While my new chapbook Personal Astronomy was still at the printer, I got the exciting news that another chapbook manuscript, “The Unknowable Mystery of Other People,” was accepted for publication by The Poetry Box. A finalist in that publisher’s 2018 chapbook competition, this collection is all about various people … friends, family, strangers, and in between. It won’t be published until sometime this winter, but meanwhile, here’s one of the poems:Hospital Lobby
I’ve been to all of them, he says,
rocking back and forth, arms
wrapped around himself, every
shelter in the city, naming
them one by one, intoning
like a Biblical prophet
in a B movie. All of them.
Everyone looks away,
away
from this embarrassment
in frayed sweatpants and bedroom
slippers. Every single shelter,
rocking harder and deeper
like water coming to a boil.
All I want is money for the bus,
money and something to eat.
It takes a hospital official, brisk
in suit and badge, to lead him
away, promising a hot cafeteria
meal. Everyone is pleased.
Smiles of satisfaction. Problem
solved. Embarrassment gone.
I can’t make it on my own out
on the street, he says, but
now no one is listening.
.................................................................................................................................... Ordinary/Extraordinary
I’ve been trying to catch up on some of the books about poetry that I might have read as an MFA student. I never was one, though, which explains why, in my 70s, I finally picked up
A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry, by Gregory Orr, who is called by the Poetry Foundation “the master of the short, personal lyric.” The book is an absorbing guide to writing and reading poetry, from the interplay of order and disorder in a poem to the wonderful ways poets use rhythm, sound, and imagination to bring their works alive.One section that struck me particularly was a passage on, of all things, syntax. Citing the “dislocations and deeper entanglements of the American poet Hart Crane,” Orr quotes a difficult passage of Crane’s “Voyages” and calls it “an extremely expressive use of syntax, one that mocks the skeletal parsing of sentence with an image of fleshly, ecstatic flowing.
I couldn’t really follow the Crane passage, I confess, so I felt better when I read on. ”I would add, just to be clear about this,” Orr writes, that I’m not really able to make any ordinary sense out of these lines, even though I think they’re rather amazing.”
Exactly. I have a friend who writes poems that are striking for their sounds and images, but I can’t always make “ordinary sense” out of them. Even so, I think they’re extraordinary. .................................................................................................................................... Between Storms Randall Jarrell once described a poet as someone who “manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.” Most of us who try to be poets check the weather reports regularly, hoping for inspirational lightning. Things can sometimes be pretty uninspiring between storms, though, and that’s where I find myself right now. In a lull.
Yes, my chapbook Personal Astronomy is imminent (yay), and yes, I have another one coming this winter (more on that later). But now, in that aforementioned lull, I’d like to feature work by a couple of other, more inspired, poets.
..................................................................................................................................... Open Doors
One such poet is my friend Rebecca Leet, whose new book,
Living with the Doors Wide Open, is now available on Amazon. In this collection, Rebecca brings her journalist’s skills of observation and her experience of a life well lived to a collection of engaging and accessible poetry. Her poems touch the universal behind the everyday, the sometimes difficult truth behind fallen leaves, a remembered piano composition, the burial of a beloved dog. Rebecca’s tone ranges from the bemused to the elegiac: “Time has tattooed itself / across my flesh,” she writes in one poem; in another, she hopes to “yield” one day with the grace of a falling leaf. “Stay facing the sun that warms you,” she whispers to a rose that, like many of us, is “a few petals toward autumn.”Mothering Backwards
By Rebecca King Leet
I’m sorry, she says, what
are your daughters’ names?
Those, twenty-five and twenty-six,
for whom she’d drawn down
Social Security each month
to ensure they’d go to college. And
whose University of Virginia sweatshirt
and William and Mary tee she’d worn
proudly. She’d sit stone still, listening
to each story Caitlin and Kristin shared.
I don’t remember – what
are your daughters’ names –
asks the woman who was my mother
of the woman who is her mother now
“I heard the owls tonight,” my friend Janet Dinsmore emailed me recently. Janet, who has attended a series of poetry classes with me, told me she has been looking for her voice in poetry for many years. She was standing outside her cottage near the Chesapeake Bay one evening when she heard the owls.Gift
By Janet Dinsmore
Owls are communing
in the soft dark
wooh wooh, a soprano
then an alto and another
I smile on the gravel road
actually
I am inside the body that smiles,
the body smiling with my face
mouth curved happy up
unbidden, unintended…
the independent inner one
on its private
unpredictable
purer path
Rejection. Rejection. Rejection. It’s hard to keep submitting work for publication when everything comes back “thanks but no thanks.” And then suddenly comes acceptance of not one but
three poems at the same time! In the same journal! Thank you, thank you
Foliate Oak Literary Magazine. for publishing “Artic Fever,” “Still With Us,” and “Bathtub Buddha” in your May issue. It’s enough to make me keep on writing, keep on submitting.Bathtub Buddha
By Sally Zakariya
Watching the water swirl down
the drain
I think of Australia –
does it really circle the other way
in the southern hemisphere
left hand one way, right hand
the other?
Do the gyres cancel each other out
when they collide at the equator
clogging the drain
bathwater rising
a flood of soap and bubbles
bathing the earth?
No it can’t be – the world
is too steeped in dirt and grime
to be cleansed so easily.
Even the rain that showers down
from Heaven
can’t wash the stains clean
without help from our tears.
In sections called 1) find literary journals, 2) follow directions, 3) cover letters matter [sort of], 4) keep good records, and 5) keep submitting, Manning gives a quick course in the art of getting your poems out there and in print or online.
