NINE MILE MAGAZINE Publisher: Nine Mile Art Corp. This is Volume 5, No. 1, Fall 2017 Editors: Bob Herz, Stephen Kuusisto Art Editor Emeritus: Whitney Daniels Cover Art: Painting is by Thomasina DeMaio, "The Last Tango." It is an anti-nuclear statement, with the dancers not seeing the atomic blast taking place to the right off balcony. The piece is 8 ft by 10 ft oil on canvas (1981) The publishers gratefully acknowledge support of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. We also acknowledge support of the County of Onondaga and CNY Arts through the Tier Three Project Support Grant Program. We have also received significant support from the Central New York Community Foundation. This publication would not have been possible without the generous support of these groups. We are very grateful to them all. ISBN-10: 0-9976147-7-3 ISBN-13: 978-0-9976147-7-0 Poetry and artwork copyright of their respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. No poem or artwork may be reproduced in full or in part without prior written permission from its owner.
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Contents Appreciations & Asides
10
JAMES CERVANTES What the World Needs
15
JIM CRENNER Fun With Death Don't Think Of A Realtor Above Via dei Coronari Exer-cycle With Underwear For Want Of A Word Of Tuesday Morning Quarterbacking
19 22 24 25 26 27
STEPHEN KUUSISTO Landscape With A Blind Man's Sun Original Sin The Magpie The nights have become bigger and they continue to grow
32 33 34 35
KEN WEISNER The Audition Orpheus To Hades The Call Typostrophe
37 39 40 42
SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY Tamir Rice ER There Is One Blue River
45 46 48
ATHENA KILDEGAARD "the tale of the buttons"
50
T.C. BRODIE Illusions Of Grandeur
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CHARD DENIORD Each Stunning Thing Talking In Bed At The Bardo Inn CAROLINE MANRING Understudy Les hiboux for whom Things You Can Do Without Children/Lies That Work more beautiful than completion is the moment hate begins to falter
54 55
60 61 62 64 66
CHRIS MARTIN Epilogue Cento A Pigeon On A Branch Reflecting On Existence Where Mountain Equals Denouement
68 69 70 72
REMEMBERING JOHN BOWIE David St. John, Bob Herz, Bill Burtis
74
JOHN BOWIE POEMS A Night At The Opera Ode To Ed Sullivan Ode To Liberace Ode To King Kong Ode To Michey Mouse Ode To Walter Brennan
80 82 83 84 86 88
DIANA PINCKNEY Chop Suey, 1929 Proposal
92 93
MAXIMILIAN HEINEGG Quarry
95
AUDEN IN LOVE
98
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SOME TRANSLATIONS God & The Sea & The Heart (Machado) Correspondences (Baudelaire) Songs Of Pianos In Rich Neighborhoods (LaForgue) Eloges. 2. (St. John Perse)
110 111 112 115
RICHARD NIXON: AN UNKNOWN MASTER
116
STEPHEN KUUSISTO On Blogging, Ten Years Worth Poetry Journal
122 134
YUAN CHANGMING Karma Casting: A Wuxing Poem
140
ELEANOR LERMAN Leaving This World Evening Primrose A Walk In The Spring With My Dog
143 144 146
DOUG ANDERSON Dancer Another Birthday And The Heart Sutra Mary Anne Angel Of Death Part III Homage To Tu Fu If I Were An Exile
149 150 151 154 155 156
UNBIDDEN LUCK, AFTER WAR, a review of Horse Medicine, poems by Doug Andxerson
159
CHRIS COSTELLO Pandora's Photography
164
HOPE JORDAN Charleston, SC My Grandmother Painted Landscapes
166 167
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ELINOR CRAMER Her Stub Pencil And Envelope Scrap Smolder Unsheathed How I Landed In The Nineteenth Century The Oysterman Writes
169 171 172 173 174
PEGGY LIUZZI A Love Poem To Myself
177
CAROL BIESEMEYER Preparing To Sleep The Cracks
180 181
SUSAN CHARLTON Redwing Blackbird Homecoming Fog In Amber Valley Hear October
183 184 185 186
JUDY CARR First Swim - Again
188
SARA PARROTT In The Garden Of You A Glimpse Of Icarus At Webster’s Pond
191 192
CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY Mourning, Not Rending Algorithm The Fisherman Like A Dog Barking At A Statue Of The Virgin Mary There Is A Word I Keep Forgetting The Ghost
194 195 196 198 199 202
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About Nine Mile Magazine Nine Mile Magazine is published twice yearly. Our purpose is to showcase the best work available to us, from authors and artists irrespective of school or aeshetic whose work, energy, and vision is deeply entangled with life. For consideration in the magazine, submit 4 - 6 poems in Word or text at editor@ninemile.org. Please include: • your name and contact information (email and home address for sending contributor's copies) • a paragraph about yourself (background, achievements, etc), • a statement of aesthetic intent about the work , • a photo of yourself We respond within 2 weeks. If you do not hear from us, reconnect to make sure we received your submission. Note that we do not accept unsolicited essays, reviews, video / motion based art, or Q&A's.
Talk About Poetry Podcasts & Blog At our Talk About Poetry podcast working poets discuss poems that interest, annoy, excite, and engage them. The Talk About Poetry blog provides more opportunities for feedback. The addresses are: Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/bobherz; iTunes: https:// itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-about-poetry/id972411979?mt=2; Talk About Poetry blog: https://talkaboutpoetry.wordpress.com
Nine Mile Books Nine Mile Books are available through our website, ninemile.org, or online at Amazon.com. Our most recent books are: • Perfect Crime, David Weiss (2017), $16. About this book the poet says, "The whole of it thinks about the idea of perfect crime metaphysically, in the sense that time, for example, is, itself, a perfect crime. Perfect meaning: effect without cause. A crime or situation or condition that can’t be solved."
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• Where I Come From (2016), Jackie Warren-Moore, $12. Poet, playwright, theatrical director, teacher, and freelance writer, Ms. Warren-Moore's work has been published nationally and internationally. She is a Survivor, of racism, sexism, sexual abuse, and physical abuse, who regards her poetic voice as the roadmap of her survival, a way of healing herself and of speaking to the souls of others. • Selected Late Poems of Georg Trakl (2016), translations by Bob Herz, $7.50 plus mailing. This book includes all the poems Trakl wrote in the last two years of his life, from Sebastian in Dream and the poems that appeared in Der Brenner, plus some poems from other periods showing the development of the poet's art. • Letter to Kerouac in Heaven (2016) by Jack Micheline, $10. One of the original Beats, Michelin's career took him from Greenwich Village to San Francisco, with friends that included almost everyone, from Mailer to Ginsberg to Corso and others. He was a street poet whose first book included an introduction by Jack Kerouac and was reviewed in Esquire by Dorothy Parker. This is a replica publication of one of his street books. • Bad Angels, Sam Pereira (2015). $20. Of this poet Peter Everwine wrote, “He’s an original.” Pereira’s work has been priased by Norman Dubie, David St. John, and Peter Campion. • Some Time in the Winter, Michael Burkard (2014). $16. A reprint of the famed original 1978 chapbook with an extended essay by Mr. Burkard on the origins of the poem and his thoughts about it. • Poems for Lorca, Walt Sheppperd (2012). $9.95. The poems continue Mr. Shepperd’s lifelong effort to truly see and record the life around him. Lorca is his daughter, and the poems constitute an invaluable generational gift from father to daughter, and from friend, colleague, and community member to all of us.
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Nine Mile Magazine Vol 5, No. 1 Fall, 2017
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Appreciations & Asides Miscellaneous notes on art, literature, and life, from artists and critics we love or just statements we find interesting here and there. WE WERE STILL TOO IMMATURE TO UNDERSTAND the doctrine of complete despair about the modern world that would later be advanced by the followers of T. S. Eliot (before their reconciliation with the Church), but we shared in the mood that lay behind them. During the brief moments we devoted to the fate of mankind in general, we suffered from a sense of oppression. We felt that the world was rigorously controlled by scientific laws of which we had no grasp, that our lives were directed by Puritan standards that were not our own, that society in general was terribly secure, unexciting, middle class, a vast reflection of the families from which we came. Society obeyed the impersonal law of progress. Cities expanded relentlessly year by year; fortunes grew larger; more and more automobiles appeared in the streets; people were wiser and better than their ancestors— eventually, by automatic stages, we should reach an intolerable utopia of dull citizens, without crime or suffering or drama. ―Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) HENRY HAS IMAGINATION, AN ANIMAL FEELING for life, the greatest power of expression, and the truest genius I have ever known. “Our age has need of violence,” he writes. And he is violence. ―Anaïs Nin. From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt THE EXISTING MONUMENTS FORM AN IDEAL ORDER among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is Page 10 - Nine Mile Magazine
complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. ―T.S. Eliot, "The Function of Criticism, Selected Essays, 1932, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. THERE IS A TIME IN EVERY MAN'S EDUCATION WHEN he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. ―Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Charles E. Merrill Co., 1907) I DO NOT OBJECT TO THESE POETS FEELING A LOVE for their country or for their religion; but I believe that nothing save confusion can result from our mistaking the Mississippi River for God. ―Yvor Winters, "The Significance of The Bridge by Hart Crane, or What Are We To Think Of Professor X?" In Defense of Reason (New Directions, 1938) THERE IS NO SUCH THING ON EARTH AS AN uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by Volume 5 No 1 - Page 11
his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic... We might, no doubt, find it a nuisance to count all the blades of grass or all the leaves of the trees; but this would not be because of our boldness or gaiety, but because of our lack of boldness and gaiety. The bore would go onward, bold and gay, and find the blades of grass as splendid as the swords of an army. The bore is stronger and more joyous than we are; he is a demigod—nay, he is a god. For it is the gods who do not tire of the iteration of things; to them the nightfall is always new, and the last rose as red as the first. ―G. K. Chesterton, "On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small, Heretics (Dodd, Mead & Co, New York, 1905) IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE POETRY WHICH IS merely poetry, or American poetry which is merely American. Poetry must be poetic in a particular way; ours must be American in a New England way. ―John Wheelwright, History of the New England Poetry Club, 1915-1931, privately printed.
PROPHECY, LIKE REVOLUTION, IS A CONVULSIVE or expressive reaction to what has already taken place, whether in the heart, in the actual world, or in a confusion of both. The truth of prophecy is therefore a matter of feeling or inspiration. Prophets rage in religion and politics; in the arts, prophets dramatize the conditions, the feelings, which underlie the rage. The rage of the priest comes about because he has to look ahead to salvation, and that of the politician because he has to look ahead to action, and neither priest nor politician can confront the terrible cost of salvation and action without the protective aid and personal momentum of rage. It is exactly those who must deal deal directly with the actual world who cannot stand it plain; they have to rely more on inspiration than upon feeling, or they could not play the prophet's role at all... The artist is always less than a prophet, though one of the high values that may be
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placed upon his work is that of prophecy. He does not look ahead to salvation or action; rather he dramatizes what is saved or lost, what acts or fails to act. He looks at the actual world with only a secondary regard to the terrible cost it exerts in religion and politics. ―R.P. Blackmur, "The Lord of Small Counterpositions: Mann's The Magic Mountain," Eleven Essays in the European Novel, (Harcourt , Brace, & World, Inc., New York, 1964). WALT WHITMAN...IS AMERICAN RELIGIOUS POETRY, and he himself is a Christ rather than a Christian. ―Harold Bloom, American religious Poems (The Library of America, 2006)
MORE WRITERS FAIL FROM LACK OF CHARACTER than from lack of intelligence. ―Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New Directions, 1960) ... THE POWERS OF DARKNESS HAVE A LIBRARY among us, whereof the poets have been the most numerous as well as the most venomous authors ... ―Cotton Mather, Manuductio ad Ministarium (1726) OH, WALTER, WALTER, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE with it? What have you done with yourself? With your own individual self? For it sounds as if it had all leaked out of you, leaked into the universe. Post-mortem effects. The individuality had leaked out of him. No, no, don't lay this down to poetry. These are post- mortem effects. And Walt's great poems are really huge fat tomb-plants, great rank graveyard growths.... All that false exuberance. All those lists of things boiled in one pudding-cloth! No, no! ―D.H. Lawrence, D. H.. Studies in Classic American Literature
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THE ARTIST IS THE CREATOR OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. ―Oscar Wilde, The Preface to "The Picture of Dorian Gray," The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Harper & Row, New York, 1989)
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James Cervantes What The World Needs What the world needs is this poem. It makes widows weep and can grow Flowers in any soil. Mechanics love Its grip and lubricated ease. No kitchen Is complete without this poem. It can be assembled with ordinary Household tools. This poem will heal The cracks in dry lakebeds, will drop Temperatures, lower the oceans, revive Dying species, renew dwindling supplies Of gold, silver, diamonds, and solve All cold cases for law enforcement. This poem will be recited by CNN panels Every hour on the hour and will have Its own late show. The lines of this savior poem Will be chiseled into Lincoln’s forehead, Will chime softly in every elevator, echo In Walmarts, and render null and void All lawsuits. It will find guilty The ducktails of Wall Street. Oprah Was waiting for this poem. It replaces All Barry Manilow lyrics. Couples twine Around its syllables mid-day. This poem Is a karaoke hit, an Oscar winner, A multilingual literary prize winner, Though it wanders late at night in search Of a Laureate to inhabit. Little is up to it, Little is lower than it. It has no bad habits, Though it did pause once to escape
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For a drink as a way to get over Itself. It is Buddhist, of course, But never sits, is compassionate Toward other poems, and swoons Occasionally at the thought of No self/no selves, an empty cosmos That doesn’t need it. But it’s the poem The world needs at this moment. Aren’t you glad that you read it?
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About James Cervantes James Cervantes's latest book is From Mr. Bondo’s Unshared Life, a series of closely related persona poems. Sleepwalker's Songs: New & Selected Poems, published in 2012, is comprised of 32 new poems and poems selected from six previous collections. Other books include Temporary Meaning, The Headlong Future, The Year Is Approaching Snow, and Changing The Subject, a dialogue in poems with Halvard Johnson. He was editor of The Salt River Review for thirteen years and is currently Foreign Correspondent for Hinchas de Poesia. He is the editor of In Like Company: The Porch & Salt River Review Anthology, published by Mad Hat Press. Cervantes has been publishing poetry in print since 1969 and almost exclusively online since 1997.
About the Poem The effect of the dark curtain that descended on the U.S. Tuesday, November 8, 2016, was to silence me. Though we live in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, the blow to mind and spirit was as palpable as if we were back in our house in Mesa, Arizona. I wrote no poetry until this one. I wrote it because I needed it. I needed to play and dance with elements of a culture that had grown unfamiliar, and I felt the world needed it too – a grandiose notion, I admit, but I also needed the pretense to be able to finish the poem. I also felt an uncharacteristic urgency to have the poem out there, to have it published immediately as someone might need to read it as much as I needed to write it. Thus, in the late afternoon of August 20th, I posted it on my Facebook page, but then deleted it early morning of the 21st. In its very brief social media existence, I received a few comments on the poem, the most memorable one from John Gilgun: “Auden said Volume 5 No 1 - Page 17
poetry makes nothing happen. This poem makes everything happen!� I hope every poet writes the poem that the world needs.
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Jim Crenner Fun With Death “I feel more like I do now than when I first got here.” --Prof. Irwin Corey The shadows of the trees about the lawn conveyed all morning the impression of standing still— as if they had, at dawn, on this bright fool’s gold mid-June day acquired exemption from the cosmic grinder, and I along with them, so that I too—with a stupid grin, have hung suspended in changeless time, as astronauts are wont to do in weightless space— while, from under the eaves of the house next door, a mourning dove coo-cooed the same mesmerizing lament over and over. Such lulling, mild euphoria, of course, was by courtesy of the temporary dereliction of that bad angel my brain, which knows full well that all shadows are always moving towards the pointlessness of their own interminable motion, while every instant arrives already gone. As Merwin has it, “There is no time, yet it grows less.” [Q: What historical event ended in 2017? A: 2016.]
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But then there is the miracle of Salvatore Dali, who died and was buried in 1989, and, when exhumed last month, proved to be still sporting, as it were, his grandiose mustache, which had kept, for all those years in the grave, its famous “10-past-10” position—closer to the correct time than any displayed on his melted watches. So sometimes the world really is as whimsical and lovely as, this morning, here beside the lake, it seemed, for a time, to be, though, verifiably, was not elsewhere— in the gore-smeared rubble of Mosul, say, or the funky pallets of a Bangkok whorehouse, or, hell, most places. But if the doleful Endgame of time’s tyrannical boredom is accurate, it is also (when not tragic) funny. [Q: How many corpses would it take to change a lightbulb? A: You must be joking.] And now (that most mysterious time of all, which, this time, let’s just call evening)—now the shadows are stretched out long across the lawn— dour with the post-meridian foreboding of yet another day un- caught, un-realized— and the anticipation of yet another sunset, another dusk pulling in like a German train right on schedule…. [Q: If Bob, a coward, had 1000 deaths, and died 930 of them, what would he have then? A: Rigor mortis.]
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Eurydice, it must be said, was not prevented from returning from the dead because Orpheus, at the threshold, looked back at her; rather, the poet, at the threshold, looked back at her because he knew no one could return from the dead. So dusk has now begun to thicken imperceptibly, intractably, and will, until, as always, the blackness startlingly, comes on, schussing, from behind to overtake us, flashes past, and plunges, immediately ahead, silently, into the vast blank Texas of eternity. [Q: How did you arrive at your answer to the question about death? A: I cheated.]
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Don’t Think Of A Realtor “Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed” —G. M. Hopkins The mind on its own is an indescribable jitter-bug, until you happen to notice it—that is, get it to notice itself—whereupon it turns instantly stately and reasonable. It can never catch itself just being itself. Not awake at least—dreams are another matter. If, when once awake, You could [Whoa! Damnit! I keep juking when, randomly, a branch of the yew under my window is flung up by the wind into my peripheral vision—like some practicaljoking bat]—if you could recall—when awake— one of your actual dreams, you would be catching your mind stochastically improvising at its laptop. Take, e.g., last night: I was alarmed to discover that a small but bottomless crevice had opened between two random-width pine boards in the floor of my house, and I called my dad, who, though dead for almost twenty years, joined me to have a look— and took the hammer he always already had to hand and began tapping and prying away at other boards and exposing more dark abysses,
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and saying, laconically, reassuringly, “It’s just, the house is settling.” [Iris out.] It doesn’t take a shrink to see what an ersatz, overly rational approximation— [Whoa! Damnit!] —of an actual dream that report is. I mean, It reminds me of all the gaps and ex post facto inventions that warp my childhood memories. To wit, in particular, those of my first playmate, Charles Frank, and his father Raphael Frank, the realtor, who owned our building, and was the only father in the neighborhood who always wore a suit and tie and a George Raft hat, which, every time he rushed by on his way “to the office,” he would pretend to doff, while singing out to five-year-old Charles his son on his knees in the sandbox, with me, “Ahoy there, Master Charles Frank!” To which, Charles, in return: “Ahoy there, Mister Rifle Frank!” And then, under his breath, so that only I, his Conradian secret sharer,
ever heard it: a deep, ghostly,
“An’ chuck you, Farley.” Then back we went to digging tunnels beneath the sand for our miniature iron cars, and, once in a while, down in the clammy dark out of sight as in a real dream our hands would accidentally meet.
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Above Via dei Coronari Some mornings we catch one another opening our shutters at the same time and can’t but nod our acknowledgments, this medieval Roman street being so narrow I could conceivably leap across to her living room balcony and help her vacuum the Persian rug visible beneath her slippered feet and nice ankles—were we not four stories above the cobblestones, and were I at all conversant with Italian vacuums, or she at all inclined to dally with an artsy gray-haired foreigner who wouldn't, anyway, risk the fractures or scandal of such a leap. Nevertheless, on the chance that she might speak, and, though my Italian wouldn’t permit me to tell whether she said, “Close your eyes and jump, Signore, and we’ll get down and dirty on the rug,” or “Shut your window, old man, I'm about to shake out a dirty rug!" I’ve rehearsed a “No, grazie—perche…” speech, and looked up the words in my Italian dictionary for “too much I love my wife.”
