Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2014

Spring 2014 // ISSUE 2

Nine Mile is an online magazine of literature and art.

Our mission is to publish the best writing and artwork from across the country, with a special focus on Central New York. The magazine will be digitally published twice a year in the Spring and Fall.

We take the name of the magazine from a local waterway, Nine Mile Creek, formed by glaciers about 14,000 years ago. The creek runs 25 miles from Otisco Lake, in the town of Marcellus, through Camillus and into Onondaga Lake in the Town of Geddes. Its watershed covers 10 towns in Onondaga County and two in Cortland County. The creek has different elevations, different turns, different speeds.

It has had a long and varied history.

The magazine is also varied, with different writings and arts coming together to form a cohesive whole. Our views are broad and we’re excited to be able to provide publication and appreciation to our fellow creative types.

Nine Mile is a labor of love. We are currently not supported by outside financial sources. At this time we are not able to offer compensation to published submissions other than the ability to ‘get your name out there.’

EDITOR: ART EDITOR: DESIGN: COVER ART:

Bob Herz Whitney Daniels WRKDesigns, wrkdesigns.com Kathleen Deep, “Nostalgia” detail

Copyright © 2014 by Nine Mile Magazine. 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.

Send submission inquires to: info@ninemile.org ninemile.org

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Nine Mile • Spring 2014

CONTENTS

POETRY 4

George Drosdowich Smiley Face Psalm The Exploding Sky Vandal Rhythm

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JD Davis The saddest letter in tragedy

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Barbara Conrad Farm to Table, a Blessing Salty-sour-bitter-sweet A Mother Dreams of Snow

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Charles Lupia Wineries Toward the Future

FEATURES 28

The Root of All Levis

By Sam Pereira

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Art & Poetry

by Michael Burkard Discussion with Stephen Kuusisto

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Sam Pereira Adverbs in Moments of Anger A Poem in That Hopeless Season Words Placed in a Box of Toys

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David Lewis Natabur

ART

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Lindsey Bellosa The First Year

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Janet MacFadyen In Marriage Homecoming

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Martin Willitts Jr Silent Intent Where Are the Stars Tonight?

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Georgia A. Popoff The Agnostic Contemplates Purpose The Agnostic Considers Travel Abroad My I Come From Poem New Bride’s First Tea

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Kathleen Deep Mixed Media Photography Installations

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Patricia Seitz Painting

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Crystal LaPoint Digital

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George Drosdowich

Smiley Face Psalm

(on the occasion of the unveiling of Will’s gravestone)

Lord why do you hide yourself from me?

I wanted a simple bed and simple sleep But You have sown discord between what is and my heart.

Why my first born son? Strength and beauty of my house, Laid out in white sheets, the heart machine pissing him warm to my lips.

Each day after, a rough slab, great stones, A circle to enclose the sun.

The Hebrew pageant around the grave-days ends, Yellow smiley face, red tear, another god denied.

And the sea did not receive him back.

Will’s clothes arrived in a box from Albany.

Lord, do You still chain that black dog at the gate?

Snarling at us who are bourn beneath?

And with what coins do I pay your Angel for him?

Will grief’s stained copper serve?

Or the salt of his mother’s blood?

Or only the silver You demand for Your own?

When I pray now there is only a muffled echo of hammers in the valley.

A son’s blood poured out onto Your immense desert.

There is no hope in priests or princes, Or fathers, or mothers, not deeds, nor the wine of darkness.

Only words, Father Written with tears on the sand.

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For this price, you, Angel, who has always been with me from the womb weeping, Buy back my heart from the wind, Entangle it in your hair Cast it forth new like a beach in first light.

Do I hear myself or do I just hear everything?

Have you not heard it is written you shall not test the Lord your God? Who speaks through the prophets now if I do not speak?

I remember the smells of the book of planets, tides in a river, steel rails, creosote, eels and smoke.

I awoke on a green bus in Winter with books of gods on my lap.

Priests measured out grain and sugar, images of naked women, monsters and supermen.

I came from a sweaty dark place of creaking wood and crumbling concrete.

Among pipes and punishments, I grew Singing the clouds rule the sky and the worms the dust.

Selah

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The Exploding Sky We stood in the tall grass together separated only by light and the promise of death.

We were cold naked running, thrilled in the leaves, we grasped hands and understood separation and release.

When memory overcame us we named it confusion, and that which was behind us we called longing, and that which escapes desire we called yesterday.

We, who had never been in any place when the light came again, knew that we had seen it before.

We named it day.

And when your long black hair disappeared in the shadows, we called the shadow night.

Our first born, the promise drowned in the river as we crossed.

We did not look back and named that tomorrow.

On the other shore, in the twilight of the moon. you gave birth to hope and fear, And in the procession of light and dark we carried time on our shoulders.

And given the weight of time, fear slew hope and follows us howling in the forest alone.

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This is how we knew it was death a child not from our bodies but of the promise.

And every sun more children came, even some like us, now become great namers, counters, dividers of mystery.

Hunters, who tend fire and see the eyes that surround us at night.

And those that fall to the ground like you, ripe fruit, bring beasts among us for warmth and milk; and those like me, carriers of the promise, bring pain.

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Vandal Rhythm Cold rainy day Brown and black Silver and grey When raindrops On the tips of branches Receive all dreams.

Pictures of a ruined building, not ancient But near, red door Hacked open, pool of light.

I find the terraced greenhouses Guarded by the same bent angels Their breasts rounded, forsaken garden Of childhood. Jagged glass, A marble ball still sits above the door, Abandoned moon.

I know now that the future is merciful, And unlike the past, does not trespass against us.

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About George Drosdowich The records show that I was born 63 years ago in Yonkers, NY and despite the lack of living witnesses, the records create their own reality for those that care. As a child, I liked music but enjoyed pulling pianos apart and destroying anything that could make a mess, collapse in a grand manner or catch on fire easily. I still like those things. During my early education I was fortunate enough to be instructed with 19th Century precision by 4th Century minds and then started taking psychedelic drugs because it was generally agreed that there was more to be seen of life then met the eye. It was then I realized how vital and beautiful every little thing was and began to relax. The records in my file draw say I don’t have enough money to retire but I make more money each year than 98.9% of all the people in Nine Mile • Spring 2014

the world. I’ve repented (more times than I can remember) and rejoined the Church of Jesus, after trying everything else including devil worship, sometimes twice. I have on occasion provoked the Devil and gotten away with it but I am reminded that in the ninth inning, as the home team, he bats last. I am hopeful that I can get Goethe to be my closer. The editor wanted to know something about my esthetic. I value the wide-open enunciations of Whitman and Ginsberg because the age of prophecy is not over. I believe that all the elements of music are also elements of poetry, as are the elements of philosophy. I agree with Charles Olsen that each line must yield fresh insight and proceed inevitably from the last. And if the elusive language of dreams made a sound, WS Merwin was there with a recorder.

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JD Davis The saddest letter in tragedy

For a long time my hands

smelled of disappointment the questioning kind

with a beauty that clusters where the fingers meet the palm

chiseled into spines that mimic perfect arches

some very far apart.

Sometimes they move in heartbeats of time

trembling separately ...

apparently naked lying quietly in small patches of violet.

I love the way the light

breaks among the leaves.

There’s a blackness inanimate

a myth about ourselves an obsession with ashes

tumescent and otherwise remembering like a creature

with a language spoke in clicks ordinary simplicity

occasionally profound.

I watch what’s left (old men in sweater vests)

faded fatigued draped on old bones ...

a leaf falls in the quietest of moments

the burden of being just an empty expression,

like these hands clasped tightly together

holding each other as I watch them bleed

by whatever means life fall into these hands

a handful of red

rises in my cup.

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About JD Davis Jack Davis has a Masters Degree in Asian Studies and has continued his education in literature and philosophy. Music and Chinese Bagua Arts take up most of the time he doesn’t spend with his wife and best friend Buster.

He has published pieces in venues such as H_ngm_n Press, and has two chapbooks: Hits, Hardknocks and Other Concussions (2010) and Cruci-Fiction; The Lost Book of Jesus Crossman and the Mysterious Woodpecker Predicament (2010).

