The Encantadas: Evolution and Emotion Poems by Karen Alkalay-Gut and Ezra Gut

Karen Alkalay-Gut

The Encantadas: Evolution and Emotion

Poems by Karen Alkalay-Gut and Ezra Gut

Simple Conundrum Press; Tel Aviv, Israel, 2014

ISBN: 978-965-7600-023; 69 pages; $25.00

Review by Joanne DeSimone Reynolds

In a mortar and brick bookstore, this volume would be an island among the aisles.

Part poetry, part pictorial. A travelogue, yes, but, with splashes of diary. A natural science text, Darwinian, a dose of Bible. And a parallel to Melville’s novella of the same name. The accompanying photographs, stunning in both color and range.

Imagine one of a nubby-skinned, spike-crowned, citron colored iguana, up close. Or another, of a Blue-footed Booby. Some of the earth’s oddest creatures staring out at you.

And the many images taken from greater distances, showing a netherworld natured Galapagos of “immense deluges of black naked lava” (from an epigraph courtesy of Charles Darwin). In a Shel Silverstein kind of way, the photographs, presumably taken by Ezra Gut, enhance the poems and entrance the reader.

But, the poems, floating aside the color-burst photos as they do, have an insistence all their own, much like the tourist-tame creatures they evoke. Included here, are two of the poems in their entirety. One from the lighter side of the collection that elicited a chuckle from this reader, followed by the introductory poem, a forthright look into the speaker’s mind:

          The Booby

          You wish it would be wiser than it is.

          You wish the eyes to be hiding a deep truth.

          But sometimes the status of “ancient”

          does not accompany the actions we admire.

          The amazing feet of the blue boobies

          are not even important enough to be moved aside

          when the bird shits. And a chick looks as smart

          as the mother who just hatched him.

          A Thought

  

          I wouldn’t want a paradise.

          Even in the Holy Book they knew

          it’s too simple just to be

          good, without judgments

          to make each moment

          a new encounter to encourage

          revision and insight.  Living

          as I do, equidistant from

          Armageddon and Gehenna,

          and not all that far from where

          the Bible places Eden

          my dreams teeter

          like a dinghy in high tide

          but with no shore in sight.

          But dream I do

How many Boobies have we met in our lives? How often have we wished one to be wiser? For “eyes to be hiding a deep truth”?  Chuckle or no, we have seen the Booby and He is us! in Pogo parlance, unable to get out of the messes of our own making. And as for the paradise the poet conjures, it is wholly rejected as a place of stasis in favor of the world as we know it. A place of choice. Of duality and ambiguity. Tensions out of which dreams arise and art is made and we become more fully conscious and human.

Many of the poems in this collection rely heavily on anthropomorphism. Dolphins “smile” from afar in the poem White Bellied Dolphin. Iguanas “clearly [listen] attentively” in Idle Gossip. Sinkers at best. But, to skip them would be like dismissing a child for less than stellar behavior. And it would be a shame to mistake something wondrous for a stone. In the poem Shells, for instance, the enormity of an animal’s armor evokes primal feelings, sending chills up the spine, “How the weird reptilian fear overtakes me.” And even in poems of lesser note, the reading experience opens up like a crevice under pressure when considered in relation to well chosen images. A Myriad of Constellations offers such a moment. The first lines “Behold:/a myriad of stars/appear in the equatorial sky” sound magisterial, even biblical in tone, but, deliver little in the way of the new, and the poem bobs somewhat in the doldrums. However, when our attention turns to the facing page, a photograph, Escher-like in its play of interlocking iguanas, spiny backs tipped in Van Gogh yellow as if electrified, sends us sailing.

Karen Alkalay-Gut is an award winning poet, a professor, and an editor. Born in London and raised in New York State, she now lives in Israel where this book was published, first in Hebrew and now in English. Having been involved in collaborations of a far flung nature, for instance, with the fashion enterprise Comme Il Faut, and one with the avant-rock musicians Roy Yarkoni and Ishay Sommer which produced an album entitled Thin Lips, this project, tethering the cross currents, the outcroppings, and the strange inhabitants of the Galapagos into a collection of poems as taught as nautical knots, makes perfect sense. I hope you consider it for its navigation of the formidable, fragile, frank, and fanciful. But, do not feel guilty if you find yourself lost in the glossies. And for heaven’s sake, don’t hide it from the kids! The book is meant to be shared, with its eye-popping photographs and thoughtful poems, as enchanting as the archipelago it describes.  

