NINE MILE MAGAZINE Publisher: Nine Mile Art Corp. Editors: Bob Herz, Stephen Kuusisto Art Editor Emeritus: Whitney Daniels Cover Art: a portion of the portrait Cass Brayton, Mistress of Communications for the Sisters of perpetual Indulgence, 3 by 5 ft oil on canvas, 2007. Painting is by Thomasina DeMaio. Nine Mile Magazine is a publication of Nine Mile Art Corp. This publication would not have been possible without the generous support of the Central New York Community Foundation. We are very grateful to them. ISBN-10: 0-9976147-5-7 ISBN-13: 978-0-9976147-5-6 Poetry and artwork copyright of their respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. No poem or artwork may be reproduced in full or in part without prior written permission from its owner.
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Contents About Nine Mile Appreciations & Asides
6 10
MARVIN BELL The Book of the Dead Man (Water) The Book of the Dead Man (Mayhem) The Book of the Dead Man (That Wednesday)
14 16 18
SEAN J. MAHONEY In the Context of Your Rapid Streams The Force of an Atom A couple no one assures
22 24 26
JEREMY WATTLES Driving to Cordoba
29
CARY BRIEL If only I'd have caught it
33
JACKIE WARREN-MOORE For Etheridge Knight Death Wish
36 38
MAX HEINEGG Triptych After Golding Ava at Eleven
53 56
SHEILA ZAMORA The Talk of Two Women Landscape for the Witch If You Offered, The Thing I'd Choose
64 66 69
PAMELA STEWART For the Love of the Century I'll Die In The Man by the Sea
70 74 Volume 4 No 1 - Page 3
MEAGHAN ANDREWS Derivative Eternal Canto Getaway Idee Fixe
90 91 92 93
STEPHEN KUUSISTO Poetry Journal
95
ALEXANDRA VAN DE KAMP So This Is How It Is Noon
104 107
DIANA PINCKNEY Dinner Party
126
MARKHAM JOHNSON Ghost Fish Taken Falling Baseball Cliches
128 130 132 134
EMILY K. MICHAEL Small Hours
154
MAGGIE DUBRIS 1983 August 1984 1984 Summer
156 158 160
GEORG TRAKL Childhood Sebastian in Dream Winter Night
170 171 174
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ARTICLES & REVIEWS Deborah Tall's Afterings
41
Sheila Zamora Leaf's Boundary
58
The Dead Man Poems of Marvin Bell
76
Alexandra Van De Kamp's Kiss/Hierarchy
112
Larry Levis The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems
137
Jack Micheline's Letter to Jack Kerouac in Heaven
147
Georg Trakl's Last Poems
164
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About Nine Mile Magazine Nine Mile Magazine is an magazine of literature and art, which has been published twice a year since 2013. It was founded by Bob Herz and Whitney Daniels. Our purpose is to publish the best writing and artwork available to us, emphasizing Central New York artists and including others whose work excites us. Our tastes are broad, and we’re excited to provide publication to a range of authors and artists whose work, energy, and vision is deeply entangled with life. This and all previous issues are available online at ninemile.org.
Submission Policy Submit at editor@ninemile.org. For poetry, submit 4 - 6 poems in Word, text, or pdf. For Artwork: submit 3 - 5 small jpg files. Include your name and contact information along with a brief paragraph about yourself (background, education, achievements, etc), a statement of aesthetic intent about these poems or artwork, a photo of yourself, and a link to your website (if available). We will respond within 2 weeks. If you do not hear from us, reconnect to make sure we received your submission. Note that at least for now we do not accept unsolicited essays, reviews, video / motion based art, or Q&A's.
Talk About Poetry Podcasts & Blog Talk About Poetry is the Nine Mile Magazine podcast, where working poets gather to discuss poems that interest, annoy, excite, or otherwise engage us. All podcasts are available on Soundcloud and iTunes. In addition, the Talk About Poetry blog provides an extended discussion of the poems and an opportunity for listener feedback. The addresses are: Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/bobherz iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-about-poetry/ id972411979?mt=2 Talk About Poetry blog: https://talkaboutpoetry.wordpress.com
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Podcasts to date include: Robert Bly’s “Old Boards” • Brigit Kelley’s “Garden of Flesh, Garden of Stone” • Phil Memmer’s “How Many Shapes Must A God Take” and “Psalm” • Georgia Popoff’s “The Agnostic Acknowledges the Food Chain” & “Name Inconsequential” • Stephen Kuusisto’s “Sand” and “They Say” • Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Voetex Sutra” (2 parts) • Discusson of Georgia Popoff’s book Psalter • Discussion of Jasmine Bailey’s book Alexandria • Discussion of Marvin Bell’s poems, and an interview, with a specific focus on his Dead Man poems (3 parts) • Readings by Ken Weisner, Jasmine Bailey, Georgia Popoff, Andrea Scarpino, Sam Pereira, Marvin Bell, Christopher Citro, and Jeffrey Harrison.
Nine Mile Books Nine Mile Books are available through our website, ninemile.org, or online at Amazon.com. Our most recent books are: * Bad Angels, Sam Pereira (2015). $20. Of this poet Peter Everwine wrote, “He’s an original.” Pereira’s work has been priased by Norman Dubie, David St. John, and Peter Campion. * Poems for Lorca, Walt Sheppperd (2012). $9.95. The poems continue Mr. Shepperd’s lifelong effort to truly see and record the life around him. Lorca is his daughter, and the poems constitute an invaluable generational gift from father to daughter, and from friend, colleague, and community member to all of us. * Some Time in the Winter, Michael Burkard (2014). $16. A reprint of the famed original 1978 chapbook with an extended essay by Mr. Burkard on the origins of the poem and his thoughts about it. * Selected Late Poems of Georg Trakl, translations by Bob Herz, $7.50 plus mailing. This book includes all the poems Trakl wrote in the last two years of his life, from Sebastian in Dream and the poems that appeared in Der Brenner, plus some poems from other periods showing the development of the poet's art. The book also includes a long essay by Herz on Trakl and on his poems. Volume 4 No 1 - Page 7
* Where I Come From, Jackie Warren-Moore, $12. Ms. WarrenMoore is a poet, playwright, theatrical director, teacher, and freelance writer from central New York, whose work has been published nationally and internationally. She is, as she has said, a Survivor, who has survived racism, sexism, sexual abuse, and physical abuse. She regards her poetic voice as the roadmap of her survival, a way of healing herself and of speaking to the souls of others. She has said, "I believe I have an obligation to speak up and celebrate what is right in the world and to shout out about what is wrong in the world, in the hopes that we may all work together to make it right for us all." * Letter to Kerouac in Heaven, by Jack Micheline, $10. Jack Micheline was one of the original Beats, whose career took him from Greenwich Village to San Francisco, and whose friends included almost everyone of any notoriety, from Mailer to Ginsberg to Corso and others. He was a street poet whose first book included an introduction by Jack Kerouac and was reviewed in Esquire by Dorothy Parker. This is a replica publication of one of his street books.
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Nine Mile Magazine Vol 4, No. 1 Fall, 2016
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Appreciations & Asides IT SEEMS TO ME THAT NO POETRY, not even the best, should be judged as if it existed in the absolute, in the vacuum of the absolute. Even the best poetry, when it is at all personal, needs the penumbra of its own time and place and circumstance to make it full and whole. If we knew a little more of Shakespear's self and circumstance, how much more complete the Sonnets would be to us, how their strange, torn edges would be softened and merged into a whole body. ―D.H. Lawrence, preface to Collected Poems
I THINK MY OWN DISSATISFACTION WITH THIS APOLOGUE is that the effect is simply one of negation. It ought to excite some sympathy with what the author wants, as well as sympathy with his objections to something: and the positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing. I think you split your vote, without gettuing any stronger adhesion from either party – i.e., those who criticize Russian tendencies from the point of view of a purer communism, and those who, from a very different point of view, are alarmed about the future of small nations. And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs. ―July 13, 1944 letter from T.S. Eliot, then then a director at Faber & Faber, rejecting Geiorge Orwell's Animal Farm for publication.
THE REMARKABLE THING ABOUT SHAKESPEARE is that he is really very good―in spite of all the people who say he is very good. ―Robert Graves
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POETRY IS A LIFE-CHERISHING FORCE. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. ―Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A MORAL or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. —Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray
I DON'T BELIEVE THAT POEMS ARE WRITTEN TO BE HEARD, or as Mill said, to be overheard; nor are poems addressed to their reader. I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem. You stand behind the words and speak them as your own—so that it is a very different form of reading from what you might do in a novel where a character is telling the story, where the speaking voice is usurped by a fictional person to whom you listen as the novel unfolds. —Helen Vendler, Art of Criticism No. 3, Paris Review 1996
I BECAME A FABULOUS OPERA: I saw that everyone in the world was doomed to happiness. Action isn't life: it's merely a way of ruining a kind of strength, a means of destroying nerves. Morality is water on the brain. —Arthur Rimbaud, from "Alchemy of the Word," A Season in Hell It is not enough that poetry be beautiful; it should also be interesting. --Horace, Ars Poetica
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POETRY THAT WAS ORIGINALLY BEYOND YOU, generating the need to understand and overcome its strangeness, becomes in the end a familiar path within you, along which your imagination opens pleasurably backwards towards an origin and a seclusion. Your last state is therefore a thousand times better than your first, for the experience of poetry is one that truly deepens and fortifies itself with reenactment. ―Seamus Heaney
POETRY IS WHAT IN A POEM makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone and not alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. All that matters about poetry is the enjoyment of it however tragic it may be. All that matters is the eternal movement behind it―the great undercurrent of human grief, folly, pretension, exaltation and ignorance ―however unlofty the intention of the poem. —Dylan Thomas
MAN SPEAKS. WE SPEAK WHEN we are awake and we speak in our dreams. We are always speaking, even when we do not utter a single word aloud, but merely listen or read, and even when we are not particularly listening or speaking but are attending to some work or taking a rest. We are continually speaking in one way or another. We speak because speaking is natural to us. It does not first arise out of some special volition. Man is said to have language by nature. It is held that man, in distinction from plant and animal, is the living being capable of speech. This statement does not mean only that, along with other faculties, man also possesses the faculty of speech. It means to say that only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man. It is as one who speaks that man is—man. ―Martn Heidigger
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IT SEEMS, OF COURSE, VERY UNLIKELY THAT young Auden, when he decided that he was going to be a great poet, knew the price he would have to pay, and I think it entirely possible that in the end —when not the intensity of his feelings and not the gift of transforming them into praise but the sheer physical strength of the heart to bear them and live with them gradually faded away—he considered the price too high. We, in any event—his audience, readers and listeners—can only be grateful that he paid his price up to the last penny for the everlasting glory of the English language. ―Hannah Arendt
ONE OF OUR JOBS THESE DAYS, anyway, is to escape from free verse. — Robert Bly POETRY DEALS WITH PRIMAL AND CONVENTIONAL THINGS—the hunger for bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for immortal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal with them. If, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eat bread; but did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, original craving to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him. If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a fossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him. Poetry can only express what is original in one sense—the sense in which we speak of original sin. It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new, but in the deeper sense of being old; it is original in the sense that it deals with origins. — G.K. Chesterton
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Marvin Bell The Book of the Dead Man (Water) Live as if you were already dead. —Zen admonition 1. About the Dead Man and Water Where the Atlantic cuffs rocks at land’s end, there a man may be reminded that things are not what they seem. The splashing at makeshift barriers anywhere also brings to mind the low tide peeling itself as it leaves. In the dead man’s brain are as many canals as has the planet. In the hollow of the dead man’s chest, like a boat in blood, his heart bumps, again and always again, the future. He bumped the tide to go out, now he bumps it to reach land. A geezer from the day he was born, now the flesh of his arms hangs like packets of dry oak leaves in winter. The dead man is not what he appears to those who think they can see time. He has his chin up, he is chipper, he towels his wit to bag a listener. Nor shall the dead man reveal himself to the historical registers. He sees no reason to bag the past. 2. More About the Dead Man and Water To the dead man, all biographers wear gloves, touch not. And the autobiographical noise mounts from people trying to remember themselves. Metaphor, a way to think few now recall, long junked. One sees a few bubbles rising from the dumps after a rainfall. It is the life of the mind gasping from the disintegrating pages of discarded books. Page 14 - Nine Mile Magazine
The family tree, shrunken, is a vine. Oh leaves that became folios, oh the marine existence of wood and cloth in the acidic baths of paper-making. It is still true that we never step into the same soak twice. Inside the dead man are the ducts and streams of a life-force field. An invisible barrier, a privacy at sea.
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The Book of the Dead Man (Mayhem) Live as if you were already dead. —Zen admonition 1. About the Dead Man and Mayhem Did the dead man say “mayhem” when he meant “mayflies,” “war time” when he meant “more time?” Did he get it wrong, or was he trying to be upbeat? Did he say nine when he meant none, did he say it’s all white when he meant to ask what? The dead man ages, words yellow like candle light, and meanings shift. A tree he thought evergreen is undressed by a wind gust, how could that happen? Something is going on underneath the orator who raises a lukewarm finger to shush the planet. The constant rasp of parliamentary idiocy is like low flying geese, circling. Meanwhile, petals, twigs and feathers are being dislodged early. Meanwhile, foliage and forests go into the past, and migrating birds go awry. Did the dead man say “scream” when he meant “cream,” is that how things changed? He meant deep when he said sleep, he meant what it was when he said what it is. The dead man will leave a small footprint, a few photos of his several looks, some writing without the key, worn shoes, unclean laundry. His tenderness will go without words, his favorite colors will be squeezed between louder shades, he will feel more and say less.
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2. More About the Dead Man and Mayhem Before the kiss of the earth and the blanket of the sky, there were tactile histories. The dead man lived low on islands, protuberant on peninsulas, uphill in the foothills, on prairie, in desert, in heat and cold, in wet and dry. As time passed, the light winked. There were hints in a rain burst, nuances in a freeze. He paused on the sidewalk, sniffing the industrial air, it was age. His handwriting grew so simple it was thought illegible, then obscure. History looked like a spiral, destined to be repeated on other planes. And friends from childhood had traveled through time, that’s it. A trace of frankincense, a face, a siren, a scrape or scraping—memory spun him behind and ahead. Where the land had kissed the water, the water had kissed back, that was how the planet shook its body. That was it, he would not perish but be a man of parts, a cool dude, at last a cool dude. Sitting at a café, looking at the Rock of Gibraltar, that’s how things are. He says he has to go have his picture taken, when he is just going to the men’s room.
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The Book of the Dead Man (That Wednesday) Live as if you were already dead. —Zen admonition 1. About the Dead Man and That Wednesday It was the middle of the workweek when the dead man checked out. It happened at the hub of activity, the midsection of a salary. Midweek was yellowing in the high floor windows. He was, on Wednesday, the pivot of a utilitarian seesaw. Perched between up and down, a diameter in some half arc of industry, he was. He was not sure what came next and what to trash. So he up and walked away. No one had quit on a Wednesday—papers stacked in the in-box. He gave notice by waving as he left. Like Bartleby, he waxed minimally on desire and wanted out. The pens bled, the stationary wilted, the desk chair rolled to the side. They thought he would return on Thursday. 2. More About the Dead Man and That Wednesday The door hinge squeaked twice as he exited. They recall now the dead man’s quietude, his odd composure, his bearing bled of angst. They think now they should have foreseen his making tracks. It seems he drank water at the cooler instead of talking. He had often swiveled in his chair, it was a sign, as was his back to the room. His reasons will be sought in vain on company websites and in office photographs. He was just tired of facing the outside. Weary of expectancy, of strategies and alchemical jargon. Everyone in ant lines under the corporate boot.
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Yet his childhood lived on, impervious to analysis. They were lost to him who had been real on Monday and Tuesday. He spoke of this into his sleeve, then threw his voice under the desk and walked out.
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About Marvin Bell Marvin Bell is the highly honored American poet, teacher, and author of more than 20 books of poetry, the most recent of which is After The Fact Scripts & Postscripts with Christopher Merrill (White Pine Press, 2016). Bell's first nationally distributed book, A Probable Volume of Dreams (Athenaeum, 1969) won the Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has also received a Guggenheim and National Endownment for the Arts fellowships, and Fulbright appointments to Yugioslavia and Australia. In 2000 Bell was appointed the first Poet Laureate for the state of Iowa. He taught for forty years for the Iowa Writers' Workshop, retiring as the Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters, and is currently an emeritus faculty member. Over a long career, Bell has held numerous visiting lectureships at many universities. He currently serves on the faculty of the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Pacific University in Oregon. Bell's Dead Man books include The Book of the Dead Man (Copper Canyon Press, 1994), Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Vol. 2 (Copper Canyon Press, 1997), Nightworks: Poems 1962–2000 which include the "Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps” (Copper Canyon Press, 2000), and Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). By his count, he has published 186 dead man poems.
About The Poems These poems are a continuation of Bell's Dead Man series, that began in 1994 with The Book of the Dead Man. Later in this issue is an extended review and anaysis of the work, which we regard as Bell's best work in a long career of truly excellent work. Others have similarly praised the work. Stan Sanvel Rubin wrote in Prairie Schooner that Bell has
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fashioned in this work "a dazzling linguistic Chinese box, at once alluring and elusive," and Bruce Murphy has said that "Bell is really out there— trying to invent a new kind of poetry, something like an epic with only one character." Richard Jackson, in an appraisal for the North American Review, termed The Book of the Dead Man "one of the most complex, most original books in a long time.... What The Book of the Dead Man does, by its verbal pyrotechnics, is redefine sensibility, and this is the most essential thing any poetry can do. . . . This is an astounding feat. There's not a greater gift any poet or poetry can bring." In Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume Two, Bell continues in a similar mode, darkly rendering what a Publishers Weekly contributor described as "the thin line that separates the real from the unreal, the illuminated from the dim, the living from the dead."
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Sean J Mahoney In the Context of Your Rapid Streams for Ia May you live long enough to die twice. May you arrest your time without cause, with juris and a hint of prudence. May you walk without suffering the radiation of your crimes. May your ribs be hidden and free of all cages. May your throat sing songs of buttery movement and indelible progressions. May presumption precede innermostly only and leave not traces in the aisle; for none need know why you roll. May the assault only be to your better sensibilities and not object personification – in other words, be gracious. May each other’s gratifications be mutually agreed upon when the time is come and pluck ripe. May you add pieces of the sky over your mind’s eye, in your back pockets, and stirred through with your smoothies. May that pickle not be the last dill, and may it be fried for your taste without batter. I do not admonish dead poets but may you conduct queries with hot flesh and keen senses, in other words, be passionate. May your heart not know your sleeve at night but only when fixed with sun; yes, yes – be proud of you. May your sorrow eventually lose its way. May those prisoners of your past remain there. If that which informs is of the earth, may the musk forever stain your fingernails and lower back. May the egg in your throat work for and through you, loose sutures and chrysalis choirs of round full melodies; emerge butterfly of purity: Page 22 - Nine Mile Magazine
jus sanguinis, a sanguine. May you meander further and far; never beholden to who you were once‌long, long ago.
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The Force of an Atom Yo coterie: you are the elephants in the room and what is on your tongue is not that which is in your heart. You inhabit the city of rock and mistreat the messengers of destiny and the table. You eat the ears and remove the hands. Yo coterie: cover the evidence when stars are shattered and moons split apart. Rather than weep as one deceive. Machinate. And while you eat, drink, and cherish this power cub sprites gather with baby soft questions. These deniers appear and echo as chambers declaring all to be insane. All who proscribe in arrogance of how world should be rather than how world is. It is full of suffering they say and far too many poets. (For my associations and lack of artfulness my face will be used as the mark of heretics) And world is not all white not all black. Not even close. You speak ill with the force of an atom like Moses and Maya though each new prophet born now bathes in a basin of soured belief and loose loud tongue. Under the light of this day, the weight of suns see that none here be worthy enough to serve as a god’s camel. Those Page 24 - Nine Mile Magazine
false coterie will be reduced to impotent folktale and tavern yarn. Behold - without visible pillars there are the heavens before you and well around your time. These are the days you have chosen to not guide but parade your banners of hideous deceit, allow the righteous messengers beatings from hecklers. Worry the drums. Ready powder. (As this may be the time for illumination I sacrifice my eyes and mouth for truth) Worry drums. Ready powder. Aim and pray for bullets. Seal the gates before those angry closed figures steal light from our margins and blind followers with suffering, sulphur, and half truths. You vapid men and women, self-styled models of autocracy choose not to lead when we are all terrorists but find your heaven in rooms of tools: erosion1, erosion2, weather and knot, your lobby an attrition of souls not unlike the dark cur of yesterday; look from far above at the growing storm that is body of this world. Winds set upon these times, exposing you coterie who speed in disbelief and sheer unscrupulousness. Volume 4 No 1 - Page 25
A couple no one assures A couple no one assures whose third try for a child produced beautiful fruit full of dark violent history, a baby which cried upon exiting that “Jim Crow Must Go.” This child’s hands clench and will not emancipate time but metaphorical dragons of fair shakes; this child will teach his generation the importance of gerunds, of compassion and compass navigation. Another child, a would-be disciple, will wrestle internal seizures and brotherly betrayal bearing witness for the hunter. This just is how it is. Red-shouldered Hawk atop the flat of a power pole popping tail feathers out off the mockingbird tail, prancing around a pink carcass before leaving it a spell to soften under summer’s searing palm. Birds arrive, dart in with small pebbles - for this one too matters - arranging them as darkest, dark then light, means to means, value-added, and as currency around the tendered fallen. Fist-width strip of grayed beard breaking the dark recesses of the hooded pullover sweatshirt on a broad man crouched, counting on his fingers, wilting away at a dank nursing home in the quiet din of years following that accidental sharpening that flat that, how he hears it, never happened, or, that he will not remember as such being played; player that he was. Starved for depth of ideas, for the ping of separations and the era of suspense that almost ended just this second, you demure; step away. Why could not the narrative resist the confines, the noose of your pen and wrist? Why could the hunted not in return flick small stones, pop the eye upon hierarchy? Not create rich harmonic alarms? Why stop here with a lie unlocking the gates? Why not add sugar to the one?
