficient to assuage the worst of grief.

Brief Bio of Grace Cavalieri
Grace Cavalieri is the author of several books of poetry and 21 produced plays; she founded and still produces/hosts public radio’s “The Poet and the Poem,” now in its 32nd year, now from the Library of Congress. Her new book is Anna Nicole: Poems (Goss183:: Casa Menendez, 2008.) She is book review editor for The Montserrat Review and a poetry columnist for MiPOradio. Her play in progress, on Anna Nicole, is “Beverly Hills, Texas.”

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Does it take 10,000 hours to be a great poet?

2009-01-12T08:08:00.000-08:00

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Malcolm Gladwell, in his most recent book, Outliers, suggests that it takes 10,000 hours to become great, to obtain a critical mass that could allow, say, a young Bill Gates to leverage what he learned during that time into the global giant that is Microsoft. The Beatles didn’t start out great, he explains, but invested and amassed 10,000 hours of hard work into their craft before things took off.

Much can be said about innate ability. About being in the right place at the right time. Networking. Being introduced to the right people just at the instant you have something to offer them (imagine if Einstein hadn’t been accepted into the American scientific milieu). All are factors that can increase opportunities for success. And yet, all are short-cuts, in a sense. How often do any one of these, in particular, play a prominent role in success? A strong argument can be made (and Gladwell makes one) that there is a far more important ingredient.

Elbow grease, a nearly forgotten commodity in today’s ‘give me’ generation, may be the greatest benefactor to success. Does the math work in the literary world? If it works, then how does one measure success in art, when there are so many different motives one might claim to pursue it seriously?

Not by the almighty dollar, we're quick to reply. Number of publications? Number of books? Do you have tenure in the Literature department at a major university, teach at a community college? Do you have your own poetry blog with thousands of viewers? Most agree that these factors, while certainly contributing, are not prerequisites or determinants in establishing quality and value with respect to matters in the art world (I'm generalizing here, but bear with me). We all know of exceptions to the rule (ourselves, for example), and are quick to point out that intelligence, or academic ardor (institutionally speaking), though perhaps useful tools, are not in and of themselves, key players in the universe of art and artists.

Thanks to internet, we have a 100 million experts. Who’s to judge who’s good and who’s bad? In poetry, for example, which poems deserve to be pushed to the fore and celebrated (if this were even possible), and which avoided at all cost? The hyperbole of such an exercise, to be sure, is distasteful. And yet, I think this is what we do to some degree on a moment by moment basis (especially on the net). From what I’ve seen, most writers care deeply about what they write, and they care about getting better. Most are open for critique. However, many don’t seem to want to seek it out proactively. But looking for critical analysis from peers may be jumping the gun. There may be a much simpler route to success.

I like Gladwell’s 10,000 rule. It puts a stronger emphasis on the value of learning a craft, a talent, even a gift. It puts a premium on rehearsing, on honing, on editing, on revising (not to discount stream of consciousness writing, extemporaneous models, etc.) It’s clear we’d do better to read 100 pages for every page we write. Or a 1000 pages. If you write poetry, then read poetry. Read about poetry. Read about the lives of poets. Read history, when a poem about an historical event strikes you deeply.

Write and rewrite. Show your work to experts, consultants, friends, your dog or cat. Success? Everyone has their own models and values of what this means, but most kid themselves if they reject the ideal. All the writers I know, and I know a good deal, care deeply about what they write, and if they understood what it took to get better, they’d move in that direction. Expectations for success can be incremental and modest; or they can be quantum leaps, the sky’s the limit.

Most who write know they need to spend more time working on their craft. Improvement can be measured a million different ways; but, in the end, little improvement is possible without contributing energy into the equation. Does it take 10,000 hours to write a great poem? Probably not (that’s a lot of hours)… but as you approach that kind of commitment, you’re sure to reap a lasting benefit in the development and mastery of your craft.

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December Poem of the Month by Diego Quiros: Horse Feather

2008-12-23T09:35:00.000-08:00

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Horse Feather

This is a horse feather,
white, the calm of clouds.
I saw it fall from the sky
a slow dart from antiquity
swirling its habitual pattern.

Its vane gentle across my lips
its sturdy rachis could pen
a poem or two about
the process of kissing or
stammering ecstasies.

I wondered if the mythical animal
would part the evening sky
with its pale steady silence
turn its crimson eyes in my direction
and rapture me on moon-hooves

over the matrix of skyscrapers
wearing nothing but its ribcage
between my legs.
Nothing is impossible.
I once loved like that.

-by Diego Quiros

SUMMARY
In Horse Feather, a mythical horse, undoubtedly Pegasus, is conjured into awareness by a musing speaker who imagines seeing one of its feathers (white, the calm of clouds) fall from the sky. The anatomy of the feather is presented with respect to the speaker’s romantic love (could pen a poem or two about the process of kissing or stammering ecstasies). In S3, the speaker delineates the power and majesty and passion of such a mythical creature that could ‘part the evening sky with its pale steady eye’ (and rapture me on moon-hooves). In the final strophe, the speaker imagines riding the horse over skyscrapers with nothing but ‘its ribcage between my legs,” and suggests that such an adventure is within the realm of possibility. In the last line the speaker divulges his hidden sentiments, revealing he once loved in the same fashion.

COMMENTARY
Horse Feather, by Diego Quiros, is a striking poem about the possibilities and limitless boundaries of love. It is a poem that begs for several readings, as it presents insights in several diverging directions. On the one hand, the poem can be read as a fantasy narrative, where the speaker muses on the passionate image of riding Pegasus over skyscrapers. Another view of the poem reveals a more subtle, perhaps melancholy desire to rise above the limits of human love and experience an altogether unbound (unearthly) love as characterized by riding this mythical creature.

The poem consists of four strophes, each with five lines. The rhythm begins fairly uniform, nearly tetrameter in the first two strophes, then half-way through, defaults to a more drawn out beat, both in sound and length of line. This shift at S3 coincides with a tone shift where the speaker becomes more open, his feelings more vulnerable.

“This is a horse feather, white, the calm of clouds,” opens the poem with a striking visual picture. It is falling from the sky, this tranquil ‘slow dart from antiquity.” Up front, the speaker wants us to know that he is really talking about Pegasus, that winged horse, sired by Poseidon, an emblem of power and grace. The name, Pegasus derives from "spring or well." Whenever the horse strikes a hoof to earth, a beautiful spring bursts forth. The metaphor aptly sets up the reader for S2 which dissects the feather into its component parts and relates them to sensual aspects of love: the vane (soft, wispy) ‘gentle across my lips; and the rachis (the part used in ink pens) ‘sturdy,’ ‘could pen a poem or two about the process of kissing,” etc.

But it is in S3 where we begin to see the inner unction of the speaker with respect to love. As well, the poetics and imagery spring more freely from the idea of the mythical animal as having superhuman abilities, both in power and beauty (part the evening sky with its pale steady silence) and in its natural proclivity to rapture (on moon-hooves across skyscrapers).

In S5 we find the culmination of such an adventure, as the speaker alludes to the naked power (ribcage) churning between his legs, a very striking and erotic metaphor which is effortlessly merged into one image. Finally, and importantly, the speaker exhales and draws back from the vision declaring, ‘nothing is impossible.” If he has loved, and loved well in the bounds of his humanity (I once loved like that), why not in the boundless sky? Why not like Pegasus, riding unbound through the heavens?

The power of this poem lies in its central proposition that love is without limits. What makes it click is that the speaker doesn’t dwell on a litany of past experience. What adds to its cohesiveness and beauty is the speaker’s confidence. The poetic, yet blunt tone. It is sufficient to merely say, “I once loved like that,” and the honesty and forcefulness of such a declaration drives the poem home like a dagger.

BIO
Diego Quiros is a poet, artist, and Electrical Engineer living with his family in South Florida. He was born in 1962 in Havana, Cuba, lived in Spain for several years, and traveled to the United States by himself at age ten.

His poetry, has been published in several issues of Ocho, Mipoesias, and Verse Libre Quarterly. Diego also co-hosted the MipoRadio show “Deconstructions”. Diego’s first collection of poems “Alchetry” (click here); a study on the four elements of writing and their relation to the four basic elements; was recently published by Goss 183 (formerly Menendez Publishing) and it is available at Books and Books and Amazon.

He credits all his work to conversations with a Muse he describes as “a woman with long dark green hair, green eyes, and light green skin”. He claims she walks around his home in South Florida and drops subtle whispers here and there while he writes.

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Poetry and Language: Ramblings on the Sweetness of Poetry

2008-12-15T16:39:00.000-08:00

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Poetry and Language: Ramblings on the Sweetness of Poetry

It was Auden who said, “A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” I can only imagine what a sweet love affair it was for one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century, a prolific poet who used language to shape about 400 of the greatest published poems in the Western poetry lexicon.

Still, even Auden must have anguished over his words. I’m sure he had his moments gnawing his knuckles over the bitter inconsistencies of grammar and syntax- the inexorable frustration of having only one set of rustic tools: the naked, two-dimensional cryptograms of an alphabet.

But is it accurate to think of language merely as a tool? Can it ever be more than that? Does it provide discrete limitations to our knowing, or can we supersede the perceived barriers of language by using it in special ways? Mysterious ways?

And what can poetry contribute to this equation? Some would argue that we can move into new rubrics of understanding as we move from prose to poetry, as one might move from a photograph to a painting. I’m not at all sympathetic to such a stretch, but I am open to the notion that poetry is distinctively different than prose; not at any one particular facet or quality: but as one takes the whole of prose and sets it along side what we have in poetry, patterns emerge. One of the most salient of all, it occurs to me, is that of the sweetness of language.

For me, poetry gives language a sweet-smelling savor. Like what I get when I slowly breathe in a Chateau Margaux (1961, please) that has had one hour to rise above the rim of a decanter. In poetry, we ask language to do special things. We ask it not only to convey, but to speak. Or better, we ask it to play music. To bounce, or slide, or glide, or stop nearly on a dime, then whisper inaudibly into our memory. Finally, we ask it to remain on the palate, or in the nose. For a lifetime. Great poetry will do this. And often with only 14 lines.

A crude thought experiment, if you will: what is the difference between the following two paragraphs:

Are you sad, Margaret, because Goldengrove’s trees are losing all their leaves? You are young and carefree, but as you age you’re liable to be much sadder than you are today, much more bewildered and perhaps find that life itself is corruptible; you may cry and still not understand that it is all the same: Spring or Fall- either way- it is still your nature to find sorrow, just like the rest of us. Only now, you are sorry for Margaret, alone.

Versus:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

I know, the prose section could have been a bit stronger, but you get the idea. Hopkins loaded his poem, Spring and Fall, with the fiery darts of language. “Goldengrove unleaving,” is a masterpiece of innovation, as is “world of wanwood leafeal lie,” and the whole poem uses language, the cadence, the sound, the smell of leaves, short bursts of energy packed into images that can be seen by the eye, all culminating in a rush of identification whereby the reader at the end finally realizes that they have, all along, been where Margaret has been. May be going where Margaret is going.

Human beings have this amped-up gift of appreciating language in all its complexity and nuance. A single word, or small group of words, if properly placed, can strike a hidden neuron in the farthest reaches of the brain, retrieve a memory, a smell; or a fundamental crisis of being.

Poetry works to tweak these neurons. It uses language and the sound of words, and the intermingling meanings and connotations to create something out of nothing. It takes the black ink outline of letters on a page and turns it into a picture. Key to all of this process is the naiveté of the poet, who, like the tiny bee in a hive of a million bees, can have no idea or appreciation for the delicacy that she is making at its center. Yet she works away with ardor, compelled by instinct, or maybe even the prospect of something sweet tickling an antennae. Either way, the honey is sweet. And the bee continues to work. In most cases, without remuneration and without acclaim. And suddenly, one day, the poet looks up from the page and realizes there is something sweet here. And the honey remains sweet.

-EDN, 12/15/08

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November's Poem of the Month, by Aaron Belz

2008-11-21T09:19:00.000-08:00

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WHISPERED JOKES

If I’m in such good company, please
explain why I have to keep looking
over my shoulder to see who’s not there:

ghost of the staircase, living
room phantasm—whispered jokes,
unheard and ungotten—or maybe not.

I call them the comedians of chance,
and I have discovered that they’re
completely cornball. Canned.

They’ve written routines
in sharpie on their luminous
hands and keep looking down

to see what comes next. My father
used to laud people who know
“what goes where,” but I swear,

I don’t anymore—it’s all up in the air,
half-visible pins twirling end over
end, and I, their ghastly juggler.

SUMMARY
Whispered Jokes gets your attention in the title and alerts the reader to look for what might be forthcoming: perhaps jokes whispered to self, some kind of cryptic messaging. The opening strophe gives what could pass for a joke: “If I’m in such good company, please/ explain why I have to keep looking/ over my shoulder to see who’s not there.” And who’s ‘not there’ is, namely, a “ghost”, or a “phantasm.” In short, “whispered ghosts,” perhaps unheard or whose punch lines are “ungotten.” The speaker calls the joke-tellers “comedians of chance,” and tells us that they’re “completely cornball.” Further attention is given to how and where they’re written, such as “in sharpie,” and “on their luminous hands.” The processes involved are alluded to as “routines.” There is a tone and content shift in S5 where the speaker speaks of his father who “used to laud people who know ‘what goes where,’” and uses the construct to insert an unsettling sense of ambivalence in personal experience: "I swear,/ I don’t anymore-it’s all up in the air.” The poem ends in a characterization of the problem and consequences of not knowing or understanding something key and fundamental in the evocative image of pins which are “half-visible,” and “twirling end over end,” with the speaker as the “ghastly juggler.

COMMENTARY
This poem, with its seemingly off-handed and light tone, has much to offer in speaking to the fundamental nature of how we learn, how we know, and how we accommodate to things we feel we can’t understand. The poem’s rolls out freely with easy words and syntax. Nothing complex here. And yet, there is a kind of deceptive foil here for an underlying deeper consideration of identity and self-appraisal. Additionally, the formal presentation, though not rhymed (except for 'swear/air' near the end) is nonetheless nicely put together in neat, free-flowing tercets, further directing the reader into the poetics of the speaker.

Some key questions are raised at the beginning of this poem. What is the nature of these “whispered jokes,” who are the people that are saying them… and to whom are they being said? As well, the poem seems to be addressing the issue of how we process what we’ve learned, what we make of past failures, for example. And how do we make order out of what often appears to be a disordered, random world.

We can see by the speaker’s opening interrogative, that there’s some degree of equivocation in his voice. This is not a prescriptive essay or a document on how to solve the world’s problems. It is the speaker sort of talking out loud, remembering his own ghosts and phantasms walking around his house (perhaps as a child), jokes uttered and not heard, or not understood. But the jokes aren't one-liners. These are innuendos, rationale, ways of thinking to ward off other ways of thinking.

The dissonance increases in S3 where the speaker, who has his own expression for these jokesters, “comedians of chance,” makes a decided tone-shift away from self-examination and toward mild invective. Here we find that the speaker has a distaste for the joke-tellers who tell 'corny' jokes; but worse, actually write them down (in indelible ink) and then refer to them as needed. This is perhaps the moment at which the poem turns from inward to outward commentary. The speaker seems to be making an ethical statement regarding meaning. Is it enough to rely on past performance, old jokes or riddles which cannot suffice, in unwrapping the serious issues of life? Indeed, they often return (as ghosts) to haunt, rather than providing any sort of apologetic for living. The speaker references his own father, and relates his (the speaker's) obvious disdain for that kind of philosophy which is blithely self-confident (“people who know what goes where.)” It leaves one wondering what the subtext is here. As with many poets, a father (or mother) theme will pop in and out of poems freely, and the poem gives room and desire to hear more on this subject. Still, it amps up the immediacy of feeling. There is a bewilderment in the voice here, that it should be so easy for these kind of people to be cavalier in their movement through life, that they would have nothing better to do than rehearse old jokes.

This is a direct poem. It tweaks the reader to ask their own questions and assumptions about what makes them sure. Not that we should be fettered with doubt. But the poem speaks to a kind of unguarded optimism that doesn’t examine deeply into meaning. And what is left? “Half-visible pins twirling end over end, and I, their ghastly juggler.” Here we find the result of such thinking: enervating, dangerous, a vacuous pursuit.

