The trauma of childhood can be summed up in a question that comes out of my mother's mouth one day— Do you want me to return you to where you came from? She is furious over something I've done: break a vase, scribble on the lampshade with a marking pen, melt her lipsticks in the sun. It isn't till much later that I mull over what she's said, then learn— opening certain doors leads back but not to the tangled dark of her womb. Dress after dress hangs in the armoire, each one a serged or tufted wonder, each one a sheath I cannot wear. The last one comes with a bridal veil—meaning, she was chosen, not the sister who helped sew on seed pearls and rosettes. This one held me like a secret before easing me into the world; she, pried open before the pericarp closed in around her. I cannot peel any fruit with my fingers, can't undo a single button without spiraling toward them— twin flames flickering on a makeshift altar, the wax melted down to one corded wick.
Poem Beginning with a Line by Farough Farrokhzad
let us believe in the ruined
gardens of imagination
even in autumn rain
there’s still such radiance
leaves underfoot whisper
my wishbone song
really just a rhythm imposed
on the slow fires of decay
but now church bells
make for a glistening listen
the dead have nothing
and everything to do
with the emptiness
of numbers
their carnival is upon us
scarlet oaks glowing
on a mountainside
of charred pine stumps
witch hazels dangling
sun-colored sex flags
and a woodpecker sounding
like a clown on amphetamines
my phone can find
the bleakest news in seconds
a shaggy mane mushroom
dissolves into ink
Poem in which my doppelgänger
dives toward the light again, a kamikaze pilot. What I mean is, I recall the slightly crazed contestants in Takeshi's Castle, running through a maze and aiming for a platform that swings above what looks like a blender full of mud. Meaning, how everything depends on getting to the palace, really a fortress dipped in DayGlo colors— while in the under- brush, other players make garbled noises like a million scraped knees on gravel, or parachuting moth wings. In every quest story, it's not so much what for or what it's worth that the hero goes through crisis after crisis—Individuation is what they call it: how a stronger, wiser self supposedly emerges after each test, dusting off the rubble, straightening her suit of Teflon, all limbs still hopefully intact. At what price, this light that scintillates? How much, if only for the splinter that drives itself so deep, I cannot ever forget it.
End Times
i am not ready for
a light-filled forest
still half aflame
i struggle to recognize it
with thinning hair
comes the chill of loss
i finger a nickel
that slaveowner’s face
riding in my pocket
like i’m lewis and clark
under red and scarlet oaks
the music of falling acorns
tick-tocking but only
at random moments
i clock in at several
caught breaths an hour
a forest can turn to coal
in the fullness of time
and those who believe in hell
can dig it up and burn it
with faith all things
acquire an airbrushed glow
but when mountains move
there’s a detachment fault
beneath which other rocks
go their own way
i sit watching
the treetops glow
in sun that they can
no longer taste
If I lit
enough incense sticks— If I fed enough eggs to hungry nuns or prisoners— If I coiled the anchor chains so the boats could stay— I could continue with this list of conditions and still I would not know how to bring you back. What a triumph to see someone finish every small task— one sock then another sock left then right shoe a zipper riding the whole way up.
Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 42
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader.
This week’s compilation is a bit of a rush job after a busy weekend. I hope it coheres.
morning walk —
Bill Waters, Morning walk
the gentle touch
of fog
– Walking through a cloud—droplets beaded my black wool
Christine Swint, Accountability With Writing and Art
– Today, I painted a tropical bird
– I cried in the parking lot, my friend as witness
– A family of deer stepped along a creek bed
– Thunder shook the rain loose and then it cleared
Nothing happened, said the
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 18
shape-shifting moon. Nothing walked
away from nothing. Nothing became of
nothing. Erasure is the way the world copes
with history. The ease of negation. The
amputation of time. Never. Nothing. No one.
But I found the revelation in the documentary, new to me at least, that Eliot was sent off to Margate with Vivienne to recuperate from a breakdown, lent real weight to the line in The Fire Sermon section, ‘On Margate sands/ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing’. OK, I had picked up the desolation, obviously, but now I can see Eliot’s own desolation as he wrote the lines. And that is no longer making too much of an assumption. It makes the lines clearer. He is with his wife but can connect nothing with nothing.