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About Sean Mahoney Sean J Mahoney lives with his wife Dianne, her parents, two Uglydolls, and three dogs in Santa Ana, California. He works in geophysics. He trusts that salsa will one day constitute its own food group. He believes in dark chocolate and CBD. He was diagnosed with MS in 2012, has co-edited the 3 existing volumes of the MS benefit anthology series Something On Our Minds, and helped found the Disability Literature Consortium (dislitconsortium.wordpress.com), which made its physical debut at AWP 2016 in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Tethered by Letters, Kaleidoscope, Catamaran Literary Reader, Occupoetry, Scarborough Fair Magazine, Militant Thistles, SharkPack, OTV Magazine, and Breath & Shadow, among others.
About the Poems "The Force of an Atom" literally began in a museum. My mother and I had gone to the Orange County Museum of Art to see the Sandow Birk exhibition of American Qur’an. I was so amazed by the artwork coupled with the text that I spent most of the time walking back and forth between the paintings and a place to sit where I could jot things down. I always have a pen on me but I was compelled to scribble on the exhibition program, some check stubs, and one of my Mom’s grocery lists. And I had my notes written sequentially – like the art – but the poem itself has things radically shifted around to suit a narrative that began internally just after seeing the first painting. You see we were at the exhibit shortly after the Paris attack. I’m sure you recall the non-stop media circus. So perhaps more than anything "The Force of an Atom" was born via a global
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sequence of action-reaction-white noise-art and finally a guy with a pen written response. "A couple no one assures" began as a few lines scribbled down and forgotten about for well over a decade. The lines were based on true events: the couple did have trouble conceiving, are interracial, and do have familial bonds back to the civil rights movement of the 60s. Hawk with prey on the pole? Real. Smaller birds invented. Broad shouldered man – real. Piano story invented. We create stories with what we’re provided. My wife’s sister’s daughter just graduated into Middle School. She is 14. There is much happening to her body and in her head space. And happening rapidly to say the least. I thought it would be fitting to give her a little perspective – and some food to boot! Perhaps, at some point, she will be comfortable enough to approach me with questions – even questions about the language of the poem itself - if she does not want to engage with her parents. I did things like that when I was her age. And I may have borrowed the first line from Peaky Blinders…or some misheard variant of it anyway. The Birmingham accent can be low and thick at times. Great show by the way. So "In the Context of Your Rapid Streams" is something I hope that she, or anybody for that matter, can crib away in a back pocket for safekeeping…a tiny ‘lighthouse in writing’ as it were.
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Jeremy Wattles Driving to Córdoba Like a madman down the E5 at 1am through round one way tunnels under Los Órganos de Despeñaperros and over swaling roads for far too many Euros with the full moon bathing the roadway and the lightning flashing sideways farther south in Andalucia. Like dogs falling over a cliff you plunged into sleep and I into a mirror of desire— despite the unfaithful train with its hummingbird nose and the indifferent Spaniards at Atocha shuttling us in circles from one shrug and spectacled frown to another desk or ticket machine and I’m failing to conjure any feeling or even memorial plaque from 2004 – only two foot wide glossy plastic limes, rum, Dominican flags, arrows that lead to el jardín not a car rental, and the lingering humidity, yet Like my father reading me Tales of the Alhambra as a child, I was the man who slept, who dreamed, with his eyes open and if we couldn’t see Granada the patio of the thousand year old stone lions and the sculpted blue egg shaped Mozarabic ceilings then I had to get us to Córdoba Like an innocent struck dumb you wanted to stay in Madrid, maybe
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at the station all night, maybe your fluency would return if we sat under the palm trees for awhile, but you married a madman who drove a gray and black plastic Citroën past Manzanares, Andújar, and Montoro filled with a sense of magic and the desire to disappear. Like thieves we arrived so late that the tapas bars were closing, stole up to the old city entrance and parked on the cobbled stones opposite the Lovers’ Monument, but inside the hotel in the Juderia, the sound of water on the patio and the feel of the mahogany floors, the marble bathroom walls, the narrow bed like the one we first slept in was a drug, a balm. Like the Romans, the Jews, the Moors, the evaporating Guadalquivir in the 109 degree heat, I wanted to disappear into Córdoba, into the white walls, the stonework, the running water under the ancient bridge, into the waterwheel itself. I would be the pyramid shaped stones topping the guard tower, or the woven straw of the matching fedoras we bought, or the blinding light shining through the cracks in the door inside the mosque—yet Like tourists on a honeymoon we believed in certain things ineffable and prosaic— the sour oranges ripening from green to a flaming coral,
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intertwining lives forming a whole geometric pattern like the placement of the pillars in the mosque and the repeated red and white arches above them, that being is transformation and contradiction, missed train tickets and a diesel car engine, flowing golden Arabic script set in cerulean blue praising God, dreams of disappearance and presence.
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About Jeremy T. Wattles Jeremy T. Wattles works at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, organizing volunteer projects and tutoring programs for college students, as well as contributing to community organizing and community based scholarship He has published poetry in the Colgate Portfolio as a student, and in the literary magazines Textualities and Nine Mile Magazine. In 2013, Star Cloud Press published "Swept Out of A Dead Frontier," his critical analysis of contemporary fiction of the American West. For the last few years, Jeremy has been working on a collection of poems exploring themes of exile, travel, and repatriation.
About the Poems The ability to travel is a great blessing and privilege. While tourist sites can obscure the daily life and struggles of those whose country or city you visit, for me there is still a kind of childlike magic and wonder to Andalucia and its many historic monuments. Andalucia represents a clash and admixture of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and its beauty, its sorrow, its different ways of being all have things to teach us. My father told me stories of Andalucia as a child and I have visited Cordoba three times. This last time was with my wife on our honeymoon, and we almost didn't make it due to a missed train. During our visit I kept thinking off and on that I wanted to disappear into some quiet apartment in the old town where no one knew me in order to absorb some part of that place into myself and write without interruption, and also that I hoped to have a long and loving marriage back home. Traveling is full of these contradictions.
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Cary Briel
"If only I’d have caught it" If only I’d have caught it, that moment, you know? But we never think that quickly. There was a dream that was Rome. If you’d have stood in the city, its white buildings emerging birthed from pure soil of the Ancient, the Sea, built by hands of calloused craftsman. There one moment in time, but then gone. With time running faster, you’ll need to be standing at just the right moment, else you’ll miss it. Like a movie on fast-forward this is how time works. You sit in the theater chair while vanity puts up monuments just to watch them come down. It looks as a children’s pop-up book looks, turning its pages . Up, down. Quicker now. But the book is kept; It's a family book. This is where you'll need to be careful, that word family. Don't let your eyes deceive, Volume 4 No 1 - Page 33
taken in by dream. Begin by wiggling your toes; the only way really. Feel the bedsheets the clothes of an alien world in which you're the little green man. Beside you lies your little green bride warm and clammy from the long, restless night of wrestling and tossing. Move a leg and feel for her toes Next her ankles and legs working a way up to her dream-weary head. As she whispers of mistakes put a finger to her lips replaced by a kiss you've been waiting to give for millennia you've lived separated, and yet never really. When you've both wiped the sleep from your eyes find that book. Remember your hot, carnal days. Ladders set up that went no where and everywhere. Hands red and sore against rungs of passion and war.
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About Cary Briel Cary Briel is a novelist currently working to complete his first full length novel. He lives in Skaneateles, NY with his wife and dog, Brando.
About The Poem This poem began contemplating time, after a friend had written, asking relationship advice. I began thinking how good it would be if a perfect moment in time, or more specifically, in a relationship, could be frozen forever. However, as I continued, the subject matter took a decidedly metaphysical turn.
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Jackie Warren-Moore For Etheridge Knight I learned of your death over spiced tea With my breath blowing against The thin membrane of the academic circle The one constantly turning in on itself I sat through polite and grammatically correct conversations A full rundown of all your sins Which actually killed you? Heroin or cocaine? Pussy or the lack thereof Was it your last love or the old love Newly found That sheltered you In the last shuddering moments Heard them speak of the Tsk tsk trauma Tragedy of a miserable life Not one motherfucking mumbling word about the passion About the lust for life that led You crashing over the cliff Like the soft brown baby boy you were Not one note of the Coltrane riff that rode you Through the long prison nights Not one word of the copper thighs that wrapped you safe From a world gone stir crazy Not one stanza of the academic prosody That sought to make you abandon the mother tongue
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Not one motherfucking word about the bars Etched indelibly in your mind And mine I suck your words Roll them bitter across my tongue And mourn my loss
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Death Wish For Uncle Joe Had luck been with me, you would have died ten minutes Before I met you Your soft brown eyes and loving touch Made me believe my father had come back from the dead God had realized his mistake and returned him to me You laughed with his laugh — the same spring brook chuckle And all-encompassing hug Yours was the first penis I had ever seen Pulsing and purple — a demon unzipped A drop of fluid at its eye/mouth My ten year old mind not knowing if it was weeping or drooling As it pointed accusingly at me “Trust me” you said “It’s alright” speaking with my father’s voice All the wrongness of it whispered In a voice I longed to hear If only you hadn’t held me with my long dead father’s arms If only I hadn’t needed to be held so badly If only I had known it was alright to wish you dead If only it hadn’t taken me twenty years to voice the shame of it To speak of the not-all-rightness If only you had died Ten minutes before you forcibly Entered my life
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About Jackie Warren-Moore Jackie Warren-Moore is a poet, playwright, theatrical director, teacher, and freelance writer, whose work has been published nationally and internationally. She is, as she has said, a Survivor, who has survived racism, sexism, sexual abuse, and physical abuse. She regards her poetic voice as the roadmap of her survival, a way of healing herself and of speaking to the souls of others. She has said, "I believe I have an obligation to speak up and celebrate what is right in the world and to shout out about what is wrong in the world, in the hopes that we may all work together to make it right for us all." Ms. Warren-Moore makes her home in Syracuse, NY.
About the Poems "Death Wish" is one of my most published poems. I have personally read it to hundreds of people. Each time I have read it, I can look into the eyes of audience members and recognize the scar left on those of us who have survived. People have asked me, "How can you share something so personal so openly?" I share it easily because each time I do, it strengthens me. It also opens the possibility for others to speak. Childhood sexual abuse has broken many people. Speaking about it helps me remain unbreakable. I believe when we speak openly about it, we remove the shame many people experience as well as educating and making people more aware. "For Etheridge Knight" is one of a very few poems that I use 'Cuss' words in. I don't run away from cuss words because I believe they are just words! Although sometimes nothing but a Motherfucker will do! I had the wonderful opportunity to meet and read poetry with Volume 4 No 1 - Page 39
Etheridge in the 1980's. He was a kind, sensitive, gentle man and a powerful Poet. He used profanity in some of his poems and in his speaking. He used his words with scapel-like precision. I use those cuss words in the poem to honor his Spirit. I was in the midst of a bunch of snobby academics when I learned of his death. One, actually tsk tsked about what she voiced as a "miserable life." Had Etheridge been there he would have had a few choice words for her. My anger and my grief gave birth to the poem.
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Review of Deborah Tall's Afterings Review of Afterings, by Deborah Tall (Hobart & William Smith Colleges Press, 2016) “Resist much, obey little,” said Whitman and American poets have struggled since to break forms and steal chances. Let’s call this poetic garden theft, recalling that it’s about both the arrangement and provenance of words—how they’ll appear on a page—but also whether they’ll deliver depth or as Charles Olson put it: Whatever you have to say, leave The roots on, let them Dangle And the dirt Just to make clear Where they come from. Olson’s lines obey little—roots dangle as appositive and still unspoken nouns. Whatever you might say (as yet unsaid) let the origins of your words be apparent, let foundational things be clear. (And the dirt…see how it hangs with roots, almost forgotten. Poets steal language straight from a garden or grave.) In Afterings Deborah Tall’s posthumously published book, poems are stolen from abeyance, from those diminishments we presume accompany the end of life. Resist much. Make poems clear. Keep the roots on. Tall’s poems are crafted for discernment, admit affections, origins, and the dangles of ars moriendi—the earthly art of dying. An early poem in the collection, “Your Absence Has Already Begun” stands consciousness against rootedness, willing the imagination to make sense of what Henry James reputedly called “the distinguished thing” and about which we may only say with certainty it troubles belief:
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YOUR ABSENCE HAS ALREADY BEGUN Say a calling knocks you out of sleep draws blood is accessible only by water. Say you believe you pilot your life but you have looked away and your absence has already begun. You grapple out, patched together by medication and makeup, scale the broken cadence, the frost-heaved lanes walking papers clenched to your chest. It's late in the season. You forget what lured you: Icarus still tumbling through the stunned stars his fingerprints all over your heart. _______ I’m reminded of E. E. Cummings aphorism: “Unbeing dead isn't being alive.” Tall’s poems are about being alive while acknowledging the provisional nature of the living so one may call them “mystic” in the mode of D.H. Lawrence. With cadence, mythology, with walking papers clutched, a grappling out—entering proffered light, the poems in Afterings are unsentimental, vested of the falsities of leisure time, open eyed. Against this stand Dylan Thomas’ famous lines: “Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.” Compelling though Thomas may be, dying isn’t an adolescent subject but a stark turn, one described by the late Christopher Hitchens as: “a very gentle and firm Page 42 - Nine Mile Magazine
deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.” In her poem “But in the Onset Came” Tall writes of the stance she’s taken toward deportation: BUT IN THE ONSET COME Where is it, the semaphore branch or bellwether sounding a trail over hill, dale, parking lot . . . leaves down, birds vanished, only a left-over tic and shiver while overhead roar the test flights, free-fall shadows stippling the defunct garden thick with invasives, those exogamous brides. I ask for bread, someone hands me a slaughtered goose, points to the stage-left exit where the long dead wave from tinted windows. There are dust rings around the stars, snow that can't find its way to the ground, old scripts curled in silver flame. When it's time, when it's time, I'll take off my watch and listen for the tick of bare tree limbs batting at what once I knew as sky. _____ Deborah Tall was a careful writer, attentive, nuanced, a researcher. In an essay published in Tikkun she highlighted the backstory behind her visit to Krakow and Ukraine: “As a child of the Fifties, granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Ukraine, the traumas of this territory were inscribed in me. It was as if, to use Carolyn Forche's apt phrase, I was "haunted by memories
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which [I] did not have"-pogroms, poverty, round-ups, gas chambers. In my family, as in many, these matters-once bequeathed-were not to be spoken of; it was vital we get on with the American dream. However, I knew that at heart I was a citizen of my Eastern European past even as I was groomed for my American future. When I chose to study Russian in college, I was already quietly preparing for this journey, my need to return to the 'site of the crime,' to decipher the genealogy of my character.” This genealogy of character was to show itself in prose and poetry that was probative and deliberate—she wasn’t a confessionalist for whom a cris de couer was a sufficient incitement for poems. For Deborah Tall each mosaic gesture reflected either a historical or personal journey— words came from great distances to reach the page. Historical memory requires careful assembly of facts, a process we see unfolding in her poem “Seraglio”— SERAGLIO (Topkapi Palace, Istanbul) Millennia of ingenuities led to this sculpted hothouse warren latticed light stippling marble floors zones
of separation
where women navigate the dust-swum air the idle hours flock-fed, immured on hold for a plumed nod drifting the intricate doldrums
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of boudoirs adept at bathing dressing in hierarchies of silk kidnapped finery (spoils, bestowals) drenched in rose, ambergris virtuoso with aphrodisiacs calligraphic bouquets flower-women, women-flowers inclined to opiates propped cushions protected (forbidden) by millennia of ingenuities in how to inflict pain genitalia of abducted black men hacked, crushed or twisted off by hand wounds dressed in boiling oil three days buried to the neck in hot sand gossip gagged by split tongues and perforated eardrums rival princes sliced from the succession
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routine poisonings, drownings of the stolen, sold (some girls gladly given over for cash) (many later found in sacks on the floor of the Bosphorus) eunuch and odalisque both slave-holders and slaves in nested bastions count them off the zones of separation between man, woman, world and Sultan (Unique Arbiter of the World’s Destinies his signature a minaret in its own right) the only light let in from remote strategic niches in rooftop domes skin untouched by sun turned to ivory see
the perfect beauty of it
millennia of ingenuities in color walls faienced in peerless cobalt, hyacinth indigoed carpets
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porphyry the twice yearly courtyard sweets (hundreds of daily cooks, a thousand during festivals) an excess of red rubies, tulips, pomegranates blood-stained caftans of the deposed aborted offspring of illicit in-house intrigue stained “example stones” for heads of traitors the rival sunset ravishing, untouchable though ships of state sail sublimely in and out of it ________ Behind Tall’s arrangements, her exquisite deliberations there was always a hint—no, more than a hint, a calling out of what Kenneth Rexroth called “the social lie”—Rexroth’s rationale for poetry, for the very act of writing it was he said to write against “the Social Lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.” Deborah Tall was a political poet most certainly but in her poems whatever might be rebarbative in the hands of a lesser poet would be distilled, perfectly placed:
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stained “example stones” for heads of traitors the rival sunset ravishing, untouchable though ships of state sail sublimely in and out of it ————The poems in Afterings demonstrate throughout that whatever we may mean by “the political" can meet with beauty, become suffused by it, until we feel both empathy and ardor—those twin affections of poems, or as Auden put it we shall love our crooked neighbors with our crooked hearts. I’ll close with Tall’s shrewd yet entirely loving poem “Montserrat”— MONTSERRAT for Margaret She requires heaven so she climbs the stairways of remembered prayer climbs stone stairways on her knees hundreds of steps, hundreds of years of monks preceding, their bleached daydreams the monastery orchards bony post-harvest, such are the rigors of pilgrimage: a sweltering train ride out of the city
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breath-pinching lurches as the gondola car traverses the abyss between today and ever on a cable thin as her ring finger (her finger still ringed to a ghost) while below, if she can bear to look, the hieroglyphic shadows of drifting clouds are transgressing fences proceeding as they wish but obeisant in the early autumn heat she disembarks joins the crowd pressing toward Mass climbs past hermit caves the serrated edge of cliffs, dust-choked the avid crowd pushing forward, narrowing toward the basilica door like a bouquet of wildflowers in a too-tight vase clutching her chest in the panicky crush inside – pews for thousands already full – jostling for space in the packed aisles for a glint, sweat-choked
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off the worshiped black enamel Virgin a glimpse of ordinary suffering lofted to cerulean her loss lent heft in the country of kneeling the Mass sung in Catalan though, no consolation so she’s almost grateful when it ends to exit and repatriate day, a beautiful one, in fact, pilgrims shouldering out now, holiness already worn thin elbows, hips, skin, building heat the doorway a beacon of relief where God unfurls straining forward in so many languages so many loyalties and apprehensions until abruptly a boy in a pale uniform, a kind of scout with a red bandanna tied neatly round his neck a teenager, nothing more holds up his hands shoves
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the crowd back into the church and deliberately shuts the twin doors, bars them with a huge, hewn cross beam locking in thousands, plunging the entrance into blunt dark the startle of it jolting her hand by habit to reach for where his used to be and then surrendering like the crowd immobilized, fallen silent, unprotesting, though locked in like all those rounded up for centuries (Bialystok, Rwanda) just before the place is torched, no one objecting or demanding an explanation as if it were pointless too late though he’s just
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a teenager in a vague uniform acting like he’s in charge and so they wait like saints skin to skin in the heat, in the silence, a gaping pause elongating toward fate’s unbreakable trance until at last the boy deftly unbolts two larger doors a capacious archway of doors of which the square ones he locked were just – it turns out – an inset his maneuver an act of crowd control, benevolent to help the crush stream out unruffled, normal as noon again time for picnic lunch, squeals of children, adult chidings echoing back to the emptied sanctuary where silence holds court a hand at her throat.
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Max Heinegg Triptych after Golding 1. In the public high school diaspora my Sarahs walk Egyptian, Haitian, Brazilian; their mother tongues still sing in their middle names: Esmael, Nehemie, Pinheiro, as each tribe clothes their daughters in that royal given name. My latest Sarah is tired from Ramadan, says she can’t wait for Eid al-Fitr, & hands me her Lord of the Flies mask project, its symbols chosen to present our dual nature, ink flowers pushed through light to stand for the shadows she encounters, between self-expression & awaited judgment. In her hijab, she’s curtained from her peers, busy with their emergent, awkward flesh, startled each moment they are perceived outside their own deftly woven veils 2. On a good day, the lone adult on the island, it’s Edenic. I walk onto my scarless stage a parados of one, add blazes to the path they’ll find as they wander for low-hanging fruit, ignoring the cairns I’ve raised.
