The Garden of Verse: January Poems in Verse-Virtual Show Poets Taking Stock at the Start of a New Year

 

 

I'm still working my way through all the poems in the January 2021

issue of Verse-Virtual, but here are some of my favorites.

 

 
Jefferson Carter’s poems often get to the place where it hurts to laugh.

In “Segue” the speaker is exhausted at the prospect of remaining on the

dance floor for a segue into “Chain Gang,” which obliges dancers to raise

“an imaginary pick ax over your head

on each “Hoh!” & striking on each “Ah!”

The image is immediately followed, no commentary required, by:

“Love, for a shy girl, you don’t sweat

much, meaning I love how you don’t sweat

being judged.”  And then by a sadder, wiser foreshadowing of the night

to come, “knowing

I’ll get up between nightmares six

or seven times to pee.”

Carter’s three February poems use self-satire along with social and

political commentary to show us to ourselves.

 

 

We find a similar pursuit of self-knowledge in “your bird does not speak english,”

Jim Lewis’s smartly titled poem that carries a bittersweet message revealed in

its conclusion. The poem offers various pleasures along the way, as in this

wonderfully precise depiction of the pet’s behavior:

 “i hear the rising volume

of a cockatiel's complaint

at being ignored. the near

train-whistle panic that you

have simply walked out of the room

without her on your shoulder”

 

I found much to admire in Penny Harter’s “Night Thoughts,” which culminates in

this beautiful word-music evocation of listening to one’s own heartbeat:

“I honor the

bloodlines that have brought me here,

 

this faithful heart that lets me fall asleep

again, wake again, stretch to  greet the

morning, breathe deeply, and rise.”

 

I like everything about Laurie Bryo’s “The Snow Angel,” a thought-dream about

the father “a wild-eyed charmer,” who returns from the afterlife

“to tell me that the dead aren’t worrying about the living, that

 

each snowflake falling is a wish spoken before it hits the earth.”

 The dialogue that follows between the living dreamer and the

spectral presence is priceless: 
“Tell me

 you aren’t disappointed dad, show me how you know

it’s all ok.  He guffaws his coffee. I would sleep like the dead.

Instead, I have dervish-toddlers, toothless men.  Mostly I have you.”

           We all have questions, the poem tells us. And dreams, perhaps, are the only

answers – and non-answers. Be sure to read the rest.

 

Tricia Knoll’s three seasonal poems deliver that cold-warm-cold feeling of

a northern winter. A stark, severe time to be existing on earth, glowing with

barely seen wonders, as envisioned in “Pagan Epiphany in the Night Woods.”

The poem evokes a sorcerer searching for truth 

“in a rarified sky,

for the Dipper pouring love

to the shivering.”

And finding this miracle: “Three sets of footprints. 

Red fox, bobcat, and doe

hold up to plummeting cold.

With what faith they cross

the road to the woods.”

            These poems shiver with insight.  

 

Tom Montag’s three selections from his ongoing lyrical epic, "The Woman

in an Imaginary Painting" continue to offer us little wonders as large as life:

“The permanence of art

is the same as death..”

            The third poem in this group walks a little circle inside a dark

museum, then comes back to its own self-mage: “She would turn

 

from darkness, yet it

holds her here. This stillness

is the same as death.”

            I am wondering if these selections share something with Whitman’s

famous assertion in “Song of Myself”: “And to die is different from what any

one supposed, and luckier.”

 

Keep reading, everybody. There’s plenty more where these came from.

The January 2021 issue includes work by 66 poets.

Go here to find your way into the poems

January 2021

 

 

 

 

The Garden of Verse: Verse-Virtual Offers Poems for the First Month of a New Year, A Time of New Hopes and Sketchy Weather

My thanks to editor Jim Lewis for managing once again to put together a marvelous new edition of Verse-Virtual. January 2021 issue includes work by 66 poets, including new poems by Tom Montag (from his "The Woman in an Imaginary Painting" series), Jefferson Carter, Tricia Knoll, Michael Minassian, David Graham, Marilyn Taylor, Sylvia Cavanaugh, Steve Klepetar, Sharon Waller Knutson, Alan Walowitz and so many others.