Jack is completing a religious horror collection and will be contemplating publication when the time is right.

And behind that beard, he is always smiling. Honest.

JD Davis - aesthetic On rare occasions...which these days are becoming all too familiar, I find myself sitting here having a drink on the front steps of Saint Paul’s. Three steps above me and nine below, a swig of cheap wine and a devil-dog keep my stomach from barking back.

Cab’s running and if I listen hard enough, I can hear the remnants of yesterday’s misNine Mile • Spring 2014

takes and tomorrow’s promises I’ll never keep. If I slip inside that front seat confessional, there’s the opportunity to bitch to myself ‘til the bars close, or read until the next fare comes along.

These books provide the only dessert I get, just or other-wise. Everyman deserves a quiet life contemplating his oral madness punctuated with enormous chunks of need. “Robinson Crusoe”, “The Old Man And The Sea”, and Rudyard Kipling sit next to the urn holding Aggie’s ashes. I always hated that cat , but now she rides shotgun.

That poem “If” has found a brand new level of meaning, even if it is quieter.

Should I wonder why my life is spent, one cynical sequence of darkly lit thoughts after another? River snow and cricket-songs are about the only seasons I can still recognize. Ageless tragic figures - oil lamps - self-published authors - poems in progress...Jesus! I’ve carried these old poems in my jacket pocket for too long now. Have a look.

There’s something comforting about looking down an empty street and doing something to keep it from being alone.

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Barbara Conrad

Farm to Table, a Blessing

Blue Hill Stone Barn Farm, Hudson River Valley

No matter these hasty blossoms of cherry and redbud, the valley is still in winter, and tonight we’ll welcome the last of its root vegetables – beets, carrots, sun chokes, parsnips. What the land has given up,

we forage: root, leaf, stem. Dig beneath the muck soil for onions, and along the tended rows, spring seedlings in their cycle of moon and season.

Below the tender plantings,

our ancient source of watershed flowing through stone and aqueduct, and deeper still this valley’s bedrock – limestone and shale. In that shale

a yearning so fierce, some would coax it out with untold thrashing, let loose a residue stew of heat-trapping gas, tainted groundwater,

an ache in our lungs.

How to harness our hunger for it all. The riches beneath us, yet this too – soft pastures where livestock graze and Rhode Island reds run free, gracing our plate

with a panko-crusted soft-boiled egg,

a scoop of blood sausage, paired with a glass of burgundy or barolo, chilled water from the tap.

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Salty-sour-bitter-sweet The highlight is my falafel

she says over lunch, arousing our tongues -- not for the taste of garlic and fried fava beans, fritters on lafa -but for the succulence of her syllables.

Stop reading and say it: the highlight is my falafel. the highlight is my falafel. Now taste it.

Like the way a rose-breasted grosbeak might taste the glow when hearing his name -rose-breasted grosbeak -- prodding a song more mellow

than a common robin’s.

Or over there in the garden border

beneath the bird’s perch, summer’s growth of -- listen to it -- rosemary, rhododendron, and by the stone wall a lonely mimosa, its dawn-hued shoots

blooming sooner this season, shade and scent easing

into the troughs of our tongue buds, lying down

with falafel’s familiar linger of olive oil, coriander, cumin, and that dazzling startle of tahini drizzle on our lips.

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A Mother Dreams of Snow Her boots are glass and lapis lined in fur

She hikes along an old mule path

from somewhere

Drifts are high as the top

of her boots She turns into the woods leaving

a moon and all its consistencies behind Under a black oak

she spots two small mounds in the snow

frozen bunnies barely born She lifts and zips them into her jacket warms them on her chest until

they wiggle Warm breath on her skin And then just then an old farm house

She enters

for warmer gloves

to rummage

and a box for the bunnies

At the kitchen table her two young daughters

are waiting for supper One asks where she’s been why she hasn’t she fed them

Startled she had thought her daughters were grown

the older one soon to give birth to her own She had thought her work was done

having been alone

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for such a long time

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About Barbara Conrad Barbara Conrad is author of Wild Plums (FutureCycle Press) and Gravity of Color (Main Street Rag) and editor of Waiting for Soup (Pure Heart Press). The latter, an anthology from her writing group with homeless folks in Charlotte, came from a passion for social justice and human rights.

If she had not been so enchanted by poetry (and diagramming sentences – go figure!) Barbara may have studied Journalism at Chapel Hill instead of English. She Nine Mile • Spring 2014

knows the value of reporting on the world.

Yet in poetry, she can go beyond the what and when to focus on the why and how of a matter. “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day from lack of what is found there,” said William Carlos Williams. In her most recent project, Barbara is letting her triggering subject be an item of “news,” whether it be front page or local, recipe or historical story, dream or personal quote.

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Kathleen Deep

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Nine Mile • Fall 2013

Nostalgia, “Pieces Series” Mixed Media Photography Installation

Nostalgia Detail 1

Nostalgia Detail 2 Nine Mile • Spring 2014

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At Quay, “Pieces Series” Mixed Media Photography Installation

At Quay Detail 1 18

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At Quay Detail 2

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Follow Your Feet, “Pieces Series” Mixed Media Photography Installation

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Follow Your Feet Detail 1

Follow Your Feet Detail 2

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ABOUT Kathleen Deep Kathleen Deep is a photographer from Upstate New York who continues to photograph in black and white film. She earned her Masters of Fine Art degree from the University of Connecticut, following an Associates in Applied Science degree from Herkimer County College,and a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree from Cazenovia College. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions as well as group exhibitions most recently in Brooklyn NY, Lubbock Texas, Herkimer NY, and Storrs CT. Kathleen currently lives and works in Connecticut, where she photographs and writes about her wanderings in the wetlands.

PIECES explores themes of nostalgia and memory, using photographs of separate locations to create surreal scenes and places of fiction. The use of tea, dirt, raw materials, ink, plastics, pins, deckled edge papers, inkjet photographs and van Dyke chemistry were influenced from my interest in working with manipulative material, and became a vehicle to push the images towards something mysterious and surreal.

The workmanship adds a sense of fragility juxtaposing the dominant scale, complicated scene and heavily treated papers. Overall this work allowed me as an artist to explore the place, my explorations in a place, and memory of them; themes I found have become a thread to current work “Follow the Water” and “Untitled” series.

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“Follow the Water” photographs (as well as new working series “Untitled”), although neglect the added manipulative materials like PIECES, still encompass qualities of the surreal and mystery, while also being quiet, poetic and haunting. I still explore the place, however my concentration has been focused towards the wetlands, and the wooded areas that surround. I explore to understand, and with this understanding, to feel a part of them or a sense of home. I always wander alone, so it is just me and the place staring back.

I walk alone amongst the trees. I wade slowly and wait for the water to still.

By slowing my step and my seeing, I become more aware of my behaviors while wandering. I choose to stabilize my camera using the trees, rocks and ground.

Some scenarios require my body to become a tripod, as I lean, hold or sit in the surroundings to secure the camera; making the experience a performance.

I question what my connection is to the natural world, and from where my comfort in silence and solitude derives. The more I explore and photograph my surroundings the greater I understand them.

Through this understanding, the closer I feel to becoming part of them.

Nine Mile • Spring 2014

Charles Lupia

Wineries Too long we sat in the room.

He would not look at me, moving his hands while I spoke, and waiting for my exit.

His mother had burnt his home, and no place he could rest now except in silence.

When I left his institution, the woman walking me asked if I had seen deer or turkey in the fields outside.

“We have lovely deer,” she grinned.

Driving out I saw no deer.

But there were wineries, gentle-roofed buildings supported by vines.

They smiled toward Italy, and with loveliness caught my breath.

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Toward the Future I have tasted Death through her visits.

She has worked through my system, and changed me.

But your road is vast even if they waste you, even if they limit you, even if you subscribe too often to their nonsense. In your loss you’ll see.

When you live longer, toward what ends will you work?

