The Centrifugal Eye Winter/Spring 2015 - Story Poems

Page

1

Winter/Spring 2015 Volume 9 Issue 2

The Centrifugal Eye : Editor-in-Chief & Art Director: Eve Anthony Hanninen Contacts Editor & Review Columnist: Karla Linn Merrifield Assistant Editors: Maureen Kingston, J. D. Knight, Mark Melton, Art Assistants: D. J. Bryant, Tyler Smith Staff Readers’ Circle: Anonymous Reviewers

:

“Barbados Plantation Slave’s Shell Art”

By Karla Linn Merrifield Karla Linn Merrifield’s photography has appeared in Outdoor, Sea Stories, The Centrifugal Eye, among many magazines and publications. In fall 2008, High Falls Gallery in Rochester, NY, featured her bird photography in a one-woman show, Dawn of Migration and Other Audubon Dreams, and the Everglades National Park Coe Visitor Center presented a dozen of her photographs in its December 2011 exhibition of works by the park’s artists-in-residence. She illustrated William Heyen's limitededition 2012 The Green Bookcase with 50+ photographs. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye (www.centrifugaleye.com).

Visit her blog, Vagabond Poet, at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.

Fonts Used: Headline — Sybil Green; Display — Wizardry & Footlight MT family; Body Copy — Footlight MT & Footlight MT Light

Copyright 2015 The Centrifugal Eye *Collected Works*

Page

2

Spot Illustrations/In-house Stock Photos by TCE Staff Orbz Icons by Milos Mirkovic, Creative Commons Notes & Book Stack by Jackson, Creative Commons

: 4

Editorial: “There’s a Bigger Story in Here, Somewhere” by Eve Anthony Hanninen

7

Featured Interview in a Poetrytale: 16 Poets & Their Editor Tale You an Interview

17

Narrative Poetrytales (Each in 3 Chapters): 19-22 Reverberations

By Glen Sorestad, Andy N. & Leslie Philibert

24-27 Catherine’s Wheels & Roman’s Candles

By Brian Garrison, Martin Willitts, Jr. & Jeff Bernstein

29-32 Concertina Effect

By Seth Crook, David Forman & Kevin Oberlin

34-37 A Toast to Other Beings & Other Globes

By Seth Crook, M. R. Smith & B. Scott Walker

39-43 Universal Zoomorphics

By Iftekhar Sayeed, Seth Crook & Matt McGee

45-49 Communion

By Leslie Philibert, Kevin Oberlin & Gram Joel Davies

51-54 Of Stones & Bones

By Karla Linn Merrifield, Maureen Kingston & Seth Crook A Lyric Essay on the Writing Life “Ceci n’est pas un poème. And yet . . .” by Maureen Kingston 62

Review Column: Merrifield’s Tao of Poetry:

75

70 Review: by Gram Joel Davies, On Catherine Chandler’s Glad and Sorry Seasons The Centrifugal Eye Contributors, Winter 2015: Bionotes

78

Publishing Tales & Narrating Needs: The Latest News & Guides

3

“a solitary, endless / infinitive” by Karla Linn Merrifield, On Bruck’s Monkey Ranch

Page

56

Page

The current issue of The Centrifugal Eye was a longtime coming. There were many reasons for this, but the most recent delay had to do with one of winter’s nastiest surprises.

This story begins back in mid-February, when I accompanied my sweetheart of a pit bull, Caprica, out into our backyard for her evening potty break in bitter -30C weather. We’d seen short, afternoon thaws for 2 days in a row, but the snow had returned the night before in a fine, thin dusting over the grass. As was our ritual, we played on the deck for a minute before she was ready to run out into the yard for a little doggy relief. She pranced off the deck, around a tree, and then headed off for a dark corner near the fence. As usual, I wanted to move into the yard a few more feet so I could keep her in sight, so I stepped off the deck and down onto the grass.

The moment my foot touched down, the entire ground slipped away from me. A single word, a deadpan whisper from deep in the primordial part of my brain, informed me that the worst was about to happen.

“Shit.”

Perhaps there was a nanosecond that followed in which I could have bargained with a higher power or implemented some martial-arts-falling technique I’d learned over the years, but I wasn’t aware of one. No, this time — compared to other times in my life — the accident had no slow-motion-action-sequence. There was no falling involved at all. Mother Earth pulled her carpet out from under me as I was stepping stork-like onto it. It was so sudden that I never saw nor felt my body move at all. There was the rug of frozen grass, the word shit, the back of my head hitting the ground or the deck or a tree root in the riffling act of a cosmic hand of cards.

I might have lost consciousness, but I didn’t think so. I knew I was hurt, that I could see only whiteness thicker than the ice about me, that the dog was somewhere in the yard, that my husband, Lloyd, was inside the house, and that I had to get up and move before I got frostbitten.

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t yet move — stunned, concussed, probably — so, I moaned repeatedly in the hope of getting someone’s attention. It was similar to trying to shout out and wake during a terrible dream, that struggle we experience while attempting to break through to consciousness.

There was no pain, I should say. Not how we usually describe pain: sharp here, stabbing there, a deep ache, a throb . . . what a concussion feels like, to me, is more like hyperawareness — the scalp, the skull, the brain all separate, after they’ve been rattled about, into distinctly functioning layers — and until everything in and on the head integrates again, the physical and emotional malaise is, well, disturbing.

After what was probably only 10 seconds of repeatedly moaning my SOS, my husband came to see where the dog and I were. He said he didn’t know why. He hadn’t heard anything. He later told me he came out and wondered why I was playing with the dog on the frozen ground. Then he realized I wasn’t moving, that I’d been downed,

4

There’s a Bigger Story in Here, Somewhere.

By Eve Anthony Hanninen

Page

Eve Anthony Hanninen is an American poet, editor, and illustrator ranging the Saskatchewan prairies.

Her poems have appeared in About Place Journal, 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 a limited-edition, altered-book imprint called Sylvanshine Editions.

Contact Eve: centrifugaleye@gmail.com

5

somehow. He said our dog was standing watch over me, unsure of what to do. Clearly, she was never trained as a Rin Tin Tin or Lassie.

With Lloyd’s help, instead, I was able to get inside the house and then to get care; I had my symptoms monitored throughout the night and next day, got lots of rest, and iced the point of impact every few hours. Other than the usual post-concussive moments of occasional dizziness and that “fishbowl helmet” sensation that takes days to weeks to be rid of, I’ve suffered far less than I might have over the past few weeks.

I’m not telling you this story to gain your sympathy. You see, through comparing this recent difficult experience with other physical accidents I’ve endured over the years, I was reminded that this one tale of woe is but a chapter of tales that unintentionally present a larger, central story in my life. While it’s my first near-tragic injury on ice, this is not my first head injury. Nor my second. Nor third. This narrative of the freaky-ice-kind is just one of several stories that feature accidents resulting in my head being injured — through incidents of nature, or through another person’s actions.

The following are all individual stories that could be called earlier chapters in the longer story of Thankfully, I Have a Hard Head: In a bike accident during childhood, I landed 20 feet away on the back of my head against the edge of a street curb. Another time I was shoved against a wall of rocks and split my head open. I was hit on the back of the head with a rock, which knocked me off of a log I was standing on. I was “hike”d in the face with a block-of-wood-football and knocked down during play. I was kicked in the back of the head and neck by a bully who had first pushed me down a couple of stairs. I slipped off of a rockface I was climbing and landed on my back (and head) on the ground below.

Sounds bad all in a string like that, hunh? Yet none of these events or attacks were very close together, and none were precipitated by the same person. They were just a long series of mostly coincidental accidents, and related together, though, they unite in a theme. For this reason, I am sharing my latest (and hopefully last) chapter on whacking my noggin’ . . . and for the reason that when we seek connections to the stories around us, we can often find them in abundance. Independent stories or poems that don’t seem to have any relationship to one another may actually have similar lines, plots, concepts, moods, or general themes in common, after all.

This you will also discover for yourselves when you read the rest of The Centrifugal Eye’s Story Poems issue. I hope you will thrill to the unexpected connections as TCE’s staff and I have done.

But don’t do what else I did; please remain safe and unhurt through the rest of unpredictable spring.

? ?

Featured Interview: A “Poetrytale” in Dialogue among 16 Poets & TCE Editor Eve Anthony Hanninen

7 Story Poems, 3 Poem-Chapters Each = 21 Poems from 16 of Today’s Narrative Lyric Poets Featured Essay:

“Ceci n’est pas un poème. And yet . . .” by Maureen Kingston

Page

6

Poetry-Review Articles

:

“Stories around the Campfire” by Stephanie Curtis, 2015.

A Poetrytale Page

7

in Dialogue

Featured Interview: A “Poetrytale” in Dialogue among 16 Poets & TCE Editor-in-Chief Eve Anthony Hanninen

Page

Into the woodlands of imagination the poets were herded, each uncertain of where they might end up and with whom they might be threesomed. It wasn’t until The Centrifugal Eye’s editor-in-chief, Eve Hanninen (with her insistent blue pencil), appeared in a clearing of wordy brambles that these brave poets began to truly understand what had befallen them and their dear, fine poems.

When Editor Hanninen asked Kevin Oberlin where he thought he was going to end up when he first submitted to TCE, the stoic poet, with chin held high, said, “In the middle. If unlucky, in the middle of a slush pile . . . like these brambles, maybe. If lucky, in between two accomplished and eccentric poems, branches reaching out in all directions, making surprising, if tenuous, connections, telling a story I didn’t even know I was trying to tell.”

