POeT SHOTS - '"Hard Rain" by Tony Hoagland

February 15, 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.

Hard Rain

by Tony Hoagland

After I heard It's a Hard Rain's Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
then I understood: there's nothing
we can't pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can't turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

You can't keep beating yourself up, Billy
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage murderer,
About all those people you killed—
You just have to be the best person you can be,
one day at a time -

and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
that the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.

Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood-
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
Signed, America.

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,
but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth-
whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.

Tony Hoagland’s “Hard Rain” is an indictment of US culture as it stood in the late 1900s, before his death and which still stands today. Most of us are familiar with the Bob Dylan song “It’s A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall”. Dylan’s version is also an indictment of US policy and culture. Yet heating this emotionally charged piece reduced to Muzak makes Hoagland recoil (…there’s nothing/we can’t pluck the stinger from. /) Hoagland goes on to continue to hold US America accountable for its actions.

Whether it’s using Thoreau to sell retirement homes or trying to tap into the hearts of a TV audience (You can’t keep beating yourself up, Billy…/About all those people you killed---/You just have to be the best person you can be, / one day at a time.) Do any of us really forgive twenty-year old Adam Lanza for killing twenty-six people including twenty children in Sandy Hook?

Finally Hoagland switches from the specific to a general call to awareness (/his shoes and his trousers/are covered in blood-/but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;/ Should I say something? / Signed America/) The stanza which contains these lines is key to the poem. Isn’t that what US America does? We go into various countries to strip them of their natural resources (Oil, Minerals, Trees) and fight wars for “independence” in these countries, ultimately bringing back the booty to the US.

We are all part of this says Hoagland (I used to think I was not a part of this/…? but that was just another song/ that had been taught to me since birth-/). Hoagland then includes himself in his indictment (…? Whose words I was humming under my breath,/ as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.) Who among us is without blame?

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.

Source: POeT Shots: Hard Rain

Review of Open Source by Warren Longmire

January 19, 2022 Brooke Palma

Open Source

Radiator Press

$18.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Philadelphia poet, performance artist, and fixture, Warren Longmire has left his indelible mark on the local poetry scene. This mark is now perfectly encapsulated in his first full-length poetry collection, Open Source. In what may be a first for a poetry collection, Open Source contains QR codes for each of the five sections that takes you to a website where a reader can watch Longmire read selected poems in a local location important to him and his work. At the end of the book, Longmire curates a Notes section with additional QR codes of multimedia presentations that explain specific images, words, and topics. This collection is an innovative tour de force.

“Brotherly Love” contained in the first section titled Hooptie is one of the most memorable poems in the collection, both as written and recorded. Longmire begins with this memorable tercet: “Philly all the emo with none of the mosh pit. Philly free jazz in a trash bag. Philly’s a synthetic weave tumbleweed down 69th street.”

With a photographer’s eye, Longmire continues to capture the nuances of Philadelphia that any denizen can instantly recognize.

Philly looks at anything but you as intensely as it can.
Philly is dubstep-basement-rowhouse-hot-pagan-lightshow-for-no-one Philly.
Philly’s a café a bored New Jersey dreamed into existence.
Philly buck toothed street with caution tape floss.

The imagery, rhythm, and wordplay in this poem is staggering and a prime example of Longmire’s poetic gifts.

In the next section, Autoimmune, Longmire deploys undeniably powerful metaphors centered on health, the body, and violence to explore the situation of being a Black poet in America. The following stanza is taken from “Autoimmune 3:”

They laughed
at the writer’s conference of brown poets liking black men
as a thing to wear. More metaphors about
black men as a thing to kill.

Earlier in the poem, Longmire describes his experience with asthma, a disease where “pesticides, genetics, and poverty are known factors,” as the joke of my hyperventilation writing itself.” This poem meticulously weaves different stands of asthma, same sex love, and racism into an exceptional confessional poem.

Another poem to check out both in the book and as a recording from the section, A Strange Place for Snow, is “Instructions for a Secret Handshake.” During one of his flaneur-style walks through the city, Longmire observes a complex handshake between a young Black couple that he has said at his readings he rushed home to write. Lines such as the following put the reader in Longmire’s shoes:

The one hand patty cake {right} into the backhand side.
A five finger ET The Extra Terrestrial Slide…
Grip like a bus pole. Twist. Lean back
like we ain’t never
gonna fall. Leap
in a semi-circle to the right. The Running Man. The Nae Nae. The Cabbage Patch with a one-two twist thing at the end that we mess up.

This poem is dance and a magical testament to a poetic observance of pure joy. It puts a smile each time I read it or hear Longmire read it himself.

In the eponymous poem from Section 4 No One Knows What They Are Doing at Microsoft, Longmire explores the shortcomings of modern technology where “No one knows what they are doing at the Disney subsidiary tucked in the zone 3 London exurb…creating a story of English war propaganda backed by the voice of Ricky Gervais.” Longmire’s wit and cultural criticism is on full display in a world where “No one knows what they’re doing in the incubator inside/the insurance company that owns a stake in Beyonce’s thighs.”

The final section, Basic Income Experiment, brings Longmire’s questing sensibility to bear on the COVID Epidemic. In “COVID-19 Dating Tips,” he writes for tip number five:

Talk about black-owned gun clubs and what happens after grad school.
There is a part of Philly so white they sell Frosé in a field beside brunch tables
overflowing with Comcast. Go to the brewery with chalk art outside it
instead and talk about your recent 90s RNB kit.

This section and this poem have a sharp sense of humor and melancholy mixed together with his astute commentary and his abundant love for Philadelphia.

If I were to be asked what I most admire about what is one of the most exciting poetry collections of this new decade, I would give three answers: 1. Longmire’s precise use of language—whether it is aching, humorous, sharp, witty. 2. Longmire’s enviable ability to take confessional and linguist risks. 3. The use of multimedia and URL codes to share his unique, timely, and important work with the world. Open Source will be one of those books that you will be able to answer when and where you savored it for the first time.

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 - '"From Blossoms" by Li-Young Lee

January 18, 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.

From Blossoms

by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

This is one of my favorite poems by Li Young Lee. The poem has the understated beauty present in much of his work. In it, Lee takes us from a casual journey past an orchard (/at the bend in the road/ where we turned toward the sign painted peaches.) to the hands that picked the peaches (/from laden boughs, from hands,) to the human desire for immortality (/O, to take what we love inside /to carry within us an orchard to eat).

Some days we take in all of life (/not only the skin but the shade,) We are exuberant and joyful at the prospect of living. (There are days we live/ as if death were nowhere in the background;) We live with our happiness, our “impossible” happiness which is as fragile and beautiful as the blossoms. These are times when one loves life and approaches a sense of the divine.

Lee gives us a picture of what it feels like to touch our spirituality in an ordinary way. This is the feeling one can get from walking in nature or at dinner with a significant other. It is somewhat like what Zen Buddhists call “satori”, a moment of enlightenment that occurs without effort. With Lee we are enlightened by the ordinary experience of eating a peach to the wonder that life exists at all.

Source: POeT Shots: From Blossoms

Local Lyrics - Featuring Hanoch Guy

January 17, 2022 Brooke Palma

Backwards Spring
by Hanoch Guy

nothing happens
as planned.
Instead of spring forward
time leaps back,
cyclones rip it apart
Wheels crushed
Screws fly
sharp time shreds grabbed by kids who
live for ever
threatened by short lived adults.
Snatched by old age

Kids collect shiny
Days into seconds
time discs flatten
into thin shiny sheets
Hurled into descending darkness
and light.

Time ignores young and old
bursts out laughing*
Puts itself together

Why do you write poetry? What about the medium appeals to you?
It was not until I was a junior in high school that I discovered the charms of poetry when our lit teacher read us poems in Hebrew English and German. I did not grasp what poetry is but enjoyed just listening.

After writing short stories, I was attracted to poetry and started writing hundreds of poems. The process accelerated for a few years On the first day in Hebrew Uni, I bought five poetry books and read them every day.

By then I was totally committed. By attending lectures on Hebrew lit and world lit, I was exposed to two thousand years of poetry.

The short lines, the white spaces, and the melodic rhythm charmed me.

Poetry became my total occupation.

