the muse - an international journal of poetry 1.1 (june 2011)

7/27/2019 The Muse - An International Journal of Poetry 1.1 (June 2011)

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ISSN 2249 2178

Chief Editor

Pradeep Kumar Chaswal

Editors

Dr. Mohammad Arif Deepak Chaswal

The Muse- An International Journal of PoetryPublished online at www.themuse.webs.com

Copyright The Muse 2011

The MuseAn International Journal of Poetry

Volume INumber IJune 2011


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The Muse-An International Journal of PoetryVol.-1 Issue-1

June 2011

Copyright notice

Copyright. The Muse, 2011

No contents of this journal can be used without the written permission of the Chief Editor

of The Muse-an International Journal of Poetry.

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN):- 2249 2178

Cover/design

Deepak Chaswal

Al Beck

Disclaimer

Opinions and views expressed by the poets/writers are not necessarily those of the editors. Thecontributors were advised to submit original and unpublished (both print and online) poems/researchpapers, if any contributor violates the condition he/she will be responsible for the consequencesemanating thereof.

While information presented here was believed to be accurate at the date of inclusion, nature andcircumstances are changing constantly. The Muse-An International Journal of Poetry does not acceptliability for any decisions made or actions taken on the basis of this information, text, images, andother content.


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June 2011

Contents Page No.

Editors Note 7

Poetry 9-72A. D. WinansILLEGAL 9SIGN OF THE TIMES 9

Alan LindsayStriation: Lines in the Sand Cliff 10Your Name 11

Benjamin MyersPOEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE 12

Carrie AllisonDrive to Catechism 13

Dalel SarnouA Lullaby of Hatred 14A scar of you 15

Hal OLearyFree Verse 16

Judith PrestTelegrams From God 17Why Poets Are Late for Work 18-19

Linda ApplebyIn the Beginning 20Snowball Fight 20


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June 2011

Mike J GallegherBookends 21Interlude 21

Raj VatsyaSlow Consumption 22Exile of Autumn Leaf 22-23

Sam EisensteinComa 24-25

Valentina CanoCold War 26

Adam BogarFOUR HAIKU 27

Anca VlasopolosThose Never Written 28-29

Boghos L. ArtinianThe Unknown Snipers 30The Cardiologist 30

Chris TanasescuA Man Consists of Sun 31

Devreaux Baker

Re-inventing Language 32-33

Hugh FoxMOZART 34YOUD THINK 34NOT A THOUGHT 35

Kathleen Spector

Will You Go 36


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June 2011

Michael D. SollarsRelative Constellations 37-46

Paul Lobo PortugesStones from Heaven 47-48

Richard Oko AjahBlack Eagles of Dark Forest 49

Shradha KamraThe Door...... 50

Victor W. PearnLiving Inside Confucius Wall 51Natural shape 51

Adrienne WolfertStreet Lamp 52Point of View 52

April AvalonFrom The Heart 53Madness So Sweet 53In Lines 54Life 55

Carl ScharwarthDeath of The Past 56

Christina MurphyDown to the rivers of gold 57

Gale AcuffFountain City, Tennessee, 1964 58

Jennifer C. Wolfe

Flower Child 59


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June 2011

Kenneth PoboPOMPEII 60DINDIS ALLERGIC ATTACK 61

Michael Lee JohnsonHookers on Archer Avenue 62-63

Philip A. EllisOur Children 64-66Married Life 66-68

Rebeca SaraFour Haiku 69

Thomas ZimmermanA Glimpse of the Tragic Vision 70

William John WatkinsMORTAL/MARTIAL/MARITAL WOUNDS 71-72

Research Papers and Essays 74-103

Joseph PowellPET TREES & DANCING BAY PONIES 74-96

Felix NicolauHow Dangerous is Digital Literature? 97-100

Byron Beynon''The Welsh-poppy flame of the sun''A Tribute to Raymond Garlick (1926 - 2011) 101-103


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June 2011

Book Reviews 105-111

Book review of Al Becks Curiositys Cushion by PradeepChaswal 105-108

Book review of Millie Niss City Bird by Joel Weishaus 109-111

E-Interviews 113-121

An E-Interview with Hugh Fox by Pradeep Chaswal 113-116

An E-Interview with Al Beck by Pradeep Chaswal 117-121

List of Contributors 123-135


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June 2011

Editors NoteThe Muse-An International Journal of poetry is started with the vision to become a

storehouse of quality contemporary poetry and representative criticism on poetry. The aim

and scope of the journal is global and universal as it strives for welcoming poems, criticalarticles, book reviews and essays on poetry from every nook and corner of our planet. Forour maiden issue we have received large number of submissions from USA, UnitedKingdom, Ireland, Australia, Poland, Hungry, Algeria, Nigeria, Romania, Russia, China,Philippine, South Africa, Lebanon, India and the list goes on. We are overwhelmed by theresponse.

We extend our special thanks to Professor Hugh Fox and Professor Al Beck for theirinterview and warm cooperation in this regard. We are also indebted to Dr. Felix Nicolau forRomanian translation and dm Bogr for Hungarian translation of our press release. We are

thankful to Phillip A. Ellis and Chris Tanasescu for circulating our press release in the literarycircles of their respective countries. We are also grateful to poets, critics and reviewers whohave sent their works for our maiden issue.

For the last one month our team has been busy in finalizing the June issue. Now June 2011issue ofThe Muse-An International Journal of Poetry is before you. Read and enjoy.

Cheers for poetry!

Cheers for life!

Editors


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POETRY


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June 2011

ILLEGALA. D. Winans

She sits alone in her small hotel room

six months pregnantforced to give head for soup and breadno heat, one wash clothe, one towelone urine-stained washbasinan immigrant without a visaan illegal caught in a legal trapshe gets upheads for the doorhears the night manager whisper whoresuspended in silence floatingface down in the bowels of theAmerican dream.

SIGN OF THE TIMES

A. D. Winans

Market Street onceThe queen of the cityNow a gaudy whore

Worn with time

I pass the Hamburger PalaceThe home of the ninety-nine cent burger

Its doors closed down

Its windows streaked with grime.

Inside streaks of mustard and ketchupOn the counter

A crushed soft drink cup

Lies in dirtA paper napkin floating ghost like

On the back of the wind


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June 2011

Striation: Lines in the Sand Cliff

Alan Lindsay

Those parallel erosion lines the river made in the sand cliff centuries ago

remain somehow in the delicate wallwe could pull it down

with just our hands: a loud yell, an avalanche; yet there it stands

undisturbed except where dogs and swimmers have dug dry sluices in the form

still it stands; its ageless indifferent triumph over the infernal patience of gravity

remains. I try so hard to find some cause for wonder in this

elaborate breastwork, these years of patient labor this

abstract aeolian rushmore of lines that are

just therevariegated, beautiful, evenly spaced parallel lines

like type on the page of the cliff, like lines of graffiti

the river wrote in the soft wall as slow centuries

of water evenly receding drew themselves along, as time does,

as water does, informing us with the infernal patience of gravity,

informing usplease give me your handinforming us of nothing

we did not already understand about time and about water and the pull of the earth

about forces so delicatelike the forces of sound in a wordso delicate

you do not feel them, no, you cannot feel them

work.


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June 2011

Your Name

Alan Lindsay

A whisper of mist, the plunk of the rain: the sound

invades the heart, shivers a universe, urges

love and fear like two dull leaves

huddled in a seed feeling the ache

for moisture heat and air open to live

in the warmth of the sound; at the sound of the name the heart-

seed anchors, strains to the notes; the hearts

shell breached at last by the damp

osmosis of the sound, of the chant, of love, my love,

your name, my love, is wetness is rain is the whisper

in wind bursting in play. Come, my love

at last, today, find me in the dark with the pulse

of your flesh. I will hear the air shiver away

as you pass, I will whisper the sound with my hands.