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I’m asked at parties how I handle them? Is high school still like Lord of the Flies? Are there Rogers in the hallways, locker-stuffing freshmen, brass knuckles & weed, coerced blowjobs & bullying? Thin slicing at my kids who gather on Winthrop Street, smattering daps, & everyone’s there because none are invited: the sheen-faced Irish clan, the lone earring’d Italians, my Brazilian congregation, my ten Tibetan Tenzins, Rohin who survived cancer of his septum, or Ellis, Jeremiah, & Taraji, who rap. The same kids roam the halls for an exiled sun, thirst in mid-day oases in the cafeteria becoming the dry malaise tolled by the bells, the gum tacked under desks, the water fountains none use, shared bathrooms guarded by a Sir Lankan emigre & the savvy, retired ELL teacher who collects a pension & the substitute’s per diem. I scrawl lunchtime library passes, swerve in the hall from barking coughs, past hastily decorated lockers, birthdays, invitations to prom, the scent of unpracticed perfume application, clandestine minds cartwheeling from lust to self-loathing, swift fingers swiping away from themselves into what fanciful rooms commerce builds this year’s model of desire, what a good dream resembles. 3. If nomen est omen, what shadows follow a boy without a name? Page 54 - Nine Mile Magazine
When Piggy’s killed in The Lord of the Flies my classes’ hearts cleave. For me, the boulder falls for eleven chapters. Marked, he braves it, from the smashed camp to the Wailing Wall of Castle Rock, the sea like a vortex above which he stands blind & defenseless, in the great hand of a god who lets the beast & the obedient boys, the dusted conch & pilot’s bones, the island's scar & mountain’s eyes fall, again, through prescient fingers.
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Ava at Eleven The puffy, as the coat is called, encases her in a navy blue chrysalis, her changes kept to herself. Her arms balloon like the Michelin man of our youth, pillowing her sleep. The jacket’s loose feathers, snow-stained blue, were mine, now hers. She’s eleven, & will wear it to breakfast, getting butter on the cuffs. This morning, Ava wears the straight braid you gave her, as directed. Her ship rope of hair with auburn, copper in its brown. She walks herself to the bus stop. Something lovely sleeps inside the gold she surrounds herself with. All year, we see little movement, in the orb about her, keeping in her room, blankets draped from the top bunk to the lower. The laptop glowing from within - just the occasional noise to keep us at bay. These days I knock. Until with luck, she will claw her way out and rest on us, standing on safety in the sun, letting her wings harden.
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About Max Heinegg Mr. Heinegg was educated at Union College (BA 1995) and Boston University (MAT 1998). He is a high school English teacher in the Medford Public Schools, in Medford, MA. He has poems accepted this year at Tar River Poetry, Crab Creek, Chiron Review, Structo (UK), and recently won the 2016 Emily Stauffer Poetry Prize from Apogee magazine (Franklin College).
About the Poems In "Ava" I was recording some scenes from this year, trying to capture my daughter growing up from a respectful distance. "Tryptich" is a series of thoughts I had this year while teaching The Lord of the Flies, a novel I use as a call to courage and empathy, in spite of the dangers of tribalism. My students are wonderfully diverse, but they all bond over their disgust at the savagery they see in the novel , and in America's gun violence . Taking its cue from Banquo's noble but futile response to his king's murder, "In the great hand of God I stand," the poem asserts that moral outrage is an empty gesture, and that it's up to us to be civilized.
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A Remembrance for Sheila Zamora It is a surprise, wonderful and sad, to read again Leaf’s Boundary, by Sheila Zamora: wonderful because so many of the poems in it are terrific, and because every poem in this collection points to the great potential of this poet. The sadness comes because her potential will never be realized. Ms. Zamora was shot to death by her husband in 1978, two years before the book appeared. We published this book in a joint venture with the L’Epervier Press, that great venture of Bob McNamara’s, under our prior imprint, W.D. Hoffstaft & Sons. You can still find copies on Amazon, which is good to see. Poets always hope that the quality of their work will preserve it for the ages, but of course that is seldom the guarantee that it would be in a perfect world. Presence on Amazon is perhaps the next best substitute. Ms. Zamora’s work was called to our attention by her friend and mentor, Jody Stewart, who also contributed an introduction to the book, which we have reprinted here, along with a few of the poems in the book, including the extraordinary “Landscape for the Witch,” and “The Talk of Two Women.” I love those startling first lines about the stepmother in “Landscape”: You are the stepmother whose beauty is inside the white and black of a winter swamp. I am the daughter most like you Beautiful, but her ability to surprise and delight is apparent in almost every poem in the book. But what brings us back to the poems is something more than that: You feel that there is a person there, speaking to you, with fine and delicate and interesting perceptions of life. So often in a first book you find poems worth admiring for their potential, for the future poet they point us toward. In this book many poems are already well finished, with a wonderful way of developing
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interesting metaphor into incandescent symbol. Here is another example, from the poem called “The Talk of Two Women”: In the study, I turn the Wandering Jew in an opposite direction from where it has leaned toward the light, find in the deep glossy purple of underleaves the underside of words. I love that phrase, “the underside of words.” The poem takes that figure and moves it through its journey, later saying, We compare our lives, using language which is a second language, intangible as instinct…. you listen to the breath shaped like woodwinds inside my poems. We share what we know about fear, about the obvious risks of loving men we can’t resist, their arms, the gentle rafts where we would drown while the real dangers wait inside what we rarely trust: other women, ourselves, and the sound of children weaving through our voices. Yet we find ways to talk, touching lightly, as instinct turns us in other directions from where we lean apart… We published this book three and a half decades ago. Ms. Zamora’s husband went to jail for manslaughter. Later furloughed, he committed another crime and was sentenced again. In the terrible and odd ways that life tangles and twines around itself, Jody told me that she would dream
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about him coming to kill her, and then one day she ran into him: …I was reading in a a prison program and he stopped me in the hallway, and this is what I remember: “You know, I never really went to prison,” and, “I didn’t mean to kill her. I'd like to set up a scholarship in her name.” There is no good response to a statement like that because there is no real reparation possible, nothing the hearer can give notwithstanding the desires of the actor; innocence given away with such finality can never be repatriated, never bought, never found again, and forgiveness does not belong to the hearer to give in any case. There was no good reason for what happened, thus no individual space for forgiveness: She was leaving him, and he retaliated by shooting her to death in front of their children. I read Jody’s email about this and wondered, what did he expect you to say? Jody said, I got very drunk later that night. Of course she did. Who wouldn’t? Read Jody’s intro, read the poems. Lament with all of us the loss of life, the loss of promise, the loss of so much possibility. Some things can never be recovered, but there is comfort of a kind in what remains, in these brief and lovely and brilliant poems.
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Introduction to Leaf's Boundary by Pamela Stewart Sheila Zamora was born in Beatrice, Nebraska, on January 22, 1947, the oldest daughter of a Mexican-German family. While still a young girl, she moved to Wichita, Kansas, where she lived until after her marriage in 1969. She received a B.A. in English from Wichita State University in 1970, and it was there that she first wrote and studied poetry seriously, though she had written poems and stories from childhood. After her marriage to a career Air Force officer, a man fourteen years her senior, she moved several times, to Arizona, California, New Mexico, and back again to Arizona. She enrolled in the Graduate Writing Program at Arizona State University in the Winter of 1978 and received, her first semester, a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. During this period of maturation and productivity as a poet, her marriage, which had always suffered the extremes of joy contrasted with dark moments of fear and violence, continued to deteriorate despite the birth and raising of two sons; finally, it became an impossibility. Constantly threatened, and fearing for her children as well, Sheila separated from her husband in the late Spring of 1978. On June 10th, while picking up the boys from a visit with their father at the house they all had shared, she was shot four times by her husband and died. What little Sheila knew of the actual physical world expands in her poems towards a sense of domain. After all, she rarely travelled east of Nebraska; she never saw New York City, or Vermont, except in her imagination, but she loved the midwest — its open air and winds are the spaces between her lines, and the tempestuous, crystalline winters were home to her. Her poems often ground this sense of the proper climate for her against the odd, varied deserts she later visited as a wife and mother. How much she missed the seasons is told in the poems, and with that, the yearning to see more of the world which so entranced her. Sheila left many more poems and fragments than are included in this book. The decision to leave out a number of early poems, and some new
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work that seemed too unfinished, was a difficult one. I wanted to allow the poet’s voice to emerge with its own integrity, and to tell with its gifts of crystallization its individual story with little or no editorial interference. Any editing was done primarily by omission; some linebreaks were altered and a few grammatical confusions smoothed out. I divided the book into three .sections, which I hope lead into each other. The first is mainly poems to, or about, women, women speaking to women about men, children, art. These poems show the poet’s concerns and affection for her individual friends, men and women, and their work, poetry, sculpture, intaglio and painting. The second section describes, gently, a concern with love and its possibilities, and some of the losses recalled from her past. These poems show her realizing the loneliness of such losses and understanding who she is in the midst of such realizations. The third section speaks of marriage, domesticity, direct fear, and her desire for a relationship to and within her home and with her husband. We see here a further loneliness, and that largest of needs, to communicate both thoughts and feelings to those she loves. To open this book, to read it, is to experience a kind of blue-edged whiteness of an event — their hot, ice-edge of fear — and it is to experience the heart’s travels as it makes its way across constantly unlocking thresholds. She sees with her eye, and she gives us a map of things in her individual universe both inside and out. Within the poems, the elements are joined in a harsh and beautiful mystery; or we find her looking out from cold, incised interiors to larger worlds through doorways and windows. The poet is seeking to determine her being, and to make a return — not just to the enthusiasms of an inevitably lost youth, nor to just romance, but to life’s varied possibilities, to a future, and to a trust that that future will not necessarily be one of violation. This, finally, is a book about the need to keep safe, and about the search for tenderness — not only the receiving of it, but also the opportunity to give it, and to become whole. We join in the intimate spaces of the poet’s heart and mind, and find her worlds placing her in this world indelibly, with an optimism that this world might be — will be — better. In the poems we discover a light that does not sleep, and that embraces in its aura the Page 62 - Nine Mile Magazine
smallest details, a flower dying, shadows across a field, her son’s drawing. In speaking so often, even, at times, obsessively, about weather, she mirrors an interior sense of the elemental. Gaston Bachelard suggests in The Poetics of Space that we desire that a house, or any enclosed, decorated structure that we share with our family, be a consciousness of our centrality in the world, and that it represent love; and that all outside us, friends, children, spouses and the natural world, be the exterior toward which our central being might radiate that love. There is much winter weather in these poems, representing, I think what we might term Sheila’s straining toward a happiness of inhabiting. Bachelard says it: “Outside the occupied house, the winter cosmos is a simplified cosmos.” Sheila suggests in these poems that if she were touched by that experience, she might discover, simplify and live happily within the boundaries of her interior cosmos. And now grief must turn outward, becoming, not just grief for a personal loss or the more “professional” helplessness of wishing for more poems from this remarkable poet, but an affection drawn toward the poems themselves. For these are poems that, ever so delicately, trace one way through a chilled, dangerous world toward light, and light’s influence. The poems reveal light’s influence on all of us, and provide an intimate lighting on loveliness despite everything. Pamela Stewart Spring, 1980
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The Talk of Two Women For Dina
In the study, I turn the Wandering Jew in an opposite direction from where it has leaned toward the light, find in the deep glossy purple of underleaves the underside of words. I ask to see your sculpture and you meet my two small sons who are suddenly between us as in a photograph taken years ago; it barely distinguishes their arms, the color of desert earth, or strands of their hair like the startled meticulous patterns of ceramic. We compare our lives, using language which is a second language, intangible as instinct. I care most for the hollows inside your bottle-hangings where I imagine breath might swirl, and you listen to the breath shaped like woodwinds inside my poems. We share what we know about fear, about the obvious risks of loving men we can’t resist, their arms, the gentle rafts where we would drown while the real dangers wait inside what we rarely trust: other women, Page 64 - Nine Mile Magazine
ourselves, and the sound of children weaving through our voices. Yet we find ways to talk, touching lightly, as instinct turns us in other directions from where we lean apart. We turn toward the polish of art or chairs shaped like violins twisting us from the idea of risk into a mutual light.
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Landscape for the Witch You are the stepmother whose beauty is inside the white and black of a winter swamp. I am the daughter most like you and closer than dreams to what you want, but in this life we are apparitions between a few rag trees, frozen to their stumps in snow. We coast past them into the sun’s cold light. Shadow, dark wing, scent of man under my wrist, you are that whisper that turns the sun to bone, the man to nothing that resembles you. I’ve dreamed of sleeping beneath a gauze lake. My body a thin stain. Once we fished for stones below the milky surface, ladies in silk and gannet plumage, witches at the pulp of other women. You and I
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locked wrists, stepped in as if blood were water, water turning to ice in minutes. * The hem of your dress brushes the water’s scum, the withering bearded shrubs. When I speak my tongue is a shred of emerald fabric, unfolding . . . I whisper to a man neither of us wants, promising a return. He says I could bewitch him with one word, a conviction that I am merely beautiful until I am. Claudette My metal chime, a gift, moved you. How little we know, we who escape from shadows accepting love’s protocol for love. The black silhouettes lock wrists behind our backs. If we run them out, Volume 4 No 1 - Page 67
in a filigree of talk, they reappear on the breeze. Still, we can mend. As when things soldered are less easily cracked again! If a copper chime had you think of me, take it to mean we are both bewitched. As are the women who never openly speak, their shadows stitched to our feet.
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If You Offered, The Thing I’d Choose would be you drawing water through a nest of fingers, as the fingers of an ordinary gardener want to carry a few clear drops for the rosemary scattering its pale blue specks among stones.
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Pamela Stewart For Love of the Century I’ll Die In Floating white of Queen Anne’s lace at dusk also white the shawl a girl wears in her corner of the room and the landscape gone to moon romantic almost bookish The flowers now sewn of darkness at field’s edge as all the syllables change peppered by cricket song. was I her? Someone was . . . was she ever greatly loved? * a man from Iraq floats on his back down a dark river within the breath of moving water he sings that song of childhood’s paradise the warm water smooths his nest of memories towards the faraway sea * The woman who wrote Inquisition of Golden Eyes sits down heavily and regards her milky cup of tea: was she once that girl who shifted from clutched pen to silken onionskin? she’d kept herself both proud and hidden at summer’s windowsill the scent of pines in the heat Page 70 - Nine Mile Magazine
tree-roots hard beneath her -it wasn’t long before she gave up her body wasn’t that a first love? It felt like water to nowhere then everywhere . . . . Now, the woman wonders if words were her only choice and remembers how, when she was tentative on the page, two poets left her world ( from shining to dark) for one, death was a silk dressing gown death was the other’s muddy boots both had been talking to Death since they were boys they never shut up one was stark the other silken her first muses like babies now * Across the sea the man from Iraq touches one finger to the fountain pen he carried out of that middle world so full of dust and salt he can’t remember if childhood ever gathered him up. Each day a border, each night the river loosening its skin. Once it slithered him down to where all the words were hidden. Once it carried him across. * three crows are eating a rabbit three crows feast as cars pass they lift their beaks almost sniffing these crows darkly shine above the tufts of red
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come evening hundreds will roost by the lake I’m told the word black rose up from the Sanskrit for gleaming so few things makes sense but that does * While that fidgety girl leans against her shoulder, the woman is back to wondering: If a bone can trace the story of where I’ve lived of where the livestock grazed while God shrugs an aching shoulder if rains can tear the road like paper or stones lift like turkeys from a field if the pigs won’t let the old white pig die alone and plastic turns to silk maybe the rats will leave without complaint and lift their snouts to a glory sky. * Now, teasels have dried to claws, are ready to card the wool I stand in the barn at Michaelmas and mourn how I can’t continue to feed all my sheep or shade their golden eyes. * he will die in the weather of me hillside ice wind he must leave to live in softer air
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I’ve dismantled the looms offered the threads away let the sky lighten and follow, and the sun with its sweet thick fruits falling heal and protect him I have nothing more to say about the absence of bread, salt and sea I have nothing more to say until he leaves * The man from Iraq now writes by a window open to London’s grey. We smell the same world – it smells of breaking bread of diesel blood jasmine and dung it’s impossible not to pray when facing a field of blue ice melting because only the world knows the world only the ice knows its sun and we just go on— so, let me sit with crumpled hands and touch that first word plucked from a pool on the riverbank water to nowhere has sprung from somewhere is everywhere offered everywhere
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The Man By The Sea Every morning he hears the sea, smells it as he walks his dogs down the stony lane. He stops for bread and a small cake. The dogs are kind to him and wait by the bake house steps. The man, his brown dog and his brindle dog, keep on until he can see a stretch of sea. Tide’s out and boats are tipped like bright, broken hats. The harbormaster stands smoking near crates and pots stacked along the quay. The sea is constantly moody. This man and his dogs nod to women out shopping, a chin-up greeting to the harbormaster, to Cyril waiting for the tide while selling tickets to early tourists. The man steps along to the butcher’s, chooses a chop and two bones, then turns away, the dogs’ leashes jingling. Yes –that’s enough of other people.
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About Pamela Stewart Known as Jody, Pamela Stewart's most recent publications are Ghost Farm (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2010) and the chapbook Just Visiting (Grey Suit Editions, London, 2014). She lives fairly quietly on a hill farm with elderly sheep and seven rescue dogs in western Massachusetts.
About the Poems I can spend a great deal of time going back and forth on article adjetives; so these days I usually write a short-ish poem—certainly shorter and less elaborate than when I first started out in the mid-seventies. I notice I want things taut and fairly simple which is difficult because gorgeous embellishment can be very attractive. Mostly I don't know if I exactly have something to say. I think I do, but it is often inexact. "The Man by the Sea" is an imaginary part of myself walking down the front in St. Ives, Cornwall where I once lived. "For Love of the Century I'll Die In" has been worked on for a number of years and is better than it was! It's a patchwork which is a way I really enjoy working—to see if bits and pieces CAN be threaded and woven into a whole. I feel old enough (just) to sit down and regard parts of how my life has progressed and, more importantly, to see if I can re-feel aspects of my "narrative." Why did poetry become important to me? Who was the girl who first tried to write? Do I know her? Lots of fun inquiries! How can the language for this be both lush and accurate, especially as I am still investigating this? (By the way, "the man from Iraq" is the poet Fawzi Karim whose long poem 'Plague Lands' is—for me—beautiful and deeply powerful.)
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The Dead Man Poems of Marvin Bell 1. Thinking About The Costs Here’s something we know about the poems we love that move us most: The poets who wrote them paid a price to create them. They put into those poems a piece of themselves that they knew they would never get back, going into the darkness of themselves to bring a thing of value back into the light. They did this because they had to, because they were poets, and because those were the poems they needed to write. I’ve been thinking about these issues of cost and creation as I read Marvin Bell’s Dead Man poems. I think that it must have cost him a great deal to make them. These poems are Bell’s best ever, an aesthetic and psychic break with his previous work. They have no discoverable genealogy in the contemporary poetry landscape, for they are not like anything being written today, or for that matter, like anything written in the past half-century or so. In our interview at Talk About Poetry, Bell says of them that “the Dead Man isn’t me, but he knows a lot about me,” and then later asks and answers a question that sheds light on this issue of personal cost and artistic result: “When is a poem done? It’s when everything has been used up.” Think for a moment about the relation of those two comments, about where the source material of these poems comes from, and about the timing of their endings, and ask yourself, exactly what is being used up, and how does it happen? The answer is there, in his comments. Bell has made a commitment to these poems, and this vision. He has so far produced three books of Dead Man poems: The Book of the Dead Man (Copper Canyon, 1990), Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Vol. 2 (Copper Canyon, 1994), and most recently Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems (Copper Canyon, 2011). There is also the “Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps” group in Nightworks (Copper Canyon, 2000), which has the form of other Dead Man poems, but a different speaker, possibly the Dead Man himself. Altogether there are in
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print about 150 of these poems, or 300 if you count each titled section of each poem as a separate poem.
2. Differences & Surprises So much of the work written at any time is like all the rest of the work written at that time. But Bell’s Dead Man poems are strange and different, outside fashion, outside the moment. Let’s look at some of those differences. Start with how the poems look on the page. All Dead Man poems have a similar look, all are titled “The Book of the Dead Man,” followed in the Vertigo book by a differentiating word or phrase like “(Vertigo),” and by a number in other books (“The Book of the Dead Man #50,” etc.). All have the same epigraph, “Live as if you were already dead,” and have two similarly titled sections (“About”… followed by “More About”) related in a loose way by subject matter, though the relation is variable. Each section is a single irregular stanza in which each line is a sentence, and runs to its end without enjambments. Everything, in short, that we see at first look seems standardized, with all the observable structural signals telling us that the poems are regular, normal, under control, and that we can expect them to develop from one to the next like chapters in a novel or scenes in a play. So it’s surprising when we come to read the poems to find that there’s nothing regular about them. There is no linear, sequential, or narrative relation between poems, and arguably none even from line to line. The approach is radical, disruptive. Traditional poetic tools, such as line counts, syllable counts, rhyme, meter, enjambment, have been abandoned. For all his extravagant talk about the Dead Man, the speaker does not organize his speech in a this-then-this plot or logical narrative, or develop a theme in usual or easily recognizable symbolic or lyric ways. Indeed, the poems do not “progress”; standardization is not organization, appearance is not certainty. This is hardly a mere exercise for a craftsman as good as Bell. His purpose here, I believe, is to increase tension and richness in our experience of the poems in new ways, to allow the reader to be lost and
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then found, to force us as readers to pay attention, to make it new for us. To come at this in another way, if the structures did not exist we would not have poems, only (only!) the poetry. In this way, the superstructure of the poems is, to turn Frost’s famous metaphor to our own different purposes, like the net in tennis, not necessary to the shot but most certainly to the score.
