Nine Mile Fall 2020

Nine Mile Magazine

Vol. 8, No. 2 Fall, 2020

NINE MILE MAGAZINE Vol. 8, No. 2 Fall 2020 Publisher: Nine Mile Art Corp.

Editors: Bob Herz, Stephen Kuusisto, Andrea Scarpino Assistant Editor: Diane R. Wiener Associate Editors: Cyrus Cassells, Pamela (Jody) Stewart, James Cervantes Art Editor Emeritus: Whitney Daniels Cover Art: From a montage “Scherzo� by Elena Ciletti.

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 over the years from the Central New York Community Foundation. This publication would not have been possible without their generous support.

We are grateful to them all.

ISBN-13: 978-1-7354463-3-2 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 About Nine Mile Magazine Appreciations and Asides

vi 12

Sean Thomas Dougherty Dear Wife, Dear Mercy Whatever Happened to David Caruso

21 26

William Neumire Nothing ends until we want it to

30

Sam Periera The Devastation of Peonies in Any Language What the Doctor Recommends Funny Thing Death Government Intervention Politics & Love AmanhĂŁ Tragic Cigarettes

34 35 36 37 39 40 42

Sara Parrott As God Would Have It Lying in the Grass with Rumi Tantrum Ergo A Glimpse of Icarus at Webster’s Pond Belief in the Making In the Garden of You

46 47 48 49 50 51

Joshua Michael Stewart November Praise Buried Deep Like A Bullett For My Brother On What Would Have Been His Fiftieth Birthday Prance On Leslie Ullman Honor thy error as hidden intention Faced with a choice, do both Think of the radio

53 54 57 59 63 64 65

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George Rawlins On The Resurgence of Plague in Moscow

69

John Philip Drury The Projectionist Cincinnati Haiku Chain Saw Blues

71 73 74

Susan Aizenberg Postcard from New Hampshire On Prospect

77 78

Stella Santamaria agua de violetas we are born, California

82 83

Ralph James Savarese When this is Over Free Soloists Contracting the Human

85 87 89

Jasmine V. Bailey Nostos Middle Age St. Apollonia Abdullah, You Don’t Know the First Thing About Saad Texas Journal

93 94 95 96 97

Rayne O’Brian Things Fall Apart Walking Without A Dog

100 102

Rene Char The Swift House of the Eldest The Window The Secret Lover The Library Is On Fire

106 107 108 109 110

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Book Reviews The More Extravagant Feast by Leah Naomi Green ’IRL, Nature Poem, Junk, and Feed, by Tommy Pico Grief Land by Carrie Shipers Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century by Alice Wong

114 117 121 125

The Nightmare of History: Notes on Carolyn Forché’s The Angel of History

128

The One Line Poem: Notes and Mini-Anthology

155

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About Nine Mile Magazine We publish twice yearly, showcasing the best work we receive from authors whose work, energy, and vision seem to us most deeply entangled with life. This includes writers within and outside the mainstream, writers with disabilities, writers of color, writers with marginalized genders and sexual orientations, and writers from different cultures and religions. We produce this magazine in inclusive and accessible formats. We believe that poetry is everyone’s art.

SUBMISSIONS For consideration in the magazine, submit 4 - 6 poems in Word or text to editor@ninemile.org. You can access a submission form at our website, 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 your aesthetic intent in the work, • a photo headshot 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 AND 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.

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NINE MILE BOOKS Nine Mile Books are available at our website, ninemile.org, or online at Amazon.com and iTunes. Recent books are: • True North and Untrue You, by Sam Pereira, $16, or $9.99 at Kindle.

"There is a dazzling sardonic brilliance to Sam Pereira’s superb new collection, True North and Untrue You, as well as something uniquely American in his voice, as if Lenny Bruce had written songs with Tom Waits, all of it graced by the angels of film noir and the cool of Miles Davis. These at times disquieting yet tender and consoling poems are an embodiment of a compelling and new American noir poetry, one that in its cultural nuances can speak wisely to our current historical moment. This is a truly remarkable book for our times."—David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems • Tipping the Water Jar of Heaven, by Sara Parrott, $16, or $9.99 at Kindle. "The idea that there is more to a physical object or an experience than what meets the five senses recurs in many poems in Tipping the Water Jar of Heaven. The inner life of dream, memory, and spirit become inseparable from the exterior world—and both are enhanced by the unity. When we observe the external world while “reading” the observation triggered within, we can inch toward God and learn about the order He created."—Sara Parrott • Republican Fathers (2020) by Ralph James Savarese, $16, or $9.99 at Kindle. "Savage and satirical, personal with a witty vengeance, sly with a dagger, facing the absurd and the tragic, and all of it written from inside the body politic, here is a mesmerizing voice of prodigious energy and nonstop invention. Chock-full of the names and events of our Age, starting from the Nixon era when the writer as a youth lived near the fabulously rich and connected of the Administration, Savarese holds the end of a bandage and slowly pulls it off. And it is timely, too, oh my."—Marvin Bell, author of Incarnate, The Complete Dead Man Poems • More Than Watchmen At Daybreak, Cyrus Cassells (2020), $16, or $9.99 at Kindle. “These twelve poems log time Cassells spent in silence in a hermitage with the Benedictine Brothers at the Christ in the Desert monastery... Cassells waited for these poems, listening patiently for their deep harmonies, probing their quiet revelations... Throughout there is a clear strain of praise and belief, unabashed and unapologetic.

The last poem ends with a ‘burgeoning dawn’ a promise of more after this geyser of sound. What distilled magical mysterious poems!”— Page7vii Volume 8 No 1 - Page

Spencer Reece, author of The Clerk´s Tale and The Road to Emmaus • Metamortuary, Dylan Krieger (2020), $16, or $9.99 at Kindle and iBooks. Brilliant variations on Ovid’s Metamorphoses with dazzling excursions through life, poetry, and death. “Each of the book’s four sections, Dangerous Meat / Raw War / Quiet Catastrophes / Eternal End-Times, is a detached possession belonging to the same church of an absent and holy endeavor where Krieger stages population myths for an imagined audience of resuscitated reanimations with a language so alive and so secretly killed that it renders irrelevant the spelling that revelation too often uses to sound out the shape of its more basic priests.”—Barton Smock, isacoustic • The You That All Along Has Housed You: A Sequence, Leslie Ullman (2019), $16, or $9.99 at Kindle and iBooks. “Leslie Ullman has the ability to spin illuminating spells through and around the matter of earth and life. Her vision penetrates with an attention as careful and as transforming as day through clear water, as moonlight on stone. She is an artisan with words, and the results are poems embodying the intricacy and beauty of the subjects they honor.” —Pattiann Rogers • A Little Gut Magic, Matthew Lippman (2018), $16, or $9.99 at Kindle.

“Reading Matthew Lippman’s poems feels like having a conversation with a hilarious, brutally honest, and brilliant friend.”—Jessica Bacal, author of Mistakes I Made at Work: 25 Influential Women Reflect on What They Got Out of Getting It Wrong • The Golem Verses, Diane R. Wiener (2018), $16, or $9.99 at Kindle and iBooks. “…Diane Wiener unlocks the door to a room of confidences, secrets, passions, and fears. These poems present an interior dialogue in which the Golem is more than symbol or legend but trusted companion and guiding, grounding force. This room is furnished with intellect, wonder, inquiry, discovery, revelation, and release. Curl up in a comfy chair and bear witness to this lyric journey.”—Georgia Popoff, author of Psychometry.

• Perfect Crime, David Weiss (2017), $16. Of 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.”

• 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 Page vii- Nine Mile Magazine Page 8

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, or $7.49 at Kindle and iBooks. 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 poems from other periods showing the development of the poet's art.

• Letter to Kerouac in Heaven (2016), Jack Micheline, $10. One of the original Beats, Micheline'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, or at Kindle and iBooks, $9.99.

Of this poet Peter Everwine wrote, “He’s an original.” Pereira’s work has been praised by Norman Dubie, David St. John, and Peter Campion.

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Nine Mile Magazine Vol. 9, No. 2 Fall, 2020

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Appreciations and Asides We have often regretted the lack of widespread reviewing of poetry books in America, but reading over reviews of two books now acknowledged as masterpieces — Song of Myself and The Waste Land — gives us pause. Maybe that’s not a good idea, a negative position to something new apparently coming more easily to most reviewers than a positive one. Or perhaps poets should be allowed to review their own books, as did Walt Whitman, whose anonymous review of his book is included below. Anyway, this encyclopedia of mockers and anti-new critics may be helpful to anyone who has received a bad review for work labored over. The message being: Your time has not yet come; but it will.

Following these bad reviews are some of our favorites from reading these past few months. ***

■

From the unique effigies of the anonymous author of this volume which graces the frontispiece, we may infer that he belongs to the exemplary class of society sometimes irreverently styled “loafers.” He is therein represented in a garb, half sailor’s, half workman’s, with no superfluous appendage of coat or waistcoat, a “wide-awake” perched jauntily on his head, one hand in his pocket and the other on his hip, with a certain air of mild defiance, and an expression of pensive insolence in his face which seems to betoken a consciousness of his mission as the “coming man.” This view of the author is confirmed in the preface. He vouchsafes, before introducing us to his poetry, to enlighten our benighted minds as to the true function of the American poet. Evidently the original, which is embodied in the most extraordinary prose since the “Sayings” of the modern Orpheus, was found in the “interior consciousness” of the writer. Of the materials afforded by this country for the operations of poetic art we have a lucid account.

— Review of Leaves of Grass, Charles A. Dana, New York Daily Tribune, July 23, 1855

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■

Our account of the last month's literature would be incomplete without some notice of a curious and lawless collection of poems, called Leaves of Grass, and issued in a thin quarto without the name of publisher or author. The poems, twelve in number, are neither in rhyme nor blank verse, but in a sort of excited prose broken into lines without any attempt at measure or regularity, and, as many readers will perhaps think, without any idea of sense or reason. The writer’s scorn for the wonted usages of good writing, extends to the vocabulary he adopts; words usually banished from polite society are here employed without reserve and with perfect indifference to their effect on the reader’s mind; . . . the introduction of terms, never before heard or seen, and of slang expressions, often renders an otherwise striking passage altogether laughable.

— Charles Eliot Norton, Putnam's Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Science, and Art, September 6, 1855

■

… we have only to remark, that [Leaves of Grass] strongly fortifies the doctrines of the Metempsychosists, for it is impossible to imagine how any man's fancy could have conceived such a mass of stupid filth, unless he were possessed of the soul of a sentimental donkey that had died of disappointed love. This poet (?) without wit, but with a certain vagrant wildness, just serves to show the energy which natural imbecility is occasionally capable of under strong excitement.

— Rufus W. Griswold, Criterion, November 10, 1855)

■

It is rumoured that The Waste Land was written as a hoax. Several of its supporters explain that this is immaterial, literature being concerned not with intentions but results.

— J. F., ‘Shantih, Shantih, Shantih: Has the Reader Any Rights Before the Bar of Literature?’, Time, March 3, 1923

■

The Waste Land is a pompous parade of erudition, a lengthy extension of the earlier disillusion, a kaleidoscopic movement in which the bright-coloured pieces fail to atone for the absence of an integrated design. As an echo of contemporary despair, as a picture of dissolution of the breaking-down of the very structures on which life has modelled

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itself, “The Waste Land” has a definite authenticity. But an artist is, by the very nature of creation, pledged to give form to formlessness; even the process of disintegration must be held within a pattern.

— Louis Untermeyer, “Disillusion vs. Dogma,” Freeman, January 17, 1923

■

… there is not, I believe, a single occasion when his context is as mature as the quotation which he inserts into it; he does not invent such phrases for himself, nor, evidently, does his understanding quite appreciate them, for they require an organization of experience which is yet beyond him… The Waste Land is one of the most insubordinate poems in the language, and perhaps it is the most unequal.

—John Crowe Ransom, ‘Waste Lands,’ New York Evening Post Literary Review, July 14, 1923

■

If you will read carefully Eliot’s three longer poems – ‘Prufrock’, ‘Gerontion’, and The Waste Land – I think you will see what I mean (even if you do not agree with me) in saying that he has been more or less repeating himself. And here we come at Eliot’s essential defect. He lacks imagination…

— Clive Bell, “T. S. Eliot,” Nation & Athenaeum, September 22, 1923

■

The gist of the poem is apparently a wild revolt from the abomination of desolation which is human life, combined with a belief in salvation by the usual catchwords of renunciation … Perhaps this unhappy composition should have been left to sink itself: but it is not easy to dismiss in three lines what is being written about as a new masterpiece. … a poem that has to be explained in notes is not unlike a picture with ‘This is a dog’ inscribed beneath.

—F. L. Lucas, ‘The Waste Land’, New Statesman, November 3, 1923

■

Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all the attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature, talking like a man unaware that there was ever hitherto such a production as a book, or such a being as a writer. Every move of him has the free play of the muscle of one who never knew what it was to feel that he stood in the presence of a superior. Every word that falls from his mouth shows silent disdain and

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defiance of the old theories and forms. Every phrase announces new laws; not once do his lips unclose except in conformity with them. With light and rapid touch he first indicates in prose the principles of the foundation of a race of poets so deeply to spring from the American people, and become ingrained through them, that their Presidents shall not be the common referees so much as that great race of poets shall. He proceeds himself to exemplify this new school, and set models for their expression and range of subjects. He makes audacious and native use of his own body and soul. He must re-create poetry with the elements always at hand. He must imbue it with himself as he is, disorderly, fleshy, and sensual, a lover of things, yet a lover of men and women above the whole of the other objects of the universe. His work is to be achieved by unusual methods. Neither classic or romantic is he, nor a materialist any more than a spiritualist. Not a whisper comes out of him of the old stock talk and rhyme of poetry - not the first recognition of gods or goddesses, or Greece or Rome. No breath of Europe, or her monarchies, or priestly conventions, or her notions of gentlemen and ladies founded on the idea of caste, seems ever to have fanned his face or been inhaled into his lungs. But in their stead pour vast and fluid the fresh mentality of this mighty age, and the realities of this mighty continent, and the sciences and inventions and discoveries of the present world. Not geology, nor mathematics, nor chemistry, nor navigation, nor astronomy, nor anatomy, nor physiology, nor engineering, is more true to itself than Walt Whitman is true to them. They and the other sciences underlie his whole superstructure. In the beauty of the work of the poet, he affirms, are the tuft and final applause of science.

—Walt Whitman, “Walt Whitman and His Poems.” United States Review September 5, 1855 ***

■

I hold (and I am sure that you will consider this doctrine untenable, so I fling it to you to tear to tatters) that punctuation in poetry is rather different from in prose: that in poetry its value is more largely that of musical notation, and the point is to indicate the emphases for the incantation. Perhaps this is a difference of degree or proportion rather

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than kind. But it is obvious that the end of a line is a kind of punctuation in itself, so that a comma at the end of a line may have the value of a semi-colon in prose. The absence of commas in parts of the last section of the Waste Land is to indicate that the voice is not to be dropped, and that the passage is to be read aloud in a kind of monotone. Of course I should deprecate the development of any exact notation for poetry, indicating the changes of tempo etc. for I think that latitude should be left to different readings just as a musical piece can be interpreted very differently by different conductors. The author’s way of reading a poem is only one possible way: certainly a good poem should be capable of being recited differently by different people, just as it should be capable of meaning different things to different people.

—T.S. Eliot, letter to Montgomery Belgion, July 19, 1940

■

It we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may only study his commentators.

— William Hazlitt, Table Talk, (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1911)

■

Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a Source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle of imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence. There have certainly been, even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry of deeper and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what his did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real,

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permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in the common feelings and common destiny of human beings.

And the delight which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis… The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.

—John Stuart Mill, “A Crisis in My Mental History,” Autobiography, The Harvard Classics, 1909

■

The world of art is human in perspective, a world in which the sun continues to rise and set long after science has explained that its rising and setting are illusions.

—Northrup Frye, Fables of Identity (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1963)

■

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.

This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding…. As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us…. For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, "Beautiful and tough as chestnut/ stanchions against our nightmare of weakness" and of impotence.

— Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (1985) online at Genius.com.

■

In rereading Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own for the first time in some years, I was astonished at the sense of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness, in the tone of that essay. And I recognized that tone. I had heard it often enough, in myself and in other women. It is the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not

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to appear angry, who is willing herself to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity. Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience of women, but she is acutely conscious—as she always was—of being overheard by men: by Morgan and Lytton and Maynard Keynes and for that matter by her father, Leslie Stephen. She drew the language out into an exacerbated thread in her determination to have her own sensibility yet protect it from those masculine presences. Only at rare moments in that essay do you hear the passion in her voice; she was trying to sound as cool as Jane Austen, as Olympian as Shakespeare, because that is the way the men of the culture thought a writer should sound.

—Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” online, quoted online, from J. G. Stewart, Jane Ellen Harrison:A Portrait from Letters (London, 1959).

■

…we want a poem to be beautiful, that is to say, a verbal earthly paradise, a timeless world of pure play, which gives us delight precisely because of its contrast to our historical existence with all its insoluble problems and inescapable suffering; at the same time we want a poem to be true, that is to say, to provide us with some kind of revelation about our life which will show us what life is really like and free us from selfenchantment and deception, and a poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ugly.

—W.H. Auden, “Robert Frost,” in The Dyer’s Hand (Faber & Faber, 1948)

■

I have learned… that poets, to be poets, must function as if they were people who were on the inside track of linguistic expression, people endowed with the highest language powers; that, in functioning so, they not only block the discovery that everyone is on this inside track, but confuse themselves and others as to the value of their linguistic performance; that the novelties of expression achieved in poetry leave ordinary speech, and its literary counterpart, prose, sunk in their essential monotony and unaspiringness; that there is no vital connection between the verbal successes of poetry and our actual speaking needs—they are no more than dramatic effects produced with words. 1 have learned that

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language does not lend itself naturally to the poetic style, but is warped in being fitted into it; that the only style that can yield a natural and happy use of words is the style of truth, a rule of trueness of voice and mind sustained in every morsel of one’s speech; that, for the practice of the style of truth to become a thing of the present, poetry must become a thing of the past.

—Laura Ridings Jackson, The Failure of Poetry, the Promise of Language, University of Michigan Press, May 22, 2007)

■

INTERVIEWER: Have you ever drawn from those [childhood] years for story material?

PARKER: All those writers who write about their childhood; gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn’t sit in the same room with me.

INTERVIEWER: What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?

PARKER: Need of money, dear.

—Dorothy Parker, Art of Fiction No. 13, Paris Review, 1956.

■

Yes, jazz and bop, in the sense of a, say, a tenor man drawing a breath and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his statement’s been made ... That’s how I therefore separate my sentences, as breath separations of the mind ... I formulated the theory of breath as measure, in prose and verse, never mind what Olson, Charles Olson says, I formulated that theory in 1953 at the request of Burroughs and Ginsberg. Then there’s the raciness and freedom and humor of jazz instead of all that dreary analysis and things like “James entered the room, and lit a cigarette. He thought Jane might have thought this too vague a gesture ...” You know the stuff. As for INTERVIEWER, yes I loved him as a teenager, he really got me out of the nineteenth-century rut I was trying to study, not only with his funny tone but also with his neat Armenian poetic—I don’t know what ... he just got me ... Hemingway was fascinating, the pearls of words on a white page giving you an exact picture ... but Wolfe was a torrent of American heaven and hell that opened my eyes to America as a subject in itself.

— Jack Kerouac, “The Art iof Fiction,” Paris Review, 1968

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Hardy is now, this afternoon, writing a poem with great spirit: always a sign of well-being with him. Needless to say, it is an intensely dismal poem.

—Florence Hardy (Thomas Hardy’s second wife), to a friend. Quoted from Thomas Hardy Selected Poems, edited and with an Introduction by Robert Mezey, (Penguin Books, 1998)

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[Thomas Hardy] was indifferent even to the prescripts of good writing: he wrote sometimes overpoweringly well, but always very carelessly; at times his style touches sublimity without ever having passed through the stage of being good…

—T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (Faber and Faber, 1934)

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Nobody has taught me anything about writing since Thomas Hardy died.