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June 2011

POEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE

Benjamin Myers

This is the line;

its existence is

an onion; its shape

is time; this is no

longer the line; it is

inevitably the body

which is either child

or memory; incarnation

humming the heat

from stomach;

nothing is

ending.


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June 2011

Drive to Catechism

Carrie Allison

I am trapped,

strapped in.

I am speeding

in the dark,

a bullet spinning

into the void.

I grip the sides

of my seat,

eyes squeezed.

My mother

beside me

drives, careening

into the rain,

eyes glassy

and empty,

a dolls eyes.

I mumble

freshly memorized

commandments

while the cage

around me

hurls out of control,

dark and long,

the barrel of a gun.


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June 2011

A Lullaby of Hatred

Dalel Sarnou

Hatred has grown within me,The growing of horns around Thee.

All those nights I cried desperately

Grab me to the chagrin, to the sea

Of tears, of groaning, of remorse.

I regret my way having lost me in pieces

I was there like a blossom in prairies

Happy in liberty around me love roses

Hitherto I smell those Sapin breezes

Yet, you stand in my way as a dark mountain

Of hatred, of anger, of fury with no reasoning

Torment, you're but a heart that is long stoning

Life is a lit that lambently lights loosely

And Death is but darkness that dooms desperately

Between Life and Death, our souls are hanging fearfully

Dread moments come to us with a wake up call suddenly

To tell us about an absurd morrow replete with tears badly

Crooning the morrow would scar in you every ain smoothly


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June 2011

A scar of you

Dalel Sarnou

I know not why these words fly away out of me

Know not why my voice starts now shivering

And I cant remember but the tears of bloods on me

Remember the dreariness of the pain Im still feeling

You came into my life with your cant and hypocrisy

To crash it over and over and over, never stop hurting

The presence of your shadow in my life smothers me

And you, like a ghost, keep on wearing, jeering and fearing

Ill always suffer that scar of you in me and my history

Worse than a nightmare, than a horror, youre being

Beg you to go away; on me you never have mercy

All you do is pour salt on my hurt and deepen my scar.


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June 2011

Free Verse

Hal O'Leary

Let not there be a doubt, I am averseTo everything they choose to call,free verse.

For me, it has become the devil's curse

On poetry, and making matters worse,

It's naught but prose.

In dictionaries, metric is most used,

Along with rhyme, (the terms are often fused)

To tell us verse should never be confused,

Or ever used withfree. We're not amused.

Give us repose

If we are free to do most anything,

And all our words, we do not choose, but fling,

Then lyricism loses all its ring,

And though we write, we do no longer sing.

I do propose.

Although it's true we cannot close the door

On charges that we live in days of yore,

It's time to claim, as we have done before,

Free Verse? An oxymoron, nothing more.

With that, I close.


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June 2011

Telegrams From God

Judith Prest

poems are liketelegrams from God

snaking like lightning

down through clouds

bubbling up

from the depths

flashes of light

bursts of steam and spark

from the core

from higher places

rearranging

molecular structure

revealing

the genetic code

of the soul


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June 2011

Why Poets Are Late for Work

Judith Prest

Im sorry I was late, but

the dam broke and I was

swimming upstream

in a torrent of words.


I discovered a poem

trapped in a pocket of light

and I had to rescue it.

Im sorry I was late, but I

got impaled upon a particularly pointy

thought shard

and it took some time

to remove it to the page.


I took a wrong turn and

got tangled

in a thicket of images.



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June 2011

I was herding

a cluster of

furry black poems

and you know

how long that takes in the dark


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June 2011

In the Beginning

Linda Appleby

Stars had not begun to shineWhen you took your place in the firmamentWater had never turned to wineAbraham had yet to pitch his tentHis sons and daughters glimpses in his eye

And the moon bowed down in recognition of a starAnd the silence swam like tearsNo wise man had ever walked so farIn the beginning of years of years

When the word became flesh, a breathing avatar

So sing of the holy ages while you waitAnd play the flute, like KrishnaSince God is man and dead is hateAnd show the thousands where the loaves and fish are

Snowball Fight

Linda Appleby

It was too cold to writeTil the new moon put a stop to it

Cutting a crescent in the black skyThat was ice

Each twig wrapped in white furBreath like a steam train pouring a living mist

Layers of it, there were

A sub-layer of iceA coat of frost

Snow made in the image of manTwo primitive balls, some sticks, a scarfHe challenges nature in a snowball fight

Who is the boss?The silhouette of the tree marks the horizon

The sun shines through the clouds

Winter of the soul

Where the heart hibernatesRound as a dormant mouse


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June 2011

Bookends

Mike J Gallagher

Four and ninety years apart, stand my bookends,an uncle, now grown old, a grandson, not yet two.

Between them, stacked, are tales of war, none won,of nations born and great empires undone;

stories of romance, of broken hearts,joy of births, painful deaths;dispersal of our island race,

the blooded drag of clan's embrace;weariness of a world worn down,hope of a world cheerily young.

Distanced by an ocean, a disparity in age,

my bookends could now, and ever after,our cares and worries soon assuagewere we to share their laughter.

Interlude

Mike J Gallagher

Drop your pen, give in,draw close to the windowwhence comes the sound.Out there in the smogof a damp April eveningA mistle thrush singsof pleas and urgings,of broody cluckingof soaring joy.Maestro mockingmy empty page.


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June 2011

Slow Consumption

Raj Vatsya

Dripping from teeth of hungry wolves

sporadic memories flow, drift

ingest, digest

life juices dissolve

slowly

Masquerading as friends

leeches attach

sanguine beads drip, flow

slowly

Every debt imposed, self-imposed

increased as paid

slowly

Exile of Autumn Leaf

Raj Vatsya

For meagre remuneration

palpitated her tiny heart, lungs

feeble muscles toiled

wrestled smidgens off air

offered bounty in gratitude

Needles pierced skin

day after day


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June 2011

sun imbibed green of flesh

little by little

Of use no more

autumn leaf could be taken out

and shot

Merciful tree sent her

in permanent exile


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June 2011

Coma

Sam Eisenstein

He rememberedthe screech of tiresa vein pulsing in his head

Comforting soundof many rubber wheelsthe smell of exhaust

An immense expanseof jeweled crystalhe shared with ghosts

His wife, the childrenparents herding sheeptall buildings collapsing

Foul tastesfar back in the throata cough not completed

Inner dialoguewith world figures

Cosmic peace

All languages hisand instant transportto distant destinations

From deep underwaterthe crystal began ascentannoying his inner ear

Then: frighting

the hosts of figureswho fled in a crowd of bubbles

The container began to meltrather than shatteryet left shards

Embedded in skin, groinbody's outlying partsunused to sensation

He groaned musicallymimicking sheep bleating


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June 2011

in a lost meadow

He saw faces above himeager for languagea telling pointed finger

They watched his eyesfor signs of recognitionbody's coherent movement

As the crystal womb meltedthe mouth of his wifeswam into his sight

Opened to her smileof familiar wrinkles

appealing irregularities

His heart leapedto meet her lipsand form his own

She said then clearlyI'm your daughterall that's left

With that he knewhe had traveledwith light speed

Over years in whichhis wife had stumbledand fatally fallen

He now bitterfully awareknew this awakening

Came too latefar from any homehe could know

He willed reentryto a fully reconstitutedmany-faceted crystal

Into which he fledwith the relief

of finality


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June 2011

Cold War

Valentina Cano

The attention he paid her

was a sliver of fingernail,

a knife blade in the light.

