If You Missed it The First Time Around: Pronouncements on Poets & Poetry (Abridged)

'The prospect of one's child becoming a poet is a parent's nightmare, conjuring up, as Michael Dirda put it so well... "a life of little magazines no one reads, temporary appointments at junior colleges, servile groveling for National Endowment for the Arts grants and Guggenheims, joyless affairs with students that wreck marriages and, at the end, the long look down into the river or the last glance around the kitchen before turning on the gas." And all that botheration never, somehow, furnishes material for poetry or even acts as a wellspring of language.'

— Katherine A Powers, The Boston Globe, 23 March 2003


'Most literary reputation is fragile and fleeting, and the reputation of poets especially so. Their stock is traded on a Nasdaq of singular cruelty and volatility.'

— Charles McGrath, New York Times, 15 June 2003


'To devote a life to poetry looks to most people like a decision to ignore the benefits of modern life, in particular the power of money to effect any meaningful progress. It looks suspiciously like sulking.'

— Hugo Williams, Times Literary Supplement, 18 April 2003


'Poetry has always attracted more than its fair share of the seriously unhinged.'

— Christina Patterson, The Independent, 10 May 2003


'Poetry, like all art, is a manifestation of other, deeper things. It can be too highly prized by the poet. It can never be too highly prized at the moment of a poet's or reader's engagement with it, but it can be crucially overestimated in a larger context.'

— Marvin Bell, American Poetry Review, January/February 2003


'One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.'

— Billy Collins, New York Times, 23 February 2003


'We have never lived in a time when poetry was treated with such reverence by those who do not really enjoy it.'

— AN Wilson, The Daily Telegraph, 10 March 2003


'Trying to compare the blurbs on a book of poetry to the contents is like trying to compare a description of angel wings to actual angel wings. The blurbs employ extravagantly unverifiable descriptions of the contents...'

— Joan Houlihan, The Boston Comment VI, 2003


'Too often, the focus on literal truth presents us not with the essence or core of the poet's being, but with the patio furniture of his or her life.'

— David Alpaugh, Poets & Writers, March/April 2003



'One reason poetry lasts is because there is no single way to read a poem. A poem is irreducible.'

— Michael Wiegers, This Art, Copper Canyon 2003



'A poet cannot refuse language, choose another medium. But the poet can re-fuse the language given to him or her, bend and torque it into an instrument for connection instead of dominance and apartheid.'

— Adrienne Rich, The Guardian, 26 April 2003



'Of course poetry is irrelevant to the "real" world of power and politics, but so is philosophy, painting, music and any other human activity where something genuine can be found.'

— Charles Simic, The Age, 9 March 2003



'Perhaps the ultimate role of poets is to be hidden but ready like firefighters to come forth in emergency.'

— Martin Arnold, New York Times, 6 February 2003



'Writing poetry is the best way I know of untying the knot of obsession. It's cheaper than therapy and better for you than getting drunk.'

— Gwyneth Lewis, PBS Bulletin, Summer 2003



'I like reading poetry at night — a doctor I know claims that this is because "poetry is the only thing you can read when you're drunk".'

— John Lanchester, The Sunday Times, 1 June 2003



'Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.'

— Stanley Kunitz, quoted in Kansas City Star, 16 February 2003


'What's extraordinary about ballet, and I think the same is true of poetry, is that you have to learn the steps... You do the exercises over and over again until your body screams with pain and then you have to infuse it with some other element to make it look effortless and lighter than air.'

— Adam Thorpe, The Independent, 17 May 2003



'A great poem can be spotted in a crowd and... the writers who most successfully shake off the mannerisms of the day are the ones most likely to produce work that survives it.'

— Eric McHenry, Parnassus, Vol. 26 No. 2



'Poetry teaches us that it is possible to have two opposing thoughts at once, which our master cultural narratives seem to deny.'

— Edward Hirsch, Five Points, Vol. 2 No. 2, 2003



'Writing poetry is like finding your way home and you didn't know you were lost.'

— Diane Lockward, The Star-Ledger, 26 April 2003


'The making of poems is mysteriously tied up with not-knowing, with willing ignorance and an openness to mutation.'

— Tony Hoagland, American Poetry Review, July 1 August 2003


'Poetry is a concise way of participating in others' experience.'

— Jay Rogoff, The Saratogian, 3 June 2003


'Poetry is born out of the superfluity of language's own resources and energy. It's a kind of overdoing it. Enough is not enough when it comes to poetry.'

— Seamus Heaney, Giving Their Word, 2002



'Lyric poetry speaks out of a solitude to a solitude. It begins and ends in silence. It crystallizes our inwardness and makes space for our subjectivity, naming our inner life.'

