Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2017

NINE MILE MAGAZINE Publisher: Nine Mile Art Corp.

Editors: Bob Herz, Stephen Kuusisto Art Editor Emeritus: Whitney Daniels Cover Art: Painting is by Thomasina DeMaio.

Nine Mile Magazine is a publication of Nine Mile Art Corp.

This is Volume 4, No. 2, Spring 2017 The publishers gratefully acknowledge support of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

We also acknowledge support of the County of Onondaga and CNY Arts through the Tier Three Project Support Grant Program.

We have also received significant support from the Central New York Community Foundation.

This publication would not have been possible without the generous support of these groups. We are very grateful to them all.

ISBN-10: 0-9976147-4-9 ISBN-13: 978-0-9976147-4-9 Poetry and artwork copyright of their respective authors and artists.

All rights reserved. No poem or artwork may be reproduced in full or in part without prior written permission from its owner.

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Contents Appreciations & Asides

10

STEPHEN KUUSISTO On The Sublime

15

SAM HAMILL After Lorca Nightingales of Kifissia

25 26

BARBARA CONRAD Trust Fall Furnace Busted, I Think of the Dead why I need to talk about January

29 31 33

CYRUS CASSELLS Massimo and Silver Full Moon Over Ischia

36 39

DIANE R. WIENER One Version of the Story that She Told

42

SAM PEREIRA In the Vestibule of Cliches Certain Things Selling the Idea in a Dark Corner of a Hollywood Bar Just Like Richard Brautigan at the Jack Tar The Blueprint Winds

45 46 48 49 51

ANDREA SCARPINO - GUEST EDITOR: "Writing resistance is possible" CARRIE SHIPERS Report on Gender Equity: Dissenting Opinion Report on Job Satisfaction: "At least I don't work in a coal mine" Letter of Resignation

53 57 59 61 Volume 4 No 2 - Page 3

SAARA MYRENE RAAPPANA Superman vs. Batman Paradise by the Paulding Light Little Red and Little Red CYNTHIA MANICK When You Kiss A Smoker My Aunts Secret to Keeping a Man In My Heaven PHOEBE REEVES The Gardener and the Garden (five) The Gardener and the Garden (six) JENNIFER GIVHAN After the First Communion Retrograde At the Altar of Staying QIANA TOWNS Liquid Revolution Complex

64 66 67 71 72 74 77 79 84 85 86 89 91

SUSANNAH LEE White Mountains The Field

94 96

ANNE HOSANSKY Fanny Brawne Afterward

101

MICHAEL MARTIN Deep In The Hollow, Lambs in Bethlehem Dear Benedictine Monk―

103 104 105

TIMOTHY W. ALLEN Relegated Folks

108

SOME TRANSLATIONS Rene Char - The Oriole Giotto di Bondone - Poverty

115 117

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Arnault Daniel - L'aur' Amara Arnault Daniel - En cest coind'e leri Jules Supervielle - A Poet

120 124 129

GREG JENSEN My Fair Share

131

DAVID WEISS from Perfect Crime

133

ANNA GEISLER Letters From A Native Tongue My First Home Asks To Be Remembered Two Ends Of A Roof

158 159 160

GAIL PECK Ironing

162

DYLAN KRIEGER babes taste better patient full of porch lights medical fetishist tell the protesters i have been their kind the moon howls back

164 165 166 167 168

BOB HERZ Some Words of Hart Crane Grounds for Pearls: Auden, Eliot, & Dylan Thomas

138 171

STEPHEN KUUSISTO Poetry Journal

188

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About Nine Mile Magazine Nine Mile Magazine, a magazine of literature and art, has been published twice a year since 2013. Our purpose is to showcase the best writing and artwork available to us, with an emphasis on Central New York artists. We publish a range of authors and artists whose work, energy, and vision is deeply entangled with life. This and all previous issues are available online at ninemile.org.

Submission Policy Submit at editor@ninemile.org. For poetry, submit 4 - 6 poems in Word or text. For Artwork: submit 3 - 5 small jpg files. Please include: * your name and contact information (email and home address for sending contributor's copies) * a brief paragraph about yourself (background, achievements, etc), a statement of aesthetic intent about the work , * a photo of yourself We will respond within 2 weeks. If you do not hear from us, reconnect to make sure we received your submission. Note that we do not accept unsolicited essays, reviews, video / motion based art, or Q&A's.

Talk About Poetry Podcasts & Blog Talk About Poetry is our podcast, where working poets discuss poems that interest, annoy, excite, and engage us. Podcasts are available on Soundcloud and iTunes. The Talk About Poetry blog provides more discussion and 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 Podcasts to date include: Robert Bly’s “Old Boards” • Brigit Kelley’s “Garden of Flesh, Garden of Stone” • Phil Memmer’s “How Many

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Shapes Must A God Take” and “Psalm” • Georgia Popoff’s “The Agnostic Acknowledges the Food Chain” & “Name Inconsequential” • Stephen Kuusisto’s “Sand” and “They Say” • Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Voetex Sutra” (2 parts) • Discusson of Georgia Popoff’s book Psalter • Discussion of Jasmine Bailey’s book Alexandria • Discussion of Marvin Bell’s poems, and an interview, with a specific focus on his Dead Man poems (3 parts) • Readings by Ken Weisner, Jasmine Bailey, Georgia Popoff, Andrea Scarpino, Sam Pereira, Marvin Bell, Christopher Citro, and Jeffrey Harrison.

Nine Mile Books Nine Mile Books are available through our website, ninemile.org, or online at Amazon.com. Our most recent books are: * Perfect Crime, David Weiss (2017), $16. About this book the poet has said, "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. Ms. Warren-Moore is a poet, playwright, theatrical director, teacher, and freelance writer from central New York, whose work has been published nationally and internationally. She is, as she has said, a Survivor, who has survived racism, sexism, sexual abuse, and physical abuse. She regards her poetic voice as the roadmap of her survival, a way of healing herself and of speaking to the souls of others. She has said, "I believe I have an obligation to speak up and celebrate what is right in the world and to shout out about what is wrong in the world, in the hopes that we may all work together to make it right for us all." * Selected Late Poems of Georg Trakl (2016), translations by Bob Herz, $7.50 plus mailing. This book includes all the poems Trakl wrote in the last two years of his life, from Sebastian in Dream and the poems that appeared in Der Brenner, plus some poems from

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other periods showing the development of the poet's art. The book also includes a long essay by Herz on Trakl and on his poems. * Letter to Kerouac in Heaven (2016) by Jack Micheline, $10. Jack Micheline was one of the original Beats, whose career took him from Greenwich Village to San Francisco, and whose friends included almost everyone of any notoriety, from Mailer to Ginsberg to Corso and others. He was a street poet whose first book included an introduction by Jack Kerouac and was reviewed in Esquire by Dorothy Parker. This is a replica publication of one of his street books. * Bad Angels, Sam Pereira (2015). $20. Of this poet Peter Everwine wrote, “He’s an original.” Pereira’s work has been priased by Norman Dubie, David St. John, and Peter Campion. * Some Time in the Winter, Michael Burkard (2014). $16. A reprint of the famed original 1978 chapbook with an extended essay by Mr. Burkard on the origins of the poem and his thoughts about it. * Poems for Lorca, Walt Sheppperd (2012). $9.95. The poems continue Mr. Shepperd’s lifelong effort to truly see and record the life around him. Lorca is his daughter, and the poems constitute an invaluable generational gift from father to daughter, and from friend, colleague, and community member to all of us.

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Nine Mile Magazine Vol 4, No. 2 Spring, 2017

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Appreciations & Asides Miscellaneous notes on art, literature, and life, from artists and critics we love or just statements we find interesting here and there.

POETS DISTINGUISH THEMSELVES BY THE WAY THEY see. A dull poet is one who sees fashionably or blindly what he thinks poets see. The original poet sees with new eyes, or with imported vision (as with Eliot seeing like LaForgue or Pound like the Chinese). ―Guy Davenport, Introduction to Anne Carson's Glass, Irony & God I THINK THAT WRITING PLAYS—THAT IS, MURDER IN the Cathedral and The Family Reunion—made a difference to the writing of the Four Quartets. I think that it led to a greater simplification of language and to speaking in a way which is more like conversing with your reader. I see the later Quartets as being much simpler and easier to understand than The Waste Land and “Ash Wednesday.” Sometimes the thing I’m trying to say, the subject matter, may be difficult, but it seems to me that I’m saying it in a simpler way.... The other element that enters into it, I think, is just experience and maturity. I think that in the early poems it was a question of not being able to—of having more to say than one knew how to say, and having something one wanted to put into words and rhythm which one didn’t have the command of words and rhythm to put in a way immediately apprehensible.... That type of obscurity comes when the poet is still at the stage of learning how to use language. You have to say the thing the difficult way. The only alternative is not saying it at all, at that stage. By the time of the Four Quartets, I couldn’t have written in the style of The Waste Land. In The Waste Land, I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying. These things, however, become easier to people with time.

You get used to having The Waste Land, or Ulysses, about. ―T.S. Eliot, from The Art of Poetry No. 1, Paris Review.

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TOPIC FOR POEM. SCHOOL CHILDREN AND THE thought that life will waste them, perhaps that no possible life can fulfill their own dreams or even their teacher's hope. Bring in the old thought that life prepares for what never happens. ―W.B. Yeats, transcribed from a manuscript book begun at Oxford, April 7, 1921; quoted in Curtis Bradford, Yeats At Work (Ecco, 1978) HE FOUND IN THE WORLD WITHOUT AS ACTUAL WHAT was what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorsteps. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend.

Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.” ―James Joyce, Ulysses, Chapter 9, "Scylla and Charybdis," the Library chapter THE BREAD OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION IS NO SOONER cast upon the waters of social life than a shoal of sharks rises from the depths and devours the children's bread under the philanthropists' eyes. In the educational history of England, for example, the dates speak for themselves. Universal compulsory gratuitous education was inaugurated in this country in a.d. 1870; the Yellow Press was invented some twenty years later—as soon as the first generation of children from the national schools had come into the labour market and acquired some purchasing power—by a stroke of irresponsible genius which had divined that the educational philanthropists' labour of love could be made to yield the newspaper king a royal profit. ―Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol IV, Oxford University Press, 1939 IT IS NOT A PERMANENT NECESSITY THAT POETS should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists Volume 4 No 2 - Page 11

at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning... Hence we get something which looks very much like the conceit―we get, in fact, a method curiously similar to that of the "metaphysical poets," similar also in its use of obscure words and of simple phrasing. ―T.S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," Selected Essays 1917-1932 (Faber 1932) I THINK IT WAS A SPANISH POET—IT MAY HAVE BEEN Calderón—who said that all his life he had been like a swimmer who could only use one arm, because with the other arm he had to hold his poems up over the waters. The things that he really cared about. It’s strange, but we live in a world which is even more alienated from poetry than it used to be; most people don’t care or know anything about poetry. Most civilized, cultivated people know something about painting, they go to galleries; they know something about music, they go to concerts; but no one cares or knows anything about poetry except the poets themselves. Since the poets don’t expect anyone else to read them, many of them have devised a way of communicating with one another through their poems, and readers often find such poetry difficult. ―John Hall Wheelock, The Art of Poetry No. 21, Paris Review.

ONE MUST BE DRENCHED IN WORDS, LITERALLY soaked with them to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. When they come . . . they come as things in themselves; it is a matter of felicitous juggling!; and no amount of will or emotion can help the thing a bit. ―Hart Crane, O My Land, My Friends: Selected Letters.

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WHAT I HAVE MOST WANTED TO DO THROUGHOUT the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. . . .Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. ―George Orwell, “Why I Write,” an essay published in 1946 I HAVE HARDLY ANYTHING IN COMMON WITH MYSELF and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe. ―Franz Kafka, Diary, January 8, 1914 Volume 4 No 2 - Page 13

OUR ARTS, CERTAINLY OUR POEMS, SHOULD FILL US with pride because they furnish our perfect experiences. But they fill us also with mortification because they are not actual experiences. If we regard them in a certain mood, say when the heat of action is upon us, they look like the exercises of children, showing what might have been. Participating in the show which is poetry, we expel the taint of original sin and restore to our minds freedom and integrity. Very good. But we are forced to note presently, when we go out of the theater, that it was only make-believe, and as we go down the same street by which we came, that we are again the heirs of history, and fallen men. ―John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body. (Louisiana State University Press, 1968)

CHAOS WAS THE LAW OF NATURE; ORDER WAS THE dream of man. ―Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams I HOLD THAT THE LONG POEM DOES NOT EXIST. I maintain that the phrase, 'a long poem,' is a flat contradiction of terms. ―Edgar Allan Poe, The Poetic Principle.

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On The Sublime

By Stephen Kuusisto Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone; peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heels of small war - until the end of time to police the earth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime. ― Robert Lowell “Waking Early Sunday Morning” 1.

Years ago when I was a thick spectacled graduate student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop I found me-self under the sway of Longinus or Pseudo-Longinus or Dionysus of Halicarnassus or whoever he was, and I swear, all I could think about was ”the sublime” and I underlined this: great thoughts, strong emotions, certain figures of thought and speech, noble diction, and dignified word arrangement…

In those days I thought Wallace Stevens poem “Sunday Morning” was the premier example. Stevens could be simultaneously Nietzschean and pragmatic (there was more of Dewey in Stevens than Santayana) and so grand thoughts were central—how does anyone live without tutelary gods or faith in Popular Mechanics? How do we achieve nobility?

Now also in those days I had a physical problem as all of us generally do. When I decided to attend the University of Iowa I flew to Iowa City three months early and walked the town like a crime scene investigator.

I marched in little grids. I moved haltingly up and down dozens of streets.

When I thought no one was watching I drew a telescope from my pocket and read the street signs. I hiked in the stifling summer heat and worried about people marking me as deviant. I was "Blind Pew" the untouchable Volume 4 No 2 - Page 15

but I wouldn't let anyone know. By late August I knew enough of Iowa City to travel from my unfurnished apartment to the English-Philosophy Building.

That was the summer I started keeping a journal. In July of 1978 I wrote: If you love others you can be brave about your challenges. I am, of course, quite cowardly—I argue with friends, strain relationships, talk too loudly, all because I hate my zig zagging eyeballs…

I’m starting to think about the politics of bravery… Would it kill me to mention in good company how much I can’t see?

2.

Sublimity isn’t merely a great idea like the vatic circles of Proclus or a sensation like Minturno seeing god’s first blue reflected in windows nor is it aspirational (though one ought never never find fault with desire), it’s an aggregate and poignant quality of irony—“Lord Thy sea is so vast and my boat is so small”; it’s the insufficiency of our floral arrangements; our shy and unspoken wish that we too may see Blake’s angels in a willow tree; it’s knowing our inadequacy and our truest principles. In the second stanza of “Sunday Morning” Stevens famously writes: Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measures destined for her soul.

Sublimity is responsibility. (Delmore Schwartz) The measures

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destined for our souls are as near to ancient sacrifice as a modern man or woman can come. John Dewey: “The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.” For Dewey “self” is the imagination; for Stevens imagination substitutes god; both believe in the sublime which is devotion to strong, arranged, and dignified emotions.

It’s better maybe to think of this as a hunger. Dewey again: “Hunger not to have, but to be.”

3.

Even at twenty five and feeling my way through Iowa City I wanted to be all pleasures and all pains remembered. That was a choice of action.

And I would admire poets and poems which took this on. In the years to come I’d admire many poets. To admire was something more than merely liking.

I admired Yehuda Amichai's "Memorial Day for the War Dead": Memorial day for the war dead. Add now the grief of all your losses to their grief, even of a woman that has left you. Mix sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history, which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning on one day for easy, convenient memory.

Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread, in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God. “Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”

No use to weep inside and to scream outside.

Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.

Memorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up as a little girl with flowers.

The streets are cordoned off with ropes, for the marching together of the living and the dead.

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Children with a grief not their own march slowly, like stepping over broken glass.

The flautist’s mouth will stay like that for many days.

A dead soldier swims above little heads with the swimming movements of the dead, with the ancient error the dead have about the place of the living water.

A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.

A shopwindow is decorated with dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.

And everything in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.

A great and royal animal is dying all through the night under the jasmine tree with a constant stare at the world.

A man whose son died in the war walks in the street like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.

“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.” **** The sublime was more than self-disclosure. It was walking grief, chance joy, intimations of ancestors; it was John Keats writing to his brother; it was Emily Dickinson’s toothache; above all it was the dignity of self-recognition.

What did I learn to like? How about Anne Sexton, "The Truth the Dead Know," For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959 and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

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Gone, I say and walk from church, refusing the stiff procession to the grave, letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate myself where the sun gutters from the sky, where the sea swings in like an iron gate and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones from the whitehearted water and when we touch we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.

Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in their stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

The sublime is unsentimental. Sometimes it’s willing to lie. “No one’s alone.” But we have to say so. As I said above the sublime has ironies. The sublime cannot save you. Wallace Stevens would easily agree. It’s a devotional. Who precisely did you and your imagination purport to be? What did I like? I liked Larry Levis, "Ghazal": Does exile begin at birth? I lived beside a wide river For so long I stopped hearing it.

As when a glass shatters during an argument, And we are secretly thrilled. . . . We wanted it to break.

Always something missing now in the cry of one bird, Its wings flared against the wood.

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Still, everything that is singular has a name: Stone, song, trembling, waist, & snow. I remember how My old psychiatrist would pinch his nose between A thumb & forefinger, look up at me & sigh.

We shouldn’t say the sublime lacks humor. And we certainly shouldn’t say it’s fussy. If everything that’s singular has a name, well, we still have to guess. Even the gods would say guesswork has nobility. If they don’t then we’re not interested in them. Not for long anyway. And to understand the sublime is to be unimpressed by “isms” and to know it early. As for the Levis poem, nothing is worse than a patient who won’t be fooled. The sublime after all is its own brand of health. The sublime is political. What do I like? Adrienne Rich: "Tonight No Poetry Will Serve" Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon’s eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action

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verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb

disgraced

goes on doing

now diagram the sentence **** If poetry is to matter it needs to be unflinching, must have ardor. It should avoid fussiness and self-regard—be properly intentional or desiring of the spirit.

John Dewey again: “The ultimate function of literature is to appreciate the world, sometimes indignantly, sometimes sorrowfully, but best of all to praise when it is luckily possible.”

Praise is the hard part.

When James Wright said he wanted to write the poetry of a grown man he meant it was time to praise what was around him.

What do I love? I love this poem by Sam Hamill, "The Orchid Flower" Just as I wonder whether it’s going to die, the orchid blossoms and I can’t explain why it moves my heart, why such pleasure comes from one small bud on a long spindly stem, one blood red gold flower

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opening at mid-summer, tiny, perfect in its hour.

Even to a whitehaired craggy poet, it’s purely erotic, pistil and stamen, pollen, dew of the world, a spoonful of earth, and water.

Erotic because there’s death at the heart of birth, drama in those old sunrise prisms in wet cedar boughs, deepest mystery in washing evening dishes or teasing my wife, who grows, yes, more beautiful because one of us will die.

The poems of a grown man or woman are, as Lowell would say, quite possibly “of” our monotonous sublime by which he meant our clinging, daily, necessary fealty to better ideas, wishes, even intuitions. We fight back against the ruinous and sequential daily atrocities of our age, which means our pitiless living. Don’t assume the sublime doesn’t take work.

You can even be tongue and cheek about it if you like. The late Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski wrote: “I want to be the sort of poet whose songs call the trees and stones forward/whose poems become houses for people…”

(A rough translation.) As James Wright would say: “put that in your

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pipe and smoke it.” Know what you’re about. Know your demands.

4.

What does any of this have to do with walking around a midwestern university town unable to see? It should be obvious I imagine—not being able to see pales compared to having no language for it. Fortunate then that the sublime is more interested in our honesty than we’ll admit especially when we’re young. (A tip of the hat to Nietzsche. The abyss will stare back.) But the sublime is far more likely to furnish the creative mind if we learn to know ourselves—indifferently, tinged with dramatic irony, seeing ourselves as if we’re simultaneously in a play and also in the audience. What do we know about this self-to-self dichotomy that passes for a man that we didn't know as the day began? Why is that knowing so critical both to poems and character? James Wright, "St. Judas": When I went out to kill myself, I caught A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.

Running to spare his suffering, I forgot My name, my number, how my day began, How soldiers milled around the garden stone And sang amusing songs; how all that day Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.

Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten, Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms: Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten, The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope, I held the man for nothing in my arms.