No one would have known

the silence held warm syllables

in its folds, no one could

have seen the reflection of

crinkling fire in his veiled eyes.

She did.

The lapping waves

made of stillborn notes

froze her feet,

clutching her attention,

pinning her down.

His breath pooled about her.

His skin a beam of

turbulent light,

a kaleidoscope of clouds.

She walked by him.

He drew back

and released her into

the afternoons gray shell.


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June 2011

FOUR HAIKUdm Bogr

blunt opposition:sharp blades of shivering sunbeamschipped by pathway-dust

xxxxxxxxxx

flame-sphere-lit skyflux of blustering lightrayscrimson sun-onsetxxxxxxxxxx

pine in shine-sweepnothing save the sun and she:Pinea-privacyxxxxxxxxxx

tick-tack of time stops:near the distance, a sharp blur.parallels X-ing....

xxxxxxxxxx


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June 2011

Those Never Written

Anca Vlasopolos

at my mothers cutting board i

learned what came first

or rather what came inextricably

together

the hen my mother dissected for at least

three of our dinners

meat being so very dear

held deep inside her a pouch

of eggs like amber beads

going from penpoint to almost full size

so when i too go

should there be reason to cut me up

will all these bottled

stored

nearly forgotten

poems

i didnt write

bunch up

like hen eggs clusters of hanging grapes

or line up

neatly

a string of maiming

debris


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June 2011

waiting to be sheathed

into perhaps

unlikely

pearls?


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June 2011

The Unknown SnipersBoghos L. Artinian

I will never know

how many times snipers had had me

clearly in their view,

yet for some reason had refrained

from pulling the trigger

to let me cross the green-line

twice a day, in fifteen years

of civil war.

For that kindness many thanks

to the unknown snipers!

The CardiologistBoghos L. Artinian

Clad in a Hippocratic gown,And effecting a compassionate frown,

He is half plumber,Half electrician,Busily thriving

On clogged vesselsAnd bizarre circuits

That envelopeA muscular pump!


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June 2011

A Man Consists of Sun

Chris Tanasescu

Aman consists of sun

light if hes a vegetarian

(its the photosynthesis

that fed the leaves he lives off)

and time if he eats meat,

the two biological clocks

clashing inside as the eater

and the eaten dance in the dark;

a woman is made of moon

stones if she drinks only spring

water as tides of masculine seas

suck in the river of her sashay

and public places, when drinking

the new wine of her wedding.

The solstice approaches the city,

steamy beams enter

the foliage, and the homes of relatives

where we nod keeping time

Dont breathe, any extra beat?

This worlds no contraceptive.


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June 2011

Re-inventing Language

Devreaux Baker

Tell me something I havent heard before

How bridges in Paris are rusting bolt by bolt

and rivers are tired of their secrets

How night loves to wash your body

Empty words from out of your pockets

and rearrange stars if you have to, but tell

me something you have never told anyone

How the object of your desire never sleeps

and your heart is made of glass that shatters

each time you break bread with your father

Tell me how you invite transgressions into your bed

and slip knots around the waist of afternoon

so twilight never leaves your side

Weave syllables into a net that stretches

from the flea market on the outskirts of this city

all the way into the back alleys of your childhood

then speak to me in the language of your birth


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June 2011

so I may finally understand the things lost to me in translation

and hold them in my hands like saltless tears

or small fires burning in wilderness


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June 2011

MOZARTHugh Fox

Dying at thirty-five, at thirty-five I would

have still been teaching at Loyola University inL.A., never have moved to (MSU) Michigan,never have gone to Brazil and met wife #3,30+ years with her now, six kids with mythree wives, my granddaughter Beatricesbirthday today, four years old, party at ourhouse, this Jewish couple from Ann Arbor,him from Montreal, her from Russia, theirdaughter, Caroline, just hitting four last

week, another couple, friends of my daughterAlexandra, Beatrices mother, with a cute littleblondie daughter, Marylane, him from England,the wife from Chicago...kids and presents, allthree wives there...Mozart, how did he everwrite so much in so few years?

YOUD THINK

Hugh Fox

Youd think Id be used to it by now,

May first, the whole world around me

flowering-greenig, old stuff by age 79,nicht wahr? , but its still miraculous

for me, as if I were age five again,

oak trees that live hundreds of years,

sleep and reawakening, why shouldnt

I have eight hundred years of

seasonalization?


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June 2011

NOT A THOUGHT

Hugh Fox

Beatrice, 4, the Phi Betta Kappa Sorority doll-

legs, even my mother back fifty years ago

in Highland Park, my father retiring at seventy-five,

Elizabeth Tayhor, Queen Victoria, even myself

a year ago not really multi-dimentionally what

mortality-dimensionalizing was coming down the

road.


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June 2011

Will You Go

Kathleen Specter

Ask me to uncover the bones of my blue twinWho was drowned in poisoned air,To separate the real from the something elseLike oil on waterHe was taken to the death baths,Saw the light of unlighted visions;Tears have long since soaked the salt from my eyes.

Now that my grief has grown old with meThings go through my mind when I cant sleep:

The cold rain; the wind as we were made to dig his grave;My father weeping beside me, falling to his knees,Struck in the head with the butt of a gun.I wake with an image like a beating heart,The mirror on the wall showing a face hardly mine, hardly not mine.Face of a man who tries to forget he is living.

My waking is haunted by listening, but to what?The spaces between notes, something

More damning than silence browning the photographOf a boy that could be me or him.

In this life I am frightened of wakingTo the cold walls, water-stained ceiling,And smokestacks belching black against the sky.Our fathers tears are gone, as is the darknessIn which I lost you, brotherUnderstand I am trying to go onWithout history.


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June 2011

Relative Constellations

Michael D. Sollars

Nocturnal, inarticulate murmur;

Is this the moment before or after?

The long awaited toll of the clock,

The long duration between seconds,

The time when the kookaburra bird,

The crows inconsequential cousin,

Ludicrously laughs aloud as the sun dies;

Not quite yet, as first falls across the room,

A whisper

A murmur

A rhythm

A drone

A moan of paralysis.

A new droning, almost imperceptible,

Fills the silence above my bed,

Trapped within the interval of a moment,

Sings from above, like the lost nightingale,

Wind tip toeing across hedge rows,

Its voice whispers, without wavering, but hypnotic.


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June 2011

High overhead,

Rafter hung,

The image races, blurred;

Aeolus bladed,

Arms extended,

Sinister slayer;

His blades strike me

As three arms at first, and then only one in a whirl,

Turning and turning in the collapsing room,

Round and round spin the fans blades,

Ancient or antique, styled with porcelain grommet,

Artful crystal blades, spinning back the contours of time,

Counterclockwise, against times march, overhead.

Still hum, blank filled, incoherent, indistinct,Crawl cocooned memories,

Of what? I know not, at first at any rate;

Greek chorus or chaos, Im uncertain.

Stepless somnambulist, sleep I;

Still, at first, none, not one thought,

Mind milling about across empty mental miles;

Suddenly then thoughts leap free,

I succumb to times snare, prey to the memory hunter lodged inside,

Evanescent hues played by hums and hymns of ethereal worlds.

New night canopy now stretches vast overhead, yard by yard,


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June 2011

Webbed by silver glow, distant luminescent essences,

Multitude of star points, devoid of design and meaning.

