Local Lyrics - Featuring Maria Masington

August 15, 2022 Brooke Palma

Snow White Walks Home from AA
by Maria Masington

Leaves loosen their grip and float, dangle
like gems from her yellow skirt. Oak rubies and
birch emeralds cling to her black hair in a wispy
crown, like the lie of ‘Happily Ever After.’

Maple whirlybirds fly to her feet. Detritus dusts
up like chipmunks racing her along the path,
circling her like reel-to-reel tapes of long-ago
conversations with witches, queens, and small men.

Mushrooms freckle the forest floor. Resentments
pop up again and again, betrayal and injustices,
real and imagined. She believes everything she thinks,
a tale where she is cast as dupe instead of darling.

She tries to remember their names, the Seven. She
knew them before the Fall: Happy, Doc, Bashful,
Sneezy, Restless, Irritable, and Discontented. Miners
of seven deadly sins, we dig, dig, heigh-ho, heigh-ho.

She loses focus, her eyes jewelers’ loupes,
magnifying and misinterpreting outdated
conversations, tiny slights, and unintended harms,
rewriting history to suit her mood and attitude.

Acorns plunk like cocktail olives onto the trampoline
of the decaying forest floor. Squirrels’ trapeze above
her head, chiding her to face the girl in the mirror,
chattering that she should stop biting the poison apple.

Step-by-step, foliage crumbles under high yellow heels,
powdery remnants of resentment in the woods’ musty air.
A mile in her sober shoes, flakes of jewel-toned leaves
speckle her silk stockings and anger clings to her soles.

What are you interested in as a writer? What do you hope to bring forth with pen and paper?
I was a social worker for many years. I search for meaningful words to decrease the stigma of mental illness and addiction and give voice to those unseen and unheard. I write about single fathers on pediatric oncology wards, women who miscarried, and ignored seniors. The more we understand, the more inclusive we become. Poetry provides a framework to tackle social issues in ways that are honest without being lofty or preachy. The aim is always to be courageous. Many of my poems are written in first person - but they are not autobiographical - I just want people to connect and have a voice.

Your poems often deal in hard truths but still find space for humor. How do you balance these elements in your poems? Why is humor an important tool for you?
That's a great question. I like to think of my writing as "brave" but others have labeled it "dark." There's a limit to how much heaviness we can carry - as readers or audience - so I always bring in humor. Life is difficult, but I also want to celebrate through laughter. (and to be honest, not everyone agrees with me, but I think I'm funny).

Do you have any rituals or writing practices that you regularly engage in to jump start or re-engage your writing?
That's a hard "no." I have no formal training or education in writing. I have my own office with a desk but almost all the work is done the night before critique groups meet so I have something to bring to the table. It's not professional or glamorous - a couch, poodle, cup of coffee and laptop while low-rent TV plays in the background. I take a prompt or a note I wrote on a piece of scrap paper and patchwork together with whatever is causing me angst or amusement. I do attend critique groups religiously - that constructive feedback is essential - I usually do one edit, bring to a second critique group and then either edit a final time or ditch an idea. Would the work be better and more prolific if I was more disciplined? Probably. Am I going to change how I work? Probably not.

Your chapbook, Mouth Like a Sailor, was recently awarded 1st place by the Delaware Press Association. Can you tell us a little about the collection and how it came together?
A few years ago - I took a huge stab in the dark- and submitted for the Dogfishhead Poetry contest. A longshot but I scored an Honorable Mention - so thought maybe there was something there. I spent the next couple years learning about the arch of a book, etc....

During mandatory lockdown I was a featured reader at Mad Poets Livin' on Luck open mic. It was a rough time for everyone so I stuck to light, funny stuff. Matt Lake - who I'd never met- was in attendance and reached out asking if I'd be interested in working together toward a publication. I had to be honest and let him know that what he'd heard was not reflective of my work - so he may not be interested. He was still game and said to send him what I had - I was delighted when he offered to publish it as a book. Matt really championed me from there.

I planned to call it Destiny of the Modern Day Gladiola but did a Facebook poll with 4 options - Mouth Like a Sailor was the unanimous choice. When Matt found the postcard of the female sailor smoking - now the cover - I named her "Lenora" and knew we were onto something. So many people comment on the bookcover - Matt really hit a homerun with that choice.

You are involved with a number of writers’ organizations (including Mad Poets), writing groups, and even host an open mic. How to you balance being enmeshed in a literary life and actually finding time to write?
It's just luck - I started writing after getting a Delaware Division of the Arts fellowship to attend a poetry retreat when I was already in my late 40's and my youngest kid was almost done high school. I'm acutely aware of how fortunate I am - an empty-nester who lives with a super supportive partner and has a lot of work flexibility. I don't make an income from writing and I'm not trying to set the world on fire. I emcee both as a professional and volunteer - so unless it's a paying gig, I draw a boundary when the "writing things" stop feeling like artistic expression and start feeling like work - that's when I back off for a while.

Where can readers check out more of your work?

Mouth Like a Sailor can be purchased at Between Books in Arden - inside the Oddporium - Greg has been a big supporter. If you Google "Maria Masington Amazon" you'll find the book and most prose, anthologies, etc...

Maria Masington is a poet, author, and spoken word artist from Wilmington, Delaware. Her poetry has appeared in over thirty publications including Adanna, The News Journal, The Fox Chase Review, Gargoyle, The Broadkill Review, Earth’s Daughter, and Never Forgotten: 100 Poets Remember 9/11. She has had seven short stories published in both local and international press. Maria belongs to The Mad Poets Society, works as “your friendly emcee,” and is a featured performer on the local art scene. Parnilis Media, aka Matt Lake, released her first chapbook, Mouth Like a Sailor, in 2021. It was awarded first place by the Delaware Press Association and The National Federation of Press Women for poetry.

John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he works as a licensed clinical social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and several of his poems were chosen to be exhibited in Princeton University's 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices art show at the Lewis Center for the Arts. He has been nominated 3x for a Pushcart Prize and serves as the Local Lyrics contributor for The Mad Poets Society Blog. His debut chapbook Roadside Oddities: A Poetic Guide to American Oddities was released in early 2022 and can be purchased at www.johnwojtowicz.com. John lives with his wife and two children in Upper Deerfield, NJ.

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art (August 2022)

August 9, 2022 Brooke Palma

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

Welcome to a new Mad Poets blog, to be offered every two months.

It’s a pleasure to write about the relationship between poetry and other art forms, to examine ways that a various creative arts relate to each other.

The term ekphrasis can be defined narrowly as writing that describes a work of art in another medium-- paintings, music, photography sculpture and the like. It can also refer more broadly to the alchemy that happens when one medium tries to define and relate to another. This could refer to poems inspired by the visual arts or music -- and also the reverse! To my mind, ekphrasis can also encompass hybrid works, like artists’ books, author/illustrator collaborations and graphic poems.

Many scholars have written about ekphrasis and there are great resources online. Though not scholar of the topic, I have had a practice of writing poetry and painting for many years. Both are essential to my creative life. These art forms interact, challenge each other and open up many questions and tensions.

My aim in this blog is to feature the work of various poets and artists, to let you know of interesting viewing opportunities and to provide some angles that might prompt your own writing. Here are opportunities of interest:

The Work of MaryAnn L. Miller

MaryAnn L. Miller is a remarkable poet, printmaker, and book artist. Her approach epitomizes the gifts of ekphrasis and creative collaboration; she connects her poems to her own in order printmaking process. Not only that, she generously partners with many other creatives publish artists’ books and fine arts publications. Miller demonstrates how collaboration across art forms and individuals can lead to riches. I admire her vibrant collages and prints, which can be viewed online at https://maryannlmiller.com/ and at her studio in Hunterdon County, NJ.

Miller’s artistic journey is wide and deep. Encouraged by family and teachers for her early drawing and writing, she went on to study art education and school counseling. This led to years of teaching art and reading in NJ public schools. She received an MFA, studying intensively with the poet David Wojahn, then went on to become Resident Book Artist at the Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College for sixteen years. Following this, Miller founded Lucia Press in Clinton, NJ. She has been a designer and binder for books by Faith Ringgold, Duncan Bullen, Sam Gilliam, Curlee Raven Holton, Barbara Bullock, David C. Driskell, Nikky Finney, Nene Humphrey, Alison Saar, Richard Viera. Sharon Olds, Lee Upton, Jim Toia, Ross Gay, Khet Mar, Janet Taylor Pickett, Nestor Gil, and many others.

Miller demonstrates sensitivity and skill in her published collections, Locus Mentis (PS Books, 2012) and Cures for Hysteria (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Some of these poems explore her experience of Hyperkalemia Periodic Paralysis. She writes movingly of this neuromuscular condition, which caused her unpredictable bouts of paralysis until properly medicated when she was an adult. This is not her only topic, however. Family history, lived experience and references to visual art are interwoven throughout.

In her artist’s statement, Miller explains some of her process:

When I begin a print, I make a serigraph from which I add or redact parts. I use parts of other prints to add to the base or cover redacted places. These parts take on a different identity and value. I spend time reflecting and rearranging before I glue them. It’s a slow process toward resolution and one I liken to writing lines in a poem. Revising along the way, laying down a layer, breaking it, tearing it, enjambing in a new place, caesuras all over the place. Empty spaces are silence, the more silence, the quieter the print, the slower the eye travels. One can’t make prints without sequential thinking, and thought being given to color, form, and composition.

Art in the Time of Savages
by MaryAnn L. Miller
Along the border all drawings have
been taken down not one left

to point a direction for our feet.
We might know the way if we had

wings to spread above the shining
twist of water.

The place of no location has flung
us away from Frida’s baby.

Don’t come here
lullabies are spiders in the bed.

They plan to rub us out
before we can make frantic art

in a jackal world.
Our scraping must matter

it reverberates like
a green poppy sending smoke.

(Published originally in Ovanque Siamo 2018 and nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize, this poem will appear in Time is Snake's Tongue, Word Tech June 2023)

*Art in the Time of Savages (MaryAnn L. Miller)*
Prints available through https://www.ravenfinearteditions.com/

I am learning so much from Miller’s discoveries and experimentation. I admire her collaging, her arranging and rearranging texts as well as visual images. Her generosity and collaborative vision have led to many interesting projects. For example, she worked together with the poet J.C Todd on FUBAR, a book project inspired by one of Todd’s war poems. Miller created monotypes that became images for the book. Another of their collaborations, On Foot/By Hand, began at an artist residency at the Ragsdale Foundation. Miller is currently working on a project for Raven Studios involving the prints of Ifyj Chiejina, a Nigerian American artist.

The following poem will appear in her next collection, Falling into the Diaspora.

Thunder Storms

Can peace be gained until I clasp my wombat?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

A magnolia unfurls her robe
in the Italian sky above Benevento
a globe of air becomes

temporale. My mother sits
on the basement stairs in Western
Pennsylvania protected from lightning

by a rubber mat;
she prays to Saint Barbara
holding her children too close.

In mother’s head-longing
to be American
she left me

on the Appian Way
her teenage gollies and goshes
a dialect I didn’t learn.

I wanted the mother language
clasped to my neck like a furry
pet raised in a forever home.

(Published in Mom Egg Review 2020)

*Falling into the Diaspora*. (Cover Art by Will Hubsher)

I invite you to learn more about the vibrant poetry and artwork of MaryAnn L. Miller, a generous, wise, and multitalented artist. She will host an Open Studio on Friday, December 2, 2022 sponsored by THAT (The Hunterdon Art Tour). Her website is www.maryannlmiller.com.

Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A painter and teacher, she founded the We the Poets program at ArtWell, an arts education non-profit in Philadelphia (www.theartwell.org). Her poems appear in journals such as Apiary, Baltimore Review, Cagibi, East Coast Ink, 6ix, North of Oxford, One Art, Passager, Philadelphia Stories, Rockvale Review and Rogue Agent. Camera Obscura (chapbook, Moonstone Press), appeared in 2017 and Etching the Ghost (Atmosphere Press), was published in 2021. She received the Interfaith Relations Award from the Montgomery County PA Human Rights Commission and the Public Service Award from National Association of Poetry Therapy. Her paintings are on view at Cerulean Arts Gallery. To learn more about her work, visit www.cathleencohenart.com.

Found in Translation

August 5, 2022 Brooke Palma

FOUND IN TRANSLATION

I’m excited to get to write for Mad Poets about poetry in translation. If you’ve attended a lot of the First Wednesday readings at the Community Arts Center in Wallingford, you’ll have noticed that translators of poetry (often also poets themselves) present their work from time to time. It’s a task that fascinates me: the verbal texture of a poem is so important, but every language has its own, even languages as close as French and Spanish, or German and Dutch. Every language has things it does better than any other, and you can bet those things wind up in poems. How then can a translator bring the poem into a new language, keeping it a poem instead of a prose retelling?

And yet poetry has exerted huge influence through translation, from Classical Greek or Latin shaping the writing of the Renaissance—or Italian sonnets spurring Elizabethan writing—to the very spare form of haiku flowering in other languages, including American English. Look closely at any big literary movement, and you’ll find translation at its roots.

Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971), translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2006).

I’ve praised the beautiful editions of poetry translations from the publisher Archipelago before, and when I saw this edition—new to me, though published in 2006—I knew I had to pick it up and review it for the Mad Poets Blog. Author Miltos Sachtouris (1919-2005) is a Greek poet I had never heard of, though he was much recognized with prizes in his lifetime. One blurb on the pack cover lists the “Pleiades of modern Greek poets” to whom Sachtouris should be added: Cavafy, Elytis, Gatsos, Ritsos, Seferis, and Sikelianos. I note that according to Microsoft Word only Cavafy and Elytis are familiar names; the others provoke that jagged red “error” underline. Sachtouris (I think that “ch” should sound like a German or Scots “ch”) was born and died in Athens—the same year as Robert Duncan, Laurence Ferlinghetti, May Swenson, for a bit of context.

The book includes poems from multiple collections (from 1945, 1948, 1952, 1956, 1958, 1960 1962, 1964, 1971)—you can see how productive Sachtouris was. It translates the original Ποιήματα 1945-1981, which was published in 1978 and has gone through a bunch of editions since. Sachtouris continued writing and publishing new stuff, too, but people seem to agree that his best and most influential work was included in the 1978 volume. The poems’ titles are mostly simple words or phrases (“Beauty,” “The Gifts,” “October”); some are more suggestive (“The Fish of Horror,” “Rehearsals for the Repetition of Night,” “A World Came Down Springlike and Strange”), and a few draw on the Greek context (“Pasiphae,” “The Metamorphosis”).

The translator of this volume, Karen Emmerich, is a poet herself and also a professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, specializing in English, Greek and Turkish. Istanbul was actually the cradle of the discipline of Comparative Literature, as erudite scholars fled there from Nazi Germany and other difficult parts of 20th-century Europe. Some of those early comparatists knew a stunning variety of languages, but now that readers have become aware of the poetic riches in all parts of the world it’s clear that no one can know all the languages you would need to read every important poet in the original. So good translation is important for scholars as well as for reading poetry for pleasure and for spiritual uplift—and Dr. Emmerich is an ace. She has translated a lot of Greek poetry—eleven volumes of it since this 2006 collection of Sachtouris appeared.

All right: the book is beautiful, as always with Archipelago. Unlike many books of translated poetry, it gives the poems only in English—without the original Greek. That’s too bad, because when you look at a language with an alphabet you can usually tell if the original rhymes. None of these poems rhyme, but they’re still lovely. Sachtouris’s work has a touch of surrealism, hardly any punctuation and only occasional capitalization, altogether a very modern feeling, and lots of darkness. The dates in the title cover all kinds of bitter moments in Greek history: WWII, civil war, juntas and dictatorships. The vocabulary includes lots of color, in particular lots of “blood” or “bloodied”—including the poet himself, and his parts. By the time Sachtouris published the final collection from which this volume was drawn, he was in his 50s but hadn’t yet gotten staid or boring.

The Sky

Birds black arrows of difficult sorrow
it’s no easy thing to love the sky
you’ve learned well to say that it’s blue
but do you know its caves its forests its rocks?
so as you pass like winged whistles
your flesh gets torn on its glass
your downy feathers stick to its heart

And when night creeps fearfully from the trees
you gaze at the white kerchief of the moon
the naked virgin shrieking in the sky’s embrace
the old woman’s mouth of rotting teeth
the stars with their swords and golden threads
the sky’s lightning its thunder its rain
the distant bliss of its galaxy (p. 48)

This early poem has striking images; the lack of punctuation makes the reader decide where to pause the stream of words. Emmerich has a wonderful ear for sound: the i and s sounds in “the distant bliss of its galaxy” seem to shift away from all the earthly details that came just before: shrieking virgins, old women’s rotting teeth, and stars that combine (masculine?) warlikeness and (feminine?) beauty or craft (the golden threads).

Some of the poems feature unexpected treatments of familiar characters:

The Sheep

My head full of dreams
my hands full of mud

Shall I too sing of the rain
when Pontius Pilate went out into the streets
no one recognized his face
in the darkness in the desert by the wires
when Jesus multiplied the fish
one man was leaning on a fence
another on a blind bridge
another on a crumbling house
when Jesus multiplied the fish
and the sea unleashed onto the land
her wild white sheep
Pontius Pilate went out into the streets
but no one recognized his joy
Pontus Pilate first mate of the river
with his cage his hungry birds
his garden his lost flowers
the two embraced on the hill
the two sighed in the arcade
the two swooned under the cypress tree
as the sea gathered up again
her wild white sheep
to lull them to sleep in her bitter embrace (p. 77)

Here the title does interesting work: a reader today might expect sheep to meant people deluded and misled; once Pontius Pilate and Jesus enter, it seems the sheep must be from a religious flock. But then it turns out to be the sea who releases the wild white sheep: a flood, with whitecaps on waves? The sea is feminine in Greek (thalasa), and the phrase “her bitter embrace” might remind us (given the religious figures in the poem) that “bitter” is the etymological meaning of “Mary.” So who knows how it is all connected. Like many of the poems, this one has lines that send the reader in unexpected directions: I suspect that the book as a whole would be excellent at stirring poetic inspiration in its readers.

There is also some effective ambiguity in the translations. In “Love slipped through your fingers” (p. 96), the last four lines are:

full
of shadows
of songs
of birds

—Does this mean “full of shadows, full of songs, full of birds” or “full of shadows of birds’ songs,” or some combination of these?

Sachtouris has occasional prose poems too, which are more traditionally punctuated:

On the Old Road

H.N.

A beast ate my darling. We had gone out for a walk as always, had seen the house with the meandering motif on its walls, and it had started to sprinkle. Then a clown came out dressed in all sorts of colors turning somersaults and laughing in the street and he wasn’t even asking for money. A little farther down a man was playing the violin while gazing up at some strange red clouds in the sky.

And when the rain grew stronger it formed lots of little streams that washed the blood away. (p. 148)

Emmerich avoids making the rhythm too pretty when it shouldn’t be: see from “The Mirror” (p. 160):

gleaming
and glowing
as the fire took it and made it
coal

the head whispered:
— The trees are burning leaving like hair
the angel flies off with scorched
wings

white pain
a dog with a broken leg
remains
remains

In the line(s) “an angel flies off with scorched/wings,” “scorched” has to be stressed because “off” and “with” can’t be, so the adjacent stresses of “scorched” and “wings” (a spondee, if we read “wings” as part of the same line), create a sort of painful effect, especially because the word “scorched” is so complex to pronounce.

Emmerich provides a brief afterword to the book—nice for a reader who doesn’t want to feel lectured to in starting a book, or who will feel guilty if they skip an introduction—especially since Sachtouris is not yet a Recognized Classic you’d approach as required reading. The afterword confirms the element of surrealism in his work and mentions a few of his Greek surrealist poet friends. (He also has a poem to Apollinaire, and one to Dylan Thomas.) Describing the challenges of her work, she writes, “In poem after poem, Sachtouris exploits ambiguities in the Greek language to confound subjects and objects, enabling multiple, often conflicting readings of particular poems. I have tried, wherever possible, to retain the oddness of Sachtouris’s syntax and the grammatical openness of his phrases” (p. 234). Indeed!

I need to cite just a few more:

The Inspector

The sky is a garden full
of blood
and a little snow
I tightened my ropes
once more I must inspect
the stars
I
heir of birds
must
though with broken wings
take flight (p. 125)

Sachtouris’s tactic of placing just a word or two beneath and almost at the end of a longer line, and of including very short lines, slows down the poems while leaving plenty of white space. In the next one it almost looks like two stanzas:

The Grave’s Bird Was Leaving
The grave’s bird was leaving
so small
red as mourning
vanishing
tenderly
over the sparse grass
with the eternal turtle and its silent
tread

the dead locust
and the bee
that had lodged itself
painfully
in the flower’s mouth (p. 183)

And a more surrealistic example:

We See With Our Teeth
The moon isn’t to blame for our bitterness
as it whirls furiously
                             in the phosphorescence
scattering its bones left and right
the moon isn’t to blame for the lemon blossoms
the moon isn’t to blame for the swallows
the moon isn’t to blame for Spring and the
                                                                   crosses
or that teeth sprouted from our eyes    (p. 201)

Finally, here’s one where Professor Emmerich had to pull out all the stops (…Microsoft Word went crazy with red underlines):

Zacchaeus
They named you well: Zacchaeus!
he said high up falling from the tree
holding a yellow flag

the motorcyclobicyclist
the hematocyclobicyclist
the motorcycollectogivetaker
the metelashster
the hemateyelockster
the motorcyclobicyclomarksman

the bandit

the bloodying (p. 219)

When I googled a bit, I discovered that many of the Sachtouris poems you might find online were translated by Karen Emmerich, and that this book was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. So I’m glad I finally found Poems, and you don’t have to take my word that it’s a good book of poetry in translation.

Poet and translator Sibelan Forrester has been hosting the Mad Poets Society's First Wednesday reading series since 2016. She has published translations of fiction, poetry and scholarly prose from Croatian, Russian and Serbian, and has co-translated poetry from Ukrainian; books include a selection of fairy tales about Baba Yaga and a bilingual edition of poetry by Serbian poet Marija Knezevic. She is fascinated by the way translation follows the inspirational paths of the original work. Her own book of poems, Second Hand Fates, was published by Parnilis Media. In her day job, she teaches at Swarthmore College.

Mad Poet of the Year - R. G. Evans (August 2022)

August 4, 2022 Brooke Palma

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have R. G. Evans serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2022.