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ABOUT AARON
Aaron Belz writes poetry in Los Angeles. He has a Ph.D. in American Literature from Saint Louis University and an M.A. in Creative Writing from NYU. His first book of poetry,The Bird Hoverer, was published by Buffalo: BlazeVOX Books, in 2007. Aaron’s second book of poems, Direction, is forthcoming from Persea. Some of his poems, essays, biographical history and much more- may be found at these websites (just click):
belz blog
belz poetry on wordpress

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The Drive for Recognition in the Internet Age

2008-11-01T07:30:00.000-07:00

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The Drive for Recognition in the Internet Age

It’s not a Sunday morning drive, looking at fields and falling leaves. It’s more of a speedway demolition derby; and, at the end of the day, everyone surveys the landscape looking for the victorious and panning the vanquished. It’s more a primal battle for superiority where what’s at stake is self-esteem and legitimacy, a raison d'être for your ambivalent soul. It pervades every profession and avocation. Politician, artisan, student and writer. The prize, nothing short of eternity. A place in the history books. A seat on the throne.

Well, if you haven’t felt that way about it, you’re still invited to read on. I’d like to focus this short essay on what I perceive to be a universal need for recognition, especailly exemplified in writing. After all, that’s what most of us do when we post to the Internet. Whether it’s the story of your day, or your latest magnum opus (“this is one of my better works, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this one!”) The Internet has come along to fan the flames of eternal recognition. The ante’s up, and the profit (in ‘recognition’ terms) can be so much greater. The blog hits so much higher. The reach so much wider. Here’s a chance, with a little networking and a lot of staying power, to get your word out. Here’s an opportunity, in the quiet of your study, to infiltrate millions of minds with what only you can say. And say it best. Don’t mind the dilution factor. We’ve always been up against numbers. Still, the loudest voice will be heard. The most strident call, the most urgent cautionary tale and doomsday prediction mandating the greatest attention. So get to work. You’ve got a few good years left, and there’s nothing better than instant gratification.

Or not. Do you buy into these premises? Probably not, but millions do ( I can't really say that with certitude, knowing that this little essay will reach only hundreds, mew hah hah). Freud, not one of my favorite founding fathers of psychology, did however say something, somewhere, that’s always stuck in my craw. He said, “Maturity is the ability to defer self-gratification.” If this is true, which I think it might be, then, on the Internet, we have a hundred million immature internet avatars looking for new and improved ways of fulfilling their lust for self-recognition. Is this putting it too harshly? I think not, having experienced, like you, the thirty-second delay (on a good day) it takes to receive feedback on a poem or a piece of writing, courtesy of my community website or social networking group. And I’ve been on the self-deluding train to Recognition City many, many times. That nonstop transcontinental line that stops for nobody, and all the paying customers are served fine meals, and sit around watching the beautiful landscape pass by while they discuss mutual successes.

But what is recognition and how does the internet influence and affect it? First of all, the desire to be recognized for what we consider ourselves to possess, be it the ability to write, the sensitivity to be compassionate, the natural gifts of athletics… whatever it may be- is, of course, a very legitimate pursuit. Indeed, it's hard to imagine writing without the potential to be recognized in the back of your mind. What you write may be qualitative. Or it may be quantitative. It may be helpful. It may only be artful. It may be base, or it may be aesthetic. Still, we view it as something of a 'special' entity, something we’d like to share (that word!); and, yes, something for which we wouldn’t mind being recognized. For even the most altruistic, self-effacing and zen of writers, the desire to be read cannot be shrugged away (there may be a few existentialists left out there who can write in a vacuum and feel self-fulfilled, but these cannot be quantified, as they remain in dark places with no internet connectivity).

New and expanding opportunities of reaching people through the internet, coupled in negative fashion with an increasingly competitive and exclusive marketplace for print publications, has led writers to saturate the world wide web with their wares. Self-publications, blogs, ezines and other personalized vehicles for getting the word out have exploded onto the scene. And what is the net effect? What might this look like in the year 2080? Or, if you have trouble with that short a prognostication, how about in the year 4080? How will the participants in this Internet Age be judged many years from now? Will there be reference manuals for the great writers of the internet age (GWIA), or a data base for the most read poets on the world wide web from 2000-2080 (MRP-WWW)?

I think not. And the reason will be (you can quote me on this), that all the great writers were too busy writing, and thus unable (and unwilling) to spend the hours necessary to get the proper recognition they might have (or might not have) earned on the Internet. All the great writers continued to read and think and work on their craft, while all of us networking sluts continued to get our names and work out there on WWW, filling in the unfillable Intenet trash heap with more and more garbage. Perhaps the one great legacy will be monumental hard drive capacity records, groups of ‘authors’ who have collectively pounded out the greatest mound of spent hard discs in the annals of human history. Google, to the google power, of text, neatly filed away in the New Writers of the Internet Age (NWIA), housed in a special annex to the Library of Congress. However, you won’t be able to visit the stacks. But you can just log on and search NWIA. You might even find me there!
EDN 11/1/08

October Poem of the Month: Resurrection, by Amy George

2008-10-09T12:33:00.000-07:00

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Resurrection, by Amy George

I don’t remember
when you grew wings…
when they flared out
from your back
above the stab wounds
now only scars.
I just remember your eyes,
how they glowed with
Easter morning,
lightning striking
the same place twice,
though years had fallen
in between.
There was beauty
and trembling
past the bruises,
cynical voices
shattered by an empty tomb.
I remembered the basement,
his hands on your small body.
And I wept to see you
lift up the little girl
you held inside,
her tears now only a memory.

Not even the world,
with all its gravity,
could hold you.

Comments, by Edward Nudelman
This taut little narrative poem by Amy George, with its interesting second person point of view, is strongly personal and experiential; so much so, it nearly defaults into first person. That is to say, while the reader can identify with the ‘you’ in the poem as being a very close family member (or a close friend) of the speaker, the frame of reference can easily devolve into the "I/me", where the voice is seen as referring to self. As such, the poem lends itself to heightened immediacy and a certain tension that would not have otherwise materialized in the first person. Second person POV is difficult to pull off. Often the poem sounds didactic or even maudlin. This is not the case with Resurrection.

This is a poem that speaks to how we heal; how scars are removed. There is a transcendency in tone that is not specifically identified. Details are not given, or belabored, thus heightening the reader’s notion of what’s going on. It makes you want to rush on to the ending (a good thing!) We understand in the very first verses that wings ‘flared out’ where there were once stab wounds, a very elegant and visual framing, setting the tone of the poem which is reserved and restrained. As if to say, these things happened, and this is the way they affected you. And that’s that.

So what is happening in the poem? The allusions to sexual abuse ocurr near the end of the poem, “his hands on your small body,” and ties in the earlier reference of stab wounds. “There was beauty and trembling past the bruises,” adds focus to the central theme of the poem, which is overcoming calamity, moving through un-navigable waters. But not just surviving. Coming through with grace, beauty.

There is, alongside this profile of coping, a second theme of resurrection, made central by the title, and also bolstered in the placement of the event on Easter, or at least describing it in the context of Easter ('I just remember your eyes,how they glowed with Easter morning'). The poem heightens and perhaps shifts in tone in, “Lightning striking the same place twice, though years had fallen in between,” an interesting juxtaposition of the terror of the event, and perhaps the path to liberation as seen through the resurrection: of moving from death to life. Further, there is this reference to a tomb, another Christian metaphor, but not necessarily restricted to that meaning. Hence, we can see how the speaker sees her subject moving beyond the tomb, a darkness and repository for death, as the little girl that was “held inside,” somehow finds a way past her tears. This is finally brought home in a powerful way in the closing strophe:

Not even the world,
with all its gravity,
could hold you

Not scars, but wings. Not death, but resurrection. Not trapped in the world, but freedom for flight. What I like about the poem is its closeness. I couldn’t help reading it as a biographical catharsis. Or better, a biographical record. The speaker seems to be telling us that there is a path beyond the dead-end scars of sexual abuse. For her, that crystallization commands the strength and power of the poem. It is a poem for those who struggle. A poem that identifies extreme exposure and need, and offers hope.

Brief bio, in Amy’s own words:
Amy L. George holds an MFA in Creative Writing from National University. Her poetry has been published in various journals including Poesia, The Orange Room Review, The GNU and Word Catalyst Magazine and is forthcoming in Pennsylvania English. She is the general editor of Bird's Eye reView and also on the editorial staff for The GNU, the student literary journal of National University. She lives in South Carolina with her husband and two psychotic cats.

-EDN,10/08

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Poem of the Month, by Didi Menendez

2008-09-22T05:56:00.000-07:00

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The poem of the month for Thirteen Blackbirds is entitled, His Left Eye, a visually evocative poem by Didi Menendez, poet, publisher, and painter.

His Left Eye

He keeps his wife
tucked inside his left eye.
I see her wearing red.

Birds fall on his lap
and he places them inside a box.
He shuts and locks them one by one.
Their fluttering wings are never silent.
They are chirps of locusts in a hot
August evening silenced only by a poem.

He keeps his wife
safe tucked inside his left eye
and not the right.

His wife cares enough about her hair
to part it with a comb.
Her eyes are brown.
She wears green most of the time.
Sometimes she wears plaid.

He says his mother wore peonies scarves.
So did mine. They may have met once at
Sears and Roebuck looking through the
same yards of material on sale
searching for another scarf, another
flower pattern for a blouse.
Stopped at the hosiery department
and fingered the lingerie before
taking my sister and me by the hand
back to her sewing machine
and the little house we rented
on Wilshire Boulevard.

My mother wore her hair long,
light brown wavy long.
When she’d bend down to give me a kiss,
I’d see my father reflected in her right eye.
I’d draw his profile with my school pencils.

I never saw myself reflected in any man’s eye.
I confirm that I saw his wife in his left eye wearing red.

His silence neither denies
nor accepts her there.
His eyes are blue.
I painted them green
and the reflection
is a white box full of feathers.

His Left Eye, a poem by Didi Menendez, is a visually inward look into experience that extrapolates in many directions, but finds its most expressive definition in a moving frame of contemplation, as if the poet were describing extemporaneously her painting into life. In her own words:

“This poem was inspired by a painting I did of Bob Hicok. When you are painting a portrait you get really close to everything on the landscape of the face. In the reflection of his left eye I saw something reflected in red. I imagined it was someone he loved and possibly where he kept love.”

-from American Poet Portraits, by Didi Menendez

A fascinating quality of this poem lies in its fluidity, a shifting perspective which begins with a detailed description of an unnamed man who “keeps his wife tucked inside his left eye,” and moves into aspects of the individual’s wife and then mother. The poem seamlessly transitions into the speaker’s own impressions with a striking image, “He says his mother wore peonies scarves. So did mine,” along with the unlikely notion that their mothers may have met at Sears Roebuck. This all to drive home the abstraction of what lies in the left eye (as opposed to the right?), and the speaker’s ensuing commentary on her own experience, involving both her own mother and father. The poem culminates with the declaration, “I never saw myself reflected in any man’s eye,” pulling the reader back into the framework of the speaker’s identification. What she paints is what she sees in the left eye, how it reflects, what it means.

This is a poem that reads well. You can read it out loud and just enjoy the flow and the tempo changes. The tone is upbeat. Though touching on significant personal reflections connoting regret, or at least a sense of loss, the poem doesn’t give a hint of sentimentality or self-absorption. The effectiveness of the poem is in its detached view. What does the artist see in the eye? She sees his wife, wearing red. She sees a box where he places birds that have fallen in his lap. This conveys sensitivity and affection, but also gives room to wonder. Why are the birds trapped in his eye? “He shuts and locks them one by one.” It’s as if the speaker is reading into her own perception; and, in fact, the unfolding of the poem bears this out, as we are directed away from the individual being painted and into the private thoughts of the painter.

The anaphora in the poem, “He keeps his wife safely tucked inside his left eye,” not only reinforces the notion of security, but also provides a convenient transition as the speaker draws a focus inside the eye. We see his wife who “cares enough about her hair to cut it with a comb.” And more, her eyes are brown, she wears green. This is a painter speaking through her poem, finding a commonality and impact in shared memory (their mothers wore peony scarves), walking through Sears and Roebuck together, stopping at the hosiery department, taking her and her sister back to their house on Wilshire Blvd.

These wonderful, surrealistic and meandering images are falling out of Bob Hicok’s eyes. The reader is pulled into the matrix, without questioning association or needing to have the dots connected. It all works so well within the central metaphor of the poem, which allows us to see anything that the painter paints or wishes to convey in her painting (how like writing poetry).

My Left Eye is a poem about a painter, processing her right brain in a non-linear fashion. Here are impressions, weaving thoughts, interconnected links from childhood. Is it a poem about a woman’s need for masculine love? One could make that argument if too much credence were given to the following couplet, placed delicately before the closing section:

I never saw myself reflected in any man’s eye.
I confirm that I saw his wife in his left eye wearing red.

There’s been an exploding revelation made here, but then the speaker reverts almost simultaneously back to the painting. “I confirm that I saw his wife in his left eye wearing red.” Are we being given the shake? Why does the speaker reinforce and reaffirm that she saw his wife in his left eye (wearing red) at the end of the poem, and further inform us that she painted the eyes green, even though they were blue? And the reflection was a white box full of feathers? Perhaps simply because that's the way she saw it. For the painter, as perhaps for the poet, seeing is one thing; understanding, quite another prospect, and putting the two together, the whole of art.

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When asked to provide a short bio, Didi provided:

Bio: Didi Menendez is a Cuban-blooded American artist and poet. The best place to find her is on google.com.

So I googled Didi and here's a sneak preview:

Didi Menendez (b1960) is a Cuban-blooded American artist and author. She is the founding editor and publisher of MiPOesias, Oranges & Sardines, OCHO and several full-length books by Grace Cavalieri, Diego Quiros, Ron Androla, Emma Trelles, John Korn and others. You may find her at Facebook, Myspace, Goodreads, and other places on the Wide Wild World of the Internet. Her latest book of poems "When I Said Goodbye" was published in March 2008 by Geoffrey Gatza of BLAZEVOX.

EDN, 09/22/08

Three Poems in Denver Syntax

2008-09-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

I've got three poems in Denver Syntax, a pretty hot literary journal.

Click here and then click on poems: Syntax

Heat in Poetry, An Essay

2008-09-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

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What is a poem? What makes a poem a good poem? Mark Flanagan, a contemporary poet and savvy free-lance writer, provides an excellent and concise definition: “Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. Poetry is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define.” I like this because it makes two points that I have long held to be true of poetry. First, it defies formal description. A poem may have rhyme, and it may not. A poem cannot be simply defined by a set of parameters relating to its form. Thus, it becomes difficult to qualitatively assign value to different kinds of poems. The second point is even more important. Flanagan is careful to stress that poetry has a primary intent that reaches into the emotional perceptions of our consciousness. Robert Frost said, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” This takes into consideration both the fundamental building blocks of poems (words) as well as the “fuel” (emotions) that one might say ignites and allows those words to burn. In writing a poem, we seek to find in the language a kind of expression that is filled with energy. We don’t look to language as a tool, necessarily, but rather work to uncover the beauty, awe, wit, paradox, understanding, beauty… (the list goes on), that already resides in the form and structure of our language.

I like to think of poetry as a collection of words, each with their own potential energy. We seek to group the words in such a way that will increase that energy, like rolling a huge ball up a hill. The higher it goes, the farther it will roll down. Poetry finds a language that is hidden in the vernacular of our imagination. It will have a certain sound (especially when read by the author, with the author’s full intent) that will sound like poetry. As prosaic as this appears, it becomes clearer if one listens to enough poetry recited out loud (podcasts of poets can be widely found on the web, not only by contemporary poets, but also past recordings of great 20th century poets like Auden, Frost, Plath, Bishop, and Dylan Thomas, to name just a few). It is in the hearing of poems read aloud that I have come to appreciate in a special way this dynamic force of building energy in great poetry.

In this connection, Robert Bly, one of our leading contemporary poets (as well as an acclaimed translator, essayist and editor), has much to say concerning what he calls the “heat” often found in great poetry. In his introduction to David Lehman’s, The Best American Poetry, 1999, Bly explains how easy it is to realize when you’re reading a truly wonderful poem full of heat. “We can tell when a poem has arrived by a certain feeling in the gut, as if a dismaying thought had slipped past our defenses. We feel that something has been taken seriously enough that it has hurt the poet.” A poem which he cites as one example, and one that I agree is packed with potential energy that gets unleashed at the end, is a little masterpiece by Ruth Stone entitled, “A Moment,”

Across the highway a heron stands
in the flooded field. It stands
as if lost in thought, on one leg, careless,
as if the field belongs to herons.
The air is clear and quiet.
Snowmelt on this second fair day.
Mother and daughter,
we sit in the parking lot
with doughnuts and coffee.
We are silent.
For a moment the wall between us
opens to the universe,
then closes.
And you go on saying
you do not want to repeat my life.