The Hastings Room Reading Series presents David Ferry Wed Nov. 4th 7PM (First Church Congregationalist 11 Garden Street, near Harvard Square)

The Hastings Room Reading Series      

presents

D a v i d   F e r r y

The February 2000 issue of The New Criterion includes a poem by Rachel Hadas with the tile “Reading David Ferry’s poems.”  The tribute heralds a special year for Mr. Ferry, seeing the publication of his translation of Virgil’s Eclogues. That year he would also win the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize from the Library of Congress for his book Of No Country I Know published the previous year.

     The opening of Rachel Hadas’s poem evokes, very appropriately, the classical image for poetic speech, recalling Pindar, Horace and Virgil, of a fountain or spring, the excellence of water for is clarity and fluency. Hadas wries,

            The words run clear like water in these poems.

            The fluency feels generous and easy,

            naturally eloquent, carrying in its current

            grains of incident and meditation.

            Many tiny facets briefly flash

            before they are carried downstream…

W.S. Merwin has noted similar qualities for David’s poetry, the “assured quiet tone” that conveys “complexities of feeling with unfailing proportion and grace.”

     Lines, such as the opening to the poem “That Now Are Wild and Do Not Remember”—“Where did you go to, when you went away”; or, like these from “The Crippled Girl, The Rose”—

            It was as if a flower bloomed…         and

            The rose reserves the sweetness that it yields

strike us as blossoms themselves of the old poets Ferry as an educator and translator has much lived with. They are “poetic” lines, which locate Ferry with the likes of W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, James Merrill, Richard Wilbur and John Hollander, the 20^th and 21^st Century practitioners not just of the English line but of its sensibility and sense of mild ironies and enduring graces. So from the evidence of his original poetry, it is not difficult for readers to trace David back to the crime of his translations.

     In the July/August 2001 Poetry magazine, then editor Christian Wiman made revealing remarks about David’s poetry, in honor of presenting the poet with that year’s prestigious Ruth Lily Poetry Prize. Wiman noted, “David Ferry’s poetry has little in common with the current style.” “We live in a time,” says Wiman, “of obvious, even aggressive assertions of style… the eccentric is prized.” Yet, Wiman continues, “willed eccentricity is doomed from the start; it’s only the unconscious strangeness, the style formed and deformed by necessity, that’s compelling.” “Wise passivity” is another noted quality of David’s, much in line with Rachel Hadas’s perceptions of his poetry as “generous and easy,/naturally eloquent…”

     While David carries on the identity of a cultural inheritance, as though it were genetic, one of his recurring themes involves a recusant awareness of this fact, creating a strange sense of paradox, magnificently expressed in the opening lines of his poem “Ellery Street,” a direct critique of the “eloquence” of poetry (or “the songs we sing”), the lines themselves caught red-handed with eloquence:

            How much too eloquent are the songs we sing:

            nothing will tell how beautiful is the body…

In light of a tendency in the poetry to hold in on glimpses of the body that are not so beautiful—scarred legs, trembling hands—this line “nothing will tell how beautiful is the body” at once is a statement of potential irony about our perceptions of beauty, and also a sort of infrared beaming through the faculties of language itself. The signs are all potentially misleading; the appearance of things and our words for them are inadequate for the joy and love others bring us.

     In his introduction to Ferry’s most recent book, Ellery Street, published by the Grolier Established Poets Series, editor Ifeanyi Menkiti speaks beyond the technical and tonal expertise, to the poet’s psychological exploration of and “way of managing the breakdown of our powers and affections, so that all is not lost.” This is insightful. In his own passive and ever humble manner, Ferry bears a solemn courage in confronting certain breakdowns, as in his beautiful epigrammatic poem “In Eden” :

            You lie in our bed as if an orchard were over us.

            You are what’s fallen from the fatal boughs.

            Where will we go when they send us away from here?