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Exer-cycle With Underwear I was hoisted on a wave of glee this morning, when I beheld your bra depending gamely by a shoulder strap from one handlebar grip, and, from the other, all but weightlessly afloat, sheer white underpants, and, draped across the faux leather seat, a pair of pale-yellow anklets— all boldly drying in the early light— loveliest of trees, the lingerie!
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For Want Of A Word Abstain from speaking and you remain “silent.” Abstain from writing and there’s no word for what you remain, no term for that condition. There is, of course, the word “blocked” for not being able to write, but voluntarily commit to preserving the void of the page and you practice a discipline with no name and hence no existence—even though it’s a vow at least as real and rigorous as the cloistered monk’s vocal abstinence. Safeguard the immaculate white of the paper long minute after minute, season after season—and what you have done will be ignored as if you’ve done nothing at all. It’s as though writing is considered as natural as eating or fucking—anyone sane and able to do it, will. It’s as if, once the thought occurred to you that nothing had been written about the non-existence of a word for notwriting, you had no choice but to abandon your fast, and write about that absence, though all you really wanted, if you had to write at all, was to write about something different from everything, if you could have thought of it.
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Of Tuesday Morning Quarterbacking “You only live twice.” --Dr. Jerry Lemler, CEO, Alcor Corp. It’s not when am I going to die that’s been picking at me this breezy, bird-riddled April-Fools day (my 79th), nor where, nor why am I going to die— but how. I’ve descended to fantasizing my ideal hospice: comely, soft-voiced attendants, down coverlets, Mozart’s K 515 in the background, and a steady, generous morphine drip not only into me but, less immoderately, into the loved ones seated around my bed, so that we all nod off peacefully together, but only me for keeps. And then there are those billionaire geniuses of Silicon Valley who plan not to die, period, forget about how. Clone and freeze their own replacement organs and/or upload their brains into The Cloud or onto silicon chips—like butt implants mummified for eternity. Sounds like a case of pie in the sky? But these geniuses are passionate believers in the possibility of hacking the code of ageing. I mean, consider the money to be made—the size of the market— if they succeed: by 2020 [when, BTW, my Mastercard next expires] there will be more people on earth over the age of sixty-five than under the age of five. And I hope to be, at 83, one of them. Sounds like my version of pie in the sky? Which reminds me of how my high school buddies used to go on about wanting to eat hair pie.) But back to the haunting how: Please. Not ALS.
NO lung cancer Not Ebola, or Alzheimers— Volume 5 No 1 - Page 27
well, maybe Alzheimers if it’s the benign kind where you don’t get terrified or violent, but are just gradually erased into a harmless little pile of pink rubber dust left from the soughing away of all the names— painlessly— until there’s no you to be aware of your benign unawareness of how you die. That would be fine. But please, no gangrene forcing piecemeal removal of limbs, no “locked in” syndrome (see Jack London’s The Seawolf), no tongue cancer, no … [feel Free to plug in your own neurotic litany]. Well, but what then? Cryonics maybe? But there are rumors of bankrupt storage vaults with the contents left to thaw and rot. Some facilities, though, do maintain their “peoplesicles” to this day. What remains of Ted Williams, e.g. is in one such, his body—remember “the Splendid Splinter”?—in one pod, his head in another, nearby, at a minus 199 F. “Cephalic isolation.” The Alcor Corp. In Scottsdale AZ. From A to Z and back again. [Of pies not In the sky, banana cream was my favorite. (To my high school buddies, though, “banana” and “cream” meant other things.)] But all this morbid contemplation reminds me that our male cat is ten years old and so could die before I do, and how, if he does, I will not have him beheaded and frozen. Bury him, probably, but not with a headstone (grim word), not with the inscription, “H. Bustos Domecq” and his dates— even though that fussy penname of Jorge Luis Borges happens also
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to be the cat’s name, or, more accurately, the pseudonym the cat goes by, as no one knows his real name. Besides the morphine delivery system, my hospice will also feature a drip of banana-cream-pie-flavored Irish whiskey. If any of my high school buddies are still alive by then and visit me in the hospice, they’ll get a boot out of the double drips. But I want to go on record as not wanting my cat to die before me. As not wanting anyone to die before me.
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About Jim Crenner I had the good fortune to study the craft of poetry at Iowa under the fastidious and ironic eye of Donald Justice, in whose seminar in 1959 we read some stuff by Yvor Winters, one of whose short poems I was quite taken by, especially its last stanza: Write little; do it well. Your knowledge will be such, At last, as to dispel What moves you overmuch. Despite its unfashionable privileging of thought over feeling, my own subsequent fondness for many poems that are counterexamples of that stance, and the fact that to “do it well” is not something you can just decide, I have nevertheless harbored ever since a soft spot for the advice found there. Anyway. My last book (2008), DRINKS AT THE STAND-UP TRAGEDY CLUB is available from the Hobart & William Smith Colleges Press, and my next one (still untitled) is predicted in a year or so from Nine Mile Press. In the meantime, I play the role of a retired professor who—along with a remarkable woman and two baffling cats— lives beside a grand lake, gardens fondly, reads wantonly, writes just about enough already, and watches constantly the light changing on the water.
About the Poems As I’ve recently borne witness to the hurtling by of my seventh decade of living in the world, I’ve found myself ever more fascinated by the hermetic mystery of time. The poems here tend to suffer from the Page 30 - Nine Mile Magazine
speaker’s tendency to be, no matter the topic, constantly glancing over at the quivering hands on the dials of life’s chronometric indicators and at the pressure gauges on its mortality alarms. I’ve also been making a conscious effort these days to loosen up the visual corsets of my poems —to let them breathe more easily, hem and haw more irregularly, chew the fat more conversationally, and be more willing to sound foolish. Actually, now that I think of it, “conversation” is not so much the point as an effort to catch the rambling way the brain actually dithers and breakdances around and shorts out its wires, connecting and disconnecting thought-feeling matrices like crazy, while still managing to keep hold of at least one thread of its theme. But now I’m sounding like the worst diedin-the-wool academic pedant I could dream up purely as an entertaining target of parody. I’ll just call it an effort at mentation about mentation, a game you can’t possibly win.
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Stephen Kuusisto Landscape With A Blind Man’s Sun It was like pouring water over lilies So wet, cold, indistinct, long— My sun was so not so common Dear astrologer, dear swarm. She was scarce at the horizon, She was two suns, halfLight, empty of fullness And everything I seek to compose Carries her artlessness, My star with a floor Of darkness, And turning As the heavens turn, Never to wake.
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Original Sin —after Fernando Pessoa Who will write the story of what he could have been? That, if someone writes it, will be the true future Of children to come, the ones locked now In dim rooms of life imagined. We do not want prospective life Written by old rules—what exists… We are, in reality, what doesn’t happen. The mind is a bird unseen. Say what one will Sometimes skiing at twilight Where they’re building houses For the wealthy One sees crude signs For peace on the walls. Unfinished, unremarkable, What happened to my reality That all I have is not yet built?
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The Magpie The magpie sat in a baby carriage in the south harbor and croaked to passersby. Her voice was like water in the bilge of a boat, just a purple softness, really not much. Something about a dingy bird is a question —where shall we work and live—or how did it come to this, a thing called “the public” shuffling near the ocean with balloons and pies? Where did the baby disappear to? A tepid breeze rides in with its assignment. A woman laughs because she is partly immortal.
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The nights have become bigger and they continue to grow…. The nights have become bigger and they continue to grow As fears will, or less than angst, a ration Of sense—the dark skies, Venus low In the south has no prospects For us—I say why not lose our wits? A favorite constellation Crosses us my love Long familiar, both of us asleep, Great horse of night Gleaming out of reach. Our disguised cosmos, Red threads to blue, Time, no time, black square To chess, bird flying To no place we can see. I love you. Love you With rain and stillness Seen through by the stars.
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About Stephen Kuusisto Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges, both available from Copper Canyon Press. He teaches at Syracuse University. In March of 2018 Simon & Schuster will publish his new memoir: Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey with an Exceptional Labrador.
About the Poems Whether I’m working in poetry or prose I tend toward the lyric—relishing “not knowing” where the writing will take me. In daily life I like getting lost, finding myself in unfamiliar neighborhoods. So it is with the poem. Each instance of composition is a gamble. You can find yourself in a tight corner where the rewards are inapparent. But I keep at it. A door opens in a drab fence and suddenly there’s a meadow with a newborn foal. The lyric standing on its new legs.
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Ken Weisner The Audition I was a funambulist Latin, funis (rope); ambulare (to walk); the path braided tight like a needle, a well-off girl… Heaven? Canada! over say, Niagara Falls. Like a Wallenda. But how I missed old-style lateral support, not this insistent saggital narrowing… unending, and without the lifetime of training in a circus family. Even with a parasol, a stabilizer bar… always sensed I could plunge like Karl into the roar; think of the financiers, falling like flies— diversify (my Uncle Roy told me) your assets! Ah, feet on wide ground! But it was my audition. How much there was Volume 5 No 1 - Page 37
to be gained in each attainment, knee bent, head high across the canyons.
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Orpheus To Hades Rich one, guarded one, I can't get near you unless I sing, and you almost never give favors… starts with turning you into a mirror, a common road to when we were made different. The winter is over, and you are getting sleepy, sleepy—spring, that hammock of splinters—we are all in the same book! but you haven't killed me yet. I try to propitiate you. Oh adamantine friend… I sense you are a little lonely there on your ebony throne, pretending not to savor narcissus on the dresser, the coffee table... or in the entryway, the spice of cypress. I beat my hands on the ground; will you let me in? I walk out on rickety words, as on incense… as if I were your friend. I am. I’m telling you I want to hold her again, as the girl she was before she was taken, before you took her and stopped the music, took the breath from the world, your brother. Here’s a little mint tea, here are three hand-carved bowls for the dog, three songs to make the Erinyes weep. Father of my hope, secret lover of the realm of shadows, who does not suffer fools. I have come to call you holy. Hear my song. Sleep awhile.
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The Call Please don't gag. Here's my story: we fell in love completely. Let the eye rolling begin. No, not at first sight. A fifty-year crossing. Then the call from the crow's nest—call of the Muezzin. We were married to other people; we had rules—no kissing, no arms round, no handholding. No hand on the other leg while carpooling. No clothes removed. No love salutations in e-mails. We were serious-minded persons. To be honorable—is to be loyal and to abnegate the impulsivity of longing. The evanescence. Everybody knows that. It's also a social contract thing. Deep friendship midlife? Yes. Adulterous affair with colleague? No. Falling in love at age sixty? "Lovers and madmen have such seething brains...." Rules were clear. I named her dearest friend of my heart. Determined on long walks—we would be catalysts for our marriages, call each other Brother and Sister, like a couple of Quakers. Or Thee-and-Thou, like Goody and Goodman, our soft necks behind Puritan collars. What is wrong with us? Pilloried. Branded. Whispered upon. Shunned. Decried… Old friends will avert their eyes. Or worse. Meanwhile this desire to witness, to soothe …. One day we will lie down together. Just peace. A kind of quiet and belonging. Not what you think. Why not just a one-night mistake? A peccadillo? Like an armadillo, an armoire—a dildo—it could just be … removed. But how do you remove belonging? quiet? home?
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At fifty-plus, life is supposed to be a diet you just stay on. You do it for your thyroid, your pancreas, your waistline, your lungs, your kids, your social fabric. Stay the course. Keep the head down. Get a sports car. Don't do foolish things. "And besides," a financial advisor whispers, "it's cheaper—to keep her." Thirty years plus. Monogamous. Two thirty-year-old children. Men I still call "kids." Men who say they are ready for me to be happy. But worth the price? World's grandest illusion, ultimate snake oil, the bow and arrow and the little naked ass! Anarchic cupid. Bottom’s Dream. I see what I have done. Destroyed marriages. Lied. Wept. Stared down heartbreak. The great tree falls. Ishmael floating on his best friend's coffin. The awful pain. The taking of sides. The ruin and bloody thoughts. There's little humor in it. Maybe one day. Everything broken open. A great love, the slow moon, the awful truth. What can’t be denied. The imagination and the dark pleading.
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Typostrophe for Tilly Shaw I can hear her mock horror at the missing apostrophe, an emphatic gasp and then laughing her head off How could you. Really! And then more howling at this imperfection in her posthumous collection. She knows better than anyone about fallibility, how hard it is ever to forgive ourselves. The only perfect thing she concluded was following the mind, never mastering, just admitting to it‌ "How could you?" she says loudly, and isn't this so hysterical! an apostrophe! the gleeful outrage and oh directly on the first poem! first page! right in between I and am no proper boundary, verb twinned,
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fused with subject, no room for proper separation and diacritical intrusion! the ultimate in enjambed subversion. Not appropriately conjoined. Such a metaphor for the disruption and insinuations of culture and the state, perhaps what seemed an error in fact a meaningful excursion, self finally one with the act of being. This is how it goes in poetry. The trickster eye. You're weightless now.
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About Ken Weisner Ken Weisner lives in Santa Cruz and teaches writing at De Anza College in Cupertino where he edits Red Wheelbarrow. For fifteen years, Ken edited Quarry West out of Porter College, UCSC. His most recent collection of poems is Anything on Earth (2010, Hummingbird Press). His work has been featured on Sam Hamill’s “Poets Against the War” website, in The Music Lovers Poetry Anthology (Persea, 2007), and on The Writer’s Almanac (2010), as well as in Wilma Chandler’s “Willing Suspension Armchair Theater” productions of Lost and Found: The Literature of Fathers and Sons—and in recent editions of Chicago Quarterly Review, Porter Gulch Review, DMQ Review, Phren-Z, Perfume River Poetry Review , Caesura, and Monterey Poetry Review.
About the Poems I’ve always enjoyed the way dogs and cats circle before they lie down. Irony does the same thing. We dance around a core, and poetry partners in the dance. Maybe we glimpse what exists in theory only (graviton, boson). I love the density & strangeness of verbal performance and life’s texture. How irony is manifold and full of color… now it is warm and funny and universal, now cold and awful and tragic: but we can name it. Poetry is the subversive function of language. Everything is accountable and has a cost, even words themselves. It is also my “hazardous attempt at self-understanding…the deepest part of autobiography” (Robert Penn Warren).
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Sean Thomas Dougherty Tamir Rice I try to translate the Aramaic of the sky. The violet streaks of dusk that frame our youngest daughter drawn in two-point perspective— she is a you & I, separate & sublime. Her voice a constant why. The video she found online, in her head on repeat. Why did the policeman shoot the boy? she wants to know. He was playing. She climbs into your lap. Around our daughter’s lips, chewed bits of white petal. She’s been eating clover. The lilac bush scythes against the wooden fence. In the hive of the wind, there is something sickly sweet blowing in. The swing hangs itself slowly in the dark.
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ER I drank my cup of ask (more ash for my forehead) & then I repented of any sin on a knee right there by the water cooler this language like learning a new alphabet of reprieve the old woman slumped into her snoring the child who will not stop screaming the nurses no longer wear hats every day we have nowhere to go so we ended up west of the projects (I paid the cab fare) I stopped weeping to watch the janitor sweep the fat cop bending over a form that smell of grief like wet dogs I was fully aware of my skin was little more than a bobbing bag of blood all of us so fragile & broken even the boy pushing the vending machine buttons & screaming someone may have just died we all wore winter coats even the woman who they tore from the room into a straight jacket she was bleeding from her chin the woman speaking Spanish was inconsolable the black daggers of her mascara cut her face
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~ They hit her with a needle in a different vein (this was years ago) you drew a sunflower on the back of every menu when we huddled this went on for a long time you pulled the tail of evening into dark you said you’ve never been afraid when you didn’t know what to do the building we lived in had no elevator to carry us back to the metronome of the broken faucet & the windows painted shut all winter the tin whistle of the radiator’s hiss at the first snow covering the lawn you flopped down to flap your hands when you stood up I reached out I am still reaching for days after there was only an outline of where you were—
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There Is One Blue River "No one knows where it is We know little but it is known" Mak Dizdar There is one blue river we must cross. I read that in translation. I wondered if it was the Blue Danube. Perhaps it was the Volga, or the Vardar we walked beside in Skopje, among the Roman ruins, where I taught, where we gave the gypsy boy what we had every day so he could buy his tiny sister the pastry and dance his little dance. The joy we felt when his mother returned that winter and we saw her tussle his hair and he was able to go back to doing what older brothers are dued. Or the Mississippi in Saint Louis where John was nearly shot trying to score, the bullet casing rang against the dark, or was it the Ohio where old Tony lost his job when the mill closed, he left to no one knows where the river takes us, the same with Timmy and the Allegheny, or was it the Susquehanna, or the Merrimack, alongside the closed down red brick mills, where we drank, where me and my friends would sit beside talking about leaving. Until we did, until we disappeared from that life and into another no one knows where it is. We know little but it is known. Or did I misread those words that were written decades ago in another language, in a country that no longer exists, was it not a blue river but did it say, There is one blue cross we must climb, like the one that rose high on the mountain above that city from another life, or the one we own inside our chests. How we make the sign when we touch our foreheads and our hearts, beyond foreboding beyond doubt, when we kneel and pray we bow our faces to the dirt of our dead and offer the sky the nape of our blue veined necks.
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About Sean Thomas Dougherty Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of 15 books including the forthcoming The Second O of Sorrow (2018 BOA Editions), Double Kiss: Stories, Poems, Essays on the Art of Billiards (2017 Mammoth Books), and All You Ask for is Longing: Poems 1994-2014 (2014 BOA Editions). His awards include a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans and an appearance in Best American Poetry 2014. He works as a Med Tech and Caregiver for people with traumatic brain injuries in Erie, PA. He received his MFA from Syracuse University.
About the Poems Thank you for the opportunity to talk about my poems. I find it is hard to talk about poems. So much of my work comes out of the intimate struggles of my life and region, the working class cities I’ve lived in so long now along Lake Erie. “ER” is made of stitched together lines from many visits to the ER to make a story. I think of this poem as the lines that define an absence. Perhaps so many of my poems are simply trying to find or define a sense of absence? How can we heal without knowing where the wound is? One Blue River is a martyrology: how many people I’ve lost who lived along those rivers, trying to cross what visible and invisible borders. The city at the end of the poem is Skopje, Macedonia, where I once lived and taught. We are all borders. There are no borders. The poem for Tamir Rice, 13 years old murdered in broad daylight by the Cleveland Police department, is an attempt to unfold in an understated manner both grief and anger for a stranger’s death, but also how we are all implicated in such a death. How many deaths loud and small we are all implicated in daily.
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Athena Kildegaard “the tale of the buttonsâ€? RenĂŠ Magritte
We sigh in unison, we thin members of the rubbing class, too stiff to sing, and yet we long for fundamental frequencies, something tuned, something more than passing in and out of propriety. We lie together neat as figures from an illumined text, too dull to raise a monk's chant. We dance the secret dance of day slipping into night.
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About Athena Kildegaard I live in Morris, Minnesota, where I teach at the University of MN, Morris, a public liberal arts college. I'm the author of four books of poetry. My poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on the Writer's Almanac, set to music for chorus and as art song, taught in a mathematics course, and stamped into the side of a pottery cup.
About the Poem These poems are part of a series of poems that take as their titles phrases from the writing of RenĂŠ Magritte. I began writing these early in this past interminable and surreal presidential election. Their brief wacky but serious and sometimes surreal qualities came to seem like brief prayers for redemption or hope.
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T.C. Brodie Illusions Of Grandeur My friend and I, on our knees, pretend we are the ones who move the rain. Like demigods, we stand, two pillars outstretched under the threats of a storm. Smudged remains of a fire, the charcoal sky grumbles as we imagine our arms summoning sheets of it. “Let’s race the rain.” Feet poised, overgrown grass tints our toes with dew. We run like we are the breeze: clear, alive, free. Envelopes of air engulf us until side stitches cut into our chests, we crumble to our knees. We turn to see the shower follow behind us and realize it was never rain we saw. It was wind.
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About T.C. Brodie Tammy Brodie is a recent graduate from Eastern University with a B.A. in English and Missions & Anthropology. Her thesis was concentrated on poetry, and she has two other publications in Eastern University's Inklings Literary Magazine. For future endeavors, she plans to pursue a career in publishing ideally in a cross cultural capacity.
