President’s Message Summer 2016 It’s hard to believe that Annie Menebroker, who passed on July 9, won’t be in the audience at poetry readings around Sacramento this fall, this winter, and in the years ahead. A true poet’s poet, Annie was always there for everyone else. She was an early member of SPC, always a great supporter of readings at SPC, at Luna’s, and wherever poets gathered. Her wise and gentle spirit will not be forgotten. Thanks to Mary Zeppa for sharing her memories of Annie in this issue of Poetry Now. California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia provided a wonderful evening for local poetry fans at the Crocker on June 26th. Reading from his new book, 99 Poems, Gioia’s blend of stories and poetry was truly masterful. SPC was fortunate to have help from SMAC, which included this program as part of its Remarkable Artists Series. Chigozie Maduchukwu opened the event with his fine recitations from his Poetry Out Loud presentations. Thanks to all who attended, and everyone who helped us present this big poetry event for Sacramento. On September 24th we will celebrate the annual international program 100,000 Poets for Change with a reading at SPC – at 10am we will feature high school poets, and there will be readings going on all day. Check the SPC website for details! SPC Board members are working on many projects – Dennis Hock is hosting a fundraiser Monday, Aug 29 at Wellspring Women’s Center. It is Penny Kline who now sends your email blasts (email address), and she will begin a regular hosting gig on September 19. Allie Gove now assists Kara Synhorst with the details of membership – (don’t forget to join SPC – you can do it online from our website!) New board member Jennifer Pickering will be filling in as a host. There’s more, but since you don’t have all day, thanks to all the board members and volunteers who keep our programs going! SPC’s Poets’ Gallery, thanks to curator Bethanie Humphreys, continues to fill our space with colorful artwork. Here’s a look at the upcoming gallery schedule: August – Photography by Michael Kelly-Dewitt September – Women’s Wisdom Art October – Treasures from the SPC Archives – posters, articles, photos. November – The Artwork of Tule Review – with the annual reading by contributors! Some notable readings coming up: Monday, October 3, Wendy Williams hosts the poets of Women’s Wisdom Art. On Saturday, November 5, Frank Graham hosts Tule Review’s annual contributors’ reading. Don’t forget we also offer free Tuesday poetry workshops at the Hart Center, and Thursday poetry workshops at North Laguna Library!
SPC is proud to announce that Juan Felipe Herrera will be reading in Sacramento on the evening of Saturday, November 12 at the Crest Theater. Tickets are available at brownpapertickets.com for $15 each. Electropoetic Coffee will open the show. Don’t miss this very special event by our national poet laureate! And if you’re interested in the inner workings of the Poetry Center, or if you want to get involved, please come to our annual General Board Meeting at 6pm on Monday, September 12. We’ll elect officers from our volunteer board for our 38th year of bringing poetry to Sacramento. All are welcome – we hope to see you there! —Bob
“Oh, a babe called Menebroker has just turned three score and ten. She is one delicious woman. Manna flows out of her pen.”** And indeed it did: manna, wisdom, wry and lively humor and the kind of plainly spoken home truths all too seldom set down in a poem. When Annie Menebroker died on July 9, our poetry community lost both a unique poetic voice and one of the warmest hearts it’s ever been my pleasure to meet. Full disclosure: we were friends. Friends–through thick, thin and everything in between–of nearly four decades. I often say that I was “not quite present at the creation” of the Sacramento Poetry Center. While Annie wasn’t one of the original crew (who held readings in coffee shops and people’s houses, who helped take-down-to-the-walls-and-create-anew our first “home” at Sierra 2), she got there before I did. And she’d been on the “poetry scene” for quite awhile before that. Annie and Joyce Odam met in a poetry class in the ‘60s. To quote Joyce’s recent reminiscence in Medusa’s Kitchen: “She is my ‘original poet’ friend. We were fledglings together.” By the time I met Annie (sometime in the ‘70s), she was fully fledged: already both a widely published poet and an experienced editor and publisher. But so low-key and unassuming, so modest—Jane Blue once (if memory serves) called her “the most egoless poet I’ve ever met”— you’d never know it. We became fellow SPC volunteers and Board Members. Annie served as, among many other things, our Librarian. She also (with Doug Blazek and C. K. Dobbs) edited our first anthology (a much bigger deal in pre-computers-everywhere days) Landing Signals. She was with us when Robert Bly came (twice) to read. With us for our first conference (held at CSUS) featuring William Stafford, Sandra McPherson and Dennis Schmitz. And she was with us (ah, the vagabond years) when we moved out of Sierra 2 and into a much less settled future. Even after Annie left behind Board membership and active volunteering, she was a steady and supportive presence in our poetry (our arts) community. In the last decade, after her 8+ years ago diagnosis with liver cancer, Annie was a wonder. She decided that if she was going to live, she was going to LIVE. And she was everywhere, taking it all (poetry, music, theater, art) in, cheering us all on. Annie never stopped writing and publishing. In recent years (far as I know) she never “submitted”. But plenty of people asked her for poems. A chapbook, intended to commemorate her 80th birthday, arrived the week after her death. Now and again, she’d get up at an open mic. Once in a great while, she’d succumb to somebody’s blandishments and take a brief spin as a featured reader. Early in 2013, I persuaded Annie we should start taking regular walks in McKinley Park. First once, then twice, a week, for three years, we circled the park proper + the Garden and Arts, walking and talking, laughing and condoling, finishing it off with more talk on “our bench” facing the duck pond. We talked, no holds barred, about anything and everything. It enriched and deepened, beyond measure, our friendship. Each of us wrote poems about that park, those walks.
