Ace Boggess: “Looking back at my years in prison, I often realize how absurd things seem compared to what the average person might expect. If I were watching a reality show like Lock-up or a TV series like, coincidentally, Oz, how likely is it that I would see a bunch of cons sitting around watching an old fantasy like The Wizard of Oz. Nonetheless, it happened. So, I put that down on paper. I love to write about the absurd in my life probably more than anything else. It allows me to make a serious point while laughing all the way.” (website)
Releasing this June, Rattle #48 features the poetry of seventeen real New Yorkers, and a delightful conversation with Jan Heller Levi, recorded live in her Manhattan apartment. Nearly 9 million people call the five boroughs home, squeezing into a land area of just 305 square miles. How does life in such a unique locale enter into the poetry, and what do New Yorker poets have in common? We explore, in the smallest regional theme we’ve ever done.
New York City isn’t the half of it, though—the issue’s large open section also features another 24 poems from around the world.
“Watching The Wizard of Oz, Summer 1988” by Rebecca LehmannPosted by Rattle
Rebecca Lehmann
WATCHING THE WIZARD OF OZ, SUMMER 1988
Such was the summer of repetition:
I lived in a purple one-piece swimsuit.
The humid slats of the painted wood floor
stuck like chewed gum to the backs of my thighs,
as I watched Dorothy’s blanched Monopoly house
fall again and again on the Witch of the East. Bam! The Witch of the West’s kodachrome
fireball exploded, a dusky orange plume
announcing her arrival, as I rewound and replayed
the dubbed video tape each new morning.
This was the summer my father walked out,
then snuck back in through a loose window
at night for several weeks to use the shower,
until, in August, my mother found him,
naked and dripping in the dark bathroom—
the summer after my grandfather
killed himself. Imagine him in the old farm shed,
the used-up garden hose snaked
from the tailpipe of his rusted car
through a crack in the window. Imagine the fumes
swirling around his head, a noxious storm
not unlike a plague of locusts.
Imagine this, two summers after he swung
a hunting gun around the farmhouse
angling for my young aunts,
the County SWAT Team circling
the lilac bushes and clotheslines,
shouting demands through bullhorns.
These were the things I was too young to understand.
While my mother laid in bed upstairs,
I fast-forwarded through the sepia tones of Kansas,
all the rickety despair of the dust bowl.
Dorothy fell into and out of the farm’s pigpen quickly—
I was interested in Oz, and knew exactly
when to press play, just as Dorothy opened
the front door, just after the tornado dropped
the farmhouse, that’s when sepia bled into color,
and the soundtrack switched to a series
of lilting angelic voices climbing up to high E.
I never wanted Dorothy to want to leave Oz.
At the end of the movie, There’s no place like home
clicked three times in her plump mouth,
a suffocating incantation. I didn’t understand
the pull to return to the place you hate,
the ability to look at life and not want to fall in reverse.
Conversations with Robert Pinsky & Natasha Trethewey
Releasing December 2008, issue #30 celebrates the poetry of the western range with work by 24 cowboy & western poets. Developing primarily as an oral tradition, the genre is often thought of as a hybrid between story and song–a collection of tall tales and folk ballads that sit well around the campfire. But the image of the cowboy has been mythologized by Hollywood, and the image of the cowboy poem has been oversimplified, as well.
Modern cowboy & western poetry is as complicated and eclectic as the modern cowboy–there are plenty of appearances by cattle and corrals and ranchers breaking horses, but the topics range from love and politics to ecology and philosophy. And while many of the poems speak in meter and rhyme, plenty of others roam wild and free. The tribute section even includes the longest poem we’ve ever published, a 20-page western retelling of Beowulf by Donald Mace Williams.
Also in the issue, Alan Fox interviews three-term Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey. Along with 60 pages of open poetry, we share the 11 winning poems from the 2008 Rattle Poetry Prize.
The early Imagist poet T.E. Hulme argued that real communication is made only by means of images, which exist prior to language, and form a “visual chord” between two minds that can only be approximated with speech. Images, then, are the essence of intuition, and the wellspring of epiphany. In his poem “Mahler in New York,” 2008 Rattle Poetry Prize winner Joseph Fasano unfolds a tapestry of images: the falcon, the wind, the black violin. Alone, these images are haunting and timeless. Gathered together they convey a figurative truth that, like all great art, resists explication—a truth about the death of childhood, and the relentless sweep of generations. Hulme would have been proud, as we are, to introduce “Mahler in New York” as winner of the third annual Rattle Poetry Prize.