About the Poem In many ways, poetry for me is more a way of life than a writing style. There are many instances in my own life that are etched forever into my being demanding acknowledgement and rumination. These moments are seemingly fleeting until I realize that they compile much of the character I carry today. This poem, accepted by Nine Mile, captures a childhood recollection of tearing down feigned youthful invincibility with the awareness of our mortality, which reveals how precious humanity is. It is part of a larger collection that deals with effects movement and absence has on one's life and the world at large. The poem hold a moment that lasted a few minutes but speaks a truth that is relevant for an entire lifetime.
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Chard deNiord Each Stunning Thing She’s the host of her own show, singing to the world in her makeshift studio: “My music fades in the light like the moon for failing to say what it means in the dark.” She leans into the microphone with all the cool of a shade from the underworld. She sings in memory of a friend she grieves with a smile that fools her fans—a tune she compares to the sparrow’s song, but also the clouds and trees and grass— each stunning thing with its guitar that takes some silence and loss to hear.
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Poems from my manuscript Talking In Bed At The Bardo Inn These antiphonal poems are from a manuscript titled Talking In Bed at the Bardo Inn in which a couple is engaged in a posthumous conversation, beginning with the husband’s voice in plain text followed by his wife’s voice in italics.
23 I tapped the sorrow inside the day, boiled it down to nothing, then ran it off into a bottle marked fancy grade. I found the crack inside the core, then swung my mall across the sky. I said nothing since I had sworn to the clouds to keep their groan a secret. “Blue! Blue!” I said, which was what I also heard in the hinge that closed the day. I had an ear that heard beyond the sky as the pile rose up to the clouds and a storm rolled in like a caravan of black sedans and a limousine.
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24 I walked beside the Great River, watching it flow in the darkness like a syllable that needed a grievous heart to be heard. I stopped to listen and heard it utter every name as it slipped in silence past the fields in which a herd of Holsteins grazed. I saw it for the divide it was, both here and not here, impossibly there. I saw my face in the mirror of its silver surface and knew I belonged to both but also neither.
25 The thistle flourished beside the road with blossoms that took their blue from the sky, then blew away. You sang along with them in a language that only hummed. Turned your eyes into a vase as wide as the field. Used your brain as a frog to spike the stems to keep them alive inside your head as flowers that die and bloom, bloom and die.
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26 Memory’s needle tracked a groove until it bled. I called it “the little heaven of memory� and covered my ears. I sang along without knowing the words to mint the pain on the disc of joy that turned inside me. I asked a crow if she wrote the song because she seemed so full of the very same music.
27 I rode wanted across the West beneath the glare of the desert sun that coruscated off my famous gun like a beacon to the sheriff who followed me, then camped in a covert of giant rocks; slept for a while before waking with a start; stared at the stars staring back like so many badges in the merciless dark.
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About Chard deNiord Chard deNiord is the Poet Laureate of Vermont and author of six books of poetry, most recently Interstate, (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). He teaches English and Creative Writing at Providence College, where he is a Professor of English. His book of essays and interviews with seven senior American poets (Galway Kinnell, Donald Hall. Maxine Kumin, Jack Gilbert, Ruth Stone, Lucille Clifton, Robert Bly) titled Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Conversations and Reflections on 20th Century American Poets was published by Marick Press in 2011. His new book of interviews with Natasha Trethewey, Jane Hirshfield. Carolyn Forche, Martin Espada, Peter Everwine and 5 others will appear this spring from the University of Pittsburgh Press under the title I Would Lie to You If I Could. He is the co-founder and former program director of the New England College MFA Program in Poetry and a trustee of the Ruth Stone Trust. He lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife Liz.
About the Poems “Each Stunning Thing” is from a new manuscript titled Dispatch from Putney, which contains poems that aspire to convey lasting news in local settings. Although often initially unconscious of my specific direction in each poem, I have striven to create a “transpersonal self” throughout this manuscript that expresses a conversational voice that
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crosses over to the other—my reader—with charged particulars and multiplies the self while maintaining its individuality and uniqueness with overhearing, direct address, and careful dictation of those voices that speak with invisible tongues which I can’t claim as my own. The numbered antiphonal poems are from a manuscript titled Talking In Bed at the Bardo Inn and comprise part of a longer posthumous conversation between a couple looking back on their life. This particular sequence (sections 23-27) of their conversation begins with the husband’s voice in plain text, followed by his wife’s voice in italics.
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Caroline Manring Understudy 1. Mathematics The mouse’s back got smashed over a dab of jam: was s/he present from two to eight a.m. in the jaws of the trap in the hours when there was no way to be otherwise? Circle a or b. As understood from my morning socks with a brick raised in my hand: gone is not the worst of variations.
2. I feel we’ll need this door, the one drilled out of the floor for that other play. My heart became more Soviet: I accepted I was a goner & got staunch about staying. Both forms were made available at the same booth. Twice I signed my name, which looked familiar.
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Les hiboux We face the goodness of oblivion. It’s gourmet in the hands of a strong PR rep. Mine is studying geography, says collision’s cozy. Not knowing better is, after all, the soul of wit. Passemoi ce hibou: I’ve become so fond of not knowing why I’m allowed to ask
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for whom You’re no longer vigilant about dying, so you’re playing the part of a king / of course you expect the people to sit on the snow with you when you fold at the hem of the thought’s nightgown, between the frozen dust & the long upward float to the giant’s hip therein. Gazing you wait for the end of certainty. It doesn’t come. The colossus & its unnamed pelvis remain, tent-poles & stays, still in the high cold above/within your scene. Maybe waiting, too, it seems. Despite your silent agency, borrowed zero & stately bloom, you’re glad for the threadbare linen tent around you & your waiting people. It moves like an extinction, slowly & without wonder. Whoever’s body this is, pinning the structure above, no one expects
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to speak to it, or scale it, or ever know even the knee. Nearby, the knife of the kingfisher smacks broadside into one of two circlets of un-iced pond pinning a fish for whom she has recalculated, for whom her mind has swallowed refraction & altered itself— not without effort, but without thought.
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Things you can do without children / Lies that work More and more we are a home for injured strays. Coffee, toast, couch that smells like hardwood ash by plastic windows set wrong in the house’s jaw. The convalescents see right angles & a rain-proof night. We stop the clock from gonging at ten. We don’t wake the ones who’ve lately been sore awake. We shop for items that cool the bunyon of drift, like chamomile, & oats. We believe in unmoving, dry bags. No more darting targets for a while, anyway. These animate hunks of muscle, braided through with gray-green tender organs soft as poached eggs, have galaxies stuck in their teeth. It’s uncomfortable. If anything deserves colorless fleece against its thigh, they do. They take hot drinks, wonder if maybe they’ll live. Friends, dear bruised bags of meat, the best thing is a series of ticks, clock-like: water, Page 64 - Nine Mile Magazine
sleep, vegetable, walk. Outdoors. Trace these vertebrae and set your watch. They never run out. People with widening wounds reside in all those books, & in the stove the things that burn lie silent as they consume.
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more beautiful than completion is the moment hate begins to falter a crack in a wren egg can be a baby wren or a dead wren on its way to this world that option is the wildness we wish after like smoke behind a cold front begging & out of breath peeled from illegal bonfires in yards too close to town
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About Caroline Manring Caroline Manring's Manual for Extinction won the 2012 National Poetry Review Book Prize. Her chapbook, No Postman, was published by Split Oak Press, and her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Conduit, Drunken Boat, jubilat, Seneca Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Cornell University, she lives and teaches in Ithaca, NY, where she also leads bird walks and fiddles in a family band.
About the Poems Grief is the most complex experience I've ever had, and perhaps also the richest. In these poems, I'm working my way across terrain that challenges me ferociously. I'm wielding any tool that comes to hand (like a doctor performing emergency surgery on a bus, without time to discern between a scalpel and a baseball bat): rage, humor, simplicity, urgency, imagination. These efforts don't so much free me as they allow me to live inside a new reality with new agency, like someone who's learned to live in a jungle, or a desert. These poems are the record and the means of a metamorphosis, with all the splitting, undoing, and wonderment that entails.
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Chris Martin Epilogue We ate the pigs out of compulsion We ate the dogs next, as radiated fish piled Like sandbags on the ocean’s edge We ate the cats, the caterpillars, the pill bugs We feasted on bright white ant’s eggs We fasted We slowed We sowed brittle barren seeds and reaped nothing We owed everything We wed neglect We’d
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Cento for and after Steve Kuusisto
People shimmer like a beehive My eye hops like a starling in the bush They say the name for what I’m walking through is morning But it must be stained glass Even when I’m still the world reels narcoleptic Staring at the splintered roof of my ice cave Caving in A teeming field of smoke roses I buried my first pair of glasses beneath the rhubarb Against a terrible glittering from the requiem light I bounded against the crowd, hoping To absorb some color from the butchered fish What is this me alive once more in the wild carrot leaf? My hands are actually breathing As a child I had only the graven need to resemble
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A Pigeon On A Branch Reflecting On Existence Is the name of a movie It’s the name of every movie, really Even the Tom Cruise ones Tom Cruise is a pigeon And all the explosions are happening in his head as it bobs on the branch Baffled leaves pick up a tweaky vibe Fall off At the serrated edge of uselessness We still use The earth like Gulliver, commonly Stockholmed And demeaning animal verbs: grouse, badger, ferret, etc. I caught it in my teeth, but then realized my teeth Were expired liquicaps of Dayquil Little blue stupid silent beautiful and bobbing Explosion where he desires to think
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But fake smiles instead And all the other bobbing Tom Cruises begin a quiet Retreat
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Where Mountain Equals DĂŠnouement There was some confusion Regarding the uncertain distinction between art and hat I climbed into a hole By which we chose to represent our squandered earning potential It was surprisingly warm And smelled like the absence of operative language, rotting lilac Success is the lowest art said Anselm Mountains wasting away If you hold still and listen very closely for several days you can hear One syllable of cosmic gossip Unwind between the cold fractured faces A mountain is only slow language after dance Decomposition notebook We need a mineral mind to read But television keeps streaming at ungodly speeds
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About Chris Martin Chris Martin is the author of The Falling Down Dance (Coffee House, 2015), Becoming Weather (Coffee House, 2011), and American Music (Copper Canyon, 2007), chosen by C. D. Wright for the Hayden Carruth Award. He’s been a writer-inresidence at the Minnesota History Center, a Bartos Fellow at United World College, and is the recipient of a 2017 NEA grant for poetry. In 2015 he co-founded Unrestricted Interest, an organization dedicated to transforming the lives of those with autism through poetry. He also teaches at Hamline University and Carleton College.
About the Poems These poems, though plainly varied in their concerns, are part of a larger sequence where I have been pushing against my love of line breaks. In part I wanted to see what would happen if I just tried to place line after line on the page. Would I be implying a narrative link between them? Could I traffic in the tension created by their juxtaposition? My own understanding of this form intersects with the notion of mapping or giving directions. I think of each poem as a walking tour of some kind, moving the reader through a serially connected (and thus inherently disconnected) landscape. I enjoy the rhythm of long and short lines– something that had heretofore eluded me. I also enjoy the heightened opportunity for humor, which I suppose is created in the tension and disconnect, if not the line length itself. In this regard I was inspired most by the artists Jenny Holzer and Simon Evans and by the poet Anselm Hollo. The "Cento" is a collection of lines pilfered and stitched together from Stephen Kuusisto's gorgeous Planet of the Blind.
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Remembering John Bowie The following is David St. John's Forward to Screen Gems, John Bowie's posthumous book published in 1976-7 by W.D. Hoffstadft & Sons Press, the precursor to Nine Mile Books. It is never easy to admit loss, to face within ourselves the silence occasioned by a friend's death. After the shock, the anger, I found, as I imagine others found, that I could not allow into my feelings the simple fact of John Bowie's death. Instead, I thought repeatedly of my first meeting with John in the summer of 1972, in Iowa City. We had been introduced by Larry Levis. The three of us, all displaced Californians, spent the evening drinking and talking. It was a conversation that included, for starters, rock n' roll trivia, the sympathy and genius of W.C. Fields, con- temporary poetry, the life histories of Nathaniel West and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the comparative virtues of Budweiser beer, Alice Cooper, and the heroic George McGovern. Then, at one point in the evening, John recited perfectly the whole, final pages of The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby. Aside from the fact that John Bowie had, apparently, seen every movie ever made, had read three times the number of books I'd read, and had learned by heart the lyrics to every Top 40 song of the previous ten years, I was most struck by—and would continue to be struck by all the years I knew him—three things: the speed of John's intelligence and wit, the depth of his understanding across the lines of disci- plines, and his enormous generosity to others, especially to other writers. And, it was not only that critical clarity John showed when he spoke or wrote about television and movies, but also the quality of his cultural sensitivity to contemporary events and to works of poetry, music, fiction, and cinema which revealed that same widely-based, unimpeachable intelligence. In Screen Gems, we find how John Bowie's youthful alliance with the world of television and cinema, its atmo- sphere of heroes and heroines, had brought him, as a poet, into a kind of affectionate confrontation with
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the figures and legends of that world. Perhaps only someone born in Southern California in 1950 has the right—or, at least, should have the right—to write poems like these. As we read, we sense in the fabric of the poems that unmistakableSouthern California air, the jauntiness, the way the sar- donically irreal sunlight colors the stucco houses, the beaches, the palms, and the back lots of the movie studios. Unlike the sarcasm and the inherently superior, if appalled, notions of transplanted Easterners who have chosen to write about Hollywood and Southern California, John Bowie, in his poems, makes no such external judge- ments; when Bowie needles a character in one of his poems, it comes from someone within, someone on the inside of the landscape, someone, perhaps, much like the figures of the poems themselves. The poems of Screen Gems are some of the few instances I know where the writing has clearly matured within the weathers and rages of a Hollywood-born sensibility, within the real terrain of Los Angeles and its sur- rounds. That we know this in the poems is one of their great achievements, and remains, for me, the source of their authority. One of the great pleasures of Screen Gems is to experi- ence the wit and compassion of each poem, as we watch Bowie return to some of the figures that integrity taken from them by their fame; how, with others, he accentuates their foolishness and, good-naturedly, joins in, offering forgive- ness for all of us. Again, these "stars," who have been fossilized by their own roles, images, and careers, are given dimension and freedom again in their encounters with the poet, within his poems. Bowie rarely sets up a target. Instead, he offers the benefit of every doubt, every hospitality, before delivering the inevitably incisive and wry punch. Not only do we feel the figures of Screen Gems (who are characters, legends, stars as well) have been exposed to us as more ordinary and recognizable human beings, but we feel this has in some way returned to them some shadow of their individual humanity as well. Bowie lifts the masks of his characters as he considers and demolishes those values and sentiments of which they have become emblematic; he offers them fragments of fictive biographies so that they might stand free of themselves, if only once—as do Liberace, King
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Kong, and Lucille Ball—in these invented lives within the poems. In some cases, as withthe poems to Billy Graham, Walter Brennan, and John Wayne, the act turns almost savage, as if nothing short of that could restore to them any semblance of grace. As the poems of Screen Gems turn alternately playful and ominous, congratulatory and accusatory, we find our own experiences of the fact of illusion, our own memories of television and cinema, entering that same suspended, nether- world between the episodes of our lives and those we desire and know and live on the screen, along with, or as, our heroes and heroines. In this way, the poem for Ozzie and Harriet seems central to the anxieties of Screen Gems. Neces- sarily, Bowie seems to say, we grow through and out of that landscape offered by television and films, but the discrep- ancies between that visual experience and the lives we are entering—the disappointments the characters of Screen Gems and we alike share—will always remain. And, as the tender- ness we feel for those on the screen becomes confused with the truths we need to tell ourselves as we mature, we must begin to confront, as John Bowie does in these poems, those flat heroes and heroines with those identical truths, so that we may again feel some tenderness and respect for ourselves. It is this equilibrium which is sought throughout Screen Gems—for its author, for its characters, and, of course, for the rest of us. It is the recollective humor of our media-spent childhoods and adolescence, balancing those steps into the harder, unmade and unimagined world. —David St. John, November, 1977
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An Afterword Bob Herz's Afterward to the book tries to give a sense of the impact of John Bowie and his poetry and work. Herz was the book's publisher, and at the time was also editor of Seneca Review. I met John Bowie six years ago, at the University of Iowa. He was brilliant and inordinately talented, even in that extraordinarily talented group that made up the Writer's Workshop there. Unlike most of those around him, he was in love with death only a little, and in love with life, his own as well as everyone else's, a great deal more. It is hard to give a sense of the force of Bowie, or the sheer momentum of his personality. He was a large man. Rabelaisian in his appetites and prodigious in his talents, and it came natural to him to be large, as if only a big frame could support so many interests. He was a novelist, essayist, poet, teacher, musician, filmmaker, movie critic, cartoonist and a journalist of consequential promise. In all things he worked extraordinarily hard, with the kind of intense, enthusiastic momentum that promised a long, accomplished life. His death in Iowa City a year ago September of a coronary was tragically sad. He was 27, all dazzling promise and fiery potential, just beginning his assault on the public life. I have no doubt that he would have been an enormously successful and important artist. We had worked together on a number of projects, becoming, as he half-complained at one point, best friends by force of telephone and letter. He became a contributing editor to Seneca Review, the literary magazine I co-edit, his energy instantly helping to transform and galvanize all our energies for the new directions the magazine was taking at that time. He read each issue—each line—carefully, tearing or praising as the occasion demanded, always more full of praise than blame. (But when blame was called for, he could lay it on. Once, commenting on the work of a mutual acquaintance in one of his letters, he wrote, “I'm reading P— T—'s new
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novel now, and hordes of adverbs have eaten away the tips of my fingers.") The average letter from Bowie was a treasure-trove: comments on high-culture, rock 'n' roll, new words discovered (or banned, as the case might be), long quotes from whatever essay he admired at that instant, plot summaries of books, movies, or of whatever he himself was working on then. He was, in short, a small industry. While the rest of us were still tapping paper with the wrong end of the pencil, Bowie had completed a novel (Heartland, still, alas, unpublished), a study of Richard Nixon's dealings with the press in the early years of his career, this book of poems, plus others, plus countless essays, criticisms and articles for his local newspaper in Iowa or for small journals. Bowie was, in all things, a delight. I think the poems collected in this book show at least a part of him at his best— though, no collection concentrating on only one aspect of his talent could give a sense of the whole person. These are good poems, arrogant and witty and fun, as Bowie was, and filled with his own human vision and tone of voice. In the vast majority of them, he claims the middle ground for himself. He is, perhaps, the now-grown man who was the boy who noticed the king was not wearing anything, and who spent the rest of his life wondering what would make a man—even a king—do such a thing. He asks of Johnny Weissmuller, "Why are there never thorns / On your jungle floor...?" and of Walter Brennan, "what's it like to reach / Old age before puberty?" He understands, with us, that it is not real life for such things to happen—any more than it is real life for a king to appear naked, or than it is real life for his subjects not to notice. In his generosity, the generosity of the childwitness, he is willing to allow the same depth of understanding to the subjects of his poems. He wonders, aloud, just how reasonable it is to admire these people for the things we admire them for. Just how unreasonable is it to wonder if Lucille Ball read Plutarch and Plato? Just how reasonable is it, then, to applaud her for recipes read backward, or guppy salesmen she couldn't resist? Much more than mere crankiness is involved in the posing of such questions. I think that, for Bowie, in his generosity, there is something much more akin to astonishment. The
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issue reaches its ultimate conclusion in the marvelous "Ode to King Kong": "The real irony / For you was success: / How would you mow the lawn?" How, indeed? That Bowie took the question seriously is testified to by the poem's ending, where the human and the monstrous blend in that final "spasm of disgrace." One was honored to have a friend like Bowie, so humanly rich, so cock-sure of our successes, so crushed at our failures, so sure that the setbacks were only temporary. After all, the essential reasonableness of things could always prevail, and the child with the good eyesight could notice more than nakedness—who was clothed, and how well. There is no question that the death of one so young and so talented was unreasonable, unfair. Those of us who knew him and valued him must hope that the unfairness of this world does not extend to the next; that there, in a reasonable ordering of things, he has an honored place. —Bob Herz, Syracuse, NY 1978
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John Bowie A Night At The Opera Mrs. Claypool (commandingly): "Mr. Driftwood!" "Why Mrs. Claypool! Helloo!" "Mr. Driftwood, you invited me to dine with you at seven!" "Mrs. Claypool." He drops his napkin. "When I invite a woman to dinner, I expect her to look at my face." He spins his chair. "That's the price she has to pay, love." Driftwood puffs on his cigar, which he has held with love throughout the scene. Mrs. Claypool: "Mr. Driftwood, three months ago you promised to put me into society." He takes her hand. "In all that time, you've done nothing but draw a very handsome salary." Woman in b.g. listens attentively. Driftwood: "Mrs. Claypool, how many men do you suppose are drawing one?" Mrs. Claypool eyes him narrowly, doubting all his help and love. "Why, you can count them on one hand, my good woman." Mrs. Claypool: "I'm not your good woman, Mr. Driftwood." "Don't say that, Mrs. Claypool. I don't care what you did in the past—you'll always be my good woman." He flicks ashes onto her plate. "Because I love you." He drops his head. "There, I didn't mean to tell you, Mrs. Claypool, but you, you dragged it out of me. I love you." Mrs. Claypool: "It's rather difficult to believe that you love me when I find you dining with another woman." Driftwood: "That woman? Do you know why I sat with that woman?" Mrs. Claypool: "No..." Driftwood: "Because that young woman
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reminded me of you." Mrs. Claypool: "Really?" He throws his arms into the air, ecstatic. Driftwood: "Of course! That's why I'm sitting here with you, Mrs. Claypool, because you remind me of you. That's why I love your eyes, your throat, your lips; everything about you reminds me of you, except you." Her face falls. "How do you account for that?" He turns to camera. "If the woman figures that one out, she's good." Mrs. Claypool: "As for love, I think we should keep everything on a business basis." He is shattered. "Every time I get romantic, Mrs. Claypool, you want to talk business. It must be a Driftwood curse—something about us brings out the business in every woman." He flutters his eyebrows, giving Mrs. Claypool a once-over. She looks away, shocked. "Mr. Driftwood!"
