I lay, watching, under bushes across the street
as a madman named Greg
throws interesting creatures
out of a sixth floor window.
I hear him screaming at these things
and watch them pile up.
I’m dumb in my spying.
Falling to shambles
as these things continuously splatter
to earth.
Suddenly
the street goes still
and I watch
in horror
as out falls what I know
must be Beauty.
I cannot tell you how I know her
for I cannot say that we have ever been
formally introduced.
I must know her from all the stories
I was told as a child –
stories about heroes, about love.
I see her
in all her glorious anomaly
hurtling like a rag doll
and I want to have my little brother
with me
to remind me that wretched men
Are also lonely men.
That humans are kind
even if they need to be reminded
sometimes
“You need to be patient, Sam”
he says to me
when my passions come ripping apart
hurting my insides.
I always need to be reminded
of those stories
in which I could envision myself
the hero,
one that rescues the Beauty.
I look at the pile on the ground.
My heart jumps behind my eyes
as the center of our earth
pulls her down.
I leap from hiding
to try
and save her,
to be the hero.
And in this instant
the same crazed lunatic who let her fall
rushes to save her from death.
From where I stand,
I can see him breathing
heavy and shaking.
He speaks to her,
in a voice I cannot hear
as he sets her on her feet and
with the most heartbreaking nod
she leaves us
empty handed on the street.
Greg makes his way back up the stairs,
but I cannot watch this madness anymore
and I move on.
Recall how close she came
to being destroyed,
which may have been
more beautiful
than having to watch her
walk away.
]]>
My best poems happen when I give up on writing my best poems, when I fall asleep at the wheel, in that half-state between daydreaming and dreaming, between asleep and awake. I wake up typing. Sadly, there’s no formula for this. When it happens—and I definitely try as much as possible to make it happen—it sneaks up on me in lots of different ways. The question is how to consciously go unconscious, how to give up and mean it, how to be exhausted and write more poems. As Frank O’Hara put it in “Personism: A Manifesto,” “When I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.” Let’s get lofty, shall we? Okay.
That said, writing about writing poetry is weird, because my process is my process, and your process, if you have one, is your thing. Maybe yours involves clouds, or energy drinks, or sleeping to dream and waking up in a racecar in a dark parking lot. I like to get exhausted—but not frazzled or anxious, just too tired and unwired to think––because that’s when I give up. And when I give up is when all the good stuff happens. Maybe that sounds paradoxical, but it’s not. By giving up, I mean ceding control. I mean forgetting who’s in charge. I mean resigning myself to “nothing gets done” to “no (good) poems get written.” I resign myself to “no good.” Instead, I take out the trash. Then I wash and dry the dishes. I sit down to read or write thinking nothing will happen, but believing that something might/could happen, if/because I am engaging with something antithetical to writing a good poem
*****
Here’s an instructive diversion:
Darcie Dennigan is one of my most favorite poets. She’s so inventive, bright, charming, insightful, hilarious, and beautiful. Mostly I can’t stand it, but I can stand her (for all the reasons just given) and love her poems (for all the reasons just given, and also) for making me want to write them as my poems. For making me ecstatic and jealous and lovely in love. I read her every day. She is full of missing and deliberate mistakes and ellipses, especially in her new book Madame X, where you can SEE the poems almost writing themselves, as if Dennigan is the one writing the ellipses and the poems are writing everything else.
Often she starts with a quotation, as in her poem “The Revolution,” which she begins with the first piece of something Frank O’Hara said (the second part of the quotation comes later in the poem): “Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial and don’t be proud.”
… Okay baby … ? He says to me … Baby … Sit down … There was a bomb …a bomb in a crowd … one town over … Oh …I hadn’t … No you wouldn’t have he says … Because I’m so … ? Because of the blackout … They’re blacking all the good news out… ! He grabs my foot … in … fierceness … but also please don’t be too serious …
That last bit, “but also please don’t be too serious” both connects back to the initial quotation and points the way forward to its/the very serious finish, “The slightest loss of attention leads to death.” Here, Dennigan reminds us how important it is to allow the worlds of our poems to unfold, to pay attention (but not too much attention), to play, have fun, get funny, go bananas, except when we shouldn’t, as later in the same poem when she writes:
Don’t be bananas, don’t be lemons, don’t be … tangelo … we are on the couch … we turn on the radio … The reporter’s in … the middle of … she puts her cell phone up … and from the mob … a man’s mouth … comes out … What is he saying … ? This couch is the color of teargas and … tangerines … I would like to fall asleep … mid-foot massage … while sucking … the juice from a coconut … But … but … I know how it goes
And how it goes, when we give ourselves over to sucking the juice of a coconut or falling asleep mid-foot massage, is sometimes a poem—one that in spite of itself is all about paying attention. The ellipses don’t necessarily signify an absence, but a disarmingly attentive presence, a mind in motion/perception, looking for what comes next. We now return to our regularly scheduled lecture.
*****
I’ve also been reading over and over this terrific poem by Peter Gizzi from his book Threshold Songs called “Eye of the Poem,” which is an ars poetica about getting to the heart of things. He begins:
I come to it at an edge
morphed and hobbled,
still morphing.
Somehow the last word of that sentence always sounds like “morphine” to me, or I read it deliberately, mistakenly, associatively that way. Nevertheless, morphing or morphine, it’s not easy to focus in a poem—to find the focus of a poem. Maybe the problem is actually looking for it, rather than showing up on its primordial doorstep (“I come to it”)(“I come to”) as Gizzi suggests, bedraggled and out of it, half-baked and sluggish. And if one does get to that edge, is it sharp? And what is going over it all about? What does one do at the mouth-edge of the volcano, the sea, the void? What do I do? Leap of faith?—maybe if I’m tired enough, not thinking too much. O I can play it like a horn. Get scared and go home. Get scarred and forever after worry about eruption, disruption, little thorn in my paw. Awe. How does one get to a place in the process where the edge of the knife, or the edge of the earth, looks inviting, and thus, with nothing to lose, accepts its invitation. How does one get so exhausted that giving up is a relief and a release, from work to play in a single bound? Well, one can (try to) make a conscious decision (to turn off the understanding), or one can get to where involuntary spasms SPUR the next move.