3. Speaker & Subject Let’s consider this speaker, who and where he is and how he knows so much about the Dead Man. We can do this while looking at one of the poems from the book Vertigo: THE BOOK OF THE DEAD MAN (VERTIGO) Live as if you were already dead. – Zen Admonition 1. About the Dead Man and Vertigo The dead man skipped stones till his arm gave out. He showed up early to the games and stayed late, he played with abandon, he felt the unease in results. His medicine is movement, the dead man alters cause and consequence. The dead man shatters giddy wisdoms as if he were punching his pillow. Now it comes round again, the time to rise and cook up a day. Time to break out of one’s dream shell, and here’s weather. Time to unmask the clock face. He can feel a tremor of fresh sunlight, warm and warmer. The first symptom was, having crossed a high bridge, he found he could not go back. The second, on the hotel’s thirtieth floor he peeked from the balcony and knew falling. It was ultimate candor, it was the body’s lingo, it was low tide in his inner ear. The third was when he looked to the constellations and grew woozy. 2. More About the Dead Man and Vertigo It wasn’t bad, the new carefulness. It was a fraction of his lifetime, after all, a shard of what he knew. Page 78 - Nine Mile Magazine
He scaled back, he dialed down, he walked more on the flats. The dead man adjusts, he favors his good leg, he squints his best eye to see farther. No longer does he look down from the heights, it’s simple. He knows it’s not a cinder in his eye, it just feels like it. He remembers himself at the edge of a clam boat, working the fork. He loves to compress the past, the good times are still at hand. Even now, he will play catch till his whole shoulder gives out. His happiness has been a whirl, it continues, it is dizzying. He has to keep his feet on the ground, is all. He has to watch the sun and moon from underneath, is all. Start with the obvious: We’re given no details about the speaker. Is he tall, short, brown-eyed, an insurance salesman, an accountant, a pro football player? We can’t know based on the information available in this or any of the poems. We know is that this speaker is not the Dead Man, not here or in the majority of the poems (the Resurrected group is different) but an unnamed and unidentified second party. We know that he either lacks the power or has given up the effort of formally organizing his knowledge in a logical or sequential way. There is nothing consistent in what he presents, no discernible pattern to the way he sees or reports things. He is basically anonymous, a narrator of stories about a man walking around and doing things whom he asserts is a Dead Man—a Dead Man!—an assertion for which we have no proof but his words and claimed witness. We can notice a few other things about the situation and the objects here. We are given no time or place for what takes place. A day is mentioned, and weather and a clock, but we are not told what year it is or what day or time or season. The speaker mentions a bridge and a hotel and a pillow, but tells us nothing about where these things are or why the Dead Man is near them. Based on this, perhaps we can say that the poem and the speaker are literally out of time and out of place. (Bell says somewhere that he “…never thought of the Dead Man as a persona, but rather as an overarching consciousness.”) It’s fair to say that the poem requires the willing suspension of disbelief, and that the mode of the
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narration is Magical Realism or fairytale where the plot lines and narrative, even if they can be said to exist, are dispensable in favor of whatever the real topic or subject is. Something is being told to us, and it is important, but it is not the story presented in these lines. So much for the speaker. What about the Dead Man as presented here, what can we say about him? Several things, I think. Let’s take them one at a time: 1. He has a weak arm and a bad leg and he squints to see farther. He skips stones and plays catch. He is an athlete of some kind, perhaps a little past his prime, or in any case was injured in a way that flares up again, or maybe he is just old. I note that the cheap way to do this would be to have the arms fall off the disintegrating corpse that is the Dead Man, but of course, that’s not who this character is. He’s not deteriorating, he’s not coming apart, he’s dead but his arm gives out, and then his shoulder gives out. He goes early to the games and he stays late, plays hard, and is uneasy with the results. He is dead but not disintegrating. He is dead but acting as if he was still living; or perhaps he is living as if he was dead. 2. His medicine is movement. What keeps him healthy is to move. This could be true physically and mentally. Movement limbers up cramps and sore muscles, weak arms, and shoulders that have given out. Psychologically movement takes us from the place where our troubles are and gives the illusion of fresh start. Geography alters psychology. So we know that he moves, and that movement cures him. 3. But now he is experiencing a new infirmity that he cannot cure: vertigo grounds him, and so he has to scale back, dial down, walk more on the flats. He has to keep his feet on the ground, and watch the sun and moon from underneath. He is of this world now. Why? How? Where was he before? None of this is explained. We are told implicitly that this is simply what happens when you break out of your dream shell into weather and recognize what the clock face masks. Movement doesn’t cure this, yet he can feel happiness. To summarize: once he could sail above the sun and the moon, but now he is aging, now he breaks out of the dream and into time and is trapped by his human vertigo on this earth, where he plays a game that he Page 80 - Nine Mile Magazine
loves, and where his happiness still comes, in dizziness, in possession by the gods. And a little more: If he was someone once, now he is anonymous, and it may be that that anonymity makes him universal, or to say it another way, it trumps identity and specifics of any one member of humanity.
4. The Ambiguous Story The voice with all those declarative and certain and authoritativesounding sentences may lull us into thinking that we know or can know the character, or the plot-line. We discussed above how looks can be deceiving when we examined the look of the poems. This is another example where what seems certain is ambiguous. “The dead man skipped stones till his arm gave out” tells us that the Dead Man pitches stones across water or a lot. It is not a surprise to learn, then, in the second line of the poem that he goes to the game and plays with abandon. These are simple declarative statements of fact. But now comes an ambiguity: “… he felt the unease in results.” A strange phrase with multiple possible meanings: He was uneasy with the results of the game, or with his game, or with how he goes to the game? Or was there an unease that was general at the game, and that he felt? Perhaps we note a further ambiguity, that the poem is not speaking about games, but THE game. What game? We don’t know. This narrator makes us substitute the story that is not there when he should be providing it. We seem suddenly to be getting only every third phrase of the story, and yet reading here we have the feeling that the story is whole, complete. These lacunae, I submit, create their own energy, and they push us into the clarifying narrative laid out in the rest of the poem: Because now it’s another day, time to end the dreams, and to realize that time has passed, and with it comes a tremor that ends the high flying. Now the Dead Man looks at the constellations and grows woozy. If the first part of the poem is discovery of vertigo, the second is about living with it, and finding happiness watching the sun and moon from underneath. The poem creates its own rules for meaning, and the narrative is given and Volume 4 No 1 - Page 81
being unraveled at the same time; or maybe, better said, we are being given enough to construct our own narrative. We do this because we are narrative-addicted. But what the poem gives, it also takes away; as we see, the mode of the poem, line to line, is disruption. Also note that the poems do not tell the story of the Dead Man, trace the development of his character, or recount the steps by which he makes his way in the world. He doesn’t progress or develop. He can’t; he was alive, then dead, and now is alive again, and so has no place to develop to. What could he become that he has not been? The purpose of all this? Coleridge called poets “gods of love who tame the chaos”; this is a wonderful description of what poets do, or can do. But that is not what Bell seeks to give us here, not what these poems are about. I suggest that these poems offer rather an entanglement in experience, a movement to the quick of mental things by an individual standing outside our world as known and as usually understood. This construct for Bell is also his most natural one, as he explained in a recent interview: … for me thoughts and sensations arrive from many directions, I often think more than one thing at a time, and everything seems to me connected or at least connectable. My mind has always functioned that way, but I had generally downplayed it when writing. Also, I was tired of enjambments. The lyrical mixing in free verse of endstopped and enjambed lines had come to feel unhelpfully artificial. It is interesting that Bell characterizes the development of this new form, new shape, and new character, as a rejection of artificiality. Wonderful.
5. Vertigo In the poem we see that the Dead Man is on earth now, suffering an affliction that prevents him from leaving by his sky-routes. (“He has to watch the sun and moon from underneath, is all.”) In a general sense we may say that this is the vertigo that the Dead man suffers, the inability to rise about the circumstance. Insofar as this may be said to be vertigo at all, it is a special kind of vertigo, spiritual and created by adherence to the laws of nature about weight and gravity. Nothing seems to have triggered it, it simply is there one day. Page 82 - Nine Mile Magazine
We could invent stories to explain why it happened (he woke up, he grew up, etc.), but they are all forms of special pleading, as the poem does not tell us why it happened, only that something happened which the poem labels as vertigo. Perhaps there are clues in the furniture of the poem, that melange of strange and diverse objects: skipped stones, pillows, breakfast, a clock face, a bridge, a hotel, constellations, a clam boat, a fork, the sun and moon… But no, there is no discernible narrative arrangement to these objects, no definition, no cause. They are a collection, is all, grouped here because they happen to be here and not somewhere else—and yet, here’s a strange thing: when we have read the poem, it feels like they all belong here, in exactly this order, in exactly this way. I’d like here to focus on that order a little more. We can start by acknowledging that we know these things, these objects, that there’s not so much special about them as objects. Yet they are changed somehow by their placement here. As we move through the poem we don’t find standard narrative or development but something else, this other thing, this magical surprise: It is like walking into a room in your house where you know where everything is, and what each thing is, and finding it all the same yet all utterly changed. Here’s an experiment that may demonstrate the randomness of the elements in the poem and how their placement acquires inevitability. First, as we read the poem, we concoct a narrative: that vertigo is what keeps the Dead Man on this earth, rather than letting him do what he really wants to do, which is to go flying through the heavens. But that narrative, created by the Dead Man’s condition of vertigo, is not necessary to the poem, it is only the occasion for it. As a way of making the point, consider the concluding lines of the second section: He knows it’s not a cinder in his eye, it just feels like it. He remembers himself at the edge of a clam boat, working the fork. He loves to compress the past, the good times are still at hand. Even now, he will play catch till his whole shoulder gives out. His happiness has been a whirl, it continues, it is dizzying. He has to keep his feet on the ground, is all. Volume 4 No 1 - Page 83
He has to watch the sun and moon from underneath, is all. These are supposed to be about the Dead Man, but an odd thing happens when we start asking even simple questions: Who is the Dead Man? Who is speaking? How does this speaker know so much about the Dead Man? Where is this speaker located? We don’t know the answers to any of these questions. Because speaker and subject are unlocated, we are unlocated—as unlocated here in the middle of the poem as the superstructure of this set of poems has left us in relation to all the poems. What we have in our reading at this point is a sense of randomness, of undefined relations. And now comes the contrary, the experience of inevitability. At the level of this group of lines in the poem, let’s consider what relation any individual line has to any other line. Could any of these lines move, up or down, in relation to other lines? Maybe we feel like they could, after all, we have a sense that they’re just randomly placed here; but look what happens when we try it. It changes our sense of the poem. Reverse the first few lines of this group, for example, and you have a story beginning to be told: He remembers himself at the edge of a clam boat, working the fork. He knows it’s not a cinder in his eye, it just feels like it. He loves to compress the past, the good times are still at hand. This is a new story, about the Dead Man’s reaction to a specific memory that he enjoys, of being at the edge of a clam boat, and how it unaccountably brings the kind of interruption that a tear brings to his eye. Interesting, but that’s not the story on offer here, it’s the story we created by inverting lines. It’s not what’s happening in the larger sequence, where any possibility of narrative is continually disrupted. In this kind of analysis, we could say that the magic in the poem— that is to say, the poetry—is in the effect the lines have on each other. It is an additive poetry, each line amplifying the potential and actual meanings of all the rest, but each existing with all its meanings as being separate and distinct.
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The lines come together almost with a feeling of collage, which— again—is not to say that the construct is arbitrary, only that the initial choices appear to be. You feel, after reading the poems, that the lines have to be where they are, and cannot be moved. There are no automatic logical or emotional relations between the lines, but once put here, in this way, the relations exist, and movement would make them cease to exist, would in fact—as we just saw—create a different poem, with a different narrative and different import.
6. Construction & Style Let’s look closer at the strangeness in the construction of the poems, where every line in every poem is a sentence. Regardless of length, no sentence continues from one line to another. There is no enjambment. What we are seeing is the prose form of the sentence brought whole into poetry, with the poet using full-stop punctuation (period, question mark, ellipsis, etc.) to determine line endings, and not syllables or poetic feet or accents. In ordinary prose, these signal that the sentence should be read as a complete statement. This is a different way of composing poetry, not a variant of free verse as it has been practiced in American poetry for the last century or more, but a rejection of it in favor of something else, something new. It is a different kind of formal control than we are used to, the opposite of both a poem like William Carlos Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow,” where enjambment and rhythm control the line breaks of the single sentence that makes up the poem, and as well of all the accentual-syllabic poetry written by your favorite poet, from Shakespeare to Poe, where line length is controlled by metered feet and rhyme words. The Dead Man poems and these others do not eat at the same table. Bell gives up that power, but he is too skilled and knowledgeable a craftsman for this to be a frivolous gesture. After three books and a sheaf of poems in a fourth, this is no longer an experiment. What Bell gets in exchange for giving up this traditional power is a new kind of power: the power of prose amplified by being set against the expectations of poetry. The language of the lines is still the language of poetry, not the Volume 4 No 1 - Page 85
language of an instruction manual or description of a painted wall; we’re not getting sixty pages on whales. But we are getting the language of poetry, in the unit form of prose, in the constructed form of poetry, and as result, a different kind of compression, disruptive in a way that would be impossible in the standard forms of verse. This way of composing means that the construction of the poems has to change and the way of presenting information has to change also. Because each line is necessarily self-contained, each has to make sense as a sentence, each has to carry the poem’s energy forward in some way, each starting from scratch has to develop its own power and rhythm. The line by line construction cannot even benefit from the power that mode achieves, since in prose the narrative comes in paragraph form, and the relation is made through the story or idea development under way. Here the form is poetry, with the expectations of poetry, and the devices of prose. Bell has made himself an uneasy citizen of the worlds of both poetry and prose. This form of prose prosody is new to Bell and mostly new to American poetry. I’ve seen it used before, but only occasionally, in a poem here or there, but not regularly and not deployed with such variety. The subject matter is also new, and requires a form adequate to it. We have never had a Dead Man talked about so consistently through so many poems in American poetry. This Dead Man is entirely a new character. He is also an occasion. That is, the subject matter of the poems is said to be the Dead Man, but the fact of the matter is that the subject is actually wisdom, a gnarly kind of wisdom, true, hard won, and now shared. The form of this wisdom comes as commentary about a man who has lived and died and lived again, the Dead Man, and about his views of the universe, and various subjects. In interviews, Bell has identified his antecedents in this work as Whitman, Smart, Neruda, and Ginsberg, but it seems clear that the real antecedents are biblical: the books of Wisdom, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Proverbs, especially Ecclesiastes: Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.
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Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun. Again, I considered all travail, and every right work, that for this a man is envied of his neighbour. This is also vanity and vexation of spirit. The fool foldeth his hands together, and eateth his own flesh. What is also interesting is that Bell conceives of the breaking of the poetic line and the systematic non-organization of his poems, as we noted above, as ways of shrugging off artificial bonds and shackles, to get closer to a mode of writing and presenting that is more natural to the way we think and apprehend the world than the way he has done it in his previous poetry.
7. A Summary Ok, then. To summarize what we know, or think we know about the poems: They are bound together by their look and structure. The first part of each poem is a statement and the second part its extension. But to say this is to suggest the existence of a linear structure where there actually is none, and to suggest specific relations between parts, when the relation is actually open and unpredictable, or could be said perhaps to be organic or intuitive. Bell has said that a poem ends when it has used up all its information. The second part of each of the Dead Man poems finds new life in old information, and in doing so extends the life of the first part. We could say, punning on the structure, that the second part brings back to life all that has been used up in the first ending, as the Dead Man has returned alive from his death to his life. Within each poem lines and sentences define each other. The speaker in the poems is undefined, has a voice and a presence but no described attributes. Nothing other than his presence in these poems distinguishes him from anyone else. Each poem—each speech of the speaker—is composed according to strict rules that in their application make each line seem like improvisations, though it is clear that the poet never loses control, the voice never falters. That voice urgently wants to tell us things, albeit in its own time and in its own way. The antecedents to the lines in these poems are the biblical books of Wisdom, Proverbs, Volume 4 No 1 - Page 87
Ecclesiastes, and others, and like them, the lines here have what I have called a kind of gnarly mysticism, almost as if one heard Lear’s lifewisdom strained through Edgar when he says, “O matter and impertinency mixed! Reason in madness!” The focus of the speaker, the subject of his speaking, is of course the Dead Man, who is essential to everything that happens in the poems; the voice is the poet’s, and it is necessary to the poems, not only in the obvious way to their creation, but also to how the poems are constructed, how the information is presented. Note that in the three books the Dead Man is the subject of the poems, but not their speaker. The Resurrected sequence has a different speaker, self-regarding and self-conscious, who may be the Dead Man, but we cannot know, as he does not identify himself. The necessary poet is a sensibility with a voice who tells us in his own words all about the essential Dead Man, larding on the facts and the situations, the attitudes, poses, and actions, one on the other, but the Dead Man is still unknown as a person when the speaking is done: The more we know specifically, the less we know generally. Anonymity trumps identity. And where any specificity is given, it is always an eccentric apposite specificity, nothing to build a character on, a real person. We know that he is a very active Dead Man, whose death is an enactment of his living —that he is dying as if he was alive. For the purposes of these poems, he is alive only because he is dead. The Dead Man in short is a contradiction, who cannot exist, yet does things that the living do, and is spoken of by the anonymous poet as if he was a real person. The Dead Man achieves a universality in this non-existence, he is everywhere relevant by being nothing and nowhere. We know, at the end of these poems, nothing about the speaker or the Dead Man: Indeterminacy is their life.
8. A Final Note I opened my discussion in these notes talking about cost and creation, so here’s the question I want to ask as I complete these remarks: If you’re a poet and if what you’re writing and plan to show publicly is not going to cost you something, why do it? Or why write the same poem that Page 88 - Nine Mile Magazine
everyone else is writing today and has written yesterday and will write tomorrow? Is it the need to see your name in print? My poem is exactly like everyone else’s but it is by me! Pathetic. There is a lot of good and technically proficient poetry being written these days. It can often be admirable, often even interesting in its moment; but it doesn’t touch us over the long term, doesn’t come to live with us, because it cost the poet nothing to make it. I’m not attacking anything or anyone in saying this, not even saying that there are things that shouldn’t be done, pieces that shouldn’t be written. People write for a myriad of reasons, and it is certainly true that a bad poem, or a mediocre poem, or a private poem, doesn’t hurt anybody, and sometimes it can help a great deal, for there is joy in writing, the pleasure of poetic endorphins being released. But—so what? Those are private pleasures, the writer’s equivalent of a mile on a stationary bike. Bell’s accomplishment here is something quite different. He has made a monument, and we can see the costs of his making on every page. He knows it too, what he has done, and that his job as a poet was to go into the darkness and bring something back into the light, and that to do it he had to reach deep into himself and give away something of himself that he would never get back. He also knew that in order to sustain what had done in the last poem he wrote, to prove that it was a real thing brought into this real world, he would have to do it again, and again. He had to write the next poem, because the next poem would prove the reality of all the rest of them. These are wonderful poems, written at great risk, by a poet who didn’t have to do it, not for us, or for reputation or resume or career or anything else, but had to do it for himself. Because he’s a poet. Because that’s what he does, because that’s what it means to be a poet.
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Meaghan Andrews Derivative Brown— the color of shit. Better to dye it red and be seen as sanguine; a fake smile to soften the hard curve of your nose; lilac contacts to steal for yourself the idyllic beauty of Elizabeth Taylor. A feral world of sounds; lips wrapped around vowels and consonants giving birth to a grey fortress of insecurities. Etymology reduced to rumors— of the beauty of the thigh gap, the slimming power of Turmeric, the repulsiveness found in the shape of your cheek bones.
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Eternal Canto Your illegitimate cry—the grey primer that coats my world—awakens a visceral reaction to throw myself on the floor, becoming one with beige fibers. Reduce my being to scratchy nylon— a five foot five square of aging carpet, threads matting together from the passing of too many feet and the dirt that clings to their heels. Not enough blotting, steaming—not enough chemical catharsis to bring me back to life.
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Getaway You in a sports bra, him with fishing reel; together I watch you sit on a dock too young to understand the appeal. With a kiss and caress you make him kneel crawling after you auburn hair, he stalks; you in a sports bra, him with fishing reel. While I sit in a cage of painted steel, he holds you in our tent perched on bedrock; too young to understand the appeal. Four days he sits at our fire, eating our meals telling you of his grandfathers flintlock; you in a sports bra, him with fishing reel. To save me from his hee-haw; a laugh I mock I slip into the lake, dip myself in nature's teal; too young to understand the appeal. Car packed, we leave him; our tires squeal. he stands still, eyes on you like a hawk— you in a sports bra, him with fishing reel; too young to understand the appeal.
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Idée fixe The dip in your chin inciting the urge to wrap myself in tricolored shawl, prowling after your steps, steeping myself in the dimples of your shoulders; arc of your back; tan of your elbow; the ripple of your shirt as the wind dares to caress your being. Oh! to be your shadow—forever connected to your feet: that dark singularity melded forever to your essence. Could you ride off with me like you do the motorcycle nestled between your thighs? Or move your hands to my waist and embrace me from behind like you do in her too bright apartment on Cherry Street? I will wretch her alabaster hands off the royal blue of your soul—the only color that encompasses your soothing nature— and bury them in the Valles Marineris of your mind. Dip you in the waters of Lethe, scrub your memories clean so when you emerge reborn there will only be me.
