Deborah P. Kolodji: “At some point in my poetry career, I decided my poems were too wordy and discovered haiku. Writing haiku soon became a way of life, and I have learned to appreciate small moments of my day and write them into snapshot poems. Because I also enjoy speculative literature, it’s fun to imagine the landscape around an imaginary or literary event, such as the evening of Cinderella’s ball, or the moment Arthur discovers the Sword in the Stone, and wondering what Basho, the seventeenth century haiku master, would write if he was there to see it.”
John Philip Johnson: “I hear a lot of poets say they’d rather be jazz musicians, but if I could be something else it would be an astronaut. I’d rather land on Mars than win a Nobel Prize. I got into poetry because I had a great high school teacher named Kirsten Van Dervoort. In college I came to believe I could write the stuff when I read Byron rhyme ‘gunnery’ with ‘nunnery.’ I thought, golly, anybody can do this.” (website)
John Philip Johnson is the guest on Rattlecast #43! Click here to watch …
On weekends when the woman walks up hills, she does it to see the sun. At sea level, thick smog obliterates the sky, a gray and toxic smothering. Despite the altitude, once she gets above it she breathes easier. She has not seen such a blue sky from down below since childhood.
masquerade party—
strangers crowding into
a downtown loft
When she tries to get some of her co-workers from the factory to climb with her, they merely laugh. “But you can see the sun,” she exclaims. “And the sky is blue!” Her friends prefer the mall or the movies, so she climbs alone.
shooting star—
how briefly its wake
marks the dark
Years pass, and she has to climb higher and higher. Having retired, she can climb more often, but it’s slower going now. One day when she arrives above the timber line, stumbling among rocks shining with lichen, she is breathing in stabbing gasps. Soon she will be too old for this, she thinks. Head spinning, she clings to a nearby boulder and stares up into the blazing heavens. Then she looks down at the tide of gray creeping up the slopes. She knows it is only a question of time until she will be forced to go up and up.
Benjamin S. Grossberg: “I think I started writing because it seemed my brothers had taken the other arts (painting, music, etc), and only poetry was left for me. But it could also be something in the genes. One of my grandfathers was a jeweler, the other a Rabbi. Maybe a poet is what you get when you cross a jeweler and a Rabbi.” (website)
Did you hear about the woman who was lonely but did not know it and so, being an amateur horticulturalist, grew a WE in her garden? (Without realizing of course—for once the intellect twigs to the doings of core intelligence, it’s game over for the road that cannot be known, the thought that cannot be thought, etc.) The freshly turned soil around her WE quickly filled with weeds (as freshly turned soil is prone to do). And the woman just as quickly hauled away a barrowful of EDS. She found she had to do this daily but took pleasure in tending her WE (which she still did not recognize as such, although she had begun to wonder if she should cut back on the manure tea). One night, while the woman slept, the WE went. The next morning (an exceptionally brilliant morning) the woman walked out to her garden and saw what had happened. She brought her clippers, then her loppers, and finally a hacksaw. But it was no use. The NT could not be removed. The woman brooded over the loss of her WE until mid-day when she discovered that a flat of scarlet dahlias worked much better in that spot.
Conrad Geller: “I have been writing poems since Harry Truman was president, maybe before that. The problem is, I can’t stop writing them. My pleasure in poetry comes not from expressing myself (who would care?), but from playing with language—its sounds, rhythms, and the reverberations of its words.”
Official records of the events of December 7, 2053, remain maligno-encrypted. All my attempts to trace the origin of reproductive plasma stored in the iCrypt of the Proto-Matriarch stall at googleterminus. But this morning, (praise-be-to-the-Supreme-GMO), an anonymous researcher at an untraceable IP sanctuary uploaded these fragments.
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