—Ezra Pound letter of 1934 to W.H. Rouse

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Sean Thomas Dougherty Dear Wife, Dear Mercy Charles Lloyd breathes a few soft phases On his saxophone. I turn the radio down.

Those days you drink and admit you’ve been drinking.

The doves are mourning.

I would not grudge you anything, At the dim bar during daylight.

The shaking of the old woman’s hands.

Certainly not this rain against the closed windows.

Our daughters high screeching on a plastic flute Fills the house. I let my anger become useless. ~ For my grief at your long leaving, Once I made a windchimes Of the empty tiny bottles I found hidden in our daughter’s drawer; I strung them with strands of your hair I pulled from hairbrushes, The sound they make is mercy. ~ Those years you were In the hospital.

What shudders is a wind

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That blows right through my ribs As you breathe. ~ Mercy for the lilac tree.

Mercy for the rain And the damselfly trapped in the windowsill. ~ There is no answer why you drink, Is there an answer why we do much of anything We do? ~ What God has given: Mercy for ourselves. ~ At the hospice house after your long surgery.

All the strangers waited for post-op news.

What elegies we prayed. ~ Put down the glass, the knife, the gun.

Walk away from the boss Who berates, from the fist: ~ What will save us is unsaid.

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~ Silence is a hymn among the distant trees.

Oak seeds helicoptering the wind. ~ Down the long hallway Between our bodies, Our daughters’ footsteps Come running Sudden as the scattering Of the rain. ~ They are here to bear witness. ~ Like Lazarus they brought you back From the dead. ~ I understand, Where is the mercy in being returned?

From a place of air and light?

To be held by God And let go?

(I often think you are more Lazarus than Magdalene.)

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~ The cotton wood rises On the wind like clouds Bearing seeds. ~ What suite of cruel light?

What symphony To remain unplayed?

Those years we ran through twilight Casting embers Of half-smoked cigarettes: The shape of who we were Silhouetted at the back doors Of bars.

There are the edges, You take a sip.

Let a strap fall Like a diva.

You enter a room, You are rouged with dead petals.

Sulphur light slants Through dog-torn curtains Pulled back to witness That sister life.

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~ We go on, or we turn back Like Orpheus To watch Eurydice fade.

We are all our own witnesses Of what we can bear. ~ The delirium of delaudid.

Half-lidded to the IV. ~ There is nothing euphonic here.

Nothing to praise Or damn. ~ To live Amongst the shadows Who move among us?

The dead raise their heads in the orchards.

I long ago gave up imagining I wanted something different.

Despite the odds or evidence, Once, together, we walked out of a room.

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Whatever Happened to David Caruso What if what you are running from is the moment when you found out your life was much worse than you suspected? It was the first night my wife hadn’t had a drink in weeks; we were up watching episodes of CSI Miami, as she tossed and turned. CSI that great cheesy 2000s cop show when she says, “What ever happened to David Caruso?” 90s red head tough guy cop whose acting career hit a snag in a series of B movies until he found his role as detective Horatio Caine in CSI Miami. He always had a tag line, to open and close a scene: a body could be lying there and the coroner looks up at the sky and says, “no one falls three stories and gets up and runs away,” and Horatio Caine puts on those mirrored sunglasses and says, “If you do, you have something to hide.” ~ Which makes me think of one of Caruso’s early roles, as a loud young cop out to nail Christopher Walken’s ultimate gangster Frank White in the classic gangster flick Kings of New York. When at a police full funeral, White rolls up in a limo, says, "hey you," and in front of a hundred cops, blasts a shot gun into Caruso’s face. ~ Which is what it feels like the moment when you find out your life was much worse than you suspected. Although I’m not sure are you Caruso? The shot gun blast? Or the shooter? ~ It is like that isn’t it with the poets with their academic predicures and their summer rendezvous at Breadloaf and their endowed professorships and endless complaints about who got what job. I can’t help but hear Biggie, who called himself the Black Frank White, bouncing in my brain "Word is bond," as I drive to work a double shift, and think of Frank White when he walks with his crew right into the mafia card game and grins, "Any Nickle bag sold in the park I want in. You guys got fat while everyone starved on the street. "

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~ My wife is sleeping now, snoring a sober snore. She is a dark music I wear throughout the day. She is a 9 MM I carry in the holster of my chest. I touch her face lightly as she murmurs. When she was young, she used to run dope up from Ohio. Black tar they bought off the Mexican crews. She used to be state Karate champion. She could drop you with an open palm. Now near forty, after ravaged years from alcoholism and disease, she gets up each day and drinks and makes our daughter’s breakfast of Fry bread and powdered sugar. She goes to her appointments. She buys potatoes. She writes some lines when she can. She braids our daughter's hair. She is a space between us that has grown I travel always towards across despite the distance. But tonight, she is a sober dreamer for the first time in longer than I can remember. The doctors tell her time is passing. She is trying, despite the wreckage. Isn’t that all we can ask of the damned? The days that remain dwindle. I inhale the warm wind through the open window this summer as if it could be our last before the long procession into that other country. I keep the bag pipes at bay. I memorize our shadows in the long light of every evening. The ceiling fan turns its spiral in the blue light of the room. Across the city of AM, the last Ubers roll toward doorways of dealers. The poppies lay down their sleepy heads. ~ I do not know what more to tell except with all our flaws and fractures we are the living. ~ David Caruso gave up acting to become an art dealer. I can’t tell from GOOGLE if he actually paints. I don't care enough to look more. Horatio is about to solve the case. Did you know David Caruso’s first “acting job” was posing as the “other guy” in police lineups? Perhaps that is the metaphor for my entire life, I have been the guy they hire to pretend they are the mugger, the forger, the rapist, the serial killer, the one who looks like the guy who did it for the witness to not finger. Because if they do, we know the suspect is maybe innocent. And when do the detectives ever want the suspect to be innocent?

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~ What more can the poem do? O Love, did you know that Czeslaw Milosz was wrong when he argued, what is poetry that does not save nations?

You are my nation. I only wanted to write poems to save you.

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ABOUT SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of 18 books including Not All Saints, winner of the 2019 Bitter Oleander Library of Poetry Prize; Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism (NYQ Books 2019) and All You Ask for is Longing: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions 2014). His book The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions 2018) received both the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the Housatonic Book Award from Western Connecticut State University. Other awards include the Twin Cities College Association Poet in Residence; and a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans, sponsored by the US State Department. He now works as a care giver and Med Tech for various disabled populations and lives with the poet Lisa M. Dougherty and their two daughters in Erie, Pennsylvania. More info on Sean can be found at seanthomasdoughertypoet.com

ABOUT THE POEMS “Dear Wife, Dear Mercy� is the title poem for a new manuscript from which both these poems are excerpted. It is manuscript about absences, the spaces between bodies: the fear of anyone's long struggle against addictions and disease. What is that space that surrounds the language that gives our lives meaning and shape? Sometimes that shape is made absurdly, and we laugh at a dumb tv show, a pop song heard at just the right time, we throw our spare change into the fountain and wish against the odds. We become as the years pass, for better or worse, the stories we tell ourselves, the myths we make. I believe (the delusion?

Illusion?) we can save ourselves (and those we love?) if only temporarily, simply with the words we shape, in just the right way.

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William Neumire Nothing ends until we want it to —Gwendolyn MacEwen For Joel and Tom I have what I want, which makes me a target.

I have what I want, which makes me a ghost, so let me tell you something I miss: thrift flannels, mosh hair, fields of goldenrod, alfalfa, grass without name, & in it that friend who called collect one night in a blizzard after two years of silence & said I need a ride to rehab & no I said I’ve got a daughter now, work in the morning.

Seven-mile runs up Jackson Hollow, weekends without clocks, football on the high school field’s palimpsest of loneliness.

And then the news of one pickup just sulking all owl-eyed night like a hay bale past harvest.

That friend slumped over the steering wheel.

I miss 16 out in the woods, each of us climbing Connecticut Hill in the leafy dark by heart, a case of stolen Blue, & then the fire, the heat of the fifth, the way we stood in the cradle of pines & saw each other shadow armored, & said everything we knew could be forgiven the next day by false amnesia.

I miss dogwoods slurring slow goodbyes as I began to understand that contrary to the law Page 30 - Nine Mile Magazine

of identity, I could be myself & an understudy. & that friend whose father threw him through the front door into the neighbors, grunted, “you can have him,” whose mother made meth of medicine & whispered, “it will all be ok.”

Listen, once, on a bus to Los Angeles, the driver fell asleep & we moved up front to tell near-death stories to keep the guy awake & save us all. Later, we got high and he said, I think I’m becoming a hole for everyone to fall through. & layers of dark catechized barn rafters & water towers, & then the blue-black & last howls & first crows & we were past life, past death, a song on a loop in the smoke of fatigue. But this morning, I walk a fog as a junked car across the street fills with snow.

A wealth of things I thought would happen didn’t. What I wanted calls me its target, its ghost.

There are rules but I don’t know them. My point is I want all my friends & enemies back, even the meth-head with his worried German Shepherd, even the racist neighbor with his dementia-plagued mother. My point is I forgot I used to be nothing as I watched the red leaves decorate the river blessed with so many fish we could live on only their eyes.

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Once we got high & I said, I dreamed I was a king & a wolf & fought myself & lived.

Afterall, if a man cannot live nobly, he can die the same as anyone. & that one who did two years for drunken robbery & bought me tacos the night he went in. & that one I thought of when, later, I sat in the warm chairs of the university library reading about Ephebes in ancient Greece who were sent into the wild to survive for two years & returned or didn’t. That wild of Io & Zeus, of Pentheus & Iphigena, foxfire & salt sea.

Their mothers asked nothing. Their fathers offered daggers.

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ABOUT WILLIAM NEUMIRE Bill Neumire's first collection, Estrus, was a semi-finalist for the 42 Miles Press Award, and his second collection was recently a finalist for the Barrow Street Prize and will be published by Unsolicited Press in 2022.

ABOUT THE POEM Practicing poetry and contending with doubts about poetry's value seem to come together, but in the end I believe John Steinbeck when he said, “Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.� I hope that my poems are all probes toward this brand of understanding.

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Sam Periera The Devastation of Peonies in Any Language —for Alma Pereira This time tomorrow, The peonies will think they are Roses. It happens that way, Whether you are in a café In downtown Lyon, or Lost in thought in the countryside Of a small American town.

The flowers of evil Baudelaire thought so often About rolling in, have no place In the hacked sunlight We stare at through the curtains.

In spite of my darkest beliefs, I resign myself—as old As that might sound, In this room full of rosaries And old whims, dresses That still carry the balance Of 1948 in their hems And quiet rebellions— To letting go, to finally Growing up and out of here, Like all good men, lost In the array of traffic lights Coming from Europe, Or the planet Texas, or Whatever they now call The beyond and beyond.

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What the Doctor Recommends It's 4:40 in the morning.

The darkness will end soon.

The woman I love is dreaming.

The dog is wondering what it is to not have a roof Over his head. All of this to say, In lieu of William Carlos Williams, Or the latest catalog from my father's old Go to nursery from back in the day Of nuclear tests in the Nevada desert, No, Mr. President, you cannot Take this photo of my life with you Into your dark rooms of shame. You won't Be allowed to speculate on sugar.

You can't have one of my plums.

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Funny Thing Death for Stan Plumly It has come to this People continue to leave Nothing is as it was Every few months A new plate from the collection Of dinnerware is lost In a loud crash While someone is talking On the phone Mirrors are suspect Incorporating as they do Old words looking For chalices to reside in Notice the deterioration Of thought here The blind elocution involved In saying good-bye Line up everyone The president is about to speak And all of us have decided To turn our heads In the direction of our bad ear We continue to drop Like flies bloated with BBQ It is almost funny The way the clouds shroud us Entering the club car And looking for trouble over There by the muted raven Who’d once performed Greatness for Poe

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Government Intervention There is nothing abstract About the stapler on my desk, But if I put it to your forehead And ask you to say a prayer, Does that make me CIA? We don't do that these days, She said, looking over Her glass of Chardonnay.

We clean up well, and We don't do that these days.

He continued to be startled By her honesty, as she picked up The check and slapped it Into the fake leather folder, Along with a $100 bill.

We try to be discrete. For instance, Right now, I am holding a .38 Under the table, along with A stainless steel emasculator, The kind a farm worker might use To bring a young animal into His adulthood one might say.

We might use one or the other On any given day. Today, I just Don't know. On the other hand, The stapler to the forehead Was outlawed right after the teacher From Fargo left a message on her cell, Telling anyone who would listen That she had been a victim of the CIA, Volume 8 No 1 - Page 37

And staples, staples had been used.

She gave us nothing, being either A Mediterranean spy or the dumbest Excuse for an educator we have Ever seen. She's gone now. We don't Know what happened. We don't Do that these days. We don't Believe the world likes it to go on.

But the gun and the emasculator Are divine. You decide. I'll get the car.

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Politics & Love He had not felt this Invigorated since The great tear gas wars Of the early 70s.

He rifled through old ideas, Searching for anything That might reinforce them: A rusted old flashlight, Proving there'd been light As he stumbled the broken Concrete walkways of town, Looking then for something Like the old dream, Love, As only Tony Bennett might Elucidate over pianos.

Now, though, the clues He wanted to find dealt With beliefs and the stunning Lack of sincerity coming From the rich and stupid.

Seeing none, he rolled Into his music, the old songs Where everyone enchants Like Sinatra on ice, and Ava moans that everything Is going to be okay, Baby, He wants to kiss her, as That bitch, the world, digs Her nails deep into his temples, And, yes, it’s alarming.

He says how good it feels.

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Amanhã Years ago, while staring At a plate of sardines In what passed for a winter sun, The old thoughts returned.

How on numerous occasions, Under the direction of a bass guitar, My head filled with a darkness Even Melville might have envied.

I had walked the perimeters Of this small town most of my life, Sometimes knowing that cars Might come out of nowhere, Sounding horns, the split second Before ending my lusts For a scotch in the night. I thought About the anguish some saw In being alone. I picked One particular evening, face dashed With the blood of my follies, And sat, just sat, on a curb, dreaming About making love with the sea, Her salt and infinitely wet glances Bouncing off my forehead, and off Into the after-breeze we’d shared there.

If I had been lucky, If I’d seen the clouds As the ocean’s gray mascara, Designed to wear me down and take me, I might have been okay with that.

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I might have said, in a slumber of love, That she, my beloved Pacific, Had given me a daughter, AmanhĂŁ, Wearing the haunting silver of sardines.

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Tragic Cigarettes I was watching an old video A couple of decades ago. Anne Sexton Was lounging around the house.

The film was in black and white, and There was a certain permanence To that long, gray ash, clinging From her clinically tragic cigarette.

I confess, for a moment, I wanted To be that cigarette; coated and wet With one of the Revlon reds It had absorbed into its filter. I anticipated Some perfect suck of poet’s air.

Does this make me crazed?

Perverted in a literary sort of way?

Would she insist on a fine mahogany Fandango before taking herself Elsewhere just to spite me?

These are the questions illness brings Out in the rain. She’d say: This is my gift to you, along with: We have finally discovered the truth.

Honestly, you men are all alike, She'd whisper, taking in more smoke.

I love you anyway, she'd say.

Good-bye, she'd say. I'm yours.

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ABOUT SAM PEREIRA Sam Pereira has been published in such magazines as American Poetry Review, Poetry, Antioch Review, Alaska Poetry Quarterly, Five Points, and, of course, Nine Mile Art & Literary Magazine. His books include Bad Angels (Nine Mile Press, 2015), The Marriage of the Portuguese —Expanded Edition (University of Massachusetts Press /Tagus Press, 2012), and Dusting on Sunday (Tebot Bach, 2012). He taught middle school English for much of his life, and has recently settled into retirement with his wife, Susan in the San Joaquin Valley of California.

ABOUT THE POEMS NOTE: All of these poems are included in my new collection, True North and Untrue You, to be published in late 2020 by Nine Mile Press.

The poem “The Devastation of Peonies in Any Language” was written in 2017, upon the death of my mother, who had waged a long battle with horrible arthritis and dementia for the final couple of decades of her life. She had, like most mothers I suspect, never given up on the possibilities for her children. I, as the first born, was always the groundbreaker for offering her sadness and failure, amidst her continuing dreams. So, when she finally left us, I did the only thing I had of any value in my arsenal of tributes. I wrote her a poem.

The poem is a selfish poem, in the sense that it insists on speaking about a world she had little knowledge of, but that I, alas, had too much of. The Peonies were a staple in our flowerbeds during the 50s and 60s.

My father’s loves, along with his roses, and his wife, my mother. In the end, the question is not her question. She already has the answer in death, and I hope it pleases her soul. For me, the question of what’s left remains paramount. And so, as the poem states toward the end: I resign myself…to letting go…

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The beyond and beyond. *** In “What the Doctor Recommends,” I rely on the reader being aware of the Williams poem “This Is Just to Say,” and its magical mention of plums. In my poem, I am trying to show how a man gathers up his small, unassuming gifts, and gives them the respect they deserve. Halfway through the poem, because we live in suffocating and political times, I felt the breath of government breathing down my neck in the form of its main honcho. I reacted. None of this is his. None of this gets touched by him and his ilk. Not even the long gone plums of my youth, when things were simpler, and Dr. Williams was a force to be reckoned with. *** The poem “Funny Thing Death” was written soon after the death of poet, Stan Plumly, who I knew from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop back in the 1970s. Throughout the decades that followed, we intermittently crossed paths along the way. There is also mention of Poe in the poem, someone I didn’t know. *** There is a conversation going on in “Government Intervention,” between two rather shadowy characters—perhaps CIA, perhaps not.

Weapons of pain are being discussed over the flan being served.

Everyone is smiling. They have been trained to smile. *** In “Politics & Love,” I try to take two of the crisscrossing themes running through the new book and put a bow on them. Probably, I failed. *** “Amanhã” is Portuguese for ‘tomorrow.” It is also one of the most

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beautiful words in the Portuguese language. One can dream. *** Finally, the poem “Tragic Cigarettes.” For me, this is just another example of a dilemma my generation felt in the 60s. Beatles or Stones.

Whiskey or Psilocybin. Plath or Sexton. I admired Plath’s work for the most part, but Sexton was the Stones for me: a disciple of the darkest disciplines.

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Sara Parrott As God Would Have It When you give us your word, we take it the way a fisherman rubs his hand down the spine of a catch he knows he will keep. We fold it like a map to a secret lean-to in the woods.

Under the darkest branch of night, you speak through silent dewfall, liquefying complacent ice until it rises, a vapor defining ascension.

We hover in the mist, ready to rest in the cup of your hand, that little ship of fingers waiting to carry us away from the harbor of our enemies, waiting to stoke the epiphanic flame singeing within.

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Lying in the Grass with Rumi Translation of Coleman Barks’ Translation of “The Grasses” by Rumi The wind knocks down trees easier than a man, leaves the sun glowing on ravaged grass.

Kingship of the wind demands obedience, a low bow from seagrass shows crowning strength.

A woodcutter doesn’t consider thickness of trunk or limb.

He cuts it all, leaving stumps to mourn the leaves.

Fire pays no attention to the depth of the pit, but a shepherd knows he must separate goats from sheep.

What is form in the presence of reality?

Is a cloudy sky an inverted teacup?

Who tips the water jar of heaven?

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Tantrum Ergo On a holy day to come they will say my mother loved wearing wide-brimmed hats, elbow-length gloves—pretty stuff.

Scarves and shoes had to match. Pocketbook was queen.

Her favorite had a shimmy chain shoulder strap. Gold. Long enough to crisscross her body. She was short. Father tall.

We all landed heights somewhere in between.

From me—and only me—she hid her purse. Chasing Chanel No. 5, I exhausted the house. She said she just couldn’t take me wherever a wallet or clutch bag was sold.

Pleather, leather, shiny vinyl, combed-cotton totes—I had to have them — to hold something I didn’t know how to carry. I zipped to unzip, buckled to unbuckle. Flails and screams fled from me. And my mother?

She scooped me against her chest. Crimson cheeks skin to skin.

Unbuttoned my overheated store, carried me horizontally. I was a briefcase, a satchel, a prickly little portmanteau dangling from her side.

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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 birds plunge into the water, others fly away. The boy's father collects the feathers, lays them on a stone.

