Tcespringsummer2013 punchlinefirst

The Centrifugal Eye Punchline First: Communicating Styles

Spring/Summer 2013 Volume 8 Issue 1

The Centrifugal Eye Staff: Editor-in-Chief & Art Director: Eve Anthony Hanninen Contacts Editor & Review Columnist: Karla Linn Merrifield Assistant Editors: David-Glen Smith & Maureen Kingston Essay Columnist: Erik Richardson Editorial Assistant & Reviewer: D. J. Bryant Art Assistants: D. J. Bryant & Stephanie Curtis Staff Readers’ Circle: Anonymous Reviewers

Cover Art Collage: “Communicating” Designed by E. A. Hanninen Image manipulation by D. J. Bryant & Stephanie Curtis Public Domain, copyright-free spot illustrations throughout from Office.com

Copyright 2013 The Centrifugal Eye * Collected Works*

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Contents Contents Contents 4 Editorial

It’s How You Say It by Eve Anthony Hanninen

6 Round-Robin Interview (It’s How They Say It ) Pages 6-17 & 56-66

19 Without Words

20 The Color of Light by Colleen Powderly 21 Beyond Repair by Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt 22-23 Rocky III Soft Hands by Mary Jo Balistreri 24-25 You laughed aloud No matter were it quilled by Murray Alfredson 26 The Way of the Toe by Seth Crook 27 Courtly Love by Nathaniel S. Rounds 28-29 Graffiti Without Prejudice by Taylor Graham 30 What is the Last Thought of the Person Dying? by Martin Willitts, Jr.

31 Spoken & Written 32 33 34 35 36-37 38-39

This imbroglio is less than phenomenal by William Breden Double-speak by Gail Eisenhart Word-of-Mouth by Charles Leggett Plain-Talkin’ Tanka by Vincent Renstrom The Ballad of Cross and Peale by Janice D. Soderling Aphasia by Judith Terzi

40 Language & Philosophy

41 If Given the Choice Between Meeting Franz Kafka or Marilyn Monroe by J. J. Steinfeld 42-44 Like What’s Not to Like?

Water Towers at a Poetry Workshop by Judith Terzi 45 Iambic Solutions by Bill Dorris 46 Sex and the Semicolon by Karla Linn Merrifield

47 Cultural Messages 48-49 Forewarned

Contemplating the F Bomb by Paul Fisher 50 Digital Communication in the Dinosaur Age by Kevin Acers 51-53 LMGTFY 54 68 74 80 84

Disassembling Remind by Samantha Zeitlin Alien Diplomacy by Kevin Acers

Essay Column: Into the Labyrinth: Life as Narrative . . . by Erik Richardson Review Column: Merrifield’s Tao of Poetry: “The punch[line] of treachery” On Chris Crittenden’s Jugularity by Karla Linn Merrifield Review: Laury A. Egan on Merrifield’s Lithic Scatter New Works in Varying Voices & Media Minutiae: The Latest News & Guides

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It’s How You Say It

By Eve Anthony Hanninen

I once heard a comedian, who (after just walking on stage and adjusting his microphone) delivered a line that was completely out of context — “out of context” because there was no context. It was not a “one-liner,” where the entire joke was self-explanatory in a single statement.

No, his line was a “punchline.” In this case, it was an answer to a question that was as yet unasked.

It wasn’t a laugh-getter (yet), because the audience didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

But folks were interested: What the hell is this guy getting’ on about . . . ?

Once the puzzled silence had lingered to the comedian’s satisfaction, he fed us another line that was a little related to his opener. And another. Somebody tittered. It struck me then that he was feeding us a joke backward. He gave us the “Punchline First,” and then unraveled the story behind it in the opposite manner than most of us would have done. You know, like: Guess what?

So there was this guy who . . . blah blah . . . and then he . . . oh yeah, and there on the sidelines, this happened . . . blah blah . . . and then it blew up! Wasn’t that amazing?!

This comedian started his show by blowing our minds first, and then he led us back from the explosion, from boom to sizzle, similar to how a journalist leads with a headline and then recounts the associated story from most important detail to least.

With each of his successive lines, more meaning was revealed, and as the connections became clearer — our minds relating back to his initial sentence — his story got funnier. The audience’s laughter ballooned. The comedian’s final line was the same one he opened with. This time, the audience roared.

There are many methods to pitching jokes. There are many styles of communicating thoughts and ideas. Often, the way information is communicated is calculated, as in the chosen pitch of the comedian. Writers and poets narrate, either with purposeful delivery, or driven by environmental influences, or in a manner shaped by a combination of the conscious and subconscious. Teachers use different ways of imparting knowledge, some creative, some direct.

Parents often speak differently to their children than they do to their partners or other adults.

Some children have trouble communicating with words and may turn to other ways of “speaking,” using facial gestures, body language, or “acting out.” Other people favor getting out their messages through the languages of art, music, and dance, etc.

And women and men — how do they express themselves? Are some gender differences innate while others are shaped through environmental circumstances? Long has there been debate over this very idea.

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Generalizations aren’t very useful in most cases, but there is sometimes truth in stereotypes.

For example, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of guys seem to stop listening when a woman is talking. Well, a few years ago I got a confession from a male friend, who told me that many men tune out after a minute or so if they don’t hear something immediately of interest to them. Get to the point, they’ll then say irritably, or Give me the bottom line. These kinds of guys don’t want the story that leads up to the reward (The Punchline). No, they want the “Punchline First.” This friend of mine said that if women would lead with the punchline first more often — Harry! There was a big explosion down the street! — instead of starting out with their trip to the doctor’s office and the neighbor they ran into there before they witnessed the explosion on the way back — they’d have a guy’s attention in a flash. What?! Where?! Was anyone injured?! And keep that guy’s attention by feeding him the highlights (backward?).

Yes, I admit I often find myself winding stories out in 1-2-3 fashion, with occasional sidetrips along the way, like many other women I know. But since learning about this not uncommon gender preference when it comes to communicating, I’ve found that tossing out a punchline to the men in my life now and then can be quite satisfying in its effects. The guffaws are particularly gratifying.

No, I don’t believe there’s only one right way of telling a story or of communicating information. Yes, of course there are men who enjoy a suspenseful tale and there are women who will snap at you for giving them too many details.

Dealing in the realm of communication as I do, as an editor, writer, and poet, I am never surprised and almost always delighted by the myriad ways people express themselves. This particular themed issue of The Centrifugal Eye — Punchline First: Communicating Styles — pays tribute to those ways through an assorted sampling of “messages” in our contributors’ poems.

Eve Anthony Hanninen is an American poet, editor, and illustrator ranging the Saskatchewan prairies. Her poems will appear or have appeared in Inertia Magazine, Karla Linn Merrifield & Friends (mgv2>publishing), Eye Socket Journal, Switched-on Gutenberg, Sea Stories, and many other fine journals. She is anthologized in The Centrifugal Eye’s 5th-Anniversary Anthology, Crazed by the Sun and Trim: A Mannequin Envy Anthology. Eve edits and publishes The Centrifugal Eye poetry journal and is currently at work on TCE’s 4-in-1 Mini-Chapbooks Project, and on two poetry collections of her own, as well as launching a new, altered-book imprint called Sylvanshine Editions.

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The Centrifugal Eye’s Punchline First

Round-Robin Interview Eve Anthony Hanninen, editor-in-chief of The Centrifugal Eye, along with TCE staffers, Karla Linn Merrifield, Maureen Kingston, and David-Glen Smith, asks this issue’s contributors for their One-Two punches when it comes to communicating about life, love, and poetry.

Describe in 3-4 words what you believe is your usual style for communicating, using ONLY nouns and/or verbs.

Acers: Gurgle. Ruminate. Clarify.

Balistreri: Speech Gesture Letter Breden: Sparring; dancing; exploring.

Crook: Bobbing Boat, Sandwich Eisenhart: directness, consideration, humor.

Leggett: Humor. Elegance. Parsing out. Wordiness.

Merrifield: touch, clarity, empathy Powderly: eyes words honesty Whom do you know who’s the easiest person to get along with? Is that because the two of you communicate similarly, or do you get along in spite of great philosophical differences?

Balistreri: My favorite person is one with whom I have similar cultural and intellectual values, positive people with a sense of humor. I am greatly put off with negativity.

Crook: My father. Because we don't have to speak if we don't want to.

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Eisenhart: Oddly, my son; we think alike. Our conversations are honest, no punches pulled but not offensive. Honesty, directness aids in trusting each other. For "girly stuff," a lady-friend (Martha) for many of the same reasons.

Leggett: This would be my friend Josef, and it is indeed because of conversations. Long ones, soaked in whiskey and cured in tobacco smoke. We speak of our lives, we turn over ideas of all sorts, we argue about a play or movie we've just seen. He regales me with his encyclopedic knowledge of classical music, and I advise him on choices regarding his career path, as he is brilliant, talented, but impatient and impulsive, and I'm not afraid to tell him so, which he appears to cherish. So there's give-and-take there aplenty.

Merrifield: No doubt about it: My husband Roger. Maybe it’s because we’ve been together going on 20 years that communication is so easy. We’re an old married couple; we fill in each other’s words. But I think it’s always been easy, not because we communicate in the same way (he speaks slowly and carefully; words rush out of my mind and over my tongue), but because we’re both good listeners who hear with our eyes as well as our ears. Besides, we’re definitely on the same philosophical page!

Rounds: The first person I got along with was my great-grandfather, a retired minister. He was in his eighties and was quiet and had a big heart. He wore a suit even at home, with red long johns beneath the black suit and purple tie. I was the "talkative" one and he was the straight man in the duo. We got along because of the age gap and the difference, strange though it may seem.

Today, my wife and I get along because we have the same goals and similar interests, but she certainly got me into some deep science, history, and math that I would not have touched.

And this opened worlds to me previously unknown.

Zeitlin: I have a friend (the subject of my three poems in TCE ), whom I met through aikido. I think it's easy because of how we met — aikido is a great way to connect with people and instantly build trust. Also, he is always asking questions, and I have essentially spent my life thus far attempting to answer questions, which usually means answering questions with more questions (in science and in poetry).

Have you ever found yourself outside of your age/cultural/gender comfort zone and/or witnessed others similarly displaced? Have you written about it?

Acers: In my twenties, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand for four years. The process of sociocultural adjustment (sliding back and forth along a slippery spectrum ranging from paralyzing awkwardness to assimilation) was omnipresent. Returning to the States at the end of those four years involved a similar process of adaptation. I have written quite a bit about the impact on identity and on perceptions of navigating these cultural waters. It can be fascinating, transformational, intriguing, and fun. As one of my prose poems included in this issue points out, it can also at times be alienating.

Balistreri: I have not written about it, but one example is a congregation of black people listening to a lecture: My husband and I, a white couple, stood by the door of their room listening, a hotel in New Orleans. It was something about marriage, and the preacher was terrific. He finally said, “Come in, come in and join us.” They found us chairs in this very posh setting — we were in jeans.

We were uncomfortable at first, felt we had infringed on their lecture, but the people made us feel

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welcome, and after a while we settled in — had a wonderful time and renewed our marriage vows along with all of them at the end, hugged and kissed and felt blessed.

Breden: I've recently returned to University and there's a 10-15 year age gap. The main weirdness is doing things I first did when I was 18 and it feeling different. Or feeling the same, which is weirder.

Eisenhart: No. I am a listener and comfortable to "hear others out" before responding.

Fisher: Probably because I was an only child, I’m more comfortable around adults than I am around children or teens. I think my poem, “High School,” from my book, Rumors of Shore, is the closest I’ve come to addressing that issue.

Leggett: Well, my true comfort zone is not particularly wide to begin with; I often enjoy myself most at gatherings by perching rather away from most of the interaction and watching, which is a good habit for an actor anyway.

One of the more profound instances of such displacement in my life was probably a six day jaunt I took to Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico, right in the middle of my divorce. I was by myself, and they didn't know what to do with that — apparently no one goes to PV alone. The greeters at the restaurants would scowl in disbelief — "Uno?!?" I don't speak Spanish either, so there lay an added challenge. (Not to mention being fond of neither rum nor tequila.) I remember it taking no fewer than four members of the La Bodeguita Medio waitstaff, and a battering ram of gesture on my part, just to ascertain whether I could stay at my table when I was done eating to listen to the live Cuban music. At receiving helpful directions to a bus stop on the street from a lovely young couple visiting from Mexico City, I nearly wept. My proudest moment was making the hotel tours concierge laugh, telling him that while I snorkeled off Marieta Island a hulking bluefish with one of those operatic faces tried selling me a Time Share. Got a lot of writing done, though. (Most of the above tidbits are in a huge, probably unpublishable poem about the trip.) Went and saw jazz music at the same venue twice (they served Irish whiskey) — the same pair of musicians, in fact — and the vocalist eventually wandered over and wondered if I was going to be the one to finally produce the real Puerto Vallarta novel.

Renstrom: At the age of 24 I moved to a small provincial capital in southern Spain called Jaén. I am 6 feet, 7 inches, or exactly 2 meters, tall. The people there stared at me. A lot. It was disconcerting at times.

I come from the Midwest of the US, northern Indiana, an hour's drive east of Chicago. I did not stand out as exceptionally tall there. Tall, yes, but no one ever pointed at me on the street in the US. That happened to me daily in Jaén. The people of Jaén were not any more short than other Mediterranean-area peoples, I would say, but I was quite clearly the tallest person in the city of about 100,000 people. While their shortness wasn't exceptional, neither did they have many tall people. So, in addition to the linguistic communication gap I experienced for the first couple of months, I had to get used to suddenly being a giant every day. It was fun, though.

Rounds: I have lived with people from many different countries and backgrounds since an early age. I prefer diversity. I live in a small city that has people from around the globe and I have positive interactions much of the time. Much of what I write borrows from these geographical/ sociological streams and that way I'm not stuck writing existential first-person poems involving drinking merlot.

Terzi: I spent 4 years overseas in Algeria during my 20s. I had majored in French in college and was pretty fluent, but I still found myself in funny situations. Here's one: At the time, you bought The Centrifugal Eye

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eggs at the butcher shop and sometimes they (eggs) were hard to come by because of speculation.

So once the butcher told me he had fresh oeufs de coq just for me. I was so elated to have found eggs, I didn't realize until I left that he was kidding me by saying he had rooster eggs. Here's another situation dealing with the metric system: At the time, butter didn't always come in a package, so the grocer had to cut the amount you wanted. For my very first purchase, I asked for a kilo of butter. The grocer was very kind and explained that I probably wanted much less than that. That's how I learned what a gram was. These and other cultural/linguistic misunderstandings are scattered through my writing.

Willitts, Jr.: After I retired, I worked last year on an AmeriCorps project with a group of twentyyear-old people. They had a hard time keeping up with my energy level. They were convinced I was unique until I took them to a senior center and they saw we all do not play shuffleboard or nap.

Swearing, curse words, salty language can frequently cause miscommunication or halt communication altogether. Why do you suppose that is?

Balistreri: Because it often indicates a lazy vocabulary.

Breden: Formal vs. informal is sometimes tricky. Some people don't see them as tools for emphasis; I very much do. Not swearing would be an unnecessary self-censorship and all that would suffer by omitting them would be the verisimilitude and quality of the content. As Stephen Fry remarked, "Swearing is a really important part of one’s life. It would be impossible to imagine going through life without swearing, and without enjoying swearing. The people I know who swear the most tend to have the widest vocabularies. Things not being necessary is what makes life interesting. The little extras in life.”

Crook: Because what they communicate is likely to be uninteresting.

Dorris: Age, gender, class immediately come to mind . . . quite common among teen males who live on the front lines of hard lives . . . not so in my experience elsewhere . . . can be sign of camaraderie, affection, as well as status/power, and often basis for marking territory . . . just as more formal literate language . . . e.g. the use of term “one” to refer to self . . . can be in other circles. Obvious effect in all cases is to let everyone know who’s on inside vs. outside, and in process disempower the outsider.

Eisenhart: These words feel like an attack; puts one on the defensive.

Fisher: Maybe it’s because we often don’t know how to react, whether to be offended or amused.

Or sometimes, like religion and politics, it may just be the “elephant in the room.”

Leggett: I think perhaps because in a way that is their purpose. The words are a non-specific trope for that towards which, in the heat of the moment, the speaker feels is worthy only of disdain or contempt rather than an actual word. "Fuck this!" sounds like the end of a conversation to me.