8

Once upon a lyric steering, 16 poets’ poems became chapters in 7 enchanting stories. These eloquent verses tell their surreal tales by making acquaintance in proximity, genre, tone, and/or theme within a series of 3 “chapters” for each story. None of the adventurous poets had the opportunity to get together to confer and shape their chapters to “fit with” one another’s — hence the magical and twisting natures present in each poetrytale.

9 Page

“And what was it like to beat your way through the bushes with a blindfold on?” the editor asked of David Forman. To which he replied: “The shape of the country disappears. There is only this step, this sharpness.

What looks like patience to others is a not a skill, but a different heartbeat. One almost longs for it after having finally broken through.”

Another poet, Karla Linn Merrifield, piped up then. “I usually don’t think of submitting poems as a bushes-and-blindfold proposition. Whether I’m taking my changes with TCE or The New Yorker, I’m like most poets I know who do the drill — read the prospective journal . . . get to know the editor’s tastes . . . and try to match my best work with the journal’s mission, theme, editorial slant. . . .

Submission guidelines can be revelatory, too, beyond the basic how-to. Their tone, for example, may demonstrate editorial biases,” she said.

“Indeed, a pragmatist’s stance!” exclaimed Editor Hanninen in response.

“And now, name if you will, the 3 top things you think are important to telling a good narrative,” the editor asked, as she turned to the brilliant M. R. Smith.

“For me, I like to see conflict for necessary tension, structure for pacing, and perhaps most importantly, I love compelling writing. I think of Anne Carson and Dian Raptosh as excellent examples in narrative poetry, and folks like James Salter, Michael Ondaatje, and Shirley Hazzard in fiction,” he answered.

Then added the erudite poet, Martin Willitts, Jr.: “Being a most exceptional liar helps, but I might be lying about that ability. Getting lost in the woods is the same as getting to the part of a story where the story takes over and the storyteller has no choice to go where the story goes, even if it means going over a cliff; but I might have been lying about that helpful suggestion, and then again I might be lying about lying — writing and telling a tale are the same confusions, don’t you agree?

“But that was not really 3 top things, was it? I lost count. Narratives do not seem to care if there are any counting rules, except for the “rule of three”; all fairytales need the number 3, as it is a magical construct: Three bowls, three bears, three chairs, three wishes, three billy goats, three magic items like a comb, which becomes a fence, a mirror, which becomes a lake, and a stick that can beat off an entire army; but I could be lying about that, too.”

Iftekhar Sayeed, also, shared his learned opinion, but with greater brevity: “Focus, imagery, and a point of view,” was his answer.

At this point, and while nodding in reply, Editor Hanninen gleefully arranged all the poets’ poems as she thought they best related. After stepping back to ponder if she should continue rearranging, she looked right into Gram Joel Davies’ heart and asked the dear author, in his opinion, what the hardest part of making a narrative lyrical actually was.

“Ah, now, funny you should ask that, because I was just wondering something similar myself. You see, sometimes lyrical fanciness gives me a

10 Page

‘special-effects’ tingle, and sometimes narrative sequence has the tingle of truth, but marrying those things, putting the emotional magic into the honest account, that requires gathering with your senses and all your organs, glands and nerves at once, and turning them on together — if you can’t do that with extreme relish, it ain’t going to happen!” was the answer he gave.

“And you, Leslie Philibert?

“To find the truth in things,” he said simply.

Poet Maureen Kingston interjected with another point of view. “The hardest part of making narrative lyrical is undermining narrative’s relentless this-happened-then-that-happened conveyer belt. Even doctoring story’s stew with such poetic spices as resonant diction, rhythm, or compression is not enough to distract readers from the this-then-that substructure. To misquote Cassius, the fault, dear readers, is in ourselves. We anticipate narrative’s routine, are on the lookout for it, think we know the story’s end after the opening gambit. In order to jolt jaded readers, lyric and narrative writing must wed and give birth to a wily child who knows how to defy readers’ expectations; who will surprise them with surreal settings, impossible points of view, and make juxtapositional revelations that astound. This kind of writing must seduce readers into forgetting the conveyer belt altogether; or, conversely, convince them they must climb aboard. Follow the yellow brick road; follow the yellow brick road . . . ,” she chanted.

“Ah. Mmhmm. If we follow that thinking on a more traditional road, we recall that in most ancient cultures, such as with the Europeans and Baltics, the epic, lyric verse was the most common sort of poetrytale,” waxed Editor Hanninen. “But that bardic method of storytelling isn’t so popular in today’s postmodern world of poetry. Should the epic poem make a return to the poetic stage?”

“Postmodern — that word through rod-deficient, post-LASIK eyes appears as ‘post-modem.’ Old Modulator-demodulator devices, in days of yore (the mid’80s) were like electronic bards relaying stories at a slow 600 baud over thin telephone lines. Today’s bards are much quicker, rapping and slamming in lyric verse the tales of modern-day Beowulfs slaying Grendels and dragons in a post slow-modem world. Though novel to view, old modems scorched by sparks from electrical pyres, should remain buried in the tumulus of broken toasters and rusted lawn chairs. Sing that dirge only once,” B. Scott Walker opined.

“Proper bards playing harps when telling their tales and sauntering around court in elegant outfits. Sounds great! But, sadly, no. The visual arts needed to find other things to do after the emergence of the photograph. They could not compete in the battle of direct representation. Just so with epic poetry. I suspect that poetry can't really compete with the ‘epic film.’ But it can do other things,” Seth Crook mostly agreed, in echo of Walker.

“Then it should hearten most of you that TCE’s editorial staff and I have purposely chosen shorter-than-epic poems to marry together in narrative

11 Page

‘chapters.’ This is, after all, a small literary journal and not a tome. Still, TCE has been known to occasionally publish long, narrative poems.

“Do you have a preference for long or short poems, Brian Garrison”?

“Conciseity's a niceity,” he quipped, quoting his younger self.

“And what about you, Karla Linn Merrifield?”

“As for me, I have a pronounced preference for short poems to the extent that friend and fellow TCE contributor Colleen Powderly affectionately calls me the “Queen of Short Poems.” That may be an exaggeration, but I do love the pressed intensity of short poems and routinely write haiku, tanka, etherees, Fibonaccis, tritinas, and so on. Yet I love to read long poems. For this issue, I brushed up on my Middle English to reread The Canterbury Tales. And Saint Walt’s Leaves of Grass is an eternal mother lode of inspiration,” she stated.

“And you?”

M. R. Smith had no compunctions about giving his opinion: “Oddly enough, like Ms. Merrifield, I most often write short poems, but treasure reading book-length works. The amazing ability to maintain lyric quality in a long work is stunning to me.”

But Gram Joel Davies was ambivalent, and simply remarked, “I once heard someone quote Keats, who said something along the lines of, ‘Long poetry is what separates the sheep from the goats,’ or somesuch. I’ve no idea what he meant. Or which is which.”

“Do you tend to think of modern poems as miniscule stories, or are they typically some other sort of beast altogether?” Editor Hanninen looked about their wooded surrounding with eyes wide. The other poets felt that at any moment she might break out into a camp-style ghost story.

Seth Crook grumbled, “I want more than a story. I want a poem to do something more than that, or something different. Why read poetry rather than short stories if what you want is a short story?”

Then Jeff Bernstein replied, “Some are hidden in the least likely places and open up portals which are like black holes where time slows and there is way more matter packed in than you could ever imagine.”

B. Scott Walker spoke up then, too. “Some poems are petite stories. Some seem monstrous. Most poems, though, are snapshots taken through some sort of newly designed lens filter specifically adapted to capture a unique image worth seeing. Who knows, that image might possibly be a ghost haunting us as it circles around just outside the light of our computerized campfire.”

“Which leaves us where? The fact is, a poem is like a twelve-dimensional aeroplane cockpit, and you sit in the pilot’s seat with all the dials and readouts telling you things at once, and through the window is the horizon reaching out forever, and, at that moment, wherever you are there’s a story going on, so yes, it’s a bit like that, really.” Gram Joel Davies concluded.

12 Page

“Okay. On those lines, how is poetry different from prose? Yet what else do both share when they are considered lyrical and narrative?” The editor was really on a roll now.

“The difference for me is: prose is typically straightforward without much decoration while poetry tends to be more expressive or ‘decorated,’ with comparisons, rhyme, and rhythm contributing to a different sound and feel,” replied Andy N. M. R. Smith inserted, “I’ve always found that some of the best prose I’ve ever read is lyrical or poetic in nature, like Galvin’s The Meadow, Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces, and Ondaatje’s The English Patient. It isn’t surprising that each of these writers is an accomplished poet.”

“I’ve boxed an unhappy couple in a series of sonnets, and they’re still insisting that I ‘free’ them through prose. I’ve tried to explain, but . . . ,”added Kevin Oberlin. He shrugged.

“Didn't Roethke say that the essence of poetry was repetition? Perhaps we should say that again,” Seth Crook reiterated.

Martin Willitts, Jr. also jumped in with, “‘Poetry and Prose’ is becoming a blended family. It is getting more difficult to tell the difference between and betwixt the two. It is like some magic fairy has decided to cast a spell merging them so they cannot be conflicting armies. There used to be more divergence and conflict. Enter realms that were destroyed and distraught. Then a fairy came along and settled the matter. However, some trolls like rules being neat and pretty well-defined. There are some dwarfs that insist on poetry having line breaks being short and easily found in a diamond mine while they dig, dig, all the day long, singing ‘Hi-ho,’ or some song by a pop singer. There are some midges (tiny fairy-like beings) who suggest that prose tell complete paragraphs. But dragons like to burn their way through any kind of books, whether it is poetry or story, they really do not care, as long as it is a good book and their library card is in good order.”