Still as stone, dumb to thought,

I stare perplexed at the night ceiling,

The fan continues its incomprehensible murmur,

And the poet finds only the much forgotten of the least learned;

Stellar names lost, lights extinguished.

The Seven Sisters of Platinum Pleiades, hunted eternally by Orion,

Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Pegasus, Orion, Virgo, Phoenix, Andromeda, Cassiopeia,

Once ago familiar constants,

All fallen forever from memory, gone beneath the horizon to dark sleep;

Even my own Libra lost,

Her scales tipped toward oblivion.

Suddenly a horn bellows, followed by a chorus call of new stars;

Curious clusters of brilliant sparks strike the firmament

Born beneath but eternally risen;

Orphic tablets beckon, pull at me,

As the new stars demand to be named,

Christened anew,

Celestial constellations, birthed for forevermore,

All dated deaths;

They belong to me now, and I to them,

Twelve new signs, twelve sad losses;


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June 2011

Beckon! The horn demands.

Stop! No more, I scream.

Who is it again blows his thunder horn?

The bright Child Warrior, Blake, fallen in February frost,

Stands uniformed anew in immortal blue,

The deepest and truest of all blues;

First and always son,

Birthday, wedding, altar candles,

All blown out by one who handles,

But evermore a glowing sun.

Now takes his proud post as nights brightest star,

Seraph, the firegiver, stargiver;Those among us await his nightly artful creation,

Lighting first one signal fire and the next,

Until all heavens leap ablaze.

Horn trumpets another note of the ages!

Roll call commences, constellations ballet onstage, one by one

Past names and new stars, Milky Ways amphitheatre

All of magnitude and minitude, bright and dim, answer:

Young Brother, dull red, fallen to March madness,

Friend of boyhood, blue-white gem, defeated by Aprils melancholy,

Serious Scholar, yellow-white globe, undone by Mays menaces,


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June 2011

Volatile Genius, red giant, succumbed by Junes Jester,

Virgin Goddess, azure blue jewel, caught by Julys cancer,

Pedant Professor, bright crimson flame, harmed by August angst,

Uncle, doomed by Septembers chance shot, appears dim in the wests low sky

Childhood friends with forgotten names,

Orphaned by Octobers perchance, sparkle anew in mild milk clouds,

Imposter, dull dwarf, destroyed by Novembers neurosis,

Silent Searchers, blue-rich twins, succumbed to Decembers dread,

Physician, harvest orange fireball, dealt the January joker,

Deeper in infinitys far dark fathoms lie other lights,

Incalculable numbers, clustering about,

Configuring artfully, forming vast arrays;

Poets proud, Sarah, Sylvia, and Anne,

Yes, the Three Graces, still rowing toward home.

More distant, beyond the skys faint harbor lights,

Painters Palette, sweeping, spiral galaxy filled with visionary whirls,

Brushed by Van Gogh, Greco, Crevel,

Daswanth, Rothko, Bugatti, Watanabe;

Novelist Nebula, nearly visible, unite

Constellations Crane and Hemingway,

Mishima and Kawabata, Pavese and Mayakovsky;

Even more remote and farther lie oldest fires,

Burning Antigone, Ophelia, Juliette,


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June 2011

Loyal Daughters, now Celestial Sisters.

A lost voice, echoing from Times vault, whispers:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge,so many,

I had not thought death had undone somany.

Still suspended under Aeolus racking wind, bedridden within the infinite duration ofa lingering moment; sudden thoughts crystallize out of the void like springs late snowflakes

and overpower the memory gather; a child clutches his small fingers around a new Christmastelescope, as he trudges off alone, bound to a cold December night hilltop; refracted lightilluminates the cosmic scene; no father appears, even long after the sun and moon are lost tothe west; double, double toil and Hubble trouble manifest in the scopes mirror; gravity failsas the boys dreams drift skyward, riding on the wings of the bird boy, only soon to fall whenthe switch of the dreaded earthly force is flipped back on.

Apparitions shadow, always guarded by light and dark, suddenly shouts: He who

gained a telescope, only to lose the world.

The same boy, and later man, feverishly searches dreams through imperfect, evenwarped lenses. Love and death circle as twin stars, mistaken as one perfect sphere. Then hespies sights fault: processional ritual observed as apparition of ecstasy and beneficence,followed by focus of cruel certainty, and finally ultimate aberration, maleficent flaw.

But then I pass with fortune like ordinary light through the polished prism glass andemerge from my prison resin; gutter gulag and guillotine guilt decanted; my hidden colorsspraying apart like royal ribbons.

The figure comes clearer, a self stranger running and running, miles and marathons.He races for the horizon, only to find it receding step for step. The moon floats in flight. Buthe is slowed and then staggered in his steady steps as he wonders for what, the to and fro. Hedeserts the oval track for longer, drifting elliptical roads.


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June 2011

No, I shout, tossing thunderbolt back,

Against an onslaught of mean memory;

But recollections argue forward,

Seeking existence at their own peril.

Leave me, free me;

An instant of clarity rushes me,

Four elements, thats all, no more;

Do away with the periodic chart;

Slice, dice, cut with Ockhams razor;

Theres Fire, hot sundae eucharist topped with grace,

Theres Air, trailing clouds of worry do I come;

Then water, water, here and there, but nowhere;

And Earth, meadows of melodies, mountains of misplay;

Restless trance, slumber silence,

On a pillow of plucked powder down.

Conflicted again!

Troubling letters cluster together like teammates for a yearbook memory. ROYGBVlean shoulder to shoulder. What does it spell? I must have known once. The thing and theforest of symbols once held meaning, but I have lost the lighted intersection where roadsmeet. I have drifted too far from center, and now any certainty of orbital return becomes evenmathematically incalculable.

The poet, a grave figure at times, a grave digger at all times;


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June 2011

No Wood of Thorns

Impresses those outland spherical souls,

To be fed on by harpies;

Try instead,

Queen of Thorns

Garden of Thorns

Path of Thorns

Rain of Thorns

Veil of Thorns

Nest of Thorns

Crown of Thorns.

The play of the spheres, commences,

Orchestra performers,

Planetary measures, cosmic scales,Music of harmonious performance,

Strings of violins, notes of flutes and clarinets;

Cornets and trombones, drums and cymbals,

Flood one ear and the other;

The Dark Queen constellation rises;

Dignified by deliberate gait of grace and grandeur,

She moves unchecked across the sky,

Through space and moment, one to the next;

Vain queen of beauty,

Gentle and alluring,


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June 2011

Wearing seductress smile;

Her luminous ascension darkens others,

Silences all galactic song;

Scent of lavender trails her gown,

Clothed in soft cotton crimson, a nuptial shroud;

Hair adorned with peacock jeweled crown;

Beckons with emerald stone, eyes the tinge of tomorrow,

Commands the earthly board, dispatches piece by piece,

Angel of sweet sleep and lullaby lies;

From high above, far beyond the Queen,

The Mover of all moments and movements,

Stirs and waits without impatience,Desiring no thought,

To consider and reconsider,

For visions or revisions.

From sovereign seat, the Mover sees:

Clockwise grind the cutting blades,

Slicing air, trimming time,

Cleaving young, slitting old,

Chopping this, slashing that;

Measure once, cut once,

Across mortalitys mark.


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June 2011

In the room, discords demon brother clamors,

Dissonance threatens near and far;

Louder, closer drones disquiets din,

Dispatching harmony, harboring destiny;

The way appears, milky and ethereal,

Vast clouds of friendly sky-lined lights,

Starsteps back.