About Charles Lupia Charles Lupia holds B.A. and J.D. degrees from Syracuse University. He has also studied acting with Gerard Moses, playwriting at Ensemble Studio Theatre, and musical composition with Marc Mellits. Among his musicals Songs for the Road has been produced at Armory Square Playhouse, The Beautiful Brown Danube at NY Artists Unlimited and The Ugly Duckling at Society for New Music. His musical Rappacini’s Daughter has received readings in New York and Syracuse. Produced plays have included The Agony and the Experts (Theatre Three) and Uncle Sergei (The Barnstormers, Studio24 and Twin Cities Chekhov Festival). His play Genograms was accepted by the NY Fringe Festival. His radio plays The Agony and the Experts and Love in Space received national broadcasts through Shoestring Radio, and his radio drama The Light of Diogenes was broadcasted by WRVO. 24

His poetry and fiction has been published in Healing Muse and Stone Canoe, and his articles have appeared through the New York Bar Journal and Life in the Finger Lakes. Lupia blogs at: jalesy55.wordpress.com.

AESTHETIC STATEMENT: My approach to creative work was heavily inspired by the late psychologist and journal workshop provider Ira Progoff, who believed that the subconscious should be allowed to do its work. With regard to poetry, I’ve tried working in the sonnet and other rhymed forms. But I am a songwriter, and much of that work involves regular rhythm schemes and rhymes. The flexibility of free verse, written for the page or recitation, allows me a different type of music. Recently I wrote a play THE PRESENT OF FRANCE, which features several free verse poems set to music.

Nine Mile • Spring 2014

Sam Pereira

Adverbs in Moments of Anger It isn’t about the absence Of rain, although clouds, In their minor flirtations, Had proven unavoidable That year. She walked Out on a Wednesday— Drove out, actually.

The wind was blowing South. In the dark morning, I heard the Jeep Roll out of Kansas.

The metaphor, not the state.

She made a point of filling The front seat with her scent, Forced a red-haired smile Into what had once been Our rearview mirror. Asshole, She whispered. That sky You claim to know personally Caused this. That fuckingly Deplorable blue sky.

I’ll miss the incorrect formation Of adverbs in moments of anger, Waiting for the annual illusions Of the annual promised rain.

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A Poem in That Hopeless Season This is what makes it good: The lost auburn eyelash Of your one true love, The tear left On the recliner’s arm After your best dog dies, All those brain cells Systematically killed Around one dark bar In Iowa, sometime During the last century.

You recall it was cold-Spectacularly cold--especially In that hopeless season.

One more thing: it carries With it an example of a man’s Final and desperate act.

Okay, maybe not the final one, But one that brings out A lingering pain in the spine.

You know, the one That causes any one of us To wail at three in the morning; Wail for mercy. You’d give Your final breath for one Right now; that poem, Perhaps, in the white Halter top and frayed cut-offs, Appearing to smile directly Into your startled eyes; Determined to make you a fool.

It kisses you on the cheek, Whispering how it’s always Had a weak spot for genius.

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Words Placed in a Box of Toys Rubbish and garland, together.

Sly and willowy, just before the divorce.

Anguish at a friend moving on Out of the universe. Relatives In the back seat of the clown car, And speaking of relatives, no parade In site anywhere, but lots of horseshit On these streets. Go figure. Come back, And whisper about the time Willie Mays and Juan Marichal Went out for beers and didn’t worry About who would interrupt them, As they spoke of the 8th inning, In a practice game in Fresno, And how it was nothing like Westfield, Alabama, or Laguna Verde, Dominican Republic, how it was Exactly like that: somewhere to leave When the fog lifted, and The planes began running on time.

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The Root of All Levis

by Sam Pereira

[The following paper was presented as part of a panel discussion that included poets Philip Levine and David St. John. The panel was part of a threeday conference celebrating the life and poetry of Larry Levis, and was held on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia in September 2010.]

I suspect that in addition to the obvious connections shared with Larry Levis and the other marvelous panelists here tonight, I have a rather clear understanding of the agricultural place that allowed both Larry and I to land in Fresno in the first place. Having said that, I must now backtrack slightly to explain that my involvement with agriculture comes from having a father who provided services and products to people in farming—something I would later find myself doing for over two decades to pay the bills. Larry’s connection to agriculture came through a father who knew farming first hand and shared it with those close to him—among them, Larry.

When you live in one of these small valley towns, it is inevitable that, sooner or later, you will find yourself on a farm. As a kid, I remember spending time on a small dairy outside of town. The children in this family—my friends—very wisely let me share the work of putting the milking equipment together for the afternoon milking. Less work for them; entertainment for me. Feeding chickens was also on the agenda. It was not uncommon to be walking or playing in a field and then suddenly find yourself up to your knees in manure. The unexpected and crusted over pile simply took all the poetry out of your young life, but you laughed about it anyway.

That was one of the last days I ever, knowingly, took myself too seriously and it was, I believe, at least partially due to the San Joaquin Valley and those occasional times shit would make itself known—sometimes literally, asking you to smile in spite of it. I am certain something must have given Larry the ability to laugh at himself as a young boy there in Selma, California. It is that quality that makes some men better than the rest and Larry absolutely had it.

For Larry, the San Joaquin Valley southeast of Fresno brought with it, also, the underbelly of the vines. These same plants that look so beautiful from the road, are full of things like the valley’s dust and the gnats that fly into one’s face as you try to collect the fruit. I don’t claim to know these grapes as well as Larry Levis obviously did, but I know enough to know he wanted more, as did I. One of the differences between the two of us is that Larry always made sure he took and used his birth right in the making of the magnificent poems he would go on to create.

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In pondering these things, I remember Phil Levine saying on more than one occasion that poets needed to address their real lives on a regular basis. That need to embrace what you might be trying simultaneously to run from was a potential goldmine of material, provided that you were not afraid to allow it to run alongside of you. In much of Larry’s work over the years, the embrace of his youth was more than just mildly touched upon. When you read Levis, you know you are dealing with someone who truly understood surroundings, someone who honed them into the quality containments his writing allowed them to become.

There is a particular moment in the posthumous collection Elegy where Larry manages to ingratiate himself to the world by clutching simultaneously to the worlds of agricultural California, world politics, and the inner workings of the soul. A tough act to pull off, but Larry seemed to do such things almost effortlessly. The poem is “In 1967” and from its outset, one can’t help but be aware that what is about to happen will be an absolutely unforgettable ride. Set in the San Joaquin Valley, the poem’s hero, young Mr. Levis, is going about the business of killing. In his case, whatever looks like Johnson grass, a particularly choking variety of weed. He does so while partaking of a bit of mescaline.

What follows is a remarkable “vision” that encapsulates a good deal of what was both right and wrong with those times. Truthfully, what remains right and wrong even today. Needless to say, the poem—and the collection—is more than a signpost to those very exciting times. It will remain, perhaps, the ultimate historical tome to a world that was about to forever be devoured by the lackluster and the useless. Here is Levis, in his own words, from “In 1967”:

The short life of a cedar waxwing is more pure pleasure Than anyone alive can still be sane, and bear.

To this day, whenever I see a bird fly over or land somewhere near in this San Joaquin Valley of ours, I cannot help but want to shout out “Larry?” If the bird ever begins to laugh at this, I know I will have been correct in assuming it was him.

Unlike Larry, I spent vast amounts of my early and middle years as a writer trying to escape the valley. So, my poems might find themselves in Montevideo, Uruguay, for example, while Larry would be smart enough and confident enough to have his develop in pool halls and places like Parlier, California.

Larry’s roots took firm hold in the soil of the valley and soon everyone was made even more aware of this place that tends to be magical only in the pages of books. Hard work and sweat always came through; one could smell the tractor fuel and envision the dust flying around the John Deere. Throughout all of this, the image of Larry stands calmly and whimsically in the background: that bemused look on his face, offering entry into what seems the built-in knowledge of generations.