For his part, Gizzi goes on: “There is also / the blowtorch grammar’s /unconquered flame.” I have no idea what he means by that. Is he saying that grammar is a blowtorch, a thing that welds words together? What would it mean to conquer that? Would we want to? Maybe in part at least this is what poets always do: conquer grammar, as a way to get out from under its authoritarian logic and prescriptions. Take your morphing or take your morphine. I don’t know. One informs the other, a heady draught to a giant cockroach, a motorcycle into a wall.
*****
And speaking of welding (see “blowtorch” above)(see “motorcycle into a wall”), fire’s interesting stuff, mesmerizing and dangerous, and a blowtorch takes that and intensifies and focuses it. To be a poet is to weld and focus one’s vision into language. Here’s Darcie Dennigan again, this time from her poem “Out of the Ether”:
Transported I behold, transported touch—
This is me typing—Darcie. I am human.
At least, when I am not a monster, with boobs and mouth and fingers.
Oh angels, if I were Milton typing this, I would find you a way to have sex
that lets you be real, nipple-biting people—and also of one soul and holy and glorious.
Well, before you fell.
What does this have to do with fire and focus and welding—and more importantly, giving up as a way to write one’s poems? Well, besides demonstrating the melding of Dennigan herself into the poem—and her poem with Milton’s poem, Paradise Lost—it’s a not-so-subtle reminder that to be a poet is to become a little less than (or more than) human, a monster ecstatic, a “real nipple-biting” person, not fit for the office, falling through the ether. And yet, one goes to the office—the office of poetry—precisely to become unfit (more on this later). To fall or jump or leap of faith. She ends the poem this way:
I’d say more if this throat I have on earth weren’t so thick with scars.
But angels, burns are totally worth the pleasure of giving a light saber a blowjob.
So, see fire. See blowtorch. See Star Wars. Getting burned is hard work.
*****
My process—and thus my focus—is always changing. (Note: “My process” sounds like such a stable thing. Beware the bewitchment of personal pronouns and nouns.) Sometimes I write in the morning, sometimes at night. Sometimes on an old Remington portable, sometimes a computer. I even occasionally write things out longhand, but that’s dreadfully slow, and I hate the way my handwriting looks—much the same way I hate the sound of my voice. I wish I sounded more like sandpaper or a wolf. Even exploratory surgery sounds better, even a liver. And yet, my voice is the only voice I’ve got. Go figure. Often I can’t find it, so I have to go running, or do an antonymic translation, or call Nate Pritts on the phone to figure out where it’s off to. In other words, I get to the poem––the thing I need to say––by playing a game, or by distracting myself from poetry, or by not writing at all. Instead I have a ball, fill up on life, reconnect with my community, my family. As Gizzi points out later in “The Eye of the Poem” the important thing(s) in writing a poem, and in art generally, is this/are these:
Stay open to adventure.
Being awake is finally
a comprehensive joy.
But this is so much harder than it sounds, because we have wills. We want (desire) to make a mark, to draw our own fate as we see and intend it, but the will shuts down possibility, keeps us asleep without dreams. Being awake comprehensively (a.k.a. perspicuous vision), is the job of the poet. But this requires engagement with the intended and unintended in the very same breath. To write a poem, or to make any kind of art, and succeed, comprehensiveness is critical. One has to be aware of/in gear with all the possibilities and respond to them, work with and against them. To communicate is key, but one doesn’t force communication, unless one is a totalitarian; rather, one creates the circumstances where the message hits the target(s) in spite of our desire that it hit the target(s). (Note: I’m using “communication” and “message” very loosely here—I’m just talking about the crux of the poem, whatever it may be—a demonstration, an expression of something, an absence of something, etc.) This is where the joy comes in, and the will goes home with its tail between its legs. Hooray! To make a poem is to let something fly, so let it be an entire jet, not just one wing and an engine. To do this, one needs a conception of the whole—the denotations and connotations, employed and deployed, and all the possible transformations. Comprehensiveness with regard to materials and process. Comprehensiveness with regard to the plethora of meanings, feelings, joys, and tragedies.
Still, it’s important to note: comprehensiveness is not necessarily comprehension—it’s not necessarily understanding anything. And it’s also not necessarily something one has a sense of until the poem’s mostly written. Just because one has a perspicuous view, doesn’t mean one can explain it. Why not? Because an explanation is always both a reduction of something and a definition, a chain link fence around the wilderness of experience, when what’s required is a wallowing into the mud and taking a bite so big that one can’t talk. One expresses oneself via the music of trying not to choke on EVERYTHING, the inclusiveness and sprawl. Sometimes to write/right a poem is to go with the musically sloppy flood. You get to be rude and play with your food. You get to be wished on by a star. Yes, epiphanies do happen, but not because we will them to happen. Meanwhile, Gizzi’s poem continues observing itself in itself:
the back porch reverie,
every parti-colored aura
on cars left and to the right of you.
Ascending through the core
I am silly with clarity
To be “silly with clarity” just about hits the nail on the heartstring. And this, in the right circumstances, makes a sound, maybe—maybe harmonious, or dissonant, or both—cars flying by as the partially-a-party (parti) gasps its last—as the poet ascends from the center, from what’s central: light-headed/ridiculous, an angel or Sisyphus. Either/or. Through discipline, practice, focus, one gets, from time to time, choked-up or flabbergasted or exhausted, and that is the exact moment—that moment when one is drowning—not rationally, not intentionally——that one must, nevertheless, go on without a plan, or a map or an aesthetic guarantee (who ever heard of an aesthetic guarantee?—only really bad artists expect a guarantee), because that’s the moment one’s knowledge is all used up.
*****
Back in “The Eye of the Poem”:
Born of air I am and
the dappled buttresses
in this vacuum glisten.
I remake my life.