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Ode To Ed Sullivan A car-horn swells and then passes. Your room is quiet, Ed, quiet enough For practice, with the debris Of practice all around you: Broken duck-pins, an out-of-tune Piano, a deck of special cards. Every Sunday, after the cameras Are packed up and the cue-cards filed. You return to this talentless room, Hoping to master something, hoping To return next week with a song In a monumental key, —or a joke That will turn each comedian That special shade of green. Instead, You find a voice that splinters With every note, a voice that Drops your punchline at just the wrong Moment; and you come back to mumble In the wings, clutch elbows. And search for some familiar face In the audience, someone who knows You could do it, while onstage The Rolling Stones mesmerize; A quivering Pekingese dances the ballet.
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Ode To Liberace All night we've been trying to picture you In the back room at Snuffy's with Four aces and a wet cigar: No picture comes. We know the closets full of sequin And polite velvet, the Florentine Diamonds, the candles and roses that Guard your gentle empire. But there must be something else. Something to uncap those frustrations Stitched into you by the eyes of a Cab-driver, or the snicker Of a burly teamster spotting you From across the room. There must be A night in the week when you play Special melodies that Charm the servants to sleep, A night reserved for old clothes And filthy nails. There must be a night, Liberace, When you slip out the back door Into an alley charged with Darkness, lighting a cigarette, One ear sharp for the sound of Bad voices, and Debussy Far away as morning. Volume 5 No 1 - Page 83
Ode To King Kong What could you expect from her, Kong? Squirming in the palm of your hand. The back of one tiny fist Against her mouth, while you Snap the jaws of ancient reptiles, Spin first and second mates Off log bridges, peel the wings from some Arrogant prehistoric friend—you knew It would never work out. You knew that no domestic scene Could include shoes that dwarf a cottage. Or a lunchbox that throws Broad streets into shadow. Just thinking of the honeymoon Made her shiver. And yet you Kept at it, proving your strength And joyous endurance, hoping that Her heart would swell and Somehow match yours. The real irony For you was success: How would you mow the lawn? What bed or hassock or divan Would survive when you settled down To flip through the morning paper. Or catch the six o'clock news? You needed huge trees Page 84 - Nine Mile Magazine
And yards of sturdy vine, the shadows of Pterodactyls on moist cavern walls To frame the elegance of a violent yawn, To give your movements grace. With a toe-hold on the Empire-State, Tossing biplanes to the ground, you Lose the terror natural to undergrowth. The steam and smell of jungle air. Your face shows that sudden fact. Not comic or tragic. Your eyes record Humiliation, fear, a spasm of disgrace.
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Ode To Mickey Mouse It was bound to happen, Mickey. When Walt saw the last rushes, with your Bifocals, your wheeze, that hint Of arthritis in your tail—he knew Your time had come. He knew that No one could laugh at a mouse With bronchitis, that when you limped Across the screen, your whiskers Touched with gray, children would Cover their eyes, or flock to the nearest Chocolatebar machine. So you tried to Bribe the cartoonists into airbrushing Your wrinkles, adding a few firm pen-strokes To your brittle spine— But they were wrapped up in Color-schemes for enchanted forests. For Cinderella's gown, while The outlines of new and more elaborate Successors already filled their boards. Back in your dressing room. Someone has packed everything Into small boxes on the floor. You Look into the mirror for a moment, into the Half-moons of your eyes, Mickey, the darkness Of your nose; then, drawing A stolen eraser from your glove,
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You bring it gently down Against one wrist, and begin to rub.
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Ode To Walter Brennan Walt,—what's it like to reach Old age before puberty? In every part in each Of a hundred films your voice Cracks like tin foil. Your legs quiver, your face Is a tablecloth too big For its table. What was it like to be called "Mister" by the other fifth graders. Or use a walking-stick At the mistletoe prom? Was it something in Your blood or bile that made you Everyone's Virgin Grandfather? Or was it the overalls. The faithful smell of manure. Of poorly-ventilated chicken Shacks, the juice-stained strawberry box In one bitten hand that gave you The aura of an unpaved road? Even without the farm, even Hustling tobacco-plugs to Gary Cooper Or priming Jack Oakie Page 88 - Nine Mile Magazine
For the big game—you smell Of psoriasis, of the blue-veined Naivete that only Rockwell Can paint into faces. Old age and wisdom are usually bred Together, Walt; but we understand. When flesh dries so quickly. When veins buckle that soon. It must be hard to focus On newsprint, to capture anything Below a whisper. It must be hard To tie your shoes to a new Heartbeat every morning. Winding down like a bad clock.
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Iowa Days With Bowie By Bill Burtis It’s been more than 40 years since I last saw John Bowie. It’s hard to write a remembrance of someone when there’s not much one remembers. Still, there are the easy things: Bowie’s laugh sounded like husking corn; he was a big man with asthma who smoked a lot and grew up in Los Angeles when Los Angeles had a breathing problem. He was a nervous person, with the many tiny habits nervous people have, a kind of constant vibration. You could talk with Bowie about anything. We talked about Vietnam and baseball. We talked about The Stones; we talked about cities and streams. We played a lot of pool. Once, when we’d decided to go fishing, we rented a canoe. But the next morning, the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, 1972, we realized we had no bait (I have no idea where we got tackle!) and no cash to buy it with. So we went to Harold Donnelley’s bar to cash a check, which required a purchase. We never went fishing. A sunny Iowa afternoon, I was sitting in my living room reading when the sound of bison rushing past the window turned out to be Bowie, arriving full speed from across the alley. “That was an earthquake,” he gasped, referring, I thought, to the explosion I’d heard (and ignored, though noted) a few minutes before. “That was an explosion,” I said, adding, “They don’t have earthquakes in Iowa City.” Still puffing from his stampede, Bowie exhaled “I’m from Los Angeles! I know an earthquake when I feel one! Didn’t you feel it in your stomach?” I had. It was. I’ve felt several since, always in my gut, a few in my feet, always thinking of John. One night, he called to ask if I’d come over because his walls were covered with spiders. I was not alone, but Lynn was a woman who liked adventure, and so we set off, picked up Bowie and went to the all-night place out on I-80. When we got back to Bowie’s, she asked if it was okay Page 90 - Nine Mile Magazine
with me if she stayed with him. I said sure; that says more about Bowie than either Lynn or me. He was a truly charming man, a lovely human. Lynn, in fact, was still with him at the end, when the Coca Cola he’d adopted to replace the booze, the cigarettes and, truly, too much caring about everything, finally killed him—though Ali’s poor performance against Shavers that night was undoubtedly the catalyst for the infarction. His heart was his tool, what he saw with and what he used to create, to communicate. His heart empowered the precision of his vision; an empathic grasp of what compels human action and emotion. Of the many telling images in his Odes, the one that illustrates this best for me is the line in “Ode to Ed Sullivan”: In the wings, clutch elbows, which suggests at once Sullivan’s famous physical posture, its psychological implications, and the depth of his distance. Bowie understood this stuff, and he was, chronologically, just a kid. But he was truly an old soul. One senses that in this collection in the compassion with which he treats his subjects, even when leveling a sometimes necessary and faithful moral exactitude. That was John Bowie in life, in my experience: Always ready to measure and forgive, seeing through the lens of his own heart, his own loves and failures. It’s impossible, of course, to say where he’d be now and what he’d be creating; the cultural, artistic, political and economic combinations, permutations and nuances are far too great. But it seems certain that his observation, wit, and desire to further the cause of humanity would have led him to continue to comment richly, in new ways and possibly new forms. One can only imagine how he would have capitalized on the technology that has blossomed since he left us.
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Diana Pinckney Chop Suey, 1929 after Edward Hopper Two women in cloche hats sit opposite each other. Their table almost bare except for a bowl, hollow beside the orange teapot with no steam. Blue shadows slide. The back of one woman dull, the other faces us in low-cut, tight-cut green against the cream of her neck. She has no interest in her companion. Her dark eyes, dense with makeup, fix on us and deepen. In a crimson that matches the woman’s lips and cheeks, the window’s half hidden neon SUEY might be blinking another word to men passing. Who will she leave with, what is on her menu? The bold gaze that holds ours shows traces of the ways a working girl fills the barren places.
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Proposal after Summer Evening, 1947 Edward Hopper A couple on a veranda, both at the rail, both on the edge. He with sharp profile and one hand across his chest. She leans against the wooden banister, hemmed between porch wall and his body. They’re starkly beautiful. Behind them, grimy curtains smother the front window and door to a house no one would want to enter. The lone globe lighting the beaded ceiling captures this pair who are young as the slip of grass next to the house, green as dreams. Clearly, she is his desire. Yet, all of her seems to pull back, mouth sour, eyes fixed on the floor. Doesn’t she dream of leaving with this man who loves her, never having to walk through her grim door again. Her proud, lovely body in pink shorts and strapless top says no, says she has other plans. She will wait. What does she know of spare hotel rooms, diners, the haunts of city sidewalks.
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About Diana Pinckney Diana Pinckney is the winner of the 2010 Ekphrasis Prize and Atlanta Review’s 2012 International Poetry Prize. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize 5 times. Cream City Review, Crucible and Persimmon Tree are among the journals that have given her awards. Published in RHINO, Cave Wall, Arroyo, Green Mountains Review, Tar River Poetry, The Pedestal Magazine, Nine Mile Magazine, Still Point Arts Quarterly, & other journals and anthologies, Pinckney has five books of poetry, including 2015’s The Beast and The Innocent. Her first collection won contests from South and North Carolina presses. Her latest contains many poems written from works of art.
About the Poems Edward Hopper and his paintings, his life with artist wife Josephine, and his haunting way of portraying the people and places in his art have always interested me. I have about a dozen poems about his paintings. That, and my interest in ekphrastic poems in general are what keeps me writing about art. Hopper’s painting Summer Evening, 1947 is one of my favorites. I titled it “Proposal” because that’s how I saw the young couple on the porch. Perhaps he is bringing her home after a night out and decides to propose. She does not look pleased. Chop Suey, 1929 is one that fascinates. Hopper titled the work Chop Suey and I wouldn’t change that for anything. His sense of humor comes through in the painting’s title
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Maximilian Heinegg Quarry 1. There’s a Steal Your Face on the boulder above Vernon’s blue-black water to say this place is for heads, up from Plum Cove for a sinking of bottles beneath Gloucester’s powdery stars. I hear what they smoke to amplify, their music, cadences of moon & skin, a surface. Some dive headfirst but that's a gamble- the limit’s sooner than seen. Above them, no vigilance of rock. 2. When the day’s stony minutiae are extracted from the skull, the riprap, slate, & rock armor blasted, dragged & ordered, I hear gravity’s overture & walk the waveless surface at the reservoir of sleep, & sink until the morning for this inheritance, broken off for me. Volume 5 No 1 - Page 95
3. Sleep, my quarry, lend me a steadiness that will stand in the shifting dust, days my retiring eyes will return to, depths of landlocked water & enter the darker wonder of what I am afterlured there from peripheries of stone.
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About Maximilian Heinegg Maximilian Heinegg is an English teacher in the public schools of Medford, MA. His poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Tar River Poetry, Columbia Poetry Review, December Magazine, and Crab Creek magazine, among others. As a singer-songwriter, his records can be heard at www.maxheinegg.com. He is also the co-founder and brewmaster of Medford Brewing Company.
About the Poem This poem began in Gloucester, MA where I visited Vernon's Quarry, which features an enormous, spray-painted Steal Your Face on a boulder. The lightning bolt skull associated with the Grateful Dead, and the fact that many locals swing by the quarry to party was still on my mind that night as I was trying to fall asleep, so I aimed to connect the two in terms of the desire to be peaceful and thoughtless.
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Auden In Love by Bob Herz One thinks of Auden—I think of Auden—as a brilliant and consummate craftsman, an often witty and tender poet, a master of more forms than perhaps any poet of the 20th century, author of some of the greatest poems of the century, a man of genius with talent to spare. Among the great poets of the 20th century, if he is not quite in the company of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams, it is still fair to say that he ranks with Hart Crane as a dominating force at least as much as they on successive generations of writers. But my admiration for him seems a distanced thing, and I somehow do not think of Auden as having a part in the tragic human poetic drama of pain and love and art: no Maud Gonne like Yeats, no Vivienne like Elliot, no stroke like Dr. Williams. He seems more self-contained than any of them, enjoying but not needing others, needing only to write his verses. A dedicated professional, a one-time radical, tamed somewhat by his late conversion into the Anglican Church, he seemed to move through the world well-protected by his mental faculties, not deranged or suicidal like so many of his peers, not harmed by events. And yet, one thinks, that cannot be the whole story. There is always more to any life than mere impressions tell us. He lived through some of the most calamitous events in history and wrote extraordinary poems that sear the mind and memory. Something happened. I recently came across Hannah Arendt’s wonderful remembrance, “Remembering Wystan H. Auden, Who Died in the Night of the Twentyeighth of September, 1973.” It originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1975, and has since been posthumously collected in Reflections on Literature and Culture (Stanford University Press, 2007), a book of Arendt’s previously uncollected essays on European and American authors, journalists, and literary critics. The essay made me re-think what I thought I knew about Auden. She speaks about the poet from the vantage point of a friend. She views him as Page 98 - Nine Mile Magazine
a great poet, and as her friend: but always she saw the poet first, and then the friend. And she saw clearly the price he paid to become the poet and artist he became. He always understood his goal, and his gifts, she says, relating an exchange between a very young Auden and his tutor at Oxford: Tutor: ‘And what are you going to do, Mr. Auden, when you leave the university?’ Auden: ‘I am going to be a poet.’ Tutor: ‘Well—in that case you should find it very useful to have read English.’ Auden: ‘You don’t understand. I am going to be a great poet.’ ” Arendt and Auden were members of that special group whose attraction to one another is secured by cultural affinity and position. She was famous author of several important books, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, among others, a philosopher (a term she rejected but that others have applied to her), a political theorist, a teacher, a lecturer, and, to some extent, and apparently to her surprise, a controversialist, over the Eichmann book and for a long time thereafter. Auden was—well, Auden. She once said that taste is a principle of organization of who in the world belongs together and how we recognize each other. She and Auden recognized each other very quickly, and she understood his art and his work, and the price he paid for it: What made him a poet was his extraordinary facility with and love for words, but what made him a great poet was the unprotesting willingness with which he yielded to the “curse” of vulnerability to “human unsuccess” on all levels of human existence—vulnerability to the crookedness of the desires, to the infidelities of the heart, to the injustices of the world. She says that Auden always understood that price, and paid it
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willingly until he reached the age when the strength the heart needed to continue to pay that price began to fade. He began then to see the price as something too high for a man to willingly pay, yet he continued to pay it until the day he died, age 66, an age not old by today’s standards, or even by the standards of the early 70’s, but by then he was quite worn out, even desperate. She knew this from an experience she’d had with him five years before, one that continued to burden her with guilt. She tells us about their relationship but makes a distinction that is tactful, even discreet: I met Auden late in his life and mine—at an age when the easy knowledgeable intimacy of friendships concluded in one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be left, to share with another. Thus, we were very good friends but not intimate friends. This is not the whole story, in fact barely part of it, for they had met fifteen years before, in 1958, both of them then in their early 50’s. Auden had reviewed Arendt’s book The Human Condition for the journal Encounter, and telephoned her to say how much he liked it. Late that year and on into the next they had an exchange on the subject of forgiveness (they disagreed over whether forgiveness is betrayed by the kind of visible action needed as an external symbol on stage or in literature). The exchange resulted in a life-long friendship. But friendship, even intense friendship, is one thing, and a loverelationship or a marriage something else again. Toward the end of his life came Auden turned desperate in his need for love. Three weeks after Arendt’s husband Heinrich Blücher died in 1970, Auden came to her building, “looking so much like a clochard” that the building’s doorman accompanied him to her door. (This according to one of Arendt’s biographers.) Auden’s 1935 unconsummated marriage to Erika Mann, intended to help her get a British passport and get out of pre-war Germany, had ended with her death a year earlier. Now he “said he had come to New York only because of me,” Arendt wrote, “that I was of great
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importance to him, that he loved me very much.” He wanted to marry her. She rejected his proposal. “I am almost beside myself when I think of the whole matter,” she later told her friend, Mary McCarthy. “I hate, am afraid of pity…. and I think I never knew anyone who aroused my pity to this extent.” Her reaction is related in Auden, by Richard DavenportHines (Pantheon, 1995). Davenport-Hines says that both the intrusiveness of his coming to her so soon after her husband’s death and his too-obvious desperation were equally shocking to her. By the time of Auden’s death three years later, shock had receded, and friendship resumed, though tainted now with pity and the additional burden of guilt: I am still thinking of Wystan… and of the misery of his life, and that I refused to take care of him when he came and asked for shelter. She turned him down, undoubtedly hurting him, but she understood that she could not shelter him, that his internal and external worlds mirrored each other, that his visible misery was a made thing, a creation to parallel his internal misery, and that she could not mediate either one. In her remembrance she speaks of the changes she saw in him over time, and of how little she had understood his misery when they first met. She sees the changes in his face between their first meeting and two years later when his face was marked by those famous deep wrinkles, as though life itself had delineated a kind of facescape to make manifest “the heart’s invisible furies.” If you listened to him, nothing could seem more deceptive than this appearance. What she would discover after years of friendship was that the squalor of his external environment and his nearly-incapacitating spiritual miseries mirrored each other. She could not understand how this could be—he was famous, he had strength, yet often seemed unable to cope. She also found his embrace of joy to be central to him, something she first thought of as an eccentricity, but came to learn that it was how he survived his profound misery: Time and again, when to all appearances he could not cope any more, when his slum apartment was so cold that the plumbing no longer functioned and he had to use the toilet in the liquor store
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at the corner, when his suit (no one could convince him that a man needed at least two suits, so that one could go to the cleaner, or two pairs of shoes so that one pair could be repaired: a subject of an endless ongoing debate between us throughout the years) was covered with spots or worn so thin that his trousers would suddenly split from top to bottom—in brief, whenever disaster hit before your very eyes, he would begin to more or less intone an utterly idiosyncratic version of “Count your blessings.” Since he never talked nonsense or said something obviously silly—and since I always remained aware that this was the voice of a very great poet—it took me years to realize that in his case it was not appearance that was deceptive, and that it was fatally wrong to ascribe what I saw of his way of life to the harmless eccentricity of a typical English gentleman.... I finally saw the misery, and somehow realized vaguely his compelling need to hide it behind the “Count-your-blessings” litany, yet I found it difficult to understand fully why he was so miserable and was unable to do anything about the absurd circumstances that made everyday life so unbearable for him. Auden was miserable, with an incurable misery of the heart. It was, she thought, incurable because it was the condition of being a poet. She came to view that as the condition of all poets, or at least of great ones, and compared his situation to what he said in his great elegy for Yeats, that he was hurt into poetry. And she sees the directives of that poem as applying to him as much as to Yeats: Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night. With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse,
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Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise. She says Auden’s “praise,” expressed in this poem and others, was of a special kind. He did not claim that this is the best of all possible worlds, or seek to justify God’s creation to men; but rather to offer the kind of praise that pitches itself against all that is most unsatisfactory in man’s condition, to “Sing / In a rapture of distress.” She says, Stephen Spender, the friend who knew him so well, has stressed that “throughout the whole development of [Auden’s] poetry… his theme had been love” (had it not occurred to Auden to change Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” by defining man as the “bubblebrained creature” that said “I’m loved therefore I am”?), and at the end of the address that Spender gave in memory of his late friend at the Cathedral in Oxford he told of asking Auden about a reading he had given in America: “His face lit up with a smile that altered its lines, and he said: ‘They loved me!’” They did not admire him, they loved him: here, I think, lies the key both to his extraordinary unhappiness and to the extraordinary greatness —intensity—of his poetry. Now, with the sad wisdom of remembrance, I see him as having been an expert in the infinite varieties of unrequited love, among which the infuriating substitution of admiration for love must surely have loomed large. And beneath these emotions there must have been from the beginning a certain animal tristesse that no reason and no faith could overcome… She draws other parallels between the life and the work—not, that
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is, between the particulars of the life, but the general themes or conditions. A small example: she says, “there was a reserve in him that discouraged familiarity, not that I tested it ever; I rather gladly respected it as the necessary secretiveness of the great poet, who must have taught himself early not to talk in prose, loosely and at random, of things that he knew how to say much more satisfactorily in the condensed concentration of poetry. Reticence may be the deformation professionnelle of the poet.” I like the way her thought moves from the particular to the general here. She is provocative but not patronizing, not judging his right to withhold. Indeed, she gives reticence a philosophical and artistic purpose: In Auden’s case, this seemed all the more likely because much of his work, in utter simplicity, arose out of the spoken word, out of idioms of everyday language—like ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.’ She discusses the influence of Brecht on his work. I'd never considered this, but she makes a good case. In the late fifties Auden translated Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The translation was never published, but she had read it, and says that she knew of no other adequate rendering of Brecht into English. She points specifically to the wonderful ballads—the “Ballad of Barnaby,” a version of “My Lady’s Juggler,” and “Miss Gee” (“Let me tell you a little story / About Miss Edith Gee; / She lived in Clevedon Terrace / At Number 83.”) She says, In the case of Auden, as in the case of Brecht, inverted hypocrisy served to hide an irresistible inclination toward being good and doing good—something that both were ashamed to admit, let alone proclaim. This seems plausible for Auden, because he finally became a Christian, but it may be a shock at first to hear it about Brecht… What drove these profoundly apolitical poets into the chaotic political scene of our century was Robespierre’s
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“zele compatissant,” the powerful urge toward “les malheureux,” as distinguished from any need for action toward public happiness, or any desire to change the world. She describes how Auden viewed the relationship of the poet to the world: To him, it was nonsense for the poet to claim special privileges or to ask for the kinds of indulgences that we often grant out of sheer gratitude for thew work. To take such a position would be impossible for Auden, who sought to be a realist about the world: The main thing was to have no illusions and to accept no thoughts —no theoretical systems—that would blind you to reality. He turned against his early leftist beliefs because events (the Moscow trials, the Hitler-Stalin pact, and experiences during the Spanish Civil War) had proved them to be “dishonest”—“shamefully” so…. In the forties, there were many who turned against their old beliefs, but there were very few who understood what had been wrong with those beliefs. Far from giving up their belief in history and success, they simply changed trains, as it were; the train of Socialism and Communism had been wrong, and they changed to the train of Capitalism or Freudianism or some refined Marxism, or a sophisticated mixture of all three. Auden, instead, became a Christian; that is, he left the train of history altogether…. the protective shield of orthodoxy [ in its ] time-honored coherent meaningfulness that could be neither proved nor disproved by reason provided him… with an intellectually satisfying and emotionally rather comfortable refuge against the onslaught of what he called “rubbish”; that is the countless follies of the age. Arendt praises Auden’s common sense as the key to the man, that he never lost a view of himself as a craftsman who saw the world as it really is, but who was hurt continually by it into his poetry. He wanted to be a great poet, and became one. Arendt saw deeply into the price he paid for
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it, and saw further—here is the tragedy—that it was a pain beyond cure, by her or anyone. He had talked about his pain, early, and about love’s saving grace in a world of fashionable madmen and fleeting virtue in the beautiful poem “Lullaby”: Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral: But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful. Soul and body have no bounds: To lovers as they lie upon Her tolerant enchanted slope In their ordinary swoon, Grave the vision Venus sends Of supernatural sympathy, Universal love and hope; While an abstract insight wakes Among the glaciers and the rocks The hermit’s carnal ecstasy. Certainty, fidelity On the stroke of midnight pass Like vibrations of a bell, And fashionable madmen raise Their pedantic boring cry: Every farthing of the cost, All the dreaded cards foretell,
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Shall be paid, but from this night Not a whisper, not a thought, Not a kiss nor look be lost. Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of welcome show Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find the mortal world enough; Noons of dryness find you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love. It is a poem that captures a reality that anyone who has ever been in love, I mean really in love, beyond pretty flowers and nice phrases and places and sex, must know and understand. You read it and think that this could only have been written by someone with that knowledge of love and of the other, that it must be experiential, a lover’s poem written by a lover. Arendt’s remembrance of Auden helps us understand that these were not merely words put on paper by a professional craftsman, a pretty thing created by a poet who could create such things at will, but words desperately needed in a life lived always at the edge of desperation, and that they were never—could never—be descriptive of his life, but must always remain aspirational, a description of his hope. That was the price paid all his life by this poet, and paid willingly, even late in life, even when he understood that the cost was too high.
