WHAT WE WERE TOLD
—from Rattle #14, Winter 2000
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Simone Muench: “I am a Southern Baptist atheist from Shreveport, Louisiana, currently obsessed with pool, musicians, and religious myth.” (web)
WHAT WE WERE TOLD
—from Rattle #14, Winter 2000
__________
Simone Muench: “I am a Southern Baptist atheist from Shreveport, Louisiana, currently obsessed with pool, musicians, and religious myth.” (web)
*
—from Rattle #24, Winter 2005
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Gregory Orr: “I know these words are hard to work with, because they sound naive. But they’re not naive, they’re fundamental. I think when I read a poem that deeply moves me, that feels beautiful and moving, I feel as though I’ve been given more courage to live.”
PRAISE DANCE
—from Plucked
2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner
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Miracle Thornton: “When I encountered the Aesop fable, the moral of the story—an individual caught between pride and loyalty—immediately resonated with me. Growing up, I always felt pulled between the environment of my home and my hometown. It was difficult to understand who I was when it changed depending on the room, depending on whomever else occupied the space. The bird was a powerful conduit and spoke to the illusive aspects of my ever-evolving sense of self.”
THE “L” WORD
—from Prompt Poem of the Month
February 2024
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Prompt: Write a haiku sequence that talks about love without mentioning it by name. Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “Kelly’s poem gathers many familiar symbols of love, such as candy hearts, and slices them with the haiku’s knife. The result is a sequence that captures the breadth of romantic love and even takes us out for fondue in the process.”
IN EARLY DRAFTS, ROBERT FROST RELIED HEAVILY ON THE THESAURUS
Discontinuing By Timberland
on a Fleecy Eventide
—Robert Frost
—from Rattle #33, Summer 2010
Tribute to Humor
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Jeff Vande Zande: “I guess I was reading a lot of student papers in which students were compelled to try to make their papers sound ‘better’ by using the thesaurus. For instance, one student had been arguing why people should take up jogging and then, in the middle of the paper, started arguing why people should take up cantering. I thought it might be funny to rewrite a Frost poem under the premise that Frost was a thesaurus abuser. Then, after reading it, Tim Green said, ‘I like it, Jeff, but can you make it rhyme?’ That’s three hours of my life that I’ll never get back!” (web)
A KADDISH FOR AARON BUSHNELL (1998-2024)
after Father Daniel Berrigan
—from Poets Respond
March 3, 2024
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Micah Ackerman Hirsch: “As a Jew opposed to the ongoing genocide being committed in Gaza, I struggled with how to commemorate Aaron Bushnell. Judaism has very little to say about concepts like martyrdom, theologically valuing existence and struggle in this world over seeking the next. So much do we focus on this Earthly life over Heaven that our prayer for the dead, the Kaddish Yatom, says nothing about death at all. Instead, it asks the mourners to praise God beyond all humanly conceptions of what it means to praise something, and expresses our longing for the day when the peace embodied by divinity exists permanently in our world. And so, following Father Daniel Berrigan’s poetry of protest and the long Jewish tradition of rewriting prayers to meet our contemporary trials, I wrote this Kaddish, a mourning prayer, a poem, for Aaron.”
SHOW AND TELL
—from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
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Bob Hicok: “I think of myself as a failed writer. There are periods of time when I’ll be happy with a given poem or a group of poems, but I, for the most part, detest my poems. I like writing. I love writing, and I believe in myself while I am writing; I feel limitless while I’m writing.”