April 23, 2018

Athlete Poets

Conversation with
Stephen Dunn

The stereotypes about athletes and poets might make it seem like an odd combination, but poetry lives everywhere, and stereotypes need to be broken. The summer issue of Rattle features 22 poets who break the mold—professional athletes from the NFL and NBA, tennis pros, soccer players, weightlifters, marathon runners, and more—capped off with a wide-ranging conversation with semi-pro basketball player and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn. As these poets explain in a particularly interesting contributor notes section, poetry and athletics fit together like a hand in a ball-glove.

The open section will make you laugh and cry as always, with a little more formal verse than usual, and an epic “Choose Your Own Adventure” poem by Caroline N. Simpson, which also adds a splash of color art for the first time in years.

	Athlete Poets
	James Adams	No Name
	Elison Alcovendaz	What Are You Doing Now?
	Chaun Ballard	Midnight Lazaruses
	Erinn Batykefer	Gimmie Shelter
	T.J. DiFrancesco	Magicker
	Stephen Dunn	Little Pretty Things
	Peg Duthie	Decorating a Cake While Listening to Tennis
	Michael Estabrook	Grand Illusion
	Daniel Gleason	Shadow Boxing Late at Night
	Tony Gloeggler	Some Long Ago Summer
	Alex Hoffman-Ellis	Modern Day Gladiator
	A.M. Juster	Heirloom
	Benjamín N. Kingsley	Fall
	Laura Kolbe	Calisthenics
	Michael Mark	Golf with Bob
	Tom Meschery	Two from Searching for the Soul
	Jack Ridl	Can We Know?
	Laszlo Slomovits	Strangers
	Brent Terry	What Happens in Church
	Martin Vest	Should I Spill My Beer
	Arlo Voorhees	The NFL on CTE
	Guinotte Wise	The Why of Bull Riding

	Poetry
	Timothy DeJong	Dog at the Farm
	Kim Dower	The Delivery Man
	Joseph Fasano	Hymn
	Alan C. Fox	Help
	Conrad Geller	Elemental Intelligence
	Athena Kildegaard	Allurement
	David Mason	A Cabbie in America
	John Lazear Okrent	After Seeing a Picture in the New York Times …
	Caroline N. Simpson	Choose Your Own Adventure …
	Anne Starling	Compassionate Friends
	Katherine Barrett Swett	Marginalia
	Stephen Taylor	Prenuptial Agreement
	William Trowbridge	Oldguy: Superhero vs. The Riddler
	Bro. Yao (Hoke S. Glover III)	Winter’s Blues

	Conversation
	Stephen Dunn

	Cover Art
	William C. Crawford (web)

April 16, 2017

“How I Survived” by Chaun BallardPosted by Rattle

Chaun Ballard

HOW I SURVIVED

I stayed in late nights.

I shot late night hoops.

I perfected windmills

and tomahawks.

I let my knees burn holes

in her mother’s carpet.

I mixed Top Ramen

with blood sausage, Jesus

with mint juice.

I developed foresight

and bad omens, packed

Juicy Fruit, a sixth sense.

I avoided gaggles of geese,

murders of crows,

and uttered no language.

I left when it was time

to leave. I arrived too late.

I prayed before I walked.

I prayed before I prayed.

I focused my gaze

upon the ground.

I never gazed too long.

I honored my father and mother.

I had a father and mother.

I ran errands. I ran home.

I completed chores.

I didn’t shoot. I shot

the breeze. I learned to clown

and mean mug. I listened

for rain. I listened for gun shots.

I hoped to God they didn’t

figure me out. I didn’t hang up

the phone. I hung up the phone.

She had a nice figure,

so I figured her yours.

I locked the storm door

when there were no storms,

and if someone knocked,

I wasn’t quick to answer.

I moved away. I moved back.

I moved away again.

I remembered what to forget.

I wrote this poem.

—from Poets Respond
April 16, 2017

__________

Chaun Ballard: “This poem is in response to the murder-suicide that took place on Monday at North Park Elementary. I spent much of my life in San Bernardino. Our city has endured many hardships and suffered many losses due to acts of violence. With every newscast from the city, I think of my years there and the people we have lost.” (web)

Tonight on the Rattlecast: Chaun Ballard! Click here to tune in live at 9pm ET …

April 17, 2018

Notable News from Past Contributors to Rattle

Note: click the issue # links to find some of their poems!

