The Garden of Verse: December's Verse-Virtual Is Alive with The People of Verse

           

Some appreciative thoughts on a few of the many poems I loved in the December issue of Verse-Virtual. 

            You can read any or all of these at http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html

            On first encountering Robert Wexelblatt's poem "After Three Glasses of Slivovitz Mrs. Podolski Explains What She Believes In," I went straight to Google to look up 'Slivovitz.'

            Then I had to say, 'I'm having what she has.'

            This poem is like a semester course on the concept of belief delivered in sharply amusing  poetic language, whether fueled by that "fruit brandy made from damson plums" or some other elixir of the gods, as in this tart observation:

            "People want to know what you believe in
as if the answer were going to rip
open the bag of skin in which we’re all
sewn at conception. "

            Then I remembered that I once actually took a semester philosophy course in 'The Concept of Belief.' This poem is a hundred times better (with an incalculable savings in time) and very timely because people keep saying things like 'I don't believe in X or Y' -- and pollsters keep asking questions like 'Do you believe in evolution?' or 'global warming.' These are not matters of 'belief.' They are matters of fact.

            Mrs. Podolski is quite philosophical in addressing questions put to her by a 'believer':

"Do I believe in religion?  She wanted
to know if I believed what she believed,
of course.  That’s what the question usually
signifies, not always.  Do you believe in me is just about as common.  Do I credit your existence as one might, say, God’s, I ask as politely as I
can."

            The poem also quivers with sharp social observations: "Oh, I guess
belief is enlarging and a comfort
to those who manage it; still, I seem to
find it most among the gullible and
smarmy."

            These excerpts just scratch the surface of a remarkable performance, a contribution to the poetry once called "the dramatic monologue," in which the drama takes place in the minds of those who read the poem.

            December is alive with the people of verse. Another is the title character of Joan Mazza's poem "My Mother Returns," in which I am stopped short by this image:

"She reappears as a tomato, hiding
oozing rot where it meets the counter."

            That's exactly how my tomatoes behave. (Mom? Is that you?)

            And then this arresting demonstration of maternal knowhow: "She demonstrates how to smack the garlic/ clove with the flat blade of my largest knife."

            Any poem that teaches us how to mince garlic is a work to be reckoned with.

            Kate Sontag offers another look at people in her broadly characterizing "Women At Sixty," who

"learn to love themselves

in a new way—
like thirty, forty, and fifty
but more immensely."

            That adverb struck me as just right. Human personalities grow larger as we age.

            The poem puts it this way: "At sixty they
have more plot twists
to add to stories..."

            A strong poem that convinces this reader that our plots are still twisting.

            Mary Makofske's poem "Signs" gives us quick incisive portraits of two men whose actions tell us something important about them. The conduct of one is correct, but that's all. The second man, as the observant eye of the poet realizes, is a deeper sort. That plastic saint on the dashboard, the poem tells us, "wasn’t yours, exactly, but a gift from your mother..." Keeping and displaying it is an act of kindness and consideration for another.

 

            Steve Klepetar has three beautiful and moving poems about his father, who was "driven" from his home by the "storm" that took the lives of his parents and so many others. In the poem "This Land" voiced in a first person narration, we learn that after the storm broke...

"I lived behind a curtain of rain.
I was hungry and ate shadows for sixteen days.
I came to this land carrying nothing, not even a history or a voice.
I had no language but the one I learned on these wild streets.
I came to this land with my fists and my blood.
I came with people who had no home,
who were torn from their lives, who were broken and sad..."

            Written in a strong, declarative style -- the repetitions above suggest a chant; the language calling on both particulars and universals -- the poems amount to a biography of the soul.  

            It was hard to open December's issue without finding strong and moving evocations of human life and remarkable images. In Joan Colby's "The Heart of a Woman" we are commanded:

"Consider where love resides: In the red pumphouse where fires are continually being lit And being put out."

            Her poem  "A Woman Scorned" goes straight to business:
 "A woman scorned sets fire to the tent
Where the new wife is celebrating.
Carves her name and yours into a tree
Then chops that tree down with her nail file."

            What an image. How much determination -- and anger -- would it take to do manual construction (or destruction) with a nail file? We get the point.

            Alive to the magic of meter, Marilyn Taylor's "Contingency" plays a happy tune on a sad predicament. This is intentional, as she tells us in her note, because a "bouncy triple meter" is unexpected in a poem on this subject. I'm caught by the image of "another pale-blue moon" for the daily-dose morphine tablet a fading mind stores in hiding against some inevitable "contingency." Then  -- knock, knock! contingency calling! The magic of the metrical dance lifts us above that final sadness.

            The "Novel," the title of the first poem in Donna Hilbert's "Six Genre" sequence, fittingly focuses on human lives and their crises. The poem gets right to it: "Anna under the train,
Emma’s apothecary poison,
and my late-twentieth century
life meanders, lacks plot."  

            Each of these six not-so-easy pieces offers pleasingly genre-fitting images and details. In "Short Story" the end comes, the poem notes coolly, with no further chapters
"in which the piper appears
demanding to be paid..." The piece titled "Opera" tell us "Every night while I cook dinner
Mimi dies..."

            In poems, of course, we're all immortal. Or something near to it. Reading the poems in December's Verse-Virtual I come away with intimations of the sort. 

See http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html
to read these, and many other poems to choose from.