For once, the documentary also used talking heads that had something to say. Daljit Nagra explained eloquently the impact of the words ‘Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata./ Shantih, Shantih, Shantih’ that close the poem and, in effect, turn it into some kind of a prayer or resolution with which we must confront what is to come. Nagra could remember his grandfather saying Shantih, Shantih, Shantih, in the house in the morning. This lent the poem an increased validity. The words are not just something Eliot read somewhere and used.
The documentary, which as you’ve gathered, I recommend, also contained enough gossipy anecdotes to give light to the shade. I particularly enjoyed knowing that Virginia Woolf found the slow pace at which Eliot spoke too much to bear, so much so that she couldn’t wait for him to finish a sentence – literally. She would sometimes leave the room before he’d got there.
Bob Mee, HOW MUCH DOES BIOGRAPHICAL DETAIL MATTER IN ‘THE WASTE LAND’?
it is enough
Jim Young, sometimes
to lose count of the pebbles
in the cry of the tide’s mourning
to wait for an eye of rust to blink
or for the ocean to say sorry
and to mean it
Heather Trickey was a social research scientist, charity worker, Quaker and poet. In 2020, during the first Covid lockdown, she received a diagnosis of cancer. She died in July 2021, aged 50. In 2020 she published a remarkable book of poems, Sorry About the Mess, with Happenstance Press. I urge you to read it.
Her poems bring to mind the everyday language, directness of tone, and craft shaped by wit rather than irony of great poets like Ann Gray, Myra Schneider, Rose Cook, Ann Sansom, Naomi Jaffa, and Julia Darling.
Next week I will have the privilege of taking her amazing poem ‘Metamorphosis’, told from the perspective of a patient receiving a life-changing diagnosis, into a classroom of medical professionals. I can hardly wait to see what they make of it.
Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: Pobble, by Helen Trickey
My new chapbook, Interrogation Days, is now available for pre-order! This book focuses on the psychic toll of two decades of the US “War on Terror,” and it forms a small trilogy with the press’s previous releases, Dysnomia and Civil Society. Over the next four weeks, I will be sharing a bit more about it, so stay tuned for that. For now, you can read a sample poem and place an order, and the book will be shipped on Nov. 14th.
Also, I will be donating 50% of all sales to The Guantánamo Survivors Reparations fund. This is a joint project between two organizations — Healing and Recovery after Trauma (HeaRT) and the Tea Project — devoted to supporting the victims of the US’s illegal prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. For donation, our specific goal is to sell 40 copies of the book, which will raise $200 for the fund. I hope you will join me in supporting this work.
R. M. Haines, New Release from Dead Mall Press
Rumors, Secrets, & Lies is a collection of narrative poems, prose poems, flash fiction — stories about abortions, unplanned pregnancies and joyous births. 116 writers, including Naomi Shihab Nye, Ellen Bass, and Alicia Ostriker, write from experience. Women, and men, recall how they navigated this always-charged and emotional landscape before and during Roe v. Wade.
This heart-felt collection was inspired by the recent Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. A team of women sent the book to the printer on Aug. 31, just two months later.
Submissions arrived from all over the U.S., but also from as far away as South Korea and Israel.
Cathy Wittmeyer, RUMORS SECRETS & LIES
Struggling to rise again from a fall. Winded. Sick of an old grief,
scolded by regrets of such long standing that they qualify for pensions (go ahead,
retire, please!) and the long low bank of dirty cloud carries particulates
from sweet mossy forests that were never meant to burn, but are burning now.What I have to ask myself is, do I feel lucky? And I do not. Lucky all my life
Dale Favier, Fall 2022
but not today. Dust off the knees of my old-man jeans; straighten the last few inches
that used to come for free. The masks for the pestilence work very well
for fire smoke. Isn’t that convenient!
I like having a hobby that has so little to do with any other part of my life, and also I need it. Playing with my “toy” camera, an Instax Square, is that hobby. It brings me joy to just play, and to not worry about product. I have zero creative investment in the outcome, I just enjoy the process. Taking photos along my walks (with both the iPhone and the Instax) has been a release and a yet another necessary reminder about how I should be focusing on process/the journey/etc. (I still like sharing some of the “products,” though.)