Just before I left for a February-March writer’s residency in Illinois, we celebrated our third anniversary with breakfast at Orphan and a victory lap. We were incredibly pleased with ourselves. Like so many people in our community, I loved Annie very much. I’d like to say we had a special friendship. I imagine many people reading these words would say the same. And we’d all be right. Because, as Jane Blue so perfectly said, “Annie had a talent for friendship.” “When our history is written, there’ll be more than one doyen but there’s only one Miss Ann.”** –Mary Zeppa
Celebrating the Landing Signals launch at On Broadway Bar & CafĂŠ are (L to R) Joyce Odam, Julia Connor, D. R. Wagner, Mary Zeppa, Ann Menebroker and Patrick Grizzell. Grizzell is waving the first dollar Landing Signals earned. Photo and caption from Keepers of the Flame: The First 30 Years Of The Sacramento Poetry Center.
Sue Daly Carol Louise Moon Ann Privateer Ingrid Keriotis Terence Sherbondy Charles Halsted Gary Kruse Emmanuel Hove Mhike Diane Funston
SUE DALY that lazy trumpet never mind the beer and wine dear, i'm drunk on that lazy trumpet singing my blues away. trees move and sway to the easy rhythm guitar. songs from the great American songbook come to life in this big-time city. gramps playing with toddler while gramma feeds the baby. kids on the playground laughing, dogs chomping at their leashes. everyone loves a concert in the park.
CAROL LOUISE MOON Gone As Wind A locust tree with blooms appears in dreams— my restless dreams as sleep is coming on. My dearest friend is there, but then she’s gone. Too soon she disappears as wind or streams of blue. I think I hear a whisper now— at times with sobs. Sometimes she sings a song, a saddened song that often lingers long. I think of these and other times—and how, when we would speak of harvest she would say, In springtime, yes… would be a sheer delight to pick these blooms. But when in satin light I point them out, I see she’s gone away. With locust blossoms high and birds on wing, it’s then I think about her in the spring.
ANN PRIVATEER A Symphony Fast dances into the arms of love into duty's complications into fuzzy post-punk respites into cool complications into a grand improvisation into new music vibrations into electro-acoustic now into slow dancing wow into the finale of laughter.
INGRID KERIOTIS Dishes Dear Mike, Here's the thing about the dishes: I wouldn’t let my mom get rid of them, so I took them home. When you moved in, I was angry. Who were you? Some guy from Oregon who took my mom dancing out late, who moved into our house too quickly with his orange cat and several floor mats, some guy who threw out what we'd been saving in our fabulous drawer of junk. You brought these blue-rimmed dishes we began to eat from every night: pesto, stir fry, foods I'd never had. You cooked and the house boomed with your laughter. I want to thank you now, for the dishes. Especially the beautiful bowls with their creamy white centers. It is amazing the heft of an oval ceramic dinner plate, how much food it can hold, how many times over the years it can be passed through hands on its way somewhere. Your hands don't touch anything anymore: the smoothness of a round edge, the silence of a soup spoon, the bounty of a shallow blue-rimmed dish filled with all it can hold.
TERENCE SHERBONDY Remembering Imagination When I was young, my friends and I spent the summer running around in shorts, t-shirts and no shoes. We occasionally dared each other to cross the heat waves of a summer street. With screeches and howls along the way, as we reached the cool, green grass on the other side, we cooled the soles of our hot, blackened feet. We were sisters, brothers, friends and neighbors who loved late night games of hide and seek and the raucous exchanges of “Marco,” “Polo” in the warm water of someone’s above-ground pool. Summer days were the auditorium for the cicada orchestra and the magnifying glass for the summer sun. We darted from yard to yard seeking the large, neighborhood, shade trees that proudly stood guard during the day. And, at night, we climbed into the arms of our stately friends, hiding from the enemy who sought to proclaim, “You’re it!” It was decided - a sleep out was needed. Sleeping bags, with a familiar campy aroma, were unrolled across someone’s front yard. Tales of mysterious strangers, who lurked in the shadows and around blind corners, accompanied our mid-night mission to a store that only grown ups were allowed to visit at that hour. When I was young, the thought of adulthood was distant, at best, or certainly remote to a world of imagination that was lived out with toy guns, tackle football, impressing the older kids, and the notion that we would remain 10-years old forever.