To give up in the process of writing a poem is to cede control to the poem and process itself—to get so tired of wresting and arresting and wrestling with the language that one lets it win and remake our lives in its image. We end, when we’re lucky, as deer in the headlights, stranded in the moment before whatever hits us. Crash. Whoops. Sorry. Perhaps Gizzi puts it in more hopeful terms:
What pressure animating giddy coil.
What not the flutter, every
ting and flange calling to you.
A bright patch over the roof
on the jobsite singing itself.
It’s not the workmen or the foreman or the architect (the poet), but the jobsite itself that sings. We have to get down to the job and then get out of the way. Daydream a little, eat lunch on a beam, fall asleep in the sun, wake up typing.
*****
On a slightly related note…
There’s a poem in Darcie Dennigan’s Madame X, “The Corpus” which is all about getting an art school education—that is, ostensibly—but it’s also about the BODY (the corpus, the corpse) of knowledge in art and how it can be “a trap.” How ridiculous and misleading is the teaching of art. Craft can be taught, and it’s important, but then what? If craft is one’s only (or perhaps even primary) focus, one can at best only go so far, or at worst be led ridiculously astray. No one I know in art wants to be a stray. And no one wants to be ridiculous either. And yet, often what passes for teaching in art is as goofy as the three “honors tracks” for the artist as proposed in Dennigan’s poem:
I sought to be an artist … so I went to school … A in all my classes … I went on … Wanted the summa cum laude next to my name in the art school graduation program … I asked the school how to … They presented three honors tracks … suicide … jail … madness … Madness was graded on a curve … madness being … relative … The other two … strictly by the book … Okay I said … Jail sounds good …
Of course, a huge part of the problem here is that the speaker seeks to be an artist and yet is concerned with getting the grade. An artist must be willing to fail, so the speaker of the poem is working on some (possibly) false premises from the start, e.g. that being an artist can be taught, that art can actually be evaluated (rather than experienced) in a meaningful way, and also that one can decide to be an artist.
In art school, the speaker of the poem is then assigned a mentor, and she proceeds in her art and with making her mark. But it isn’t until her “Milkshake” piece, which consists of ice cream and Red Dye #3, and which she sells “only atop Mount Everest” “… to those ladies and gentlemen who could afford [them]…”) that she finally succeeds in achieving her goal. “The milkshakes of ‘Milkshake’ were … many things at once … a symbol of … Also poisonous…” the implication being that poisoning her wealthy patrons results in her going to JAIL, right on track—with honors. But of course the artist is never meant to be “right on track,” so after many years and “torture … etc. …” she gets her final report card from the art school and is surprised to find “All F’s”:
F in the thing thought is in the thinking that thinks it
F in the thing bought is in the thinging that things it
F in the thing taught is in the torture that brings it
F in the sing sought is in the wringing that rings it
This riddling sing-song of a report card (Note: she is 4-F—in military terminology, certifiably not fit for service for physical, mental, or moral reasons) causes the artist/speaker to go mad, and she commits suicide with a shard of mirror (Hello, Narcissus). Thus she completes all three Honors tracks, “suicide … jail … madness,” but realizes in the process (at the very end of the process, when it’s too late) that “The track itself was a trap … The whole art school … was a joke …” And in a ridiculously Deus ex machina sort of moment that ends both the artist and the poem, the artist’s mentor shows up (as the artist herself is bleeding to death) “… beret and all … right away I recognized him … He said … with compassion … We at the school would be happy to grant you … an aesthete’s … funeral …” In other words, while she mayn’t have been fit for service for physical, mental, or moral reasons, aesthetically speaking, she’ll make a beautiful corpse/corpus. Or, to put it another way, she’s solved the koans of art school—“the thing thought,” “the thing bought,” “the thing taught,” “the sing sought”—but the answers and their implications weren’t anything like what she wanted or expected. Expectations and what we desire to be as artists (the corpus of art) are always at least potentially a trap—but who is it that defines them? Well, we revere the great artists of the past for the ways they established the rules, not for the ways that they followed them. What you can KNOW or be TAUGHT about how to write a poem is a tricky thing indeed.
*****
Goodbye, cruel world. And now for the afterlife.
Here’s the end of Peter Gizzi’s poem “Analemma,” also from Threshold Songs:
now that you’re gone
and I’m here or now
that you’re here and
I’m gone or now
that you’re gone and
I’m gone what
did we learn
what did we take
from that oh
always dilating
now that you’re here
and also gone
I am just learning
that threshold
and changing light
a leafy-shaped blue
drifting above
an upstate New York
Mohican light
a tungsten light
boxcar lights
an oaken table-rapping
archival light
burnt over, shaking
You have to walk, stumble, or rapture into the light. One can’t think one’s way into being an artist. Nor can one imitate one’s way there. One has to be willing to forget the rules, the various tracks, the teachers and the teaching, and give oneself over to the art, to make oneself available to possibility. For me, that involves finding ways, either procedural (antonymic translation, erasure, centos, lectures) or physical (sleep deprivation, sickness, cases of beer, running, dancing, talking to friends on the phone) to let go of the notion of writing a poem at all. The best poems aren’t written, they happen and we sing them. That is, suddenly, we realize we have something. Giving up meaningfully is a deliberate lack of focus, of being present and away, of, the powers mysterious and often mislaid. We prepare for this through reading, writing, connecting with and to ourselves and other people, their lives and their work. But then to actually make art we have to turn it all off and walk away, let it bake in the oven at 425 degrees for 33 and 1/3 minutes. When we return, it’s like magic or it’s a total failure. There’s no in between…or maybe there is, but that isn’t the point.
*****
Here are some points:
!!!!!!
*****
And just look what Amanda Nadelberg does at the end of her poem “North Country Concrete,” which is from her new book Bright Brave Phenomena:
What a picture this is becoming.
Shapes are difficult to speak of.
Shiny protective material. All these little
mishaps. Quiet! Quiet riot in the city.