My love affair with poetry deepens every day and night; writing poems is still a deep discovery and and delightful.

According to Aristotle, poetry is the best words in the best order, and quality poetry has the best fitting rhythms and fascinating imagery.

I write poetry because it fits my personality and temperament.

I like to close my eyes when inspired, compose the poem in my head, and then type it

I can never imagine writing a novel.

What are your current influences? How do ideas for new writing come to you?
The symbolists VerlaIne, Rimbaud, and Beudelaire influence me in their theory and practice that we travel in a forest of symbols. I also believe that a poet should leave a mystery in each poem. I am also influenced by Wallace Stevens, Louise Gluck, by Japanese poets, and the Israeli poets Yehuda Amichai, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Avraham Halfi, and more.

The world is full of prompts ;it may bring me a flying hummingbird, an odd conversation. I find inspiration listening to music as well as in viewing paintings.

How does being bilingual influence your poetic style?
Writing in Hebrew or English is living in two separate universes. Being bilingual influences my poetry immensely. Both languages feed and enrich, both in technique and figurative devices. There is a rich and long tradition of Hebrew and English literature.

I believe languages are extremely important for an artist’s development in diction, imagery, and associations. I read French every day, Yiddish a few times a week, and a few phrases in Rilke's Duino Elegies in German.

Engaging foreign languages expands the brain’s verbal center’s plasticity.

You write a lot about nature (both outdoor nature and human nature). What is your relationship with these subjects?

I am imprinted with my childhood landscapes of ancient olive trees, watermelons, and wheat fields, fragrant tulips, anemones, and citrus orchards. The changing colors of the trees and bushes. All these are prominent in my poetry.

I am connected deeply to the creek in my backyard as well as the birds’ songs. Gorgeous and powerful scenes of Bryce and Zion emerge in my poetry as well as craters of the moon, and the fragrant flowers of Grand Teton National Parks.

Human beings are fascinating to me everyday. I like to meet everyone for the surprise awaiting me The rest of the profiles I invent.

Do you notice new directions in your poetry?
I see two contradictory changes in my recent writing. The first is that I tend to write longer poems that blur the borders between prose and poetry. The second change is writing very short poems similar to haiku.

You’ve got two new books coming out. Can you tell us a little about them?

We Pass Each Other on the Road, published by Kelsay Books, offers sixty profiles of women and men young and old that I knew or invented. The book offers readers a snapshot of their lives and struggles.

My latest book, which is currently in production, is In the company of Angels, Fools, and Donkeys. It challenges Jewish and Christian assumptions and dogma via Jewish legends, folktales, and saint stories. Sometimes these stories are entertaining; at other times, they are as irritating as donkeys' wisdom.

Where can readers find more of your work/buy your books?
Several books can be bought at Kelsay Books . Others are available at Author house.

NOKADDISH is available at Ben Yehuda Press.

All my books are available on Amazon.

Hanoch Guy, Ph.D., Ed.D., spent his childhood and youth in Israel surrounded by citrus orchards, watermelon fields, and invading sand dunes. He is a bilingual poet in Hebrew and English. Hanoch is emeritus professor of Jewish and Hebrew literature at Temple University specializing in Holocaust literature. He has mentored and taught poetry classes at the Musehouse CCenter in Philadelphia. Hanoch has published poetry extensively in the US, Israel and the UK, Greece, and Wales. His poems have been published in Genre, Poetry Newsletter, Tracks, the International Journal of Genocide Studies, Poetry Motel, Visions International, and Voices Israel, and many more, He has won awards from Poetica and the Mad Poets Society. Terra Treblinka was a finalist in the Northbook contest. He has won first prize in the Better than Starbucks Haiku Contest. His books are: The Road to Timbuktu, Travel Poems; Terra Treblinka, Poems of the Holocaust; We Pass Each Other on the Stairs, 120 Real and Imaginary Encounters; Sirocco and Scorpions, Poems of Israel and Palestine; A hawk in midflight, Haiku and Micropoems; A Green Cow, Parah Yerukah (Hebrew); Back to Terezin, Holocaust Poems; NOKADDISH, Poems in the Void; Twilight Passages, Death Poems; We Pass Each Other on the Road; In the company of Angels, Fools, and Donkeys (2022).

“Catfish” 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 social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured in the Philadelphia based Moonstone Poetry series, West-Chester based Livin’ on Luck, Mad Poets Society, and Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM. Find out more at: www.catfishjohnpoetry.com.

Review of Square Peg Round Hole by F.X. Baird

January 12, 2022 Brooke Palma

Square Peg Round Hole

Moonstone Press

$10.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Abbey J. Porter

F.X. Baird is a keen observer and commentator, as demonstrated by his recent chapbook, Square Peg Round Hole. A thoughtful and engaged writer, he offers perspectives on life, religion, and where to find optimism in what can be a difficult and alienating existence.

The book consists mostly of open verse poetry, with occasional short prose pieces mixed in.

In “Triptych of the Incarnation,” the poem that opens the 32-page collection, the narrator reflects on his birth and each of his parents, concluding:

Ahead, my life, the crucifixion
of addiction, its recovery,
the irritation of not knowing
why I am here, who is my God.

One gets the sense that he is questioning a life that is challenging and searching for meaning in that life. This perception is reinforced throughout the collection. “I’ve given up on anyone interpreting this life for me,” Baird says in “Off Balance in Three Acts.”

The themes of God and religion also recur throughout the book. In “Mystery,” the narrator seems to ask whether God exists, inquiring, “Are you there/ waiting in silence that is deafening?”

Baird explores questions about the afterlife in poems such as “My Father’s Ghost”:

Beyond the door of death,
I hear no raucous party, tear-smeared reunion,
see only the vast re-cycling of souls where thirst
evaporates in our mouths.

His words suggest he does not subscribe to Judeo-Christian beliefs concerning life after death. Further evidence of Baird’s perspective on religion and the relationship of Man to God surfaces in “And God Said”:

And we bow and pray
as if a bended knee will sway
the answer to our prayers.

In “Dark Matters,” Baird reflects, “I’ve been waiting for God to show up all my life.”

Religion is not the only system Baird interrogates and finds lacking. In “American Haiku,” he critiques the attitudes typical in the United States, which he calls the “little country with the big heart and bigger ego.”

The title of Baird’s book is significant. The narrator of his poems often does appear to be a “square peg in a round hole”—someone who feels inherently alienated, inherently isolated. In “My Father’s Ghost,” he says he has “no illusions that I am anything more/ than alone.” At the conclusion of “American Twilight,” he queries, “You know holidays at home, the card table at the end/ of the big table? I’m always there, alone, at the end.”

In the context of not buying into or fitting with the belief systems around him, Baird appears to find the world daunting. “She knew the truth,” he says of Eve in “And God Said.” “We are born in pain.” In “Hyena,” he says, “I gnaw on the life left to me.”

Some might describe Baird’s perspective as cynical. However, we glimpse in this collection an inherently hopeful outlook as well. Such is the case in “No. 40,” a prose piece in which Baird relates the story of a slave who ships himself to freedom in Philadelphia in 1849. The piece ends with the optimistic lines, “What song are we to sing? For we have been delivered into this day to change all that we see, all that we feel and think, about each other and ourselves.”

The poem “I Saw a Little Girl Running with a Jump Rope” also demonstrates the writer’s ability to find the positive in the common things of the world. Baird’s powers of observation are on full display as he describes coming upon a family that has parked their van behind a school. It’s the youngest member of the group, a girl of about 3, who captures Baird’s attention.

She emerged from the van with a jump rope, a simple
object, began to run, trailing the rope behind, twisting her
neck around to see the plastic grip bounce up and down as she
ran, a smile splitting her face.

Baird describes the girl as “taking a simple thing, ignoring its purpose/ its design, transforming it into something not yet imagined, creating joy.”

But it’s the book’s final poem—my favorite of the collection—that offers the most optimism. “Redemption” describes the narrator’s outing with his young daughter:

She inventories the yard into the bright afternoon,
through squeal and discovery shreds the veil that time

has laid over my ears, my eyes.

He describes how “She turns to me, eyes shining, gripping the earth with her toes/ Do you see this, do you feel this? I do, daughter, I do.”