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If you were lucky enough to have seen Larry Levis read his work, you will remember with amazement, I am sure, that he pretty much did it from memory, a feat that I cannot imagine accomplishing with my own work, even with poems I have lived with for 40 plus years. Masterful and heartfelt always, these were the moments I cannot and will never forget. They mingle, equally, with other memories: Larry sitting in a cafe on campus at Fresno State, talking about Viet Nam, as we all did back then; Larry, years later in Iowa City, sitting in a bar called the Deadwood—the perennial cigarette held against his forehead; Larry smiling, even when everyone around him knew things could not possibly be that good.

As always happens if one stays around long enough, people who have been important slowly begin to disappear. Many times, they leave us holding nothing more than the cold air. We realize, too late, that we forgot to tell them thank you. Tonight, forgetting that cold air for just a moment, I wanted to finally say thank you to Larry, who is in this room, by the way, standing over there in a corner, snickering at all the fuss and looking for a smoke.

Sam Pereira Richmond, Virginia September 22, 2010 Los Banos, California

About Sam Pereira Sam Pereira’s books of poetry include: The Marriage of the Portuguese (L’Epervier Press, 1978), Brittle Water (Abattoir Editions/Penumbra Press, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1987), A Café in Boca (Tebot Bach, 2007), and the expanded edition of his first book, which was published by Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth in 2012. His most recent collection, Dusting on Sunday, was released in December, 2012 by Tebot Bach. He has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Piecework: 19 Fresno Poets (Silver Skates Publishing, 1987), The Body Electric: Poems from the American Poetry Review (W. W. Norton, 2000), How Much Earth (Roundhouse Press, 2001), and Blue Arc West (Tebot Bach, 2007). He lives and teaches in the San Joaquin Valley of California and is 30

married to the writer, Susan Graham.

The three poems included here are from a new manuscript of poems, which is nearing completion. I don’t generally proceed with some notion, pre-conceived or otherwise, as to destination. In approaching my writing in this way, what some might see as artistic neglect, I view as buying a ticket on a plane and never looking inside the ticket jacket. When you get there, smelling of other passengers and scotch and a bag of Doritos, you are certainly a different fellow than when you left. Specifically, these poems deal with loss and the manipulations of the human animal. In at least one instance, they include the personifying of a poem into a long-legged lover. For the most part, I am a very happy man.

Nine Mile • Spring 2014

Patricia Seitz

California Eye Candy 9x12 palette knife oil on panel

Cabin Fever in Central New York 5x7 oil on linen

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Lilly Pond 16x20 oil on canvas

About Patricia Seitz

Patricia Elliott Seitz is an accomplished artist and RN. Graduated from Syracuse University; BSN, Nursing. Patricia is listed, with, “Ask Art”, “OPA”, “CNY Art Guild”, “NYPAP”, “The BB of NAA”, “Who’s Who in American Art” 32nd 2012, Publications: “The Healing Muse Vol. 11”, 13, “Cat & Horse Sayings Wit and Wisdom”.

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David Lewis

Nataburi

for Carol

Today, thirty years married Chiseled and unfinished, yet no longer work in progress And stubbornly incomplete, caught in mid passage Epochal time in spurt and flash Sudden as is laughter and pain Scripted improvisation set against A typeface, faceless as at first Moving not in opposition but Not harmony but living With the complementary chisel marks Unfinished, wise in unsought ways Of incompleteness, forward.

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About David Lewis Mr. Lewis is a lawyer working in New York City and Albany. This is his first published poem. He lives in Croton-on-Hudson.

Natabori 鉈 彫 = Single-block carvings are also known as natabori 鉈彫 (literally “hatchet carving”), but natabori pieces are differentiated from ichiboku zukuri carvings by the characteristic round chisel (nata 鉈) markings left on the statue’s surface.

Popular from last half of the 10th century to around the 12th century; revived again in Edo period. Single-block carvings (ichiboku zukuri) are sometimes called natabori, but natabori statues are differentiated from ichiboku-zukuri carvings by the characteristic round chisel (nata 鉈) markings that are added to the statue’s surface.

Natabori images are rough-cut (arabori 荒 彫) or fine-cut (kozukuri 小造り) without undergoing the finishing (shiage 仕上げ) process, and for this reason, some Japanese claim that natabori are unfinished works, while others claim that natabori statues are a unique sculptural style. In the Nine Mile • Spring 2014

Edo Period, two wandering artists of great fame revived this technique. They were the Buddhist priest Enkü 円空 (1632-1695) and the Zen priest Mokujiki Myöman 木食 明満 (1718-1810). Nearly all of their extant pieces were carved from a single block of wood, including the pedestals, and were not hollowed out. This gives their pieces a freshness that is completely different from the refined works of traditional Buddhist sculpture. Nearly all of Enkü’s pieces (allegedly 120,000 figures) were carved as single-block figures, including the pedestals, and were not hollowed out. Enkü was not widely recognized during his lifetime, but has achieved great fame in modern-day Japan. He hailed from Mino 美濃 (modern Gifu prefecture). He was not affiliated with any temple or workshop, nor considered a professional maker of Buddhist images.

Rather, he was a mountain ascetic and pilgrim who traveled about the eastern and northern parts of Japan carving statues in exchange for food and shelter.

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Lindsey Bellosa

The First Year A warm entangle of skin and limbs, and wills. Your fat frog legs kick; you clutch skin of my belly, a touch that I shy from: skin too stretched to ever be taut again, that one year ago encased you— your whole world. I have tried this year, to introduce you to this new world, let it grow slowly for you.

Lying here, looking out at the snow: tethered to you, as I have been often this year: wanting more of the world but knowing you weren’t ready yet, I have tried to enjoy this bubble of warmth, of simple love that we are encased in so briefly, knowing that soon the world will swallow us up like snowflakes swallowed into vast, cold sky.

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About Lindsey Bellosa Lindsey Bellosa lives in Syracuse, NY. She has an MA in Writing from the National University of Ireland, Galway and has poems published in both Irish and American journals and magazines, online and in print. Her first chapbook, The Hunger, was recently published with Willet Press. Her work can be seen at her website: http:// lindseybellosa.weebly.com/ When I write poetry, I am capturing a particular moment or feeling but also seeing through it. Poetry is what is in between the lines of everyday life; it asks the obviNine Mile • Spring 2014

ous questions that we are often so blind to because we’re so busy being alive. A line of poetry will come to me at a random time… when I’m driving, when I’m playing with my children, whenever my brain is not completely focused on the task at hand.

Poetry needs some room, some white space. A line comes when I’m open to it, and I build the rest of the poem around the idea. Lately, it seems much easier to keep my mind open: my children have these brand new minds that make me realize how everything in the world needs description and interpretation.

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Janet MacFadyen

In Marriage I opened a door. The shape in the half-dark looked familiar.

There is a deep secret in all of us and it is Our own glory. I stepped back, but then I stepped Forward. I wanted to apologize but why, and to whom?

For too long sheets flapped on the line with the owners Gone missing. The mirror showed only what was, not What was waiting to be born. Creatures, half-human, Half-crow, surged over a hillside; there was nothing To do except follow that crying urgency, We who had been exiled. I thought we were dead, But we had been sleeping. O my goat-headed Husband, once you awakened me, now I awaken you.

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Homecoming I find myself deep in a jungle. Lizards with creamcolored pouches. A plink-plink sound, a warbling cackle.

When you call wanting to visit, I say

I don’t have a clue where I am.

Wild hibiscus and bougainvillea— Royal palms grow free in a wealth all their own, and the banks of impatiens breed themselves with inborn

Edenic color.

Palm trees flow over mountains, and palm roots ooze fibrous dreadlocks, the aftermath of a feverish brain. Under my skin

is a tangle of roots.

Where you are I can’t remember. The phone has stopped working and the water tank overflows.

I always did speak a foreign language, which is to say

I am home now.

About Janet MacFadyen Janet MacFadyen is the author of three works of poetry, including A Newfoundland Journal (Killick Press, 2009) and In the Provincelands (Slate Roof Press, 2012). Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart, and has appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Atlanta Review, The Malahat Review, Mead, Southern Poetry Review, Rosebud, and Sweet. Janet has been a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and a recipient of a Cill Rialaig residency in Ireland. She lives in western Massachusetts among the trees.

