I'm sure my publisher would rather I not do this, but I've had several people ask me where they can see the poem "So Norman Died, Of Course," which received a Special Mention in the new Pushcart Prize Anthology, so I'm going to post it here. Of course I'd prefer that you buy a copy of "The Fractured World" from the Main Street Rag online bookstore at http://www.mainstreetrag.com/store/books.php. You could also buy a couple of the other fantastic books MSR has published recently. My personal favorites have been Irene Honeycutt's "Before the Light Changes," Paul Hostovsky's "Bending the Notes," Sara Claytor's "Howling on Red Dirt Roads," and Joanna Catherine Scott's "Night Huntress" (maybe that plug will defuse the publisher's anger a bit). The poem first appeared in the now defunct "Charlotte Poetry Review," edited by A.J. and Lisa Jillani (true patrons of poetry), so it's no longer available in any other print form. Anyway, here is the poem.
So Norman Died, Of Course
So Norman died, of course,
like everyone, but being
Norman, of course,
he couldn’t die like everyone.
He couldn’t die no
ordinary death.
He had to die
all over the place at once.
He had to die
all into things.
He had to spread himself out
like a warm day
and lie there like everyone
dying, slowly turning
into something else.
So he left his fingers
on the ground and they
turned into earthworms
and wriggled away.
And he let his ears
fly free, the wings
they’d always wanted
to be. And he let his eyes
roll into the ocean
to become pearls
held tight in oysters’
clamped shut shells.
His hair spun itself
into spider webs
that stretch across your face.
His skull opened itself
for chipmunks and night things
to nest in. His face
became a flower with one eye
that winked open
in the morning, winked
closed at night.
His leg became a persimmon
branch, its unripe fruit
turning your mouth
inside out. His heart
hardened into stone.
His bones picked themselves up
and wandered to the river
and threw themselves in
and flowed downstream
until a beaver gathered them
together for his dam.
His lips turned into blades
of grass that whistle
with every breeze.
His arms transformed
into wild lime trees,
covered with spines
and yellow fruit,
inviting, forbidding,
letting nothing go easy.
His tongue flew into the wind
and was never heard from again.
His skin had grown so thin
it easily changed into birchbark
and started peeling away.
And his hand,
his hard right hand
which never learned to hold
anything gently turned into
a leaf that held wind,
rain, sunlight upon it,
then let everything go.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
You Just Had to Be There
You Just Had to Be There
“Musings” for November 12
On October 10 I attended my very first Poetry Day at Catawba College, sponsored each year by the Poetry Council of North Carolina. And all I can say about it is, “Wow! What an experience.” Don’t get me wrong; this was not my first poetry event, far from it. Over the years, I’ve probably attended 500 readings and 4 dozen conferences, workshops, and other poetry happenings. None, however, have managed to outdo this one for intimacy, sincerity, talent, or pure joy taken in and from poetry.
Not all of what made Poetry Day so special can be easily quantified. Part of it was simply the spirit or soul of the thing. Here were 50 or more poets and poetry lovers ranging in age from 7 to 70 gathered together on a Saturday morning to celebrate the success of this year’s Poetry Council competition winners, but nothing about the day felt competitive. Appreciative, yes, supportive, reflective, and at times, ecstatic, but there were none of the negative trappings of competition. On a rainy day, in a room where 3 of 4 walls were made of 10 foot high glass panels and people talked of poetry, listened to music from a banjo and an upright bass, and ate fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and really good cherry cobbler, it simply felt . . . nice.
Part of it, of course, was the people. Many of the best poets from all across NC were here: Shelby Stephenson of Benson, long-time editor of Pembroke Magazine; Anthony Abbott of Davidson, president of the North Carolina Poetry Society; Katherine Barr of Charlotte, Sara Claytor of Carrboro, poetry activist; Bill Griffin from Elkin; David Manning from Cary; and many more. The student winners were also here, each one displaying talent and confidence far beyond their years and renewing the hopes of the poetry aficionados in attendance.
Part of it was the poetry itself: the quiet longing of Bruce Lader’s “Things in Her Life He Would Love to Be,” the strident intensity of Lenard Moore’s A Temple Looming as the poems reanimated black and white photos, the sometimes-painfully honest reflections of Stephenson’s Family Matters, and the perfectly relevant humor of Jean Rodenbough’s “A Poem Goes Through Airport Security” (reprinted below).
And part of it, perhaps the biggest part of it, were those unique moments we’ll tell others about years from now and follow with the phrase, “You just had to be there.” Moments like Anthony Abbott following readings by 7 middle and high school students, each of whom began by saying, “This is my first reading,” with the line, “This is my 3422nd reading.” Moments like Katherine Barr, despite severe macular degeneration, walking to the podium alone and reading from the page her cathartic poem “Squamous Cell Carcinoma.” And moments like Shelby Stephenson singing with Linda, his wife of 43 years, “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”
I don’t know if I’ll ever have such a day as this again, but I do know I’ll attend next year’s Poetry Day with great expectations, and I know that when I read the poems in Bay Leaves (PCNC’s competition winners’ anthology), what I feel will go well beyond what might be apparent in any single poem.
