STARWOUND INTERIORS
AN AFTERNOON OF MUSIC AND POETRY
Sunday, October 20 @ 3 PM Korb Classroom, Fine Arts Wabash
About StarWound
StarWound is an alternative Anglophone band based in Athens, Greece. It consists of three musicians: Konstantina Stavropoulou (vocals, synthesizer), Petros Bouras (piano, synthesizer), and Dimitris Azorakos (drums). Their songs reflect upon the philosophical and social dimensions of the human condition. Their debut album, “Miles to Walk,” released in September 2015, provides a musical reflection of the Greek financial and social crisis.
About “Interiors”
“Interiors” represents StarWound’s survey on the lyrics of contemporary US-based poets. The goal is to provide musical accompaniment to original poetic compositions and to present these songs in a multifaceted and multi-institutional concert program, based on the thematic concept of “Interiors. ” One professor from each of the selected Universities has contributed to the project with a poem. For the 2024 tour, StarWound solicidted poems from professors Amy Ash, Carmella Braninger, Brenda Cardenas, Chris Forhan, Jennifer Moore and Nynke Passi. The Greek trio will also perform songs from their three albums that deal with the theme of the project, as well as songs-poems from the first ‘Interiors’ tour.
Concert Program
1. The Wolf
2. What Do You See?
3. Corona: A Suite (2020) poem by Sandra Meek
4. I Hope the Owl Remembers Me poem by Jennifer Moore
5. You’re in Pain
6. Marianne Loup
7. Prophetess poem by Jonathan Fink
8. Wonderful and Empty
9. Open poem by Amy Ash
10. Echoes poem by Kerry Brackett
11. Insane
12. Extended Jam with poet Ella Braniger
13. Over Portishead cover
14. As They Always Did
15. Bucketsful poem by Brenda Cardenas
16. Rose
17. Toward What’s Beyond the Self poem by Chris Forhan
18 Hidden Heart Drum poem by Ella Braninger
19. Orpheus poem by Kendall Dunkelberg
20. The Opposite of Love poem by Nynke Salverda Passi
21. Unspoken Tales
Poems & Poets
Corona: A Suite (2020) by
Sandra Meek
Almanac
Lampblack sparks arrant stars, flak’s avatars. A bat’s a hatchway: gangplank. Wand. At stalls, hands hack what flaps, a day’s catch; a palm’s wan map charms data drawn as dash what was strand, swarms.
Bluff
Truth unspun, untruths spun murmur trust us. But drums trump susurrus.
Whipstitch
Silk lining twilight rips, night’s nihilist vigil civil’s the poems rising bright splits, twilling with light its miring mist; still, midnight is sizing mind in binding stitch: wind circling in mill’s kniving twists.
Eyeteeth
Eggshells nestled between trestles, we were bells steepled between vespers; then, fever beget fewer, melt beset meld: lest let’s beget less, helterskelter we sheltered; wed beget web, the deepest velvet tether.
Lockdown World of blossoms
blown to two rooms, two doors to doom: moot, now, who to whom; who’s cork, who monsoon.
Sandra Meek is the author of six books of poems, most recently Still (Persea Books, 2020). She is Professor of English at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia.
I Hope the Owl Remembers Me by
Jennifer Moore
In a land of needles and mosses, I want to know what the prey and the preying bird knows I will sleep with both eyes open
Who wants you, little star? Who wants you, hatchling?
No wind moves the blue evergreen. I cannot find the source of noise.
I know she lives with the moon in her eye, the hazelnut moon, hazelnut sky, and she sees the thimbleberry light in mine.
If, like the owl, I could look backward. If, like the owl, I could mimic the texture of the forest
Instead I guessed the cryptic plumage, the beak hooked at the tip for gripping but what I want to grasp is the grimmer meaning of the owl’s locking foot, her practically silent flight and asymmetrical ear.
The bird, of course, is a kind of misdirection
another way of saying that I will fill my own coffin with bark. It will be like a nest that knows something
Treehouse, take back your architecture.
I want to live in the structure of a feather and the gaze of an absolute eye When I leave the world
with a sleeping tongue, the door of the forest slightly open,
I hope the owl remembers me
the owl I hope she remembers
Jennifer Moore was born and raised in Seattle. She is the author of Easy Does It (2021) and The Veronica Maneuver (2015), both from the University of Akron Press, and a chapbook of centos, Smaller Ghosts (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020) Her poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Interim, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor of creative writing and Director of the Honors Program at Ohio Northern University and lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.
The
Prophetess by Jonathan Fink
The slightest breeze becomes a voice, a message on the air I neither wish for it, nor want it gone
It settles over me the way that darkness falls a veil upon a bride. The visions shake me every time.
I see the faces of the strangers in the marketplace and recognize in them the forms they do not know they will become The man who holds a garment like a book across his open hands, who folds it tenderly, a wedding gift, will pass nine months unspeaking to his wife until, two days before his daughter’s birth,
his wife will leave him, loudly, just outside his shop, the shadow of an awning cutting him from waist to feet.