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Poetry is a restorative function for me, how I begin and end each day; I connect it with sleep, dreaming, travel, and evolving. A lot of recent work has been pulled from travel journals I wrote over the past 30 years. Often I’m trying to process something I experienced years ago, some landscape I never understood, either interior or exterior. I like my poems to be journeys, and if the journey is through a surreal or archetypal landscape, I like to look around and try to learn from it.

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Martin Willitts Jr

Silent Intent Sometimes, some things bring us to our knees.

Some small thing can change the way things are into something else surprising in results and silent purpose.

Alpine strawberries work their silence on a stump decomposing it back into the music of the earth.

This is what surrender looks like: the release and separation into the unknown.

Where Are the Stars Tonight?

Where are the stars tonight?

I cannot find myself in such darkness.

I have never felt more alone and abandoned.

It is soundless here. I cannot find anything in this nothingness, removed from every thing. I have forgotten all I knew.

The moon is blue. The second moon in a month is a mouth swallowing the stars. Such loss!

If I move I might disappear in intense darkness.

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About Martin Willitts Jr Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Senior Librarian living in Syracuse, New York. He is a Quaker, Organic Gardener, and Paper Cut Out Artist. His poems have appeared in Stone Canoe, Blue Fifth Review, Comstock Review, Bitter Oleander, Rattle, Big River Review, Centrifugal Eye, Poppy Road Review, Written River, and hundreds others.

He has had poems in over 20 anthologies.

He has 6 full-length collections of poetry including national contest winner “Searching for What is Not There” (Hiraeth Press, 2013) and over 20 chapbooks including contest winner “William Blake, Not Blessed Angel But Restless Man” (Red Ochre Review, 2014). He has a currently web book “Constellations of Memory and Forgiveness” (Seven Circles Press, http://www. sevencirclepress.com/webbooks). He is the editor and publisher of Willet Poetry Press (http://willetpoetrypress.com/).

Martin Willitts, Jr is a Quaker, organic gardener, visual artist, and retired Librarian living in Syracuse, New York. Winner of the 2012 William K. Hathaway Award ; co-winner of the 2013 Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest; winner of the 2013 “Trees” Poetry Contest; winner of the 2014 Broadsided award. His poems have appeared in Nine Mile • Spring 2014

Rattle, Stone Canoe, Comstock Review, Blue Fifth, Big River Review Poetry, Poppy Road, and numerous others. He has 6 fulllength poetry collections including national ecological poetry contest “Searching for What is Not There” (Hiraeth Press, 2013) and over 25 chapbooks including contest winner “William Blake, Not Blessed Angel But Restless Man” (Red Ochre Press, 2014).

As a Quaker, I practice Silent Worship, listening for messages, the voice of the Spirit, from even the smallest life forms. As a former Jazz musician, I use these messages to compose the poems. In Jazz, this is called “Playing the Pauses”. It is the thematic improvisations within a structure. In other words, I never know what will come out, and I allow the messages to flow through me, letting the words find the experience.

In the poem, “Where Are the Stars Tonight?” I am caught in the wonder of how small and insignificant we are, how short our lives are, how at any moment things can change. In “Silent intent” I am thinking of what we call the goal of going into silent worship, and how it is the same as letting go, emptying the self, allowing things to happen.

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Georgia A. Popoff The Agnostic Contemplates Purpose Joy is plotting, conscious of mortality.

She confronts a compulsion to document her life in lists. Joy struggles with the way time is a coyote, how we slough our bodies, such slight evidence of these shells summarized in two column inches, an epitaph that stalls a jogger, artifacts comprising home.

Consumed by clutter, compelled to clean and dust, her fingers diagram dreams before whisking them off, like a sand mandala returned to the capacious river.

With no hope nor leisure of pension she intends to be noted for order, for translating her internal language of labor, a life rattling like a maraca.

The Agnostic Considers Travel Abroad Joy relies on travel to fill her wanting bowl. She keeps a log of sacred sites.

Late at night, when all is still, she calculates her vacation club monthly interest.

She rambles her rooms draped in Asian silks, blue batik from Ghana, daydreaming of overnight flights, taxis honking anywhere but here. The wedge of India caused Joy to doubt her own strength. Did she receive shaktipat? Did the holy man burst open a seed within her?

Will the Southern Hemisphere taunt next?

Can camels or tigers stifle her yearning?

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My I Come From Poem

by Destinee

We had to leave our block. Everything.

All my friends, my park, my school.

We moved to another state.

I had to say goodbye to my pastor and aunties, my cousins, my dog.

We couldn’t take her to our new house.

Mommy couldn’t sleep.

The man who shot my daddy got out of jail.

He moved in down the block.

Three doors away.

My teacher let me take pictures on my phone the last day without taking it away.

I put the note from her on my bulletin board in my new pink room.

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New Bride’s First Tea Linens the color of papyrus will be starched, napkins in terse folds, the silver polished full moon bright, crystal salt cellars and tiny vases beaming with violets wafting gentle sugar through the dining room, the kitchen thick with fresh scones and elderberries.

A flutter of negotiations to even arrange the visit, the ladies will arrive mid-afternoon with whispers of gloves, their attitudes reflected in the jaunty angles of their hats. It is a relief to join together. Seated around the parlor, secrets and truths slowly unfold.

The walls will witness this necessary conclave in which husbands with heavy hands are revealed, lost pregnancies grieved, the politic of our subservience guised as gossip. I will serve lemon curd and Lady Grey.

We will speak of my wedding, remember the cake fondly.

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Anonymous

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About Georgia A. Popoff Georgia A. Popoff, of Syracuse, NY, is an educator, arts-in-education specialist, Comstock Review managing editor, Downtown Writer’s Center Workshops Coordinator and faculty member with two poetry collections and coauthored a book for teachers on poetry in the K-12 classroom.

Her fourth book is forthcoming from Tiger Bark Press in 2015.

More detail on the poems: I have only been working in persona since The Doom Weaver was released. The two agnostic poems are selections from my book due out early 2015 from Tiger Bark Press: Psalter: The Agnostic’s Book of Common Curiosities.

I am also working on two other collections: one series of prose poems on conjoined twins and related syndromes and a book of persona poems to be called Pyschometry. There are four cycles of poems to be included: Nine Mile • Spring 2014

1) Historical iconic women examined through the voices of inanimate objects that are present in their daily lives 2) Letters in the voices of women from different times and circumstances 3) Poems by “Anonymous” - poems that other women may have “written” in honor of all the women who were published without their names attached 4) “I Am” poems that I am not sharing yet.

They are the first return to my own voice and will be a part of the book because I listen carefully to my muse Both of the poems that I sent, the voice of Destinee and the voice in New Bride’s Tea are a part of this body of work. Hope that gives more context to you for the poems. I grew very weary of autobiographical work after two books of it. I was not growing as a writer either so I imposed challenges that served my work really well.

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Crystal LaPoint

Ballet de Feuillage Digital

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Lapins en Fou Digital

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le Cri d’Enfant Corbeau Digital

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About Crystal LaPoint Crystal Godfrey LaPoint attended the Syracuse University School of Music, where she earned degrees in both Piano Performance and Composition & Theory. Crystal is a professional pianist/accompanist, as well as an award-winning, commissioned and published composer. Her digital fine art and couture silk scarf collections have garnered awards and a loyal clientele in central New York and the Boston area. Crystal has been a radio and TV host on the Syracuse NPR/ PB affiliate stations, a private piano instructor, and is a published poet and lyricist. An ardent advocate for the destigmatization of mental illness, Crystal has authored a children’s book and song titled “When My Mommy Cries” which addresses the issue of parental depression.

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Michael Burkard Following are excerpts from Michael Burkard’s marcekous and mysterious long poem, Some Time In The Winter, which will be published shortly by W.D. Hoffstadt & Sons Press. The drawings are also by Mr. Burkard, from an untitled series. They are available at Blurb.com.

Some Time in the Winter Meeting the thick view of pine, one misses longboats, the evenness of the canal through fire.

And now I’m tired of these reports: my brother hid in longboats. Three villages of ice, carts. The villages of lupin, pine, and tremble a canal considered in their direction.