CHARLES HALSTED Hummingbird While eating breakfast soon after dawn, I hear a whirring sound, a tiny bird midair: magenta helmet, shiny green back, vibrating wings not three feet away, seeking nectar from salvia in bloom. What miracle sent you, suspended midair, to enchant me today? Is it all in your DNA? Oh master molecule of life, your helices link the quaternary codes that mapped your flight, that trigger synapses of wonder deep in my brain.
GARY KRUSE Suburban Archaeology a room of offhand thoughts some waylaid, some discarded a room sanctioned not long ago for the domestic safekeeping of financial archives and all manner of published data for household operations as pertains to a family now disbanded dissolved data—some waylaid, some discarded countless bundles of records regarding monthly status of consumer accounts now an ironic counterpoint to a life losing all sense of linear association to a life, the sole remaining life, still to inhabit any adjacent interior space bundles of bills now ruptured—strewn about and transcribed notations in arduous tongues on various envelopes of unsolicited mail as well as un-mailed meandering epistles scatterings from a life now dismembering and dropping out of cohesion all manner of printed waste swept aside and into hollow corners among gathering balls of dust and the tittering of hungry squirrels
INTERNATIONAL POET EMMANUEL HOVE MHIKE Rich but Poor Their bus rumbled past everyday But we walk miles to town What do we get? A cloud of dust Our river Lundi is the destination of their wastes Our land, our wellbeing, they do not care Blessed are them, they have been granted every right The right to employ 5 out of 5000 poor villagers The right to just extract our precious stones The right to run over our dusty road, goats, cattle…… Father said I do not have the right to write but I have to write!
EDITOR’S CHOICE DIANE FUNSTON My Soldier, My Son At war, voices of authority command him to act. He seeks to draw blood, maim and alter the plans of what went before, leaving a barren field where dreams once grew green and reached for sun. Napalm spreads quickly beneath the shelter of skull. At peace, he rests his head on my weary shoulder. Watching the tv flicker more slowly than his thoughts, he snuggles closer now, at ease, a soldier on furlough. from foxholes of fear, where the commander in chief is silenced only by the cease-fire of chemicals in his brain. Drafted into an army of darkness, he listens for marching orders again. A foot soldier for perseverance, he hurries then waits, unaware of how this stint will become a career with no Purple Heart and no heroes parade. Incoming, incoming, thoughts and voices arrive, storming the beach with heavy artillery, they will take no prisoners but will hold this family hostage. My son, missing in action for three years, waves his own flag but will never surrender to the winds of war whispering through him.
C O NTR I B UTOR B I O G RAPH I ES Sue Daly has been writing poems since she was a teenager. Her poetry has been published in The Clinical Update, Survivorship, The Literary Humanist, When the Light Changes, Brevities and Poetry Now. Sue facilitates a Poetry Workshop at Wellspring Women’s Center in Sacramento. She has an interest in empowering women to find their unique voices through writing and sharing their poetry with others. When Carol Louise Moon is not sewing or crocheting, or playing with her dog Barkley, she just might be composing poetry. Published in journals in four states plus England, Carol Louise enjoys a wide audience. She is co-founder of the Pantoja Pleiades Circle. She considers herself a neo-formalist poet choosing formal poetry forms, as well as free verse. Her other passion in life is Simulated Client Acting work in the Sacramento area. Ann Privateer is a poet grounded by a rich sense of place. She grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio where she wrote lists of words while walking in the woods or along the Chagrin River. She moved to L.A., California to continue college, married, and moved north to raise a family. Now retired, she spends time visiting family in San Diego and Paris, France. Her poems have appeared in Manzanita, Poetry Now, Tapestries, Entering, and Tiger’s Eye to name a few. Ingrid Keriotis received her MFA from Eastern Washington University. She has been published in the anthology More Than Soil, More Than Sky and in such literary magazines as Blue Unicorn, Talking River, and Alehouse. She teaches English at Sierra College in Northern California. For the last 17 years, Terence Sherbondy has enjoyed living in Northern California. Terence retired in 2014 after a 25+ year career as a federal probation officer, concluding his career as the Deputy Chief. He has a wonderfully creative, intelligent and gifted wife and two adult children who make him proud each day. His newest delight is his 18-month old granddaughter, Annora, who inspires him to be more childlike and to whom he dedicates the poem “Remembering Imagination.” Charles Halsted is a retired professor of medicine at UC Davis and has been writing poetry for several years. His poems have appeared in Poetry Now 2008, Medusa's Kitchen, Yolo Crow, and The Gambler. Gary Kruse grew up in Iowa and attended the University of Iowa where he completed a fiction workshop, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in art and theatre. He went on to complete an MFA in stage design at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2013 he returned to creative writing after a career in architectural design. He has read his poetry frequently at the Winters Out Loud venue and attends the SPC Tuesday Night Workshop. Gary moved to the Bay Area in 1989 and to Yolo County in 2013.