So there is something selfless about sublime engagements. The more powerful and evocative the experience the more we will carry away. We build ourselves with proper words. We learn by standing for things. It is

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much harder work than simple autobiography. What happened to me is not as interesting as what I understood about what occurred. In my memoir Planet of the Blind I describe how I went running in Iowa, unable to see, and ran straight through a freshly laid patch of sidewalk cement.

Surrounded by indignant laborers, one of whom shouted, “are you fucking blind?” I told the truth. “Yes,” I said. “I’m blind and I’m running.” This revelation was so unexpected that one of the men drove me home and told me to get a dog. His uncle was blind. He thought there was a better way of doing it. Back to Dewey: it’s about growth, curiosity, expectation, and hunger to be.

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Sam Hamill After Lorca Under a full moon, on a half-paved street in Bucerias, we kissed, and she swore her love for me. Being elderly and lonely, I needed to believe, I needed to give to her the very best of me.

As the moon sank slowly in the sea, we sipped margaritas on the beach and laughed at just how foolish we could be, two old wanderers searching for a life, giddy, eyes full of stars with possibilities.

Now, of course, she has flown. And I’m alone, as I should be: the same old unwise fool drunk on gullibility, the same dreamer I’ve always been. Here, alone at the end, embracing the stars, the moon, and the sea.

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Nightingales of Kifissia An evening in Kifissia, a taverna after the botanical garden, now more than thirty years ago, the nightingales, hundreds, the sound of nightingales through it all.

And me feeling terribly alone.

Ten years later, walking with my new wife through the teeming streets of Tokyo, the convocations of jungle crows, loud, rude, but sounding happy, happy as I was— for a little while...

Then, ten years ago, my wife feeding sparrows at her feet in a Buenos Aires plaza, speaking softly of my life after her death by cancer. So much grief in me that I found no question and no answer. She laughed and said, “You’ll have to find yourself a hottie,” and fed the bird on our table and it hopped right into her hand. “You see?” she said. “Love is everywhere.”

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After years of mourning, I was awakened one dawn to the sound of doves above the empty streets of Paris.

Grown old, infirm, I felt my heart grow young again, remembering there is so much meaning to touching a hand, a cheek, across a little table, what it means to speak intimately of cities and streets, to tell of how the sparrows eat in Buenos Aires, and how, in Kifissia, the nightingales sing away my grief. While she I barely knew made coffee, singing softly, I said nothing while I thought these things.

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About Sam Hamill Sam Hamill is the Founding Editor of Copper Canyon Press. He hs translated Chinese and Japanese extensively, including Tao Te Ching, Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese, and Narrow Road to the Interior & Other Writings of Basho.

Hamill's most recent book, Habitation: Collected Poems, (2014,University of Washington Press) presents some of Hamill's best poems spanning a career of over 40 years.

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Barbara Conrad Trust Fall Scent on the pillow still you toothbrush left in a bathroom drawer echo of urging unheard yet not the shock that you’d leave one day those wicked words we tribute to hearts opened and broken or maybe that game at camp between bonfire and Taps how fluid my body to learn it felt good to be touched back of the neck and hairline brush of my nipple through a knit shirt everyone crossing arms planting feet in the dirt backs straight eyes shut again and again falling safe into the grasp of fellow campers hearts thumping everyone caught by everyone until one night I was not blood burning arousal rising as I waited for those fingers on my skin and though his name eludes me now the night remembers

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a crescent moon slicing clouds into rain spatter of wet red clay on my bare ankles a strange smell of rust

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Furnace Busted, I Think of the Dead for Queenie, a typhoon survivor Bone cold in this early freeze not yet November rain and wind scorning through icy windowpanes making the chill bitter inside my house Legs ache from fighting the shivers as I wait for a repairman I own a closet full of coats gloves hats Hot water heater Car Library card Don’t have to be cold No water rages through my door house filling with shrimp and fish from a broken vessel at the dock and my father miles off the coast counting the cost of ditching his fishing boat as waves slam against his hull My one-legged grandfather doesn’t need to be toted to higher ground I don't even have a one-legged grandfather Flies won't gather on garbage in my street I'll not be digging through rubble dragging body bags to a makeshift morgue Volume 4 No 2 - Page 31

All my memories are dry tucked in attic boxes After supper I’ll not be that girl who clutches the back of her neck feels herself (she says) so quickly getting thinner

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why I need to talk about January because January is a margarita rimmed in salt because in the scrub brush of the Abacos next to a cocktail bar there was a loose chicken loose and illusive and I was hungry and because I went there in January because on a different island in a different ocean at zero latitude a mangrove grows despite the odds because a tree like that lives on the edge because I wanted to live on the edge because my granddaughter was born in January on what would have been my mother’s 100th because my mother may be watching though she still wears that flowered dress and back seams in my dreams because there are plums chattering in the crepe myrtle because I’m still wanting to talk about the mangrove anchored in waterlogged mud and the way she spits out her yellow leaves to save the world because I incidentally made her a she because there is salt in those yellow leaves and releasing them is a sacrifice―ask Volume 4 No 2 - Page 33

the shrimp

invertebrates

algae

amphibians

because I know what lies in the roots of that mangrove buffer from storm surge nectar for rodents and bats because I’m encrusted in salt

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About Barbara Conrad Barbara Conrad is author of Wild Plums, published by FutureCycle Press and The Gravity of Color, published

by Main Street Rag and editor of Waiting for Soup, a collection of art and poetry from her weekly workshops with homeless neighbors in Charlotte, NC. Her poems have been selected by Tar River Poetry, Pembroke, Broad River, Atlanta Review, Nine Mile, Southern Women's Review, Kakalak and Southern Poetry Anthology.

Three of her poems were finalists for the 2015 NC Literary Review, James Applewhite Prize. Her writings focus on personal journey, nature and social justice issues. A new book out this summer bears witness to the interconnectedness of lives.

About the Poems The gift of poetry for me is the opportunity to bear witness to many lives and many stories. My forthcoming collection represents such a weaving ―personal moments, ghostly memories and reflections on the larger world. Whether it be a childhood game of trust remembered, a woman's meditations on mangroves and salt, or an unexpected sisterhood with a typhoon survivor in a world only imagined, in the end, these all become part of my being.

Rumi spoke of that field beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing where we'll meet. Poetry, if we pay attention, can illuminate the reality of our interconnectedness with one another, so vital in today's fractured world.

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Cyrus Cassells Massimo and Silver I. Identical When I came back for Massimo, twenty years had passed: the brash sea was the selfsame turquoise, the same brisk, unceasing spool below the promontory; the uncountable roof tiles of the seafront city (made tiny by the dizzying cliffs), the identical terracotta

II. Massimo and Stiver True: the lustrous hillsides, the colossal bell-tower remained uniform, unchanged, but Massimo himself was no longer the unblinking, sun-marked Sicilian who gladly escorted me

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from a bygone hermitage to Diana's broken temple I spotted poignant silver, spilling from his blue and poppy tank top, cheering threads of silver, scattered pell-mell in his cascading hair III. Indelible Tell me, Mr. Mystery, did we ever reach Diana's temple?

Massi, I can’t recall— But what’s indelible, of course, is the long-ago 5pm when the college sophomore offered me a peach from his faded rucksack, his ancient-as-Eve lure to risk a man’s whiskery kiss for the first time, savoring, with a cardsharp’s or a mint-new Casanova’s aplomb, bits of delectable pulp from my juice-stained fingertips—

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IV. The Core He’s vanished, the headlong Virgil I adored, my unhindered pilgrim, but on the promontory, an up-to-the-minute Massimo affords me a felicitous smile, pleased with the lingering tern’s cameo, the playful gust’s finesse: proof of unremitting Time’s lust to alter form but never the exhilarating core—

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Full Moon Over Ischia I. The Second Honeymoon Beyond our sovereign belvedere, the ink-black bolt of the sea, a blue hour tournament of jousting olive branches — Lord, so much imperial purple adorning our getaway cottage: Oh we’ve marched here from the mundane world to this bold demesne of purple to be dubbed as knights, allies of the grail of bougainvillea!

Dear husband, we’ve hardly left our long, leeward terrace; we’ve followed so many bulletins of the mercurial sea, such a panoply of clashing moods and windblown colors, we’ve had little impulse to explore the lush remainder of the island, though, on a whim, we hailed an ascending bus to Barano, in time to witness racing clouds leave ornate shadows, lovely patterns on the coruscating sea

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II. Grapple and Caprice Hammock tied between sturdy island olives: All night I tossed and turned on the starry belvedere, after a surly cannonade, a galling round of accusations: No more Gethsamanes!

No more pieces of silver!

But now we grappling lovers behold a honey-daubed moon that blooms, the port’s adroit fishermen claim, just once in a hundred years, as, in a sudden fillip of gallantry, they gladly loan us a you-boys-go-work-it-out white boat to win ourselves a silvery path toward Vesuvius — Love, still possible love, when did moonlit caprice and bell-clear truce beat the nosey doomsayers, the gossipmongers to become the first signs of summer?

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About Cyrus Cassells Cyrus Cassells is the author of five acclaimed books of poetry: The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, More Than Peace and Cypresses, and The CrossedOut Swastika, which was a finalist for the Balcones Prize for Best Poetry Book of 2012.

His sixth book of poems, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in the spring of 2018 as part of the Crab Orchard Poetry Series.

"Massimo and Silver" is the last unpublished poem from the book. "Full Moon Over Ischia" is his first new poem. Among his honors are a Lannan Literary Award, a William Carlos Williams Award, and a Lambda Literary Award.

He is a professor of English at Texas State University.

About the Poems My impulse as a poet is to move to beauty and music as anodyne— as a healing approach to things that are challenging, even horrific. I don't know if it's a balancing act or a need to ameliorate, but the goal is memorable language, emotional richness, spiritual heft, and a linguistic beauty that is not ornamental.

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Diane R. Wiener One Version of the Story that She Told He was very despondent, he left work early, he had just been humiliated and sent off elsewhere. Again? Not again.

He took the elevator to the top floor and all the old women watched.

He removed his burgundy and blue 15-year-old polyester checked jacket and put his watch next to him, then he put it back on his wrist.

He got up onto the edge, where the metal bar resembled the one near the neighborhood pool, where she was pushed and later suffered a back injury but He wasn’t pushed, he went willingly. He jumped up, springing on the aluminum rail as if it was a diving board.

He dove. His arms went out, like a soaring gull, and a noise came out of his throat, also like a bird’s. “Was that my voice?” he asked himself.

Everything seemed very slow and then it was over.

But as he was going down, he felt himself go light and then dim. “Am I fainting?” he wondered. He saw Saturn, holding an hourglass, sitting on a yellow cloud to his left, he saw his daughter and his wife, he saw himself at the farm as a boy, holding the kitten in that photo that she has of him on her night table. He saw all the pencils fall out of his pocket and bounce off the sidewalk.

He saw the air rush out of his limp hands as his lungs emptied.

He tried to climb back against gravity to the top but he couldn’t.

He was sort of sorry, but he had made up his mind.

He wrote a poem.

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He dove, his arms went out like a soaring gull and a noise came out of his mouth and he wondered who had placed that sound there was it God was it his father who was gently facing him and greeting him through the sun, no longer blinding.

All the sadness flew out of his body and landed inside of his daughter, far away. It went into her chest and glowed red like a fresh cigarette he smoked before he married her mother.

Daddy fell then.

We got his watch and it didn’t even get broken.

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About Diane R. Wiener Diane R. Wiener has published on subjects related to diversity, social justice, inclusion, pedagogy, and empowerment, with particular attention paid to interdisciplinarity and the Mad Pride movement. Diane holds a Ph.D. (U. Arizona, 2005: Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies), an M.S.W. (Yeshiva University, 1989), and a B.S. (Rutgers University, 1987), as well as a Postgraduate Certificate in Medical Anthropology (U. Arizona, 2005). She is licensed as an L.M.S.W. in New York State.

Diane joined the Syracuse University Division of Student Affairs (now the Division of Enrollment and the Student Experience) as the Director of the Disability Cultural Center in the fall of 2011, after being a full-time faculty member at Binghamton University, and having worked in the social services, education, and mental health activist fields on the east coast and in the southwest. Diane self-identifies as an educator, administrator, social worker, advocate, poet, singer, bassist, and artist, among other roles. She has longstanding commitments to mindfulness, interfaith and secular contemplation, humanism, and exegesis. Diane began blogging for the Huffington Post in May of 2016. Her forays into poetics have been read by her, publicly, as well as used by others as adapted dramatic monologues; however, while Diane has written poetry since the age of 7, she has published very few of her poems (in Archie Comics and Child Life Magazine, during childhood; in a now defunct interdisciplinary journal of science and literature, during adulthood). Diane is honored and moved to have her work―this poem, in particular―included in Nine Mile.

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Sam Pereira In the Vestibule of Clichés Preaching to the choir is a cliché, of course.

So, too, the idea that an armed group Somewhere seems to be terrorizing the world.

What makes them get out of their cots Each morning, as the clouds begin To shade small towns in West Virginia, Let's say? Why the insistence On making the first pot of coffee With their own piss? Tough guys remain A dime a dozen. Another cliché. Another Dark stain on the universe. Somewhere Near Minneapolis, just to pick a spot, A man is using an acetylene torch On his right index finger, hoping the scars Become brothers. More clichés.

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Certain Things A person remembers Certain things, important things, Like buying a black leather jacket, And instantly thinking You looked like James Dean Just before stepping into a Porsche.

There was that time you offered Your father a copy of your first book, And he, having never considered The likelihood of your being A man of words in a culture Of regret until that moment, Suddenly, and without warning, Smiled. He'd been afraid for you, Thinking you would end up On the corner, just you and those words, Along with a cheap red wine.

He was closer than he might Have ever imagined, but He smiled, and shook his old head Instead. Finally, There was your mother, Who’d always been content To stand alone in the background, Preparing a beautiful dinner, Like the one she did For you and your girl.

She presented a carved roast, And some fine red potatoes, Like you had mentioned Once in your work, she said.

Then your mother smiled, Page 46 - Nine Mile Magazine

Like your father had done before, When he was alive and looking At what he’d been given, its fine paper.

One could always tell the quality Of the writing by its paper.

You remembered every tone In his delivery. Your mother Smiled at the woman you’d brought To the house for dinner, The one you were going to marry.

Everyone explains it this way, If you ask people nicely On a warm afternoon in the valley: The notorious beauty of smiles Is always reflected in their tears.

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Selling the Idea in a Dark Corner of a Hollywood Bar I give the participants in my little stories The best lines & the wickedest love scenes.

They smell of the French countryside, laced With tobacco and Bordeaux. If you ask them Where they like to spend their time When they are not in bed, They will always respond with great lust: The art museum on 23rd, or the laundromat That serves Champagne, while everyone waits, Watching the bras and panties spin, Lost and confused like those They cling to most cold mornings. I will, Need to kill at least one of them, while The Spanish guitars soothe the audience to sleep; While a child no one expected Is created under its nose, and the world, Wearing its garlic-scented coat, stumbles To its car, obsessed by the hard core of it all.

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Just Like Richard Brautigan at the Jack Tar In the winter of that year, He took a bus From this little town Landing on his feet In the city. The hotel Was just down the street.

He spotted five bars While riding in a blue cab To her room. He liked Saying he'd taken the el Up to her door; that It sounded like he'd lived In the city a very long time.

She kissed him. She knew He was watching her tits Under the sheer pink veil Of silk netting she'd used To lure him inside. This Was a game like no other.

He kissed her hair. He Licked her ear. He said Stupid things into the night.

He came and went, Which would end up being

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His biggest lie. He came And would never go away.

He stayed right there At the bottom of page 117.

Years later, he would define Death as having an aroma Of watermelon and quicksilver, Under a plagiarist's moon.

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The Blueprint Winds Those are my cold walls.

And the air? Mine.

The Chinese own the stars Over Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Trust me, none of this Has anything to do With the silicon chip Inside the head of a rock classic.

Even the women of Belarus Secretly long for a dozen Red roses delivered In a shining white box.

But those are my cold walls.

I made them decades ago, During my last ridiculous prayer To the universe, in the rain.

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About Sam Pereira Sam Pereira has published several books over the past several decades, the most recent ones being Bad Angels (Nine Mile Press, 2015), Dusting on Sunday (Tebot Bach, 2012), and The Marriage of the Portuguese— Expanded Edition (Tagus Press, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, 2012). He received his BA from California State University, Fresno, and then went on to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received his MFA back around the time the country was just getting over Nixon. He lives, with his wife, Susan, in the Central San Joaquin Valley of California.

He expects to retire from teaching middle school English one day soon.

He expects to live happily until he dies.

About the Poems These new poems are part of a working manuscript that finds itself dealing with, among other things ancient, the process of growing into one’s winter. While not particularly liking such adventures, I find it nourishing to delve into the memories of days when a man could walk blocks, indulging his vices and never get tired. I find it easier to say things in these new poems that seem tantamount to lies, yet establishing a higher level of truth than I ever thought possible. I believe creation gives the human animal deification at such times. These poems are part of the God trip.

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Guest Editor Andrea Scarpino: "Writing resistance is possible"

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Introduction Since Donald Trump’s election, I’ve struggled to write, to find something substantial to say in this political climate. I’ve struggled to even take the time to write when I feel like I should spend every waking moment calling my representatives and volunteering for Planned Parenthood and working to protect undocumented neighbors and marching in the street. Some days, I feel like all I can see is hatred: for women, for people of color, for queer people, for people with disabilities —basically for anyone who deviates from Trump’s limited (and false) vision of The United States. And I’m not alone in seeing hatred everywhere: according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), for the second year in a row, the number of hate groups in the US has risen.

They are currently tracking 917 groups. “2016 was an unprecedented year for hate,” says Mark Potok, an SPLC senior fellow.

And yet, even in the midst of a difficult political climate—especially in the midst of a difficult political climate—writing and reading are important reminders that our world can be different from what it currently is, that we can imagine ourselves into a better future. “Create an Alternative,” the SPLC suggests as one strategy for fighting oppression: “Every act of hatred should be met with an act of love and unity.”

For the SPLC, creating alternatives to intolerance include organizing community meetings and unity demonstrations, repairing hate-fueled vandalism, and rallying the neighborhood, colleagues from work, and religious organizations to participate in conversations about equality.

Creating alternatives should also mean reading and writing poetry that reminds us of our shared humanity, that challenges the status quo, and that stands firm against injustice.

Take the poetry of Qiana Towns, a water activist living in Flint, Michigan. In her poem, “Liquid Revolution,” she writes: The lead settling into my daughter’s Bones is my fault. The lead

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Settling into the bones of my city Is not my fault any more Than it is yours—citizen Of the first world I look straight Through my tears and into yours.

This is a damning, clear-eyed poem that reminds us that clean water is a basic human right, and that we all must work to ensure our citizens have access to it.

Carrie Shipers reflects upon corporate culture in her poetry, illuminating the many injustices inherent in our working lives, and Saara Myrene Raappana’s poetry delves into the vulnerabilities of adolescent girls who are so often pitted against one another by patriarchal norms of beauty and success. By focusing on the relationship between a gardener and her garden, Phoebe Reeves fully imagines a life closely linked to nature and the work of creatures as small and vital as bees. And Jennifer Givhan’s poetry resists the many ways that other people can make us feel powerless. “you’re tough as tar” she writes in the final line of her poem, “At the Alter of Staying.”

Cynthia Manick writes in “In My Heaven”: “Each corner of heaven/ is guarded by statues/ of poets. They hold pens// as spears.” This is partly a warning to pay attention: these poets are watching and writing and using their words in every way they can.

I asked these poets to submit work for my selection in Nine Mile Magazine because their writing is a necessary reminder that imagining alternatives to our current situation is possible, that writing resistance is possible, and that hatred doesn’t have to win. Yes, hate can be a strong and overwhelming force in the world. But we can call it out, stand against it, and actively work to diminish its power. It’s not a coincidence that these poets are all women; women are writing some of the most inventive, politically charged, lyrically powerful contemporary American poetry.

And in so doing, they are creating the kind of world in which I want to live.

I hope you will find the same to be true when you read this selection.

— Andrea Scarpino

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Carrie Shipers Report on Gender Equity: Dissenting Opinion For JVS and HH We’d be more convinced by your report if you had evidence instead of stories.

Without statistics or some kind of graph, the numbers seem too small to be significant.

We admit there have been problems in the past.

We remember when the only women were our secretaries and the dragon in accounts.