The weather here holds horizontal, moss. Birds step out. The longboats bleed on the canals. We’ve given over, to such good scenes, a common thermos of tea.

At the back of the land such colder places, reflected this morning the boats were like the first series of walks beyond the house.

The many necessities of trees were you.

This morning the vase seemed larger, and you thought of lettering these tents.

He’s brought you bowls again, the ocean goes. From the mountain the water breaks down, the mountain mistaken as back. Your clothing on the bed, the design of the trees, fog lowering in places. And sometimes I can’t sleep and the land becomes an undesired project. Only we were seeing the world, the porches intrude from far away.

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For example, in the bedroom two yellow vases were moved to the bureau. We moved others to the pantry. A stubborn arrangement, as though the night like a regime. And until you came to this town, October was my favorite, full of the sea, my first porches! I was very happy.

Elsewhere, the road acquired other limits, suggested the grass dies. Across the lake snow was still falling, moving away. Markings disturbed the boats.

What was left there, on the figure: do these bathers have branches to propose. The solitary who collected bottles, who failed to stage the phantoms for these bathers, adrift and so proposed. Secondly, not even the boats justified the distance. The damage the work of a father and son, and the way the wheel was not just scorched but sewn.

An entire village of sons. Which is the broad dark, the boats missing in the spaces. ///

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I tried to say, the Adirondacks are choking with sorrow. The maps blow across the park.

You were more attached to the box of dry milk, the album of Persian drawings (Rustam Sleeping, Khusrau Sees Shrin Bathing In A Pool). The borders were attached to other borders. Such references permitted troops to advance on the attic.

Hungers groped in the trunk.

When you arrived I was about to riddle the piano.

She turned back to consider a few months, the sky, the surface of her house in the country.

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White Fragments There are smaller orbits of clothing and simple executions. The bulk of munitions is like this: a flute escaping under the feed of stars, the marriages speaking of axes.

About the plane that collapsed in the mountain: we should begin with burial, with a black invention of clarity and doubt that concerns the lost.

It is 5 o ‘clock in the afternoon.

He has climbed faces. Even his words belong to him — the gifts that consist of bandage. What is missing is the tale of himself, old lamps hanging from rope, the paler light confusing. The oar functions with its slow prediction: we would be back from the removal.

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And the wood and the mountain would have us, viewing the swimmers below us and farther the hangars with their fragments of bones and distinctions. He has drifted, the tables being dragged through snow. ///

The thoughtful going home with a corpse on his wagon was not the effect of grief. He underestimated the airfield near the coast, how bathing he circled a small way in the water. About now the weather lurches in anger, a lyric of light assassinates the crows. These are sentinels also. /// 54

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The sleigh entered the woods during one preparation of soup. The pond was stupefied and having carried her ancestry with milk. I still question the absence of a hotel, in his background. Papers flew out the window. And you can appreciate how this study was overdue: the overweened coach, the gondolier on the calendar. Not that the city is white at its edges, it’s not. But these Maritimes, the eyedropper filled with frost.

For the Racquette Lake trip, I borrow your thermometer.

When questioned about the bay , a misunderstood gas station attendant setting fire to the boats.

My, he was young. And the Leica ‘s aim at the lake. The steamer”Branches” discouraged all the tourist’s food. The thermometer seems to read 52 relentless degrees of panic.

A duck is gliding into view. And the Durango, the colors in that portrait of the deerslayer, exude suspicion.

About Michael Burkard Michael Burkard’s books of poetry include My Secret Boat (W. W. Norton), Entire Dilemma (Sarabande Books), and Unsleeping (Sarabande Books). His poems appear in many journals and magazines, including The American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Verse, Fence, and Black Clock. Twice he has received fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Foundation for the Arts.

He received the Alice diFay di Castagmola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and he has received a Whiting Writer’s Prize. In 2008, Michael Burkard was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. His poetry has appeared in four separate Best Nine Mile • Spring 2014

Anthologies. His improvisational songs are available at redhouseartradio.org. Nightboat Books published a selected and uncollected volume of poetry in 2008, Envelope of Night. Nightboat Books will also publish The Found Face Girl in 2010. He is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing. He frequently teaches creative writing in Syracuse public schools. He frequently collaborates with artists and photographers. He was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In past decades he has taught at New York University, Sarah Lawrence, and the University of Louisville.

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Discussion with Stephen Kuusisto This discussion took place on April 15, 2014, while we lunched at 317, a restaurant on Montgomery Street in Syracuse. I had asked Steve to provide some poems of his own and of others who had influenced him, or which he felt deeply about. He produced several, though we only managed to speak about four of them.

The discussion that follows is like any discussion, I suppose, with points made and responded to and others dropped or dropped too soon, some made well, some left vague or speculative. My own feeling is that this is what gives a discussion some interest, the sense that we have parameters to our discussion but no rules and were free to go where we chose. Note that the discussion is slightly edited for syntax and to eliminate some redundancies.

— Bob Herz BH: I asked you to give us some poems that you liked that had an influence on you. One of these is “Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River” by Robert Bly.

Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River 1.

I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota.

The stubble field catches the last growth of sun.

The soybeans are breathing on all sides.

Old men are sitting before their houses on car seats In the small towns. I am happy, The moon rising above the turkey sheds.

2.

The small world of the car Plunges through the deep fields of the night, On the road from Willmar to Milan.

This solitude covered with iron Moves through the fields of night Penetrated by the noise of crickets.

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3.

Nearly to Milan, suddenly a small bridge, And water kneeling in the moonlight.

In small towns the houses are built right on the ground; The lamplight falls on all fours in the grass.

When I reach the river, the full moon covers it.

A few people are talking, low, in a boat.

You’ve said that Robert Bly was a big influence on you in terms of the possibilities of poetry when you started to write. Do you want to talk about that a little, and also why you like this poem?

SK: I wonder if sometimes we aren’t in love with poets who we first discovered, and if that love doesn’t last all our lives. For me, Robert Bly’s poetry was an early discovery. It was introduced to me by a mutual friend of ours, the poet Jim Crenner, who founded Seneca Review magazine at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. When I read Bly’s first book, Silence in the Snowy Fields, I found several things: a freshness about the ordinary world, his descriptions of the ordinary world, the world of farms and telephone poles, and soybean fields under moonlight were luminous descriptions, imbued with qualities of consciousness which I had always suspected being a person who grew up in rural places. He brought to even the simplest and homeliest things a quality of beauty and strangeness, conferred on ordinary things a quality of strangeness, and I loved that. I’d grown up in rural New Hampshire, and those poems about the snowy fields of Minnesota and the barns at dusk coming closer to the house in the twilight and the branches of trees like fierce old men on their deathbeds—these descriptions were just captivating to me. Later in that poem he describes men in a rowboat under the moon talking. Evoking these things, one realizes that the world around us is entirely meaningful, that everything is meaningful. He says, “the houses are built right on the ground.” Literally he means that they don’t have cellars, but it also makes sense in another way, that there’s a sort of energy to everything, not only the details of a poem, but your house built right on the earth is filled with a kind of earth divinity. There’s a secret soulful energy flowing through those poems, and I was really taken with it quite early.

BH: Let me ask you about a line and a half here that struck me. The whole first stanza here is a series of declarative sentences. But then the last line and a half something happens —

I am happy,

The moon rising above the turkey sheds.

What an interesting co-location—“I am happy, The moon rising…” you might expect a period, “I am happy.” and then something else. But no, that comma Nine Mile • Spring 2014

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links the two of them in some way. It’s mysterious to me. I think it works, it’s effective, but I don’t know why.

SK: One thing that Robert Bly has spent a lot of time thinking about in his career is the strangeness of the human unconscious that it has a life moving in tandem with the conscious mind. One could conceivable be happy in a couple of different ways. You can be happy going about your customary business in the quotidian world of simply driving somewhere, probably going to mail a letter. On the other hand, just the very sight of moonlight and something as customary and rude as a turkey shed suddenly fills him with a kind of joy. We all experience this, all the time. We’re just walking about minding our own business when something small touches us and for whole moments we feel a sense of the strangeness and wonder of being alive.