Somehow, for me, this both demonstrates something—the “becoming”—of what I’ve been getting at here, and also exists as a summary of it, “All these little/mishaps. Quiet. Quiet riot in the city.” Makes me wanna bang my head until I can’t anymore, singing “Come on feel the noise. Girls rock your boys. We’ll get wild, wild, wild.” Be exhausted. Give up. The poems! The poems will come.
]]>
(for Malena Morling)
Scared of a world of shadows, a world of late afternoon’s long light,
scared of the rust dusked gloaming when we walk home alone. Scared of
boredom and watching it rise, of wanting a coat, of running past the empty
steel plant along the twelfth street tracks and being struck by the broken
glassed emptiness, that space like a burnt-out cathedral, and falling to my
knees, empty as the space where men once worked the machines, the
absent space of voices.
~
Do you ever hear them, Sasha asks. Who? The voices of men
or my lovers? All of them! She says, the swirling voices, the ones that rise
off the train or the lake at dusk? The ones from inside you. The lost
voices. Or are they ever lost?
Smoke faded into the black seam. Or are they arc-welded?
Voices weeping, voices going blind, trying to read the Brailed air
in the gray light the voices of men, hard to decipher, speaking
into their gloved hands, waiting in a doorway in the rain to hear about
work.
~
Sasha, I don’t hear the voices of those violent rooms, perhaps you are right. Though I do hear the voices of the stories my lover tells me, the mother of my child, she who has left graffiti across town. I see her with her own ex lover, cutting the chain link fence to the closed down Paper Mill, making friends with the abandoned pitt bull, cutting the copper wire to sell for scrap. I hear her hand writing the bad checks, her nights running dope, I rub these voices from her skin until they become just stories she tells, until even they become nothing more than once I did that, this, old paint, varnished over, hidden with distance till they become part
of the gone worlds we inhabit, only when the voices return when we are alone.
Sasha says, my voices come to me at night. That is when you hear me dance. I wear the headphones and dance with my eyes closed. That is why the sound of my feet is silent.
~
They become part of you, no? Sasha asks.
Is that why you cannot grieve them? I puff on my cigarette.
In her hands a white blouse embroidered turquoise, the laundry
on the line fluttering in the high wind blowing off the lake, blue shawls,
white sun dresses gold hand-stitched by her mother.
The high whine of Jesus’ electric toy car whizzing
across the corner. Once, I said, when my woman left
I told her, now without you I will not become
who I was supposed to be ….
Sasha stares at me, does not say a word. But then, I tell Sasha,
I realized that is not true because in losing someone we become someone
else, someone, maybe, more human. Sasha nods. Perhaps it is our losses
that give us the capacity to give?
It is not grief we should carry but gratitude.
If we are able, Sasha says, to forgive.
~
Sasha hangs her blouse. Her dark hair
blowing rivulets into the watery-
sunlight of the air. She is seventeen,
her English getting better.
She will soon leave for school.
She has learned to drive. Soon the geography
of her own dreams. Soon the nightshift, like her father,
in the last factories on the edge of the great lake,
or the stock shelf, or the needles
of her mother’s hands, or a book.
She is done, the laundry is folded.
The light is Spanish today, yellow
and Russian blue, Sasha says I must go upstairs.
~
Now I must go as we all must go.
You will not see her again, except
when you look everywhere, as I see you
everywhere, when I look inside
myself I see you, as I see Sasha, humming a hymn, her voice
floating out into the air, filling the invisible seams
into which we fall from one another and disappear.
]]>
This morning it wasn’t meaning to rain. I didn’t even owe
Now a story not worth telling. compulsive from a skittish memory who
I met a blues player. washed up cup
Put away til vodka
You poems and poets rupture my trunk in graft. the anti pain killer
Not gaugeably inflicted. nosing into the corners of eyes
Unprotected stream beds suffer the open sky. holed up in any-where’s silence
Trotting behind its endless stone wall. if turning to write appeared
Laugh may have history but not definition. a crash of joy of secret slaughter
]]>
I loved a quiet boy. I was afraid
to look at this boy because desire
and panic were the same thing.
I was as open as the graves
in our town cemetery.
When I returned in dreams
the streets were wide and empty.
When I saw him again
heat traveled to my face.
His bare neck made me miss
a step. My youth that I hated
I wanted back.
]]>
Jeffrey Allen is the author of Simple Universal (Bronze Man Books, 2007). He holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago, where he now works and teaches. His poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, CutBank, Blue Earth Review, and Clementine. He is the Poetry Editor of phantom limb, an online poetry magazine.
Holly Amos has an MFA from Columbia College Chicago and is the Library Assistant at the Poetry Foundation and the Social Media Intern for Wave Books. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from A cappella Zoo, Bateau, Columbia Poetry Review, North American Review, Phantom Limb and RHINO.
Amye Archer has an MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. Her work has appeared in PANK Magazine, Twins Magazine, Provincetown Arts Magazine, The Ampersand Review, and Boston Literary Magazine. Her first chapbook, No One Ever Looks Up was published by Pudding House Press in 2007. Her new chapbook, A Shotgun Life, was published by Big Table Publishing in 2011. She currently adjuncts at 9,000 different schools, and is the Reviews Editor for [PANK], and the Interviews Editor for Hippocampus Magazine. She shares her life with her brilliant husband, Tim, and their twin daughters, Samantha and Penelope. She hates talking about herself in third person. You can read her blog at www.amyearcher.com.
Micah Ballard’s recent books include Waifs and Strays (City Lights Books, 2011), Parish Krewes (Bootstrap Press, 2009), Poems from the New Winter Palace (Arrow as Aarow, 2010) and Evangeline Downs (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006). He co-edits Auguste Press and Lew Gallery Editions, is on the editorial board for the Contemporary Poetry Series at UNO Press, and works for the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.
Mary Biddinger is the author of three collections of poetry: Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), Saint Monica (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), and O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming September 2012), and co-editor of The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (U Akron Press, 2011). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Bat City Review, Blackbird, Forklift, Ohio, iO, Minnesota Review, Puerto del Sol, Redivider, and South Dakota Review. She teaches literature and creative writing at The University of Akron, where she directs the NEOMFA program. She also edits Barn Owl Review, the Akron Series in Poetry, and the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, and blogs at wordcage.blogspot.com.
