The Garden of Verse: A Brief Tribute to Verse-Virtual May 2020, Even As We Mourn the Loss of Founder Firestone Feinberg

As our journal's managing editor Jim Lewis put the matter recently, "I cannot think of a better way to show appreciation and support for Firestone than to continue to build this community that he started."
            Firestone Feinberg, the founder and editor of Verse-Virtual, the online journal and community of poets I have been fortunate to be part of for the last five years, passed last Monday.
           I had just written these comments on a few of the many poems that particularly impressed me in the May 2020 issue of Verse-Virtual.org. As Jim implied, we can best honor him by doing what we do.
            So here are some thoughts on a few of the poems in the May issue of Verse-Virtual I am particularly fond of. You can find all of these poems, and many others at Verse-Virtual May 2020
 

            Barbara Crooker's depiction of this time of year in "It's May," -- "the time of year when

everything we’ve been waiting for opens" -- accords very much with my own thoughts. The idea of the world's 'opening' is wittily captured in the images that follow:

"The iris wave their flags, every shade of the rainbow,

and the peonies have unclenched their fists"

The poem continues an imagistic walk through this season of delights -- "An Oriental poppy is about

to stamp its orange exclamation mark" --

            leading to a nature-centered pitch for an earth-friendly politics. If I wasn't already marching in this parade I would swiftly join it. It's time to plant a perennials garden on the White House lawn. (It can't hurt.)

Two strong poems Marc Alan Di Martino walk us down the other side of the street. Skillfully and affectingly told, "Dark Matters" connects its 'matter,' a piece of  family history, to universal themes:

"The blades of life

spare no one—eventually, each of us

is butchered in one fashion or another

like Isaac on the chopping block."

And I thought its ending  (which I won't spoil here) was perfect.

Neera Kashyap's satisfying exploitation of the villanelle form, "Self-Rule" sees both dark and light in a world imaged by the poem's first line:

"There is work to be done on this hill."

After several tightly pinioned instances --

"The rabbit runs, paws tremble, thoughts mill;

Stumbles and falls, sorrows break in."

-- the poem's final lines fulfill its form and offer a satisfying reflection. 

Tamara Madison's "Seeing Paris" is not about the conventional associations of its two-word title. The irony of what it is about makes for a moving poem. The truth of the poem's observation that many of us"even learn

to free their faces of feeling,

to meet the world with a mask

that is smooth and shiny and which may

indeed look good, but we are not fooled"

...seems to me to take on an even stronger impact now that we are so often meeting one another behind the barrier of actual, physical masks.
            A deep and complex poem about a troubling reality, the extent to which we all wear masks. And what we wish them to say.

David Graham's "Accidental Blessings" is another poem that suggests there is so much more to life -- and much of it pretty hairy -- than we're likely to put on that other kind of officially made-up 'face,' the resume.

            While the poem's tone is relaxed and informal, its tally of bumps and bruises is scarily impressive: A little childhood brain fever, a near-miss run-over, a swinging collision with a tree; pills not taken, fights ducked. It's enough to prompt a class assignment on near-misses (start making lists...). The poem ends with a vividly phrased toast to survival I won't spoil here by quoting.

As so often in the past, I am grateful to Marilyn Taylor for the pleasure of form. Her sixteen-liner, "Piano Overture" finds the essence of a certain species of formal occasion, the twice-a-year visits of the piano tuner. I can't help quoting these two lines

"brandishing his hammer like a sword,

we watched him wring concordance from the air."

            Nor can I refrain from pointing out what a beautiful rhyme "concordance from the air" makes with the line it rhymes ending with the words "clean and spare." Please read this poem if you haven't. It requires something more than a semiannual visit.

These and so many more strong poems can be found at http://www.verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.html

The Garden of the Seasons: Birds and Plants Remind Us That the Earth Is Still Turning, Even If We're Kind of Stuck

Let's do something hands on.   Let's look at the evidence

all around us, the birds, and plants and trees are doing their jobs, right on schedule. 