INTERNATIONAL POET Emmanuel Hove Mhike was born in Mazvihwa, a rural area of Zvishavane, Zimbabwe. His father is the chief of Mazvihwa, and he is affectionately known as the Prince of Mazvihwa in writing circles. He attended Midlands State University where he completed his Honours Degree in Music and Musicology. He earned first class, and a university book prize award. In 2015, Emmanuel attended the Chisiya Writers’ Workshop in Mazvihwa, Zimbabwe which was facilitated by his role model Emmanuel Sigauke. He was motivated by Sigauke and the workshop to start writing, and since then has published in journals like Munyori, Zvishavane Arts and Culture association, and Chisiya Writers Club. He has become the chief administrator of Chisiya social networks. Currently he is working on an anthology entitled Shining Black Stars and one in his native language, Nzungu Dzembeu. EDITOR’S CHOICE Diane Funston lives in Marysville, California with her soul-mate husband and three boisterous dogs. She is widely published in journals throughout California and on the East Coast. She is the founder of a weekly poetry group that has been meeting in Tehachapi for over 10 years. She holds a degree in Literature and Writing from CSU San Marcos. She once heard Lawrence Ferlinghetti read in San Diego, and has visited City Lights Bookstore several times. She writes frequently of longing and loss.
Photography
My Inspiration —Nanci Lee Woody
Coastal Travelers Overshadowed, Northern Ireland —Heather Rose Skinkle
The Wall —Robert Grossklaus
Pacifica —Katy Brown
Enshrouded Napa Color —Jason Stephen Shapiro
Temple of Karnac, Egypt —Nick LeForce
P H O T O G R A P H E R S Nanci Lee Woody‘s “Tears and Trombones”, won an IPPY medal for “Best Fiction in the Western Pacific Region.” She loves drawing, painting and photography. Her art has been shown in various local galleries and on the KVIE on-air art auctions. Nancy found one of her favorite birds, black-necked stilts with their gorgeous, long pink legs, at Anahuac NWR (NE Texas) on a birding trip. She takes photographs in her spare time of anything striking or beautiful. Heather Rose Skinkle does Public Relations for the Sacramento Public Library and serves as a military photojournalist. Heather’s an avid reader, writer, photographer, and traveler. She’s working on publishing her fiction writing and has spent the last couple of years on the American River Review‘s editorial staff. Robert Grossklaus enjoys nature and photography. His subject matter can emerge unexpectedly, and his camera often tells the story that he himself was not seeking. Currently, he’s looking for someone with a boat interested in salmon fishing along the Pacific coast. Katy Brown met Alfred Eisnestaedt when she was a freshman in college. He told her that her work showed great promise. She’s been trying to live up to the promise ever since. Jason Stephen Shapiro has a background in theater, photography, and radio. He served on the American River Review as a fiction editor in 2012 at American River College. He graduated cum laude from CSU Sacramento, and is working on his MA in creative writing, while serving as executive editor of Calaveras Station. His work appears in the ARR and The Gapped Tooth Madness literary journals. Nick LeForce, known as the Transformational Poet, has enjoyed a lifelong love of words. He has published five books of poetry. He often enjoys taking “poetry walks” with camera in hand, capturing pictures that inspire poems. A collection of these picture-poems was published in his fourth book, The Poetry of Life.
BLANK VERSE COMPETITION WINNERS Sponsored by Sacramento Theatre Company and Sacramento Poetry Center in honor of STC’s 2016 production of Twelfth Night. Congratulations to winners, Alysa Joerger (Adult Division) for “Learning to Play” and Megan White (Youth Division) for “My Heart Will Wait”. STC held a blank verse writing contest with two grand prizes: the winner of the youth division received a $50 honorarium, and the winner of the adult division received a $100 honorarium. LEARNING TO PLAY by Alysa Joerger – Adult Division The heartfelt chords of clarinets never could complement the modern pop rhythms inside my head. Remember when you once had played for me in sunset blues and pinks? I still recall those earthy sounds – so brave. I did not know that music could become substantial like a flooding rain after a year of drought – or fire scarring homes. The fractured reeds now play off-key. Forget the classical; I miss the easy days of pop. Our rhythms are always out of time; my forced rhymes and your clarinet always clash.