BH: Is it both things them? I am happy, seeing the moon rise above the turkey sheds, and I am happy, the moon rising above the turkey sheds shows me that happiness, and I am happy seeing the spirit of the world evoke itself in the moon rising above the turkey shed.

SK: It’s all of that. He’s created a kind of confected multiple levels of happiness.

He’s happy driving his car, he’s aware that he’s happy, and then he sees this beautiful little still life of moon and turkey sheds and that happiness just reverberates. That comma is a reverberation, a little diaphragm in the old victrola.

BH: It’s an extraordinary line and a half. I remember being struck by out when I first read the poem, and I could not get to the next stanza because of it. I did eventually, but I kept thinking about it, because it’s different than all the rest of the lines in the poem. And then at the end—

When I reach the river, the full moon covers it.

A few people are talking, low, in a boat.

Richard Howard says that so many of Bly’s poems take the shape of journalism, that they’re trying to tell you that something happened at a particular time, in a particular way, on a particular date. But it’s not like journalism like you’re used to. It’s not the comic pages or the sports pages or the local news, telling us that the town council met last night. It’s all this other kind of news coming at us, maybe from that simplified world that you talked about.

SK: Well, poetry confers upon even the simplest thing a new sense of wonder, which is what Aristotle said it did. That poetry gives us an apprehension of what was always beautiful and strange but that we didn’t have language for.

And Bly accomplishes that, in such spare elegant lines, so I agree that it is like journalism, but journalism imbued with a sort of Aristotelean quality.

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BH: Does he make the world too simple? A funny thing to ask, right? But is it that the world just is this simple sometimes?

SK: No, I think the world is this simple sometimes. In a later poem he says, holding a dead bird in his hands, forgive the house I spent listening to radios.

BH: O God, please forgive all of us that…

SK: We’re taxed by so many things! Wordsworth said the world is too much with us, and we lay waste our powers in getting and spending…so in a sense we’re all taxed by our modernity. There’s just too much in the world. It takes art to simplify it. Or at least that is one capacity of art.

BH: That is one capacity. Think about reading a Hemingway short story, and you walk away thinking, okay, that’s it, the world is entirely within my grasp. I can deal with this world. As opposed to a Proust or a James Merrill, or a Richard Howard, who give us such a much more complicated world.

SK: Auden too…

BH: Auden…I always want to be careful about him, because he’s so prolific, he goes so many places.

SK: There are so many Audens.

BH: So many Audens.

SK: But when he’s bringing forward an observation about the nature of observation and feelings he’s making sure that we recognize that there are ironies and then more ironies associated with our self-recognition. Auden would say that the world is not what we suppose. And further, what we can say about it is not quite right either.

BH: I love that early Auden, the English Auden. The Sonnets from China.

SK: But I like the later Auden too, where he says the boys are whooping it up on the moon, in a kind of phallic dance, you know when he writes about the Apollo 11.

BH: One felt about Auden that there was almost nothing he couldn’t write about, and make successful and be brilliant at. And somehow that hurt him.

It’s like it’s hard to read Swinburne because he’s such a perfect poet.

SK: If you look at just the sheer capacity to understand the death psychology of his Shakespeare. His Sea and the Mirror, his long prose reaction to the TemNine Mile • Spring 2014

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pest is better than the Tempest in some respects. It’s pretty astonishing. I can think of no one today who can do that.

BH: Let’s talk about one of your poems, called “Waiting.” A lovely poem.

Waiting Is part of something: a blue door opens, Portuguese fishermen walk from a coffee shop In Providence, Rhode Island —or Lisbon — And head for the pier with buckets.

Part of something, they ride the sea: The Atlantic, part of something.

Mornings on the coast, houses In fog on the hills, the paint Like carnival pastels… People believe The whole world is part of something.

The phone rings… they give it away.

I spoke last night with a friend… He might One day become your friend, or sometime, Far off, a friend to your children — Part of something. I told him About the English poet Who, deserting God, still loved With clean irony the churches On country roads… He’d lean his bike And go inside—not certain of motive But to wait, because others had waited In just that place, sitting through the sunset Beneath the slender windows.

What a strange bunch of characters. Portuguese fishermen and Philip Larkin—not the people I would ordinarily think of together. Let’s talk about the assembly of the poem. Where do these fishermen come from?

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SK: This is in the homely world, like Bly’s poem. The world of the Portuguese fishermen is also the world of Bly’s men sitting low in a boat, it’s the world of the turkey sheds, it’s the customary world of slightly battered houses, it’s not the dressed up world, it’s not Wallace Stevens world, it’s the world of ordinary circumstance. So I would say that from Bly I get that sense that the local, the neighborly, and the slightly homely are all starting points for poetry.

BH: Is this a real Portuguese fisherman who walks out of the coffee shop, or is that something you imagined.

SK: No, it’s something I witnessed.

BH: So, this starts in the real world, with you being somewhere and seeing something.

SK: Yes. And then it slowly drifts into a kind of incantatory state of belief, hope, a vatic state, almost, where we sense that there are larger beautiful connecting principles at work in our lives, and that wisdom and beauty resides in recognizing that.

BH: So we go from the fishermen who start in Providence Rhode Island in a coffee shop and then they go sailing into the Atlantic, and they see the coast, they see the houses, they see the paint, and then suddenly the phone rings— I’m just staying on construction for a moment.

SK: Right. And then I’m talking to somebody who is very dear to me and I’m thinking of the conditional tenderness of loving minds all inhabiting the world in a kind of dance that is not apparent to us, a kind of flow of what one hopes is a wash of goodness through things—just as sailors going to sea hope that there is some connection, some sense of belonging to a world.

BH: The poem feels like all this stuff belongs in it, and yet if I stand away from it for a second and think about it, I think of fishermen and a phone call, not local, and Philip Larkin, Atlantic ocean, and churches, and maybe kids and grandkids at some point—if I look at it that way I think, well this is just an arbitrary assemblage of people. Now the poem doesn’t let me think that.

SK: The poem puts a magnet under the steel filings on top of the paper, and says that there are forces that bring these things together. Poems can make insistences, you know.

BH: How do you mean that?

SK: Well, for whole moments poems can create constellations of feelings and ideas and sensibilities that within the poem are very real, in a way that walking Nine Mile • Spring 2014

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out on the street belies. The chaos of the ordinary belies. Wallace Stevens says that a man and a woman and a blackbird are one.

BH: Right, and you read it and it feels inevitable. Or Yeats in the Second Coming—we get a widening gyre and a falcon, and the Sphinx and Jesus, or antiJesus. Pretty odd assemblage of people if you think about it.

SK: Back to Auden, right—“To get the last poems of Yeats You need not mug up on dates; All the reader requires Is some knowledge of gyres And the sort of people he hates.” The last poems of Yeats are ones in which he’s really given up on many elements of humanity. The Second Coming is a really dark and bitter poem. He thinks we’re all going to hell in a hand basket.

BH: It is I find as I get older to some extent a function of age. It gives you a perspective where you can see some sense of where we are compared to where we were, and things then begin to look dangerous, and things that seemed so important now just seem casual to so many people.

SK: Yeats hoped for great things for Ireland in his youth and didn’t live to see them. It’s easy to be disenchanted and bitter but when you create a mythology about it you elevate it somehow, and you’re consigning people to it. It becomes an allegory.

BH: An interesting way to think about it. So there’s the parallel between Yeats and Dante.

SK: It’s the same impulse. I get this idea from Auden, in a little throwaway poem but it illuminated it for me. I really love Yeats but I’ve never liked the later poems.

BH: Remember the play of concepts that he does, about living each others deaths dying each others lives. And yet it’s those ones in the 20’s, during the anni mirabiles years—we have the Tower, the first bunch of the Cantos, the Wasteland, The Magic Mountain, Ulysses, all in the space of six years. Extraordinary outpouring. As far as Yeats’ hope for Ireland, he did get greatness but in literature, not in the other places where he wanted them. Back to the poem.

This is a lovely poem, I really like this a lot. What is it that we’re waiting for?