I pick up one 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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Belief in the Making God, why do you keep asking me to look for a ram in the battered thicket?

There are no brave animals here, no lambs, no turtle doves—nothing clean enough to sacrifice. Every blemish hides a scar. You know what is under my brambled skin, how many bruises nest in the heads of men I toppled over benches, forsaken altars. Who can untangle this herd huddled in the divide between public spaces and private entrances?

There are no rams to save us—Saul, Samuel, and Isaiah are dead.

Is there no other ear in which you can whisper? Mine still rings from the night you sent an awkward bird to whistle my name.

Shrill funneled through a loose stitch in a pocket of the sky, drilling so much rain I had to scramble like a man without a roof, without an umbrella, with nothing but empty hands to press together like bookends in prayer, as the onrush of rain pounded out a flood, fishtailing my senses, and I flailed until all flailing failed to keep my soul skeletal. God, how long can a man be reduced to full expansion, slog through waterfall until he becomes spirited mist?

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In the Garden of You Your garden has outlived you.

French lilacs speak your name in soft pleas the way prisoners do.

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, wield a tool tough enough to twist woody stems unwilling to bend. I pound a hammer against them until they splinter into straw, forcing them to accept transference from earth to container, forcing them to continue to live.

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ABOUT SARA PARROTT Sara Parrott’s poetry has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Nine Mile Magazine, Stone Canoe, The Literary Nest, Dappled Things, Ghost City Review, and True Chili. Several of her haiku are featured on posters created by the Syracuse Poster Project, including a commemorative poster celebrating the 50thanniversary of Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, New York. She holds an MA from Binghamton University, and Tipping the Water Jar of Heaven is her first book.

Photo by Philomena Leavitt

ABOUT THE POEMS The idea that there is more to a physical object or an experience than what meets the five senses recurs in many poems in Tipping the Water Jar of Heaven. Gerard Manley Hopkins, the plowman of inscape, described the idea as “a sudden perception of a deeper pattern, order, and unity, which gives meaning to external forms…a quasi-mystical illumination.” The inner life of dream, memory, and spirit become inseparable from the exterior world—and both are enhanced by the unity.

When we observe the external world while “reading” the observation triggered within, we can inch toward God and learn about the order He created.

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Joshua Michael Stewart November Praise The smell of ferns and understory after rain. The tick, tick, of stove, flame under kettle. Bing Crosby, and not just the Christmas records.

Cooking meat slowly off the bone, and every kind of soup and stew.

To come this close to nostalgia, but go no further, leaving behind the boy who wore loneliness like boots too big for his feet.

That time of evening, when everything turns blue in moonlight, when darkness has yet to consume all for itself.

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Buried Deep Like A Bullett For Adrian C. Louis Adrian when you’re a child and your mother says your great-grandfather was a full-blood Sioux your only question is when can you get a horse and a bow and arrows and if she said your ancestors were dragons you’d shoot snot out of your nose to breathe fire but time goes on and you’re not a dumb kid anymore who believes everything their mother tells them you’re a stupid adult who doesn’t believe in anything except death you wonder what a Lakota was doing farming tobacco in Kentucky hills wonder about documents that prove tribal enrollment reservation assignment only to find family hearsay it’s one thing to dream you’re a star quarterback and another to believe you were always on the team but then find you never made the roster there’s a pride that doesn’t belong to you just another thing white men have stolen and I carried mine jutting out of my breast pocket showed it off at kindergarten show-and-tell scratched a black X on it on my college application I loved to hate the other side of me the white side of me the forked tongue the “he takes fat” by the time I was ten I could name more warriors and chiefs at the Battle of the Little Bighorn than I could name U.S. Presidents I’ve often dreamed of pissing on Custer’s grave in the third grade my teacher displayed Thanksgiving cut-outs turkeys and cornucopias pilgrims and multi-colored corn

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I told her of my great-grandfather and she said proud you must be very proud and I was and I loved my great-grandfather more than anyone else dead a month before I was born and I sat tall in my seat that day raised my hand higher than I ever did before and when there was a picture of buffalo in the textbook my whole body shimmied as the teacher turned my way I was ready to accept the honor of being called to the front of the class lecture on what it was like to be one of America’s first people but instead she said thanks to Indians bison almost went extinct my jaw unlatched I shook my head because even at that age I knew the fur trade wiped out the buffalo before I could speak utter disgust she shot a finger in my direction and said keep quiet you don’t know everything about Indians I told my mother and she was irate but not enough to go down there and slap the teeth out of that bitch’s mouth hell if she’d said that shit today she’d be out of a job a lawsuit filed but that was unheard of in 1982 and turns out I wasn’t even native and by the time I learned of it the last thing I wanted to be was exactly what I was a white guy who thought he was a skin I stopped talking about my great-grandfather stopped going to powwows searching for some kind of connection through thunder-drum and ancestral song stopped thinking I belonged but Adrian that teacher’s sneer

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is buried deep like a bullet unremovable too close to the spine that discrimination was real even if it wasn’t meant for me

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For My Brother On What Would Have Been His Fiftieth Birthday His greatest joy was to pin my arms to the floor with his knees fart in my face When he pushed me and I hit my head on a nail jutting out of the wall he full-blown blubbered all the way to the hospital it was my greatest revenge For years we didn’t speak He spent much of that time sleeping in abandoned houses had a habit of pulling a revolver out on his friends and squeezing the trigger just to hear it click to hear his own laughter He smirked when I walked into the room saw how gaunt he became the slightest flash of tooth when he knew I knew he was dying Always ready to fight the world when he needed a cane he chose one that sheathed a blade in its handle And when there was nothing left to say and I told him I had to leave he wrapped his arms around my neck and I could feel his ribs through his flannel as he heaved and wept

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the way he did in the backseat of our father’s Pontiac as he held a blood-warm towel to my face

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Prance On I remember sitting on the sofa in my grandparent's house--my day care center--watching television with my grandfather. He spent most of his life on the couch after an accident on the job. He recovered from the accident but continued to sit. I had no father and was absorbing whatever maleness was around. Later in life, I realized I had my grandfather's laugh, and now, at 76, with the requisite muscle and joint stiffness, I've begun to move like him. When I catch myself doing this I immediately rebel and start prancing like a young man.

—Doug Anderson Prance on beautiful raven over the roofs of the world.

Prance on scared bodies, the healing more painful than the wound.

Prance on child abandoned at the edge of a family’s dark woods.

Prance on three-legged dog chained to the cruel winter of man.

Prance on veterans of wars that scorched the earth of your souls.

Prance on fathers afraid for their sons, who know the comforts of sleeping in the Monster’s arms.

Prance on youth-wild dreams eager to fly even with tarred wings.

Prance on. Prance on. Prance on.

Prance on old draft horse with bones as thick as the eldest pines.

Prance on ill minds hidden away in dungeons made from the shame and disappointment of others.

Prance on potbelly hearts with white-hot coals deep within cast-iron shells.

Prance on poets who drink from cesspools and piss mountain springs.

Prance on deaf rooster who thinks themself a canary.

Prance on scarecrow who yearns for the company of crows.

Prance on bleeding thorn wishing to be loved as much as the bloom.

Prance on. Prance on. Prance on.

Prance on lonely ghosts who make love to the shadows of the living.

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just to keep up with your heartbeat.

Prance on jazz man searching for the unheard note from within.

Prance on prisoners of poverty, your hope hurdling over the tallest wall.

Prance on gamblers losing each hand to God and Devil and realize the game’s Solitaire.

Prance on kindness, endangered species in the poacher’s crosshairs.

Prance on sentient kin with your multitudes, inherited and invented.

Prance on. Prance on. Prance on.

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ABOUT JOSHUA MICHAEL STEWART Joshua Michael Stewart has had poems published in the Massachusetts Review, Brilliant Corners, Coal Hill Review, Plainsongs, and many others. His first full-length collection of poems, Break Every String, was published by Hedgerow Books in 2016. A new collection, The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums, is forthcoming from Human Error Publishing. You can find him at www.joshuamichaelstewart.com or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/joshua.m.stewart.526

ABOUT THE POEMS All these poems were written between 2017-2019, not quite sure in what order. These poems come from a manuscript of poems that focus on homages, odes, eulogies, and praise. Basically, it is a book of gratitude.

My first book, “Break Every String” dealt with the hardships of growing up poor in the Rust Belt and other dark subject matter, so I wanted my next project be one of affirmation and thanks. Of course, with that said, I can’t say I always manage to move away from the difficulties of life.

“For My Brother on What Would’ve Been His Fiftieth Birthday,” started out as an attempt to write a biography of my oldest sibling in the form of a list poem. The image of us in the backseat of the car on the way to the hospital is an image I’ve been trying to work in a poem for over a decade. All other poems failed, I’m glad it lives in this one. “Buried Like a Bullet” is for the late Native American poet, Adrian C. Louis, who I was lucky to correspond with on a few occasions. Louis often writes poems that read like handwritten letters using very simple language. I try to mimic that style in this poem. I also experiment with punctuation, letting space tell the reader to breathe. “November Praise,” is part of a series of poems in which I start each month by keeping a list of things I’m grateful for, and at the end of each month I take the list and craft a poem. Lastly, “Prance On” was inspired by a Facebook post by the dear poet, Doug Anderson. I’ve been extremely lucky to become associated Volume 8 No 1 - Page 61

with Mr. Anderson over the year, and when I began this project of writing homages, I knew one had to be for him. I could write an entire essay on my gratitude toward his generosity and kindness. Though this poem is in Doug’s honor it is for all those who fight the hard fight, who need a little kindness, who need to prance on.

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Leslie Ullman Honor thy error as hidden intention Robert Motherwell raised his brush, muttering, his whole body stretching into his mistakes. I have uttered wrong words, clichés that fell flat but sometimes led away from themselves to unexpected freedoms, and misspellings-turned-visitations— once I wrote “slightful” and felt a little ghost tickling my shoulder. See how spilled toothpicks make a lattice Mondrian lost and found himself in?

Water everywhere finds its way down, creating fissures/havoc/mud, tumbling and buffing river stones to a smoothness Henry Moore loved as silhouette and skin, woman, repose — gravity never apologizes for a mess though I have made errors from which the court inside me will never let me off. Fault line, plucked nerve of shame…. Jackson Pollack just poured more paint on the canvas every time a can—oops— tipped over.

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Faced with a choice, do both I wish I was dead a friend mumbled on the chairlift a month after his wife died, mumbled so low I wasn’t sure I heard, after I asked how he planned to spend his winter. Dead his voice, the sear cauterized small talk, his abyss now mine. I had never heard this in a voice before—utterance from the realm of endings. I touched his arm, feeling the chill slice me, bind me, and then we skied down that sparkling mountain, dead, dead, as we carved our turns from the habit of living, dead a curtain I suddenly could not part, vacuum I could never again dismiss, dead the two of us savoring our skills even then because what else could we do as our skis caressed from memory the loved terrain and bright snow, sunlight touching us dying all over.

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Think of the radio …for example, the blond-wood console where your grandparents gathered, a map of Europe before them as they traced Hitler’s shadow spreading through France, while Roosevelt from his fireside sought to calm them— and in London night after night, deep underground through blackouts and strafings, the BBC kept lit the candle of King’s English. * …and the hive on your first nightstand— built of something like Bakelite, frame and cross-pieces trussing its speakers like chrome on a mid-century Chevy— it eased you away from the Void, Dragnet breathing beside your pillow, its music scarier than its plots but less scary than your solitude. Later, Wolf Man’s nicotine rasp, the voice of night itself, introduced you to rock ‘n roll that would follow you through your teens on a pink transistor, to the beach and paneled dens, its single antenna funneling the swoon of cheek-to-cheek, trippy lights and revved engines— your future. Hovering. * …and today’s evangelical stations, all you can pick up while driving late through lunar stretches of this country if you Volume 8 No 1 - Page 65

don’t have Satellite—by reflex you reach to turn them off—but sometimes a familiar child, peering into the bottomless hour, re-appears inside you, hungry for any voice that might talk her down from the dark. .

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ABOUT LESLIE ULLMAN Leslie Ullman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The You That All Along Has Housed You, from Nine Mile Press. She also has published a hybrid collection of craft essays and writing exercises, Library of Small Happiness (3:A Taos Press), several of whose essays first appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle. Her poetry has won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, The Iowa Poetry Prize, and the New Mexico/Arizona Book Award. She is Professor Emerita at University of Texas-El Paso and continues to teach in the low-residency MFA Program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts.

Now a resident of Taos, New Mexico, she also teaches skiing in the winters at Taos Ski Valley.

ABOUT THE POEMS In 1975 composer Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt created a list of 110 Oblique Strategies which they produced as a deck of cards, one strategy per card. The project arose from the discovery that they approached their art in remarkably similar ways. For Eno, who survives Schmidt and has continued to give interviews on the subject as well as compose a significant body of innovative ambient music, the Strategies evolved from situations of “panic” when he felt creatively stuck in the middle of limited and expensive studio time. These situations, he recalled, “tended to make me quickly forget that there were…tangential ways of attacking a problem that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach.” The Strategies were designed to encourage lateral thinking—to help artists break through barriers via such tangential routes and take themselves by surprise.

Which is what I did, using all 110 of them as titles and catalysts to poems, each time waiting out a period of resistance and sometimes outright paralysis until something broke through. Ultimately, I felt great freedom—to play and write discards—and often I found myself

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exploring the literary, visual and musical arts from angles that had never occurred to me before.

Among other things, the Strategies prompted me to re-visit loved paintings and research the painters themselves, to attend concerts where I not only absorbed the music but studied the gestures and facial expressions of the performers, to listen more deeply to jazz, electronic, and popular music, and observe my own experiences as maker of poems through a new lens. Sometimes I found myself treating the blank page as a musical score in which to notate margins and white space in ways new to my ear; thus I came to experience language as a more material, malleable, and rhythmic medium than I had before. After all this play and exploration, I was sorry when after four years I got to the last of the Strategies, but I have retained something of lens they offered— holographic, ever-shifting, and revealing.

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George Rawlins On The Resurgence of Plague in Moscow The news comes to London of the Great Mortality in Moscow, reminder of our smugness. A mother discarded on the death-cart overnight, children heaped onto a passing bier at daybreak. The Great Emptiness comes to collect our human taxes, the Blue Sickness drains into the bluest sea, leaving our scuttles stacked in tiers like a ship’s cargo for an alien voyage. Surely the end is near, yet surely not—small endings come a thousand times a day. I’ll leave space here for you, reader, to chronicle your fate, which you must jot quickly while struck by lightning lightning lightning.

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ABOUT GEORGE RAWLINS George Rawlins has recent poems in Mudfish, Pennsylvania English, Sanskrit, and Spinning Jenny. He has a BA from Ohio University, attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for a year before dropping out, and received an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He lives in California where he makes a living in Silicon Valley.

Photo credit: Constance Rawlins ABOUT THE POEM This poem is from an unpublished manuscript that reimagines the life of the 18th-century British poet Thomas Chatterton. At age 16, Chatterton invented the persona of a 15 -century poet and tried to pass off the poems as the work of an unknown priest to the literati of London.

When that failed, at age 17, he committed suicide. In 1770, just before Chatterton left his native Bristol for London, a major outbreak of the plague—called the “Great Mortality,” “Blue Sickness,” and “Great Emptiness”—had begun in Moscow. During the plague families put their dead out onto the street during the night to be picked up by the daily death-cart in the morning. The corpses were then taken to deep pits where they were buried in layers. This year, the 250 anniversary of Chatterton’s death, we still experience the difficulty of contemplation as the world and our lives move through recurring crises. th

th

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John Philip Drury The Projectionist in memory of Liam Rector We were good friends when we were desperate, shirking work, writing letters on the job, “cheating our employer,” as Frost would say.

You came back to Baltimore and took me drinking, and I got drunk enough, at the Cat’s Eye, to change my mind about my future plans, declining a fellowship, relinquishing a funky apartment and a doctorate.

You lured me to an office in New York, a minor job in arts administration that I regretted. But I did enjoy going out to lunch together there— Papaya King or the hot, smoky joint that advertised itself as “Home of the Flameburger,” no diet for your undiagnosed conditions.

You had another first name when we met, but Liam did what Ron could not have done, your way to “make it new.” I never told you I tried to change my name when I was serving as an interrogator in the Army, living in Zirndorf, posing as a civilian, undercover in a refugee camp, cocksure and unsure, signing my letters home “Love, Morgan.” It didn’t stick. I chickened out.

But you held on, a truly self-made man like Whitman, who turned Walter into Walt.

At parties in a rowhouse you were renting, you showed old movies on exposed brick walls,

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threading the film, projecting black and white, and you were Laurence Harvey, starring in Room at the Top—ambitious, cool, and pushy, but still the character we rooted for.

I think of you as the projectionist who flashed a scintillating waterfall of edginess, the hippest repartee.

Who else but Liam would gun himself down, leaving a note that planned his funeral?

My grandfather killed himself with much less style, no shotgun, just a bottle of rat poison.

You claimed that poets ought to kill themselves, a starry, stormy, celebrated end, but cancer and a heart attack convinced you.

I couldn’t travel for the ceremony but read about your hand-made Italian shoes arranged on steps in St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery and how your friends could pick a pair and wear them, keepsakes to keep you with them on their walks.

Thanks a lot, Liam. You transformed my life by coaxing me to go in the dark, fly blind, and take a chance on messing up my prospects.

Here is the letter I can never send my rowdy, reckless, hip, foul-weather friend.

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Cincinnati Haiku in response to sequences by Etheridge Knight and Marilyn Chin Once, I could order dim sum in Chinese. Now I stay home, sipping tea.

Snow on Mt. Storm, slopes at right angles. Sleds converge, sharp runners glinting.

Blocks of houses razed. Two stories remain: dark windows collecting stars.

The car motor’s off.

Standing on the ferry deck, I’m frisked by the breeze.

Coal barge docked near trees. Catfish lurk in the river, but no one’s fishing.

Raking rocks, combing furrows in sand—Zen garden in a litter box.

Slice those ears off! a swimming instructor yells. Your hands are razor blades!

Green-tiled house (its late owner murdered in the yard) gushes Christmas lights.

Violet sky through bare branches; full moon’s whole note between open blinds.

Harnesses, hard hats, chainsaws, chipper—the tree crew pardons one white ash.

Parade on opening day—we stay home, turn off the Reds game, make love.

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Chain Saw Blues The building inspector said, “You need a chain saw.”

Magnolia in full leaf about to come down Too many trash trees, so I need a chain saw.

Planted years back on the White House lawn I need to cut through laziness, my main flaw.

General Jackson had just come to town The safest power tool inflicts pain raw.

President Jackson craved whiffs of home Buzzing and shaking, it chafes my pain raw.

Black men, his slaves, dug in the loam But weeding the tangled mess lets my brain thaw.

Planting a sapling in the new Rome In the funhouse, the boy said, “That’s not a real chain saw.”

Trees are temporary, but so’s a President The boy, my stepson, gave me a chain saw.

We’ll blast the creepers that leave the truth bent Now I’ll cut and clear for the sake of plain law.

Soon, Dante will report where the boss man’s been sent

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ABOUT JOHN PHILIP DRURY John Philip Drury is the author of four books of poetry: Sea Level Rising (Able Muse Press, 2015), The Refugee Camp (Turning Point Books, 2011), Burning the Aspern Papers (Miami University Press, 2003), and The Disappearing Town (Miami University Press, 2000). He’s also written Creating Poetry and The Poetry Dictionary (both from Writer’s Digest Books). New poems have come out recently in Able Muse, The American Journal of Poetry, Ascent, Maryland Literary Review, Measure Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. He has taught at the University of Cincinnati since 1985.

ABOUT THE POEMS “Chain Saw Blues” intersperses the lines of blues stanzas with italicized riffs (as if played on a guitar during breaks in the lyrics). While I was toying with the rhyming possibilities of “chain saw” (a Christmas present my stepson gave me), I read about an ancient magnolia being cut down on the grounds of the White House, and that triggered all sorts of associations, including the idea that I could interweave two themes and develop both personal and historical threads. It soon became political, and I started thinking about how Dante, in Canto XXXIII of Inferno, devised a punishment for the treacherous, whereby a host who betrays a guest is replaced on earth by a demon, “in soul now underground / Who in body still appears alive, above” (Robert Pinsky’s translation).