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June 2011

Stones from Heaven

--for the children of Haiti

Paul Lobo Portugs

"What crime what sin had those young hearts conceived

That lie bleeding torn on a mothers breast...

The human race demands a word from God." --Voltaire, " Poem on the LisbonEarthquake" (1775)

the flesh of the city blends its blood with the dust of earth's grave

the devil quake broke the bones of their beds with its terrorist bomb

they could see the day light of death in the beaten air

feel it in their prayerful souls as the some time glad day sun fell

into forever's darkness and all the all reeked with the ashes of fear

where is the loving God of married hallelujahs?

all the poor man's houses falling falling "amid the deepening gloom"

into a tomb for sons of promise and green daughters

their pleasure and pain drowned in a ghost of tears

lost like raindrops on the grey face of the bottomless ocean

vanished like the passing shadows of stories in the imagination of clouds

why oh darkened God of stones God of the Word God of Heaven?

in the once bright light of a schoolyard's promise silence now bleeds

where young eyes yesterday shouted from their books a belief in tomorrows

now the living dead carry their bodies with loving worms

on the gallows of their bent backs wander the veins of the beaten streets


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June 2011

chanting horror's verbs black angels mourning the flesh of graves

where is the open hands of God the prodigal Father?

they lie down forever in the weather of their sorrow with the innocent dead

weep for the seed of their breathless children in the blood lit city of gospels sorrow

no glad to be home families no wined friends with hope's holiday songs

no loving child's prayers or whispered shut eye no sweet good nights

no these good soldiers of Jesus' hosannas are the inspired blind no more

to the womb of endless night no to the forsaken God of their brambled loins


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June 2011

Black Eagles of Dark Forest

Richard Oko Ajah

Black Eagles of the evil forest

Are the brides of feathers,

Blessed with pacy paddles

For transport into high rocks

Where their sacred treasures

Are cloaked like black gold.

Black Eagles of the dark forest

Are clothed with rubber clogs

Whose snazzy skins are nourished

With its preys blood and body

Killed to satisfy their SisypheanInstincttheir luxury.

Black Eagles on High Rocks

Who scream like a woman in travail and

All corners of our commonwealth penetrate

Through with lustful eyes which are

Deadly weapon for mass destruction

And escape-route to their hunters

Aim


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June 2011

The Door......

Shradha Kamra

I pass by here

unbiased each day

to feel you closer

until its gray.

with no other way

to unlock the door

neither the recourse

nor the roar

i put down my desire

to take this side

to stand at the door

to look inside.

As I turn around

Forwarding back

again to recover

the complete lack,

with still moves

and running eyes

I suddenly stop

and once more rise.

I turn around

to the previous side

to stand at the door

to look inside.


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June 2011

Two poems

Victor W. Pearn

Living Inside Confucius Wall

A few have lived here before

in peace and harmony,

where moonlight still shines

brilliantly orange in Octobers haze

And along Gu Lou street you may

hear the clomp, clomping, sound

of old horsespulling tourists

to and from the Confucius Temple.

Here there are intricate

roof patterns and those

ancient eaves, built to overlap

fill in space, as if sky and eaves

were loverstouching over and

under.

Natural shape

tyrannosaurus rex

crouching

head twisted to the right

ferocious jaws

stretched open

his unyielding body

prepared to pounce

a landscape rock at jining university

an igneous stone

clouds change shape

form a temporal wispy illusion

transparent mist

in moonlight


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June 2011

Street Lamp

Adrienne Wolfert

The street lamp

distances the moon,

stars dont stand a chance.

Night , the siren,

sings our false voyages.

Point of View

Adrienne Wolfert

At the bottom of the lake

the drowned watch

looks like a fellow species

to the incurious fish.

Scholars sift the sand, discover

each civilizations grave atop the other.

Eternitys the name we give

the casual castaway of what is over.


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June 2011

From The HeartApril Avalon

I'm here in the corner, devoured by cold,My little ribbed shell hides a desperate sigh,It holds an enigma for you to unfoldUntil I'm asleep to your breath's lullaby.

My soul is rushing beyond the extremes,Revealing the vibe that is hard to appease,But once you discover the door to my dreams,My consciousness lives through a moment of peace.

Whenever my lips start exploring your skin,They bleed unexplainable bitter remorse -My poison leaves stains, and it feels from within,But lips ever sealed do appear much worse.

Madness So Sweet

April Avalon

Pearls of fantasies shine in the waters of hopeThat February turned tears to.We will certainly free weakened hands from the ropesIf wonder is all that we do.

Let us build a small ship as a shelter-to-be

And paint it in colors of spring.It is madness so sweet to spend life on the sea;I will turn to a siren and sing.

In the song of my heart that will beat twice as fast,Your own inner voice will reveal.Reminiscence I'll crave is for ages to last,I'll gift you a moment to steal.


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June 2011

In Lines

April Avalon

Invisible scars.

The blades of your hands.Repeating old lines of my own.The well-hidden sense.The hopeless romance.The eyes that could gift me the dawn.

The days go by.Three months till July.

Love, listen, I'm honestly strivingTo perpetuateMy fortunate fate,Still learning the art of surviving.

But I am too weak,Frail fingers do seekA chance to entwine for a moment

With yours, then lose holdAnd feel this strange cold,Indulge in a beautiful torment.

The same tragic theme.I've reached the extreme.It seems I'll be waiting for agesOf riddles and signs,

Of love fixed in lines,Of counting papers and pages.


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June 2011

Life

April Avalon

The words I hardly figure outAnd all our mornings are about -A cigarette, tea flavored menthol,The train, the underground noise...And then - in turn: your eyes, your voice...

A warm embrace, so quick yet tender,So evanescent, yet desired,The lurking verses, eve-inspired -

A perfect mix, and I'll surrender.You'll leave around half past five...That's it. And, well, it is my life.


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June 2011

Death of The Past

Carl Scharwath

Enlightened moon an abortion of nighttime creation,

cries energy in summers final luminance.

Grave yard headstones manifest elongated shadows.

Cement souls embedded in the humid grass,

the distant, lonely house exhales the past.

History impregnates the air through tiny stucco cracks.

Curb adorned in one broken old television set,

the future anchored in its rusted satellite dish

No one ever dies here anymore, where have they gone?

Displaced suburbia manifests abandoned dreams,

a neighborhood raped in shuttered factories.

Polluted smoke replaced with the whiteness of lonely clouds


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June 2011

Down to the rivers of gold

Christina Murphy

Down to the rivers of gold

in autumn light once green

with promise, we will bring

our hearts to the fading season

of youthful light lost in regret

Everything heads to conclusion:

carefree, unaware, and gripped

in dying; it is the passage, the weight,

the hearts burden of knowing loss

and the souls requisite of forgiveness

Better dreams shall hold us soft

in the mercy of remembrance

the green to gold, the gold to silence

the currents of the river moving us on

to the changes that hold our fate


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June 2011

Fountain City, Tennessee, 1964

Gale Acuff

At the end of her street is a dead end,

Grandmom says. I want to see it, I say.

There's nothing to see, she says.I want to

see what nothing looks like, I say. She laughs

but I don't know why. I want to hit her

for laughing at me, for laughing at all,

whatever the reason.Don't make me mad,

I think, but I don't say it because she

might not take me to the end to see what

an end that's dead can do and I'm not brave

enough to go there by myself. Maybe

when I'm a little older. I'm 7

now, not a baby, but not a grown child.