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Some Translations We try to include some translations in each issue of Nine Mile Magazine in order to broaden the scope of what we bring to readers, trusting that they recognize that translating is not an exact art, and that all translators have their own approaches and preferences. Ours is always to try to bring the poet forward, giving a sense of the tone of voice, the substance of the poem, which often means a lesser effort at placing the exact words in the exact order in each line. If we succeed in generating interest in the work of poets we admire, giving a sense of their art in in a different language in a way that readers can comprehend, we will feel completely justified in this exercise. In this issue we include four poets: Antonio Machado (1875 – 1939), whose full name was Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz, was one of the leading figures of the so-called Spanish Literary Generation of 1898. There is a beautiful line about him from one of his colleagues: He "spoke in verse and lived in poetry.” He was formed, as a poet, in the years when Spain lost the last of its empire, and it changed expectations in the young. He was 23 in 1898. He spent most of his life as a schoolteacher in the provinces of Spain, and wrote in long and short forms. His work is always stunning, always beautiful. The short poems here are from two longer collections of "Proverbios y cantares" from 1912, and a later group from around 1916. Charles Baudelaire (1821 –1867) was one of the greatest of French poets, also an essayist and critic, and a champion of other poets, including Edgar Allan Poe. He published Flowers of Evil in 1857, which gained a small but impressive readership, one of whom was Gustav Flaubert, who wrote him: ”You have found a way to rejuvenate Romanticism.... You are as unyielding as marble, and as penetrating as an English mist.” But the book also had critics, who found the themes of sex and death and their variants to be scandalous. One wrote: “"Everything in it which is not hideous is incomprehensible, everything one understands is putrid.” The
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poem here is from Flowers of Evil, and retains its title. Jules LaForgue (1860 – 1887) was a French poet whose work exerted a significant impact on a generation of English and American poets, including T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Hart Crane. He was one of the first French poets to write in free verse. This poem, with its several voices and dialogue, is in many ways a typical poem of his later career, a time of poverty and deep despair. Alexis Saint-Léger / Saint-John Perse (1887 – 1975), a French poet and diplomat who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1960, "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He made a brilliant career in the French diplomatic service starting in 1914, and traveled widely, in Spain, Germany, and the United Kingdom. From 1916 to 1921, he was secretary to the French Embassy in Peking, where he wrote his first published work, Anabase, publishing it in 1924 under the pseudonym Saint-John Perse, after which he published nothing for many years, believing it inappropriate for a diplomat. Strongly anti-Nazi, he was dismissed from the service in 1940, after France fell to Hitler, and began an exile in Washington, D.C., where he was employed by the Library of Congress, thanks to the intercession of Archibald MacLeish. After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1960, he wrote the long poems Chronique, Oiseaux, Chant pour un équinoxe, and the shorter "Nocturne" and "Sécheresse." His work is often praised for its precision and purity, and has been compared to that of Arthur Rimbaud. Anabase was translated as Anabasis by T.S. Eliot. The poem included here is from his early work, published in 1911as Éloges, and Other Poems.
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God & The Sea & The Heart (Machado) Hour of my heart: Hour of one hope & of one despair. *** Last night I dreamt I heard God call me: Stay alert! Later when God slept I called back, Wake up! *** All men fight Two constant battles: In dreams with God, & awake, with the sea.
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Correspondences (Baudelaire) Nature is a temple from whose living columns Confused words sometimes are permitted to escape, A man wanders through a forest of symbols That watch him with familiar glances. Like long echoes that mingle distantly In a shadowy & profound unity, Vast as night & clear as the light of day, All colors scents & sounds answer to one another. There are smells fresh as the skin of children, Sweet as the music of oboes, & green as meadows —Others, corrupt, rich, overpowering, That expand outward like infinite things Like amber, musk, balsam & incense That sing of the sudden transports of the spirit & the senses.
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Songs Of Pianos In Rich Neighborhoods (LaForgue) Yes, you know a lot about literature. But now we come to pianos in rich houses. These are the first evenings of spring. The weather is so fine that you are without a coat. Your anxieties, so often misunderstood, Have left you a bundle of jangled nerves. Those girls, what do they dream of, Under the boredom of their songs? “The courtyards of night, Christ of the dormitories!” “You are going away, leaving us here, Leaving us here & going away, While we curl & uncurl our careful hair, & embroider endlessly our embroidery.” Pretty or vague? sad or wise? still pure? O days, why did you become all the same? You, my world, are you really what I wanted? Can anyone still be pure, I mean even bodily pure, Knowing what bloody scenes attend Even the purest confessions of the roses? But what do they dream of, these girls? Warriors like Roland? Fine lacy underthings? “Our hearts are in prison. Its seasons seem endless.... Page 112 - Nine Mile Magazine
“You are going away & leaving us here, Deserting us & going away. In our gray convents, like a choir of Shulamites, We cross & uncross our arms Over breasts that have not yet decided to exist.” Then one fine day the fatal key of the soul shows up. It was inevitable. Heredity, the ageless pursuer, Begins one of his punctual fermentations— You can see it leap out almost beyond them In the endless dance of our strange streets, Ah, you theaters & dormitories, papers & books! Stop these empty songs! Life is real & criminal! “The curtains are drawn. May we come in?” “You are going away & leaving us here, Leaving us here & going, so far away; But the spring under the rose is dry, & still, he has not come....” He will come! But you will not recognize him. Your poor hearts will be courted only by sadness. You will make every foolish attempt to escape your fate. You will begin to think your own heart inadequate. You will clothe it in routine & new cloths & even in these lonely trappings—O broken-hearted What now—are they trying to win The bachelor uncle with the dowry? Volume 5 No 1 - Page 113
‘’Never! Never! If only you knew!” “You are going away & leaving us, Leaving us & you will not stay. But promise you’ll come back again & cure these exquisite little pains?” Look at them! The Ideal has them all in disarray Like one of those wild bohemian weeds Even here in the wealthier neighborhoods. But life is here! It arrived before them! It is like a flask of purest wine that is alive. It will become their last baptism. Very soon now they will sing Songs with much less sentimental refrains. “The single pillow! The wall I know... too well...” “You are going away & leaving us, Leaving us & going away. Why couldn’t I have died at Mass! O months, O lingerie, O meals!”
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Eloges.2. (St John Perse) The servants of my mother, big shining girls... with fabulous eyelids... O such Charities! O such sweet favors! That was childhood for me, a childhood as of Adam: calling to each thing, I said that it was great; calling to each beast, that it was beautiful & kind. I stocked my garden with tall hungry flowers, I hid them among red leaves, I watched them devour beautiful green insects. One year a little sister died: I smelled the good smell of her mahogany coffin Between the mirrors of the rooms, & the way the bouquets in the garden smelled of the family cemetery One must not kill the hummingbird with a stone, I know that.... The earth hid in our games then, crouched down humbly & carefully Like the maid who played with us, The one with the right to sit in a good chair even when the family stays home.
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Richard Nixon: An Unknown Master by Bob Herz It is time—past time, really—to put aside differences and ideology, and acknowledge one of the great minimalist masters of poetry in the 20th century, Richard Milhous Nixon, a man known for many things but not, alas, as the fabulous poet that he really was. Many have ascribed to him a mastery of the arts of politics and policy and govenment, and he has been—there is no getting around it, I suppose —controversial in many respects, and often reviled. He is in many ways the most confusing of our presidents, a large-visioned chicken thief, a paranoid whose internationalist activities and policies broke down barriers between America and the world, a big-government conservative who enshrined many policies that were anathema to the right (arts, environment, almost a reverse income tax), a brilliant self-pitying realist and political tactician, and I expect others will add to this list with more fulsome descriptions. The very smart Gary Wills, for example, once wrote a book about him (Nixon Agonistes) in which he described him as capable of being almost everything at once, and Rick Perlstein one (Nixonland) in which he all but accused Nixon of being Satan, and never having a good or virtuous thought, so that even his best actions must have been motivated by a sociopathic venality. What is astounding is how well Nixon has ploughed those controversial political and personal fields with honesty and transparency, often at moments of extreme pressure and under sway of nearly paralyzing paranoia, in the service of his poetry. It is all collected in The Poetry of Richard Milhous Nixon (compiled by Jack Margolis, Cliff House Books, 1974, unpaginated). The book is long out of print, but should not be. Consider the mastery shown here—who has handled the variable foot so well? Or the intrusion of a line of sprung rhythm (“In it”) with such careless aplomb? Look at "Together": We are all In it Page 116 - Nine Mile Magazine
Together. We take A few shots And It will be over. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t Want to be On the other side Right now. This is the first poem in the book, and it captures the American idiom as well as anything in Williams, Lowell, Berryman, or in Robert Bly for that matter, all of whom pale in certain respects compared to poet Nixon. In part, perhaps, they lack the experience that he brings to each line, that sense of real but corrupted power, the slight whiff of brimstone and mendaciousness. Where else, for example, could you find an acknowledgement of reality so complete, so desperate, so intentionally calculating and even self-damning, as in these lines? Nixon is at all points the poet of ultimate reality, never turning aside from subjects others would never touch, with a level of understanding others could never match. Again from the book, the poem "A Million Dollars": We could get that. On the money, If you need the money, You could get that. You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten It is not easy, But it could Be done. So many themes conflate here—self-reliance, American cocksuredress of the kind that got Tom Sawyer’s fence painted, an Volume 5 No 1 - Page 117
understanding (rare as radium among poets) of money as the commodity that it really is. (Old joke: How do you insure that a poet will have $1 million? Give him $2 million to start.) I also see in this something intentionally teleological here: a satire of commodification seeking an object. It is very subtle, but it is there. Or consider as another strength the pure lyricism and enforced selfdiscipline of a poem like "I Can't Recall": You can say I don’t remember You can say I can’t recall. I can’t give any answer To that That I can recall. It would be so easy to have an answer, to provide a grounds for transformation and then to do it, even to claim a virtuous reason for the memory lapse: but no! That easy way out is for others—let them claim their discount redemption! Master poet Nixon will not sucuumb to the easy task, to the ending-route of the lazy poet. He has said he can’t recall so lyrically in those first two lines that he then in an act of extraordinary self-discipline applies that same logic of dismissal to the closure of the poem. This is no James Wright claiming epiphanic redemption on viewing nature from a hammock on some farm. No, there is no transcendence for this man. He stays, honest, here, earth-bound, lovely (not really), and courageous! Some of us of an age can remember the old Pogo comic strip, which provided the line, much-used at the time, We have met the enemy and he is us. Well, master-poet Nixon goes Pogo and all of us one better by giving the detail, by showing the accurate turnings and churnings of a mind trying to get it straight in the high-pressure paranoid morass of reality: Here is "Them and Us" Shouldn’t we be trying to get intelligence Weren’t they trying to get Page 118 - Nine Mile Magazine
intelligence from us? Don’t you try to disrupt their meetings? Didn’t they try to disrupt ours? (%$&%)(*!) They threw rocks, Ran demonstrations, Shouted, Cut the sound system, And let the tear gas in at night. What the hell is that all about? Did we do That? Here at last is a vision of life at the top of the American pinnacle of power that no one else has ever put into a poem and that it is likely no one else ever could. Or, again, in the same vein, "Let's face It": Nobody Is A friend Of ours. Let’s Face It. Don’t worry About That sort Of thing. This is the Coriolanus of the American mind speaking out and exposing himself at leader-levels. One can imagine the visible world swirling around this speaker, with voters driven mad by the excesses of
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their candidates, of citizens put up against the mental wall as they try to figure out if and how to fight back against these very real excesses of their leaders, and he with this statement of belief as reassurance in the midst of it all. The fear, the shrugs, the paranoia, the almost casual certainty of what Fate will bring, that it’s not worth worrying about because it can’t be avoided—it’s all here. How do I know from the few words here about this poet’s view of Fate? Well, what’s implicit here is made explicitly clear in another poem, "In The End": In the end We are going To be bled To death. And in the end, It is all going To come out anyway. Then you get the worst Of both worlds. I am frankly blown away by this collection, by the unflinching honesty with which Nixon confronts and presents his seen and experienced reality and his mental processes and reaction to that world. I also praise his deft handling of the American idiom, his eschewing the preciousness of pentameter—”to break the pentameter, that was the first heave,” Pound says in the Cantos, and here is master-poet Nixon showing thart he has learned, and how it can be done well. These poems were written amid real shock, under continuous intense pressure, with, we are told in the book cover, not one word, not one syllable of the actual utterances changed. I say written, but of course, they were dictated. This poetry was oral before it was compiled by Mr. Margolis, in effect the Greek writing committee to Mr. Nixon’s Homer. It is an amazing performance in any case. Nixon is known for many things, as acknowledged at the start of this article, and has been praised and reviled and endlessly psychoanalyzed for his mastery of many of
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them; who knew that to his long resume of contradiction we could also add master-poet? How much of a master, you ask: The first review of this book was done tongue-in-cheek by the great Hugh Kenner, in National Review, back in the mid-70’s. Not a bad critical pedigree! This may be the right time to pause to reflect on some of the hidden mysteries of the American psyche: poetry among the powerful should draw out some such meditation. And perhaps it should also make us question ourselves, for is not one of the challenges of a poetry like this to wonder whether its application is singular or general, to wonder how much of what is revealed here applies also to all of us? If Nixon, then why not you and me as well? I say no, rejecting the judgment; but others may have different answers. There is room for all.