MOON AT DAY
by R.G. Evans

Pulling down the rotten boards
of a swing set no longer loved,
I feel you up there over my shoulder.
I built these swings myself
a dozen years ago. The tilt,
the lurch, my work for sure.
Now I pull it down and you pull too,
eye that couldn’t wait for the night.
The tide in me rises to think
of those unborn children
who might have made me keep
these posts from falling apart.
A little paint. A little patch.
Maybe you’re one of them,
looking down on me now
as I go about my best work:
destruction. Only one of you there,
precocious, ignoring bedtime.
Where’s the other?
Maybe Halley’s Comet, silver sibling,
running wild across the heavens,
not to return till I’m most surely gone.
These boards are full of rusty nails.
My knees creak like the gallows.
My daughter is sealed away in her room
writing stories that don’t include me.
Only you can see me wipe my eyes
that burn in the lowering sun.
Only you have the grace to linger
as sky gives way to sky, empty blue
to a black freckled with impossible light.

--from Imagine Sisyphus Happy, Kelsay Books, 2020

Two lines from the Kris Kristofferson song “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down”-- In the park I saw a daddy / With a laughin' little girl who he was swingin'—never fails to stir melancholy feelings when I hear it. “Daddy” instead of “father,” the girl is “laughin’” and “swingin’”—a moment of innocence the song’s persona knows is only temporary. I felt a similar melancholy when I disassembled the swing set I built for my daughter once she’d outgrown it. And the full moon high in the clear, blue, daytime sky has always given me pause, something out of time, there where it doesn’t belong. Add a dash of family tragedy, and this month’s Mad Poets poem was born.

R.G. Evans’s books include Overtipping the Ferryman (Aldrich Poetry Press Prize), The Holy Both, and Imagine Sisyphus Happy. His original songs were featured in the poetry documentaries All That Lies Between Us and Unburying Malcolm Miller, and his collection of original songs, Sweet Old Life, is available on most streaming platforms. Evans teaches creative writing at Rowan University. Website: www.rgevanswriter.com

Profession: Poet

August 2, 2022 Brooke Palma

Profession: Poet is a quarterly blog feature exploring craft and identity in poetry by Hanoch Guy, who writes poems in both English and Hebrew.

Poetry does not have to make sense and other unusual prompts

When you feel that your poetry needs a shakeup, open your mind to clear the slate and consider the following:

Pick up your last poem and choose a middle line, and enlarge it in a new document.
- Then pick another line from another poem.
- Combine the two lines and leave a triple space.
- Sit with the lines for a while and open a cookbook.
- Copy part of the first recipe.

Make it a habit to listen to a poem in a foreign language every once in a while. Write down your reactions.

Go to totally unfamiliar places and write.

Next time you are on public transit, write what people are saying.

Drive to another place and write another poem.

I was struck by Daniel Ari’s observations on poetry, especially the ones about outstanding strong words. I like his point that there are firework words and that some poems have a few fireworks words and some too many. You can read more about what makes a poem stand out among hundreds or thousands of poems. He blogs at fightswithpoems.blogspot.com.

Can you come up with a list of juicy words, wild words?

Also think of smelly, weird, strange, upside-down, and funny words.

Add hilarious words to each line.

Slice open a watermelon, honeydew, or melon. Smell and taste them. Look intensely at one of them until it talks to you; maybe it will tell you its story or poem.

Focus on an object in your house: a vase, a crystal, or a doll.

Focus on your cat when he or she stays still and have a dialogue.

Write a six-line poem in reverse: write the last word of the first line as the first. Pick every third word of each line, put them all in a list.

Write a trapped poem inside a rectangle.

Arrange a dizzy poem in a circle.

Which prompt was the oddest for you to do? Which prompt did you most enjoy?

Hanoch Guy Ph.D, Ed.D spent his childhood and youth in Israel. He is a bilingual poet in Hebrew and English. Hanoch has taught Jewish Hebrew literature at Temple University and poetry and mentoring at the Muse House Center. He won awards in the Mad Poets Society, Phila Poets, Poetry Super Highway and first prize in the Better than Starbucks haiku contest. His book, Terra Treblinka, is a finalist in the North Book Contest. Hanoch published poems in England, Wales, Israel, the U.S., and Greece. He is the author of nine poetry collections in English and one Hebrew book.

Review of The Book of I.P. (Idle Poems) by Chris Courtney Martin

July 27, 2022 Brooke Palma

The Book of I.P (Idle Poems)

Alien Buddha Press

$10.44

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by guest blogger, Anthony Palma

When most people think of being idle, things such as relaxation or inertia come to mind. These words don’t even begin to describe Chris Courtney Martin’s The Book of I.P. (Idle Poems) (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). This is a book full of dynamism and observation, wit and sorrow. At once funny and sad, it chronicles Martin’s search for discovery and understanding in a world that is tragic, absurd, and beautiful.

First of all, this book makes good use of pop culture references and nods. A number of poems make use of songs, ranging from The Beatles to Earth Wind and Fire. There are callouts to Shakespeare, Disney, and the MCU. What is really impressive, though, is the way that these references are used. They aren’t merely there for name recognition or to impress us. Rather, they are woven into the meaning and the concept of the poems in which they are found. A perfect example of this comes in “American Juju,” where in the first lines Martin makes a play on the famed line, “Go do that Voodoo that you do so well,” by saying, “There are no words for/that hoodoo that you do.” The rest of the poem then deftly riffs on the theme of Voodoo, using it to seemingly address a relationship before circling back to the image of the first stanza near the end. This creates a whole, unified poem that utilizes a theme to heighten its meaning while never feeling forced or unnatural in flow.

The above poem works in part because of Martin’s firm understanding of how the form and structure of a poem works. These are overall not formal poems, but all poems have form, and these play on that concept. The poem “A Yuletide Carol” has a physical numeric list that is intentionally unfinished. “Carpe Diem” plays with the concept of lines of poetry. And then there are poems such as “Love, Superduke,” and “Me, Myself and -Eye-“ that experiment with rhyme. Despite the experimental nature of these poems, though, they never fell haphazard or gratuitous. Martin writes them with a controlled certainty, showing us that they know exactly what they’re doing. Bruce Lee famously said that, we must first understand the rules in order to be able to break them, and that is exactly what this book does.

The Book of I.P. is not just about form and cultural awareness. It is in its social awareness and commentary where it really shines. The book’s description confirms that it hearkens back to the author’s attempt to get ideas ‘greenlit’ as a screenwriter, but this is not a mere industry book. It explores themes of identity, social stratification, and the biases endemic in American society. “Kira and the Fly King” touches on the unreachability of so many of our dreams, seemingly the result of classism. Poems like “Les Immigrés” address colonialism and gender, while others such as “Sadness, Sex, and Hector Rex” deal with the misogyny so prevalent in the both the entertainment industry and in our society overall. While acknowledging the problems, the poems are mature enough to recognize the difficulties in addressing them. The poems show their presence, mark them with disdain, and accept them – for better or worse - as part of the American landscape.

Were they written by lesser hands, it would be hard to get through these poems, but the ironic and at times funny tone of Martin’s work makes the ride interesting and enjoyable. After spending the first half of the poem “A Yuletide Carol” railing against the culture surrounding Christmas, Martin interjects, “Yes. / I am EXACTLY this fun at parties. / And at church.” Then, at the end of the poem lists the

REAL sins of this day--
1.      Blood Blackmail
2.      Unabashed Capitalism
3.      “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer”
...

Often throughout this book I found myself somewhere between laughter and tears. These poems skate on the thin ice that covers a river of vinegar and bitterness.

Overall, though, these poems are about coming to terms with these, society’s flaws, and finding meaning in our struggles with them. In the words of Martin, the book “expresses the freedom of shrugging creative restrictions after tapping into the voice of the Universe.” This is something that poets, artists, musicians, and all types of creatives need to consider. But we all as humans need to heed the message Martin offers, that in a world where conformity is legion, carving your own path is a form of resistance, a small, quiet rebellion that undermines all that is wrong with our society. And if you are to pursue that revolution inside yourself, let The Book of I.P. serve as a very worthy, crucial manifesto.

Anthony Palma’s work attempts to bridge the gap between poetry and other forms while addressing issues of social justice, identity, and existence. His work has appeared in publications such as Rue Scribe, Oddball Magazine, and the Show Us Your Papers Anthology. His debut collection of poetry, flashes of light from the deep (Parnilis Media), is now available on Amazon. He recently published Horror, a chapbook. His latest project is Palmoetry, a YouTube channel of his poetry and performances that are sometimes enhanced with music. Be sure to look him up on social media at anthonypalmapoetry.

Review of Little Black Book by Chad Frame

July 20, 2022 Brooke Palma

Little Black Book

Finishing Line Press

$19.99

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

As readers, we sometimes come to poetry to find a perspective outside of our own—new experiences, new voices, and new worlds. Other times, we like to see our experience reflected through a different mirror—similar life experiences captured with courage, grace, heartbreaking honesty, and linguistic ingenuity. Chad Frame’s tour de force, Little Black Book, is the second category of book for me. Anyone interested in a revitalization of the confessional poetry genre and queer literature must read this debut volume from the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Montgomery County.

In “Andrea,” the narrator describes in taut couplets the senselessness of a gay eight grader (yes, DeSantis, gay eighth graders exist) forcing himself to be heterosexual like the other boys in his class.

Alone in my room, just me and the two—
by-three wallet of you, attempting
over and over, my hands desperate,
my efforts futile, your wide eyes
unblinking, as if desire is a puzzle
that can simply be hammered to fit

This poem becomes its own visual and visceral snapshot of a wasted moment in time. As an eighth grader questioning my own sexuality, I attempted to fantasize over my own “Andrea.” I think the realization that you are not like the other boys who “use their IQs to describe in detail/all they’ll do when they get you alone” is the first step on the long road to self-acceptance as a gay man.

As a fellow teenager in the ‘90s, I remember the murder of Matthew Shepard. It was a touchstone for all queer youth at that time. As a queer poet, and from this poem I assume Frame feels the same way, I feel it is vital to record LGBTQ historical events and our reactions to them—the good, the bad, the indifferent—so future queer people have a record. A record that for so many people of our and earlier generations had lacked since so much of our literature had been consigned to a dusty closet corner. In “Shepard,” a powerful poem with (again) taut couplets envisions Shepard’s beatified martyrdom as

slumped, arms raised, tied
to a buck rail,
and left to watch
over his flock.

While mourning this national tragedy, the narrator also wonders in light of Shepard’s murder how accepting would his friends be “thinking maybe/I could just tell someone, a friend/what I’m feeling.” At the time of Shepard’s murder, I contemplated coming out, but then decided that in a 1998 Virginia it was just not safe. The narrator does see a way forward with a hope I did not possess myself with the lines: “Matthew, I wish/I could show you/what you’ve achieved.” I think we all wish that somehow Matthew Shepard could see the more tolerant country (although America still has a far way to go) he never lived to see.

Another poem I can unfortunately relate to is “Nick,” a hard-hitting and an accurate description of an unpleasant situation that most queer people face. It starts innocently enough with Nick and the narrator “running and singing…just like any two people in love/might do on a Spring day.” The romantic jollity ends with a truck that “hurls cruelties out the window/easy as a flicked cigarette.” Frame’s poem than lists other horrific possibilities that could be tossed out at them—” a used condom” or “a Gatorade bottle/filled with two hundred miles/of warm piss.” The cruelty is not a physical object, but a slur. A slur queer people know well. As the popular meme and tweet says almost every gay man has been called it from a moving car. It is true.

