Albert Haley: “After many years of writing short stories and novels and seeing some of them published, I one day woke up and realized I had written my way into poetry. One immediate benefit of divorcing fiction and marrying poetry was that I could stop buying paper by the case at OfficeMax. The greater thing was that I could suddenly say much more. It’s that beautiful paradox built into the form. Though I enjoy autobiographical and even confessional poetry by others (e.g., Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ginger Andrews, Sharon Olds), I find that my poems tend to shy away from being a record of the life I’ve lived. So when it came time for ‘Barcelona’ to want to be written, I started with the fact that, yes, I once sat next to a girl in junior high biology class. That was it. Nothing fleshy happened to us, only to the frogs and pigs we poked and dissected. The poem became a fabrication, which come to think of it is a nice word since it gets at what I value—making new things out of words. And ‘Why Barcelona?’ my wife asked. Well, I’ve never been there; I just like the name.”
Albert Haley: “Sometimes I find myself pondering how one-third of the Hebrew scriptures are poetry. Or that Jesus of Nazareth speaks and teaches like a poet, not a fundamentalist minister. This poet’s gift seems to have been passed on to Mary Karr and Franz Wright whose verse carves out divine mysteries. I guess I’m saying I’m interested in what can’t be seen, yet feels as real as smooth stones held in the hand. Words on the page that become signposts, signaling, ‘Something just happened here.’ Trying to explain how it feels to have been run over by light.”
Albert Haley: “This fantasy poem treats the entirety of the week of June 8-14 as a single sequence of events that become simply “summer.” Since this is an alleged ‘poetry briefing,’ I’ve tried to focus on those items which might, if this were a different world, push the natural disasters and accounts of human malfeasance and murder off the front page of our newspapers. And I found it fun to imagine that within the soul of the man in the Oval Office is the same Barack Obama who wrote love letters (excerpted by Vanity Fair in 2012) that displayed such an affinity for the sounds and rhythms of words and the poetry pulsing through all of life. Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King is the #1 novel in the country. The best iced latte was described by The New York Times. The Fault In Our Stars was the box office leader for the week. The Miami Heat have struggled mightily with the San Antonio Spurs. The hashtag ‘hiddencash‘ has continued to pop up in even obscure locales like Abilene, Texas, where I saw as the lead story on the local news that a man found $20 inside a bronze canoe in a park. Everything else is made up.” (website)
“The Eros of Testosteros” by Albert HaleyPosted by Rattle
Albert Haley
THE EROS OF TESTOSTEROS
I speak of a key that will undo a lock.
We’re not very bright once handed such.
Down there, down there rests his pride and joy.
What’s it worth if it’s not deployed?
So each moves about with it at hand
and a question on the lips:
which lock? We must keep trying.
It is the only way to tell.
It might be hers, hers or titillation,
hers. We insert, we fiddle,
jimmying energetically, to gain entrance.
You know very well how intent
we are. Like thieving ravens in glossy
black coats or boys rapping knuckles
against the shuttered candy
store. Until one night a door swings
wide and we walk into the room.
Spacious cave. Our blind intention
is only to find commodious lodgings
and wonders of the underground felt
through seismic trembles of the groin
and girth. The key, the key, everyone speaks
of the key when it’s really all
about that room. Where we’ll lie down
in green pastures, curl up like a hound
with nose in tail, shudder at the chill
of night, and smile before we nod off
with the thought that we’ve found this
instead of the coffin. How we beat out
ol’ Skull Face again to dream
(greedily, unfaithfully) of how many others
might offer similar amenities for a weary
traveler until the dawn when the cock
again must crow and what makes a man
a man will arise. That’s what we think
about during the act, that’s where the mind
goes. Are you not now sorry you ever asked?