These days we’re so afraid of getting sued we don’t open doors or hold the elevator, let alone tell jokes or say someone looks nice.

Frankly, some of these complaints just don’t make sense. Once you’ve been invited to a meeting, how much more welcome do you need to feel? It’s not like we give out flowers. And if you think you’re being interrupted or drowned out, maybe you should change how you communicate. We already know we can’t read women’s minds. We also don’t believe reviews have been unfair.

If someone’s dress is unprofessional or she gets too intense, won’t share her work when colleagues ask, it’s not revenge to document

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the truth—we’re helping her improve.

Comparing salaries is one case where numbers aren’t enough. If women tend not to earn as much, let’s look at reasons why—not just time off for babies or sick kids but projects they turn down because they’d rather not stay late or put in weekend hours, promotions they don’t want because they’d have to travel.

We can’t help but wonder if you’ve lost your objectivity, let emotions overwhelm your common sense. For example, consider how you treat your audience: You started on a hostile note and then became hysterical, accused men as a group of things we know we’d never do. Even if a few of these complaints are based on facts, it’s not clear what you want besides someone to blame. But because we hate to see you so upset, we’re willing to compromise. Please write up a list of actions you’d like us to take, and as long as they’re drawn on research we respect, we promise we’ll consider them when our free time permits.

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Report on Job Satisfaction: “At least I don’t work in a coal mine” No shovel, pick and dynamite, headlamp and grimy coveralls, 12-hour shifts spent sweating underground.

No being cheated at the scale, paid in worthless scrip.

No smug-faced foreman with his pants hitched high, crooked state inspector taking bribes. No risk of cave-in, fire or flood, no rescue efforts dragging on for days, friends crushed by tons of rock. No picket lines or union dues, no months’-long strikes spent fighting scabs and Pinkertons, defeat announced by government decree. No lamps or candles lighting your tar-papered shack, children sick from unclean air and water, coal-dust baked into their bread.

No unset bones from accidents, no blue tattoos branding your skin, black lung siphoning your breath.

No fear your sons will follow you into the dark or that the mines will close before they can.

Instead: Your office with its lumbar chair and highspeed wireless, infinity of paperclips and sticky notes, door you can close at any time. The insurance and prescription plan, paid sick days and family leave, right to unemployment if you’re fired. The supervisor desperate to be liked, manager who never follows through. The emails, calls and meetings, spreadsheets and reports. The nagging aches from sitting still all day, stomach pain from coffee and self-doubt. The commute you spend rehearsing your resentments and mistakes, anger you displace onto other drivers doing the same thing.

The mortgaged home where you retreat to drink and watch TV, check your devices while brushing

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your teeth. How hard it is on any given day to know if you’ve done anything at all. Your guilt at how much worse your life could be. The shame you feel when you complain.

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Letter of Resignation I admit I liked this job the most before I started it, when I was simply grateful to be chosen. On my first day, I collected keys, passwords, binders of information that was badly out of date, defaced with someone else’s notes and highlighting. My coworkers didn’t care about my name, where I was from or what I needed. At lunch, they talked about pornography, how much they missed my predecessor.

Five years in, I understand why no one’s nicer to new hires. It costs too much to get attached to someone who won’t last. At first, I didn’t quit because I didn’t want this place to win.

Then, what looked like loyalty was actually despair: Every time my phone failed to reach an outside line, it felt like proof that “outside” didn’t exist.

I convinced myself this was the job that I deserved, that somewhere else would be different but not better.

I can’t say my time here was all bad.

I’m proud of my accomplishments, how well I’ve adapted to what I once found strange. But I’ve also learned a lot I wish I didn’t know: how I’m exhausted by incompetence Volume 4 No 2 - Page 61

and can’t forgive mistakes, how my anger and worry about work creep into every aspect of my life, how much I need a job I don’t dread going to.

I doubt you really care about my reasons. I know I’ll be easy to replace, that the company will go on like before. But I’ve been writing this letter in my head for a long time, trying to explain—if only to myself— why this place made me feel the way it did, why leaving here feels less like changing jobs and more like making my escape.

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About Carrie Shipers Carrie Shipers’s poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New England Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other journals. She is the author of Ordinary Mourning (ABZ, 2010), Cause for Concern (Able Muse, 2015), and Family Resemblances (University of New Mexico, 2016), as well as two chapbooks.

About the Poems These poems are part of an ongoing series I’m writing that examine what I’m thinking of as “corporate” culture, a category that increasingly includes academia. I’m interested not only in the physical and emotional space in which such work takes place but also the ways the language of that space often implies double and triple meanings, perhaps never more so than when the words being used initially seem clichéd or meaningless. As the first person in my immediate family to receive an advanced degree—and certainly the first person to become a professor—I’m also interested in the ways my feelings about my job are complicated by an awareness of my privilege. Knowing that my work is less dangerous, more secure and better rewarded than that of many people isn't always enough to assuage feelings of discontent, but often does add a layer of guilt. “Report on Gender Equity: Dissenting Opinion” was inspired by real responses to a survey about gender equity conducted at the college where I previously worked. Not surprisingly, those responses were strongly divided along gender lines, with many more men than women stating that there were no inequities that needed to be addressed, and that any seeming disparities likely reflected women’s individual choices rather than issues within the institution.

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Saara Myrene Raappana Superman vs. Batman We’re on the roof. Kelly’s hair blows behind her shoulders like a long red cape. She says the night sky makes her think a world she can’t remember blew up years ago. To me, it looks like robbery on asphalt, pearls in scattershot. Imagine skin sterile as space: Kel’s razor bends when she begins to cut her arm, but mine draws blood. She says that boys want girls with pores invisible as stars at noon. Her eyes are suns. But mine are sclera full of irises that hold the empty space I use to catalogue a world of things—paper airplanes soaked with mud, a plastic paratrooper guy, the chew cans that our boyfriends dropped onto the oil-slick rainbow of the high school parking lot. Kel’s gaze can repel ugliness the way that steel makes bullets ricochet. I’ve seen her clear the halls of skanks until the floor tiles shine like skin. I like to walk behind her to observe what specks stick in her wake: whole ecospheres crushed into tile or carpeting, what grease appears when fingers lose their grip. Kel says I should exfoliate my nose. She says that both our nighttimes are the same: sky calling us

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to join it in its black expanse of loss. I don’t know if we’ll jump, but what I know—know better than the certainty of ground—is that, to falling bodies, flailing is a desperate prayer to fly.

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Paradise by the Paulding Light “We’re too busy mining to be scared.” —IfIHadAHifi When Kelly flipped her jeep (roll bar crushed straight and seatbelt split), they said she’d never wake.

When she sat up, they said she’d never speak.

She said they claimed her wrapped eyes wouldn’t see, but when they rolled the bandage off, she saw.

We drove—she drove us—out to Watersmeet.

At midnight, there, they say ghost lights emerge: A train, iron miners: lanterned, spectral, searching.

They say the lights start slow, speed up, revolve; they almost burn your skin. Stay still, though; they’ll dissolve.

We waited, still. I asked her what she’d met the night she crashed full-body into death.

Half-past midnight: Silence. No lights. Nothing.

Kel laughed and turned away and spat, fuck this.

I’m not sure if she meant the mine that died, the stitches in her head, the iron-hard sky —maybe whatever flies as if to knock you dead but brushes lightly past your cheek instead.

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Little Red and Little Red Once upon a time

a lake

deadfall as couch

a twitch-eyed rabbit

and her rapid

Kelly and me leaned

lanternless

pear-seed heart and pipe-lit

in a Have-You-Seen-Me?-poster-tinted where perhaps woodsmen

perhaps psychopaths hid

for our teen-sweet flesh we flinched

each time

and laughed

the stringtrap cracked and pulled it back and fire

a woodsman shopping malls

unzipped the fur

to hood the rabbit head

I woke

at home

tonguecurl

I dreamed with ash from

and drove to town

and giggle

so Kel and I

like two girls

a starlit parking lot where

had ever parked to watch

and then the stick

and upthroat

spicing grandma meat

could smoke a bowl burgers in

applebait crunch

we wire-hung feet

that night

drooling

a dry spruce needle snapped

but then

and sweating meat

wolfhowl teeth

wilderness

chewing safe

every hunter who

had dribbled motor oil

we leaned

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against the hood

the constellations

I thought that I heard against the car louder than reflected

Lupus growl

while Kel

said

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regarded us

and cooled my cheek

who’d fallen

chopping wood

in the rainbow oil

high

roared her laugh

and looking at

what a giant

my face

pretty smile you have

Saara Myrene Raappana Saara Myrene Raappana wrote the chapbooks Milk Tooth, Levee, Fever (Dancing Girl Press) and A Story of America Goes Walking (collaboration with artist Rebekah WilkinsPepiton, Shechem Press). She was born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in southern China, is a founding editor of Cellpoems, and works for Motionpoems. She likes ice fishing, train rides, reading poems to rooms full of strangers, and making up new names for imprecisely labeled birds. For more, go to saaramyrene.com.

About the Poems I started writing these poems about a cousin named Kelly by accident —I wanted to write about the rivalry/love relationship that can happen between women, especially adolescent women, through the lens of Superman and Batman’s relationship because for some reason, on the same day, I go all riled up about both the patriarchy pitting women against each other and Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice sucking. So at first, Kelly was just a name that echoed Superman’s Kryptonian name, but then she started popping up in all my poems, and so did this idea of focusing on the unreliability of stories about girls and women needing to be flawless, being the sum of their vulnerabilities, being broken, etc.

In “Paradise by the Paulding Light,” that unreliability looped back on itself a bit—I grew up hearing about the Paulding Light (an unexplained orb of light that people say appears in Paulding near Watersmeet, MI); then, a few years ago a good friend wrote a song called “Paradise by the Paulding Light” that he performs with his band, IfIHadaHifi. For the song, he made up a story about the Paulding Light providing the light for ghostly miners still working long after they died. They’re so caught up in

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the routine of debt and work that even in death, they just keep mining. I’d listened to the song so much that I forgot the Paulding Light legend has nothing to do with miners, really, and it wasn’t until I’d finished the poem and showed my friend that I realized I’d added his story to the legend. It’s a rhymed-verse version of the Telephone Game.

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Cynthia Manick When You Kiss A Smoker Gums crave cinder and ash like whole milk and pear trees.

Scent spins like a pack of bees high off steam, in a pattern your brain can't or won't forget so, you seek it out like midnight rides when the air is quiet, some dark house party in a friends basement, or hot prayers under a blanket where the breath goes clumsy. Men with parched lips and Newports, musicians with long fingers on break by a propped side door, one cigarette in hand posing like a question, the other tucked behind an ear, a dark rose unbloomed. You think this is what love is, a scent with promise and no real name, but you smelled it in your father's hug, tight as a moonpit when you didn't know fear.

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My Aunts Secret to Keeping a Man eastern potatoes was the first wish. the first language offered from the ground. prone to brine and settle the stomach, liver, and lungs like a Ceiba tree. knowledge rests here. this is what God gave. aluminum pans never fear a reaper or audience. it’s all about heft. can it stay stolid. take mass into all four corners of its heart and hold a floor steady. can its body grip, like a pallbearers palm, a man’s center without shaking at the root. paprika curls like a scarlet vine on the tongue and you quickly forget fresh water fish and sugar cane pulled from fists. see this new master coming to greet them. linger. carry its red flag on teeth until it has conquered the kitchen. relish is the side of right. all the grandmas are gone but they murmur in throats and ladles of cracked wooden spoons. don’t fear the tart bits honey. it’s the grandmothers calling you home. showing you the right way to stir a man pickled.

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mayonnaise can plug a hole and heal a hearth. slick a thorn from any rib. there are many songs in the minor key. each has a gift for sniffing out weakness. binds the secrets you want to keep. mustard bitters the barbeque. breaks bread with aunts and ants like bees around blossoms. a waterfall of smoke sneaks into hair. light descends through the knees. eggs was the second wish. potato salad the third. an unsuspecting Uncle dances with plastic fork in hand. joy falls from his skin. he wants to live in this shimmy. the heat is like being in the womb again.

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In My Heaven after Robin Coste Lewis Everything begins with hunger. Some crave Bartlett pears, trees that breathe, playing violin on gold roads.

Others only answer to their animal names, knowing which heart chamber calls to the wolf, the sheep, the jackal. In my heaven the currency is words– people sing or recite verb to noun to buy burgers and cake, furniture like wide screen TVs that show favorite programs on loop with no commercialsSoul Train, I Dream of Jeanie, and Happy Days.

Each corner of heaven is guarded by statues of poets. They hold pens as spears. When you rub their stoned feet, you hear dialects-dipped in Marian Page 74 - Nine Mile Magazine

Anderson arias.

In my heaven Ms. Rose plays the numbers and hits every week.

Our shadows talk to other shadows, have smoke-shaped tea or whiskey at noon.

They visit bonfires to show their best forms in the light. When you turn 18, 35 or 68 in my heaven, you lay on a bed of tobacco and ivy leaves, and the stems pinprick as you watch stars fade into each other.

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About Cynthia Manick Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). A Pushcart Prize nominated poet with a MFA in Creative Writing from the New School; she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, and Poets House. She serves as East Coast Editor of Jamii Publishing and is Founder of the reading series Soul Sister Revue. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day Series, African American Review, Bone Bouquet, Callaloo, Kweli Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

About the Poems I've always been fascinated by what makes us who we are. I like trying to discover why we do things. Is it impulse, flights of fancy, or some type of predisposition? In my work I tend to reference memory and its interaction with the five senses. So in both "When I Kiss A Smoker" and "My Aunt's Secret to Keeping A Man," smell and taste drive each line toward the next action or realization. While potato salad seems simple, when you've tasted a bad batch it's all over! There's all this lore about witches and recipes and how ingredients have power. But in AfricanAmerican households food, prepared right, can have that same power. "In My Heaven" is one of my favorite poems because it's where my poet brain lets the imagination take over. I think everyone should imagine what heaven looks like. I just read a book where hell was a mall with a horrible food court, so I may tackle that next.

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Phoebe Reeves The Gardener and the Garden (five) Why do you leave these hieroglyphs for me, and no Rosetta Stone? I sit at my desk and watch petals fall from the yellow roses to the mulch below, while bumblebees stumble into and out of the foxgloves’ mouths, buzzing and shaking their wings to settle the pollen.

After weeks of waiting, the peonies all unfurled in yesterday’s thunderstorm, their faces cast penitently earthward, ants running over their skin, urging them to open upward, to funnel sun for them.

Everywhere this morning there are new mole burrows pushing up and breaking ground.

What does the garden look like from his angle?

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understand any of it, how it keeps happening. Last night in the basement I found among the wine bottles one bumblebee belly up, perfect pure black on the gray floor like a lost toy and how did she find her way inside, anyway? How do I find my way inside? If I stoop long enough over her and trace the fairy outline of her wings, the tiny bristles on her legs, will you begin to speak to me in a language I can comprehend?

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The Gardener and the Garden (six) I only grow the lamb's ears because I know it pleases you. The bumblebees come to them wholly, lovingly—a flock of black on a field of soft white-green fuzz, the modest purple flowers on their messy stalks.

The bees stumble and flit and bump one another, moving from this to that and quick over to the coreopsis but then back.

I find their singlemindedness, their devotion to such an unlovely blossom mysterious in a garden full of flowers with more pollen more panache more sex appeal. I watch them leave the last of the foxgloves, one or two final flowers at the apex of their drunken stalks, beaten down by rain or knocked about by the neighbor's cat who lays there in wait for the sparrows, murder always in his mind. They move over under past, sharing a flower, Volume 4 No 2 - Page 79

pushing one another out of the way. They go where they want—but how do they know what they want? It might be an ultraviolet message only they can see imprinted on the plants, or a pheromone message unspooling genetic desires, or as one goes, so go the others—always focused, swift, not frenzied not full of anxiety in their choices— this particular flower right now, no wait, maybe this one or this one, and anyway their only loyalty is to the hive, the queen who never gets to wander in among the garden with them but must imagine it as they return with its essences on their wings.

The lamb’s ears don’t behave, don’t stay in their places. Sometimes I have to hack back their perimeters or else they would slop over into the coneflowers, the phlox, the hibiscus. You care nothing for such boundaries—what lives, pleases you. I am not so catholic. I have favorites, as I must. As I wish you would, Page 80 - Nine Mile Magazine

and save my clematis from the blight that turned all its leaves to a greeny-grey pulp, limp and hanging like dead bats from the once-plump vine. Does it satisfy you to prove your ascendancy here, to prove I too could be erased and what remains hang dead from the onceplump vine? As in every second of every hour of every day we cut each other off at the root and leave ourselves to wither. I cannot accept that this is an exercise in selective death, selective survival—help for the lilies, uprooting the asters, or if not, life for the asters, who will choke out the lilies.

Either way the choice is someone's ending. Some days I think you are speaking to me in the pattern these bumblebees make. They make the garden alive with their contamination. Life as contamination, as accident, the bee loving one flower more than another, the bee interrupted by the barrier of my body Volume 4 No 2 - Page 81

as I bend to cut the lavender stalks. She diverts to another and life is changed.

Is it pattern or white noise? I strain to hear to see to touch something I can make sense of, to make sense with my touching— what was not now is, what was is gone and it changes because I am watching, because I need it, the flower there or not there depending on the bee's flight path, depending on the way the sun strikes the lawn's newly shorn hair and a few low clovers dotting the green.

I want to ask you why, why everything, but you will only speak to me in bumblebees, in the things I have put in the earth to see them rise again—I will not rise again. When you put me in the earth, my dark flower will grow downward and the nectar of my death will call all the bees belowground.

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Phoebe Reeves Phoebe Reeves earned her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, and now teaches English at the University of Cincinnati’s Clermont College in rural southern Ohio, where she advises East Fork: An Online Journal of the Arts. Her chapbook The Lobes and Petals of the Inanimate was published by Pecan Grove Press in 2009. Her poems have recently appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Drunken Boat, Phoebe, and Radar Poetry.

About the Poems These two poems are part of a longer series focusing on a gardener's work in the garden. They move in a seasonal direction and are interested in the fine details and small dramas of the garden's world, but they are also fascinated by the gardener's inner world and the places where those energies overlap.

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Jennifer Givhan After the First Communion in their beds with prayer books & rosaries worrying rocks spittled by holy water down the aisle as the father came muttering the children in their bridal white their groom ties the eye at my chest powerless to protest (what would I have said lighting my candles sprinkling my burial dirt? I was witness to their ceremony I had my taste of holy toast & fermentation once it never kept me safe) while the children finger their beads kneel & rise I do not object Lord I will do my best what cold sky would I otherwise deny lights out—I whisper close your eyes & find nothing until even that unravels that ghost belief

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Retrograde I wonder at the dryer static I’ve become the patchwork threadbare clinging— Maybe the Universe is telling me I’m sticky Here’s a fried sandwich Love a slice of watermelon plastic silverware Life’s a picnic blanket there are ants Stick around Letters in the mail like Mama’s broken chains of prayer notes unmeant for me but maybe they are Here’s the address Come pick me up let’s get out of town let’s drive Open a window person I’ve never met in person Here’s a fresh pair hang something other than yourself on the line for a change One even said there’s a light Jennifer She meant another Jennifer-in-the-dark You’ve been drowning a long time Here’s air

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At the Altar of Staying A coyote in the road straddling double yellow lines nopassing flame-blue flickers against the body’s horizon My mother watches my small children sleeping early I drive where sky quilts mountains black birds twinning distance against my mother’s face lines in the road trash I must resist peeling roadside & feeding at the wick another prayer Jenna girl you are not the coyote skirting the edge feeding fear’s belly ten cuidado ama

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the animal in the center is wild & sweetness you’re tough as tar

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Jennifer Givhan Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American poet from the Southwestern desert. She is the author of Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize) and Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Series, University of Arkansas Press). Her chapbooks include Lifeline (Glass Poetry Press), The Daughter’s Curse (ELJ Editions), and Lieserl Contemplates Resurrection (dancing girl press). Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship, The Frost Place Latin@ Scholarship, The 2015 Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, The Pinch Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, AGNI, Ploughshares, POETRY, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, and The Kenyon Review. She lives with her family in New Mexico.

About the Poems These poems come from my newest work Girl with Death Mask, which illumines the suffering and the love of a mother coming to terms with sexual trauma. Her children are touchstones of healing as the mother seeks to unravel her own emotions as well as protect her children with a fierceness she must find within.