Notice the tremendous and almost simultaneous convergence at the end of the poem of both cognitive recognition and emotional energy. At once you understand that the gulf of separation between the mother and the daughter is paramount, and your emotional pump, if you will, has been well primed in the intense sensations of beauty and simplicity that are found in the scene described before the last leveling couplet. Before you even understand all there is to understand here, you get a jolt, one that gets locked into your brain and your emotions. A jolt you likely won’t forget for some time. That’s a great poem. Further, and importantly, one is not struck here with the details of form, line breaks, rhyme schemes (even though there are none). One doesn’t have time to consider if the poem resembled prose or had a classical “poetry skin.” And this is not say that rhyming or metered poetry cannot have just as much heat. Let’s be clear on this point! What makes this poem wonderful is what it has to say and how it was said. You feel it.

But don’t always go looking for a bolt of lightening or a knock over the head that dumps you off your chair. Heat can affect different people in different ways. It can be subtle. It can be funny. Take Billy Collins, one of America’s most acclaimed living poet’s (and poet laureate) who is known for his profound levity and an uncanny perception of the foibles of everyday life. One example of heat in Collins’ poetry from a lighter side, is seen his poem, “Consolation,” in which he goes to great pains to describe how relieved he is to NOT be taking a holiday in Italy, but left to meander around his own neighborhood. The poem begins,

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

The heat is building up here, but not nearly boiling yet. Collins is laying the groundwork for a powerful, if not lighthearted ending, that sticks in the brain and evokes a response. He uses four more brilliant stanzas to fully hammer home the personal benefits found domestically, as contrasted with the headaches of an overseas junket where he might be found, for example, “slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice.” Finally, the poem ends in a magnificent explosion of heat:

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

I don’t know about you, but I’m nodding my head, grinning and thinking of all the times I’ve felt exactly this way, thanking my lucky stars that my car is taking me home for a hot shower and not to the mall (or anywhere else on the planet).

Elizabeth Bishop’s monumental poem, “In the Waiting-room, takes place in the waiting room of a dentist’s office. What appears to be an orphaned child is leafing through a copy of National Geographic and finding all those graphic pictures of natives in the bush, etc. (who can’t identify with that?) as her “foolish aunt” is being worked on in the next room. The poem is a complex commentary on the discovery of self and early delineations of language and discovery. Remarkably, the act of waiting is nimbly converted into a rite-of-passage experience as well as a startling discovery of her identity. The poem packs this kind of heat like a six shooter:

Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.

What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I – we - were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I cannot end this short essay on what makes a poem a good poem, without giving you one of my own favorite poems that illustrates this idea of generating heat. It's Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall,” which, in my estimation, starts off hot and continues to build steam all the way through.

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man,
You, with your fresh thoughts
Care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name
Sorrow's springs are the same:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

That is potential energy mounting in each word, collecting heat with each new line- the heat of a grieving Margaret who mourns for the leaves falling off the trees in her beloved town of Goldengrove- heat building as she is warned that as she grows older, much more “sights colder” will befall… that she “will yet weep and know why.” All this amidst a beautifully strung series of white-hot words that draw you in to the final climax- reaching its atomic detonation in last fateful line, “It is Margaret you mourn for.” This is the kind of heat that I aim for in writing poetry, and only rarely achieve. I believe it is a hallmark of great poetry and a quality that we would all do well in trying to achieve, if only to catch a little of that kind of warmth in our words.

-EDN 08/08

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Winner, Poem of the Month for August: Rae Pater

2008-09-04T07:23:00.000-07:00

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I'm proud to present Thirteen Blackbird's Poem of the Month for August, a compact and highly charged poem by Rae Pater. Rae’s poetry is superb. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes , one of the highest awards for poems published in small press poetry journals. Following the poem I give a short explication; and don’t forget to read Rae's bio at the end which includes a link to her poetry.

Song of War

The final wedge is driven
up beneath my breastbone
by my father, from whom I never
thought to look for it.

I seek the red tiger now,
as he bounds through snow -
my arrow, my sword.

Like an ember he burns
my path forward from here
in the wake of the rising sun,
through the cycles of the moon.

I choose not the way of the warrior,
it chooses me.
I make my most perfect bow
and sing to my ancestors
for a good day to die.

Rae Pater’s poem, Song of War, in four tight and varied strophes, expresses in a confident, if not complex voice, the internal struggle to account for the speaker’s deep wounds from a father who has ‘driven up beneath my breastbone,’ a most evocative opening metaphor that arrests the reader up front. The poem is about the speaker’s reaction to this fundamental wound, about a response to an event or a series of events that, ‘like an ember,’ burns her path forward.

The opening strophe is wonderfully geared for sound. You can breathe it out in one short breath, and the three ‘b’s’ in ‘beneath’, ‘breastbone’ and ‘by’ help ease the sudden presentation of the central and most striking metaphor in the poem. The speaker alludes to a wedge which is driven, a forceful act, with intention. Further, it is driven up (the adverbial expression giving even more force) into her breastbone. Here is where we understand, early in the poem, that the injury incurred was great (the breastbone connoting a covering or protection over the heart). It was a good choice not to expand here; we are not given specifics, and thus not tempted to take sides or over-empathize. The tone appears to be softer than what one would imagine with a sexual violation, especially with the qualifier, “from whom I never thought to look for it.” Perhaps this is a divorce, or an unexplained leaving, or a serious falling out. In any event, the tone is set for the central portion of the poem which directs the reader to the speaker’s response.

In the second and third strophe, we’re introduced to the red tiger, a reference to the speaker’s way out of her struggles. Here we see a tone change, and the poem conforms to the central theme (and title) presenting an individual who is not willing to let her wounds accumulate, but rather must take the offensive. She seeks the red tiger, to use its cunning and strength as a means of overcoming ('my arrow, my sword'). And not to mutilate her father, but to cut away the darkness and the personal obstacles in the path of recovery (‘Like an ember he burns/my path forward from here/in the wake of the rising sun,/through the cycles of the moon). The speaker is drawing on some strength that lies outside of herself and marshalling its prowess to attack the demons in her own psyche. The struggle, thus, is focused inward, and keeps the integrity of the poem intact (versus refocusing on the father).

The final strophe adds a twist, and the poem turns, perhaps, on the building realization that the speaker's power to cope does not fully originate from within, but tied to other forces, namely, the innate teaching of ancestral origin. Here we might imagine a mother of native origin, and the speaker finally acknowledging her struggle to cope is inextricably aligned and connected through blood lines.

What’s striking about this poem is that there is so much opportunity for identification, with so little detail given. That’s where the poem shines. It’s not about the injuries, per se, but the struggle to find a battle ground, to find a 'warrior' that will take up the battle; or at least, to acknowledge and understand where that strength comes from.

From Rae:

Rae Pater has been published online and in print. She has three grown children and a cat named Gus. She spends far too much time in front of a computer, and her bio needs some serious work.

Rae edited Verse Libre Quarterly for a year or so, placed first in the NPAC online poetry competition in January 2004, got honourable mention in the IBPC August 2006, and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Verse Libra Quarterly in 2003, by Erosha in 2004, and by Sun Rising Press in 2005. Rae has just completed the final year of a B.A in English literature and is currently training as an adult literacy tutor.

My blog link:
http://burning-moon.blogspot.com/

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Update

2008-08-28T11:18:00.000-07:00

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Just to let you know, I'm alive and well... just doing a lot of traveling, writing and not really on the web this past month. Check out what's new below:

* I'm 94 and 44/100ths percent finished with my manuscript for my first book of poems which has about 125 poems on 70 pages. I'm going to start mailing to publishers this next week.

* My poem, "Room 230" was just accepted into fourW, a very cool Australian print poetry journal. I can't reproduce it here, but here's a small excerpt:

She recalled the regimen of pills, dim
amber lights and young-buck counselors
waxing omnipotent on their swiveling stools
to the weeping and gnashing of inmates.
Even remembered the frogs in her toilet,
Jewish men coming to take her valuables,
iron crosses, tattoos, dark black nights,
dark black thoughts and dark black days.

* I'm working on the monthly installment, "Poem of the Month," and should have it for you by weeks end.

* Please tell your friends about Thirteen Blackbirds. Send them the link: http://www.edwardnudelman.blogspot.com The blog is gaining momentum and I'd love to expand the readership even more

* Please don't forget, you can comment anonymously (or directly with a blogspot membership)

* Send me your ideas for what you'd like to see more of here:
enudelman@msn.com

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Winner, Poem of the Month: Pris Cambpell

2008-07-21T09:57:00.000-07:00

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I'm very happy to present a brilliant poem to you by Pris Campbell, an accomplished poet with a long list of published poems. Her poem, "Undertow," is a great example of controlled use of energy in the form of sadness and identification, which the reader takes in and tries to accomodate all through the poem. It leaves you with an easy feeling. It delivers!

Undertow

I expected my father's death
to draw the sea to my feet,
the water threatening to bear me
away with it--not mother's.
Our voices were constant coils
of disagreement; my hair was too long.
I was too thin. My clothes were too tight.
My mish-mash of dishes would never do
if the relatives came down for Christmas.
I lived 'in sin' with a man, traveled with him,
tossed away my bra to her mortification.
After my knees buckled
and this illness pinned me to my bed of thorns,
the core of metal between us softened,
became a pillow to rest our heads upon, but
she slipped quietly into that undertow
and I was left alone on the beach, a girl again,
weeping.

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This powerful and compact poem builds on
layers of dysphoria which the narrator recalls
from early maternal influences up to the present.
Interestingly, the poem opens with a reference to
the speaker's father, whose death was anticipated
to take a much larger toll (at least when compared to
grief experienced through her mother). We find a
metaphor of the sea, which in this case, 'threatens
to bear me away with it." A sense of instability and
loosened underpinnings, early on, is evinced, that
appears to be superseded by her mother's constant
jabbing and attacks on self esteem ("my hair was
too long, I was too thin, my clothes were too tight").
But we're not looking at generation gap here, or the
dystopic imaginations of an adult making hyperbole
of what otherwise might be considered adolescent
bewilderment. What really hurts, and where the
poem turns on both tone and importance, is here:
"After my knees buckled and this illness pinned me
to my bed of thorns, the core of metal between us
softened:" a serious physical problem, as well as
obvious deep emotional injury (the two are
all too often inextricably related). Interestingly,
this malady somehow brought an apparent softening
in the Mother-daughter relationship, that was
tragically, short-lived. Thus, the force in the poem
is set up and springs as the narrator returns to the
sea metaphor and its ever-present pull, expressed
as 'that undertow." The language here puts the
effects in the dynamic range. This is not something
that just happened, but a process over many, many
years. And it hearkens back to earliest memories,
with her father, and now operating to pull her mother
back under. It's not hard to imagine, though never
stated, the tacit idea that the daughter has to deal
with these same negative forces. The striking
reversion, in the closing line, to a childhood day
at the beach conjures up images of a real drowning
and hammers home the heat of the poem in blazing,
enervating sadness. This poem brings one startingly
close to the edge of shared experience and allows
for just the proper amount of detachment (in tone)
to enter into the narrator's strife, but not be overcome
by its negative pull.

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Pris Campbell, A Brief Bio

Among other journals and anthologies, Pris Campbell's poetry has appeared in Poems Niederngasse, Boxcar Poetry Review, MiPo (digital/print/radio/OCHO), Thunder Sandwich, The Dead Mule, Empowerment4Women, In The Fray, The Cliffs: Soundings, and The Wild Goose Review. She's been featured poet in a number of journals and appeared on PoetryVlog, a site for video poems run by George Wallace. She has two chapbooks: Abrasions and Interchangeable Goddesses (Rank Stranger Press and Rose of Sharon/3 Virgins Imprint). A third chapbook, Hesitant Commitments, will be part of Lummox Press' Little Red Book series. A former Clinical Psychologist, she's now sidelined by CFIDS. She lives in the greater West Palm Beach, FL , with her husband. More of her poetry can be found at her website poeticinspire and her MySpace blog

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Winner, Poem of the Month, by John F. Walter

2008-06-24T05:36:00.000-07:00

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Freezing In Phantasmal Light, by John F. Walter

Throw away mousepads, wolfman gone to snow! Blood moon glows
with a crispness not envisioned in virtual risings ever displayed.
Nocturnal light was shunned a century ago, yet the lunatic mood
persists in you. Resist that urge back onto neverland's screens.

When did you last to real window steal? Once upon a frozen fall?
Dim subjects swoop into the room: the mind maps a wife, a child--
their own ghost-boards held in hand, happiness' geiger counters.
La luna llena, te espera.... but a report zooms into upper left corner:

news coming in from an iceberg sighting--LIVE ICEBERG CAM--
as a frigid voice like a slur swings by, no longer language.
She's turned on an ambient strobe, the baby wails on the patio;
time to nosh a midnight nano snack cast rudely on the keys.

No "Tranquility Sea" frees your gaze from this fractal flicker. Choose.
Shall love return, the iceman thaw, or baby take chill in our winter?

This visual poem, with its sweeping horizontal lines, expressive tone and chilling admonitory language, serves up an icy warning to the present age of video voodoo, internet idolatry and the ever-pressing urge toward Virtual. Walter presents, in sonnet form, a one-act play where you are the central figure and the setting is under a blood red moon that glows ‘with a crispness not envisioned in virtual risings ever displayed.’ Up close and personal, the narrator cautions the reader to resist the lunatic mood that wants to replace real light in favor of a transmitted image, on ‘neverland’s screens.’ The poem begins to turn on the question posed in S2, “When did you last to real window steal?” and rhetorically answered, “Once upon a frozen fall?” The icy metaphor is adroitly carried throughout the poem (iceberg sighting, iceberg cam, frigid voice, iceman thaw). We are led into a mini-vision where ‘dim subjects swoop into a room,’ and we imagine a wife, a child, with their happiness toys (ghost-boards, Geiger counters), simulating a world in miniature, focusing and displacing attention away from the present and into a phantom zone of flickering larval images and thoughts... into phantasmal light. And yet, there is still a moon that awaits you, written in Spanish, to reinforce the symbol of pristine beauty. Is the moon, an essential icon of reality in the poem, real; and better, is it lovely? The vision is interrupted with news coming from a remote camera on an iceberg; a ‘frigid voice’ communicates something ‘no longer language.’ Here is the full immersion we’ve been waiting for, the slip past surreal into the non-real, with time pixilated by an ambient strobe… inopportunely and rudely interrupted by a glimpse of reality: the baby cries, get a snack, keep it moving. Inevitably, the poem ties its own knot, as do we. There is no exit from this virtual panacea, no beautiful moon photo of a real sea on a real moon. Not in the simulacra we forge. Interestingly, Walter slips in the nudge, ‘CHOOSE’, as a stand-alone entreaty, dangling, as it were, at the very end of the penultimate line. The message is clear: it’s not too late. But change demands decision. Personally, and outwardly, to a culture ramrodding through a virtual hole in the cosmos. In the stunning couplet to end, there is a fascinating tone shift in the question, “Shall love return?” It turns out what the poet is speaking about refers as much to real love and adulation for real things, as it does in perception or consciousness. A brave new notion for a modern world distracted by the ‘fractal flickers’ of the virtual world.

Here is a quintessential ‘pre-Simulationist’ poem that addresses key notions that engage artists and writers today. Even if we think we live in a Platonic Cave, or feel left for dead by Descartes and his little demon, our common sense experience of the natural world still tells us that this amazing cosmos we take in through the senses and map our way through is infinitely superior to any 'copy' or perfectly realized simulacra we can fabricate, invent or google our way towards. While our imagination has genuine intention (it is always about real people and real things in the world), and even when we choose to mediate with symbol, word, icon, or even a 3D virtually rendering between our consciousnesses and that cosmic awareness, we never match or even awkwardly approach the Real. On the other hand, the poem seems to indicate, we more easily fall into serious dysfunctional delusion. A clever semblance, perhaps, but still virtual and fabricated. Do we want an Absolute Fake of a moon that we can grasp with phantom tentacles, or a real moon that we can contemplate in the sky, land upon, and dream our way toward the stars from? Can we hold the moon and its double in our gaze at the same time, and if so, do we remember to love all the ones under the sublunar reflection it returns? And does the apprehension of real things affect our art, our understanding, and our appreciation for the world around us? -EDN

Brief Bio
John Walter is a U.S. citizen writing in beautiful Granada, Spain, where he splits his time with his theatre productions in LA and wandering the subterranean mazes below Granada finding fodder for his novel on Al Qaeda and Sufi mysticism (ANNIHILATION). He is an accomplished poet working on his first book of poems, a noted playwright with plays produced off-Broadway, SOHO, SF and often in LA. Walter co-founded the ‘pre-Simulationist Movement,’ (along with the author of this article and several other artists/writers), an artist’s movement that is finding new ways to surpass the exhausted postmodern epoch and its errant constructions of language and thought.

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Winner, Poem of the Month for May

2008-06-02T05:01:00.000-07:00

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Flying, by Susan Budig
Tu ne seras pas oublié.