“If you’re not one of those rare, lucky poets who have poems accepted on the first try, don’t worry,” she writes. “Most of us took a long time to get a first poem published, and sometimes even well-published poets have dry spells. Submitting poetry can be discouraging, but keep doing it.” Words to live by. After all, as Manning observes, it’s a numbers game. The more you submit, the more likely you’ll get one of those good-news acceptance emails. ..................................................................................................................................... There’s still time If you’ve been meaning to order my forthcoming chapbook Personal Astronomy but haven’t gotten around to it, never fear. The chapbook is slated for publication in mid-August, and there’s still time to reserve your copy. The poems “express a stargazer’s wonderment, doubt and acceptance of the extraordinary grounded in an ordinary life,” says one reviewer. Another calls the collection “a poetic journey into the microcosm of love and relationship juxtaposed against the backdrop of the universe in poems that are as lucid and ordered as the constellations they invoke.” Buy a copy and the stars will shine on you. ..................................................................................................................................... Coming Soon(ish)
My forthcoming chapbook “Personal Astronomy” is now available for pre-order from
Finishing Line Press. I’d like to think people will enjoy the poems inside, and I’m hoping they’ll like the cover illustration as well. It’s a detail from a star chart by Johann Elert Bode (1747-1826) showing the constellation Andromeda. (That’s her, reclining among the stars.)
When I first mentioned
"Personal Astronomy". here a couple of months ago, I included a poem that will be in the chapbook, “Constellations.” Poet Dianne Silvestri responded with a poem of her own. (Dianne, by the way, wrote the charming “Summer Treasure” in
Joys of the Table..)
“Since you invited correspondence,” she wrote me, “I am drawn to send you a poem of mine I recently resurrected which I thought of as I read your ‘Constellations.’” August Midnight
By Dianne Silvestri
The ranger locked the gate
at sundown, our group inside
to camp at Bluffton Game Preserve.
We unrolled sleeping bags
like planks to bridge the road,
lay wide-eyed to observe
unobstructed midnight sky
of August set to astound us
with one shooting star after another,
all sites on the map overhead
firing meteors in rapid succession.
No one died while asleep
in the middle of that asphalt.
When we awoke the next morning,
in fact, we were all more alive.
Insomnia, 4 AM
The end of the world comes when you’re awake
the dark clamor, the rush of wings,
the taste of copper in your throat,
the jagged wire of dread dragged
through your veins and capillaries.
You don’t get to sleep through this.
The moon may hang a jaunty lantern
outside your window, but you see the scowl
on its face, you grasp the sheer dimension
of the final freeze.
No welcome thaw to come. No cozy sleep.
Not even dreams of sleep.
When the end of the world comes
you will still be awake.
A recipe box is a little history not just of
dishes you love but also of the people who
taught you how to make them. Take dessert: Even
though I try to stay away from cakes and pies
these days, that wasn’t always the case.
Flipping through the recipes in my box brings
family members and old friends sweetly to mind.
My thanks to the Mississippi University for
Women for including this poem in the Fall 2017
issue of
Ponder Review:Their Desserts
By Sally Zakariya
Robin, who couldn’t hide her
innocence, maker of poppy
seed cake,
unhappy in love, leaning toward the nunnery
last I heard
Jeanne of the
freckles and flaming orange hair, never quite
one of our group
and remembered mostly for her
carrot cake
Willie,
practical Midwesterner who did it all a year
ahead
and better, who
served flaky almond pastry from her
Dutch forebears
friends and
family all filed together in the old recipe box
under Cakes and
Cookies along with others -- Mother’s
there of course
no baker, still
we relished her peach skillet pie and apple
goodie, sweet
memories neatly recorded in her own left-
leaning hand
Nancy, too, big
sister who settled into a domesticity I envied
but failed to
emulate (I never make her pecan pie but savor
the recipe)
and you, Aunt
Betty, your spice cake topped with tangy lemon
sauce deserves a poem of its own, warm and
pungent, starting
with the same
simple stuff as all the rest -- flour, butter,
sugar, eggs
-- but how
various the cooks, how various their desserts
I’m always delighted to see new work by poets I
know, even if I only know them through
publishing. Case in point: Michael H. Levin,
whose delicious poem “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”
(after the movie by the same name) appeared in
Joys of the Table. Levin’s new collection,
Man
Overboard, is now available for preorder from
Finishing Line Press.“Michael Levin’s poems are a captivating collection of dramatic slices of life netted over the course of decades,” writes one critic, and another adds, “Levin’s poetry circumnavigates the globe like a time-traveling Indiana Jones and sticks a shiny fork deep into earth’s volcanic heart.”
The title poem, which first appeared in Poetica Magazine, tells a tragic story with Levin’s characteristic economy and Imagination
Man Overboard
(C.G.R., d. 2004)
By Michael H. Levin
Dark head bobbing in a
chevron wake
disconnected as the space surged
you slipped through the O
of our grasp.
Cool as Wisconsin, you forgot
safe dreams are toxic, that fear is how we fly
--
stood off, maneuvering. We scan your log now
seeking its theme.
Cold virtues are an ancient curse --
they reek of Artemis and Mimë.
To wall one’s heart with denial, is to
starve the self away.
Our saving grace is to open
like glories; for openness is all
the earth we have, we dots on the
sliding gray plates
of a following sea.
Bon
Appetit
Don’t forget to “Like” our
Joys of the Table Facebook page. And check
back often! We’re adding poems and recipes from
time to time and would love to hear from you.
.................................................................................................................................... What
Are You Writing?
Why should we get all the
bylines? Submit your latest poem—just one for
now—and we’ll publish the poems we like best in
an upcoming blog post. Simultaneous submissions
are fine, but please let us know if the poem is
accepted or published elsewhere. Send your poem,
plus a few lines about yourself, in the body of
an e-mail message to:
poetryeditor@RicherResourcesPublications.com
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