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Stephen Kuusisto On Blogging, Ten Years Worth - June 2017 I started this blog ten years ago. In 2007 I didn’t know what I was getting into but I was mindful of Samuel Johnson’s dictum—via Boswell —”No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” “Would blogging,” I wondered, “be vanity and/or a waste of time?” It’s both and neither. But it can be wonderfully egotistical.. Here’s one of my early posts: I watched part of the Tony Blair-George W. Bush news conference and was reminded of the old folk story about the turtle on a fence post. Here were two men who know that their respective places in history will be circumscribed by the course of events in Iraq. They can’t imagine how this turtle got on top of that fence post. And so of course they talked about courage and they spoke about the hard decisions that leaders must make and they spoke affirmingly of their corresponding strength of purpose. The trouble is that for George W. Bush the war in Iraq was always meant to be nothing more than a theatrical production. It was supposed to be easy. It was never meant to be a war on terror. Iraq was nothing more than an extravaganza. And when it quickly became a civil war with a swift infusion of real terrorists Bush failed to put enough troops on the ground to manage the situation. We don’t have to wait for history to know these things. I am certain that our nation’s current course of action is utterly wrong. No rational person inside or outside the military believes that we should keep our troops in a civil war. But courage in this instance requires more than the social semiotics of
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the turtle on the fence post. Iraq is not the front line in the “war on terror”–it’s a blunder that looks and smells like imperialist occupation and the sooner the U.S. gets out the sooner we can work toward peaceful solutions for the many conflicts that are heating up across the Middle East. Such a move will look at first like defeat. But it won’t be. History assures us of that. Why was I egotistical? You can probably guess. It’s the last sentence. History offers no assurances about abandoning war, nor does it give examples of military withdrawals in the service of statecraft. Wars end badly. What was I thinking? C.S. Lewis: “If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.” Well there’s nothing like looking at old blog posts to bring one down a peg. One has to ask, “Isn’t blogging after all just an ego trip?” Of course it is. Being a blogger is like imitating those dudes who give away poems on the street in Haight Ashbury. The only difference is the street poets sometimes get paid. So the glib immediacy of web writing is both its attraction—no editors, no delays, just my words emblazoned across the digi-sphere— and it’s greatest peril. You’re guaranteed to make an ass of yourself at least part of the time. But it’s the other moments I’m attracted to and that keep me going. The immediacy gives you a chance to say some necessary, even righteous things in Kerouac style—first thought best thought—and if, like me, you come from a historically marginalized position this is all to the good. Example: Disability in the Morning Why am I such a sad man? Oh I’m funny alright. I can talk Dolphin like Robin Williams and imitate a medieval jester’s lavish chicken bone dance, but I’m sad. Some days I think it’s because of disability— Volume 5 No 1 - Page 123
a “dis-life” is a daily struggle and there’s no use pretending otherwise. If the attitudes of the able bodied don’t get you, the built environment will. Every cripple knows it. My friend Bill Peace (who is paralyzed) and I often talk about the moments when, early in the morning, we sense respectively we don’t want to leave our houses. The spirit flags. Bill can see it coming: the ugly encounters with parking lot bullies who steal the handicapped parking; the smarmy waitress who says, “I don’t think I could live if I was in your situation.” These things really do occur almost daily. Blind? There are all sorts of miscreants waiting for you. “You can’t come in here with that dog.” “We don’t have time to make our software accessible.” Whatever. And then one has to imagine the possibility that sadness precedes this life. We bring it with us. Born crying. We die crying, most of us. In the middle we’re supposed to smile. Don’t get me wrong. I love smiling. I’m not against a good grin. Sadness, conditional, part of mortality, is exacerbated by disability and there’s no way around it. The politics of disability struggle keep me awake, literally, for I think about all the disabled who don’t have jobs. They don’t have jobs because there’s profound discrimination in HR circles. If you don’t think so, try this: Apply for a job. When they call you, tell them you’re blind. You’ll be astonished at what happens next. Longfellow said: “Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.” A consolation I think: few will call me cold. There’s something about the instantaneous element of web writing that produces a nurtured confessionalism, at least for me. Pushing myself to write quickly I throw caution aside. It’s not a barbaric yawp but it’s
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principled and necessary—I need to get something emotional out. Sometimes this need is sparked by nothing more than a new day: Many Happy Returns to You and Your Shadow The year is new—hypo allergenic like certain poodles—and you can feel lucky or dreadful but the year (like a poodle) will have none of you, for the year is high strung and indifferent as years must be. I won’t go on with the simile. I’m sorry. Perhaps you love your poodle. I’m sincere. I don’t wish to offend “poodlers”. No one can live without sentiment. Capitalism as its now bruited will do anything to rob you of your last ounce of sentiment. I’m sorry I kicked your poodle. But whatever I say, the year will have only indifference like the stars.
When I think about the virgin year I’m mindful of just how provisional and difficult the lives of people with disabilities remain worldwide. If you want to know about cruelty and “ranking” (in the crudest sociological sense) than look to disability. Look to it here at home in the United States and you’ll see how the police in Maryland killed a young man with Down Syndrome; see how a blind man and his guide dog were kicked off a US Air flight; see how the liberal press (Chris Hedges, Democracy Now, Alternet, etc.) actively rooted for a disabled American veteran of the Iraq war to kill himself—just so they could pin it on Bush and Cheney. These examples are from the US. When you look at disability globally things are no better. A UNICEF Report on the state of the world's children highlights the plight of kids with disabilities across the planet—ill clothed, unschooled, without health care, denied food. The virgin year indeed. Don’t let the new year rob you of your heart’s renewal. If you’re an able bodied person I suggest you write your Senator and demand passage of the UN Charter on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
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Wordsworth walked in his lifetime and in turn, calculates the poet’s mileage per line of verse. I love this idea. What if instead of watching vulgar automobile commercials (as most Americans will do today, especially if they watch college football—for every sporting event is now sponsored by Lexus, BMW, Audi, and Mercedes Benz. Gone are the days of shaving cream, Schlitz, and Aqua Velva)—what if instead of vulgar car advertisements Americans were challenged to imagine their human and social productivity per mile? Emerson would have championed this. Why I think even Teddy Roosevelt would have endorsed such a plan. Our new year dawns on a nation more politically immune to suffering and the true calling of our souls than at any time in its history. I take no pleasure saying so. Here’s wishing you long walks, walks with ideas, chance meetings with wise and kind strangers. And triumphs of the spirit. I’m wishing you those. I think we gave away too much when we abandoned Freud and Jung, preferring pills and “big pharma” to the hard work—the acknowledgment—that the unconscious has lots of darkness. America is a nation of terrifying smiles. I can’t find the quote right now, but Alice Munro said recently the most frightening people are the do gooders (paraphrase mine). I tend to think we’re in Fascist times and its proper and necessary both to say it aloud and to know who you’re looking at—whether on television or in a board room or on a street corner. As World War II commenced the poet W.H. Auden wrote the following poem. It strikes an eerie chord, or if not a chord precisely, maybe some thermemin music.
Blessed Event Round the three actors in any blessed event Is always standing an invisible audience of four, The double twins, the fallen natures of man.
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On the Left they remember difficult childhoods, On the Right they have forgotten why they were so happy, Above sit the best decisive people, Below they must kneel all day so as not to be governed. Four voices just audible in the hush of any Christmas: Accept my friendship or die. I shall keep order and not very much will happen. Bring me luck and of course I’ll support you. I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen. But the Three hear nothing and are blind even to the landscape With its towns and rivers and pretty pieces of nonsense. He, all father, repenting their animal nights, Cries: Why did she have to be tortured? It is all my fault. Once more a virgin, She whispers: The Future shall never suffer. And the New Life awkwardly touches its home, beginning to fumble About in the Truth for the straight successful Way Which will always appear to end in some dreadful defeat. ** Yes. The Wise Men, poor dears, have walked into a story “in medias res” and damned if every human actor isn’t two actors—one smiling, the other stricken by guilt. What a dramatis personnae. Cue that Theremin music indeed.
And the new year with its pretty pieces of nonsense is here.
So if ostensibly I write to you about a clean slate, look behind me to see what my shadow is up to.
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I know for certain, owing to dreams, my shadow is very upset about the children of war.
Happy new year. Small letters. Happy straight successful Way. Capital “W” for will and work.
I think blogging has turned me, made me warmer to readers. And also more ironic about my own peccadilloes and motives. My shadow is upset and yours is too. We can see our shadows dancing. When I was twenty and wildly in love with poetry I admired indirection and complexity in writing. And though I still do (who can give up on Wallace Stevens?) I’ve grown to demand fewer refinements from myself. It’s not that I want to blab about my tennis shoes, but really, one can’t be finicky and openly contrarian at the same time. If being an awakened disabled person has taught me anything it’s that delay and deferral have no place in advocacy. Say what’s on your mind. Example: Why “Nothing About Us Without Us” Should Be Required Reading for Everyone in Higher Education In his groundbreaking book Nothing About Us Without Us, published in 1998, James Charlton declared the disabled have a culture, an extensive one, and that time is up for able bodied people to be making decisions about the disabled without their input. In one of my favorite passages Charlton writes about the imperatives behind his book: “Nothing About Us Without Us” requires people with disabilities to recognize their need to control and take responsibility for their own lives. It also forces political-economic and cultural systems to incorporate people with disabilities into the decision-making process and to recognize that the experiential knowledge of these people is pivotal in making decisions that affect their lives. Third, while the number of people affected by this epistemological breakthrough is relatively small, a movement has emerged. The disability rights movement has developed its own ideology and politics. It is a Page 128 - Nine Mile Magazine
liberation movement that is confronting the realpolitik of the world at large. The demand “Nothing About Us Without Us” is a demand for selfdetermination and a necessary precedent to liberation. Fourth, the philosophy and organization that the international DRM {Disability Rights Movement} embraces includes independence and integration, empowerment and human rights, and self-help and self-determination. The demand “Nothing About Us Without Us” affirms the essence of these principles. Finally, the DRM is one of many emerging movements in which new attitudes and world views are being created. Through its struggle comes a vision that requires a fundamental reordering of priorities and resources.” Excerpt From: James I. Charlton. “Nothing About Us Without Us.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/gEPDU.l Nowadays self-determination for the disabled has grown from a nascent concept to a global movement. From Africa to Asia, Finland to the Middle East, disability activists are not merely calling for their rights but are living their lives in accord with the best principles of independence and empowerment—educating others, assisting their sisters and brothers, demanding opportunities for children, health care, freedom to travel…just to name the basics. The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 helped create international opportunities for dialogue between the disabled and served to incite a worldwide confrontation with what Charlton calls “realpolitik” but I’m calling “business as usual” because—why not? What does “business as usual” mean where disability is concerned? Historically the disabled have been segregated, locked up, hidden, euthanized, sterilized, denied educational opportunities, kept out of public spaces, and perhaps worst of all—they’ve been talked over. Their lives are narrated (and mediated) by medicine and rehabilitation programs that always fortify pejorative meanings about disability—not disability as it’s actually lived, but instead reinforcing how it’s understood by the public. Biz as Usual pushes a medical model of disability which
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designates imperfect bodies, ill bodies, “incurable” bodies as outlier corporealities, things not devoutly to be wished—they become failed patients, abnormalities. Accordingly the abnormal must be farmed out to “special” places which stand at the edge of the fairground where normal people remain happily assembled. Consider the average college campus. Disability is “dealt with” “managed” “serviced” “accommodated” by underfunded offices that in many instances are hard to locate both physically and administratively. I’ve been to many universities where the disability services office is in the basement of a building—reachable only by elevator, or on the top floor of a building, reachable only by elevator—where in the event of fire there’s no way out. I’ve been to campuses where renovations to facilities have left out necessary improvements to make auditoriums accessible; classrooms usable; technology approachable; where there’s minimal or entirely unacceptable transportation for disabled people. These examples are legion and not exceptions. In Biz as Usual disability is conceived as a marginal issue, something that must be grudgingly acknowledged because of the Rehab Act of 1974 and the ADA of 1990, but not as a matter of culture, inclusion, communication, or respect. When college administrations make decisions about the physical or digital agora they seldom if ever consult with the disability communities on their campuses. “Nothing About Us Without Us” should be required reading for administrators, staff, and faculty in higher ed. Of course in 99% of the cases, there’s no required reading for the aforementioned. Faculty know next to nothing about disability, relying on the hidden “special” unit to solve whatever student accommodation request comes their way—and note, accommodation is always narrated as a problem. And so the disabled student is a problem. He or she is defective and trying to get into the happy tent. Faculty Member A resents having to think about this. “Doesn’t someone else handle this?” The disabled must be “handled” —the imagery is perfect given our histories, we’re straight jacketed and dragged away. At Syracuse we offered the first disability studies courses in the Page 130 - Nine Mile Magazine
country. We understand disability is part of our diversity and inclusion aspirations. But still we have problems. All too many students, staff, and faculty with disabilities feel left out of important conversations. And we have real problems. Unfortunately, raising them, we’re often made to feel like oppositional figures, malcontents, stylized figures with megaphones, waving our crutches. This should be easy to solve. Invite the disability community “in”—ask them what they think. Employ what I like to call the Ed Koch gambit—“How am I doing?” If the question is sincere it will come after listening. And then we will take positive, culturally engaged action. Back to James Charlton whose book remains indispensable. “Life itself is a series of struggles—some won, some lost. Resistance for most people with disabilities is a necessity for survival. The DRM should never lose sight of this. Throughout the course of this project, I have been impressed with how many of the stories and experiences of politically active people with disabilities reflect this proposition. We have begun to speak for ourselves, to make demands, to organize, and to educate others. ” Excerpt From: James I. Charlton. “Nothing About Us Without Us.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/gEPDU.l In the coming years “best practices” in every human endeavor must acknowledge the experiences of the marginalized and embrace the opportunities for education diversity offers. I think colleges and universities do a lousy job with disability. Administrators believe listening to disabled students and staff is a mistake and look for ways to avoid it. Those of us for whom this matters feel the contempt. What has blogging done for me, or done to me, as a poet? Ha! I won’t presume to tell. If you don’t honor poetry by asserting her essential mystery you’ll be in trouble. But I can say I’m less finicky. I don’t throw paint at the walls but I’m less cautious than I used to be. I used to think I had to feel a certain way to write a poem. I can’t describe that feeling but
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it was moody, self-abnegating, even obsessive. My pencils had to be lined up like boy scouts. Not a one could be crooked. Blogging has led me to writing prose poems like this: Hydra and Cricket: A Micro Memoir Always I write about the boy, not out of innocence, but because he is me and not me and the not me is where the advantages of irony can be found. I like knowing this. The boy always loved hieroglyphs. Once the boy spent a day believing he was an Ibis. In school they made fun of him for being blind. The Ibis was better. People who dismiss mythology probably don’t understand the nature of personal suffering. Hercules and the Hydra together make a child. The clear sunlight and the boy searching for mushrooms. He was all alone in the woods. He did not play with toy soldiers. He played with the life around him, the miniature “up close” creatures that let him in. “They are me and not me,” he thought. “That also means I am not me.” Long before there was a disability rights movement he knew he wasn’t any one thing. Later in college he read Emerson and he admired “Self Reliance” and: “Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.” Secrets came to him then. He lay face down on the frozen pond and knew there was ice under the ice but the fish could move there. And there were private crickets inside his sleeves. He could talk sideways to living things. That boy is me and not me. The man cannot spend his day face down with the ice fish though often he would like to do this. The poor man must workaday workaday in the steep hours feeling the tensile struggle to retain his innocence and curiosity. If he has irony its in the service of protection. The boy ran away; the man carries the woods with him. And the man knows why this isn’t sentimental at all. He also rescues crickets whenever he can. What else?
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A blogger can cry with affection: Lately as spring arrives and the days grow longer I’ve found myself dreaming of the dead–though not the abstrract chalky missing, but rather those who I have loved and who I still miss though my days are filled with bus schedules and the nearly private gamesmanship of getting by in the political world. I miss John Lydenberg, Professor of English at Hobart and William Smith Colleges who taught me how to read Herman Melville. I deeply miss his sharp, unsentimental humor and his unapologetic leftist politics which he learned at Harvard in the years before the second world war when pacifism and idealism weren’t yet sullied by all that’s come since. I especially miss his game of cutting out funny, overlooked newspaper headlines: “Young Couple Happy on Small Newspaper” was particuarly good. I thought of him the other day when I read: “Pope’s Condom-stance Under Fire” . I miss my father who died on Easter Sunday 2000. One doesn’t need a reason to miss one’s father but today I miss him because I’ve been reading William Manchester’s “The LastLion” about Winston Churchill and I know that he would have very interesting things to say both about Manchester as a historian and about Sir Winston. I miss my dad’s voice. I miss the way he used to sing to the dog. 14 years ago today I arrived home in Ithaca, New York with my first guide dog “Corky” who changed my life in a thousand ways. How I miss her! I could start crying right now. So I love the odd, innocent, half-shy silliness of the Bloomsbury crowd. Tonight I want to wear a turban with a sapphire pinned to the front. I want to carry on a bit with my gorgeous and beloved dead and feel them touching my hair. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
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Poetry Journal June, 2017 Yellow Bird I don’t know what you are—my world is necessarily impressionistic —I see and do not see as blind people often do. This morning, early, you were there, poised in mid-air like a dream face and though nothing in your life concerned me you were mine for all of ten seconds. You made the dull bones in my wrists come alive. Though I couldn’t see you, not precisely, I touched the window…
Of Spinoza And A Spruce Tree No one reads Spinoza in my neighborhood. The elderly woman with her old dog hasn’t heard of the devaluation of sense perception as a means of acquiring knowledge. She’s never thought of a pure, emerald nest of dendrites zizzing the accidents in her head and it’s not that she’s old, or feminine, she’s not wrong headed, she just happens to trust what she sees. I sit on an old wooden chair under the spruce tree. The eyes are not necessary for perfection of mind. And the woman who hasn’t read Spinoza walks by with carpet slippers on her feet. A thunderstorm is coming though it’s early morning.
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Sibelius' Honeymoon It would not be you, dreaming, mid-summer, Dreaming your grand piano, which, waking, you will play, Not you, who, in love in woods, hand in hand with her Plays Liszt, or when you wake, will play, And it would not be you, hunched at the keys, mid-summer, In love in woods, who paid some laborers to carry a piano Far into Karelia, where you imagine You will make at least three kinds of love.
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Poetry Journal May 2017 String I write poetry, a foolishness Much like thinking The heart Has an Edenic flavor— Continue my mistake In these times. I’m an old, mad, blind, despised, And dying king alright. Fine saying so. When I was very small My father bought me A kite and you can imagine That sightless child Holding a string.
The poetry of earth is never dead... I mourn for the one who used to be me— He was pacified with cold water A dictionary Understood In aggregate Like the worms He found Inside a thistle.
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Everything Behind Me, I See... There will be a day soon when old translations, flawed though they may be, will defy the odds and return to meaning—pages falling at the feet of reckless students, word-scraps carried on the wind like newsprint. Cicero will get tangled in your hair: a room without books is like a body without a soul… Montaigne catches on your wrist: My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened… I wish I could tell you more but there’s little enough to say, the dead stick around for better or worse, words poorly understood always plot their homecoming. I say they come back before sunrise. The Finnish poet Saarikoski, a great translator wrote: “everything behind me, I see, is just death, but when I sleep, I sleep…”
Remembering Velamo I am walking in circles. I erase this sentence. It’s better to be clever. Perhaps I should bring a talking animal into this? You see I didn’t erase it. You see how convoluted narration—any—really is? My mother died today, or was it yesterday? It doesn’t matter, the old country is dead. Bring on the talking crow. Or the hundred year old monk I met in the sauna whose sweat smelled of strawberries. The sighs of a centenary holy man—who was celebrating his birthday in a steam bath, they are ‘of or pertaining to’ the talking animal. I left that sauna wiser. I’d no language for the matter. Time wasn’t reliable. My Merleau-Ponty wristwatch had stopped. One wished to be shrewd, but it didn’t matter because there, mid-summer, beside a monastery, time had stopped.
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Orphan Morning, April, maples heavy with rain— And before life has begun one thinks, How a customary human mind starts up Cold, still dark. Last night I recalled John Butler Yeats, the poet’s father, A famous talker, a one man college, Who taught his son to listen. I wonder Who taught me About life after life?
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Summer Solstice Dreaming of dead friends these last ten days All of them curiously happy though they’re grey And they speak of Sisyphus in whispers Ten dreams with the departed And for nothing extra voila, Sisyphus! Even Jung, not known for humor Would laugh! The final years of life Are a staging point for flight What comes next— Bathing solo Under stars Then they acquaint you With your stone
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Yuan Changming Karma Casting: A Wuxing Poem - Believe it or not, the ancient Chinese 5-Element Theory accounts for us all.