Let us take off the heavy gloves of social caution and put on the work gloves, the ones with holes in the fingertips. These holes are pre-installed, free of cost, thanks to heavy use last year, and probably the year before that. 

                The Covid pandemic is real enough. But pandemic and springtime are separate empires of thought, incommensurable ideas, maintaining their own quite borders. 

                I confess to voting for Spring, for all its routine disappointments. And yet today's forecast for a cold, blustery, partly-cloudy day turned into a cool, breezy and ecstatic celebration of sunny skies, a sublime background for occasional flotillas of fair weather, cottony clouds, turned into an unexpected Mother's Day bonanza. 

                Springtime's poll numbers go up and down regularly with the standard fluctuations in the weather, but on the whole I am a firm supporter, casting party line approval for April, May and June. Arguably, June is summer, and I am always happy to arrive there, but feel no need to rush through the early floats in this luxurious parade through the season of hope and renewal. 

             Already, April's bounty floats down to the pavement.

The trees weep blossoms, open-faced white like those on our weeping cherry. The promising pink buds curled tight as shuttered lips on wild cherry in the woods we walk now have opened and ornament the trails. 

The young street trees turn the skyline lemon-lime with fresh new leaves. While their heavy forbears show tiny blossom, catkins, or bare branches against the deep blue skies.

          In the front and backyard gardens, dried leaves and wintry grasses give way to new greens: and to the Japanese Primrose in the top photo on this page; the reliable spring bloomer Bleeding Heart; the Hellebores (Lenten Rose); and in the final pic at the bottom of the page with the oddly delightful name of Spring Vetch.

The Garden of the Seasons: Restoring the Sidewalk Strip

When the company hired by the city last fall to rebuild our street and its sidewalks got to our house they told me I would have to remove all my plantings from the strip of soil between the sidewalk and the curb stone. New cement sidewalks, new curb stones, and new soil in between were being provided by the city.
             The most likely reason why those sidewalk strips exist on residential streets such as our own is to plant trees. 
              Trees are good for neighborhoods. They're good for the whole community. They clean the air, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The reason we have an atmosphere breathable for human beings is the presence of green plants. Earth's forests and trees and green plants everywhere habituated a plant capable of supporting large, air-breathing land animals. 
               No trees were growing on the strip of dirt in front of our house, so we put our name on our list for the city to plant a tree, which the city did a few years later. Then a second tree was added. They've grown, providing more shade for our house, front yard, and our street.
                 The rest of the sidewalk strip held the tattered remains of lawn grass. But these areas by their size and position are not hospitable to lawn grass. They're too small to mow. No one takes care of them. And lawn grass is a non-native plant that grows poorly in Northeastern cities and towns, requiring frequent watering, fertilizing, weed-killing and re-planting when the dead spots appear. So we didn't plant grass in our strip of dirt between the trees. 
                 We planted perennial and annual flowers. Since the strip is a hot, dry spot -- surrounded by pavement and automobile exhaust, it is vulnerable to road salt and visitations of urban waste -- we planted a patch of Autumn Joy sedum, because sedums survive in hot, dry climates. We planted flowering annuals, rotating them through the season. Our daughter planted a patch of crocuses and grape hyacinth for spring color. I added some hardy mums, some of them hardy enough to return each year. 
                     Those were the plants we lost when the city's contractor ripped up the sidewalks and started over.
                      But a new start is also a new opportunity. A long trough of new dirt is a blank canvas. Unwilling to face a completely blank canvas when a new spring rolled around, I decided to look for some spring bulbs. But the contractor didn't finish work until mid-November. When I went to the garden section of a big box store, no bulbs were to be found anywhere. Everything was Christmas greens. However I asked a guy in work clothes if the store still had any bulbs -- and got lucky. He confided that he had just thrown the last of them out, leaving them in a big box next to the store's dumpsters. 
            He suggested I go see if they were still there. I took the hint.
            The bulbs were there. A big box, with netted sacks containing probably a couple hundred daffodil bulbs altogether -- all daffodils, nothing else. I rescued a half dozen sacks and tossed them in to the trunk of the car. 
              So the new composition of the sidewalk strip began on a raw Thanksgiving morning when my daughter Sonya and I planted eighty or a hundred bulbs -- those fat spuds of floral potential -- in the Thanksgiving cold, a couple hours before the family feast.
                We waited five bare months to see if they would bloom, and when they did, happily, springfully, I began to look for what I could find in Covid Time to keep them company. 
                 In April green plants spring up, free of cost, out of the ground. Which is a good thing, especially this year, when shopping for anything, or taking yourself out in public, can be a fraught, restriction-hedged errand.
                So I looked closer to home, i.e. our own backyard, for candidates for missions Sidewalk Strip. Violets, I noticed, the kind of New England wildflower that grows in your lawn unless you poison them. I transplanted them from the weed-addicted soil of the backyard perennial garden; some already had buds, I hoped they would all bud and flower. 
                  Today, as I look around, they are. I found other flowering weeds -- another world for wildflowers whose names I do not know -- and added them to the mix. I added in some newly prominent, suspiciously prevalent, fast-growing plants -- I suspect them of being invasives.... but these, joined with violets and daffs will do for spring color. 
                Then I broke down and masked myself and visited a small garden center where I found some small planters of lavishly priced pansies. I bought three of these, divided the contents and added them to the pebble-strewn soil of the strip. 
                 These will do for spring. We have color, we have life. 
                 I will have to find more plants, more color to add, and soon, because the daffs after a beautiful month's showing are beginning to fade. 