— Edward Hirsch, Five Points, Vol. 2 No. 2, 2003



'Lyrics can lift one's heart, prose can make one think, and speeches can move one to action. Poetry can do all three.'

— Robyn Hammer-Clarey, Post-Gazette, 25 May 2003



'The prose poem is the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist, but it does. This is the sole instance we have of squaring the circle.'

— Charles Simic, quoted in American Poetry Review, March/April 2003



'Poetry is closer to speech than prose... Speech involves strategies that are inappropriate to prose but are essential to poetry. Hesitations, repetitions, hints, refrains.'

— Germaine Greer, The Guardian, 1 March 2003



'Much of our mainstream poetry is confined by an ethic of sincerity and the unstated wish to be admired (if not admired, liked; if not liked, sympathized with). American poetry still largely believes... that a poem is straightforward autobiographical testimony to, among other things, the decency of the speaker.'

— Tony Hoagland, American Poetry Review, March/April 2003



'The poem that refuses to risk sentimentality, that refuses to risk making a statement, is probably a poem that is going to feel lukewarm. So I'm in favor of work that if it fails, fails on the side of boldness, passion, intensity.'

— Mark Doty, The Charlotte Observer, 14 March 2003



'Poems still get written, naturally, but the flames, one suspects, don't burn quite so hot these days. Poets behave better, live longer and probably settle for less.'

— Charles McGrath, New York Times, 15 June 2003



'The ground is currently thick with poets dropping obliquities like phone numbers on napkins, in part because of the ease with which this method can be adopted.'

— David Orr, Poetry Magazine, June 2003



'If you have doubts about the poem you have written, the kind of doubts that make you want to ask a friend what he or she thinks, don't bother. Trust the doubts.'

— Wesley McNair, Mapping the Heart, Carnegie Mellon, 2003



'There is only one real reason to read a poem, and that is to find your way to a larger life than would otherwise be yours to live. This is also the only reason to write a poem.'

— Jane Hirshfield, The Writer's Chronicle, March/ April 2003



'There's one subject in lyric poetry, and that is that you have this existence and at the end of it you're going to experience non-existence.'

— Billy Collins, The Independent, 31 May 2003



'Poets are like aerialists: the wire they walk. stretches from history to eternity, fact to dream, language to silence. When they get across we feel rapture. They've taken us with them.'

— Margo Jefferson, New York Times, 11 May 2003



'Trying to write a good poem is like running off a cliff to see if you can fly. Most of the time you can't, but every once in a while something happens.'

— Marvin Bell, American Poetry Review, January/February 2003



---------------------------------------------------------------
* source - Dennis O'Driscoll - Poetry Ireland Review - reprinted on Poetry Daily

Pompeii

Don Freeman - Pompeii Porfolio

Poems in Vitro - Vol. 2, No. 5

Disclaimer: Taking William Stafford's advice via - Robert Peake's response to my post "On Intent, Occasion & Poetic Handicaps " :

"Writing blocks? I don't believe in them ... I've never experienced anything like that. I believe the so-called "writing block" is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance. I can imagine a person beginning to feel that he's not able to write up to the standard he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that's surrealistic. The only standard I can rationally have is the standard I'm meeting right now. Of course I can write. Anybody can write. People might think that their product is not worthy of the person they assume they are. But it is ... you should be more willing to forgive yourself. It really doesn't make any difference if you're good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it. You should simply go ahead and do it. And do it, I might add, without being critical."

I sat down in front of my keyboard; lowered my standards and wrote this:

Musical Interlude


If you'll hum a few bars maybe....

--------------------------------------------------

This is an idea for a poem comprised of varied sections with song titles that are associated by the speaker with anecdotal recollections. More of this crap to come....

Paul Violi

Appeal to the Grammarians


We, the naturally hopeful,
Need a simple sign
For the myriad ways we're capsized.
We who love precise language
Need a finer way to convey
Disappointment and perplexity.
For speechlessness and all its inflections,
For up-ended expectations,
For every time. we're ambushed
By trivial or stupefying irony,
For pure incredulity, we need
The inverted exclamation point.
For the dropped smile, the limp handshake,
For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift
Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,
Or felt love or pond ice
Give way underfoot, we deserve it.
We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot,
The child whose ball doesn't bounce back,
The flat tire at journey's outset,
The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken.
But mainly because I need it—here and now
As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio
Staring at my espresso and cannoli
After this middle-aged couple
Came strolling by and he suddenly
Veered and sneezed all over my table
And she said to him, "See, that's why
I don't like to eat outside."



