Steve Abbott: “The Rust Belt encompasses, depending on how you look at it, the northernmost Southern states or the easternmost Plains states. Right now, particularly in Ohio where I’ve lived my life, it’s a swath of nostalgia, resentment, and disorientation polluted by political opportunism and corporate venality. Some see the struggle here as rural vs. urban, but it’s actually conflict between those who want to keep living with people just like themselves and those who are accustomed or open to interacting with people of different races, cultures, religions, ideas, and appearances. The proximity of the two groups provides a high-resolution lens a poet can use to view contemporary American life—sometimes appalling, sometimes inspiring, but always deeply human.”
“Saved or Spared” by Devon BalwitPosted by Timothy Green
Ekphrastic Challenge, September 2017: Artist’s Choice
Image: “Agnes Was Here” by Jody Kennedy. “Saved or Spared” was written by Devon Balwit for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, September 2017, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
Comment from the artist, Jody Kennedy, on this selection: “I really appreciated all of the poems I read (thank you poets), but in the end this writer’s interpretation of the image won me over. It was one of several poems with, surprisingly, a Catholic theme, which I loved. There is a beautiful back and forth tension and in the end we aren’t quite sure, as the title implies, ‘if we’d been saved or merely spared.’”
Francis Santana: “When I was ten years old, I found Pablo Neruda gathering dust on a bookshelf—that’s when poetry became the only language I could speak to my first love. When that first love looked away I wrote to myself about solitude. When in that solitude I began to see my sisters and my brothers being carted away around me, I had to come out and speak up, to write beyond myself. I do get lost sometimes, mostly in the type of anger that supersedes tact and drowns the tenderness required to mend bullet holes. And the truth is I want to give up more often than not, but to hang back is not an option. I write to be heard, to keep away from extinction.” (twitter)
Perie Longo: “A friend recently sent me a card of a woman jumping in the air at the sight of a mountain range, with the saying, ‘Life is too short to take seriously.’ I’m trying to laugh at myself a little more often, especially in unguarded moments, and trying, too, to capture those times in poetry.” (website)
Ron Riekki: “Working in the military and in prisons has been, not always, but at times, to be honest, one of the most brutally negative experiences imaginable. In the horrors of those memories, I try to realize that comedy is one of the main things that can get you through hell, whether it’s a twelve-hour shift or a four-year presidency. Think of the onomatopoeia of ‘trump!’ being similar to ‘splat!’—the country tripping and landing on its nose. Even the Donald has a face and hair that is so clownish that when he posts his potentially war-inducing tweets, it’s pure post-millennial Dr. Strangelove. If I remember correctly, Robert McKee calls the mix of horror and comedy ‘delicious.’ It was wonderful to receive an email from the Rattle editors saying the poem ‘Just plain cracked us up.’ I’ll close with this eloquent tweet posted by Donald J. Trump on May 3, 2013, at 9:35 a.m.: ‘Amazing how the haters & losers keep tweeting the name F**kface Von Clownstick like they are so original & like no one else is doing it …’ I was cracking up myself just now retyping that. Ahhh, comedy. Hail to the thief.” (twitter)
Dion O’Reilly: “There has been much in the news to cause anxiety this week: Trump’s assertion that his meeting with generals was the calm before a storm, the fires raging just a few hundred miles away from me in Sonoma and Mendocino County. Every alarming piece of news is part of a broader picture of a sea change– the eerie feeling we are being forced into a new and deadly normal.” (website)