You were not ready when you flew from earth,
snatched, like a bird in a storm.

Now I sit at your desk writing the last words in your journal.
I pour out your shampoo, sudsing my hair twice a day
until there is nothing left.
I paint my nails mismatched colors while emptying your chic bottles
of Le Rouge Foncé and Rose Scintillant.

Birds feast on your half-eaten bag of Cheetos that I shake,
salting the wind.
I burn your cinnamon candle down to a nub,
leave on your night-light until the bulb burns out,
open to your bookmark, finishing Baudelaire’s final verses.

Then I lay my head on your pillow,
inhaling your lilac memory,
pull up the yellow cotton sheet,
and dream your last dream.

My aching heart hears you whisper
Allez à Paris.

When I land at Charles de Gaulle
every face I see is yours—
the blue-gray eyes
the chestnut hair
fair face dotted with freckles.

And then I see him:
the Frenchman in your dream.

He smiles at me, steps forward.
His cheeks press mine,
right and left.
I feel the rasp of his peppered beard.
But I know you want more.

Standing on tiptoe, my arms wrapped around his neck,
I look into his brown eyes, pleading
Une fois plus pour Jacqueline?
I hold my breath.
“Avec le plaisir,” he replies.

And we kiss like old lovers,
lingering on
until the taste of his lips cannot be forgotten.

Susan gives the following short bio and addendum to the poem:

I decided when I was eleven years old after winning a Scholastic Writing Contest that I wanted to be a writer. I can't remember when I didn't write poetry, but for the past five years I've written as a journalist and music journalist, freelancing for two newspapers (Mshale and Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder). A couple of years ago I was included as a finalist for Minneapolis' Loft Literary Center's poetry mentorship program, but haven't made much more headway into the world of poetry than that. This poem, Flying, began in my head in January, 2003, but wasn't finished, as if that's ever possible, until I actually went to France early in May, 2008. I stood in the airport for over an hour, people streaming by me, and simply envisioned the scene in the dream segment of my poem. I revised that section while flying over the Atlantic ocean.

Explication by Edward Nudelman

This free-verse narrative poem is very nearly two poems melded into one. Seamlessly. Flying is a poem of loss evincing a strong depth of love which the narrator emphasizes in the cataloguing of objects left behind from a very close and recently deceased female friend or relative, named Jacqueline. Using emblems that jog the memory, objects that were shared by both individuals, the narrator reminds herself (and us) what must be lost to lessen the anguish of loss. The narrator affirms her anguish in the untimely passing (‘you were not ready’) by over-stressing what must be jettisoned from sight and sense in order to assuage the grief: shampoo, chic bottles of nail enamel, a half-eaten bag of Cheetos, cinnamon candle, and even her night light. So much of working through grief is taking action; and conversely, so much of love is clinging to every last vestige of love- even when it is physically impossible.

There is a brilliant transition into the second section of the poem in the quartet,

Then I lay my head on your pillow,
inhaling your lilac memory,
pull up the yellow cotton sheet,
and dream your last dream.

which helps build energy and anticipation into the middle and ending sections of the poem. At this point of transition, the poem changes palpably in tone and we are introduced to an intimate and chance meeting as the dream of a dream unfolds: to visit Paris. It is true, the narrator cannot extricate herself from the memory of her loved-one, even after clearing the house of every reminder. ‘Going to Paris’ (perhaps an alternate suggestion for the title), is her dream, and one obviously never realized due to her early death. So the narrator must go there for her; and once there, the delineation between dream and reality become a little fogged. We find a reference to 'the Frenchman in your dream,' a clever construct to further magnify the illusory tone. The two phrases following consecutively, 'I feel the rasp of his peppered beard,' and, 'but I know you want more,' join the displaced lovers together in place and time with only imagination left as the final barrier. Cleverly, though we know the narrator is the stand-in, the scene is evocative of much more, a kind of transference of passion. We understand and see the meeting that could never occur, now fully realized. She melts into his arms, pleading, 'once more, for Jacqueline?' 'With pleasure,' he responds, and they 'kiss like old lovers.' Time has been erased from the equation. Finally, two lovers meet in the body of a poem, that were prevented from meeting by an early passing. The poem is an emotional release, but more than mere catharsis, it creatively describes an illusory representation of love that enacts a service of ultimate value, the resolution of a life-long dream.

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American Poet Portraits, by Didi Menendez

2008-06-01T09:20:00.000-07:00

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I am very proud to be included in a one-of-a-kind series of portraits of contemporary poets, an idea crafted and executed by Didi Menendez, poet, founder of MiPOesias Poetry Magazine, Oranges and Sardines, and many other ground-breaking forums for poetry both online and in printed form (Menendez Publishing).

You can find the complete set of paintings hosted by Didi on her blog here:

link to American Poet Portraits.

I hope you'll have a look; to my knowledge, this is the first series of such portraits for contemporary poets and one that will, in my humble estimation, find its way into the annals of art and poetry history.

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Winner, Poem of the Month Competition

2008-05-05T05:35:00.000-07:00

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Intrinsic Differences, by Laura Tattoo

You are adamant, you want answers!
You rally reason from wreck, put out inchy
feelers, scrutinize pharmacologic text,
then proffer cures like colored seeds to birds.

I'm intransigent; I swear I've tried it, all of it!
I've spent thousands on gels, mincemeats and frills
and still I'm sexless; I peck among the rhetoric,
swallow limpid jewels, rise a shadow of myself.

Spilling over this thirsty landscape, we're all
dry as dinosaurs and old as hills;
we've got loser libidos and sinewy sloughs,
we've got what we paid for and we're thirsty still.

You are a maestro of bird song with all that hope,
singer of Ode to Joy in the cafe dawn, you thrill:
I'm torn down in the book of Psalms, I sin,
for I can't wait for a god to call me home

And end this senseless race for cure,
another muck-muck run of luck
that seeps into deep caverns of my skin,
absorbed in the big pores of my nihilism.

This poem dramatically contrasts, with an attitude, the salutary and optimistic outlook of an unnamed individual with that of the narrator’s bitter, if not hopeless sense of futility, apparently due to an incurable ailment. Near the middle of the poem, a single stanza serves to universalize (almost parenthetically) this perceived futility in human suffering. The poem then quickly reverts back to its sardonic rant against a person who is characterized as one with hope and joy, and possessing some measure of faith. This contrasting imagery forms the basis for a poem illustrating the depth of suffering, in part, by its contrast to its opposite.

Composed of five fairly uniform quatrains, the poem has an unusual rhyming structure with an emphasis on a repeating end-rhyme: 'frills', 'hills', 'still', 'thrill', in addition to the quirky paired rhyme, 'muck-muck run of luck'. As well, an additional end-rhyme occurs (sin/skin) separated by three unrhymed lines. These uneven rhythms provide an order and otherwise structured tone to a poem which, without them, might have become heavy with its hard tone. Interestingly, the poem ends on a fascinating near rhyme couplet of skin/nihilism.

These rhymes add a lyrical quality to a fairly heavy-handed and deliberate poem. The poem is also lifted out of an otherwise negative tone by some excellent alliteration: ‘rally reason from wreck,’ ‘dry as dinosaurs,’ ‘loser libidos,’ and ‘sinewy sloughs.’

The poem opens declaratively, addressing a person the speaker obviously knows well, in an accusatory tone, “You are adamant, you want answers!” This sets the tone for the poem and ushers in the notion of certainty and the speaker’s frustration with an individual who may not understand or have a basis for empathy in their experience. This person who rallies ‘reason from wreck,’ is obviously aware of the speaker’s problems, which appear to be rooted in some serious physical impairment or disease (reference to 'pharmacologic text', 'proffer cures'). However, the speaker has heard all of this and declares herself intransigent, unable to change (or be changed). It is clear, early on in the poem, that there is a history of suffering and striving, of failing to get better in the face of injurious therapeutic regimes (‘I've spent thousands on gels, mincemeats and frills,; ‘I’m still sexless,’ and, ‘swallow limpid jewels, rise a shadow of myself’).

The third stanza brings the reader into the fray. No more is this is solely an argument between the speaker and another party. “We're all dry as dinosaurs and old as hills/ We've got loser libidos and sinewy sloughs/ We've got what we paid for and we're thirsty still.” This appears to be a reference to possible side-effects of some drugs (i.e., drastically affecting libido). In addition, in declaring we get what we pay for and are still thirsty, the speaker implies there is little comfort in costly protocols whose side effects are worse than the curative benefits.

The fourth and fifth stanzas contrast the speaker's despair with the apparent opposite nature of the subject addressed, whose hope sings like a bird, a ‘singer of Ode to Joy,’ in a café: a reference that lets the reader know there is a history here, and brings attention to perhaps a specific encounter or discussion that may have formed a basis for the inspiration of the poem. Further, the biblical reference to the Psalms serves to illustrate the depth of the speaker’s suffering (‘I'm torn down in the book of Psalms, I sin') and the the phraseology continues the tone of sarcasm here, pointing out a perceived hypocrisy in a person who is a “maestro of bird song.”

The poem ends by drawing the reader back to the central issue at hand: the speaker’s hopelessness in the face of a disease or condition that apparently has no cure (‘end this senseless race for cure’). Although the speaker makes a reference here to a ‘run of bad luck,’ it is clear that there is a subtext here which remains unresolved. In the face of such devastating effects of physical (and no doubt emotional) exhaustion, the speaker finally withdraws away from a tirade and looks inward, avowing a kind of bleak resignation, if not complicity with her own suffering, which becomes ‘absorbed in the big pores of my nihilism.”

This poem dramatizes the speaker’s highly personal, candid and visceral response to an apparently incurable physical ailment showing profound frustration with an unnamed individual who obviously possesses quite divergent views on the subject. Intimate and ‘intrinsic differences’ in ways of thinking (and feeling) between the speaker and another individual are used to juxtapose the universal struggle against the physical realm, against forces which are resistant to change (i.e. for the better). Though sardonic and intentionally dark, the poem amplifies the speaker’s travail by vividly comparing her own plight with the seemingly joyous (though perhaps callous) temperament of an unnamed individual. It is a poem of despair in which the speaker unabashedly amplifies a kind of intractable anguish (and angst) and finally accepts blame, after a fashion, in the personal recognition of nihilistic hopelessness. While this may be a poem easily panned by those without a context for years of suffering, it will, conversely, find resonance for many who find identification in their experience for the bleak harsh realities of human suffering.

Laura Tattoo was inspired, early on, to write poetry by the likes of Dr. Seuss, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Shakespeare, but feels she discovered it much more by simply living it. In her twenties she studied English and French at Portland State University where she won the Nina Mae Kellogg award for best senior student in English. Between then and now, she has written several volumes of poetry in both English and French, and at 51 is seeking to publish and share her work. Originally from New York and Massachusetts, Laura now divides her time between her home in Astoria, Oregon, and long sojourns in Paris, France.

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Art and Science and A Robin

2008-04-20T12:05:00.000-07:00

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All art presupposes some degree of scientific method. All science begins with the art of ideas. Looking out my kitchen window I see a robin. I am aware, as I watch it gently tamp the grass with both feet while at the same time making the most pleasant, airy chirps a bird can make- that I'm writing a poem of a painting.

I try to imagine this painting of a robin in its own poem, with its own premise. The robin's premise, in my poem, is sound. The breezy refrain in her song, the lack of sound in her gliding footfall across my lawn. I jot down a few lines. My words, together with their syntactic foundation, form a premise whenever I assemble them together to say something. They always aim at something, however grandiose or base, however monumental or trivial; and they always bear the subtle fruit of some kind of methodological approach, however unclear it may be to either me or the reader.

The robin must know, better than I, what she is about. But since she can't tell me in words, I have to rely on other senses to inform. And when I want to write of death, or global warming, or a disquieting conversation with a neighbor (in a poem, for example), I get to remember the sound the robin made through its tiny beak, or its silent, frustrating foray through my grass, finding no worms.

This word picture may reasonably find its way into my thinking at any moment, without ever using diagnostic words relating to the robin. Importantly, however, while pleasing to the psyche and sometimes to the heart, this approach can fall short in providing absolute information. I may speak much of a robin, but I may say less of Robin. I may describe her demeanor and talk about her successes and failures, and relate them to my own, and you may find something in the delineation of my robin that you hadn't seen in your robin. Still, we may widely disagree. This amounts to a kind of Wikipedia entry for a robin. If enough of us write robin poems and enough of us interact with each others work, we may come to understand more and more about the robin. This is beginning to sound like science.

In fact, this is about all that science purports to accomplish. It aims to observe, to write about those observations, and to make conclusions based on these observations. It aims to submit these findings to some sort of Wikipedia, some bulletin board of review, so that others can comment, agree, admire, disagree and, yes, denigrate (in a civil sort of academic way, of course!).

These methods, whether of art or science, have their own peculiar aspects of inquiry, observation, examination, discussion, conclusion and/or qualia of experience. Whether describing atmospheric pressure in a balloon, or the circular perambulations of a robin in a poem, it is necessary to make assumptions and reason your way through them toward a semblance of conclusion. Even in absurdist poetry, one is clearly making a statement based on random or nonsensical premises.

Science need not be rigorous and restricted to nomenclature to be scientific inquiry, just as art need not be diffuse and metaphorical to be artistic; we fool ourselves to think we live and operate in a world where we don't commonly think, project and/or imagine, using very distinct patterns of logic and mechanistic inquiry. These patterns of thought are subject to both our own scrutiny, as well as the scrutiny of others. To say that we can approach a definition in our art, is not to deny any kind of mystical or emotional basis to that art. Quite the converse, we give more credence to our art as it touches the senses and the supra-sense, when we acknowledge that it has a basis in reason, as opposed to being on the fringe of reason, or outside of experience altogether.

Scientific method does not (nor has it ever intended to) war against art, and vice versa. But rather, the two coexist, right beside each other, benefiting in a mutual and symbiotic process of declaration, understanding and enlightenment.

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Poetry Competition

2008-04-09T04:05:00.000-07:00

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Announcing a poetry competition. Submit your poems to me personally at: enudelman@msn.com

I will review all poems and once a month I will select one to appear on this blog with an introduction about the author and a short explication (by me) of the poem. Hopefully, this will generate excitement and comments for each poem selected. I look forward to receiving your submissions.

Simply email the poem IN THE BODY OF THE EMAIL (I would prefer to not receive attachments) with the subject simply saying "poetry submission," or something similar. Please don't expect an answer to the submission by email.

Warm regards,

Edward Nudelman

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Get Real: Vetting Your Work

2008-03-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

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Get Real: Vetting Your Work

Are you a human being?
If yes, continue. If no, go plug yourself into a socket.
Are you interested in writing?
If yes, continue. If no, go work on a crossword puzzle.
Are you interested in someday publishing, in any way shape or form?
If yes, continue. If no, go find a snack.
Okay, if you said no, I’ll give you one more chance.
If not interested in publishing, what about interest in having more than one person on the planet read your work (not counting you)?
If yes, you may continue. If no, bite me.
Are you interested in putting the ‘best’ product out there?
If yes, continue. If no, go write a poem about angels using 14 mixed metaphors.
Now the capper!
Have you vetted your work?
If no, read on.
If…not sure what vet means- you definitely should continue. If yes, go ahead and read it anyway; as my Yiddish grammy used to say, “it voodn’t hurt!”

Definition of vet.. to subject to thorough examination or evaluation: vet a manuscript.

Okay, that was a bit harsh. But you get the idea. Or maybe you don’t have a clue where I’m going, but the hook was so good, you’re willing to read at least one more paragraph.

I’m going to approach this a little sideways, and perhaps by the end you’ll get some idea of what I’m trying to say. I’m a scientist, by profession (I write poetry too). I think I can say that awful word (scientist) with some degree of certainty, partly because I’ve worked in a laboratory for over 25 years, but also because I’ve published over 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals. Before you get all ruffled and think this is yet another academic snob spewing forth self-righteous self-accolades, let me quickly tell you I have no multiple initials following my name. I’ve no masters, I’ve no PhD, but I do have over 60 papers published in peer-reviewed journals (obnoxious for effect). I personally think that means a lot more than a degree. I also think degrees mean something, but not always. I’ve seen an awful lot of pretty inept PhD’s float through our labs, some that can’t pipet squat, others that can’t think their way out of a test tube, still others quite incapable of holding a conversation with anything but a computer screen and/or a pencil.