• Art Beck (The Impertinent Duet) has published his translation of Martial, Mea Roma. Starting with a “dissenting” translation of Martial’s Book of the Spectacles, Back translates 130 poems “strictly from a literary standpoint.” (October 17, 2018)

• Chaun Ballard (issue #60, PR) won the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize from Tupelo Press for Flight. Judge Major Jackson described it as “… songs that celebrate the miracle of endurance in a country defined by the peculiar phenomenon of race.” (July 19, 2018)

• Rodrigo Dela Pena, Jr. (Ekphrastic Challenge) just published on his first book, Aria and Trumpet Flourish! Frequent Rattle contributor Luisa A. Igloria blurbed that “these poems sings always out of a sense of urgency underwritten by love.” (July 13, 2018)

• Donna Hilbert (issue #57) just published on her New & Selected book, Gravity, with Tebot Bach! “Donna Hilbert’s poems are brave, unsparing and heartfelt revealing a woman’s life in a way that is universal,” says Joan Colby. (June 28, 2018)

• Martin Ott (issue #20) just published his eighth book, Lessons In Camouflage, which “spans his turmoil as a U.S. Army interrogator to conflicts personal in nature …” (June 24, 2018)

• Chera Hammons the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award for poetry! Two of the poems in her book, The Traveler’s Guide to Bomb City, appeared in Rattle: “Sparrows” and “Tornado Alley” (June 15, 2018)

• Lynne Knight has a new book, The Language of Forgetting! Lynne has appeared in seven issues of Rattle and #PoetsRespond, and was winner of the 2009 Rattle Poetry Prize. Order the book from @Sixteen_Rivers Press! (April 27, 2018)

• Timothy Liu (issues #43, #47, Poets Respond) has a New & Selected book, Luminous Debris, just out from Barrow Street. “Timothy Liu is a poet faithful to forms of unruliness,” says Roberto Tejada. (April 27, 2018)

• Luisa A. Igloria (issue #24, 27, 59 & Poets Respond) has a new book, “The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-life Crisis from Phoenicia Publishing. “Poem after poem reveals the Buddha.” (April 17, 2018)

• John Gosslee (issues #39 and 56) has a new book, Fish Boy, where “he turns to face the raw nerve of grief with guts and grit.”

• George Bilgere (issues #51, 57, and more) has a new book, Blood Pages. “The poems in Blood Pages take the bland surfaces of our daily lives and beat the daylights out of them.” (April 17, 2018)

• Big congrats to Malachi Jones (RYPA 2017) on winning a $10,000 scholarship through the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards! (April 17, 2018)

• Lowell Jaeger (issues #26, 37, 59) has a new book, Earth-Blood & Star-Shine: “… poetry turns every-day life into a meditation on what it means to be human.” (April 17, 2018)

• Yakov Azriel (issue #59) also has a new book, Closet Sonnets: The Life of G. S. Crown (1950–2021), which “turns life as a closeted gay male into an aesthetic form …” (April 17, 2018)

• Finally, congrats to Michael P. McManus (issue #24 and more) on his new book, The Buddha Knot, a book about love, death, and “the slow erosion of all we cannot keep.” (April 17, 2018)

January 3, 2016

“What Would You Say If You Were Tamir Rice & You Had Two Seconds—” by Chaun BallardPosted by Rattle

Chaun Ballard

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY IF YOU WERE TAMIR RICE & YOU HAD TWO SECONDS—

Too late,

you’re dead.

—Poets Respond
January 3, 2016

[download audio]

__________

Chaun Ballard: “I was raised in St. Louis and San Bernardino, but my wife and I currently live abroad and are working as educators. News from the States rarely comes to us quickly. Today my brother posted a news broadcast, which featured a video of the twelve-year-old Tamir Rice being shot. It shocked us both. I don’t think that anything else needs to be said.” (website)

October 26, 2001

Rattle Poetry Prize

Conversation with
A.E. Stallings

The Winter 2020 issue of Rattle has arrived, and with it comes good news: Despite the challenges of this year, poetry is as vibrant, beautiful, and necessary as ever. The proof is here, in poems like “Psalm of the Heights” by Dana Gioia, a reverent homage to Los Angeles; “Deitic” by A.E. Stallings, a formal poem about a museum visit during a pandemic; and “Graffiti” by Josh Lefkowitz, which begins with Indonesian cave art and ends with bathroom graffiti. “A Litany of Lukewarm Sentiments” by Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal made us laugh (“On being gaslighted by a millennial/the millennial will ask another millennial/if gaslighting is a millennial thing. The millennial/will not know.”); “Modesty” by Richard Luftig made us nod in understanding (“I am still waiting for the university to figure out that they meant/to send it to the other guy who had the same name as mine”); and every poem made us feel grateful that poetry exists. We hope you’ll feel the same way.