SK: Well, that’s a really great question. I would say.

BH: Waiting is part of something…

SK: The something is the real key there. I would say a kind of unified connection with other human beings in a dance of sensibilities…I don’t want to go all mystical on you, but I’ll often walk around and think, “There’s someone 62

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with a really good soul.” I just feel it in airports and it’s just an intuition. It’s an intuition that just comes over you, and you feel sweet tenderness, a sort of sacred geometry of people and things that is not easy to describe. Poetry is a good place for it, in that sense that which is why I like that DH Lawrence poem do much.

BH: Because you can’t fake it.

SK: No, rhetoric won’t do that work.

Pax All that matters is to be at one with the living God to be a creature in the house of the God of Life.

Like a cat asleep on a chair at peace, in peace and at one with the master of the house, with the mistress, at home, at home in the house of the living, sleeping on the hearth, and yawning before the fire.

Sleeping on the hearth of the living world yawning at home before the fire of life feeling the presence of the living God like a great assurance a deep calm in the heart a presence as of the master sitting at the board in his own and greater being in the house of life.

BH: Very religious poem, yes, do you think?

SK: A very religious poem. Lawrence had a kind of kooky pantheism in him.

When he sees a snake he sees the divine in it. He’s constantly seeing little morse codes of the divine. In the way that Whitman did. Whitman saw letters from God dropped in the streets. Those are the horse turds. He’s seeing the morse code of the divine in horse droppings. Which is why Lawrence was such a great reader of Whitman.

Whitman has a sense that the dust of stars and the blab of the pavement are all connected. That every atom belonging to you as well belongs to him. In the final analysis, Whitman is very much a 16th century German mystic, like Jacob Boehme, with the idea of the signature of all things. Boehme’s idea that the energies of the divine universe are flowing through everything. even a table Nine Mile • Spring 2014

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top. And Whitman very much is aligned with that tradition, and believes it, and believes that he’s a spokesperson for it. Which is an interesting trick, isn’t it?

Because if you assert that, you deflect the individual talent and the work associated with it. Whitman can be proud and boastful and noise and noisome, but he seldom says, save in letters, that I’m the responsible genius of this particular enterprise. He allows himself the humility to be that voice.

BH: Something clearly happened to him, that he just woke up one day and kabook there’s Leaves of Grass. We don’t feel like there’s a gestation, like he wrote his way toward it. The way Yeats moves from Responsibilities to the Tower. Suddenly there’s Leaves of Grass, just suddenly!

SK: Reading Emerson electrified him. We use electricity with Whitman, right, the body electric. Emerson was the igniter switch. Reading Emerson’s Nature just—as they say in the venacular—just grooved him.

BH: Still has the ability to do that. I remember Sharon Olds talking about Emerson as one of the things that gave her strength to get out of the horrible situation she had been in. Amazing.

SK: And then to be in a city like Manhattan in the 19th century that was teeming with every kind of life in a way that it does not anymore. We can say that it’s a world city and it’s filled with immigrants and it’s filled with people but not in the way that it was. It was developing, it was a bawdy, filthy, and yet also beautiful complicated booming thing, and to ride around that city as he did over and over on those omnibuses or walking it and just absorbing everything and writing it down was as, in the context of Emerson, to be part of a poetic and experiment and arrival.

BH: You said a lot of important things there, but here is one: one had an idea and filled it with experience and created a product that we had not seen before. No one wrote a poem like that previously. It was a wholly different kind of poem than what anybody had ever done.

SK: The only thing close to it, in my mind, is the writing that Rilke does when he arrives in Paris. Paris was still a medieval city with its prostitutes and beggars its disabled people and the blind singing on the street corners. He had that sense of a divine mystery taking place right there.

BH: He also tried to teach himself to see. The famous poem the Panther is the product of that. The elegies I thought were the complete break for him of what had gone before. To read them even now is just wild. There are some times when poetry seems to break from everything that has gone before. And with Whitman you can’t go from Emerson’s The Sphinx to Leaves of Grass. It doesn’t happen, form to form. New topic: I do like Bloom’s notion that a lot 64

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of Eliot is a fight against Whitman.

SK: I think thats true. We don’t know what Whitman would have done with the horror of WWI. I think Eliot really does spring out of that reaction to the vast and oceanic horror of the war. The sense that civilization was deeply complicit in it. Eliot was as much a reaction to that as the dadaists and the surrealists were. Only Eliot is more carefully allegorical.

BH: He’s more something. I wind up—this is probably a bad analogy—but I wind up thinking of him the way I do about the Beatles, which is not so much that they created a lot of things, though they did create some things, but that they that gathered to themselves a lot of what was out there and combined it and recombined it into new ways. So that things seemed brand new that we hadn’t seen previously. So Eliot felt like a breakthrough all the time, from the Wasteland through the Four Quartets. But never as again, to my mind, though it would be hard to recreate the impact of the Wasteland on day one, but in terms of being an innovator between Eliot and Pound. When you get the Cantos, there’s nothing like that previously anywhere in literature. You can maybe look to Jubulate Agno, Christopher Smart, or Whitman, or…kind of hard to go anywhere else. Pound is so extraordinary. But with Eliot something else is going on there, some balancing between tradition and form and sound and sense everything is happening there. He’s very broad, he’s very big.

SK: One thinks of Pound as the bibliophile, and one thinks of Eliot as the anthropologist. Which are different sensibilities. Both equally important, but slightly different. You never get the sense that Pound is interested in people.

But you do get that sense from Eliot.

BH: What’s so interesting about that is that Pound is the one who went out of his way to help everybody he met, Eliot was not. It’s sort of the reverse of life.

SK: You know that story about Alan Ginsberg going to Rapallo to visit Pound in 1967, and Pound was living in silence. Ginsberg goes to see him, and spends the entire day playing on a gramophone Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to Pound. “You gotta hear this, Ezra!” So very Ginsberg.

BH: Donald Hall had a wonderful interview with Pound that appeared in the Paris Review, and then he reprinted it with some things that had been lift out in a wonderful book, Remembering Poets. But he also talked about being there and having the conversation, and Pound’s energies flagging, and Pound’s doubt and self-condemnation. That must have been very hard.

Let’s do one more poem.

SK: Guiding Eyes is the follow up to the Lawrence, in the sense that there is a quality of mystic connectedness in that poem. Guiding Eyes For The Blind Nine Mile • Spring 2014

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is the name of the school that Corky the yelow Labrador came from. This is about wandering around NYC with the dog who has been trained to see. I guess there’s only one more thing to say, which is that Columbus Circle is quite possibly the most dangerous place in the city for pedestrians. And Pascal was alarmed by the blackness between stars.

“Guiding Eyes”

—Corky, a yellow Labrador

It’s been five years Since I was paired with this dog Who, in fact, is more than a dog— She watches for me.

Our twin minds go walking, And I suspect as we enter the subway On Lexington That we’re a kind of centaur — Or maybe two owls Riding the shoulders of Minerva.

The traffic squalls and plunges At Columbus Circle, Seethes down Broadway, And we step out Into the blackness That alarmed Pascal: The emptiness Between stars.

I suppose we’re scarcely whole If I think on it — We walk on a dead branch, Two moths still attached, The inert day poised above us, The walls of the canyon looming.

Did I think on it?

A blessing opens by degrees And I must walk Both bodily and ghostly Down Fifth Avenue, Increasing my devotion full much To the postulate of arrival — To how I love this inexhaustible dog 66

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Who leads me Past jackhammers And the police barriers Of New York.

All day snow falls On the disorderly crowds, It clothes Miss Corky Until her tawny fur Carries the milky dirt Of ocean and stone.

The centaur gathers What passes from our flesh Into the heart of animal faith.

Meanwhile She guides me home.

BH: Steve, thank you.

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If you, or someone you know is a great writer or artist, we encourage you to submit your work.

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For now we do not accept essays, reviews, video / motion based art, or Q&A’s without invitation. But if submitted, we will keep your information on file for future reference.

For more information visit us at ninemile.org 68

Nine Mile • Spring 2014