January 16th, 2009
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KIP DEEDS: “‘Walden, Sprawl, and All’ began with a drawing of a cabin, inspired in part by my own experience of cabin-living in Michigan. Although this drawing went unresolved for two years, I began doing watercolor tests on the paper in the summer of 2007. By autumn I was developing a sprawling urban landscape around the cabin, in contrast to the more placid central image. The text adds commentary to the inevitable contrast between the quiet, solitary life and the pervasiveness of so-called modern progress. ‘Elevated Findings’ began as a study of a piece of furniture in the poet Janée J. Baugher’s Seattle home. On tiers of shelves is an arrangement of office supplies and knick-knacks. Among these items I added some of my own objects. The text in the scroll tells a story and presents a tour through the shelves and curiosities.”
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–from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
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January 15th, 2009
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Review by Ginny Kaczmarek
THE DIRTY SIDE OF THE STORM
by Martha Serpas
W.W. Norton & Company
500 Fifth Ave.
New York, NY 10110
ISBN: 978-0-393-33143-1
2008, 89 pp., $13.95
www.wwnorton.com
Every hurricane season, those of us who live along the Gulf Coast are reminded of the fragility of this part of the country. Hurricanes Gustav and Ike blew through Louisiana and Texas this past August, bringing to mind the devastation wrought by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and underscoring how vulnerable we still are. In The Dirty Side of the Storm, Martha Serpas, a native of Galliano, Louisiana, artfully evokes the beauty and power of the Louisiana bayou, building a case for the survival of a landscape and culture in danger of being exterminated, not only by nature’s forces, but by human carelessness and greed.
Despite the book’s title, all but one of these poems were written before Hurricane Katrina and its resulting floods, which gives them an eerie prescience. The eponymous poem, for example, describes the relief and guilt that survivors experience each time a storm—or any disaster—approaches and passes by: “Death just misses you, its well-defined / eye and taut rotation land on /someone else.” As others get the brunt of the storm—“The Red Cross mobilizes elsewhere”—we realize that being physically removed from catastrophe doesn’t free us from it entirely:
January 14th, 2009
James Cushing
THE MAN WITH THE CORPSE ON HIS SHOULDERS
I know a man who carries a corpse on his shoulders.
Yesterday, at sunset, I thought I saw
a lump of what had been a foot, or a smear of what
maybe was a face, just to the side of my friend’s pant leg
down by the unshined toes of his brown saddle shoes.
It was the dead, gray, mortal thing, beautiful and real
in some way no one can explain – the corpse he carries
and the way he carries it – so much so that
when I hear a bossa nova, I think of him, and when
I try to write a poem, sure and frank and flashing
with sex and wisdom and all the things I want to include,
like my friend and the corpse he carries, I think of him again.
Today he told me “Stay away from me, I’m sick.”
I told him his shoes were in a poem I was writing,
but that’s not true: the shoes escaped me
while he hoisted his corpse. Back home,
he props it in its chair for the night, so it may watch
him dreaming.
I carry a corpse, too.
Here it is, in my black-and-tan book bag, next to my green
Plato. Look at it. His face, uncorrupted, has lost what rage
it ever had. His white hair, grown past his shoulders,
feels so delicate; strands show up on tabletops, sweaters,
bowls of soup. His veiny hands, covered in loose,
translucent skin, clasp one another as though he were
meeting himself and felt on fire with the need
to touch. Some trouble with his belt: it keeps unbuckling,
catching my book bag, scraping my right ear
as I force his body into it. The bag-weight hurts my shoulder,
pulls me to the right as I try walking a straight line.
I love the work I make when carrying him, love
the hurt of his buckle on my ear, the chafing of my
shoulder, the ache in my arm, my full bladder, sleep-amoebas
swimming in front of all I see.Through this nest of floating
shapeless things, I see my friend walking to his car, stopping
to adjust the corpse’s feet so they don’t kick him every step.
I see him the way I sometimes see haloes a few inches above
the heads of strangers, or statues making tiny movements
with their eyes. I think I’ll ask him if I may sleep tonight
in his back yard. The radio predicted comets, shooting stars,
and it’s dark enough out there for them to seem real.
–from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
January 13th, 2009
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DIANNE CARROLL BURDICK: “I photographed all the images with black & white film and printed all images on fiber-base black & white paper. When the print is dry, I treat the paper with an oil-base solvent and color the image with colored pencils. ‘Playground’ was photographed at my dad’s ranch in Ukiah, California. Strangely enough, Ukiah spelled backwards is haiku. My dad, Bruce Carroll, had 200 acres called Round Mountain, and when I would visit, I would always twirl near the spot that this photograph was taken, to enjoy the vast beauty of the land.”
LINDA NEMEC FOSTER: “Throughout my writing career, I have had a deep interest in collaborating with others. In 1998 Dianne Carroll Burdick asked me to write poems in response to her photography for a collaborative art/poetry exhibit called ‘The Good Earth.’ I composed haiku—the traditional form created by Japanese poets over 500 years ago. Then, as now, haiku were written in response to the natural world: the human reaction to the landscape that we are a part of, yet separate from. Ultimately, this project was not only about the landscapes of images and words, but about ourselves: how each of us reflects the universe that the world contains.”
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PLAYGROUND
She wants to run, twirl
Follow the path all the way
To her past: those trees
–from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
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January 12th, 2009
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Paul F. Cummins
UNDER COVER
The skies were pretty much blue those years,
Quiet streets lined with burnished maple trees,
The horizon lay where it was supposed to be
Ever so far away wherein vision disappears;
Neighborhoods welcomed carts with ice cream chimes
And fireflies designed galaxies spread above the ground
As random owls floated inquiries over cricket rounds,
And we listened spellbound while summoned to bedtime.
Lights out I listened under the covers to Jack Benny,
To the Shadow who knew evils that lurked in men,
The Lone Ranger and Tonto triumphing again and again,
To the reassuring deference of Rochester, Amos and Andy.
All was quite well ordered, quite a set of certainties—
It seemed that all was as it was ordained to be.
–from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