One thing remains clear. When I want to know what’s up in the lab, how to plan an experiment, where to insert a gene, how long to incubate an enzyme reaction, I do one thing almost exclusively: I consult a published paper. So, what’s so terrible about that? What I’m doing is relying on past experience. On collective experience that has stood the test of time as well as multiple reviews and peer-vetting. That’s a good thing. And when I do that, I don’t just turn to any old journal. I consult the best indexes, choose the best journals, as universally accepted by my colleagues. Then I find the journal article that best relates to the problem at hand. I trust the findings (insofar as reason allows), because the research has been reviewed (vetted) beforehand by a team of experts. (There you go, cringing again!) I know experts is a dirty word. And it gets worse when you invoke: a team of experts. But what’s wrong with the idea? Is there a better alternative? Should we consult a team of beginners? I don’t think we’d do that with our medical problems.

In science, there's a huge spectrum of journals in which one can be published. Some are universally recognized as being top tier journals, others have more loose qualifications and prerequisites, and some lower end journals you just don’t want to be seen in. But, for the most part, to be published in a scientific journal, one’s work must be vetted by a board of reviewers chosen by the editorial board to be proficient in the area which the investigation is reporting. This makes for a highly competitive and rigorous acceptance protocol the net result of which is a high degree of veracity and reliability of the final product. I’ve participated in many, many rounds of the review process. It’s really quite fascinating, and there’s a good deal of plasticity built into the system. Reviewers interact with the submitters and edits are made along the road to publication. That’s a good thing, and there’s really no equivalent, that I’ve found, in other disciplines. Without benchmark standards, we don’t have criteria to judge what is good and what is bad.

I want to draw a comparison between vetting scientific work (by submitting to journals) and vetting your writing. The former is rigorous and pretty established. You have clear cut options. The latter, vetting your writing, is a much more nebulous proposition, and one needs to be careful in drawing similar conclusions about what is art, versus what is science, for example.

On should strive to have their writing viewed by a discriminating eye if one wishes to improve. To settle for anything less is to settle for deception, a path of least resistance accommodated by many a writer, including yours truly. But it’s worth it to go the extra mile and look for a friend or associate you trust who can give you candid and discerning feedback without a sugar coating. Further, one should always take casual praising with a huge shaker full of salt. It’s good to get it. But too much can be intoxicating. In online forums, especially, it can be an all-consuming opiate (see above flowchart if I’m losing you here… remember, if you don’t want to publish, feel free to get a Reader’s Digest and turn on the tube).

I think the problem is not that one can’t find suitable avenues to vet your work, but more that one is not, ultimately, really interested or prepared to take that kind of input and use it to a worthwhile end. It may seem like an obstacle, but it doesn’t take long to get used to critical remarks, especially from a friend or associate sharing your common interest to improve a craft.

Extrapolating from informed friends, internet groups and writing forums to- heaven forbid- journal editors or publishing houses may seem daunting, but take heart! You take the steps necessary to walk as far as you want to go. If you want to be good, and you want to be read, you’ll work hard to improve, vet your work, seek earnest and critical feedback, and finally, if you really have the stomach for it, you’ll vet your work to publishers, and work your way up the feeding chain. Some of you will go right to the top. Most, if you’re like me, will find you’re not as good as you had hoped or dreamed… but you'll land on your feet and have as much ink as you need. At least you’re walking in the real world. Planet earth, last time I checked.

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New Poem Just Published in Mipoesias

2008-02-17T16:37:00.001-08:00

A new poem just published at Mipoesias, one of my favorite poetry journals:

Summer of 1969

Interviewed in Mipoesias Magazine

2008-01-20T12:05:00.000-08:00

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Recently, the editor and founder of Miposesias magazine, Didi Menendez, interviewed poets on Cafe Cafe. You can find it here: Poet Interviews and then navigate around to find other interviews of poets querying poets. It all makes for some very interesting, if not snarky, reading.

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Rockin' Your ABC's

2007-12-18T17:16:00.000-08:00

My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz. It's the letter I use to spell yuzz-a-ma-tuzz. You'll be sort of surprised what there is to be found once you go beyond 'Z' and start poking around!" -Dr. Seuss

There is probably no more familiar poetry form than the ABC. These poems, based on the alphabet of any particular language, can take many forms. Commonly termed, the abecedarian, this poetry genre takes its structural architecture, by definition, from the letters of the alphabet. Usually, the poem begins with the first letter of the alphabet and then builds successively, in order, moving through the alphabet from A to Z (i.e., in English).

Early Semitic ABC poems abounded, appearing in religious Hebrew poetry, for example, which centered around sacred practices as early as 1000 B.C. The Hebrew Bible contains many examples of abecedarian poetry. Probably the most acclaimed of these comes from Psalm 119 where the poem is broken up into twenty-two eight-line stanzas, each representing, in order, a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Here is a brief extraction from the poem (NIV Version) where the initial words of the stanza (translated here in English) begins with the corresponding Hebrew letter, as shown in italics below:

Aleph
Blessed are those whose ways are blameless,
Who walk according to the law of the Lord.
Blessed are they who keep his statutes...

Bet
How can a young man keep his way pure?
By living according to your word.
I seek you with all my heart...

Gimmel
Do good to your servant, and I will live;
I will obey your word.
Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things...

In the fifth century, a fascinating abecedarian poem appeared by Coelius Sedulius, a Latin poet, who wrote an ABC to be used as an adjunct to worship. The poem, entitled A solis ortus cardine (click here to view both Latin and English translation) was later transcribed and converted into a hymn by Martin Luther, in 1524.

An early ABC poem in the English language is Chaucer's "La Priere de Nostre Dame" (The Prayer of our Lady), or more commonly dubbed "Chaucer's ABC" (Click here for complete text). The poem is an adaptation of a prayer from an illusory French poem entitled, "La Pelerinaige de la vie humaine," ca. 1330. Here is a link to view a leaf from the original manuscript. The poem is noteworthy as Chaucer blurs the lines of what was considered orthodox 'clerical' poetry using a sensual courtly imagery of love, a practice that became commonplace in medieval poetry.

The earliest primers for children appeared in England in the fifteenth Century, a period predating modern educational institution, and an era without the benefit of materials and resources that later advanced learning so rapidly throughout the Industrial Revolution. These books were termed hornbooks, because they were covered with a thin layer of horn as a protective coating. The hornbook usually came with a wooden handle and had as a prominent feature a graphic representation of the alphabet. The hornbook, along with its paper counterpart, the chapbook, which followed in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, often had rudimentary ABC poems as learning instruments for the child.

Probably the most famous American chapbook, the New England Primer, published in Boston, ca. 1688, was full of alphabet rhymes, devices and pictorial teaching devices for children. It soon became a mainstay as a textbook for New Englanders in the eighteenth Century. The New England Primer followed a time-honored tradition used by the early settlers in America using biblical themes and stories as an aid in teaching the alphabet to children. Here is a striking example from the Primer:

A
In Adam's Fall
We sinned all.
B
Thy Life to Mend
This Book Attend.
C
The Cat doth play
And after slay.
D
A Dog will bite
A Thief at night.
E
An Eagle's flight
Is Out of sight.
F
The Idle Fool
Is Whipt at School

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William Blake's, London, a poem written in the seventeenth century, deals with the palpable images and sounds of London. One stanza is brilliantly depicted as an acrostic, where the first letters of each word in just one stanza of the poem, spell out the word, "Hear."

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

Modern ABC poems abound. Perhaps more than any other poets, Dr. Seuss and Edward Gorey (more widely known as artist) popularized this form in the twentieth century. Dr. Seuss's ABC appeared in 1963, an alphabet book where each letter is accompanied by a poem and an ABC rhyme, as well as an illustration. Edward Gorey's poem, "The Gashlycrumb Tinies," is a remarkable achievement, made that much more appealing with Gorey's expressionistic and rather macabre sketches. Here is an excerpt.

A is for Amie who fell down the stairs
B is for Basil assaulted by bears
C is for Clara who wasted away
D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh

You can view the whole poem, with illustrations, by clicking here.

Harryette Mullen is a gifted modern poet who has recently explored the abecedarian in a wonderful and complex poem, included in her book, "Sleeping with the Dictionary." In it we find a 47-page poem, "On Earth," a complex ABC poem adhering not only to order in the stanzas, but also in the words themselves. Here is a link to obtain her book and, in following, a short extraction from the poem:

languid at the edge of the sea
lays itself open to immensity
leaf-cutter ants bearing yellow trumpet flowers along the road
left everything left all usual worlds behind
library, lilac, linens, litany.

In case you weren't paying attention, that was the letter "L."

Kate Greenaway, a famous nineteenth century English illustrator of children's books, produced a superb alphabet book at the turn of the nineteenth century, entitled, "A Apple Pie; An Old-Fashioned Book." The work begins coyly:

A Apple Pie
B Bit it
C Cut it

It is now in the public domain, and may be easily viewed, poem and illustrations, in their entirety by clicking here.

A fascinating sub-genre of abecedarian poetry is a poem consisting of only the exact number of words in the given alphabet. Thus, for a poem in the English language, there must be only 26 words, each beginning with a letter of the alphabet. Most are built successively from A to Z, but some very creative poems in this form begin with Z and work in the reverse. One of the more acclaimed poems of this type, by Robert Pinsky, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, is entitled simply, ABC. The poem has a brilliant opening, with a memorable snarky two-line aphorism, which presents letters A-J:

Any body can die, evidently. Few
Go happily, irradiating joy

You can watch and hear Pinsky recite his ABC poem on Youtube by clicking here. This is one of the more power-packed readings of twenty-six words of poetry, in my view, you'll ever hear, and it's introduced by Pinsky with a short but edifying explanation of the abecedarian poetry form.

Here is an ABC poem I recently wrote, entitled, not surprisingly, "ABC."

ABC

All bright creation
Doubles

Exponentially
From gaudy heights:

Iridescent jar,
Keening lover,
Magpie nesting on pier.

Queer reproduction,
Subtle triangulation.

Under velvet wings,
Xerox
Your zen

I have also written several longer ABC poems, including "Animal Alphabet of Collective Nouns" (excerpt below). To view entire poem, click here)

Animal Alphabet of Collective Nouns

"A" is for Apes,
A troop of Apes.
Swinging right over your head.
With parachutes white,
They make quite a sight.
Don't let them land on your bed!

"B" is for Bears,
A sloth of Bears,
Raiding your kitchen for food.
They've eaten the jam,
Are downing the ham,
Could they be any more rude?

Here's an excerpt from another longer ABC poem I wrote:

Zany Alphabet of Creepy Bugs

A
Black ant, red ant
A huge compound eye,
Six skinny legs,
Can they fly?
I'll tell you a tale
If you keep still.
I have seen red fire ants
That live in Brazil

B
Big beetle, black beetle
Crawling on the floor,
Don't let him out,
Close the door!
He'll be a fine pet,
Don't think he'll bite.
But he may have buddies
That come out at night.

C
Dance cricket, sing cricket,
Rub your wings so fast,
Can you not stop?
An hour's passed.
Jumping legs so long,
Springing on me.
If you hop in my hand,
Will I set you free?

You can view the entire poem by clicking here.

.

Viral Poetry Particles

2007-11-29T17:38:00.000-08:00

Poetry is viral. It is highly infective, invisible to the naked eye or common microscope, and self-replicating. Deep inside the poetry envelope, an ordered and immensely intricate informational architecture directs the maintenance and operation of the poetry organism.

Recently, researchers at the Yale Literary Research Laboratory (YLRL), in New Haven, have successfully isolated and sequenced the first authentic poetry viral genome. The poetry particles were originally isolated from the blood of an undergraduate student who became infected with a rare disorder after reading too much Shakespeare in a survey level poetry class. Iva Hedachia, a 22 year-old English major, became ill during an exam and was later found by a friend in the bathroom reciting the Preamble to the Constitution in iambic pentameter. She was rushed to the ER and was initially screened by an EMT specialist, who, fortuitously, happened to be the wife of a scientist at the YLRL. The technician phoned her husband, Dr. Seymour Smalley, who rushed over and was able to take a sample of the blood back with him to his lab.

Smalley and his colleagues were successful in isolating the first genes in the so-called “poetry allele.” Using a PCR amplification process, the researchers produced enough viral-encoded message to map out the mysteries of the poetry genome. What they found was as startling as it was beautiful.

In a paper in this month’s Nature Genetics Journal, Smalley et. al. report that certain informational quanta can spontaneously arise in the brains of especially astute and passionate literary majors. These high-energy bundles of genetic material, dubbed “Poetry Virome Catalysts (PVC’s),” can lie dormant for months and suddenly become activated by a single extrinsic event or emotional stimulus.

Smalley, in his groundbreaking paper entitled, “Poetry Viromes and Shakespeare,” suggests that these hotspots of genetic coding are formed somewhere in the amygdala, a center deep within the brain which communicates with the hypothalamus and is responsible for controlling levels of the emotional response. Smalley and his coworkers discovered that Ms. Hedachia had gone far overboard with her reading of Shakespeare. In fact, she stayed up for three straight days (an 82 hour period without sleep) reading through most of the Tragedies and all the Shakespearean Sonnets, memorizing most of the latter to perfection. Her boyfriend caught her on the roof of her eight-story dormitory, with a lavish table set with fine bone china, polished silver, and a complete gourmet meal for two. It wasn’t until the researchers completely explained the syndrome in detail to the boyfriend that he realized the full import of the nametag set for William S.

Smalley has been literally inundated by the media. However, as a caveat to the research conducted at the YLRL, it should be stressed that these PVC’s have not, as yet, shown themselves to be long-lived. Fortunately, the pathological effects of PVC infection and propagation are quite innocuous. It turns out, most people have high levels of “poetry blockers” that quickly attach to the PVC molecules and inactivate them before too much cognitive damage can occur. Moreover, and quite interestingly, complete amnesia seems to accompany most PVC infections observed by the researchers.

Smalley and his team of molecular biologists are currently working on a unified theory of pathogenesis that they say will revolutionize our understanding of how we process the emotional input from reading poetry. The work, in his words, “will ultimately explain why so many of us cannot understand or appreciate anything about poetry, be it modern or classical.” In fact, both Roche and Bayer Pharmaceuticals are interested in developing small molecule “unblockers” that can be taken, for example, just prior to a reading of, say, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, or even T.S. Elliot’s, The Wasteland. Moreover, an executive for Roche commented, with exhilaration, that the market alone for English majors could be in the hundreds of millions (US dollars).

New Poem in Atlanta Review

2007-11-26T14:31:00.000-08:00

My poem, "The Wrong Poem" has just appeared in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of the Atlanta Review. This is a paper only journal, but please click here to check out their webpage: The Atlanta Review

I'm really proud to appear alongside some great poets, including Ted Kooser (two-time US Poet Laureate), Louis Simpson (received Pulitzer Prize for poetry), Albert Goldbarth (National Books Critics Circle Award), Ann Lauterbach, Brighde Mullins and many other luminaries in the poet world.

Poems on Poems

2007-11-26T12:08:00.000-08:00

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves.
Memory by memory the mind--

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

-Excerpt from Ars Poetica, , 1926, by Archibald MacLeish

There is a fascinating body of poetry that looks inward into its own craft and asks the unanswerable question, what is poetry? These poems, perhaps self-conscious, often purposefully pretentious, and certainly noticeable in their peculiar form and voice, have much to teach us about what makes a poem a poem. What are the distinctions? What are the qualities in a poem that leave us breathless, caught up in the transport of an image away from our accustomed vantage and reference points, that lead us into new, unfamiliar territory?

Many great poets have written poems on poems. I’ve taken a look around and chosen some examples that I think will interest you. As well, I offer one of my own to chew on. Hopefully, this will inspire you to think about your craft, not only in writing poems, but prose as well.

Robert Frost once said, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” In looking at what poets have said about poetry in their poems, a striking number have dealt with the effect of words on an individual’s feelings and the resultant impact on all of the senses. It is true, I think, that poetry accentuates the moment in its form, by nature given to brevity (when compared to prose). Perhaps it is this punctuation of the moment that arms the poem to eventually fire rockets into our emotional being.

A poem can shoot off a receptor in the brain with two well-placed words; and, at least with me- I rarely see it coming. This unanticipated dart to the soul is what I love about poetry. Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), a wonderful poet out of the New York School, put it this way:

My Heart, by Frank O'Hara

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!", all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

-from poemhunter.com

Robert Frost said, “A poem begins with a lump in the throat." Often, this kind of response can come from the majesty and sound of words linked artfully together by a master poet. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) wrote a superb poem on the effect of the spoken word in poetry on the senses, entitled, Sound and Sense, which begins:

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense...

The sense of sound in poetry is paramount. When all else fails, it is often the pure sound of a great poem that grabs us and prompts our emotions. This lyrical quality is something poetry can claim as a distinctive. Not all poems, obviously. But I’ve often sat in front of a poem trying to figure out what it was that I liked so much about it, and then finally realized it was simply the beauty of the words put together in a magical way.