1 Metal (born in a year ending in 0 or 1) -helps water but hinders wood; helped by earth but hindered by fire he used to be totally dull-colored because he came from the earth’s inside now he has become a super-conductor for cold words, hot pictures and light itself all being transmitted through his throat 2 Water (born in a year ending in 2 or 3) -helps wood but hinders fire; helped by metal but hindered by earth with her transparent tenderness coded with colorless violence she is always ready to support or sink the powerful boat sailing south 3 Wood (born in a year ending 4 or 5) -helps fire but hinders earth; helped by water but hindered by metal rings in rings have been opened or broken like echoes that roll from home to home each containing fragments of green trying to tell their tales from the forest’s depths
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4 Fire (born in a year ending 6 or 7) -helps earth but hinders metal; helped by wood but hindered by water your soft power bursting from your ribcage as enthusiastic as a phoenix is supposed to be when you fly your lipless kisses you reach out your hearts until they are all broken 5 Earth (born in a year ending in 8 or 9) -helps metal but hinders water; helped by fire but hindered by wood i think not; therefore, I am not what I am, but I have a color the skin my heart wears inside out tattooed intricately with footprints of history
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About Yuan Changming Yuan Changming, nine-time Pushcart nominee, grew up in rural China and published monographs on translation before obtaining a Canadian PhD in English. Currently, Yuan edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver; credits include Best of Best Canadian Poetry:10th anniv. ed., BestNewPoemsOnline, Threepenny Review and 1319 across 40 countries.
About the Poems Into the fabric of this carefully structured poem, I weave some of the most ancient Chinese cultural constructs, that is, the basic concepts of the Wuxing (5-Element) Principle, which can supposedly be used to account for us all.
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Eleanor Lerman Leaving This World Something has changed, I say, speaking into the dust You speak of seabirds in endless flight, meaning that you agree. And there is more evidence in the way that each day claps with such small hands, dawning as slowly as an afterthought. Morning is all mist, lunchtime sews itself shut at the thought of sex and fortunetelling. The night reveals that the dead are so long gone their messages can’t be trusted anymore Suddenly, a flower in a vase turns its poor head A vase shatters on a table, the table crashes through the floor, all catastrophes that could have been predicted but each a reason to trust the little piece of feeling inside that makes you believe that you are leaving this world. Running across a sunny field on an empty afternoon. Broken, finished. Free
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Evening Primrose The therapist accuses me of telling stories and of course, she is not wrong. In fact, that’s all I do, murmur to this woman, this bundle of thoughts and bones who waits for me in a house across the Rolling River. There is a footbridge in the story and sunflowers growing along a lane. My mother, last seen in the sky, used to tell me this was all a fairytale, I think. And I think that I remember the sunflowers as clearly as I remember her But look, I tell the therapist, in my defense, I just lived through a cold white winter, a cold green spring, a summer in chains The autumn turned into needles but maybe those injections worked: deep in my spyhole, low in my shell, I am seeing words again, hearing the scenery reassemble itself So now I want to know: is that normal, what goes on up there? Tell me the truth, little lady: is that normal for the rest of you? Well then, so what if the new elixir looks a lot like evening primrose? It still tastes like the suggestion that the infinite ends at the bus stop on the corner. The bus by the beach, by the ocean, by the golden horizon closing itself down sooner than anyone expected. Sooner than the heroic efforts made to count the days and nights
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that were pressed between my hands when I could not sleep The footbridge, the sunflowers, the mother and the golden horizon: these are the necessary elements of my stories and I will tell them if I want to I will speak before silence worms its way into the tale and even after that when life, or some other fabled rumor like it, proves to be better than me at spreading lies
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A Walk In The Spring With My Dog Well yes, it takes medicine now and will, plus the kind of footgear that a wild child just down from the barricades would expect to anchor the costume of an elder An old party, new to the game which apparently begins now: as others gather to march, we are stepping off into the winds of tomorrow. The trees part like a gate for The Dog Who Believes That She Will Live Forever. Green grass, yellow flowers, silver-running creeks: all that, again and again, year after year Why should it be otherwise? Why? Because the winds have invaded my house, so there is no turning back The cups and saucers have been put away The bed has fallen through the floor Now, only the dreams of the dog know how to clean the rooms. Only the dreams of the dog filter down through the sunlight and reveal the way. Now is the time of lonely steps: human time, but with an animal’s seeing eye. Thus, the days arrive like letters in the wind and open themselves fearlessly while we wait to breathe
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About Eleanor Lerman Eleanor Lerman is the author of numerous award-winning collections of poetry and short stories, and several novels. She is a National Book Award finalist, the recipient of the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2016, her novel, Radiomen, was awarded the John W. Campbell Prize for the Best Book of Science Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Stargazer’s Embassy, was published in July 2017 by Mayapple Press. www.eleanorlerman.com
About the Poems When Armed Love, my first book of poetry was published over forty years ago, The New York Times Book Review said that if poetry were given ratings, mine would deserve "a double XX." I was very proud of that because I was only 21, and what I was writing about was sex, drugs and wasting away--all suitable topics for the celebrated male writers and poets of the early 1970s, but apparently, not fit subjects for a young woman. In the decades since, I have learned what I imagine all young, wild wastrels find out: that time and fate, if you survive them for a while, have more in store than allowing you to use your body and soul as a testing ground for how much you can risk. Now, I understand that being alive requires real courage and not the kind that sends you off to wander the streets in the middle of the night: what it demands is that you be awake long past the witching hours and face the fact that your body is no longer something to play with and your heart, mind, and soul have to start turning towards the question of what--if anything--lies beyond the human horizon and if you are still strong enough to make it to that edge and step
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over. My poetry, now, tries to approach that edge, that far horizon and guess at what might be waiting to greet us when we get there. Maybe nothing. Maybe no one. Maybe something worth having stumbled and struggled through life and all its suffering for. But whatever it is, we have to go on, and so we do. One step after another, still hoping for happiness. Still hoping for meaning. Still believing we'll find it somewhere along the way.
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Doug Anderson Dancer Doesn’t really sit down arranges herself on the furniture all that dancing put some kind of snake spine all up in her and then that bare arm hanging over the back of the chair cool as gin eyes way her upper lip is tilted, lower in a pout, she spreads her toes out like a cat stretch the ceiling fan whop whop it goes cuts the shadow into triangles epileptic groin stir lift me off rescue me haul me up she doesn’t talk much like a horse she says it all with skin, moves up a little put that curry comb here and clean my hoof while you’re at it smile now and then so I’m going to pick her up like a Siamese and drop her on the bed that’s okay she doesn’t say leans back, unsnaps her jeans.
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Another Birthday And The Heart Sutra Now well past the age T’Ang poets sent old men to the mountains to wander and live close to the bone. How a sudden gust could sound a chord through the trees. The way pine scent from higher up could ease the heart. What remains, love: no one left to fight inside or out. Gone the young fool swaggering in delusion. Tired. Can’t keep my eyes open, my lids bring the curtain down while another, inside, lifts. My God, that first girl, so long ago. The way she slid her arms around my neck on the dance floor and moved into me. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form: but oh, what form.
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Mary Anne Her hands are as strong as mine. She says, these folks don’t have any common sense. And I don’t mean how to count eggs. I mean, look out there. I can tell by the rain just when that band of trees will go green. And look, you can see just a bit of red in the tops of those maples. But they make it hard, you know. They come out and tell me I can’t plant right there because it’s wetlands. These guys in their suits and ties. Sit in front of a computer all day. Their rules don’t work out here. Seems like they’d know to ask first. I was planting there before they noticed it was wetlands. It takes one hundred nine days for cauliflower to get ripe. It’s warmer to the south and things get ripe sooner down there but the stores around here know just when my crop comes in. That’s good because cauliflower too long in the sun gets brown spots, but you know what they do, the stores. They start selling two for the price of one so that cuts my profits. They don’t know. They don’t have a clue. These guys in their ties. It seems like they think up something new each day to make it hard for me. Volume 5 No 1 - Page 151
For us. I can either sell out to the big growers or go small. But I can’t keep up a farm like this on what I make. And these kids. These kids sit around punching their phones. I don’t know if I can get one knows how to fix that roof. But the Army, they like video games. It makes for good snipers, fighter pilots, tank gunners. They get the electronics down. The hand-eye. But they don’t know anything else. You know it makes me sad. What are you doing on my land anyhow? Is that your car? My dogs like you so I guess you’re all right. What are you going to do with those pictures, anyhow? I’m glad you love farms. Glad somebody does because I just can’t see anything good coming up for us. Out here trying to get by. Trying to keep something precious those men don’t understand. They don’t know enough to miss it when it’s gone but I’ll bet something I grow. Something I’m all tender with. Something I give my love to will taste better than what those big growers plant in their greenhouses. It just has to be. There’s something to watching the light shift. Picking something up on the wind. Something about breathing right along with everything that makes a soul.
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You know we don’t come with souls. We grow them if we let things touch us all the way down. Let us wrestle with the angel. I know this is true. I don’t care what they think.
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Angel Of Death Part III She is here again with her little black car, wings folded and tucked under her sweater. Her magenta hair, nose ring, black socks with little skulls. She is taking me for the usual morning ride. See, she says, how the fog hangs below Mount Sugarloaf and the tip appears bright in the sun. See how the old farmer bends to fix his tractor in the field, how the river resists the ice that crusts near the bank. How even in fog the colors persist, the leaves hanging on for one more day, another wind. It is not so bad, she says. What you have is the longer death, the dying, the composting of the soul. She drives me up the mountain and we stand overlooking the valley, the river a snake twisting to shake off the cold, the fields heavy with manure before the first snow. We let the wind carve us into stillness. I want you to get used to me, she says, so that when I come for the last time, you won’t be frightened. You’ve seen me before. I was there when you tried to keep a man from bleeding to death. I was there when you could not stand to live another day without the woman who broke you. I was there when you were a baby, woke up in the night crying, and no one came to hold you. She leads me back down the mountain. And then I’m alone and tasting the first rich coffee of the morning. I smell her perfume the rest of the day.
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Homage To Tu Fu Snow quiets away the day. Still it falls, and the horses gather it on their backs. Black water moves beneath the ice where the Swift and Ware rivers meet. Sorrow is muffled in its softness. Death is finally kind. There is nothing to fear, says the snow. No, and the mind clears. The storm thickens in this field away from the town somewhere behind the swirling white.
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If I Were An Exile I’d look just above your head for a common sun. I’d memorize your face, every cell of it, every scar, while longing for home. I’d burn the air between us until there was nothing but clarity. I’d put both hands around the warm bowl and tip it to my lips while remembering the cup. I’d take heart in the aroma of coffee knowing it pleases you too. I would blow out the candle and know your nakedness as my own.
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About Doug Anderson Doug Anderson’s first book of poems, The Moon Reflected Fire, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and his second, Blues for Unemployed Secret Police a grant from the Academy of American Poets. His memoir, Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties and a Journey of Self-Discovery, was published by W. W. Norton in 2009. His most recent book of poems is Horse Medicine, from Barrow Street. He has written criticism for the New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, and the London Times Literary Supplement. His play, Short Timers, was produced in New York City in 1980. He has taught in the MFA programs at Pacific University of Oregon and Bennington College, and creative writing and literature at Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts. He has won awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, Poets & Writers, The Virginia Quarterly Review and the MacDowell Colony. He has twice held a residency at Fort Juniper, the former home of the poet Robert Francis, in Amherst, MA. He is at present working on a novel about the Vietnam War.
About the Poems I think now that my poems are about listening to myself beneath the noise I used to believe in, which allows me to listen to others the same way. At my age, death is a constant companion. Not the violent death I might have had in my youth, but a death I might befriend in her slow inevitability. In Latin cultures, death is female. Reframing it thus I'm able
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to see tenderness in her, compassion, a welcoming after a long life to sleep, to be held in her arms. She is also a guide to what is true and luminous and worth knowing in the last days.
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Stephen Kuusisto “Unbidden Luck, After War” Horse Medicine, Poems by Doug Anderson I never went to war, even though President Richard Nixon picked my birthday first when he pulled draft lottery cards from that game show whirling drum in the second series of Viet Nam lotteries that ran annually from 1972 to 1976. Having your number come up first meant you would be first to be called: That was bad chance. Bad chance was also my blindness, a problem that turned into good chance when it meant that the Army didn’t want me. These crooked ways of chance—good, bad, good, bad, etc.—are more far-reaching than most Americans imagine. Chance decides our fates as individuals, but it is also the enemy of empire, the adversary of ships, and often at the heart of the best poetry. Doug Anderson went to Vietnam as a combat medic and has written about his experiences in both poetry and nonfiction. With Horse Medicine (Barrow Street Books, 2015, $16.95), his most recent book of poems we find poetry admitting chance—not as tragedy or irony—but as the foundation of consciousness. In “Return” (a poem that calls to Hafiz) Anderson questions the exquisite and riven heart: Hafiz, let me understand you: even when broken by love, when you think you’ll die and are afraid you won’t, or even when struck silly in the first weeks before you wake to see her with the glow worn off and know that, like you, she is a stranger, Volume 5 No 1 - Page 159
even then—or in grieving the loss of her and the long longing after—in a heaven we have not yet eyes to know, our hearts are ripening and it will all come back to us, children that we are, and will be. ** Anderson is one of our finest poets. He reminds us that the lyric imagination is never helpless, is inhospitable to falsehood, and its every discovery is a pure finding. This should be no surprise: his work has been charged with urgencies from the beginning. He is the author of the poetry collections The Moon Reflected Fire (1994), the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police (2000). In 2009 he published his memoir, Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery. As I’ve read and re-read this remarkable book I’ve found myself turning to the rhetorical term “proleptic”—the anticipation of possible objections in order to answer them in advance. There’s an eschatological bent to his poems. If we live according to the whims of chance we must take responsibility for our reveries. Doug Anderson proves imagination is not static. Poetry asserts its power in phenomenological terms from movement. The motion of the poems in Horse Medicine is strong, sure, and graceful. In “Mare” we’re asked to hear the sure turn of love: Listen to me: this Percheron follows me up the slope where the others gather at the hay and we stop to talk, or whatever it is we do. She takes this time to drop
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her huge head and pluck imagined bugs from my coat. I rub the long muscle just below her mane and she folds me into her with her neck. I think how hard it is to manage love’s rush. How sometimes we are slapstick with it, all hooves and teeth as big as piano keys, tongues like sides of beef and yet sometimes we get it right and power puts on the glove of gentleness. I would you knew this up front before I touch you, kiss you, and all that follows, I mean my best. Take my stampeding heart, and all the rest. ** Movement both in mind and body becomes the nexus of hope. The fullness of time, ardor of youth, neither outstrips desire or loss. Anderson’s work has the clarity of Kenneth Rexroth, the tenderness of Lawrence, and a brightness as if one might be reading the Greek anthology: I hope I’ll die as if I’d swung a pick since dawn then dipped my cup and disturbed the stars that swam there in the barrel, so long had been the day, and full, and my body grateful to lay itself down. ** I started off by referencing chance and war. Many of the poems contained here are about aging. We do not precisely suffer into truth, but instead grow to recognize whatever is fortuitous about the accidents. In “Binge” we’re asked to look a personified war-ghost in the eye:
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War comes to visit me once a day. I can’t get rid of him. He’s grown old and hates himself. I stopped a quarter of a century ago, but he still drinks—sits in airport bars and watches the cocky uniforms line up at the departure gates. Desert camouflage this time, tan boots. He orders another double and snickers, little eyes set close together in too large a head, like a grizzly’s, opaque and dead. Flies swarm around his gore smeared muzzle. He stinks of corpse. I let him sleep in the garage. You see, there’s no way to make him leave. Go to war just once, he’s always with you. At breakfast he feels he’s got an ice pick in his head, swears off the stuff. Never again, he says, I’ve found God. By five he’s back in the blood glow of the bar, bumming drinks and telling lies. He’s got an eye for boys and girls with wallets full of combat pay. He’ll Mickey Finn them, roll them for their souls and go off giggling. I see Senator Goldmouth weaving down the bar to slap him on the back: Let freedom ring! says he, teeth twinkling from the neon at the bar. ** Kings Solomon and David were said to have grown virtuous on account of their advanced ages. The French say: Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait! (If you’re lucky enough to grow old, you may possess some virtues.) Poetry confronts sublimations, faiths, despairs and a thousand self Page 162 - Nine Mile Magazine
willed determinations but a poet is particularly memorable if he or she understands we’re at first merely the victims or beneficiaries of chance and sometimes of luck. These are poems from a virtuous and mobile imagination.
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Chris Costello Pandora’s Photography I found it on the table, the morning after you left. A box, marred with the withering of memory. It is the color of the end of night. When the sun goes down, I picture a floating raft of flood-weary fire ants clinging to one another to stay alive. I make what was once our bed, leaving the lights off. I sleep on the couch, turned away from the box on the table. Everyday before work, I place my hands on the lid commanding my fingers to open the box for me. I am too afraid of what I will learn about myself to do it alone.
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About Chris Costello Chris Costello is a writer and student at Westhill High School in Syracuse, NY. In addition to Nine Mile Magazine, his work has appeared in Stone Canoe. In September, he will begin teaching a teen poetry workshop at Hazard Branch Library.
About the Poem "Pandora's Photography" is a separation poem, exploring the idea of emotion embodied in concrete objects.
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Hope Jordan Charleston, SC White boys in polo plaid and madras nab an Uber for girls whose sunglasses crown the world’s most perfect ponytails. And what of their solitary sadnesses? Absent parents, dead pets, hours spent weeping in one of four bathrooms – these sunburned brothers drink like it’s Mardi Gras. Take a horse drawn carriage to the cobblestones where the slave market is marked for all history. Sepia dolphins haunt the harbor and sweet ghosts of sugar cane plantations inhabit the ice cream swirling over the tongues of brown children. Barriers narrow the street before the black church where I don’t have to tell you what happened.
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My Grandmother Painted Landscapes At her kitchen table, between meals made for her husband and eight children. Wooded hills, waterfalls, boulders. My father liked one so much he had it framed, and it hung in our house all through my growing. I can’t say the painting is good. I worked for a small art museum and when asked, I always said my favorite painting was a David Johnson, Harbor Island, Lake George. I could never explain why but maybe it was the landscape my grandmother was painting toward— the smell of the lake, the generosity of trees, how this poem is my painting toward a better poem, lush green, shadows, then red leaves in the foreground, just turning.
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About Hope Jordan Hope Jordan’s first chapbook, The Day She Decided to Feed Crows, is forthcoming in 2017 by Cervena Barva Press. Her poems have appeared in Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, SLAB Literary Magazine, and Red Headed Stepchild. She was the first official poetry slam master in New Hampshire.
About the Poems As a child, I was aware that my grandmother painted – her pictures hung on the walls of her house and mine – but to me she was the grandma who watched Monster Movie Matinee and cooked Sunday suppers and provided bread to feed the ducks. I was in my 40s when I realized how difficult it must have been for her to squeeze sessions of oil painting into her days. In addition to holding down a full-time job at General Electric, she cooked and cared for my grandfather and their home, raised eight children and hosted many of her 23 grandchildren on weekends. I don’t think she was ever trained to paint, but she had a natural talent, and I wonder what she might have accomplished had she had the time and resources to pursue it further. This poem is an appreciation of her work, and an understanding that she and I share this creative persistence.
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Elinor Cramer Her Stub Pencil And Envelope Scrap In my dream, Emily Dickinson lived up a stair, had a fireplace with a fine mantle, moldings clear to the ceiling, all the hue of old linen. In her next room thousands of rosebushes sprung through the floor: Seven Sisters and Skyrocket Wise Woman, a hybrid tea, an old damask, Bella Donna to name a few. There was a laundry kettle on a platform, a pot with hinged lid. Even in my sleep I knew the kettle shouldn’t have been in that room. (the toilet in the kitchen of my childhood best friend.) The roses had no need for walls or doors.
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Emily scrubbed and hummed. Wiping her hands she reached into her pocket.
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Smolder My body’s rule is something’s always angry and red, I said. He thumbed the blister on my arm, Inflamed, he said. I said, From the middle of my forehead, through my skull to my eye. See the red behind my ear? It’s so sore the frame of my glasses hurts it. Emily Dickinson’s head would explode, I said. He said, The world will end in fire. That’s how my doctor is. And why I need to see him in June. The smoke tree shakes its pink embers. Waxwings flit in and out of the rose hedge. Steam plumes from wooden fence posts. I’m confined to the house with an overdose of beauty. Bloom and flare and swell. Sinusitis, rhinitis, and allergy. Didn’t someone say of Emily, it was epilepsy made her the shut-in of Amherst?