------------------------------------------------
Paul Violi : "Overnight "
Hanging Loose Press

Paul Violi: Overnight is Paul Violi's eleventh book of poems. On receiving the Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was cited for "bringing the sharpness and surprise of the avant-garde to a poetry that continually impresses by its honesty, its sincerity, and its clarity. One is taken through the solidest and strongest emotional landscapes on a remarkable new road." Recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry as well as grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, The Fund for Poetry, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts and many other awards, he currently teaches in the New School's graduate writing program and at Columbia University.

* source - Poetry Daily

Time Keeps on Slipping...

daily dose of imagery

Dolce Far Niente

John William Waterhouse - 1880

Oil on Canvas - 95cm X 50cm

Jessica Smith

The Callow Heart

Inside of anyone you see
There is s heart of candle-wax
and a slender string
That is lighted
by trivial fires
of orange...
So that when
A heartbreaking incident
Occurs
The wick burns crimson
and after a time
Your heart
Callow and soft
Is melted hard
and nothing, now,
will light it
Because it is wiser
than it once was
when faint orange glows
set it afire.


---------------------------------
from : "Juvenilia: Poems 1992-1998" -
2006 - Jessica Smith - LuLu publishing

Bio - Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Jessica Smith received her B.A. summa cum laude in English and Comparative Literature and her M.A. in Comparative Literature from SUNY Buffalo, where she participated in the Poetics Program and started the poetry magazine name. She is now a Ph.D. student in English at UVA, where she devotes her free time to outside voices and the D.C. poetry scene. Jessica's most recent work can be found in Drill, Ferrum Wheel, OEI, American Weddings, and Filling Station. Recent and forthcoming chapbooks include bird-book (House Press), The Plasticity of Poetry and Telling Time (No Press), and Shifting Landscapes (above/ground press). Her first book, Organic Furniture Cellar, will be released in April (see outsidevoices.org for updates).

Lethargy

daily dose of imagery

Received This in the Mail:

For more info.: The Gettysburg Review

Some Simic

The White Room
Charles Simic


The obvious is difficult
To prove. Many prefer
The hidden. I did, too.
I listened to the trees.

They had a secret
Which they were about to
Make known to me--
And then didn't.

Summer came. Each tree
On my street had its own
Scheherazade. My nights
Were a part of their wild

Storytelling. We were
Entering dark houses,
Always more dark houses,
Hushed and abandoned.

There was someone with eyes closed
On the upper floors.
The fear of it, and the wonder,
Kept me sleepless.

The truth is bald and cold,
Said the woman
Who always wore white.
She didn't leave her room.

The sun pointed to one or two
Things that had survived
The long night intact.
The simplest things,

Difficult in their obviousness.
They made no noise.
It was the kind of day
People described as "perfect."

Gods disguising themselves
As black hairpins, a hand-mirror,
A comb with a tooth missing?
No! That wasn't it.

Just things as they are,
Unblinking, lying mute
In that bright light--
And the trees waiting for the night.

Resting

"Le Repos" - William Bouguereau

I've Been "Meme'd"

Sam Rasnake asks me to list:

"My ten favorite films... about as close to an order as I can get them today."

1. Casablanca (1942)
2. Shichinin no samurai (1954)
3. Apocalypse Now (1979)
4. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
5. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
6. Nuovo cinema Paradiso (1988)
7. Ladri di biciclette (1948)
8. 8½ (1963)
9. Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)
10. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

Honorable Mention - or Movies That I'd Pick on Another Day

1. Rear Window (1954)
2. Cidade de Deus (2002)
3. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
4. North by Northwest (1959)
5. Sunset Blvd. (1950)
6. The Third Man (1949)
7. Untergang, Der (2004)
8. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
9. Sjunde inseglet, Det (1957)
10. Duck Soup (1933)
11. Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
12. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
13. In the Heat of the Night (1967)
14. Rosemary's Baby (1968)
15. Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966)
16. Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
17. Kumonosu jô (1957)
18. Doctor Zhivago (1965)
19. Brazil (1985)
20. Inherit the Wind (1960)

Something Devoutly to be Wished

CLOSURE

Atrium voices bleed over threshold,
enter salon 6, linger with the wreaths
of dead husks of color that nod to eye,
their vivid dirge resonating - beneath
the canopy, he lies sheathed in vestment.

The conversation filters in like jabberwocky
lies, lacks girth or conviction: incantations
muttered to ward off the lack thereof.
Three deaths in three days: three rooms full
of the necessity of natural progression.

We are trespassers in this house with death's
hands pounding the walls into acoustic purity
so that all is heard - no word escaping
the debate - a silent and futile discourse.