“Wow! Yes, I think we all have a pretty good idea now how to tell the two creatures apart. Or not.” Editor Hanninen chuckled.

Once again, she reviewed the poem chapters and did a bit more shuffling, noting that some of the lines created more subtle, thematic threads than others had previously suggested to the editorial team. When she was satisfied, did she allow the poets to see which poems and their authors they accompanied? No, she did not. Instead, she asked the poets to be patient a while longer. So, they huddled in the fading light and put their faith in TCE. “Have you ever done this sort of thing before?” asked more than one longsuffering poet.

“No!” cried Editor Hanninen. “And never will again! But it was a beautiful experiment, nonetheless. Shall we resume?” Most of the imperturbable poets nodded, while 1 or 2 groused.

13 Page

“How do you feel about the process of revision, Jeff Bernstein? Are you comfortable with whittling down your wordcraft, or do you favor the go-withthe-flow method of versification?”

“Revision is its own reward. Subtraction is often addition and one word has to be pondered over long walks in the woods, days or even weeks. The early drafts often are left so far behind it is hard to remember where it all started,” he asserted.

Glen Sorestad said with equal conviction: “For me, revision is an ongoing process after the initial draft; it is the search for compression and the words that are the best choices for meaning, sound, imagery — all the qualities that make poetry what it is. Revision also means, for me, always being attentive to the actual form of the poem and sometimes there can be dramatic alterations in the actual structure of the poem after the initial draft.”

“When I was younger,” said Andy N., “I used to just write a poem and when it was done, think it was done pretty well. However, as my writing matured and grew up, you could say, I started to look at things in a somewhat different way, like an artist painting different layers onto a painting until sometimes the poem, when finished, can look totally different to what it was when it started off.”

“I almost always “go-with-the flow” to get something down while it is fresh,” admitted M. R. Smith, “then turn to revision to perfect and flesh-out. I’m not good at word-for-word writing and revising. I get lost.”

“Okay. Switching focus from writing and revising— when you’re reading any kind of poetry, whether narrative or impressionistic, etc., do you feel that every word needs to make sense and add to progressive context? Or are you content with the lyric entertainment and abstract mysteries, wherever the lines may lead?” Editor Hanninen raised her eyebrows. Some poets thought this might be foreboding. Others ignored any implication.

Matt McGee jumped at the chance to respond: “Use the word ‘poetry’ around typical Americans and you’ll see their eyes tune out. Poets have killed their own livelihood by being obscure, boring, and self-centered. They’ve completely forgotten that we’re entertainers. Like it or not, we’re here to enlighten and tell a story, and that means making every word count. Every word either advances the story or gets cut. Don’t like it? Go cry in your copy of The New Yorker and drink a big cup of shut-the-fuck-up because my job is hard enough to get paid for without a bunch of self-righteous obscurists making it harder for me.”

With a touch more composure, David Forman offered his point of view: “Neither entertainment nor mystery interests me particularly, but only passion and awareness. Every word has both a sense and a sound; the two can soothe or spark against each other. But sense is not the same as vitality, or as meaning. Sounds change color depending on the patterning around them.”

14 Page

Down-to-earth as usual, Seth Crook said, “Yes, or close to it; I want sense and progression. But we should aim to go to the limits of sense on occasion. That is interesting, more interesting than mere sound and imagery. " “Poetry is a collaboration between writer and reader. Each reader will complete the piece by connecting whichever dots he/she chooses, and leave behind a multitude of diaconnections,” insisted Brian Garrison.

Laconic Leslie Philibert added, “Poetic quality is the child of emotion and observation.”

The brooding poets fell silent, and not long after, a cricket made a few hopeful chirps.

“Would anyone like to say a few words about their specific poemchapter(s)?” Editor Hanninen asked, breaking through the gloom of night.

“The idea of just sitting still and listening is all about paying attention to what surrounds us. The poet puts on what Irving Layton called “improved binoculars” to see and then, by writing the poem, try to reveal what he/she sees to the reader, seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary,” said Glen Sorestad. A last chirp, a chuck-chuck, and a rustle in the woods followed this pronouncement.

Not to be outdone, Seth Crook offered these fine words: “It will be interesting to see how different the poems seem when put in the context provided by the others. A sober man standing alone in a picture does not strike an onlooker in the same way as a sober man in a row of drunks. (Not that I am implying anything by that!)”

Not one to shy from such questions, Brian Garrison shared his insight: “There are whole new elements of interpretation that are entirely out of my control now that my piece is sandwiched among the work of other artists. There's freedom in letting go.”

Grinning, the editor hmmmed a few times and then redirected with, “And just to spark our readers’ interest, do any of you also write fiction? What genres?

What topics interest you?”

Maureen Kingston raised her hand. “I write poems that get out of hand — some just a smidge, which become flash fiction or nonfiction, and others that dare Niagara themselves into lyrical essays. I’m interested in the visual arts, history, politics, geography, technology. Honestly, I can be interested in anything for ten minutes, which is my not-so-subtle way of admitting to a short attention span — too short to ever contemplate writing substantial fiction,” she said.

M. R. Smith said, “I have to tell stories since that is how I perceive the world. Often they come out as poems, other times as fiction, and still others as the reported truth. That is not to say that poems and fiction aren’t truth, it’s just that they tend to carry some embellishments!”

Matt McGee, too, delved into prose and storytelling. He said, "If it lives, breathes, or once did live and breathe, I can't wait to write about it. Embracing

the ability to write fiction is like opening a sixth sense, or getting a press pass: you start seeing everything as a story that needs telling. 'My rusty shower curtain rod? That'd be a great story!’”

And, of course, Iftekhar Sayeed also wrote outside of the realm of poetrytales, affirming, “I write fiction with a political and social bent.”

Further realizing that the “rule of three” was still implicit even in the last of the discussion, Martin Willitts, Jr. interjected (before he was accused of being an outright, down-and-out, full-blown liar), “The ‘realm of poetrytales’ be some kind of mist. One of punctuation and stanzas, where Shakespeare becomes Philip Marlowe, or Ernest Hemingway becomes T. S. Eliot, or Jane Kenyon becomes Philip K. Dick, or Chaucer becomes Emily Dickinson. All spells can be broken, and that’s no lie. But do we want to break the spell? To break or not to break, that is the question.”

“Well, this has all been wonderful,” Editor Hanninen exclaimed, “and I do hate to break the spell . . . but thank you for sharing your exemplary thoughts with us, patient poets, and with our readers. Yet this is not the end of the story — for now that I’ve held you all in suspense long enough, let’s go unveil and read our intriguing Story Poems.”

Page

15

“A Rehearsal in Fairy Land” (In Fairyland, 1870, Poem by William Allingham), by Richard Doyle.

Page

16

“Storytime” by Charles Haigh-Wood, 1893

Narrative Verse in the Form of Story Chapters Featuring 16 Poets:

17

Kevin Oberlin M. R. Smith B. Scott Walker Iftekhar Sayeed Matt McGee Gram Joel Davies Karla Linn Merrifield Maureen Kingston

Page

Glenn Sorestad Andy N. Leslie Philibert Brian Garrison Martin Willitts, Jr. Jeff Bernstein Seth Crook David Forman

18 Page “Soundwave Garden” by E. A. Hanninen, 2015

Reverberations A Poetrytale by

Page

19

Glen Sorestad, Andy N. & Leslie Philibert

Chapter One

How the Poem Happens

Page

20

If I sit very still and just listen to the sounds that surround me, at first I may have little awareness of anything but a bland soundscape, or even white noise, a merging of sounds, perhaps even a din.

But the longer I sit and listen, the sooner individual and distinct sounds will separate themselves from the mĂŠlange and like an oboe in an ensemble become distinct to the point of fixing itself in my memory of that place and of that time. If I sit very still and just listen.

.

Chapter Two

The Way Out Words gobbed around The middle of a woodland Nestled in a portal Of forgotten bedstories Half opened at dusk Bent yellow in static Kicking leaves onto rocks Stung in maddened tongues

Page

21

Crying for a way out In broken poetry.

Chapter Three

A Murdered Girl Lies Next to a Motorway Eyes shadowed from stars The not-quite silence rests On your bleached cheek Shadowtrees adorn your faint skin The sun does what a sun does And melts the water on your face A passing fox kisses your hand The moon lights or not All this as the busy race by Under orphaned bridges, tearless

Page

22

You are lost for all the wrong reasons But safe in loam, sleeping in the ground like a blues song.

Page

23

“Fireworks over Belfast” by Eamonn Stewart, 2015

Catherine’s Wheels &

Roman’s Candles A Poetrytale by

Page

24

Brian Garrison, Martin Willitts, Jr. & Jeff Bernstein

Chapter One

Heights

Page

25

Fireworks in the distance sprinkled across the valley depths.

We keep our conversation hushed beneath mountain wind pushing on grass as though there may be other night wanderers to overhear us. Our words eclipse the hisses, booms, and pops that arrive — explosions rolling upward — muffled once they finally climb the slopes.

Thin, earthy breeze more potent than the flash and sparkle — the man-made glow bugs blinking between the forest and the constellations — a slow and easy scent breathing in.

,

.

Chapter Two

Chrysanthemums in July I smash a wasp nest under the eave, its papery hexagons shattering; I bring desolation as a Wasp God. Above my head, a fireworks celebration of chrysanthemums hisses in the rain.

Am I under obligation to respect all life?

Where does bitterness begin or end?

Is forgiveness the shape of a wasp nest?

How can I praise chrysanthemums and not wasps?

Was I supposed to forgive the wasps?