Here again the paradox: the poetry of anti-poetry. Most commonly a poet of the first two lines of “In Eden” is going to try to reassure this gasp of astonishment at approaching sleep with some image to reassure us of our successful “translation,” perhaps as a constellation amid the stars. Yet it is the moment before such a poetic stroke, the feeling of sinking and sinking without knowing, that Ferry chooses to make vivid in the poem. It’s spoke plainly enough – “Where will we go…” – yet in its context is perhaps every bit as striking as the image of Achilles dragging Hector’s lifeless cadaver around the walls of Troy. The simple question of bewilderment and Homer’s image each ask: What do we do with this wonder of our humanity?

     A moment ago, we mentioned Christian Wiman’s comments about “unconscious strangeness” and the pressure of necessity on form. These harken back to the qualities of  Ferry’s breakthrough work to national recognition with his version of the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh in 1992. It is one of the oldest literary works in Western Literature, originally composed in cuneiform, at the same time as the oldest parts of the Bible. As William L. Moran wrote, Ferry’s epic “is not a translation of a Sumerian original. It is, rather, a highly selective and creative adaptation and transformation of what we find in the earlier works.” Those works included linear translations incapable of imaginative unity. While other freer adaptations made critical departures from the contextual probabilities of the original.

     Richard Poirier noted, “The poetic splendor and sublimity of David Ferry’s Gilgamesh is entirely of his own making… his great poem is no more indebted to earlier versions of its story than is anything of Shakespeare’s to North’s Plutarch.”

     A large part of this accomplishment lies in the establishing and sustaining of a large narrative voice capable of dramatic emotion, such as the fear of the people for their ruler, Gilgamesh, who is supposed to be their protector.

            There was no withstanding the aura or power of the Wild

            Ox Gilgamesh. Neither the father’s son

            nor the wife of the noble; neither the mother’s daughter

            nor the warrior’s bride was safe. The old men said:

            “Is this the shepherd of the people? Is this

            The wise shepherd, protector of the people?”

            The gods of heaven listened to their complaint.

            “Aruru is the maker of this king.

            Neither the father’s son nor the wife of the noble

            is safe in Uruk; neither the mother’s daughter

            nor the warrior’s bride is safe. The old men say:

            “Is this the shepherd of the people? Is this

            the wise shepherd, protector of the people?

            There is no withstanding the desire of the Wild Ox.”

Interrupted by neither textual fragmentation nor fanciful detours, Ferry’s version traces the problem of the hero-king’s unbearable rule—tyranny—to his humanization through friendship and grief with mysterious encounters in the spirit world. The visitations convincingly remind Gilgamesh of his humanity and its frailty, his need for compassion to deal with other humans. The way Ferry has worked out the theme, with great attention for a neutral yet compassionate voice, line for line over 90 pages, attests to the marvel of this poem. Its “unconscious strangeness” ranges dizzily in the mind with affirmation of our ever elusive, uncanny albeit wholly human experience with death. Its ability to speak to us in this way accounts for the story’s long preservation. It challenges the undeniable authority of everything “present,” like a photo of the earth from the moon.

Women Musicians Network 19th Concert Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 8:00 pm

Photo taken March, 2015. Photographer: Caroline Alden. Singer: Nadia Chechet

Women Musicians Network 19th Concert

Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 8:00 pm (doors 7:30)

Berklee Performance Center

By Kirk Etherton

        One great thing—or problem—about my living here in "Greater Somerville" (which includes Boston) is that there are always so many very good events, it's easy to miss something great.

        The W.M.N. concert, usually held in March, is truly a great thing. I've seen at least the past 12 shows, and I won't miss this one.

        What sets this event apart is always the exceptional level of diversity, plus very fine musicianship.

        Women Musicians Network is a student club at Berklee College of Music. Somerville resident Lucy Holstedt (also a Berklee professor and the club's co-founder and faculty advisor) directs and hosts the concert.

        Every time, the focus is on women students and their bands from around the world. There are plenty of guys performing, too, but the spotlight is on women—as composers, bandleaders, rock guitarists, you name it.

        I got to hear "audition tapes" from all of the 11 original acts chosen to perform on Nov. 10—from jazz and blues to gospel, folk, and fusion. Here is some of what impressed me the most.