I was never much for such language until I worked on a David Mamet play. That I found liberating somehow, and yes, a whole lot of fun. Mamet has very carefully parsed out his rhythms and sounds — you're well served to spit out "fuckin'" when he's written it and to ring out "fucking" when he's written that. Contempt and disdain are abundant; the curse words are an invitation to sort out that towards which the contempt and disdain are leveled. I found it sort of exhilarating — but then, I'm an otherwise fairly mild-mannered fellow, and I was also slamming doors, kicking chairs, file cabinets and a garbage can, hucking mints (stolen from the Chinese restaurant) at the The Centrifugal Eye

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office manager's window, and chain-smoking Old Golds through it all. In Mamet, it's all about what the characters want from each other and how they go after it. In that world, any niceties of phrase or detail in language are liable, in most of the characters' view, to distract from that pursuit, so the curse words are used to swat away such niceties like flies in order to bore in on their objectives.

Powderly: Most often they’re associated with anger. Anger stops communication more often than just about anything else I can think of.

Renstrom: Swear words can certainly be overused. People hide behind them: hide their ignorance, hide their inability to otherwise enter the conversation on a meaningful level. That might cause others in the conversation to dismiss the swearer and walk away from the conversation, figuratively, if not literally.

Rounds: Swearing is made up of various scatological/sexual/racist epithets that are used as verbal assault devices. People on the receiving side are likely to cave under that assault.

It's also what people rely on when facing a ton of stress. There's enough of that. It's interesting to see the progression of acceptance of its use both in the literary world and the professional workplace over the last sixty years. I work hard at not using it.

Willitts, Jr.: Since swearing is not intended to be a part of normal language, it can cause miscommunication when the listener “turns-off” the speaker by not listening anymore. Swearing occurs when people get hurt, physically or mentally; or occurs when a person wants to “get back” or “get even” with another person by belittling the other person. Any or all of these still can “turnoff” the listener, and alienate them.

Psychotherapist John Gray popularized the established communications theory that “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” to epitomize the idea that there are vast differences in communications styles between men and women. Do you think poets are also at the mercy of those differences? Or are we, given our muscular verbal skills, able to rise above them to communicate as if we and our readers were from the same planet?

Acers: Facile overgeneralizations and a clever book title can garner commercial success. I am less interested in variances among groups clumped together by gender or other constructs than I am in each reader as an individual. There are so many variables between individuals, whether they are of the same gender (or whatever) or not. I am writing for one reader at a time, even when I do not sense clearly who that is. How will any one set of eyes, upon seeing this poem, relate to what I write? This is the question that guides my word choices, my tone, my decisions about how explicit or ambiguous to be. In honing a piece of writing to be read by an anonymous Someone, the mustering of verbal skills to connect effectively is what the craft of writing is about.

Creative self-expression — the sort of spiritual Art moment — can have its own innate worthiness, but sharing turns it into a celebration (even if it is a celebration of despair). Success is a reader's sense of discovery and connection. I can get excited by a poem written centuries ago in China or two decades ago in Serbia. I can be bowled over by the intensity of, say, Sylvia Plath. Ko Un, from Korea, can make my jaw drop with his short poem about finding a dead dog under the floorboards of a house. I can be gently moved, as if musically, by Arthur Sze’s impressionistic poetry without anything more concrete than the artful juxtapositions of his imagery to sustain me.

On the other hand, some poems I read (and surely, some poems I write that others read) fall flat.

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The challenge is not Mars v. Venus, but mind connecting with mind — gender is but one element in all of that, sometimes relevant, sometimes not. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

Alfredson: I think we have to learn to communicate across such differences, in life as well as in writing. The latter does not have within it any means for exploring attitudes and differences between people’s construct systems. The Mars/Venus polarity is only one of many differences that can give rise to misunderstanding. And a person, however, whose construct system is not permeable but cast hard, will very likely never understand those who think differently.

Balistreri: Yes, I do [think we can rise above]. I’ve had two good reviews by men, and generally responses have more to do with where the person is at the time.

Dorris: Ha . . . in a recent meeting of our poetry group, none of the men had a clue re the meaning of “a twin set,” and ditto none of the women re “a Harley.” Leaving aside obvious influences of cultural differences, adult communication styles are inevitably yoked with weights of socialization, i.e., gender, class, urban/rural, family dynamics . . . not to mention, especially with relevance to poets, socialization with reference to literature and poetry. In my own case, the legacy of the rural, working-class world I grew up in . . . although not working-class myself (the old ‘outsider’ affliction of writers), not to mention intense socialization, via usual schooling techniques emphasizing evaluation rather than learning, resulted in me learning to avoid anything with the slightest whiff of poetry, much less literature.

Not surprisingly, centuries later when a friend introduced me to likes of Stephen Dunn and Billy Collins, and I read fairly widely, especially American poets, the ones who touched me greatly were all male, and wrote of themes that resonated with my formative experiences, e.g.

Philip Levine’s “What Work Is”, Ray Carver’s “In a Marine Light”, and Jack DeWitt’s “Almost Grown.” And more specifically, they wrote of experiences which I could feel and taste, which echoed in my life even though I hadn’t thought of them for years. Not just the experiences, but the feelings and larger life meanings that to this day ever resonate from them. Words like (from Carver’s “In a Marine Light”): blinds, blow-downs, caught in the flywheel, faulty U-joint, powdermonkey, trolling a coho fly, a 7-10 split, fast rattlers . . . all carry multiple levels of meaning and emotion, and connect the particulars of a poem to long buried and massively evocative, though unmentioned, realms of my own life.

For many others — perhaps especially women, but many others as well — the same words might just be skipped over, or perhaps Google-searched these days, but either way, the massive treasures of personal history would never be touched. By way of comparison, there are poems by women I greatly appreciate, and ditto feel my own self/life evoked in, e.g. Mary Oliver’s “Learning about the Indians”, Peggy O’Brien’s “Only Renting”, Elizabeth Bishop’s “In The Waiting Room”, Leontia Flynn’s “Without Me” (esp. the 5th one). But there are fewer of these, many fewer, than from male poets. And I suspect differences in gender, class, and literary socialization are the likely culprits.

Eisenhart: Poets may have an advantage with readers who are men; I assume if they are reading, they are willing to think about the words on the page. Verbal communication may be a different matter, considering body signals and the like.

Graham: Shakespeare wrote in the voices of various genders, ages, and classes. He wasn't on any special planet except our common Earth. I believe poets can put themselves outside themselves — isn't that what imagination is for?

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Leggett: From my relatively unschooled viewpoint, the more I read, the more it just seems to me that good writing is good writing — some of which I admire, and some of which I really, really like, and relate to in a fundamental way. So I think both positions are true. To the extent that it is good, writing can cross the boundaries set by Venus and Mars. But good writers become good at least in part by learning to adhere to who they are and be in the world while doing so. It is a self-embrace concomitant with an embrace of the world at large, the senses, heart, mind and spirit embracing the experience of the world with the arms wrapped tightly about the body squeezing those stanzas out onto a page. Is not an adherence to whom one is necessarily concomitant with an adherence to one's experience of one's gender? Beyond adherence, even: you can buy your garlic salt, your garlic powder, your pre-made garlic sauce. Good writers are the peeled cloves of it themselves, and they are going to get far closer, than any average person walking around, to everything that constitutes themselves, including — centrally! — their experiences of gender.

So, to put a hopeful spin on the contention that this gulf between men and women is indeed essentially unbridgeable in any thoroughgoing, game-changing way, I would posit that it can be worked through, with care, diligence and patience, given the assistance of writers' fidelity to their experience of it and their growing craft with words. Writers needn't be "at the mercy" of the conundrum; being true to their sex, writers can help illuminate it.

Powderly: I’m sure to take a knock from my peers for this, but I think it has to do with assumed authority. Women, at least in my age-group, have been taught that authority is the province of men by birthright, of women by “earning” it. (For what it’s worth, when I watch interactions between young couples today, I still worry that’s true.) Most women have been afraid to exercise authority (although I think that may be less true in the workplace now than when I first joined it several decades ago. I’ve been in trouble professionally many times for acting in an authoritative manner and spent a long time learning to fly beneath work radars).

My point is, when I began to seek out woman poets who spoke with authority, the most obvious among them was Adrienne Rich, whose work I have come to use as a standard for my own.

While I have read dozens and dozens of women poets, only a few have owned their voices as Rich does and as I try to. Most of the time they do this when speaking of abuse and difficult family issues (although, that may be my own bias toward writing about abuse and bad-family survivors’ poems showing).

Terzi: I love the analogy. I forced my husband to read that book years ago! I guess all this depends on what kind of poetry you write. Personally, I think most of my poetry is pretty accessible; however, some people have suggested they need a course to interpret the poems. I think it goes further than just the "muscular verbal skills." I think the issue of misconception has a lot to do with clear or cloudy communication. Misconception of what a poet actually does when s/he writes poetry. Or for that matter, why s/he writes poetry in the first place. For example: What is the usual reaction when you tell someone you are a poet? I've encountered total silence or "Oh, okay."

It's funny, but that's the same reaction I get at conferences when I tell someone I'm from Los Angeles!

Willitts, Jr.: I do not think all poets own the gateway to better communication, not even me, and as a practicing Quaker concerned with “speaking simply”, “choosing words carefully”, and trying not to offend anyone, I still manage to offend someone accidentally. Perception involves how the listener hears those words. If those words have a “secret code” or “secret meaning” to the listener, then they will take offense regardless of the intention of the speaker. I have seen men The Centrifugal Eye

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misunderstand other men, and women misunderstand other women, so communication is not necessarily gender-specific. I have seen different ethnic groups disagree with their members, so communication breakdowns are not race/ethnic/cultural specific. These misunderstandings, intentional or unintentional, are the cause of fights, anger between people, and in some cases lead to violence, such as killing, beatings, war, etc.

I believe this all is explained in the Old Testament story of Nimrod trying to build a tower to God. It was destroyed by God. Until then, everyone spoke the same language and used the cooperative language to build that tower; when God struck it down, he also made everyone speak different languages. The city of Babylon is where we get the word, “babbling” for people who do not make sense when speaking. We say they are babbling, and we ignore them or institutionalize them.

Form is a vital element in a poem whether we are writing in free verse or undertaking a sestina or villanelle, a Fibonacci or a piem. How do you think poetic form contributes to the communication of a poem’s meaning(s)?

Alfredson: Yes, some forms like the limerick with its rollicking rhythm are suitable only to light verse. Others, for example, rhymed or unrhymed iambic pentameter with end-stopping, are great media for the grand style or the sublime. Short, two-stressed lines or even three-stressed, are great for allowing a poem to “unfold” itself in tiny steps, each line new statement, image or development. The Old Norse lays were very like that, since each line fell into two halflines. Combined with the alliterative pattern this lent a certain vigor or straight-backed quality to a poem. A form that was suitable as much for wit and pithy sayings as for an extended epic.

I have been intrigued, however, of the enormous difference in expression between the handling of a particular Greek stanza form, the Alcaic, between Tennyson and Hölderlin.

Tennyson tried out the form to write his panagyric on Milton. He end-stopped his lines, and ended up with a rather pompous result. Hölderlin, however, say fifty or more years earlier, did not make his statements coincide with the very strict metric form. His statements stopped somewhere in the middle of lines, overran between lines and even at times between stanzas. He thus wrote much more fluid poems, gentle, often pained, and very lyrical. Perhaps it is no wonder that Tennyson attempted only one poem in this form, where Hölderlin wrote many.

All that said, much depends also on how the poet handles the other factors of which the poem is built, the quality of the vowel sounds, for example, whether “dark” vowels (the back-ofthe-mouth vowels like u:, o: or au) predominate, or lighter, higher and more forward sounds. Liquid consonants stretch out the syllables, and can make for a singing tone, and a slowing of pace. Clipped consonants can give a brisker pace. Not to mention the images through which a poets chooses to write.

Balistreri: Form is part and parcel of the message.

Crook: An appealing form may make a reader more likely to keep reading and so bother with the poem's meaning. So many poems are never fully read, but only started. And good form is so frequently a matter of emphasis.

Eisenhart: I doubt if we can totally escape the visual when reading. How a poem presents itself on the page plays a part: short line appears terse/long line more explanatory.

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Fisher: I think the effort to write within the scaffolding of a traditional form can force a poet to say things he or she may not otherwise have thought of. And I guess that’s helpful or not depending on whether the poet is happy with the results. I’ve sometimes used pre-determined stanza lengths, such as couplets or quatrains, to weave words around.

Graham: I gave up on lit-crit in grad school so I could forget theory and just write poems. This doesn't mean I don't love to try all sorts of poetic forms, feel my way through them and discover how they help convey what I'm getting at, in their different ways. But don't ask me to explain how.

Merrifield: I have a passion for poetic forms, especially newer ones like the mathematical ones referred to in the question. And I’ve been known to invent new forms to meet the needs of my poems. Indeed, I think form can really enhance the communication of a poem’s “message.” An example: When I set out to write a series of poems about the people who had been important in the history of the Everglades of Florida, I developed a new form called the cameo. Although it’s free verse, it is restricted to 100 syllables, no more, no less (not counting the title). The form forced me to condense and compress my mini portraits of those individuals (naturalist John James Audubon, Everglades advocate Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, to name two). And in so doing, what emerged were poems that conveyed the essence of each person’s contributions (good or bad) to the Everglades. The reader walks away from the poem with a single image, a single feeling about the person and his/her role in Glades history. I’ve since written dozens of cameos, including selfportraits. They pack a punch; form enriches content.

Soderling: I think any of the repeating forms (villanelle, pantoum, rondelet, rondeau, and so forth) open up wonderful opportunities to communicate in unexpected ways. As we all know, the meaning of any phrase depends on the situation in which it is uttered — in poetry, in its context — and non-repeating lines can be used to supply a new context. That which starts as funny easily ends in tears.

Terzi: Wow. I had to look up the last two forms. For me, a form like the sestina can help expand the thematic motif of the poem and allow for multiple layers of meaning. Writing a sestina is like taking a walk in the woods.

Willitts, Jr.: Even free verse has a structure. There is no such thing as lack of structure, because once you use recognizable words, it still has a structure. If you use line breaks and stanza breaks, you have structure. Therefore, all poems, formal or informal, have structure. All writers have this unconscious need for structure so that other people can recognize what we write. It is inescapable.

Even a foreign language has structure, even if we cannot read the language.

The meaning arrives from the use of words, the combination with other words, the contextual arrangement of the words, the imagery of the word and how it affects the words and meanings around it. The meaning of a singular word is the definition of that word, if it has multiple contexts (like the word “addition” is a math term as well as a part added to something else like a house). When a poet chooses one word over another word, the meaning is amplified by its choice of that word over other words. Words can either lead, or be led. In this way, words in a poem, structured or unstructured, can lead or mislead.

What do you hope to communicate through your poem(s) in this issue of TCE? Acers: The starting point — the prequel, in a way — to communication is ruminations inside one’s own head. At the same time, there’s all this stuff going on in our periphery. Signals are coming in, The Centrifugal Eye

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like multiple phone lines ringing. It’s up to each of us to decide whether to answer the phone, so to speak, and get outside our own head, or simply to let it ring. Also, sometimes we think we are communicating when we are actually conversing with our own assumptions — like talking on a phone, going on and on, without realizing that there’s nobody on the other end.

Alfredson: My two poems in this issue of The Centrifugal Eye are very different one from another. “You laughed aloud” arose from the strange events at a funeral in Ballaarat of one of the art teachers at the local college who had died slowly of melanoma. He was popular, so the church was crowded. How to explain that sudden wind that rattled the roof tiles, mere chance of nature, or in fact a message from the dead man. He had such a sense of humor that I went with the latter explanation. But, of course, it also tuned with my own conviction that somehow there is an afterlife, a life I do not intend to attempt to map. Such a gesture was in character for the man, and most people present saw it so, and the contrast between the putrefaction of the corpse, and the sheer cleanness of whatever remains beyond death.