                  So that's the formula: Add rain, repeated squattings followed by subsequent lower back complaints; two weeks of subnormal chill for the end of April, plus a surprise, summer-like May weekend -- and there you have it, one floral sidewalk strip, restored to the homeowner's -- temporary -- satisfaction

The Garden of Verse: In the Locked-Down Spring of 2020, Verse-Virtual Looks Into the Hearts of People Much Like Ourselves (or Not)

The May 2020 issue of Verse-Virtual is now online. Thanks go to Managing Editor Jim Lewis and guest editor Tom Montag. 
          I have three poems in this issue. The crazy one, based on a highly unlikely premise is titled
 "Trump Watches 'Turandot' on Late Night TV."                 To explain the unlikelihood: 'Turandot' is an opera by Puccini set in China. It's about selflessness and, ultimately, love. 
             I watched it recently -- not exactly on 'late night TV,' but on a screening of a Metropolitan Opera performance of the opera taped live a few years ago. These broadcasts are being screened on the Met's own channel, a new free offering every evening, but just for that one evening. You can, but don't have to, watch them late at night. 
              The greater unlikelihood has to do with that other proper name that appears in the title of the poem.... But, just suppose, this unlikely intersection came to pass. Here's an excerpt from  "Trump Watches 'Turandot' on Late Night TV":

People, the ordinary ones who live on the streets,
gather outside the temples, read the news on the billboards,
are nervous, fearful, they cower
amid presentiments of catastrophe
Even the bureaucrats are fed up, frightened, and desperate to
go home, lock their office doors behind them,
and turn off the spigot
of blood that runs through the capital..."

He's bored. What else is on?
He calls for Conway, or whichever of his stooges 
     hangs outside his door 
to demand that publicly funded TV
screen only biops of famous white males 
who succeed and triumph without a single dime of their 
father's money.
Everything they touch turns to money!
But, holy moly, who are all these people, look at them!
Dirty, ragged clothes, crowds of them—they make me sick...

To read the rest of the poem, click the link 

Trump Watches Turandot   
My other, shorter poems in this issue, "Saturday Soul,"
and "In a Younger Day," both have to do with memories
of earlier days.
You can find them at the same link.