Page

26

Chrysanthemums handed out at the funeral remind me everything needs balance, time; everything has a plan, and sometimes the plan hurts like a sting, and someone dies from anaphylactic shock.

Chapter Three

When the Perseids Met the Leonids unexpectedly in December sky, it was all some cosmic accident of biblical proportions. No engraved invitation to this postprandial soiree, no e-vite, no text, no call, no advance nothing!

Before the sun went out, heavens blazed in a cheery holiday spectacular, summer and fall in congress one last time, the most ill-advised hook-up the world had ever seen.

Perseus was no doubt handsome, with his blond curls, abs of steel and a nose no plastic surgeon could improve. Lioness had a mane to die for and a Roman mini-toga not fit for the season. Still, theirs

Page

could not have conjured up: grand finale of streaking meteors, constellations run amok, icy kama sutra the frosting on the cake before mountain snows melted on this the shortest, the last night.

27

was the last act anyone would ever witness, hisses, crackles, fizzes, pops, bangs, lurid starbursts — the most varied assortment of effects even the most rogue Chinese fireworks factory

28 Page “Bottleneck” by D. J. Bryant, 2015

Concertina Effect A Poetrytale by

Page

29

Seth Crook, David Forman & Kevin Oberlin

Chapter One

The Time Tree Time has raindrops falling from the apple, has the apple falling from the tree.

The bobbin may not love me. Though I love her.

Time will have the apple falling from the tree, though it is green, soft and succulent.

Though the bobbin does not love me, I love her.

Though the bobbin does not love me, we will sit and wait now beneath her apple tree.

Time, that shines the summer apple, may shine me.

Page

30

The “bobbin” is a Scottish nickname for someone whom others depend upon, such as the head of household or matriarch. It refers to a weaving spool, also known as a “textile bobbin.”

Chapter Two

Reading about the Soul’s Journey I want the chair to simply be the chair.

Not the throne on which the reader sits in heaven.

Not the great seat of enlightenment, where Buddha sat.

Not where the death sentence of desire is carried out.

The chair.

I know the wood frame must have come from somewhere.

I don’t deny my share in the waste of rainforests. Nor do I mean to be ungrateful for the chemistry of foam; nor blind to the stripe design, yellow, red and thin.

The yellow is massed of small dots, the red a woven fern.

But I just want the chair to be a chair.

I’m sitting in my living room alone, bathed indirectly (so neither wet nor warm) by winter sun through bay windows. The chair is large. Almost Egyptian in form, its outward curling arms befit the grand vision in the book.

Not the vision I’m looking for.

Page

31

I can’t bring back the name of the store we got it from; we bought it when we moved from Montreal.

Nor do I want it to stand a symbol of that time, or of the house we bought it for, or how she sat in it and watched the fire, or how I looked at her and fought despair.

I only want the chair to be a chair.

Chapter Three

In the Dream Where I Stand up for Myself You are there, mowing the blades of your body.

I follow behind and bail the skin quick as I can.

It mingles and falls among stalks, just as the cuts on your hands feed the roots with old blood.

Surely this poisons us.

Your black swirl of blouse swings down the rows.

Perhaps if I keep closer I can catch more of you, widen my bail until I’ve saved enough for another you, a homunculus, a shade birthed from discarded parts I love as much as you with your constant growth.

Page

and add my body to yours, polluting the red field around us.

32

Or perhaps, stepping close I might get caught in the swing,

Page

33

“Evidence” by D. J. Bryant, 2015

A Toast to Other Beings & Other Globes A Poetrytale by

Page

34

Seth Crook, M. R. Smith & B. Scott Walker

Chapter One

Feet on the Sun Lounge Roof

Page

35

Midway between a rattle and a scratch.

They don't stay long, like lone travelers at an out-of-the-way railway station poddling around on the platform.

Sometimes mistaken for a knocking visitor, perhaps a polite, hook-handed pirate, or a hesitant Hebridean quite uncertain that he has the right address. So out we rush, opening the door with a smile: greeting a nothing. By then the tiny feet have gone, not sorry, chasing after wings or on the next flapping train to the coast.

.

.

Chapter Two

Insecticide Where do insects go when it rains? Is there a big log in the woods below which they all gather?

I imagine a temporary armistice among them, myriad species at rest under cover, eyeing one another warily, while tipping a frothy beer in this bug-bar with a juke box buzz-jangling in the corner.

I think the gnat is partial to white varietals while the cicadas like whiskey up with a beer back.

Ladybug sits alone at the end of the bar pretending to read A Moveable Feast while a dragonfly lingers by the door continually checking the sky for signs of clearing. He has a pond to haze and it won’t wait.

The ladybug can see the mantis’ approach, follows her saunter in the back bar mirror.

He knows her reputation, as does the comely black widow, from one stool down, who has similar plans. The preying lady wants to talk Hemingway with the handsome red bug. But the widow slowly spins her stool to meet the interloper,

Page

36

who catches on quickly and sidles by to pick a song on the jukebox, acting as though it never even happened.

.

Chapter Three

Space Inseparable “Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in other globes with their suns and moons.” ~ Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass

Just another alien life form, human-like, but not quite.

Light years from his home planet, wandering now, wandering in a mother ship of civilized anxiety.

Just another body stumbling by the waffle house; every town’s Roswell, every town’s Area 51.

An extraterrestrial begs a warm cup for a cold night.

Eyes bulged, black and void, staring at a cement bed permanently parked under the storefront canopy, possibly caught in deep-space memories from a lifelong journey, fixated on the entanglement stuffed in a black garbage bag, the stained shirts, oily pants, photos of family, and an old stainless-steel toaster.

Page

37

He raises an amber bottle to his unshaven face, a salute to an army of one, a fragile flag of a new nation, a toast to celebrate the other world reflecting from within the toaster.

Page

38

“Bug Bar” by Tyler Smith, 2015

Universal Zoomorphics A Poetrytale by

Page

39

Iftekhar Sayeed, Seth Crook & Matt McGee

Chapter One

Of Fire and Fog light rains in waves from the gibbous moon to the hoar valley of Khagrachari on this cold closing night of the year the hills are wearing white the river silver a monotone of monochrome

Page

the village sleeps but life pullulates among the ululating creatures anonymous choirs hymning the harmony though faint and far

40

neither kerosene lamps below nor stars above dare interrupt the marriage of moonlight and mist

Chapter Two

Memo from the Short-Eared Owls on the Road along Loch Scridain Questions— they sit upon the stobs, perch upon the poles.

If only they would flap away, or drop. Mice and shrews are easy, likewise the frogs.

And we don't hate the scampering, hopping things.

We all must eat, make do.

Page

41

But questions give us indigestion.

Chapter Three

The Fishtank Life The old Vietnamese man who runs the tropical fish store once told me why all the fish in his store die.

Is no poisoning, or people not feed. Is because they scooped out of homes in coral or ocean, taken away from their families.

They spend rest of their lives swimming around tank, seeing only reflection.

They think it’s their brother or sister or kids or whatever.

But is only reflection.

I asked the old man when he came to America.

You know fall of Saigon?

I climb over fence, get inside embassy.

Leave wife. Take daughter.

Keep me alive.

Didn’t you ever send for your wife?

He shook his head. No. She dead.

How did you find out?

Quickly, NO. No need to try.

Page

Did you ever—

42

No. Just know.

The old man watched a bright orange fish darting side to side in its tank.

I swear all he saw was his own reflection, and I wondered how he managed to last so long in a new culture.

Then, inside the tank, a second, smaller, yellow fish wiggled out from a crack in the faux coral, and the old man smiled.

Page

43

And for a moment, I thought I knew how things worked.

Page

44

“Kissing Fish” by E. A. Hanninen, 2015

Communion A Poetrytale by

Page

45

Leslie Philibert, Kevin Oberlin & Gram Joel Davies

Chapter One

Priest The entrance to paradise Is the soul in a small boy Two ruddy apples, cheeky chappie Your pulse in a starved eye Fingers against cotton and elastic A swamp sanctified With wood and blood, this the call For a fingered miracle, the perfume Of wet perfection, rub-a-dub And so you tell yourself;

Page

46

To save you must love Have a smile brittle with chalk A breath full of hot wine

Chapter Two

Before Opening the Envelope, Consider

Page

47

This better not be another coy attempt to get a rise out of me by saying sex would have been inevitable and made me resent how easily you could seduce me, turn my erection against our friendship. Those threats seem less urgent now that my opportunities to flirt have worn at the knees. Most evenings I undress unattended, adding a shirt to the pile of shirts.

Perhaps if our friendship had better survived, I might thank you for caring enough to keep me away from your bed, instead of this surprise, a letter, another intimacy I’ll have to concede.

The scent in the damp of the sheets left by your thighs would at least have been something I could remember you by.

Chapter Three

How Many Nights?

A caress like a cat’s tongue. Moisture on rough palms. Nicotine fingers.

I wake at the touch, your sound, sobbing, your chemical stench of delirium.

I cannot count sleepless nights, smooth as zero, those forced enactments of calm.

I know when breathing is not sleeping, that you have not slept in days, I match my breath to yours, hope you will sleep as I do.

But you are busy not sleeping, not eating, lying like a glass corpse filled with hornets, scented by psychosis and ashtrays.

Page

48

Mind a reactor, your flesh hums. Four a.m., your talk is paranormal. I gasp from sleep, woken again when your quest became too hard, and dress hurriedly in the rags of Reason, cup my fatigue like a moth in both hands, not daring to touch, nor let go.

Night and day are the same; you talk of tormentors who leave landmines in your head for you to find, scheming from afar without rest to take, from you, your capacity for love, the power to feel, the very will that is your essence.