The issue also includes my own poem "Calendar Days," a salute to the new year that takes a bittersweet look at the climatic possibilities of the upcoming months, particularly in atmospherically unpredictable New England.

Here’s my wintry forecast for the next three months:

Calendar Days

You cannot count on when the snows

will hide the ground and draw the flocks

January shifts its ground, confusing eager body clocks

Some days of rain refuse to freeze

Others tempt with softer breeze

February, much the same, is also March

Frost holds the ground, but seldom white

Some days are mild, the roots to stir

And thoughts of spring begin to whir

Then freezing spells turn hopes to spite

And then the month whose name is change

All months now are seeming March,

With chilly fingers in the wind

We stalk the sunny, sometime hours

Looking for foreshadowed flowers

To read the rest of the poem, my other two poems, and work by all poets in the January 2021 issue see

January 2021

The Garden of Fiction: Good Reads From 2020, the Otherworldly "Piranesi" and a Recollected Journey with Borges in Scotland

To start the new year, I'm recommending two books I enjoyed in the final days of the last one. The first,  "Piranesi" by Susanna Clarke is simply the best fiction I've read since -- I can't remember. You may recognize her name if you read her earlier book, "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell." 

I am partial to a little 'speculative fiction' along with my literary fiction, but Clarke's imaginative reach extends beyond any notion of genre. Her novel's nameless narrator -- "I believe I am between thirty and thirty-five years," he/she says -- is in the dark about everything. Piranesi's words betray him as the victim of abuse who thinks his master is the friend. 

His situation exemplifies the skeptical philosophical trope that asks, “How do we know what we think we know?” If we were born alone, a stranger in a strange land, how would we know whether anything is ‘true’? or, real? The novel’s narrator is in this predicament.

And then this book treats us to the always rich hypothetical, unprovable  (one way or another) but possible existence of other worlds. A speculative proposition, but hard, I would say impossible, to disprove by logic and reason alone.

Clarke's story begins with a human being alive in what to us is clearly an ‘other world,’ To the reader – but not to him – his world possesses a lot of resemblance to ours. And, oddly, he does not question this remarkable lack of knowledge about his own origins. Finally, his world include visits by another human, whom he simply calls ‘the other.’ The other's brief, though regularly scheduled visits are accepted by Piranesi as a cardinal fact, along with the tides, the weather, the seagulls, and the seemingly endless rooms of his otherwise solitary world filled with statues depicting human and animal forms.

            From this beginning, the novel opens its fan of complexities, including, of course, the existence and agencies of our ‘real’ world. Very little is predictable in this place. Every revelation is a stunner, helping to build a complex web of illusion over the haunting beauty of his world's material reality. 

            To me, Clarke's new book is speculative fiction at its best.

 

          The second book, "Borges and Me" by Jay Parini, is a less reliable pleasure. Here I think you could skim (or even skip) the first 50 pages. The memoir is the story of a young guy in the Vietnam era seeking to evade the draft, while writing an academic thesis and becoming a poet -- familiar ground, especially for my generation. 

But when the author gets himself to Scotland the book gains some traction, and when Argentine storyteller, poet and master of all literature Jorge Luis Borges turns up in Scotland -- we're being told this unlikely visit actually happened -- the book takes off. Borges who is of course blind is both an oracle and a pain in the ass... 

The author may have kept some good notes from that time, but even if he did I suspect he is "re-inventing" the shape of actual conversations prompted by the sites of their shared journey through the Scottish Highlands. I cannot imagine a memoir of events taking place a half century ago being written without relying on the technique of literary recreation. The encounters between the blind master for whom "the world is a library" and -- to take one example, the Loch Ness monster is Grendel, the embodiment of savagery in the Anglo-Saxon horror story "Beowulf" -- and the unself-confident American draft dodger grow in depth. They become two wanderers thrown together in unknown country, bumping against the limitations of their own visions. 

By the end, the reader finds himself himself rooting for everyone, even though the issue of those ominous letters from the local draft bureau back home is left unresolved. 

Still I liked his story, and identified with much of it. 

I can't say that I -- or anyone has ever in actuality experienced Piranesi's challenges. But anyone who dreams can imagine them.