“Cincinnati Haiku” alternates the usual 5-7-5 tercets (with Etheridge Knight as my main influence) and 17-syllable monostichs (as practiced by translator Hiroaki Sato and adopted by Marilyn Chin and John Ashbery). Even though some of the images are ominous or wistful, I’m celebrating the city where I’ve now spent over half my life.

“The Projectionist” is an epistolary elegy addressed to Liam Rector, who was my classmate in the M.A. program at Johns Hopkins University in the late 1970s. He and Gigi Bradford traveled to Baltimore, where I Volume 8 No 1 - Page 75

had been accepted into the Ph.D. program at Hopkins, and cajoled me into joining them at the Academy of American Poets, where I was a Program Associate and earned a starting salary of $9,000 a year, which was terrible even back then.

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Susan Aizenberg Postcard from New Hampshire Driving backcountry roads we watch for storms, remembering that here in the Valley downhill always leads home. Black birches and the hammered nickel of the river gleam in late afternoon sun, then vanish into lusher forest, the saturated greens of trees thick with weeks of rain.

Beside the now-scenic mill converting to condos, the falls are picturesque.

Inside, new windows etched to look old and fresh brick lining the cracked walls bear the gone coughs of the dead mill workers and their great-grandchildren, who drink too much, work the season, must collect unemployment all winter.

Today, we park among the pickups with For Sale signs ringing the lake, spread our Sunday picnic by the shore.

Reflected in its blue waters, the sky’s gone suburban as a backyard pool.

These towering clouds appear to sink into it, tangible as trap rock.

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On Prospect I wasn’t spying, just idling at the hotel’s picture window when I saw them, a slender boy and girl dressed in jeans and thin jackets I thought too slight for January. They were walking away from me, holding hands, and even from nine stories up, I could see they were young.

And I watched as they stopped and he turned to her, lifted her arm, and twirled her entirely around, dancing right there beside the bare trees and afternoon traffic on busy Prospect; and they were lovely, and I was glad when he leaned down and kissed her upturned face.

It was, I thought, the kind of kiss you see in glossy perfume ads, underscored by Louis Armstrong, and I thought about all they could not know and whether they would last, as we have lasted, love, although we couldn’t have known forty Page 78 - Nine Mile Magazine

years ago we’d have such luck. Still, we must have known something— don’t you think?—in those early days when driving in your red Toyota through the rush of Dallas traffic, at every yellow light and stop sign, you’d turn and lean so sweetly into me.

At every stop, that kiss.

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ABOUT SUSAN AIZENBERG Susan Aizenberg is the author of three poetry collections: Quiet City (BkMk Press 2015); Muse (Crab Orchard Poetry Series 2002); and Peru in Take Three: 2/AGNI New Poets Series (Graywolf Press 1997). A new chapbook, First Light, is forthcoming from Gibraltar Editions in 2020 in a limited, letterpress edition. Aizenberg is co-editor, with Erin Belieu, of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press 2001). Her awards include a Crab Orchard Poetry Series Award, the Levis Reading Prize, a Distinguished Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council, the Nebraska Book Award, and the Mari Sandoz Award from the Nebraska Library Association. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, among them Blackbird, On the Seawall, Bosque, The American Journal of Poetry, The North American Review, Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Connotation Press, and The Journal, and have been reprinted in several anthologies, most recently, A Constellation of Kisses (Terrapin Press 2019).

Aizenberg is Professor Emerita of Creative Writing and English at Creighton University and now lives and writes in Iowa City, where she teaches in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

ABOUT THE POEMS “On Prospect” and “Postcard from New Hampshire” began as brief journal notes. In the case of “Postcard,” I’d visited a friend in New Hampshire and was struck by both the beauty of the scenery and the hard lives of many of the local people, especially in comparison with tourists like me. “On Prospect” has its origins in a visit to one of my sons, where I watched from a picture window as a young couple holding hands walked down the street. Both poems are written in open form and bring together memory, observation, and imagination in much the same way fiction does; many of the details in each are wholly or highly

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fictionalized. If I have any conscious goal for the poems when composing, it’s to recreate an experience for the reader in language, especially image and sound.

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Stella Santamaria agua de violetas aisles full- light lilac bottles bolted to the equator dotted line wake up absent invoking rows on metal removable air sand enamel shiny miami shelves anaphylactic walnut lips stained cielo blue stress induction scrubbed soft brillo disintegrate deteriorate walnut creek flares recyclable glass ones lavender looking perched plastic lighter in the section labeled next los angeles or a white exoskeleton brass finish duct tape cranberry plush with black onyx gold & vodka pendant four-teen carats, 13 links ruega por nosotros crucifix susceptible protein type typing to xavier to let me join the x-men off on jean & chromosome thirteen flash check, questioned sir, lost my spray how can I drive without the flies? clutching purses, clutching lost zygotes stream palaces peeling teeth visiting each other in chemical compositions ruinous electropositive consulting castro sterilized pores bubble gum painted hearts in fragile- lavender then half cuban newborn note violet water Page 82 - Nine Mile Magazine

we are born, California come to me with a wiped history an era & a song yo te canto born to live on a mountain with over 7000 ft of elevation highest balcony overlooking the high trees, lichen, blue jays hawk & eagle wings welcome me every sun up me entendistes every sunrise a pink hue the shaking of the mirrors that cherry blossoms offer trying to corral the hummingbirds the blossoms falling con las cerezas

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ABOUT STELLA SANTAMARÍA Stella Santamaría is a Cuban American poet. Santamaría holds an MFA in Creative Writing: Poetry from Saint Mary's College of California, with honors. Stella studied poetry under Brenda Hillman, Matthew Zapruder and Cyrus Cassells. Santamaría has been published in a number of literary journals, performed spoken word in the Lab in San Francisco and in Nuyorican Poets’ Café in New York City. She was featured in the HBO Films and CNN documentary Latino in America.

ABOUT THE POEMS About agua de violetas Agua de violetas is a perfume located in most pharmacies, convenience stores, even some gas stations in Miami. It is the perfume mothers use for Cuban babies and the scent is said to protect from all evil especially from mal de ojo, evil eye. As I am Cuban American, I wrote this poem to indicate my journey as a child through adulthood based on the foundational sense of smell in my community, agua de violetas. As such, this poem provides a road map of sorts of what being a Cuban American is like for me. These sensory rich surrealistic dream like stanzas takes the readers along for this adventure.

About We are born, California As I finished my graduate thesis, California Silence my thesis professor asked me to write a poem to frame my work. A monumental task, as my thesis included a number of bilingual references in Spanish and Latin. Nevertheless, We are born, California, represented a new journey in my life as a Cuban American moving from Miami to California to pursue my dream of being a writer and completing my MFA in poetry. This ecopoem begins in bliss as I approach a blank page then delves into the natural world surrounding my apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Ralph James Savarese When this is Over Every house in the neighborhood is on a ventilator— it’s called an HVAC system, which, among other things, moves fresh air in and stale air out.

Think of it as a lung within lungs.

Think of it as intubated living.

“A house has to breathe,” my HVAC guy says— he’s a doctor of sorts.

“A sick one doesn’t.”

For decades we’ve wrapped our homes so tightly in Tyvek that even our thoughts can’t escape.

Every mind’s an aquarium: thoughts go round and round; a stranger taps at the window.

We want, it seems, an impermeable barrier, as if our lives were ships and the world a wave that would sink us.

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The hospital plays hide-and-seek: ICU! Yet we must have it backwards: the patients all wear personal protective equipment while the chief attendings, the trees, stand naked above us.

In my dream, our old Victorian climbs out of bed and says, to no one in particular, “Come in.�

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Free Soloists All our knowledge begins with the senses.

—Immanuel Kant My friend Max thought they were lined up for the bus as he approached in his van, but they were attending a funeral the way students now attend class— at a distance.

The chain-link fence around the cemetery like a computer screen, except that the mourners were climbing it— one foot on the keyboard, the other on the desktop— Volume 8 No 1 - Page 87

as if moving vertically might get them closer to the coffin 200 yards away.

Radio wave tunnel rats, free soloists playing Twister and sobbing.

The fence streamed heartache, but the connection was poor.

A burial without bodies— their bodies?

The senses tell us what we know.

The mourners were like shoppers on Black Friday, just living to get in.

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Contracting the Human Who touches this touches a man.

—Walt Whitman For Elizabeth Prevost How shocked I was to be holding a first edition of Leaves of Grass in my hands, my bare hands.

Light sauntered in through the Newberry’s windows.

I could see people loafing on the lawn outside.

Here it is, I thought to myself, the book, the body of work, you treasure.

I had expected to be wearing some sort of gear, but there I was, essentially naked.

My fingers like newly minted coins or crickets.

Gloves, I learned, make damaging a book more likely—tearing a page, for example.

Our white cloth clumsiness, our dreams

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of purity and preservation, as misguided as deodorant or shoes.

At least formal ones.

Touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, Be not afraid of my body.

The librarians, Walt, have read your work!

Every volume in the vault may contract the human, that bawdy illness or contaminant.

In so doing it expands.

How many readers have disturbed this book?

The page contains multitudes.

My lovers suffocate me! you wrote. Crowding my lips, and thick in the pores of my skin.

Bughouse Square is awash in sound—I can almost hear the past.

An IWW soapbox…

Jeffrey Dahmer in search of a date….

I think of you, Walt, caring for soldiers during the war, talking to them, patting their foreheads.

I think of you after your stroke—that homemade

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wheelchair a cosmos, a starred infinity.

And I think of those old-school librarians at the hospital in this time of the virus, fully decked out in PPE, their plastic hands as blue as the sky or a body on ice.

Look at them attending to their books, which die without readers beside them.

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ABOUT RALPH JAMES SAVARESE Ralph James Savarese is the author of two books of prose, Reasonable People (Other Press) and See It Feelingly (Duke UP) and two collections of poetry, Republican Fathers (Nine Mile Books) and When This Is Over (Ice Cube Press).

ABOUT THE POEMS These poems come from my most recent collection, which tracks the pandemic from March to July of 2020. In each of them, life as we know it has been profoundly interrupted. We’ve quite literally lost touch with one another.

The first poem found its origin in the odd fact that the material we use for house wrap is also the material we use for personal protective equipment. The second poem links mourners to students: grief becomes a kind of distance learning. And the third poem adopts Walt Whitman’s famous conceit. If he is his book, then in a pandemic the hospital is a kind of library where patients are merely preserved. Poetry, of course, rejects taxidermy. A lover’s art, it asks the senses to discover life, not merely record it.

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Jasmine V. Bailey Nostos I would plough my fields with salt but not my daughter.

Men clever as Palamedes know this is not sanity, but the borders of one madness like a kingdom in the days when every free man had one in the topaz Aegean. Still I sail.

Still the gannets dive and the past is thick as cream with what I’ve lost.

I thought Dan was the beginning and the end of beauty, especially the scars: an egg in hot oil, a car door in Boston.

One browned the shoulder, one bleached the elbow.

I had an inventory. I mistook angels for birds, but birds don’t sigh.

I fly above myself— I see a brown head cradling What is destined to be lost.

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Middle Age He does not sleep on a blanket of dandelions, but among piled shoes, thread-girdled books.

His dreams fill the room with East Germany; he is a Jew again and for the first time.

Let him sleep until democracy is consolidated— I want the night to last.

Texas and Mexico argue in wisdom statements whiskey makes true.

To listen to Dan breathe is a good alternative to heaven.

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St. Apollonia after the painting attributed to Piero della Francesca Tooth by tooth the grim truth of man repeats itself like a stutterer.

Sentenced to accuse, you invoke the fist that tore your mouth, reprove the torturer so easily produced in men.

Hold the tooth like a bone that’s pierced the surface of the ground after a storm, like a phone that blazes a wrong name.

There is no weekend where you are, the gardens granite-coiffed.

The gold leaf cracks your robe as if to remind us God once noticed bodies.

Who else could fit teeth so tightly in the jaw, sew the gums so flush that man would have to conjure iron to undo them?

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Abdullah, You Don’t Know the First Thing about Saad I asked Abdullah what Saad was like when he was young. He said, “He was…a little more beautiful.”

—from the notes of Susan Brind Morrow For to startle Saad at night is to trip into a fire.

For casting a rock Saad fells a bird for dinner.

For Saad is made of dust and shall have a son splendid as Joseph.

For Saad runs in the sudden rain turning each drop to jasmine.

For his grin is a gazelle a great cat has just given up.

For Saad sings when he thinks himself alone.

For Saad is private, a tent around a world.

For Saad sips lemonade at dusk.

For Saad makes coffee more slowly than a saint.

For his fingers are strings tuned by the Red Sea, which studies him.

For his eyes are two fossils sent by the Sea’s great memory.

For the beloved only surpasses.

For love, like Jacob, wrestles the crookedness out of truth.

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Texas Journal The plain summer gloom is common to all towns children can’t drive from.

Wind-split grackles batter pecans and day Lasts so long we don’t know when to eat.

Night catches in the wind like the gone Indians’ breath.

We sleep so we can kiss someone else.

Travel happens like windfall or measles—I step out onto some street in Washington, DC I never cared for, like every other street in Washington. Or Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City lays before me like a question Burt Lancaster couldn’t bring himself to ask Susan Sarandon, and the hot rods and hookers and Dairy Queen mean something true as the Second Amendment.

We are not tired generally but of betrayal.

The time zone that ruled me is distant, exotic, but how small the country felt laying states under our tires. For a long time a town of five thousand in South Jersey had to suffice for everything I could want. Time loosens its belt like it’s eaten a steak someone named; we let more air than we can breathe stay empty.

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ABOUT JASMINE V. BAILEY Jasmine V. Bailey is the author of Alexandria, Disappeared and the chapbook Sleep and What Precedes It. She has been an Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University, a Fulbright Fellow in Argentina, and a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. She won the Michigan Quarterly Review's 2019 Laurence Goldstein Prize and the 2020 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize from Ruminate Magazine. Her translation of Silvina Lopez Medin’s second book, That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

ABOUT THE POEMS “Nostos” The title refers to a collection of mostly-lost epic poems telling the stories of the homecomings of the heroes of the Trojan War, of which The Odyssey is one. The first stanza riffs on the story of how Odysseus is finally made to enlist with Agamemnon, and in the second stanza I introduce the character Dan, my husband in real life, who will appear again in the next poem.

“Middle Age” Portraying men as objects of sexual and romantic longing in poetry is something I’ve long been interested in. Exercising that gaze, one to another, and exploring what love feels like, how it’s at once about someone else and also really about you, is a premise of good love poems.

“St. Apollonia” This is an ekphrastic poem about one of a group of so-called “virgin martyrs” who suffered appalling violence in order to maintain their virginity, for which they were sainted. Apollonia had all her teeth broken or removed. The moral of these early Church stories too often seems to be that all paths for women on earth are violent: rape on one side, torture on another. God’s grace rarely seems interested in preventing their suffering, only in preserving their chastity.

“Abdullah, You Don’t Know the First Thing about Saad” I spent a semester researching the notes of several environmental writers in Texas Tech’s Sowell Collection, including those of Susan Brind Morrow. In

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some of the notes pertaining to The Names of Things, her memoir about her time in Egypt and Sudan, she mentions asking one of her guides, Abdullah, about his brother, Saad. It’s clear, between the book and the notes, that she was very much taken with Saad. I wrote this poem in the voice of someone who is in love with Saad and takes offense at the idea that his beauty could be impugned, even to point out that he was once lovelier.

“Texas Journal” The voice in this poem is half my own, half imagined, written in the first months after I moved to Lubbock, TX to finish graduate school. The desolation of the area, the unique and extreme weather, and the sheer heat made a strong impression on me. I thought often about the Comanche, who had been eliminated from West Texas through the genocidal policies of nineteenth century western expansion. Their nomadic, hunting-based way of life had kept the plains grasses intact, and once European Americans settled in West Texas, they cleared those grasses that had held the sandy soil in place. This was the original act responsible for the constant dust in the air.

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Rayne O’Brian Things Fall Apart Cornbread crumbles in my hand dropping yellow pollen in the hollows of the bacon Fading roses escorted to the sink, loose a path of petals to the floor Wait!

Don’t be quick to sweep— Once flowers sprang everywhere the Buddha stepped Here’s the thing Hens lay eggs It’s what they do Things fall apart It’s what they do Beauty wept on the battlefield but stayed to tend the light Goya knew So lift your fiddle to your chin Mourn with Lorca Walk with Whitman Now help me with this what shall I wear to dine with Baudelaire

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To dance with Dante, Kabir and Keats still singing Guests of the Beast

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Walking Without A Dog I do not have my dog this year so I've taken to the Grand Ideas for my best company They behave the same in many ways The Idea bounds ahead of me then races back and circles crowned in golden burrs One should touch the earth, said Rilke like the first man Worn soles learn the shapes of stones, the suck of mud My bare feet will part the grass scrape coarse lichen And we will walk, Rilke and I through cherry blossoms and falling snow Past the delta, past the dunes dropping the garments of thought until it's awe ─ and nothing else Like the first man

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ABOUT RAYNE O’BRIAN Rayne O’Brian lives near the Golden Gate Bridge in a yellow Victorian with her two long-haired dictionaries.

ABOUT THE POEMS Deep in the forest, have you ever met a deer you share a gaze and before he can bolt away you’d give anything if he would stay?

Then give it Melt. Lose your outline Turn in your insignia of identity the lichen of opinion, the motley of an” I Where you once were the deer will enter lie down in the lilac shadow of your breath Scent of cedar rises Taste of bark and blackberrry on your tongue I think a poem can be written in this way

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Rene Char During his lifetime René Char (1907–1988) was regarded by critics and the public as France's greatest living poet. Like many of his colleagues, he was also a warrior in World war II, serving as an heroic member of the French Resistance under the name of Captain Alexandre in charge of seven departments or sectors, from the Drome to the Alpes Maritimes, overseeing a huge stock of weapons and explosives.

His early work, from the 1920’s to the late 1930’s, was primarily surrealist, in company with such friends and colleagues as Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, André Breton, and René Crevel. His work often appeared with artwork by such figures as Kandinsky, Picasso, Braque, Miró, Matisse and Vieira da Silva.

He refused to publish during the Occupation, but wrote the “Feuillets d’Hypnos” during 1943–1944, prose poems dealing with resistance that were published to acclaim in 1946. His full poetic maturity came in the 1950s and 1960s. He wrote twenty books of poetry during his lifetime.

He died of a heart attack in 1988 in Paris. He often quoted Neitzsche: “I have always put in my writings my whole life and my whole person. I don't know what purely intellectual problems might be.”

He was a friend of Albert Camus, and was to have been a passenger in the car accident that killed both Camus and Michel Gallimard, but fortunately for him, there was not enough room in the car for all of them, and he returned instead that day by train to Paris.

The poems here are from his great work, Fureur et mystère (1948), Fury and Mystery, which demonstrate the sense of loss and discontinuity which are so much a part of Char’s work. The poem “The Swift” is from the last section of Fury and Mystery, titled The Narrative Fountain; “House of the Eldest” is from the first section of the book, They Remain Alone; “The Window” is from a later collection, The Hammer With No Master; and “The Secret Lover” is from another later writing, The Morning Ones.

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The final poem, “The Library is on Fire,” is titled after a code phrase for a parachute drop of supplies to Char’s resistance fighters. When one of the containers exploded, setting fire to the first and nearly revealing the position of the group, Char contacted his superiors, insisting that the words be changed. The fire, he insisted, showed that language had a power that could change the world: “I believe in the magic and in the authority of words,” he said. “The Library is on Fire” was written immediately after the war and contains beautiful descriptions of poetry and the act of writing: “How did writing come to me? Like a bird’s down on my window in winter. Immediately arose a battle of embers in the hearth that has not ended.” The first stanza talks abbott the importance of poetry in our modern world of war and horrors: “Through the muzzle of this cannon it snows. It was hell in our heads. Meanwhile, it’s spring at our fingertips. It’s a way of walking that is allowed again, the earth in love, the exuberant grass.”