        1. Olivia, a composer and pianist from Spain, doing a Spanish / Indian fusion piece along with an Indian singer and a sitar player.

        2. Shir, a woman from Israel who has an amazing vocal range, leading her "electro-pop" tune. (It would be difficult to describe, without losing most everything in translation.)

        3. Mariana, a pianist / guitarist / singer-songwriter from Portugal, doing a very beautiful, original song in her native language.

        4. Gretchen, guitarist and vocalist from Chile. She leads a mostly male band; her singing on the rock tune she composed brings to mind some of the most powerful and affecting female vocalists of the past 40 years.

        That's four of the 11 acts. I could go on and on, but space is limited. Besides, music doesn't come across very well in a newspaper.

        I should mention that most of these women arrive at Berklee with significant musical credits. Natalia has a great Andean folk-based tune that's doing very well on the radio charts in her native Columbia. Some of these "college students" have already taught in universities, and performed around the world.

        Special guests this year are three Berklee professors, also doing original material. Christiane Karam, concert co-director, will be leading her Pletenitsa Balkan Choir.

        The concert starts at 8:00 pm and ends at 9:30 pm, which I feel makes it an extremely efficient international music festival.

Women Musicians Network 19th Concert

Tickets: $8 in advance / $12 day of show

www.berklee.edu/BPC

Box office: 617.747.2261

Somerville's Jane Sherrill: An Artist Who Is All About Water

By Doug Holder

Somerville artist Jane Sherrill thrives around water. Most recently her sculpture and art has revolved around oceans, icicles and the shadows they produce. Sherrill has been producing art for many years now and she is a longtime resident of the Vernon St. Studios in Somerville. I talked with her amidst the din of the Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square.

Doug Holder: You have worked in many different forms: painting, sculpture, etc...You are self-taught. Are there any disadvantages to that?

Jane Sherrill: Yes. You don't have teachers to help you get grants and better shows. But it also pushes you to be more creative. It has been up to me to teach myself how to draw. So I found my own way of doing things.

DH: You had another life before painting.

JS: I had a few lives before painting. I taught emotionally disturbed and learning disabled children. I was a psychiatric social worker, and a graphic designer. I also did some performance art based on temp jobs I held.

DH: Recently I heard that you completed a series of pictures of the pre-Sandy New Jersey shore.

JS: Yes. I took some pictures in Point Pleasant. I completed some very large paintings using these photos. There are 5 in the series. Right before I finished them Hurricane Sandy plowed through.

DH: Why did you choose New Jersey beaches?

JS: Here is the thing. I started a series of paintings about the ocean. I did this because I love the ocean. I worked on the large sense of the ocean and the tiny details, like droplets. I was aware that beaches are very different. I mean the color of the water varies from Cape Cod to New Jersey. I visited different beaches. I wanted to document that in the face of climate change. But what really inspires me is my awe of all of this. Oceans are stunning. And from this I have gone into cloud and sky. And people are telling me after they look at my paintings they are looking up at the sky all the time. I want people to look at this gorgeousness.

DH: How long have you been at the Vernon St. Studios?

JS. Over thirty years. There are people who have been there longer. It is a wonderful place. The only problem is that everybody is so busy that we don't get together as much as we did years ago.

DH: Can you tell me about your icicle project?

JS: This past year I was accepted into the Vermont Studios. I went up to Johnson, VT. It was bitter cold. One morning it was 27 below. The studio was beautiful. I walked in and I noticed that windows were covered with icicles. I came up with no set idea of what I wanted to work on. Then I began to draw the icicles. I also started to trace the shadows they made. I also decided to paint the icicles. I also made sculptures from hot glue.

DH: You were in the poetry scene in New York City some years ago.

JS: Years ago. I read at St. Mark's Church—and in a theatre in Hell's Kitchen—among other venues. My poetry was very performance based. I was touted as the new Patti Smith. (Laugh) It was the late 70s. I still love to write. It is wonderful to work with words. Now that I am on Facebook I write poetic vignettes.

DH: Do you make your daily nut from your art?

JS: I do a number of things to get by. I sell may paintings; I do graphic design and in the past I have taught everything from the Torah in Hebrew School and substitute taught. It ain't easy.

