The Garden of Verse: Real and Imagined, Pleasures and Pain, New Poems from Forty Poets

   

   The new March issue of Verse-Virtual is online now. I'm proud to have played a creative role in putting together this issue as guest editor, working with Managing Editor Jim Lewis.
       The issue includes poems by Tom Montag, Barbara Crooker, Sylvia Cavanaugh, Kate Sontag, Penny Harter, David Graham, Donna Hilbert, Steve Klepetar, Joan Colby, Marilyn Taylor, Joe Cottonwood, Neil Creighton, Robert Wexelblatt, Alan Walowitz, Joan Mazza, Jim Lewis, Michael Gessner, Michael Minassian many other others -- over 40 poets included in all. Read it all here. http://www.verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.html
         It includes an imagistic tour by Kate Sontag of the stages and struggles of putting together a successful verse in "Before It Was A Poem," such as the challenges glanced at in these lines:

In the house of do-over dreams 
the writer sleeps on pencil shavings
and eraser dust, unlearns standard 
grammar skills, relinquishes any
obsession with formal elements 
of syntax, diction, parallelism.

March 2020 includes: The splendid details in every stanza of Alarie Tennille's poem "Taking Forever One Day at a Time," such as these

hearing your voice in conversation
downstairs before realizing
that you’re talking to the cats
in the same serious tone you use
with plumbers

A marvelous poem about true intimacy. 

It includes Penny Harter's mysterious poem "The Oracle":

The oracle predicts without speaking,
slaps its tail for emphasis, eludes our traps.
It knows we are bigger than it is, 
has learned that we don’t care to heed 
the messages it brings us from the deep.

And Ingrid Bruck's lively depiction of a place she calls 

"Country Abecedarian," though it sounds like some places we know, where:

manacled ribs vibrate waves of cicada buzz, the screech

noise joins bleating lambs and grunting hogs.
often crows gather in murders cawing the news.
peace in the country is a bucolic notion.

I've often wondered about the correct term for gangs of crows. "Murders" sounds about right. 

It includes Shoshauna Shy's richly imagined biography for a waiting room patient, called (in the poem's title) the "Silver-Bearded Man in the Waiting Room at the Dental Clinic," whom the speaker of the poem confides she will never get to know:

I will not learn his eldest daughter’s 
nickname for him nor the story
of how he earned it, where he found
his dog if he has one, what route 
he biked after taking the Merrimac 
Ferry toward Baraboo. I will not find 
out in what country he last drank
a glass of wine. 

Verse-Virtual, March 2020 offers a whole world of speculations, possibilities, occasions for joy, and those for regrets.