Apart from life experiences and national tragedies, Frame’s collection addresses or mentions a panoply of queer men including Mark Doty, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Rock Hudson, Oscar Wilde, and Walt Whitman. In “Reading Myself to Sleep,” Frame writes “I want to fall asleep with two great men/pressed on top of me, the weight of their years/leather-bound on my chest.” Many queer poets turn to Oscar and Walt for inspiration and sustenance since they are a few of our queer forebearers who are not lost to us. As Frame beautifully exclaims as the narrator sees himself in their lineage, “Three generations/of men and poems, no apologies.”

Frame certainly has nothing to apologize for in this haunting, lovely, and vital collection. He is the perfect Bridge (to allude to one of my favorite queer poets Hart Crane) between the gay literature of the past and the gay literature to come. One of the best debut collections I have read, Little Black Book will be a signpost for queer poets for generations to come and is a reminder that Pride is a year-long affair.

Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt Press) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone Press) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in several anthologies, including Moonstone Featured Poets, Queer Around the World, and Stonewall’s Legacy, and several journals, including Impossible Archetype, Mobius, Peculiar, Poetica Review, and Voicemail Poems. He has taught classes titled A Chapbook in 49 Days and Ekphrastic Poetry and hosted poetry events throughout Philadelphia.

POeT SHOTS - '"Undertaker" by Patricia Smith

July 19, 2022 Brooke Palma

POeT SHOTS is a monthly series published on the third Tuesday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ed Krizek.

Undertaker

by Patricia Smith

For Floyd Williams

When a bullet enters the brain, the head explodes.
I can think of no softer warning for the mothers
who sit doubled before my desk,
knotting their smooth brown hands,
and begging, fix my boy, fix my boy.
Here's his high school picture.
And the smirking, mildly mustachioed player
in the crinkled snapshot
looks nothing like the plastic bag of boy
stored and dated in the cold room downstairs.
In the picture, he is cocky and chiseled,
clutching the world by the balls. I know the look.
Now he is flaps of cheek,
slivers of jawbone, a surprised eye,
assorted teeth, bloody tufts of napped hair.
The building blocks of my business.

So I swallow hard, turn the photo face down
and talk numbers instead. The high price
of miracles startles the still-young woman,
but she is prepared. I know that she has sold
everything she owns, that cousins and uncles
have emptied their empty bank accounts,
that she dreams of her baby
in tuxedoed satin, flawless in an open casket,
a cross or blood red rose tacked to his fingers,
his halo set at a cocky angle.
I write a figure on a piece of paper
and push it across to her
while her chest heaves with hoping.
She stares at the number, pulls in
a slow weepy breath: "Jesus."

But Jesus isn't on this payroll. I work alone
until the dim insistence of morning,
bent over my grisly puzzle pieces, gluing,
stitching, creating a chin with a brushstroke.
I plop glass eyes into rigid sockets,
then carve eyelids from a forearm, an inner thigh.
I plump shattered skulls, and paint the skin
to suggest warmth, an impending breath.
I reach into collapsed cavities to rescue
a tongue, an ear. Lips are never easy to recreate.

And I try not to remember the stories,
the tales the mothers must bring me
to ease their own hearts. Oh, they cry,
my Ronnie, my Willie, my Michael, my Chico.
It was self-defense. He was on his way home,
a dark car slowed down, they must have thought
he was someone else. He stepped between
two warring gang members at a party.
Really, he was trying to get off the streets,
trying to pull away from the crowd.
He was just trying to help a friend.
He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Fix my boy; he was a good boy. Make him the way he was.

But I have explored the jagged gaps
in the boy's body, smoothed the angry edges
of bulletholes. I have touched in in places
no mother knows, and I have birthed
his new face. I know he believed himself
invincible, that he most likely hissed
"Fuck you, man" before the bullets lifted him
off his feet. I try not to imagine
his swagger, his lizard-lidded gaze,
his young mother screaming into the phone.

She says she will find the money, and I know
this is the truth that fuels her, forces her
to place one foot in front of the other.
Suddenly, I want to take her down
to the chilly room, open the bag
and shake its terrible bounty onto the
gleaming steel table. I want her to see him,
to touch him, to press her lips to the flap of cheek.
The woman needs to wither, finally, and move on.

We both jump as the phone rattles in its hook.
I pray it's my wife, a bill collector, a wrong number.
But the wide, questioning silence on the other end
is too familiar. Another mother needing a miracle.
Another homeboy coming home.

Patricia Smith is an African-American poet who won the National Poetry slam four years in a row. She is originally from Chicago.

This is one of my favorite poems. It captures all the love and pathos of living with violence.

With all the gun violence today this poem illustrates the grief as well as the milieu of much of it. Only.1% of gun deaths are from mass shootings. The poem starts with the shocking statement, /When a bullet enters the brain the head explodes./. This image is what is in the reader’s mind while reading. The poem further shows us the image of a mother who wants her boy “fixed”. But, of course, that is not possible.

In the poem we move between the realities of a young mother whose son has been killed to the terrible world of the undertaker who must do his best to reconstruct lost life.

/… I work alone
until the dim insistence of morning,
bent over my grisly puzzle pieces, gluing,
stitching, creating a chin with a brushstroke.
I plop glass eyes into rigid sockets,
then carve eyelids from a forearm, an inner thigh.
I plump shattered skulls, and paint the skin
to suggest warmth, an impending breath.
I reach into collapsed cavities to rescue
a tongue, an ear. Lips are never easy to recreate.

The best way to get the full impact of the poem with the pain, frustration and anger of a gun death is to listen to or watch the video included here. Smith has a masterful way of telling the story.

Ed Krizek holds a BA and MS from University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA and MPH from Columbia University. For over twenty years Ed has been studying and writing poetry. He is the author of six books of poetry: Threshold, Longwood Poems, What Lies Ahead, Swimming With Words, The Pure Land, and This Will Pass. All are available on Amazon. Ed writes for the reader who is not necessarily an initiate into the poetry community. He likes to connect with his readers on a personal level.

Review of Horror by Anthony Palma

July 13, 2022 Brooke Palma

Horror

Independently Published

$8.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Abbey J. Porter

Given the title of Anthony Palma’s new chapbook, I was braced for poems screaming with gape-mouthed terror. This “horror,” I discovered, consists of subtler stuff, of a deep disquiet that sneaks in and accumulates in layers, like cosmic dust.

Writing in a spare, minimalist style, Palma reflects on big topics: connection and grief, life and death and the spaces in between. Most of these poems are short, some fewer than a dozen lines—but their brevity doesn’t detract from their impact. Consider, for example, the haunting “The Astronaut in the Abyss,” quoted here in its entirety:

How long
until
the air runs out?

How long
until
I float into
unknown
wonders,

gasping.

“We talk like we matter,” Palma says in “The Rose.” But the truth of “Horror” is that people exist amid, and at the mercy of, forces beyond their control, including death. Ceasing to exist is a recurring theme. In “Annihilation,” Palma writes,

Who I was
will fade

like a fever dream
along a backroad curve.

Palma’s view is clear-eyed and unblinking. In “Cosmic Horror,” he reflects,

In the sky,
there are no gems that twinkle-
only rocks and reflections.

“Horror” is as much about absence—what isn’t there—as anything else. In “In the Ruins of the Old World,” the narrator describes being in what once was a mall:

I look on as the life fades from this place,
searching for nostalgia,
but feeling mostly nothing.

His dearth of feeling suggests both a numbness on his part and a lack of anything to feel: It could be that what’s been lost does not rise to the level of longing.

Palma uses simple, straightforward language to consider not-so-simple subjects. In “Meeting the Beast,” one of my favorite poems, he tells his reader,

If you look hard enough
at the space between
the sea
and the clouds…

something’s there.

Something was always there.

In some ways, this poem epitomizes “Horror”: Palma points to the in-between, the nuanced, the not seen. Such is the case with “The Cathedral of Now,” in which “The evening echoes/ through an empty intersection” and a traffic light guards the silence. The poet is a lone observer, seeing what no one else does.

Palma opens “Empty Spaces Part IV,” another favorite, with a reference to a death. One can feel the impact of the loss in his description of sitting outside in the cold with his friend,

drinking whiskey
and watching
the puddles
ice over.

Like others in the collection, this poem offers a comment on the power of connection, in this case in the form of the friend who shares a drink and moment of mourning. Palma closes the poem with

Voices from down the block proclaim
the new king has come,
and the old lie
things happen
for a reason.

The poet thus evinces a certain disillusionment with life. Likewise, he suggests throughout the collection that things are not always what they appear. In “Things Gone,” he describes “slipping into the light/ we perceive as golden”—as if the underlying reality is different.

Despite the unadorned somberness of many of the poems, this chapbook offers spots of brightness and hope. That’s especially true of the last poem, “Getting Up.”

The night and darkness
will always be there.

Hope is the thing
slipping through our fingers,
pooling at our feet,
but never evaporating completely.

In “Horror,” Palma is unafraid to stare some of our deepest fears in the face. The result is a thoughtful, probing work of considerable beauty.

Abbey J. Porter writes poetry and memoir about people, relationships, and life struggles. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte, an MA in liberal studies from Villanova University, and a BA in English from Gettysburg College. Abbey works in communications and lives in Cheltenham, Pa., with her two dogs.

Source: http://madpoetssociety.com/blog

Review of Customs by Solmaz Sharif

July 6, 2022 Brooke Palma

Customs

Graywolf Press

$13.60

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

Solmaz Sharif’s Customs is a remarkable collection that engages with the notion of homelands and travel in ways both deeply personal and undeniably profound. The work is of the moment and of every moment. At a time of forced displacements, migrations, and unfamiliar and, for many, unprecedented limitations on travel, the question of what happens in the time and space between origination and destination is especially timely. Equally so is the question of what it means to flee, beyond the physical act of migration, and what the consequences are, both short and long term, of doing so. Customs takes on these questions and many more, primarily through the lens of the customs area in international airport terminals and the sometimes clouds, cloaks, and conceptions that linger long after processing.

Exploring migration, borders, and war alongside associated concepts of belonging, mobility, and customs processing from multi-layered perspectives, Customs both transports and transforms readers. Some books take us places we long to see. Other books take us places we need to see. Customs simultaneously does both. The work travels through and among locations of long-lingering revelations, including airport terminals (“Visa” 14), Ohio hotels (“Now What” 17), Oakland potholes (“Without Which” 53), and landscapes of “small and sharp stone … lined with cypresses” (“Does yours have a landscape?” 63), all while never journeying far from a carefully constructed examination of what it means to belong and to be subject to rules, often arbitrary, with life altering implications, often equally arbitrary and uncertain. The work engages with concepts both timely and timeless, all while presenting traditional conceptions of those same concepts in untraditional and unambiguously brilliant ways. The pieces are as varied in form and structure as their themes are similar.

Customs explores the complicated act of being (un)welcomed and (un)welcoming. Customs also prompts reflection on what it means to exist within and without perimeters and according to whose rules. Sharif zeroes in on what it means to belong, and at what cost, while inviting readers into the repeated conduct and rituals of airport terminals, guarded exchanges with customs officials, and the ever-present “The Master’s House” (59). As a guard on shift makes decisions “by blood sugar, last blow job received, and relative level of disdain for vermin” (“Visa” 14), Sharif simultaneously welcomes readers to do the same. Themes of perpetually conditional states of being, belonging, and otherness, alongside equally arbitrary rules and recommendations thread the work. Together the poems present a memorable, often harrowing, commentary that binds and reminds readers that welcomes and welcomings take many forms.