The poem suggests that in an uncertain life, even for one who finds emptiness and failure in traditional belief systems, innocence, wonder, and beauty are still possible.

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

Local Lyrics - Featuring Sean Lynch

December 20, 2021 Brooke Palma

You Don’t Belong to Anyone
by Sean Lynch

We argued in bed
about what Hart Crane thought
when he drowned to death
until you threw a pen
at me, hit me in the chest
marking a single ink dot on my skin.

I wanted to cover you
in yellow sticky notes
writing random words to fill
the spaces between your freckles.
I wanted to stuff
flower petals under
your fingernails.
I wanted you.

Your tongue clicked
like a machine
as we shared music
from childhood funerals.
You, an expert oceanographer
in your slumber, and I, a whale
swimming away
from a thunderstorm.

There was a cyclone in your coffee cup
and your water painted thighs swirled
around me, holding me down
to the sea floor until I couldn't think
anymore. Until I couldn't breathe.

How would you describe your poetic aesthetic? What inspires you?
I would describe my poetic aesthetic by remixing the meme, “reject modernity, embrace tradition” into, “reject post-modernity, embrace modernity.”

What inspires me most is absolute, abject despair. The kind of feeling that you think you can’t crawl out of, like existential anguish and suicidal ideation, or when you drop your toothbrush on the floor.

Do you have a process? How do you move from all possible blank page to finished work?
My process starts as a reaction, whether it’s to an event or something that I read. I do my best not to be derivative though. I try to be authentic, although whenever I get lost I go back to my classic favorites, like Pablo Neruda, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, or W.B. Yeats, to remember how to write poetry well.

Do you go into a different mental space for writing haiku/senryu?
I definitely get into a different kind of mental space for writing haiku. My other writing is more interiority centric, (or maybe self-centered) so when writing haiku I have to transform my mindset to an entirely opposite kind of observation mode. One that focuses outwards instead of inwards. I’ve recently written two essays as introductions to anthologies about how haiku as a form works to develop your senses and actually helps hone other poetry writing, even if it’s subconscious.

From your work with the Nick Virgilio Writer’s House and Moonstone Arts to curating a number of other literary outlets, like Serotonin, you seem enmeshed in literary life. What does this work bring to your life and your writing?
Working for Nick Virgilio Writers House, Moonstone Arts Center, and Serotonin brings humility and gratitude to my life. On the other hand, it’s a bit detrimental to my own writing. I have little time for writing anymore, several manuscripts in drafts, and zero of my own submissions currently out there. That being said, my editing work brings me joy and fulfillment. I’m grateful to have the opportunities that I have and to be able to do the work that I do in the literary world.

How do you see the potential for poetry as a form of community engagement and about its potential to bring change to a community?
I don’t think I have the proper answer as far as poetry as a form of community engagement goes. Or about poetry’s potential to bring change to a community for that matter. My hopeful side would be positive about the subject. My cynical side would say that political activism, mutual aid, and social justice are efforts that must be pursued separately in a tangible manner.

Where can readers find more of your work and buy your books?
People can read my published work on my linktree: https://linktr.ee/seanlynchpoet and as far as my books go, two are out of print, and the other two, Broad Street Line and 100 Haiku, are still available to buy on Moonstone’s website. I’m currently looking for a publisher for my full length poetry collection, which is focused on dealing with grief after my mother’s death.

Sean Lynch is a poet and editor who lives in South Philly. His poems have appeared in journals including Apiary Magazine, Meow Meow Pow Pow, and Drunk Monkeys. He’s the founding editor of Serotonin, on the editorial board of Moonstone Arts Center, and Program Director of the Nick Virgilio Writers House.

Profession: Poet

December 15, 2021 Brooke Palma

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

Writing the Elusive Time

Two essential elements in poetry are time and space. Our focus in this blog is time. You may decide to write a poem in the past ,present or the future but I have news for you. Once you write the poem, it is all present. The brain perceives every thing as now.

Consider the conflict between rigid clock time and fluid personal time.

Clockless time reminds me of the handless less clock in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries.

In my research, I came across an excellent article by G. Kim Blank and Magdalena Kay, which includes essential questions about time and poetry. I’ve summarized these questions here.

Does the poem take place in one time (the present, the past, the future) or does it move back and forth between times?

Does the poem present single actions in time or continuing actions?
Does the poem bring different times together or set them apart?
Is there a particular event for the poem?
Are different parts of the poem in different times? What effect does this have?
Is the speaker of the poem situated at a certain point in time the past, present ,future or blend them, does the speaker feel regret, resolve, clarity, uncertainty)?

Does time move smoothly or abruptly? In an uncertain way? Are different states of being, or different ways of thinking, associated with different time?

Let us explore further the nature of time in poetry by considering the following prompts:

The best of times---
Handless clock------
The worst of times-----
The river of time------
Dissolving time--------
Punishing times-----------
Timeless grief

Consider these snippets of poems dealing with the concept of time as well.

A Clock stopped –
Not the Mantel’s
(Emily Dickinson)

I had not known before Forever was so long a word. The slow stroke of the clock of time I had not heard.
(from “Forever” by Paul Laurence Dunbar)

Time is Too slow for those who Wait, Too swift for those who Fear
(from “Time Is” by Henry Jackson van Dyke, Jr.

As the time draws nigh, glooming, a cloud,
A dread beyond, of I know not what, darkens me.
(from “As the Time Draws Nigh” by Walt Whitman)

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
(from “Time does not bring relief; (Sonnet II)” by Edna St. Vincent Millay)

I would like to end this blog with a poem of my own on the nature of time.

My pasts are robbers

My pasts are robbers
Of the present
And my futures
Imprison me in narrow cells.
Time smashes
Calendars
And handless clocks
Set them on fire
Leave in the ashes.

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.

Mad Poet of the Year - Ray Greenblatt (December 2021)

December 13, 2021 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 Ray Greenblatt serve as the inaugural Mad Poet of the Year for 2021.

DREAMING IN THE MOVIES

by Ray Greenblatt

(camera eye slowly opens)
Benny & Claire honeymooned
in Maine. In their big
Auburn—bright red, of course—
they drove right through
George & Marian Kirby’s ghost car.
City-bred they shivered all night
in each other’s arms at
the baying of a hound.
Morning the surf brilliant,
Claire bought a small balsam pillow
whose scent is still with us
a hundred years later.

“My Funny Valentine/sweet comic valentine/you make me smile with my heart/your looks are laughable/unphotographable/yet you’re my favorite work of
art” (Rogers & Hart, 1937)

Stopping for a nightcap
in their dentist friend’s
--a bridge pro and
jazz aficionado—
new Art Deco apartment
high up in the Philly clouds
(camera: scene grainy, sepia)
in the living room
the hot ruby glow and
pungent reefer smell
was circling a giggling room.
When lights came back on
among the clique was Bing in
bowtie and two-toned saddle shoes.

“You Go To My Head/like a sip of sparkling burgundy brew/and I find the very mention of you/like the kicker in a julep or two” (Coot-Gillespie, 1938)

Benny & Claire drove west on the Pike
to the Big Band Ballroom
where in a sea of tuxedos
they danced while in the
mirrored ceiling Fred & Ginger
aped their every step
(camera: angled shots, slow-motion
& speeded up).
At intermission
Benny jingled the piano
and Claire did the Lindy
quivering and shimmering
in her knife-pleated skirt
till sun rested on the roof.

“A tinkling piano in the next apartment/those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant/a fairground’s painted swings/These Foolish Things remind me of you” (Marvell-Strachey-Link, 1936)

At a birthday party for a cop
Nick & Nora Charles were there
he once a cop who knew gangsters.
(camera: quick cuts and close-ups)
A pile of guns in holsters
on the hall table.
Clusters of liquor and beer bottles
on dining room table.
Benny’s worried face. Claire querulous.
“Hon, let’s get out of here!” “But why?”
“Let’s just go!” “Oh, okay . . .”
Early morning headlines: Deadly police
shooting on Rosewood Street.
(camera dissolve)

Benny & Claire lived till 1990 when at age 90 they passed over hand-in-hand.
They were my parents.
(fade & finis)

Since this is my final contribution as Mad Poet of the Year—a great pleasure and honor—I want to highlight my parents whom I loved dearly. My father was a jazz pianist and my mother loved to dance. Music, popular as well as classical, surrounded our family. This poem touches on real moments in their life, using strains of music special to them. Much like a past poem “What Is French,” this poem is written in fun, as a dream sequence in a movie.