------------------------------------------------
Originally published in March, 2003 - Poetry Super Highway

Accessibility and "Real Sofistikashun"

Excerpts from Real Sofistikashun - by Tony Hoagland - Graywolf Press - 2006

Self-Consciousness

• The gradual intrusion of self-consciousness is one inevitable side effect of an education in art. To read ten poems, or a hundred, is one thing. To read ten thousand is another. As we internalize more of the tradition and become progressively less shielded by our ignorance, we realize how local our upbringing has been, how much there might be to know, and perhaps even, sigh, how limited our talent.
• When a person takes the step toward learning more of craft and its history, more of artifice—when, for example, a person crosses the threshold of an MFA program—she chooses to end a childhood in artlessness. She gives up some of their innocent infatuation, the naïveté, the adolescent grandiosity, maybe even some of the natural grace of the beginner.
• This initiation into knowledge will infect the learner with the virus of self-consciousness. As a consequence of learning of the existence of the poems of W.H. Auden, or Marianne Moore, or Louise Glück, your writing may suddenly seem horribly simplistic, crude as crayon drawings on Masonite. Now the poem, even as your are making it, seems stiff, clumsy, and obvious. Now your work may become, in compensation, coy and encoded. ...Yet that very knowledge, which can inhibit and choke, can also inspire and challenge. Self-consciousness is the necessary border crossing of craft, skill, and even of poetic ambition.
• Self-consciousness in writing, as it does in life, opens up a kind of delay between impulse and action, between thought and word. That pause—as these examples show—offers the opportunity for calculated intensifications and angularities that would never occur in “natural,” uninformed speech.
• Self-consciousness in art is a little like the use of radiation in laboratory experiments; while it can produce truly valuable genetic variants, it can just as easily lead to frightening mutations. Getting the dosage right is tricky. Holding a microscope up to language, to meaning itself, there is the danger of falling through, down into the infinite space between words.
• Self-consciousness often provokes an overexertion of cleverness. But intelligence, when used well in a poem, never makes the reader feel less smart than the writer, or left behind. Rather, it gives the reader the exhilarating pleasure of being smart in concert with the speaker.
• The goal of the healthy artist is not to be crippled by the weight of literacy, not intimidated into a kind of aesthetic conservatism, not to be engorged with fancy self-protective mannerisms, but to be selectively informed and empowered by knowledge. This development of sensibility could be called the acquisition and use of taste.
• To learn what a poet needs to know is to become an initiate; that initiation imposes burdens as well as powers. We have the obligation to make real poems, to contribute to the living, evolving heritage of poetry. To make that contribution requires not just skill and desire, but a kind of discriminating insight into the deep structures of poetry. This resourcefulness surely must spring from the union of learning and bold inventiveness.

Vincenzo Bruno (1926-2007)

Farewell
Emily Dickinson

Tie the Strings to my Life, My Lord,
Then I am ready to go!
Just a look at the Horses --
Rapid! That will do!

Put me in on the firmest side --
So I shall never fall --
For we must ride to the Judgment --
And it's partly down Hill --

But never I mind the steepest --
And never I mind the Sea --
Held fast in Everlasting Race --
By my own Choice and Thee --

Goodbye to the Life I used to live --
And the World I used to know --
And kiss the Hills for me, just once --
Then - I am ready to go!


.

What's Up?

Mary Biddinger has a debut book of poetry out with a stunning cover. It's published by Steel Toe Books . Check it out.

Waiting

John Everett Millais

(June 8, 1829 – August 13, 1896)

"Waiting"

1854. Oil on canvas.

City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery,

Birmingham, UK.

Not Another Anti - "Narrative Arc" Rant

Lately there has been talk of the "narrative arc" of chapbooks & poetry collections. Some eschew this tendency on the part of other poets while others laud the benefits of the poems in a manuscript to "hold together". I'm not sure that any poem written by the same author can be anything but a part of a "narrative arc". After all whatever one writes is but a facet of the mindset of that author. If we "see things as we are" can anything that is produced by our cognitive mindset be that different from whatever else we wrote say in the last few years that it took for us to put a MS together (barring some life-changing occurrence)?

Yes cognitive mindsets do evolve and change as life's experiences change, but certain socio-cultural variables (which inevitably define us) will always be constant in our lives. These variables are unique in each and every person. That is why one voice can never fully echo another. This is also why I must reluctantly side with the school of thought that thinks that deliberately manipulating a manuscript to more closely appear that it follows a "narrative arc" is redundant. There already is a "narrative arc" in place and that is the narrative of the poet's existence that is transmitted to us via the objectification of their poems.

Robert Hass

Heroic Simile


When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai
in the gray rain,
in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,
he fell straight as a pine, he fell
as Ajax fell in Homer
in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge
the woodsman returned for two days
to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing
and on the third day he brought his uncle.

They stacked logs in the resinous air,
hacking the small limbs off,
tying those bundles separately.
The slabs near the root
were quartered and still they were awkwardly large;
the logs from midtree they halved:
ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,
moons and quarter moons and half moons
ridged by the saw's tooth.