The collection opens with America but its themes extend far beyond United States borders.

America stands alone, outside of the collection’s three formal parts. Acting as not a gatekeeper but a reminder that gates are often neither open nor friendly, the opening poem serves, as well, as a reminder that often that which purports to welcome does much more to exclude. America is a compact poem of eighteen lines, two words per line, and remarkable breadth. The piece is one of reflections and mirrors, opening and closing with “I had to” (3) as if to invite readers to see their own reflection in and through the experiences of others.

Part I includes sixteen pieces, including an epistolary (“Dear, Aleph”) that presents as three poems. Throughout the section, the speaker explores and wrestles with prejudices both self-imposed and imposed upon oneself as they present before, during, after travel to and from homelands. The section explores concepts of home (“He, Too” 21), exile (“The End of Exile” 31), and language (“Learning Persian” 24; “Into English” 29) both apart and as an equally complex whole.

Sharif examines what it means to be a spectator in one’s own land

To watch play out around me as theatre – (“The End of Exile” 31)

and an outsider in others

This will be the last I write of it directly, I say each time.
This is a light that lights everything and dimly.
All my waiting at this railing.
All my writing is this squint (“Visa” 14)

Part II includes two poems, “Without Which” and “The Master’s House”. “Without Which” appears to continue with the speaker’s return to a changed land. Sharif uses repetitive brackets and white space in ways that are both memorable and masterful. “Without Which” spans twenty-two pages of the eighty-six page work and represents, perhaps, the emptiness, confusion, and inexplicable ]] of exile in lands with which souls worldwide struggle.

A blank page divides “Without Which” from Part II’s second piece - “The Master’s House”, a list poem that moves from empty space to spaces heavy with actions (customs and compromises, often repeated, often relentless, often reluctant) taken to survive in contradictory lands of new and never homes and of relentlessly inhospitable masters.

To revel in face serums (59)
To disrobe when the agent asks you to (60)
To do this in order to do the other thing, the wild thing, though you’ve forgotten what it was (60)

Part III contains two pieces, “Does yours have a landscape?” and an extended poem - “An Otherwise” (22 pages). While “An Otherwise” is the collection’s final piece, the poem is much more a beginning than an ending.

I tried to say it was dead, the song,
But then it came, my mother singing
of cypress – (80)

At one gate, my mother is waving. (84)

Customs is a standout by a standout poet. Readers not only gain a deeper appreciation for a poet at her best but also a deeper appreciation for Sharif’s ability to masterfully engage with language both constructed and consumed as a tool for understanding the impact of rules, expectations (“Wave, girls, the teacher says” (65)) and customs that extend far beyond their utterance. Readers also gain a deeper understanding of what it means to exist in a world of forced migration and simultaneously persistent isolation. The work is for anyone (everyone) who has come from somewhere (elsewhere) and wrestles with what it means to belong (and by whom). I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She loves words, experimental poetry, and the change of seasons. She’s also a fan of late nights, crossword puzzles, and compelling underdogs. She has authored several chapbooks and full-length poetry collections, with stories, poems, and essays published in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. Sample works include Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility, A Collection of Recollections, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups. She is currently working on her first series, which (not surprisingly) includes a novel in verse. She is the 2022-2023 Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate.

Mad Poet of the Year - R. G. Evans (July 2022)

July 4, 2022 Brooke Palma

OF LONELINESS AND BONDAGE
by R.G. Evans

Rather than rings, they gave each other ropes
small enough to twine around their fingers.

She thinking, how Bohemian. He thinking
of her with a riding crop and boots.

At first they explored
the tender practicality of rope,

its usefulness in binding, the love of
a thousand pragmatic knots.

Years passed and the ropes grew,
an inch one year, a foot or two the next,

their fingers no longer enough to hold them.
One Christmas, she planned to braid them together,

sympathetic magic, a renewal of their vows.
He entered the bedroom moaning

like Marley’s ghost, shaking his rope
like chains in the silent and unrattled air.

It didn’t make her laugh. That night
he started sleeping in the guest room,

his rope coiled beside him
like a magicless trick.

They began to consider the ropes
as one without the other,

she thinking Rapunzel, he thinking
noose. Neither noticed

the ropes had begun to shrink
far faster than they’d grown

till all that remained
were the ring-sized bits of twine

they’d exchanged so long ago.
When they finally shook hands goodbye,

each noticed that the other’s rope was gone,
not even an impression where they’d been.

Sometimes they dream of the way it was.
Neither dreams of rope, the way it comes undone.

I’ve never read this poem from my second book The Holy Both at a poetry reading, in fact, I had forgotten all about it until at a recent reading someone told me how much the poem spoke to her. I wish I could comment on the origin of the poem, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten that, much like the poem itself. I offer it here for Amanda and anyone else to whom this poem may speak from beyond the veil of the poet’s forgetfulness.

Found in Translation

June 30, 2022 Brooke Palma

FOUND IN TRANSLATION

Review of Sixty Years. СтихотворениЯ: Selected Poems of Mikhail Yeryomin, 1957-2017.

Translated from the Russian by J. Kates. Boston: Black Widow Press, 2022.

This is another bilingual edition of poetry, in the original and in translation: my favorite kind. Even if you don’t know the Russian alphabet (Cyrillic is based on Greek, with a lot of recognizable letters but also some “false friends” – Н, for instance, actually makes the sound N), you can see the shape of the original: the length of each line, how many words per line, and sometimes a few words in Latin.

J. Kates, the translator, is himself a poet, and his introduction before the bilingual selection of poems includes some very capable wordplay. When he writes that elements of Yeryomin’s work “compel me to compile,” you know it’s on purpose. Yeryomin’s name could also be spelled “Eremin,” but using the Y makes it clearer how to say it, with stress on the o in the middle; the cover of his Russian book has Ерёмин, where ë is “yo.” Perhaps nomen est omen à wouldn’t such a beautiful name make you want to do things with language? Yeryomin was born in the North Caucasus in 1936 but grew up in Leningrad (now St Petersburg); he was friends with Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940) before the USSR threw him out, is a playwright and translator, and had hardly any work published in the USSR, though some in the émigré press, and more in post-Soviet Russia.

The introduction would be useful for teaching the volume, with information about Yeryomin’s biography and publication history, but it doesn’t mention that his perpetual title (as the intro notes, for all but one of the books he published in Russia), СтихотворениЯ, itself offers some word play. It means “Poems,” but the final letter я that makes the word plural is capitalized, activating the other meaning of я = the pronoun I (not usually capitalized in Russian, though if it weren’t capitalized here no one would catch it). How could you translate that, really? If you know Latin or Italian or any other language where plurals end in -i, you could play this game in English too.

As the title suggests, the book presents verse written over 60 years, which Kates says he has been working on for 30 years (and is still working on); a number of the translations included have been published in earlier editions and places. Kates’s intro notes that Yeryomin began writing rhyming poetry but later stepped away from that. The first poems (dated 1957) do rhyme, but in very slanty ways, with nervous and jumpy rhythms. Kates frequently strives for great precision in word choice (“Боковитые,” p. 14, becomes “Polyhedral”), but otherwise he prioritizes rhythm over rhyme. It’s too bad in a way, because when early Yeryomin switches away from rhyme the reader of the English won’t notice the change. Kates has written elsewhere about the different status of rhyme in Russian poetry: even now it’s more common than rhyme is in serious Anglophone poetry. He suggests that therefore it is more stylistically neutral not to rhyme when translating poetry into English. True, perhaps—or at least arguable—but it does mean that a poet who sometimes uses rhyme can be shortchanged in new versions. In one early poem Kates misses the rhyme, which has already grown more subtle, and misreads снегá (‘snows’ plural) as снéга (‘of snow,’ genitive singular). I regret that he rendered “обыкновение монад” (literally “habitualizing of monads,” p. 88) as “everyday monad” (p. 89), though I don’t know how “everyday-izing” could be rendered poetically: it’s all very well to critique a translator’s decision if you can’t offer a better solution. On the whole, though, Kates’s translations are truly scrupulous, with only a handful of misreadings (or debatable choices?) in the course of all these pages.

Yeryomin uses sound gorgeously in some poems, with internal soundplay, agglomerations of sounds, half-rhymes or series of words all with the same stressed vowel. There is a feeling of strict diction, but not dense and dry. Some of the early poems have a Mayakovsky feeling in their use of sound, especially in the inexact, sort of snarky rhymes, and that spirit of Mayakovsky seems to resurface even later in ludic play with the language. None of the poems have titles, which is quite common in Russian and some other traditions (…though if I try it with something of my own the critique group lets me have it). A number of poems do have dedications, which could stand in for titles; several of these are to well-known poets, plus a few to someone whose last name makes clear that they’re related to the poet. More importantly, every single poem gleaned from this sixty years of writing has the same form: eight lines. To the poet reading this now: can you imagine writing that long in only one form? A series of sonnets, okay, but sonnets alone for 60 years? Somehow writing only haiku makes more sense, but that’s because of the traditional spiritual dimension, the reflection of spiritual discipline. – I recall being told to write haiku by elementary school teachers who supplied only the syllable rules, 5-7-5, and maybe maybe an authentic example, but no explicit description of what haiku DO in Japanese. I you ever sat there at your desk wondering whether to squander a syllable on the word “the”—or worse yet, two syllables on “of the”—then you have some experience with what you face trying to make a metrical translation. But back to the spiritual dimension: Yeryomin’s poems, though not a bit like haiku, do reveal a spiritual aspect. Some seem inspired by natural science, with its gorgeous Latinate or compound terms, while others note the Bible verse that inspired them, and many toy with the interaction of word and Word.

The constant eight-line form enables some things: the switch away from rhyme, already mentioned, is more noticeable; it’s more striking when one line is much shorter; the very visually comparable poems reveal other kinds of shifts in what is going on. The rhythm is most often iambic (ta-PUM, ta-PUM, ta-PUM) (…not for nothing did Sylvia Plath play with the term of art, citing her heart’s brag “I am, I am, I am”), and Kates with his sensitive poet’s ear generally observes this, giving the translations a sculpted beauty even if they don’t rhyme. Some lines are quite beautiful, especially juxtaposed with the original’s pulse. Although English tends to offer shorter words (especially the likes of the), which can clutter a poetic line, Yeryomin’s use of specialized vocabulary allows Kates legitimate access to some long Latinate words that balance the length. (Actually, even a long word in English can have multiple main and secondary stresses—reflecting a relationship to Scandinavian rhythms?—so perhaps the length of each word is less an issue than in a language like Russian that has only one stress in most words, however long.)

Author and translator clearly share a sense of humor; the words “равнины черны, как раввины” (“flatlands … rabbis,” p. 18) are visibly similar, even if you don’t know the language. Kates responds to the soundplay rather than providing the precise meaning (“[the] flatlands black as rabbis”) and gives us “ravines as black as rabbis,” not bad at all (p. 19). Some solutions are triumphant, like “semibird and semiburden” (p. 71)—I imagine Kates showing this to Yeryomin, and Yeryomin saying, thoughtfully, “All right, my friend, you are worthy to be my translator.” Elsewhere, Kates has a superb sense of the necessary stylistic level, as when he renders “сиречь” as “to wit”—archaic but not incomprehensible—or “пилигрим” as “palmer” (“pilgrim,” the cognate word, has some less relevant associations, especially for a translator who lives in New England).