What about the obtuseness found in some poetry? How many of us have thrown up our hands (versus our lunch) and remarked, what in the world is this poem talking about? Have you read any Wallace Stevens lately? Or what about T.S. Elliott? If so, then try some excerpts from the following two compelling poems on for size and tell me if you feel any better.

Introduction to Poetry (excerpt), by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive...

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with a rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

My Poems, by Robert Currie.

My poems
are slim bombs
craving explosion
Their fuses lie
dark on the page
awaiting your arrival with a light.

Appears in a text book, Literary Experiences, Vol. I by Oster, Iveson and McClay (in the section entitled "To the Student")

So what is poetry? I imagine there are as many answers to that question as there are readers. However, in examining poems written by well-known poets on what comprises the essence of their craft, I’ve been happily surprised by what I’ve encountered. A striking poem on this topic comes from Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), who saw and felt his way through poetry, in the delineation of the imagery of ideas and the effects of those ideas on the senses. Stevens said of modern poetry, “…[it is] the poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice.” His sardonically honest poem, “Poetry is a Destructive Force,” brilliantly captures one quality of poetry that is incontrovertible: its potential influence and power over the reader.

Poetry is a Destructive Force

-by Wallace Stevens

That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.

Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast
Its muscles are his own...

The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.

-poemhunter.com

Marianne Moore (1887-1972), was a Pulitzer Prize winning American poet who was influential in the early writing careers of many young poets who went on to become great American poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and James Merrill.. The following poem is astounding in its clarity and understanding of the nature and distinctive qualities in poetry that make it interesting and appealing. I highly recommend reading it a number of times.

Poetry, by Marianne Moore

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers
that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a high
sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat,holding on upside down
or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing,
a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree,
the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that
feels a flea, the base-ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid to discriminate against "business documents and
schoolbooks"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets,
the result is not pretty,nor till the poets among us can be
"literalists of the imagination"--above insolence
and triviality and can present for inspection, imaginary gardens
with real toads in them, shall we have it.
In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,
the raw material of poetry in all its rawness
and that which is on the other hand genuine,
then you are interested in poetry.

poemhunter.com

Here's one by a lesser known poet:

How to Write a Poem, by Edward Nudelman

First, arise very early in the morning. Brush your teeth
and floss (if you forgot last night). No wait. First drink
a cup of dark black coffee on a couch, alone, while you
gaze out the window and watch the school kids march
solemnly to St. Catherine’s. Strike that. Better to first
open the window, then you may catch that beautiful
mockingbird song (or, if not there, imagine that you hear
a mockingbird). If today is a warm August morning,
(which it is not, for me) you may be able to pick up the
pungent orange blossom which can coat your tongue with
enough perfume to literally exclude the need to brush
your teeth (this is a lie). If no birds are singing, try to find
the sound of rustling wind. And don’t forget, if the school
kids are walking by, you may be able to see them slowly
proceeding in single file (if your sidewalk is very narrow).
When you see them, quickly close your eyes and remember,
these are the moments of your life. Now, it’s probably past
your cutoff point, so quickly go upstairs and brush your
teeth (if no orange blossom). Steel yourself for the day.
Remember that Susan has been going through hell with the
loss of your dog (as have you, but that pertains to other
poems); see if you can think of something nice to say to her
that might comfort her, give her solace, or prepare her for
what looks like a pretty difficult day. (Note that these
notions are platitudes, but milk them for all they’re worth).
Hold Susan, and say, “I’ll come home for lunch today, if I
possibly can,” knowing that you certainly cannot. Strike that.
Simply say, “I love you dear.” Then kiss her on the very
top of her nose. Drive to work, trying to find a song that
you can cling to. Work. Look for that meager scrap of
paper in the pile in front of you that will free you from the
dread of all the other pieces of paper in front of you. Eat
lunch in your meeting. On the way home, take the car to
the dealers for the umpteenth time in the last month. Yell
nicely at the clueless manager. Hold that thought. Just
threaten him with a lawsuit. That always works. Drive
home in the rental car. Give Susan the flowers you forgot
to buy. Greet the dog you no longer have. Sit back on
your couch, where earlier you couldn’t hear the mockingbird,
and remember, as best you can, what that sound did for you
last summer, when everything else was just wind and scent
and moments piling on top of themselves. Like school
children in a straight line. Now write the bloody poem.

The Pre-Raphaelite Germ

2007-11-22T06:56:00.000-08:00

In the mid-1800's a group of artists and poets, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and J.E. Millais, founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) with their initial publication, The Germ. The groundbreaking periodical only survived for four spectacular issues between January and April of 1850. However, its influence on the art and literary community in England as well as the Continent was striking. This seminal vehicle for a new interpretation and expression of art in literature and the applied-arts displayed the poetry of William Michael and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, and Christina Rossetti, as well as essays by Ford Madox Brown, Coventry Patmore, and others.

The periodical, subtitled, Thoughts Towards Nature in Art and Literature, was an attempt to marry art, in the form of book illustration, and poetry. William Michael Rossetti, in an introduction to a 1901 facsimile edition put it this way:

…it was [The Germ] intended to enunciate the principles of those who, in the true spirit of Art, enforce a rigid adherence to the simplicity of Nature either in Art or Poetry, and consequently regardless whether emanating from practical Artists, or from those who have studied nature in the Artist's School.

W.M. Rossetti, further explained that the depiction of nature in and through art was to be their “paramount storehouse of materials for objects to be represented.” The artists and poets of the PRB studied nature, the representation of it in ideas, and the delineation of nature as seen through allegories and symbols.

Woodcut illustration by Edward Burne-Jones for the renowned 1896 edition of Chaucer's Tales. Burne-Jones, though not an "official" member of the PRB, was one of many artists of the period who associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and illustrated the books and poetry of the PRB. Burne-Jones contributed hundreds of woodcut illustrations in this tour-de-force. First editions of the work sell for over $100,000 on the auction block.

PRB artists and poets wanted to free themselves from the restrictions and mechanizations of the incipient Industrial Revolution as well as norms in art that became part of the institutionalized and commercialized "industry" of art. Their poetry was filled with rich imagery and symbolism. Rarely did a poem provide a contemporary context or a narrator, but rather aimed to address universal ideas, images and feelings. The Pre-Raphaelites drew heavily on the lore of mythology and the historical-literary archive of such classics as King Arthur, Norse and Greek Legends, Medieval culture, as well as romantic characters and poems in literature (Ophelia, Persephone, Eve of St. Agnes) They painted vividly colored pastoral and metaphorical paintings often illustrating a classical poem or legend. The Pre-Raphaelite poets formed their own distinctive voice, calling for a return to a more simplistic, contemplative life.

Probably Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s most famous book illlustration, “The Maids of Elfin-mere,” is a hauntingly beautiful etching of three young women with their arms outstretched. It appeared in the 1855 edition of The Music Master by William Allingham. DGR was very upset with the woodcut when he saw the first proofs, feeling it had inadequately expressed his line. He only begrudgingly let it be published. Many of the Pre-Raphaelites pursued the non-lucrative avenue of producing woodcut illustrations for the poetry books of the period. Most prolific of those artists were the celebrated William Holman Hunt and J.E. Millais, both founding members of the PRB. As well, these two, along with D.G. Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones avidly painted full-size oils with vivid colors and graphic representation. The best known and acclaimed of all the poets in the group was indisputably Dante Rossetti. His poems are often very long and heady, but a careful reading will review a genius in his verse. Here is a shorter poem which uncommonly (for DGR) speaks of peace in his world of torment, high stress, and eventual drug addiction.

Lost on Both Sides, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

As when two men have loved a woman well,
Each hating each, through Love's and Death's deceit;
Since not for either this stark marriage-sheet
And the long pauses of this wedding bell;
Yet o'er her grave the night and day dispel
At last their feud forlorn, with cold and heat;
Nor other than dear friends to death may fleet
The two lives left that most of her can tell:
So separate hopes, which in a soul had wooed
The one same Peace, strove with each other long,
And Peace before their faces perished since:
So through that soul, in restless brotherhood,
They roam together now, and wind among
Its bye-streets, knocking at the dusty inns.

Christina Rossetti, Dante's and William's sister, was an extremely gifted poet. Unlike the long, enigmatic and cerebral poems of Dante, Christina's voice was soft, sensitive, and full of the pathos and conflict that she experienced in her close association with the PRB. CR had a very vibrant faith in God which came out in her poetry in a marvelous free and moving counterpoint, unlike some of the more overtly "religious" poetry of the period. The following poem, entitled Aloof, is a masterpiece of poetic ambivalence with a strong assertive current of honesty saturating every line:

The irresponsive silence of the land,
The irresponsive sounding of the sea,
Speak both one message of one sense to me:--
Aloof, aloof, we stand aloof, so stand
Thou too aloof, bound with the flawless band
Of inner solitude; we bind not thee;
But who from thy self-chain shall set thee free?
What heart shall touch thy heart? What hand thy hand?
And I am sometimes proud and sometimes meek,
And sometimes I remember days of old
When fellowship seem'd not so far to seek,
And all the world and I seem'd much less cold,
And at the rainbow's foot lay surely gold,
And hope felt strong, and life itself not weak.

The opening number of The Germ begins with a stunning, lengthy poem by Thomas Woolner, one of the four founding members of the PRB. It is illustrated with a stunning woodcut etching by William Holman Hunt, another founding member. It is a split illustration, with the upper panel showing a lady picking flowers near a river with her lover pulling her back. The lower panel shows the lover collapsed on his lover's grave, with a procession of nuns passing behind him. Here are the first two stanzas of the poem:

My Beautiful Lady, by Thomas Woolner (first two stanzas)

I love my lady; she is very fair;
Her brow is white, and bound by simple hair;
Her spirit sits aloof, and high,
Altho' it looks thro' her soft eye
Sweetly and tenderly.

As a young forest, when the wind drives thro',
My life is stirred when she breaks on my view.
Altho' her beauty has such power,
Her soul is like the simple flower
Trembling beneath a shower.

It’s difficult to place The Pre-Raphaelites in the order and scale of art movements throughout history. Some decry their idealized representation of the human figure as evidenced in many of Rossetti’s over-romanticized paintings. Others have criticized their narrow and focused view. Most, however, agree that these kinds of narrow assessments sadly misrepresent the effect and value of their art. It was, first and foremost, a reactionary, if not revolutionary movement by a few very gifted artists who wanted to exercise their individuality in an area where that kind of action was vehemently opposed by the institutions in place. Putting it simply, William Rossetti captured the early motives of the founders in this way:

The Preraphaelite Brotherhood entertained a deep respect and a sincere affection for the works of some of the artists who had preceded Raphael; and they thought that they should more or less be following the lead of those artists if they themselves were to develop their own individuality, disregarding school-rules. This was the sum and substance of their “Preraphaelitism."

One of 38 full-color illustration by Edward Burne-Jones for The Flower Book, London, 1905

Four New Poems Just Published

2007-11-12T11:15:00.000-08:00

Ampersand Poetry Journal just published four of my poems in their Autumn edition. Please follow this link to view them at the journal. (click here) Ampersand Poetry Journal

A Jar in Tennessee

2007-11-07T16:55:00.000-08:00

After reading the first poem I ever read by Wallace Stevens, a strange thing happened. For several months afterward, whenever I heard the word “jar” or “Tennessee,” I would think of this poem. In fact, it still happens on occasion. This is an interesting phenomenon often characteristic of great poetry which is capable of eliciting an instant feeling or recollection by just the hearing of a word or phrase. The poem, entitled, "Anecdote of the Jar", appears simple on a first reading, but has so much to offer on various planes of thought.

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around; no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

(originally appeared in the 1919 issue of Poetry Magazine and later was published in his Collected Poems, copyright 1923, 1951, 1954, by Wallace Stevens.)

The poem has its roots in John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn. On one level, Anecdote is a commentary and comparison of Stevens’ own roots, a kind of critique of the poet’s homeland identification versus what one might have found in England, historically speaking. John Keats, as sort of figurehead for quintessential british Romantic poetry, had his London and the high society art-critic world, the sonnet, strict meter, etc. Contrastingly, the American contemporary poet (at the time Stevens wrote the poem) had Tennessee (a slovenly wilderness), a model for a much different art and cultural milieu. From a strictly historical perspective, this might be considered a slightly hyperbolic statement. However, Stevens is trying to convey a feeling. The poem seems to have purposeful “weakness” in rhythm (note the awkward flow in v3), as well as an unorthodox meter (the poem starts out with flawless iambic tetrameter, then has only two beats in v4 and variations after that). Add to this the striking contrast of a polished poem like Keats’s Urn compared to a poem about a jar in rural Tennessee, of all places. Helen Vendler, in her excellent book on Stevens, Words Chosen out of Desire, (I highly recommend reading this book) puts it this way:

"The American poet cannot, Stevens implies, adopt Keats’s serenely purposive use of matching stanzas drawn from sonnet practice. Stevens was entirely capable, as we know from Sunday Morning, of writing memorable Keatsian lines and stanzas; so we must read the Anecdote of the Jar as a palinode—a vow to stop imitating Keats and seek a native American language that will not take the wild out of the wilderness. The humor of the ridiculous stanzas and the equally ridiculous scenario of the Anecdote does not eliminate an awkward sublimity in the jar; or does it eliminate the rueful pathos of the closing lines."

Note how the poem speaks on so many different levels. You can imagine yourself being the jar. You find yourself on a hill surrounded by the great outdoors. Suddenly, the wilderness rises up, transforms. Something opens up for you, this little glass jar of self is now surrounded by an entire dominion. (As an aside, a friend of Stevens has said that the word “dominion” was intended by the poet as a double entendre for the famous “Dominion Wide Mouth Jar.” )

The indication of the jar being placed in the Tennessee wilderness refers to the complexity of human feeling in the natural world. A wild wilderness rises up. The jar is fixed, gray and bare. And what becomes of it? “It did not give of bird or bush, like nothing else in Tennessee.” The all important “it” must refer to the jar, and the insinuation is, that even in the throes of compelling and perhaps unavoidable natural events (hurricanes, cancer, even car accidents), still we can find a way to rise above and overcome what appears to be alien and unalterable circumstances. To “not give…” but continue to strive and be "a jar upon the ground."

Wallace Stevens (1879-1959) published his first series of poems in 1914 in Poetry Magazine at the age of 35. He published his first book of poems a full nine years later. Hart Crane, the famous contemporary poet of the period, said of Stevens, “There is a man whose work makes most of the rest of us quail." Indeed, Stevens was widely acknowledged in the 1940’s as one of the greatest American living poets of the period. His work became even more popular after his death, in 1955, and he is currently widely appreciated as one of America’s premier "poet of ideas" in the modern era. His poetry deals with themes of imagination, consciousness, the pathos of life, and the dynamic forces and influences of the mind. Stevens, through his poetry, has put together a sensual and imaginative worldview that is ultimately concerned with finding meaning and order in the universe.

Nowhere are these themes more apparent than in the late (chronologically) and fascinating poem, "Local Objects", where the poet reveals the depths of his own loneliness and inadequacies along with a longing for solace and ultimate meaning. Stevens was a man that never settled down, both emotionally and geographically. He had an early falling out with his father who disapproved of his marriage; they never spoke one word to each other after the quarrel. His marriage was unhappy and failed. In his poetry, he often speaks of resignation in referring to his shattered and lonely life. In "Local Objects", we see in the very first line a remarkable use of an abstract and uncommon word, “foyer." This is a word which Stevens masterfully uses to connote a space or locality where things ought to be peacefully and harmonically situated. But for Stevens, they never were. The poem spins an intriguing web of cognitive imagination around this one word.

Local Objects

He knew that he was a spirit without a foyer
And that, in his knowledge, local objects become
More precious than the most precious objects of home:

The local objects of a world without a foyer,
Without a remembered past, a present past,
Or a present future, hoped for in present hope,

Objects not present as a matter of course
On the dark side of the heavens or the bright,
In that sphere with so few objects of its own.

Little existed for him but the few things
For which a fresh name always occurred, as if
He wanted to make them, keep them from perishing,

The few things, the objects of insight, the integrations
Of feeling, the things that came of their own accord,
Because he desired without knowing quite what,

That were the moments of the classic, the beautiful.
These were that serene he had always been approaching
As toward an absolute foyer beyond romance.

Can you feel the sense of loneliness and longing? Can you sense a deep desire to have this foyer filled with beautiful, meaningful objects? The poem is wholly autobiographical and deals with objects as if they were not only things, but moments, snapshots of experience. Vendler describes this unusual transformation in terms of turning a spatial object into a temporal event: “it is for Stevens the axis on which his poetry turns. The world presented itself to him in visual terms; and yet poetry turned the visual object into the temporal integration, into that musical score for experience that we call a poem.”