There are tests, ordeals of character, forced ways of being: shadow-puppet hands give you this shape to be, that hat to wear.

I wonder at your captors sitting, round the clock, at Ouija boards, crystal balls, crow’s bones — how much sleep can they have had?

You are saturated by psychedelia, while I am parched, a mummified wafer of assurance, bleached clean of feeling, anticipation, nearly of hope, placating each second in turn.

How many nights unslept, before the doctor comes, kind lantern bearer, casting out this sickened night?

She refuses to send you to bedlam halls where banshees and harpies dwell, treats you at home. For the first moment, I hear you breathe the sleeping breath, and dare not move.

A tablet works magic on those speakers, meddling fingers fall still. The scent of hysteria dries almost fresh. You wake, one-hundred-years-full with sleep.

Your eyes have been meteors, destroyers of worlds, but with a yawn you ask me,

Page 49

Is there any food?

Page 50

“Ammonites” by E. A. Hanninen, 2015

Of Stones & Bones A Poetrytale by

Page 51

Karla Linn Merrifield, Maureen Kingston & Seth Crook

Chapter One

Wealth of Souvenirs

Page 52

In seaport Barbados, the Sea Cloud secured, the cruise ends and Captain Santos discharges his elite load of tourists, well-off travel junkies, to the prosperous Barbadians of old, who grew fat on flying fish and rum; those British planters with imported African slaves made to cut the sweet acres of sugarcane.

Today only one windmill churns, a photo op; the plantation mansion’s now a museum, its St. Nicholas Abbey but a pricy distillery.

Despite its flowered terrace cafĂŠ and fragrant herb garden, the boiling house still smells of syrup and blood.

Chapter Two

The Skeleton Coast My son’s washed-up masks lie low in closet dunes, living fossils, like horseshoe crabs, exposed Halloween carapaces, Neanderthal faces, subject to towel mold and tossed-shoe tears. He’s out hunting with the other bushmen, jockeying for position among the baboons, hungry lions, charging bull elephants, his baritone voice bellowing, asserting dominance, searching for a queen to share his desert kingdom by the sea.

Page 53

The rusted hulls and forlorn skulls of Octobers past are mine to mourn. I lay a wreath of candy corn in remembrance, in honor of the Orange River we once shared. I tissue-wrap the smooth pebbles we collected from the river’s mouth, stow them in a steamer trunk — a treasure to be passed down to an older version of my son; after fatherhood’s fog has settled into the valley of his heart; after he’s been bewitched by his own child’s phantasy realm.

Chapter Three

The man made of moss feels a fondness for small walls, sometimes has an unexpected urge to hide in crevices, or fill in lettering on gravestones at the parish.

Seeming old, but always young, he loves small secrets, like names he hides as soon as he finds them.

Page 54

“Moss Man� sculpture (& photo) by Georgia Crook, 2015

Zillah Pinder, Lizzie Major, William (could be Antcliff ?) . . .

“Late lies the wintry sun a-bed, / A frosty, fiery sleepy-head; / Blinks but an hour or two; and then, / A blood-red orange, sets again.”

Page 55

~Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses

A Lyric Essay

By Maureen Kingston

Ceci n’est pas un poème.

My husband and I have been married for decades. Naturally, through the years, communication problems have erupted. He’s accused me a time or two of not paying enough attention to X, whatever X was that week. How if he could twist X into sonnet form I might better notice it (or him). A fair point. 97% of my bookshelves, plus adjacent tables, are filled with books of poetry. A comfortable certainty, this — my obsession with poetry. Or it was until about 18 months ago when everything I wrote, suddenly, ominously, turned to prose.

Page 56

And yet . . .

Page 57

My writing muse hadn’t abandoned me but she stubbornly refused to be lineated or corralled in any way; and worse, would go on jawing for pages, exceeding any prose poem I’d ever written. Stumped, I commenced a reading odyssey — purchased all of Rose Metal Press’ field guides to flash fiction, to nonfiction, other volumes penned by Dinty Moore, Judith Kitchen, Holly Iglesias.

None entirely satisfied.

I decided to submit a few of my odd pieces to see how editors might classify them. Poetry editors slammed the door the fastest. Clearly these pieces weren’t poems. Fiction editors (often doubling as nonfiction editors as well) appreciated my lyricism, but thought the story elements were deficient (unreliable narrators, not enough character development, fragments of historical artifacts, political quotes oddly interjected). And as for nonfiction, was there any chance I could stick to one topic and add another three thousand words?

Frustrated, I approached the three percent of my bookshelf that was not devoted to poetry — Montaigne, Gore Vidal, George Orwell, Lincoln’s speeches, ecological diarists, Studs Terkel, Virginia Woolf, Eric Hoffer, the likes of which bleed right into my prose poetry section. (As far as I’m concerned, my favorite essayist pals are just poets who write long.)

In an old collection of E.B. White’s essays I rediscovered a brief page-anda-half meditation entitled “Riposte.” In it White takes an English reporter to task for his New York Times article alleging telltale weakness in American civilization because Americans don’t fancy brown eggs. White quips that the Englishman hadn’t done his homework. That New Englanders, as it happens, were quite partial to brown eggs; why, he even had a neighbor (in Maine) who was “planning to go the brown egg one better. He dreams of a green egg.” (75) And it wasn’t a penchant for abstraction, as the Englishman suggested, that drew Americans to white eggs, but a love affair with a particular egg-machine hen that never got distracted from her job: “A Leghorn hen, if she were on her way to a fire, would pause long enough to lay an egg. This endears her to the poultrymen of America.” (Essays of E.B. White, HarperCollins, 1977, 74) “Riposte”’s concision, diction, and multiple meanings (at the same time lauding and critiquing America’s twin fetishes of novelty and efficiency) is ribald and lyrical, while the subject matter extends beyond the lyric moment to allow for the entrance of larger subjects and sourced materials. This was closer to the kind of writing I was doing. Perhaps I was inventing a new form: the poetic essay.

Alas, I am late to an ongoing party. Deborah Tall and John D’Agata, editors of the Seneca Review, coined the phrase “lyric essay” to describe the hybrid form in 1997. Later this year, the journal will publish a double issue exclusively showcasing the form. In “We Might as Well Call it the Lyric Essay” (http://www.hws.edu/senecareview/lyricessay.aspx), D’Agata defines the genre thusly:

Given its genre mingling, the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically — its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole. The stories it tells may be no more than metaphors. Or, storyless, it may spiral in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea, without climax, without a paraphrasable theme. The lyric essay stalks its subject like quarry but is never content to merely explain or confess. It elucidates through the dance of its own delving. Loyal to that original sense of essay as a test or a quest, an attempt at making sense, the lyric essay sets off on an uncharted course through interlocking webs of idea, circumstance, and language — a pursuit with no foreknown conclusion, an arrival that might still leave the writer questioning.

As far as I’m concerned, the lyric essay is still a slippery pig — defiant and wonderfully creative to play with. Sherman Alexie’s daring fragmented frames, such as “Captivity” (http://genius.com/Sherman-alexie-captivity-annotated), is an intriguing exemplar. Alexie uses a primary source epigraph (the colonialcaptivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson) to interrogate “captivity” as a literary form — as a living artifact that is both remembered and forgotten by whites and Indians again and again. While seemingly prosaic, the treatment is definitely poetic — bending time, juxtaposing lists, breaking the rules by interacting with found poetry. Lia Pupura’s On Looking (2006) and Rough Likeness (2011) lyric essay collections do likewise, but for fascinating book lengths, allowing for more extended treatments of aesthetics, identity, and historical interpolation than is usually allowed in poetry.

Nearly a thousand words and I wonder if I’ve even begun to communicate the essence of what I had intended. Consider the following piece of writing that was forwarded to me via email with no explanation or even a title:

The piece meanders for another nine lines (sentences?). It has elements of an Asiatic travelogue, a diary entry, hints of politics, and ends with a hobbled boy and a crutch, but in such a way as to make you consider the observer the wounded party. Who was the author? A poet, I was certain.

Page 58

The landscape like homespun boro: a patchwork of rice paddies. A barefoot child wearing a ragged pair of burlap pants, a coarse rope tied around his waist, lugging a large, rickety cart up a rutted, dusty hill. Houses built with cinderblocks.

Homes made of earth, dung, and stalks. A display of lemurs stranded on an island in a park; a man poling a raft heaped with bananas out over the stagnant water to feed them. A woman in a pink shawl, sitting on the sidewalk, her face worn away by leprosy. The street: a bed the river Suffering streams. The Queen's Palace: a burnt-out marble carcass crowning a hill. I wander the ruins, moving through them like the smoldering vermiform tracing the ashen remains. I extract a few hand-hewn nails from a charred transom, slip them into my pocket.

In fact, the writer was a talented ceramic artist, Erik Rehman*, whose work brought me to tears when I saw it a few summers ago, and who also, apparently, writes poetry. I would consider Rehman’s prose a kind of lyric essay, and like other such essays it offers unqualified access to and acceptance of the poet’s primitive mind. If a poet set out to build a house of prose this is what it might look like. The lyric essay allows poets to be themselves, the eccentric, associative creatures they are without first passing through a sieve to make themselves more palatable to either fact or fiction crowd.

I don’t know how long I’ll be visiting this new land, but it surely has shaken my poetic tree.

Read Maureen’s Poem Chapter on page 53.