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Some Discoveries This Week
A collection of poems that span a week in the life of the poet and family (not in lockdown; this is not a pandemic collection), friction, delight, a near miss in a car. The idea is that the specific focus can be extrapolated like a trail of cupcake crumbs to build connections and a more complete picture of human interactions and concerns. […]
“One Week, One Span of Human Life” is a week’s journey looking at the wider implications of a series of seemingly-small, regular events. Paul Ings’ writing is sparse, sketching details for the readers to fill in and connect with their own lives.
Emma Lee, “One Week, One Span of Human Life” Paul Ings (Alien Buddha Press) – book review
Last week I spent an enjoyable afternoon walking around the British Art Show 2022 in Plymouth. I know the majority of readers of this blog live in America but as Liz Truss has managed to tank our economy and bring Sterling to an all time low, you may be able to afford to visit. Let’s face it we Brits will all be on our uppers if this insane tory death cult is not replaced…
The Home Secretary has resigned citing her opponents as the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati– hey! She means me! I read said newspaper, I eat tofu and I thoroughly detest this [unelected] government.
Let’s return to saner topics. At the exhibition one installation that caught my attention was by Oliver Beer and explored the relationship between sound and space. The installation was divided into three parts and represented his grandmother, his mother and his sister. He has taken objects that were significant to them and miked them up to reproduce the notes they produce. The effect is rather similar to an orchestra tuning up. My attention was caught by a golden hare.
Paul Tobin, THE GOLDEN HARE SINGS
What I remember: the blue sibilance of a sad farewell.
Shadows uttering rosaries in forsaken alleyways.
Pale silences slipping from the bodies of mannequins, painting our lips with all the words we’ve been afraid to share with one another.
Rich Ferguson, The Re-Rememberer
Travis Helms gave a poetry reading at 12:45, but it was unusual. We sat in the front behind the altar in a group of chairs in a u shape. The poet read one poem, discussed it, and read another. Consequently, we only heard about 5 poems–but the discussion was superb. We talked about Jericho Brown’s approach with lines from past poems. It was really cool to hear about another poet’s experiment with this approach. Helms takes stanzas from old rough drafts, and he also keeps track of observations on the Notes feature on his phone which gives him a starting point each writing day.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Work Comes Due (in a Good Way)
The full-length debut by Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany, following chapbooks through above/ground press and Dark Hour Books, is no farther than the end of the street (Los Angeles CA: Okay Donkey Press, 2022), a collection predominantly constructed out of short, single-stanza prose poems that float the realm between lyric, short story and lullaby. “I wrote you a poem,” he writes, to open the poem “Publicity Stunt,” “called ‘Planet Earth.’ / It’s a ghost / poem or maybe a poem // I ghost wrote. It’s an / X-ray I pass around / the neighborhood.” Holding echoes of myth and fable, Niespodziany’s poems offer a selection of prose openings into whole worlds that might even exist between the curved narratives of Lydia Davis and the surrealisms of Stuart Ross. “You can’t / take my call.” he writes, to open the poem “The Silence That Finds Us,” “You’re busy // making volcanoes / out of swamp products // and ketchup packets.” […]
There is such a delight to these pieces, and there are moments throughout this collection that I almost see echoes of the short stories of Richard Brautigan, offering insights into daily interactions and simply being and living in and moving through the world, tinged with a wistful surrealism simultaneously playful and dark, moving in, out and through focus, from sentence to sentence. there is such a delight, even across such dark foundations of loss, death and distance, as connections are established, demolished or never quite connect. Across eighty-four poems, Niespodziany writes of first dates, first loves, weddings, streetscapes and neighbours, suggesting a lyric set entirely within the focus of a small geography, even one centred on the domestic, with not one poem set beyond a boundary set just down Niespodziany’s imaginary or actual street. One imagines a cul-de-sac, just down from an urban setting of shops and what-have-you; a small tucked-aside corner of residencial space, not far from everything else in the world. One imagines a set of boundaries established to attempt to keep the narrator and his household safe, from whatever dangers might exist beyond.
rob mclennan, Benjamin Niespodziany, no farther than the end of the street
Why do you
grip your pen
so tightly
when you write?Write lightly,
Tom Montag, THREE OLD MONK POEMS (337)
the old monk
told the poet.
I wrote about six new poems in the weeks after I received my funding, using the money to keep me afloat, so that I didn’t need to worry about finding paid work over the summer. I also used some of the bursary to fund writer-in-school training with the National Literacy Trust, which was very helpful. I wrote about that here.