A Poem Goes Through Airport Security
by Jean Rodenbough
stop there please
we need to scan you again
our screen shows you are carrying
incomplete sentences poor
line breaks dangerous metaphors
and some unlikely similes
as though you were cunning
as an ice cube
just walk back through this detector here
no, don’t ask questions
we ask what we need to know
now place any small syllables
or words that alliterate into this plastic bag
stop! don’t touch anything else! that phrase
and the irregular meter must be removed
take all that is not secured you must bre
ak your lines in order to make them
safe be careful now leave these
stanzas on the table
and walk a
way slow
ly without
a
word
“Musings” for November 12
On October 10 I attended my very first Poetry Day at Catawba College, sponsored each year by the Poetry Council of North Carolina. And all I can say about it is, “Wow! What an experience.” Don’t get me wrong; this was not my first poetry event, far from it. Over the years, I’ve probably attended 500 readings and 4 dozen conferences, workshops, and other poetry happenings. None, however, have managed to outdo this one for intimacy, sincerity, talent, or pure joy taken in and from poetry.
Not all of what made Poetry Day so special can be easily quantified. Part of it was simply the spirit or soul of the thing. Here were 50 or more poets and poetry lovers ranging in age from 7 to 70 gathered together on a Saturday morning to celebrate the success of this year’s Poetry Council competition winners, but nothing about the day felt competitive. Appreciative, yes, supportive, reflective, and at times, ecstatic, but there were none of the negative trappings of competition. On a rainy day, in a room where 3 of 4 walls were made of 10 foot high glass panels and people talked of poetry, listened to music from a banjo and an upright bass, and ate fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and really good cherry cobbler, it simply felt . . . nice.
Part of it, of course, was the people. Many of the best poets from all across NC were here: Shelby Stephenson of Benson, long-time editor of Pembroke Magazine; Anthony Abbott of Davidson, president of the North Carolina Poetry Society; Katherine Barr of Charlotte, Sara Claytor of Carrboro, poetry activist; Bill Griffin from Elkin; David Manning from Cary; and many more. The student winners were also here, each one displaying talent and confidence far beyond their years and renewing the hopes of the poetry aficionados in attendance.
Part of it was the poetry itself: the quiet longing of Bruce Lader’s “Things in Her Life He Would Love to Be,” the strident intensity of Lenard Moore’s A Temple Looming as the poems reanimated black and white photos, the sometimes-painfully honest reflections of Stephenson’s Family Matters, and the perfectly relevant humor of Jean Rodenbough’s “A Poem Goes Through Airport Security” (reprinted below).
And part of it, perhaps the biggest part of it, were those unique moments we’ll tell others about years from now and follow with the phrase, “You just had to be there.” Moments like Anthony Abbott following readings by 7 middle and high school students, each of whom began by saying, “This is my first reading,” with the line, “This is my 3422nd reading.” Moments like Katherine Barr, despite severe macular degeneration, walking to the podium alone and reading from the page her cathartic poem “Squamous Cell Carcinoma.” And moments like Shelby Stephenson singing with Linda, his wife of 43 years, “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”
I don’t know if I’ll ever have such a day as this again, but I do know I’ll attend next year’s Poetry Day with great expectations, and I know that when I read the poems in Bay Leaves (PCNC’s competition winners’ anthology), what I feel will go well beyond what might be apparent in any single poem.
A Poem Goes Through Airport Security
by Jean Rodenbough
stop there please
we need to scan you again
our screen shows you are carrying
incomplete sentences poor
line breaks dangerous metaphors
and some unlikely similes
as though you were cunning
as an ice cube
just walk back through this detector here
no, don’t ask questions
we ask what we need to know
now place any small syllables
or words that alliterate into this plastic bag
stop! don’t touch anything else! that phrase
and the irregular meter must be removed
take all that is not secured you must bre
ak your lines in order to make them
safe be careful now leave these
stanzas on the table
and walk a
way slow
ly without
a
word
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Review of Bruce Lader's "Landscapes of Longing
Review (First published in Wild Goose Poetry Review)
Landscapes of Longing
by Bruce Lader
Main Street Rag (2009), 90 pages, $14
ISBN: 9781599482057
One of the epigraphs of Bruce Lader’s new collection of poetry, Landscapes of Longing, suggests that one, “Keep death and exile daily before thine eyes . . . . Then wilt thou never think a mean thought, nor covet anything beyond measure” (Epictetus). While this imperative might help justify the subject matter explored in these poems, Epictetus’s suggestion that such healthy perspective could be attained as easily as this is perhaps a bit Romantic, as is made abundantly clear by the speakers of the poems in Landscapes of Longing. Nevertheless, the epigraph and the title do make it clear what unites this otherwise apparently diverse collection of work, namely that these poems are all about the daily struggle to attain or maintain perspective. One poem after another proposes answers to the question: what can we learn from each other, from our lives as human beings, from the inevitability of disappointment, despair, longing in all its innumerable varieties.
