Mid足June
Mid-June unfolds today with showcase 1. The Collaborative Poetry of Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a non-profit dedicated to the publication of literary work in hybrid genres. Her most recent books include the essay collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2010) and the poetry chapbook, After Robinson Has Gone (Greying Ghost Press, 2011).
Elisa Gabbert is the author of two collections of poetry: The French Exit (Birds, LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press), a chapbook. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Salt Hill, and Sentence. Her nonfiction has appeared in Mantis, Open Letters Monthly, and The Monkey & The Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics.
Collaboration Note by Kathleen Rooney: Back in the Spring of 2010, I was on a tiny book tour of the East coast, and when I read in Boston, I stayed with Elisa. Her partner, John, had recently rescued a bunch of moldy old books from a friend's father's library, and he was giving some of them away. I scored a copy of a super-ugly but wellorganized book called Designs in Poetry, which was edited by R. Stanley Peterson (formerly, Chairman, English Department New Trier Township High School, Winnetka, Illinois), put out in 1974, and intended for classroom use. The section called "Image, Figure & Symbol" included the brief poem "The Warning" by Adelaide Crapsey, and the combination of the strangeness of the piece and the comedy of her name made me want to know more about her. Per the Poetry Foundation website, "Adelaide Crapsey is best remembered as the inventor of the cinquain and as a poet whose compressed lyrics "are a remarkable testament of a spirit 'flashing unquenched defiance to the stars,'" as quoted in Boston Transcript" and "With her invention of the cinquain, Crapsey created an American form similar to these Japanese predecessors. Like Ezra Pound, she admired the Japanese poets for their compressed language and formal aesthetics. The five unrhymed lines of the cinquain followed strict accentualsyllabic requirements." We decided we'd try to write some very small, succinct poems based on her cinquains, but without the rigid metrical requirements. In Adelaide's honor, we call the resulting poems "Crapseys."
BORDERLINE PERSONALITY An event of infinitesimal chance is still more likely than my going to therapy to erase my past. Fuck happy people—I’m a lone electron.
EDITORIAL The experts won’t tell you that a cape and a chiffon scarf is two rights make a wrong, although I might not either. How can we communicate across such distances?
THE PLAY’S THE THING Plenty of sunshine and a soundtrack of birdsong and a well-tipped hat are all in the stage directions. So what’s this hadron collider doing here.
STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS I. A physically plain heroine, a topologically complex & desolate storm cloud— are these the makings of a classic rent party? I doubt it. II. A physically plain heroine, a topologically complex & desolate storm cloud— are these the makings of a classic cocktail, and if so, what to call it?
CLEOPATRA A strange invisible perfume hits your visible tanline like a caress. No flower can make you live forever, correct? Isn’t that so?
Copyright 2012 Dead Man Publishing, LLC All poems in this archive are Copyright 2012 Kathleen Rooney and Elisa Gabbert.