There was no pressure to report back to the bursary funders, although I did send regular updates, and no strict dates to adhere to, or rules about the number of poems I wrote or what I had to do with them. If anyone was measuring my productivity, I think they would have been underwhelmed by my creative output! Nevertheless, the bursary has most definitely enhanced my practice even though it’s taken a while for me to get there. I don’t think I would have written these particular poems at all if I hadn’t been given this small pot of money, since I hadn’t written about place before, or closely observed landscapes or researched the heritage of any area. However, once I began researching and planning for these poems, I became more and more interested in writing about all of these things, particularly in the context of climate change. The money gifted me time and nudged me in a particular direction without imposing restrictive rules.
Josephine Corcoran, The impact of receiving funding on my creative practice: update about a 2018 Local Artist’s Bursary
Today, my proof copy of AUTOMAGIC arrived in the mail, which means I hope to spend the next couple days searching for ever-elusive typos and tweaking margins and getting it ready before I place an order for the first batch. Every time, I am amazed at how beautiful and nice the quality is for the POD books, which have come a long way from the humble beginnings in the early aughts. I am probably right when I say that a good number of trad publishers I’ve worked with also use POD instead of printings, thus the quality has improved overall in terms of cover gloss and interior papers. I opted for cream this time as with ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MONSTER though I went with the size I used for FEED, so it’s an inch or so larger and tops out at 100 pages. I need to nudge over my title riding a little far to the right, but otherwise the cover is glorious both front and back. I had initially planned for a hardcover edition, but it does seem unnecessarily expensive per copy (which would raise the sales price higher), so I nixed those plans in favor of paperback.
I am learning how much I revel each time in the process of bringing a book into the world with each step. I usually compile the manuscripts a couple years in advance, so AUTOMAGIC has been waiting, mostly finished since the end of 2020, though I added in a new section, the bird artist, that I wrote last year in this longer version, as well as what remained of the unfinished unusual creatures series completed in 2021. The other stuff is older, beginning with work from as early as 2018. This was prior to writing most of what went into FEED and AVM, but after finishing up SEX & VIOLENCE in late 2017. Unlike a couple of the others I did give BLP first dibs on, I knew I would probably issue this one on my own–it being an idiosyncratic little victorian dream of a book, largely since I had more timely and pressing projects with newer books like COLLAPSOLOGIES.
The past few months I have been picking at bits and pieces and revising some things, but mostly it was intact and only needed the final layout and adjustments and of course, the cover and promo graphics and trailers. The business of launching a book into the world of course being arduous even with a publisher behind you, let alone fending it alone. I’ve been more and less successful with past books depending on how much effort I put into them, with comparable sales to my trad published books so I know better now what works and what does not. Where to sink efforts and what is wasted time.
Kristy Bowen, automagic coming soon….
Autumn is here and that should mean that I have more time to write. More time to breathe. Summer in Alaska is a time of long days packed with work and garden. For me, autumn heading into winter is a time to turn back to my desk. This year, that means Black Earth Institute and my project on Bridget Cleary.
Earlier this month, I was in Black Earth, Wisconsin meeting with the rest of the Black Earth Institute cohort. It was four days of good talk, amazing presentations, and forming bonds that will help us collaborate on various projects. It was incredible to spend time with such vibrant, intelligent, and diverse people. I am really excited about how the next three years will unfold.
Meanwhile, I am reading and writing about Bridget Cleary. I’m planning a trip to Clonmel in Ireland for February 2023. And of course, I’m working my butt off with Storyknife and the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference.
Erin Coughlin Hollowell, The fire of autumn
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Audre Lorde and her book Sister Outsider changed the way I saw myself and the way I saw poetry. I learned how poetry belonged to Black women because it was something that we could do anywhere. It is an art of economy. It is an art that gives us power. You can write poetry on a napkin and stick it in your pocket. It can carry the weight of the world, and it can fit on the tiniest slip of paper. How amazing is that?
Thomas Whyte, Katerina Canyon : part eight
I can’t help but feel that there is a meta-perspective just beyond my scope, from which my whole life makes sense. And something tells me that I am not supposed to have thoughts like these. They might line a slippery slope to conspiracy theories and religious epiphanies.
Or they might form a poem.