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About Meaghan Andrews Meaghan Andrews is a writer situated in the Middle Georgia area. She has been previously published in The Fall Line Review and Forage Poetry Journal, with upcoming poems in Belle Rêve Literary Journal and The Bitchin' Kitsch. She can be found on Twitter @MeaInterprets
About The Poems Anne Lamont suggests that “We write to expose the unexposed.” Each of my poems are aimed at pointing a flashlight on a scene, emotion, or moment in time that can expose something about the world we live in to the reader. In "Derivative" I was angry and had something specific I wanted to say about the world we find ourselves in that I believe other people can relate to. "Getaway" was a bit more experimental. I wanted to capture a moment in time that showed youth and innocence. My mother took me camping once when she was getting divorced, and that camping trip paints the picture for the scenes in 'Getaway.' In "Eternal Canto" I wanted to give a voice to postpartum depression. Too often depression is seen as shameful, particularly when it comes to postpartum depression. It took a year or so to completely come together in its current format. 'Idée fixe' materialized from a dark fantasy; the idea of giving into obsession and really seeing it through and giving it a place to live.
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Stephen Kuusisto Poetry Journal It is Early or Late for Different People AUGUST 22, 2016 It’s a Mozart morning—not all of them are—there’s Suor Angelica or Gillespie, Dizzy; Caruso; even Peer Gynt. But this is a dawn for Piano Concerto #23 in A, K 488, it’s second movement breaking my heart the way it first broke it when I was a boy. Dangle a heart—there’s flying in our lives. Drop it like a sucking wave—there’s so much sorrow. A little boy with bandages on his eyes listens beside a record player. A late summer’s day… ** How early did he know himself? Very. Don’t you understand what Mozart does? ** It’s the adagio kills me. ** It is late or early for different people I am without a name Others talk in the smoky railway car Morning sun—the loneliest physics— My feet shift under the seat As though my toes Stitch seams on carpet How one makes poems from nothing— A train, a few flickering points— Don’t cry body, we’re going someplace Volume 4 No 1 - Page 95
** Finnish poet Tua Forsstrom: “Nothing terrifies us more than the godforsaken places” I don’t know about this When I think about it—terror and nothing sacred, I think less of the outer world and more about my bones She would say: godforsaken means bones too…not just ruined orchards… But the bones invented godforsaken in their private sphere ** Well well I didn’t have much when I came Don’t have much now I do have a well worn record of “Swan Lake” which you can have if you like ** I like black currants
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Small Life, Soul Takes Comfort… AUGUST 15, 2016 It’s a little life we’re after, minnows in a pond, a donkey standing beside a ruined house, oddities of chance, but always with hints of revelation. Most will miss it—the sure knowledge that discovery is small and not altaic. The poet says, “let’s be small together,” and the sweet soul takes some comfort. Emily Dickinson wrote: How happy is the little stone That rambles in the road alone, And doesn’t care about careers, And exigencies never fears; Whose coat of elemental brown A passing universe put on; And independent as the sun, Associates or glows alone, Fulfilling absolute decree In casual simplicity. When the soul’s diary tends to smallness and insignificance it also turns toward aloneness. We were children alone looking into the shallows. We stood at windows and drew our names on the chilled panes. If we were lucky no adult came along to say we were dirtying the glass. There were no exigencies, no arbitrary pressures to absorb or assuage. A small life is absolute decree. It’s enough. And as the soul knows this, it grieves for the adult who it must accompany; it sorrows; hurts because she’s compelled to go to human resources meetings, endure the social frostbite of grownup politics and all their mordant habituations. How many meetings have I attended where I’ve thought: “there isn’t an ounce of life in this room” and wished I could don the mantle of the universe and fly to independence? Well, too often to count. A little life. The magnanimity of less and less. Soul says—Once I aspired Volume 4 No 1 - Page 97
to tallness like the oak…now it’s magenta seeds I’m after… Emily Dickinson again: “My best Acquaintances are those/With Whom I spoke no Word” Small life needs nothing of the tongue or ventriloquism. Finger at a window…
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from a Journal, Circa 1980 AUGUST 2, 2016 I climbed to the top of Helsinki’s highest ski jump and swayed with my arms out like a fluid moon-struck Jesus but I then climbed down again, thinking of my mother. ** Out in the courtyard as the evening news was going on, I played with a wooden top and laughed because it sounded like my cat. ** You don’t have to be well known. Repeat. It’s enough to read books and drink tea. Rain welcome. ** I love small littered towns one sees from the train. ** The sun in memory is always as strong as before. ** Theodore Roethke. My buttercup. ** Water shining through the trees. What a bargain! ** Blind I drive home through the glitter of moon-skin treetops.
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NOTEBOOKS JULY 25, 2016 Don’t moan! Just pull your hair as I do—waltzing in my head with death & a glowing point straight before me… ** Who appointed you? Nah. Forget Spinoza. I mean “who” besides your mother told you your thoughts are worth a damn? “Well, when I was a boy the postman said I was smart.” ** My face is a flag of surrender. I’ve cultivated it. My torso fights on… ** Happiness crawls in and out of me like that childhood song about the worms and the corpse… ** How beautiful to see we are still funny. Five friends and no one is selling anything. Though one of us who has lost a lot of weight lifts up his shirt and I say if he keeps this kind of display up, a piano will fall on him. The dog walks into the room with her dish clutched in her teeth. A five point buck looks in the window. Any moment now, Dr. Doolittle will drop by for coffee. We are just laughing animals. Save the human textbook for tomorrow.
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** Carl Jung thought the plants were talking to us. I’m with him. ** I want you to understand me. I come from one or two regions beyond the blurry pasture. The dark pines are engraved with the bold eyes of my sleep. Here I am, new to this day. What should I do?
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Old Notebook JULY 23, 2016 You never walk into the same street & fears are never quite the same— & like dark animals they’re present whether you wanted them or not but white rubber boots are Apollonian & you see the sun is as strong as always…. ** Pete Seeger… ** Here come the leather skinned lizards. Everything they write is between the lines… ** The dog in me wants reassurances about the sun and stars. Let’s call him Proclus, the dog who models circles, mimic of the universe as he lies down. He has come home from the woods; his fur smells of horse weed, a Scandinavian mid- summer scent, part hay, part flowers. That the dog in me has been roaming is clear. Less obvious is his uncertainty, for his instinct is to worship the body’s capacity for survival, but his cultural memory won’t have it–one of the things most people do not understand about him. Dogs do understand death. Meanwhile, the poor boy is epicurean. He knows how to savor found fruit. He does not temporize. ** Funny, all the vain pastries behind glass in the Strindberg Cafe. Meanwhile the Heavens turn in silence…
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From a Journal JULY 22, 2016 Was it you who sat up writing in the summer night? Was it you who feared poetry won’t solve a thing? Yes. Despair lay on the water. Yes. Ghost widows carried books & vanished Behind the apple trees… ** Memory: a girl, her dress yellow as a buttercup… Behind her, the green chill of the Baltic… ** Politics in my time is much the same as in Voltaire’s day: Off with his head; let him keep his head But live exiled; rail against him; Read his books in secret. ** Catherine the Great did not die under a horse. It’s not even a good story. ** Livelier dreams do not always await the dreamer. A principle problem. ** Then there are the oldies: The shirt in my dream was from my childhood. It had dreadful stripes. I wore it in the hospital, blind child, alone in a ward. The damned thing came back last night. You can count on the Id. Volume 4 No 1 - Page 103
Alexandra van de Kamp So This is How It Is This week the most decisive thing I’ve seen is a grackle—its neck compressed into the blue oils of black feathers before it kicked off a street’s curb. Lately, chaotic bodies plummet all around me: pebble-colored birds, each a child’s fist, quiver at the neighbor’s red feeder, the shape and size of a small doll house. Why do we insist on offering the birds little human houses? The sun is unemployed and spits tawny tobacco diamonds into my backyard, and last weekend I saw grasshoppers litter the sides of a highway like dry cigarette butts flicked from someone’s 1970’s getaway car. I want the rain to shake my coffee-fumed hands and tell me everything’s Page 104 - Nine Mile Magazine
going to be okay. No rain comes. I want to stop placing the opened jar of orange marmalade into the cupboard with the sea salt and olive oil. I want to stop mislabeling moments of myself. How many times have I walked by a lavender-singed bush and not known its name? How many times have I woken from a dream taking place in a city I’ve not been in for years? I’m sick of missing London elevators and the green, see-through waters of some beach I once visited. I’m tired of rummaging around the rooms in a French film, nudging against a plot someone else has written. There are days the here-and-now seems nothing more than an uneasy, flabbergasted arrangement of half-seen furniture, shifting temperatures, and garbage smells wafting over watery cocktails. Days when the damp braille of newlyawakened grass isn’t enough Volume 4 No 1 - Page 105
to rouse us toward a passion for the lives we find ourselves living. At least ice cubes never apologize for what they are and can maintain a certain persistent stance for hours. I’m all for persistence and hours, and for the glaring pink batteries some clouds are as they putter through a June sky.
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Noon A pair of cellophane scissors that snaps the day in two. How many have wrapped like a breathless sash about my waist, and how many do I have left? Plump pouch of time I never see, midday grab-bag of petty thoughts and grumpy disease, ripe threshold the rain pours its black sifting hands through, sugar packet of dust crushed by the sun, I want to look straight at you and call your heady bluff. Each day a cascading. Each restless bird a witness disappearing. Right now, the afternoon sky emulsifies into a midnight, and pink peonies pop the darkness like glow-in-the-dark toys as rain gurgles gutters and plucks brick walls. The variables tremble, and another noon is gone in a confusion
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of birdbaths and missed appointments. I count (to keep account) but such counting only divides the loss into smaller, more glittering proportions.
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About Alexandra van de Kamp As far as a little background about myself. I am a native of New York state, Rye, NY to be exact. I earned my Bachelor of Arts at The Johns Hopkins University and an M.F.A in Poetry at the University of Washington. For six years I lived in Madrid, Spain, where I co-founded a bilingual literary journal, Terra Incognita. I taught writing and rhetoric at Stony Brook University for eight years and recently moved to San Antonio, Texas. Currently, I am Creative Writing Classes Program Director for Gemini Ink, a literary arts nonprofit. I have been previously published in numerous journals nationwide, such as: The Cincinnati Review, River Styx, Meridian, Lake Effect, The Denver Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, 32Poems, Court Green, and The Connecticut Review. My first full-length collection of poems, The Park of Upside-Down Chairs, was published by CW Books in 2010, and my chapbook, Dear Jean Seberg (2011), won the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. My most recent chapbook, A Liquid Bird Inside the Night (2015), was published by Red Glass Books, a Brooklyn-based independent press. A second full-length collection, Kiss/Hierarchy, came out from Rain Mountain Press in August 2016.
About the Poems When composing these two poems, I followed slightly different, but typical processes for me. In “Noon,” I tried to pin down what the phenomenon of “noon” was. Here we go about our days and each of those days has a “noon” tucked inside it, marking the midpoint of daytime. This is, of course, a man-made demarcation, but nonetheless a familiar threshold that I’ve been living with for over 50 years now. And I guess, Volume 4 No 1 - Page 109
having turned 50 recently, I was interested in midpoints of different sorts. With this in mind, I tried to write a definition poem with noon as its focus. What images could I conjure up that would evoke the strangeness of noontime—this abstract yet very real fulcrum in each day that we continue to pass through as long as we are living and breathing our way from dawn to dusk on this planet. And time itself is a surreal idea—that we can mark time into neat, hourly increments and think we’ve captured it in any way seems an impossible, slippery task, to say the least. So I tried to list images that evoked the ephemeral, impossible-to-hold-down quality of passing time. I also let the sounds of words feed into my imagemaking process, so I played with alliteration in moments such as: “Plump pouch/ of time I never see” and assonance worked its way into wordclusters like: “sugar packet of dust crushed by the sun.” I was after a density of language and imagery in this poem. It’s written in couplets to compress this imagery and sound more. I also think having recently moved to San Antonio, Texas, I was encountering new weather patterns, and my first spring in the city was marked by a series of intense thunderstorms. It would be 11am and the sky would darken so rapidly it was as if a dark cloth had been thrown over the sky and a night had been imposed over late morning, so I think this made me consider describing these extra brooding noons I was experiencing. As far as the poem “So This is How It Is,” the title phrase just popped into my mind and became a trigger. I liked its world-weary, almost cinematic tone, and I used that phrase as a frame for the mood and images in the piece. This can also be a typical process for me in that I can have phrases pop into my mind, and I suddenly envision these lines as the starting point for a poem. In this case such a phrase became the title. I also am a very visual writer, and I had recently experienced several visually memorable moments after having moved to Texas. One of them was getting used to the grackle, which is a typical bird in South Texas. They are beautiful sleek birds, and their plumage is so black it veers on seeming blue in places, but then they open their mouths and have a very harsh, domineering cry, and the image of avian beauty is suddenly marred. However, they are fascinating to watch! Also, my husband and I had Page 110 - Nine Mile Magazine
recently driven to West Texas, and its flat, harsher landscape made an impression on me. So images connected to these natural encounters began to surface in the poem. A last influence was my nocturnal dreams at the time, and I’d had several in the week before writing this poem that brought me back to previous cities I had lived in. I think each person is an accruing catalog of memory and places, and this poem attempts to do justice to this sense of ongoing accrual, this collage-like feel of experiences stacking one on top of another. I’ve lived in several places by now and this sense of relocating to another city or state brought on this searching, world-weary poem, and the sense that I no longer had full control over the effects the passing of time was having on my life.
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Kisses Dark & Light Review of Kiss/Hierarchy by Alexandra Van De Kamp, (Rain Mountain Press, 2016.) 1. There is much to love about this book, starting with its wonderful music and its technical virtuosity. Take the couplet that opens the first poem in the book, “Le Pont De Passy Et La Tour Eiffel,” a poem about the painting of the same name by Marc Chagall: Circus clown + rouge cheeked whore = the color scheme for this city scene. I love that internal rhyme (scheme and scene, and the wonderful cand s- and o-sound echoes throughout) and the way the trochees in the first line sing out to the mixed iambs and anapest of the second. The couplet quickly gives way to a nice piece of wit: “It’s France, of course. Pass the soup…” If you have a chance, look up the painting online. You will note that the language throughout this piece also has the advantage of being accurate as a description of the pieces of the painting. I want to focus on this poem and one other as a way of approaching and describing this book. Both are significant. This opening poem sets expectations for the rest of the pieces we encounter in the book, and the other, as the title poem of the book, “Kiss / Hierarchy,” announces its significance. That poem does its work nicely, pairing its lightness and wit against a rather dark series of scenes in Henry and June: From A Journal of Love: the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931–1932) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1990) that deal with her first meetings and erotic entanglement with Henry Miller and the sensual life. The Nin is brought in by the epigraph to the poem: There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.
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2. Let’s take the opening poem first. The poem opens the first section of the book, a section titled “Bonjour Tristesse.” The phrase has several antecedents which create a depth and richness to reading the poem, from Paul Eduard through the movie with Jean Seberg. The poem: LE PONT DE PASSY ET LA TOUR EIFFEL — Marc Chagall (Oil on Canvas 1911) Circus clown + rouge-cheeked whore = the color scheme for this city scene. It’s France, of course. Pass the soup, sing yourself to sleep and watch a river murder itself again and again, the waters churning in their own tureen of sunset blood, the eye sucked along as if dragged down a drain—some internal plumbing in the paint pulling you toward the back of the scene, where The Eiffel Tower waits, the faucet turning off and on all this luminous action, all this Technicolor speed. The evening a migraine of pinks and greens, or a clementine smashed into sheer pulp and sheen. At the embankment stands Chagall’s blue and green horse—a flattened gypsy caravan, a paisley toy in a child’s hopeful hand. Lurid fairy tale + working-class
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arrondissement = a train shuttering across the metal bridge—its blue windows blind eyes in a peacock’s sleeping tail. I’m waiting for the gangster girl clutching her purse to appear, skidding on heels beneath the buildings simmering in reddishdark shadow, by the fiery brick walls lining the river. Instead, no people in sight. Instead, there is just the sky: a crime of light and desire, a gash of dark blue that whitens as it recedes towards the Tower. The movement of this poem extends from the circus clown and whores of its opening to the darker invocation of the unknown unsaid crime at the end, from circus colors to noir finish. It is too much to call it a pleasant movement, when described like that; and yet the richness of the language carries us along in a way that makes it seem almost fanciful, a more or less set of random associations generated by and held together by the sense of the picture it appears to be describing. But there is more going on here, as I suggested above, a background to the poem and the section that comes both from the Chagall picture and from the section title. I want to focus on the section title first, “Bonjour Tristesse.” The first of its antecedents is from a poem by Paul Eluard, “À peine défigurée.” My translation follows the French: Adieu tristesse, Bonjour tristesse. Tu es inscrite dans les lignes du plafond. Tu es inscrite dans les yeux que j'aime Tu n'es pas tout à fait la misère, Page 114 - Nine Mile Magazine
Car les lèvres les plus pauvres te dénoncent Par un sourire. Bonjour tristesse. Amour des corps aimables. Puissance de l'amour Dont l'amabilité surgit Comme un monstre sans corps. Tête désappointée. Tristesse, beau visage. Farewell sadness, Hello Sadness. You are written into the lines of the ceiling. You are written into the eyes that I love. Your misery is not so absolute For even the poorest lips condemn you With a smile. Hello Sadness. Lover of lovely bodies Power of love Kindness rises from you Like a bodiless monster. Head disappointed. Sad beautiful face The phrase "Bonjour Tristesse" was also the title of the very popular first book published by the then 19-year old Françoise Sagan in the 1950’s. It was something of a sensation at the time, because of its plot and also because of the youth of the author, and was made into a movie starring Jean Seberg in the title role of the teenaged Cécile, with David Niven as the playboy father Raymond to whom she has a rather unhealthy attachment. Deborah Kerr plays Anne, the woman he falls in love with and wants to marry. The plot of the novel and the movie revolves around the efforts of the Volume 4 No 1 - Page 115
17-year old Cécile to continue a lifestyle on the Riviera with her father Raymond, a playboy, a little dissolute. Justifying his lifestyle, at one point he quotes Wilde, “Sin is the only note of vivid color that persists in the modern world,” to which Cécile says, "I believed that I could base my life on it.” Disrupting their life is the appearance of Anne, a friend of Cécile’s late mother. Raymond falls in love and wants to marry her, and seeing a threat to the way they have always lived, Cécile immediately begins to work to undermine the relationship. She eventually succeeds, but with tragic results: Anne, leaving them, dies in an auto accident, an apparent suicide. After that death, Cécile and her father return to their empty desultory lives. The development arc shared by the Eduard poem, and by the book and the movie, is from the joy that comes between sadnesses (Adieu and Bonjour) to a more permanent empty place where there is only disappointment and and emptiness, where there are crimes are for which no one can be prosecuted, because no one has actually committed them. I spend time on this because I think Ms. Van De Kamp is a very serious artist who does not add pieces or referents to her poetry or her book frivolously. We are meant to see these things, and to understand them as the background against which we are to read the poem. The poem starts with the lurid gay colors of clowns and whores and ends with that sense of the unwitnessed “crime of light and desire.” The life depicted in this description of the painting is a crime, there in the river that murders itself again and again in crimson blood, and in the eye sucked down the drain, the smashed clementine. The speaker is waiting in this scene for the next thing too happen, the appearance of the gangster girl, who never shows, the completion of the crime wrought by the sky that leaves behind this open gash of dark blue that recedes towards the Tower. I love the way Ms. Van de Kamp uses the language, with its rhythms and rhymes and puns, sustaining momentum throughout, and all the time keeping the focus on the two subjects of the painting, the Pont de Passy (the bridge) and the Eiffel Tower. The Tower becomes something rather ambiguous at the end, the place where all the crimes go, the eternal watchman. Page 116 - Nine Mile Magazine
In Chagall’s painting, the bridge is in the background, carrying the train in the direction of the Eiffel Tower. He painted this picture in 1911, one year after he first saw the Eiffel Tower during his travels to Paris from Russia, his native country. At the time of the painting, these were relatively new additions to Paris, metal, mechanical, symbols of the growing urbanization and the new technology that was taking hold with the new century. The Tower was then twenty-two years old, and the highest man-made structure in the world. The bridge was also new, six years old, its upper story constructed as a Metro bridge and its lower story for vehicular and foot traffic. Chagall places them in the upper half of the painting. In the bottom area of the painting are the older objects and symbols, a horse, a dirt road, plants, a brick wall, all of them painted in warmer colors, oranges and reds, opposed to the cool blues and colors of the upper part. Everything in the painting forces our glance to the Eiffel tower; every line moves in that direction, as the poem says,“some internal plumbing // in the paint pulling you toward the back / of the scene, where The Eiffel Tower waits.” Chagall’s vision is of an old and new Paris as a single city, or as the poem has it, … At the embankment stands Chagall’s blue and green horse—a flattened gypsy caravan, a paisley toy in a child’s hopeful hand. Lurid fairy tale + working-class arrondissement = a train shuttering across the metal bridge—its blue windows blind eyes in a peacock’s sleeping tail. This poem is, in the terms of the book, the first hello to sadness, the announcement of a crime expected but not fulfilled, one that is alluded to but not described, but whose effect is felt powerfully and deeply before we can claim it or before it claims us, its colors sweeping into the river and the sky in the painting and bringing forward the old and new Paris.