*http://artmapburlington.com/content/2011/frog-hollow-downtown-burlington-april-2011/web-erik-rehman

Page 59

“As far as I’m concerned, the lyric essay is still a slippery pig — defiant and wonderfully creative to play with.” ~Maureen Kingston

Merrifield’s Tao of Poetry Review Column

by Karla Linn Merrifield

“Bruck’s poems may be unified of voice, but you’ll meet characters and read their stories, both every bit as lively and enchanting as Chaucer’s.” ~Karla Linn Merrifield (On Julie Bruck)

Review

by Gram Joel Davies

“The classic forms of poetry have always been able to tell us stories, but there is a new quality to be found in comparing historic lives, told in verse, and modern lives recounted the same way. . . . As a means of storytelling, it exists outside the changing fashions of cultural milieu.”

Page 60

~Gram Joel Davies (On Catherine Chandler)

Page 61

“Lost in the Story” by E. A. Hanninen, 2015

Monkey Ranch Cover, Stock Photo, D.J. Bryant

Merrifield’s Tao of Poetry Reading

By Karla Linn Merrifield Monkey Ranch

By Julie Bruck, Brick Books, 2012 http://www.brickbooks.ca/shop/monkey-ranch/

85 Pages / $19

“a solitary, endless / infinitive”

There’s no predicting the imagination. There I was, closing the covers of Canadian Julie Bruck’s Monkey Ranch after another read through, when lo and behold the opening lines of the Prologue to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales leapt into my head. Say what? Where did that come from? How’d I get catapulted back to the 14th Century reciting words in Middle English that I had once

Page 62

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote the droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote, and bathed every veyne in swich licour, of which vertu engendred is the flour. . . .

memorized in college and not thought about since? After all, The Centrifugal Eye contributor Ralph Gordon recommended we review Monkey Ranch, noting in his Reader Survey, “Think Elizabeth Bishop, with a 21st-Century vibe.” But it was not Bishop who sprang to mind, nay, nay.

I wracked my brain for two weeks trying to figure out what my imagination could be telling me about a connection between Chaucer and Bruck. Different time period, different language, different nationalities, different genders, different styles, different subject matter, different, different, different.

Finally, I unlocked the secret to imagination’s great leap of time and place.

The reason I’d linked the two works and writers together was twofold: Both are comprised of poetic stories. And both are, in a word: enduring.

And, maybe, just maybe, my imaginative jeté had something to do with quality poetic craftsmanship, too.

“let the world name names”

vacuumed the bedroom while he slept.

The harder I hoovered, the deeper I wanted him, the more I hoovered, the deeper his sleep.

Page 63

I expect most TCE readers have some familiarity with Chaucer’s Tales; as educated Westerners, we would have had him rammed down our throats by our professors. And cinephiles may have “met” his gaggle of pilgrims in the eponymous 1972 Italian film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, which won a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. (If you aren’t familiar with this magnum opus, you can always follow along with me on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales, or Bartleby’s, beginning with http://www.bartleby.com/40/0101.html.)

So, most of you know that these medieval stories are told by a mélange of characters from friar to knight to prioress and so on. Bruck’s poems may be unified of voice, but you’ll meet characters and read their stories, both every bit as lively and enchanting as Chaucer’s. He may have given us “The Monk’s Tale,” but Bruck delivers two young siblings, described as “small monks who remained, / to all appearances, untouched” (“The Trick”).

“The Clerk’s Tale” is the story of a young woman whose husband tests her loyalty, while Bruck’s “Once” shows us an amorous woman frustrated by her lover, a “man who did not want or wake.” She:

Many of Chaucer’s tales are as much about the tale-tellers as they are the story. The Man of Law, for example, comes across as a judicious and dignified man through his wise words. Similarly, many of Bruck’s tales are confessional, revealing to the reader what it means to her to be a daughter, to be a mother.

Two poignant poems, “Entre Chien et Loup” and “My Father’s Clothes,” while being about her father, show Bruck as a perceptive and intuitive child. In the former, Bruck-as-little girl observes her impatient father “storm from the house,” sensing already that “he will leave my mother.” In the latter, she’s able to capture her father’s character in a single line — “He could have been a dressmaker’s dummy,” while also revealing herself as a woman of profound tenderness. Speaking about her father, she says: No one showed him how to live in his clothes, how an elbow needs to worry its way through a sweater . . .

This about the man who deserted his family. This, an uncommon tenderness.

That capacity for tenderness comes through as well for Bruck the Mother. In the opening poem, “This Morning, After an Execution at San Quentin,” Bruck wills herself to find in the “sharp light” of the prison, a soothing moment of tenderness for her daughter. The exuberant little girl finally has “run out of joy,/ and fallen asleep on her knees.” This is a tenderness common to most mothers.

But the supreme TLC of the poet shines through brightly in “Ocean Ridge,” a story poem that at first presents us with Bruck as rebellious child who she didn’t want her mother to tell her “what to look at, how to see,/ didn’t want her using my head/ as a spare room for her own.” Now, as an adult reviewing that scene of mother and daughter on the beach collecting shells, Bruck recalls her mother’s profile:

A phenomenal empathy beautifully, succinctly portrayed.

Lastly, let me suggest another similarity between Chaucer and Bruck regarding characters and characterization. In Tales, 23 characters come to life on the page through their words. In the poem “Please,” Bruck delivers 13 mini

Page 64

all I can see is the tip of one ear, sunlit almost to transparency, its delicate runnels and inlets shaped as if by water.

portraits in 31 lines! So both poets are indeed masters who enjoyed creating a well-populated scene for their readers.

Stories told “between / outer and inner doors”

Page 65

Just as Chaucer employed different characters to lend variety of voice and point of view to his collection, Bruck achieves variety by adopting different strategies to tell her stories.

The best example is the title poem, “Monkey Ranch,” which is a fable.

Wholly imagined without a hint of autobiography, we meet a family that raised “striped / green and yellow” monkeys until, one day, the father tires of monkey farming, so he quits. Besides, the mother “always favored chinchillas.” “We starved our monkeys.” And soon thereafter, Bruck the fabulist reports, “It took them a whole year / to die off while we watched.” And the moral of the story is: Man is a brutal animal with little regard for his fellow animals.

Meanwhile, “Love to, But” is a mood piece rich in ominous imagery that delivers time and place with a deft hand. You hear “the packs of feral dogs / howling all night,” can feel the “fog-bound city” surround you, and smell the “poisoned river.” This is the atmosphere in which people inexplicably disappear.

Thus, “A yellow Hummer slipped / through a crack in our street.” So when Bruck tells you near poem’s end that “these are strange times,” you know you’ve read not only a mood piece, but a cautionary tale as well.

Bruck also tells the story of a troubled marriage via ekphrasis (a literary description of artwork) in the modern sonnet “A Marriage.” In the opening lines we learn that the husband is an artist whose “paintings were small, suggestions/ of houses, pinpricks of green for trees.” Quickly, Bruck gets at the crux of conflict between spouses. When the wife tells him to paint “from memory and passion— / two words he especially didn’t care for,” the artist, like a spoiled child, takes his “painting back down / to the basement.” It’s no wonder she is disappointed: “He would never touch her the way she wanted.” All he had to offer were suggestions and pinpricks.

There’s also “New, Used, & Rare,” a complete romance novel in five quintains. Bruck demonstrates that it is possible for an “elderly lady with bright / red hair” and a “thin man with purple skin lesions” to find love. Read it to find out how!

“A subway token. A dime. That vertigo.”

While it is difficult to tweeze the finer details of Chaucer’s craft for modern readers without a knowledge of Middle English, even without a pronouncing gazetteer, you can sense Chaucer’s mastery of craft in lines such as these from the prologue to “The Cook’s Tale”: Upon his argument of herbergage!

Wel seyde Salomon in his langage, `Ne bryng nat every man into thyn hous,' For herberwynge by nyghte is perilous.

In just four lines, you get a good idea of his nimble use of rhyme, rhythm and music. And then, as was natural to his task at hand, he deftly wove direct speech into the lines so we can hear his cook, his physician, his pardoner’s voices.

Julie Bruck is also a consummate craftsman, er, craftswoman, as you might detect from the subheading above, quoted from “Girl in Her Brothers’ Bedrooms,” and in the hammer notes of tiny, punchy sentences that conclude the poem.

What utter delight to read the short-lined “Indécis,” where the poet took meticulous care in selecting the verbs that make this poem vibrate off the page: “bulge,” “ripple,” “palpitates” and “drums” enliven the poem even as the lines’ rhythm gets the reader moving in her chair. Here are opening lines:

She makes my tongue happy to read these lines aloud.

Her metaphors are quite often sublime and always perform their function admirably. Music is the sustaining metaphor in “Gold Coin,” where she asks in the beginning of the second stanza: “What gives this day such perfect pitch, / a held note against the usual desolations.” In “Great White, Released,” we join her at an aquarium where she observes a shark in its tank, its “dented face — a solitary, endless / infinitive that couldn’t hold a crowd.” And then we turn to a “half-ton sunfish, a pocked, prehistoric boulder / rolling its perennially alarmed

Page 66

Chicken or shrimp, sell or keep, cerulean or indigo, go, stay?

eye, / the grimace pure German Expressionism.” The touch of anthropomorphism in the poem adds spice to the reader’s pleasure.

Speaking of pleasure, I draw attention to Bruck’s expert use of enjambment.

She is no Chaucerian rhymer, but manipulates her line breaks equally deftly. To wit: Returning to “Great White, Released,” I note these lines: Children shrieked into the parents’ legs while the shark continued his autistic revolutions, dull skin glancing off the glass.

It’s the “autistic / revolutions” that stun me. In emphasizing “autistic,” we are reminded of the thousands of tragic children afflicted with the disease. And that links them to the primordial shark, evoking the idea that we humans, too, are animals with animal DNA and brain cells that can malfunction, causing all manner of troubling diagnoses.