Dorothea Lynde Dix wrote during what was likely a period of manic depression (mixed state): “I cannot write – I ought not.” I have always felt like I understood what she meant. These thoughts, diagramed and articulated, conjure the black dogs that will rip your life apart.
I am a scattering of facts- banal facts. Random.
Who has the power to choose, to bother, to make sense of it – to validate your life’s story? You risk annihilation by writing it. You risk petrification – from a single perspective, even your own. This, too, is still death.
We spent our time becoming fiction based on fact. I am not sure that I really want conscious control of that.
Ren Powell, Today When I Rattle the Bones
What I find most sobering is the plight of artists and craftspeople who still desperately need those large studio spaces, yet are being pushed out of one once-affordable but now-gentrified neighborhood after another. During the moving process, we’ve shared the freight elevator, loading dock and dumpster with many other tenants of this large former factory building, who can no longer afford the rent charged by the new landlords who are upgrading and changing the building into a place for small businesses, high-tech firms, and offices — all of which can afford considerably higher rents. It is a business decision for the owners, and they have a right to do that; the building is much more attractive than when we moved in more than fifteen years ago. But as I’ve talked to others who are leaving, their anxiety and stress are palpable, and there are few good options for them in this city. And while a society without art is unbearable, and the governments everywhere tout their artists as intrinsic to the society’s identity, very few actually give the necessary support. Relentless capitalism always wins.
Beth Adams, Artists, Moving On
The fourth tells of the long, circuitous route to get
Luisa A. Igloria, Five compatriots
away from stethoscope or scalpel, and instead
to brushes and color swatches. Everyone in this town
seems to have a maritime connection, a giant
wooden spoon and fork, a saint in velvet and gold
filigree taking up space on the walls. The youngest
of them wants to write stories and poems about
the in-between, where the light can glance off
surfaces in so many ways and in so many beautiful
directions, none of them merely resembling
brown, none of them merely falling like leaves
to be raked over, season after season.
It’s truly turning—I don’t know if it feels like fall, it feels like we went straight from a hot, smoky summer to winter-time temperatures and rain, which is a shame. Winter means more writing, of course. But less time in the garden with flowers and birds.
So, we’re saying goodbye, finally, to smoke and fire, to over 80° temperatures, and welcoming in the rain and the cold, and occasionally putting on pumpkin sweaters. I’m so excited about some AWP news that I can’t quite share yet, and there’s more news about Flare, Corona coming soon.
And I’m doing a podcast – the “Rattlecast” on Sunday, October 30th, 8pm Eastern Time: Jeannine Hall Gailey I’ll be talking, appropriately enough, about spooky poetry, and reading a few spooky poems from Field Guide to the End of the World and the new book, Flare, Corona. So tune in if you want a sneak listen to my new book’s poems.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Some Good News from AWP, A Quote in Poets & Writers, Blurbs for Flare, Corona, and Visiting with Writer Friends as Smoke Season Turns to Rain Season
It’s been six years since Otoniya J. Okot Bitek published her debut poetry collection 100 Days, which powerfully explored the 100 days of the Rwandan genocide. I was lucky enough to interview Otoniya shortly after the book came out – you can read that interview here. The book went on to be shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay, Pat Lowther and Robert Kroetsch awards, among others.
I’ve been waiting patiently for Otoniya’s next book – and I need wait no more! Her new book, A Is For Acholi, will officially be published next week. As the titled suggests, this book focuses attention on her people, the Acholi of Northern Uganda.
A bit of a side note: Song of Lawino, the most famous work by Otoniya’s father, Okot p’Bitek, was originally written in Acholi. p’Bitek opened the English translation of the book with a note that read: “Translated from the Acoli by the author who has thus clipped a bit of the eagle’s wings and rendered the sharp edges of the warrior’s sword rusty and blunt, and has also murdered rhythm and rhyme.” […]
The book ranges more widely than the tight thematic and stylistic focus of 100 Days. Its subject matter includes “exploring diaspora, the marginalization of the Acholi people, the dusty streets of Nairobi and the cold grey of Vancouver.” Formally, the book is wide-ranging as well: lineated poems brush up against prose poems, concrete poems, erasures and – in keeping with Otoniya’s 2019 chapbook Gauntlet – voluminous footnotes.
