February 23rd, 2010
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Scott Woods
TO THE HIGH SCHOOL THUG THAT BROKE INTO HIS ENGLISH TEACHER’S CAR
What you know about Nina Simone
could do laps on a pencil tip,
so I’m struggling to understand
why you would steal that CD.
That you skipped the vodka in the glove compartment
but took my reading glasses is equally perplexing.
It’s not my fault you can’t handle grammar,
but it may be my fault it never took.
Allow me the honor of tutelage now:
Name the verb in the following sentence:
Nina Simone sings.
Not knowing what kind of grades you get in math,
let me point out that you have a 50/50 shot here.
What will you make of the ugly woman who sings
so sweetly from the bottom of her stories
that she becomes beautiful?
That you long for her entreating loneliness in the night
and wonder why girls today can’t do it like that anymore?
How will you explain the mourning tripping out
of your poster-covered bedroom and into the hallway,
making your momma wonder who got into her momma’s records?
Nina Simone knows who you are and why you took that,
why the record called to you when fear struck your senses.
Nina Simone sings and I know you don’t understand yet
the ramifications of what you’ve done,
how getting kicked out of your English class doesn’t make it okay,
I know you couldn’t possibly have conceived
that there are people in this world
who can show you their love in three notes.
You had no idea that some people need songs like that,
songs that reach through time and pull your heart down like
fire alarms and run through the hallways of your soul,
banging on the doors,
trying to get the demons to walk out civilly,
in a straight line just outside your mouth,
falling into a vodka double-shot you can’t lift on your own.
I want to imagine you just like that:
sitting in your bedroom,
staring out a window cracked from your previous shenanigans,
headphones to your skull,
scanning liner notes in my reading glasses,
Nina Simone singing long and hard into the night,
after a moment of trifling anger,
to see a beautiful thing and imagine it could save your life,
sometimes,
like it does mine,
every time the moon hangs there like its harvest time,
pregnant with mankind’s wishes,
heavy with the sorrow of thieves.
–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets
February 22nd, 2010
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E.K. Mortenson
DREAMING OF EMILY DICKINSON
I did again last night and when I told my wife she said,
“Are you, like, in love with her or something?” And I remembered a letter
that Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote to his wife—he was a writer
for the Atlantic Monthly to whom Emily would send her poems for comment—
about the time he went to visit her and she talked so much and so fast
that he wrote that he was glad that they didn’t live next door to her,
if you know what I mean. But then again, he wrote to that same wife
when he was a colonel of, of all things, an all-black, South Carolinian,
Civil War regiment, that he didn’t see what all the fuss was about
now that he was there, since it seemed clear that slaves didn’t mind
being slaves since he rode by a field on his horse and saw a group of them singing.
No one sings who is unhappy. Her selection of old Tommy Boy
as a reader of her work is the only intellectual failing
I permanently charge Emily with. So, no, dear, I am not “in love with her
or something,” because if that clown didn’t want to live next door to her,
I would never want to live with her. But I would like to visit her for tea.
She’d brew it herself because they wouldn’t have bags and it would taste
unusual and her house would smell like shortbread and fresh ferns
and she’d talk and talk and move through the house like a bird
and I’d try to ask questions like where those metaphors of hers come from
and, seriously, I won’t tell anyone, but what’s the deal with the dash
and the capital letters? Do you, as I sometimes—like Every three Years Or so—
have to admit, in the absence of contrary evidence, just not get it? Not care?
Do you compose in your head hearing so much of your hymnal
that your rhythms are natural, like the way someone said
that Shakespeare thought in iambic pentameter? Or when
the Second Great Awakening popped its tents on the Amherst town green,
did you garden instead of get saved? But I never got a word in edgewise
because she was busy with narrow fellows and broken planks
and frogs and flies and chariots and loaded guns and sifting sugar on the shortbread
from a leaden sieve. Finally I broke in and asked, “Now Em,
I know that your business is circumference, and that’s all fine and good,
though no one I know gets that, but, um, do you ever let your hair down?
I mean literally. Out of that bun?” For the first time she is struck dumb,
mouth slack. I rise from the small tea table in the parlor and approach her
carefully. When I extend my hands past her head she gasps shortly
and closes her eyes as I pull the pins from her hair. It falls long and lustrous
and auburn and I run my fingers through it, pulling it straight,
keeping the top of her head from coming off.
–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
February 21st, 2010
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Patricia Smith
52
Baffled by stark ache and symptom, I get in my bed
beside the bearded charmer who is yet in my bed.
As graying denies and dims me, I vaguely recall
the line of whimpering whiners I’ve let in my bed—
every one of them goofy with love, dazzled by curve
and color, until I screeched, “Oh, just get in my bed!”
The could-be queens, pimpled wordsmiths, thugs and mama’s boys,
porcine professors, all casting their nets in my bed.
Valiantly, they strained to woo with verse, acrobatics.
One fool dared a pirouette, on a bet, in my bed!
(We dated for months.) But like the rest, he finally
did things I would much rather forget. In my bed!
So, all that leads to this. Me, a slow, half-century
woman, turning toward he who conjures sweat in my bed.
“Patricia,” he whispers, stroking me young, unnaming
the men. Then my husband turns the world wet in my bed.