By writing about longing, failure, persistence, and perspective, Lader writes honestly, unflinchingly, about what it is to be human. Not surprisingly if such verisimilitude is one of his goals, the poems are spoken in a variety of voices, as would be any accurate record of any human life. The first and perhaps most memorable of these voices is that of a teacher at a school for troubled boys, “ninth graders no one would bet on / discarded by split parents” (“Attendance Check”). This narrator recognizes the existential persistence of these boys as they long for such elemental human ambitions as justice and opportunity:
And yet their feisty, undefeated spirits
grapple with prison sentences
of poverty . . . .
they dodge and gamble to exist . . . .
stay afloat in the system chiseling them.
The narrator goes on to teach the reader to see beyond the surface, to see the humanity behind the stereotype and statistic, as in “Promises,’ where the tough from the boys home, longing for decency and love, revealingly promises his girl “I won’t leave you / the way my old man left my mother turning tricks.” And he teaches us, through the image of his hemophiliac friend Robert Goldstein in “A Brief History of Prejudice,” who longed to experience as much as he could while he could, to value life more urgently as we come to understand that it could end sooner than we imagine possible.
Other voices in this first section of the book range from that of a teenage boy surprised to be learning from his father’s competitiveness, from his longing to be extraordinary (“Breaks”); to that of the same boy become father and longing now to make sense of violence for his own son (“Quandary”); to a chorus of voices from war, longing for peace, for reason, and for acceptance of responsibility. This last set of voices illustrates how the individual despair and criminal behavior we might sometimes be tempted to decry in the first poems are mere microcosms of what we do and suffer on a larger scale. These voices also set the stage for the middle section of the book where the longing moves from the first section’s apparently personal concerns to a larger social and political arena.
This middle section of the book announces the context out of which these voices of longing arise in its title: “Interviews Following the Sentencing of Sisyphus.” Lader provocatively and amusingly imagines what a variety of figures would say if questioned about the trial of Sisyphus. The speakers are philosophers, goddesses, priests, and prophets among others, each one weighing in like ancient bloggers, their opinions, as is usually true of opinions, revealing more truth about themselves than about that which they speak of. Not surprisingly, what unites them all is the sense of longing they reveal, whether it be longing for justice or retribution, truth or reform, or just the opportunity to have their perspectives considered. Perhaps the underlying question in this section is if we accept the idea of Sisyphus as a metaphor for human endeavor, then don’t we also have to accept the actions of Sisyphus as indicative of what we are capable of? Certainly the speakers in this group of poems, with their apparent myopia, self-interest, and lack of forgiveness do nothing to refute that implication.
Having begun with poems of longing in a semi-individual context (family, profession, community) and proceeded through a larger social and political context, Lader concludes with a series of poems that illustrate longing on the most personal and intimate level: the longing for love, for the maintenance of the individual in love, and for the seemingly impossible persistence of love. In other words, the final section of the book, like each previous section illustrates that such things as fairness, justice, and even love are not as easy as we would like to think. These poems, after all, feature voices that proclaim, “I reserve the right / not to shed my soul” (“Behold”), “You’re not the only one / who can say No” (“Jig”), and “they felt something /missing grow between them, / inwardly resented the cherished / offspring who siphoned their energy” (“Soulmates”), before finally announcing “They will go there, / and to Moscow, when he partners the dances / she wishes he'd learn, the salsa, rumba, / swing, and tango millionaires tried seducing / her with, until he swept her off her feet” (“Trade-offs”).
Landscapes of Longing
by Bruce Lader
Main Street Rag (2009), 90 pages, $14
ISBN: 9781599482057
One of the epigraphs of Bruce Lader’s new collection of poetry, Landscapes of Longing, suggests that one, “Keep death and exile daily before thine eyes . . . . Then wilt thou never think a mean thought, nor covet anything beyond measure” (Epictetus). While this imperative might help justify the subject matter explored in these poems, Epictetus’s suggestion that such healthy perspective could be attained as easily as this is perhaps a bit Romantic, as is made abundantly clear by the speakers of the poems in Landscapes of Longing. Nevertheless, the epigraph and the title do make it clear what unites this otherwise apparently diverse collection of work, namely that these poems are all about the daily struggle to attain or maintain perspective. One poem after another proposes answers to the question: what can we learn from each other, from our lives as human beings, from the inevitability of disappointment, despair, longing in all its innumerable varieties.