Betsy Brown’s book Year of Morphines won the National Poetry Series. She has poems forthcoming in The Antioch Review and Conduit.
Alan Stewart Carl spends his days trying to balance fiction writing with kids, work and his compulsion to check the latest NFL news. Previously, he’s had work in HAYDEN’S FERRY REVIEW, MID-AMERICAN REVIEW, PANK and other journals. His thoughts appear at AlanStewartCarl.com and in short, occasionally coherent bursts on Twitter (@alanstewartcarl).
Darin Ciccotelli has recently published poems in Barrow Street, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, VOLT, and ZYZZYVA among other publications. He received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. He received his PhD from the University of Houston, where he was awarded an Inprint/C. Glen Cambor Fellowship, an Inprint/Lucille Joy Prize in Poetry, and was the managing editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Art. He currently teaches at Soka University of America.
Mel Coyle is from Chicago and other places where the corn grows. She has been previously published in elimae, the smoking glue gun, OH NO and < kill author. She co-edits the poetry journal TENDE RLOIN.
Caroline Crew keeps looking for a home. Her poems have appeared in PANK, >kill author and Artifice, among other places. She edits ILK journal, contributes to We Who Are About To Die and blogs at flotsampoetry.com. In between times, she is a grad student at Oxford University.
Jessica Cuello’s first chapbook, Curie, came out in 2011 from Kattywompus Press. New poems are forthcoming in Clackamas, Tampa Review, Comstock Review, and LUMINA.
Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of 12 books including the forthcoming All I Ask for Is Longing: Poems 1994 to 2014 (BOA Editions). He works part-time at a pool hall in Erie PA and works other jobs stacking stuff. He survives, which is no small thing.
Kristen Evans is assistant managing editor of jubilat. You can find her poems in GlitterPony and Jellyfish Magazine and her critical prose in The Common, Kenyon Review, Gently Read Literature, and other journals. She lives in Northampton, MA.
Katherine Factor is the poet-in-residence at Idyllwild Arts Academy in Southern California. Her wild idylls can be found in the Colorado Review, thermos, Quarterly West and online at Katherinefactor.com.
Noah Falck’s first book, Snowmen Losing Weight, will be released later this year from BatCat Press. In addition to three chapbooks, his work has appeared in many journals, including Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Forklift Ohio, and Smartish Pace.
Maureen Fellinger will be graduating from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in May with a B.F.A. in Illustration. Her work is inspired directly by human existence and all of it’s ups and downs. Her comic, human, concrete was recently featured in Sawmill Comics Vol. 1. More of Maureen’s work can be viewed at www.maureenfellinger.com, or her daily drawing blog- www.maureenfellinger.wordpress.com
Jennifer H. Fortin’s first book of poems is Mined Muzzle Velocity (Lowbrow Press, 2011). Greying Ghost Press will publish a chapbook of hers, Give or Take, in its next season. You can find her on the internet at www.jenniferhfortin.com.
Kit Frick is in her final year of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University. She has poems in recent or forthcoming issues of CutBank, PANK, Conduit, Jellyfish, Foothill, Georgetown Review, and Stone Canoe and is very excited to be a first-time nominee for a Pushcart Prize this year. Kit is Poetry Editor for Salt Hill Journal and is an Associate Editor for Black Lawrence Press, where she edits the small press newsletter Sapling. Kit lives and writes in central New York.
Les Gottesman’s first published poems were in Ted Berrigan’s C magazine in 1965. More recently, his poems have appeared in Juked, Anamesa, Beatitude, Harper’s, and Antioch Review. Les has been a teacher in San Francisco for over 30 years. He received an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts in 2011. Contact Les at lesgot@comcast.net.
Seth Graves was born in Memphis. His work has appeared in Barrow Street; Coldfront; No, Dear; La Fovea; and elsewhere. He teaches writing at Pace University and lives in Brooklyn.
Eryn Green is a doctoral candidate at the University of Denver and holds an MFA from the University of Utah. He has been nominated for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, awarded by the Poetry Foundation, and recently his collection Eruv was selcted by C.D. Wright as a finalist for the 2011 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize. Eryn’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Jubilat, Colorado Review, the tiny, Bat City Review, H_NGM_N, Word for/ Word, Rhino, Iron Horse Review, Pheobe, Painted Bride Quarterly, Esquire.com and Denver Quarterly.
Arielle Guy is a poet, graphic novelist, imaginary astrophysicist and mindfulness life coach living in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been published in 6x6, kadar koli, lungfull!, small town, EOAGH, and other beautiful journals. She edits Turntable & Blue Light, is part of Dusie Kollektiv and her first full-length collection, Three Geogaophies: A Milkmaid’s Grimoire, was published by Dusie Press in 2011. She is currently working on her second manuscript and on a book about mindfulness practice, finding peace and sustainability of life as a poet.
Daniel Hales’ poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Bateau, Conduit, Quarter After Eight, and elsewhere. You Make A Better Door Than A Window, the 2nd album by Daniel hales, and the frost heaves. will be released in July, along with I Have A Song To Tell, You Now, a chapbook with poems by Michael Earl Craig, James Grinwis, and 8 other poets: each writing a poem about a different song on the album http://www.thefrostheaves.com
Originally from the Mississippi side of Iowa, Joanne Hart has lived her so called adult years in Massachusetts. She graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1988 where she also earned her 5th Year certificate. Mother of three, she mistakenly began writing poetry in 2006. Desperate to know what illness had befallen her she was quite fortunate to have been put on the proper outbound train by Paul Sheprow. She has continued her writing journey tied to its rack and an IV bag of emphatically dripping stealth and expert support from Darcie Dennigan and Catherine Imbriglio.
Matt Hart’s most recent book of poems is Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast, 2012). A co-founder and the editor in chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the poetry/noise band TRAVEL.