Rob Taylor, “A is for Acholi” by Ontoniya J. Okot Bitek
Family Riches are not long back from a trip to Seville. I’m thinking of it as a midweek long weekend as we went from Tuesday to Friday. A lovely time was had by all that attended, we walked, we ate, we walked and ate some more. We visited the Giralda, Real Alcazar De Sevilla, and Plaza de España. I had also hoped to visit Convento de San Leandro to sample some of the nun’s biscuits, but couldn’t due to forgetting that most things shut down between 2 and 5 in Spain. I suspect the nuns were having a well-earned kip.
I’d read about the place on the Atlas Obscura website I linked to above, but I was also aware of the practice through a poem by Matthew Stewart called Bishop’s Hearts. My plan was to get a photo of me receiving said biscuits and then link to Matthew’s excellent poem…
However, this experience has taught me two things.
1. Remember the local knowledge given to you by people. In this case, the aforementioned Matthew Stewart
2. Always remember to capture PDFs/images of your poems when they are published online, lest the site close down.Bishop’s Hearts was published by the excellent Algebra of Owls site, but that now looks to be out of business/has closed down. I was lucky enough to have a poem published there too, but I don’t have a copy of it. Well, I do, obvs, but not the page and the link is now dead. I’m not sure what happened to the team behind AoO, but I hope they’re ok.
Mat Riches, Having nun of it
How do you know if what you’re revising out of a piece isn’t the very thing that made the piece interesting to someone else? What is the difference between thinking about “the reader” and pandering to “the reader”? How do you know if you’re thinking too much about “the reader” or not enough? What if you never think about “the reader”? Do you risk writing poems that are just you mumbling to yourself? What if there is no “reader”? Ever? Is the thing you made still a poem?
Marilyn McCabe, I’ve lived my life like a howling wind; or, On Some Questions
unhurried, the window becomes a mirror
Jason Crane, haiku: 20 October 2022
Reading helped during the stress, a way to step aside, as did doing crossword puzzles in old New Yorkers, passed along to me by my mom, for me to read and recycle. “Watch out,” she said, “you can get hooked.” I did. Going to and from the hospital in Peoria, we had lunch twice, and pie once, at Busy Corner, a popular eating place at, yes, a busy corner. And saw the colors of the changing leaves by the side of the road. A joy to my mom. Less so to my colorblind dad, but his joy was getting out of the hospital!
Reading books with colorful covers, too. Balladz by Sharon Olds and Where Are the Snows by Kathleen Rooney, the latter in my stack of books to review for Escape Into Life. I need to 1) read slowly and repeatedly for a review 2) have a clear mind, ability to focus…so I am behind in this task. But I got the laundry done! Plus, these two books look great on my coffee table.
My own poetry waits patiently for me to get back to it. I have a composition book at hand for bits of inspiration. I flip back through the pages and see lots of actual poems there, awaiting revision and assembly. I have sent out a few things, received a few rejections, and one wonderful acceptance. A nice surprise.
Kathleen Kirk, 10,000 Steps
There is a ghost in this book, the title, The Most Charming Creatures, because it came from the title of a poem which, in the end, I took out of the book. It was something that I wrote for an eponymous video work by Catherine Heard. The video was published in the Heavy Feather Review, Catherine’s work is so beautiful – both so human and so non-human, both vast and tiny.
The phrase comes from Ernst Haeckel’s Monograph on Radiolarians, published in 1862. He described radiolarians, ancient single-celled organisms with mineral skeletons, as “the most charming creatures.” But look: we’re all the most charming creatures. Who? Us. Letters. Words. We neurons.
Gary Barwin on Form, Social Media, and the “Epistemological Hijinks of Poems”
What I know now, having escaped the toxic relationship and untenable career is that I didn’t need to work harder, change my attitude, have more self-discipline, or stay where I was and count my blessings. What I needed was to get out.
I finally fully have, and I wish more than anything I could share some way for everyone else to get away from whatever is making them not-OK, but the truth I’m seeing now is that there isn’t always a way. I made the moves I was able to make (leaving that marriage, changing to a different job within my industry), and I searched constantly for better alternatives. But I couldn’t leave everything that was damaging AND take care of my people the way I wanted and needed to care for them. I am not looking back and thinking that I should have made different choices. (I don’t regret them, given my givens.) I am looking back and wishing only that our culture had been more honest about the scarcity of good choices for many of us to make.