Additionally, we’re proud to present the finalists of the 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize and their diverse poems, including “I Admit Myself to the Psych Ward in a Pandemic” by Beck Anson, a long poem that approaches its subject matter with honesty and depth; “Mega-” by Shelly Stewart Cato, which colorfully explores the now-trendy “megachurch,”; “Farm Sonnet” by Kitty Carpenter, a beautifully restrained and evocative portrait of farm life; and more. Not to mention, of course, the winning poem, Alison Townsend’s “Pantoum From the Window of the Room Where I write,” a masterful work that moves us more each time we read it.

Finally, Timothy Green and A.E. Stallings meet up via Skype for a conversation that runs the intellectual, literary, and cultural gamut, from classical mythology to quantum physics to the Syrian refugee crisis. It’s a thoughtful and in-depth discussion to round out an issue of Rattle.

	Open Poetry
	José A. Alcántara	Divorce
	Paola Bruni	Why I Joined the Cult
	Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal	A Litany of Lukewarm Sentiments
	Fay Dillof	Self-Therapy
	Alan C. Fox	Throughout This Teeter-Totter World
	Nicole Caruso Garcia	Warning Sign
	Dana Gioia	Psalm of the Heights
	E. Laura Golberg	First Night as a Widow
	Laura Gregory	Tiffani’s Testimony at the 11:30 a.m. Service
	Lola Haskins	The Discovery
	Ron Koertge	Because Wolves Are a Protected Species …
	Josh Lefkowitz	Graffiti
		Next in Line
	Richard Luftig	Modesty
	Joan Murray	The Book Pitch
	Jim Peterson	Following You
	Alice Pettway	Homestead
	Derek Sheffield	Exactly What Needs Saying
	A.E. Stallings	Deictic
		Lockdown Puzzle: Hokusai’s Great Wave …
	Sophia Stid	I Am Tired of the Movie About …
	Sarah P. Strong	My Tie
	Anthony Zick	When My Mom, for the Millionth Time …
	Theodora Ziolkowski	At the Memory Care Center


	Poetry Prize Winner
	Alison Townsend	Pantoum from the Window of the Room …

	Finalists
	Beck Anson	I Admit Myself to the Psych Ward in a Pandemic
	Chaun Ballard	Survival Is a Matter of Perspective When
	Kitty Carpenter	Farm Sonnet
	Shelly Stewart Cato	Mega-
	Skye Jackson	Spoon-Rest Mammies
	Gordon Kippola	Army Service: Tikrit
	Lance Larsen	And Also I Ran
	Jessica Lee	Greener Pastures
	Austen Leah Rose	Dear Husband
	Alexis Rotella	Empty Souls

	Conversation
	A.E. Stallings (web)

	Cover Art
	James Christopher Carroll (web)

Rattle: Poetry

… without pretension since 1995.

Search Results for: chaun ballard

April 23, 2018

Athlete Poets

Conversation with
Stephen Dunn

Athlete Poets

Poetry

Conversation

Cover Art

April 16, 2017

April 17, 2018

Notable News from Past Contributors to Rattle

January 3, 2016

October 26, 2001

Rattle Poetry Prize

Conversation with
A.E. Stallings

Open Poetry

Poetry Prize Winner

Finalists

Conversation

Cover Art

Athlete Poets

Conversation with Stephen Dunn

Athlete Poets

Poetry

Conversation

Cover Art

Notable News from Past Contributors to Rattle

Rattle Poetry Prize

Conversation with A.E. Stallings

Open Poetry

Poetry Prize Winner

Finalists

Conversation

Cover Art

Conversation with
Stephen Dunn

Conversation with
A.E. Stallings