MY HEART WILL WAIT by Megan White – Youth Division I hear the bells ring, taking you away My love, this country that is my heart longs for you For how long must I wait for your return? In this city of our eternal love Even a short absence is hard to endure Fight for this land as you fight for my heart It waits here at home until your victory march I wait back home willing to play my part You must go your way and I must survive Come home to me soon, do not wait too long This flag of our country flies in my soul Your name always on my lips in a prayer Take my heart as a compass to lead you home It is yours now, my soldier, to protect Love it like you love this land of the free But do not forget to come back home for me
ANNOUNCEMENTS NOTABLE ONLINE PUBLICATIONS Patricia Wentzel‘s two poems, “The Scent of Dandelion” and “I wait for you” were both published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) JAMA has a potential readership of 340,000 worldwide. Patricia encourages other writers to submit up to 5 poems by simply e-mailing them to jamapoems@jamanetwork.org. Patricia Wentzel lives in Sacramento with her family. She’s been published here and there: poetry, a short story, some creative non-fiction. Her young adult fantasy novel is nearly complete. She participates in many writing groups around town including the SPC Tuesday Night Poetry Workshop and the Women’s Wisdom Art Poetry Group. To read her poems, please enlarge by zooming in, or subscribe to the edition. The Scent of Dandelion I wait for you The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor shared the poem, “Still, I give Thanks” by Marie Reynolds, and the poem, “Tomatoes on Interstate 5” by Albert Garcia. Marie Reynolds’ poems have appeared in journals including Prairie Schooner, Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, the Arts, and Humanities, Tule Review, Ekphrasis, Rattlesnake Review, Cosumnes River Review, The Writer’s Almanac, and the anthology Late Peaches. She has work forthcoming this fall in Poet Lore. She is a registered nurse who lives in Sacramento where she facilitates an expressive writing group for individuals coping with illness and loss. To listen to, or read her poem please click on the title Still, I Give Thanks Albert Garcia is the author of three books of poems, Rainshadow (Copper Beech Press), Skunk Talk (Bear Star Press), and most recently A Meal Like That (Brick Road Poetry Press). Individual poems have been published widely in journals across the country, and he has taught workshops and given readings both locally and nationally. He serves as Dean of the Language and Literature Division at Sacramento City College. To listen to, or read his poem please click on the title Tomatoes on Interstate 5
~ Congratulations ~
SALLY ASHTON There was a party going on in the other room, and the Brazilian music floated into our room. Sally Ashton and I sat at a round glass table, which had its own centerpiece of faux grapes builtin below the surface. We exchanged greetings, and we discussed the Sacramento Poetry Conference we attended earlier. Sally noted that she had been looking forward to Tim Kahl’s presentation “The Art of Song and Beyond,” but arrived after it had begun. However, during that time, she had the opportunity to meet a few guests and board members. She later attended Salgado Maranhão and Alexis Levitin’s presentation “Translating the Music of Poetry,” taught her own workshop, and then gave a reading with the other presenters after lunch. Alysa Joerger : How did you get the idea for your workshop, “O-U-Oulipian: Writing Poetry of Constraint”? Sally Ashton : At first, I considered doing a workshop on the ode. However, I was just finishing teaching a local 4-week Oulipian workshop, an approach to writing poetry I’d first seen mentioned in Best American Poetry 2015. The workshop participants really enjoyed the process of Oulipo and were writing some exciting new work, so I thought why not try it in a one-session format? I think it worked well. A.J. : You came from the Bay Area to attend our conference, and you’ve taught workshops in Lisbon, Portugal as well. Do you travel often? S.A. : Not as often as I’d like. I love to be in the suspended place of travel – whether it’s on an airplane, train, in a car, or boat. It’s a place between places that’s also no place. As for Lisbon, I’ve taught there a few times through Disquiet: An International Literary Program. The name derives from Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, and his idea of disquiet informs the program as well. A foreign place can make you feel “disquieted,” or off-balance. In such a state you can experience heightened awareness and gain different perspectives. Travel for this reason is important. It’s good to be unsettled every now and then – in your writing and your thinking. A.J. : How many times have you taught in Disquiet’s program? S.A. : Three times now. I’m there for two weeks when I do, so I’ve actually spent a lot of time in Lisbon when I think about it. There’s a word in Portuguese, saudade, that doesn’t have an exact translation or meaning – but I’ve experienced it. Saudade is a sense of nostalgia, a longing for something lost. I miss Portugal when I am away. It’s become a sort of second home. A.J. : In addition to teaching various workshops, you also teach at San José State University. How do you think your work as a workshop teacher, college professor, and poet interact with each other? S.A. : At SJSU, I teach both creative writing and composition. In both types of writing, we focus on finding the best way to say something. Reviewing writing strategies, teaching writing, reading their writing, writing about their writing, reading for writing… one process can’t help but to fuel