Go to: http://wwww.janesherrill.com for more info.

Stable Poems by David R. Surette

David R. Surette

Stable
Poems by David R. Surette
Moon Pie Press
Westbrook, Maine
www.moonpiepress.com
ISBN: 978-0-9861524-2-9
50 Pages
$12.00

Review by Dennis Daly

These animal poems by David Surette, in his new collection entitled Stable, paw and hoof their paged-out floor and signal with enormous eyes the kinship and mutual dependency of all life’s creatures. They exhale a wonderfully natural sentimentality found, as much as we like to deny it, in our double helixes. The often postulated biblical responsibility that goes with humanity’s seemingly endowed dominion over lesser beasts pervades each verse and connects the poet to surrounding family, friends, and acquaintances in sometimes surprising ways.

Opening the collection with Aquarium, a poem that delves into the well-worn template of the soft-hearted tough guy, Surette personalizes the character type and utilizes the most unlikely life forms as objects of the proffered kindnesses. He also seems intent on making a point about altruism. The hero of the piece, the poet’s brother, uses good heartedness as a survival strategy that clings inseparably to the laudable acts of compassion. Initially speaking of his brother’s pet turtles, the poet explains,

They didn’t last long, and sometimes
their eyes swelled shut or their shell grew weak.
Steve learned what to do to save them,
fed them what they needed
and even bought drops when their eyes swelled.
He had fish too, guppies and gourami and African frogs.
This didn’t fit with the hockey Steve,
The fierce, quick tempered defenseman
or the Steve I saw in the empty lots by school
fighting all comers, throwing lefts
when they expected rights.

Defeat and life’s limits Surette muses on in After Watching the Bruins, a pointedly didactic poem with a message of stoicism. The poet’s dog, Maggie, acts the part of the wise teacher and Surette ties the dog’s lessons and the commonality of human failure neatly together in a splendid conclusion. The piece opens with the dog adapting quickly to human foolishness,

I walk Maggie to Devir Park.
At home plate, I set her free and
watch her round up imaginary sheep.
Once, while she ran through the outfield,
I hid behind a tree. She searched
the park as if it was a grid.
it took a while, but she found me.
The next night I hid again.
She went to the middle of the field
and sat until I showed myself.

Building a stable requires plans, wood, a quirky sense of humor and, most of all, an ability to hold one’s tongue in the face of studied provocation. The humor sneaks up on the reader in Surette’s poem entitled The Sawmill. Here’s part of the set-up,

He leads me down the hill
to the sawmill which looks
like it’s either half built
or half falling down.
I don’t ask.
In the center
a buzzsaw
so huge I expect
to see Pearl Purebread
tied down waiting for Mighty Mouse.
The whole operation is run
off the engine of an ancient pickup truck,
the belts stretch from it to the saw,
a liability nightmare.
I keep that to myself too.

Surette’s poem The Border Collie etches itself into one’s sense of other. It’s my favorite piece in the collection. The loyalty and responsibility of the poet’s dog in the face of adversity inspires awe, just as it triggers suspicion. How much should you anthropomorphize another species, especially one directly descended from wolves?  Those loving and shame ridden eyes do, after all, have crosshairs built in. But, yet, the connection of touch and the space of separation translate into friendship as true as anything found in humanity. Our kind, after all, are killers too. Suspicion pervades all higher levels of civilization. Surette considers a bestial possibility,

Rowdy cowers at every harsh word,
assumes all our guilt.

He stares when it’s time to work,
Turns away when the stare is returned.

I can’t lie down in his presence,
refuses to rise in our home’s hierarchy.

I wonder if he’s just playing me … 

In The Back Yard, a sturdy yet modest piece of five couplets, Surette suggests an invisible dream-world of Hadean shades leaving hints of its reality in natural decomposition. The imagery stuns with a strange combination of putrescence and hagiography. The saint involved is Veronica, who famously wiped the face of Jesus during the crucifixion passion. The poet identifies his numinous image after mowing the grass,

A young fox on its side. Fully furred. Empty eyes.
Legs extended like it died dream-running.

I fetched a shovel from the shed, pried it off the grass.
Under, the bugs had eaten him to the bones, his skeleton marvelous.