Char’s work has been translated by many poets, including William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, Richard Wilbur, James Wright, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, Cid Corman, Gustaf Sobin, Kevin Hart (poet) and Paul Auster. Translators into German have included Paul Celan and Peter Handke. Translators into Bulgarian include Georgi Mitzkov and Zlatozar Petrov.

—Bob Herz

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The Swift The swift with its too wide wings turns and shouts joy around the house. Such is the heart.

He parches the thunder. He sows in the quiet sky. He breaks if he touches the ground.

His other is the swallow. He hates her familiarity. What worth is that lace from the tower?

He pauses in the darkest hollow. No one is more contained than him.

In the long light of summer he slips into shadow through midnight shutters.

No eyes can hold him. His presence is all in his cries. The smallest rifle shoots him down. Such is the heart.

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House of the Eldest Between the curfew of the year and the tree’s thrill at the window.

You have interrupted your giving. The grass water-flower surrounds a face. At the threshold of night the forest welcomes the persistence of your illusions.

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The Window Pure rains, expected women, The face you wipe, This glass bound to torment, Is the face of revolt; The other, the happy glass, Shivers before the wood fire.

I love you twin mysteries, I touch each of you; I am in pain and I am light.

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The Secret Lover She has set the table perfectly so that her lover seated opposite will soon speak low, watching her. This food similar to the reed of an oboe.

Beneath the table, her bare ankles caress the loved one’s heat, while unheard voices compliment her. The light of the lamp entangles, weaving a sensual distraction.

She knows that there is a bed far away that is patient and trembling in an exile of fragrant sheets, like a mountain lake that will never be abandoned.

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The Library Is On Fire To George Braque Through the muzzle of this cannon it snows. It was hell in our heads.

Meanwhile, it’s spring at our fingertips. It’s a way of walking that is allowed again, the earth in love, the exuberant grass.

The mind too, like everything else, trembles.

The eagle is in the future.

Any action which engages the soul, even if the soul doesn’t know about it, will have as its epilogue repentance or sorrow. You have to agree to it.

How did writing come to me? Like a bird’s down on my window, in winter. Immediately rose a battle of embers in the hearth that has not ended.

Silky cities of daily gaze, inserted among other cities, with streets traced only by us, under a wing of lightning that responds to our attentions.

Everything in us should only be a joyous feast when something is accomplished that we have not foreseen, that we shed no light on, which will speak to our heart, by its own means.

Let’s continue to sound our probes, to speak in an even voice, grouping the words, we will end up silencing all these dogs, by getting them to merge with the grass, watching us with a smoky eye, while the wind will wash away their backs.

The lightning lasts me.

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of the old desert so that I triumph over it. No other. No heavens, no privileged land, nothing to tremble.

Torch, I only waltz with that one.

You can not begin a poem without a bit of error about oneself and the world, without a straw of innocence from the first words.

In a poem, almost every word must be employed in its original sense.

Some words detach themselves, acquire many meanings. They are amnesiacs. The constellation of Solitaire is tense.

Poetry will steal my death from me.

Why pulverized poetry? Because at the end of its journey to the Country, after the pre-natal obscurity and hardness of the land, the end of the poem is light, bringing beingness to life.

The poet does not retain what he discovers; having transcribed it, he soon loses it. In this lies its novelty, its infinity, and its peril.

My job is the cutting edge.

We are born with men, we die unconsoled among gods.

The earth that receives the seed is sad. The seed about to risk so much is happy.

There is a curse unlike any other. She twirls in a kind of laziness, has a comely nature, a face composed of reassuring features. But what buoyancy, past the deception, what an immediate race to the end!

Probably, because the shadow is malignant where it is hung, the region perfectly secret, it will evade a name, always escaping in time. It draws in the veil of the sky of some clairvoyants of terrifying parables.

Books without movement. But books that fit smoothly in our days, making a complaint, beginning the dances and balls.

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How to speak of my freedom, my surprise, at the end of a thousand detours: there is no bottom, no ceiling.

Sometimes the silhouette of a young horse, of a distant child, scout toward my forehead and jump the bar of my concern. Then under the trees the fountain speaks again.

We wish to remain unknown to the curiosity of those who love us.

Those we love.

Light has an age. Night has none. But what was the moment of this source?

Not to have more dead hanging and like snow. To have just one, of honorable sand. And no resurrection.

Let’s stop near the ones who may cut themselves off from their resources, it’s good that there is little or no withdrawal for them. The wait leaves them dizzying with insomnia. Beauty poses them in a flower hat.

Birds, entrusting your grace, your perilous sleep to a bunch of reeds, when the cold comes, how we much we resemble you!

I admire the hands that fill, and, to match, to join, the finger that refuses the bet.

I sometimes realize that it is difficult to seize the current of our existence, because we not only endure its capriciousness, but also the easy movement of the arms and legs which want to take us to where we would be happy to go, to a coveted shore, where we would meet loves whose strange otherness would enrich us, but this is a movement that remains unfulfilled, quickly declining into little more than an image, like the passing of a scent in our mind.

Desire, desire that knows, we take advantage of our darkness only from a few real sovereignties matched with invisible flames, invisible

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chains, which, revealing themselves, step by step, make us shine.

Beauty makes its sublime bed all alone, strangely acquiring fame among men, next to them but apart.

Let us sow reeds and cultivate vineyards on hillsides, at the edge of our mental wounds. Cruel fingers, careful hands, this facetious place is favorable.

The one who invents, unlike the one who discovers, adds nothing to things, brings to beings nothing but masks, compromises, iron mush.

The end of life, when I snatch the sweetness of your loving truth from your depths!

Stay close to the cloud. Take care near the tool. All seed is hated.

Benefit of men on some shrill mornings. In the swarming air of delirium, I climb, I lock myself in, an insect undeveloped, followed and following.

Facing these waters, of hard shapes, where all the flowers of the green mountain pass in bursting bouquets, the Hours marry gods.

Fresh sun of which I am the vine.

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Book Reviews The More Extravagant Feast by Leah Naomi Green Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, 2019 (Graywolf Press, 2020) Has it become cliché to say that this is a hard moment? But it is a hard moment, and hard moments call for extraordinary poetry, poetry that lifts our spirit, helps us breathe, and reminds us that our world will heal, that most people are kind and generous, that we are on Earth to love one another and help one another and be with one another.

Leah Naomi Green writes just such extraordinary poetry in her debut full-length collection The More Extravagant Feast, which Li-Young Lee selected as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. Lyrical and lush and fully rooted in nature, this book is the salve we need for our hard moment. I read it in one hungry gulp, intending to read just a few poems before moving on with my day, and finding myself, instead, immersed, savoring poem after poem until I reached the end of the book and then started again from the beginning.

Take the poem that opens the book, “Field Guide to the Chaparral,” which begins: The fire beetle only mates when the chaparral is burning and the water beetle will only mate in the rain.

In the monastery kitchen, the nuns don’t believe me when I tell them how old I am,

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that you were married before.

The woman you find attractive does not believe me when I look at her kindly.

There are candescent people in the world.

It will only be love that I love you with.

There is so much to appreciate in these words, but what continues to strike me the most is the word candescent, which means (I learned) glowing with heat instead of the more familiar incandescent, which refers to the emitting of light. This may seem like a subtle difference, but Green’s use of candescent shapes the entire poem; indeed, the entire book.

Green’s poems glow with the heat of pregnancy and childbirth, relationships, and our intimate connection to the cyclical nature of life on Earth. She writes poems about almost dying in childbirth, about killing deer and harvesting it for food, about Einstein and understanding the universe, about nursing a child, about losing a grandparent, about gardening. Birth and death are ever-present themes, as in the poem, “CSection” which combines the story of a difficult birth with the story of how humans came to know that Earth was round.

The speaker labors for 31 hours to birth her child; Green writes, “your believing head wedged/ where I was trying to open.” And mariners are the first to understand the Earth was not flat; Green writes, “It would have been difficult // to believe: the curvature of the earth, / but some did.” This connection between the curvature of Earth and the curvature of a woman’s birthing body comes to a crescendo in the final three stanzas of the poem: I believed at least one of us must know the way, your helpless body unable

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to escape my helpless body, or appear beyond the curve. Your bare and tiny shoulders would have stilled the waves.

Wowza. That’s all I can think to say. I feel those last lines deeply in my body, in the best possible way. And this book has so many moments like that when I needed to pause and reflect, consider, reconsider, relish the moment, when the poems resonated deeply in my own body, in part because these poems are so firmly grounded in the body.

Take one more of my favorite poems, “Hashem,” a Hebrew term for God. The poem begins, “October came and the air lifted up, / unstuck itself from the roads, / from our backs.” What a way to describe fall, as the unstucking of sweat from our backs. The poem ends: All I have is air, and I’ve made none of it.

Held together by holding, by not holding; small lungs that breathe by breathing.

I love this image of God and our bodies: that we survive by not holding, by breathing air that we have no hand in making.

It is no wonder that Green won a poetry prize named after Walt Whitman: his writing infuses these poems in the breadth and depth of Green’s subject matter. Like Whitman, Green’s work “contains multitudes.” And like Whitman, Green doesn’t shy away from the hardest moments of our lives, while insisting that even when things are their hardest, there is so much gratitude, there is so much light.

—Andrea Scarpino

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’IRL (2016), Nature Poem (2017), Junk (2018) and Feed (2019),

by Tommy Pico

The first thing I should say about Tommy Pico’s poetry is that I love it unabashedly. In part because it is unabashed: unapologetically political and personal, raw and tender, heartbreaking, funny, unafraid, experimental. It looks to the past and to the future while also being fully of the present moment.

IRL (2016), Nature Poem (2017), Junk (2018) and Feed (2019) are considered a tetralogy, which is a word I had to look up: a “compound work made up of four distinct works” (according to Wikipedia). And they are four distinct works, but they are also so fully linked, they speak so fully to one another, that it is possible to move in and out and through each book and into the next with ease. Pico’s poetry tackles queer dating and desire, what it means to be a Kumeyaay person living in Brooklyn, religion, food, music, American history, the origins of the universe, the potential for extraterrestrial life, pop culture; if you can think it, Pico probably discusses it somewhere in these four books. And after reading all four, I dare you not to feel like Tommy Pico is your best friend.

IRL, which won the 2017 Brooklyn Library Literary Prize, is written as a long text message or a series of text messages (IRL is text speak for “in real life”). It is described on the book’s back cover as a “sweaty summertime poem” and it does often feel sweaty, like a rush of desire, but it is deeper than that, tackling the extermination and forced assimilation of indigenous people, American stereotypes of “Indians,” who is allowed to tell what stories, and what muses a poet can find in the 21 Century.

It is challenging to excerpt Pico’s work because it is so expansive, but here is a section I particularly like: st

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It’s summer, I think, and I hate nature bc every poem is like Poplars and Bunch Grasses and Peonies and shit, but the East River is ambling outside my window like holding hands with Stevie Nicks: so beautiful right, but also deafening, and kinda scary, and I feel small online and in real life bc there’s my body and then there’s your body, and I don’t think anybody’s coming over tonight.

There is text speak (“bc” for “because” for example), and a pop culture reference to Stevie Nicks, and deep longing to connect. And there is such a beautiful rhythm to Pico’s lines: they amble like the East River, and I love the rhymes of “life” and “tonight,” “body” and “anybody’s.”

Nature Poem, which won a 2018 American Book Award, grapples with how a Kumeyaay NDN (as Pico describes himself) can write about nature in the 21 Century, when “nature” has been stereotypically identified with indigenous people and used by white culture to oppress and silence them. Identity is at the heart of this book.

Although the frenetic pulse of the lines is similar to IRL, the format of Nature Poem is different: there are many smaller sections, and the lines spread longer across the page. Here is an excerpt: st

I wd say how far I am from my mountains, tell you why I carry Kumeyaay basket designs on my body, or how freakishly routine it is to hear someone died but I don’t want to be an identity or a belief or a feedback. I wanna b

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me. I want to open my arms like winning a foot race and keep my stories to myself, I tell my audience.

Do you feel the heartbreak in these lines? Do you see the subtle humor and complexity of telling an audience you don’t what to share your stories?

Pico changes his line to long couplets for Junk, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Moving through the many ways we use the word “junk” including junk food, space junk, and a nickname for male anatomy, this is a breakup poem to the junk of our lives, including capitalism, consumption, and white supremacy. Here is an excerpt: First things first: get out of bed Another black man shot by police Another missing woman in Indian country Another trans person discovered by the roadside Another mass shooting They pile like stones and overtake the poem Resist wanting to burn it all down Native basket grasses paperwhites mint and irises elderberry and honeysuckle A bunch of baby oak trees Yes, these are hard lines to read. And they have such music; there is such loveliness in their sounds. The lack of punctuation between sentences helps the lines race forward, and help us to understand that every moment is connected to other moments, every image informs the next.

I haven’t yet excerpted much of Pico’s humor—and he is very funny at times—so here are the first two stanzas of Pico’s fourth book, Feed: Me n Leo yakkity yak yak’d about writer’s block and the starchy long stroke of quote unquote God on the Meadow Walk and he didn’t know I was fully head over banana peels I mean in Kiehl’s I mean in straight up crappy love with him yet and maybe I didn’t

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either? Sand crabs poking their bodies & legs post wave Hindsight is Good & Plenty I mean 20/20 clearly the worst American candy And what is candy, but a crush?

Setting aside the fact that Good & Plenty is my favorite candy, these lines make me laugh when I read them, the playfulness of “peels” and “Kiehl’s” that undermines the expected “head over heels,” and the final moment, “what is candy, but a crush?” which somehow feels so true, while also bringing to mind the popular game Candy Crush. Pico’s word play is so sharp and his leaps from idea to idea so agile, I find myself reading breathlessly to keep up.

And Feed might be my favorite of his tetralogy: it is chaotic and hungry and musical and vulnerable and raw and deeply political. It is about food and food history and how much is lost when a culture loses its recipes. It is about Beyoncé. It is about the selves we create for others and the selves we know we really are. It is about taking in the world, the whole world, with all its beauty and horror. It is a poet showing off his skills in the best possible way.

—Andrea Scarpino

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Carrie Shipers’ Grief Land (University of New Mexico Press, 2020) Full disclosure: Carrie Shipers is my dear friend, a poet I met my first year in graduate school with whom I have exchanged writing for years. Our telephone calls can stretch for hours. I knew her husband Randal and loved him. I met her father once, at graduation, and heard stories about him for years.

In Grief Land, her fourth collection of poems, Shipers writes about Randal dying not even three months after her father, and about grieving itself, the painful ways we move through the world after unbearable loss. And also, how we do bear loss. Even though it feels impossible to survive, we survive it. In Shipers’ book, we still walk the dog, go to work, take our car to the mechanic, take out the trash. Sometimes we feel rage. Sometimes we find humor.

One of the things I love most about Grief Land is how Shipers gives grief its own physical presence, turning an amorphous, abstract feeling into concrete places and things we all understand: an amusement park, a terrible roommate, an office where no one wants to work.

Let’s look at the title poem of the collection, “Grief Land,” where Shipers imagines grief as the worst possible amusement park or carnival, a place where “Admission/ costs more than you’d thought” and “you crave cotton candy,/ funnel cake, corn dogs striped with yellow mustard you drip on your shirt.” But this isn’t your county ordinary fair: “Inside the gates, the landscape you remember/ has been changed” and “In place of a photo booth, a funhouse full of foggy mirrors.”

I love how these descriptions do double duty, so perfectly describing a day at the fair and how different the world feels when we’re grieving.

We may take the same road home as we’ve always taken, but in grief, it looks like a different road. When we catch a glimpse of ourselves in a mirror, we look distorted and not-quite as we looked before.

Later in the poem, Shipers writer: The longer your day at Grief Land lasts,

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the more unease you feel among the smeary clowns, groundskeepers trailing smoke as they sweep up debris. Your feet and knees are sore, but even when you find a place to sit you can’t keep still— you need one more thing to make your trip complete, and only walking will remind you what it is.

And here is a central tension of the book: the longer we grieve, the stranger we feel in the world, the more our body aches, the more we forget how we once lived without grief. But leaving grief also means leaving behind the people we’ve lost as our new lives continue without them. We know it’s not good for us to stay in Grief Land forever, but leaving can feel just as hard as staying. And we know, just as we’ll return again to a carnival, we’ll return again to grief. As Shipers ends this poem, “Grief Land/ may not be your favorite place, but no one stays away for good.”

The backbone of Grief Land is a series of letters, some written to famous people who have also written about grief, including Joan Didion, Mark Doty, and Sheryl Sandburg, others written to her husband or directly to grief. Shipers writes a holiday letter, a letter in which she contemplates a malpractice suit against the hospital that treated Randal, and a birthday letter to herself. These letters help the book feel like a conversation about grief with many perspectives and voices sharing their thoughts. It’s clear through these poems that Shipers has done her homework, studying grief as a writer and researcher while also experiencing it as a daughter and wife. Take this final stanza from the poem “Dear Atul Gawande,” (Gawande is a physician who writes about improving medicine): Atul, if I asked you to review my husband’s case, the narrative I’ve lived with for a year, it wouldn’t be because I want to sue, blame myself more than I already do. I’ll probably always struggle with uncertainty, wonder what went wrong and why

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I didn’t know. But even if you couldn’t answer everything, I trust you’d tell me which skills I should improve so I don’t fail my next test, too.

I love this moment so much. It’s heartbreaking and vulnerable. It perfectly encapsulates the uncertainty and questions many of us feel after a loved one dies. And it’s so practical, a speaker trying to learn from her loss in the desperate hope that her learning will help her avoid the next loss.

“Dear Atul Gawande” is one of many poems in Grief Land that should be mandatory reading for medical professionals. In “Narrative Medicine,” Shipers writes, “It bothered me when people at the hospital/ misunderstood my husband’s story” and “I couldn’t stop the staff// from hearing what they wanted to.” As someone with a lifetime of intimate experiences with medicine, I relate so much to feeling doctors aren’t actually hearing what I’m trying to say. In “Teaching Hospital,” Shipers writes, “In the ICU, the students came in flocks/ so large the white wings of their coats/ obscured my husband’s bed. The patterns/ of their flights were unpredictable.” What a wonderful and perfect description of the way doctors move through a hospital, always on their own schedule.

I love too many poems in this collection to quote from them all, but here are a few more. In the poem, “The angry widows,” Shipers writes: The angry widows don’t want therapy. Support groups make them spit. They hate hot baths, candles, and anything designed to increase mindfulness. Their minds are what they wish they could escape.

YES! I love the anger seeping through these lines at the conventional advice given to those who are grieving. I love the raw honesty of “Their minds/ are what they wish they could escape.” I have felt that exact feeling so many times without having the language to describe it.

In the poem, “My dead husband,” Shipers writes of Randal,

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Although his size could make him seem intimidating, he made friends everywhere because he was so kind. He’d love that people talk about his jokes, how warm his smile was. He wouldn’t want me to point out that sometimes he was lonely too, loaded down with worries he only told to me. My dead husband had amazing legs.

I love the rhythm and sounds of these lines, and how beautifully they create a portrait of a multifaceted person who “lost his keys/ and temper”, “clipped coupons/ and read the grocery ad, kept a notebook/ of products I used.” There is such generosity in Shipers’ descriptions, such pain in attempting to show the reader this whole, multifaceted person she lost, such deep belief in the power and heartache of remembering.

And that is another strength of this collection. Shipers doesn’t turn away from the people she’s lost or the pain of those losses. She doesn’t sugarcoat. She doesn’t reframe anything into an opportunity for growth.

She allows her heartbreak to fill the page. She asks us to consider if we ever leave grief, if it ever leaves us. She holds her memories, her grief, her love for her father and husband up to the light. She allows her readers to share in them. And that is a gift I’m so grateful to have.

—Andrea Scarpino

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Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century by Alice Wong Writing as a poet let me venture that our understanding of tears, their history, or put more darkly our suppression of them is the paramount subject now in America. White people who either do not understand the tears of Blacks and indigenous peoples or they willfully suppress knowledge of them, which gets me to my point: confederate statues are engines to aid white people quash tears. When another statue comes down I say, “there goes another tear quelling appliance.”