Think of what I might have done to actually improve my life if I hadn’t wasted energy on blaming myself, on attempting to fix what wasn’t mine to fix, or on “solutions” that were never going to address the source of the problem.
I wish I could change the world so that everyone could have what I now do. I wish there was some formula I could share for how to get it in the world as it is. For myself, it has required some compromise, some luck, some risk, and a lot of years of living in poor health and doing what I had to do to get here. (The promise of that pension kept me in the world of K-12 education, and without it the life I have now would not be possible.) I can’t tell you how to do it, and I want to acknowledge that not everyone can do it, no matter how hard they work, but I’m writing this because if nothing else, I can give an assurance that I wish others had given me. If you’ve worked to heal from and deal with your childhood traumas and have a clear sense of your strengths and challenges and are working hard within the systems you have to live within and are still struggling to be OK, I want you to hear (especially if you’re of my generation and grew up drinking a lot of Kool-Aid) that it’s not just you, no matter the privileges you have. Keep doing what you can for yourself, for sure, but be as clear-eyed as you can about what’s yours to own/do and what is not.
Think of what a different world we might live in if our goal was that everyone in it could be OK.
Rita Ott Ramstad, The pursuit of okayness
Quonset
It rhymes with onset, so it makes sense:
these huts appeared shortly after war began.
Kits of them shipped to American outposts
abroad: curved metal ribs, plywood floor strips;
corrugated iron to lay a roof like bent
accordion pleats. Ten men could put one together
in less than a day—rows of them a camp,
a base. Mess hall, machine shop, hospital, barracks.
Somewhere, a radio or decryption machine. Upon
his return, the general who said he knows what every
enemy lieutenant had for breakfast adjusts his aviators.
After the smoke clears, the Peashooters and Bombardment
Squadron lift away. It's Peacetime now
and the huts are turned to civilian use. In the city
where I grew up, one of them becomes
a dispensary. Another close to the park
is a library, where my father takes me
one day to get a card, to borrow my first library book.
It's quiet there but when it rains, the masonite
lining cannot silence the drumming on the roof.
Lookout
You have to drive quite a ways to escape the sound of traffic. In the end, though, there’s no getting around it: you have to get out and walk. I follow an almost vanished trail to a high point called Penn Lookout where the scenic vista long since grew in. I have the former picnic area all to myself. It’s too far from the road. When I snap a photo of the low light through the trees, the camera shutter startles in the silence.
fall colors
a yellowjacket’s
unsteady flight
Underlying
The bloom of blood, mysterious blasts
teeming in the marrow—as you sleep,
quietly running along the endothelium.
Granular and protean, clustering
toward any surface threatened by a breach:
think of them as cloud, as solar wind;
capstan of fragments or fury of starfighter pods
gunning for a dark mass sensed,
an enemy not yet visible on the horizon.
Why else would an army assemble from seed, proliferate as reticulum?
An enemy, not yet visible on the horizon.
Gunning for a dark mass sensed,
capstan of fragments or fury of starfighter pods.
Think of them as cloud, as solar wind;
toward any surface threatened by a breach:
granular and protean, clustering.
Quietly running along the endothelium,
teeming in the marrow as you sleep—
the bloom of blood, mysterious blasts.
Five compatriots
in a panel on identity: one talks-story about being born in the '40s to parents who had to skip to a different state to get married. Fair enough, she could pass for white; but also got told how lucky she was to get lead roles in school plays and musicals (when it was West Side Story or Pocahontas). Another shares that he's just gone through divorce (so American!) which doesn't sit well with the older generation of church-going immigrants—the same ones who tried to keep their children from learning their native tongue so they could become more American. (And let's have a conversation about something besides noodles and egg rolls.) The one in the middle chooses her words carefully, says it's taken her all this time (decades!) to arrive at an understanding: she has to seek out those like her—queer; or they don't tick the boxes, not even "other"— who refuse to be seen by their own. The fourth tells of the long, circuitous route to get away from stethoscope or scalpel, and instead to brushes and color swatches. Everyone in this town seems to have a maritime connection, a giant wooden spoon and fork, a saint in velvet and gold filigree taking up space on the walls. The youngest of them wants to write stories and poems about the in-between, where the light can glance off surfaces in so many ways and in so many beautiful directions, none of them merely resembling brown, none of them merely falling like leaves to be raked over, season after season.