He left a shadow on the grass
like the cloth of Veronica.

A superb metaphor for the human heart, Stable, the title poem of this collection, invites hard work and life-affirming postures. Human beings need their tools, but nothing comes easy. The poet’s self-made stable is neither square, nor plumb. However with each added stall the artistry improves, as true in carpentry as it is true in poetry. Yet life rarely proceeds in an orderly fashion. Tragedy occurs more often than not. The poet’s family recommits to life,

A winter night, Stanley,
the Percheron/quarter
horse rolled in pain,
knocking down the walls of the first stall,
but it didn’t fall on him and kill him, but he died
the next day anyway.
I tacked up a picture of our remaining horse
at the feed store,
hoping for a fair price.

Then the girls bought two foals.
I rebuilt that damaged stall from the studs up.

Like his honestly constructed stable Surette’s collection of poems shelters wonderful qualities of fauna-nurture and pantheistic understanding that will endure the mercurial fashions of today’s poetic art.

COME DANCE UPON THE MOON’S BRIGHT EDGE Contemporary Poets Talk and Waltz…

COME DANCE UPON THE MOON’S BRIGHT EDGE 
Contemporary Poets Talk and Waltz…

by Diane Smith

Sure, everyone remembers how Arthur and Ford were tortured with grueling Vogon poetry in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Don’t despair.  Our contemporary poets take us through the Milky Way minus the word-boarding, speaking to new platforms in contemporary poetry—not so distant from glyphs on a cave wall.   Themes and use of language, along with cross-cultural styles shift with the landscape.

Aside from the obvious changes, new platforms for poetry are cropping up daily.
“Installation poetry is displayed on public spaces like subway stations, parks, the side of a building, sidewalks... Poets are branching out,” Doug Holder, Founder of the Ibbetson Review Press and arts/editor of the Somerville News in MA said.

Holder’s poem encompasses elements of the contemporary poetry scene; free verse, eloquent language, strong cultural identity—as reprinted from Grey Sparrow Journal.

The Bronx 1965

All those ancient Jewish women on lawn chairs—as I walked by they pinched my cheeks as if I was a piece of prime meat. "Such a nice boy, he is Minnie's grandson," they crowed. These old women—once their now deflated breasts—fed their children shtetl milk. And in the hall of my grandmother’s building—a waft of Eastern European cooking—I could Daven—like a religious man: "kishka, herring, schmaltz, borscht, flanken, blintzes, chopped liver...amen." My grandmother—senile— scolded my father, "You went all over Europe, you were a playboy!" My father replied: "Ma! I was in the army—World War II!" "A playboy, a playboy," she muttered. Uncle Dave, a rare book dealer, Homburg hat, cane, never cracked a smile, a brilliant bald head under the lights—started out selling books on pushcarts in the Lower East Side— "I had to make a living," he explained—called George Gershwin—"A good kid." He grew up with him—urchins darting up and down the street, roasting spuds in back alleys—there was music—Klezmer, Jazz, the neighs of horses, the come-on from peddlers, prayers on tenement rooftops, the cooing of pigeons on fire escapes...
                                                                                                                                                            
 —Doug Holder

While installation art is one dimension that speaks to the contemporary landscape, book art offers softer decibels in terms of distribution for the poet.

A poetry or prose book may become a container to hold and to communicate.  How that’s done is a critical issue with book art, Jill S. Weese, former director of youth and community programs, artist and current volunteer at Minnesota Center for the Book Arts [MCBA] explains.

“Book arts include both the traditional crafts that go into making books and the creative art process.  That’s when you may get into the sculptural piece [such as the mushrooms on the wall.] Book art is such a broad field. It presses the boundaries of what a book is perceived to be, Weese said.

While new platforms offer creative space for poets, themes are constant as well as changing.

Poetry has been and continues to be either private (domestic) or public (political), M.J. Iuppa, poet and lecturer in creative writing at St. John Fisher College, said. The landscapes, that is the poetry of place gives us regionalism, whereas the political takes on protest in an inclusive and far-reaching call to action.