the other. I feel that I’m always learning more about writing by teaching it, and my students, at whatever level, always have something to teach me. A.J. : It sounds like you keep pretty busy. How do you find the time to write? S.A. : It’s not easy during the teaching semester, when I spend a lot of time grading. My goal then is to take one weekend per month—whether it’s one or two days—to focus on writing. That’s not always possible, but I manage to write in small spurts here and there. I do take a lot of notes wherever and whenever I can. All of this material, I think, is fuel for when I sit down to write. A.J. : What do you tend to write about? Do you have any particular interests at the moment? S.A. : Among other things, I’m quite interested in the cosmos, in space exploration, discoveries, and the loss of dark skies. Fewer and fewer stars are visible at night, and that concerns me. Space suggests a sense of wonder, adventure, and the unknown. The poems I read this afternoon, “Have you Seen the Stars Tonight?” and “Lunacy,” reflect this interest. I’m also writing some about my mother as she ages. But I will write about pretty much anything that intrigues me. A.J. : Do you do any collaborative work with other artists and poets? S.A. : Yes. I was part of an ekphrastic poetry project this past year in which four poets wrote in response to four artists’ work about the four elements. Our poems were then displayed alongside the artwork in an exhibit at the San Jose Quilt Museum. We gave a reading and the artists put together a lovely museum catalog featuring all of the work. “Fiber & Poetry” will be on exhibit at the SMUD gallery starting July 7th, and in Grass Valley next fall. It was a wonderful collaboration and an exciting project. I have done such ekphrastic work with other artists in the past and have also done readings with musicians. I love the collaborative experience. It’s very energizing. I haven’t written with another poet, but poets are always collaborating indirectly with each other and with writers of the past. The things we hear and read influence our own writing. For example, the title of my book Some Odd Afternoon comes from a line in an Emily Dickinson poem. But I think a joint project with another poet would be fun. A.J. : What specifically are you working on right now? S.A. : I recently finished a full-length collection called Behaviour of Clocks; it’s a hybrid work of short prose including lyric essay, flash fiction, and prose poems, inspired by Einstein’s theory of relativity. I’m trying to get that published, but am continuing to write new stuff. I do like the short prose form in all genres, and I seem to write poems in a series. And I’m looking forward to the summer break! A.J. : To close, what is your first memory – or perhaps just your favorite memory – involving poetry?
S.A. : The earliest is probably nursery rhymes my mom and dad read to me. Nursery rhymes aren’t something we necessarily think of when we think about poetry, but they are – they have rhythm and rhymes, and they play with sounds in the same way poetry does. There was a lot of music and storytelling in my home, too. However, for some reason I had no idea there were contemporary poets outside of who we read in school: Frost, Eliot, and perhaps Richard Brautigan in the 70’s. So being a poet was an idea that never occurred to me until later in my life. But I’ve always loved language, the rhythm and the music.
Sally Ashton is the author of Some Odd Afternoon, Her Name Is Juanita, and These Metallic Days. She is Editor-in-Chief of the DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art. Honors include a fellowship from Arts Council Silicon Valley and a residency at Montalvo Arts Center. She served as Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County, 2011-2013. Ashton earned her MFA at Bennington Writing Seminars. She teaches at San José State University and has taught a variety of workshops including inDisquiet: International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal.
BOOK REVIEW I Spider Season by Susan Kelly-DeWitt Publisher: Cold River Press ISBN 9780997245608
We barely notice the sirens careening past the parking lot. It’s after 10 p.m. and my coworker and I have just finished closing up the store; our location of this corporate chain has its own lot, and we’re lingering because she’s telling me that she’s a medium, or that she’s at least able to make contact sometimes, often. After telling her about the recent passing of my grandmother, she tells me that no one who dies is ever truly gone. They are always near. And this feels strange to me at this moment because on my scheduled breaks I have been reading Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s newest collection of poems, Spider Season, and it is a collection haunted by death, covered in “the dew of the dead.” It’s partially literal, within three pages we are “crossing the Acheron,” just before entering séances; but it is really pervasive throughout the entire work, like a kind of background radiation, or a low and constant hum. “Even the voiceless bones in the cemetery woke and each/ silent grave began singing” so that it’s not just the living that try to reach beyond their material boundaries. In these poems the dead are also reaching out. See, Kelly-DeWitt is a mystic poet here, and these poems are full of crossings and signs, and an animistic view of the world expressed. However, where this usually means believing in a kind of life for all things, here it is more apt to say there is death for all things. But death is not an end to the discussion for Spider Season. Just as my coworker was saying, it is just another phase, and in these poems we see the dead rise in dreams and the living search for messages from them. The issue then isn’t caesura, it is proximity. The issue is the distance between that which is noumenal, and that which is phenomenal. It is between what can be named, “Kingdom – Animalia / Phylum – Arthropoda / Class – Insecta…” and that which is