We're walking and holding hands, or she holds

mine. If she lets it go it will fall to

my side. I'd hold hers back but I'm afraid

of her, I'm not sure why, maybe because

she's so old. She can't walk very fast. I

could break free and run ahead. I'd hear her

calling me. I'd probably ignore her

and see what the dead end looks like all by

myself. I'd be a man then. Like she is.


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June 2011

Flower Child

Jennifer C. Wolfe

I saw the creased white business card

Lying in the sand of the parking lot:

It looked as though it had been run over

By tires immersed in fresh tar.

Flowers and Friends, its name stared

Up at me in neat, black letters.

I stared at the card, mesmerized by

Thoughts of childhood zoo conservatory trips.

As a summer wind rifled through my hair,

I pondered how long it had been,

Since someone had arrived at my doorstep,

Holding flowers clenched in their hand.

My last bouquet had been an apologetic,

Rumpled assortment from the local supermarket;

It reminded me of yellow dandelions

Intermingled with pink cake frosting roses.

I thought it looked somewhat pricey,

Especially when lovelier wildflowers

Could just have easily been picked

Along the side of the road for free


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June 2011

POMPEII

Kenneth Pobo

Your beauty is like a calendar

with August missing. When I said

if youre late again, Ill stuff you

in a pre-digital TV, drop you

in the Delaware River. You

were on time. Oh hairy-toed one,

oh hairy toad one, I called you darling

just when a horse from a farm

in the long ago showed up at my door.

You didnt say it back. I waited

for a century to crumble

like the gardenia I pinned on

my prom date. Youre cold

and Im Pompeii sniffing

a smoking mountain.


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June 2011

DINDIS ALLERGIC ATTACK

Kenneth Pobo

I order bisque in a posh

Michigan Avenue restaurant,

forget to ask is lobster in it,

I cant breathe,

my eyes squeeze shut,

Im going to pass out,

in the ambulance

some woman holds my hand,

saysjust hang in there,

honey, just hang in there.

I become a code, a quick blast

of fix. Some say that in

a near-death moment

we see ourselves rising

toward the light. I saw nothing.

When breath returned,

my lungs were two

planets circling the sun,

both full of life.


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June 2011

Hookers on Archer Avenue

Michael Lee Johnson

Late evening, early morning,

I search the night for whores,

young, bloody with desire.

Night streets are silent streets

except for hookers and their Johns.

One wants the dart of groins

the other green eyes in dollar

sacred treasures-

snatch the wallet, a consecrated craft.

Both hit the streets quickly

satisfy needs quickly.

Im an old buck now rich with memories

more than movement, still talk, take porn shots,

with a peeking eye, snoop around

department store corners,

and dumpy old alleyways.

My hair is gray, my teeth eroding,

thoughts toward prayer

A.M. Catholic Mass,

then off in early morning

to the mailbox, a lethargic walk,

I pick up my social security check-

comforts my needs.


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June 2011

Evening settles into bed time

with a western romance novel,

ambushes, excitement,

old transgressions stretch

and relax.

No desires, homage

to the day, to the night.


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June 2011

Our Children

Phillip A. Ellis

Though you are not fertile,

these poems are our children,

and, as we settle them into bed,

and as we bring them to rest,

you will kiss each one good night

and retire to my arms.

But you are not here with me,

and these poems are all crying for you,

as if you had never been,

and, like an infant monkey

clinging to galvanised wire,

to a mother that never calms,

they are clinging to my knees and plead

to mefor you.

As I try to lay each one in bed,

and as soon as one is settled,

those who had gone before climb out

and come crying to me.

They will not sleep and dream.

I do not know what to do with them:

they will not be calmed.

They cling to me, who am but wire,


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June 2011

and they seek a succour that cannot come,

and they seek a comfort I cannot give,

and I am alone as you are elsewhere,

and I am as one sorrowing

for a wife who will not return,

for a wife who will not come home,

for a wife who will not take up these children

into her arms,

and lead them into sleep and dreams.

And, as we settle them into bed,




I am alone with them;you are away.

I am alone with them;

you are a waiting researcher,

marking in records the poems that will cling to me,

marking in records the poems in a misery

that your ears cannot hear,

and that my ears cannot forget.

I am alone with them;

and you are away.

Though you are not fertile,

these poems are our children,


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June 2011

and, as we settle them into bed,




But you are not here with me.

Married Life

Phillip A. Ellis

We are the couple brought together, writing

these poems, with first one line, another line

turned on its head, the way an ox would plough

along one line then turn, return

the way it came. And, writing these, I wonder

whether such oxen ever felt a sense

of peace, and cooling muscles once the work

had ended, whether they found satisfaction,

relief, an oxen sense of purpose, almost

meaning to life. You need your rest? Then rest,

O ox: your work is well, and done, and finished.

But if these lines were lines of sonnets, maybe

iambic sonnets, not free verse, then maybe

your hands would hold the rhymes, all predetermined,

ready to broadcast through the furrows, scattered

by hand the way the seeds of other ages


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June 2011

were scattered, sowed. And maybe, in these sonnets,

the sense would swell and fill the lines with shoots

so cleanly green and fresh, the earth itself

would seem to sing the sonnet's sensibility,

seem to announce the poetry itself,

with a wine's voice. I think the oxen dream

of such a voice, so sweet, so honeyed, rippling

encouragement when ploughing furrows, first

one way and then another, then, at end,

O ox: your work is well, and done, and finished.

And would you guide the ox that ploughs our land?

With me behind it, making sure the plough

itself will never turn, and leap and break

the line the furrow makes within the soilwe turn over. I know this, know that something

about us, making us as one together,

a singled team, that toils and works the soil

together, sowing seeds so shoots of green

can rise and grow to fruitful wheats we harvest,

with some to feed the oxen, some to sell

and some to sow again, until the end

when we will never sow again, our children

inheriting our toil, our legacy

until at last the line is dead, the soil

is also dead and barren, sun like one

who withers with a look of anger. Would you,


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June 2011

knowing this, guide the ox at all? Or would

you take your leave and, breaking my heart, leave me

with fields unploughed, the oxen lorn, heartbroken

and yearning your fair voice? I can't believe

I'd want to live, or even shift the plough

along the furrows, only allow weeds

to rise and grow upon the fields until

they fell to entropy at last, the poems

forgotten, rotting, dust, and nothing more.

.................................


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June 2011

Four Haiku

Rebeka Sra

lips of petal bride

kissed into purple berries

by springtime sunlight

+++

hovering white faith

silken prayers in the wind

cherry blossom

+++

twirling flowers

carry dreams of captive bird

on winged winds back

+++

metallic light-twang

pale Sun dressed in fumes, rolling

above the winter road


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June 2011

A Glimpse of the Tragic Vision

Thomas Zimmerman

How serious it seems: the universe

so multiform, a zillion-petaled bloom

of clashing forces, ocean to immerse

and drown each spark of thought, enormous room

with furniture too big to reach to sit

and rest upon. So we assert ourselves:

heroic anagnorises will knit

our strands of fate. Some books upon our shelves

affirm it. Goat-song. Tragedy. To lives

to suffer. And to die. The art we make

portraying this ennobles us and gives

us bittersweet release. Rebirth. Just take

Osiris, Dionysus, Christ: the grief

of death and joy of life beget belief.


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June 2011

MORTAL/MARTIAL/MARITAL WOUNDS

William John Watkins

First wounds go deepest

clear to the heart and that

thrill of mortality,

"God! I will not survive this,",

this Other,whose death

means more to me than mine!"

but even first wounds close,

and open, over time.