“No matter were it quilled ” has very different origins, but is still to do with the ephemeral. As a librarian I had long been taken with the power of the written word to communicate across the barriers of space and time, a power that I always found Romantic, and which also went close to the heart of my profession. The archiving functions of some libraries deal particularly with the time aspect. And is it not Romantic that a great poet like Sophokles can speak to us today, wherever we happen to be, some of us practically half a world away from Athens. On the other hand, the vicissitudes of history do not preserve much of the written record. We have only seven plays of Sophokles, a small sample, considering that he very likely contributed four plays a year to the festive competitions in Athens. Perhaps most of his work was in fact archived in the great libraries of the ancient world, libraries that one way or another have been destroyed. So what lasts is going to be a very small proportion of the total output of thought, or in this case, poetic thought. The form of loss can be as various as the form of laying down the record. So it goes through decay in ways I knew before computers dominated the information scene. But in this day the old modes of loss are still with us, the decay of paper through its own or acquired acidity (or flood or fire or dust) but more modern CDs have their own vulnerability, and magnetic records even more so. Above all, though, the sheer volume of recorded data and the difficulties in managing them (as I know only too well as an information-retrieval expert) is the cause of loss through retrieval failure and/or the inability of people to master that mass. Along with my Romanticism I am a realist.

Breden: A sense of frustration, with those who fling language lazily, who reduce it to a basic pencil sketch rather than an oil painting.

Crook: Not much. Perhaps I am merely expressing love more than communicating anything.

Lovers have their wordless ways of communication, but I doubt whether anybody needs to be told that.

Eisenhart: The humor in our inability to communicate with the opposite sex.

Fisher: I usually don’t think in terms of what I hope to communicate in a particular poem, but rather how I might release what the poem itself wants to communicate. For me, the writing and especially the revision process is like an interview with the poem. I’m employing whatever means I can to persuade, cajole or seduce the poem into revealing the possibilities it contains, even if that means it will say exactly the opposite of what I would expect.

Powderly: Simply, the power a sexual experience can sometimes have.

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Renstrom: It's important to think before you act.

Soderling: It would be nice if I could make someone laugh. Laughter is good for everyone.

Willitts, Jr.: My poem, “What Is the Last Thought of the Person Dying?, ” is a dark look into the mystery of death. Many people write about seeing a “light at the end of a tunnel” or about neardeath experiences. This poem explores the possibility we do not see anything special, and other things are happening while we are dying. Some deaths are this painless, this sudden, and the people we leave behind have to go on with living. This poem splits the living from the dead into two versions of the same story. Our relationship(s) in our own story is always from our viewpoint, and we rarely see how other people see the same experience. We are the “star” in our own narrative; and everything else . . . co-stars. But in truth, we are all insignificant, a part of a greater story that will go on until the universe collapses.

Zeitlin: How technology can be a double-edged sword when it comes to finding answers of some kinds but not others: communicating some things but not others, and in some cases, more than we might expect was possible to express using few words and a relatively impersonal method of delivery.

With all the newest technology advances and networking communication methods available, in what ways have digital elements impacted your poetry?

Acers: A status update occasionally becomes a poem — and vice versa.

Alfredson: Well, apart from the fact that I have written a poem that brings that technology and its limitations to the fore, the technology has impacted me in many ways. It has certainly made it easier for me to: keep the record of my work so far without loss; be in touch with far more other writers of whom I would never have otherwise heard; to form friendships around the world and provide that fellowship we all need; to have my work published internationally, at much lower cost to me through email and other channels for submission (soon may the old-fashioned troglodytes who insist of paper submissions change their ways, for I find the cost of international postal coupons prohibitive); and I can actually read poetry and theoretical works that would be otherwise inaccessible, even if I could know about it. We live in an environment where an enormous amount of poetry is being written (OK, much of it mediocre). I expect we shall only ever from now on have to be content with sampling each other’s work. It is at once daunting and exciting, even for an old man such as I. Breden: Drafting. Most of my starts, fragments, ideas are now on a phone, a tablet, or a computer, rather than in a notebook.

Crook: I live on a small island. I can now discuss poetry with people from all over the world. Big difference.

Dorris: I taught Flash Authoring Software for maybe a decade and during that time used it to both create interactive poems and translate existing text poems into Flash movies. You can get really interesting and subtle poetic effects, e.g. slight, almost imperceptible, visual changes on each replay of the same poem (via actionScripting), but I finally gave it up because the “writing” of Flash poetry is mostly about thinking, planning, etc., rather than feeling, nuancing words.

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Mostly, these days the marketing, etc., uses of the Internet and related technology advances serve as a target for my own writing; “Iambic Solutions” being one such example.

Eisenhart: It probably makes my work more easily accessible to readers.

Fisher: As a left-handed writer whose cursive is painfully slow, I’m grateful to keyboards for equalizing both hands, and making the physical act of writing similar to playing the piano.

Because the visual form of a poem on the page is important to me, I love the way computer screens instantly reveal how it will look in print. And without access to digital storage capability, I don’t know how I’d keep track of my multitudinous revisions, not to mention the deleted lines I sometimes save for possible inclusion in future poems.

Leggett: Well, simply put, more people have had a chance to read it than would have otherwise. The pace of the whole enterprise has leapt forward for me. I tender many more submissions than I used to because it's so much easier and quicker to research markets, which also results in my reading more — generally, and certainly more of what is being published right now.

Merrifield: For one thing, it’s made for a full-length manuscript of poems (The Gizmo Girl’s Diary) that examines the roles of technology, including social media, and its impact, in our lives. I’m trying to discover where we draw the line in the sand when it comes to technological ubiquity.

How much is too much? How do we resist the black hole that can suck us into Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, for hours on end?

But personally, I think technology is a great boon to poets. Look what The Centrifugal Eye is able to bring into the world thanks to email, the Internet, Lulu, etc. There are many fine poetry journals online doing fabulous work — and giving so many of us an outlet for our creations.

What’s also so valuable is the networking capabilities. I’ve “met” dozens of poets through technology, many of whom have gone from mere email contacts or Facebook Friends to “real” friends.

And the Internet is a researcher’s good-good friend! Need the species and genus of that bird who’s flown into your poem? Bang. It’s instantly on screen.

I also know that it’s good to take a break from it all and fairly regularly go “off the grid,” leaving my gizmo self behind, for a device-less vacation.

Soderling: I'm old enough to remember carbon copies, corrector fluid and turnaround times of six months or more from writer to editor to writer. So time-gain has got to be the greatest single benefit of technology.

Willitts, Jr.: It took a long time to embrace online poetry. I was a hand-set letterpress and offset operator. I learned how to assemble print, upside-down and backwards, and I printed books. I was a Librarian for over 30 years. Books and print media are special to me. But I was also at the beginning of computers before there was Internet. I spread out submissions to both print and online magazines. With computers I do not have to retype every time I make a mistake or change a word. Online publishers tend to respond to submissions faster; however, I have known online publishers who were slower and print publishers who were faster. I am such a fast and prolific writer that online publications seem to a better fit for me.

The Punchline First: Round-Robin Interview continues on page 56.

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Punchline First: Communicating Styles Poems about Communicating Without Words Spoken & Written Language & Philosophy Cultural Messages

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visual, spiritual, symbolic, psychological, visual, spiritual, symbolic, psychological,

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Without Words

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Colleen Powderly

The Color of Light Your fingers tracing skin say prayers of completion.

They map new lands across a hip, its bone rising to meet them as they cross soft hills of belly, the long high ridge of thigh. Tiny curled hairs on the calves form a rainforest where tropical birds fly in hues brighter than rainbows. Gray vines textured like grass hang from trees where birds of paradise call you in greeting, warning of potential loss. Superheated air numbs you. Sweat beads your skin. Every dark inch of you pushes toward the ancient ruin of a temple, its steps stained with fossilized bones colored in light.

You step between them, wary of breaking the spell.

High, higher, the altar of sacrifice to unknown gods who promise only forward motion, no knowing what is next, a hail of stones or a glimpse through trees to sky wider than earth.

Colleen Powderly began writing poetry in 1997. Early poems reflected her childhood in the deep South and youth in the Midwest. Those poems eventually formed the basis for her book, Split ( FootHills Publishing, 2009). More recent work has focused on stories from the working class, particularly from women’s lives. Her work has appeared in many journals, including The Palo Alto Review, RiverSedge, The Alembic, Fox Cry Review, The HazMat Review; online in The Centrifugal Eye and Sea Stories; and is also forthcoming in the Malala Yousafzai anthology to be published in 2013. Colleen supported her poetry habit by working as a chemical dependency counselor before leaving the workforce in 2010. She now tries to live poetically, write dangerously, and dream impractically of living in Ireland. She keeps writing poems because she simply cannot stop.

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Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt

Beyond Repair Anger deep in my throat threatens, like a bully, to come out, do some damage, break a few things— a marriage, maybe— a sweet intimacy dropped from a height like a finely-crafted ceramic vase on a marble floor— an unforgiving fall.

Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt’s poetry, essays, and fiction have been published in Crux, Room, The Centrifugal Eye, qarrtsiluni, Saint Katherine Review, Other Voices, Grain (forthcoming) and in the anthologies Writing in the Cegeps and Taproot II, III, and IV, as well as Liberty’s Vigil, The Occupied Anthology: 99 Poets among the 99%.

Tanya is mother to four children, teaches classes in embodied prayer, and is a professor in the English Department at Champlain Regional College in Lennoxville, Quebec. She and her husband are the founding directors of the Quebec House of Prayer. Tanya is also now an MFA student at the University of British Columbia, and currently working on a novel for young adults.

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Mary Jo Balistreri

Rocky III Even with the door partially closed I hear the man I love heavy tread steady back and forth pacing silence Snarled by quiet I look through the crack shoulders slouched over desk eyes buried in abyss of the ledger pencil pressing erasing fingers punching When the plaintive folk-like theme of Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto begins I know the music will minister as I cannot Words do not help Intimacy does not bring him closer When we first married I did not understand this need to distance himself did not know that only by his leaving could he return I peel potatoes for dinner long brown curls of melodic line warm water removing surface dirt I put them in a pot of boiling water the furious third movement reaches a climax opens space for howl and rage steam of illusion and grief until spent he can let go and I can mash and mash

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Soft Hands Light waves over the pond.

Ice soaks in sun.

An amber houselight shines through tangled trees, reflects itself whole in the mirrored patch of melted ice. Wind sleeps.

A mourning dove, its back to the house, watches with me as the soft hands of sunlight gently stroke the resting fields awake.

Long ago my husband awakened our sleeping child in just that way.

With gesture and no sound, he brushed open his dreaming, welcomed the boy to the joy of himself.

“Soft Hands� first appeared in Joy in the Morning (Bellowing Ark Press, 2008)

Mary Jo Balistreri spent most of her life in music: as a concert pianist and harpsichordist. She began to write poetry when her grandson died, wanting to give witness to his life and to honor him by living the joy that was the boy. She now writes exclusively, and poetry is her passion. In an interesting turn of events, in 2008 she lost her hearing in the ICU, so poetry was in place for even that tragedy. Her second book of poems, Gathering the Harvest, published by Bellowing Ark Press, was released in late November 2012. Visit Mary Jo: http://maryjobalistreripoet.com/

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Murray Alfredson

You laughed aloud (to Ian Page at his funeral )

From whence it came, that wind that shook the tiles then went, none knew; it was as though it swift-stooped eagle-like and struck. Some said it was mere turbulence — they spouted chaos — a random happenstance; but others took it as a visiting — to tell us all who’d gathered in farewell, though elements of mind, of body parted, though form was left to rot inside your coffin, still you flew mercurial and free like wind. On drift of memories and eulogy you rode; you laughed aloud that all was well with you.

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No matter were it quilled No matter were it quilled or brushed on paper, vellum or papyrus, wedge-pressed into wet clay-slabs, or finger-stroked in ones and zeros, this poem takes its future chances fed to the flow of human history, to speak across gulfs of space and time as did the Psalms or odes of Pindar rendered into many tongues; or shatter on discs of fragile foil, flake to acid paper dust, or disappear in data oceans.

“No matter were it quilled” appears in Murray Alfredson’s new collection, The gleaming clouds (Brisbane: Interactive Press, 2013).

Murray Alfredson is a former librarian, lecturer in librarianship and Buddhist Associate in the Multi-Faith Chaplaincy at Flinders University. He has published essays on Buddhist meditation, inter-faith relations and poetics, and poems in various journals and anthologies in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the USA, and a short collection, Nectar and light, in Friendly Street: New Poets. 12, Adelaide: Friendly Street Poets and Wakefield Press, 2007. He has a full-length collection forthcoming for 2013, The gleaming clouds, Brisbane: Interactive Press. He has won a High Beam poetry award 2004, the Poetry Unhinged Multicultural Poetry Prize 2006, the Friendly Street Poets Political poetry prize 2009, and was nominated for other poetry prizes in 2009 and again in 2012. He lives on the Fleurieu Peninsula by Gulf St. Vincent in South Australia.

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Seth Crook

The Way of the Toe Reach with your foot, to touch hers.

She may be asleep.

You are quite irresistible, on a good day . . . which may not be today. We’ll see.

Next door, they are at it.

Next to the next, perhaps that sailor trims his toes.

At the end of the row, a couple row.

About? God knows.

You could try ear kissing — she likes.

But it has been a long day.

No, the toe is the way. We’ll see.

Seth Crook taught philosophy at various universities before moving to the Hebrides. He does not like cod philosophy in poetry, but likes cod, philosophy and poetry. His poems have recently appeared in Other Poetry, Ink Sweat & Tears, Snakeskin, The Journal, Antiphon, Northwords Now, and Message in a Bottle. This is Seth’s second appearance in The Centrifugal Eye.

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Nathaniel S. Rounds

Courtly Love Chivalry isn’t dead It’s just in remission Like a cockroach sleeping There beneath the stove In Hell’s Kitchen And I will gladly open the door for you While you speed through Eyes closed to my empty gesture I will carry your books home Even though nobody reads books These days and I will gladly Send a bottle of wine To your table Even though you hate wine And this week only I will offer you my protection Even though you dwarf me With those high stiletto heels Because despite the common consensus Chivalry isn’t dead It’s just a coat we sometimes shed To avoid the heat

Nathaniel S. Rounds is a seasoned autodidact, ectomorph, and near-sighted photographer. He has been published in 75 journals over the last twenty-six years. Nathaniel is a longtime contributor to The Centrifugal Eye. Contact Nathaniel: nsrounds@gmail.com

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Taylor Graham

Graffiti Miles of gray grapevines, gnarled old men in winter rows as straight as train rails, as asphalt pressed across the folds of alluvial fan. We pass in and out of fog, driving to school, where Mother keeps the nurse's cubicle. I spend the day with crayons and a coloring book, while older girls and boys sit in straight rows and give correct answers.

This morning, nothing is correct.

Overnight, the classroom walls have been smeared sticky-red as a bloody hand.

No one lets me see — a child who loves to brush poster paint in wild design across blank paper. No one guesses how my three-year-old fingers scream for color, for rose and crimson, deep forever-blue, cerise to bleed across the gray.

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Without Prejudice on a line by Shakespeare

The skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment to tell his story. Blacksheep of white parents, dark nubbin-wooled to warm him in January storms. Dropped among rocks by his dam, sheltered under her belly. Now he's joined the flock. Look how he pursues the barren ewes, believing all the universe gives milk. The way he chases our shepherd-dog as if it were his brother.

The mother-ewe knows to distrust canines, a whole life's prejudice in her distinctions. The dog's gone down on its elbows, tail waving the air; grinning to play. The mother stamps her foot, drives him off.

A blacksheep two weeks old, what could he know?

The skin of a lamb should be made parchment.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. In addition to The Centrifugal Eye, her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She’s included in the anthologies, TCE’s 5th-Anniversary Anthology (Centrifugal Works, 2013), Villanelles (Everyman’s Library [Pocket Poets set], 2012), and California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her book, The Downstairs Dance Floor, was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her current project is a collection of dog poems, about living with her canine search partners over the past 40 years. Contact Taylor: poetspiper@att.net

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Martin Willitts, Jr.

What Is the Last Thought of the Person Dying?

For her, it was a mild disappointed “Oh.” She barely said it and she was not here anymore.

She was in the elsewhere-place.

It was a surprise that failed to live up to expectations, and then she was naught.

A leaf curling into dryness takes longer.

There was no light, no chorus of monks.

Her lips puckered into a circle pushing the word out like a newborn. Her passing was a flicker.

Here, then not here. Her husband did not notice, fidgeting with the car keys as the engine misfired, going into a silence, his feet pumping CPR of gas, causing it to choke, thicken, refuse to ignite — his cussing rattled like his useless keys, until he finally noticed she had settled into somewhere else.