Ray Greenblatt has been a poet for forty years and an English teacher longer than that. He was an editor of General Eclectic, a board member of the Philadelphia Writers Conference, and is presently on the staff of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. He has won the Full Moon Poetry Contest, the Mad Poets Annual Contest, and twice won the Anthony Byrne Annual Contest for Irish Poetry sponsored by The Irish Edition. His poetry has been translated into Gaelic, Polish, Greek and Japanese.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Erica Abbott

November 22, 2021 Brooke Palma

How Close I Came to Breaking
(first published in Anti-Heroin Chic)
by Erica Abbott

As a child, my Saturday evenings

were spent trying not to break

the ice. They say we are all born

from stars but I imagine the skies

must have been empty the night

I was created. The paper cut on my palm

line still itches from failing to fall

in love without holding my breath;

never shouting of my infiniteness

as the car sped down Route 322. //

Mental illness has been my most

consistent friend and everyone else

is trying to get rid of it. Fires can burn

underwater. My blood is trying

to extinguish me. The Earth pulses

deep within its core. An orchestra’s

crescendo always makes me weep.

Outlining my life has been the roadmap

to my survival. Gushing red rivers

once threatened to replace saltwater seas.

A tissue can only hold so many marbles.

I wonder how many people know

just how close I came to the breaking point?

I read somewhere that you often use prompts to help you dive into your poems. Can you talk about how you choose prompts and what the creative process
is like for you?
Yes, I love using prompts! I especially like to use them when my creativity seems to hit a low point because they give such thought-provoking, perspective-bending (and sometimes even silly) jumping off points that I may have never even considered writing about without them. I also use them a lot during National Poetry Month, where for the past two or three years, I’ve challenged myself to write a poem a day so having those prompts, most of which I find through the poetry community on Instagram or the NaPoWriMo website, is crucial to getting to the end of those 30 days. In a Write or Die Tribe article from a few months ago, I wrote about how my brain just does not want to cooperate with me at times and I’ve found prompts to be one of the best solutions to that problem over the years. They really help to stretch the creative muscle and write something totally surprising at times.

You have a chapbook, Self-Portrait as a Sinking Ship, out and available pretty much everywhere. How did this chapbook evolve into its published form?Toward the end of 2019, I was really itching to start getting my work out there. I had never even submitted to a lit mag at that point and I was sort of at a loss with where to even begin. A friend sent me a call for poetry submissions on the theme of duality from Toho Journal and around the same time, I ended up finding an opportunity to do a writing coaching session through Toho Publishing. That kind of paved the way to me discovering their chapbook publishing course that spring. At that point, we were over a month into the pandemic lockdown and, after counting up my poems from over the years, I figured out that I had enough to apply for the course/chapbook publication. I applied about a week after learning about the opportunity and by summertime, I was stunned to actually have the confirmation that I was accepted into the publishing course and my words would be making their way into the world through my very first chapbook that year. Funny enough, the poem I had written and submitted for the duality issue of Toho Journal was accepted just two days before I applied. I think it really gave me a much-needed push to believe in my work and it actually ended up becoming my opening poem in the chapbook. Several other poems ended up coming from workshops I had taken early on in the pandemic, while others had been written years before and edited/polished during the publishing course. After poem selections were made, it was a matter of swapping feedback with the other poets in the course, all of whom were crucial in helping get everything together, cutting lines/poems, ordering, and finding an artist to do the cover artwork. When it finally made its way into the world in December, I was beyond ecstatic with the end result and holding the chapbook in my hands for the first time was a moment I’ll never forget!

Dual themes of darkness and hope play out through the poems in this chapbook and I think encourage the reader to set up camp on a plane of self-
acceptance. Is writing a self-care practice for you?
Absolutely. It’s the main reason I found myself coming back to poetry several years ago. I began writing poems just before I started high school, was part of the poetry club my sophomore year, and continued writing those four years. When I got to college, though, poetry kind of took a back seat. But in 2017, I lost my dog of 11 years and the reading and writing of poetry was so cathartic for me. That darkness, which very much overstayed its welcome into the following years, is what ultimately ended up bringing me back to my love of poetry and saw me through to the light moments. At the same time, I know if I’m not writing, or haven’t written in a few days/weeks, that’s okay too and is just as much a self-care practice as writing is. Sometimes a recharge is necessary and you need to step away until you’re ready for the words to come back to you (or I suppose for you to come back to the words). I know my notebook and pen are there when I’m ready. And when I am, I know it’s one of the best feelings getting those words down onto the pages. I’d be completely lost if I didn’t/couldn’t write at all and I think writing is what has helped me stay hopeful throughout those dark times in life.

I get a science fiction vibe from many of your poems. What is your relationship with the fantastic?
That’s so interesting you say that and, to be honest, it’s the first time I’ve heard that! I’ve actually joked that a few of my poems that were published in the last year have had very apocalyptic, dystopian-hellscape vibes, so it’s so interesting to consider the science fiction angle as well. I love letting my imagination run wild but I think sometimes my anxiety in general takes those imaginative/fantastic elements and gives them a bit of a darker twist haha. It’s like if I take a handful of whatever bad stuff is happening in the present and let the pen run wild, it’s bound to turn up some weird lines/unknown futures along the way, especially if it’s a free write. You just never know where a poem will journey to and those poems can sometimes end up having the strangest elements in the end.

What do you most want readers to take away from your work?
It’s going to sound extremely cliche, but I hope they feel less alone—knowing there are other people out there feeling the same exact things they are at any given moment. That even when it feels like no one is there to provide comfort, hopefully the words do. It’s one of the things that brought me back to poetry and one of the things I love most when reading a collection so I hope people see themselves in the work and feel the same way after reading a poem of mine.

Where can we buy your books/read more of your work?
Copies of Self-Portrait as a Sinking Ship can be purchased through me and a list of my published poems is on my website and when a new one is published, I’ll always share links/snippets to them on my social media as well (Instagram @poetry_erica and Twitter @erica_abbott).

Erica Abbott (she/her) is a Philadelphia-based poet and writer whose work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, Midway Journal, Serotonin, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other journals. She is the author of Self-Portrait as a Sinking Ship (Toho, 2020), a Best of the Net nominee, and volunteers for Button Poetry, Kissing Dynamite, and Mad Poets Society.

Review of What I Heard by Sekai’afua Zankel

November 17, 2021 Brooke Palma

What I Heard

Moonstone Press

$10.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Sekai’afua Zankel’s What I Heard is a refreshingly frank collection of poems addressing the failure of contemporary society to protects its most vulnerable members whether they are Black Americans, the elderly, and/or women. Amidst the hard-hitting poems, Zankel illustrates an abundant capacity for grace, humor, and wisdom. She is an inimitable voice on the Philadelphia poetry scene, and this chapbook is a perfect encapsulation of her voice.

“I heard Sarah Huckabee Sanders Speak on the ‘Little Rock Nine’” is a visceral poem exploring the intersection of generational racial trauma and contemporary American politics. The Little Rock Nine refers to the brave Black students who were the first to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. This historical event happened well within living memory; it happened in 1957. Zankel expertly deploys a communal voice that incorporates both the past and present:

Sarah had no sorrow in her voice. I looked around for one friendly face
for hope. I saw a lady, kindness filled my heart, and then she spat on me.
I got scared when my dress was torn violated by hands. I settled
on one thing and that was home, had to get back there no matter how.

The speaker realizes “It is insensitive of me to assume Sarah should speak on my behalf” and finds a path forward for herself as well as all Americans through utilizing famous advice from Mother Theresa : “It’s no time for tears there is work to do.”

