Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade: “We have been collaborating on poetry and prose for several years. For this ghazal, we picked an end-word ahead of time (as well as a subject, though sometimes the subjects are open-ended) and then we began, alternating couplets and sending those lines by email to one another.”
“Shoulder MRI” by Elizabeth McMunn-TetangcoPosted by Rattle
Image: “Graphing Uncertainty V” by Christine Crockett. “Shoulder MRI” was written by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, February 2024, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “Even the title of this poem alone seems to me to resonate with the enigmatically compelling image—the abstract, angular, black-and-white tone reminiscent of an MRI scan. As the piece unfolds, I see an even stronger connection between the two: There’s an objectivity, a detachment, to the way the speaker describes pain, and yet also a vulnerable rawness that comes through, a contrast that reflects the distinction between the black-and-white angularity and the rounded red shape in the center. I love the way the poet writes in mostly clipped, staccato phrases—‘A refugee. There is / a word. / It’s like a hammer’–that don’t bely any feeling, and then the last line is the first time emotion is explicitly introduced, a surprising ending that renders the poem suddenly personal. In image and words alike, there is a beating heart under all this abstraction.”
Denise Duhamel: “We had several memorial readings for Maureen, and my joke is that we had an open relationship and we weren’t monogamous. If you were there and ready to write, and you were a sweet soul, Maureen would write with you. She loved collaboration so much, and often collaborated with her students. Neil de la Flor and Kristine Snodgrass and Maureen were one set of collaborators (a triad), and then she had a foursome collaboration group with Carolina Hospital, Nicole Hospital-Medina, and Holly Iglesias. She also collaborated extensively with Sam Ace. Both Aaron Smith and I completed whole collaborative manuscripts with her while she was ill. She had all these different collaborations going on even through her illness and treatment.”
Maureen Seaton (October 20, 1947 – August 26, 2023) authored fifteen solo books of poetry, co-authored an additional thirteen, and wrote one memoir, Sex Talks to Girls, which won the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography. She frequently collaborated with many poets, including Denise Duhamel, Samuel Ace, Neil de la Flor, David Trinidad, Kristine Snodgrass, cin salach, Niki Nolin, and Mia Leonin.
George Bilgere: “When I was eight years old my parents got divorced. My mother packed her three kids into an old Chevy station wagon and drove us from St. Louis to Riverside, California, looking for a fresh start. She had visited there when she was an Army nurse stationed in LA during the war and fell in love with the place. That cross-country car trip, full of cheap diners, cheap hotels, and desperation, changed my life. I fell in love with the vastness and beauty, the glamor and tawdriness, of America. I’ve travelled all over the country since then, on that ancient and deeply American quest, the search for home.” (web)
Gail Dawson & Richard Garcia: “We wrote this poem based on the objects on the table right in front of us. Richard wrote the first stanza and Gail wrote the next stanza. We proceeded writing alternate stanzas until we felt it was finished. We were surprised how a poem could be written just using the objects right in front of us.”
Pamela Manasco: “This poem responds to the recent firing of several employees at a Prattville, Alabama, library, which itself is related to the recent decision of the Alabama Senate to pass SB10, a bill which allows local city councils to fire library board members. After Prattville library director Andrew Foster publicly shared emails from a board member who requested that some juvenile library materials be moved or removed from the library, Foster was fired without the board of trustees providing information about which library rule he supposedly violated. Later, four librarians closed the library in response to the firing—and they were also fired. It’s a messy story and a scary one which shows the future Alabama’s Republican government members want: remove any library material which violates ‘Alabama values’ (good luck finding a definition for those, by the way), and fire anyone who disagrees.” (web)
Claire Fields: “Last spring I took a walk and ended up horribly lost. Eventually, after an hour of reading street signs with foreign names, I found my house again and collapsed on the couch, shaken by the experience. Yet, when I think back to that afternoon, what I think of first is how the leaves being swept from the sidewalk by wind looked so much like a flock of sparrows, spinning into the air on brown wings. This is why I write poetry: to be comforted by the beautifully mundane when I find myself lost.”