Her lips were waiting for a kiss, still stuck in the “Oh” phase, like an engine that does not turn.

When the engine goes cold, you must wait, pump slowly, before giving life breath. It is too late if it dies completely.

He flung the keys into the woods and waited for rescue.

Martin Willitts, Jr., retired as a senior librarian and lives in Syracuse, New York. He is currently a volunteer literacy tutor, and editor of Willet Press. He is a visual artist of Victorian and Chinese paper cutouts. He’s been nominated for 8 poetry-prize awards. His forthcoming poetry books include, “Waiting For The Day To Open Its Wings” (unbound CONTENT, 2013), “Art Is the Impression of an Artist” (Edgar & Lenore's Publishing House, 2013), “City Of Tents” (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2013), “A Is For Aorta” (Seven CirclePress, e-book, 2013), and “Swimming In the Ladle of Stars” (Kattywompus Press, 2013). Martin is a regular contributor to The Centrifugal Eye.

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Spoken & Written

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William Breden

This imbroglio is less than phenomenal Too late I see you approach.

You launch in to some tedious tale of backstabbing, betrayal and snakebite and black.

You say

She says to me, she says Dave I silently protest that I know your fucking name and don’t need it scattered like punctuation (there is malice unconfined in my heart as you bracket with nonsense your incoherent racket).

I can cope with the ebb of your babble but the repetitive flow of your, like, use, like, of, like, like, is not something I, like, like.

You say

She turns to me, she says Dave and I turn to her and I says Yeah, then she turns to me I have to brace to counter as you spin around on your barstool shouting your name.

William Breden has talked all sorts of nonsense for years but has only recently started writing some of it down.

He lives in England, which is handy, because that’s where his wife, cats, and fridge are. You can find his work in the Kenning Journal and Seltzer. In his spare time, he goes Bunburying.

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Gail Eisenhart

Double-speak She said, Look . . . the fog is a gray blanket swaddling squirrels in that bare tree.

He said, I can barely see my practice tee.

I hope the sun burns the fog away soon.

She said, A burning log would be nice;

We could snuggle by the fire, sip mulled cider.

He said, I’ve been mulling vacation plans.

How about a trip to Pebble Beach?

She said, Can you sweep the pebbles from the path?

I almost tripped yesterday afternoon.

He said, Look . . . it’s after noon!

What’s for lunch?

“Double-speak” was first published in Cantos: A Literary and Arts Journal, April 2012

Gail Eisenhart’s poems can be seen in, Assisi, Cantos: A Literary and Arts Journal, Generations of Poetry: The eZine of Genealogists, Specter, Jet Fuel Review, New Verse News and New Mirage Journal. A retired Executive Assistant, she works part time at the Belleville (IL) Public Library. She travels in her spare time, collecting memories that show up in new poems. Gail is a regular contributor to The Centrifugal Eye.

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Charles Leggett

Word-of-Mouth —“Cappuccino Row,” Fremantle, Western Australia.

Lunching at a dockside brewery we asked our waitress which of near-the-dozen cafés along the storied stretch of blocks she’d recommend. She came out with a word that sounded like GEE-noise, then patiently repeated it until we asked her please to spell it. We were treated to the letters g-i-n, and then the dizzying swirl Australians give the vowel oh.

My Long Black pulled at Gino’s was superb.

Charles Leggett is a professional actor based in Seattle, WA, USA. Recent publications include Cirque, Palimpsest Journal and Graze Magazine. Others include The Lyric, Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, and Rio Grande Review; work is forthcoming in bottle rockets. His long poem “Premature Tombeau for John Ashbery” is an echapbook in the Barnwood Press “Great Find” series. Other writing projects/ experience include a play, The River’s Invitation, featured at Seattle’s Theatre Off Jackson as part of its inaugural Solo Performance Festival, “SPF 1: No Protection!” in March 2007. He also spent three years as lyricist/frontman for the Seattle blues band, Uncle Ed’s Molasses Jam.

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Vincent Renstrom

Plain Talkin’ Tanka Remember: all life’s actions have repercussions.

So, when you shouted Fuck! into that vast abyss, your echo flipped you the bird.

Vincent Renstrom lives with his wife and two children in Middletown, Ohio. He received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature from Indiana University. His poems have appeared in Little Patuxent Review, MARGIE, and Spillway Magazine, as well as in the online journals Alba, Gutter Eloquence Magazine, Red Lightbulbs, SHARK REEF, Slow Trains, and a few others. Vincent is a regular contributor to The Centrifugal Eye.

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Janice D. Soderling

The Ballad of Cross and Peale 'Twas a miserable day, a spurious day, — for a wedding, a horrible day — when Jeremy Cross sidesaddled his hoss, a rundown and rambunctious bay.

The rain pattered grim, but that didn't faze him, not Jeremy, hamstrung and bold.

Such an unlikely pair.

The virgin was fair, but the man, like his dobbin, was old.

His farm was forlorn, the soil red and worn.

If he worked it and cursed it out loud and got a good rain he might get a grain and a half for each acre he plowed.

But there was no call to plow it at all.

Oil sputtered! Oil gushed! How it flowed!

And each grasshopper pump in its non-ending hump caused old Jeremy's id to explode.

So wanting a wife to brighten his life, a helpmeet to stand at his side, he scoured the whole state in search of a mate not too costly, and not too cross-eyed.

He found what he sought. Elvira was not used to comfort or cruises or style.

She was only sixteen but smart as a bean and she thought he would do for a while.

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Woe and betide, as the tremulous bride and her hubby stepped out the church door— on a stallion of steel, galloped Ephraim Peale crying, "Elly, I'm back from the war.

"Who is this villain and why are you willin' to take him when you can have me?

What a skinny old coot in an ill-fitting suit, with water, I'll bet, on the knee.

"I haven't much dough, but libidinous glow," cried mustachioed Ephraim Peale.

"I'll take you to France and teach you to dance and steal us an automobile."

Her lace bridal veil from a charity sale fell quick as a falling soufflé.

To wan Jeremy, she said, "Hold this for me," and gave him her daisy bouquet.

They talk of it still, in the huts on the hill, how the warrior rode off on his steed, like a devil-may-care, with Elvira the fair, leaving Cross, like his name, cross indeed.

'Twas a horrible day, a spurious day, an ugly and miserable day, when Jeremy Cross tallied profit and loss— twenty wells and a wilting bouquet.

Janice D. Soderling is a regular contributor to The Centrifugal Eye and her work is included in TCE's newly released 5th-Anniversary Anthology. Recent and forthcoming publications include a translation at The Raintown Review, an ekphrasis at American Arts Quarterly, flash fiction at Boston Literary Magazine, Penduline Press, and 100 word story; poetry at The Literary Bohemian. Janice is assistant fiction editor at Able Muse.

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Judith Terzi

Aphasia I revisit my mother's dementia— the time I recorded her for 30 minutes, non-stop monologue like Rick here weighing in at this seminar on investment strategies.

I don't get much of what he says, can't grasp the metaphors for “ETFs.”

When I get my minnen in the pento, mother told me. Rick may as well have dementia as he explains exchange-traded funds saying they're “baskets of stock.” A minute ago he presented a “bucket” strategy.

Bring my stockings back to life: Mother's way of saying these receptacles have way too many holes? Now Rick uses “passive vehicle.”

The only passive vehicle I knew was a non-strategic ’64 Chevy Impala my father drove like a mensch until a cop said he was doing a sluggish minuet in the fast lane on the San Diego Freeway. Dad said he was going fifty-five. “Twenty-five,” the cop said.

Mother said, This looks like a matte. No more freeways for Dad, record-holder for commute minutes on surface streets. We're on page 4 and “stagflation”: Horns growing at the IMF? Oh, the myth dimension, the faux sestina. Circumvention was mother's strategy—

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Shiny things makes things come back, strategy for mirror. A wish? A reflection on (in)sanity, say?

Always, there are always surprises with dementia, the unpredictable charm, alarm. Now Rick weighs three portfolio options, presents “Libor.”

This sounds pharmaceutical to me. Man, it's a slick dance floor out there. I search the Web, minuet through mortgage rates. Rick strategizes from charts on page 5 — charts he calls “parabolic.”

Same root as parable. I'm talking beginner's talk, said mother. “The naked truth chases the truth away,” warned the rabbis, but I crave the id of dementia.

Strategies vest, invest, divest, undress in minutes.

Rick says no one can predict the future anyway.

This looks like a ginny, Judy. Now I get what she meant.

Judith Terzi is the author of several chapbooks including Sharing Tabouli (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai (an anthology, FutureCycle Press, 2014); Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems (Tupelo Press, 2013); The Raintown Review; Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the 60s & 70s (She Writes Press, 2013); TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism; and elsewhere. Her poetry has received awards and recognition from journals and presses, including Gold Line Press, Mad Hatters' Review, Newport Review, and River Styx. A new chapbook, Ghazal for a Chambermaid, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. A former high-school French teacher, she also taught English at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria.

Contact Judith: jbkt@earthlink.net Website at http://home.earthlink.net/~jbkt.

Read more of Judith’s poetry on pages 42-44.

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rhetorical, philosophical, linguistic, literary, rhetorical, philosophical, linguistic, literary, rhetorical, philosophical,

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Language & Philosophy

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J. J. Steinfeld

If Given the Choice Between Meeting Franz Kafka or Marilyn Monroe both in their primes at the height of their creative or cinematic powers for twenty or twenty-five minutes during a near-death or hallucinatory state but one that would feel so real and memorable that it could not be distinguished in texture from say shopping at a grocery store when hungry or attending the fiftieth birthday party of a dear friend who has read all of Kafka and had the most vivid erotic dreams of Marilyn how long would it take me to make my decision knowing this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as fantastic as scaling Mount Everest or even playing golf on the moon— I pause, deliberate, think of my life and wants, which one would I take?

How about you?

J. J. Steinfeld is a Canadian fiction writer, poet, and playwright who lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published fourteen books, including Would You Hide Me? (Stories, Gaspereau Press), An Affection for Precipices (Poetry, Serengeti Press), Misshapenness (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions), and A Glass Shard and Memory (Stories, Recliner Books). His short stories and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals internationally, and over forty of his one-act plays and a handful of full-length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States.

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Judith Terzi

Like What's Not to Like?

You'll love this sestina, I thought, my treatment of the California theme you posted. 80-mph winds ripping through jacaranda, liquidambar, twisting king palm, Chinese elm, oak. This just isn't quite right for us, you emailed. What didn't you like?

Oh, you wanted Tinseltown. You didn't like the moan and grind, wind’s one-night stand, thought Walk of Famers like Marley or Orbison more right up your alley. Next time I'll do the beach theme, ride you on the crest of a foam-capped wave, palms slapping froth, sewage and plastic spinning through red tide. (That's a whole other poem once I'm through with this one.) We'll visit Monroe — what's not to like? — in that funky L. A. version of Père Lachaise. Palmlined streets where starlets stroll will sway your every thought.

So I won't give you the we-lost-the-old-oak theme, viral fluid streaming from its trunk like b & w's oozing right out of photo booths at Rexall's in the ’50s. You dig, right?

The morning scent of chaparral will synesthesia through my poem, like you were at a rock 'n' roll-themed camp for the first time in the Hollywood Hills. Like you'll wish you had grown up in L. A. — perish the thought — when you read about Brando and me on Palm

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Drive off Sunset, Marlon in a red Triumph, me palming the wheel of a two-tone Chevy Bel-Air. He had the right of way at the stop. (He winked.) I know the thought of earthquakes scares you to hell; Heston got me through my first one — in an elevator. Thou shalt not panic. Like Charlton really said that, I swear. But the storm theme, my white-bougainvillea-tied-to-the-wood-fence theme, fence exploding into smithereens the night of the fury, palm fronds stacked like tiles on roofs, power poles split to look like trees, like exiled antlers gasping for last breaths? Not right, all those funerals for trees that didn't make it through, like refugees trudging, dropping in mud and sand. I thought you would like the nature theme, red-tail hawk flying right through the poem, its flight path not quite right after the storm. God, I thought I’d have you in my palm.

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Water Towers at a Poetry Workshop Gusts of torsos at dusk

women come and go

towering above Manhattan

dreams drenched it seems

like an encampment of soldiers

women crave truthful eye

as far as the eye can gather

leader woman stars

a reign of stars downpours

a poet is slowly sinking

fantasies into storage tanks

leader woman reins in the poet

Harlem ripples all night long

a Bronx woman shouts "facts"

nightcaps sway sweet Brooklyn

others are speechless

as hip wooden sentries

extraordinarily

swish watery hips

pushed and pulled

lined up on zaftig rooftops

across the poem

Read more of Judith Terzi’s poetry and her bionote on pages 38-39.

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Bill Dorris

Iambic Solutions As the world’s largest provider of anapestic procedures we can leverage your lyric right down to size.

Remove any lingering murmuring metrics, any primevals – trochee, spondee, or otherwise.

We’ll flush out your consonants with account-based transactions, round down your rhythms to outsourced rhymes.

Iambic your doggerel in pink pentameters.

You’ll be the full doggie diner on the night.

So free yourself from wimpling wing technologies, analoged forever in 6/8 time.

Integrate your sonnets with straight-through parameters.

Stressed, unstressed . . . whatever your dull brain perplexes We’ll minimize your risks with a full petrarchal capture, and quick the hemlock to any wild surmise.

In the words of Mr. Milton, our Senior Vice President for Spenserian Arrears, there’s no safe bets on split-vowel options, no lasting remuneration in these drowsy down times.

With the broadband overstretched and near to snapping, your only chance now for early remittance is to double your spread, and just pray to the dactyls — that like young Keats — someone stumbles across one of your handy marketing lines. (“murmuring . . . primevals” from HW Longfellow — “Evangeline” “lustrous, dull brain perplexes, hemlock, drowsy” from J Keats — “Ode to a Nightingale” “wimpling wing” from GM Hopkins — “The Windhover” “wild surmise” from J Keats — “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” “negative capability” – J Keats’ handy marketing line)

An American living in Ireland, Bill Dorris has published maybe 30 poems in US- and Irish-based, online journals, including, e.g., Three Candles, Pemmican, and The Centrifugal Eye. All of his current writing is about the same topics — IT, idiocy, and greed, usually with a couple drones tossed in . . .

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Karla Linn Merrifield

Sex and the Semicolon Whitman; Updike; Sze; and Smith— I summon my semicolon men— to this single sentence; I bid them to attend me; lift my robed lines in this, my hour of desire; I ask to weave clauses of elegant nouns and of their nimble verbs; I wish for poets the good marriage of subject and predicate in this semicolon tango (cha-cha-cha; we dip; we twirl); I pray I’ll dance again; and stay until last stanzas collapse.

Karla Linn Merrifield has had some 400 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has ten books to her credit, the newest of which are Lithic Scatter and Other Poems (Mercury HeartLink) and Attaining Canopy: Amazon Poems (FootHills Publishing). Forthcoming from Salmon Poetry is Athabaskan Fractal and Other Poems of the Far North. Her Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills) received the 2009 Eiseman Award for Poetry and she recently received the Dr. Sherwin Howard Award for the best poetry published in Weber — The Contemporary West in 2012. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye, a member of the board of directors of TallGrass Writers Guild and Just Poets (Rochester, NY), and a member of the New Mexico State Poetry Society. Visit her blog, Vagabond Poet: http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.

Read Karla’s review column on pages 74-79.

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Cultural Messages

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Paul Fisher

Forewarned The beverage you are about to enjoy is hot. It’s your right to slurp or sip, but a crime to complain if you burn your lip.

Women of child-bearing age are advised not to consume our product.

A significant number of test subjects bore lizards, a smaller percentage conceived gods.

Do not stand too close to the edge of the platform.

We provide no railing, parachute or net.

If you desire wings, order in advance.

Allow a lifetime for delivery.

You must be five feet tall to ride.

Anyone shorter is sent to bed.

Anyone taller returns minus head.

The subway’s lovely, dark and deep.

Its rats are fat as barnyard cats, and the third rail’s a hungry bitch.

Whatever you say or do will be used against you.

If you cannot afford an attorney, a baboon will be appointed.

Run for your life, but watch where you walk. If nothing else, know when to stop.