Even though the poem has a somber tone, it is also clear Stevens takes delight in his poem. He is saying that these local objects are to be desired and understood. Perhaps not fully attainable, especially for him, but desired and appreciated. A foyer must be filled with spirit, with a past, a present and a future, with signs of our having visited and spent time there, even if only in the mind's eye.

So, what kind of objects is Stevens talking about in "Local Objects?" He doesn’t offer specific examples, but one might imagine rivers, trees, farmhouses, an attic, a rope swing, a local pub, a path, a hill. “Moments of the classic, the beautiful.” Stevens is talking about how important these objects become, especially for a man who had no “remembered past,” who was a “spirit without a foyer.” The poem speaks of the desire to find peaceful points of rest and identification. “These were that serene he [i.e. Wallace] had always been approaching as toward an absolute foyer beyond romance.” .

Notes:
To read more of Wallace Stevens poems, click here
To read more about Wallace Stevens’ life, and what other colleague said about him, click here
To order (Amazon) a wonderful book about Stevens’ poetry, explicating many poems and discussing his ideas, click here:
Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, by Helen Vendler, 1984, University of Tennessee Press

The Power of Poetry: Richard Rorty's Story

2007-11-05T14:46:00.000-08:00

Richard Rorty (1931-2007), one of the more prominent and often controversial philosophers of our time, died this summer. His last months were spent battling painful and inoperable pancreatic cancer. Poetry Magazine occasionally has a feature ("The View From Here") where they present people from diverse backgrounds who tell how poetry has impacted their lives on a deeply personal level. The contributors are often celebrated authors, philosophers, artists, scientists and the like, but usually individuals with no real formal training or experience in writing poetry. In a recent issue, only months before he passed away, Rorty provided an installment which I found as shocking as it was revealing of the true nature and power of poetry on many different levels.

In his essay for Poetry’s feature (Nov., 2007), entitled “The Fire of Life,” Rorty begins by explaining what he was trying to convey in his paper, “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” where reason is described as being subservient to words. Without words, you can’t reason, Rorty submitted. While the poet tries to give us a richer language, a philosopher tries to convey real things using non-linguistic tools. In his article for Poetry, Rorty was reflecting on the rigorous nature of his arguments, and continued by stressing that at that time he was not particularly interested in the differences between prose and verse.

Writing, however, on his literal death-bed, Rorty goes on to make some startling realizations as he began to consider the value of poetry in his life-experience. Interestingly, though he had an extensive and renown writing career, and his father (James Rorty) was an accomplished poet and writer, Rorty the son, wrote little if any poetry. He did, however, read poetry.

While having coffee with his elder son and a cousin, he relates, Rorty responded to a question his cousin asked concerning what his thoughts have lately turned to, now that he was facing the end of his life. Rorty replied:

"Neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation…. Neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point."

His son prodded him. “Hasn’t anything you’ve read been of any use?” Rorty’s response was swift: “Poetry!” He quoted two passages in the Poetry essay, one from Swinburne’s “Garden of Proserpine,” and the other from Walter Savage Landor’s “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday.” The latter I found provocative:

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

The power of verse, for Rorty, was not readily identifiable, although he was quick to maintain that he doubted the same effect could have ever been afforded by prose, and added:

"I found comfort in those slow meanders and those stuttering embers…In lines such as these [rhyme, rhythm and imagery] conspire to produce a degree of compression, and thus of impact, that only verse can achieve."

These are telling words from a very learned man who spent his life in the hallowed (and sometimes stuffy) University halls, offices and auditoriums, and a renowned philosopher who wrote seminal treatises on moral philosophy and the rigors of philosophical inquiry. Here, at the very end of his life, he is melted before the power of three bare lines of poetry. In a poignant conclusion, Rorty makes a revealing confession, of sorts, which to me conveys the power and sway that poetry can have on the human mind and heart. He says:

"I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. Rather, it is because I would lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts, just as I would have if I had made more close friends. "

Charles Simic

2007-10-26T07:48:00.000-07:00

Charles Simic (b. 1938) is a great American poet whose influences are easily traced to his European upbringing in the midst of the upheaval during and just after World War II. Simic’s poetry richly draws on the bewildering despair and disorientation of those early experiences, retold in the modern vernacular with hidden treasures to be mined by the careful reader. “I’m sort of the product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents,” he said in a recent interview. “If they weren’t around, I probably would have stayed on the same street where I was born. My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go, so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity.”

Simic, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, immigrated to the United States in 1954 at the age of 16. He grew up in Chicago, received his BA from NYU, and is a professor emeritus of American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire. In many ways a self-made man, Simic, found a voice in the 1970’s in minimalist poetry which inferred deeper meaning from ordinary experience. Simic held a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant from 1984 to 1989, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1990, and succeeded Donald Hall as the 15th U.S. Poet Laureate, in August, 2007.

Simic’s poetry once received some criticism as being too obtuse, his poems likened to “tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes.” However, this opaque quality to his poetry is now almost universally seen as a prominent attribute of his genius. Indeed, Simic himself did not deny the deeper side to his poetry, saying, “Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.”

James Billington of the Library of Congress, on the occasion of announcing Simic’s laureate, said he admired the poet because his poems were “both accessible and deep… the lines are memorable.” Billy Collins has remarked that he often reads a spate of Charles Simic to get him into a mood for writing. It's helpful to read Simic out loud. He doesn't use fancy language or big words, but the images he builds are lasting. You can easily log on to a website and with one click hear him recite some of his poetry: Simic Readings. The following is a striking ending to a poem you can find at this site describing some interesting qualities of a fork:

Fork (last stanza)

As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald beakless, and blind.

Here’s an excerpt from a poem entitled “My Turn to Confess,” from Simic’s 2005 book, “My Noiseless Entourage (Harcourt). In it one captures the ineffable task of writing poetry, couched in an illusory metaphor of a dog trying to explain why he barks.

A dog trying to write a poem on why he barks,
That’s me, dear reader!
They were about to kick me out of the library
But I warned them,
My master is invisible and all-powerful.
Still, they kept dragging me out by my tail.

One of my favorite Simic poems is Paradise Motel, a haunting commentary on war, undoubtedly rehearsed from memories of his childhood years, but set in the freakish veil of having to view it through the voyeuristic eyes of the television screen.

Paradise Motel (first stanza)

Millions were dead; everybody was innocent.
I stayed in my room. The President
Spoke of war as of a magic love potion.
My eyes were opened in astonishment.
In a mirror my face appeared to me
Like a twice-canceled postage stamp.

Another classic Simic poem is Hotel Insomnia, a telling of an incident that so many of us can instantly relate to, but spoken with such fine language and imagery, that the mental picture captured is one that sticks around for some time. It’s the kind of poem you always want to go back to, if only for it’s powerful visual representation. However, don’t be fooled by the brilliant images. Below the surface is a chilling, powerful and emotionally provocative poem. Here is the closing stanza:

At 5 A.M. the sound of bare feet upstairs.
The "Gypsy" fortuneteller,
Whose storefront is on the corner,
Going to pee after a night of love.
Once, too, the sound of a child sobbing.
So near it was, I thought
For a moment, I was sobbing myself.

The Supreme Moment is an astonishing poem with a curtailed, blunt, and some might say, anticlimactic ending. But I love this poem that speaks of the moment before annihilation, the boot acting and reacting in its own consciousness and consequence, a pervasive metaphor for human action (or apathy); the quaking ant, powerless and futile in its hope, has only a moment to see its frail life pass before itself, in the reflection (quite literally) from a boot. Here is the opening stanza..

As an ant is powerless
Against a raised boot,
And only has an instant
To have a bright idea or two.
The black boot so polished,
He can see himselfReflected in it, distorted,
Perhaps made largerInto a huge monster ant
Shaking his arms and legs
Threateningly?

Of all Charles Simic’s poems, the one that has sticks with me the longest is a wry personification of death, entitled Eyes Fastened With Pins. Perhaps no other personification runs the risk of tiring out its own metaphor than that of death, but Simic succeeds where others have failed in the plain speech of the poem, and the detached viewpoint presented. The poem opens,

How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry.

We’re quickly drawn into the nine-to-five of Death, watching him roam through the town looking for “someone with a bad cough” and finding him bewildered, with the wrong address and even “death can’t figure it out.” The poem ends in a tour de’force of human identification, to say nothing of drop-dead humor (pun intended):

Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death's side of the bed.

Charles Simic is currently co-Poetry Editor of the Paris Review. He received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2007 from the Academy of American Poets. Below is a bibliography of his published books of poetry.

Bibliography of Simic's Published Poetry Books

What the Grass Says - 1967
Somewhere Among Us A Stone Is Taking Notes - 1969
Dismantling The Silence - 1971
White - 1972
Return To A Place Lit By A Glass Of Milk - 1974
Charon's Cosmology - 1977
School For Dark Thoughts - 1978
Classic Ballroom Dances - 1980
Austerities - 1982
Unending Blues - 1986
The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems - 1990 (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)
Hotel Insomnia - 1992
Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell - 1993
A Wedding in Hell - 1994
Walking the Black Cat - 1996 (National Book Award in Poetry finalist)
Jackstraws - 1999 (New York Times Notable Book of the Year)
The Book of Gods and Devils - 2000
Night Picnic: Poems - 2001
The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems - 2003
Selected Poems: 1963-2003 - 2004 (winner of the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize)
My Noiseless Entourage : Poems - 2005
Monkey Around - 2006
-from wikipedia-

Heat in Poetry

2007-10-17T11:45:00.000-07:00

What is a poem? What makes a poem a good poem? Mark Flanagan, a contemporary poet and savvy free-lance writer, provides an excellent and concise definition: “Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. Poetry is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define.” I like this because it makes two points that I have long held to be true of poetry. First, it defies formal description. A poem may have rhyme, and it may not. A poem cannot be simply defined by a set of parameters relating to its form. Thus, it becomes difficult to qualitatively assign value to different kinds of poems. The second point is even more important. Flanagan is careful to stress that poetry has a primary intent that reaches into the emotional perceptions of our consciousness. Robert Frost said, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” This takes into consideration both the fundamental building blocks of poems (words) as well as the “fuel” (emotions) that one might say ignites and allows those words to burn. In writing a poem, we seek to find in the language a kind of expression that is filled with energy. We don’t look to language as a tool, necessarily, but rather work to uncover the beauty, awe, wit, paradox, understanding, beauty… (the list goes on), that already resides in the form and structure of our language.

I like to think of poetry as a collection of words, each with their own potential energy. We seek to group the words in such a way that will increase that energy, like rolling a huge ball up a hill. The higher it goes, the farther it will roll down. Poetry finds a language that is hidden in the vernacular of our imagination. It will have a certain sound (especially when read by the author, with the author’s full intent) that will sound like poetry. As prosaic as this appears, it becomes clearer if one listens to enough poetry recited out loud (podcasts of poets can be widely found on the web, not only by contemporary poets, but also past recordings of great 20th century poets like Auden, Frost, Plath, Bishop, and Dylan Thomas, to name just a few). It is in the hearing of poems read aloud that I have come to appreciate in a special way this dynamic force of building energy in great poetry.

In this connection, Robert Bly, one of our leading contemporary poets (as well as an acclaimed translator, essayist and editor), has much to say concerning what he calls the “heat” often found in great poetry. In his introduction to David Lehman’s, The Best American Poetry , 1999, Bly explains how easy it is to realize when you’re reading a truly wonderful poem full of heat. “We can tell when a poem has arrived by a certain feeling in the gut, as if a dismaying thought had slipped past our defenses. We feel that something has been taken seriously enough that it has hurt the poet.” A poem which he cites as one example, and one that I agree is packed with potential energy that gets unleashed at the end, is a little masterpiece by Ruth Stone entitled, “A Moment,”

Across the highway a heron stands
in the flooded field. It stands
as if lost in thought, on one leg, careless,
as if the field belongs to herons.
The air is clear and quiet.
Snowmelt on this second fair day.Mother and daughter,
we sit in the parking lot
with doughnuts and coffee.
We are silent.
For a moment the wall between us
opens to the universe,
then closes.
And you go on saying
you do not want to repeat my life.

Notice the tremendous and almost simultaneous convergence at the end of the poem of both cognitive recognition and emotional energy. At once you understand that the gulf of separation between the mother and the daughter is paramount, and your emotional pump, if you will, has been well primed in the intense sensations of beauty and simplicity that are found in the scene described before the last leveling couplet. Before you even understand all there is to understand here, you get a jolt, one that gets locked into your brain and your emotions. A jolt you likely won’t forget for some time. That’s a great poem. Further, and importantly, one is not struck here with the details of form, line breaks, rhyme schemes (even though there are none). One doesn’t have time to consider if the poem resembled prose or had a classical “poetry skin.” And this is not say that rhyming or metered poetry cannot have just as much heat. Let’s be clear on this point! What makes this poem wonderful is what it has to say and how it was said. You feel it.

But don’t always go looking for a bolt of lightening or a knock over the head that dumps you off your chair. Heat can affect different people in different ways. It can be subtle. It can be funny. Take Billy Collins, one of America’s most acclaimed living poet’s (and poet laureate) who is known for his profound levity and an uncanny perception of the foibles of everyday life. One example of heat in Collins’ poetry from a lighter side, is seen his poem, “Consolation,” in which he goes to great pains to describe how relieved he is to NOT be taking a holiday in Italy, but left to meander around his own neighborhood. The poem begins,

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

The heat is building up here, but not nearly boiling yet. Collins is laying the groundwork for a powerful, if not lighthearted ending, that sticks in the brain and evokes a response. He uses four more brilliant stanzas to fully hammer home the personal benefits found domestically, as contrasted with the headaches of an overseas junket where he might be found, for example, “slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice.” Finally, the poem ends in a magnificent explosion of heat:

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

I don’t know about you, but I’m nodding my head, grinning and thinking of all the times I’ve felt exactly this way, thanking my lucky stars that my car is taking me home for a hot shower and not to the mall (or anywhere else on the planet).

Elizabeth Bishop’s monumental poem, “In the Waiting-room, takes place in the waiting room of a dentist’s office. What appears to be an orphaned child is leafing through a copy of National Geographic and finding all those graphic pictures of natives in the bush, etc. (who can’t identify with that?) as her “foolish aunt” is being worked on in the next room. The poem is a complex commentary on the discovery of self and early delineations of language and discovery. Remarkably, the act of waiting is nimbly converted into a rite-of-passage experience as well as a startling discovery of her identity. The poem packs this kind of heat like a six shooter:

Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.

........................

. . .What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I – we - were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I cannot end this short essay on what makes a poem a good poem, without giving you my own personal choice for one of the hottest poems I’ve ever read. It is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sublime poem, “Spring and Fall,” which, in my estimation, starts off hot and continues to build steam all the way through.

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man,
You, with your fresh thoughts
Care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name
Sorrow's springs are the same:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

That is potential energy mounting in each word, collecting heat with each new line- the heat of a grieving Margaret who mourns for the leaves falling off the trees in her beloved town of Goldengrove- heat building as she is warned that as she grows older, much more “sights colder” will befall… that she “will yet weep and know why.” All this amidst a beautifully strung series of white-hot words that draw you in to the final climax- reaching its atomic detonation in last fateful line, “It is Margaret you mourn for.” This is the kind of heat that I aim for in writing poetry, and only rarely achieve. I believe it is a hallmark of great poetry and a quality that we would all do well in trying to achieve, if only to catch a little of that kind of warmth in our words.
- -------------------------------------------

How to Read a Poem

2007-10-08T05:00:00.000-07:00

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),
A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

-Man Carrying Thing, Wallace Stevens

What’s different about a poem? Let’s not belabor the question in this small space. Here’s some improper answers: it uses metaphors, it’s short, it has special form, it has a recognizable rhythm or meter, and the kicker… it rhymes.

I’m squeezing open the pages of my crackling new Best of American Poetry, 2007 and trying to discern a distinguishing poetic marker. Just when I thought I had one, I turned the page and found a stunner that had absolutely no properties close to anything on my ever changing criteria-list. Then I remembered the image I had formed from just a few lines in a poem by Jane Hirshfield, entitled Critique of Pure Reason:

Let reason flow like water around a stone, the stone remains.
A dog catching a tennis ball lobbed into darkness
Holds her breath silent, to keep the descent in her ears.

You can reflect on that thought picture for a lifetime. Granted, it was planted neatly within the context of a powerful poem, but still, the image holds up on its own. It has to. Poetry gives you very little time to make mistakes. It’s got to grab you on an impulse and somehow find a place outside of (or at least alongside) reason and reasoning. As Wallace Stevens writes, it must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

When you come to that three-liner in Hirshfield’s poem, or shortly thereafter, you lose a breath before comprehending the full import of how and why you lost that breath. That’s the power in the stroke, the torque in the engine of poetry. And to fully appreciate it, you have to give in to the temptation of having it all right there on your plate at that very instant: green peas, corn on the cob and a steak, medium rare. You have to be willing to sit there, reading, without any kind of a clue, but anticipating the grand possibility of somehow getting a clue. Sooner or later you just may.