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Qiana Towns Liquid Revolution My daughter is a crier Like her mother she weeps At the beauty and sorrow Of things which isn’t As trite as one might think In a place like this in a time Like this when so few of us value The science behind eyes. How The body Calls into itself for increase, repair.

Its mending ignites blood and breath And when this process is done The body may be improved.

Picture her Tear-stained cheek, the wetness Of her pretty brown Eyes-- the artistry of all of it. She is seven Everything they say blackness Is not; a thinker. She has always been First in her class; her earliest teacher Said her tears were a bi-product Of her intellect. I blamed myself.

When her father And I split the first time she Lived inside me and could not Escape grief as I wept At the parting. On the night she was born My only prayer was not to give Birth to the byword of my sorrow. Now Volume 4 No 2 - Page 89

I imagine her seven y/o tears have nothing to do With me. They are her own. I cannot Blame myself for everything.

Except sometimes I do.

The lead settling into my daughter’s Bones is my fault. The lead Settling into the bones of my city Is not my fault any more Than it is yours—citizen Of the first world I look straight Through my tears and into yours. We Haven’t changed much; we have taken To crying and given up fighting.

But that is a lesson we never grow tired Of learning.

She will be 8 soon; yesterday she told me Her resolution for the New Year is not To waste her tears except She called it her new year’s revolution Which must mean there is an uprising Brewing behind her Pretty brown eyes.

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Complex When the flame is plump and blue Insert the body.

And the body, plump with its gases, will infatuate the fire, gnaw flesh and bone to dust.

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Qiana Towns Qiana Towns is author of the chapbook This is Not the Exit (Aquarius Press, 2015). Her work as appeared in Harvard Review Online, Crab Orchard Review, and Reverie. A Cave Canem graduate, Towns received the 2014 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. She is a resident of Flint where she serves as Community Outreach Coordinator for Bottles for the Babies, a grassroots organization created to support and educate the residents of Flint during the water crisis.

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Andrea Scarpino's selection of poems and poets ends here. The editors express their gratitude to Ms. Scarpino for her work on this anthology, and for this terrific selection of voices she has chosen.

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Susannah Lee White Mountains in Memoriam Open like a prayer-washed canticle sounding a fricative love for the world this is the day that the lord hath made !

She packed her rucksack and set out not tentative exactly, but not confident where she was going. She packed a pb & j and Stanley thermos full. This was the scope of things and it had the feel of old vellum, the notes lovingly holding the skin of the journey with intention, but leaving a lot out as well.

Did she know the end of the trail would be a compass, would ferry her back to a beginning? The song unwound silently at first and then polyphonic like the wind lifting each light follicle , and the fine gauzy shirt of bravery, her singular smile

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greeted the wind and was carried up and out to the light but only when earthly time, its broad history, permitted.

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The Field So small this expanse of open view, funny she thought that had something to do with enlightenment but no, it held the barter system in its gleaming bone washed teeth, ripping flesh from truth.

Adjudication, I told her and she wept for the stern cellular division, bilateral stand-off she would never want to call home. But the fact was, it was. A field of view so parsed each creature was annotated in its arrival and departure from the water source. They drink daily and go home, some are killed on the road. And the bone washer sleeps in a kind of incessant reverie so distant from the field, he inhabits only his canine flash and tear, dropping down farther into sleep forelegs whisking as though escape was the only purpose to the horizon.The spine hollowed to a whistle, air is speaking down that long corridor of ritual that brings it both farther away and close at the same time.

Bone washer, name sayer, calisthenic matrimony, what I wish for you are the wings that will both

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carry and reverberate with the tremors that bring us on. * * * In the slurry that flushed past the window the night of the flood, who knows how many misfirings and amputations had bled into the stream that curdled past the well.This was age-old, we drank from the well. The fly-catcher knows it.

And the small wingĂŠd fledglings that emptied out into dusk dipped past the source. This tangy repertoire so helplessly New World, I too stretched my own forked flight and said prayers just as my grandmother had and hers before her, heralding death each evening with the well-oiled grace of someone stirring up gratitude, as though it and only it would save you. * * * It was the glacial formations and how they had been used centuries later that moved them. The stone runs were clearly made for domesticated animals, surging in with hunger or fear or simply a return to where they could go no farther. The dark woods abounded with sounds of ash against ash, old bough sounds

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that mimicked the call of a black bear yearling cast from its den. He would travel, travel down to the field unsure of what he needed, forage or flesh, and snag a goat, Capra Domesticus (sweet and heavy in her tender unawares) but being so uncertain would retract claws and retreat leaving the goat to die in the field.

In as much as I understood the bear’s quandary as he ran away mistaken I blessed his sole dark run out through hunger, I blessed the goat as she turned her flat goat neck up to the sky and saw the end itself a mark of arrival. * * * Back when the road first came through it likely brought with it sows, does and all manner of prognosticators down the hill, wheeling slowly because ruts were inevitable, and if not filled with rainwater gushing and undermining the whole effort, then hell on the whole machine.

Now the macadam is pressed annually every summer with oil and puddingstone and left to stink

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until use wears it down into itself. Cars hitting the level where it joins the field spring up with a kind of reckless joy.

As I tell you this a great blue heron carries the air on its primordial span across the divide and folds up like origami in the weeping cherry.

Seriously, this could kill you with wonder and the macular prayer that sits with me surrenders a lot to memory and then walks on. * * * After searing drought and drenching rains, the old oak and maple give up what buoys them most, letting go where sessile limbs have gradually opened too much and often to the elements. She cried out at the leafy crash that could be a cub descending but nothing so gamey and pulsing here.

Smack dab on the tarmac from fifty feet blows the spongy branch to bits. This a map, I tell her, smitten with age and the reliquary of our love one to the other.

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About Susannah Lee Susannah Lee has worked as a writer and producer for both film and radio. Her radio stories have aired on All Things Considered, Living on Earth, and Monitor Radio, while a number of her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Seneca Review and Sonora Review. She lives in western Massachusetts with the photographer Tom Young and their young daughter.

About The Poems These poems are elegiac but I hope with a deep, ruminant love for the world. I live in a rural area where the topography is marked by an ancient quality, both geologically and the ways in which we have walked upon it. I find myself thinking about the cumulative marks we leave and how this generous earth holds them all. Until it can no longer. That moment and the subsequent transformation interest me.

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Anne Hosansky Fanny Brawne Afterward [Fanny Brawne was loved by the poet Keats, who died at 25] And no birds sing. One of your lovely lines I was unable to understand.

Used to facts but not to fancy, I only wondered what sort of birds did not sing - and why?

Were their small throats ailing?

I could not hear what silence meant.

Once fond of frills and frippery, now garbed in melancholy black, I wander at dusk upon the heath in my own leaden-eyed despair, your exquisite words wrapping themselves around my tongue.

Oh love, I have come late to poesy.

It is not your odes that tutored me, but your dying. Touch is memory, you promised. The absence of touch is what you have bequeathed –– hands that cannot caress my body now, lips that will not kiss my aching breast.

I cling to your words as if they unite us, yet though darkling I listen, I never hear your nightingale.

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About Anne Hosansky “Fanny Brawne Afterward” was the first-place winner in a New York Poetry Forum contest. Some of Hosansky’s other poems have been published in “Mobius,” “First Literary Review East” and ”Poetica.” On the prose side, she’s the author of the memoir “Widow’s Walk,” and four additional books.

Her short stories have been published in the US, Canada, England and Israel. In her “previous life” she was an actor, which enables her to give lively readings.

About The Poem In my long-ago college days Keats was my poetic idol. For my senior paper, I chose to write about his letters to the young woman he loved but was unable to marry, because he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. From his lonely exile in Italy, he wrote her wrenching and candidly passionate letters.

My paper was decades ago, but last year Keats and Fanny unexpectedly came back into my life. I had just finished watching a film about them which ended with his death. Afterward I was unable to get the young woman out of my mind. Was she devastated when he died? Did she regret - or recognize - how much she lost by not being able to understand his poems? Sometimes we don't have to wait for our emotions to be “recollected in tranquility.” Immediately I reached for a notebook and pen, and wrote “Fanny Brawne Afterward.” Probably my strong identification with her feelings was because I’d been bereaved myself.

I don’t recall any conscious decision to include some of Keats’ beautiful phrases. They just insisted on being there— rightfully, I believe.

Some poems - like babies - are born comparatively quickly, while others take agonizing hours. I find that’s true of writing, whether poetry or prose. (A poem I wrote about my father required 12 years before I was able to compress the feelings from three pages to one!). But in one of my rarest experiences, “Fanny” arrived almost complete.

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Michael Martin Deep In The Hollow, Grandfather passes the gravy Like a Bishop giving up the gun.

Sister dies, never knowing If she was a coward or not.

A weatherman falls for peculiar weather And lets his son live In his cage of birds while an old Vaquero adorns his face in the mirror For the Champagne Dolphin Swim At Midnight.

But there in the corner, Is that a dead loved one refusing to die?

Or a thought we’ve fallen into And can’t crawl out of.

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Lambs In Bethlehem Tucked into his death bed the Father Speaks off and on like a morphine drip His final face staring back From a mirror the Nurse with a tree Tattooed on her neck holds near his eyes.

She’s the Father’s favorite nurse.

Everyday he tells her, I love you. I love you.

Shaving himself this one last time, The Father speaks of his last nightmare—a ghost Cutting him with a knife.

“So I just turn myself into a jet fighter And fly the hell away.”

“Sometimes I wish I could fly away,” the Son says.

“Oh,” the Father says. “It’s really something.”

The Father tells the Son what it’s like To be high in the sky and see women In nighties at dawn half-awake In their gardens divvying Out bread to some birds.

“When you’re a jet you get the lay Of the land,” the Father says. “You can buzz A lamb in Bethlehem.” Then the Nurse Collects the shaving things, tidies Up the room and crosses the desert to leave.

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Dear Benedictine Monk— In your last missive you mentioned, The River Sarthe!

Betraying a thirst to swim to every side.

And when you mentioned, The Abbey of St. Peter!

I got the feeling you haven’t made it so far.

Here, it’s all pretty much the same— It rains and sounds like applause.

The girls are so hot they can fry an egg.

Do you ever feel like a storm window Nailed to a jetliner?

Last Friday, another dateless Prom Night.

After the late shift I emptied the grease bucket Counted the cash and took all the money.

It always feels good. Like outrunning the sea.

You write so strangely friend Of your evenings alone on the riverbank, Doing things like, ‘Lining up a convex lens With a dead star to burn A fire at the feet of some avatar.’

Are you trying to tell me something?

I only see you in my mind’s eye, sinking; And writing postcards underwater.

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About Michael Martin Michael Martin’s first poetry collection, Extended Remark: Poems From A Moravian Parking Lot, was published by Portals Press (New Orleans, 2015). Poetry and fiction have appeared in Gargoyle, New Orleans Review, Booth Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Chattahoochee Review, & Berkeley Poetry Review, among others.

He co-founded the literary magazine, Hogtown Creek Review and for a decade lived in Holland where he was a feature writer with Amsterdam Weekly. In 2010 he edited the anthology, Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper’s Magazine. He is a regular contributor to Sacred Trespasses and is currently working on a second manuscript of poetry. He’s been a Consulting Editor for books by Lewis Lapham, Dutch film director Louis van Gasteren, among others. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and kids.

About the Poems Reading these poems again I’m reminded of a through-line that seems to run through some of my stuff, which is grief—almost a sanctification of it. But that’s just my read. I don’t write poems ‘about’ anything, but rather ‘from’ something, and grief might be one of the sources of this batch. And ambivalence. These ditties seem to conjure their own logic and rhythm, though at first blush they look like unrecognizable worlds but if the thing is a poem those worlds will feel, I hope, emotionally familiar and resistant to paraphrase. I also had a welcome surprise when I noticed the actors in the poems were either running head-on into the big, bad world or trying to get the hell out of it; the Benedictine Monk and his young pen-pal especially. It’s sort of funny how the young guy thinks the Monk isn’t making any sense in his letters, being elusive, though the kid is writing things like, Do you ever feel like

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a storm window / Nailed to a jetliner? and thinks his colorful, no nonsense approach to things is the way to go. The Monk thinks exclaiming something like, The River Sarthe! The Abbey of St. Peter! explains his heart. Language fails both of them but they don’t know it. Typical; we all make perfect sense to ourselves. Like poems.

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Timothy W. Allen Relegated Folks Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone attracted a good deal of Attention a few years ago.

Social capital is waning, he says Membership in organizations is Dwindling, the unions are nearly gone Even bowling leagues are almost extinct Face to face contacts Are becoming scarce.

We are living in “The Age of Loneliness,” Experts say.

Students tell me they have a plethora of Facebook friends, yet few, if any, real ones “I just don’t have anything in Common with my roommates,” one says Even those on dates spend more time Texting to those distant and removed Than in conversing with the person Across the table from them.

The social fabric seems To be wearing Thin.

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To dust off the thin layers That veil them.

Relegated folks have uncanny connections, It seems, Though our thrownness takes different forms On the surface At a slightly deeper level The solidarity is profound.

Secret sharers, we are All of us, who are In this boat.

In a small town in South Dakota As a family approaches I ask directions.

Harsh glances ensue “Why is this white man here On our land and what does he Want with us?” they are thinking Yet as our eyes meet The woman’s body loses its Tautness, the corners of her Mouth upturn slightly; “Yes,” she Says, “it is down there no More than four blocks.”

I thank them all.

“That curb is high,” her husband says Concern in his voice as I step toward it.

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The woman in the wheelchair gives The escalator a hostile glare And as I approach it she eyes me With suspicion.

Yet, as our eyes meet, a knowing smile Crosses her face.

“There’s an elevator in housewares” I say, and gesture In that direction.

"Gracias," she says Her countenance brightens As I fumble for the Handrail.

The grey-haired man limps noticeably His hands, too, bear unmistakable Witness to years of hard labor As he grips the hand of the waist-high Girl at his side.

He holds her hand tightly as He scans me coldly; But as I board the same bus All three of us endure Maligning glances

From those awaiting buses To destinations more Upscale than ours.

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As he stares at the floor.

Once seated, though He squints at me Our eyes meet Surprised, he grins.

He never would have guessed But now he Knows.

On the bus, my phone buzzes A text, apparently.

I glance down G . . . something or other E . . . something or other It looks like; Reminds me that Yes, I have to finish grading those exams.

As the bus stops My attention is drawn to a tapping It is a cane; a woman with a White cane is boarding the bus Dark haired, stylish And carrying a large bag.

The seats on the bus Are nearly taken She brushes my leg with her cane The seat next to me is vacant.

“Here’s one,” I say.

She sits down.

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My phone buzzes again Another message; I can't tell what it says I hit voiceover “. . . . had a sore throat . . ."

It fires out rapidly "Missed the exam . . . .”

“Oh, are you blind?”

She asks, her attention cowled by The phone sound’s badge.

“Not totally,” I respond; “I can see a little, but not to read.”

She is interested She looks right at me Her eyes twinkle They are sharp and lively But I can tell that she cannot see “I am not blind,” she says “But, I have a blind body.”

She smiles, appreciating That I understand her fully.

My stop is approaching “Yes,” I say "I know."

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About Timothy W. Allen Timothy Allen is trained as an academic philosopher; adventitious vision loss, however, has rekindled his dormant literary interests. His work has appeared in The Platte Valley Review, Breath and Shadow, Wordgathering, and Philosophy of Literature; he lives in the Allegheny Mountains in upstate New York.

About the Poem Experiences of the past three years have thrust me into a world I had visited previously only through literary and philosophical works. The path I now tread is eerily familiar; I glimpse the apparitions of Poe, Keats, Dostoevsky, Hesse, Beckett, Wolfe, Camus, and Sartre, each nodding solemnly, as I make my way along it.

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Some Translations These are translations—imitations really, as all translations must be —that interested us for various reasons. Something in each poem captivated us, perhaps startling imagery, or a tone of voice that gives a sense of a real person speaking, sometimes the hint of plot. Some of the translations are mashups—the Arnault Daniel pieces, for example, are constructed from several poems, as a way of giving a sense of the flavor of this remarkable poet. Notes on the poets and the poems, and why we chose them follow each poem.

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Rene Char The Oriole Then the oriole entered the Capital of Dawn.

The sword of its singing closed the sad bed.

It was all over forever.

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About Rene Char Rene Char (1907 - 1988) was a great poet and a member of the resistance who fought against the Nazis in World War II. He came to poetry early, publishing his work and starting a magazine locally. After completing his military service in 1929, he moved to Paris, where he joined the surrealists, remaining with the movement through the early 30’s, after which he gradually distanced himself. In 1940 he joined the resistance, taking the name Capitaine Alexandre as his nom de guerre.

For his military service, he was awarded the Medal of the Resistance and the Croix de Guerre and was named to the Legion of Honor. Char said that in the war he learned that “It is not whether your words or actions are tough or gentle; it is the spirit behind your actions and words that announces your inner state.”

His reputatuion grew quickly after the war, and in the 1950’s he was considered one of the country's greatest poets. He was translated into English by many poets, including William Carlos Williams, who has has a lovely poem about Char, W. S. Merwin, James Wright, Richard Wilbur, and Thomas Merton. Char never took up automatic writing, or wooing of the unconscious, as other surrealists did. “The poet must keep an equal balance between the physical world of waking and the dreadful ease of sleep; these are the lines of knowledge between which he lays the subtle body of the poem, moving indistinctly from one to the other of these different states of life.”

"The Oriole" is a reverse aubade. In this version, the dawn opens over a sad bed, and when the bird sings its morning song, the world ends. In a typical aubade, the poet speaks to a sleeping woman whom he is leaving as he dawn breaks; or sometimes there is dialogue between lovers, or a watchman warning lovers of the approaching dawn. This is clearly not involved in any of those scenarios. One of the many things to love about this poem is the startling way it upends tradition.

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Giotto di Bondone Poverty There lies the broad road to sin.

The judge grows unjust. Men & women lose their honor.

Even the good man loses the trust of his friends.

Wit follows gold, dignity flees, & the light is gone from the eyes of the eldest daughter.

Now she would do anything.

As to the voluntary poverty our good churchmen call for— There is no voluntary poverty! None good.

Who calls good that which throttles good? Virtue All that kills virtue? Notice how those Who preach poverty are least at peace.

Hypocrites! Perhaps they believe They possess some interior richness. Who says!

All it means is that they too are trying to escape.

Lord, we all love virtue, but extremes bring vice, & because of these insane preachers of yours No corner of the earth is safe.

If they hear this my song Let them recognize their error in it; & if they are too proud, or too stiff-necked, Let them see us my song & reflect On the plain facts of experience Till their heads, too, are down.

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About Giotto di Bondone Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337) is one of the proto-Renaissance painters who, it was said, introduced the technique of drawing accurately from life. Information about his life is sketchy and untrustworthy, shaped in surmises and myths. He may have been from Florence, his father may have been a blacksmith, he may have been tutored by Cimabue, who discovered him drawing on a rock, he may have been influenced by the ideas of St. Francis of Assisi about Nature and about how inner contemplation can create connections between the individual and God. The lack of confirmable biography aside, he was a great painter, whose work includes many mural paintings, including those in the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi (though this authorship is challenged), a large cycle of mural paintings in the Scrovegni chapel in Padua, and murals in the Bardi and the Peruzzi Chapels. Giotto is also credited as author of several altarpieces, among which is Madonna and Child Enthroned, made for the Ognissanti church in Florence. In his last period he was appointed chief architect of the cathedral in Florence. He died on January 8, 1337 in Florence, so famous that Dante compared his place in literature to Giotto’s in painting.

Regarding his relationship to St. Francis, we know that Giotto created several cycles about the life of poverello (as they called St. Francis), and wrote this, his only known poem, “Canzone. Of the Doctrine of Voluntary Poverty,” against poverty, but in in a practical and humorous tone. This translation tries to capture the spirit of its humor and acerbic wit. Others have approached it differently. Rossetti, for example, was more serious: Many there are, praisers of Poverty; The which as man's best state is register'd When by free choice preferr'd, With strict observance having nothing here.

For this they find certain authority Wrought of an over-nice interpreting.

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Now as concerns such thing, A hard extreme it doth to me appear, Which to commend I fear, For seldom are extremes without some vice.

Let every edifice, Of work or word, secure foundation find; Against the potent wind, And all things perilous, so well prepared, That it need no correction afterward.

Of poverty which is against the will, It never can be doubted that therein Lies broad the way to sin.