In the narrative poem “Those Who Are Marked,” Zankel manages to walk the tightrope between humor and pathos. The speaker recalls her grandmother “with the biggest corns ever seen” watching “Billy Graham speaking loud on reruns that Sunday morning” while wanting “to get out of the room quickly. I can’t stand religious TV.” The grandmother shows clear signs of memory loss and asks, “Is FDR coming on tonight”? This leads the speaker to ruminate on social security and other welfare programs and their current state of decline: “So many people died this year without insurance, no food stamps or heat, / and the newspapers made a point to warn people not to get sick, to keep / their hands clean.” Reflecting the fact that there is no clear solution to the inadequacy of social welfare programs, the speaker muses “I worry about what is going on with sickness and disease. Old age burial / practices are not factored into modern living. She closer her eyes as I sat / down next to her, and all I could reflect on was numbers.”

In this collection, Zankel makes poetic space for women who defy societal conventions. In “At the Bottom,” she writes about a woman who decides to make her own life decisions and move to California, “on the coast.” Her reasons are unexplained, mysterious, and that mystery is why this poem will continue to haunt me long after I have read this chapbook. Zankel offers some explanation:

She must have lost her temper.
She made an awful decision,
and might have gone looking for it,
when she swam to the bottom of the sea.

Zankel’s gift for humor really shines in “Who Are They Who Are Watching Me Watch Them?” She begins,

Are they screwing? No, they will say they’re making love
in a sunlit room in the middle of an afternoon.
Each window in the whole house is wide open, and I can see everything!
I’m getting excited playing with the dog on top of the bed and laughing.

Witnessing the curtainless indiscretion of her neighbors, leads the speaker to ruminate on that big question of mortality: “We are all on that path to death, and yet some complain about it, like / after making love with someone. Some people pretend, avoiding sleep, / escaping whatever they can, not to mention it too loud.” After her musing, the humor comes roaring back in the final line: Get down off the bed, Walter! In this poem, Walter is not identified, adding layers to the humor.

What I Heard is one of the most original chapbook collections I have read. Zankel deftly interweaves humor, tragedy, and personal and collective experience with a unique voice and vision. Reading this chapbook is a rewarding experience with a speaker who comes across as a trusted friend.

Review of Maria Masington's Mouth Like a Sailor

November 10, 2021 Brooke Palma

Review of Maria Masington’s Mouth Like a Sailor

Mouth Like a Sailor

Parnilis Media

$11.95

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Abbey J. Porter

The cover of Maria Masington’s new book, “Mouth Like a Sailor,” hints at the poems beneath. In the vintage image, a woman in a sailor uniform casts a knowing look over her shoulder as a cigarette hangs from her lips. She is a study in contradiction: a woman in man’s garb, innocent but knowing, beguiling but bold.

Like that woman, Masington seems unafraid—to write about the hard stuff, the stuff that matters, the stuff that makes you want to look away. In 56 pages, this wide-ranging collection covers topics from addiction to aging, from family relationships to 9/11, always with a sensitive and masterful hand.

The book’s opening poem, “Snow White Walks Home from AA,” spins the well-known fairy tale on its head, referring to “the lie of ‘Happily Ever After.’” The idealized meets and mingles with gritty, imperfect reality.

She tries to remember their names, the Seven. She
knew them before the Fall. Happy, Doc, Bashful,
Sneezy, Restless, Irritable, and Discontented.

Paranoia and resentment penetrate this fairy tale-ish scene, producing a poem that is at once unexpected and freshly sacrilegious.

A similar juxtaposition of innocent and sinister takes place in “Clues.” Masington mixes the harmlessness of the game “Clue” with the suggestion of something far more disturbing.

It may have been Colonel Mustard…
or her weird uncle,
or one of her brothers.

She continues to drop hints, suggesting the “it” might have been with the pipe or candlestick of the game, “or an adult body, / or a Coke bottle.” Likewise, it might have taken place in the billiard room, “Or in the family camper, / or her own canopy bed.” The narrator, meanwhile, had only “foggy memories of / things she’d always known.”

I don’t know when a poem has produced in me as visceral a reaction as “Clues.” I squirmed; I shuddered. I got chills. The power of this piece comes partly from the writer’s restraint, from what she doesn’t say but instead leaves to the reader’s imagination.

The theme of addiction introduced in “Snow White” re-emerges in “Lullaby.” When, after hosting a party, her parents started fighting, “the girl in the flowered nightgown…found the / answer in the sink.” That answer was the remnants of alcoholic drinks.

The key was drinking just enough to feel safe. It worked
every single time, tucking her into a dream of happily-ever-
after, and the only thing she could count on.

The poet then tells us how the situation concluded—and projects us into the girl’s future: “Soon the parties stopped, and her parents split, but / it took two more decades for the booze to stop working.”

Addiction resurfaces in “Storm Windows,” in which a (presumably adult) child becomes “trapped between pains of / addiction and self-loathing…demon trapped within, / keeping him slave to the needle.” The addict’s mother is left praying for a pulse.

This is one of several poems about the narrator’s relationships with her children. In “Carnival Gold Fish Boy,” the narrator/mother says,

I was unprepared for a toddler correcting
my observation that the “fluffy” cloud,
was actually cumulus,
who read A Wrinkle in Time
in kindergarten and could do calculus
before he could ride a bike.

When she gave her precocious son a circus-themed box of animal crackers,

he stared at me blankly and asked,
“What am I supposed to do with this?”

I look down at him, then up to the heavens,
and asked the exact same thing.

Masington also writes about other family relationships. One particularly affecting poem is “My Father Was a Paratrooper in Vietnam,” in which the narrator describes her tough-minded father and the dynamics of her family as she grew up, including:

the only rule in our odd world,
“Bite the bullet, all ways, and always.”
No crying allowed.

As an adult, this narrator faces the prospect of telling her parents she is ill, knowing that even the telling goes against the family code, that “True alpha females put the pack first, / and slink off into the woods, to die alone.”

Masington writes with tenderness and sensitivity of what happens to bodies—and relationships—over time. In “Terrain,” for example, “she unrolls her body like a / brittle, ancient map” that is scarred by surgeries and time. Nonetheless, at the poem’s conclusion, “she curls herself around him / and whispers welcome home.”

The poet’s sense of humor, which threads itself subtly throughout the collection, surfaces fully in the prose-poem “Aqua Zumba at the YMCA.” The narrator relates that “We are invisible, women of a certain age, between hot and / doddering.” She describes the women’s “cellulite and stretch marks … / sturdy feet, corned and calloused.”

The narrator addresses a young male lifeguard: “I watch you smirk, laughing at the old broads / gyrating to Nicki Minaj.” She concludes:

But let me guarantee you something, Son...
Forty years ago you would have given your right arm to tap
this.

One could argue that this book is to some degree “feminine” in its perspective and sensibility. In addition to poems about the aging female body, some poems involve abortions, and one describes a hysterectomy. Yet I would say the collection is universal in its appeal and scope, and in the human issues at its heart.

The latter part of the book includes poems about AIDS and 9/11. A standout in this section is “Statistics of 9/11,” a gut-punch of a poem whose haunting power made me want to turn away and not look back.

Masington begins the piece with a quote from Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb.”

When you... step into the darkness of the unknown...
one of two things shall happen:
either you will be given something solid to stand on,
or you will be taught how to fly.

She then describes the actions of the people who, trapped at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center when a terrorist-controlled passenger plane crashed into it on September 11, 2001, chose to jump rather than burn to death.

Bodies folded into origami.
No net or parachute,
no 1,500-foot ladders,
just cement and parked cars.

The poem’s conclusion, though understated, lands hard: “The decision to control destiny / when denied wings.”

Fans of the great singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen will likely recognize the lines, “There is a crack…in everything / That's how the light gets in” (from Cohen’s song “Anthem”). Masington writes of her characters’ challenges and tragedies in a way that lets us appreciate not only their difficulty, but also their shining beauty.

Source: http://madpoetssociety.com/blog

Profession: Poet

November 9, 2021 Brooke Palma

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

The Treasures of Poetry

The year was1959 and I was a freshman at the University of Jerusalem. Standing in line at the bookstore, I noticed a small faded booklet on the floor. I offered to pay but the cashier said it was free because of its poor condition.

The book was Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry.

For me, it was an amazing reading.

The treatise was written a year before the poet’s death.

Shelly argues that poetry helps to advance civilization.

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.
Poetry is utilitarian, as it cultivates civilization by “awakening and enlarging the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand combinations of thought.”
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.

Shelley exalts poetry as part of the Romantic movement in the context of his elite education and immersion in classical poetry. He does not explain why poetry needs to be defended.