By writing about longing, failure, persistence, and perspective, Lader writes honestly, unflinchingly, about what it is to be human. Not surprisingly if such verisimilitude is one of his goals, the poems are spoken in a variety of voices, as would be any accurate record of any human life. The first and perhaps most memorable of these voices is that of a teacher at a school for troubled boys, “ninth graders no one would bet on / discarded by split parents” (“Attendance Check”). This narrator recognizes the existential persistence of these boys as they long for such elemental human ambitions as justice and opportunity:
And yet their feisty, undefeated spirits
grapple with prison sentences
of poverty . . . .
they dodge and gamble to exist . . . .
stay afloat in the system chiseling them.
The narrator goes on to teach the reader to see beyond the surface, to see the humanity behind the stereotype and statistic, as in “Promises,’ where the tough from the boys home, longing for decency and love, revealingly promises his girl “I won’t leave you / the way my old man left my mother turning tricks.” And he teaches us, through the image of his hemophiliac friend Robert Goldstein in “A Brief History of Prejudice,” who longed to experience as much as he could while he could, to value life more urgently as we come to understand that it could end sooner than we imagine possible.
Other voices in this first section of the book range from that of a teenage boy surprised to be learning from his father’s competitiveness, from his longing to be extraordinary (“Breaks”); to that of the same boy become father and longing now to make sense of violence for his own son (“Quandary”); to a chorus of voices from war, longing for peace, for reason, and for acceptance of responsibility. This last set of voices illustrates how the individual despair and criminal behavior we might sometimes be tempted to decry in the first poems are mere microcosms of what we do and suffer on a larger scale. These voices also set the stage for the middle section of the book where the longing moves from the first section’s apparently personal concerns to a larger social and political arena.
This middle section of the book announces the context out of which these voices of longing arise in its title: “Interviews Following the Sentencing of Sisyphus.” Lader provocatively and amusingly imagines what a variety of figures would say if questioned about the trial of Sisyphus. The speakers are philosophers, goddesses, priests, and prophets among others, each one weighing in like ancient bloggers, their opinions, as is usually true of opinions, revealing more truth about themselves than about that which they speak of. Not surprisingly, what unites them all is the sense of longing they reveal, whether it be longing for justice or retribution, truth or reform, or just the opportunity to have their perspectives considered. Perhaps the underlying question in this section is if we accept the idea of Sisyphus as a metaphor for human endeavor, then don’t we also have to accept the actions of Sisyphus as indicative of what we are capable of? Certainly the speakers in this group of poems, with their apparent myopia, self-interest, and lack of forgiveness do nothing to refute that implication.
Having begun with poems of longing in a semi-individual context (family, profession, community) and proceeded through a larger social and political context, Lader concludes with a series of poems that illustrate longing on the most personal and intimate level: the longing for love, for the maintenance of the individual in love, and for the seemingly impossible persistence of love. In other words, the final section of the book, like each previous section illustrates that such things as fairness, justice, and even love are not as easy as we would like to think. These poems, after all, feature voices that proclaim, “I reserve the right / not to shed my soul” (“Behold”), “You’re not the only one / who can say No” (“Jig”), and “they felt something /missing grow between them, / inwardly resented the cherished / offspring who siphoned their energy” (“Soulmates”), before finally announcing “They will go there, / and to Moscow, when he partners the dances / she wishes he'd learn, the salsa, rumba, / swing, and tango millionaires tried seducing / her with, until he swept her off her feet” (“Trade-offs”).
Friday, November 13, 2009
Review of Terry Kirby Erickson's "Telling Tales of Dusk"
Review (First Published in Wild Goose Poetry Review)
Telling Tales of Dusk
by Terri Kirby Erickson
Press 53 (2009) 107 pages, $12.00
ISBN: 9780982441633, Poetry
What do a Ferris wheel, a motel sign, a roadside diner, and a bay window have in common? In the poetry of Terri Kirby Erickson, they are all sources of light, literal means and transformative symbols of salvation in the poems “County Fair,” “Star Lite Motel,” “Betty’s Roadside Diner,” and “Saving Grace,” respectively.
And perhaps salvation is what poetry is all about, redeeming the finer details of life by imbuing them with the value of memory, finding meaning in what we might otherwise all too easily deem meaningless. As Williams helped us realize just how much did depend upon a red wheelbarrow, Erickson finds meaning in how “Queen Anne’s lace dandies up a ditch” (“Queen Anne’s Lace”), in how an old woman’s moaning is like the wind “when it whips / around a house, rattling windows, / searching for cracks,” (“Assisted Living”) searching, in other words, for ways in, much the same way this woman searches for her way into another world, one of peace, reunion, and clarity.
