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. 

 

 

The Garden of Verse: Magic Moments in Verse-Virtual's December 2020 Issue

Is the fraught year 2020 actually coming to end? 

A troubling year ends on a high note for the poets who contributed some of the year's best work to December issue of the online journal "Verse-Virtual," which every months publishes new work by some 50 contributors. Here are a few of the poems that offered word magic in the waning days of 2020.

Among the poems in the December issue that got deeply inside me and stayed there are two poems by Steve Klepetar. “Thin Air” speaks to the  Election Day anxiety many of us felt (I did: trying to decide whether to flee to Costa Rica), but takes us to a fantastically dark place made beautiful by its depiction. It’s hard to call out the great lines here –

“Your sister hides in the attic.

She has broken the necks 

on all her dolls.

There will be much to discuss.”—

for example; there are so many of them, and they build on one another. The

fractured dolls follow:  

“Your father has limped home late.

His briefcase has torn, his shirt 

hangs in rags. Could it be dogs 

again, or the human gang?”

It’s the ‘human gang’ that’s really scary, isn’t it?

The second poem “Reading Quantum Physics and the End of the World," 

takes us to a similar place. Though the atmosphere is rarified, the landing 

is familiar: 

“But now I have a headache and my Facebook friends/ are 

weeping. Those boots again, and now a rustling in the trees.”

I’m down with Tamara Madison’s strong poem on aging, "The Last Rain," for some of the same reasons. It addresses, beautifully, effectively, things I don’t even want to think about. So the poem sings them to our hearts: 

“Tonight when I hear the rain

slap the sidewalk as they say that it will,

I will stand in the street with my arms

outstretched and let my face go wet

and my clothes stick to my sides

because the way things are now,

this may be the last rain ever.”

 

Marilyn Taylor's poem “The Four Who Would Be Will” may well be the last, best words we will ever hear on the bizarro, upper-class-twit conspiracy theories over who ‘really’ wrote Shakespeare’s plays. The comic zingers keep coming, with the wit and agility that would have pleased the master.

 

“My Lord Francis Bacon, let’s open with you:

a scholar you were, and a scientist too;

you wrote of enlightenment, back in the day—

but nary a poem, and never a play.

It’s likely that we would be sadly mistaken

to look for a Hamlet along with our Bacon.”

 

A poem that serves Hamlet and Bacon on the same dish, the latter as a strong, stanza-clinching rhyme, deserves a bust in Westminster Abbey.

 

Michael Minassian’s poem "Dressing the Buddha” finds shadings of divinity in the street scenes of our secular existence. Even if finding Shakyamuni barefoot on the side of a road was only an “illusion,” the poem’s speaker takes him home for tea and a bowl of soup.

 

Both funny and profound, the poem winks at its metaphysical storyline, suggesting (without preaching) that we should care for someone in need because we never know when we might be driving an angel from our door.

 

The speaker gives the Buddha his favorite clothing “along with my wife’s warmest boots.” And she, arriving home, gets to the heart of the matter: “have you been meditating again?” but then embraces the same wisdom-with-humor philosophy:

 

“she ran after him and gave him her saffron

colored scarf, wrapping it gently twice

around his bare neck.”

 

That’s the bare neck we should all be seeking to save. 

 

Some poems are simply great stories, such as Sharon Waller Knutson’s poem about reliving old loves and losses, “I get an email from a former co-worker on a Montana newspaper in the mid 1960s.” The magic is in the detail: 

 

“It is two am and 44 below zero

and my 1956 Ford Thunderbird

won’t start and he has locked his keys

in his 1961 Chevy Impala. He kicks

in the window and his car chokes

and coughs but finally starts

and we slide over icy streets.”

If you haven’t done so already, you need to read the rest. 

The same is true of “Vietnam Vet,” a poem about a soldier who has

been reported dead. The story is told with spare gallows humor: 

“As the barber cuts his hair, he says:

Aren’t you that soldier on the news?”

The poignancy of these period particulars are the poetry.

These, and the many other fine poems in the December 2020 (my god, are we really at the end of this year?), are still up there for us to make a first, or subsequent, visit.