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Unsheathed Red Horse’s drawings in the morning Times say, Remember. Arrows flying and sticking in soldier’s backs. I was there, they declare. Lines drawn with colored pencils, his epic speech. My brother, bare-chested, all of five years old, snuck down the hall, toy bow in his hand, arrows in an oatmeal box he’d slung with a belt and string over his back. Dave burst in as I played with dolls. Leaping up, I pushed him from my miniature household. He struck me with the bow. Our father flew up the stairs and found the two of us in the hallway scuffling. “He hit me with his bow,” I cried. My brother reminds me of this incident over the years. He says, “Our mother was always there, but Dad didn’t know how to do it—didn’t know kids are always after each other, fighting.” What burns him in my version of the story is what happened next. Our father broke the bow over his knee. Many years passed before the Indian side was told. The way he tells it, our father bought him a new one. “What got me,” Dave said, “was Dad’s not listening to my side of the story.” Our elderly father’s slumped dead outside Dave’s Body Shop in my dream. I trailed my brother’s push broom as he sopped up oil spills. So much to put right for a burial. Dead horses, decapitated troops. So much to tell. For Red Horse it was the beginning of the end.
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How I Landed In The Nineteenth Century I climbed stone ledges—sedimentary grays and blues. More like books piled into steps, with spines of articulated fossils, the backs of very old bones, bones and books. They led to a bluff, a second floor pouring into the clouds. Below, canoes fought the turgid water, muscles leaned into paddles. I can too, I said, beguiled by a narrative. I stood at the washout of uneven rocks spilling into a gully. Buffalo leapt by the hundreds, the stench was horrendous. I read these words in Lewis’s journal. Too late—I fell for him— and I was in.
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The Oysterman Writes “Anson W Turner (oyster Fulton Market)” —Walt Whitman, 1857 pocket notebook In my youth, the gray poet, Walt Whitman, stopped at my cart where housemaids selected fresh for the kitchen, and men passed the time. My hands, then, swift to insert, with a slight twist eased the shells to give up their prize. This man, hands like-same as mine, large, as was his frame—this poet, I offered to teach. He touched my working hand, then the handle, black with use seven years since first apprenticed with my father. He said he’d likely break the blade, his hands unused these same years to anything other than the pencil, and setting printer’s type. I saw in truth, the black smudges on his forefinger and thumb, and I rubbed the stains some moments of pure joy, with my eyes only. He would not stop for weeks, and I’d glimpse his form engaged with others, like myself, in trade. I’d hear his name, agreeable to my ear from a friendly mouth. Then nothing, until the news today. Page 174 - Nine Mile Magazine
A copy I’d bought of his life’s work, I wrapped in a cloth and took out to sound the words, my reading improved the evenings I heart-songed his lines. I write for his passing, who warmly laughed when saying his hand would not do justice to my faith in him. My faith, my joy I gave willingly.
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About Elinor Cramer Elinor Cramer is the author of a recent chapbook, “Mayflower,” a collection, “She Is a Pupa, Soft and White;” and “Canal Walls Engineered So Carefully They Still Hold Water,” chapbook. She holds an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College and a Master’s in Psychology. She lives in Syracuse where she practices psychotherapy.
About the Poems I’ve recently become aware of our country’s 19th Century in ways ongoing and, to me, unsettling. Current events as the continuation of the Civil and Indian Wars and slavery. As I immerse myself in letters and journals, their voices and struggles appear in my day to day awareness. ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me before?’ comes to mind. So much that others know. Yet, Whitman, Dickinson, and President Lincoln, contemporaries, didn’t know one another or all that was going on in their own chaotic times.
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Peggy Liuzzi A Love Poem To Myself I see you under the dining room table, arms around your knees, body rolled tight and small, like a ball, ready for a one-girl game of hide-and-seek. The room is dark, but an oblong of light leans in from the living room where Mummy and Daddy sit on the sofa and the baby sleeps nearby. People are laughing on the TV and the lamp light looks all buttery and warm, but you are hiding in earnest. It is a test. To see when they will miss you. You have been there so very long. The linoleum, patterned with pale green leaves, is cold and clammy under your bare legs. The empty wooden chairs look lonely. Still no one calls your name. Unwanted girl, lost child, alone like Snow White in the forest. Defeated, you crawl to the door to slide into the room where your absence was never noticed. If I had a time machine, I would travel back to you. I would pick up your mother and father, like the little pink parents in your doll house, and arrange them anew. I would change the world for you. Mummy says Our family is not whole tonight. Someone is not here. Our darling daughter! shouts Daddy. We should look for her right away. We’ll start in the dining room.
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Here she is! they cry together. Daddy picks you up. How I missed you. he says. Your curly brown hair, your smile, your hugs, the way you squeeze my hand when we walk in the park. Mummy kisses you on both cheeks. Little one, she croons. How I love you! The dash and clatter of your shoes when you run, the questions you ask, how you sing on the porch swing. Even when you are messy. Even when you fold your arms across your chest and say NO in your loudest voice. Even when the TV is on. Even when Mummy and Daddy fight. I leave you now, safe and satisfied, snug between your parents on the grey sofa. We will watch over you, faithful as the moon that gazes through the car windows at night, to follow you, always, back home.
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About Peggy Liuzzi Peggy Liuzzi is a long-time resident of Syracuse, NY who spent her career in the non-profit world as an early education teacher, director and advocate. She has read and written poetry since second grade, but only began to share her work late in life. Several of her haiku were illustrated and published by the Syracuse Poster Project. After retiring, Peggy began taking classes at the Downtown Writers Center and had a poem published in Stone Canoe in 2017. She is delighted to have one of her poems included in Nine Mile.
About the Poem My childhood memories are quite vivid. I remember the powerful emotions I experienced as a young child and my frustration when the adults around me misunderstood my intentions and how I saw the world. In my work with children and in time spent with my own grandchildren, I've tried to pay attention to their perspectives and honor their feelings. This poem is one of several I've written to explore these childhood themes.
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Carol Biesemeyer Preparing To Sleep Listen to the drain swallow the day’s detritusspent makeup and mouthwash. The hamper sags with smelly socks. A line of dental floss cast out, to which clings bits of pork and corn hulls cutting through the silent lake, the silver wake curls and rolls, breaks on shore, a breath, a sigh, a snore. Swells lift impotent pollen strewn across the surface. Seaweed sways towards the mink, who all day dove through dark water, surfacing each time with a small fish flapping in his mouth, still now, in his den.
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The Cracks It’s fall and the insects begin seeking shelter in the house; ladybug, housefly, stink bug. My dimming eyes deceive me as I swat at shadows and watch a black dot dance across the ceiling. It’s only old age coming in through the cracks.
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About Carol Biesemeyer Carol Biesemeyer studies and writes poetry and creative non-fiction at the YMCA Downtown Writer’s Center in Syracuse, NY. She is the Submissions Manager for Stone Canoe, a literary journal published by the YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center. Carol lives in Camillus, NY. This is the first time her work has been published.
About the Poems My writing is often about domestic encounters with the creatures that live in or near my home. I imagine these creatures, usually unwelcome or simply not seen at all, have lives and desires, and it is we humans who are the nuisances.
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Susan Charlton Redwing Blackbird One crystal whistle tripwires this dark room ruby flash–– folded into black––gone an iced stiletto in the ear out before pain starts one bare tseeeer! penetrates a mind overdressed in my pale sheathed ways of saying here
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Homecoming White Pine Flat against the sky in needled strokes–– He sees how it’s grown since when–– a windy shadow brushing past his feet Sudden branches shake free thrash the air caaahs break open overhead Late into night he listens to it creak against the sky–– that keening for brief wings
Crow Briefly redolent of pitch–– it wings along cold curve of earth staring into blank heaven
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Fog In Amber Valley Below, another evening filling in elegant pools, pale, between trees until trees, dogs, even brute barns disappear. Nearly inaudible voices still from the hollow–– ghosts in the end of an afternoon. Now clouds are boiling in silence up the hillside. The house behind seems a final resistance. A cloud in the outstretched hand passes through. Whether fog shifts with a sweep of an arm or drapes swing closed–– turn back to the room, red chair–– If he’ll swat at wraiths rising on slow legs between you.
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Hear October If you keep the windows open longer, let evening damp in–one light on for reading–– it sieves through rusting screens, settles chronic dust in the air. Looking at you, rapt in a book, the slow whoosh of breathing, god it is good. That you still gasp –a screech-owl trills out there–Both of you hunched over most of the time, listening through wet air: if the voice sounds lost. Then wake to the way white feels on eyelids– the Norway maple dropped its leaves overnight. Wake to fog on everything: its weight on red-eyed morning, woods gone still.
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About Susan Charlton Susan Charlton left Boston for graduate school at Syracuse University. She remains in Central New York. After completing an M.A. in English and just part of a PhD., she married, raised four daughters, and taught secondary English. Eventually she traded urban life for a farmhouse on a hill, where she writes what she sees, or thinks she sees. Her poems have been published in several journals
About the Poems A poem is an organic fusion of meaning and form, in which poet and reader participate. My few stronger poems may reflect principles of poem-making I value: economy of language rather than selfindulgence; images that arise experientially into thought or feeling; application of my ear to sound––not for its own sake––but to bear meaning; avoidance of the didactic; awareness of ear and soul at the receiving end of a poem; honor given to white space––and silence––if needed; application of pressure on a word, a line, sufficient to concentrate an experience; use of form that is the only form for that poem. I always write in front of a large window.
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Judy Carr First Swim – Again The wreaths of weeds crowd my legs as I push to deeper water, feet stung by sharp rocks remembering similar walks, hand enfolded with dads. Now the plunge. Stark sting of June ocean bites, surprised by forgotten salt taste permeating freedom as I cut waves buoyant atop them. It comes right back. That looseness, optimism. Spirit resilient as body bobbing in the wake. Facts of last
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swim forgotten but sensations familiar as thirst for a Summer day.
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About Judy Carr Judy Carr is a lifelong resident of Syracuse, NY. She discovered poetry in retirement and takes workshops and classes at the Downtown Writers Center of the YMCA. She has also studied at the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown and Castle Hill Arts Center in Truro. When she's not writing, she is plotting ways to return to Cape Cod.
About the Poem This past June I swam in the ocean for the first time in over thirty years. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed it until the plunge. This poem is my attempt to capture that moment.
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Sara Parrott In the Garden Of You Your garden has outlived you. French lilacs speak your name in soft pleas the way prisoners do. Their purple buds cluster like a crowd of a thousand pinwheels, begging the wind to carry their transcendent scent across the apron strings of the sky. Grounded in your flowerbed, I kneel to the sun and wield a tool tough enough to twist woody lilac stems unwilling to bend. I pound a hammer against them until they splinter into straws, forcing them to accept transference from earth to container, forcing them to continue to live.
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A Glimpse Of Icarus At Webster’s Pond A rock shaped like the Island of Crete rises above green water not deep enough to make its own waves. It relies on geese sailoring through stillness to ripple its surface. Young birds preen on the pebbled shore, giving lift to down mottling the air. A boy the size of a swan runs toward them, waving three long feathers in his small hand. "Don't you want these back?" he asks. Some of the birds plunge into the water, others fly away. The boy's father collects the feathers and lays them on a stone. I pick one up and flutter it fast, then faster, carried away by the beat of my own wings, carried back to the final cry of my father.
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About Sara Parrott Sara Parrott is a former Bookspan Creative Director and elementary school teacher. She is a member of the Downtown Writers Center in Syracuse, NY, and a volunteer writer for the Syracuse Poster Project. She holds an MA from Binghamton University and a BA from New Paltz University. She and her husband, Joe, have two adult children (Andrew and Emma) and live in Upstate New York with their dog, Louie.
About the Poems Both poems are reflections of the catalytic ability of nature to jumpstart timeless mindbody-spirit connections among human beings, history and eternity--the imagined and the real. What comes to you on a walk or in a garden is suddenly magnified and intensified beyond external landscape and time, stirring a curious awareness within. It’s as if ordinary objects extend themselves across temporal dimensions, enabling you to absorb the universality of everything. Ordinary stones and feathers become inextricably linked to the Apian Way and ancient Greek heroes, the living and the dead. Old life breathes new again‌ becomes one.
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Christopher Kennedy Mourning, Not Rending I hear music without wires and voices of the dead singing love songs from fifty years ago, and no one calls this a miracle, but I think it is, and so is the sun in the sky when the dead are still sleeping, and the clocks go on telling time though the dead take no notice, though I have seen crows mourn another crow on the street where I used to live, the street rainsoaked and dotted with samaras, and the crows crying out a human cry of disbelief, and in the air a murder flying in to see this, and at first I thought they were tearing at its flesh, but their cries implied otherwise, and I saw that they were mourning, not rending, and if blood needs to be shed it will be shed, and the bombed-out husks of buildings on the other side of the world are like stalagmites in a misty cave, and the guardian angels are beside themselves with grief and shame, the tiny white coffins an obscenity in the desert, this holy place where death makes more sense every day, all of it miraculous, all of it terrible, and the crows not moving when the wheel of my car approached.
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Algorithm The past is black and white footage. A religion of dirt practiced in the dark. The tomb-shout echoing in the skull-bell. A priesthood made of knives. Your grandfather clanging shut a jail cell door, photographing a murder scene. The ruins of small boats, the oily gears of old clocks spread out on a card table. The long hallway attached to nothing, pitch black, like the entrance to a funhouse. On the wall: a head skewered by thorns, the Holy Ghost with its tongue of fire. Willows at the windows, crashing their limbs like grieving widows, the wind's howl the only syllable, the only prayer, like the shriek of an exotic bird stolen from an intricate cage. Always night. Always the lights, just about to come on.
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The Fisherman For John Corbett Otisco is twenty minutes from here, the working-class lake, bass and catfish, lots of carp, where the fisherman used to stand on the causeway that juts across the lake like a spine. He kept his rowboat, Lady Chatterly, anchored near the sluice gate. He was there every night in summer, never caught much, just the occasional bottom feeder he gave away or threw back. The goal was to stay until dark, then sit at the bar in The Amber Inn, tell stories, drive home a little lighter with thoughts of how good it was going to be when he got to Puerto Rico, where they serve you cocktails, while you sit under an umbrella on the beach. When I was a child, I would watch for his truck to pull up outside, while his wife sat in our living room, chatting with my mother. When he’d had a few beers, he could be coaxed into telling a story or two, and he was, hands down, the best in the West End. I didn’t realize it then, but most of his stories were about cheating death. He’d say, “Doctor Michaels saved my life, and now he’s in the marble orchard, a bum like me still alive, and the good doc long gone.” Or he’d tell how, after years of agnosticism, he went to confession when my father died so he could receive communion at the funeral mass: “I said, Padre, I like dogs and kids, so I can’t be too bad, and he waved his hand and gave me the Dominus, Dominus.” One night he came to the house a little late. His wife was worried, and when he walked in she gave him a look that could melt steel. He laughed and held up a rainbow trout, gleaming in the lamplight, and he set it on the floor where it flopped around, its gills opening and closing in the dangerous air. “A member of the Finney tribe,” he said, and scooped it up to put back in the truck where he kept the fish alive in a cooler filled with Page 196 - Nine Mile Magazine
lake water, and drove it back to the spot where he’d caught it, and let it go in the murky place where it was born.
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Like A Dog Barking At A Statue Of The Virgin Mary We are made of mayflies, of speech, an animal music, conscious of being and non-being, woven out of clouds or constellations, waiting to form memories, where we live forever with the dead in a jailed silence, among the human but apart, a strange kinship, translated to something like a dog barking at a statue of the Virgin Mary, or a bird confused by clear glass.
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There Is A Word I Keep Forgetting For Michael Burkard This started as a forest and a pitcher of blue milk. You found the door we walked through the night the moon appeared like a pink shell over Houston Street. Door whisperer. In the room we entered, we learned that a living man is scarier than his ghost. It was as if we were inside the moon. The moon was a pink shell, but I couldn’t hear the sea. I heard the migraine pulsing of my heart, a thumping instead of. Somewhere in the forest, a Buddhist temple appeared like a line from Coleridge. You thought maybe your old phonograph was somewhere in an antique shop on Route 9. My dream was of fire and yours was of Elvis, still alive. I remember your father at the toy piano, touching the white keys and smiling. There wasn’t enough sunlight, so we said it was night. My dream had fire, so we traded. A pitcher of blue milk to douse the flames.
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You showed me your ventriloquist doll, and I picked some books from your shelf and smelled the mold on them. Your mother stayed in her room, as if she were a ghost. I believed in her. I believe in you, too. There is a word I keep forgetting. I want to say it starts with D. I know you would know if you were here. Are you here? So many ghosts. So many of us hidden in our rooms. I am losing more words, I suppose. You gave me many of them. The dreams were a poor exchange. We still have the mole people, though. The strange mark on the father’s neck. And Baron Damone. Mr. Trolley. The Play Lady. Bob and Ray. We did not ride a donkey there, but there was “something Don Quixote” about it all. You drew a colorful car and gave it to me. It had a childhood feel, bright green and yellow. You gave me Yesenin. Then you gave me Yesenin again. You took one back, and now we both sleep with the rope’s constant threat. I remember the funeral in your hometown, all of high school lined up to say good-bye. I would like to ride a donkey with you some day and take another journey.
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You can send me to the store again. I’ll know the way this time. There is a good chance I will return. I will give you: the change, the way home, the hidden kitchen where you stood, while I looked the other way. I will tell you my troubles like a blues man. There will be no shame. I will establish a rhythm and a way of telling it. I will reach down to the depths and say what it is that keeps me awake and wakes me up when I sleep. I will hum the melody and stamp my foot. My voice will deepen like the ocean. My troubles will be ancient and holy. We will sing to each other over the phone lines. We will be like two hermit crabs that have buried themselves in the terrarium’s pink stones and surface at exactly the same time on either end of their glass world. And you will spin the blues back at me like a painting lost in the attic, lost, in fact, in the day that is this day, the voice that is your voice. This could be the longest whispered childhood on record.
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The Ghost In the nether-morning, my ears shift from the industry of flies to the hum of sleek machines outside the window. I feel the bulwark of snow against the house and see the insistent swirling that sculpts the drifts and valleys. I wonder how much torque it takes for wind to twist the way it does today. I think of the desert where you died, a whirl of sand, the miles between us turned to years, brother a foreign word for stranger. What’s not here, or, is here but invisible, silent, is like an animal in the woods at night, as afraid of you as you are of it, if it’s even here at all. (I know only as much as you did.) The nearby lake is frozen. Catfish look at the stars through an endless sheet of ice. I am always a thousand miles away.
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About Christopher Kennedy Christopher Kennedy’s fifth full-length collection of poems, Clues from the Animal Kingdom, is forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2018. His work has appeared in many print and on-line journals and magazines, including Ploughshares, Plume, New York Tyrant, Ninth Letter, 5-Trope, The Threepenny Review, Slope, Mississippi Review, and McSweeney’s. He received an NEA Fellowship for Poetry (2011), a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship (1999), and a Constance Saltonstall Arts Foundation Poetry Grant (1997). He is a professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
About the Poems These poems are my attempt to address my personal history as it pertains to family, religion, and friendship. My working class, IrishCatholic roots inform the poems in the way that symbols and images work to shape an individual consciousness. I have no interest in nostalgia. What I am interested in is the detritus of the past, how it can be reshaped in the process of writing a poem to create a small window into one’s own psyche, and, hopefully, affect a reader in an intimate way, despite how different our past and present might be.
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The newest book from Nine Milke Books is Perfect Crime, from David Weiss.
$16. About this book the poet says, "The whole of it thinks about the idea of perfect crime metaphysically, in the sense that time, for example, is, itself, a perfect crime. Perfect meaning: effect without cause. A crime or situation or condition that can’t be solved."
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A new book by editor Stephen Kuusisto, available March, 2018.
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Advance praise for Have Dog Will Travel: "Never before has the subtle relationship of a blind person to a guide dog been clarified in such an entertaining way. That Stephen Kuusisto enables us to see the world through his blind eyes as well as through the "seeing eyes" of his dog is this book's amazing, paradoxical achievement." ---Billy Collins “A perceptive and beautifully crafted memoir of personal growth, and a fascinating example of what can happen when a person and a dog learn to partner with one another.” ---Temple Grandin
It wasn’t until the age of 38 that Stephen Kuusisto got his first guide-dog, Corky, and they embarked upon a heart-stopping and wondrous adventure. Kuusisto’s lyrical prose gives his story a vivid quality, placing us directly into his shoes as his relationship with Corky changes him and his way of being in the world. Profound and deeply moving, this is the story of a spiritual journey: discovering that life with a guide dog is both a method and a state of mind. Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Planet of the Blind and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. His website is www.stephenkuusisto.com.
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