At first the bleeding is profuse,

the pumping of the heart is clearly seen,

life spurts and squirts

wetting everything within reach

before the dozen natural forces that congeal

blood into clot, scab, scar

begin their unseen irresistible work.

Sometimes, the wound's so wide

the flow so copious and continuous,

it dies of its own exuberance

before anything can be done to stabilize it.

Others knit and seem to heal,

mature toward scar and even skin again

until trauma breaks them open one time more.


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June 2011

Always when it does, there is the hesitation,

the numbness that creeps slowly into pain

and the first weeping drops before the flow again,

sometimes with the first wound's thrill,

but never with the first's velocity.

Those that have gone all the way to scar a dozen times

split easiest from the unexpected blow,

bleed least, close quickest, do not turn

gangrenous, necrotic, terminal.

The broken open scar lasts longer,

means more than the superficial heal,

the surface close that leavesunsuspected abscesses,

cancerous pockets that open only to the grave.

Crosshatched with scars, we find

even wounds have their life cycles

and the years reveal

for all its pain, the wound,

however battered,

better than no wound at all.


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RESEARCHRESEARCHRESEARCHRESEARCH

PAPERSPAPERSPAPERSPAPERS

ANDANDANDAND

ESSAYSESSAYSESSAYSESSAYS


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June 2011

PET TREES & DANCING BAY PONIES

Joseph Powell

Professor

Dept. of English

Central Washington University

As a college student, I remember a pivotal moment in a class taught by a novelist and

critic. He asked this question: Where do you go for truth--religion, science, philosophy,

novels, psychology? Of course, truth is contextual, personal, multi-layered, elusive, but its

an intriguing question, especially as a speculative topic in a literature class. I was a

psychology major at the time with the uneasy suspicion that psychologys answers were too

easily packaged. My response to the truth question for the last thirty years has been poetry

(though its clear to me now that literature operates on its own system of elisions, of tried and

tired metaphors as reductive as a syndrome). I feel that poetry has revealed more about the

exigencies of life and death, of hope and dread, of love and hate, of men and women, of race

and reconciliation, and the poignant articulation of what it means to inhabit and embrace a

world weve damaged. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that poetry can render men more

amiable, more generous and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapors of the little world of

self (28), and for me, this has been true. By writing poetry, I have been invited to see

beyond those dull vapors and the confines of the self. Wallace Stevens shows us that

perception is necessarily personal, and the apprehension of otherness is the beginning of

empathy, of global awareness, of humanity. For years poetry has been my way to understand

the human condition, especially its dark underside. Poetry has been a vital tool in shaping my

relationships, my delights and sorrows.


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June 2011

Others have expressed their allegiances to this art form in similar and emphatic ways.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in hisBiographia Literaria when discussing Shakespeares

depth and energy of thought that Poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human

knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, and language (19). Matthew

Arnold is more guarded about the broad influence of poetry, but his estimation of its power is

similar: If it is said that Goethe professes to have in this way deeply influenced but a few

persons, and those persons poets, one may answer that he could have taken no better way to

secure, in the end, the ear of the world, for poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive,

and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance (161). Of course,

most high praise for poetry comes from poets who have felt its effects profoundly. However,

for most people in America, the word poetry cant even be said without an imaginary or

literal eye-roll, the suspicion that somebody is wearing pink underwear and might want you

to touch it. The prejudices against poetry have a variety of causes and effects often

pronounced by people who ought to be more amiably disposed to its charms and uses.

Unfortunately, poetry and sentimentality seem to be intertwined like those two snakes

suggesting a pharmacy. It is difficult to disassociate one from the other because fiction

writers and comics and other glib social commentators rather enjoy the embrace. In

nineteenth century America, there was a demand for sentimental poetry which made its way

into popular magazines and could be snipped out and put into a frame and hung on a kitchen

or an outhouse wall, into poetry anthologies, into inspirational books, into the emotional

lexicon of the age. In his weirdly eclectic collection of favorite passages from a multitude of

books, Ralph Woods includes in hisA Treasury of the Familiara large sampling of extremely

bad poetry which had tickled his fancy. He also includes fine poems by Keats, Blake,

Coleridge, and Gray, but generally the choices are blushingly sentimental. The two poems

chosen from Emily Dickinsons work are mediocre and project platitudes her startling mind


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June 2011

was not prone to. Woods makes them worse by giving them his own sentimental titles. The

first is #919 in her Complete Poems:

If I can stop one Heart from breaking

I shall not live in vain

If I can ease one Life the Aching

Or cool one Pain

Or help one fainting Robin

Unto his Nest again

I shall not live in Vain. (433)

He uses the 1924 version of this poem published in Martha Dickinson Bianchis The

Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Bianchi eliminated the capitals and added punctuation,

but Woods went even further in his editing. He titles it Helping The Handicapped, which

fatuously narrows the poem, and he changed unto to into and the his to its. The

poem has a fainting robin problem, is overly general, and presents a kind of stereotype that

Dickinsons poems generally avoid or at least grapple with more completely. In her

introduction to the book, Bianchi saw the fainting robin as a synonym for the universe

(viii) which makes the robin reference a little more likeable but still quite a stretch, but seeing

the robin as the handicapped is beyond absurd, besides misrepresenting Dickinsons work

and being patronizing to the handicapped. The second poem he calls Chartless which

cozily endorses a God and heaven that many of her other poems do not. This lack of taste in

a reader and editor who thought of himself as extremely well read, who wanted to preserve

his intellectual garden which he had tended over his lifetime, was probably common at the


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June 2011

end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. And it is not uncommon today; for the

book is still available and has gone into three printings.

The sentimental public image of poetry includes both poems and poets. Thedemographics of poetry changed after the advent of Romanticism where peasant poets were

celebrated as natural geniuses who tapped an inner resource without much learning, and some

highly educated poets hankered for the uncomplicated emotional directness of peasant poets,

sentimentalizing their wise simplicity. In one sense, this was a good thing. It opened up

poetry to everyone, encouraged many people to find meaning by writing and reading poetry.

Yet there is a difference between those who use poetry to find or construct meaning and those

who use it merely to illustrate the trite blessings of conventionality, of the status quo, of

religious dogma. In a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Robert Frost described the act of

composing a meaningful poem: A poem is never a put-up job so to speak. It begins as a

lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to

begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness. It finds its thought and

succeeds, or doesnt find it and comes to nothing. It finds its thought or makes its thought. I

suppose it finds it lying around with others not so much to its purpose in a more or less full

mind. (22). The process he describes here is generally not how sentimental poets compose;

their language is merely a fulfillment of what they already know and feel. There is no

discovery, no thought hunting for its meaning; they generally are not driven by doubt, by

contradiction, by a need to understand their own complexities. Any writer worth reading

examines the conflict between received reality and the way the writer has experienced it.

Helen Vendler wrote that writers can betray themselves as artists, and their art itself by

papering over the actual with the agreeable or the socially enjoined (283), and novelists are

just as prone to this betrayal as poets are. Or perhaps poets are even less prone to it because

there isnt a commercial incentive to write the sentimental and stereotypical for readers who


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enjoy having their own prejudices confirmed. Poetry books rarely make much money for the

poet or the publisher unless they are written by famous people, and these books are generally

sentimental like the poems of Suzanne Somers or Jewel. Poets who write with an

inspirational or religious agenda may be able to find a publisher and an audience, but only

within a narrow group looking for that kind of validation of their own sensibilities.

Historically, the poets job was more elevated that it is today. Plato has Socrates say in

theIon that poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally

possessed (33); when they compose poems they are divinely inspired and lose their reason.