Here's the link Verse-Virtual December

  

The Garden of Verse: On the Theme of Gratitude, I'm Grateful for the December 2020 Issue of Verse-Virtual

My thanks to editor Jim Lewis for including three of my poems in the December 2020 issue of Verse-Virtual. The issue includes work by 60 poets, including strong efforts by Jefferson Carter, Steve Klepetar, Betsy Mars, Sarah White, Marilyn Taylor, Carole Stone, Barbara Crooker, Robert Wexelblatt... and so many others. 

Of my three poems in this issue, titled The Morning After the Morning After, There Will Be Consequences, and That November Feeling -- 

all written in the immediate aftermath of the Nov. 3 National Election, the one with the most impact for me is the first. "The Morning After the Morning After" refers to the changes in the outlook for the the final result in the 2 days following Election Day. When I went to bed on Election Day, the hosts on all the networks were speaking in dour tones about the strong Republican turnouts in the traditional "swing states" that would no doubt determine the result of the Presidential election. Texas and Florida, two states in which I'd had (foolish, it appears) hopes for the Democratic candidate were already in the wrong column. Others states, which had handed the Monster a victory in 2016 appeared to be following similar paths this year.... Well, you know all this. 

So on the "morning after" Election Day I was not feeling very good. Psychologically hung over. What would i do? Find another country to live in? Express my frustration with my country's affection with a veritable sick and evil nut-job by doing something stupid that I would immediately regret? Break a window somewhere?  

Happily, I began to reacquaint my paranoid brain with the pre-election prediction that the still uncounted mail-in votes were likely to run strongly Democratic. 

By that second "morning after," that trend was already well in evidence. Hence the emotional recovery in the poem that states in its first line, "I'm stepping from the ledge..." Here's the whole poem:

The Morning After the Morning After

I’m stepping back from the ledge.
The view from there is sickening,
a landscape roamed by entitled monsters
on whom we have pinned badges of honor 
for so much crapping on the landscape. 
 
Specimen days in a ravaged land:
sticks with dead flowers, stones with the faces
of people one might have known.
Today, a week from a killing freeze, 
the sun shines on the still-breathing leaves
and the compost bin keeps churning.
 
We walk the edges of a fault line
burned by the frost of a dead man’s embraces,
watching spellbound as the monster bleeds out,
but dare not yet descend
into the pit. 

To read the other poems, see Two More Poems 

To find poems by all 60 contributors to December's issue, 

see Poems and Articles 

Calendar Days: Anne and I Begin to Put Together Next Year's Calendar. Here Are Some Pages

 

Sonya in the Field: August 2020

We’ve emerged from the hills of Jug End into the paradise of the open fields 

Will butterflies appear, ex nihilo, in bursts of Super HD?

Birds sing like articulate brush-strokes from the fertile fingers of animators?

Flags fly in a sky of puffy clouds like the thoughts of heroes, doers, actors on the stage

of events: women 

Clouds pass above, like hungry souls praying for the gift of speech

 

Our daughter, a light into the future,

leads through fields of memories

All the green truth of the living world her truth now

What it means to live       this turn of the wheel

Images of Autumn: October 2020

Anne walks on a carpet of fallen leaves 

in the last days of autumn

From autumn to autumn,

from year to year,

the road leads on.

The leaves emerge in spring,

ripen in May

Hang large and languorous

in summer months.

Then turn the green blanket

of the forest to the farewell costume party of

October

Later, we find them underfoot

No need for the broom

We are walking the trail of the seasons

Each footfall landing on time 

What the Reeds See

The thing in itself. The thing in reflection.

Isn’t this what the painters have so often sought to do? Paint the light. And, as here,

the light on water. The reeds are not painting themselves. 

The water is painting them? Or the light.

Who can paint on water? The light. Only the light.

Who sees by light? Us. All of us. This sentient brotherhood. Deer drinking in a stream. Mallards floating by. Fish leaping to visible rumors of winged protein

All of us children   Of light 

Fog on the Marsh

A salt marsh by the shore. Impressions of a Great Egret and a couple of Mallards on an estuarial stream called Furnace Brook, as fog swirled through an afternoon disguised as some place else.

Who painted the colors? Who wielded the brush?

Concealment blew in the from cold saltwater, an arm of the sea stretching, a few hours lingering here

Inland, a five-minute stroll to the land of Everyday, blind to the occlusions of the shore.

Will that fuzzy white egret ever be the same? Will those mallards be taken back by their friends? Or hooted off

as the by-blows of some illusion?