unknown and perhaps unknowable. The world then is not dying as much as it is slipping out of reach, and this drives the constant tension between living and dead, dreams and waking, and hopes and facts. It might be too easy to turn a skeptical eye toward these poems. In a time when search engines can serve you facts while you wait at a stop light, it is tempting to question the place of mysticism. What relevance do the dead have on the living? and how are clouded dreams relevant to concrete waking? What need is there for hope when we have so many facts? Skepticism can be a powerful drug that promises to open more possibilities, but the reductionism of such lines of thought can leave one ironically unprepared for the vastness of reality. These poems, in keeping attention to specifics like speciation, but looking for more in death, are attempting to take in that vastness. From Night Shift to Chernobyl to Some Say, these are dark poems, and yet they are hopeful, and that is valuable. As I stood in the parking lot, with Spider Season under my arm, talking about death, sirens in the distance, I realized that these poems were necessary. To dismiss hopes as mutually exclusive from facts, or to question the way “Caladium leaves are like hearts” is to miss the value of these poems. These poems are a comfort. They do not dismiss darkness but they do not abandon themselves to it. These poems are a hand to hold as we “put one blind foot before the other / as we must all do sometimes.” Stuart L. Canton
Stuart L. Canton lives in Sacramento, California. His work has been published several times in local journals including WTF!?, The American River Review, and Poetry Now. He is a recipient of the Bazzanella Award for Poetry from California State University, Sacramento (CSUS) where he is studying literature. Stuart is a section editor for The Calaveras Station Review, the literary journal of CSUS. Recently, he has been making an effort to drink less coffee and more tea, and he has been researching deep ecology and sake brewing.
BOOK REVIEW II Tiller North by Rosa Lane Publisher: Sixteen Rivers Press ISBN 9781939639097
Rosa Lane’s Tiller North maps a voyage, seasons spinning, masthead pointed ever forward, across the coast of Maine. “Tiller” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary in three parts as “a horizontal bar fitted to the head of a boat’s rudder post and used as a lever for steering,” “an implement or machine for breaking up soil,” and “a lateral shoot from the base of a stem.” Images of navigation, cultivation, and change intertwine throughout the poems of Tiller North, cycling within the seasons, embodying the phenomenal tendency of all living things toward survival. In Part I, Lane’s second poem, “June Bugs,” begins as the speaker watches “spring peepers pin the night, / pitch a universe in my mother’s kitchen” (Lane 5-6) Immediately following this incantatory beginning, with its precise repetition of sound drawing our attention to its particularity, the speaker warns us that she has yet to be born or even thought of. Of her mother, she says, “I have not yet occurred to her. She is sixteen, / and I will be hers in less than a year” (7-8). Set in June when spring turns to summer, the spring peeper’s chirp signals this seasonal transition. A change exists in the speaker’s mother as well, as she turns from a girl of spring into a woman of summer. Mingling also with these changes in her mother’s kitchen is the notion of who the speaker is about to become, “conceived,” she says, “in the heat / of summer… a small spark of night / planted in the deep crevice between them” (15-17). Here, planted between her parents in the moment of creation, as her mother becomes a woman, some bit of flora or fauna, the speaker begins life. Concluding Part I with the poem “Winter Crow,” Lane brings images of both life and death together. Beginning the “morning / after last night’s squall,” the speaker notes “little holes of onyx” and “a constellation of black stars [that] rises ragged just above / last October’s field” (1-
3, 5-7). Set solidly in winter and following a storm, Lane uses the image of crows to fuse ideas of winter and the message of death they often represent. According to the speaker, the birds land as “a tremolo of notes lands / on wires, one measure of argument” (9-11). The crows not only bring the message of death but the music of desire as well, in which also seems to rest some degree of protest against death itself. In the third stanza, the reader is presented with “one cleft of desire: / caw, caw, caw” (13-14). These birds, according to the speaker, call for a “father who told us… One day I will be / one of them” (15-16, 18-19). Ultimately judging neither death nor life, the poem’s final image foreshadows not just a father’s death, but also his rebirth. Following the father’s prediction of his own reincarnation, Part II begins with the poem “Omen.” The speaker signals to the reader that the omen is a bad one with the first line as “a wreck of weeds washes up pale” (1). Conjured here as an image of corpses washed up on a beach, death returns in the second stanza during a “June [that] began with our father’s boat / pocked with barnacles, laid keel up, / overturned by a cancer undetected” (7-9). Here, as summer begins, images of death continue as the father’s battered boat becomes a symbol of his body, the