Katie Hartsock grew up around Youngstown, Ohio. She received an MFA from the University of Michigan, and is now in the PhD program in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern. Her poems have appeared in Hanging Loose, Michigan Quarterly Review, Clementine, Another Chicago Magazine, and DIAGRAM. She can often be found perambulating the northern Chicago lakeshore.
Joshua R. Helms is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. His poems and fictions appears or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, elimae, Monkeybicycle, NANO Fiction, PANK, Stoked, TYPO, and Used Furniture Review.
Ken Henson now rides the bus, which in his opinion is not unlike astral travel. After getting off the bus, he enters the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where he teaches people automatic drawing techniques and other methods for achieving deep trance. When he isn’t doing this, Ken can be found in his basement getting his drawing fix to the backdrop of a stellar VHS horror movie collection. Awards Ken has won include The Chautauqua Institution Award in the 46th National Exhibition of American Art at The Chautauqua Center for the Visual Arts, NY, and Grand Prize in the All Kentucky Open Art Exhibition, hosted by the Lexington Art League. Ken was a finalist in the 4th Annual Miami University Young Painters’ Competition for the William and Dorothy Yeck Award. Ken’s work has been published by Forklift, Ohio A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety, and Typecast Publishing’s Sawmill Comics.
Liz Hildreth works as a writer for an education company and lives in Chicago.
Nathan Hoks’ first book of poems, Reveilles, won Salt Publishing’s Crashaw Prize and was published in 2010. He is also the author of a chapbook, Birds Mistaken For Wind, and the translator of Vicenete Huidobro’s Arctic Poems. With Nicole Flores, he co-edits Convulsive Editions, a micro-press that publishes chapbooks and broadsides. He lives in Chicago.
Christopher Hund is the author of In Forest Static, a chapbook available from Convulsive Editions (http://www.convulsive-editions.org). The book explores tiny forested zones that are flooded by the memory of both inner and outer worlds. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has also published poems in ForkliftOhio, The Columbia Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and other journals. He works for a healthcare improvement organization in Chicago and lives with his wife and two children in Grayslake, IL.
Courtney King Kampa is from Virginia, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has received awards and distinctions from Poets & Writers Magazine, The Atlantic, North American Review, and elsewhere.
Christine Kanownik’s reviews, art, and poetry can be found in the past or upcoming issues of: Everyday Genius, Lungfull! Magazine, Glitterpony, Shampoo, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. She has been a writer-in-residence at the University of Chicago and La Misíon of Baja, California. In 2009 she co-founded Augury Books. She lives and works in New York.
Genevieve Kaplan’s poems have recently appeared in Yew: a Journal of Innovative Writing & Images, Western Humanities Review, and Terrain.org: a journal of the built and natural environments. Her book, In the ice house, is available from Red Hen Press.
Molly Kat is a graduate student of Literature and Literary Theory at Binghamton University. She has work published or forthcoming in Omega Magazine, Foothill Poetry Journal, Pedastal Magazine, Muzzle, Corvus, Toad the Journal, Samizdat, and many others. She is working on a manuscript called Lucy, from which the following pieces are excerpts. Lucy is a third person experimental prose poetry narrative about a young girl exploring the parameters of existence post-trauma.
Abby Koski is Assistant Editor at [PANK] Magazine and a blog contributor for Coldfront Magazine and vouchedbooks.com. Her work has previously been published in Used Furniture Review.
Mike Krutel is graduate student in the NEOMFA and an editor for Barn Owl Review. His reviews are forthcoming in Lituanus and American Book Review.
Amy Lawless is the author of the poetry collection Noctis Licentia (Black Maze Books, 2008), a chapbook Elephants in Mourning ([sic] Detroit, 2012), and a four poem pamphlet from Greying Ghost Press (2011). She was awarded a 2011 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She teaches writing in New York City and New Jersey and blogs at amylawless.blogspot.com and Best American Poetry.
Gregory Lawless is the author of I Thought I Was New Here. His poems have appeared in the National Poetry Review, Third Coast, Zoland Poetry, Sonora Review, La Petite Zine, Gulf Stream, Cider Press Review, InDigest, H_NGM_N, Artifice, and many others. Poems are forthcoming in Devil’s Lake, the Cincinnati Review, burntdistrict, thrush, and Paper Darts. He is a four-time Pushcart nominee. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts, and teaches writing and literature at Suffolk University.
Samantha McCormick has been published in H_NGM_N and is the founder of Trigger. She is currently studying at The Art Academy of Cincinnati.
Marc McKee received his MFA from the University of Houston and his PhD from the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray. Recent work appears in Sixth Finch, Sou’wester, Pebble Lake Review, The Journal, and Artifice. He is the author of a chapbook, What Apocalypse? (New Michigan Press, 2008) and two full-length collections, Fuse (Black Lawrence Press, 2011) and Bewilderness (forthcoming, Black Lawrence Press, 2014).
Sara Michas-Martin lives in Denver and currently teaches at Goddard College and for Stanford’s Online Writer’s Studio. Her work was chosen for the Best New Poets 2011 Anthology and has been published in the American Poetry Review, The Believer, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, Harvard Review, jubilat, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Please visit saramichas-martin.com for more.
Gina Myers is the author of A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009) and several chapbooks, including most recently False Spring (Spooky Girlfriend, 2012). Her second full length book will be published by Coconut Books in early 2013. She lives in Atlanta, GA.
Amber Nelson is the co-founder and poetry editor for alice blue review and alice blue books. She is the author of three chapbooks. Her first full-length, In Anima: Urgency is forthcoming from Coconut Books (2013).
Jesse Nissim is a Faculty Fellow at Syracuse University and the author of the chapbook Alphabet for M (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Court Green, ecopoetics, Rhino, and online at Verse, and Requited. Her manuscript, Diagram Her Dream of Flight, was a runner up for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Award (2008), and a finalist for the National Poetry Series Open Competition (2011).
Josef Noh currently lives and works in Western NY.