In the disability community where great literature has been steadily rising for over two decades we’ve seen a potent reckoning with tear crushing, not as victimization, the tabloid weeping of television talk shows, but tough, ironic, edgy poetry and prose about the true histories of cripples. There are so many excellences. Check out Molly McCully Brown’s collection of poems, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded. (I’ve not yet read her new collection of essays Places I’ve Taken My Body but it’s on my short list.)

Consider now an extraordinary new anthology edited by Alice Wong entitled Disability Visibility: First Person Stories for the Twenty-first Century. The disabled are not supposed to cry; we’re supposed to be inspirational; the ghost of Tiny Tim haunts every person who walks with a cane, rolls in a chair, navigates with a guide dog. Yet poets and literary non-fiction writers bring forward righteous cries, howls, odd giddy laughter that unsettles, yawps, and sing of ardor and truth.

This book holds so many awakened voices and is so expertly edited you’ll turn its pages (or screen read with your talking tablet) in a readerly condition of glory. One has this with great literature. “At last someone has said this!”

There are so many treasures in the book I fear I’ll overlook some while typing on my talking computer. I say read the entire book. Give it to friends. Buy several copies. (A trick I’ve had for years is to buy extra copies of poetry volumes and leave the on bus seats.) (This is what I do instead of giving to the United Way.) Volume 8 No 1 - Page 125

Consider Ellen Samuels essay “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time” (what could be more apt for a pandemic struck nation?) where she writes: Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get. The medical language of illness tries to reimpose the linear, speaking in terms of the chronic, the progressive, and the terminal, of relapses and stages. But we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear, and we rage silently—or not so silently—at the calm straightforwardness of those who live in the sheltered space of normative time.

As a guide dog traveler I’m invariably “out” of time and I spent years lamenting it until after reading Samuels I understood that time keeping is simply another instrument of industrial life, normalcy written on human bodies, a kind of scarring. But despite the predations of time the disabled can now imagine their own futures. Leah Lakshmi PiepznaSamarasinha writes: Yet as disabled people, we know that one of our biggest gifts is the Mad, sick, disabled, Deaf dreams we are always dreaming and have always been dreaming, way beyond what we are allowed to dream. Not in the inspiration-porn way that’s the only way many abled people can imagine that disabled-people dream of “not letting disability stop us!” Wanting to walk or see or be “normal” above all costs, being a supercrip or an inspiration but never human. I’m talking about the small, huge, everyday ways we dream crip revolutions, which stretch from me looking at myself in the mirror—disheveled and hurting on day five of a major pain flare and saying, You know what, I’m not going to hate you today —to making disabled homes, disabled kinship, and community networks and disabled ways of loving, fighting, and organizing

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that not even the most talented abled could in a million years dream up.

“What we are allowed to dream” is a resonance, a revolution, and it stands behind every poem and literary essay in the book. Consider the Harriet Tubman Collective’s assertion “that any struggle against white supremacy must also address all of its interrelated flaws—including ableism and audism.” Or consider this from Patty Berne, as told to and edited by Vanessa Raditz, on disability, queerness, and eco-systems: “Let’s start by openly, joyously proclaiming that we are natural beings, not aberrations of nature. We find healing and justice in the realm of queer ecology, a burgeoning field exploring the vast diversity of gender and sexuality that exists in nature, such as the more than fifty species of coral reef fish that undergo one or more sex transitions in their lifetime, completely transforming their behaviors, bodies, and even reproductive organs.

When we begin to see the planet through this lens, we remember that the entire world has biodiversity that is precious, necessary for our survival, and deeply threatened. Whether we’re looking at ecology, society, or our human culture, diversity is our best defense against the threats of climate change.”

Wong’s stunning anthology gives us the true meaning of the ADA@30.

We grieve, imagine, deconstruct the old, create spaces for the new.

Speaking as a disabled man I’m a walking sign. It doesn’t say panic but it does say “this man will upend acquired habits and may cause headaches, cramps, even some dizziness.” The waitress leans in close to my wife who seems normal enough and with a nod in my direction says: “what will he be having?” I haven’t even opened my mouth and I’m a crank as my presence upsets custom and in most settings custom is what passes for belief.

Disability is implicitly an overturning of practice which means it’s suspect and maybe it’s worse than that because it forces a revision of actual behavior. People living without disabilities, at least temporarily, genuinely dislike this.

Small wonder I love this book so much. Equally small wonder that the ADA@30 matters so much.

—Stephen Kuusisto

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The Nightmare of History: Notes on Carolyn Forché’s The Angel of History 1./Origins When I was in Beirut it was a very difficult time. It was the winter of ’83–’84. We came under shell fire. One night I was in the basement listening to all the explosions. After that night, for awhile I felt that my mind was behaving as a kaleidoscope: I couldn’t sustain a thought the same way, and when I wrote, I couldn’t sustain the speaker on the page. It was a kind of staccato rapid firing of images, perceptions, and memories in my consciousness —all the time. I thought, to my horror, that it was going to last forever, and that’s how I was going to be. It didn’t last forever, but while it was happening, I decided that since I couldn’t stop it, I would set it to paper, that I would work with it, rather than against it—write my way out of it. The breaking up of the language in The Angel of History started because I was writing in that mental state. Everything was kind of swirling around, so I thought I will make something with this broken glass; I will glue it together, because if I don’t do that I won’t be able to do anything.

—Carolyn Forché, interview in Under a Warm Green Linden in 2009 (https://www.greenlindenpress.com/carolyn-Forche´): Rereading Carolyn Forché’s stunning The Angel of History now, a quarter-century after its appearance, the sense of originality and authenticity duplicated my first experience, and its other aesthetic virtues showed more clearly, including the clarity, control, and unstrained musics of its poems. Also showing more clearly was the poem’s humanity, its neediness to be recognized as a human voice in a created vehicle, and its demonstration of itself as a poem the poet needed to make for her own survival as a poet and as a person. I felt again the press of her ambition and voice—and to be honest, also of her desperation—come together in ways I would not have predicted from her prior work. The title poem and the book that includes it are her best work, the brilliant response of great talent confronting great disorder.

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Clearly, it cost her a lot to write it, and clearly, it was a necessary effort.

As she says about writing the book in the interview quote above, she thought if I don’t do that I won’t be able to do anything.

She has acknowledged the emergence of this unwilled happenstance in two places: her description of the personal experience that ripped her from saner moorings during her time in Beirut, as in the quote above; and a description of the aesthetic and philosophical change in her work, described in the book’s notes: The Angel of History is not about experiences. It is for me the opening of a wound, the muffling and silence of a decade, and it is also a gathering of utterances that have lifted away from the earth and wrapped it in a weather of risen words. These utterances issue from my own encounter with the events of this century but do not represent “it.” The first-person, free-verse, lyric-narrative poem of my earlier years has given way to a work which has desired its own bodying forth: polyphonic, broken, haunted, and in ruins, with no possibility of restoration.

Not a history of things as was, she says here, but a selective engagement with particular histories, memories of the poet and of others mixed, a poetic and memorial Rorschach. Her shattering personal experience incarnated and initiated the broader public statement which was channeled through her and formed itself into many voices.

This is made-history at two removes, the first in the way that any poem that recounts a memory defines less what the memory is than what it could be—for the poem we read is not the record of the event as actually lived through or quietly remembered or as told shortly after, but a thing made new by being shaped to fit the teller’s form. And second, this already-transformed instance now appears in a medium different from its original, consisting not of thought or mental or spoken images, but of words and symbols on a page; the lived events, recreated and transformed, become the fixed written presentation. As she says, the book is “a gathering of utterances that have lifted away from the earth and wrapped it in a weather of risen words. These utterances issue from my own encounter with the events of this century but do not represent ‘it.’”

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Her note presents this process less as the result of the poet’s desire or will than as the book’s necessity and the voice’s need. Her earlier voice has given way, she says, to this new work, which has desired its own bodying forth: The book’s truth is in its self-created process. She doesn’t write these poems—given their terms, how could she? The poems are rather presented as a gathering of utterances, a phrase that describes the poet’s sole willful act as this gathering-together. The poems arrive with their own fields, and make their own selections and demands in voices new and old. They rehearse their own success as they go along, on terms that reflect the recreated impress of this particular moment, that particular memory, and together create a version of collective memory. The poems are not written, she tells us, not as we think of a writing process, using paper, pen, perhaps a computer-screen: Rather, they are a wound opening, with the implication of something anatomical and painful. It is bloody, she says, in ruins, “with no possibility of restoration.” And yet—here it is, the evidence, the poetry, come before us on the page.

In this essay I want to talk about the creation of the work, insofar as it can be gleaned from Ms. Forché’s comments in various places, and about the origin of the Angel, and to look at some of the themes and modes of the book. The first several sections deal with history, background, and creative process, as I believe that knowledge of these enrich the reading of the poem. After that I touch on ways of reading and responding to the poems using the first section of the book’s title poem. Each poem is a new beginning, of course, but the themes and modes of other sections of this first poem and of the other poems in the book are rehearsed in that beginning instance. These modes draw attention to themselves, insisting that their experience is unique, and also that, however impersonal or public or multi-voiced the presentation may appear, their subject-matter must finally be understood as personal in its telling and in its effects. For that reason, they demand that the reaction to the ways in which suffering and evil are here memorialized must also be personal and moral, a full confrontation by the full human self. One of the modes used to realize this demand is the splintering of time and space, making the past present and the scene of horror present everywhere, and thus to force our hands into a wound that can never be

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closed—to make that penetration the price of the confrontation, the description of a debt that can never be paid.

2. /The Angel The Angel first appears as “Angelus Novus” (“New Angel”), the subject of a 1920 monoprint oil transfer from watercolor by Paul Klee, which was purchased in 1921 by the German Jewish philosopher and literary critic, Walter Benjamin. Two decades later, Benjamin used the Angel figure in his 1940 “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” an influential and controversial critique of historicism, which is, crudely put, a theory that history progresses toward some desirable end point.

The historical materialism of Karl Marx, with its claims of a scientific objectivity whose application leads to a paradisal endpoint, is an example of the historicism criticized in the essay. Benjamin said the historicism theory can win its philosophical competition over other theories only by availing itself of the services of theology, “which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.” He used the analogy of a chessplaying device to show historicism as not science at all but as a quasireligious fraud (the analogy is discussed further below).

The Angel appears in paragraph IX of the essay’s twenty paragraphs, where it is introduced by a segment of a poem: Mein Fliigel ist zum Schwung bereit, icb kebrte gem zuruck, denn blieb ich aucb lebendige Zeit, ich hiitte wenig Gluck.

-Gerhard Scholem, “Gruss vom Angelus”· A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history.

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no

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longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

The translation used by Ms. Forché, which I also use here, is from Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, a collection of essays by Benjamin edited by Hannah Arendt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968).

The poem that introduces the paragraph is by Benjamin’s long-time friend, the philosopher and historian Gerhard Scholem, and is translated in the notes to the book as My wing is ready for flight, I would like to turn back.

If I stayed timeless time, I would have little luck.

Interestingly, Ms. Forché uses only a portion of the paragraph in her book’s epigraph, starting from “This is how one pictures…” I believe the excision is an intentional repositioning of the Angel. In Benjamin’s original, the poem and references to the painting are the paragraph’s starting point. He says that the Angel is “looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history.” He thus gives the Angel an origin, and a point of view, a location, even an expression: “This is how one pictures the angel of history,” he says (emphasis mine). It is only after referencing the picture and invoking the Angel that Benjamin describes the Angel’s relationship to history. Taken together, the reference to the painting, the description, and the introductory poem create an artifice that frames the paragraph and directs our response.

Ms. Forché introduces the Angel but without the poem and the two introductory sentences. This changes the meaning of the sentence she begins with, “This is how one pictures the angel of history.” The artifice of selfhood in Benjamin’s definition is extinguished in favor of treating the angel dynamically, as a metaphysical figure whose self exists in relation to the piled-up calamity which is history. I believe that Ms. Forché’s purpose is to make us see history as calamity and not as artifice,

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to thus dissolve the time and the distance between ourselves and that storm of horrors, and the manner in which she uses the paragraph adumbrates this purpose. There is no resting place, no start, no end, only this dynamic of the horrible, the quotidian nightmare that defines our existence in relation to itself. Importantly, the change also eliminates the otherwise implied suggestion of equivalence between the horrors of Nazi genocide and the events witnessed by the author in her travels, an implication that arises because both important elements are present here without prioritization. The change to emphasize process makes these and other events instances of horror that is endless and ever present, but are not necessarily comparable. If I have understood this correctly, the mischief done to Benjamin’s original structure in this paragraph was done with cause, to make the angel of a piece with the fragmented and dynamic aesthetic and philosophy of horror that her book presents.

3. /More Background Benjamin and Klee were Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany in fear for their lives. Their personal stories ally them with the themes of the poem, as witnesses to and victims of the piling up of calamities that was Nazi Germany. Klee made it to Switzerland with his family in 1933 just as the Gestapo closed in, while Benjamin tragically committed suicide when his 1940 effort to escape to the United States through Spain was blocked.

A member of the Frankfort School, Benjamin was known as a writer of important essays on Baudelaire, Kafka, Goethe, Proust, and others.

He was friends with many prominent intellectuals, including Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukåcs, and Hannah Arendt. Fearing the rise of Nazi power, he moved to Paris for much of the 1930’s, but when Germany stripped Jews of their German citizenship in 1939, he was arrested and incarcerated for three months by the collaborating French government.

He knew from this that his safe refuge was disappearing, and when he was released from jail, he fled Paris in 1940 just a day before German soldiers arrived at his apartment to arrest him. Obtaining a travel visa to America, he planned to embark from Portbou, in Catalonia, but Franco Spain closed the border on the day he arrived, and announced that all emigres would have to return to France. Rather than be repatriated to France, where he was certain to be turned over to Nazi hands, the 48-

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year old Benjamin committed suicide with an overdose of morphine tablets that night, September 26, 1940. His act was premature, as it turned out, for the next day his party was allowed passage, and reached Lisbon four days later.

“Theses on the Philosophy of History” was apparently the last thing Benjamin wrote. He gave it to Hannah Arendt, who took it with her as she fled Paris after the Nazi invasion in 1940, making her way to America in 1941. Though Benjamin had asked that it not be published, his friends in the Frankfurt School, which had supported him for the past decade, decided that the essay was too important to keep private. The School had relocated in 1935 from Germany to New York City, where it joined Columbia University, and where Benjamin hoped to become a member of the faculty. The first printing was as a mimeographed memorial to the author in 1942. It has since been published, translated, and widely commented on in several languages. The essay created interest in his other work, and made him famous.

The originator of the Angel figure, Paul Klee, was a Swiss-born artist who worked in Germany, teaching at Bauhaus and then at the Dusseldorf Academy through the 1920’s and into the early 1930’s. But after being singled out in a Nazi newspaper and having his home searched by the Gestapo in 1933, he emigrated to Switzerland with his family. In Germany, his work was considered “Degenerate Art,” and 102 of his pictures in public collections were seized by the Nazis. He died in 1940, in Switzerland, of scleroderma, a fatal disease that made swallowing very difficult and left him in great pain in his final years.

Klee created “Angelus Novus” during a breakthrough year in his career: In 1920 he had his first large-scale exhibition in Munich, and was about to join the Weimar Bauhaus. He had just completed his artistic credo, “Creative Confession,” in which he set forth his metaphysical perception of reality. The supernatural beings that inhabit Klee’s work— during the last years of his life he created some fifty celestial angels— give a his work a metaphysical context.

“Angelus Novus” was recently found to have an interesting back story. In 2013 the New York artist R. H. Quaytman was invited to do a show at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which includes the Klee work in

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its collections. After two years of research, Quaytman saw something previously unnoticed—that Klee had glued the Angelus Novus monoprint onto an old engraving. The engraving, clearly visible around all four sides of the artwork, hinted at a portrait of a single figure in a black robe made by someone with the initials LC in the 1520’s. She eventually determined that Klee had mounted his image on an 1838 copper-plate engraving by Friedrich Muller after a portrait by Lucas Cranach (1472-1553) of Martin Luther, who, late in life, became an outspoken anti-Semite. We cannot know whether Klee’s choice of the portrait to stand behind his work in what we might consider a gesture of defacement was deliberate; but if not intentional, it at least seems fortuitous.

4./Theories of History Benjamin was a committed Marxist who had lost faith in that doctrine’s historicism. His friend Gerhard Scholem, the author of the poem quoted in the paragraph of the “Theses” essay, considered him a “theologian marooned in the realm of the profane,” a description that seems self-confirmed by the essay’s opening paragraph, which portrays the philosophy of history as a mechanical chess game with a cheat: The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called “historical materialism” is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.

Theology makes an odd figure in this paragraph, where it is portrayed as “a little hunchback” who is an expert at chess but also part of the fraud played on the viewers and participants who challenge the

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chess-playing “automaton.” To trick out the analogy a little further, the puppet is historical materialism, and the expert chess-playing hunchback who must be hidden within it to win is theology. It is easy to understand why the automaton needs the hunchback to win, but what services does Benjamin suggest that “historical materialism” needs that theology can provide? Belief or compelled assent, with or without proof, perhaps is one obvious and vital thing. But I think as important to answering that question is the suggestion given later in the essay. Paragraph B, the final paragraph in the essay, references Jewish mysticism, and suggests that the service historical materialism needs from theology is faith in redemption in some future time through a Messiah: The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty.

Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance—namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.

5./Creative Process We discussed above Ms. Forché’s description of the making of the poem as involving more receptiveness than control, and the way the processes of memory and creation interplay in its making. Interestingly, Benjamin describes a similar process of history seized by memory, in his paragraph VI: To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Perhaps tellingly, Ms. Forché offers a variation of this precept in the opening of one of the sections of her poem: Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an / experience all the way to the end.

During a recent visit to Syracuse, as Ms. Forché discussed the composition of the poem and the book, she referred to her sense of

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presence in the articulation of the past and her compositional sense of danger. Some of what she said tracks her comments in a print interview in Under a Warm Green Linden in 2009 (https:// www.greenlindenpress.com/carolyn-Forche´): …when I had come out of El Salvador, I was not in very good shape, and I was not strong enough for what transpired. So once again, a decade long retreat and the project of the anthology, Against Forgetting, which was really a beautiful experience for me. I was so engaged, and it was such a pleasure to do the research and the reading and editing. I didn’t have to worry about anyone else. It was a labor of love. My friend Daniel Simko encouraged me and made it possible for me to start writing my own work again because he came and took care of my son everyday for a few hours, on the condition that I would write while they were gone. So I started The Angel of History really because of Daniel.

She told us in Syracuse that she didn’t know that what was coming onto the page was poetry—that it seemed at the time more like notes toward a poem. She shared the notes with her friend, and gained confidence in what she was doing because of his encouragement. The poem in this sense was a “gift,” and her description in the notes to the book exactly mirrors her experience: In some of those polyphonic poems in The Angel of History I allowed myself great leaps in time and space between the different sections. I let myself move from Beirut back to the place along the sea shore: maybe I felt the spray, the salt foam, that was lifted out of the Mediterranean by the helicopters in Beirut, and I was writing through that, and then I was back at a window facing the sea. When I was in Beirut it was a very difficult time. It was the winter of ’83–’84. We came under shell fire. One night I was in the basement listening to all the explosions. After that night, for awhile I felt that my mind was behaving as a kaleidoscope: I couldn’t sustain a thought the same way, and when I wrote, I couldn’t sustain the speaker on the page. It was a kind of staccato

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rapid firing of images, perceptions, and memories in my consciousness—all the time. I thought, to my horror, that it was going to last forever, and that’s how I was going to be. It didn’t last forever, but while it was happening, I decided that since I couldn’t stop it, I would set it to paper, that I would work with it, rather than against it—write my way out of it. The breaking up of the language in The Angel of History started because I was writing in that mental state. Everything was kind of swirling around, so I thought I will make something with this broken glass; I will glue it together, because if I don’t do that I won’t be able to do anything.

What she describes here, and what we glean from the book, is how the theory follows the act. She wrote, as she says, because she had to, as a necessity to preserve life and sanity. This is the process she describes in the book as “The first-person, free-verse, lyric-narrative poem of my earlier years has given way to a work which has desired its own bodying forth: polyphonic, broken, haunted, and in ruins, with no possibility of restoration.” Her life changed, and the physical and mental experience changed the materials and forms of her poetry. The process of making it new, of editing the vertiginous swirl, saved her.