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Contemplating the F Bomb Is it kryptonite that levels Superman, or the axe that topples woods?

Does the ancient device rattle and clank from too many miles on worn-out shocks?

Will the world’s oldest cliché resuscitate your tombstone prose, jolt to life your comatose verse, or fry the stale potatoes decomposing on your stove?

If, after eons of keeping your peace, you still hear that voice commanding you to pull the pin of the hand-grenade embedded in your head, hold your breath, count to ten, save it for the day when poetry deserts you.

Make it your last, unfortunate resort, a payment to the Taliban, an offering to the Russian mob, your insanity plea in the court of God. Maybe every other lifetime, every third blue moon, once in ten trillion mother fuckin’ years.

Paul Fisher is a writer and visual artist. Born and raised in Seattle, he has lived and worked in more places around the country than he cares to think about. He attended the University of Washington, earned an MFA from New England College, and is the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Fellowship in Poetry from the Oregon Arts Commission. His first book, Rumors of Shore, won the 2009 Blue Light Book Award and was published in 2010.

Recent work appears in Crab Creek Review, Naugatuck River Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Washington State Geospatial Poetry Anthology, and in The Centrifugal Eye’s 5th-Anniversary Anthology. He currently lives in Bellingham, WA, where he is organizing an art studio and working on his second book. Paul is a regular contributor to The Centrifugal Eye.

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Kevin Acers

Digital Communication in the Dinosaur Age “I am out of the dinosaur age and got a smart phone” —seen on Facebook

I listen intently to a reconstructed dinosaur. Hearing nothing through my iPhone, I wish for a stethoscope. Dinosaur does not need one to listen to me. It hears me through the fossilized suggestions of its remains, stares me down with giant paralyzed eyes. We momentarily lock onto each other’s place in oblivion. Finally, I timidly stroke its cold toe bone with one finger. This is communication enough. Our digital connection.

Kevin Acers is a licensed clinical social worker. He lives in Oklahoma City, OK, with his wife, cat, and several potted plants. He has been a teacher, a Peace Corps volunteer, and a human rights advocate. His poetry appears in Red River Review, Illya's Honey, The Oklahoma Review, and The Prose-Poem Project. His new collection, Time Machine: Prose Poems and Vignettes, is available on Amazon.com.

Read another poem by Kevin on page 54.

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Samantha Zeitlin

LMGTFY

(“let me google that for you�)

I was joking about how Jesus would save you and you said, Not me! and I said, No really, you just have to give your heart to Jesus and you said, Not me! and I said Well that depends Do you know where your heart is?

The way we ask Google sometimes, when neither of us is sure And I know you don't believe me when I say You gotta go with whatever keeps you up at night (meaning me) but you're determined that it's something else Sugar! Caffeine!

I've been down this street with all its graffiti The truck full of art parts says Trust Your Struggle So I'm trying to trust that mine and yours will lead to sleepless nights of the good kind Not this limbo dance where we're kicking things around in circles on the ground Stuffing it all down into dark backpacks so it stays close but hidden, crumpled Could mean more than answers anyone could find on the internet

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Disassembling I sent too many things this weekend, I know And yet there were so many things I wanted to show You because I'm having trouble Adjusting to the distance, and the time-space continuum Has always deluded me into thinking More space means more time or more speed maybe Or was it that less time means more space?

So, to try to lull myself to sleep, I read some poems by our mutual friend And I want permission to call and read them to you sometime I think this should be okay because they are not love poems Although they are about being lonely, and being seen Which are not exactly the same thing as love But in this case I just want to hear your voice Coming through something other than a green Or blue colored text bubble popping up on my phone With a little blurb sound Which lets me know that you are angry Because I think what you're not saying is that you hate Assembling furniture And I'm not sure if it's because you hate the process Of the assembling, or the furniture itself Or if you hate what it means, settling into a new place Agreeing to stay, feeling slightly more nailed Down than you want to feel right now (I can imagine you feeling that way) Resenting the stuff, while it's just sitting there, trying to own you Or maybe you're having those furniture-assembling arguments Everyone has them when they've just moved They're a lot easier to have alone with yourself And a hex wrench And the wall But even when you're alone they're never really About the furniture at all The Centrifugal Eye

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Remind I want to send you something cryptic With no words Like a flower Or a photograph of something tiny Blown up out of all proportion.

There's no emoticon for riding on the train listening to songs that alternately remind me of you and that I am not allowed to miss you I want to send an origami alien or a stuffed furry octopus toy Something absurd but friendly Like watching passengers compare their Kindle devices in the row ahead of me While swapping nanny stories and laughing.

I am seated with a sleeping girl The sun going down A glass of something in my future A list of things to do None of which will remake my mind.

Samantha Zeitlin grew up in Virginia before finding home in California. She has published 15 scientific manuscripts, and multiple essays related to life as a scientist, as well as poetry in The Odyssey, The Slate, HMS Beagle, San Diego Writer's Monthly, Harrisburg Review, The Unknown Writer, and Voyage Out. Contact Sam: szeitlin@sciencegeeks.org

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Kevin Acers

Alien diplomacy The people of the other planet have two mouths where our eyes would be, and one big eye just under the nose. The eyebrow is a moustache, and the women, like some on Earth, pluck it into a fine arched curve. In sidewalk cafés they would give us a special table apart from the rest where they could view us from a distance with curiosity and bemused disgust. They find the way we put edibles into our mouths and chew to be unusual and vulgar. They do not masticate their food. Rather they stuff balls of sea-washed hair into a sort of pipe and smoke it. They make gurgling sounds as they suck on the pipe-stem with one mouth while exhaling through the other.

The smoke they’d blow was barely visible and stank like burning rubber bands. On payday the men would buy little vials of iodine and, using eyedroppers, lace the hairballs in their pipes. Each man’s stereophonic, coughing laughter would join the others in an unbearable cacophony. A random loner might sit against the wall, his head leaning slightly forward, empty bottles and droppers littering the table, his one lid grotesquely drooping over a yellow, bloodshot eye. Off-duty policemen with their sidearms still strapped to their hips would sing and laugh outrageously at nothing, making us nervous. Random groups would notice us and point with their eyedroppers or their pipes, screaming with laughter: “Aliens! Aliens! Join us in pipe!” knowing well the toxic smoke would make us retch and weep. We were ambassadors, well paid, highly valued as clowns.

Read another poem by Kevin, and his bionote, on page 50.

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The Punchline First: Round-Robin Interview continues from page 17 . . .

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When creating your poetry, how much subconscious influence do you factor into the creation of your persona's voice? Do you allow obvious miscommunication elements to factor into your work?

Breden: Yes, oh yes. Ambiguity not merely in meaning, but in how characters progress.

Eisenhart: I try to get inside my persona with imagination. As for miscommunication, I allow for double entendre, because I think it's fun.

Fisher: Maybe not “obvious miscommunication elements” but sometimes a level of calculated ambiguity, and often words with more than one meaning. I sometimes like to use words that can be read as either nouns or adjectives, and hopefully achieve a double meaning. For example, my poem, “The Boat,” ends with the words “dark whispering below,” which changes meaning depending on whether you take dark for an adjective or a noun.

Rounds: I had a poem that appeared recently and I could not recall writing it! The poem addressed things beyond what I could do through deliberate speech. The non sequitur and surrealist leanings, and surprising personas all come out of listening to the creative side of the brain. It's become the ink in the pen.

Soderling: Ideally, the muse who lives in the grotto of the subconscious will do the heavy lifting.

The Freudian slip is sometimes the most inspired phrase or the key to where the poem wants to go.

Willitts, Jr.: I tend to write in different voices, because I write a lot of “persona” poems.

Do you think writing helps you communicate more clearly than you can through speech?

Acers: The sometimes compulsive/obsessive focus on deliberate choices of phrasing in writing definitely has an impact on the way I speak. To spend time writing is to swim a bit deeper than normal in the realm of language, and that spills over into spoken language, whether it's expressed through word choice or the use of metaphors or mental editing — or, conversely, saying “screw the editing” and indulging in a verbal gushing forth, artfully or otherwise.

Balistreri: Yes, because writing it down often tells me what I really think — it’s more conclusive.

Breden: Sometimes. It allows fact-based info to be delivered efficiently, but doesn't deal as well with my stocks-in-trade of humour, sarcasm, and affection.

Eisenhart: Yes. I THINK before I write; not always true of speaking.

Fisher: Yes. Writing can be revised before it’s released. Once spoken, words cannot be retrieved and become part of the atmosphere forever. This is important to me because I disagree with Ginsberg’s often quoted, “First thought, best thought.” In my case, inspiration rarely gets it right the first time. It’s usually “first thought, worst thought.” I’m still working at poems I began years ago.

Leggett: If by communication you mean the use of words — definitely. Time is the reason. I try to be careful, exacting, thorough, humorous — even in run-of-the-mill emails; this is facilitated by writing. In person, however, one has a universe more at one's disposal than words.

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Powderly: I was just reading Einstein’s Space & VanGogh’s Sky by Lawrence Leshan and Henry Margenau. One of the things they point out is that scientists have not yet begun to “map” the creative process, or many mental processes for that matter, because we’ve never developed a specific language for them, as for instance, we have for physics. We use metaphors to communicate many emotional states and moments of creative discovery. When we use them, which I don’t do in speech terribly often, they seem to work well as emotive communication tools.

In that area, I think I can say more with metaphor than with simple speech.

Soderling: I do think written communication sometimes can be superior to oral communication, because one can always retract that unfortunate word choice which, when spoken, flies straight to its destination and returns only to roost. A writer attempts to compensate loss of body language, loss of intonation by selecting among nuances of synonyms. (One hopes the reader is using the same dictionary).

Willitts, Jr.: I am used to public speaking. I am an oral storyteller, and I used to be a workshop trainer. I have talked to crowds from 20 people to over 2,000. You have to be a good communicator, have a good topic, and try to make the information interesting. When I tell stories from memory, I do not need anything written. When I give a workshop, I need a few random notes to help me to focus so I do not lose my place. When I write poems, I do not memorize them, so I rely on scanning as I read aloud. I can see a whole line in a glance. I tend to think my poems need to be seen, so I try to break up a reading with antidotes, mini-stories, and other things to get people to realize when I am moving on.

Zeitlin: Yes. Being able to see what I'm saying, and edit it, is helpful. The format of poetry allows emphasis and innuendo and layers in ways that prose and typical conversation do not.

What’s your favorite way to express yourself without words?

Acers: I am a cat person. My wife and I meow a lot.

Alfredson: Do you really need to ask?

Balistreri: Before losing my hearing, it was music.

Breden: Dance.

Crook: Silly faces.

Eisenhart: Facial expression.

Fisher: Not sure if I have a favorite. Maybe silence.

Leggett: Depends on the situation. A silent, baleful stare can work wonders, but I also play a pretty mean harmonica.

Merrifield: Smiles. Hugs. More smiles. And I hope a twinkle in my eyes with heaping helpings of laughter.

Powderly: With my face — I’ve learned it will show what I’m feeling anyway, so I just try to use that well.

Soderling: I'm sorry to confess that I do a lot of grimacing and face-pulling. I also use my hands a lot.

Willitts, Jr.: I am fluent in sign language. I also am a visual artist.

Zeitlin: Eye contact and a slight head tilt.

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“Mental” verb tense is rarely articulated as a point of conflict (or attraction, for that matter), yet we know people who predominantly live in the past, or spend their time preparing for the future, or bungee-jump off bridges to heighten the moment. Do you have a dominant tense? Do the themes/subjects of your poetry have them?

Acers: Time is slippery. As an over-50 fellow, I tend to dwell a lot on memories (real or imagined), but in doing so I firmly stand in the present, mentally. That is to say that the moment of the past to which my mind transports becomes my present reality as if I have made use of a time machine. (I have explored this very theme in my collection released earlier this year, entitled Time Machine: Prose Poems & Vignettes.) Paradoxically, I mentally entrench myself in the present regardless of what tense I write in of my visits to the various temporal zones. Perhaps this is delusional, or possibly just rotten grammar.

Alfredson: I am not sure I look at it in that way. Sure, many of us do live in the past or the what might have been, and others dwell in the future, or fantasizing about the future or in a worry-stew about it. This, of course is daydream, and not living in the moment that is here. But of course, reflection about the past or planning and deliberate projection into the future can be very valuable in the present-moment mind activities. From the viewpoint of a creative artist, such activities can be the stuff of our creativity, just as much as springing off from some external event. And reflection on our past is also a method for self-assessment and taking stock, a tool for personal growth. It is the getting lost in the past or the future that is unhealthy and unprofitable.

A mind-event, the arising of a mind-object, a thought or memory is as much a part of our sensory experience as impingement on our consciousness by external objects, a sight or a sound or an odor. And equally, these experiences through any nor several of the six senses can be the stuff of our poetry or other writing, so long as we are skilled enough to evoke that event and lend it significance.

And yes, I have written poems about this getting caught up in the past and not letting it go. An example I can refer you to is a poem, “Ch’an pictures I, ” based on a Zen story, and one that I recently had published online here: http://www.dovesandserpents.org/wp/2013/03/51-psaltery-lyre-murray-alfredson-two-poems/

Balistreri: I try and live in the present but my poems are equally past and present.

Crook: My poetry tends towards the rather tenseless. Perhaps this is because I tend to write more about ideas than events.

Eisenhart: I try to live in the "now," though past and future are unavoidable. I do think of future effects of what I want to say and try to avoid offending (most of the time).

Leggett: My favorite blues songwriter is Percy Mayfield, aka "The Poet Laureate of the Blues." Late in his life he made a number of live recordings that are at once devastating and hilarious. He had a glorious way of using the repetition inherent in most blues lyrics, the stating of a thing and then repeating it with the first chord change. Most all of those live recordings of Percy's are of slow blues — and I mean slow. Percy will sing a line, and wait for what seems like an eternity (though he might cough out an aggrieved chuckle at the situation he's describing). Then into that verbal canyon he'll drawl, "I said..." and then he'll wait some more. Finally, when that chord change rolls around, he'll repeat the line, and maybe tender an additional comment, such as, "That's a cold shot, ain't it?" Then he'll wait some more, as the band with agonized patience brings it back to the root chord and starts climbing up the turnaround. Then will come the conclusion The Centrifugal Eye

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Percy has reached, which, if we've lived at all, will knock us to the floor. But that "I said..." accomplishes so much. For one, it's a declarative that demands our ongoing attention to the story he's telling. (It's not as though we didn't hear him the first time.) But it also plays around with tense, because he'll say "I said..." regardless of when the story he's telling actually happened, and regardless of what tense the lyrics proper are in. Spookiest, though, is that the time that elapses between the initial statement, his saying "I said..." and the repetition, gives me the sensation that the " I said..." could be utterly disembodied, as though Percy's consciousness is hovering far above both the story and his telling of it, and as though the " I said..." applies to both — applies to his story, his song, and for that matter his career, his whole life.

Here's Percy playing with time: I woke up this mornin Got me a jug, and I laid back down (Chuckles — because everyone in the club he's playing is cracking up laughing)

I said I woke up this mornin Got me a jug, and I laid back down I was searchin' for the future But the blues was all I found

For myself, I almost never phrase things with the future in mind. I'm fairly straightforward about tense, I think. Most all my poems are worked up from journaling sessions, which I call "site readings," and are pretty strongly rooted in the present, even if, as with my poem, " Word-ofMouth," they are eventually nudged into the past for the sake of storytelling ease.

Powderly: depends on what I’m writing. The bad-family poems of course run toward past tense.

When I’m writing a lyric narrative (my favorite) on another topic, I try to keep it in the present, but sometimes find past tense works better.

Renstrom: One of my goals when writing poems (some poems, not all) is to "capture a moment."

This often involves writing about a past event in the present tense, a case of "living in the moment" meets retrospection. But the poet must be true to the past event in order to capture its essence.

When it works it can be sublime, but it doesn't always work.

Soderling: I like to think that I live in the here and now, but that is probably only what I want to think. As one ages, as the past comes to greatly outweigh the future measured in terms of years, one does reflect and compare the present with what has been. I think the common phrase for that is "to draw on experience." Most certainly, I draw on the past in my writing — not that I often use a narrative past tense, but I frequently take a particular incident and make up a whole new tale around it, one which transpires in real time.

Willitts, Jr.: I live in the temporary and write about the temporary. I am an organic gardener, so it takes time to grow from seed, plant, water, weed, until harvest, and then you repeat the next year.