Elsbeth Pancrazi is the Membership and Development Director for the Poetry Society of America. She serves on the editorial board of PEN Journal and sometimes binds books for Small Anchor Press. Her poems and book reviews have appeared on BOMBlog, Bookslut, Boog City Reader, Forklift, Ohio, and elsewhere in print and on the web.
More of Jean-Paul Pecqueur’s recent poems can be read in the current or upcoming issues of Forklift, Ohio, Fence, Ping Pong and Eleven Eleven. You can also find some older poems in his volume, The Case Against Happiness, published by Alice James Books.
Amy Pickworth is a writer and editor living in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Smartish Pace and Forklift, Ohio, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2011.
Matt Rasmussen’s poetry has been recently published in Gulf Coast, Cimarron Review, Water~Stone Review, Mid American Review, Paper Darts, MARGIE, and Dislocate. He’s received awards, grants, and residencies from the Bush Foundation, The Minnesota State Arts Board, The Corporation of Yaddo, The Loft Literary Center, The Jerome Foundation, Intermedia Arts, and The Anderson Center in Red Wing, MN. He is a 2012 McKnight Artist Fellow, a former Peace Corps Volunteer, and teaches at Gustavus Adolphus College. His chapbook, Fingergun, was published in 2006 by Kitchen Press and he’s a founding co-editor of Birds, LLC, a small, independent poetry press.
Christopher Rizzo is a writer, scholar, and editor who lives in Albany, New York. His full length collection of poetry, Near Point Balance, is forthcoming from Skysill Press. Most recently, a second collection of poetry, Of Love & Capital, was awarded the Bob Kaufman Book Prize, guest-judged by Bernadette Mayer. The book will be released by Trembling Pillow Press in 2012. Awarded the Phyllis Hurd Liston Poetry Prize by the Academy of American Poets in 2011, Rizzo has published a range of critical and creative work in magazines and journals over the past twenty years, both online and in print, including Art New England, Bright Pink Mosquito, The Cultural Society, Dusie, H_NGM_N, Jacket, Otoliths, Process, Reconfigurations, Spell, Tight, and Turntable & Bluelight. Actively interested in exploring the work of other writers and artists, his latest critical work on poets Charles Olson and Pierre Joris appeared in a recent anthology of essays, Pierre Joris—Cartographies of the In-Between, and his latest chapbook, Tmēsis / In Other Words Continuing, documents the documentary “Philip Guston: A Life Lived.” Committed to small press publishing as the lifeblood of contemporary innovative poetry, he is the founding editor of Anchorite Press. Rizzo currently lectures at the University at Albany, where he is finishing his doctorate in English studies on twentieth century American poetics.
Martin Rock lost everything to the great pickle fires of the early 1980’s, and regained it all in speculation on the essential nature of zephyr. His poems have escaped and are rumored to be hiding out in Black Warrior Review, Conduit, DIAGRAM, Forklift, Ohio, La Petite Zine, Salamander, Sixth Finch, Tampa Review, Tuesday; an Art Project, and other journals. He edits Loaded Bicycle and is Managing Editor of Epiphany, a Literary Journal. Don’t look now, but he’s thinking himself into your amygdala. www.martinrockpoetry.com
Christopher Shipman is the author of Human-Carrying Flight Technology (Blaze VOX), Romeo’s Ugly Nose (forthcoming from Allography Press), and coauthor of Super Poems (forthcoming from Kattywompus Press). His poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Exquisite Corpse, The Offending Adam, La Fovea, and Salt Hill, among many others. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been featured on Verse Daily. Shipman is poetry editor for DIG Magazine of Baton Rouge, where he coordinates the River Writers Reading Series with Vincent Cellucci. www.christophershipmanwritingwork.com
Born in Steubenville, Ohio, home of Dean Martin, Sommer Sterud received her MFA in poetry from The Ohio State University. After teaching and living in Ecuador for several years, she became an instructor at Capital University where she teaches creative writing and composition. By night, Sommer does stand-up comedy, something she says is remarkably similar to poetry writing as both attempt to deliver big truths in small packages and neither pay very well. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.
K.M.A. Sullivan‘s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Pearl, Potomac Review, Cream City Review, Gargoyle, >kill author, diode, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in creative non-fiction and from Vermont Studio Center in poetry. She is the editor of Vinyl Poetry and the owner/publisher of YesYes Books.
Jen Urso creates performance, video and drawings that explore endurance, persistence, change, and ignored or forgotten moments and places. She is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant recipient and has exhibited in Arizona, New York, Colorado, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. Jen received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and is pursuing an MFA in Art Practice at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She lives and works in downtown Phoenix, AZ.
W. Vandoren Wheeler was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and cracked his head open on the playground in various ways in the 2nd, 4th, and 6th grades; he began writing seriously in the 8th grade. He has published poems in Swink, Forklift, Conduit (forthcoming), and a dozen other fine publications, including ratemyprofessor.com. His manuscript The Accidentalist won the 2012 Dorothy Brunsman Prize from Bear Star Press, and will be published in late 2012. He lives and teaches in Portland, Oregon, and is tweaking his manuscript Lonely & Co.
Wynn Yarbrough lives in Mt. Rainier, Maryland and teaches creative writing and children’s literature at the University of the District of Columbia. He has worked as a painter, bartender, editor, teacher, and mover (among many jobs). Poems, reviews, interviews and articles have appeared in The Potomac Review, Branches Quarterly, the Pedestal Magazine, Poetry Midwest, H_NGM_N and others. He has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has won prizes from The Virginia Poetry Society and the state of Louisiana. He was a Marion Park Lewis Foundation Recipient for 2005 and 2006. His book, A Boy’s Dream, was released this year by Pessoa Press.