“Often, I tell my students that the nineteenth century, especially after 1870, the trend in poetry was “The good will be rewarded and the bad will be punished”; twentieth century’s trend was “Sometimes the good don’t get what they deserve;” and currently, I think the trend is a divide on what is and isn’t authentic, and that in itself is debatable,” Iuppa said. (Iuppa’s poetry follows.)

Nothing Ever Dies

In the middle of autumn
do you hear yellow explosions?
                              ~Pablo Neruda

It’s no longer surprising when summer begins
to crinkle at its pinked edges, and in spite of rain,
nothing smooths out, supple and green as a field
of wheat swelling in wind’s constant indecision.

Over and over, and over, everything appears to be
the same.  Yet, all of our life, it’s been a subtle
expectation— something will change by the way
the sun shifts in the sky. We sense the second

it happens: that gush of light in heady marigolds;
the heavy scent of moss and yellow leaves set
loose in the weight of our steps. We’re pleased
by this ticklish thrill. Nothing ever dies. 
                                                 —M.J. Iuppa

Thomas R. Smith, poet and teacher at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, buzzes on contemporary themes in poetry.

“Though the academics still have a strong hold on the college-based literary journals, the online world is a dizzying profusion of sharply and often cultishly defined styles and movements. Sometimes I think this is a good thing, and at other times a bad thing, and at still other times a neutral thing.   All the tiny new isms of poetry need to find ways to talk with each other if American poetry to live up to its great democratic history.”

Smith’s poetry [in memoriam] in 7 quatrains and a single line, in free verse, offers historical context from 9/11:

People Falling

It¹s one thing to watch the explosions
on TV, the smoke flagging its black
united nations of grief, hydrangeas of
flame in horrible exfoliation,

but another to see the photographs
of the people who chose to jump
rather than suffer incineration in that
relentlessly collapsing inferno.

Thirteen seconds to drop from the upper
stories, hitting pavement not with a moist
meat-thud but the dry, almost metallic
fury of every fiber shattering . . .

During the Cuban missile crisis,
Dylan sang, Let me die in my footsteps
before I go down under the ground.  That song
comes back to me while staring at a Time

Magazine photo in which, very high up
and small, a man and woman hold hands
as they plummet past the windowless, sheer
wall that can do nothing to help them,

that in fact can do nothing to prevent
its own falling, soon to follow.  Lovers?
Friends?  Or merely strangers brought together
by desperation in the last minutes of life?

How your leap, leaving behind everything
but the touch of another¹s hand, tears
my heart open again, that was closed
by fear and anger, my heart that is torn

and held together by your hopeless clasp.

                                —Thomas R. Smith


“People are starting to incorporate more language from the world of computers and the Internet. Daniel Y. Harris, the president of the board of New York Quarterly Books, is a pioneer in the incorporation of computer language,” Holder said.

Harris’s poetry rich with metaphor and contemporary language follows:

The Bug in the Bait File*
 
An ecclesia of wings
enters ear
and net 

Trojan or worm

replicates
deadlock by

a bit rot glitch
of a software
gland

in a handle leak—

Heisenbug,
Bohrbug,
Mandlebug,
Schroedinbug, 

fandangos on the core
before a patch
signals to the cargo
cult

leaving
blank.

*Hyperlinks of Anxiety (Cervena Barva Press, 2013)

-Daniel Y. Harris

Platforms, themes, language have seen major changes along with Cross-cultural poetry.

“There's a beautiful confluence in the literary ecosystem where writers, readers, critics and publishers engage in an unending and exciting conversation on new works, or new concerns pushing at the limits of our literary consciousness,” Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingde, global poet in Singapore said. 

Zhicheng-Mingde’s lyrical prose poem follows:




in aeternum :: into eternity

An awkward plant that tilts out from under the grass.   It looks like the pedestrian on the embankment, keeping unnaturally still.  As if frozen in time, in mid-thought, like Laotzu dreaming of Zhongdian.   “I saw Shangri-La once,” the woman beside him says matter-of-factly.   “I lived in a Tibetan house.   I ate at their table, slept in all day because of the cold.”   This could be Shuodu Hai or Haba Village, no one can be sure.   There are no landmarks.   Only vast tracts of land, and a range of mountains only the locals tell apart, and name, intimately as if calling out to a friend.   The tree behind the guesthouse has drooped its branches to nearly touch the ground, the ground dry and cracked all the way to the pond of ice.   At the edge of the cliff, another tree, an old willow, grows out into the mist.