Here’s the poem from which I drew that last-but-one example:

М. Ереминой

Течение вытачивает рыбу,
Вынашивает птицу ветер,
Земля
(Неповторимы дни Творенья,
Поскольку вечны, сиречь закодировано
Во всякой тварной матрице
Несовершенство воспроизводимого.)
Свидетельствует абсолют зерна.
1998

for M. Yeryomina

The current spins the fish
The wind bears the bird,
The earth
(Not repeating the days of Creation,
Considering them as eternal, to wit
The imperfection of reproducing
Is encoded in every creaturely matrix)
Certifies the Absolute of the seed.

1998 (pp. 92-93

And another, earlier one, with wonderful Mayakovskian slant rhymes:

Сшивает портниха на швейной машинке,
подобно дождю, голубое с зеленым,
Дождю, который окном изломан,
Как лодкою камышинки.
Гром за окном покашливает.
Капли дождя к стеклу прилипают,
Полузеленая каждая
И полуголубая.
1957

The seamstress stitches on a sewing machine,
Light blue with deep green, like rain,
Rain broken by the window
As reeds are broken by a little boat.
A thunderstorm coughs outside the window.
Raindrops cling to the glass,
Every single one of them half green
And half light blue.
1957 (pp. 16-17)

The translation doesn’t reproduce the rhyme, doesn’t strive for the inconsistent amphibrachs (pa-DUM-pa) of the original, but it has good poetic qualities: the rich s-sounds of the first line, the internal rhyme of green with machine, the shifting rhythms (note the lovely iambic pentameter in the fourth line). The stylistic level is appropriate: not too serious; that little passive “by a little boat” runs parallel to the archaic instrumental ending of лодкою (rather than the standard лодкой—if you’re wondering).

And a final example from among the later poems in the book:

И всяко было слово — и наскальным, и резьбой
По кости, и на писчей глине выдавленным,
И на папирусе, пергаменте, бумаге, и берёсте
Начертанным, и закодированным
(Тире и точке, флажный семафор и прочее),
И оцифрованным. И было слово
Явленное и, быв расколото в сердцах,
По памяти воспроизведено.
2017
Исх. 32:19

And each word was—on rock, and in carvings
On bone, and on extruded clay tablets,
And on papyrus, parchment, paper, and birchbark
Inscribed and coded
Dash and dot, flag semaphore, and so on),
And digitized. And the word was
Made manifest and, having been riven in their hearts,
Recreated from memory.
2017
Exodus 32:19

The Bible, again, provides an important subtext for many of Yeryomin’s poems, and Kates handles the style confidently: “the word was/Made manifest…”

The book is handsome if unassuming; there are hardly any typos though I did find a few (more in the Russian, less in the English). Besides the informative introduction, there are no explanatory notes, but a bilingual table of contents is provided in the back, where a Russian publisher would put it.

This book was published before Russia invaded Ukraine in February; the introduction might well read differently if it were published now. Born in 1936, Yeryomin is now around 86 years old; none of the poems in the book address the Russian annexation of Crimea, which had the effect of splitting the Russian intelligentsia—some people condemned it, others defended the move. If Yeryomin is writing about the situation today, I hope Kates is on the job with a translation

Review of Cleave by Darla Himeles

June 29, 2022 Brooke Palma

Cleave

Get Fresh Books

$18.00

You can purchase a copy at Get Fresh Books or Amazon

Reviewed by Autumn Konopka

I’ve got to be honest: I’m not even sure how to begin reviewing Cleave, Darla Himeles’ 2021 full-length collection of poetry.

It’s not just the book’s expansiveness, which ranges from the speaker’s early childhood and moves through to her own experiences conceiving and raising a child. And it’s not the breadth of the speaker’s vulnerability as she explores family relationships, romantic and sexual encounters, marriage, motherhood, and social and political connections. It’s not even the unflinching honesty of these poems, which dare to present enduring love and hope even in the aftermath of excruciating violence.

The power of this collection lies in Himeles’ ability to bind (cleave) all of this together with freshness and beauty. The poet’s gift for precise, concrete images and unique turns of phrase make uncommon, almost unimaginable, experiences come viscerally alive. At the same, she can also transform even the most ordinary event into something brand new. As I read the book, pencil in hand, preparing for this review, I found myself repeatedly writing in the margins Damn! She’s so good! It was hard to come up with much more than that.

Take, for instance, “What It Felt Like” – the second poem in the book and one of the most brutal, which recounts a truly horrific act of violence, as witnessed by a four-year-old, with descriptions that are, at times, nothing short of stunning. I don’t necessarily want to call this poem “beautiful”; yet, with lines like “Mom’s bloody screech,—elongated/ purple ribbons of her breath” and “her pink body whisked up like paper,” how can I not?

It is not that the poet is trying to make a brutal experience anything other than what it was by blunting it with “poetic” language. No. Himeles is keenly aware of the weight borne by her descriptions as she makes clear in the poem “Philadelphia.” Another poem with graphic images of abuse, “Philadelphia” begins:

I don’t know anymore the line between witness
and cruelty, whether you should see what I will
show you, the black magic of a shadow
gaining contour in the flickering streetlight,

The poem clearly intimates the violence to come and, yet, entrances the reader with the “black magic of a shadow.”

Himeles is a poet who understands that the world is full of shadows – things are not black and white, good or evil. As such, terrible things might appear beautiful – at least for a moment, at least from certain angles. This is rendered with honesty and vulnerability in the poems “Marriott Hotel, Marina del Rey” and “Among the Things I Haven’t Asked My Father Because I Love Him.” The two poems appear on facing pages later in the book and find the speaker, now an adult, interacting with her abusive father – affording him a deeper level of consideration and kindness even than most probably would. For instance, in “Among the Things…” the speaker poses nine questions to her father. The first eight convey an act of cruelty he had committed, but the last asks: “What made you love us with such radiant eyes? Who taught you to treasure us like that?” This simple list poem is one of the most dangerous and moving in the collection because of the poet’s willingness to show tenderness and see light in someone who has hurt her in the most awful ways possible.

This book is not beginning-to-end pain, however. One of the most delightful aspects of Cleave is the way Himeles uses humor, especially when confronting topics that are potentially uncomfortable. “Insemination 12” takes an awkward, clinical experience – an intrauterine insemination procedure – and makes it sexy and funny. Then there’s “GODildo” – part ode/part anti-ode to, you guessed it, a dildo. One of my favorite poems in this vein is “For the FedEx Guy,” which recounts the arrival of frozen sperm and considers the full journey of those “millions of motile swimmers.”

Overall, Cleave takes readers on a journey of surprising resilience. Himeles demonstrates the myriad responses possible – perhaps necessary – to move through life’s most challenging and traumatic experiences. Humor and beauty, as I’ve explained – but also desire, passion, and persistence. All of that is here. I was repeatedly surprised and inspired by the way this collection – no matter how dark – refuses to simplify or demonize. Instead, again and again, the poems here turn toward light and redefine hope.

Autumn Konopka is a writer and teaching artist who enjoys coffee, running, and reggaeton. She's currently working on her first novel, which she expects to publish in early 2023. Find her online: autumnkonopka.com.

POeT SHOTS - '"Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa

June 21, 2022 Brooke Palma

POeT SHOTS is a monthly series published on the third Tuesday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ed Krizek.

Facing It

by Yusek Komunyakaa

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair..

In “Facing It’ Yusef Komunyakaa delivers a moving and vivid account of the experience of viewing the Vietnam War Memorial. The poet wants to be impervious to the pain of remembering his time in Vietnam, /I said I wouldn’t/dammit no tears, /I’m stone…. But he follows that sentiment with the words /…I’m flesh. / Which shows he cannot deny his feelings. We travel with Komunyakaa back to Vietnam as he views the memorial and depends on “the light to make a difference.” The poet travels down the names and remembers someone he knew who died in the war. He states /I’m a window./. The poet’s emotions are reflected and transparent. In a sort of wish he sees /a woman’s trying to erase names:/ Wouldn’t it be tempting to remove the names so that these people would not die?

With Memorial Day just past it behooves us to read this poem and consider the consequences of war and the pain of those who were/are in harms way. The simple act of “brushing a boy’s hair” calls the reader back to the peace taken for granted in the US. Those who served and lived as well as those who died are remembered in this poem. Komunyakaa is “Facing It”. He faces his participation and current freedom.

Hear Yusef Komunyakaa read “Facing It” here.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Lucia Herrmann

June 20, 2022 Brooke Palma

The Apocalypse Came to My Block
by Lucia Herrmann

on a Tuesday when most folks still had their recycling out.

The season had finally turned hot enough spring so sound of swarming
pestilence was confused for hum of air-conditioning machines.

Managers at Whole Foods, Giant, and Acme reported once more
to the crowds outside their doors that the trucks had arrived empty.

Bananas, and oh, sweet sweet plantains had died decades ago—
endangered, extinction, lists were redundant.

No more berries or bengals, cocoa or bees,
peaches, puffins, or ASL-signing chimpanzees.

Then, suddenly

From basements, attics, parks, back-alley libraries,
on corners, & coming in hordes down the streets
were artists carrying craft:

clutching paint brushes, pouring words out of orifice,
contraction in long Os, taffy-knees loose bodies,
etches in concrete, tag up to dope beats,
hair braid, snip-sculpt, shaped clay, sound play,
drab cloth to regal view, needle point to next muse,
and ever-ready with onus of,
here came Lectores with stories to tell:

birds knowing where it is safe to nest,
not fighting to find home

a lonely leaf that fell before friends,
and how everyone cheered on the descent

mountains that moved over for siblings,
slowly, with patience what grace to make space

They told stories of death that didn’t begin with
unarmed, sleeping, or running away,

of birth that was always blessed.

How would you describe your poetic aesthetic? / What are you interested in poetically?
My poetic aesthetic is inextricably linked to my performance practice. Words are living, breathing entities and while the importance of how they are presented on the page is perhaps most obvious, for me the way they are brought to an audience is just as important. A lot of my poems focus on cultural authenticity, highlighting our shared humanity, and drawing attention to how climate change will radically change our societies and communities. I don’t usually rhyme in my poems but I am notably drawn to alliteration and assonance, and will often find myself unconsciously following a syllabic pattern just because of how it rhythmically sounded during the process of writing and refining. I believe part of the poet-artist’s responsibility is to comment on the ailments of contemporary society and imagine the more inclusive and equitable future we want to be part of. When there’s so much wrong with the world, and such a long track record of prioritizing profit over people, it’s hard to conjure hope and optimism. I hope my poetry inspires people to reevaluate their relationship to the planet, find a bit of beauty in unexpected places, and explore how to exist in a state of ecological belonging.

Poetry has been a really essential part of how I’ve come to understand my own identity and heritage. I have poems that detail the experiences of Cubans and Cuban Americans, particularly as it relates to Miami (as a transitory melting pot milieu) and first-generation USAmerican citizens. Every December I return to South Florida to be with my family over the holidays and I always come out with a new poem. I am interested in how the residuals of colonialism/conquest shape legacies of immigration, diaspora, and displacement. How do we build cross-cultural connections and promote compassion for our perceived other? How can descendants of diaspora overcome the generational trauma of relocation, while supporting those who are currently going through it? How do we navigate liminal language spaces and maintain a connection to our past? I am most interested in how poetry and language help people locate themselves—physically, emotionally, and generationally—and strengthen connections with others and within our communities.