To have a clue, reading very good poetry must be swallowed whole. Don’t sit there chewing away, gumming the food and trying to figure out if you like it (I’m not talking about fast food here, but fine cuisine). Most people know within seconds if they’ve got a really big fish on the line. The pole goes down and you get a tug. The response? Any self-respecting angler will exclaim in glee and start reeling away like a lunatic.

So, I’m suggesting, when you read poetry, do just that. Read it. It’s that simple. Don’t cerebrum your way through it, asking: what does this mean? What does that imply, what is the author trying to tell me? Oh dear, that poet must be in a very dark place… no, that poet can’t be talking about a real life experience, etc. There's plenty of time for that later. Sometimes you just have to swallow before chewing.

There are other similar pitfalls. George Szirtes, in an insightful essay in the latest issue of Poetry Magazine (October, 2007), comments on a popular confusion that ‘bedevils’ the reading of poetry:

"…it [the confusion] involves the reading of poetry primarily in order to find out about the poet as a person in real life. This involves reading the poem as symptom or evidence. Poetry is useless as evidence. As far as I know, no poem has ever been adduced as evidence in court."

I think one begins to see this operating in an online forum. Communities that are organized around poetry on the internet abound. Folks begin to become familiar with each other and suddenly poets are being sympathized with and counseled through their poems. Further, and interestingly, authors in this milieu often morph into a symbiotic relationship with their newfound observers, and begin to write poems that are shaped by the demands and reactions of others. Perhaps this will spawn its own 21st Century variety of fascinating poetry, but for now, it lurks as a danger to creativity for both the writer and the reader.

So what are you to do after you’ve breezed zenfully through a poem? You could ask yourself the following question (just for fun!) How do I feel? Here are some choices, circle at least one: sad, happy, perplexed, exalted, or even apathetic (a valid emotion). But don’t tell me you don’t feel anything. If that happened very often to you, I’d probably have never gotten you past the first paragraph of this essay. After all, we are talking about poetry here, not linear equations.

Some more options. You can always go back and reread the poem to see if your initial impressions are bolstered or amplified or diminished in some way. See if you learn anything new about the poem, or about yourself. See if an image fills out, a thought comes into better focus. See if you suddenly remember an incident or sound or reaction hearkening back to experience. Perhaps a thought sequence is jarred in your recollection.

Do you like the poem? If not, no worries. On to the dishes or a mystery novel. But if you like it, you may find yourself a little more open to understanding why you like it. That’s an interesting proposition and one that matters, I think. Maybe you’ll bookmark the poem and try to find other ones by this poet online or in a bookstore. Maybe you’ll write your own poem with a newfound perspective afforded by this poet’s work (secret: that’s how good poets write good poems!).

After all is said and done, my guess is, you won’t be impressed by the logic of the poem or the didactic way in which it presented in linear, irrefutable arguments (admittedly, there are such poems). Szirtes, in his essay, develops a rather compelling case for jettisoning reason as a primary tool for appreciating poetry (note here, this is not advocating the expulsion of meaning in poetry, quite the oppositie). He makes the following bold assertion:

"[the confusion involves] the reading of poetry as articulated intention; that is to say, imagining that the poet intended to mean some specific bare thing, then sat down to dress it up in pretty, graceful, elegant forms that you could then strip away to find the naked meaning. Fancy talk."

He goes on to make the point that such ‘plain speech,’ if it really existed, is not of much use in poetry. “Tell me what you really mean, the plain-spoken demand,” he argues, “the poet has a broad subject, but he cannot know what line or what word will come next in his poem. The poet listens as intently as he speaks and sings.”

This is perhaps revolutionary to some, and may elicit a knee-jerk reaction in poetry readers who do not want to abrogate meaning in text. I’m very sympathetic. Yet, I don’t think Szirtes is trying to convince us that poets don’t care about meaning! Quite the opposite. Yet, the purpose of poetry is not to convince or prove from premise on through to conclusion. We have other forms for that. I think a poem takes on a fragrance in reading, acquires its own shape and color and texture. To give it a pro forma look, bottled and ready to distribute, would be to kill the poem before it has one minute to breathe.

Poets do care about meaning. However, speaking as a poet who tries to communicate some very discrete ideas in his poems and hopefully identify emotions and observations that convey meaning in experience, I think I can still see the importance of decrying reason as the ultimate arbiter of understanding in the reading of poetry. How many poets, after all, will fall on the sword of their own explication? Not many, I think. That is to say, if pinned down (and I have been… more times than I care to think about), they will spew you their nuggets out of one side of the mouth, then, from the other, on a different day, or in a different mood, give you quite another explanation. This is no secret. And there is no shame in it.

Perhaps even more illuminating, however, is the observation that average run-of-the-mill spectacular poets will allow you to get away with a pretty wide band of interpretation of their vaunted metaphor and argument, if you insist on describing them in those terms.

Bottom line (and here’s where I’ll probably get chopped to pieces and spit out like a bad poem), most poets I know will be very satisfied that you are satisfied with their poems- even if you come up with some fantastic new gem that they never had one inkling of, while writing it (unless it relates to your cat). Life is short, and you write a poem, stick it out there, and hope it makes a splash somewhere. It’s not an essay and it’s not a sermon. Well, I suppose some are, but I’m not tackling that one today!

Thus, poetry is fluid, not static. Poems are water, not ice. They should be read with observation and sensitivity, realizing that they may die tomorrow, then be revived a month later by the taxi driver who reads a haiku waiting for a rider, or the professor trying to explain a bloody Shakespearean sonnet to dumbfounded students with slumping heads. Or, maybe they only live for one ephemeral blinding moment in your heart. For many, that’s enough.

EDN, October, 2007

2007-10-02T10:39:00.000-07:00

An Interview with Didi Menendez, MiPOesias Poetry Magazine (2/26/07)

Didi Menendez is the creator and publisher of the online poetry magazine, MiPOesias Magazine as well as miPOradio, whose byline “where poetry tunes in,” aptly describes an energetic site where you can listen to podcasts of interviews and poetry readings from accomplished poets. She is a busy woman who has a passion for introducing new voices to the poetry scene. “But what I love most,” she is quick to point out, “is inspiring others.” It is clear she has been successful in this endeavor.

Among many other pursuits, she also hosts MiPO Café Café, a hip meeting room with serious poets critiquing and encouraging one another. This is but one of many sources which she taps for possible candidates to give podcast readings and interviews at miPOradio.

MiPOesias Magazine is a beautifully designed online poetry magazine that greets you with a seductive splash of images and drawings, then immediately ushers you in with a default podcast of a recited poem. Amy King is the Editor-in-Chief and Jenni Russell is the magazine’s Print Editor. Recently, Didi arranged to have Nick Carbo, a prominent author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry, take the reins as guest editor for the Asian-American issue of MiPOesias. The resultant product is nothing short of genius. I haven’t found anything remotely similar anywhere online or in the printed world.

Didi loves certain aspects in the design elements of the MiPOesias Magazine, but wrestles with the technical deficiencies of browsers and incompatibilities of formatting which can often frustrate contributors as well. She relates,

“For example, let’s say someone wants their poems formatted a certain way and they send me the poem attached in the way they think it is going to be seen online. Well, what I get is not what they necessarily are seeing at their end. First, many writers for some reason feel that they need to format their fonts at their end and send me all sorts of funky fonts that are not necessarily in my own computer, therefore my computer is going to default to whatever font I have. This is also the case of other people reading their work and whether it is being seen on a Mac or on Windows or on Mozilla Firefox....etc. This is the part where my head bangs against the monitor and I take my frustrations out on my peaceful editor Amy King.”

Didi (DM), Jenni (JR) and Amy (AK) were kind enough to address some questions I put together with a view toward giving our readers a feel for how one can interface and interact with online poetry magazines such as MiPOesias and miPOradio and begin to benefit from the richness available in this growing web sector.

EN: How did you come up with the name, MiPOesias?

DM: I was trying to write ‘all my poems’ in Spanish. I was searching for the availability of domain names, and mistakenly typed in MiPOesias. It was available, so I bought it.

EN: Do you like the term ‘ezine,’ in referring to online poetry magazines? How would you define that term, and what, in essence, makes an online magazine different from a paper-only printed magazine?

DM: I do not like the word ‘ezine’ and I do not use it. I treat my publication just as if it were on paper. I publish and design it in the same way any print publisher would. I treat the work I do as professional. I have been trying to bring this across from the very start of the publication. I have been trying to educate people and strive each year to make the magazine better than the year before. Hence my production of audio; and also, last year we made the magazine accessible with an RSS feed.

EN: What do you see as some advantages that online magazines provide versus printed?

DM: …since the audience understands this word [ezine] to mean that a magazine is available electronically, then the answer to your question is that MiPOesias, because it is available online, receives more varied readers than your print publications because it is accessible by everybody that has internet access. This gives our contributors a more varied audience and far more readers than a print journal will ever have unless that print journal has now been made electronically available as well. You may check our readership from the stats which are available online.

EN: Where is your time spent in managing MiPOesias? Which tasks do you prefer?

DM: I work on the magazine mostly on the weekends and on miPOradio on weeknights as well as the weekends. miPOradio actually takes up most of my time because it is a radio program which is available on the internet and we have various programs which need to be uploaded regularly. On the other hand, once I have created a template for the issue at hand, the magazine is easily updated (unless there is a format issue as mentioned earlier). I have taken to resolving formatting problems by using Adobe PDF and turning the problematic “submission” into a jpg instead of copy.

EN: How does one submit poems to MiPOesias? What is the acceptance rate?

AK: I really don't keep count, so unfortunately, I can't give you even a rough ratio. On the plus side of the question, I don't feel limited by how many submissions I can accept because Didi updates the magazine quite often, more so than any other online magazine that I'm aware of. We're something of a weekly or bi-weekly production – this allows me to accept good work whenever it appears. Sometimes there might be a lull on the receiving end, which sends me out to solicit work. I like this balance because we can publish a range of people who have never been published before side-by-side with established writers.

[EN} From the website: Submissions are only accepted via email. Do not send work being considered by another editor. Send only new work. Response time is within a four to eight months time frame, not including holidays. If you have not received a reply after 8 months, you may send a query. Once a submission is accepted the recipient will receive further details with the rest of required material for publication including a photo of the author not already online and audio of the accepted work. Publication of the magazine takes place once work is accepted and materials requested are received by Didi Menendez.

EN: Does MiPOesias have a persona or a particular style of poem that you look for? Could you give a general idea of the kind of poems you turn away?

AK: I suppose if I had to generalize the style, I'd use the very abstract word, “experimental.” However, I hesitate because I've accepted many poems that one could also classify as traditional, even formal. I like a range of work, and the foremost facets that I look for are shaped by the common elements of poetry: content and form. Of course, I prefer innovative forms that allow for multiple readings. I also appreciate carefully-crafted poems. These two adjectives, “innovative” and “carefully crafted,” are not always exclusive.

Poems I tend to overlook are those that seem to be striving for some sort of obvious message that one can summarize upon a first reading. In other words, I don't enjoy poems that can be read and digested instantly and attempt to incorporate some sort of romantic notion about life's ups and downs. I tend to think of these poems as “Hallmark-y” and too quick. I want work I can dig into a few times over and still be surprised by. I'm a firm believer in the act of reading, that the reader has a responsibility to participate in the poem's materialization vis-à-vis her own mind.

EN: Can everyone “tune in” to the poetry at MiPOesias or miPOradio? What does your readership profile look like?

AK: Absolutely. Poetry comes in all shapes, sizes, and sounds, just like music, which means there's something out there for everyone. It's my responsibility as an editor to locate an array of quality of work that piques curiosity, and further, gives readers something substantial to delve into. Luckily, our readership and submissions have proven to span many styles of poetry along with a smorgasbord of content. We have some very talented people sending their work in on a regular basis, for which I am grateful. I should add a qualifier here: our audience won't like everything we publish anymore than a person will like every song on the radio – but there's always something you'll find yourself moving to.

EN: I believe MiPOesias has a printing arm where you publish chapbooks. Would
you describe what that looks like? How many poems do you need to assemble a competitive manuscript?

JR: Our publishing arm is quite sexy but also tough. It has a huge bicep and tiny wrist. The manuscript should include 17-25 pages of poetry.
[EN]: From the website: Our print product is located at lulu. Submissions are open from January 1st through April 1st and from August 1st through November 1st each year. Manuscripts should include a table of contents page and a page including your name, email address and mailing address. Please DO NOT send illustrations or an acknowledgements page for previously published poems. We are not interested in where you've been published. Just send us your best work. Poems from the manuscript may be previously published, but the chapbook as a whole should be unpublished. We accept electronic submissions only.

EN: MiPOradio is fascinating. Given that this medium is rapidly expanding on the Web, where would you like to take it, personally? What are the benefits of listening to poetry, versus reading poetry?

DM: I believe your statement about rapidly expanding on the Web is incorrect -- I believe the real answer here is that if your journal does not have some kind of Web presence, you might as well go fishing and call it a day. Regarding the benefits of listening to audio versus reading poetry, I will answer it from a personal standpoint as a listener vs. a reader. If a poem is submitted with audio, I can listen to it while I work on the magazine. I get a better appreciation for it. Again this is a personal opinion on my part.
Regarding where I would like to take the magazine, it all depends on my creativity and resources-, and my study of web trends. Also, I am nothing without the good work of people in the front line such as Amy King, William Stobb, Grace Cavalieri, Bob Marcacci, Jenni Russell, Michelle Buchanan and our wonderful contributors. Plus, let’s not forget the help I receive on cafe cafe's community from Diego Quiros and all the writers who encourage each other there.

EN: Is the vocal recitation of poetry an innate gift, or can it be learned, perfected? What kind of reading style attracts you?

DM: What I have learned from producing audio on MiPOesias is that not everyone can read their poems well. Some people simply do not give the poem the energy it deserves. They actually forget to stop at the periods, to give the commas their time of day and forget why they wrote the poem in stanzas to begin with. Some people should not record their poems. It may actually turn a reader off. I don't know this, though, until I get the audio. Sometimes we can blame the microphone and software they used. I recommend that writers try to read publicly as much as possible. We have a Reading Series in New York every last Friday of the month at Stain Bar located in Brooklyn. Any contributor of MiPOesias or Café Café is invited to read.

EN: What would you tell the serious writer who is exploring writing poetry and would like to develop and hone their skills?

AK: Read a lot of poetry. Read widely. Locate a few poets whose work you strongly admire. Imitate, imitate, imitate their work. Get a book on poetic form and style and toy around with the ideas that catch your eye. Remember that you can enjoy writing. Join a community of writers like the MiPO Café Café forum and practice critiquing others’ work as well as posting your own. Learn the art of editing. Defend the parts of your work you love. Finally, make writing a habit. Set yourself a daily schedule, even if it's just an hour a day, and sit down to write. If you don't write, don't do anything else except sit there and read others' poetry, with your pen and paper in front of you. Stick with the schedule and allow yourself to write badly. Be patient. Don't expect fame or praise when you finally publish. Eventually, you'll be a serious writer.

EN: Can you tell us any “hot” new directions, programs or plans that you personally
have in the wings?

DM: I am always looking for new audio programs. It is very hard to find the right individual for this. I have approached a certain prominent poetry blogger a few times about having a version of his blog available on miPOradio but, again, the technology and time that is involved in getting me the audio and recording the audio and uploading the audio for such a task is limited not necessarily just on my part but on whomever is the one recording. So expanding miPOradio is more in my future plans than the magazine per say, and how to make this process easier, better, faster and friendlier on writers trying to get their work recorded. Then there is the matter of archiving the work on miPOradio. I have turned to PENNSOUND for this. I am not offering PENNSOUND everything at this time, because frankly I have way too much audio out there. However, every year I plan on sending them audio to archive in the University so it is available 100 years from now whereas I know that my publication will someday not be. Hence when I die, the magazine will too.

Recently I published the Asian-American issue guest edited by Nick Carbo. I approached Nick in the spring of 2006 and told him that I wanted to publish an Asian-American issue and that I wanted him to guest edit it and by golly he did and there it is now.

EN: Thanks to Didi, Amy and Jenni for taking the time to answer these questions.
-originally published on Gather.com, Feb. 26, 2007. Some of the particulars in the above interview may be outdated.

***** Click here to view Edward Nudelman Poems: http://enudelman.blogspot.com/