The woodsman and the old man his uncle
are standing in midforest
on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.
They have stopped working
because they are tired and because
I have imagined no pack animal
or primitive wagon. They are too canny
to call in neighbors and come home
with a few logs after three days' work.
They are waiting for me to do something
or for the overseer of the Great Lord
to come and arrest them.

How patient they are!
The old man smokes a pipe and spits.
The young man is thinking he would be rich
if he were already rich and had a mule.
Ten days of hauling
and on the seventh day they'll probably
be caught, go home empty-handed
or worse. I don't know
whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean
and there's nothing I can do.
The path from here to that village
is not translated. A hero, dying,
gives off stillness to the air.
A man and a woman walk from the movies
to the house in the silence of separate fidelities.
There are limits to imagination.


-----------------------------------------------------
From Praise by Robert Hass, published by the Ecco Press. 1978.
HarperCollins Publishers.

Is There Balm in Gilead?...or Bukowski?

so you want to be a writer?

Charles Bukowski


if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.


------------------------------------------------------
From sifting through the madness for the Word, the line, the way by Charles Bukowski. © 2003 - Harper Collins

Burnt Pier - Brighton

On Intent, Occasion & Poetic Handicaps

I haven’t been writing much poetry lately. Yes there have been distractions – plenty of them actually. But that hasn’t stopped me before from waxing poetic or at the very least trying to. At times in the past, I’ve even been a furtive poet - when I couldn’t for the life of me find the time to sit down and write. It’s sort of like having sex with one’s partner when the children are constantly around – you’ve got to be an opportunist if you’re going to get anything done. So what’s different this time?

Well this is one of the first times that I haven’t been involved in a poetry workshop. This activity in and of itself usually was conducive to the conditions that I needed to write poetry. I guess I thrive on the camaraderie and competitiveness that we associate with these venues. Blogging has taken its toll on whatever poetic predisposition that I can muster at any one point in time. You see I suffer from a poetic handicap. I do not work well in a vacuum. I should and I know that many of you seem to flourish on your own, but I don’t.

There’s no one for me to measure myself to. There is no benchmark to reach or supercede. My problem entirely – I know. Which leads me to the following question: Why is it that intent and occasion seem to be negatively correlated? When intent is present – occasion does not present itself; and conversely when you’ve got nothing better to do you couldn’t write a real poem even if your life depended on it.

Tammy Armstrong

Rogersville: Garage Man's Daughter Back From the City

Exhaustion wraps you like brilliant wrenches
in the too orderly garage
where your uncle who'd fallen asleep at the wheel
in the 70's off the old highway
won't work on blue cars
anything resembling sky, sea, bruise.

I waited past midnight on a milk crate
re-reading outdated Popular Mechanics
staving off your apologies
for the carburetor, the dirt road
without street lamps
my marooning
in a darkness
that cramped and hemorrhaged
cast shadows on the shells of cars--
cumbersome, bovine.

Far from the city
with its unending dog mouth hues
I'm still the daughter of garage men
oil and dust muted in my veins
affection for your grease-stamped knuckles
how you angle your arms away
to keep me clean, unoriented--
your hesitation to bring me back
rural, small town cluttered.

On the drive home
two bucks will run across the line
I'll think stallions, a broken fence
my percolating fear:
just brush fire eyes in high beams
all of it fish tailing the ditches:
your hand on my knee
cupping what I'd forgotten to expect:
how foreign we seem
after ten years in the city.


---------------------------------------------------
Excerpt from 'the Dublin Quarterly' : Issue No. 10. Feb. '07-May. '07

Tammy Armstrong's work has appeared in literary journals in Canada, US, UK and Europe. She is the author of Translations: Aistreann (novel), Unravel (poetry) and Bogman's Music (poetry), which was nominated for a Governor General's Award.

John William Waterhouse - (1849-1917)

Miranda - The Tempest (1916)
oil on Canvas - Actual Size: 136cm x 96cm

The Lady of Shalott - Looking at Lancelot (1894)
oil on canvass - actual size: 86cm x 142cm

She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces thro' the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look'd down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried

The Lady of Shalott.

excerpt from: The Lady of Shalott (1842) - Alfred Lord Tennyson

Call For Submissions - NōD Magazine

Hello all,

This is the official call for submissions for Issue 6 of the magazine. This issue will be our second non-English language issue. We are seeking work in any other language but English, even if those languages are "fictional" or respond to language in an innovative way. Please send a maximum of 8 pages of work; screenplay and prose writers, we will consider work up to 1500 words as a general rule. Having said this, we are flexible, so if you have a special piece that operates outside these strictures, let us know; we'll be glad to take a look at it. Graphic artists, please note that we publish any visual work in black and white on a 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 page. When submitting work, please include a short bio introducing yourself and/or your work and an English language translation with any written work: we will not publish anything that has not been translated. Anyone whose work is accepted for publication in NōD will receive a free copy of the issue they are published in. Our commitment to publishing beginning artists alongside veteran practitioners has thus far resulted in an excellent publication.