How do you begin when that all possible blank page is in front of you? Do you have any writing rituals?
I would say my most important writing practice is actively keeping a notebook at all times. That’s right, pen and paper AND lugging it around with me everywhere I go. I write the way a detective might: recording clues, odd occurrences, and other noteworthy instances of beauty, paradox, or heightened emotionality. My notebooks are the place I turn to when I want to start a poem. I look at what has most recently moved me, what I’ve been dreaming about, the topics that take up mental real estate by quite literally taking up “page” real estate. One of the most important things I’ve learned as a creative is that it’s easier to enter an image than an abstract concept or idea. An image evokes sensory details that you can tap into to make a place real for yourself and then for your readers and listeners. Sometimes a poem pours out of me and what I write in my notebook will end up being very close to the final version. When that happens, it’s often because I’ve been mulling it over and already settled on the turns of phrase but haven’t yet had the time to sit down and write it. I wish I could tell you I had more of an intentional practice; I’ve always admired people who start their mornings with a bit of writing. I do find that when I’m more in the daily habit of writing, that which I want to say feels closer and easier to reach.

Many of your poems incorporate Spanish words and phrases that add an additional dimension of musicality to your poems. How did you decide to bring these influences into your writing?
Growing up in Miami, I existed in a sort of linguistic battleground with English and Spanish vying for power and attention. In the 1990s, scientists misguided generations of parents by suggesting that speaking two languages at home would confuse children rather than what it actually does, ensuring fluency in both. Because of this, in my family and that of many people I know and grew up with, English became the dominant language at home. There was an unspoken pride in raising children, descendants of diasporic Cubans, who would be US citizens, fluent in English without an accent. Spanish was always around, however, especially when speaking with my abuelos and extended family. As I got older, Spanish language acquisition became a definitive site of focus. I wanted to reclaim the language to tap into my roots and feel connected to my ancestors. I incorporate Spanish because I need people to experience my own liminal linguistic identity. Even if someone doesn’t fully understand the words, they can appreciate the sounds and context, the feeling that the mezcla provides. I like to think that by bringing the languages together, I honor my own bilingual identity and the immense effort it takes to feel comfortable navigating both these home languages. I hope that those who similarly straddle different languages and cultures might feel represented through my work. If they are unfamiliar with that sort of balancing act, then at least they can gain some insight into an experience unlike their own.

You are a dynamic performer – a far cry from the droning recitations many associate with poetry. How did you become comfortable with performance? What do you think makes for an engaging live reading?
Thank you! I really appreciate that. I’ve honestly always been a performer and I’ve always loved it. I was reciting poetry in elementary and middle school (in French, too!), and went on to theater classes and productions in high school. I started going to an open mic at the iconic Churchill’s Pub in Miami (a little lenient on checking IDs) the summer after I graduated high school. It was my sophomore year in college, however, officially a part of a poetry group and burgeoning creative community, that I got the first taste of crafting pieces with the explicit intention of performing them for an audience. There was no turning back after that. Writing and performing one’s own words is immensely powerful. You have total control over what you present of yourself, how vulnerable you want to be, and what feels vitally necessary to share. As a senior in college, I started to learn more about performance studies as an academic discipline, which offered me a new perspective: performance as embodied knowledge, a site of sacred energetic transfer that asks for a presence and engagement that operates outside of literary tradition. Poets and orators have been around since the very beginning of human history. For me, one of the most important aspects of a performance/live reading is that it can never be exactly replicated. I certainly have specific ways I perform certain lines within my poems, but I need to find something new each time I present a piece. By keeping it fresh for myself, I believe it also helps keep audiences engaged since it’s a sort of communal discovery process. I try to always take an audio recording for my own personal archive. It’s always fascinating to hear how the same poem/piece can evoke different reactions from an audience. Maybe something has recently happened in society or in someone’s own life that makes a line hit differently; maybe I’m reading after someone else that has similar themes—it’s all wrapped up in the singular experience that every live reading/performance offers. I’m unsure what my future holds in terms of career path and community engagement, but I know performing will certainly be part of it. It’s the most invigorating feeling to know you’re facilitating a shared experience in performance space, holding attention, and offering an emotional encounter for others to process and bring with them after they leave.

When you are not writing poetry, you are a teacher. Do your students influence your writing or your creative process?
Teaching is definitely an active influence on my work. One of my favorite poems to perform is called “Señora Lucia’s Class is a Vibe.” It really goes in on how much I love the metaphorical possibilities of the ocean and swimming. Last year when I was teaching high school English, I felt like the Spanish honorific was more indicative of the type of cultural awareness I wanted to bring into the classroom. In much the same way that I focus on heritage and authenticity in my poems, I aim to diversify the English canon and bring in and celebrate minoritized voices in literature. I often reflect on how and what I teach, and my students are certainly aware of my passion for poetry. At the end of last academic year, the students wrote me letters and one young woman said “(My) passion for poetry is very visible.” For far too long poetry has had the reputation of being esoteric and unapproachable. I want students to know that in some ways, poetry is the clearest form of communication we have. It is concise and focused in ways that other literature is not. I want them to gain confidence in analyzing and discussing poetry, while also finding the joy and freedom of writing their own words. I love teaching poetry because without fail, my students bring up something that I had not yet noticed. And that’s one of the many gifts of creative expression—the unique way we each experience something and how we then build together a shared understanding of what we encounter.

Where can readers check out more of your work?
I try to update my website www.luciaherrmann.com regularly with news on upcoming events (virtual and in-person) as well as links to the publications I’m featured in. I also have audio and video recordings of some of my readings and performances. I’m on Instagram @luzzyluce, though I don’t actually put many poems on there. Any and all creative inquiries can be directed to poetvoz@gmail.com and I would love to hear from you!

Lucia Herrmann is an artist and educator from Miami, Florida. She has lived in Philadelphia since 2014 and is heading to the University of California San Diego to join their MFA program in the fall of 2022. Lucia feels most alive when performing. In 2019, she was featured in two Philly FringeArts productions and has been in countless comedy shows, poetry readings, and open mics. She is dedicated to teaching, empowering, and uplifting individuals and communities through decolonized and anti-racist pedagogy and creative practice. Find her online or in the nearest green space.

Review of The Broken Night by Bruce Arlen Wasserman

June 15, 2022 Brooke Palma

The Broken Night

Finishing Line Press

$14.99

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Katch Campbell

I image that all poetry impacts breathing in some way. The reading of it aloud, the connection to emotion, the respite from external stimuli. And, I expect that much of this impact is unconscious, at least, most often, it is for me. This was not the case as I read, The Broken Night, by Bruce Arlen Wasserman (Finishing Line Press June 2022.) Wasserman’s book is an elegy to his father and, I assert, a treatise on the connection between breath and being. An extension or expression of the work of Bachelard, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Silence. Inhalation. Exhalation. Being. In which I was aware from the start.

Farmall F-12
It was all rusted iron and grinding gears
the 12 in its name standing for 12 horses
though I doubted, at 19 years, I could handle
12 breathing ones, 6 doubletrees and all those
leather-long reins gathered to two hands
at 3 miles-an-hour but the F-12 did 6 when
minted in ‘36, a year you could still buy rubber
when my father was 15, yet by ‘43 he was 22
wearing lieutenant’s bars and hoping for overseas
though he shipped to Texas and thought to ride
a horse …..

I could spend this space discussing his use of poetic techniques to create the presence of breath, the rush, and Wasserman has these skillsets, but I know Bruce a bit and got to know him further when I interviewed him for this article which leaves me inclined to blame it on a proven desire to break barriers in the quest to express and address the human experience. Bruce, a dentist, a blues vocalist, a song writer, and musician (harmonica and guitar,) a wilderness survivalist, a husband, a Jew, the list goes on, pulls from the extremes of these pursuits to express the awe, devotion, and devastation that encompassed the life Albert Wasserman: Role model. Trailblazer. Ever-present friend.

A Cow and A Calf and…
But this… this head-in, tail-out
asswords rotated transfixation
of new calf would never work
and so the neighbor brought
some specialist, sad sack that he was,
his arm all-the-way-to-the-shoulder
in hot, sticky birth canal, all the while
grumbling about the life he couldn’t
wait to leave, and struggling to turn
that first calf before birthing stillborn.
While Elsie, standing calm,
somehow sensed all that pushing
—five fingers twisting fetus
and wrenching womb—
would eventually work.
And faith, I figured as
not just for farmers
praying for rain, hoping
for healed land and cattle or yield
to pay the banker one more season—
faith, I figured, is far from fact.
It’s a heifer,
heaving every load of life,
trusting every drop of blood
to strange hands,
as the moon arranges
shadows on the ground
and things work out
beyond all control.

Somehow, I’m left with my lack of ability to express how this book will impact you as a reader, but it will. That is to say that if you have ever been around a campfire where everyone is a friend and taken a moment to take it all in, the lift of smoke on the air which blends into the purple dusk, the crack and timbre of laughter, boots on, boots off, the zip of nylon, the passing of a bottle, the first June Bug. Being. Inhale. Exhale. Again.

Today the Sun Shined Black
I was surprised at the finish that your body wasn’t nervous,
that your spirit breathed uninterrupted beauty
as you followed me, just like you always have, each footfall
leaving one last print in the snow, each pause as casual
as any other day, for assessment of the view, the mountains
you would never see again, the finding of the last few blades of green
before our two souls locked together, my hand on your nose…

Katch Campbell is a connector. With a master’s degree in Science and an MFA in poetry, she creates metaphors for her patients and others about the world around us. Her work is an inquiry on the atrocities we commit consciously and unconsciously against each other and the universe. Katch serves as Vice President and is a permanent faculty member at the River Pretty Writing Retreat, a bi-annual workshop in the Ozarks. She has co-led immersive poetry trips to Slovenia and Italy and used to edit for ZoMag.com.

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art (June 2022)

June 14, 2022 Brooke Palma

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

Welcome to a new Mad Poets blog, to be offered every two months.

It’s a pleasure to write about the relationship between poetry and other art forms, to examine ways that a various creative arts relate to each other.

Hearing the Brush: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer

Woodmere Art Museum 04/09/2022 - 07/10/2022

I highly recommend a visit to this exhibit, which pairs Warren Rohrer’s paintings with the poetry of Jane Rohrer, his wife. Raised in different agricultural Mennonite communities, they met in college, wed and purchased Christiana Farm in Lancaster County, near to where Warren was born. Warren became one of the leading abstract painters of Philadelphia, exhibiting and teaching widely.

Both members of the couple explored their shared Mennonite roots as well as their artistic development as they broadened their experiences, traveled, studied and eventually moving to Chestnut Hill. Both retained deep ties to the land, a source of inspiration and connection with their ancestors.

Warren’s works seems composed of gestural marks depicting images of pastures, boundaries and water through a deeply personal alphabet. Jane’s elegant poems document her development, experience of domestic life and intimacy. She is also a keen observer of her husband’s process.

I hear the little whiskers
of the brush
crossing

the canvas

He follows

as a farmer pursues
the furrow plowing
left to right left to right left to right
the hush metaphor a shared landscape
See

Jane Rohrer

The Woodmere exhibition is revelatory, pairing Jane’s poems with Warren’s work. They vibrate side-by-side along the walls. They’re not place this way so that the poems explain the paintings. Rather, poems and paintings converse, as we might suppose the couple conversed.

I was taken with the spaciousness inherent in the work of both partners. So much is suggested as well as obscured. I could feel the couple’s intimacy, impact upon each other and connection.

Upcoming Workshops- Here are some online and in-person which might be of interest.