Another beautifully executed enjambment occurs in “New, Used & Rare,” the romance story I’ve mentioned. Two unlikely elderly people serendipitously find themselves in the same bookstore at the same time, but then: A thin man with purple skin lesions, leaning hard against Used Film, looks up from his book.

Here, Bruck doubles the dramatic leap by ending both the middle line of the sentence and the stanza with “looks up.” One simple gesture doubly emphasized by clever enjambment and suddenly, love blossoms.

Allow me, dear reader, to indulge in one more example. In “Islands,” which concludes Part III, Bruck employs the same strategy as in “New, Used & Rare.”

A palsied man shuffles past the window, drool swinging from his chin; the street steams after rain. Certain afternoons

Aha! By breaking the third line of her triplet with “afternoons” before concluding the sentence, Bruck drives home her point with considerable strength. Her islands are the islands of time, precious islands of quietude.

Page 67

are islands.

I could gush on and on, but must pause here to pick my wee nit. Taste is personal, as we all know. I’m not enamored of the three poems, “Final Season,” “Today’s Handicap,” and “The Winningest Jockey,” that deal with the world of horse racing. These horsey poems don’t seem to rest comfortably in the flow; they feel jimmied into place at the end of Section V. Perhaps if they had been treated as a triptych the subject matter wouldn’t have felt out of context.

In sum, it is no wonder that Monkey Ranch earned the Canadian Council for the Arts’ Governor General’s Literary Award. Brava, Ms. Bruck. What a serendipitous fit with TCE’s “story” issue; what an enduring (and endearing) collection; what “swich licour.”

Read Karla Linn Merrifield’s “poem chapter” on page 52.

Also a National Park Artist-in-Residence, TCE Staff Columnist and Editor Karla Linn Merrifield has had some 500 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 Eiseman Award for Poetry and she received the Dr. Sherwin Howard Award for the best poetry published in Weber — The Contemporary West. Karla is a member of the board of directors of Just Poets (Rochester, NY), and a member of the New Mexico State Poetry Society, the Florida State Poetry Society, and TallGrass Writers Guild.

Page 68

Visit Karla’s blog, Vagabond Poet: http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.

Page 69

“St Catherine Reading a Book” by Carlo Dolci, ca 1650

Review: Catherine Chandler’s Glad and Sorry Seasons

by Gram Joel Davies There is a novel I love, Rainforest (Diski, 1987), in which a scientist goes crazy in her attempt to lay a grid of numbers over the jungle — metaphorical of all that seethes unconsciously within her. Writing, particularly poetry and its inspiration, is often characterized as being quite “wild.” There is a beast, a forest, within (or, so we are sometimes told). Frequently, seemingly unrelated observations pass in the course of a day, only to resurface hours, weeks, years later, coagulated into the perfect depiction of some truth, or even as analogies of one another. How does a writer do it?

Catherine Chandler opens Glad and Sorry Seasons with a tragic miscarriage, in “Coming to Terms.” Birth and death, the biggest themes, encapsulated at the outset. With a bit of effort, I have struggled to regain my familiarity with the conventions of form poetry, so involved have I become with free verse. The grid of meter, the hard corners turned by rhyme, at which Chandler is exquisitely precise — how can this square with the agony of loss?

The poem’s title may reveal more than it first suggests.

Her crafted poetics are intelligent. You can feel the poet through these words. Often funny, impressively learned. There cannot be many writers who could pen a cento also in the form of a sestina, as in “The Bard,” entirely in the Shakespearean mode. And the sonnet becomes her, like a favorite suit of clothes.

As I say, over time I have slipped out of classic verse and gone naked through the waterfalls of free verse, forgetting in so doing how there is a “song” in every sonnet.

This heavenly reminder from my favorite and final section of Glad and Sorry Seasons encapsulates for me, perfectly, the music in poetry, how the story it tells rides on the frequency of a wave. It is a capacity Chandler can utilize, and does so early during the book, in “Two Poems of the Sea” (Part I, “The Dawning”). Her line, “And then the crash. The Undertow. The ache” culminates the piece’s mounting pulse with a timely gut-wrench.

Page 70

Now, in a frail voice, tremolo, she whispers ‘pear’ as if it were ineffable as petrichor. ~ “Heartwood,” Glad and Sorry Seasons

Page 71

The human voice has, of course, its own internal rhythms and consistencies, and there must always be a tension between the natural form and the imposed shape of music, a tension that has dramatic effect when sudden concordances occur. While “free-form” poetry relies strongly on the internal consistency of language and narrative (a quality I could liken to a waterfall or rivulet for the sense in which the language seems to pour itself through unseen strata in search of a pool, a rest, an equilibrium), meter takes a story and patterns it deliberately.

When she tells us tales of worlds that fall apart, entropy at work (as Chandler often depicts in her poems), there is defiance, or hope, structured into her measured words by virtue of their form.

There might seem something anachronistic about a volume so concerted.

Chandler’s themes, however, feel contemporary. Think perhaps of the “cheeky CEO” who rampages on a plane in “Ira.” In spite of that, readers might become aware of another tension at work, between what I might characterize as “nobility” of the past, and a sadness of the realized present. “Down. Down in history we go;” writes Chandler, “through anthracite, the colour of all woe.” She does not flinch, but the sadness is real.

Part II of Glad and Sorry Seasons is titled, accordingly, “Driving Back Shadows,” and it contains the triolet, “A Fieldstone Fence.” This old stone wall lasts across time to become scene for both ancient settler passing by, and now, poet-and-narrator mulling it. Not, therefore, so different in its conception to the triolet itself; or the sestina, or the sonnet. Constructions whose timelessness appeals to us for their own sake.

Maybe we need some things to stay the same. To view modern life through such ancient lenses matters. The classic forms of poetry have always been able to tell us stories, but there is a new quality to be found in comparing historic lives, told in verse, and modern lives recounted the same way. The form is a kind of control, a vantage. As a means of storytelling, it exists outside the changing fashions of cultural milieu. Chandler takes power from this, as well as reassurance.

Of unusual note is “The Lost Villages: Inundation Day.” Catherine Chandler may have stretched herself with this piece, which feels characteristically different from the rest. Principally a pantoum, the poem is memorial to homes destroyed by a planned industrial flood. I have always loved pantoums — not for their repetition, but for the surprise they create. Shifts in meaning seem to suggest the generative iterations of evolution. Chandler pushes these mutations faster, writing some quite radical deviations into the form. I am made to wonder whether the matter the poem itself deals with innately allows for what feels like a daring experiment for Chandler. Has contemplating a culture obliterated prompted her to sanction some erasure of tradition herself? Nevertheless, the piece's concluding cry of “Rising, rising . . . oh, how the water's rising” strays from naturalistic speech to a more archaic tone, as if to anchor the poem.

Page 72

Her classicism is visible in other areas of her poems as well. A number of biblical quotes lace her work, and poems composed or launched from lines borrowed from others, such as a billowing illumination of one of Yeats’ quatrains in the glosa, “Críonnacht,” all contribute to the learned feel Glad and Sorry Seasons has (the book’s title, of course, is Shakespearean). “The Oldest Sins” features seven witty sonnets exploring those ancient vices, which include Sloth and Gluttony, with a soft touch. These are far from scathing admonishments of human folly. In “Acedia,” (interestingly, classically the sin associated not with laziness but melancholy) the fate of the “puffed-up puppy/Twitter-texting yuppie” is sad: behind the scenes, beyond the pirouetting volta, we are privileged to experience his loneliness close-to; while the poem “Gula” makes a villain not of a Häagen-Dazs®-guzzling addict but the one behind her at the checkout, who will judge her shallowly. Beneath these hip expositions of up-to-the-minute living are archetypes which suggest, in human terms, an arcadian template still underlies nature, now as always.

In Part V — “A Smack of All Neighbouring Languages” — ten translations are made of French Canadian and Spanish American poets from approximately the turn of the last century. It might not be immediately apparent to readers these are translations, because the language, as in all Chandler’s verse, is so naturally housed in its meter and comfortable with its rhyme schemes. There is nothing rough or compromised in these pieces, which are perhaps uniquely “in between” — not quite in Chandler’s own voice nor neither quite that of their original author. The convention for taking much license with regard to the musicality of the final translation is deeply traditional. While it piques my curiosity as to what is subtracted, what is additional, the end result is diamond.

There are some pitfalls for the modern reader of Glad and Sorry Seasons . . . for me, at least. Chandler phrases her work in an abundantly ready style, easy on the ear and often conversational, so make no mistake there, it would be wrong to create any impression that reading her poetry feels stuffy. She is a delight — for her ability to take on the persona and voice of so many characters — a real storyteller not locked into an idiosyncratic perspective. Nor will every reader experience a jolt from the ever-present substrate of Form; and, though it must be said that in much of her writing, the author is conspicuous by her very erudite art, it is not this which poses risk. Only, it is that there is very little that is truly postmodern here. Unlike the novel I mentioned in the first paragraph, whose pretext is that madness lies in craving uniform structures that can underpin or overlay life’s teeming, Chandler suggests the platonic belief in perfect forms; a universal metronome; the pulse of God. The difference between them is an act of repression and one of expression.

Chandler’s is an assertion of human hope which does harken back to a philosophy of a bygone year. It needs faith. “Coming to Terms” could almost be seen as a manifesto at the book’s outset, a grappling with life and death that, no matter how estranged from God its protagonist feels, still solves its own anguish

via its artistry. Chandler admires Charles Baudelaire in “Ragbag,” for “straining to hold what tidy lives discard,” that this might “permit a vision that transcends the pool / of vomit.” This is what a sonnet does, she tells us. Perhaps this accretion of sense out of fragments underlies all our needs for stories.