Finally, because we are a small magazine, we would be delighted if all of you forwarded this announcement to anyone you know who might be interested in submitting work to us or who might just want to know more about what we do. If you have any questions or comments, We'd love to hear them and answer them if we can. We can always be contacted at nodmagazine@gmail.com

Thanks
Jane Thompson
assistant editor, NōD


Addendum:

In our previous email we forgot to include that the deadline for submissions to the non-English language issue of NōD is February 28th, 2007.

Thanks,
Felicia Pacentrilli
NoD Editor

Poems in Vitro - Vol. 2, No. 3

En Passant


I

It drifts limply, being pulled
into the eddies of the filtered pump.
Suddenly twitching into life,
its caudal tail steers the goldfish
from the filter’s vortex,
only to resume its dormant state.

The other fish stop by to nudge
its shimmering body with their snouts,
taking nibbles out of its dorsal fin.
Part of its left eye has been scooped out:
the result of a late night cannibalistic raid.

Still it hangs immobile, its body folded
onto itself – the gills slow to react.
The remaining eye bulging out,
lidless against its own expiration.



II

Her mind floats between dilated pupils
and aqueous humor. Sputum drops
from her chin: a web-like filament,
untended and unheeded by those eyes.

She is strapped down into a mobile chair.
Her hands unable to ferry her across
the room; the hem of her nightdress lifted,
stuck between the grip of thumb and index.

Still, they come to poke her with their thoughts
and their fingers; testing the flaccidity of flesh;
gauging bone loss; weighing her longevity.

Louise Glück

The Red Poppy


The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.


-----------------------------------------
From The Wild Iris, published by The Ecco Press, 1992.

Some of the White Stuff

Daily Dose of Imagery

Edward Byrne's Blog

The highly respected editor of Valparaiso Poetry Review has started up an editor's blog to complement the semi-annual publication of VPR. "The editor's blog has just begun and will contain ongoing personal commentary about notable recent books of poetry. Since VPR receives many more review copies of new books than can possibly be examined within the journal, the complementary blog is intended to allow for ongoing further discussion and promotion of recommended books. I invite you to check out this new venue." It's located at: One Poet's Notes : Recommended Readings of Recent Contemporary Poetry. So far he's reviewed: Lynda Hull’s - Collected Poems, Brian Turner’s - Here, Bullet, Rebecca Dunham’s -The Miniature Room , & Dave Smith's - Little Boats, Unsalvaged.

Don't forget to visit VALPARAISO POETRY REVIEW . I have a poem in the current issue along with literati such as: Mark Conway, Frannie Lindsay, Jared Carter, Beth Simon, Jeff Knorr, Sarah Brownsberger , E.G. Burrows, Helen Ruggieri, Richard O'Connell, Heidi Czerwiec, Thomas Reynolds, Elizabeth Kirschner, Jason Huskey, Jeanine DeRusha, Nick Bruno , Carol Hamilton, Scott Welvaert, Jordan Sanderson, Rane Arroyo, Taylor Graham, J.D. Schraffenberger, Lynn Strongin. There's an interesting review by Ed. Byrne on CLAUDIA EMERSON’S third collection: "LATE WIFE ".

View From the Vatican

daily dose of imagery

Robert Lowell

Sailing Home from Rapallo

[February 1954]

Your nurse could only speak Italian,
but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,
and tears ran down my cheeks....

When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body,
the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova
was breaking into fiery flower.
The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds
blasting like jack-hammers across
the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner,
recalled the clashing colors of my Ford.
Mother traveled first-class in the hold;
her Risorgimento black and gold casket
was like Napoleon’s at the Invalides....

While the passengers were tanning
on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs,
our family cemetery in Dunbarton
lay under the White Mountains
in the sub-zero weather.
The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone—
so many of its deaths had been midwinter.
Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts,
its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts.
A fence of iron spear-hafts
black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates.
The only “unhistoric” soul to come here
was Father, now buried beneath his recent
unweathered pink-veined slice of marble.
Even the Latin of his Lowell motto:
Occasionem cognosce,
seemed too businesslike and pushing here,
where the burning cold illuminated
the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives:
twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks.
Frost had given their names a diamond edge....

In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin,
Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.
The corpse
was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.



----------------------------------------------
Robert Lowell, “Sailing Home from Rapallo” from Selected Poems. 1976 by Robert Lowell. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com.

