Ryan McCarty: “I’ve been so struck by all the people I hear talking about their plans to watch the solar eclipse. Everyone is traveling, planning, convening. Thirty-one million people are supposed to be traveling to get somewhere within range. I love cosmic phenomena, but I love the way people obsess about them even more. I find myself wondering exactly what they hope to see—what they imagine—and if there’s any chance that one of these hyped-up celestial flickers might just one day change everything while we’re all standing around staring, together. Add in the almost apocalyptic warnings that accompany these kinds of events – communications breakdowns, gas shortages, traffic pileups, snack shortages—and I can’t stop imagining. That’s where this poem started.”
“Hart Crane in the Islands” by Anthony SeidmanPosted by Rattle
Anthony Seidman
HART CRANE IN THE ISLANDS
He kept a rum bottle on the mahogany desk. All day, the rhythm, like calibrated pistons pumping, as the Victrola blasted Ravel’s Bolero, while the white curtains rippled from the window facing a plantain grove. In his reveries, the salt of a sailor still stung his lips, as his tongue licked for that taste, the dark phallus in a rocking hammock, tears, and teeth; while composing, the rigging of metaphors pulled palms and flotillas, the parlors of Ohio, and the smoke and lachrymae of the Americas into his blue estuary.
Mornings spent on the sun dazzled shore. Late afternoons peeling mangos in an esplanade beneath the green shade of trees; and then, slowly, the colors of the aquatic dusk. There was a lover, a cane-cutter tart with liquor and sweat, and bonfires on the sands. At night, he would correct sheaves containing Voyages and The Bridge, then sleep like a Faust cleansed of all knowledge-lust, shadows of birds passing across his face with the softness a boy feels as he sobs against his mother’s apron. And for the first time his body felt as if it was weightless, as the sea opened her dark drapes, revealing her bones.
Anthony Seidman: “Often I come home after teaching middle school Spanish, & revise my poems. I visit Jean Toomer in the South where tawny women burn in his sleep; or Byron, bloated & hung-over, witnessing beheadings & the heat of carnivals in Italy. Not blind to my own purlieus, I also emulate Ruscha & Andreas Gursky, and write about the Valley: mini-malls, gas stations, and the natural history of parking lots.”
Julie Kane & Erica Reid: “We messaged back and forth over the course of three days as the villanelle grew a few lines at a time. One of us wrote the first 2 lines, tercet 3, tercet 5, and the second line of the quatrain. The other one wrote the third line, tercet 2, tercet 4, and the first line of the quatrain. That gave us one refrain line each; or, as Theodore de Banville put it, the gold thread and the silver thread of the villanelle. We both find collaboration joyful, as it restores the element of play to poetry when we start to get too serious about it.”
Michael Chitwood (North Carolina & Virginia): “Several summers I worked for my uncle’s construction company and my job, because I was under-age, was to read the grade transit. It was solitary work, standing behind the tripod. It’s like writing poetry now, huge machines rear and grind all around you and you are quiet and alone.”
A.M. Juster & Deborah Warren: “Dana Gioia contributed the title to get us going. Dana envisioned a pantoum, but we decided a ghazal would be better for a first try at collaboration. Although we live fairly close to each other, Boston traffic is an issue, so we did this by phone and email.”
“My Brother Buries His Dog” by Chris GreenPosted by Rattle
Chris Green
MY BROTHER BURIES HIS DOG
He moves furniture for a living, oversized bureaus and beds for the rich. He is big now and dumb with love that animals sense—cats, dogs, squirrels, birds, his pygmy turtles and rabbits, tree frogs—they all take him in, nuzzle his childhood scars, forgive his bad jobs and girlfriends. The middle child who grew up telling us all to fuck off—now a grown man, calls me crying, Why my puppy! (His Great Dane is dead.) He sobs, and I remember how we beat him—Mom, Dad, nuns, coaches, teachers—I know I did. And like animals before a storm, he has premonitions—this time a dream of me crying over Nina’s corpse. He says, I want you to think about that. He says it because I’m the godless eldest son who knows everything. So we carry his huge dead dog from the vet to his truck to his backyard. He digs a hole all day then lays her black body in the dark. Weeping, he seals her in with a last block of sod, and between the kiddy pool and the garage we embrace. He whispers, I love you. And in that moment I knew what animals know.
Chris Green: “I began writing poetry without knowing it. I feared poems my whole life, until I spent six months after graduate school writing a horrible essay about my grandfather. I read and reread trying to see what went wrong—then I realized there were poems embedded in the prose. I soon learned that poetry was in me, and bad essays can make great poetry.” (web)
“Disaster Wireless” by Richard Gilbert & Jennifer HambrickPosted by Rattle
Richard Gilbert & Jennifer Hambrick
DISASTER WIRELESS
broadcast from the village loudspeakers, far away, like a scratchy 1940s radio. a language for bees or aliens. the nashi in the village orchards are coming into their sweetness. half the farmers are retired or dead. long lives swallowed by the soil.
there’s no war in the forest, just trees disordered in their own way, steep hills, sculpted terraces. old, old stone walls bedded in volcanic loam. the echo of chisels. weaponry would be inhuman.
I tend these woods like the man before me, subtracting myself from inoshishi trails, sightlines the doves fly through. the forest breathes all the time. shifting. familiar, yet ever-distant.
Richard Gilbert & Jennifer Hambrick: “We enjoy a synergy at once powerful and playful and revel in making words dance across the page and across the thousands of miles between us. Richard lives in Japan, Jennifer lives in Ohio, and our colleagueship, friendship, and multi-dimensional poetic collaboration have unfolded entirely via email. The immediacy of email enables us to work quickly, and also gives us time to consider and research our responses before sending them. Beyond the logistics of our unique collaboration, we are quite intentional about fostering for each other a safe creative space. We give each other total freedom to play, suggest, question, and experiment, and we undergird that freedom with deep mutual affirmation. The positivity of our work together results in writing full of authentic feeling across the full range of emotions.”