It is not clear to me from her written or oral materials when the process of change started or when it ended; she references working on the Angel book for a decade in her Green Linden interview, and she talks about working without aesthetic support and the historical fact of change in our time in her introduction to the anthology Against Forgetting (W.W. Norton, 1993), published the year before the Angel of History in 1994. By this time, the initial shattering impulse had become something distanced enough from her that it could be described philosophically: Our age lacks the structure of a story… The history of our time does not allow for any of the bromides of progress, nor for the promise of successful closure. That this history can be retold in scattered images (while eluding them) indicates that the age repeats the same story over and over again, marking an infernal return of the same… The fact that extremity can be translated the world over—that institutionalized suffering has been globalized—

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means that fragmentation might also be global—that displacement has been rendered universal.

Clearly, wherever it started, it was a difficult aesthetic journey, and from all that she has said, she had to find her way through doubt from the kind of poetry she had written and been celebrated for, to this new form, capable of accommodating the shaggy monsters that now sought inclusion. It is interesting to me that she portrays the process and the result as sui generis, something forcing itself onto the page and into her poetry, or as a random sequence of notes toward poems that she did not recognize as poetry in themselves until her friend told her differently.

But it is clear that the poems of The Angel of History have distinguished modernist ancestors, or if not ancestors, then at least predecessors. The imagistic time- and space-shifting method is Poundian, as he used it in The Cantos, and the disjunct scene-shifting was pioneered by Eliot in “The Wasteland,” as edited by Pound. In both those poems, the argument is often carried, as here, by the train of images and the music of the lines, and the reach of the argument is deep into history. I think, to draw the parallels out a little further, that the writing of “The Wasteland” saved Eliot, just as Ms. Forché says the writing of The Angel of History saved her.

I should add that perhaps, given the seriousness of the terms engaged here, and the experiences of tight author, it touches on the dismissive to speak of ancestry or influence in this way; it may be more appropriate to speak of the environment in which this poem is composed as being modernist, and being shaped by the same influences and external events as shaped those two foundational works, that is, of finding ways to cope with a world changed utterly by violence and the horror of what men do to men. For Pound and Eliot and their colleagues and peers it was World War I, which resulted in a change of phase of their society so extreme that it rewrote all their histories, with the disappearance of a culture and civilization that had existed just before; in Ms. Forché’s case it is the disruption of her world resulting from the places she has lived, a description that sounds like PTSD or in any case the aftermath of one or more traumatic life events which were experienced whether lived through or not: Beirut was one such experience, lived through. The Nazi horrors were not lived through, but yet were experienced

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emotionally by a person open to that experience, and thus could be shared in the telling, and in the sharing seen as part of the calamity that is history. The chaos of such extreme experiences required in her a rational response to hold it together, to make an order of the chaos, to invoke reason to hold the madness in.

6./The Voices I mentioned earlier that much of the method and approach of the rest of the book are signaled in the opening section of the title poem: There are times when the child seems delicate, as if he had not yet crossed into the world.

When French was the secret music of the street, the café, the train, my own receded and became intimacy and sleep.

In the world it was the language of propaganda, the agreed-upon lie, and it bound me to itself, demanding of my life an explanation.

When my son was born I became mortal.

Our days at Cape Enrage, a bleached shack of rented rooms and white air. April.

At the low tide acres of light, boats abandoned by water.

While sleeping, the child vanishes from his life.

Years later, on the boat from Beirut, or before the boat, an hour before, helicopters lifting a white veil of sea.

A woman broken into many women.

These boats, forgotten, have no keels. So it is safe for them, and the emptiness beneath them safe.

April was here briefly. The breakwater visible, the lighthouse, but no horizon.

The music resembled April, the gulls, April, but you weren’t walking toward this house.

If the child knew words, if it weren’t necessary for him to question me with his hands— To have known returning would be like this, that the sea light of April had been your vigilance.

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The structure is intuitive, not narrative, guided by what we might call the felt logic of its images. If it feels sometimes arbitrary and non-linear in its particulars it also feels necessary in the fullness of its gesture—as if the poet had arrived suddenly in a foreign capital and was looking at everything in no particular order or priority, in an effort to orient herself, but you feel that the view is completed at the end. The voice is impassive in its engagement with this world, neither numb nor casual, but removed, even affectless. I wish that Ms. Forché had described her method as multi-voiced rather than polyphonic, as the later leads us to expect a structure of voices, contrapuntal perhaps, or counterpoint, with intertwined melodies, as we would get in music; but that is not what is on display. Rather, there are many voices speaking besides the poet’s own, and I would divide them into speakers as witnesses and speakers as validation, what in computer methodology would be a validator, a program used to check the validity or syntactical correctness of a fragment of code or document. Think of the structure as that of unwilled choices, like being like a bus where people get on and off, where some sit beside you and tell their stories, and then you never see them again, and some stay with you all the way through, and meanwhile the imagery keeps changing as the bus moves forward.

The several other voices in the full poem besides Ms. Forché’s include voices with reputation, like Eli Weisel, Rene Char, Gershom Scholem, C.W. King, and then the others that would remain anonymous but for their recognition in this poem, like the singing children, Ellie, Simone, the anonymous letter-writer, the soldiers, and others. But they are all important, they all lend something significant to the whole. The otherwise-anonymous are important because they drive the poem by words that describe their memories, and so create their memory collectively, until it fuses into a single collective of calamitous history.

That history and those words are then buttressed by the words of the others, the group I called the names of reputation. Their contributions and uses are all different. For example, the words quoted throughout from Eli Weisel’s poem, “Ani Maamin,” le silence de Dieu est Dieu (“the silence of God is God”), already powerful in themselves become more powerful when we realize that this is a long poem about the Holocaust, which Weisel has called “a war against memory.” In his poem the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob rise up to challenge God

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about the atrocities they have seen, even as the speaker and others condemned to death say repeatedly, I believe, I still believe.

Another name of reputation is Rene Char, a French poet and fighter in the Resistance who was active as a poet and writer from the 1920’s to the end of his life in 1988. He was a friend and associate of Albert Camus, Georges Bataille, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, and others. He was to have been in the car involved in the accident that killed Camus and Michel Gallimard, but there was not enough room, and so he returned instead that day by train to Paris. His line in the poem, Comment me vint l’écriture? Comme un duvet d’oiseau sur ma vitre, en hiver (“How did writing come to me? Like a bird’s down on my window in winter.”) is from his poem “La Bibliotecheque Est En Feu” (“The Library is on Fire”), from La Parole en Archipel, 1952 - 1960 (The Word As Archipelago). The poem title is a code word used in the French resistance for a drop of supplies in 1940. Char wrote the poem right after the war, where he had served the resistance under the name of Captain Alexandre, where he commanded the Durance parachute drop zone. He insisted that the code be changed after one of the containers exploded, setting the forest on fire, and numeral leading to their capture by the Gestapo. I quote below the first page (my translation). I can see the appeal to the poet of these long lines, with their discussions about why poetry matters and its place in our world (“It was hell in our heads.

Meanwhile, it's spring at our fingertips”), their discontinuous imagery and exhortations to write what comes: Through the muzzle of this cannon it snows. It was hell in our heads. Meanwhile, it's spring at our fingertips. It is a way of walking allowed again, the earth in love, the exuberant grass.

The mind too, like everything else, trembles.

The eagle is in the future.

Any action which engages the soul, even if the soul doesn’t know of it, will have as its epilogue repentance or sorrow. You have to agree to it.

How did writing come to me? Like a bird's down on my window, in winter. Immediately rose a battle of embers in the hearth that has not yet ended.

Silky cities of daily gaze, inserted among other cities, with

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streets traced by us alone, under the wing of lightning which responds to our attentions.

Everything in us should only be a joyous feast when something is accomplished that we have not foreseen, that we shed no light on, which will speak to our heart, by its own means.

Let us continue to plumb our soundings, to speak in an even voice, in words grouped together, we will end up silencing all these dogs, by getting them to merge with the grass, watching us with a smoky eye, while the wind will wash away their backs.

The lightning lasts me.

The method is not the same, of course, but the aesthetic appeal of having lines come to you like feathers on a window in winter suggests the kind of willed unwillingness at work in Ms. Forché’s poems in this book. My reading of her poem suggests that the use of Weisel’s line is philosophic or metaphysical, and judgmental, while that of Char’s is aesthetic. There are other possibilities, of course. In the case of the Char line, think how many scenes in this poem take place in winter—for example, We held roses, then the roses rested on the snow as if someone had died there. Winter. Think of those scenes of winter, and then of the line about how the writing comes, and then see how acid a self-judgment it must seem of the work, effectively saying that I make poetry from your tragedy. The reader can make his or her own judgments concerning the use of these and others voices.

7./The Child I am fascinated by the poem’s relationship to the child. Consider the opening four lines: There are times when the child seems delicate, as if he had not yet crossed into the world.

When French was the secret music of the street, the café, the train, my own receded and became intimacy and sleep.

In the world it was the language of propaganda, the agreedupon lie, and it bound me to itself, demanding of my life an explanation.

When my son was born I became mortal.

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This first section has many tasks, one of which is to set up the poem’s series of oppositions. The first line, for example, speaks of seeing the child “as if he had not yet crossed into the world,” which is the poem’s delineation of the first of its many borders. This one is the border of life at the entrance to the world, a position where a child’s delicacy is still possible. The opposition here is delicacy and life as against the rest of the poem which contains and speaks of so much death, in a world where delicacy is not prized, and roughness is everywhere.

The child opens and closes this first stanza, as the speaker tells us in a lovely line, “When my son was born I became mortal.” This is closure, as in the intervening lines the speaker tells us that she lives in exile in a world where a foreign language is all around her and her native language thus becomes an interior one, for intimacy and sleep (another series of oppositions, interior and exterior), and then that this intimate language becomes in the world around her the language of propaganda and the agreed-upon lie, “and it bound me to itself, demanding of my life an explanation.” As becomes apparent in the rest if the poem, the “explanation” demanded is for her life itself, explaining why she should be freed from the surround of death and waste. It is the guilt of asking oneself, why am I like this while they are all like that.

There is much that is odd about this first stanza. The poet is looking at the child, her son, and then discussing the effect on her of its birth, but there is no exclamation of joy or of anything else, no moment of current or recollected happiness. She tells us about the child in several separate lines in this section: There are times when the child seems delicate, as if he had not yet crossed into the world…

When my son was born I became mortal…

While sleeping, the child vanishes from his life…

If the child knew words, if it weren’t necessary for him to question me with his hands— But the language in these lines is impersonal, not scientific but passive, numb, as if she might say, Today is Tuesday, or The color of that wall is blue. The “he” of that opening line becomes the more distanced

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and impersonal “the child” in the rest of this section. Think about what is not said, what we are not told about the child: A name, a description, parents, home, demeanor… Is he slight, heavy, colicky, happy, what color is his hair, what kind of clothes or toys does he have—but no, there is nothing, no information. This is not a mother giving us a picture of her child. We don’t know if she is happy with him, or proud of him. We know that she observes him, and that she mentally pits his life against the world’s. We can almost infer her general view of life and the world, but we don’t know if the things she reveals are true.

I keep coming back to read the opening sentence because so much seems left out: “There are times when the child seems delicate, as if he had not yet crossed into the world.” Delicate how? What does “seems delicate” mean—is this different than being delicate? What is the delicacy of someone who has “not yet crossed into the world”? The delicacy of the womb? Is this meant to convey a physical or a mental state? She says, “When my son was born I became mortal,” the reverse of the usual metamorphosis, in which the child of a god becomes mortal because its mother is, or God is born to a mortal mother and becomes, for a time, mortal. I read that sentence and wonder again, what was she before she became mortal?

Later in the poem we are told that the child takes its first step, but it is “In my absence.” The child has few other references in this poem, but none are descriptive, none tell us of its impact as a presence, making it less a figure than almost a passing moment, a thought succeeded in this construction by another, a shadow. Perhaps it is this very insubstantiality that may allow other readings of the importance of the child—religious or psychological readings, for example. How else understand the metamorphosis of “When my son was born I became mortal”?

The child is an important reference, even with this small notice, for as a figure of a living child is he is juxtaposed to the dead children we will meet two sections later, and to the terrible loss experienced by one of the other speakers. We know also know that, external to the poem, the child’s absence in the care of another made the poem possible, giving the poet two or so hours per day to wrote.

This first section sets up walls, delineations, boundaries, that encompass or imprison the poet as in a maze that tempers feeling. The

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lines in this first stanza, as indeed in the section and the poem as a whole, are disjunct, and one senses large silences or spaces between them. This is not a conversation, rather a hesitant presentation stitched by silences, a voice almost impersonal.

If the child seems fragmentary, defined more by its usefulness than its relationship to its mother, so too the speaker, whose words are fragments, who speaks so many words in this section and in the whole poem, but about whom at the end we know almost nothing. Who is she?

What age? Tall, short, what? Where is she? We are given places but not location, or location stripped of details, remaining as anonymous sites until named.

8./The Cape The reference in the second stanza to Cape Enrage seemed to be at first too… well, too fortuitous, like something made up: Our days at Cape Enrage, a bleached shack of rented rooms and white air. April.

That place-name, Cape Enrage, seemed such a perfect place name to occur at the start of a work about civilizational horrors and insisting on a moral response to them—but no, it’s a real place, with a real history, and links to a famous work by one of our country’s greatest poets. It is the name of the southern tip of Barn Marsh Island, in New Brunswick, Canada. The island is surrounded by high sea cliffs, and separated from the mainland by a narrow tidal creek. The name, Cape Enrage, comes from the effect of the large reef that extends south into Chignecto Bay on the ocean water off the point, causing it to become extremely violent, particularly at half tide when the reef is partially exposed and the water is moving quickly. The name Cape Enrage is an Anglicization of “Cap Enragé” the phrase used by Acadian sailors to describe the boiling waters. In 1840, the area became the site of the first lighthouse in Chignecto Bay, referenced in the poem’s third stanza. As storms frequently destroyed or damaged the lighthouse and other boathouses and the houses of the lighthouse keepers, the lighthouse was frequently rebuilt. The current lighthouse is circa 1952, automated in the 1980’s, but then subject to enough vandalism to make the government slate it for

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demolition. It was saved by a group of high school students, who restored the lighthouse and turned it into a tourist attraction in 1993. It is now owned by a for-profit group, Cape Enrage Adventures and Cape Enrage Interpretive Centre.

It is probably not a coincidence that this site, like most everything else in the poem, touches on the maltreatment of one group of people by another. The original settlers of the area were the Acadian people, descendants of the Indigenous Peoples who comprised the Wabanaki Confederacy and the French who settled in parts of eastern Quebec, the Maritime Provinces, and Maine, calling it “Acadia,” during the 17th and 18th centuries. The area was subject to the many colonial wars fought between the British, French, and Dutch—ten in the first eighty years and another six in the following seventy years. Between the mid 1750’s and mid 1760’s, having finally taken control of the area in the midst of the French and Indian War, and fearful of military or subversive threat, the British began to expel the Acadians, first to the Thirteen BritishAmerican Colonies, then to Britain and France. In all, of the 14,100 Acadians in the region, some 11,500 were deported, with about 2,600 remaining behind, after having eluded capture—this from a 1764 census.

Many of the expelled migrated from Britain or France to Spain, and then to Spanish Louisiana, where the Acadians became Cajuns.

The result of the Expulsion was devastation of both the civilian population and the economy of the region. Thousands of Acadians died in the expulsions, mainly from diseases and drowning when ships were lost. The Expulsion is memorialized in the epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie, written at the suggestion of his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne. The poem became Longfellow's most famous work in his lifetime and remains one of his most popular and enduring works. The poem’s prologue reads THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

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This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?

Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers,— Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands, Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven?

Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!

Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o'er the ocean.

Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pré.

Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient, Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman's devotion, List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest; List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy.

9./The Boats I was puzzled for a time by the imagistic centrality of boats to all the relationships in this section—boat and child, boat and woman / many women, boat and unnamed you: Our days at Cape Enrage, a bleached shack of rented rooms and white air. April.

At the low tide acres of light, boats abandoned by water.

While sleeping, the child vanishes from his life.

Years later, on the boat from Beirut, or before the boat, an hour before, helicopters lifting a white veil of sea.

A woman broken into many women.

These boats, forgotten, have no keels. So it is safe for them, and the emptiness beneath them safe.

April was here briefly. The breakwater visible, the lighthouse, but no horizon.

The music resembled April, the gulls, April, but you weren’t

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walking toward this house.

If the child knew words, if it weren’t necessary for him to question me with his hands— To have known returning would be like this, that the sea light of April had been your vigilance.

The lines about the child and the boats are striking and beautiful—a wonderful leap of imagination to describe how the light occurs at low tide when the boats are abandoned by water, and the child in sleep vanishes from his life. But there is a twist in the lines, as the apparent structure inverts our expectations by its parallelism: That is, read as parallel in sense, as the structure invites us to do, the child’s life would be the boat, and the sleeping child the water that vanishes from his life.

But a thought shows that correspondence can’t hold; instead, I think that the two quoted lines are analogous, the one a development of the other, similar in structure but not parallel in sense. They are images that follow one another in the composition of a scene: The writer at Cape Enrage in rented rooms (in a “bleached” shack, a possibly punning reference to the writer’s stay after travel and before other journeys—Beirut is mentioned in the next stanza—and to the boats later in this section, “bleached” both holding its definition as emptiness made from harsh and exhausting experience, and as a descriptive joined to the “white air,” the “white veil,” the emptiness beneath the boats, and perhaps also the way the ear elides it to “beached”), looking out at low tide while her child sleeps.

Her thought is perhaps also her prayer, for we are told that the child disappears from its life while sleeping—meaning, I take it, that it thus avoids the cruelty of this life being described in the rest of the poem, and the shattering experience of the war in Beirut referenced in the next stanza that breaks a woman “into many women.” This form of differential parallelism occurs elsewhere in the rest of the poem. It is one of the many modes of psychological dislocation. For example: If a city, ruin, if an animal, hunger.

If a grave, anonymous.

If a century, this.

——

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A colander of starlight, the sky in that part of the world.

A wedding dress hanging in a toolshed outside Warsaw.

——Night terrors. A city with all its windows blank.

A memory through which one hasn’t lived.

The images in these two stanzas of different locations, Cape Enrage and Beirut, draw the scenes together: the sea, the whiteness of the air and the water, the boats. These are neither plot-lines nor a piling on of hysterical chaos, where images come without sense or order, but are threads, reference filaments, indications of the personality that sees and records these things as they come. They are related to each other as the scenes in a life are related, by the person speaking, recounting events as imperfect echoes of each other.

The final stanza in this section is a summing up of what has been said, an effort, as I read it, to draw a moral: “These boats, forgotten, have no keels.” The boats are the physical boats seen at Cape Enrage, and the remembered boat from the flight from Beirut. Memory is what makes them safe, without keels, an emptiness beneath them, able to be brought into relation in this way.

In the final lines of this section, an ambiguous “you” appears: it is not the poet, or the child. Perhaps it is the lover or the husband, but whoever it is, we overhear the poet saying to the person that he is not walking toward the bleached shack at Cape Enrage. The child is questioning that return, but the sea light in April is what brings the memories back: it is “your vigilance.”

I notice, reading this line, what it is not, and what is not included here: It is not love, or comfort, not even recognition. It is your vigilance, which my dictionary defines as “the action or state of keeping careful watch for possible danger or difficulties.” The reference to the child, and to “you,” does not mean family, or love, or community. The child and the you are both startlingly undetailed, and the reaction to them affectless. Even the time passes too quickly to be more than a passing

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notion: “April was here briefly.” The lines telling us of boats without keels tear away from any sense of grounding of life or memory. The geographic references of France, Canada, and Beirut both bring in and dismiss a world, as if the names of the countries were signs passed on the way to the memories they contain: as insignificant as candy wrappers.

10./Other Sections The next section begins, “In the night-vaulted corridors of the HôtelDieu, a sleepless woman pushes her stretcher / along the corridors of the past.” The time is autumn, and the memory is of the burning of the fields, where children played. The Hôtel-Dieu is a real place, the oldest operating hospital in Paris, founded in 651 by Saint Landry. It is near Notre Dame, and contains a private garden. When we are first introduced to the hospital, we meet a woman named Ellie. The time is indeterminate, though she remembers trains and fields, and fire in Autumn.