For oftentimes it makes the judge unjust; In dames and damsels doth their honour kill; And begets violence and villainies, And theft and wicked lies, And casts a good man from his fellows' trust.

And for a little dust Of gold that lacks, wit seems a lacking too.

If once the coat give view Of the bare back, farewell all dignity.

Each therefore strives that he Should by no means admit her to his sight...

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Arnault Daniel L'aur' Amara Now the bitter wind strips the trees Where softer winds set leaves & they are gone, Or stammering now, or mute, The birds that usually sing here, The paired & many single....

Now I have to force myself to work.

I am like one of those birds fallen from the heights: & she did it.

For I lie here sick, There's no fun, there's no good work, & I am desperately afraid of death. *** So clear, The light that came to me When first I chose her.

Now....

It's as if I loved Another woman, In secret.

Here are two thorns: For my own song is not sung, Yet to hear The least word of desire from her, The least word without anger in it,

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& I am hers, From the curl of my toes to my first hot blush. *** Look at me, Love, For I am yours.

No—don't turn me away.

For I'm afraid I'd tell About some of those habits of yours You'd be better off dropping.

But still, I'm true!

I'm honest, Rare, Steadfast, & my heart makes me gloss Some other obvious truths.

Love, I ache!

Yet one kiss Would cool my hot heart down. *** Shall I compare you to A citadel of virtue: For my mute prayers are drawn up in ranks Within me, ready to fly.

Do I confuse?

If you helped me My thought Would be clear before you, even now. ***

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Listen. I'd be dead by now Except That I've learned From our courtship Patience, Yes, Even for death.

But what I beg you Is to cut short Hope & patience: Use fulfillment on them.

Because it's only you I want.

I tell you the truth when I say That the joy of enjoying another Is not worth even the leer. *** Sweet face, With Every beauty in it, You've brought me many cruel friends To mock me, Though I never loved anyone as much, or with such little display. *** Alas....

Ready yourself, my song.

Go please our King.

For he will receive you well.

For the glory that is dead here There has a double season.

There, riches survive in the giving.

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So go in joy.

Kiss his ring if he raises it.

Tell him I've never been a day from home without wanting it the more, & that now mighty Rome calls me away. *** Each night I see her within my heart, I, Arnault, without peer, & often I have thoughts My mind never reaches the end of.

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En cest coind'e leri Song Of Love's Trades & Works I I'll plane each word & finish it Till each is true & once I've passed the file there Love herself will guide them home Knowing the one this craft is for Is governess & guardian of all true lines: Lord, she it is who gives them worth.

II My song is like a forge Partly open to the elements: Yet each day I'm more refined My metal purer For whom I serve & though in this season's changing The wind blows cold as I work The Love raining in my heart Will warm me most when it winters worst.

III I have resigned myself to paying A thousand masses for her Burning candles & lamps That God will help me here For I have no tricks against her; When I look at her golden hair Page 124 - Nine Mile Magazine

Her body that is so soft so young so spirited I love her more Even than the one who could give me Lucerne!

IV My heart is so full from loving her I think I shall lose her by loving her As if one heart should submerge the other As loving too well the river Floods the long fields of grain....

V I do not want to be Emperor of Rome Nor would I take the Pope's chair Not if in the taking I should lose her For my heart burns now It breaks apart in the intense flames she has made & if she does not end this torment With what is in her power to give A kiss before New Year's She has murdered me & damned herself.

VI I work in loving Like a man who works the earth Casting my words into long planting-lines Though the fields still seem Barren & gray; Love's work is harder than threshing Felt as much by common laborer Volume 4 No 2 - Page 125

As by the royalty That all the other singers praise.

VII I, Arnault, loving the wind Chasing the rabbit on an ox Swimming against the harsh sea-tides.

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About Arnault Daniel Only 16 poems of the troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel (active 1180-1200) survive , though he was once seen as so exemplary a poet that Dante called him miglior fabbro,“the better craftsman,” the same phrase T.S. Eliott used to dedicate The Wasteland to Ezra Pound. Pound, in turn, considered Daniel one of the greatest poets who ever lived. It is surprising therefore how sketchy and contradictory are the biographical details about him. One account, for example, says he was born of a noble family in a castle near Perigord, while another says he was a jester, and yet another says he was in constant financial trouble, possibly from gambling. As an artist, he was master of the trobar clus, a complex poetic style of intricate rhymes, meters, and words that were chosen for sound as much as for meaning. He is often credited with inventing the sestina, a significant and inventive form. Arnault appears in Dante’s Purgatory, suffering penance for his sins of lust (another clue to his biolgraphy).

When asked to identify himself, he replies in Provencal, the only speech in the Divine Comedy not in Italian (Purg., XXVI 140-147).

Most translations seem incomplete to me and give little sense of the voice, tone, and scope of the poems. As an example, below is a direct translation of the first few lines of "L’aur’ Amara" (from http:// www.trobar.org/troubadours/arnaut_daniel/arnaut_daniel_13.php), followed by the Italian. To my ear the English feels archaic, even wispy and pretentious, while the very sound of the Italian is fresh and exciting.

To give a sense of the scope and rhythm and the great wit of these great poems, I have mashed up some pieces, combining lines where it seemed appropriate to give a sense of the original, even at the expense of linebreaks and rhythm.

The bitter air makes those bough-laden woods barren, which the sweet one thickens with leaves,

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and the gleeful beaks of the wandering birds it keeps stammering and dumb, couples and single ones, therefore I endeavour to act and speak pleasantly to many for the sake of her who has cast me low from high, for whom I dread to die if my grievance isn't eased.

And here is the original, where the sound is so much better: L'aur amara fa'ls bruels brancutz clarzir, que'l dous'espeis'ab fuelhs, e'ls letz becx dels auzels ramencx te babs e mutz, pars e non pars, per que m'esfortz per far e dir plazers a manhs per lei qui m'a virat bas d'aut, don tem morir si l'afans no m'asoma...

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Jules Supervielle A Poet I'm not always alone in the sea-depths.

Others still alive are sometimes there, Brought by me, though no one knows, Entering those cold caverns, If they will be the same when they leave.

*** I pile up the night, I am like a ship which is sinking, I fall through an endless tumult of passengers & sailors, In the sea-cabins I turn off even the lights of the eyes, I make friends with the great sea-depths.

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About Jules Supervielle Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) was born into a French-Basque family living in Uruguay. Sent to Paris at ten, he completed his education at the Sorbonne, and for the rest of his life, divided his time between Uruguay and France. He made early literary friendships with André Gide, Paul Valéry and Jacques Rivière. In 1923, he met Rilke, a crucial influence on his work. Supervielle also wrote a number of works of fiction as well as several plays. His collections of poetry include: Gravitations (1925), Le Forçat innocent (1930), Les Amis inconnus (1934), La Fable du Monde (1938, 1946), Oublieuse Mémoire (1949), Naissances (1951), and L’Escalier (1956).

His poetry is rich, showing an exploratory faith along with a yearning to bring the self and the exiled other into one whole. In this poem, we have the sense of lonely space occupied by his consciousness that can see others and know about them, but does not directly communicate with them. The poet works from this inner world, alone, “making friends” with the sea-depths. Distance is often a factor in his poems, as it is here, allied with deep feeling and not so much a fear as a profound awareness of how the self is overwhelmed in encounters with oceans, night, and of course, the great distance of death.

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Greg Jensen My Fair Share Feeling the flesh caressing my bones, just sitting here bathed in candlelight.

I measure a distance and take up more than my fair share.

Living doesn’t belong to me even if it passes through my ribs one more day.

I call to someone else when I see my legs running the length of the pier and cast myself out further than oyster beds going hungry at low tide.

I ask what is clinging to me like a veil.

What have I done to deserve this body holding me back from its own oblivion with such force I can’t smell the salt burning on my skin.

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About Greg Jensen Greg jensen is a native of the damp Pacific Northwest. He has worked with homeless adults living with mental illness and addiction problems for the past 20 years. Winner of the 2014 Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize, his work has appeared in december, Crab Creek Review, Bodega, Fugue, Jazz Cigarette, and Dunes Review. He lives in Seattle with his wife and their two children. Greg received his MFA in Poetry from Pacific University.

About The Poem “My Fair Share” started at the end of a particularly invigorating yoga class, a moment in which I found myself unable to fully comprehend the good fortune of having a body that supported and served me so well. The more I write, the more the poems draw me back to the mystery of body and breath, which yoga seeks to join. Our sense of beginnings and endings is rooted in our experience of the body we have. The body alone provides the perspective we share of traveling through this world unable to say precisely who are, what we are, or where we are going, which is the source of all poems. And yet despite the fact our bodies make us vulnerable to the ultimate uncertainties, the physical and mental pain of existence, they also serve as the ultimate source of comfort. I find the body’s seeming contradictions, of being both a strange and familiar home, endlessly fascinating. Not many, or perhaps any, of my poems are quite like this one with a speaker directly addressing the gift and curse of mortality, which is one of the reasons I have a certain fondness for it and was grateful that it could be published and have a home in the world.

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David Weiss from Perfect Crime It’s all there in the tool box: the team of oxen, the underground spring, the seven ages of man, escapes routes, mnemonics, a map of promises, the foundation walls.

The one who’s not a suspect gave it to you.

Nothing’s missing or lost, not the pas de deux or the porch swing, not mother love beside the vice grips, or the blueprints blowing through rows of rusted wheat, not the cenotaph lit by heat lightning, or what he said, she said.

Useless as it is and heavy, you pick through it, surprised at what you find, surprised at who’s found you.

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From the sparrow: seed-sized victories.

From the soup spoon: the shrunken face at the bottom of abundance.

From the drill press: all about into, through.

From the traffic light: time’s changing pigmentations.

From privet: the meaning of night, of inflorescence.

From the sparrow: tireless quiddity, keen gladness.

From myself: nothing to speak of, to bank on.

From low tide: high and dry, the look of the crime scene.

From the crowbar: leverage, dead certainty.

From the definite article: how to hold hereafter between your lips without bursting it.

From the storm drain: what down feels like, what unquenchable.

To: what follows from from.

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The perfect crime is a fortune teller off the midway. She reads the lines of your hands, your tea leaves, the bumps on your head, She shuffles the deck.

But it’s not your fate you want to know.

It’s who this fate is happening to.

She pulls out her abacus and subtracts the stars and their houses.

She factors out family history, DNA, national identity, religious denomination.

She writes off decisions you made, blunders, moments of happiness.

What’s left? you ask.

Dreams? A belly laugh? The fertility of the color green?

No, she says, looking up, her eyes like the first organisms floating in the Precambrian sea.

What’s left is me.

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From the heart comes Morse code, the stone-breaking work song.

Even in the late Holocene, John Henry was a little baby sitting on his daddy’s knee.

Inside the glacial core sample, the blues came before slavery, before the sieve of dominion.

John Henry’s pick was a volcano, his white house a Parchment farm.

It’s a short step from heartbeat to heartache to flowering Judas.

So, bring me a little water, Sylvie, every little once in a while.

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About David Weiss David Weiss is the author of a recent book of poems, GNOMON, two previous collections of poems, The Fourth Part of the World and The Pail of Steam, and a novel, The Mensch. He has also published numerous essays on poetry. Weiss teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

He is the editor of Seneca Review, a literary and art journal published by Hobart & William Smith colleges. Mr. Weiss has two books coming out this year: Per Diem, from Tiger Bark Press, and Perfect Crime, published this spring by Nine Mile Books.

About the Poems The poems here are from a sequence of poems called "Perfect Crime" that Nine Mile is going publish this spring. (Thank you, Nine Mile!) 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. In our present moment, we’re at a virtually decriminalized crossroads defined by cause without effect. Which is often how early days can seem. But the poems, rather, examine the permutations of the idea: crimes that can’t be found; crimes that haven’t been committed; crimes without criminals; criminality without crime; conditions of existence that are themselves crimes, crying shames, tragedy. We might say that desire itself is a crime; it’s characterized by its non-consummation; what one wants, the object of desire, is taken from us, a priori, as the condition of desire; achieved, desire dematerializes, is itself stolen; attained, it ceases to exist. The poems are aftermath’s play, it seems to me. And the consolations are the consolations of recognition

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Some Words of Hart Crane 1.

It’s a mysterious process, how a poem starts and grows, what makes it take root, why this and not that. And the writing, the building-up or building-down, from these words or those, to those finished quatrains or these couplets, to something free-form, or to some mix of all of them, all those choices guided by the inspired hand of—well, of something: art, God, intuition, “the wind that blows through me,” who knows its name?

In the end, we as writers or readers may not know exactly what happened, and can be sure only that something happened, because the evidence is there before us, in the finished poem on the bounded white space of the page (or the not so finished: the poem, as Paul Valery says, is never finished, only abandoned).

What we don’t see so much is the start, the ur-moment, the angelic troubled mix that takes place in the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

I want to talk in this essay about that process, and its costs, and about the instigation, those shards that begin the magic, that somehow inspire the poem into motion. Some of these instigators are humble, a few unsuspected words perhaps, a surprising rhythm found or heard somewhere, a haunted moment of traction of something from somewhere, that may lay around for days or months even years, waiting its moment to launch the journey into the dark place, to bring back the gold that, in Ezra Pound’s wonderful phrase, “gathers the light about it.”

We have a record of the hot externals of that process of creation for one poet, Hart Crane, a poet for whom the inspired moment of composition seemed to whose who witnessed it an ecstatic Dionysian plunge, the poet obliterating all consciousness of his surroundings as he retreated to some inner place to write—but here’s he thing: what was seen by the witnesses was only in fact the half-seen, for it had actually been preceded by months of waiting for the right compositional moment, and then it was followed by more months of hard private labor. The compositional moment, the lightning strike, was the important point in Page 138 - Nine Mile Magazine

the process where the bits collected so painstakingly over those weeks and months came finally together, and it could occur anywhere, at any time. Often for Crane they came under inducement of copious amounts of alcohol, or anyway of some extreme condition; but the eureka moment was not the final and perhaps not even the definitive moment.

Here’s how it would have looked had you been present to witness one of these moments: Imagine that it is the mid-1920’s and you’re at a party with friends, all New York City-based artists like you, or art-interested types, away from your digs in Greenwich Village, out in the country for the summer, in Patterson, NY, just over the line from Connecticut.

You’re staying in an old farmhouse for $10 a month, taking this long vacation, an essential part of an aesthetic life lived on the cheap, intended to allow you and your group to pick your jobs selectively, taking only as much money and giving only as much time as you need to live and eat, but never enough to interfere with he time and energy needed to do your best work, and not ever enough to risk commodification or surrender to the workaday ethos that destroys so many talented others by drowning their visions in drudgery. This is a cocooned life you’re living, in a charmed circle, and it is like living on a secret island. This particular day you’ve spent the afternoon playing croquet, with a pitcher of hard cider barely hidden in the tall grass (it is Prohibition, after all), to which everyone returns between shots, and now it’s evening and you’re all gathered around a warm fire in the house as the rain begins. Here among you is the poet Hart Crane, whom many people are talking about these days, an intense man, laughing twice as hard as the rest of you, drinking twice as much. The rumor is that his first book is close to completion and he is looking for a publisher, that he is hoping the book will come with a foreword by Eugene O’Neill (when it comes it will have a forward by another in your group, Allen Tate, after O’Neill bows out from dissatisfaction with his own effort). Sometime in the middle of the revelry a change comes over Crane, and with it an inner imperative for action, a call by the gods of poetry: Gradually he [Crane] would fall silent, and a little later he Volume 4 No 2 - Page 139

disappeared. In lulls that began to interrupt the laughter, now Hart was gone, we would hear a new hubbub through the walls of his room —the phonograph playing a Cuban rumba, the typewriter clacking simultaneously; then the phonograph would run down and the typewriter stop while Hart changed the record, perhaps to a torch song, perhaps to Ravel’s Bolero. Sometimes he stamped across the room, declaiming to the four walls and the slow spring rain.

An hour later, after the rain has stopped, he will appear in the kitchen or on the croquet court, his face brick-red, his eyes burning, his already iron-gray hair bristling straight up from his skull. He will be chewing a five-cent cigar which he has forgotten to light. In his hands will be two or three sheets of typewritten manuscript, with words crossed out and new lines scrawled in. “R-read that,” he will say. “Isn’t that the grreatest poem ever written?”

This passage and others cited in this essay are from Malcolm Cowley’s wonderful book, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics, 1995 reprint, original 1934). Cowley was close to Crane, and for many years after his death, he said, he couldn’t bring himself to write about his friend’s last days. (He finally did in his memoir of the 1930’s, The Dream of the Golden Mountains, Viking, 1980). He knew Crane well enough to see at close hand the poet’s labor in creating his poems, the pushing and pulling and nudging that would go on for months, and continue even after a poem had been accepted and printed in one of the literary magazines. It was never finished for him, the language was always only a temporization, approximating the initiating vision. That moment witnessed in the farmhouse, Cowley said, may have appeared to be one of the visible instances of creation, but it was more the moment of assembly than the instant of composition: As for the end of the story, it might be delayed for a week or a month.

Painfully, persistently—and dead sober—Hart would revise his new poem, clarifying the images, correcting the meter and searching for Page 140 - Nine Mile Magazine

the right word hour after hour. “The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise,” in the second of his “Voyages,” was the result of a search that lasted for several days. At first he had written, “The seal’s findrinny gaze toward paradise,” but someone had objected that he was using a nonexistent word. Hart and I worked in the same office that year, and I remember his frantic searches through Webster’s Unabridged and the big Standard, his trips to the library —on office time—and his reports of consultations with old sailors in South Street speakeasies. “Findrinny” he could never find, but after paging through the dictionary again he decided that “spindrift” was almost as good and he declaimed the new line exultantly…. There were many poets of the 1920s who worked hard to be obscure, veiling a simple idea in phrases that grew more labored and opaque with each revision of a poem. With Crane it was the original meaning that was complicated and difficult; his revisions brought it out more clearly. He said, making fun of himself, “I practice invention to the brink of intelligibility.” The truth was that he had something to say and wanted to be understood, but not at the cost of weakening or simplifying his original vision.

This story verifies how careful and conscientious a craftsman Crane was, working his images hard as he developed his poem. His was not, as some have suggested, automatic writing or in any sense careless; rather it was the effort to accurately portray the captured moment, words and images carefully shaped through repeated workings. The passage also shows how he worked upward from the word to the image and to the line and the poem. “Findrinny” is not a word, though it had a spine and a sound that Crane liked in conjunction with “gaze,” and so incorporated into his line for a time, until it was replaced by “spindrift.”

Here, I suggest, is where we see Crane working. His habitual mode was to find new associations between words, creating relationships of meaning that had not existed before he brought the words together. One reads the new association in this poem—that “spindrift gaze”—and thinks, yes, that’s it, that’s right. And it is right, but in how strange a way!

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It is an odd word, “spindrift,” but it is also one of those words that we feel we know immediately when we hear it. A little research shows that it is an old word, derived from the Scottish word spene, to sail before the wind, and the word “drift.” It was probably first coined in the mid 1500’s. It refers to the spray blown from cresting waves in a gale, which “drifts” in the direction of the gale. A gale, to continue this pedantry a little farther, has a Force 8 wind speed, of 39-46 mph, equal to 34-40 knots, and produces moderately high waves of length, with the edges of the crests beginning to break into spindrift, and foam blown in streaks along the direction of the wind. A spindrift gaze toward paradise would then be a violent, elemental, and intense view, a gaze that rides on a crest of wave as it looks toward paradise. In the poem—this is section II of “Voyages”—it is the gaze of a seal (a seal? Yes, and a surprise to me too; I discuss it below) that is being described, a gaze that has rich implications for the rest of us, who make up that anonymous collective the poet claims to speak for here, and who are at this moment in the poem in our graves: Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours, And hasten while her penniless rich palms Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,— Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire, Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.

O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, Bequeath us to no earthly shore until Is answered in the vortex of our grave The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

I said that that seal was a surprise to me, and remains so no matter how many times I read this poem. It is not prepared for, it simply appears, as if dropped from the sky, and honestly, it would be a comical intrusion except for that adjective “wide,” and the act of gazing toward paradise.

The poetry takes over, with the vowel sounds of the “a”’s, “e”’s, and “i”’s Page 142 - Nine Mile Magazine

somehow lifting the moment of this unexpected visitor to an instant of profundity. Something has been found, or maybe better stated, something has been created, in the conjunction of the words, that did not exist before Crane put them together: “spindrift gaze.” A new thing, aided by the music of the line that surrounds the words, and come to this juncture not feeling at all distorted or forced but independently alive, full of life, almost natural, as if you or I might say to each other one day, looking out to the ocean, a word or two about the “spindrift gaze” of those mysterious others clustered along the beach.