                                                                                                     Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingde

“This robust dialogue is always welcome.”  Zhicheng-Mingde said.

Diane Smith is the founder of the Grey Sparrow Press and Journal.

On Earth and in Hell By Thomas Bernhard

 


On Earth and in Hell

By Thomas Bernhard

Three Rooms Press

$19.95

Review by Thomas Gagnon

If Thomas Bernhard’s poems were paintings, they would be German Expressionist, emphasizing distortions of objective realities to convey subjective feelings (think of The Scream by Edvard Munch, not German but a definite influence on Expressionism). While, in 1957, the free verse of Bernhard’s poems is hardly renegade, his distortion of realities is much more so. It provokes.

A majority of Bernhard’s poems feature repetition, of words or phrases. This is impossible to miss. It is likewise impossible to miss what he is repeating: “decay,” “die,” “shadows,” “black blooms,” or “black is the grass.” It appears that Earth is Hell, with no salvation in sight. The joylessness of such a world begins to have a deadening effect, when, about halfway through the collection, there comes a different sort of repeated phrase: “I embroider.” And so he does. Bernhard is a maestro of language, which allows him to describe and claim his world. In one memorable image, he speaks of “a father who drove the northern storm like a beast/through the intestines/of Scandinavian cold.” (69) How vividly repellent! Mind you, Bernhard’s world is not always repellent, not “In My Mother’s Garden,” where 

 

The night is warm and my limbs

emanate my green ancestry,

flowers and leaves,

the call of the blackbird and the clack of the loom. (193)

Here, Bernhard “embroiders” a pastoral and domestic image. Language saves.

Bernhard does, however, accentuate the negative. If a poem begins with any joy or exuberance, it goes sour soon. In the second poem, a great-grandfather, apparently beloved by many, “wouldn’t give me a scrap of bacon/for all my despair,” and that’s the end of that. Others of his poems are (what I’d call) anti-Psalms. Most obviously, his poem “Nine Psalms” doesn’t particularly resemble the Psalms at all, apart from addressing the Lord. These are verses not of praise, faith, or exultation, but of anger, despair, and poverty. Many of Bernhard’s poems are anti-Romantic, in the sense that Romantic poetry often celebrated Nature. In his poetry, Nature is destructive. It is all “black”: “black chests of country earth,” “black woods,” “black grasses,” “black hills,” “black sun,” and so on. Nor does Nature nurture. This is most dramatic in the opening lines of “Summer Rain”: “Cease, you birds/no evening/comforts me…” (123) Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Wordsworth!

One of Bernhard’s poems, “At Twenty-Six,” brought to mind the Romantic poet, Lord Byron, who wrote the four-line poem, “On my Thirty-Third Birthday.” Unlike Byron, Bernhard has a lot to say about aging, that is, a lot of specifics:

Twenty-six years

among beer drinkers, saints, murderers and madmen,

in the city and in the swollen villages…

staggering from Christmas to Christmas…

Even Byron’s longer poem “Growing Old” is not so specific—witty but not specific. Anyhow, the vividness of “At Twenty-Six” redeems what might otherwise be a deadening dirge. Once again, language is the savior.

Bernhard makes big leaps. Often, he will lament the transience of existence. At another time, he will suddenly endow a character in a poem with thousands of years, or, once, with “hundreds of millions of years.” Often, he talks of decay and dying, and then he talks of glory and immortality—once in the same poem (“Into a Carpet Made of Water”). There is rarely a place between these extremes. “Chioggia” could well be the only poem evoking an everyday content (in one of my frankly favorite lines, “They scoop the sand from the skiff/and lie in the boat at night…”).

Safe to say, one would not confuse Bernhard’s Austria with the Austria of The Sound of Music. There is no edelweiss to greet you every morning, no vigorous nuns climbing ev’ry mountain. Nonetheless, there is a charm and a sweetness that emerges toward the end of this collection. There is a wise father and a nurturing mother; there are ever-present devoted ancestors. Even in a harsh world—and Bernhard presents a very harsh world—a home, it seems, can still be found.