The speaker of that poem in her unforgettable search for what is inexplicably missing from her world is only the first of a number of remarkable portraits gathered in this collection. There is also the lonely man in “The Speckled Trout Café,” the illiterate preacher who builds his sermons on the scripture read to him by his less faithful wife “the words warmed / by her breath and scattered into his / brain like dandelion seeds” in “Papa Never Learned to Read,” and the blues guitarist in “Delta Blues” who, the speaker comments, “should roll a stone / over hurt that deep, but” instead lifts “it up like Lazarus for anybody / lucky enough to listen.”
These portraits and simple symbols of salvation add up to a memorable second collection of work on their own, but the reader should be careful not to be fooled by the apparent simplicity of these poems, for just as still waters run deepest, the greatest revelations are often expressed in the fewest words. I, for one, am a fan of understatement, something often achieved in poetry through the metaphysical, poems which, as Dickinson encouraged, “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” In “Smoke and Mirrors,” for example, Erickson doesn’t spell out her warning of how a teleological obsession with the prize indiscriminately dissolves all else from our focus, good and bad, superfluous and necessary. Instead she shows only how the call of a longed-for boy affects the perception of a young girl: “The boy / I was talking to dissolved, tablet-like, / in the watered down scenery of the things / that were not you.” Similarly, in “Daisy Chain,” she presents the image of four little girls “daisy chained” to their mother to illustrate “belonging so / palpable, it beat like heart / on the pavement.”
Just as these poems are satisfying in their surface-level imagery but tricky in their larger or deeper implications, so too is the book as a whole. There are plenty of poems that seem trivial, merely descriptive, but taken together, they are subtly effective, quietly teaching the reader to reach deeper into the everyday image to recognize and value significance. In other words, they lull you into such comfort that when you finally begin to cry while reading “Blue Hydrangeas,” you realize the poems have taught you the empathy needed to feel this deeply for someone you’ve never known and that you’re not crying just for the speaker of this poem, who reminds us that as long as we are able to love anything our capacity to love ourselves remains, but for all the speakers of all the poems and the wonderfully vital world in which they live, the same world you realize in which you live.
Telling Tales of Dusk
by Terri Kirby Erickson
Press 53 (2009) 107 pages, $12.00
ISBN: 9780982441633, Poetry
What do a Ferris wheel, a motel sign, a roadside diner, and a bay window have in common? In the poetry of Terri Kirby Erickson, they are all sources of light, literal means and transformative symbols of salvation in the poems “County Fair,” “Star Lite Motel,” “Betty’s Roadside Diner,” and “Saving Grace,” respectively.
And perhaps salvation is what poetry is all about, redeeming the finer details of life by imbuing them with the value of memory, finding meaning in what we might otherwise all too easily deem meaningless. As Williams helped us realize just how much did depend upon a red wheelbarrow, Erickson finds meaning in how “Queen Anne’s lace dandies up a ditch” (“Queen Anne’s Lace”), in how an old woman’s moaning is like the wind “when it whips / around a house, rattling windows, / searching for cracks,” (“Assisted Living”) searching, in other words, for ways in, much the same way this woman searches for her way into another world, one of peace, reunion, and clarity.
The speaker of that poem in her unforgettable search for what is inexplicably missing from her world is only the first of a number of remarkable portraits gathered in this collection. There is also the lonely man in “The Speckled Trout Café,” the illiterate preacher who builds his sermons on the scripture read to him by his less faithful wife “the words warmed / by her breath and scattered into his / brain like dandelion seeds” in “Papa Never Learned to Read,” and the blues guitarist in “Delta Blues” who, the speaker comments, “should roll a stone / over hurt that deep, but” instead lifts “it up like Lazarus for anybody / lucky enough to listen.”
These portraits and simple symbols of salvation add up to a memorable second collection of work on their own, but the reader should be careful not to be fooled by the apparent simplicity of these poems, for just as still waters run deepest, the greatest revelations are often expressed in the fewest words. I, for one, am a fan of understatement, something often achieved in poetry through the metaphysical, poems which, as Dickinson encouraged, “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” In “Smoke and Mirrors,” for example, Erickson doesn’t spell out her warning of how a teleological obsession with the prize indiscriminately dissolves all else from our focus, good and bad, superfluous and necessary. Instead she shows only how the call of a longed-for boy affects the perception of a young girl: “The boy / I was talking to dissolved, tablet-like, / in the watered down scenery of the things / that were not you.” Similarly, in “Daisy Chain,” she presents the image of four little girls “daisy chained” to their mother to illustrate “belonging so / palpable, it beat like heart / on the pavement.”