barnacles an undetected cancer, “a sunset across his chest [that] brooded / in his lungs that hung on a plastic line” (11-12). While it is unclear exactly what disease is consuming the speaker’s father, the speaker and others tend her father’s bedside in the final stanza as “sunflowers planted / around his bed” (14-15). Seemingly already at his graveside, the poem ends with the father’s image, whose face is “half hidden under the wing / of his arm, his body disappearing,” a reminder of his earlier prophesy that he would someday become a bird (19-20). The father’s prophesy is carried out near the end of Part II in the poem, “Father.” According to the speaker, “My mother knows / my father has returned as a hummingbird” (2-3). Rather than returning as a crow as he predicted, a messenger of death, the speaker’s father instead returns as a hummingbird, a messenger of life. As he “stitches the backyard…mending rips of difference, the speaker remembers her father’s death (1, 7). She says, “That last night, his daughters sat in a circle / puckered tight to his bed [and] I was one of them” (8-9). “This moment was complicated,” she continues as she describes how her “mother bloomed open against hospital white. / She saw her daughters: rearranged patterns of him, / perennial and timeless” (20-23). Blooming open, a flower herself, the speaker’s mother views her daughters as flowers as well, seeing them now as rearranged patterns of their father. As she takes “each daughter’s face in her hands,” however, the speaker says, “she let us go for the first time” (24-25). As her husband dies, becoming a hummingbird with “ruby throat” and “emerald green pulse” hovering above them, the mother is transformed as well, blooming open, seeing her daughters anew. “That night,” the speaker says, “three birds of paradise flew up-stem / into a sky he left us to fly into” (26-28). With both mother’s and father’s blessings, retaining qualities of both flower and bird, the speaker and her sisters are released into the world to fly on their own. The circle of birth, death, and rebirth continues in Part III of Tiller North with its title poem. “Tiller North” begins as a set of directions as the reader is told to “take Route 130 nine miles / where it dead-ends at the coastal tip” (1-2). While it appears in the first line that the poem may itself be map to anywhere, by line two it is clear the intended destination is a dead end less than ten miles away. According to the speaker, “households begin at the Point, / where fisher boys drive… their girls, who squeal and dive” (13-14, 17). Apparently, this dead-end road at the coastal tip is where boys take girls to get laid, and, the result of getting laid being getting
pregnant, the speaker continues to describe how “sixteen-year-old bellies grow / pregnant, birth armloads that suck / tiny breasts, unready” (21-23). Clearly, this dead-end road at the water’s edge is where many girls become mothers, “unready,” the speaker says, for “a path of church bells calling them / to kneel Protestant pews and swallow / white wafers of a single mind” (2426). The path of a pregnant teenager in this town is marriage and religion, the forced swallowing of both. The poem closes with the final image as “our father’s fingers, cracked with cold, count / singles laid on the kitchen table at night” (35-36). The speaker recites the memory as if it were a prayer, beginning with the words “our father,” and continuing with an image of the blue collar life her family lived. Her family’s “porch lights lit proof of survival at the edge / of the harbor we are damned to leave” (37-38). Having begun on the road that led to the edge of this town, travelling the cycle of motherhood and possible escape, the speaker admits in the end that this is not a life most would be able to escape from. The penultimate poem, “The Hunter” begins as “wails of the hunter’s loon / reach across the pond, its cry / echoing inside us” (1-3). It being illegal to shoot loons in Maine, the wail of the hunter’s loon may be the cry of something wrongly hunted; a cry of indignation at a life being taken away. It is this “cry echoing inside us” that makes us like the loon, says the speaker, who continues, “I didn’t realize how much of me / was not mine, how much I earned / myself back” (20-22). Though some things are deemed to be wrong, it doesn’t mean those things don’t happen; it doesn’t mean loons won’t be shot and it doesn’t mean that young girls won’t be stuck in fishing towns forever, pregnant at sixteen. And while it has been determined illegal to shoot the loon, it is often the law against something itself that becomes an allure for hunters to chase after it. Of the chase, the speaker says, “I would not look back, but in poems I do. I hunt / for the cry of the loon. And when I find it, / I know, for me, I am living” (36-38). In the end, existing as both hunter and hunted, the speaker hears the cry of the loon and her own insistence to survive. With the final lines of Tiller North, in the poem “Maine Summer,“ Lane leaves the reader mesmerized to the point of chanting, suspended in “an interval of time” where “the cicadas every seventeen years / sing” (23). As sure as the cycling of the season, every seventeen years the women of the speaker’s family, like the cicadas of Maine’s fishing coast, birth a new generation into the world that will grow, mature, reproduce, and die, singing forward centuries of survival. Heather Judy Heather Judy is a poet and artist living in Sacramento, California. She received her MFA in Poetry from Mills College in Oakland, California in 2009. Her poetry has appeared in publications such as the Tule Review, the California Quarterly, Flatmancrooked, and others.