The “wild” inspiration of the poet is a misnomer; the unconscious adores a coming-together of things and a writer plumbs its capacity for finding pattern where nature fails to provide. All art puts angles around the unframed, says, “look at it this way.” What appears chaotic, the forest, is itself a triumph of life over nothingness. As Chandler puts it, “All roads lead to Rome / from shared beginnings in the tidal pools.” It is done by effort, by sheer trying. Not the discovery of mythic order, but its making and remaking, as people, with their stories, have always strived to do.

Read Gram Joel Davies’ “poem chapter” on pages 48 & 49.

Editor’s Note: And you can learn more about Catherine Chandler by revisiting TCE’s August 2009 Featured Poet Interview in our Unbidden issue: http://issuu.com/centrifugaleye/docs/tceaug09-unbidden/8

Glad and Sorry Seasons

By Catherine Chandler Biblioasis (2014) http://www.biblioasis.com/catherine-chandler/glad-and-sorry-seasons

79 Pages / $16.95 US

Page 73

Glad and Sorry Seasons Cover, Stock Photo by D. J. Bryant, 2015

Page 74 “Portrait of a Man Reading a Book” by Giovanni Francesco Maria Mazzola, ca 1520

The Centrifugal Eye Contributors, Winter/Spring 2015 In Order of Appearance:

Glen Sorestad is a well-known, Canadian poet who lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. His poems have appeared in literary magazines all over North America and other countries. His poems have been translated and published in seven languages, and have appeared in over 60 anthologies and textbooks, as well as in his nearly 25 books and chapbooks of poems published over the years.

Andy N. is a poet and writer and an experimental musician from the North West area of England (United Kingdom). He brought out his first poetry book, Return to Kemptown, in 2010 and has since followed it up with a few low-key ebooks.

His major second collection, A Means to an End, came out at the end of 2011, which is a split book with his good buddy, Jeff Dawson. The third collection, Europa (2014), is another split collection, this time with poet Nick Armbrister.

Leslie Philibert is a writer living in Germany. After studying English Literature at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, he now works as a social worker and has translated for South German theatre groups. He’s married, with two children.

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

Martin Willitts, Jr., is the winner of the 2012 Big River Poetry Review’s William K. Hathaway Award; co-winner of the 2013 Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest; winner of the 2013 “Trees” Poetry Contest; winner of the 2014 Broadsided Award; and winner of the 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest. He has 6 full-length poetry collections, including contest winner Searching for What is Not There (Hiraeth Press, 2013), and 28 chapbooks, including winner William Blake, Not Blessed Angel But Restless Man (Red Ochre Press, 2014). Martin is a regular contributor to The Centrifugal Eye.

Page 75

Brian Garrison pens poems on receipts while driving, types them into his fancy phone (not while driving), scrawls them on whatever scraps of paper he can grasp in his dark bedroom, and once tried writing on the steamy shower door. If you search near Rochester, NY, you may find some of the words that got away from him. He runs errands for the poetry journal, Parody. (http://parody.onimpression.com)

Jeff Bernstein is a lifelong New Englander and divides his time between Boston and Central Vermont. Except on summer days when his beloved Red Sox are at Fenway, he prefers to rattle along back roads, although he is proud to be a Bostonian. Poetry is his favorite and earliest art form (he can’t draw a whit or hold a tune). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ballard Street

Poetry Journal, Birchsong – A Poetry Anthology (Blueline Press), Best Indie Lit New England, Main Street Rag, Muddy River Poetry Review, Paper Nautilus, Reckless Writing: The Modernization of Poetry by Emerging Writers of the 21st Century, San Pedro River Review, Soundings East, and Tipton Poetry Review. His second chapbook, Nowhere Near Morning, was published in the fall of 2013 by Liquid Light Press. Jeff’s writer’s blog is (http://www.hurricanelodge.com/).

Seth Crook taught philosophy at various universities before moving to the Hebrides. He does not like cod philosophy in poetry. But likes cod, poetry and philosophy. His poems have recently appeared in Scotland's Northwords Now, Gutter, The Open Mouse, Southlight, New Writing Scotland, and Far Off Places.

And south of the border in such places as Magma Poetry, Envoi, The Rialto, Orbis, The Journal, The Interpreter's House and various fine e-zines. The world is his lobster. Seth is a regular contributor to The Centrifugal Eye. David Forman’s first career was as a calligrapher. His second was as a behavioral scientist and college teacher. He returned to his early love of writing in midlife.

He lives in Rochester, New York. His work has recently appeared in the journals, Decades Review, The Bakery, and Shot Glass Journal. In addition to his poetry, he is currently working on translating a children’s book from Yiddish to English.

Kevin Oberlin lives in Cincinnati with his wife and a passel of animals. His chapbook, Spotlit Girl, is available from Kent State University Press.

B. Scott Walker is a warehouse supervisor from Takoma Park, MD. He spends his free time spelunking through dark, unexplored cranial cavities searching for a sturdy, phosphorescent hat rack on which to hang at least one of his helmets.

Page 76

M. R. Smith is a technology executive writing in Boise, Idaho. His work has appeared in publications such as The Cascadia Review; Camas (Montana); The Literary Bohemian; Punchnel's; Red River Review; The Innisfree Poetry Review, Blacktop Passages; the FutureCycle Press anthology, What Poets See; and the Western Press Books anthology series Vol. 2, Manifest West: Even Cowboys Carry Cell Phones — among others. He is also currently a staff reader at The Cascadia Review. His son, Tyler Smith, is a part-time staff illustrator for The Centrifugal Eye, who also collaborated with his father’s contribution in this issue — see pages 36 and 38 of the poetrytale, “A Toast to Other Beings & Other Globes.”

Iftekhar Sayeed teaches English. He was born and lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

He has contributed to The Danforth Review, Axis of Logic, ENTER>text,

Postcolonial Text, Southern Cross Review, OpEdNews.com, Left Curve, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Erbacce, down in the dirt, The Fear of Monkeys, and other publications. He is also a freelance journalist. He and his wife love to tour Bangladesh.

Matt McGee is a musician and writer living in Thousand Oaks, CA. His collection, We Liked You Better When You Was a Whore, is available on Amazon.com.

Gram Joel Davies (37) is from England. He has contributed to The Centrifugal Eye as reviewer and poet on several occasions, and you can find some of his poetry online at Blast Furnace, Bolts of Silk, and the Black Market Review. He is a member of Juncture 25 poets, and is currently working on his first collection. He also plays at being a photographer, tweets as @poplarist, and blogs a bit at Poplar Culture. http://poplarculture.wordpress.com/ Karla Linn Merrifield, a National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had over 500 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has eleven 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 FootHills is Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada, a sequel to Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills), which received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye. Visit Karla’s blog at Vagabond Poet: http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.

Maureen Kingston is an assistant editor at The Centrifugal Eye. Her poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Apocrypha and Abstractions, B O D Y,

Page 77

CHEAP POP, Gargoyle, Gravel, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, So to Speak, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and Terrain.org.

The Centrifugal Eye’s Publishing Tales & Narrating Needs: The Latest News & Guides

Press Releases TCE Contributor Denton Loving’s collection, Crimes Against Birds, is available through Main Street Rag Publishing Co. (2014). http://mainstreetrag.com/bookstore/product/crimes-against-birds/ Kevin Acers’ Dead Mouse Poems (2014), which includes a poem that first appeared in TCE, can be found at both Createspace and Amazon.com: https://www.createspace.com/4981703 Longtime contributor Ellaraine Lockie’s Where the Meadowlark Sings, winner of the 2014 Encircle Chapbook Contest, came out in January 2015 from Encircle Publications. http://www.encirclepub.com/store/product/where-the-meadowlark-sings

Early TCE contributor CarrieAnn Thunell has returned to poetry after a few years’ hiatus and brings along with her 2 new (2014) collections: Love In Four Seasons: A Backpacker's Love Story in Tanka Poems, and Deep Gyn-Ecology Trusts in the Earth: Poetry for the Planet, both available through Createspace/Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/Love-Four-Seasons-Backpackers-Journey/dp/1500230995 http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Gyn-Ecology-Trusts-The-Earth/dp/150042868X

Civilized Ways, a collection of poetry by contributor Gary Beck, and published by Winter Goose Publishing, is now available from all major retailers. Also out, Gary’s new Pirate Spring, a novel available through Kindle Scout/Amazon.com http://garycbeck.com/ You can watch the Civilized Ways video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhiWIulpW58 Twice TCE-reviewed Mathias B. Freese returns to the fore with more lyrical short stories in his 2014 release: I Truly Lament: Working through the Holocaust, available from Wheatmark. http://www.wheatmark.com/catalog/entry/I-Truly-Lament

Assistant editor, book review columnist, and regular contributor Karla Linn Merrifield has a new collection forthcoming in May 2015 from FootHills Publishing: Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada, a sequel to her award-winning Godwit: Poems of Canada. Signed copies will be available from Karla (no postage) or from FootHills: Walter Ruhlmann’s new collection, Crossing Puddles (with foreword by Karla Linn Merrifield), is now available through Robocup Press (January 2015). http://www.robocup-press.com/forthcoming.html

Page 78

http://www.foothillspublishing.com/index.htm

Back Issues The Centrifugal Eye has been around for almost 10 years. Much of the work published during that time is still available in our online archives, and has been collected into an anthology (see http://centrifugaleye.com for details). During the past 6 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

Back Cover Art: “Orchid & Claret” Marbled Book Endpaper

Page 79

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

Page 80