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As if it were a scene made-up by the mind
so difficult for a day to find its sources
as though yearning were an answer to jags
immediacy gives to description’s weight a pause
a succubus waltzing on the head of a pin
& the wind turns back the words I spit in my face
as if to gold-leaf a final cause upon desire
around anomalies wander & compasses spin w/wrongs
suffering imagination’s strange directions
remorse cuts a pathology of its own experience
certainty bound to consequential strife
abandoning the deuce you know for now
wonder arrives at my door & knocks bashfully
as if she were a scene made-up by wishful cares
aging gifts a knowing I’d rather return
terms of convenience conceded in a private room
distrustful of scenes & disembodied minds
the next time I say goodbye will be my last
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I fall asleep, waking to find
a poem in which leaves
figure prominently. If you
tear all of the skin away
leaving only the veins,
they are miniature trees
the poem informs me.
I nod off when it describes
snow falling, warm as living skin.
The poem is right though,
warm snow would be nice
to lie down and sleep in.
This leaf is orange,
my dream last night: poorly lit.
But the snow falling though it,
whiter than real snow
which isn’t really white at all
just a deflection of light before
it melts into puddles the color
of whatever hovers above.
YOUR BODY IS A TEMPLE IS A BODY AGAIN
Your stained glass
depicts the holiness
of gun flash.
The tapestries hung
in the cathedral
honor the doom idol’s
peeled-open, copper
face. To turn around
during The Tapping
of the Divine Shoulder
is a transgression.
In The Sacred Image
at City Beach you kneel
while your hands
are buried to the wrists.
Praise the hallowed
hollow-point, the negation
creation. Thus Enters
the Holy Bullet.
Your worshippers’ arms
float upward as though
tied to invisible birds.
Only they have no hands,
they’ve sunk them
into the sky.
I laid the cornerstone
over your deathface
then we burned
your sanctuary
to the bone and poured
it down the ground’s
black throat. Your life
was just a doorway,
and hovering above you
a red voice urging
EXIT.
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—suppose still—
inside a blue and fleshy lure
but of being and skinned
walking through a greenery
the self, the figure speaks
for all the bodies: needles, petals, fur
“we” suspect open power lines
—energy surges through the water—
suffering into anonymity a truth
“we” will orbit “we” orbiting “we”
voicing the threshold, the embrace of song
each note sings bright so
the loss moves as one and speaks
like shadow puppets—green
is a place that is also a song erotic
all of the leaves broken from trees
sing here in this song the voice
spools as thread unloosed to
safety, found never alone
the song is always the song
sung simultaneously by all
The Trees
in the dark an earth unformed
formed so from the wing the world
ends you see its round cusp
ghost husk ellipses collect
each in an envelope
the viol dictates the song
a cryptographer a mask maker
wing in the arcade even now homeless
light lifts a candle and rubs
the sulfur out on my tongue
I already know the taste
of carbon—bodies—but
when it burns out cleave
these sever and hollow ways no longer
of the world in the world
lights a tremor in the body wave
inside the skin knows a falling
into a dust bowl’s pink halo
do you think Apollo whispers
to the daffodils
or the dandelions never mind
I saw something once
that made me forget
a rainbow how you can’t touch
it or fog
gone by midmorning the flowers
white lilies on the pine
boxes grow old all grow old
trying to remember light
from 10,000 feet—
how does it do that still
glow orange alive and grow
the halo is gone now
even the light can die
it’s boring the streets full
of protective blossoms
umbrellas that gasp into
opening wings in expectation
of breeze ever noticed the inside
of a bird’s wing eagles reveal mottling
flamingos a blast of night
these rooms are mine what do you think
strange weird beauty all of the private
horrors I want to know my shame
forgiven in the sun stark raving naked
with fig roomfuls of fig and dark
and crowds of trees burn a warning
on the mountainside scotch burns
a throat full of goldening I want
song to torch the curtains see each flame
on each undertow glowing rise
a starting over in ritual
sacrifice the apple bark and leave
the husk this what’s lift in blue
what lies false in a palm
the whorls of fruit feels sour
pressed against a chest plate
threadbare and easy to parse to
look inside the creak of old stairs
seek air and breathe now for fire
lungs are weird and crows
murder the air with wings
and cries a serrated consonant
throat stretched blood
blooms in a sunbreak
in an unblooming time there
two twined trees and naked limbs
clear in the blue a welcoming freeze
people forget people want
to forget
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Set in desolate locations, near border towns and ghost towns, Cindy St. John’s Be the Heat consists of twenty-four short poems that address survival among a rugged environment. Throughout the collection, certain ideas reappear, from a series of letters addressed to “City,” to a series of “map” poems (“Map of a Border,” “Map that Will Become Your Home,” “Map of Things You Forgot,” and so on) that read as instructions to past experiences. The opening “Dear City” introduces a sense of alienation and dislocation; the speaker relies on another’s words, “it is as if there was a dark fleshy space between us labeled, ‘I am not myself.’” Many of the poems seem to be heading towards destruction, where disappearing into the landscape is a desire but perhaps one that isn’t really supposed to be lived out, as St. John writes in “Map of What Can Cut You”:
swim/drive your field of vision infinitely
multiplying the weight of your arms you lived/died
break the glass
fade/disappear into the landscape isn’t this
what you wanted?
In the title poem, St. John writes, “there are places / we go to keep // from going somewhere else,” and later, “just because there’s a trail / don’t mean you belong here.” The speakers come across as simultaneously tough but damaged. They have lived and have lost loves and are hard drinking. In “Morning,” the speaker says, “I dreamt I beat you / with a big yellow saucepan / and like money / you deserved it,” and the speaker on the very next page in a poem titled after the Sam Cooke song “We’re Having a Party” finds herself crying at the bar but claiming, “just because / I am crying doesn’t mean I’m not having a good time.” The poems fluctuate between this space of confidence/self-assuredness and uneasiness.
The poems are tightly written, mostly in concise couplets and short-lined poems, with the “Dear City” poems written in prose. Even though the poems easily stand on their own, there is a narrative that emerges across the chapbook that, despite wonderfully descriptive language, the reader is not given full access too. For example, we learn someone has died but we do not know the relationship between the speaker and this person, though we can certainly guess at it. However, it isn’t really important that we know anything for sure. The poems come across tight-lipped, which feels emotionally honest for these speakers who are telling us what it’s like now, with hints to what perhaps once was.