–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets
February 20th, 2010
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Review by Lori A. May
RUIN AND BEAUTY
By Deena Metzger
Red Hen Press
P.O. Box 3537
Granada Hills CA 91394
ISBN 978-1-59709-425-2
2009, 312 pp., $23.95
http://www.redhen.org/
For more than forty years, Deena Metzger has been demonstrating her dedication not only to penning wonderful poems, but also to living a life as a Literary Citizen. When reading the media release provided by the publisher, Red Hen Press, I immediately thought of Whitman and Emerson and the primal call for our poets to take action. Speaking of Metzger’s creed, the publisher says, “It is no longer sufficient, she believes, for the poet to be an unacknowledged legislator of the world, for the committed poet is called to engage with the full heart in the continuous activity of restoration on behalf of beauty, wisdom and the natural world.” Such a statement is an incredible preface to reading the 300+ page collection of new and selected poems. But how does the poetry answer this call?
Metzger’s poems respond beautifully. Such a substantial collection requires organization and Metzger has done well to group the poems by themed, titled sections that act as an invitation to the topics included. The first poem included in the section entitled “Service at the Earth Altar,” calls for action among us, through the chant-like verse of “Oh Great Spirit”:
Oh Great Spirit. Heal the animals. Protect the animals. Restore the
animals.Our lives will also be healed. Our souls will be protected. Our spirits will be restored.
Oh Spirit of Raven. Oh Spirit of Wolf. Oh Spirit of Whale. Oh Spirit of
Elephant. Oh Spirit of Snake.Teach us, again, how to live.
In this poem, we collectively beg for forgiveness, remembering those “we have slaughtered” and those “we have feared” and those “we have tortured.” Our humanity is questioned. Our own spirit is tested. A call to action is served to us on a harsh, cold platter.
Throughout this section, Metzger puts humanity in its place, elevating nature and urging life to work in harmony, for a common good. In “Opening All the Doors to the Rain,” the reader is confronted with the ethics of being blessed by nature:
In the Beginning, after the flood there was a rainbow. Now, during the
drought, this sweet interval of rain. But the question remains: Do we have
a right to pray for rain? What can we offer before we take in the rain with
our dry roots and open mouths, when the fires we are setting are seething
on the horizon?
I am stunned and awed at the simplicity of how so few words can remind us that life is not a buffet; “What can we offer before we take” is enough of a mantra to live by, and applicable to all walks of life, if you ask me. Within this statement, humanity is reborn. Actions made in response to these words would most certainly be fair, compassionate, and empathetic to all living, breathing things.
As a poet, essayist, teacher, healer, and medicine woman, Metzger offers us an abundance of necessarily heavy subject matter bundled with passion between these pages of love, rage, and hope. It comes with the territory. It is to be expected. However, every now and then, Metzger throws us a break, a moment to stretch our legs, breathe in, breathe out, and within these moments we are given poems slightly lighter, slightly tongue-in-cheek, but always refreshing.
I was struck with the poem “Do Poems Have Gender or Sex?” within the section entitled “The Dark Animal Gods.” Within this prose poem are beautiful nuggets of lines too pure and too full of wonderment not to share. But, first, an introduction from the beginning lines:
OK. There are poems that both men and women write, and then there are poems
that come only from a woman. Also, of course, poems that could only come from
a man.
While Metzger introduces us to the subject by pondering the either/or of gender, we are quickly entertained by one-liners that wow us, and not only make us think, but make us smile and truly dig deep in questioning gender roles. “So, I am wondering,” the narration tells us, “what kind of poem goes to church / with a gun in its pocket?” From this point on, the poem counter-plays between male and female poems, the roles of gender within the poem, and the personified genders of poems. Metzger’s mastery is sheer brilliance.
Whether you have read Metzger’s many previous collections or, like me, are new to the poet’s power, Ruin and Beauty is a welcome cornucopia of pleasures, dares, warnings, and resolutions. For each moment of ruin, Metzger offers suggestions for reviving beauty. Where there seems to be little hope, the poems subtly shift and provide some. Metzger is a master of her language, a guiding force for her pen, and through her substantial collection, she is also a poet’s poet, one who knows how to solicit emotion and call for action.
____________
Lori A. May is a poet, novelist, and freelance writer whose work has appeared in publications such as The Writer, Tipton Poetry Journal, and anthologies such as Van Gogh’s Ear. She is the author of stains: early poems and two novels, Moving Target and The Profiler. May is also Managing Editor at Marick Press and Founding Editor of The Ambassador Poetry Project. For more information, visit http://www.loriamay.com.
February 19th, 2010
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Joe Mills
CONVERSATION
Daddy, what are these?
my three year old daughter asks,
pointing to the car grill
and the dozens of insects
we have smashed
while driving around.
I want to say “spots”
or “nothing” or
“I don’t know.”
I want to put off discussions
like this until she’s older
or at least with her mother,
but I know I can’t.
Bugs, I say, Just bugs.
Why are they there?
We hit them.
She knows this is bad;
a boy down the street
was hit by a car
and taken away
in an ambulance.
Should we take them
to the hospital?
No. They’re dead.
We carry the bags
into the house
and unload the groceries.
Later, after dinner
and the evening bath,
we work on a puzzle,
and as she tries
to figure out
how the sky
fits together,
she says
without turning around
They don’t want to be dead,
do they?
No, I say, No, they don’t.
–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