Just as these poems are satisfying in their surface-level imagery but tricky in their larger or deeper implications, so too is the book as a whole. There are plenty of poems that seem trivial, merely descriptive, but taken together, they are subtly effective, quietly teaching the reader to reach deeper into the everyday image to recognize and value significance. In other words, they lull you into such comfort that when you finally begin to cry while reading “Blue Hydrangeas,” you realize the poems have taught you the empathy needed to feel this deeply for someone you’ve never known and that you’re not crying just for the speaker of this poem, who reminds us that as long as we are able to love anything our capacity to love ourselves remains, but for all the speakers of all the poems and the wonderfully vital world in which they live, the same world you realize in which you live.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Review of Linda Annas Ferguson's "Dirt Sandwich"
Review (First Published in Wild Goose Poetry Review)
Dirt Sandwich
by Linda Annas Ferguson
Press 53 (2009) 81 pages, $12.00
ISBN: 978-0-9824416-6-4, Poetry
For poets, every word is a first word, still full of the power and freshness of creation as they struggle without the tools of logic or reason to “put it right.” In her poem “Breech Birth,” Linda Annas Ferguson captures that sense of urgent discovery in the lines, “I had a hard time getting the beginning right, / . . . no measure / for what is true . . . / an abrupt breath rushing / into me . . . filling / my body with a sudden urge to cry.” She repeats the sentiment in “The First Word,” a poem about Adam’s love of words:
He strained to fill his tongue with every thought,
unable to identify the pleasure, raw
with newness and power, mouth parting--
their genesis and tone feeling true.
Such is the reverie of Ferguson’s fifth collection of poetry, Dirt Sandwich, newly out from Press 53. In one poem after another in this collection, Ferguson embraces (a frequently repeated word in these poems) the power of words as a means of embracing life. In “Genesis,” we hear again of the vitality of language for Adam:
Words lived in his bones,
touched his tongue, still wild,
a slow burning freedom
inside every sound.
How he longed for more words
to love, thought they could save
him from the wet falling sky,
from red flaming sunsets,
from all that hadn’t come yet.
Whether it is Adam speaking or a woman reflecting on her own audacity in the act of embracing language and all its potential as a child, the theme of language as a tool of exploration and knowledge is the same, as in these lines from “Innocence:”
When I was three, I could write
my name, scrawled it on doors,
walls, furniture, floors.
When Mama took my crayons,
I fingered it in the cold sweat
of windowpanes, paused to dot
the “I,” an eyehole to the moon.
**************************
I can hear my mother’s “Don’t--
touch,” as I poked
at splintering fissures of frost
on the other side of the window--
and all that enchanted me
about the broken.
As these last lines suggest, the poet’s love of the world is not limited to all that we normally think of as good. Rather, she has a more even-handed curiosity about and appreciation of all experience, all that life has to offer, all that living uncovers. Seamlessly, the next poem, “Topless Dancer,” begins her stubborn exploration of the forbidden and the tragic:
She embraces her own body,
cups a glitter-laden breast,
a golden moon. Dance
is the way she speaks,
embodies what she can’t say.
Such juxtaposition of the mythic, the individual and the personal from one poem to the next, or even within the same poem, is characteristic of the collection and illustrates the correctness of Jung’s concept of archetypes and the reason Confessionalism still works in poetry. This practice of relating the individual to the mythic, the personal to the universal as a means of deepening one’s experience of life, granting greater meaning to the seemingly insignificant details of our days, and revealing the still-relevant humanity behind the sometimes all-too-distant stories that represent us as a species is again made clear in “Rainbows Are Real:”
Once I saw a rainbow while flying,
looking down from the sky, not an arc,
but a complete circle, the plane’s silhouette
in the center. Pilots call it a “glory.”
I wonder if this was the way one first appeared
to God, His magnified shadow hovering
over muddy land and multitudes of dead bodies.
And so it continues throughout the book, each poem teaching us to reach deeper into the joys, the sorrows, and the mere details of life to find meaning, to understand that pressed between birth and death is the stuff of life “alive with dying” (“The Origin of Entropy”), the stuff of our very own dirt sandwich and to remember, in the words of poet Galway Kinnell ,that there is “still time, / for one who can groan / to sing, / for one who can sing to be healed.” It is a story everyone knows but few pause to contemplate. Thank you, Linda Annas Ferguson, for helping us be aware that we live.
Dirt Sandwich
by Linda Annas Ferguson
Press 53 (2009) 81 pages, $12.00
ISBN: 978-0-9824416-6-4, Poetry
For poets, every word is a first word, still full of the power and freshness of creation as they struggle without the tools of logic or reason to “put it right.” In her poem “Breech Birth,” Linda Annas Ferguson captures that sense of urgent discovery in the lines, “I had a hard time getting the beginning right, / . . . no measure / for what is true . . . / an abrupt breath rushing / into me . . . filling / my body with a sudden urge to cry.” She repeats the sentiment in “The First Word,” a poem about Adam’s love of words:
He strained to fill his tongue with every thought,
unable to identify the pleasure, raw
with newness and power, mouth parting--
their genesis and tone feeling true.