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There is also a second movement we should note in the poem, from the light and beautiful music of the lines throughout, not just the opening couplet, but in such motions and internal rhymes and chimes as The evening a migraine of pinks and greens, or a clementine smashed into sheer pulp and sheen. Or the beauty of the train’s “blue windows blind eyes / in a peacock’s sleeping tail.” These fade as we reach the end with the crime and the Tower, where the final lines are almost brutal — “… there is just the sky: / a crime of light and desire, a gash // of dark blue that whitens / as it recedes towards the Tower.” The sky is the crime, it is a “gash,” a powerful and brutal and unexpected word coming after the sweeter rhetoric of the rest of the poem. It “recedes” toward the Tower, where the word chosen to describe the movement is intentionally prosaic, a surprise after the vocabulary that preceded it, as if the imagination was itself retreating. It is effective because of the way it calls attention to itself, and stands distinct from the rest of the piece. I like the expertise of this poem, the way it entangles itself into the painting and the city and into the ethos of this section. It feels exactly right. 3. The book’s title poem is “Kiss / Hierarchy.” It is a mashup of two words from a sentence by Anais Nin in the Henry and June section of her diaries. Nin began the diary in 1914, at age eleven, as a series of letters to the father who had abandoned the family, and wrote in it almost daily throughout her life, ultimately filling some 35,000 pages. The writing gave her an ability to describe her thoughts, reactions, and emotions of the moment, in the moment, and many critics believe that these entries comprise her best writing. Her involvement with Henry Miler and his wife June Miller began in 1931, simultaneous with her decision to seek a more sensual life. Her diary is quite explicit in their description of the events that
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prompt the quote that Ms. Van De Kamp uses for the poem: There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work. I think they give depth to the poem, but also show that something different than a first reading of the quote, out of context, might suggest. The poem is lovely and lyrical, and may appear to be extending the meaning of the Nin quote, or riffing a set of variations on it. In fact, I think the poem is an argument against the quote. Here’s what I mean: This part of the diary opens with Nin and her husband, Hugh Guiler, discussing the possibility of an open marriage, but they find that even to discuss their temptation to indulge in what she calls “orgy” almost overwhelms them physically and releases forces that threaten to destroy their marriage. She has finished writing a book on D.H. Lawrence, whose work and philosophy she considers a model for herself as an artist, and is in the process of working with an editor, named here Lawrence Drake, from the firm that will publish it. They are in his apartment working on the manuscript when he makes a pass. She doesn’t trust him: When he takes me to his place to go over the proofs, he tells me I interest him. I can’t see why—he seems to have had a lot of experience; why does he bother about a beginner? We talk, fencingly. We work, not so very well. I don’t trust him. When he says nice things to me, I think he is playing on my inexperience. When he puts his arms around me, I think he is amusing himself with an overintense and ridiculous little woman. When he gets more intense, I turn my face away from the new experience of his mustache. My hands are cold and moist. I tell him frankly, “You shouldn’t flirt with a woman who doesn’t know how to flirt.” It amuses him, my seriousness. He says, “Perhaps you are the kind of woman who doesn’t hurt a man.” He has been humiliated. When he thinks I have said, “You annoy me,” he jumps away as if I had bitten him. I don’t say that sort of thing. He is very impetuous, very strong, but he doesn’t annoy me. I answer his fourth or fifth kiss. I begin to feel drunk. So I get up and say incoherently, “I’m going now—for me it can’t be without Volume 4 No 1 - Page 119
love.” He teases me. He bites my ears and kisses me, and I like his fierceness. He throws me on the couch for a moment, but somehow I escape. I am aware of his desire. I like his mouth and the knowing force of his arms, but his desire frightens me, repulses me. I think, it’s because I don’t love him. He’s stirred me but I don’t love him, I don’t want him. As soon as I know this (his desire, pointing at me, is like a sword between us), I free myself, and I leave, without hurting him in any way. I think, well, I just wanted the pleasure without feeling. But something holds me back. There is in me something untouched, unstirred, which commands me. That will have to be moved if I am to move wholly. But then a little later she reads his novel, and in it she finds insights into him that make her start to find him interesting, “foreign, uprooted, fantastic, erratic. A realist, exasperated by reality.” Thinking about Drake, she writes the lines that form the epigraph for the poem: There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work. She continues: At the same time I concede to myself that he knows the technique of kissing better than anyone I’ve met. His gestures never miss their aim, no kiss ever goes astray. His hands are deft. My curiosity for sensuality is stirred. I have always been tempted by unknown pleasures. He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away. Finally I lie still on the couch, but when his desire grows, I try to escape. Too late. Then I tell him the truth: woman’s trouble. That does not seem to deter him. “You don’t think I want that mechanical way—there are other ways.” He sits up and uncovers his penis. I don’t understand what he wants. He makes me get down on my knees. He offers it to my mouth. I get up as if struck by a whip. …When I see that I have let him be aroused, it seems natural to let him release his desire between my legs. I just let him, out of pity. That, he senses. Other women, he says, would have insulted him. He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity. I owed him that; he had revealed a new world to me. I had understood for the first time the abnormal experiences Page 120 - Nine Mile Magazine
Eduardo had warned me against. Exoticism and sensuality now had another meaning for me. After this she goes home and tells an expurgated version of what happened to her husband. She is apparently excited by it, in an odd way, perhaps pushing against what has happened, and perhaps he senses it, for they make passionate love, “without twists, without aftertaste. When it is finished, it is not finished, we lie still in each other’s arms, lulled by our love, by tenderness—sensuality in which the whole being can participate.” Shortly after all this she begins an affair with Henry Miller, and with someone named John. In the diary she confides,“I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman.” That’s the background against which to approach this poem. It what the epigraph puts in play: KISS / HIERARCHY There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.—Anais Nin If kisses don’t suffice, their caviar salt and champagne dew—what would? The night inside each kiss, the liquid bird inside that night, the slick backs of ants sliding through the grass, the moist reluctance of time inside a kiss, the standing back and pondering the canvas of a kiss, its feast of unknowns— its drowning flowers and rose dresses, its rising barometers? Or the chaise-longue legs of a kiss, the pale face emerging from a night-garden kiss. There are green-tea kisses,
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kisses brewed long and slow, like the heat building in trees in a Virginia June—the humid tapestry of their branches, the swerved spine of their stare. A kiss is never wrong. It knows what it is—whether it lies or tells a truth. Each kiss is a museum hung with previous kisses, a history: the Marc-Chagall kiss, the View of Naples through a Window kiss. Windshield kiss, the Let’s get this over with kiss. Presumably, you could kill with a kiss. It all depends on the setting and script, on what needs to be done. A kiss is a dent into us; it leaves its gun-powder smoke and ash residue, its sparrows dropping from the sky. Where does a kiss end and a scar begin? Now I am getting all Ingrid Bergman on you. All cat burglar and stealth bomber. But no movie can tell you this. You have to kiss your way through to your own truth about a kiss; there is simply no other way to do it. It’s lonely. A kiss is a darkness, a cave we fumble into and through. But I only speak from personal experience, from a wake of kisses and not-kisses trailing behind me, keeping me in their own peculiar company.
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In my way of reading this, the context in which Nin’s epigraph is set changes the import of the poem. On a first reading the poem seemed to me a lovely way of retelling and validating a thought about the need for imagination in love, a set of fanciful variations on a theme. But in this context it seems to me that it argues against something: For the underlying story, Nin’s story, is of the faithful wife who changes her ethos to become a sensualist, and uses as justification that she is a writer and must be true to experience. The writing in the dairy, where she tells the story, is strong enough, even passionate at times, as when she speaks of first meeting Miller or her reticence and the terms of her ultimate surrender to Drake; but it is never lyrical, and never in and of itself imaginative. The poem understands the back story and references it where necessary but only in the abstract, and only, in effect, adopts the topic sentence, and not the conclusion. Its eros is lightly worn in its deft use of language—the “liquid bird,” the “slick backs of ants sliding through the grass,” and so forth. Wonderful, unexpected imagery. If kisses don't suffice, she asks, what would? Nin says: imagination; and Ms. Van de Kamp shows us how that might be, giving us what Nin seems to have missed, a taxonomy of kinds of kisses, and then by declaring that “a kiss is never wrong,” that it is “a dent into us,” she says that it is a way of approaching a truth. Her argument with Nin—and as I see it, it is an argument, for the terms are serious—is that a kiss understood correctly is its own truth, its own imagination, and that it makes a history that we take with us, a wake that keeps us company but which is not us, in the way that places where we have been which are memorable and exciting may tell us a lot about ourselves or about the moment, but which in the end are not us, and not separable into parts of passion and thinking. The hierarchy of the kiss, in short, is the kiss. It is a lovely rejoinder. 4. This is a terrific book, and in discussing these two poems, I hope I have given a sense of the artistry and imagination and energy at work that Volume 4 No 1 - Page 123
is so visible in every poem here. Throughout the book, Ms. Van De Kamp serves up French referents, in art, in location, in people; but her true Penelope is Wallace Stevens: that is, her language is what excites, is precise, memorable, and always alive. It may be useful to share one more poem from the book, the last poem, titled, wonerfully "I've Decided to Write the Greatest Poem in the World," I’VE DECIDED TO WRITE THE GREATEST POEM IN THE WORLD It will encompass the mother-of-pearl glow of the Caribbean and the best latte I ever sipped, which was in a cafe bordering a sloping plaza in Siena, Italy. There will be tendrils in this poem, green shoots growing out of its spine, and an occasional rose so soft and brimming anyone would swear it was a champagne glass they could sip demurely from, and with each taste, pain would evaporate, such as a six-year-old getting shot outside the local library and breast cancer feasting on the 21st century, female body I don’t think I will insert scoliosis into this poem. My mother might make a brief appearance: her right pinky finger bent since birth, so that her hand always seems to be holding a teacup when it isn’t—that hand half-curled around a shapely emptiness. I will lay, side-by side, like knives in a velvet drawer, the nights my husband and I made love with the nights we didn’t. Myrna Loy will make a cameo appearance— martini shaker in her evening hands. There will be a gaggle of detectives, and someone will finally be proven innocent. The trees won’t succumb and the houses won’t give, no matter the speed and mood of the green wind, and the tea I pick up in my hands will smell of vanilla extract and a ten-year-old about to blow softly into his piccolo. What I love in this piece is the extraordinary range of the images, the Caribbean and a latte and Sienna, Italy, and a champgne glass and Myrna Loy and the gaggle of detectives and the 10-year-old with a piccolo.
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Nothing is excluded on its own terms, by necessity or definition, or the need to belong to this or that series or category of things; indeed, the wit of the poem is that all of it, everything in the world can be included on its own terms. The greatest poem in the world must include everything in the world; if it did not it would not be—could not be—the greatest poem in the world, and would not be worth the writing, only the saying. This is a book that engages with life on its own terms, and as it does so it takes up its causes in art, movies, and love in ways that are always interesting and often quite brilliant. Other subjects in the book beyond kisses and paintings, are Teresa Wright, Jean Seberg, Miss Marple, a Scandinavian Hotel, Key Largo, Tulips, and—well, rather than continue this catalogue of all the things in the world let me repeat what I said at the start of this paragraph: This is a terrific book.
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Diana Pinckney Dinner Party Surprise, surprise. I’ve burned the bread again. I trust the lamb will save us. Tonight, our deck rattles with crickets while I hand my husband a platter, his face in shadow. He replies, It’s all right. Everything’ll be fine, that old mantra his brother murmured for hours to his dying wife. A yeasty, bitter scent drifts from the kitchen as the guests arrive. Sue enters with a wild story, laughing herself soundless, brown eyes shinning tears. She’s very fragile, her husband confides. Joe’s hip grinds him into a chair. Here’s our late one, slipping through the door alone, scattering excuses and hellos. How long since we’ve seen his wife? How long since he’s seen her? Drinks served, chatter rising. Where on earth is that butter knife? And the blue bowl, for the peas now cold. Oh dear, Betty Lou’s wobbling this way–come to help for God’s sake– lipstick crooked, hands shaking. Lord, have mercy. Someone’s turned on the news. Not now, I plead. Who wants to know. At least the dog’s quiet, her nose to the back door, eyes on my husband, who nods everything’s all right, the crickets sawing, the grill in smoke. Page 126 - Nine Mile Magazine
About Diana Pinckney Diana Pinckney’s work has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Arroyo, RHINO, The Pedestal Magazine and many journals and anthologies. Author of 5 collections of poetry, including The Beast and The Innocent, 2015, she is the winner of The 2010 EKPHRASIS Prize and Atlanta Review’s 2012International Poetry Prize among other awards.
About the Poem The poem is a mixture of opposites, truth/ fiction, all of us enjoying/not enjoying each other, me loving/hating being a host--sadness/humor while the world is falling apart just as we are. Only the beloved dog and, maybe, my husband, are to be trusted. I guess that's what I was writing about.
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Markham Johnson Ghost Fish "I remember death. And I remember desire. And they are not the same." — Frank Stanford The jukebox at Jimmy's sings Hank Williams, George Jones, Roger Miller, and a single Graham Parson's--In My Hour of Darkness, which Jena craves so much she slides half the quarter tips from Branson tourists into the sweet machine. That night, she tells me of Spring Keepers--tiny white fish that feed on darkness, completely blind. She found them, with her brother, in a cave north of Kimberling City when she ran away, and she can find them, again, and does. Below the cliff in Goat Holler she slides my hand through a crack in the world, rift in the karst, where ancient breath's cold as angle iron. By the time my cheap Sears flashlight stutters and fades, we've crawled too far back to turn. She hands over binder's twine, unspooled, and flicks off her lantern. Darkness enters, empties me of lumin I believed collected in the body. You
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promised to be brave, she reminds me, and disappears below a slab of black limestone where I follow with the flashlight on, though my shoulders and hips will only fit because I'm thin as onion skin. Minutes squeezed below, I'm ready to turn and scrabble back when I hear her singing Hickory Wind and reach out so she can pull me loose and drag me into a cavern where our crap lights just graze stalactites fletching the dome. We whisper in this vast empty space and stare across the water of millennia where our lights fall silent before finding a far shore. And when this freckle stained Virgil slips her hand in mine, I'm a young half-baked thing that may never rise, but I can tell death from desire, and squeeze back hard because soon we'll have to return as we've come. First we wade into the bright cold, waiting for ripples to still, for the unseen blind things to gather, to nibble salt from our ankles. Here in this place we have learned that two might do what one would never.
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Taken For weeks after the sermon, I search for men, placid as dairy cows, for women, lovely as Mrs. Anderson, my third grade teacher. I know she’ll be taken and Pastor Bob, his head rubbed slick, so God, with his Sputnik vision can locate one already claimed. My cousins dream of Fords and Chevys, vacant, comfortless, their hands palming lonely steering wheels. My unsaved uncle, buried in entropy and resurrection--a blown head gasket and oil blackening the breadth of a Dodge slant six--waves a blind hand at me for a torque wrench to gentle this broken car like Pastor Bob parking the eucharist on Molly Sander’s perfect pink tongue. Yes, we were endowed with imagination and very little sense, but for years the cousins and I were stuffed together in the rear of grandmother’s Chrysler Wagonmaster, backwards, atoms of empty space squashed between flailing arms and legs, as our little starter kit brains kept firing
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random questions: Will God fix Jimmy Dolan's blown plugs and points? Does Jimmy pray in pig latin? Years later, hitching home from college to parents whose marriage was flapping like cheap retread, I caught a ride through Florida's panhandle at dawn in a Cadillac DeVille huffing gray clouds of high test into the still to be born morning, and dragged my fingers down those sleek side panels to the yawning trunk and bumper sticker—In Case of Rapture, This Vehicle Will Be Unmanned, and imagined my cousins locked in a clutch of girlfriends, binding them to good red Oklahoma dirt, felt the old tether stretch taught, and tossed my pack in.
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Falling "Vaulting the sea, the prairies dreaming sod." — Hart Crane The year the B-43 Stratojet falls, my uncle's driving home after winning the heavyweight wrestling championship and flunking out of Colorado School of Mines. One of those bombers his dad built at the mile-long Douglas plant, he watches the wings detach, engines drop a mile off, and one 18 foot propeller blade slice straight through a house, a whole family scattered inside. A Houdini trick—everyone saved. When the pilot pops open a white puff of cloud in the wreckage of sky, Dick realizes he's stalled and jumps out to help this man, snagged in a cottonwood, return to earth. Miles from home, and waiting till the old man's asleep, he pulls out the field journal and the books he's hauled through wrestling rooms from Fort Collins to Albuquerque into vast flat grasslands of Kansas. The old Ford threatens to fuse pistons to cylinder walls, so he drags Hart Crane from a back pocket, as water from a jerry can he's poured on the block transmigrates to steam, and sees wind parting winter wheat, like an ocean liner slicing through the heartland. When he tries to conjure the Brooklyn Bridge, he can’t get past the story of Crane on the stern of the Orizaba, waving
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to someone who has turned to watch. The wind moves on, the furrows seal over, and Dick imagines drowning in a vast Midwestern prairie. I'd like to say no one died when that B-43 tore loose from the sky. I'd like to say my uncle returned to his freshman year and learned to bear the world gently in those brutal arms. I'd like to say Crane did not despair, but stumbled and fell into Gulf chop. I'd like to say, years later I sat beside my uncle's hospital bed, though he'd never wake again and listened to my aunt retell the story of how he lost the Olympic trials on a single penalty point. Watch the leg sweep, she whispers in his mauled wrestler’s ear. I'd like to say This time, you’re going to win.
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Baseball Cliches I flail at change ups rooting like nightcrawlers through red clay. Open your eyes, yells Coach Green. You can't hit what you can't see. While in wood-rot stands grandfathers dig dreams of athletic legacy loose from the roots. Just, begs Coach, a dying quail, as back to the dugout I drag my Louisville Slugger and tear loose the plastic ear flaps Arnie Green once drilled with a practice slider when I dropped below the Mendoza Line. Half-deaf I heard nothing for hours until he waved his magic clipboard over our heads, chanting With enough hard work, any of you can make the bigs. Even me, Coach? I ask Oh, minor gods of little league, oh broken heartwood of dugout pine, some nights I still wake at three a.m. with gouts of failure pumping through my cerebellum and watch him lean over the backseat because only girls need eyes to drive, and point his unfiltered Camel. Not, you, Johnson. This morning when my retriever claims another
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baseball from the woods I hear a groan rise from the third base coach's box in the Bardo and Arnie Green mouthing It was right in your wheelhouse, while some poor fifth grader fists another so foul it's only fair for dogs and doesn't even run it out, though Coach's screaming and teammates up and down the bench smell doom wafting from the green porta potty by the snack shack and don't even try to bring that one back from the bog. But not Ajax, who breaks from the woods and races past third, with the rain blackened ball in his great jaws and after bearing it gently through our long walk, trots back to the infield grass where some cosmic residue of atomized Arnie Green is mesmerized to watch him tear the cover off the ball.
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About Markham Johnson I've never been good at multitasking, so for twenty years, as I raised my children, taught English classes, and coached baseball and basketball, I didn't write many poems. Now that yoga and long walks with dogs have replaced bouncing up and down in the third base coach's box, I've returned to writing poems marked with the stigmata of this state where I grew up and have lived for most of my life. Woody Guthrie said "Oklahoma is a red dirt girl in a white collar world." I recently won the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod for 2016, and my first book, Collecting the Light, was published by the University Press of Florida as part of the University of Central Florida Contemporary Poetry Series. My MFA is from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
About the Poems As I was putting my current manuscript into some comprehensible order, I noticed how many times friends and family who have passed on appear in my recent poems, as they do here with my cousins and my uncle. With "Falling," I wanted to present some of the complexity of my uncle who won a national heavyweight wrestling championship and sometimes tried to write himself out of the darkness that seemed to haunt each day. The other two poems recall a time in the 70s when my friends and I had pulled loose from the printed scripts of our lives. I don't think I was ever afraid of hitchhiking half way across this country as happens in the poem "Taken," not even during a midnight ride with a pig farmer whose sow in the truck-bed had just taken two of his fingers, but that cave in "Ghost Fish" scared the hell out of me.
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Larry Levis: “God Is Always Seventeen” The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems, by Larry Levis (Graywolf press 2016); Afterword by David St. John Sometimes you read a poem that seems so bleak and hopeless about the possibilities of life, love, and generation that you want to say, Wait, stop: It’s all better than that, because no one would bother with it if it wasn’t. I mean, why continue if there is no value to be found anywhere? But reading a poem like that is also in some ways like listening to the blues. Strange, isn’t it, how you can listen to the blues and laugh and cry at the same time, and pick up your life and go on joyfully refreshed with a self wholly remade by a painful cathartic voyeurism, not yours but someone’s, with and through an art that you can only admire and a voice that sinks into your soul and lets you rise again. I’ve been reading Larry Levis’ The Darkening Trapeze, a posthumous book of his poetry wonderfully edited by his friend and colleague, the poet David St. John. There are many excellent poems in the book, but the last of them is truly extraordinary, a leap beyond the rest. It’s called “God Is Always Seventeen,” and it may be the last poem that Levis wrote. That sounds a little too death-bed romantic, doesn’t it, so let me add that it is not what you think: It is not a nice poem, or a consoling one, and it does not say nice things about our situation in this world, or present a pretty picture of the poet, or by extension of any of us, though it does not demand that we also be the speaker. Our identification and judgment (and repulsion) happen in the course of the poem. It’s an option, not insisted upon. This kind of poem is the blues of poetry, and by that I mean, the deep blues. I like its honesty, admire its intense effort to confront its situations and speaker, and I am frankly awed by its final uncertainty, its refusal to take an easy way out by resolving all the desperate issues that the poem has raised to that point. It feels less like poetry then than like real life.