Writing ekphrastic poems with Jessica Jacobs
June 21, 2-4 pm ET (both online & in-person): With the Fine Arts Work Center, Jessica will offer "Talking to the Walls: Writing Ekphrastic Poetry." In this workshop, we’ll explore different pathways into the deep conversations available to us with visual art and its creators. Ideal for writers and artists of all levels of experience, our time together will be primarily generative and designed to give you news to appreciate art and get you writing.

Writing and painting with Cathleen Cohen
These two separate offerings are geared towards folks who are interested in drawing or painting as well as poetry. No worries if you’ve never taken a drawing or painting course before! The explorations we take up will be engaging and accessible. My aim is for each of us to deepen our process.

Painting and Poetry Workshop

July 9 (outdoors, in-person) Cerulean Arts Gallery
Do you jot down writings as you paint? Or maybe you have an ongoing writing practice. Join poet and artist Cathleen Cohen and explore the link between painting and poetry. Deepen and expand your creative process even if you've never written a poem before! Make your artist statement more engaging! Draw and paint with watercolor and write in response to helpful prompts in a supportive environment. Examine how artists like Jean Arp, Kenneth Patchen and Wassily Kandinsky linked the written word and visual art. All levels welcome.

Painting and Poetry

(online and recorded 11/29-12/20), Penn Studio School of Arts

Poetry has been written by many visual artists, past and present (e.g., William Blake, Wassily Kandinsky, Kenneth Patchen, Kansuke Yamamoto, Zachary Schomburg). They can inspire us. I’ll demo my own watercolor painting approach, but you can use any media you like for in-class exercises.

We will use simple, helpful prompts to learn about the craft of writing poems. We’ll experiment and match language to images we create. We’ll try ekphrasis (poems that describe works of art). This can open us up to writing about others’ artwork, having others write about ours and writing about our own.

Found in Translation

June 9, 2022 Brooke Palma

FOUND IN TRANSLATION

So I look forward to writing about this.

ENGLISH BESIDE THE ITALIAN

Giuseppe Ungaretti, Allegria, translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2020.

I had to pick up this volume because I had previously acquired Brock’s collection of Italian poetry (data). I hear from people more knowledgeable than I about Italian poetic culture that Ungaretti is a very big deal, very popular—think W. H. Auden or Robert Frost. He’s present in public culture over fifty years after his death. Geoffrey Brock is a wonderful translator and a poet himself as well; anything he has translated is worth picking up to check out.

The volume has no introduction: you open it and immediately hit poetry. The final section of “Afterthoughts,” pp. 194-98, does provide essential context: Giuseppe Ungaretti was born in 1888 in Egypt (to Italian parents; his father was working on the Suez Canal), and he died in 1969. This book translates the 1931 version of Ungaretti’s evolving collection L’Allegria, which Brock calls “a seminal work of Italian modernism.” The poems were written between 1914 and 1919, overlapping WWI, in which Ungaretti fought in the Italian army. The publisher, Archipelago, always produces lovely books with a strong family resemblance. The presentation here feels especially well-suited to a bilingual edition of poetry.

Each poem appears in Italian on the left, English on the right (and implicitly secondary). Many of the poems are very brief, only two or three lines, and each poem gets its own page (or as much as needed), short ones tending to alternate with longer. Sometimes only the place and date of composition, supplied for almost every poem, make clear that difficulties evoked come from being at war. If you know French or Spanish, you’ll get a lot of the Italian, but it’s very rich and evocative even if you don’t quite get it. You can note the cognate words: “solitudine” and “solitude,” “benedizione” and “benediction,” “discendente” and “descendant.” Brock doesn’t do this mechanically: “sull’umido asfalto” (p. 4) is “on damp asphalt,” not “on humid asphalt” (which would have been kind of cool, but lazy); “confusa” (8) is “murky” (9), “torbido” (24) is “gloomy” (25). Words with Germanic origins get their chances alongside Latinate vocabulary. The only choice I doubted, in SONNOLENZA (SLEEPINESS, not “SOMNOLENCE,” pp. 100-101), where “the grumble of crickets” “E s’accompagna/ ala mia inquietudine” – “It keeps my troubles/ company.” Here the longer, more similar “It accompanies /my troubles” might have made the crickets work like an awkward musical accompaniment, as if the troubles too are audible (“inquietudine” after all). For those who know Italian, of course, you don’t need a translation to get Ungaretti, but you can follow and evaluate Brock’s work—and then share with readers who need the English.

Almost every poem offers a grain of the unexpected, or a turn at the end, and they are quite refined, satisfying to read from a variety of aspects. Some of the verses could be set anywhere, while others offer specific details from the poet’s life (his Arab friend who committed suicide after difficult immigrant experience, pp. 32-35), but always presented in brief brushstrokes.

Like a proper modernist, Ungaretti does not write formal verse and does not even use punctuation, but he provides a lot of delicate soundplay:

…un uomo (a man…)
e pare un’ombra (p. 6) (he seems a shadow (p. 7)

Here is the difficulty of the whole enterprise: the original is simple and clear (though evocative), and so should the translation be, but “man” and “shadow” have less phonetic relationship than uomo/un’ombra. How to balance what the original says in terms of meaning and HOW the original says it, which is what makes it poetry? Over the course of the book, Brock does convey both the sound richness and the simplicity of the originals, though not always in the same parts of the page.

In just a few cases the verse does rhyme, as in the third stanza from ANNIENTAMENTO = ANNIHILATION (pp. 50-51):

M’ama non m’ama                         She loves me loves me not
mi sono smaltato                               I have painted myself
di margherite                                     with daisies
mi sono radicato                               have rooted
nella terra marcita                            in the rotted earth
sono cresciuto                                  have grown
come un crespo                               like a thistle
sullo stelo torto                                on its twisted stalk
mi sono colto                                   have gathered myself
nel tuffo                                           in the cascade
di spidalba                                        of hawthorn

The Italian has an incantatory quality (recalling the cliché—whose author I forget—that Italian speech is doomed to come out as poetry, if not as an outright aria): smaltato/radicato, margherite/marcita, torto/colto. Brock recreates some of that music with strong assonance: rooted/rotted, thistle/twisted/cascade, and cites minor folk magic with the “loves me, loves me not” game of counting petals.

In this brief poem, the translation gives a near-rhyme, mimic/tunic (pp. 132-133), and both original and translation have a haiku-like compression:

DORMIRE                                         SLEEP
Vorrei imitare                                   I’d like to mimic
questo paese                                 this landscape
adagiato                                            reclining
nel suo camice                               in its tunic
di neve                                             of snow

Santa Maria la Longa il 26 gennaio 1917/January 26, 1917

Here’s a couple only in English:

SAN MARTINO DEL CARSO
Of these houses
there remain
only a few
pieces of wall

Of so many
who resembled me
there remains
even less

But in my heart
each has a cross

My heart is the most
broken country

Lone Tree Gully, August 22, 1916 (p. 103)

ITALY
I am a poet
a unanimous cry
I am a clot of dreams

I am the fruit
of countless conflicting grafts
grown in a hothouse

But your people are borne
by the same land
that bears me
Italy

And in this your soldier’s
uniform
I rest
as in my father’s
cradle

Lokvica, October 1, 1916 (p. 116)

And one more example brief enough to give both versions:

IL PORTO SEPOLTO
Vi arriva il poeta
e poi torna alla luca con i suoi canti
e li disperde

Di questa poesia
mi testa
quel nulla
d’inesauribile segreto

Mariano il 29 giugno 1916 (p. 36)

THE BURIED HARBOR

The poet goes there
and then returns to the light with his songs
and scatters them

Of this poetry
I retain
that nothing
of bottomless secret

Mariano, June 29, 1916 (p. 37)

Here Brock keeps that interesting syntactic inversion in the second stanza (where ordinary English would want “I retain that nothing of bottomless secret of this poetry”—though that’s still pretty strange!). Does it work? Perhaps the inversion, much less common in contemporary anglophone poetry, suggests a descent into the buried harbor, its depths and the secret things under the water there.

I’ll end by noting that many translations of poetry by a single author offer a selection of the author’s work rather than a collection; this one is really a book of poetry, chosen and ordered by Ungaretti himself. It can be read as a record of that moment in time, moving through the poems in the order intended, following the musical score of the soldier-poet’s moods or locations. Whether read from end to end or dipped into, Allegria has a lot to offer.

Review of A Tree and Gone by Terrence Culleton

June 8, 2022 Brooke Palma

A Tree and Gone

Future Cycle Press

$15.95

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Emiliano Martín

Any poet knows that to write a sonnet, besides the muse, a good knowledge of the subject must be present. Furthermore, during the life of a poet, the ability to write just one sonnet is an achievement by itself, but writing over fifty sonnets and displaying them in a book... is an accomplishment, and a very distinguished job to be proud of. This is the case of A Tree and Gone. Each page of the book resembles poetry, pure artistry the way it used to be. Good taste, rhyme, and metrics... are there:

Herds, flocks, wildflowers, startled on a knoll
Once, here, somewhere- the heart, maybe, the soul.

The poet, Terry Culleton, very tactfully exhibits a degree of wisdom and humor in his verses.

A peacock butterfly unfolds on air
and glides a yard or two, then re-alights
atop a primrose bell to bristle there
and fold back in and think about its flights...

Also, a sense of philosophy and life’s experiences adorned the stanzas of each sonnet.

The counterpoint that sounds itself in me
just now, I guess, is yes, it’s almost night-
But almost isn’t all: there is still some light.

Terry Culleton is a modern sonneteer, who makes us believe in the magic of traditional poetry. Definitely, A Tree and Gone is a fine job, a treasure with original sonnets found in a fine book; It is a breath of fresh air for any poetry lover to enjoy. The reader of this traditional form of poetry will not be disappointed at all.

Emiliano Martín, Spanish-born and longtime resident of Bucks County, PA., is the founder and former director of Philadelphia Poetry Forum and past president of the Latin American Guild for the Arts. Currently and since 2018, he is president of Pennsylvania Poetry Society. He has authored over a dozen titles of poetry (and prose), besides having been published in Mad Poets Review, Philadelphia Poets, The Lite Fuuse, S.V. Journal, US 1, The Swarthmorean, and other Spanish language publications in Spain, such as Mizares and Marejadas. He is the author of Footprints of Spain in Philadelphia (2020), and his latest book of poems is Caught Between Layers.

Mad Poet of the Year - R. G. Evans (June 2022)

June 6, 2022 Brooke Palma

IMAGINE SISYPHUS HAPPY
by R.G. Evans

Does he whistle as he sweats and groans
the boulder up the mountain?
Does he ever think At least I’m not at home
where my daughter wants to die
trembling there at the summit
just before the rock rolls down?
As he follows it, his mind might wander
to the time his daughter screamed
Sixteen years in this goddamn house
with your failed marriage as my roommate!
What did she know about what god has damned?
Maybe he smokes, letting gravity do its job
one step at a time. Eternity is eternity after all,
no room here for a goldbricking soul.
If one can imagine Sisyphus happy,
it isn’t hard to picture him grinding his smoke
beneath his toe, cracking his knuckles,
and glancing at Tantalus in his lake
beneath the trees, bending as the water recedes.
And yet, Sisyphus wonders,
was that a wink he saw from his damned neighbor
when the fruit pulled away out of reach?
At least the bastard’s in the shade, he thinks
and shrugs his flesh into the stone.

This is the title poem from my latest book of poems. I’ve been thinking a lot about old Sisyphus lately. That rock doesn’t get any easier to roll.