As for the seal, there may be a source, though it is external to the poem, and more than a little extravagant. I got the hint from Harold Bloom, a great lover of Crane’s work, who suggests that “Voyages” in its entirety is actually a poem of lost love, a requiem in eros for Crane’s one true love attachment, to Emil Opffer (this from Bloom’s terrific The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, Random House Publishing Group, 2015). And Bloom sees the sea’s role here as the sea of death, as the end of love, and then suggests that this section of the poem parallels in small the plot of Moby Dick, with the Pequot falling into the vortex, “the conceptual image of whirlpool that will end Crane and his lover in the yearning glance of Moby-Dick’s young seals seeking their lost mothers, a paradise unknown.” It’s an interesting notion, and seeks to rationalize the presence of the seal as a borrowing or entrance into the poem from some images of Melville. If it is a correct reading, it also offers a view of some of the machinery behind the poem, some movement off the staging of the words, in the back room where the poetry starts. The scene with the seals is from Moby Dick, Chapter 126, “The Life Buoy”: Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the Volume 4 No 2 - Page 143

human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men.

Can this reading be right? I don’t know for sure, or at least don’t know it for sure in the way you would know your multiplication tables; but the poem is so oddly and wonderfully put together that it is possible to accept the magical entrance of the seals looking toward paradise without necessarily needing to know their provenance. Certainly the Melville passage enriches the sense of why the seal should be there, but it is not wholly necessary to know about its existence at the level of the poem as presented to us, which is the level of magical entrances and exits. In such a poem it is possible to view the image of a seal looking toward paradise as not necessarily absurd, and even as acceptable.

This is not the first time that Crane has lifted or borrowed a sense of meaning, or image, or even, as we shall see below, specific words and rhythms from Melville, whom he much admired. He was enraptured by Moby Dick, and said that by June 1926 he had read the novel three times.

His relationship to the book and its author was more than fan-boy admiration; he found in it many of the structures and even words that he made and incorporated into his poetry. I am not suggesting by this that Melville “makes” Crane, or makes Crane’s poetry, but that his work is there in Crane’s imagination, occupying an honored spot in his spiritual library, and so is one of the instigators of much of his work. I want to focus in the next sections on Crane’s use of language, and on the relationship between Crane and Melville, as a way to appreciate some of Crane’s methods and sources in the creation of his poems.

2.

The process I’ve have described about Crane’s mode of composition suggests something more than Wordsworth’s notion of “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” or “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions.” It is a heightened visionary moment of induced ecstasy, followed by the hard labor of fitting the thing seen to the words that had Page 144 - Nine Mile Magazine

been accumulating, a process more Rimbaud than Wordsworth, more mosques at the bottoms of lakes than intimations of anything. But, as we have seen, if the words he used were true to the vision, they were not always true to the language or to ordinary logic of the world as it is commonly understood by those ope us who must get about in it. He needed his own language, or at least, a language that could carry his own meanings, but he used the words of our common language for this purpose. They were the only words he had, and were the only way that the poetry got to the page. I believe that he thought in those words, and that the words created or half-created the vision, and that the meanings he ascribed to them seemed to him a perfectly normal—no: a perfectly necessary—thing for the kind of poet that he was to do.

As illustration, here is a 1926 exchange between Crane and Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine. Crane at the time is still composing the poems that will occupy his first book, White Buildings, and has submitted his poem “At Melville’s Tomb” to the magazine. Ms. Monroe reads it and responds, perhaps with some exasperation: “Take me for a hard-boiled, unimaginative, unpoetic reader, and tell me how dice can bequeath an embassy (or anything else); and how a calyx (of death’s bounty or anything else) can give back a scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph; and how, if it does, such a portent can be wound in corridors (of shells or anything else). . . . I find your image of frosted eyes lifting altars difficult to visualize. Nor do compass, quadrant and sextant contrive tides, they merely record them, I believe.”

Crane’s response is below. Here is the poem she was writing to him about: AT MELVILLE'S TOMB Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath An embassy. Their numbers as he watched, Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

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And wrecks passed without sound of bells, The calyx of death’s bounty giving back A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph, The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil, Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled, Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars; And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive No farther tides … High in the azure steeps Monody shall not wake the mariner.

This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Crane responded in two ways: specifically, to her comments on the images in the poem, and then also generally, giving his view of what poetry and poets must be allowed to do in language, arguing that this is not license but necessity.

Specifically, he said, “Dice bequeath an embassy, in the first place, by being ground (in this connection only, of course) in little cubes from the bones of drowned men by the action of the sea, and are finally thrown up on the sand, having ‘numbers’ but no identification. These being the bones of dead men who never completed their voyage, it seems legitimate to refer to them as the only surviving evidence of certain messages undelivered, mute evidence of certain things, experiences that the dead mariners might have had to deliver. Dice as a symbol of chance and circumstance is also implied.”

About the calyx, he wrote, “This calyx refers in a double ironic sense both to a cornucopia and the vortex made by a sinking vessel. As soon as the water has closed over a ship, this whirlpool sends up broken spars, wreckage, etc., which can be alluded to as livid hieroglyphs, making a scattered chapter so far as any complete record of the recent ship and her crew is concerned. In fact, about as much definite knowledge might come Page 146 - Nine Mile Magazine

from all this as anyone might gain from the roar of his own veins, which is easily heard (haven’t you ever done it?) by holding a shell close to one’s ear.”

On “frosted eyes,” he says that it, “[r]efers simply to a conviction that a man, not knowing perhaps a definite god yet being endowed with a reverence for deity—such a man naturally postulates a deity somehow, and the altar of that deity by the very action of the eyes lifted in searching.”

And finally, about the words compass, quadrant, etc., he said, “Hasn’t it often occurred that instruments originally invented for record and computation have inadvertently so extended the concepts of the entity they were invented to measure (concepts of space, etc.) in the mind and imagination that employed them, that they may metaphorically be said to have extended the original boundaries of the entity measured?

This little bit of ‘relativity’ ought not to be discredited in poetry now that scientists are proceeding to measure the universe on principles of pure ratio, quite as metaphorical, so far as previous standards of scientific methods extended, as some of the axioms in Job.” There’s an old line about how what you see depends on where you sit, and that may be as true for Ms. Monroe’s reading of the poem as for Crane’s explanation of his use of language. Certainly these explanations are eccentric and the definitions and associations he offered are even perhaps magical as he insists that his private meanings and conjunctions may be as valid in a poem’s language as more ordinary and common understandings. In a sense, he argues against the idea that a poem can ever be about its paraphrase, and that rather it must be about its own logic of meanings, and about itself. He does not say this in defense, but he might have noted that the setting of the poem is not Melville’s actual tomb which, title notwithstanding, is a stone slab in a cemetery in the Bronx, but is given in the poem as the sea—“This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.” He claims a large license for his and any poet’s use of language: “The nuances of feeling and observation in a poem may well call for certain liberties which you claim the poet has no right to take. I am simply making the claim that the poet does have that authority, and that to deny it is to limit the scope of the medium so considerably as to outlaw some Volume 4 No 2 - Page 147

of the richest genius of the past.”

The arguments against this position are easy and vast, and have to do with the effect on intelligibility of the piece as written and about what level of clarity and understanding an author owes his audience. The arguments in favor of the position are the artifacts of Crane’s own poems, and those of the poets he cites in his letter to Monroe: Blake, Eliot, and also many others, who used words in similarly magical ways.

Genius, in its works, always claims broad scope, the right to the unfettered moment. What is key to note in this colloquy is Crane’s description of building up the poem not from the denotations of the words he uses, which are discarded quickly, but from connotations and fuzzylogic associations, so that the selected meanings join as needed while the others fall away as irrelevant to the requirements of the poem, just so much specious chaff disappeared into the wind during the time of the poem. Crane saw, or felt, those associations, and made it his labor to discern them in crafting the poem.

Crane’s method of working also imposes a responsibility on us as readers, if we are truly to appreciate the extent of his achievement, or even for that matter to judge it. That’s because his method calls on us to discriminate the words he uses in the same way that he worked on them as writer, and to do so not just this or that piece of a poem, but the totality of the individual poem, and indeed in the totality of the poems in this book, White Buildings. Others have pointed out that there are connections in and between the poems, and have made a credible case about how they echo each other. And we have just seen how the words work on each other, and how carefully chosen they are, how much he expects of himself, and of us. He set a high and difficult bar to meet, and understandably, not every effort works. When it doesn’t, we’re left with a sense of artificiality, the irresolution that attends an arbitrary parlor trick, the handkerchief that makes the egg disappear too obviously into the sleeve, where it sheds its goo. But when the effort does its work, the effect is truly magical.

The end of the story of the exchange of letters between Crane and Monroe was some level of acceptance on her part, or perhaps a belief that Page 148 - Nine Mile Magazine

the discussion was worth sharing, for she took the poem and printed it along with their exchange of letters.

3.

We discussed above how the seals in Moby Dick may have entered “Voyages II.” Here is another place where Crane’s relation to Melville helps churn something in his consciousness as it works to produce a poem.

In this case the poem is “Repose of Rivers,” written in early summer of 1926 and published in The Dial in September of that year. Here is a sentence from Chapter 58 of Moby Dick, where Melville describes “vast meadows” of “the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds” and continues, As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.

And here is the opening stanza of “Repose of Rivers”: The willows carried a slow sound, A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.

I could never remember That seething, steady leveling of the marshes Till age had brought me to the sea.

Note the parallel words: “mead,” “sound,” “mowed (mowers),” “sea,” “marsh (marshy),” “slow (slowly),” and the sense or meaning of “cutting” and “scythes” with “mowed on the mead.” Other parts of the poem appear to draw inspiration from another piece of Melville’s, “The Encantadas.”

To be clear, those words shared by Crane and Melville did not create the poem, or the stanza, and the poem is not drawn from these words and scenes; and I am not suggesting either thing. But I can imagine the words Volume 4 No 2 - Page 149

instigating the poem, creating a mental friction that resulted in the poem, like the grain of sand in the oyster that produces the pearl. Here perhaps were words or a sentence that Crane carried with him a long time, working on his psyche, developing into something else. And not just the words, but also the rhythms: There is a rhythm in the words Melville uses, as he writes “side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes…”

Crane’s words, and more, the internal vowel and consonant echoes, and the sound echoes of the words, give us a rhythm that to the ear seem surprisingly similar: “That seething, steady leveling of the marshes…” the “sarabande the wind mowed on the mead…” Crane is working and reworking not just the words but the rhythms and sounds of these lines.

He has heard something in the Melville sentence, and it is profoundly moving at some level of his creative poet’s soul, and he carries it in his head and he works his works to that rhythm. Here is the full poem: REPOSE OF RIVERS The willows carried a slow sound, A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.

I could never remember That seething, steady leveling of the marshes Till age had brought me to the sea.

Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves Where cypresses shared the noon’s Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.

And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them Asunder …

How much I would have bartered! the black gorge And all the singular nestings in the hills Where beavers learn stitch and tooth.

The pond I entered once and quickly fled— Page 150 - Nine Mile Magazine

I remember now its singing willow rim.

And finally, in that memory all things nurse; After the city that I finally passed With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts The monsoon cut across the delta At gulf gates … There, beyond the dykes I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer, And willows could not hold more steady sound.

We know some things about Crane’s life at this time. He had written this poem, or most of it anyway, on his brief stay in Grand Cayman, during a longer trip to the Isle of Pines. He was deeply depressed at the time, both by the troubled passage to the island, where he had intended to stay the summer to work on The Bridge, and by his reading of Spengler’s Decline of the West, with its suggestion that western civilization was entering the final stages of its Faustian bargain for existence. He was having a hard time writing. The passage to the island had occurred over four unbearably hot and humid days instead of the two that had been planned, and many of the passengers were sick on board from the heat and the apparently vile drinking water, and there were constant mosquitos to fend off. The experience left him deflated emotionally. He says, in a June 26 letter to Waldo Frank, “it is absurd to say that one is battling indifference; but neither does one build out of an emptied vision… at times it seems demonstrable that Spengler is quite right. At pres— I’m writing nothing….” He also mentions that he is “cooking up a couple of other short poems,” among them one he calls “The Tampa Schooner,” which is the ur-name for the poem that will become “Repose of Rivers.” His unhappiness, in this case, was a gift, as was the boat journey, for they coalesced to provide an environment and a theme for the new poem.

“Repose of Rivers” at at least one level is about a journey by water to the ocean, from the smaller water to larger, and from peace to storm; but it has many moving parts, as we discuss below.

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We have seen the words and rhythms that instigated its beginning, but what else can we know about this poem? As with the Melville poem, we note that the poet is not following rules of logic or providing words anchored to real-world descriptions: Willows, for example, may make a sound as wind blows through their leaves and branches; but how do they “carry” it? And in what possible world does the wind “mow” a sarabande? A sarabande is a older form of a slow, stately Spanish dance in triple time. It may be possible to imagine a sort of double-pun working at the level of the language: the mowing being a sound of the dance, and the Sarabande having a sound like something that might cut (because of that syllable, “band”); but honestly, I find such associations strained.

We see other other odd uses of the language. We can almost imagine marshes leveling or at least being leveled by gravity or heated evaporations of summer, for example, but how is it possible for something called “sun-silt,” whatever that may be, to “ripple” a mammoth turtle “asunder” in “sulphur dreams”? For that matter, how is anything rippled asunder? We have moved beyond the use of words to describe a world, to something else, to the sounds of words, to words stripped of denotation in favor of deeply eccentric connotations and private meanings, to the magic of singing willows and a world where it is possible to barter a black gorge and singular nesting of something unnamed, for something else unnamed, to visit a city with scalding unguents, to…. well, you get the idea. The point is that these are not images so much as words and word forms that point toward images, or suggest them, placeholders of sense that hint at some apprehensible meaning about to come or that tease us into thinking that it can arrive with just a little more work on our part. To that extent, they are almost Swinburnian, the poet about whom Eliot said, “When you take to pieces any verse of Swinburne, you find always that the object was not there— only the word.” And yet—what words! Beautiful and startling enough to make us want to understand their relations, and to submit to the temptation of forgiving them in belief that they point to something greater than we are seeing at first read.

Some readers, tempted so, have concocted plots or narratives for the Page 152 - Nine Mile Magazine

poem. And so perhaps we can, with effort, join them in constructing a story, a sort of plot for the poem by first delineating its structure. The poem centers around wind and water, and describes a movement from one place to another, from the pond to the sea, from slow wind to monsoon, from the pond the poet can enter and quickly flee, to the monsoon wind that flakes the sapphire at the city dykes. In the interim, the poem moves from mead and marsh to hot sulphur dreams, with those odd mammoth turtles presented as erotic beings whose longings or fulfillment rip them asunder in a sulphuric dreamy kind of hell. The poem remembers something that to the poet is perhaps equally threatening, the pond’s singing willow rim, the pond that he tells us he entered once and fled, coming later upon the city whose scalding unguents are spread among smoking darts while a monsoon works against the gates. We are left with the sense of everything about to be sprung open, with the possibility of moving through this final gateway from one stage of life to another. It is a plot with words but without firm details, a magical movement from ponds and lakes through signifiers of hell to sea and hurricane. And we can find, if we wish, other Melvillean antecedents for the imagery. The turtles, for example, parallel the tortoises seen in Melville’s The Piazza Tales, in the sketches called “The Encantadas”: Meeting with no such hinderance as their companion did, the other tortoises merely fell foul of small stumbling-blocks—buckets, blocks, and coils of rigging—and at times in the act of crawling over them would slip with an astounding rattle to the deck. Listening to these draggings and concussions, I thought me of the haunt from which they came; an isle full of metallic ravines and gulches, sunk bottomlessly into the hearts of splintered mountains, and covered for many miles with inextricable thickets. I then pictured these three straight-forward monsters, century after century, writhing through the shades, grim as blacksmiths; crawling so slowly and ponderously, that not only did toad-stools and all fungus things grow beneath their feet, but a sooty moss sprouted upon their backs. With them I lost myself in volcanic mazes; brushed away endless boughs Volume 4 No 2 - Page 153

of rotting thickets; till finally in a dream I found myself sitting crosslegged upon the foremost, a Brahmin similarly mounted upon either side, forming a tripod of foreheads which upheld the universal cope.

And the “black gorge” of the poem may similarly have a source in another part of Melville, Chapter 98 of Moby Dick, “The Try-Works,” where the placement of the “blackest gorges” and of a Catskill eagle that can dive down and soar out of them may function as a sort of background music to that part of the poem, those things that the poet says he is willing to give up in barter: …There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

Others see differently complete narratives in the poem. Harold Bloom, in a brilliant reading, sees the poem as wholly erotic, and it may be, though despite his efforts I confess to having a hard time constructing an erotic plot from the text on the page. And John T. Irwin, in his very engaged reading of the poem in Hart Crane’s Poetry: “Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) suggests that the poem is about the growth of the poet’s soul, a transit from adolescence to maturity as a poet, “from the river constrained within its banks down to the freedom of the open sea.” To make his case, he brings in an image-dictionary’s worth of backup, seeing in Crane as poet-speaker an Orpheus just prior to being torn apart by the Dionysian women. It’s a rich and fascinating reading. In yet another reading of the poem, Laurence Lieberman says in his essay, “Hart Crane’s Monsoon: A Reading of While Buildings,” (American Poetry Review, March/April Page 154 - Nine Mile Magazine

2010) that the poem is a confrontation with a type of memory, and is a “self-elegy” whose images carry a weight and density that “we recognize as kindred to images we’ve all encountered in our rare life-changing dreams.” I like this characterization of the images a lot, though I am not sure it tells us anything useful to help in reading the poem. Happily, Lieberman continues, echoing Bloom perhaps: “I believe that Crane has adapted to the structure of his compact lyric an experimental scenic art that approximates—by a curious mimicry—the form of Moby Dick.

‘Repose of Rivers’ is an improbable small-scale replica of the novel’s allegorical format. No other poem of Crane’s simulates the Melvillean structure in quite the same way.” In this reading, each of the four key stanzas are like chapters in the novel, “tackling a palpably delineated segment of extrovert reality—scenic, pictorial, as in a slide show drawn from the poet’s life story.” The pictures magically summon up the flutterings of the other world that lurk behind their silhouettes; “they function more as emblems, and they finally coalesce into an allegorical map of the author’s inner life. Those images come to strike us as final, absolutes, total in their spiritual knowing. Their gnosis…

Unchallengeable, like images that leap before us in dreams, they evoke a bedrock reality masked by the world of the senses.” The thing to take out of this part of the discussion is not only how much the poem is able to give itself over to many different readings, but how much we as readers are almost impelled too try to create that plot, to find that hidden narrative.

The poem is controlled, intense, private—and also inviting and open.

And also, utterly brilliant. Even Yvor Winters, in his great reading of The Bridge cites Repose of Rivers as one of the great romantic poems written in the past 200 years (In Defense of Reason, the essay “The anatomy of nonsense : The significance of The bridge / by Hart Crane : or, What are we to think of Professor X?” The Swallow Press & W. Morrow And Company, 1947),.

4.