It is the pursuit of beauty.
Poetry is the experiencing of the rainbow of emotions.
Poetry turns everything to loveliness.
It merges the eternal with change.
Poetry reveals the happiest moments.

What would the world be without Shakespeare, Dante, or the translation of Hebrew poetry?

You could make arguments against poetry.

For example, Shelley presents an idealized concept of lofty poetry that may not be accessible or appreciated.

Also, you can argue that poetry:

presents nothing of utility
consumes time
causes frustration
proves too difficult.

We should consider that Shelley reflected and idealized the state of poetry five hundred years ago. Since then poetry has changed in content, technique, and presentation. Today, there is less emphasis on the classics and more on opening up a vast array of ideas.

For more on treasures of poetry, you can take a look at my previous four blogs.

I would like to broaden the discussion of poetry and its place in the world.

Looking at this poem below that I based on a Lea Goldberg poem, we can ask ourselves what function poetry serves in the world.

what shall we do with

dead stars
rusted screws and locks
hopeless optimists
wild rams
killer wasps
thorns scorpions and snakes
Sahara sandstorms
stupidity
feather clouds

love

and poetry?

I welcome your comments and feedback. What do you think poetry’s function and role is in the world?

Mad Poet of the Year - Ray Greenblatt (November 2021)

November 8, 2021 Brooke Palma

EXPERIMENT

by Ray Greenblatt

The dog’s nose follows
          the rolling red ball
                   across the grass
                              snuffling up nuances of every blade
until it halts in a cluster of weeds
          as still and tantalizing as a bone
                    where she searches out other dogs’ messages
                              other animals’ secrets.

The taut string of the boy’s kite
         points straight at heaven
                     in a blue he never ever glimpsed before
                              where if he sights along that line
                                        he might discover new comets
                                                  bright shining planets
that will quench his many questions
           his constantly expanding world
                     when even a high-flying dove
                              will be a thrill
                                        will become an Eureka!

While you and I loll on a blanket
          on a smooth lawn at Valley Forge Park
                    among plump perspiring peaches
                              wandering aromas of brie and cheddar
                                        a half-empty bottle of fine Chilean cabernet
creating high-wires of words between us
          on which balance shaggy stories
                    newly hatching philosophies
                              a tight-rope of intimacy
                                        wrapping round us in ever-weaving coils
                                                  festooned with moments of love.

For me life is experiment and discovery. An animal does it by instinct; a child tests boundaries. Two adults in an intimate relationship keep developing individually, but at the same time they are working on mutual growth: love binds them. Where this poem takes place reinforces the idea of birth and growth on a national level.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Catherine Doty

October 25, 2021 Brooke Palma

New Girl in Town
by Catherine Doty

Cross the street, Franny, if ever you spy
Joe Moe, whose hand-hewn tar paper
shack we approach on bets, or pitch chunks
of pudding stone at from moving cars.
You’ll want, too, to skirt Donna’s Uncles,
Drunk and Jolly, who’ll sneak through
your screen door with snow cones and try
to kiss you, and Ronnie Vee, who just got out
of Rahway (we’re not supposed to know
what got him there).

And Saint Ag’s School is an iron maiden
of dangers, though statues of saints peer out
of each dusky corner, and Jesus his plaster self
tops the entrance stairs, where one day he stared
at a second-grader’s vomit, hand held before
his exposed and flaming heart, as if to express
distaste for incarnation. Expect more shame
to be handed out than blessings, administered lavishly
both in word and deed: for girls, eighteen inches
of steel on open palms, for boys, once slung across
a nun’s black lap, lusty whacks on the seats
of their regulation pants.

So, that’s about it, Fran, except for that candy store
where the old guy gives out wax lips for Halloween,
and ends of cold cuts to the dogs he lets inside.
He’ll say, Sweetheart, you look pale, are you on the rag?
If you’re hungry, Franny, tell him yes. He’ll put his hand
on your stomach, and then on your forehead, then tell
you you’re clammy, then toast you a piece of toast.

How does a poem begin for you? Do you have any sort of process?
My poems begin when an experience, phrase or image intrigues me. When I recognize that desire to get to work I feel that the poem somehow already exists within me, though only hours of questioning, of writing and rewriting, of wandering every corridor of meaning, of experimenting with image and language and sound, of weighing, finally, the worth of each word, will, with luck, result in a piece of writing that is surprising, powerful, universal in its truth, and, I hope, thrilling to read.

I think humor is one of the most difficult poetic tools to effectively utilize and your poems often successfully use humor in tandem with darker themes. Do you have any advice for poets trying to utilize humor in their poems?
It’s going to be a whole lot easier if you’re a funny person. Like simile and metaphor, humor is something fundamental and intrinsic that informs a piece as it is develops, rather than something attached or added to a finished work. Also, humor in poetry ranges from the slyest, most subtle irony to flat-out slapstick. Since I often write from a child’s viewpoint, and children commonly see humor in what is tragic or too mysterious to make sense, so the dark and the funny do tend to hang out together in much of my work.

The term stand-up tragedy has been suggested to describe the business of poetry, and it is true that many of the earmarks and techniques of stand-up comedy are found there, including timing, specificity, hyperbole, sound, tone, and, most importantly, surprise. Finally, a sense of humor is an element that can be deepened and developed, though not taught.

Does your work with cartoons seep into your poetry?
I don’t find that my cartooning affects my poetry or vice-versa. The two disciplines share some fundaments—for example, successful cartoons and poems both derive strength from what is left out, that estuary between what one supplies to the reader and how the reader’s life experience affects it. Imagery, of course, is vital to both. It’s my intention that my cartoons perform as wordless stories, and that the imagery in my poems be more sensory and powerful than any illustration.

Your new collection, Wonderama, was released this past February. Your last collection, Momentum, was published in 2004. How was putting together this second collection different from assembling the first one?
Many of the pieces in my first book, Momentum, were chosen or developed from a pool of poems spanning decades. The poems in Wonderama, however, were written with a specific narrative trajectory in mind, though each is meant to stand alone as a satisfying and thoroughly realized experience.

The poems in Wonderama are grounded in place but I think even more so in exquisite details. How does memory and (possibly) altering memory play a role in crafting your work?
My memories, because they shape my view of the world, are the source of all my work, though the last thing I want to do is to place veracity over craft. No matter the depth of emotion in a poem, no matter how passionate the voice or how arresting the situation found there, literal truth is not what that makes the heart pound. Each poem is a form of propaganda, and each an exercise in manipulation. I know what I want the effect of a poem to be, and it’s cold calculation and a fierce attention to detail that get me there.

Where can readers find more of your book/buy your books?
My books can be purchased through CavanKerry Press, the University of Chicago Press, at most major retailers. Learn more at www.catherinedoty.com.

Catherine Doty is a poet, cartoonist, and educator from Paterson, New Jersey. She is the author of Wonderama and Momentum, volumes of poems from CavanKerry Press, and Just Kidding, a collection of cartoons from Avocet Press. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as an Academy of American Poets Prize and fellowships from The New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has taught poetry for many years in many, many places.

Just Kidding, Avocet Press, 1999 (cartoons)

Momentum, CavanKerry Press, 2004 (poems)

Wonderama, CavanKerry Press, 2021 (poems)

Profession: Poet

October 12, 2021 Brooke Palma

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

HUMOR: The importance of not being earnest

Humor can spice up your poetry. I don’t know how much attention you have paid to humor in poetry. Do you have any favorite poets who use humor?

Writing humorous poetry requires a change of perception, observation, and focus.

It begins with looking at the world with amusement and maybe a chuckle.

The basis of humor can be incongruence and wanting to release stress or fear.

As with any new skill, it requires learning new terms and practices.

Some elements of humor are:

irony
sarcasm
exaggeration
ridicule
wit
surprise
rhyme
incongruence
reversal
distortion of proportion
surprise
absurdity

We should be aware that humorous is not the same as funny.

While humor is a set of different language uses and is objective, funny is subjective and depends on the speaker as well as the audience’s sensitivity or lack of it. There are a few overlaps between the two such as exaggeration, irony and sarcasm.

