June 30th, 2009
Review by Moira Richards 
DANCING AT THE DEVIL’S PARTY: ESSAYS ON POETRY, POLITICS, AND THE EROTIC
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker
University of Michigan Press
839 Greene Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-3209
ISBN 978-0-472-09696-1
2000, 136 pp., $14.95
http://www.press.umich.edu
I devour books like this. I live across the world from Alicia Ostriker and my education barely touched on poets in the USA–even less on their women poets–so I need engaging and accessible essays like these to learn what more I want to know. Dancing at the Devil’s Party, as the subtitle suggests, comprises six essays that explore aspects of love and politics, the politics of love, and most interesting to me, the politics of gender. The essays look in the main at the works of Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon Olds, Maxine Kumin, Lucille Clifton and Allen Ginsberg. I’ll touch on four of them here.
In the opening essay, “Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Some Notes on Politics and Poetry,” Ostriker asks and answers her own questions about poetry and politics and whether or not poetry can change the world we live in. She ends up in the exciting world of feminist writing: « Read the rest of this entry »
June 29th, 2009
Link • Audio, Poems • Leave a Comment
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
David M. deLeon
NOT EVERYTHING I DO IS MAGIC
Consider, Sally: the way the sun shines laterally
below stormclouds. And the clipped exuberance of green.
And there’s everything that passes by in a single
still moment, there’s the messy kanji of branches,
the superscript of birds. There’s that warmth that someone
you don’t mind sitting there left on the seat before
you sat on it. Lots of little things not worth talking about.
If I said it’s all crap I’d be lying. But I’m lying anyway.
I didn’t do any of that. Someone fell off the rafters
of an imaginary barn and he wore a robe of clean red
and he landed in a daze and, having been sleeping, woke up.
He walked around the imaginary barn and counted the timber
supports and heard the wrens in their hidden nests. Why
did he fall from the rafters? Magic. What were the wrens?
Magic. Who is he? Not magic. The barn falls away
and we can see fields of both green and red and the sky is blue
bordering grey, a color that contains its own promised
color. Sally, there just ain’t enough words to tell even one
story, to tell you even who you are in this, or who I am, or
why the wrens seek warmth and not freedom and are now
trapped in one man’s red-cloaked imagination. I ask you
why are you here? and you just listen, listen on, because
you know more than I do. You know that the little upward bend
of the voice at the end of a question isn’t a waiting pause,
it’s a little hill cliff where we stop and look around and wait
for some clue from the landscape to tell us soon where oh where
oh where are we now that we are here, please tell me.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
June 28th, 2009
Link • Poems, Tributes • Leave a Comment
Christine Gelineau
BREAKING BABIES
Nobody breaks ranch stock the old way now,
leaving those youngsters wild till two or three
then snub ’em down, cinch ’em up, and pow,
spring to the saddle and set ’em free.They’d sunfish, crow-hop, leap and roll, frantic
to lose the catamount hooked to their back.
The cowboy had to ride out the antics,
a feather in the storm—some had the knackbut it was hard on leather, broncs, and men.
You didn’t need to come off to get hurt;
when a bronc pile drives you, the jolt can
rattle your bones even without biting dirt.Mostly these days we leave the rodeo
riding to the rodeo cowboys, let them
win their buckles and busted bones—you know,
ease a youngster in, avoid a problem.Nowadays we gentle ’em while they’re foals,
teach long yearlings commands in the round pen:
jog, lope, whoa, some even get ’em to roll
back and reverse in lines, soften and bendwith the long lines, make ’em bridlewise
’afore you ever climb aboard that first time.
Trained, not busted, the way to go in my eyes.
They’ll steer soft as butter, stop on a dime.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
Tribute to Cowboy & Western Poetry
June 27th, 2009
Link • Poems, Tributes • 1 Comment
Thea Gavin
COTTONWOOD BLUES
Somewhere along Highway 395In the pasture over west—
when cottonwood shimmer fills the air
the lizard in me wants to rest
up on a silvered fence rail; there,
twitchless between red dirt and sky,
I’d blend into the wind-carved wood,
let the dark birds circle, try
not to blink until the hood
of stretching shadow catches me
open-mouthed in the hay-green breeze—
looming blue mountain gravity
draws down the sun, darkens the leaves.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
Tribute to Cowboy & Western Poetry
June 26th, 2009
Link • Audio, Awards, Poems • 3 Comments
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Joseph Fasano
MAHLER IN NEW YORK
Now when I go out, the wind pulls me
into the grave. I go out
to part the hair of a child I left behind,and he pushes his face into my cuffs, to smell the wind.
If I carry my father with me, it is the way
a horse carries autumn in its mane.If I remember my brother,
it is as if a buck had knelt down
in a room I was in.I kneel, and the wind kneels down in me.
What is it to have a history, a flock
buried in the blindness of winter?Try crawling with two violins
into the hallway of your father’s hearse.
It is filled with sparrows.Sometimes I go to the field
and the field is bare. There is the wind,
which entrusts me;there is a woman walking with a pail of milk,
a man who tilts his bread in the sun;
there is the black heart of a marein the milk—or is it the wind, the way it goes?
I don’t know about the wind, about the way
it goes. All I know is that sometimessomeone will pick up the black violin of his childhood
and start playing—that it sits there on his shoulder
like a thin gray falcon asleep in its blinders,and that we carry each other this way
because it is the way we would like to be carried:
sometimes with mercy, sometimes without.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
Rattle Poetry Prize Winner
2008 Pushcart Prize Nominee