Two sections later in the poem, we will see the hospital again, but this time it is in the winter of the dead, an image that brings deadening phrases after itself: the ruined city, the anonymous grave. The reason is in the intervening section, which begins, “This is Izieu during the war, Izieu and the neighboring village of Bregnier-Cordon.”

This is Izieu during the war, Izieu and the neighboring village of Bregnier-Cordon.

This is a farmhouse in Izieu.

Itself a quiet place of stone houses over the Rhône, where between Aprils, forty-four children were hidden successfully for a year in view of the mountains.

Until the fields were black and snow fell all night over the little plaque which does not mention that they were Jewish children hidden April to April in Izieu near Bregnier-Cordon.

Comment me vint l’écriture? Comme un duvet d’oiseau sur ma vitre, en hiver.

In every window a blank photograph of their internment.

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Within the house, the silence of God. Forty-four bedrolls, fortyfour metal cups.

And the silence of God is God. In Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, in Les Milles, Les Tourelles, Moussac and Aubagne, the silence of God is God. The children were taken to Poland.

The children were taken to Auschwitz in Poland singing Vous n’aurez pas L’Alsace et la Lorraine.

In a farmhouse still standing in Izieu, le silence de Dieu est Dieu.

This shattering section references a terrible story. Izieu was the site of a Jewish orphanage during the Second World War. Many of the children there were not orphans, but had been sent there because the area under Italian rule seemed safer than under the French. On April 6, 1944, the Gestapo arrived under the direction of the Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie, and took 44 children and their supervisors to the concentration camps. Forty-two of the children were gassed at Auschwitz, and two were shot in Estonia.

After this section we are back to the hospital: “We lived in Ste. Monique ward over the main corridor, Ellie and myself, in the HôtelDieu on the Place du Parvis Notre Dame. / Below us jonquils opened.”

The spring of the poem contrasts with the story of the woman who has lost her sons and her husband. For the speaker, the time is death. The next section begins, “We must wear our slippers,” a section I understand as a comment on the sections that have gone before, with its key phrase, “And if language is an arbitrary system, one must not go further than the sign No / ADMITTANCE.” The Hôtel-Dieu has become the world.

Two sections later she will pun on the name of the hospital: “HôtelDieu? Some people say so. I say this God is insane.”

Another section begins, “We held roses, then the roses rested on the snow as if someone had died there. Winter.” The roses are on the snow because, as it turns out, this is a military cemetery. The remainder of the poem moves to the present, then back to occupied Paris, then conflates the history recounted and the pain of the individual: “How can one confuse that much destruction with one woman’s painful life?” What

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has been seen cannot be unseen, what has been said cannot be unsaid. “…the world is worse now than it was then,” said the woman Ellie, earlier in the poem, and then she says something that links God to the fires in the fields: Le Dieu est un feu. A psychopath. Le Dieu est un feu.

She has nothing, not even knowledge of how her parents died, and lives a life of sadness in a world that is, she says, “No good,” that is “worse than memory, the open country of death.” The final section begins, “As if someone not alive were watching,” as the poet dreams the memory of another person. It ends without ending, because a poem of memory like this can have no term for its ending.

You see, I told Madame about my life.

I told her everything.

And what did she say?

11./Conclusion Each section of this lead poem is rich enough to engender extended discussion, and so my notes here, though lengthy, are intended to provide only a brief tour, suggesting a way of reading the poem. The vision of the poem is always in motion, quick cinematic shots from one view to the next, with Poundian conjunctions, many of them analogous references to events or conversations without disclosure or hints of the full context. In some cases the gaps can be filled by research, in others the event is personal, and impenetrable in its fullness but with enough apparent to get the gist or the relation.

We want to ask as we read the ordinary questions a reader asks— who is speaking? Who is being spoken to? Why does the poem have this structure instead of some other?—and realize that those questions have all been answered or anticipated by the poet. The poet is not always the speaker in the poem, but the poem always reflects the poet’s consciousness in its selection of facts and events, and in its construction, and is always mindful of the poet’s argument. The audience for the poem is unselective, that is, it is for everyone who can read it.

The poems and the book seem to me to be an in extremis demonstration of why we can say that regardless of subject-matter or origin, each authentic poem truly is a new creation, something that by its nature and terms did not and could not exist before. Each adds the to the

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poetic storehouse, the universe of poetry, and alters how we view all other poetry. It’s why each new poem matters when composed at this level, and why each poem rightly demands a full moral response. This is very serious poetry, of a high order.

Perhaps we can conclude this exploration with the resurgence of the feather imagery that Rene Char used to describe how poetry came to him. Ms. Forché used it as part of a judgment on her own writing. The feather imagery recurs again toward the end of the poem: While the white phosphorous bombs plumed into the air like ostrich feathers of light and I cursed you for remaining there without me, for tricking me into this departure.

Parlez-vous français? Est-ce que vous le parlez bien?

So beautiful, ma’am, from here, the sailor said, if you don’t stop to think.

And it went on like that all night, questions in French, and it went on, radiant white feathers along the coast of Lebanon, until Ellie slept.

—Bob Herz

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The One Line Poem: Notes and Mini-Anthology 1.

Why not a one-line poem?

Think about it: The greatness of poetry as a medium is that it can take in anything, and anything it takes in can become good or even great poetry: Think of the worlds of things taken in by Whitman and Dickinson, Ginsberg and Hecht and Ammons, Black Mountain, Deep Image, Auden, Gluck, Justice, Collins, Koch, Language poets… catalogues, and mountains, galaxies of things large and small, hot and cold, and all others neither this nor that…

So why not the one-line poem? What’s the problem?

Well, says the critic in all of us, consider the objections, think of the contraries to be posited, the real distinctions to be made.

For example, consider this question: In writing a one-line poem, how do you know when you’re done?

The easy answer is that the form tells everything you need to know: write two lines and you’ve blown your charter, and written something else; might as well go finish that sonnet.

But maybe a better answer comes from poet Marvin Bell’s wonderful statement that a poem ends when it has used up all its information. He wasn’t specifically talking about one-line poems, but the principle applies. Consider Ben Jonson’s beautiful and perfect O Rare Ben Jonson What more is there to say? What more is needed? Any addition would make this poem not merely different, but would lessen it, for it has in that one line used up all its information, said as much as Jonson needed for it to say, and as much as anyone could want for it to say.

And against all arguments is the fact of the one-line poem. That is, the fact that they exist. Take a look at the little anthology of one line poems included in this issue. They are poems, written by poets and intended to be read as poems. Is there any reason to think of them as not-poems?

There is of course more to discuss about this subject, about how the

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one-line poem is different from the aphorism, the folk-wisdom, the prophecies of bibles and men, cliches, haikus.

And it’s worth pausing for a moment to note how often we as readers treat our poems as if they were one-liners: Slouching toward Bethlehem, Not with a bang but a whimper, The world is ugly and its people are sad, etc. These are of course not one line poems, except by virtue of an application of memory’s razor, and except by the preference of our forms of speech and thought, which make in practice an implicit acknowledgement that the power of such lines comes not from their respective poems from but from the world as it is, as we have found and live in it, which is the criteria that makes the lines detachable and great: They touch the world, and they inform and organize reality. Separated from their origins, they have become part of this new thing, our lives.

2.

There’s not a lot of room in a one-line poem. The poet can’t do much witty turning and pirouetting (that turn from one line to next being at some point in its ancestry descended from Latin versus “a line, row, line of verse, line of writing,” the enlivening and informing metaphor lurking behind being one of plowing, of “turning” from one line to another, as in vertere = “to turn,” as a plowman does): the one-line poem being unable to turn, as verses do, and thus surrendering ab initio at the level of form one of the great traditional armaments of poetic strength.

In such rejection, the one line poem must have other strengths, other pleasures.

There’s also this taxonomic problem, that one-line poems are both like and unlike everything near them: They borrow, for example, their sense of balance and tension from the aphorism, their offerings of wisdom from the folk saying, their perfection in the moment from the cliche; but they are not aphorisms, folk sayings, or cliches. Their life is different, their purpose inclusive of these others but also broader, as all poetry is broader, else it is not poetry.

As a starting point for discussion of these differences, let us endure the shock of the obvious by positing that all poems start as one-line poems. There is always, somewhere, a first line. Everything begins somewhere, wherever it may ultimately end. This rule of first-line-ness is true in poetry and in prose, and for the same reason: Everything must

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begin somewhere. Hemingway famously discussed it in A Movable Feast: Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

Hemingway’s stories and novels do not stop at one line, of course.

What I think is important in his description is the tremendous weight he puts on that first finding, of the “.…one true sentence…” It is not only a beginning, in his hands, it is also the criteria by which he will judge every sentence that comes after: “If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.” The one true line is thus both beginning and aesthetic, the start and the criteria, the reality of everything and the promise of more. That’s a lot to carry; and of course it’s easier to bear if you’re a great writer like Hemingway.

Dylan Thomas, another great, described his writing process as beginning somewhere, and then becoming in effect self-created. As I understand his description, it is a variant on the Hemingway notion of a criteria that firstness brings with it: I make one image… let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all,

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within my imposed formal limits, conflict. Each image holds within it the seed of its own destruction, and my dialectical method, as I understand it, is a constant building up and tearing down of the images that come out of the central seed, which is itself destructive and constructive at the same time.

Got that? You ask, perhaps, what is left after all that tearing down and building up, all that heavy-breathing Hegelian afflatus? Well, the answer seems to be something similar to what Hemingway said: what is left is the image, the creation that contains within itself not only everything necessary to it as an image, but also the criteria used to judge and accept or reject its warring successor.

The lesson I take from these two writers is that poems and stories begin somewhere, with a line or sentence or image that contains information enough to sustain itself, and all that is necessary to generate a next line or image.

And if it doesn’t do that? If the information is all used upon in the first line? Well, then you have the one-line poem.

3.

Everyone knows, sort of, what we mean when we speak of a line of poetry, and what we mean by a poem. But here, for the pedants in us all, are definitions of line and poem, and a brief excursion into etymology.

First, “line,” from The Poetry Archive (http://www.poetryarchive.org/ glossary/line): A line is a subdivision of a poem, specifically a group of words arranged into a row that ends for a reason other than the righthand margin.

This strikes me as pretty nearly perfect a definition as ever could be needed for any line in any poem, but more especially for our subject, the one-line poem. I’m not sure any more is needed; but the discussion goes on: This reason [for the ending of the line] could be that the lines are arranged to have a certain number of syllables, a certain

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number of stresses, or of metrical feet; it could be that they are arranged so that they rhyme, whether they be of equal length or not. But it is important to remember that the poet has chosen to make the line a certain length, or to make the line-break at a certain point. This line-break, where a reader has to turn back to the start of the next line, was known in Latin as the versus, which translates as “turn”, and is where the modern English term “verse” comes from. It is one of the strongest points of a line, which means that words that fall at the end of a line seem more important to a reader (an effect that rhyme can intensify); other strong points are the start of a line, and either side of a caesura.

Note that this is not so much a definition as a set of parameters intended to contain the notion of a line in poetry; the words here define the container, as the critic or reader must see it for analysis, and syllables or rhymes or stresses, but not the content, as the poet and the lover of the words must it to take and hold them.

So for the line. What about the poem? The Oxford Living Dictionaries defines a poem as A piece of writing in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by particular attention to diction (sometimes involving rhyme), rhythm, and imagery.

—a definition not especially helpful, as it could apply to what we usually think of as poetry, in stanzas and lines and rhymes, but also to any heightened piece of writing, in prose, songs, plays, or for that matter, in words shouted at no one in acts of madness on some dim street. Yet, there is something here, that the writers of this definition thought helpful, that wonderfully avoids the can’t about little machines of words.

We should consider one more thing, origins. This is from the Online Etymology Dictionary, the etymology of the word “poem”: poem (n.) 1540s (replacing poesy in this sense), from Middle French poème (14c.), from Latin poema “composition in verse, poetry,” from Greek poema “fiction, poetical work,” literally “thing made or created,” early variant of poiema, from poein,

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poiein, “to make or compose” (see poet). Spelling pome, representing an ignorant pronunciation, is attested from 1856.

I’m fascinated by parts of all three definitions and explanations, and want to cherry-pick them a bit, in order to do a little special pleading for our one-line poem genre, thus: A poem is a “thing made or created” (etymology) which possesses intense feelings and ideas and imagery (definition) whose ending comes typically for reasons other than facing the right-hand margin of the page (Poetry Archive). I would add, it ends where art ends because its information is used up. It doesn’t go any farther, because it can’t. Back to our beginning: O Rare Ben Jonson That in itself is enough for our distinctions. An aphorism, says my Merrian-Webster, is “1 : a concise statement of a principle. 2 : a terse formulation of a truth or sentiment : adage the high-minded aphorism, “Let us value the quality of life, not the quantity.” A truth, a principle, are surely important things; but the principle business of an aphorism is in these things, not poetry.

As for folk wisdom, my Collins English Dictionary defines it as “wisdom or beliefs associated with or traditional to the common people of a country. Folk wisdom recognizes that to forgive is divine. A leopard’s spots are fixed for life, according to folk wisdom, but despite the saying, people do change.” Again, wonderful; but the aim of folk wisdom is wisdom, not poetry.

In both cases, aphorism and folk wisdom, the writing can rise to the level of poetry, in which case it becomes a one-line poem in addition to anything else it might be. You can see countless examples of lines which are both poetry and something else through the Book of Proverbs in the bible: “As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.” A haiku, of course, by entering this world in three or four lines, violates our first principle, of being a one line poem.

4.

People keep trying to make poetry co-dependent, as if it needed criticism, or needed teachers, or books, or magazines. But here’s the

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thing. Poetry has always existed. It was here before any of those other things, before books, magazines, the internet. In fact, it’s likely that the only thing that is co-terminus with poetry is the poetry critic.

Thinking about the starting place of poetry, of the first moments, it’s possible that the first poems were one-line poems: subjective exclamations, exhortations to the sun or moon, not scattered, or unintentional, not accidental, but a necessary calling out, of gods or fire or rain. The fact of the one line poem is the fact of speech so heightened as to become poetry.

With all that as background, I offer here a brief anthology of one-line poems from many sources. What I love is the variety displayed, from the wit of Winters to the images of Charles Wright and Bill Knott, to the wisdom of Mathews. As we said at the start, the genius of poetry is that it can engorge anything and make it poetry. The one line poem is the reminder of all beginnings of the art, what a poem is before it becomes anything else. A brief selection of one-line poems follows.

—Bob Herz

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Ivor Winters Noon Did you move, in the sun?

The Shadow’s Song I am beside you, now.

The Aspen’s Song The summer holds me here.

God Of Roads I, peregrine of noon.

Sleep O living pine, be still! ***

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Ben Jonson O Rare Ben Jonson ***

W.S. Merwin Elegy Who would I show it to Savonarola Unable to endure my world and calling the failure God, I will destroy yours. ***

James Wright In Memory Of The Horse David, Who Ate One Of My Poems

***

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John Donne 194 (Epigraph beneath portrait in his shroud. Deaths Duel!, 1632).

Corporis haec Animae sit Syndon, Syndon Jesu.

Amen.

(May this shroud of the body be the shroud of the soul of Jesus.

Amen.) ***

Donald Justice (From: From A Notebook. No. 6~) M., opening my diary, found the pages blank *** William Mathews Spiritual Life to be warm, build an igloo Dawn Insomnia, old tree, when will you shed me? ***

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Bill Knott Poem Just hope that when you lie down your toes are a firingsquad I only keep this voice to give to anything afraid of me Cueballs have invented insomnia in an attempt to forget eyelids History Hope‌ goosestep Poem Your nakedness: the sound when I break an apple in half ***

Charles Wright The rain has stopped falling asleep on its crystal stems ***

Antonia Porchia (tr W.S. Merwin) He is small who hides in order to show himself It was always easier for me to love than to praise

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Available at Tiger Bark Press, $16.95 http://www.tigerbarkpress.com/kuusisto.html

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Praise for the new book by Stephen Kuusisto, from Tiger Bark Press: “Everything I touched today belonged to Rimsky Korsakov” writes Stephen Kuusisto in this beautiful collection of poems where music is, truly, a presence in each thing he touches. It is in the playfulness, in the inventiveness, in the understanding of how childhood shapes us, how memory does. The knowledge here is in clarity: “you loved me and I wasn’t confused.” This knowledge is also in the lyric abandon, the kind of understanding of last things: “press your face down by the roots,” the poet says, “ignore the neighbors.” Yet Kuusisto’s is also the kind of lyricism that embraces neighbors, embraces poetry as something we give to each other: “I wanted to be useful so I wrote a poem” Kuusisto says. Indeed. I need to sit you down, dear reader, pour you some tea, and read you whole poems. This is gorgeous work: beautiful in its clarity, which keeps on giving. What else can I add?

I can tell you that Kuubeautiful Kuusisto is writing at the height of his powers. But what does that mean? It means that the poet sisto finds a lyric key to the word, and knows it. But how is it done, what is his secret? Perhaps it is his knowledge of “the pressure that makes each fact float.” Perhaps. Or maybe it is the perspective of his poems, the angle from which he sees himself, and us—and he sees through us: “Just a bone in a larger collection of bones, / what I am...call it the body if you like, / I know better. Soon now, / rocks will roll straight through.” Old Horse, What Is to Be Done? is a beautiful, unrelenting, moving book. It is a book to live with. I love it.

—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf RepublicDeaf Republic and Dancing in OdessaDancing Odessa Who in the world of poetry is like Stephen Kuusisto? I want to give you lines like “pale geographies of the heart,” or “I love the Jesus who lets me stay blind,” unforgettable words, but no one moment conveys the beauty and austere brilliance of these poems. These are so finely wrought they feel like precious coins in the hand, coins that have been unearthed as much as made. Horses, ravens, dogs haunt these poems, but so do Einstein, Kierkegaard, God. And many others, but above all, we follow Kuusisto, guide who is “half soul, half body.” These poems announce themselves as perfectly right and necessary, yet like nothing you’ve seen before.

—Susanne Paola Antonetta, author of The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here

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Available at the Nine Mile website, ninemile.org, or at Amazon.com.

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Praise for Leslie Ullman: Progress on the Subject of Immensity, University of New Mexico Press, 2013 “For over thirty years now, Leslie Ullman has steadily refined a poetry of the most acute and lyrically precise mindfulness, of what one of her poems calls t`he ‘greater alertness.’ This method has been forged in part by her ability to render the harsh beauties of the southwestern landscapes that have been her adopted home. More important still, however, is her almost shamanistic willingness to visit those liminal states between waking and dreaming, conventional reality and phantasm—states that sometimes offer menace, sometimes wonderment. This is all to say that Leslie Ullman is a poet of the first order, writing at the height of her very considerable powers.”–David Wojahn Slow Work Through Sand, Iowa Poetry Prize, 1998 “Leslie Ullman has the ability to spin illuminating spells through and around the matter of earth and life. Her vision penetrates with an attention as careful and as transforming as day through clear water, as moonlight on stone. She is an artisan with words, and the results are poems embodying the intricacy and beauty of the subjects they honor.”

—Pattiann Rogers Dreams by No One’s Daughter, Pitt Poetry Series, 1987 “In her new volume, Dreams by No One’s Daughter, Leslie Ullman traces with characteristic grace the urgencies of one’s passage through a life—from the fabular weathers of childhood into those hard climes of adulthood, and along the endless currents of dream. There is a quiet, a composure here that is both beautiful and disarming. Contemplative, precise, these poems instruct us in the delights of their world.”–David St. John Leslie Ullman is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Progress on the Subject of Immensity (University of New Mexico Press, 2013. Her first collection, Natural Histories, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and Slow Work Through Sand won the Iowa Poetry Prize. She has published a hybrid book of craft essays and writing exercises, Library of Small Happiness (3: A Taos Press, 2017). She is Professor Emerita at University of Texas-El Paso and teaches in the lowresidency MFA Program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts. Now a resident of Taos, New Mexico, she teaches skiing in the winters at Taos Ski Valley.

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