The Garden of Verse: Finding the Right Words in August's Verse-Virtual

So many excellent poems in the August 2020 issue of  Verse-Virtual -- Here are a few of my favorites.

Robert Wexelblatt's poem "On the Road Near Chiangling the Poet Chen Hsi-wei
Encounters a Young Musician, Summer, 597" follows his Hsi-wei Tales, a newly published collection of stories about the vagabond peasant-poet who wanders through China during the Sui period. Its opening stanza is a stylish evocation of that point in the summer when we've all had a bit too much of it:

"Prickly lettuce and withered jasmine

lie flat, like bing cakes baking on the dirt.

Paving tiles burn right through straw sandals."

            The young musician of the poem's title then surprises the poet by expressing love for one of his early poems. The final lines contain an image that beautifully sums up the meaning, and the feeling, of the encounter:

"Taking up her liuqin, she begins to sing

and it’s like running water by a dusty road.

I feel my forgotten poem surfacing from

Lake Weishan itself transformed, summoned

by the sudden beauty of this butterfly."

David Graham finds the right words as well in "News That Stays News," a poem about reading great poems: "Now nearing midnight, wind raises

its wordless ruckus all over town—

that great nothing that is something—"

            That's what wind is, isn't it, "a wordless ruckus"? And it's also, perhaps like so many of the world's ordinary gifts, a "great nothing that is something."

            Something about winter, and the winter of life, permeates a second poem, "A Winter Drive With Dad," concerning a day when an older relative transcends the routine plague of remembering names:

"these taunting glimpses,

 these lucid landmarks lost in ice fog."

 

            It's the language in Kate Sontag's "Covid Notes On A Silver Standard Poodle" that turns a quotidian dog walk into a regal procession. There's "nothing standard," the poem observes, about the pet's 

"legendary lavender tint revealed through wanton

brown cover-girl curls poofed as a topiary lamb,

sprouting surreal head to tail. Oh puppy, we stare

in disbelief at such Brothers Grimm style, pointed

snout gleaming in profile wolfish as Little Red

Riding Hood’s grandma, velvety eight-month-old

face shaved to show off an authentic silver lining,

topknot and ears bouffant as a woodsman’s wooly

cap, laps flying mid-air, equally animal and human..."

            The parade of language goes on from there, convincing me that even non-pet owners would worship this "anthropomorphic princess." 

            Kate's poem Corona Triolets -- a triolet, one discovers (who knew?), is a short poem of eight lines with only two rhymes used throughout -- offers another splendid dish of word music, from its opening line, "This new form of distancing gives me pause/

with every breath." right to the end. It's the poem's repetition of the rhyming phrases, I think, that makes me think of music. And that first sentence evokes the pace of moving in Corona time: "distancing --pause -- breath."  

 

Felicia Chernesky's "Castles" is a seasonal poem that seems to have all the right words working together. You can practically hear the ocean approach in two sweet lines, playing with both consonants and vowels:

"Each surge of surf that sweeps

your summer castles clean away"...

And see the insubstantiality of those sandy constructions in the lines that follow:  

"builds such dreams          

on briny foam and tiny grains"

How can we not love the music of "briny foam and tiny grains"?

I could go on quoting the word music, but I don't want to spoil the ending.

 

            I'm a sucker for poems with a late 60s flavor, and Sharon Waller Knutson's two concise narrative poems deliver the goods. The nut of the story in "Santa Monica Dec. 3, 1969" is a  similarity in appearance shared by the narrator and one of the defendants in the notorious murder case that unfolded on that date. But appearances mislead, the poem tells us:

"After the press conference, her hands

are cuffed behind her back, while mine grip

the steering wheel and type the story."

            Appearances mislead as well in "Hollywood 67" when a drab "cleaning lady" turns out to be a famous comedian. 

 

            Another striking reminiscence poem, Steve Klepetar's "Privilege" offers an unbeatable metaphor: "Privilege is a white bird streaking the sky." We absolutely know why that bird is "white," regardless of whether many of us find ourselves still 'streaking' or not. In the lines that follow the poem efficiently evokes a youthful moment of ordinary pleasures, cum philosophical sophistication: 

            "We are young and white and none of this is real."

            Those were the days, my friends.

           

So many strong poems appear in the August 2020 issue. The more I look into its virtual pages, the more I find.

Find these poems and many others at 

 http://verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.html