Here are a few examples of humorous poems:

I sit at my grave and weep
Try hard not to fall asleep

Dan was always cranky
I thought I’d offer him a hanky

Ghosts have as a good a right
To love the night and fear the light

For me, a spider is delight
For you detest and spite

Enjoy the following prompts:

Challenge: rhyme it.
A cat on dog’s_________________.
There once was a porcupine_________________.
Wise and dull_________________.
Rain is pain_________________.
Purple can_________________.
Hollow brain_________________.

Humor is a whole different world. Explore, enjoy.

Mad Poet of the Year - Ray Greenblatt (October 2021)

October 11, 2021 Brooke Palma

THE GAME OF PATIENCE

by Ray Greenblatt

Funny, I met him at a barn dance
didn’t say much
slit always-darting dark eyes
soft brown eyes

did say he wanted to be with people
who sank their roots deep
he moved well
especially graceful hands
I knew then that he used guns.

I used to be a hairdresser in a salon
now I tend only to my own hair
put it up in fantastic folderols
          let it down like leaves
          like feathers
          mist from a waterfall,
I had all the children I wanted
when I had a school house,
I taught dancing too in a dance hall
          now I whirl around the kitchen
          in the arms of an invisible man
          dust rising to outline his shape.

When he is relaxed in my bed at dawn
          is my greatest happiness
his mustache
          a vole twitching in my palm
his body firm and smooth
chest hair in shape of a cross
          hard-calloused hands
          hard-calloused buttocks
his voice low whisper like wind,
when a woman loves a man
          --rare thing at that—
makes no difference what
          he does to get by.

Garden patch out back
goat in the field
some Rhode Island Reds in a shed
          tumbleweeds roll by
          cottonwood limbs creak
crow’s morning alarm
owl’s night warning
          down the lane my mailbox
          beside it a sign: Etta’s Place
a letter is more holy
          than the print in Scripture
I am the Red Queen learning to wait,
I mumble the chant
without being aware:
          I listen to the Moon Sing
          I watch the Sun Dance.

Paul Newman and Robert Redford are major actors in the history of American cinema. Their roles as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid especially endeared them to us. But I’ve been fascinated by the Kid’s girlfriend, Etta Place. Not many facts are known about this real person; the rest is hearsay. I wanted to create a back-story that gives dimensionality to this mysterious woman.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Emari DiGiorgio

September 20, 2021 Brooke Palma

Mercy & Dolores
by Emari DiGiorgio

Let me tell you about my tits
who I named just for this poem.

They’ve been called small many times–
mostly by men, who must’ve earned
this authority in naming breasts

from fathers or well-meaning mothers
who let their sons think they were the first mouths to gum those nipples. Yes,

it is common practice to name a gift:
a stuffed bear, a toy boat Santa’s sent,
but I wasn’t nursing those Dorito-stained

lips, wasn’t some after-school shake
to be sipped on the bus ride home
when Dan god-my-judge Rollins leaned over

the seat and said the only twin peaks
I see around here ain’t very steep.
Instead of ignoring him, I wish I’d said

these little bitches are black diamonds; no
I wish I didn’t feel that avalanche of hurt
in the valley between my breasts, wish

I didn’t wish them bigger. This boy,
whom I’d defended when others shamed
his father’s drunken bouts, would trade

my kindness to be part of this alliance
of boys and men telling me I’m less
because of the size of my breasts.

I want to make them mine, instead
of training them to be an image
of what I thought they must be: buds praised

with sunshine and water until they bloomed
full magnolias, petal-soft, leaking sweetness.
These handfuls are enough and not yours.

I’m taking them back from the still August air
of that windowless bedroom, from the man
who’d worry my nipple until it grew

dull to touch because he said as a boy
he stroked the mole on his mother’s neck
to put himself to sleep. Yes, I let him

use my nipple as a pacifier
because I didn’t know these tits were mine.
Neither did my female colleague at the job talk

who said just put your pretty little tits on the podium
and read nor the busty clerk who recommended
the ultra-padded Very Sexy Push-Up Bra.

I’m taking them back from every human
who’d stop and stare, who’d toss a penny
into the well between my milk-swollen

breasts with a wish to kiss or bury their face
and every radical sorrow in them.
My blessed-to-be-maternal-rivers-of-milk

and my-daughter-at-their-banks breasts.
My nipples-glittering-like-copper-coins

no-one-can-make-me-spend breasts:
twin sisters, mercy and pain.

How do you begin a poem? What is your process when presented with that all possible blank page?
Sometimes a phrase or line guides me. It might be something I overheard or read, and it haunts me like an earworm. Other times, I have an idea or feeling but no language to accompany it yet. In both cases, I often “announce” the line or the idea and permit myself to freewrite by hand in a journal or to literally talk about and through it as an audio-draft recorded as a voice memo in my phone. I have a bad habit of self-censoring, even responding to your interview questions; I revise and edit before permitting myself to move forward. My analytical self is loud-mouthed and confident. I have to silence her for my creative self to emerge. If I don’t start on a computer screen, I can undermine the perfectionist and play on the page or in the air. That’s where my best writing comes from, when I don’t know what I’m doing or how to control it.

Your work succeeds in exploring connections between personal and political without coming off dogmatic. What is your strategy for this tightrope walk?
For me, I don’t think it’s possible to write about the political without exploring my personal connection. If a writer explores some concept or historical moment as “other,” they’ve missed a real opportunity for discovery on the page and in their life, and those poems likely risk appropriation or objectification. I have to uncover why I want to write about a particular topic or moment in time, how am I part of this story/tradition/tragedy. That complicity is crucial in my mind and work, as a human and as a writer. These questions are not easily answered, especially when writing about histories of oppression and privilege, so I trust that the language and music of a poem will help me.

In addition to a poet, you are a yoga practitioner and teacher. Do you find there are connections between practicing poetry and practicing yoga?
When we talk about yoga, we often focus on the physical practice, the asanas, but yoga is much more complex. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras offers an eight-limbed guide to live with purpose and meaning, to acknowledge our connection with others and the natural and spiritual world. In that sense, I believe there’s a kinship between the practice and study of poetry and yoga. Both require deep listening and attention.

You recently became the director of Murphy Writing of Stockton University and host World Above: Open Mic & Featured Reading at the Noyes Arts Garage in Atlantic City. What are your goals when curating a space for writers? How does being enmeshed in a literary life effect your writing?
Whenever I’m curating a space for writers, whether it’s a community workshop or open mic or a more formal course at the University, my primary goal is to create a safe, inclusive space for participants to help them see themselves as writers and part of a writing community. This was vital to my own growth as a young poet, and I was so fortunate to be invited to attend Murphy Writing’s flagship program The Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway when I was nineteen. I firmly believe that the arts, whether literature, music, dance, sculpture, affirm our individual experience and connect us with each other, even when we come from very different backgrounds. There are poets among us everywhere–bagging groceries at Acme, teaching elementary subtraction, running the electric in a new home. I am grateful to provide opportunities for these lovers of language to gather, create, and share their work; and I am bolstered by these events, reminded #whypoetrymatters when so much of the world is cracked and broken.

What is your method when it comes to editing and revising your poems?
Because my initial drafting process produces unstructured prose, I will often experiment with formal constraints to help me revise. This might mean I rewrite the poem in a traditional form, such as a sestina or villanelle, or I might give myself some rules, such as couplets with seven-syllable lines. Then, I adhere to or abandon the form/rules I created in subsequent drafts. The use of form helps me overcome my narrative tendencies and experiment with sound and image. Ironically, formal structures help me play more in a poem.

Where can readers find more of your work? Buy your books?
You can find my books, sample poems, and interviews on my website: https://www.emaridigiorgio.com/. Check out my feature on NJ’s State of the Arts, too.

Emari DiGiorgio is the author of Girl Torpedo, winner of the Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and The Things a Body Might Become. Her poetry has received numerous awards, including the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, RHINO’s Founder’s Prize, and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. At Stockton, Emari teaches first-year writing and poetry, is the Faculty Director of Murphy Writing, serves as President of the Stockton Federation of Teachers. She is also a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ.

Profession: Poet

September 14, 2021 Brooke Palma

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

Writing Poetry of Fantasy and Dreams

You may want to go back and read the previous blog, as it will offer connections with this one.

This post will offer you prompts and methods to stimulate your imagination for creating new poems.