La Jolie Vierge

RALEIGH, N.C. — A North Carolina artist - Kate Kretz - intrigued by the public obsession with celebrity has found herself feeding that obsession with a painting of actress Angelina Jolie as the Virgin Mary hovering over a Wal-Mart checkout line.

Lost in the Translation:

GLUT

by Gerald Stern

The whole point was getting rid of glut
for which I starved myself and lived with the heat down
and only shaved oh every five days and used
a blunt razor for months so that my cheek
was not only red but the hair was bent not cut
for which I then would be ready for the bicycle
and the broken wrist, for which- oh God-I would be
ready to climb the steps and fight the boxes
with only nothing, a pair of shoes, and once
inside to open the window and let the snow in
and when the fire was over climb down the icy
fire escape and drop the last twenty
feet with notebooks against my chest, bruises
down one side of my body, fresh blood down the other.



-------------------------------------------------

Cortland Review - December 2006 - Sonnet Feature

Bev Juno

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From left to right - top to bottom:

1. The Glance
2. Dream Garden
3. Prologue
4. The Reflection
5. Nude Study III
6. Emerald
7. Gilded Lady
8. Call Me Sometime

For more artwork: JUNO ART - circa (2002 - 2004)

From The: "I Wish That I Had Said That" - File

"When we read texts in poetry workshops, we tend to read singularly and reductively, toward a revision of the poem that yields the story that all can follow. Toward a narrative, a certain coherence. But when we talk of the poems we love, the ones we return to, we often speak as one haunted.

If we, in poetry workshops, when reading poems, look for ways to reveal the fragments of the poem, and to let the breakages speak, we might find our poems becoming larger. So rather than asking a poem to yield itself to our ideas of the necessary surface unity, we open our thoughts to looking for a deep unity behind fragments, our questions and our enjoyment might possibly be enriched. "


-------------------------------------------------John Gallaher


Check out the rest of his post entitled: The Poetry Workshop: a Question

Portrait of a Poet

See You Next Year -

Theodore Worozbyt Jr.

From Aphorisms I-XV

------------------by Theodore Worozbyt Jr.


I

The most devout long to breathe the dirt's scent once more.

The cat runs faster at night; he sees you better.

Only the ordinary is reprehensible, but praise disgusts the just.

Wine is not drunk enough.

Be bitter but only about the Truth.

With a friend, poison is sweet; sweetness, with an enemy, poisons.

The colder things are, the slower, unless they are flowers.

You will never know the river wets your hair.

What is sweetness, that bees do not remember honey?

Work is wings.



II

If you would judge, then be a Judge.

If you would be judged, be just.

The color of a stone is darker in water.

To be loved, love no one.

The catacombs are not the end. Past them lies a wall.

I am an enemy to what I have forgotten.

If a bell rings, then a bell has been moved from its sleep.

Change admits error, but will prove correct in its assumptions.

Every antipole is itself. Every identity is another.

As I walked along the river, an old man carried a walking stick on
---his shoulder, as a soldier will carry a rifle. When we passed I
---greeted him, but he could not bring himself to answer, though I
---too am an old man, taking pains as I go.


-------------------------------------------------------------------

excerpt from Poetry - January 2007

Alex Lemon

Kinematics

Someone is hanging from an ice-pick
Wrestled into my lung
But I haven’t had Blue Cross
In so long it might only be my memory
Of a blue jay chasing the others away—
House finch, sparrow and pigeon—
How it sat at the feeder,
Beak-high, without eating for hours.
The entire afternoon I watched, reliving
The smoke-dark morning I shot my best friend,
And how four years later, seniors
In high school, we sat drunk on Pabst,
Squeezing the remaining buckshot from his calf
As a girl we both thought was ours
Watched, a cigarette burning a knuckle
On her hand. The moon was something
I will never remember and plutonium
Was what I thought of the fireflies.
And now, when I leave my porch
The ground will give beneath my feet
On this day wet and comfortable
With warm rain. Most of the apples are mealy
With bruises, but I will sliver them
With my grandfather’s pocketknife, eat
Them with peanut butter while sipping green tea.
It would be much easier if I could
Say I have so much of everything I don’t
Remember loving anything at all, but really,
What wouldn’t I do for twenty-bucks?


------------------------------------------------------
from AGNI online

Cellular Disease

daily dose of imagery

Getting the NoD

NoD--an undergraduate literary magazine initiated by the University of Calgary English Literature Student Society has accepted a couple of my poems. The magazine published its first three issues last year. The editor Felicia Pacentrilli is pictured here with several issues of the mag.

Season's Greetings

Cornelius Krieghoff (1815 - 1872)

What Started it All

Eyes Fastened With Pins

----------------------by Charles Simic


How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death's supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can't figure it out
Among all the locked doors...
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
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.