Gardening makes me see things from the ground up, respecting the land and resources, and see things from birth to death. I see the way nature and God work together to have certain plants on different time tables, some successful and some failing, and how I have to attend to the garden like

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I used to attend to my family, by nurturing. I use these ideas in my poetry. I often say, “Put Love in; get Love out”. Too many people put anger in, and then they are amazed when they get anger in return. I also say, “Forgiveness is the hardest thing, but it is the only thing worth doing.”

Poets are often drawn to a non-linguistic companion art (e.g., music, visual arts, math). Are you?

To what extent does your companion art influence the poetry you read or write? Some of the biggest battles in poetry among its champions seem to revolve around the companion arts we choose (or fail to choose) — such as the image-driven poem, for example, that pays scant attention to musicality, and vice versa. Do you have a position?

Alfredson: An interesting question, though I find the way it is couched limiting.

I suppose there are two ways in which we can be influenced by another art. The most obvious way is to draw our poetic stimulus from a work in another art or our response to it, as when we write about a painting or a musical work. For example, I have sprung a poem off from listening to Händel’s Royal fireworks suite, a poem though it reflects the grandezza of the music, its strings and winds, is in fact about the fact that I could listen to that almost 300 hundred years after it was written, and halfway around the world from London. Likewise, I could (though I have not) spring a poem from a single daub of paint with which Rembrandt created the illusion of his bulbous nose in a self-portrait housed in Melbourne.

But you refer to the use of images in a poem as akin to the visual arts, and perhaps the rhythm, rhyme and other soundplay a poet builds into his language molding as akin to music. And yes, the kinship is there. I often reflect on the musical analogy to various prosodic games, the departures from strict meter for example as akin to syncopation, a tension between the expected and the actual. The analogies can break down, but they have point. And some poetry can be almost or entirely devoid of image, as are some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and a little poem in Asclepiadic form, by Hölderlin, Das Unverzeihliche (The unforgivable), poems of pure sentiment of feeling thought. And others these days are strong in image but very weak in rhythm or other musical qualities. The two, however, are not mutually exclusive, not by a long chalk. The best poetry so often combines aspects of each of those other arts, just as dance is both visual and musical. The polarity is useful as a thinking tool, but ought not be driven too far. Like all other constructs, both public and private, it has a limited range of convenience (to use George Kelly’s principle). I personally prefer to draw on both realms of thought.

Last, I could say that I find the notion of “image” in writing (prose or poetry) goes well beyond the range of the visual. Image suggests or evokes experience, sensory experience in general, especially if one takes mind as the sixth sense. Thus an odor evoked, a sound, a sight (form or color), a body experience (touch, feeling of hot or cold, itch, etc.), taste, or a thought (think of Hamlet’s sudden “perchance to dream”  all these and more can be images.

Hence I would argue that the polarity neither a necessary one, nor sufficient.

Balistreri: Music and art are big contributors to my writing. I don’t believe I’d be writing without the music that was part of my identity from a very young age.

Crook: I like genuine poem/visual hybrids but only when they are genuine hybrids . . . with both the linguistic and visual representation needed to grasp what the poem is about. Such poems are not just comments on a visual work or something inspired by it. They genuinely employ nonlinguistic sources of information.

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Dorris: Songwriting and guitar flatpicking were strong interests of mine some years back . . .hence rhythm and rhyme . . . and not surprisingly, these are often central to my poetry writing.

Eisenhart: I love art and have a daughter who is a painter . . . so I'm very aware of the visual. However, I consider myself a very verbal person and attempt to paint word-pictures in my poems.

Fisher: Visual art and music were my first loves. I credit my love of musicality in language, and what I think is a good ear for rhythm and sound, to years of violin lessons while growing up, and credit my love of images and other visual aspects of poems to my training, teaching, and practice of visual arts, including painting and ceramics. I resisted poetry for a long time, probably because of the way it was taught by my old-school English teachers, and because, in the blue-collar environment of my childhood, it was considered a “girlish” activity, not suitable for boys. However, when I was fortunate enough to enroll in an undergraduate creative writing course taught by a former amateur boxing champion, I was cured of that misconception forever.

Graham: As a kid I wanted to be a visual artist; I was always drawing or painting. Poetry didn't call me until the 10th grade. A year later I discovered and fell in love with classical music, but I have no musical understanding or talent. So poetry is what I do. I'm always aware of design (the look of the poem on the page) and music (the sounds and flow of the lines) as I compose my poems.

Leggett: Music. For one, as subject matter: a significant portion of the poems I've had published are explicitly about music, be they ruminations on compositions, artists, or snapshots of gigs. Some of those poems, and many others not overly concerned with music itself, were begun with journaling while listening to music. I'm not a guy who has music playing all the time, either; I'm quite particular about the soundscape in my living space. I have a decades-old radio plugged into a kitchen wall to hear the jazz station while I cook; I have that station on my headphones for walking to and fro, and also for journaling sessions on my balcony. I mentioned my divorce earlier — I survived it with whiskey, journaling and jazz. My iTunes library comes in handy from time to time as well; it comprises no less than my history in song.

My position is that what gets you going is what you go with, be it your ears, eyes, nose, fingers. I posit as much more in regard to, say, arguments made by Wallace Stevens in regard to "temperament," than to the academic realm of literary movements or schools, to which I am not really qualified to speak.

Powderly: My theory of poetics, if I have one, recognizes that poetry began with the ancient bards of pre-writing societies. Their poems were necessarily musical for mnemonic purposes, and poems that are not musical read to me as rather flat. The beauty of language, for me, is in its rhythms and musics. The reason I love Van Gogh’s work so well is that I “hear his voice” in his later works’ brush strokes, and it is wild and rhythmic in my ear.

Soderling: Though not a musician or visual artist, I am much influenced by both art forms. I try to sing and paint through my writing. I actively use paintings as a trigger when I can't get going.

Terzi: I don't think I have a fixed position. For me, personally, music plays an important role in my poetry. Maybe not especially in the three poems included in this issue, but usually. For example, I recently wrote a sonnet about being a stepmother and used Lady Gaga's Bloody Mary to establish a beat. I also used a line from the song.

Willitts, Jr.: I write a lot of poems based on art. I have a forthcoming full-length collection based on Impressionistic painters and paintings, “Art Is an Impression of What an Artist Sees” (Edgar & Lenore's Publishing House). I also make visual art out of paper cut-outs. I tend to think of my The Centrifugal Eye

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poems as being like paintings, in that I want two different people to see one poem two different ways. I hope that these readers will go back and see something different the next time. I do not know if these things happen, but it is a goal.

Many writers incorporate foreign words and phrases in their poems for various reasons. For example, Max Early, a Laguna Puebloan poet, writes in English, yet many of his poems reflect on a word in his Native American language as a way of perpetuating that endangered language among his tribe as well as for non-Native readers. TCE contributing poet Kitty Jospé sometimes sprinkles French words among her lines, adding both depth of character to the speaker, and sonic contrast. Do you ever summon foreign words to your poems? How does it further communication with your readers?

Acers: There is a certain je ne sais quoi about texturing up a poem with non-English phrases. It can be disorienting at times, which in itself is not a bad effect if that's the desired outcome. It can be decorative, and at times it can be humorous. Generally I prefer it to be organic to the poem, not a gimmick. When I write about eating lunch at the side of a road on the outskirts of a city in Laos as stray goats wander by, for example, I use the local names for the food. To translate them would be imprecise. The context demonstrates the general meaning clearly enough, if written carefully.

If a word or phrase is unfamiliar to the reader, well, that is a part of the experience the poem conveys, because to the poem's narrator there is also much that is unfamiliar in that moment being described. The words that we know from the human families of language are part of our verbal repertoire, colors on the palette.

Balistreri: Not often. It doesn’t come naturally for me.

Breden: Writing in (British) English I would find it impossible to omit foreign interlopers. They're as much part of the language as any domestic squatters.

Dorris: I’ve written poems/songs which combine English with Irish (Gaeilge), but only for the craic for simple reason that unlike, e.g. French, which is widely known among poets, Gaeilge is virtually unknown and most times the pronunciation can only be sussed if the Irish words are used in such a way as to make their pronunciation obvious because of a rhyme within the poem. Compare these commonly used French and Irish phrases: bonjour vs. Dia daoibh; au revior vs slán go fóill.

Craic, by the way, means “fun,” and is pronounced “crack.”

Eisenhart: I rarely insert a foreign word unless it is so common that it's understood by most readers. If I use them, I hope to portray the poem's persona more clearly.

Fisher: I don’t have any philosophical problem with using foreign words, but seldom employ them myself, and when I do, I try to make their meaning clear in the text of the poem. I’m sometimes irritated when I feel a poet is trying to impress me with how smart, well-traveled or well-read he/she is. If I’m sent to footnotes or to the dictionary too many times, I might not return to the poem.

Leggett: For me, in practice, it is a matter of flavoring, specificity and sometimes whimsy. I've sent out portions of that huge unpublishable Puerto Vallarta poem: one of them is set on PV's gorgeous bayside promenade, the Malencón (which word is in the poem's title); is written in an ancient Irish verse form called rannaigheacht mhor; and contains the French word allons, which I learned while working in a production of The School for Scandal — which is set in London and was written by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, an Irishman. That's all a little dizzying, but allons seemed to The Centrifugal Eye

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me the perfect gesture for the poem, and I had no equivalent in English to match its particular sonic elegance. Furthermore, the whole PV poem centers on the rootlessness inherent both in traveling far afield and in divorce — each section of it is in a different form, so even the prosody is restless; I found that whole menagerie of cultural strains to be appealing and truthful.

Merrifield: I can think of no reason not to avail myself of foreign words or phrases in a poem. Grant it, such usage shouldn’t be gratuitous, and I try to make every effort in the poem to let context provide the reader with access to the word(s). It’s a small world getting smaller and language is alive, so yesterday’s “foreign” word is today’s word of the day. If I use the word “Grossmutter” in a poem, I’m summoning my Austrian grandmother from the past to be alive with me in the present. And, like Jospé, I’m a French speaker, so French words often slip into my lines. Beautiful, musical words that deepen the poem! And quite frequently, I avail myself of Latin to clearly identify a species I’m depicting in a poem. Some of my most delightful composition surprises come when I turn to a field guide to find the Latin binomial for a creature. Not only are the syllables of the twinned words pleasing, but often knock my socks off. To think that a five-lined skink (a type of lizard) is in Linnaean parlance known as Eumences inexpectatus. To see one lurking in the woods, its yellow stripes glaring, is indeed to meet the unexpected.

Terzi: This is a thorny issue. I use a lot of French and Spanish words in my work. I'm fluent in French and mediocre in Spanish and dream in three languages. Some of my poems which use quite a bit of Spanish are about Mexico or South America or Southern California where I live. How do the foreign words further communication with my readers? I don't know, honestly. Perhaps their inclusion is an impediment to comprehension. So many American English speakers do not speak a foreign language and seem intimidated. Especially today, with budget cuts in education, foreign language is one of the first disciplines to get chopped. At readings, I translate the words.

It happens; you’re giving a reading and when the Q&A moment arrives, a reader/auditor makes an observation about one of your poems that seems to come out of nowhere. It can be a pleasant surprise — she’s seen something in the poem you haven’t seen, didn’t realize was there in the lines. Or a reader completely misinterprets the poem and reads into it a nefarious meaning (e.g., sexism, racism) where no such meaning exists. Have you ever had either one of these scenarios unfold? How did you react?

Balistreri: I had a response that inferred racism in one of my poems in a workshop. It startled me, and I said that wasn’t my intention, and then asked to hear more from the person who said it. And then asked the others what they thought. In the end, I just thanked the person [who brought it up] and said I would seriously think about it.

Eisenhart: I've had mostly positive feedback, though I've been asked "what made you write that poem?" When presented with the thought behind it, the listener response has been positive and a good conversation followed.

Merrifield: I vividly recall a moment last year at a workshop session when one perceptive reader pointed to a word in my poem, “‘Magic Psalm’ Redux.doc,” about Allen Ginsburg’s travels in Amazonia. The climax of the poem is “A scream.” She thought it was a “marvelously sly allusion” to Ginsburg’s great poem, “Howl.” I had no idea I’d incorporated the reference and was immensely delighted by her insight. And grateful.

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On the other hand, more recently, an editor of a journal I’d made my first submission to responded to my trio of the poems addressing his theme for the issue with great disdain, proclaiming their shocking language and imagery as “over-the-top.” “Shock value has no place in poetry,” he declared from his high pedestal. He totally missed the point about the violence of grief and a molestation victim’s rage. In the end, I “won.” I wrote a nifty poem about the uses of shock in poetry . . . and those rejected poems have since found homes to my satisfaction. But I still warm and color to his condescending and dictatorial response.

Soderling: Oh, yes, I have had listeners approach me afterward and been aware that what they saw in the poem wasn't what I thought I'd put there. A differing interpretation is perfectly valid, as far as I am concerned. Once I send the poem out into the world, it belongs to the reader. Despite dictionaries, I think it is rare that two persons agree exactly what a single word might mean. Each person always adds connotative elements to the denotative meaning. Why then should we expect our readers to give a poem exactly the meaning that the writer thought she gave it? It is a different matter if you are writing a technical manual for a nuclear-power-plant control room, or a checklist for airline pilots. It's one thing to write/understand "Pull the lever slowly until the two dial points coincide," and another to write: "I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill."

Willitts, Jr.: I have had both happen to me. It is a surprise either way. Furthermore, it is a surprise they were able to focus on a poem/image out of all the other poems/images. Even a misunderstanding can lead to an interesting discussion, because I have had another audience member support my poem. I have also had discussions over one poem where the entire audience disagreed with each other over the meaning of one of my poems.

What is the most annoying communication quirk you’ve had to deal with in somebody else?

Balistreri: A fellow who rubbed his nose every time he was making a point. And he was always making a point.

Breden: Inquisitive inflection. Everything is not a question.

Crook: The urge to repeat. I repeat: the urge to repeat.

Eisenhart: Persons who want me to write "a novel" into the poem and are unwilling to do the work of thinking about what the message is.

Fisher: That would definitely be the use of the word “like” to begin every phrase.

Leggett: In conversation, because I prefer to take care and employ precision with my language, I am not always the quickest of speakers, and I rather abhor the feeling of impatience I occasionally get from those who operate faster, circling like sharks to finish my sentences.

Powderly: The lack of honesty when people speak — say what you mean, tactfully if you can, but say it regardless of how you think I will perceive it.

Willitts, Jr.: I dislike when someone explains the entire poem before reading, reads the poem, and then explains it again, especially when it is not a workshop on how the poet writes their poem. I have heard some truly dreadful poem explained like the poem was the Holy Grail of poetry. I do not want to break their self-delusion.

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If you have kids, do you think you do a better job of relating to them than your parents did to you?

If you don’t have kids, do you think you can relate better to kids, in general, than your parents can/did relate to you?

Balistreri: Yes; and probably not in the long run. We just make different mistakes. But I’ve always related to kids, taught them for years before having them. I like playing with them.

Eisenhart: Yes; my mother gave directions rather than having a 2-way conversation. My Dad was better at communicating and much better at listening. I've tried to listen to my kids’ pointsof-view and then respond. I'm willing to negotiate.

Powderly: I don’t have kids. I don’t relate to them especially well, because I decided at an early age to not make the mistakes my parents made with me and my siblings, so I skipped the whole mother experience altogether. I’ve never been around enough children to develop much of a style of communication with them.

Soderling: Yes; it is a fact of life that every parent thinks he or she is doing a better job raising the kids than his/her parents did. This is brought home to me almost daily.

Have you ever had a “secret language” that you or a friend invented and used (alone or together)?

Fisher: Not really a language, just a word. “Gronga.” We would say it in certain circumstances to make ourselves laugh. I don’t remember if it ever had a real meaning.

Willitts, Jr.: Quakers have a lot of special language in their religion, and as a Quaker I find myself explaining the different meanings we use. I tell other Quakers to be careful with the special language because it might turn-off the listener. When this happens it feels like “I’m in with the In-Crowd.”