Set aside a quiet hour during a time you won’t be interrupted.

Get together a drawing pad or pieces of paper, crayons, markers, and inspiring music.

Consider Fantasia, the movie, to get your creative juices going, or another movie you can bring to mind that has a fantastical storyline and a magical landscape.

Look at surrealist paintings from artists such as Magritte, Klee, Dali, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and others who create imaginative, dreamlike worlds.

Have your drawing pad or paper ready.

These writing exercises may help you to break out of the style of poetry you usually write.

They provide an opportunity to concentrate on fantasy and dreams and use that imagery, terrain, and sensation in your poetry.

Remembering the last blog about the limbic brain, which houses the language of poetry, below are some prompts to start with.

Focus on the following phrases and write what comes to you with each one:
- Wonder
- No common sense/no logic
- Put aside the judge (your left brain)
- Mix up time and space
- Omit lines and words
- Surrealism
- Daydreams
- Imagination
- Symbolism
- Synesthesia (blending senses)
- Non sequiturs
- Incongruence
Here are some other methods to consider to open up your imagination and limbic brain.
- Read a foreign language poem aloud.
- Think about distant lands.
- Experiment with signs and symbols such as flags, banners, and runes.

In order to understand more , I suggest looking at the poetry of the great Indian poet, Kabir, especially his hilarious upside-down poems. Here is an excerpt from one:

The cow is sucking at the calf’s teat,
from house to house the prey hunts,
the hunter hides.

. . .
frog and snake lie down together,
a cat gives birth to a dog, . . .

You may also enjoy this excerpt from e.e. cummings:

in the middle of a room
stands a suicide
sniffing a Paper rose
smiling to a self

I would like to offer you a poem of mine where I used some of the above devices. This poem was published in Springtime in Moldova, by Kelsay books.

The house on Mill’s corner stretches its walls, yawns,
slides on mud to the creek.
The basement trades places with the attic.
Kids’ beds hang upside down.
They travel to Israel in their sleep.
The wind puts a French sign on 259 rue Ashbourne door.
Hydrangea in the front switches
with the azalea in the back.
The deck is stuck to the side wall.
Burglars get confused and surrender.
The owner is cited by the township
for numerous infractions.

In closing, I leave you with the following prompts and bid you creativity, play, and inspiration.

A pink elephant------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------in the black river
Purple wooden bird------------------------------------------------------------
A star split--------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes and no--------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------powerful blow-------------------------------
Red mud covers----------------------------------------------------------------
Sad painting-------------------------
No seams---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------sliding trees
A sad gorilla ----------------------------------------------------
Heart and lungs----------------------------------
Why because------------------------------------------
Icy fire------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Write a 4-6 line poem.

You may use the prompts.
Borrow any line from the poems we read above.
Mix up lines without thinking.
Or use guided visualization as a spring board :
- Close your eyes and imagine yourself on a mountainous road
- The wind blows hard
- Horses fly
- Elephants dance
- A pink crayon draws giant purple clown hats

I always welcome your questions and feedback.

Mad Poet of the Year - Ray Greenblatt (September 2021)

September 13, 2021 Brooke Palma

ROBINSON CRUSOE LIVED THERE

by Ray Greenblatt

At first he was stimulated by his nakedness. He ached for mirrors. After some time he wore his skin as a suit to filter the sun . . .

Sometimes he would sing and dance. Observers might think him crazy. They never did . . .

Wind was his friend cooling him, making shadows slide and shimmy. He would translate what the wind said . . .

He studied the minutest things. On the beach a tiny sand crab appeared out of a hole. Then he reentered his tunnel pulling it after him and disappeared. Ants in a spaced row carrying leaves like coolies to build a thatched hut. Birds with brilliant plumage forever flitting. They all held magic . . .

Every day he exercised his memory. Scraped up every speck and smudge of the past. For the future each word, letter, diary, tome would have to be stored on a specific shelf in his brain . . .

We all need gods. He shaped his god in the form of a ship. What if his savior arrived. Grew larger and larger on the horizon. Would he be awed or terrified . . .

At night he would float on his isle in the sea, on his own planet among the stars.

The fictional Robinson Crusoe lived on a desert island for 28 years. The real castaway—Alexander Selkirk—upon whom Daniel Defoe’s novel (considered by some critics to be the first English novel, 1719) is based lived there for 4 years—long enough! However the length of time, what would you do? I wanted to get inside a stranded person’s head and imagine. This piece turned out to be a prose-poem, because there is such a strong narrative line running through it.

Review of Alla Vilnyanskaya's Void

September 8, 2021 Brooke Palma

Review of Alla Vilnyanskaya's Void

Void

Thirty West Publishing House

$14.99

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Abbey J. Porter

Definitions of “void” include “the quality or state of being without something”; “a feeling of want or hollowness;” and, for the verb form, “nullify, annul.” It’s possible that poet Alla Vilnyanskaya had all these definitions in mind with the title of her recent book, Void.

The debut collection of the Ukranian-American Vilnyanskaya, Void tackles sobering themes, from conflicted relationships and violence against women to the fragility of life itself. Vilnyanskaya is unsentimental in her presentation; indeed, one perceives from her a sort of distance, a detachment. Yet her poems can stir and disturb, fascinate and haunt.

I’ll admit to finding Vilnyanskaya’s poems challenging. They take unexpected twists and turns, sometimes achieving a stream-of-consciousness quality. As a reader, one has the sense of peering through a hazy window; you have to work to untangle many of the poems’ intended meanings. But what’s clear are the poet’s intellect and wit, which shine through her work’s complex layers.

Vilnyanskaya announces the gravity of her content with her opening poem, “#2666,” which describes, in part, a woman’s murder and sodomy. “A numb sensation takes over/Nothing at the bottom of evil,” she concludes. The poem’s title adds to the sense that the murdered woman is an anonymous one among many.

The opening poem also introduces one of the book’s themes: the treatment of women. Rape is a recurring topic. In the prose poem “Pink,” Vilnyanskaya says,

I said no and it sounded like “Yes. Yes. Yes. Please take me, right
here. In fact, I would prefer it if we didn’t wear any clothing.” There
is a certain way that after a rape the sound of a woman’s voice
changes. She becomes an angel.

But some of the aggression toward women described in this collection is more subtle. The prose poem “Tennis Ball” includes the lines, “I was locked in a basement and forced to take the blame/for isolating myself. Women’s emotions are fraudulent.” Here, Vilnyanskaya suggests that women are made to internalize guilt for wrongs committed against them, and that their feelings—perhaps their objections—are invalid.

These various offenses against women are committed amid a troubled landscape, in which relationships are fraught. “Anniversary Gift” begins with “It’s like he is happy for me/He just loves me” and changes course, until he is “Sleeping alone/next to some new girl.” The poem concludes:

You shouldn’t have said five years.
You should have said tomorrow, or fifty.
Try saying tomorrow.

These lines seem to speak to the ultimate fragility and untrustworthiness of romantic partnerships. In “Cinderella: Master Class, Practicing on the Violin,” this fragility is echoed everywhere:

It takes special skill
to discern
that almost anything
may be ruined.

Indeed, in the world Vilnyanskaya describes, life itself is exceedingly fragile. She gives a nod to the effort required to sustain anything alive in “Homerun”:

I’ve always hated
plastic flowers,
but as I grow older
I realize that one
does not always
have the time
or patience
to sustain
a living thing

One of Vilnyanskaya’s skills is showing us just a glimpse of something and managing to imbue that glimpse with inordinate power and story. Perhaps the best example of this minimalism comes in the four-line poem “Encounter,” one of my favorites of the collection:

A boy bounces
a tennis ball in the street
he sees a car
turning

It took a few readings of this understated poem for it to reach its full impact, perhaps because it leaves so much for me, as the reader, to fill in. But once that happened and the poem sank in, it produced a haunting effect. I feel caught in the moment with the boy, poised on the edge of disaster.

This poem provides but one example of Vilnyanskaya’s sometimes-unsettling prowess. Anyone looking for a complex work that explores gender violence, the mutability of relationships and life, and much more might do well to enter Void.

This 96-page book ends with several pages of poems by Anastasia Afanas’eva in translation from Russian.

Source: http://madpoetssociety.com/blog