I have written elsewhere of the cost to the poet for making poems like this. I return to Cowley’s book for an assessment of the cost to Crane of Volume 4 No 2 - Page 155

his entry into the ecstatic moments that created these visionary poems from White Buildings and others in The Bridge. Crane sought high moments of derangement of the senses, through alcohol, in pursuit of his visions. Cowley says: Hart drank to write: he drank to invoke the visions that his poems are intended to convey. But the recipe could be followed for a few years at the most, and it was completely effective only for two periods of about a month each, in 1926 and 1927, when working at top speed he finished most of the poems included in The Bridge. After that more and more alcohol was needed, so much of it that when the visions came he was incapable of putting them on paper. He drank in Village speakeasies and Brooklyn waterfront dives; he insulted everyone within hearing or shouted that he was Christopher Marlowe; then waking after a night spent with a drunken sailor, he drank again to forget his sense of guilt. He really forgot it, for the moment. By the following afternoon all the outrageous things he had done at night became merely funny, became an epic misadventure to be embroidered—“ And then I began throwing furniture out the window,” he would say with an enormous chuckle. Everybody would laugh and Hart would pound the table, calling for another bottle of wine. At a certain stage in drunkenness he gave himself and others the illusion of completely painless brilliance; words poured out of him, puns, metaphors, epigrams, visions; but soon the high spirits would be mingled with obsessions—“ See that man staring at us, I think he’s a detective”— and then the violence would start all over again, to be followed next day by the repentance It is a sad ending, a wounding vignette about a poet with such great talent and powers, and such great promise. We can see the end in such stories: deracination, despair, eventual suicide. His was an emotionally compromised life from the start, and it is a miracle that he survived at all in that battleground of growing up, dominated as it was by the love and hatred of his badly matched narcissistic parents, his neurotic mother and Page 156 - Nine Mile Magazine

uncomprehending businessman father, who fought to alienate their son from each other. He lived hard, as hard perhaps as he had to, and he made bad choices, and in spite of all he became a great poet, who left behind an incredible record of his brilliant engagement with the sublime; but it was an engagement that cost him everything. Others have debated whether the cost in life is worth the product in art, but I think that the terms of such debates are red herrings, meaningless. Poets of this caliber and vision really have no choice. It is what they do. They are poets. Their lives are constructed around their poetry. Their art is what gives them the value that they live by, and determines their relationship to the world. They would not and could not live, or live as they had, without their art, which was, in this strict sense, what made their lives possible. They could not have changed the terms because no such choice was ever available to them. —Bob Herz

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Anna Geisler Letters From A Native Tongue I lay with closed eyes under the roof of your mouth.

Some light keeps blowing in from the east.

Only looks like a sky, but it’s not endless, you say.

I’ve been trying to give in to sleep ever since you found an alternate route for your words.

From the Vistula to the Nile the men in your head are hard at work building larger, sturdier ships.

Do I ask to be jolted?

I flip towards your throat. Even there darkness is scarce, solitude a thin whistle.

I want to drain out every bell, every hammer hit, every spark. But each time I come close to losing consciousness the stars of the alphabet drive into me on the train tracks of your vocal cords.

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My First Home Asks To Be Remembered The street knocks on my door.

It’s the middle of the night, and it’s asking for milk. For a quarter of my life I haven’t craved fire or sparkle. I haven’t sucked on its flame and now it’s weightless.

My memory too is ill and ruffled, it looks out through the door but doesn’t sing. Oh, maybe if the street would rock from side to side. Maybe if the street would start to bend at the knees, sway its giant hips, whistle with its wet lips. It could jolt the birds awake in the trees. Stealthily, I wait for a gesture.

I drink what I can.

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Two Ends Of A Roof A woman and a man hold up two ends of a roof, but the rain is flowing from the ground up: the drowning kettle is screaming, the wind tears at the arms of the hanging parkas. Even the painting has been pulled down into the mud and is unrecognizable.

This is the life they know: “ If there’s time for kindness, there’s time for suffering”—a landslide revelation. It floods the walls.

Or an old tube of toothpaste, clotted at the top but half-empty.

And this is what they do: one hand holds the roof, one hand holds the other’s splitting back.

“All that sunshine will make us crazy,“ said the old florist looking out the window and squeezed my untrained hands until they ripened. And suddenly I had to cry I could just barely hear the music dying.

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About Anna Geisler Anna Geisler is a Toronto-based poet with a BA from McGill University and an MFA from Pacific University (Oregon). Her poems have been published in The Rusty Toque and are forthcoming in december magazine. She was born in Konin, Poland.

About the Poems As I was working on completing my MFA thesis, questions of identity began to emerge in my poems. Specifically: how does one negotiate multiple nationalities and cultures? I moved from Poland to Canada when I was 6 years old—an age when I was still young enough to fully adopt the culture of my new home, and yet, when memories and experiences of where I came from were already strongly rooted in me. It’s been a privilege to grow up rooted in two cultures, but it hasn’t been easy.

Sometimes, the two cultures fight. “My First Home Asks to Be Remembered” and “Letters from a Native Tongue” speak to existing in this liminal space between two identities and nationalities, and to the internal conflict of being pulled back and forth between them. “Letters from a Native Tongue” speaks specifically to language. “My First Home Asks to Be Remembered”— to longing for a physical place that one has left.

In his poem “The Hills,” Guillaume Apollinaire addresses the dichotomy of suffering and kindness: “there will be time for suffering/ there will be time for kindness,” “beauty will be made of suffering and kindness.” “Two Ends of a Roof” began as a response to his poem, an affirmation of this contradiction—kindness and suffering going hand in hand. Times of suffering bring out kindness in us, and kindness opens us up to suffering. You can't have one without the other.

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Gail Peck Ironing My mother is ironing the moon she taught me to embroider on a pillowcase. She irons the sheets too, drapes them over the board. I hear the hiss of steam. The sheets dried outside and smell like wind.

She has starched the doilies, and they rest under the fruit bowl, on the backs of chairs. She even irons my stepfather’s boxer shorts, and now she’s singing “I Can’t Help it if I’m Still in Love with You.” I wonder if she’s thinking of my real father. Or, the man named Frank whose letters I read. She pushes her dark hair away from her face. The sun shines across the kitchen floor she’s forever waxing, trapping me on the other side. Her song’s refrain drifts over the board she’ll soon put in the closet, then she’ll lie down for a nap, and I’ll lie beside her. Be Still, she’ll say, and I’ll try. Now shadows move across the ceiling, leaves from the trees, leaves that will soon fall.

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About Gail Peck Gail Peck is the author of eight books of poetry. Her first full-length, Drop Zone, won the Texas Review Breakthrough Contest; The Braided Light won the Leana Shull Contest for 2015. Other collections are Thirst, Counting the Lost, From Terezin, Foreshadow, and New River which won the Harperprints Award. Poems and essays have appeared in Southern Review, Nimrod, Greensboro Review, Brevity, Connotation Press, Comstock, Stone Voices, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart, and her essay “Child Waiting” was cited as a Notable for Best American Essays, 2013.

About the Poem There are certain images that are forever instilled in the mind, and this image of my mother ironing is one. As the piece reveals, she was quite obsessive. I guess that was her way of ordering her world. She was someone who struggled with happiness, marrying two men who never truly appreciated her. I imagined in this prose poem, that if she’d married her boyfriend, Frank, maybe life would have been different for both of us.

I longed for closeness with my mother, and loved sitting next to her learning to embroider. Also, lying next to her when we napped. The world seemed a safer place in those moments when time appeared to have stopped.

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Dylan Krieger babes taste better when i come home from the hospital my sister hatches out a plot to thicken: break the baby’s foot open and make soup a fast-acting coagulant stew, witch’s brew of the third kind, the other white meat steeped in congenital disease and suckling cream so what if she doesn’t yet bite? she can bleed and yes, a sophisticated observation for a four-year-old: it is indeed the leanness of the long pig that makes her hamhock lack succulence compared to the short but all that baby fat’s a surefire way to baste a juicier roast to spin your sibling on the spit that takes her home a different road— all the way down to the bone, the now-only child is left smiling wide bearing her canines, daring the world to find the crime in her hunger in life feeding on lesser life, when a single family dinner could cancel all our separate strifes in one fell bundle of delicious youth left fussing underneath the knife

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patient full of porch lights so you pry open your thorax like a firefly letting the night’s crimes stultify their hideouts in your spine they first want in because you’re lit up like a christmas tree a jack-o-lantern banshee going blind from its own starshine but the white coats take care of that with a convulsion here and there and a handful of phenobarbital or some such deadening medicine that sounds suspiciously like fuck it all, nothing matters when sedation braces your gums against a metal bite-guard and the open-fisted codeword clear begins to match your blank-eyed fight-or-flight fog if the goal is to leave this padded dream without any memory of insects or their hypothetical capacity to crawl on me how am i ever again to sleep outside among the burning leaves or plant a garden for the last surviving honey bees? there’s a different sort of therapy in these retreats, the nurses tell me but their cliches--like my own buggy brains—are not to be believed

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medical fetishist when the rough hand of a doctor is the only one to touch you something shifts. no longer simply necessary prophylactics or preludes to vaccines, his stethoscope and foreboding say ah into the microscope grows into a first pass at romance. like, no, i’m not actually a hypochondriac. i just like it up here on the paper-lined table, where someone cares enough to look and press whatever i’m not able, and my family fades away into a long-forgotten fable, as if i were conceived by shades that disappear whenever well-lit in a room half sterile the stale air, the tasteless thumbnail of the tongue depressor stump, the chummy buzz in my ear when he asks whether i got a good teacher in home school this year--a fearful sort of familiar, when this is your closest ilk, your confidant: a glorified coroner with a bowtie and a combover. he listens to my heart and says my body’s made of sturdy metals, but i don’t want it to be over, so i undress again, layer by layer, hunting for the knobs and levers that hold this human suit together

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tell the protesters i have been their kind when an old man in suspenders drops the atlas from his shoulders & saunters over to alert me my uterus has been co-opted by the clergy i’m too full of murderous mommy hormones to ignore him, so i hiss, don’t worry, mister, i know the script; i used to be you—give or take a second grader’s toothless lisp. on the devil strip outside a clinic like this is where i first learned the rosary, each bead a symbol of something unclean i had to cut out of me what makes one flagellation holy, the other burn-worthy? you tell me. or maybe the horsehung sun will tell the sea, after the ozone layer gives way to UV and the ice caps thaw their karmic loss across every man-made territorial thrall maybe these stirrups feel just fabulous to my tired heathen feet when the ultrasound tech says this hearing of the heartbeat is mandated legally, she follows up in a whisper: but you don’t have to listen, sweetie i’ll tell you when it’s over. count to three...

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the moon howls back if “getting high� is how we describe altered states then dying is like leaving the atmosphere for outer space a different kind of counter-crime. the dissidents laid out to dry while i and all the other dumbfounded yankees stand around to behold the unfolding infanticide, fascinated by the infertile crescent the lunar balloon dooming the human race to a fatal riptide sometimes, in the dead of night, my last living defense mechanism wakes up just in time to stiffen my spine: deny, deny, deny you place the tab on my tongue while all the cops are distracted by my dress drifting up—to make the drunk tank shakedown fill with glitter, you say, as if communicating. as if this is the true communion wafer, come to save our aching hateful. at the bottom of an empty cradle, what is there really left to mangle? to strangle all this reproductive rubble in a chokehold all my own is the only blood ball left to juggle, the only pageantry new moons and acid dreams do little to unmuddle

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About Dylan Krieger Dylan Krieger is a transistor radio picking up alien frequencies in south Louisiana. She lives in the back of a little brick house with a feline reincarnation of Catherine the Great, sings harmonies incessantly to any song she hears, and sunlights as a trade mag editor. She earned her BA in English and philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 2012 and her MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University in 2015. She is the author of Giving Godhead (Delete Press, 2017) and dreamland trash (Saint Julian Press, forthcoming). Her more recent projects include an irreverent reimagining of philosophical thought experiments (no ledge left to love, 64 pp.) and an autobiographical meditation on the tenets of the Church of Euthanasia (the mother wart, 68 pp.). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in several print and online literary journals, including Seneca Review, Midwest Review, Quarterly West, Phoebe, So and So, Tenderloin, Coup d’Etat, and Maintenant. Find more of her work at www.dylankrieger.com.

About the Poems All of my writing in some way or another engages social mores and taboos, sublime longings hemmed in by rigid religious or philosophical constraints. In my first book, Giving Godhead (Delete Press, 2017), these terms are clearly situated within the context of biblical Christianity, but the more recent poems of the mother wart turn instead to the tenets of a more obscure and distinctively modern belief system: that of the Church of Euthanasia, whose only commandment—for both ethical and practical reasons—is "thou shalt not breed." Looking beyond the movement's

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environmental and social goals, the mother wart delves into an autobiographical meditation on early memories and associations with motherhood, childbirth, infancy, and female sexuality, emphasizing the importance of early childhood trauma in the later decision to abstain from having children of one's own.

In its thick fog of sound play, close-set cycles of internal rhyme evoke a nursery rhyme starting to spin off-kilter, a grade-school chant turned violent and unpredictable. This is the version of the fairy tale in which the witch wins. But here, the witch is also mother, the origins of life transformed into a sign of virus (the wart). The grotesque, therefore, figures heavily throughout these poems, especially in the sense of Mary Russo's The Female Grotesque, which points out the pregnant female body constitutes the epitome of the human form as a site of volatile and irrepressible change. However, as most proponents of grotesque aesthetics would insist, the porous changeability of the body here is not intended to elicit either revulsion or attraction per se, but rather that rarely traversed region in between, in which we at last see the two as not so opposed after all—the respective poles of a dividing line which in fact comes full circle if followed far and fearlessly enough.

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Grounds for Pearls: Auden, Eliot, & Dylan Thomas 1.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Here’s the scene: It’s 1934, a decade less and less dominated by the powerful poetic voices of the near-50ish T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, those enfant arbiters who initiated the modernist movement in the Anni Mirabiles years a decade ago, and more and more by the 20-something new generation of W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and other politically committed intellectuals of their circle.

W.B. Yeats, the 1923 Nobel Prize winner, is at age 69 an honored but increasingly distant master. Serious readers of poetry (including yourself in this experiment) follow both these Modernist original and new generation writers, but their tastes are still satisfiable by the traditional formalist modes they grew up with. These trends, old and new, show in the major published work of this year, which includes Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Wine From These Grapes and James Agee’s Permit Me Voyage, but also Auden’s Poems (2nd edition: 1933 in Britain, 1934 in the USA), and Spender’s Vienna. The presence of the elders shows in William Carlos Williams’ Collected Poems 1921-1931, and in the unchecked and random dynamism of Ezra Pound, who publishes Homage to Sextus Propertius, and ABC of Reading, but also the often-unhealthily obsessive Eleven New Cantos: XXXI–XLI, the subjects of which include Jefferson, Adams, and other American founders, the American banking system and coinage, and various unpleasant anti-semite references; in a few years his political apocalyptic will overtake his poetry, and he will envision himself as a political theorist and world savior. He is moving toward crackpot status, already almost but not quite dismissible.

And now imagine yourself in this year of conflicted trends, buying this little 36-page book titled 18 Poems by a 20-year old Welsh poet who won a contest sponsored by The Sunday Referee newspaper. It comes in a white cover, its title in big san serif type, with the poet’s name just below it. Perhaps you want to know more about the poet, but at the back of the Volume 4 No 2 - Page 171

book is the postscript, “This book, the second volume of the Sunday Referee Poets series, is unaccompanied by either portrait or preface, at the author’s request.” In other words, all you have is the book of poems, no guideposts, no blurbs from well-known poets and critics attesting to its quality, no smiling hopeful poetic face set there to convince you of the sincerity and excellence of the soul-baring venture contained within the pages.

Message: You are on your own. No teachers, no guides, no gurus.

You read the first stanza of the first section of the first poem: I see the boys of summer in their ruin Lay the gold tithings barren, Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils; There in their heat the winter floods Of frozen loves they fetch their girls And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

And you think: What is this? Who writes like this? No one, is the answer, and no, don’t bother looking around because there is no one to tell you what this is, and there is no possible appeal to authority or precedent, because nothing like this is being published even in this poetically varied year of 1934, or for that matter in any other year in your reading experience. Even today, 80 years on, the words of this stanza strike a reader as new, different, with images that are collage-strange, that come into these six lines from so many directions, with no direction about the psychic or geographic place or about the speaker—and so no answers to the questions, who are these boys who are referenced as the subject of the poem? What are “gold tithings”? Who is speaking and what is seen? For that matter, although so many of these words are visual nouns and adjectives—“gold,” “apples,” “soil,” “girls,” “frozen,” etc.—can they actually be said to describe a scene? Can we visualize it? Is it even visualizable? There are hints that something is there, a scene, or at least, that there should be a scene, and there is a tone that suggests we should be able to see it, but… what is it?

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Even in this first reading we can sense tremendous force, an intense compression of the lines, drawing in many themes and setting them off against each other, although we may still wonder about what action is being described. What does it mean, after all, to say that someone lays “the gold tithings barren”? And in what sense are these boys “ruined”?

The verbiage seems to suggest that the sighting happens in present tense, that they are ruined now, and yet there are ambiguities in the phraseology: does the speaker mean that they are ruined later as they age, or that they are ruined later in some way, that is, that they are still young and still boys of summer, but ruined ones? As we move through the poem from unsettling image to image, from winter floods and frozen loves and girls who are fetched (different than the frozen loves?) we come to the final line about “cargoed apples,” which we can sort of understand if we take it literally, as this is the Depression, and crops were sometimes dumped to insure higher prices for the remainder at market; but then, what does the Depression crop-dumping have to do with girls and tides and gold tithings? Nice as those auditory assonances may be (tides and tithings, girls and gold, etc.), do they tell us anything? Move us somewhere?

The questions pile up as we notice something else, how much at the level of the images and the words is concatenated in these few first lines: heat and cold, wet and dry, love and sterility, games (apple-bobbing, “fetching”) and death, creation and destruction. This is not a full encyclopedic run of all available poetic and thematic possibilities, but it is certainly broader than most of what we encounter in a single stanza in a single poem. We notice too that these lines scan like older poetry but read like new poetry, even if like poetry bitten by madness (to play a variation on Jacques Maritain’s wonderful “Art bitten by Poetry longs to be freed from Reason”). These lines are strange, even unsettling, but our sense of confusion may be allayed somewhat by the certainty of the tone, the definitive rhetoric of the stanza that says that this is exactly what the poet means, that he is not confused, that he knows what he is saying to us, and he means to say it. And so we think, there is sense here, there must be, the poet seems to insist on it, and so we just have to find it, to open ourselves to it to grasp it. But it is strange! There is no father to this, no

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predecessor. Seamus Heaney has said that “Others may have written like Thomas, but it was never vice-versa.” I would amend the first part of his statement only to say that others have tried to write like Thomas, but I know of no one who succeeded past a few lines or parts of a poem or two.

It should not be surprising that none of this unavoidable perception of difference and obscurity would help sell the book. Quite the opposite: It took two years for that first edition of five hundred copies to sell out, making it no success, but in fairness, not a total failure either, at least in terms of poetry book sales. Perhaps the publishers expected some such outcome, for they bound the book prudently, in two sets of 250 each, not binding the second until the first had sold out. The good news for the poet was that the book was widely reviewed, and noticed by older established poets and critics, including T.S. Eliot, and by some of the prominent younger ones, like Stephen Spender. Today, of course, the book is famous, a collector’s item. You can buy a good first edition for around $900 (or $500 of you ca be content with the second binding), and you can buy an original from the second printing by its second publisher, the Fortune Press (London, 1942) for around $200.

I’ve been reading through 18 Poems, trying to recover my initial experience at encountering these poems some decades ago, and finding it—surprisingly—not hard at all. When you enter their world, their power shows immediately, even aggressively: They are meant to be experienced that way. From the first line you read you are taken in and you live inside the poem as if there was no other world, and no other words or language but these on the page before you, for nothing else is possible in the moment of your reading. Stepping away, putting down the book, it comes to you how stunning it is that a 20-year old could have written so many of what we now regard as masterpieces: “I see the boys of summer,” “The force that through the green fuse,” “Before I knocked” (of which Heaney has said it “breaks the print barrier”), “Light breaks where no sun shines,” and many others. They share an extraordinary quality, presenting themselves as sui generis, and yet also as familiar and inevitable. The words, that is, feel inevitable, as if they have been there a long time, and yet we are conscious at the same time of how new they

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are, coming to us this way. Where does this come from? How do poems like this even get to the page?

2.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the mysterious process of how poems come into being, and want to talk in this essay about what I think is part of that process, the way that frictional elements can sometimes help a poem along—that is, items that are not the source of the poem or of the poetry, but are the tiny pieces, some words, or a scene, the somethings, that help in its development, which for one reason or another lodge in the imagination and work there like the bit of sand in an oyster that helps produce the pearl. And there is also related item, a way of thinking about or validating the mode and construction of the created object, that gives license to how the thing is conceived and put together, an environmental piece that helps define and protect the final output.

Both of these pieces lurk behind and around this first poem in 18 Poems, “I See The Boys Of Summer,” and indeed around the book as a whole. One of these somethings is from W.H. Auden, and one from T.S. Eliot. One Thomas embraced and used to strengthen and articulate his approach to his poetry, giving it a safe space in which to develop and mature; and one he also used but resisted, derogated, and denied, even as he admitted to its importance, almost as if he resented its influence.