Such is the reverie of Ferguson’s fifth collection of poetry, Dirt Sandwich, newly out from Press 53. In one poem after another in this collection, Ferguson embraces (a frequently repeated word in these poems) the power of words as a means of embracing life. In “Genesis,” we hear again of the vitality of language for Adam:
Words lived in his bones,
touched his tongue, still wild,
a slow burning freedom
inside every sound.
How he longed for more words
to love, thought they could save
him from the wet falling sky,
from red flaming sunsets,
from all that hadn’t come yet.
Whether it is Adam speaking or a woman reflecting on her own audacity in the act of embracing language and all its potential as a child, the theme of language as a tool of exploration and knowledge is the same, as in these lines from “Innocence:”
When I was three, I could write
my name, scrawled it on doors,
walls, furniture, floors.
When Mama took my crayons,
I fingered it in the cold sweat
of windowpanes, paused to dot
the “I,” an eyehole to the moon.
**************************
I can hear my mother’s “Don’t--
touch,” as I poked
at splintering fissures of frost
on the other side of the window--
and all that enchanted me
about the broken.
As these last lines suggest, the poet’s love of the world is not limited to all that we normally think of as good. Rather, she has a more even-handed curiosity about and appreciation of all experience, all that life has to offer, all that living uncovers. Seamlessly, the next poem, “Topless Dancer,” begins her stubborn exploration of the forbidden and the tragic:
She embraces her own body,
cups a glitter-laden breast,
a golden moon. Dance
is the way she speaks,
embodies what she can’t say.
Such juxtaposition of the mythic, the individual and the personal from one poem to the next, or even within the same poem, is characteristic of the collection and illustrates the correctness of Jung’s concept of archetypes and the reason Confessionalism still works in poetry. This practice of relating the individual to the mythic, the personal to the universal as a means of deepening one’s experience of life, granting greater meaning to the seemingly insignificant details of our days, and revealing the still-relevant humanity behind the sometimes all-too-distant stories that represent us as a species is again made clear in “Rainbows Are Real:”
Once I saw a rainbow while flying,
looking down from the sky, not an arc,
but a complete circle, the plane’s silhouette
in the center. Pilots call it a “glory.”
I wonder if this was the way one first appeared
to God, His magnified shadow hovering
over muddy land and multitudes of dead bodies.
And so it continues throughout the book, each poem teaching us to reach deeper into the joys, the sorrows, and the mere details of life to find meaning, to understand that pressed between birth and death is the stuff of life “alive with dying” (“The Origin of Entropy”), the stuff of our very own dirt sandwich and to remember, in the words of poet Galway Kinnell ,that there is “still time, / for one who can groan / to sing, / for one who can sing to be healed.” It is a story everyone knows but few pause to contemplate. Thank you, Linda Annas Ferguson, for helping us be aware that we live.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Wild Goose Poetry Review Pushcart Nominations
Wild Goose Poetry Review has nominated the following poems for 2010 Pushcart Prizes: Joe Milford, "The Janitor Moonlighting;" Pris Campbell, "Original Sin;" Linda Annas Ferguson, "I Wanted to Hear Her Howl;" Janice Moore Fuller, "Ellipsis;" Joseph Trombatore, "Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue;" William Keener, "Refuge". Congratulations to these wonderful poets.
Read them all at www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com
Read them all at www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com
Review of Felicia Mitchell's "The Cleft of the Rock"
Review (First Published in Wild Goose Poetry Review)
The Cleft of the Rock, Poems by Felicia Mitchell
Finishing Line Press, 2009, 24 pages
ISBN: 9781599244310
I love the first poem of Felicia Mitchell’s new chapbook of poems The Cleft of the Rock. “Alley” is an existential manifesto that essentially states, “I go; therefore I am.” It is a poem about temptation and embracing experience related from a childlike perspective that cannot help but remind the reader of Eve:
. . . the branch of a fig
grew through a fence,
its fruit gnarled like a gnomish thumb beckoning me:
. . . .
So I went.
. . . . . . . . . .
I went closer to the tree,
close enough to touch its leaves, its fruit,
. . . . . . . . . .
I played until my hands were filthy.
This is not just Eve in the garden, but the Eve inside us all, an Eve needing no serpent but only the fruit, only the tree, whether the tree is knowledge, experience, or life, an Eve who, far from regretting her submission to temptation, relishes it.
This same defiant embrace of life is repeated in other poems and becomes the emotional and intellectual center of the entire collection. We see it again, and once more expressed through a sort of mythic revision, in the title poem, a dramatic monologue in which the Greek goddess Persephone proclaims
When the earth opens her thighs
and guides me like a newborn
through the folds of her great lips,
I almost forget the one who drags me back
three months of every year
to the bowels of the earth.
The sensual imagery of these lines is also characteristic of the entire collection and is part of the experience the poems’ various speakers celebrate, cling to, and find rebirth in, as in the poem “Secret Garden:”
Barefoot, listening to the cat,
worrying about the chipmunk
and the lackluster lack of rain,
I am nothing like a mother or a wife.
