JUST IN CASE YOU SHOULD MEET ME ON THE STREET
—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
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Erik Campbell: “I wrote the attached because I wanted to feel more alive and consequential than I have in ages.”
JUST IN CASE YOU SHOULD MEET ME ON THE STREET
—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
__________
Erik Campbell: “I wrote the attached because I wanted to feel more alive and consequential than I have in ages.”
THE NEW BATTERY SHOULD COME TOMORROW
—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
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Ruth Bavetta: “I write at a messy desk overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Once, it was important to me to make sense of life. Now, I’m convinced that there is no sense-making. There is only what is and what has been. I am human, separate and mortal, and that’s where the poetry comes from. This poem is pretty much an accurate report of an actual morning a couple of years ago. This kind of thing happens with increasing frequency as we age. What can we do but laugh about it?” (web)
GAY CHICKEN
for b, y, s, and all the boys who knew me first.
—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
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Animashaun Ameen: “I am a queer person who comes from a place that is determined to hunt and hurt people like me, and poetry provides me with the means to touch the faces of other boys like me and share my story with them—letting them know they are seen and are not alone in this long journey to becoming.”
WHAT TO DO IF YOU’RE BARELY SCRAPING BY
—from Poets Respond
April 21, 2024
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Chera Hammons: “This week I read that two-thirds of baby boomers, the wealthiest generation, don’t have enough saved for retirement as they reach retirement age (with a quarter having no savings at all). I also saw a story about people who have lost their entire life savings to a wire transfer scam, with no recourse available to them. My internet browser keeps recommending an article to me titled, ‘What to Do if You’re Barely Scraping By Financially.’ These things made me think of all the financial advice I’ve heard before, how it’s so often completely out of touch with reality.” (web)
THE TUNER
for E.C.
—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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Colette Inez: “A poem is born right here, somewhere in my heart, in my blood vessels, in my gut. It comes to the brain much later. I have to feel them actually pulsing in my body, and then when they get shaped, when the brain, the controller, the pilot, whoever one’s metaphor, however this metaphor can extend, takes over. I like to think that my brain is the lesser part of my poems and that my heart, in the best of my poems, is the one that rules.” (web)
SOMETHING FISHY
a rengay written on a Washington State Ferry
—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
Tribute to Collaboration
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Michael Dylan Welch, C.R. Manley, & Tanya McDonald: “‘Something Fishy’ is a rengay we wrote mostly on the ferry between Edmonds and Kingston, Washington. Fish seemed like a natural theme to write about while we crossed the Puget Sound. Michael wrote the first rengay with Garry Gay, its inventor, in 1992, and has been promoting the form ever since, with essays and my website. Renku always links and shifts between the verses as it seeks to taste all of life, but rengay deliberately focuses on a single theme, which we had fun exploring in various fishy nuances.”
BABEL
—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
Tribute to Collaboration
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Matthew Shelton & Timothy Liu: “For the past five years, we have been collaborating on poems and performances that incorporate music with verse. The texts for the project include pieces performed both acapella and with instrumentation (tabla, shruti box, log drum, singing bowl) in the tradition of the Sufis. Through the use of repetition and incantation, a single sonnet can be stretched and pulled beyond recognition into a hypnotic and improvisational rhythmic space.”