The Eliot contribution to Thomas came in his criticism, in the early 1930’s books Selected Essays and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. These were so helpful to Thomas that he cited passages from them often in letters and interviews as a justification and philosophical underpinning to his methods. They validated and created the environment in which his poems could thrive, and he recognized that and was grateful for it, for he needed it. But with Auden he had a different and deeply conflicted relationship. Auden’s voice, structure, and poetic is influential in this first poem and throughout the book. Thomas tried in various ways to differentiate himself from the other poet, and to deny his influence, and I will show some ways in which he tried to do this.

(Eliot and Auden are not the only influences to be seen in these

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poems. Although I don’t discuss it in this essay, there is also the significant influence of Shakespeare, particularly Hamlet, which can be seen in the scansions and rhythms of the lines, and sometimes more: Consider for example a possible ancestry of “If I were ticked by the rub of love” as being Hamlet’s “Ay, there’s the rub” from the great “To be or not to be” soliloquy.)

I want to be clear about this. These other items and authors do not create the poems, and they are not the motive or the force that makes the poem in the end definitive for its author and for us; and there is in any case no reason for them to be acknowledged, either in the poem or anywhere else, after the poem is completed. What has happened is not an act of plagarism. Think of their relationship to the poem, if you will, as similar to that of the angel that appeared to Caedmon and ordered him to sing the creation of the world; after which, following the command, Caedmon sang of the glory of the world, but not of the extraordinary appearance of the angel, whose holy instigating presence we know of only because Bede, the great historian and Doctor of the Church, told us so in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

3.

It may be helpful here, before we get to the analysis, to remind ourselves of Thomas’ bona fides with respect to the language of poems in general, and then of his language as he saw it in relation to other writers.

For he was serious about his language and his choices, and the poems were not accidental in their parts. Everything—every image, word, phrase, and syntactical connective—was meant. Here is an example from a letter to Vernon Watkins, in which he speaks about the necessary language of poetry. Thomas was 23 at the time of this letter, three years older than when he wrote the “boys of summer” poem. He was critiquing a poem Watkins had sent him for comments: All the words [in Watkins’ poem] are lovely but they seem so chosen, not struck out. I can see the sensitive picking of words, but not the strong inevitable pulling that makes a poem an event, a happening,

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an action perhaps, not a still life or an experience put down…They [the words] seem, as indeed the whole poem seems, to come out of the nostalgia of literature…A motive has been rarefied; it should be made common. I don’t ask you for vulgarity, though I miss it; I think I ask you for a little creative destruction, destructive creation.

I am taken by his phrase about the words needing to seem a “strong inevitable pulling that makes a poem an event, a happening, an action perhaps, not a still life or an experience put down.” This is as good a description of the authority that a poem’s truth can command as I know, written by someone who clearly understands what that is and why it is important, and why it must always stand in opposition to the “still life or an experience put down.” Thomas spent many hours working in the service of this vision of truth in poetry, seeking to find it and to make his poems different than those of others writing at the time; his letters are full of references to the insufficiency of the 30’s poems he read, and contain sharp asides on Auden, Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and others. He said, for example, in a 1934 letter to Glyn Jones that “I like to read good propaganda, but the most recent poems of Auden and Day-Lewis seem to me neither good poetry nor propaganda. A good propagandist needs very little intellectual appeal; and the emotional appeal in Auden wouldn’t raise the corresponding emotion in a tick.” This is judgment functioning as differentiation, a way of creating an aesthetically and psychologically necessary boundary between what he was doing and what they were doing. Of Spender he wrote, “I find his communism unreal; before a poet can get into contact with society, he must, surely, be able to get into contact with himself, and Spender has only tickled his outside with a feather.” Again, the judgment, if sincere, can be made only by one who has in fact been in contact with himself; for if this is not a criteria yoked to one’s own aesthetic, then it is fatuous and narcissistically selfindulgent. To say it to another who knows you is to invite rebuke and embarrassment. It may also be worth noting how odd it is to suggest that the reality of communism is only possible to a poet who is truly in contact with himself; as judgment, this overwhelms its occasion.

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But Auden, it was Auden he came back to, to both praise and criticize, for Auden was the big one, the one he could measure himself against, the one he could learn from, the one he never wanted to be compared to. He had to be different. His vision was different, and he was charting a new way. And for all his protestations and critiques of Auden, Thomas was influenced by him in ways which he knew and understood and resisted, making his literary relationship to the other poet problematical, even passive-aggressive, at the same time deeply admiring and carefully distant. You can see it in his piece in the 1937 New Verse magazine’s salute to the poet: “I sometimes think of Mr. Auden’s poetry as a hygiene, a knowledge and practice, based on a brilliantly prejudiced analysis of contemporary disorders, relating to the preservation and promotion of health, a sanitary science and a flusher of melancholies. I sometimes think of his poetry as a great war, admire intensely the mature, religious, and logical fighter, and deprecate the boy bushranger.” This is praising, somewhat, but also catty, something one might say of a wartime environmental engineer given to writing with a florid streak who keeps a very neat office. He says nicer things about Auden in the following paragraph, that he is “wide and deep,” is “potentially productive of greatness” (note that “potentially”!) and that “He makes Mr. Yeats isolation guilty as a trance,” a nice two-fer of a joke. And then he ends his short piece by congratulating Auden on his 70th birthday—another joke: Auden at the time was 30 years old. The young dog keeps jumping forth uninhibited from the 20-something poet and doing something not quite respectable right there in the plain sight of God and man and everyone.

There is one more bit of information that may be useful to know about Thomas’ method of writing. It also shows his faith in Eliot, for he uses him as an external authority in an appeal to judgment. In 1933 he wrote to ask Eliot to “corroborate or contradict” a criticism that his poems were products of automatic writing, a charge that had been leveled by Richard Rees. He says in his cover letter that the “fluency complained of is the result of extraordinary hard work, and, in my opinion, the absence of ‘knotty or bony passages’ is again the result of much energetic labour…

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and many painful hours spent over the smoothing and removing of the creakiness of conflict.” Note the distinction here: it is not the conflict that is being removed by constant work and refinement, only its creakiness.

The high rhetoric of his syntax holds together the otherwise disjunct and warring images and words. The technique is collage, the labor is to make it all seem both new and inevitable, or in Thomas’ words, “the strong inevitable pulling that makes a poem an event.”

4.

And now, with that mess of conflicting emotions and scenery and explanation as backdrop, it is time to jump into it: For the first line of “I see the boys of summer in their ruin”—the first line of the first poem of this, his first book—is more or less a mash-up of a line in Auden’s “Consider this and in our time,” from his Poems (published in 1930 with a second revised edition in 1933). Here is the final stanza, that contains the “ruined boys” line: Financier, leaving your little room Where the money is made but not spent, You’ll need your typist and your boy no more; The game is up for you and for the others, Who, thinking, pace in slippers on the lawns Of College Quad or Cathedral Close, Who are born nurses, who live in shorts Sleeping with people and playing fives.

Seekers after happiness, all who follow The convolutions of your simple wish, It is later than you think; nearer that day Far other than that distant afternoon Amid rustle of frocks and stamping feet They gave the prizes to the ruined boys.

You cannot be away, then, no Not though you pack to leave within an hour, Escaping humming down arterial roads:

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The date was yours; the prey to fugues, Irregular breathing and alternate ascendancies After some haunted migratory years To disintegrate on an instant in the explosion of mania Or lapse for ever into a classic fatigue.

At first glance, this seems an odd place to find inspiration. Written in 1930, the poem is oddly dull for the Auden of these years, and to me reads as mechanical, even lusterless. Auden undertakes this kind of apocalyptic and cynically urban posture so much better in so many of his other poems that this seems not only unfulfilled but unfinished, as everything here, even the cliches, seem weary and not so much placed as dropped here by someone passing by: “where the money is made but not spent,” “the game is up,” “it is later than you think.” And the absurdist caricatures of people who “pace in slippers on the lawns,” who are “prey to fugues, / Irregular breathing and alternate ascendancies,” and so forth, seem set here from some other place, a better poem perhaps, or from discarded lines from some other writing. I can’t imagine that Thomas, so hungry for excellence and so quick to judge his contemporaries, found much to admire in the poem as a whole. Auden must have agreed, as much of the poem was rewritten for its appearance in his Collected Poems (Vintage, 1991), dropping the financier and the slippers on the lawn and other distracting elements altogether.

And yet, something in this first version caught something in Thomas’ imagination, perhaps the sense in the lines of a remembered generation that judges the present waste of the financier’s world, or perhaps just the phrase. Something clicked, in any case, about a world in which they gave “prizes to the ruined boys.” It may be that a partially realized poem is more inviting to the hungrily creative poet than the completely realized one; one wanders through what might have been without being required to admit to full accomplishment, with the prohibitions to sharing that a finished object would bring. From this partially realized effort, in any case, license was loosely taken to move from the “prizes to the ruined boys” to “the summer boys in their ruin,” which may not be so great a

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psychic distance. And perhaps there was something else creatively appealing in Auden’s theme of the ruin of the financier and his world, that made him think about what the prize-winning ruined boy became, or to wonder what ruined the boy to begin with. Possibly it was this sense of a lost world in the Auden poem taken into his own language and vision that prompted the concluding lines of the Thomas poem’s first section: I see that from these boys shall men of nothing Stature by seedy shifting, Or lame the air with leaping from its heats; There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse Of love and light bursts in their throats.

O see the pulse of summer in the ice.

There are other echoes from Auden in this poem and in this book. This may be a good place to show the full poem: I I see the boys of summer in their ruin Lay the gold tithings barren, Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils; There in their heat the winter floods Of frozen loves they fetch their girls, And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

These boys of light are curdlers in their folly, Sour the boiling honey; The jacks of frost they finger in the hives; There in the sun the frigid threads Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves; The signal moon is zero in their voids.

I see the summer children in their mothers Split up the brawned womb’s weathers,

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Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs; There in the deep with quartered shades Of sun and moon they paint their dams As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.

I see that from these boys shall men of nothing Stature by seedy shifting, Or lame the air with leaping from its heats; There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse Of love and light bursts in their throats.

O see the pulse of summer in the ice.

II But seasons must be challenged or they totter Into a chiming quarter Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars; There, in his night, the black-tongued bells The sleepy man of winter pulls, Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.

We are the dark derniers let us summon Death from a summer woman, A muscling life from lovers in their cramp From the fair dead who flush the sea The bright-eyed worm on Davy’s lamp And from the planted womb the man of straw.

We summer boys in this four-winded spinning, Green of the seaweeds’ iron, Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds, Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth To choke the deserts with her tides, And comb the county gardens for a wreath.

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In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly, Heigh ho the blood and berry, And nail the merry squires to the trees; Here love’s damp muscle dries and dies Here break a kiss in no love’s quarry, O see the poles of promise in the boys.

III I see you boys of summer in your ruin.

Man in his maggot’s barren.

And boys are full and foreign to the pouch.

I am the man your father was.

We are the sons of flint and pitch.

O see the poles are kissing as they cross Some have suggested, for example, that the line in the first stanza about cargoes apples may reflect, in addition to market practices, the influence of Auden’s line, “Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys,” from the villanelle “Paysage Moralisé.” There may also be the result of Thomas learning structural techniques from poems such as “It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens,” or “The Witnesses.” For our purposes it is enough to say from the evidence that Thomas read Auden’s poems thoroughly and in depth, and found in one of them a line that created a response or variation—created something that was transubstantiated by the poetic imagination to the new thing.

Now I need to add this cautionary note: That this is poetry, and involves people, and so there is no one-to-one correspondence, no argument being made that Auden’s dross became Thomas’ gold. We are all of us more complex than that, and God knows, poetry is more complex still. Nor is this some kind of argument about Bloomian “influence,” or outright theft or even a more subtle borrowing; Auden’s ruined boys do not “become” Thomas’ “boys of summer.” Rather the imagination of the poet encountered something that set it working on this image of ruined boys and this context or narrative of the poem until it became something

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else in this new poem. To return to an earlier image I used to describe this process, the Auden line is the grain of sand that becomes the line of poetry that launches in the first line of this other poem.

5.

As for structure and aesthetic of this and other Thomas poems, I have said that Thomas used T.S. Eliot in defining and validating his approach to poetry. Consider these two examples from Eliot, both from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: The chief use of the “meaning” of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be (for here again I am speaking for some kinds of poetry and not all) to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog.

This is a normal situation of which I approve…

What I call the “auditory imagination” is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.

And this from Thomas, in a 1934 letter to Glyn Jones: Remember Eliot: “The chief use of ‘meaning’ of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him.”

And again: “Some poets, asking that there are others minds like their own, become impatient of this ‘meaning’ which seems superfluous, and perceive possibilities of intensity though its elimination’….

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It is interesting that these are the parts of Eliot’s writings that Thomas chooses to retain and quote to others. I believe, as explained above, that he read deeply in Eliot and used him to justify and validate his method, that he needed Eliot because of the way he works, from the words up to the image and then to the poem as a whole: He works, that is, at the level of the poetry, not that of the narrative or of the individual poem. This methodology allows him to bind the pieces of his poem together at the syntactic or rhetorical level, finding and sometimes creating the hidden connections between the images and the lines that will exist once stated and brought into the light. The poem is thus assembled piece by piece, collage-fashion. Narrative, he says in “Replies to an Enquiry” (In Quite Early One Morning, New Directions, 1968), is essential: Much of the flat, abstract poetry of the present has no narrative movement, no movement at all, and is consequently dead. There must be a progressive line, or theme, of movement in every poem. The more subjective a poem, the clearer the narrative line. Narrative, in its widest sense, satisfies what Eliot, talking of “meaning,” calls “one habit of the reader.” Let the narrative take that one logical habit of the reader along with its movement, and the essence of the poem will do its work on him.

Note the distinction: Narrative is the instrument that works upon the reader while the “essence of the poem” does its work on him, suggesting that narrative is not the essence. That essence is the thing that Thomas learned from or had confirmed by Eliot, and which is described as the “auditory imagination” in the quote above. The phrase is from Eliot’s essay about Matthew Arnold. Eliot admired Arnold’s The Study of Poetry, but demurred from the other’s description of the “life” of a poem.

He thought that it did not go deep enough, an infirmity, as he saw it, so serious as to render a devastating judgment on the great Victorian: “He had no real serenity, only an implacable demeanor.” This is a harsh judgment by itself, but Eliot went further, saying that he sensed a lack of confidence and conviction in Arnold, tied to this imperfect sense of the

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life of a poem. You can see why Thomas would have found the quote and the sense of poetry it offered so appealing, to say nothing of the judgment in those lines.

6.

A quick note on the structure of the poem. It is in three parts. The first part is a speaker talking about the boys of summer, which ends with ice. In the second section the boys speak, who “ring the stars,” and who after experience and thoughts of love and a description of acts of masturbation, find ability to “hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,” which I read as an image of birth, and who therefore view themselves as “poles of promise.” The exuberance of the imagery in this section almost offsets the thematic images of sterility. The final section is just one stanza, a dialogue of alternating lines that calls out the lie of all the rest of what has gone before in two stunning lines: I am the man your father was.

We are the sons of flint and pitch.

Each section is complex and rich with image and cross-talk. Each stanza and each section is held together by various devices. Within the stanzas we find that the lines scan and are bound aurally by half-rhymes and consonant rhymes, by a syntax that almost but never quite coheres in the kind of sentence structures we are used to, but flies off with undefined referents and apposite clauses. Each section ends in a parallel structure: O see the pulse of summer in the ice.

O see the poles of promise in the boys.

O see the poles are kissing as they cross.

Promise joins ruin: The boy is the promise until he becomes the man, at which point destiny limits all choices, and each person enacts the life that has gone before. This is the point at which the poles of life kiss as they cross.

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This is an incredible, masterful, wonderful poem, fun to read at the level of the “auditory imagination,” and even more fun to listen to in readings by Thomas and also, in an amazing reading by Richard Burton.

Each reading tells us something new about the poem. Each approach releases something else in the magic of this classic poem, and of the poems in this book. Read them yourself and experience how the power and the magic of these poems remains so fresh and overwhelming, despite many readings. Something always comes and surprises.

7.

I have several debts to pay for sources and authors who helped me along the way or suggested readings and interpretations for this essay.

They are John Goodby, Under the Spelling Wall (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013); Seamus Heaney, “Dylan the Durable? On Dylan Thomas,” (Salmagundi No. 100, Fall 1993); William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Dylan Thomas (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1962); New Verse, “Auden Double Number,” November 1937; Adam Kirsch, “Reckless Endangerment The making and unmaking of Dylan Thomas,” The New Yorker, July 5, 2004; Andrew Lycett, Dylan Thomas: A New Life (Overlook, 2003); The Poems of Dylan Thomas, ed. and intro Daniel Jones (New Directions, 1971) and The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, ed. and intro Ralph Maud (New Directions, 1966). For quotes from or about Auden, I have used the wonderful The English Auden Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-1939 ed and intro Edward Mendelson (Faber and Faber, 1977). The T.S. Eliot quotes are from Selected Essays (Harcourt Brace 1932) and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Faber, 1933).

—Bob Herz

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Stephen Kuusisto Poetry Journal Reading - March 1, 2017 Each day now I climb the branches of my private tree Not as a child might, more like a scholar Whose life has failed in the city Whose friends vanished Over the lake of the underworld.

“I know you,” I say to the beetle, “I read your declensions,” I tell her.

The top of her back, What they call “the carapace” is clean Braille.

Blindness - January 18, 2017 The eye, a sparrow really, Unfeeling In its church– And half-defined, Whelms in first light.

I raise a pail of ashes, Walk to the garden….

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The Limits of Poetry - December 30, 2016 My third guide dog Nira has gone wherever animals go when they die.

Where do loyal hearts wind up? What's the point of love?

Kurt Vonnegut said our brains are too big. No wonder I can't imagine a heavenly reunion with my beautiful dogs. And if there's beauty in death it comes in dreams and they're slow and infrequent.

Oh Nira you were so glad to be with me. You kept me alive more than once.

Now I have your ashes in a small can.

Benjamin Franklin wrote: “Fear not death for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal.”

How should a yellow dog be immortal?

In General It Is Hard to Make Oneself At Home December 23, 2016 Among twenty snowy mountains the only thing moving was John Cage.

NB: there never was a blackbird in the Himalayas.

One never flies out into the same mountains twice.

Heraclitus and Cage had many things in common.

Both stitched their faces many times out of silence.

Both asked, which year was that? Was it summer or winter?

Each had his proleptic humor—anticipating dread well in advance.

Each dropped his eyes into a warm bath.

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Well Poets Don't Tell the Truth Much - December 21, 2016 Well poets don’t tell the truth much, too busy bathing the peacocks Walking lonesome in the harbor, Helsinki, spices in the air— First time I was productively isolate, singing softly Up river or down the road, all my friends lived far away.

When I think on it now I’m still twenty three among the Baltic gulls Humming “My Funny Valentine.”

Wind from Estonia blowing darkness against my cheek…

Looking warily at strangers, thinking: Imagine well of me, oh, and glance just so To say everything will be OK… I wasn’t yet patient or experienced, but could tell it so…

Micro-Memoir - December 19, 2016 The poets in America disappear while still alive like birds turned sideways against a hedge while the child just down the street keeps playing her violin with the door open. Clouds move with the wind across our faces.

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Chet Baker After Years - December 11, 2016 You didn’t need me, father, not much though I washed your windows with vinegar— and such a song that was late August, the dear light whispering in the goldenrods and your boy with his crooked teeth, blind eyes, a song or two in his heart (aiming to be useful, wanting to have the utility of sons, to be of worth) pushed a wadded rag into mullioned corners My Funny Valentine on the battered radio, crickets in the grass, love songs everywhere.

Well, let me tell you though its now too late, ill favored devotion is my horn.

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Morning Again - December 2, 2016 In last night’s dream trees came close—near as window panes and I pressed my tired eyes against them. The heavens turned silently.

When I woke, the first words on my lips were “watch what you say.”

The rhetoric of trees, I thought, so formally complete. I remembered a line by William Gass: “Culture has completed its work when everything is a sign.” Trees in a dream, I thought, possessors of consummate poems.

There are lots of men my age with even less reason to like themselves.

Was it I who sat up writing in the weak morning light?

Nobody Told Me - November 29, 2016 A friend tells me her tattoo continues weeping—I had no idea—I always imagined despite the pain it was a dry affair. And when I was young I thought one could step from the rowboat to walk across water lilies—I had no idea—didn’t know they were simply for ghosts.

What was it Nietzsche said?

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Oh Friedrich, not so rare, the living contain the ichor of first causes.

This is why the dead stick around.

This is why the body weeps after we write on it.

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