Zeitlin: Yes. My best friend Joelle Bartoe and I had a made-up language at one point in elementary school. It was written and had a whole alphabet. I think we were inspired by an assignment to look up the origin of our names, and I got an idea from my artistic greatgrandmother, Daisy Zeitlin, who signed her paintings "DAZY.” My first name was translated from Arabic and my last name was translated from Russian, so I started playing with using Arabic and Russian letters to develop a code for my name. Then we started using our "language" to pass notes in class.

Some unrequited love stories (with people, animals, objects) are funny, others tragic. There’s something very 6th-grade about most of them; imaginations that seem both under- and overstimulated at once. Love seems to involve as much or more body language than words. Is it just the body (or hormones) momentarily overtaking the mind or do you think something else is at work?

Acers: Even something as "simple" as a hormonal highjacking can be nuanced with emotional authenticity (although it isn't always). The dimensions of attraction are sticky ones. They arise, converge, and stick to each other to the point of being indistinguishable. Physical excitement, perceived compatibility, urges of neediness, intuitive appreciation, easy delight, inspiration to hope, randy impulses, a sense of feasibility, tender affection, possessiveness, curiosity, admiration of character, ad infinitum — they glom together into one intriguing and often The Centrifugal Eye

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uncomfortably hungry readiness to connect. The results can be widely varied, as the history of poetry and other literature illustrates. When it turns out to be unrequited, it may not be inaccurate to describe it as 6th-grade. But to do so dismissively is to forget how startlingly vivid and important love in the 6th grade can be.

Balistreri: I think there’s more to it than just hormones. Sometimes there’s regrets, often something was left unfinished. Since we’re mind, body, spirit, I think unrequited love is more complex than one single thing.

Eisenhart: I think it often happens because the speaker needs attention and believes that is the avenue toward it.

Leggett: I saw Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown in concert once, and during a somewhat lengthy disquisition on the subject, he remarked, "Love ain't nothin' but a misunderstanding between two fools." The astrologer Robert Hand defines romantic love as "a temporary narcotic state produced by people projecting onto others the creations of their own minds." What makes me remember these is what it is in them that tickles me — the words "fools" and "narcotic." The wisdom, of course, lies in the rest of what they say, which I can as easily and gleefully forget as any sixth grader on the rolls.

Powderly: I would not dare to answer this question, given that I’ve had numerous relationships yet am alone today.

Willitts, Jr.: I write a lot about Love. I have published a lot of poems about Love. My poem in this issue is essentially a Love poem. I keep approaching Love from different angles, even lack of Love, or break-ups, or divorce. It all comes back to Love and how we Love, and if we Love completely or ignore Love.

Our Round-Robin participants are: Kevin Acers Murray Alfredson Mary Jo Balistreri William Breden Seth Crook Bill Dorris Gail Eisenhart Paul Fisher Taylor Graham

Charles Leggett Karla Linn Merrifield Colleen Powderly Vincent Renstrom Nathaniel S. Rounds Janice D. Soderling Judith Terzi Martin Willitts, Jr. Samantha Zeitlin

Interview Editors: Eve Anthony Hanninen, Maureen Kingston, Karla Linn Merrifield & David-Glen Smith

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Essay By Erik Richardson

&

Reviews By Karla Linn Merrifield

& Laury A. Egan

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Into the Labyrinth:

Life as Narrative— Bring Your Own Protagonist into Sharper Focus

By Erik Richardson

Strange to stop and realize how much writers know about making an interesting character and an exciting story and how little they apply that knowledge to their own lifestories. There is a strong tradition in psychology showing that thinking of your life as a kind of story you are writing is exactly the way to go — improving everything from your motivation to your fashion sense to your ability to communicate clearly and persuasively with others.

To help set the stage, we need to take a quick tour through the tradition and theories that have gone into this model. The keystone is Alfred Adler, the landmark Austrian psychologist. He was greatly influenced by his long professional association with Freud. The elements that allowed him to develop his own distinctive theory came from the influence of a lesser-known German thinker, Hans Vaihinger, and to even larger extent, from Friedrich Nietzsche.

Building on the work of these thinkers, psychology has continued to develop and flesh out this approach to health and happiness, and a number of modern thinkers and clinical practitioners are carrying the approach forward. The resulting body of research has helped us to understand more fully that we are inevitably engaged in an ongoing effort to mold a meaningful life narrative to give our lives a sense of unity and purpose. Only by being conscious of this process and plugging in our creativity can we succeed.

Let us look at how our knowledge of good storytelling can help us bring a greater sense of meaning and narrative unity to each of our lives, and in the process, change the shape and outcome of the story of our lives by helping us succeed in the battles and quests that are (or will be) part of our plot.

Accept the Character Arc It might seem that the first element in this approach to creating a hero’s journey for yourself would be to settle on a character. However, the reality of our own existential mode of being means that we will stall out at this stage for an indefinite amount of time. In fact, that is exactly what has happened to the vast majority of contemporary society. They are stuck not being sure which character to pick because they think they somehow get just one choice for now and for all future time.

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Instead, just start with (and return often to visit) the realization that the protagonist of your story will change over time. If she does not, then your story has grown stale and the readers — including you — will lose interest.

Settle on a Character Relativism runs rampant in our post-modern culture, and some people continue to overexaggerate the range of things we can choose or change. There is, however, growing research to support the idea that each of us has a kind of acorn of potential within us — a pattern of our unique individual personality. This is something beyond our hardwired nature or our familysociety nurture. It gives us a basis for developing our protagonist in terms of “who we really are” and “who we were meant to be.” Some of you will want to argue about the idea that we each have a true nature already inside of us, I know. I understand the temptation. Let’s bracket that, because if you have to solve all the philosophy before you write your book, you’ll never write the book.

You won’t even manage to settle on a solid character until part way through the story. For now, dig down and put together a character description of the person you most wish you were. Not someone it would be “kind of cool” to be like. Not someone of whom you would merely say, “I’ve always thought I would like that.” Not, “oh, that would be fun.” This is a profound, moving, substantive person. This is someone you would pass over all the other books on all the other shelves to see how their story turns out. Try asking yourself what kind of amazing person you most wish your daughter, or grandson, would grow up to be. Of course, you need to pick one character to focus on. We all have a mix of characters running around in our heads, a less-cool “fellowship of the ring,” composed of the voices of teachers, our first boss, our parents, on and on (and on). Trust me, trying to write a book by committee won’t go well for you. You can have some advisors. You can have other characters in your adventure group. There has to be a decision maker, though — a party leader. Decide if you are Gandalf, or a hobbit, or Arwen. Whoever.

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Take on a Quest No conflict, no story. It’s as simple as that. Yes, there are all kinds of novels with all kinds of quests. Stay with me, though, as I’m leaning on some foundations of specific theorists and specific areas of research. To make the best kind of lifestory — one that provides the struggle we need to grow, one that gives an opportunity to collaborate with others and to fulfill our deeply-rooted drive to contribute to the common good — you need to pick an external quest in the real world as the center of your (personal) storyline.

But what if you just want to live out a peaceful, quiet life in the Shire? Then you are choosing a life with less happiness, growth, and connectedness than you think. Theory and therapy results show that you are stunting yourself and, at some point, there will be loss and regret. I don’t mean to say you have to be the one to physically run off to Mordor to destroy the ring or the one to lead armies into battle or carry protest signs on the picket lines. Those might not be your greatest talents. Faramir wasn’t a warrior, his dad’s nut-case issues aside, and trying to be one went really badly for him.

Given your talents and your experiences, though, you need to make sure you pick a quest that is hard to achieve. If it does not challenge you and force you to grow, you will not find the satisfaction of triumph along the way, you will not help people or move the world forward, and your story will, in the end, be really lame.

Put the Quest at the Center The rest of your story — subplots, key decisions along the timeline, recruitment/ collaboration with other characters — should be organized around and driven by the quest.

Consider the myriad ways that the average person fails in this regard. Three hours of sit-coms and reality shows on television every night before ambling off to bed to start the process all over again the next day does not move you toward Mordor. (Yes, your quest might be, say, the thoughtful critique and satirization of contemporary television in order to displace it from the center of our lives. This is obviously not the case for the vast majority of people burning away their intellects in front of the long infomercial for apathy).

Aside from organizing your time and energies around the quest, you also need to frame your literal storytelling around it. How do you characterize your daily work in relation to your quest? This is certainly true in talking about your work to others, but keep in mind that it is also true in your self-talk. If you find it hard to convince yourself that you are really helping people or moving the world forward, or that you are really leveraging your greatest talents in the service of your greatest passions, then the readers do not want to wallow in that, they want you to fix it. If the hero in your story is trapped in the mines of Moria, there is only a certain amount of time they will stay with the story while your character wanders around and around in the dark getting depressed and trying to comfort themselves. (There is a reason that there is not a book about the hundreds of years Gollum lived in the caves.)

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Hone Your Craft Another element to consider is that even if all those things are present in a story, the book might still suck if it’s poorly written. Does your Gandalf talk like a dwarf all the time? Does he engage in false modesty and pretend to be a simple, folksy hobbit when people turn to him for help? The language, the choice of metaphors, the style of your storytelling should grow organically out of the decisions and realizations about who you are — who your character is.

Now, in addition to the actual speaking, there are other elements to making the story fit together that many of us neglect in our daily lives. That is the variety of things that we think of as setting and props and costumes. No, I’m not suggesting that most of us ought to be dressing up like elves to go to work every day. (Though, hey, if you can make it work, and that’s you, rock on.) All of those areas of our lives are kind of the non-verbals of our storytelling. Should the elves’ Rivendell look and feel different than the hobbits’ Shire? Of course it should. It would make for an ambiguous and hard-to-engage story element if the style and architecture and music of Rivendell weren’t a good fit for how the elves who live there are described. What story is your scenery creating for you and your audience?

Yes, we are more complex in some ways than characters in a story. You don’t have to be a one-man quest, and your house or your actual writing or your wardrobe doesn’t have to have only one aesthetic theme, and so on. Remember, though, the point about having a clear leader of the group: The scenery and style in which you surround yourself every day serves to either reinforce who you are, the character you most deeply want and would love to be, or it muddles and muddies your sense of what you are about.

Avoid Cliché A part of that theory about having a kind of acorn down inside that will unfold and grow as you bring your life and your story in line with it is that it is unique. That means if you are falling into the same patterns and same plotlines as lots of other people around you, then you’re not being true to yourself. It also means you and your other readers will find your story common and trite.

At that point, you start to move from being one of the diverse characters in Lord of the Rings, like Elrond, to being one of the many redundant Agent Smiths in The Matrix.

Quest and Character Are Connected Each good protagonist needs a defining struggle, and that struggle helps to drive the heroine’s development. Imagine Frodo without the quest to destroy the ring or Aragorn without his hope to restore the line of the kings of Gondor. The real world is full of examples, too. Think of the people we wish we were more like, think of the figures we know and learn about — the ones The Centrifugal Eye

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who have made it onto the stage of our collective consciousness: Gandhi’s push for Indian independence, Curie’s quest to unlock the secrets of radioactivity.

If it does not feel like your quest and your character are connected (by “connected” I mean that you are growing the direction you most wanted and hoped, you are challenged, you are passionate about the goals, etc.), then that probably means you are either on the wrong quest or you are doing it the wrong way. In both cases here, “wrong” means merely that something is not in harmony with your unique nature. You either need to change the way you’re tackling the goals of the adventure, or you need to change which monster you’re fighting against.

Don’t Obsess A brief overview of how to combine some of the progress in modern psychology with some of your talents as a writer is just that: a brief overview. It should help you reframe the way you think about issues, and it should also help you to create a more integrated, holistic, and interesting style — both lifestyle and communication style. However, there are a wide variety of ways you could overdo it.

One of those would be to become obsessive. Just stop and think about how it would make a weaker story if there weren’t friendships, romance, side trips, and subplots along the way. Please don’t misunderstand and swing your life too far in the other direction — toward being only about your single, main quest. Give yourself recesses and days off. Spend some time helping other people along the way on their own quests. Take a vacation here and there. Play. Definitely play.

The last key danger I’ll mention is to be mindful that happiness is not always the same as happiness. What I mean is that feeling cheerful-happy all the time is not the goal and is not likely to be true if you are living out a life that will make you fulfilled-happy along the way. If it’s a hard quest, then parts of it will make you cry real tears, maybe throw real keyboards out of real windows. As strange as it sounds, Nietzsche and those influenced by his thought argue that it is deep in our wiring, deep in our spirits, that we need suffering to overcome. If the monsters you battle don’t really scare you and the wounds of mistakes don’t really hurt, then you are playing below your skill level. Your character won’t grow, your readers (and you) won’t care much, and you will not get to fulfilled-happy at the end.

Now, take the idea and go have some fun with it.

Erik Richardson lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his family and assorted pets. The whole group is a tangle of dandelions in the middle of the suburban lawnscape (and takes pride in that). In addition to teaching math and science while attending grad school in psychology, he coaches several robotics teams and runs a small consulting business with his wife. Erik is a regular contributor to The Centrifugal Eye.

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Merrifield’s Tao of Poetry:

The “punch[line] of treachery”

By Karla Linn Merrifield

Jugularity Chris Crittenden Stonesthrow Poetry / Lazarus Media LLC Online / 114 pgs $3.99 (Kindle Edition)

Welcome to the 21st Century’s dark side, lit by the fires of an inferno in which poet (and The Centrifugal Eye contributor) Chris Crittenden envisions both man and his fellow creatures with “claws and fangs / attacking each other” (“Under A Bed”). I can think of no other contemporary book of poetry that so completely embodies the Zeitgeist of our era of drone attacks, ruinous fiscal austerity, chemical warfare, genocide, Newtown-like massacres. . . . There are indeed monsters lurking in “Under A Bed,” for Chris’s world — our world — is, alas, a world of “innocent sparrows with broken necks.”

Like scrimshaw etched in onyx, Chris’s poems lead us on a descent into Hell in poems like “Inferno,” where we witness his antihero in the final stanza, a defeated human who

took out a piece of his heart and dangled it down trapdoors as demon bait.

Chris’s poems stun, they chill — and with sublime diction and sonics that keep us turning the virtual page even as we might resist the message lurking in his beautiful language. Thus, he draws us into “Patterns In Rotting Wood” with: “gills, scabs, cuts, / cyrillics not found in vacua.”

And “Slave Ship” opens with “cold of shackle / gnaws warmth of ankle.” The poet hooks us through the ear; I find the music irresistible, and am willing to move forward despite images of slaves “fecal and bitten / by lice and rats.”

He is a master, too, of the killer punchline. The music that drew us into “Patterns In Rotting Wood” propels us through “a crush of graves” and “quarrels flaking into palms” to the final crashing quatrain:

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who can decipher this Rosetta of dull hells? pick it up and it crumbles, suicidal pantheon into the fire.

How fitting for this issue of TCE in which we’ve explored the contrasting realms of communicative expression, which all too often in our modern age is indeed a “Rosetta of dull hells.”

Here’s another punchline that takes the breath away. It’s from “Inside Metal,” a poem that exquisitely juxtaposes the natural world of “jungles and tundras” with the “casino jaunts” and “savage pistons” of our mechanized world. Chris concludes it:

your life waits before you, laid out in crushed stone. in a long dark tunnel unheard victims curse obscene in reflective glares.

Our machines reflect us; we are their “unheard victims.”

“Plague” also delivers an arresting punchline. That plague is at our very core: “the cauldrons of our hearts boiled with crime.”

You may be thinking right about now that I’m one masochistic book reviewer trying to get you into a book full of “skull-backed moths / and smitten loons” (“Ghost Trance”) — and worse — that some well-turned rhymes and cleverly construed sonics aren’t enough to take the sting out of such a grimly-toned collection. Not so!

There are also those shining moments of poetic truth to ponder. My favorite occurs in the opening lines of “Twister:” “some hearts have only / ornamental doors.” “Endless Novel” draws us in this with truth in line 1: “obsession is a hydra.” Ain’t it, though?

Also, Jugularity is a poet’s book with many poems that address the writing life with Chris’s usual candor. “Lust” of the “pen withered” is only one of them. In the ars poetica, “Writer’s Block,” we find comfort in the difficulty Chris admits he has some times when “letters / fidget like grubs / on the corpse of an idea.” Haven’t we all been there?

Similarly in “Genetics,” the poet defines the writer’s task: “we polish enzymes, / re-splice their slant.” Check out “Endless Novel,” too. I’ve never been able to finish any of the three novels I’ve begun; Chris helps me understand why: There are “too many necks of words / soft as maggots, / wide as cottonmouths. And in “Romeo Reads Himself,” the Shakespearean character not only

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reads himself, but also imagines himself a writer, slaving away “until the poison between the periods / no longer torments.” Sound familiar?