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I also think that this poem, like so many of the poems in Levis’ previous book, Elegy, offers something new in American Poetry, that stylistically and structurally we confront a different kind of voice and different manner of composition. I will say more about this aspect of the poem below, but it is quite amazing. Here is the poem: GOD IS ALWAYS SEVENTEEN This is the last poem in the book. In a way, I don’t even want to finish it. I’d rather go to bed & jack off under the covers But I’d probably lose interest in it & begin wondering about God, And whether He’s tried the methamphetamine I sent Him yet, & if He still Listens to the Clash & whether the new job He got for Mozart As a janitorial assistant in Tulsa is working out. Besides, I can’t imagine a body in the first faint stirrings of arousal Without feeling sorry for it now, & anyway, I’ve built a fire in the fireplace And I don’t have a fire screen yet, & have to watch it until it goes out, Even the last lukewarm ember. It isn’t my house. It belongs to a bank in St. Louis somewhere & they have four thousand Different ways to punish me if the place goes up in flames, including the guys From Medellin who work for them now & specialize in pain. Besides, it’s still winter everywhere & maybe you want to hear a story With a fire burning quietly beside it. The story on this night when it Got really cold, & the darkness of the night spreading Over the sky seemed larger than it should have been, though Nobody mentioned it. It was something You didn’t feel like bringing up if you were sitting in a bar Page 138 - Nine Mile Magazine
Among your friends. But all that happened was the night kept getting larger Then larger still, & then there was a squeal of brakes Outside the bar, & then what they call in prose the “sickening” crunch Of metal as two cars collided & in a little while the guy went back to telling This story in which the warm snow was falling on the yard Where he & the other prisoners were exercising. I guess the guy Had evidently done some time, though everyone listening was too polite To bring it up. And what happened in it was a clerk bleeding to death In a 7-Eleven, & the guy telling it called 911 for an ambulance, & the police found both Cash from the till & the gun on him when they arrived. He didn’t think he’d shot Anyone that night or anyone ever & was surprised & puzzled When they made a match on the gun, the clerk lived to testify, & they convicted Him. No one along the bar said anything when he’d finished Telling it, & the night went on enlarging in the story, & I think our silence Cut him loose & let him go falling. And one by one, we paid & got up & left And went out under the stars. I have a child who isn’t doing well in school. It’s not his grades. It’s that he can’t wake up. He misses his morning classes & doesn’t answer when I call & doesn’t Return my calls. The last time I saw him we took the train down from Connecticut To New York & wandered around Times Square. We went into this record store
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And pretended to browse through some albums there Because we didn’t know what to say to each other. It was night. It was just Before the Christmas season, & the clerks in the store Would call out loudly Can I Help Anybody & Can I Help Someone & there was Some music playing & something inconsolable And no longer even bitter in the melody & I will never forget Being there with him & hearing it & wondering what was going to become of us. The last episode in the poem, with the poet and his son at the record store, is apparently about Levis’ son, and may be a real episode. I gather this from information included in David St. John’s Afterward, forwarded from the poet Amy Tudor, who was Levis’ former student and friend. Ms. Tudor helped find many of the poems for The Darkening Trapeze from manuscripts left behind by Levis. About this one she wrote: I read a poem he wrote about Nick—I think it was called “God Is Always Seventeen”—sitting by itself in a single draft. It was clearly recent because it had in it the darkness I’d seen in him all winter, something that was sort of gray-coated and not at all like the vaguely amused and wry face he presented most of the time. He wrote heavy poems but he did not despair. This poem had an edge of that to it, and it was lonely and full of grief, and honestly, it made me too sad to go on with the work for that day. I ended up sitting and talking to Mary on the couch for awhile instead and then going home. She subsequently located the version of the poem that appears in the book. The incident with his son has the feeling of something true and real, something that actually happened. Other episodes in the poem seem invented, paradigmatic circumstances necessary for the points made. Not this one. This one is merely—merely!—devastating and a conclusion to all that has gone before. Page 140 - Nine Mile Magazine
The first lines of the poem are hard for me to wade through. I have wondered if they are supposed to be comic, or perhaps some form of black comedy, but I don’t think so. Levis was entirely capable of being funny when he wanted to. If these lines are funny at all, they are drearily so, and drag in too many of the situational and philosophic points he needs to make to be intended as real stand-up. The speaker begins self-consciously, aware of us, reminding us that this thing before us is a made thing, a communication with a place in the world and that it has a specific self-conscious intent to its composition, saying that “This is the last poem in the book. In a way, I don’t even want to finish it. / I’d rather go to bed & jack off under the covers…” It’s not an opening designed to endear him to us, or make him likable. It’s a crude insult, saying that the person speaking considers talking to his readers one step below self-diddling, so you want to ask, what’s he up to. The answer is, I think, that he’s setting the bar: After this, is there anything he can’t say or claim to have done? He doesn’t want to be with us, but he will submit to it, even if he has to view our interaction as a form of such extreme self-indulgence. But then look at what strange thing happens next: For having raised a kind of sex as an opening (and open-ended) topic, he goes on to say that he’d probably lose interest in continuing, and begin instead “wondering about God, / And whether He’s tried the methamphetamine I sent Him yet, & if He still / Listens to the Clash & whether the new job He got for Mozart / As a janitorial assistant in Tulsa is working out.” To state the obvious: This is not a God we know, He (note that honorific of the capital letter used here) apparently uses or may be interested in speed, or the speaker thinks that He is the kind of God who may be, and He is a God who does listen to rock’n’roll, at least a kind of it, in the form of the 1976 English punk band the Clash, whose memorial FM radio hit continues to be, “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” a mock-up of extreme diffidence complete with what sounds like fake Spanish lyrics (they are actually in badly pronounced Ecuadorian Spanish). We also learn that this God has a taste for pranks on the famous, such as assigning Mozart to a clean up job in Tulsa. Volume 4 No 1 - Page 141
So if I read this right, the speaker has jettisoned the traditional God of comfort and mercy and justice for the God of bad tricks (Mozart’s new job), drugs, and punk rock’n’roll, i.e., become a fiction and a bad joke, but not entirely a non-presence. Sex in this version of the aimless self is reduced to the activity of one, and arousal said to invoke pity, with the sense behind it (seen in due course in the rest of the poem, and as one of the conclusions to it) that the cycle of generation is inconclusive and even dangerous when viewed as a virtue or when wished for as a future. As he says, “I can’t imagine a body in the first faint stirrings of arousal / Without feeling sorry for it now.” This is a fully alienated speaker, alienated from Life, from the cycle of generation, and from God, a speaker who lives in a house not his own, where he is unable even to build a fire for heat or comfort without watching that it not become dangerous to this temporary shelter, and to himself, from “guys / From Medellin who work for” the banker-owners and who “specialize in pain.” Meaning, I take it, that these are enforcers from the cartel. Their exact relationship to the bank and to the speaker is not specified, but the drug market reference suggests another not-socasual vice for the speaker. All in all, this is not the most trustworthy or likable of speakers. But he is also at this point self-conscious enough to want to give us a better or at least a more interesting story, one “With a fire burning quietly beside it” against the spreading darkness and coldness of the night, and so he begins a story about sitting in a bar with friends, with the night getting larger and darker, though no one with him mentions it. Suddenly outside there’s an accident, a collision loud enough to hear even inside the bar, in the middle of someone’s story, and it seems that it is part of the expansion of the night and of the darkness, but no one leaves the bar to go outside and see what happened, or see if they can help. We then hear the story of the man in the bar that had been interrupted by the accident. He has been jailed for a shooting and a robbery at a 7Eleven. He doesn’t remember the crime, though “the police found both / Cash from the till & the gun on him when they arrived.” His story, which seems to have taken some time, elicits no response from the others at the Page 142 - Nine Mile Magazine
bar except silence, and when it is done everyone leaves, and we move on to the next story, about the speaker’s boy, “who isn’t doing well in school. / It’s not his grades. It’s that he can’t wake up. // He misses his morning classes & doesn’t answer when I call & doesn’t / Return my calls.” So to summarize this part of the poem, life is dialogue inside a bar where accidents happen without cause or explanation from the world outside, and evoke no interest in any case, and where inside we hear about this man who is a witness to a Kafka-type judgment of guilt and punishment, the perpetrator of a proven crime of which he has no memory, only the guilt and only the punishment, the story of which is then received in silence by his listeners, a silence which does not amount to a judgment or even truly to a response. And then we immediately slide into a new and final story, a heartbreaker about the speaker’s son, whom he last saw when “we took the train down from Connecticut / To New York & wandered around Times Square. We went into this record store / And pretended to browse through some albums there. / Because we didn’t know what to say to each other. It was night. It was just / Before the Christmas season, & the clerks in the store / Would call out loudly Can I Help Anybody & Can I Help Someone & there was / Some music playing & something inconsolable / And no longer even bitter in the melody & I will never forget / Being there with him & hearing it & wondering what was going to become of us.” But there is something unsettlingly ad-hoc in this narrative, an addendum to the cycle of generation, of a kid who can’t stay awake in school, for reasons not explained—because he’s bored? because he’s narcoleptic? on drugs?—but who in any case has little desired interaction with his father, not answering the phone when the father calls, not returning calls from him. Whatever is going on with him doesn’t affect his grades, so we can assume that he’s smart enough and that he works his way through school well. Perhaps we are to understand that his father is the problem. And then we get the final anecdote, the two of them in a record store (records? Not cd’s?) with the clerks willing and wanting to help them and everyone if they would just acknowledge the offer, and the Volume 4 No 1 - Page 143
two of them wandering around in the music that is inconsolable without being bitter, and the father now wondering what will become of the two of them. In a world fraught with the “sickening” crunch of accident and the amnesia of criminal acts and consequent sense of guilt and judgment and punishment, in which the God of care and comfort is reduced to a druggie punk rocker joke—a world in which, in short, all the life-supports and assumptions of a better non-arbitrary future are challenged and removed —the wondering at the end seems almost a small and even an ignorant response, because the future of everyone in this dystopian world is set in cement, and set so badly that no one will survive or connect or be happy, even though they may sometimes say they want to, and there is no way for the speaker not to know it except by avoiding the obvious conclusion, which is what he does. His is a life among the disconnected, without affect. This speaker is a man who is in but not of this life, that is, he is here because he is here, and for no other reason. Desire is dead in him, and is at best an object of his pity, and the sense of any possible structure in life has been washed away: In his world, one thing follows another with no particular reason, a new story might hinge on a word perhaps, as in the movement from the fire in the house to the metaphor of fire warming in a bar. But the world is full of accident whose outcome we do not know, and guilt for reasons explained and proved but not remembered, a guilt which in that sense is threaded into the life as lived. It is no wonder that this speaker, given his philosophical view, can’t find a way to make his progeny comfortable with him. One of them is a judgment on the other, and neither judgment is a good one. It is, as I say, a very dark poem. I’m impressed that Ms. Tudor found something not despairing in it; I cannot. And yet—I find myself lifted by the created honesty of this poem, the way its maker, not its protagonist, lifts us above the abject emotional poverty of the things presented. I say it is like the blues, and it is, when the blues are honest: John Lee Hooker or Howling’ Wolf, that level of blues, blues as lived and as earned. And note how at the end when it would be possible to offer a transformation, Page 144 - Nine Mile Magazine
an epiphany, a transcendental change in the speaker, that’s precisely what doesn’t happen. Instead we get the speaker “wondering what was going to become of us.” This speaker cannot know more than he does, and his life as it is lived cannot offer more. Impressive. More — I know of no other poems with this kind of ambition that remain this true to themselves. As always, I’m impressed by the skill of Levis’ writing, and I have the same sense reading this and other poems in the book that I’ve had about his work starting with Elegy, his previous book: that Levis is a good and skillful poet, but that there is something more going on here than skill and good technical construction. He has brought a new note and a new kind of writing into American poetry. It’s a combination of effects that all come together: the way he uses narrative to give the sense of a sort of uncompressed almost drawling telling, as one event or image follows the next, and the way he exercises an almost invisible laconic control over his lines, many of them extended but all of them flowing into one another, so that you have the sense of great fluidity, even though the poems, as you look at them on the page, seem almost casually composed. The style and the narrative reinforce each other to create this new thing. It is all quite stunning. It is obvious in this poem, but it is present in all the major poems of Elegy and of Trapeze. A final, personal note: I knew Larry Levis at the Writers Workshop at Iowa. We weren’t friends but we were acquaintances, and we had many mutual friends. His book The Wrecking Crew came out from Pittsburgh Press in 1972, while we were both students. It was a first book, and there were some fine poems in it, though nothing with the power or ambition that would be so present and overwhelming a few decades later, with Elegy and now with Trapeze. But we were all excited for Larry as we would be for any of us who began a career so auspiciously. A few years later his The Afterlife would win the Lamont Prize, and we would begin to see the shape of a terrific poetry. He was a careful and conscientious craftsman, as I knew him, and aware of his strengths. I liked him a lot. Someone asked me what I thought of that first book, and I said it was good, but would have profited from a little more time in the oven. The Volume 4 No 1 - Page 145
workshop at Iowa was a wonderful place, but it had its fight-pickers and rumor mongers, and one of them ran off to take the comment to Levis, perhaps hoping to start a controversy. But Levis said, Well, he’s right, it would have. I respected him enormously for that comment, for his honesty and for his transparency. People say that we lost a great poet whose strengths were increasing with every poem — the kind of easy thing that people say, perhaps, because it costs them nothing to say it; but it is true in this case. “God Is Always Seventeen” is a terrifying, wonderful, honest, unflinching poem from an extraordinary poet who was developing a new kind of poetry. In the Afterward, David St. John talks about Levis’ Elegies as his version of the Duino Elegies. If they are not quite that, they are close, and I would say that taken as a whole they are damn close, and that they constitute a broadening and powerful embrace of so very much of life and death and beauty in an American idiom in an extraordinary voice. They did not need more time in gestation. They were and are real, and wonderful.
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Jack Micheline's Letter to Jack Kerouac in Heaven Nine Mile Press has just published Jack Micheline's Letter To Jack Kerouac in Heaven. What follows is the introduction to the book, and an introduction to this startling and innovative poet and his work. This book came to us from the extraordinary painter Thomasina DeMaio, to whom it was originally gifted by the author in 1985 as number three of nineteen. Ms. DeMaio had been friends with Micheline in San Francisco for many years prior to his death and knew him well. We are grateful to her, and to the Jack Micheline Foundation, founded by Mr. Micheline’s son, for permission to reprint here. Our reasons for printing this book, beyond the obvious fact that Jack Micheline was an interesting, original, and innovative writer and poet, have to do with the intrinsic historic value of the work as produced and of the author himself. He was without question an historic figure, a member of the original Beat community on both coasts, a friend and admirer of Jack Kerouac, who wrote the introduction to his first book, River of Red Wine, and a friend of many in the Beat and literary community of both coasts, including Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, Charles Bukowski, among others. He was active in the San Francisco Renaissance in 1950 and 1960. There is also the historic appeal of the document here produced, a “street book,” the kind of thing that was created by street poets in those decades when the interest in forms of poetry and the forms of the poetic life were so high as to be considered exemplars of ethics in action. The art or artifice of street books is mostly gone now, technology having reduced the distance from conception to act, and the internet having all but eliminated the distance between author and audience; but the idea was unique and in its way captivating at the time. Many of Micheline’s books were produced this way, xeroxed pages gathered from here and there and stitched together. He was not a big press name poet. Volume 4 No 1 - Page 147
Even the non-street books of his that were published during his life came exclusively from small publishers. *** Micheline regarded poetry as a calling, from which those called could not turn away. He also believed that the role of a poet should be a full time role, a work of being as an exemplary or epitome, showing that it can be done, that a person need not succumb to imprisoning jobs or soulkilling or limiting relationships. Bukowski said of him, “Jack is the last of the holy preachers sailing down Broadway singing the song. Going over all the people I’ve ever known, he comes closer to the utmost divinity, the soothsayer, the gambler, the burning of stinking buckskin than any man I’ve ever known.” Another testimonial about Micheline, and his view of the work of the poet, is this, from the poet Ray Freed: “Jack was the only one who was a full time poet. I mean that's all Jack did, be a poet. He had no regular job, didn't teach, and at the time was sleeping on the subway. For drink and food Jack would take a poem or two in typescript, make copies, staple the pages inside a brown folder, and on the cover write the poem's title with a marker. On the inside there was a cover page with the title and Jack's signature and the edition number, like This Is Copy 3 Of A Limited Edition Of 10 Copies, again written by Jack with a marker. These productions he peddled for a few dollars each in saloons and on the street. Jack called them Midnight Special Editions. “At that time there were several saloons with regular poetry readings, uptown and downtown, The Tin Palace and St. Adrian's among them. Jack always showed up for these events, and always, invited or not, got on stage and recited a piece or two. Never read, always recited. He knew all his poems by heart. Other poets carried briefcases stuffed with paper, Jack carried his poems in his head.” Not that being a poet was the kind of thing that Micheline believed one could choose or not. He wrote in his poem “Sad for an UnBrave World”:
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I never wanted to be a poet. I just wanted to be a human being. Anyone who wants to be a poet is out of his mind. Either you are one or you are not. Most poets are not poets. He elaborated on these lines in an interview with A.D. Winans: “I never wanted to be a poet. I still don’t want to be a poet. I just want to live my life. The thing is people don’t understand poetry. All they have is their football, baseball, and television. They’ve never had a chance to see a real poet that relates to them. What they need are poems that relate to their own way of life. In America, everything is profit motivation. It’s the spirit that I relate to. The church doesn’t do the job. Television doesn’t do the job. Everything in America is based on greed, money and mediocrity.” *** Micheline was born in 1929 in the Bronx as Harold Martin Silver and he died in SanFrancisco on a BART bus in 1998. His life between those dates was in more or less constant motion, moving from the Bronx to Greenwich Village in the 1950’s, where he mashed the names of Jack London and part of the surname of his mother (Mitchell) to rename himself as Jack Micheline. He lived in the village for the next five years, identifying himself as a street poet, or bohemian in the tradition of Vachel Lindsay and Maxwell Bodenheim (Bodenheim was known as the “King of Greenwich Village Bohemians”). He made many friends, including the poet Langston Hughes, who encouraged him in his writing. When Hughes was asked once why he remained in Harlem, he said he preferred the company of wild men to wild animals. Micheline liked this so much that he later adopted the motto as his own. Other friends of these years included Norman Mailer, Franz Kline, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Gold, and other noted poets, writers, and musicians of the Beat era. In 1957 Micheline won the "Revolt in Literature Award" at the Half Note Club in the East Village, where one of the presenters was Charles Mingus. The two became friends, and later performed together at San Francisco’s California Music Hall in the 1970’s. In 1958 Micheline Volume 4 No 1 - Page 149
published River of Red Wine with Troubadour Press, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac, who said he had ''the swinging free style I like and his sweet lines revive the poetry of open hope in America.'' The book was favorably reviewed in Esquire magazine by Dorothy Parker. He was included in Elias Wilentz’s Beat Scene and later in Ann Charters' Penguin Book of the Beats, notices and exposure that furthered his reputation as a poet. He and Kerouac became close friends, and would walk the Bowery, drinking and talking to people whom in those days were indelicately referred to as "bums." Like Kerouac, Micheline had a habit of getting drunk at parties and gatherings and then would act out in an effort to liven things up. Some have mentioned his delight in outrageous behavior, how after getting drunk he would run across a room shouting, "To be alive is to lead an exciting life!" or how he would try to bed the most proper girls using the most offensive language. He once said to Fielding Dawson, a New York poet friend of his, that “To go into a café and go Boom, Boom, Boom and see some woman spill coffee on her skirt is a revolution.” In 1963, we are told, he was briefly married to a politician's daughter, with whom he went to Europe, traveling there for a time. The marriage broke up within the year when an earlier girlfriend gave birth to his child. He went back to Greenwich Village, where he continued to write poetry, fiction, and plays. *** He had his own view of what poetry should be. It involved music first: “I write the music first, not the words for it, before I write the poem. I hear the music, the rhythms, and therefore I’m basically a composer, a musician. I can’t remember when music wasn’t an important part of my life. Without music there is no life.” But that was not all. As he said in his “Real Poem,” A real poem is not in a book It’s a knockout A long shot Page 150 - Nine Mile Magazine
A shot in the mouth A crack of the bat A lost midget turning into a giant A lost soul finding its own way… He published over twenty books, some of them mimeographs and chapbooks. His early writing especially draws on blues and jazz rhythms, and is a poetry meant to be spoken, or at least heard by the mind as words and lines being spoken. He lived always at the fringes of society, in poverty, writing about people he met or saw, hookers and drug addicts, numbed out working stiffs, the marginalized, the crazy. He was a street artist, an outlaw poet. He was identified as a member of the Beats, but disliked the term, characterizing it and the movement as a product of media hustle. He was also a painter, working primarily with gouache. He was an enthusiastic participant in the counter-cultural movement of the sixties, but he realized quite early that the movement was being quickly commercialized and commodified. "They say we opened up society. What did we open up? We opened up the banks for some people in Hollywood,” he said in the eighties. He did not lose his faith in the power of poetry. He said, “I drank, wept, and pissed and created in the darkness of a world which seemed bent on destroying itself through its ignorance, fear, greed, futility, and insensitivity.” Yet through it all he retained his faith. As he says in one of the poems in this book: The light is coming out I’ll give the sun away It belongs to everybody It is not mine to give away Those with the sun Those seeking the sun Those on the run in the Chicago night Those in jail Those in the towers Those chasing a ghost in the wilderness Those on the road Volume 4 No 1 - Page 151
Those with dreams Those who will never give up Those who are learning to dance Those perplexed agonized wicked wretched tattooed confused We are all the sun‌
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For those interested in further reading about Jack Micheline, his published works include • Tell your mama you want to be free, and other poemsongs (1969); Dead Sea Fleet Editions. • Last House in America (1976); Second Coming Press. • North of Manhattan: Collected Poems, Ballads, and Songs (1976); Manroot. • Skinny Dynamite and Other Stories (1980); Second Coming Press. • River of Red Wine and Other Poems (1986); Water Row Press. • I maginary Conversation with Jack Kerouac (1989); Zeitgeist Press. • Outlaw of the Lowest Plant (1993); Zeitgeist Press. • Ragged Lion (1999); Vagabond Press. • Sixty-Seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints (1997); FMSBW.2nd enlarged edition (1999). • To be a poet is to be: Poetry (2000); Implosion Press. • One of a Kind (2008); Ugly Duckling Presse. You can also find a wealth of information about him and his career, and other poems by him, at the Jack Micheline Foundation, at http://www.jack-micheline.com, to whom we again express our gratitude for permission to reprint this work.