I am a girl in a make-believe puddle,
coloring in the shapes of her life
while a cat meows in the background
and the yellow sun grows hotter.
Through these poems, Mitchell reminds us that all life and all experience is valuable and worth saving. Even grief has its place given appropriate time. The poem “How to Dry a Rose” tells us,
Before the life blooms out of it,
hang it upside down. In a dry place,
away from direct sunlight.
. . . .
And forget about it, forget about the rose
among the rafters . . . .
. . . .
When the red has faded
to a more acceptable pallor and the leaves
are brittle to the touch. By then, you will
be ready to remember how your friend looked
when she lay in the casket, the rough on her face
not much paler than the roses at the altar.
And even though one may suffer, as the speaker of “Fall” whose “thin blood” means she is “destined to feel the cold / that is arriving daily” or the speaker of “Dirge” with a tumor in her breast, Mitchell would have us “feel them all,” “the cherry tree in the backyard, / the tulip magnolia that would never bloom, the crabgrass, / the violets in the grass . . . / the impractical, the unnecessary, the excised.”
The more intimate connection with the details of our lives encouraged by The Cleft of the Rock makes us all, like the spirit of “A Hard Rain,” “a virtuous pagan, unwelcome in heaven, not suited for hell,” a line which cannot help but remind us of Wordsworth’s “pagan suckled in a creed outworn,” who through his appreciation of nature is able to “have glimpses” that make him “less forlorn.” These mythic and Romantic reinventions are indeed timely in a world where we too often ignore or are totally unaware of the vital connections that could and should sustain us.
The Cleft of the Rock, Poems by Felicia Mitchell
Finishing Line Press, 2009, 24 pages
ISBN: 9781599244310
I love the first poem of Felicia Mitchell’s new chapbook of poems The Cleft of the Rock. “Alley” is an existential manifesto that essentially states, “I go; therefore I am.” It is a poem about temptation and embracing experience related from a childlike perspective that cannot help but remind the reader of Eve:
. . . the branch of a fig
grew through a fence,
its fruit gnarled like a gnomish thumb beckoning me:
. . . .
So I went.
. . . . . . . . . .
I went closer to the tree,
close enough to touch its leaves, its fruit,
. . . . . . . . . .
I played until my hands were filthy.
This is not just Eve in the garden, but the Eve inside us all, an Eve needing no serpent but only the fruit, only the tree, whether the tree is knowledge, experience, or life, an Eve who, far from regretting her submission to temptation, relishes it.
This same defiant embrace of life is repeated in other poems and becomes the emotional and intellectual center of the entire collection. We see it again, and once more expressed through a sort of mythic revision, in the title poem, a dramatic monologue in which the Greek goddess Persephone proclaims
When the earth opens her thighs
and guides me like a newborn
through the folds of her great lips,
I almost forget the one who drags me back
three months of every year
to the bowels of the earth.
The sensual imagery of these lines is also characteristic of the entire collection and is part of the experience the poems’ various speakers celebrate, cling to, and find rebirth in, as in the poem “Secret Garden:”
Barefoot, listening to the cat,
worrying about the chipmunk
and the lackluster lack of rain,
I am nothing like a mother or a wife.
I am a girl in a make-believe puddle,
coloring in the shapes of her life
while a cat meows in the background
and the yellow sun grows hotter.
Through these poems, Mitchell reminds us that all life and all experience is valuable and worth saving. Even grief has its place given appropriate time. The poem “How to Dry a Rose” tells us,
Before the life blooms out of it,
hang it upside down. In a dry place,
away from direct sunlight.
. . . .
And forget about it, forget about the rose
among the rafters . . . .
. . . .
When the red has faded
to a more acceptable pallor and the leaves
are brittle to the touch. By then, you will
be ready to remember how your friend looked
when she lay in the casket, the rough on her face
not much paler than the roses at the altar.
And even though one may suffer, as the speaker of “Fall” whose “thin blood” means she is “destined to feel the cold / that is arriving daily” or the speaker of “Dirge” with a tumor in her breast, Mitchell would have us “feel them all,” “the cherry tree in the backyard, / the tulip magnolia that would never bloom, the crabgrass, / the violets in the grass . . . / the impractical, the unnecessary, the excised.”
The more intimate connection with the details of our lives encouraged by The Cleft of the Rock makes us all, like the spirit of “A Hard Rain,” “a virtuous pagan, unwelcome in heaven, not suited for hell,” a line which cannot help but remind us of Wordsworth’s “pagan suckled in a creed outworn,” who through his appreciation of nature is able to “have glimpses” that make him “less forlorn.” These mythic and Romantic reinventions are indeed timely in a world where we too often ignore or are totally unaware of the vital connections that could and should sustain us.
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