La Dolce Vita

Wings of Desire

Well That Explains it!

As of late I have noted that I am less and less inclined to listen to the latest in music. It just doesn’t seem to speak to, connect with or resonate with me anymore. Yes, of course there are exceptions to this rule, but by and large this has become the norm. Then of course I remembered as a teen saying that my parents just didn't "get it" when it came to the music I listened to. So this prompted me to consider what had changed for me vis-a-vis my appreciation of today’s music. Was this a factor of age or perhaps of some other variable that I was unaware of?

Then I came across this article by Nick Southall in Stylus Magazine: “Imperfect Sound Forever” and became enthralled. He forwards that:

• One result of [overcompression] is that modern CDs have much more consistent volume levels than ever before. But when is it desirable for music to be at a consistent volume? When it's not being actively listened to; i.e. when it's intended as background music.



• Music isn't meant to be at a consistent volume and flat frequency; it's meant to be dynamic, to move, to fall and rise and to take you with it, physically and emotionally. Otherwise it literally is just background noise ...



• Music is about tension and release. With very "hot," un-dynamic music there is no release because the sensory assault simply doesn't let-up.



• ... people I see out and about wearing walkmans or MP3 players seldom seem to tap, or nod, or hum along at all though; instead their gazes seem fixed with a steely resolve, their bodies tense and their minds seemingly tenser. To me that isn't the body language of someone enjoying music.


• People are forgetting how to listen, and who can blame them?

Now this would explain why I tend to gravitate to music that was recorded in the 70's, 80's & early 90's:

Take a look at these two graphs. The original is Abba's "One of Us" as recorded in 1981. You can see a wide dynamic range. The second graph is "One of Us" remastered in 2005, compressed to make all of the sound-wave "big" and louder.

Pull out a record from the 70s or early 80s, and listen to it. Odds are it'll have a big dynamic range -- it'll be whisper-quiet in some parts and booming loud in others. You'll pick up new nuances every time you listen to it. Now listen to any music track recorded in the last ten years, and it'll be radically different. That dynamic range is gone: The entire track is loud, all the way through. The sound sounds a lot more intense, and it "grabs" you more quickly the first time you hear it. But does it still reward re-listening?

Southall argues that the "loudness wars" are destroying music. Record labels for decades have tried to make records louder, on the mostly-correct theory that louder music is more likely to pull you in on first listen. But the way you make music louder is via "compression". In a normal recording of music, the loudest parts -- the peaks -- are much higher than the quietest ones, the valleys. Compression shrinks the difference between the peaks and valleys, so there's less dynamic range; this frees up more room up top so you can boost the whole volume of the entire song.

So now I get to feel better about telling my 12 year old to turn her music down - after all it's all Muzak to an old geyser like me isn't it?

Adding Insult to Injury!

In Response to a Letter of Complaint to the Editors of Poetry That it Publishes Too Much Prose:

"In fact, I think a strong case can be made that the more respect you have for poetry, the less of it you will find adequate to your taste and needs. There is a limit to this logic, of course, or else Plato would be the patron saint of the art. But still, an overdeveloped appetite for poetry is no guarantee of taste or even of love, and institutionalized efforts at actually encouraging the over-consumption of poetry always seem a bit freakish, ill-conceived, and peculiarly American, like those mythic truck stops where anyone who can eat his own weight in rump roast doesn't have to pay for it. ...

Anyone involved with the institutions of poetry would do well to remember this. With all the clamor in this country about the audience for poetry, a veritable barnyard of noise into which I myself have been known to bray, we shouldn't lose sight of one of poetry's chief strengths: how little of it there is. I don't mean how little there is in the culture, but how little there is at any one time that is truly excellent. "

The point I want to make here has to do with the prose in these [back] issues [of Poetry - 1913 & 1915], which in both cases remains surprisingly fresh, readable, even relevant. ...This tendency is borne out by other back issues of Poetry (issues old enough to allow for some perspective, I mean). The poetry is pretty much a steady backdrop of competence for the occasional and (now) unmistakable masterpieces. The prose is surprisingly consistent in its quality and appeal.

----------------------------------------------------------The Editors of Poetry

From the Side Window

by Arun Gaur


From the side window
I can see a grove of bamboo trees.
When it drizzles, they shed their rust colors,
become green.

When it pours for days,
whorled twigs become quick and full and thin,
almost crisp,
and at their delicate ends,
leaves become razor-sharp and long.

In the night when I hear the howl,
tall and dusky shades
would scratch and knock my windowpanes,
lurching with the wind of the storm.

Ultimately,
they would succeed in touching me.


------------------------------------------------
Eclectica - Nov/Dec 2006

Where My Mind's At

Orion Nebula From the Hubble Telescope - 2006