There’s also great pleasure to be found in Chris’s lush vocabulary. He sent me (and I’ll send you, perhaps) to my Merriam-Webster with words like “ichneumon” (“Ghost Trance”), “vacua” (“Patterns In Rotting Wood”), and “falchion” (“Basin”). I’m always delighted when the Tao of poetry leads me back to the dictionary.

With “a leopard’s grace” And nature lovers (like me) will revel in this remarkable bestiary that, page after page, turns animals both lowly and magnificent into images that bite and sting, but also those that fly off the page sparkling. “Writer’s Block” has those letters like grubs, but it also has “lightning bugs / flicker as photons.” “Delicious Sweat” is a particularly pleasing poem in light of its animal population. Only in a Chris Crittenden poem will you encounter “the vigor of a tarantula,” “the last twitches of a vole,” and “the butcher wings / of hawks and vultures” — all in a single poem!

His is a brand of mystical naturalism that resonates with authenticity. In reading that “scorpions are couriers” (“Basin”), we can easily make the leap to the brand of humans that are scorpions, preying on their brethren.

There’s often empathy in the poet’s heart for many of the creatures he appropriates as in “Howl,” where Chris notices how “sluggish deer / rue their bevies of ticks.” In fact, animals crawl and swoop and tramp through so many of these poems, it’d be no stretch for me to call Jugularity a new kind of nature poetry. We humans may be suffering “from neurotic molars / and caffeinated bicuspids (“Toothbrush”), but we are not alone in our suffering, and we are not without the succor of “the nudity of the black-crowned night heron” (“Nocturne”). ◊◊◊ Mirroring life, modern or otherwise, Jugularity is not without humor. I chortled to follow “Lust”— a poet’s poem in which a woman writer gives into “monsoons of word, / until lust forms liquid lions.” The penis-pen conquers her; it “branches through her” and then, in the final lines we find the leavening breath of humor:

the pen withered, the sheets rumpled, the loins slain.

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In “Maenad in Mojave,” which is very much a poem of its place in the desert, I had to grin at the lines that bring together an unlikely trio: “Satan, Jesus or Lear.” Chris, known on his blog as Owl Who Laughs (http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/), certainly gets a laugh in about our silly human pretensions, as in his “In the Philosopher’s Condo,” where we see

decades of life without a vacuum cleaner or toilet-bowl brush. faux feng shui unbothered by crud.

And, circling back to Chris’ encyclopedic bestiary, I’m amused that, of all creatures, a banana slug makes its slimy way into “Thoughts After A Stroke.”

“earning no bones” Jugularity’s vultures didn’t leave me many bones to pick. Only one, in fact, and it a small one the size of a werewolf’s phalange. (Yes, there are werewolves lurking in the book.) I’d liked to have seen more variety in the style of Chris’s lines. His lines are uniformly short or shortish, and while that brevity of line helps propel the poems through the horrors he describes and they serve his sonics well and hence our ears, he neglects to surprise the eye as well. Why not try a longer line now and again to imitate human speech?

Also, there are many places in the poems where a dropped line, for example, would have added drama as well as a visual kick to jolt us out of the lines’ conformity. I think dropped lines would have worked particularly well in “Lust,” where in three places he ends one sentence and begins a second in the same line. For added visual pleasure and a skosh more emotional oomph, the opening lines that now read:

the pen nudges her hand like a see, eager to nestle in her grip. she becomes its lover, unretractable . . . would be transformed to:

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the pen nudges her hand like a see, eager to nestle in her grip. she becomes its lover, unretractable Or maybe, for similar effect, he could have employed an indented line here and there, making, say, a poem of triplets cascade across the page to heighten suspense with a pinch of surprise amid the unfailing left-hand margin sameness. Thus, in “Dead Cow,”

a flabby malodor punishes nettle trapped in its curls, and the crow cries out, hoarse and savage to surge in pace could be rendered:

a flabby malodor punishes nettle trapped in its curls, and the crow cries out, hoarse and savage, to surge in pace.

But, as I said, it’s a small bone. I’m being picky like a vulture.

Avid Crittenden fan Shanna Wheelock, who brought my attention to the book via the TCE Readers Survey, calls Jugularity “his very best work.” I’ve not read Chris’s entire opus, but sense that this book has to be among his very best works. These are taut, visceral poems in a distinctive style and tone. Chris is courageous and unflinching and demands we be the same. His book will make us wiser, more prepared to survive — with, I think, greater tolerance for life’s rude punchlines from that nasty neighbor or the ticket-writing sheriff or the wise-cracking waitress who suggests you order from the lite menu or . . .

And in the end, when we power-down our e-readers, we walk away with a smile, realizing he has charmed us with what I’d call an hermaphroditic style of communicating his message, a style where he is at liberty to lead with a punchline in the first stanza like a stereotypical maleThe Centrifugal Eye

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from-Mars, sprinkle a couple more midway through a poem (unlike either gender), and, then, bam, sock it to you with a memorable, lingering, and oh-so-satisfying woman-from-Venus zinger. Such is the delightful seduction of the Owl Who Laughs.

Column Editor’s Note: What’s your story behind a poetry book that you’ve read and desire others to read? What path led you to that book? Tell me. Just complete our online Reader Survey. From your stories I’ll select the books and I’ll review them for all our readers in future issues of The Centrifugal Eye. Give me something new to rave about!

Survey: http://home.earthlink.net/~tinyviolet/thecentrifugaleyepoetryjournal/id366.html

Read one of Karla Linn Merrifield’s poems, and her bionote, on page 46.

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Swept into “Green Water Pastures”

By Laury A. Egan

Lithic Scatter and Other Poems

By Karla Linn Merrifield Mercury HeartLink, 2013 Paper / 110 Pages / $16 US

In this fine collection, the first poem, “Dancing with Green Bees,” sets the joyous tone as Karla Linn Merrifield, a widely traveled poet (and book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye), revels in the landscape and celebrates the wisdom and lives of our native inhabitants, including the ancestral people, the Anasazi. From ephemeral bees to ancient stones, nothing is beyond her eager examination; indeed, a tiny cobble will set her on a flight of wonderment and philosophical conjecture. When readers of Lithic Scatter and Other Poems finish this book, they will be impressed with how she has absorbed the beauty, knowledge, tradition, and history of the natural world, which, in turn, has expanded her awareness and her humanity — and ours. As reviewer Colleen Powderly writes: “Because Merrifield grows into these landscapes and allows them to grow into her, we experience their magic as she does, in moments of powerful peace and ecstatic union.” Or attend to the book’s epigraph by Gary Snyder: “The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.” Certainly, this poet has an enormous heart and prodigious perceptions.

In keeping with the theme of this issue of TCE : “Punchline First: Communicating Styles,” let’s consider Merrifield’s book from a somewhat different angle than usual and examine her method and manner of communication. Throughout the 59 poems, she takes alternating positions: at times, she is an observer-participant, a woman standing before a scene or subject and reflecting on its history or its being-ness. At other times, her approach is to become her subject, to lose herself within it.

In the observer-participant poems, Merrifield is a player in the relationship, a self encountering what she sees, absorbing and then translating the subject’s message. For example, in a wryly humorous poem, “Copters,” the poet is on Galveston Island Beach watching “three subtropical dragonfly species” and equating them to the “metallic imitations / [that] patrol far overhead— the Coast Guard’s / draconian Homeland Security spawn.”

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The closing lines:

Only Homo sapiens of the tourist variety, myself included, lying on the sand are terrorized, knowing those hovering creatures, like practiced predators, take their prey alive.

Here, Merrifield is situated with the other people on the beach, but her sympathies lie with the dragonflies more than the Homo sapiens, as she expresses a darkly negative view of man’s military creations that fly above her. In “Mile 75.5: SOS,” she is once again a presence as she thinks “about the silence of the rocks” and wonders “how such ancient rocks might speak to me, / in what language, with what song, and how I should tune / my ears to their key . . .” Here, it feels as if the poet wants to become the rocks and for the Little Colorado River to sweep her away “into green water pastures” — a lovely turn of phrase. In “Mile 166: Canyon Colors,” she writes:

My wildness is brown— days of desert sun on my skin turn me into driftwood.

The desired merger almost happens in this poem, at least in her sensibility and imagination, yet the poet still retains sufficient individuation to speak for herself. However, we, the readers, sense her wish for magical fusion and are persuaded to share it, to hear the voice of the subject through her voice.

In the second approach, Merrifield has successfully become the personality of a rock or river or that of an ancient Anasazi woman. The voice which speaks to us is no longer the poet’s.

This transmogrification allows us to experience a fresh, omniscient perspective or one espoused by objects or by the ghosts of native ancestors, as in “Feet of Clay”:

Now, after dark, I fly over carved clay mesas, spires, canyons, a shadow upon shadows bringing another thunderstorm, needed rain, floating on a good tailwind.

Here, the poet achieves unification with a long-departed woman’s spirit, as she does in “Amazons of the Anasazi Follow the Chimney Rock Tour Guide,” in which the female shamans are channeled, their warm, musical stories contrasted with the cool, modern, scientific recounting of facts about them. This tonal dichotomy is striking and quietly impressive. After stating that The Centrifugal Eye

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“scholars believe astronomer-shamans followed / the 18.6 Lunar Standstill Cycle,” the riposte is elegant and succinct:

Only the women read celestial calendars, told when and how to worship the moon.

Only we kept the stars.

And notice the use of “we.” The integration of the poet has become a seamless synthesis.

She clearly prefers kinship with the ancients and seeks to shed her twenty-first-century persona.

Similarly, in “Parsing Mato Paha,” Merrifield communicates the voice of the badlands: “Under my skin is a nation of beings.” In many ways, these non-self poems dominate the book, creating a sense of soaring expansiveness, of agelessness, of floating identities, some of whom cannot speak because they are inanimate or dead, forgotten and trampled under the Earth’s dust — cannot speak, that is, except through these poems. This splitting, while cohesive in tone and style, pulls us in and out of our human selves, as the various “actors” relate their stories, lore, and points of view.

Karla Linn Merrifield, with her equally adventuresome husband, Roger Weir, has taken on the task of traveling to locations many of us never venture, or, if we do, we do so as tourists on a bus, scurrying from place to place, only dimly observing detail, nuance, or even the grand picture.

Her depiction of these wild places, of the geography and flora and fauna, enlarges our hearts and unites us with the landscape and its history, at the same time reminding us that we are human and separate, which she accomplishes by taking these dual perspectives. Her words instill a beautiful poignancy, a combination of appreciation with a sense of inherent loss because these magnificent places are disappearing or are being mangled by our insensitive and devastatingly destructive intrusions.

Stylistically, this collection is a marvel of musical lines, such as when she describes “arriving like snowmelt in spring from the slickrock flanks of the Chuska Mountains.” Color is also a constant revelation: a black bear is “in a cinnamon morning coat” and “bald domes wake from violet sleep.” And, if her vivid sensibilities aren’t sufficient, Merrifield ponders paintings by Georgia O’Keefe, although perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she participates in the paintings.

“I follow Georgia’s sweeping, round touch / and write within her circle / with the circle of the universe.” In a previous poem, she writes: “Where time is different a painter toils.” Substitute “poet” for “painter,” and we have an apt description of the timeless state we enter while reading the book.

Lithic Scatter and Other Poems is a unique pleasure and will undoubtedly strengthen Merrifield’s considerable reputation as an American naturalist-poet.

Laury A. Egan is the author of Beneath the Lion’s Paw; Snow, Shadows, a Stranger; and The Sea & Beyond (FootHills Publishing). She’s also a longtime contributor to The Centrifugal Eye. Visit her website: www.lauryaegan.com and her blog: www.lauryaeganblog.wordpress.com

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Want more great reading?

The Centrifugal Eye’s 5th-Anniversary Anthology is a representative collection of poems published in TCE’s first 5 years of quarterly publication.

This hot collection includes works by some of our favorite, contemporary, international poets, all of whom have made TCE the popular literary journal it is today. (For a list of anthology contributors, visit our website: http://centrifugaleye.com/) 210 pgs / $19.95 US Available through Lulu Press: http://tinyurl.com/TCEs5thAnX2

Coming Later this Summer: The Centrifugal Eye’s Chapter & Verse Mini-Chapbooks Project 4-in-1 Print Edition Visit our website: http://centrifugaleye.com/)

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The Centrifugal Eye’s New Works in Varying Voices & Media Minutiae: The Latest News & Guides

Press Releases Hat’s off to TCE contributor Laury A. Egan whose new chapbook, The Sea & Beyond, was published by FootHills Publishing. At 24 pages, it’s available for $10 at FootHills Publishing: http://foothillspublishing.com/2013/id61.htm; to obtain a signed copy, contact Laury directly (see pg. 80).

Congratulations to contributor Ellaraine Lockie, whose 10th chapbook, Coffee House Confessions, has just been published by Silver Birch Press. It’s 43 pages and available from Amazon.com for $10. http://www.amazon.ca/Coffee-House-Confessions-Ellaraine-Lockie/dp/0615727670

TCE contributor and book reviewer Karla Linn Merrifield has a new book out from FootHills Publishing; Attaining Canopy: Amazon Poems is a 60-page hand-stitched paper book with spine, and includes 5 color photos by the author. The book, which introduces the reader to the Amazon rainforest, is available online: http://foothillspublishing.com/2013/id63.htm; signed copies available directly from Karla (no shipping charges). (See pg. 46.)

Also from Karla is a new anthology – Karla Linn Merrifield & Friends – featuring her poetry along with that of TCE contributors Colleen Powderly, Chris Crittenden, and M.J. Iuppa, and TCE editor Eve Anthony Hanninen, along with poet Michael G. Smith; the foreword is by contributor Ken Pobo. The collection is 53 pages, and sells for $10.99 from Lulu Press at http://www.lulu.com/shop/karla-linnmerrifield/karla-linn-merrifield-friends/paperback/product-21079562.html?showPreview=true. The book was edited

by TCE’s Walter Ruhlmann and published by mgv2>publishing.

Contributor Walter Ruhlmann’s new book of poetry, authored with Adam Henry Carriere and published

by Stonesthrow Poetry / Lazarus Media LLC, Carmine Carnival, is now available in Kindle Editions from Amazon.com for $4.99. http://www.amazon.ca/Carmine-Carnival-ebook/dp/B00BU4BKUY Contributor David Trame’s collection about the loss of his wife, Make It Last: An Elegiac Sequence, was published by Lapwing (Belfast) and is available in both hardcopy and digital forms from Lapwing’s store: https://sites.google.com/a/lapwingpublications.com/lapwing-store/davide-trame

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Back Issues The Centrifugal Eye has been around for 8 years and much of the work published during that time is still

available in our online archives, and has been collected into an anthology (see page 81 for details). During the past 4 ½ years, all but one of our issues have also been made available as print-on-demand editions through Lulu.com. If you’d like to peruse our archives or pick up print copies, please visit these sites: Archives http://home.earthlink.net/~centrifugaleye/index.html Centrifuge/Special Projects http://home.earthlink.net/~centrifuge/ TCE Storefront/Lulu Press http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/centrifugaleye

Submissions If you are a poet, essayist, reviewer, or artist, and you think that your work may be a match for us, please visit our guidelines page on TCE ’s website.

Submission Guidelines http://home.earthlink.net/~tinyviolet/thecentrifugaleyepoetryjournal/id5.html

Back Cover Art:

“Louie’s Punchline: Hard2Kidnap” (Portrait of TCE Poet Louie Crew)

Photograph by Louie’s husband, Ernest Clay Louie Crew is professor emeritus of English at Rutgers University (NJ), and a poet of illustrious repute.

Editors have published 2,233 of his essays and poems. His photography has appeared in recent issues of Annapuma Magazine, Bitchin' Kitsch, Rose Red Review, Meadowland Review, and The Living Church. He has edited special issues of College English and Margins. You can follow his work at http://rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/pubs.html.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Crew. The University of Michigan collects Louie's papers.

This is Louie’s second appearance in The Centrifugal Eye. The Centrifugal Eye

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“Louie’s Punchline: Hard2Kidnap” Portrait of TCE Poet Louie Crew, by Photographer Ernest Clay

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