Similarly, in The Republic, he finds poetry a little dangerous because it feeds and waters the

passions instead of drying them up (51). He also says that poetry is a higher thing than

history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular (60). He excludes

poets from his ideal republic because they keep us in touch with the baser parts of our

psyches which reason cant quite conquer; poetry is thus a threat to a free and virtuous ideal

society. It is quite clear in The Republic that Platos grudge against the popularity of poetry

in Greek society is an attempt to make a little more room for philosophy and philosophers. In

our culture, both poets and philosophers have been banished to butler for the rich and famous

and are kept in slim padded rooms.

Although Albert Cook tells us in his edited version of Shelleys A Defense of Poetry

that this defense was a mode of argument practiced in the schools and given as assignments

to schoolboys, it is clear both from Philip Sidneys Defense and the tone of Shelleys that

both poets are concerned about the cultural lack of respect that poets and poetry gets. At the

beginning of his Defense, Sidney complains that the highest estimation of learning

[poetry] is fallen to be the laughingstock of children (5), and later in the essay, he says that

poetry. . .is among us thrown down to so ridiculous an estimation (8); he then goes on to

show how important poetry was to all incipient cultures, that it was the way each culture


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preserved its rituals and history, whether oral or written. He feels that poetry was the first

light-giver to ignorance and first nurse whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed

afterwards of tougher knowledge (4), and its present state of disregard and abuse is rather

ungrateful. In Sidneys day, there were religious critics who picked up Platos argument

about poetry corrupting its audience and turning people away from the Ideal or God. Sidney

felt compelled to respond, but assumptions about the virtuous aims of poetry have remained

fairly consistent from the Greeks to present. In his letter about The Divine Comedy, Dante

wrote to his patron that the role of poetry is to remove those living in this life from the state

of misery and lead them to the state of felicity (82). That is a tall order, but the use of poetry

as a teaching tool, as a vehicle for our edification and happiness, has a long history.

In the age of reason before romanticism, Shakespeare described the poets activity in A

Midsummer Nights Dream as:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name. (5.1.7-12)

Here, the poet is a kind of inventive prophet who looks comprehensively at the world

and synthesizes what he sees until he creates something, a shape out of nothing, and gives it

local context. The modern reader would read fine coupled with frenzy as an oxymoron

which suggests an acquired and refined taste that controls the wildness inherent in

possibilities. However, in the 16th century, poetic frenzy was a common Neo-Platonic term

among poetry critics; in the introduction to Sidneys Defense, Lewis Soens notes that this


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frenzy is the poets ability to perceive supernatural and ideal truth (xx); it also has a

religious connotation and seems indistinguishable from the inspiration which created the

Psalms (xxii). It is a synonym for inspiration, but the sense of frenzy as temporary

madness was also current in the 16th century. For Shakespeare, the poet tries to align the

ineluctable need for religion with the baser facts of our existence; he tries to reconcile the

irreconcilable; he submits to the tension and yet must yoke the opposites together to create a

form, to give it a location and a name. The resultant poem is a marriage of alien forces

requiring a superior will and imagination. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that . . . the test of a

first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time,

and still retrain the ability to function (69). Shakespeare clearly assumes that its the poets

job to do this.

In the midst of the Romantic Movement, Shelley was enthusiastic about the role of

poetry in the world: It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers

of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words.

They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive

and all penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its

manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of

an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon

the present. . . . Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world (46). This is a

grandiose claim, and the works of superbly talented poets today which are full of the electric

life which burns within their words cast little light to mainstream culture; they are more

unacknowledged than ever, and the legislation they sponsor would hardly light a match.

Yet it is partly because of the Romantic revolution that poets become idle dreamers,

purple recorders of nature, self-absorbed fools who oversimplify and have a dull disdain for

the history of ideas, not to mention work itself. In The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel


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Hawthorne writes that the fishes went gleaming about, now turning up the sheen of a golden

side, and now vanishing into the shadows of the water, like the fanciful thoughts that coquet

with a poet in his dream (164); here poets are idlers beside a pond bewitched by

metaphorical fish as they slide in and out of view, not knowing which to choose because they

are all so lovely and golden. Hawthorne is doing the real work while the poets are dangling

grass stems from their teeth as they dream in the sun, (or the saloon in this case), afraid of

real fish in real ponds. His use of coquet is particularly revealing. It literally means a

flirtatious man, and its connotations suggest to trifle, dally. Its French root is derived

from coq suggesting a cock, and the Latin word coco meaning to cackle. Poets are

dreamers and triflers, dalliers who like to make a lot of noise with a sexual agenda.

This image has persisted among prose writers into the twentieth and twenty-first

centuries with various degrees of snide generalization and rather nasty caricature. InNew

Stories from the South, The Years Best, 2003, Mark Winegardner published a story called

Keegans Load that satirizes two poets: one is a fraud, the other is real, yet they are

both rather ridiculous. The story is a satire of academe, so one would expect most people in

the story to be frauds in some way. However, the poets are presented in the most grossly

stereotypical and lopsided terms. Of course, poets can be objects of ridicule like other people

involved in a somewhat odd vocation or occupation, but it is exceedingly rare to find even

casual references to poets in anything but derogatory terms. Furthermore, in these

persistently Romantic times, there is a need to separate the poet from the poem, to place the

value on the product and to de-emphasize the biographical oddities or social quirks of some

poets. I know this sounds New Critical, and knowing something about biography and

historical context is useful and sometimes necessary, but often this extra effort is used to

excuse bad writing.


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However, there are plenty of poets who still prefer to make sense, who see their work as

naming their local habitations, who struggle with aligning the spiritual world with the

mundane.

Winegardners poets can only write about themselves in the most stubbornly literal

way; their thinly veiled autobiography is self-indulgent and tasteless. His academic poets are

charlatans who are self-absorbed, have no sense of audience, no sense of cultural propriety,

are opportunists, and, like children, love the sounds of their own voices. He reserves his most

savage attack for the fraud poet who couldnt be more inane, and of the hundreds of

academic poets Ive known, he resembles none of them.

Winegardners fraud poet trembles at commencement while reciting his occasional

poem about a Charlotte shopping mall developer to whom we were giving an honorary

degree (287); his occasional poems were a blend of the earnestly literal with enough

mystical babble to kill an adult horse (301); his Poetry Reading Voice [was] stilted, self-

conscious, in awe of its own profundity (288); his books came out from a vanity press and

the last one from the press of a former student who printed it in his parents basement (290);

many of his students seemed honestly to mistake Keegans incoherence for depth (290);

Keegan tries to get the fiction writer to recommend his novel to her agent, finally gets his

student to publish his book, then tries to nominate himself for the Nobel prize; he reads poem

after poem at his third wifes funeral, saying some poems were written for her but were

recognized as coming from books that predated her, and he had copies of the poems that he

read at the funeral available after the service. A writer responds to Keegans novel by saying

I just blurted out the truth: that he needed to revise the whole thing, with an eye toward what

a stranger might find interesting (297). We get the feeling that this is Winegardners main

point and advice to all poets. However, the qualities of the fraud poet in Winegardners story

are only slightly inflated characteristics of those found in the American public consciousness.


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A fairly recent novel on the best seller list was Lief Engers Peace Like A Riverwhich had a

few compelling characters but generally pushed a romantic version of the West and was

occasionally infatuated with its own sentimentality. The young girl in the novel loves to

write rhymed verse and later becomes famous for it with s

the muse - an international journal of poetry 1.1 (june 2011)

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