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Emily K. Michael Small Hours She shifts in her rented sheets, clicks off the lamp: So you can’t see their faces at all? What do they look like to you? No, I see hair, bodies mostly. The way someone walks, how she carries herself. But I can’t tell who wears makeup. She turns on her side: So you don’t know who’s pretty? Because some of them look kinda rough. I’m grateful for the dark, the sudden hum of the air conditioner. I guess I can’t tell, not in that sense: I don’t really think about it. You don’t think about what we look like? Not really. She smiles: That must be so nice. You’re not hung up on it. It’s not a choice.
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About Emily K. Michael Emily K. Michael is a blind poet, musician, and writing instructor from Jacksonville, FL. She graduated from the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, FL, and she has an M.A. in English. She teaches composition courses, developmental writing, and business writing, and designs grammar workshops for multilingual learners at all levels. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Wordgathering, Breath & Shadow, The Fem, Rogue Agent, The Deaf Poets Society, BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog, The Hopper, Bridge Eight, Disability Rhetoric, Mosaics (Vol. 2), and I Am Subject Stories: Women Awakening. Her manuscript, Natural Compliance, recently won Honorable Mention in The Hopper's Prize for Young Poets. Currently she is putting the finishing touches on a TEDx Talk about disability and imagination.
About the Poem “Small Hours” is a piece of layered conflict. The poem uses a highly visual form to convey a difficult conversation about blindness. Here, the small hours aren’t just a marker of the early morning; they’re a time where imagination dries up, where both characters talk into a silence that distorts their words. Listeners may not hear the colons marking the switch from thought to dialogue, and that ambiguity makes the poem fun. In the poem, the two characters share a borrowed space, a hotel room, because neither holds the high ground. It’s not clear whether the last line is spoken aloud or only in the speaker’s mind. And it’s not clear whether the speaker is hostile or simply reluctant to answer their companion’s questions. These ambiguities are deliberate, asking each reader to filter the poem against their own attitudes about disaiblity, confrontation, and intimacy.
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Maggie Dubris 1983 August I drive my ambulance up Tenth Avenue, through the drifting pink light. A crimson sun twinkles into the Hudson as it sinks. The road peels away beneath my wheels, the windows rolled down the summer air woven with cool strands of river, winding against my bare arms. A man runs out from the gas station at 55th Street shaking his fist and yelling as we pass. “Liars! Liars! Give me my money!” Poor fellow. He does this every night. I hope it brings him some measure of comfort. We’re on our way to a different gas station run by Korean men who neither read nor write English. They can’t decipher the letters on the side of our ambulance that identify us as the neighborhood welchers. They smile and nod as they fill up our tanks, and I sign with a great flourish not feeling the least bit guilty because, after all didn’t my very own paycheck bounce last week at the check-cashing place? Night deepens. We do a few calls, then drive to the riverside where the grass grows crazy tangled, and runaway teenagers live in the abandoned truck-trailers. Dead cars rest in the wild place Page 156 - Nine Mile Magazine
between the highway and the water. Lucy and I pull out the state-mandated extrication equipment and begin to extricate parts from a freshly abandoned Chevy. A mirror. Some hoses. Lug nuts. An accelerator chain. All will have new life at St. Clare’s the hospital of second chances and castaway dreams.
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1984 Crossing in front of the ambulance is a woman dressed entirely in white. A Santeria princess, walking among us. On Ninth Avenue is a small store, filled with candles, room spray, and statues. All the magic is here, in Hell’s Kitchen, baking in the summer heat. In a fifth floor walk-up apartment a man collapses on the worn rug, barely breathing. A candle flickers on the altar The only bright spot in the room St. Barbara’s face illuminated by flame stark as the lightning that struck her pagan father dead. O Saint Barbara protect me From the miserable people who lurk in the shadows Seeking to harm me. O virgin Saint of revenge I know we must pray often Against a sudden and unprovided death. O Chango, God of lightning Of war and drums and lust I know we must bathe often in roses and cinnamon. Watch now, the flames behind your eyes lit by your servant, who dies
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on the floor beside your feet. Two medics kneel beside him Trying to wrest him from your hands.
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1984 Summer The girls out on Twelfth Avenue Tonight, who wants to be with you? Pink fuck-mes, size thirteen, from a store on The Deuce A dusty picture window, rows and rows of giant stiletto hells and open-toed pumps. Sally’s Hideaway for when the sun comes up. Late August. The sun comes up. We follow a man through the bromegrass of a vacant lot. He stumbles along in three-inch heels. On the ground is another man. Smaller. Bleached blond hair, red miniskirt. I think. He’s been slashed so many times I don’t know what color it was before. His tits are balloons, filled with some kind of jelly. Sliced into blood-spattered pieces. No words come. Just a constant scream as we carry him to the ambulance. Inside my uniform, I’m safe. Outside, in the real world everyone’s bound for a violent death. Night turns to day, two or three more die That scarred old junkie dragged from a walk-up on Ninth Avenue lying on the sidewalk, his clothes smelling of incense, dawn lighting his tracks. This Minnesota hooker, crumpled on the street where she’s been hurled from the door of a speeding car. Pimps and whores. Junkies and dealers. A tourist beaten into seizures in Times Square.
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Everyone’s hustling. Fortunes are being made on Wall Street but not here. Fries and ketchup at the diner. Counting out the change.
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About Maggie Dubris Maggie Dubris is the author of In the Dust Zone (Centre-Ville Books, 2010), Skels (Soft Skull Press, 2004), and Weep Not, My Wanton (Black Sparrow Press, 2002). Her poem, “WillieWorld," first published as a chapbook by Richard Hell's Cuz Editions, is now available as an ebook. For ten years she was guitarist and a principal songwriter for the all-female band Homer Erotic (Homerica the Beautiful, Depth of Field records, 1999), performing at NYC clubs and festivals in Tampa and Las Vegas. In 2010 she was awarded a NYFA fellowship in music for her soundscape work, which has been featured as the sound element in The Vanishing Birds Project and The Vanishing Oceans Project, collaborative installations created with the artist Linda Byrne that have been exhibited in New York and Pittsburgh. Maggie worked for twenty years as a full-time 911 paramedic in the Times Square district in New York City, and responded to the Trade Center on September 11th. She is currently employed as a professional hypnotist and a paramedic on film and TV sets. She also has a black belt in karate, and works part-time for Kids Kicking Cancer as a martial arts health care worker.
About the Poems I worked as a 911 paramedic at St. Clare’s Hospital in the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan from 1983 until the hospital closed in 2007. These poems are from a book-length manuscript, BrokeDown Palace, that tells the story of that hospital. As a poet I feel it’s my job to preserve lost times, to expand the scope of “history” to include my own experience and the world and times of people who are normally not a part of the historical narrative. As a medic during the years of crack and AIDS, I had Page 162 - Nine Mile Magazine
access to a part of life that was often hidden from the rest of the city; the desperately poor homeless, addicts, and AIDS patients who filled our area during those years. In writing this work, my goal is to bring the reader into this lost world, show them what I saw, and allow them to feel whatever it is they might feel. To briefly experience the era that I and so many others lived through.
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The Poems of Georg Trakl Nine Mile Press has just issued its book of translations of all of the late poems of Georg Trakl, plus some early ones, with a long essay by the translator, Bob Herz, on Trakl's poetry and life. This is a portion of the introduction to the book, following which are several of the poems. 1. I felt that I knew the poetry of Georg Trakl before I ever read any of his poems. I was an undergraduate in the late ’60’s just learning my craft as a writer and discovering how much a poem could do. In that wonderful time it seemed possible to do everything and anything in poetry. The old rules had broken down, many seeming even precious. A poem by a poet I admired a great deal, James Wright, deeply impressed me. It was called “Rain”: It is the sinking of things. Flashlights drift over tall trees, Girls kneel, An owl’s eyelids fall. The sad bones of my hands descend into a valley Of strange rocks. What was it about that poem? It seemed so slight, just 30 words, and yet—there was a density there that said everything it needed to say. It was about rain, but about so much more than rain. There was a snapshot of the whole world in there somehow, and a moment that encapsulated an eternity, transforming everything, including the speaker. I was astonished by the delicacy of the imagery, and by the way the imagery drove the narrative in what was really a plotless poem. I spent hours puzzling over how a line like “Girls kneel” could seem to have the same relative weight as “The sad bones of my hands descend into a valley,” and how “Strange rocks” could seem the absolutely right conclusion to this Page 164 - Nine Mile Magazine
poem. What are “strange rocks”? How could a phrase so close to being a cipher yet bring so much to the poem that it allowed a graceful and satisfying end? The images seem to have a mystical weight all their own, developed in or brought into the context of the poem. I loved how the poem seemed to imply something larger than itself, hinting at a view into another landscape, a place where we had never been but could almost see, because it was so familiar. I didn't understand it, and I wondered if maybe that sense of the larger unknown familiar world gave added meaning and weight to what was visible, those 30 words, bringing something just beyond definitional meanings to the individual words and phrases. Reading these poems of James Wright, from the hugely influential books The Branch Will Not Break (1963) and Shall We Gather At the River (1967) I learned to read the poems of Georg Trakl, just as, perhaps, translating Georg Trakl, James Wright learned about a certain kind of magic he could bring to his poems, that would make them different from work he had done before, in The Green Wall (1957), which won the Yale Younger Poets Award, and Saint Judas (1959). He knew Trakl’s poetry well. He had been translating and writing about it since his graduation from college in the 50’s. The breakthrough came with the translations later gathered in the Sixties press book, Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl, with Robert Bly, which arguably started a revival of poetic and academic interest in Trakl’s work and brought the poems to a larger public. Wright was always honest about what he had learned from Trakl. He spoke about it in his 1975 Paris Review interview. It was the 1950's and he had just read a copy of Robert Bly’s magazine The Fifties, which contained a poem by Trakl: Some years earlier, at the University of Vienna, I had read in German the poetry of Trakl and I didn’t know what to do with it, though I recognized that somehow it had a depth of life in it that I needed. Trakl is a poet who writes in parallelisms, only he leaves out the intermediary, rationalistic explanations of the relation between one image and another. I would suppose that Trakl has had as much influence on me as anybody else has had.
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But the interesting thing is that when I read Robert Bly’s magazine, I wrote him a letter. It was sixteen pages long and single-spaced, and all he said in reply was, “Come on out to the farm." I made my way out to that farm, and almost as soon as we met each other we started to work on our translation of Trakl. I love the way Wright credits a poetic ancestor in this interview: "I would suppose that Trakl has had as much influence on me as anybody else has had." I don’t mean to suggest, and I don't think he does here either, that there was imitation or borrowing involved between Wright and Trakl; there wasn’t, at least not in any simple sense of adopting a voice or an imagery, or taking the pose of another. But there was influence. But Wright must have felt the power of the imagery and those a-rational methods of bringing the images into the field of the poem as he translated a piece like Trakl’s “De Profundis”: It is a stubble field, where a black rain is falling. It is a brown tree, that stands alone. It is a hissing wind, that encircles empty houses. How melancholy the evening is. A while later, The soft orphan garners the sparse ears of corn. Her eyes graze, round and golden, in the twilight And her womb awaits the heavenly bridegroom. On the way home The shepherd found the sweet body Decayed in a bush of thorns. I am a shadow far from darkening villages. I drank the silence of God Out of the stream in the trees. Cold metal walks on my forehead. Spiders search for my heart. It is a light that goes out in my mouth. Page 166 - Nine Mile Magazine
At night, I found myself on a pasture, Covered with rubbish and the dust of stars. In a hazel thicket Angels of crystal rang out once more. [Note that this version is from Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl, Translated and Chosen by James Wright and Robert Bly (Sixties Press, 1961). Some lines were altered when Wright later included the translation in Above the River The Complete Poems, James Wright (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition April, 1992)]. You can see the delicacy of imagery and the "leaving out the intermediary" development of it in many of the poems in that original Twenty Poems book. Take a poem like “Sleep” Not your dark poisons again, White sleep! This fantastically strange garden Of trees in deepening twilight Fills up with serpents, nightmoths, Spiders, bats. Approaching stranger! Your abandoned shadow In the red of evening Is a dark pirate ship Of the salty oceans of confusion. White birds from the outskirts of the night Flutter out over the shuddering cities Of steel. It is not just the method of setting images forth without narrative connectives, and letting them speak for themselves, so that the images become the narrative, that Wright learned from his work with Trakl, and put to such impressive and profound use in his own poems. You can also feel in these poems—in Wright's “Rain” and Trakl's “De Profundis” and “Sleep”—that sense of a larger world hinted at and viewed through a smaller space. Wright felt this powerful force just as others have felt it.
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Rilke felt it and described it this way: “I imagine that even those standing close shall still experience these views and insights as if through a window-pane: since Trakls’ experience goes as if in reflections and fills his whole room, which is unenterable, like the room in a mirror. (Who could he have been?)” I like this comment a lot, with that description of a wide vista in enclosed space circling back endlessly on itself. The philosopher Martin Heidegger has also made some penetrating comments on the poems, in the way they open and close, present and distance themselves and their objects and images in what he describes as the four-fold nature of reality (earth and sky, divinities and mortals). It is the way that Heidegger apprehends the nearness and distance of poetry —Trakl's poetry, but also by extension all poetry—that struck me as revealing something about the nature of this poetry that is also apparent in the passage quoted above from Rilke. I also like this by Robert Bly: “The poems of Georg Trakl have a magnificent silence in them. It is very rare that he himself talks—for the most part he allows the images to speak for him." The images speak, not the poet. It is a brilliant comment, and perfectly describes the feeling we get reading the poems. 2. I love this poetry. There is nothing else like it in my reading experience, in the choices of imagery, the construction of the poems, the essential otherness of the work. The closest I have seen are perhaps Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, which also occupy this strange ground of implication, multiple meaning, and ambiguity, with rapid leaps from image to image and sudden changes in diction and tone, and a somehow coherent narrative plotlessness. I have tried to translate these poems in ways that make them more accessible without sacrificing that essential strangeness. I should perhaps also note here that translating poetry from the German is an interesting and sometimes frustrating exercise, as sentence structure and use of verb tenses is much different in German than English. Mark Twain has a famous example: “But when he, upon the street, the (in-satin-and-silk-covered-now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newestPage 168 - Nine Mile Magazine
fashioned-dressed) government counselor’s wife met." Funny, but alas, also accurate. This is all made more difficult in poetry, especially Trakl’s poetry, which bends grammar to somewhere near its breaking point and pushes ambiguity often far beyond its breaking point. Others have written, for example, about the difficulty of bringing Trakl’s neologisms and compound words into English, or of getting the right meaning of the several connotations of a word like “wild” which is used in reference to non-domestic animals. The word is generally understood as a hunting term, close to our word “game,” though neither that word or the often rendered “deer” carries quite the same weight. Some have suggested “prey” as a possibility, although that brings another set of connotations to English readers. In these translatuions, I have tried to render it in ways that are sensitive to context. One more example of this ambiguity in words used and chosen: the German word “Geschlecht” can mean “sex,” “race,” “family,” or “generation." This is significant for a line in the poem “Helian”: Erschütternd ist der Untergang des Geschlechts which I render, “The ruin of a generation is shattering,” but which could also mean and entail all of the other word possibilities. It is probably best to simply acknowledge that every translation is also an act of homage, and another version of an untouched original. These are my versions, and I know that there will be plenty of opportunity for readers to quibble with my word choices, sentence structure, and referents in this volume. Others have chosen different words or sometimes have published different understandings of lines or phrases. Their translations are wonderful and I am indebted to all of them. I learned something reading them, found something new and often wonderful in the words, or the lines, or the translated poems as a whole. I hope this work will add something also.
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Childhood The elder full of fruit; childhood has dwelled calmly In a blue cave. Silent branches ponder Over the old path where wild grass waves & has turned brown; the rustle of leaves Makes a sound like blue water in stone. Soft lament of the blackbirds. A shepherd Silently follows the sun as it rolls down the autumnal hill. A blue moment is only more soul. A shy deer appears at the forest’s edge & peacefully Old bells & sinister hamlets rest in the valley. More devout now, you know the meaning of the dark years, Coolness & autumn in lonely rooms; & the shining footsteps that ring forth continuously in the holy blueness. An open window rattles its a small sound; tears flow At the sight of the ruined cemetery by the hill, Memories of legends told over & over; but the soul sometimes brightens Thinking of happier people, of dark-gold spring days.
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Sebastian in Dream For Adolf Loos 1. Mother carried the infant in the white moon, In the shade of the walnut tree, the ancient elder, Drunk with the sap of the poppy, cry of the thrush; & silently A bearded face bent over her in compassion Quiet in the darkness of the window; & in the old household The goods of the fathers, ancestral heirlooms, Lay in decay; love & autumnal reverie. So dark the day of the year, sad childhood, The boy quietly walked down to cool waters, silver fishes, Calm & countenance; When he threw himself down like a stone to where black horses raced, In the grey night his star possessed him; Or when holding his mother’s freezing hand He walked at evening over Saint Peter's autumnal cemetery, A delicate corpse lay still in the darkness of the bedroom & raised its cold eyelids over him. But he was a small bird in bare branches, The bell rang in the November dusk, The father's silence, as he descended the twilit sleep of the spiral stair.
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2 Peace of the soul. Lonely winter evening, The dark figures of shepherds at the old pond; Infant in the hut of straw; how quietly His face sank in black fever. O Holy night. Or holding his father’s hard hand He silently climbed Calvary & in dusky recesses of the rock The blue figure of Man passed through his Legend, Blood ran purple from the wound below the heart. & the cross rose up quietly in the dark of his soul. Love; when in black corners the snow melted, A blue breeze was caught cheerfully in the old elder, In the shadowy vault made by the walnut tree; & quietly a rosy angel appeared to the boy. Pleasure; as in cool rooms the sounds of an evening sonata, In the brown rafters A blue moth crept from its silver chrysalis. O nearness of death. From the stony wall A yellow head bent down, silencing the child, When in that March the moon decayed & fell.
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3 Rose-color of the Easter Bell in the burial vault of night & the silver voices of the stars, So that in showers dark insanity fell from the sleeper’s brow. O how silent a walk down the blue river, Thinking about things forgotten, when from green branches The thrush calls a stranger to this world of ruin. Or when holding the old man’s bony hand He walked in the evening before the ruined wall of the city, Carrying a rose infant in his black greatcoat, & in the shadow of the walnut tree the spirit of evil appeared. Groping his way over the green steps of summer. How softly The garden decayed in the brown stillness of autumn, Scent & melancholy of the old elder, As in Sebastian's shadow the silver voice of the angel died.
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Winter Night Snow has fallen. After midnight, drunk with purple wine, you leave the dark precinct of Men, the red flame of their hearth. O darkness! Black frost. The earth is hard, the air bitter. Your stars show evil signs. With petrified steps you stomp along the railwayembankment, eyes wide, like a soldier storming a black hill. Avanti! Bitter snow & moon! A red wolf strangled by an angel. Your legs rattle as you walk like blue ice & a smile of sadness & arrogance turns your face to stone & your forehead grows pale with the lust of frost; or it leans silently over the sleep of a watchman, sunk in his wooden hut. Frost & smoke. A white shirt of stars burns the shoulders that wear it & God's vultures mangle your metallic heart. O the hills of stone. Silent & forgotten, the cool body melts in silver snow. Black sleep. The ear follows the paths of the stars in the ice for a long time. Church bells were ringing in the village as you woke. All in silver, the rosy day stepped in from the eastern gate.
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