A woman buys a terracotta bowl and in my mind
I see her pouring water in the basin. Both eyes closed, she leans above it, cups the water in her hands and lifts them to her face The water is a mirror writhing under her, her gaze distorting, mouth and eyes, her cheekbones and her teeth. Her hair descends around her face so that the tips of curls
submerge into the bowl like quills into an inkwell.
What I see, I cannot help: her lover’s hands around her throat, the way she tries to turn, to call his name
as stillness enters him, some silent beast, and falling from the table to the floor, the terracotta bowl.
At first, I tried to speak of what I saw. The more specific I became, the more the listener would disbelieve.
I saw the fall of Troy, the wooden horse, the sight of Paris, naked, stepping from a shroud.
The more the strangers turned from me, the more I learned to trust the visions I received
There’s power as the dispossessed. My name became a curse. Now, men and women part before me
like I am their queen The air around me is a chariot My robes are flames, my words a long-forgotten tongue.
(from The Crossing, Dzanc Books, 2015)
Jonathan Fink is Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing at the University of West Florida. He is the author of three books of poetry, including the forthcoming Don’t Do It We Love You, My Heart.
Open by Amy Ash
On the clothesline, your shirts hang open, outstretched I walk into their flimsy embrace. The curtain is all shift and witness, in the light of the window. Footsteps inaudible on the soft wall to wall. There is nothing wrong with want, only lack. No way to escape the ache of a slammed door. In the corner, a Kleenex expands into an orchid, but what I see is the open mouth of the vase.
(Amy Ash, “Open,” The Open Mouth of the Vase, Cider Press Review, 2015.)
Amy Ash is the author of The Open Mouth of the Vase, winner of the Cider Press Review Book Award and Etchings Press Whirling Prize. She is co-editor of Imaginative Teaching through Creative Writing: A User’s Guide for Secondary Classrooms (Bloomsbury, 2021) Her work has been widely published and is currently featured in Poetry in Transit, a public arts project of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. She is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Indiana State University.
Echoes by Kerry Brackett
Sometimes I like to wonder and think about
What these four walls in my house would talk about I ponder if it would be an intelligent conversation Or would it be unbearable with just shouting and debating It used to be fun to go outside to enjoy the sunshine
Before the city shut down and it became a crime I only wore masks around October during Halloween
Nowadays, it’s only my eyes that you’ll ever see I miss going to the park to play basketball
Now it’s a ghost town, the hoops are gone as the leaves fall
I can only binge watch movies and television every other hour
The couch is tired of holding me hostage, so I take a shower
These four walls may talk about my trials of cooking at home
Or when my wife told me to leave the stove alone
But I can only eat fast food for long And I can only nod my head so many times to the same songs
My kids can only watch the same cartoons so many times
So we have to make up games just to make the time fly by It’s getting unbearable to watch the news these times
Different cities, same problems across the lines
My heart goes out to the doctors and nurses in the field
Wearing invisible medals of honor as they fight in the battlefield
I cringe as we continue to count the losses of our loved ones
I wish I can hug the ones left behind, who are still stunned
Teaching students through computer screens takes a special talent
Giving class work is one thing, keeping them awake is the challenge
Entertaining through education as they stare through laptops and tablets
Keeping them engaged and motivated, I deserve to own the patent
Sometimes I like to wonder and think about
What these four walls in my house would talk about
I ponder if it would be an intelligent conversation Or would it be unbearable with just shouting and debating
Kerry Brackett is the Writing Center Director and Assistant Professor of English at Miles College in Fairfield, Alabama. He has published three chapbooks of poetry and several spoken word albums
Bucketsful by Brenda Cárdenas
When I was a child, I had a rusty bucketfull of ochre wonder, of mustard seed and yarrow, jasper stone and finch feather, of butterscotch and hopscotch, botched tongues and dizzy syntax.
Bullies dumped it all over the sidewalk, their pimpled hiccups echoing under overpasses while pigeons pecked at the granular wreckage, and the finch feather flew south in search of its bird.
Others stuffed my bucket with snarls and suffocating toadlets, ravenous revulsion and arrogant sermons
One held a bucketful of Jesus to the sky, and the buckets multiplied.
I snuck away with the ugly bucket scratched by stars, dented by dark clouds, the lonely one ready to carry friends like shells and seeds, water and bone, caterpillars, ladybugs, mud and stone
Brenda Cárdenas has authored Trace (Red Hen Press), winner of the 2023 Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry and silver winner of Foreword Review’s Indie Poetry Prize; Boomerang (Bilingual Press); and three chapbooks Cárdenas has served as Milwaukee’s Poet Laureate.
Toward what’s beyond the self by
Chris Forhan
Past the sleeping bees and still pondwater, past silt-drift and updrafts of ash, past gravity, accretion, decay, the has-beens and who’s-to-come, past love and scruple, sadness, owing and aloneness all that, go past it, go toward a purer aloneness, blackness past the galaxy, snowfall at the back of the brain, and what will you be then, and where, and what use as your hair falls out in clumps in the tub, as your small son calls for you in his sleep?
Chris Forhan is a poet, memoirist, and essayist whose most recent book is A Mind Full of Music: Essays on Imagination and Popular Song. He is also the author of the memoir My Father Before Me and four books of poetry, including the forthcoming The Ghost Won’t Go Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, he is Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Butler University.
Hidden Heartdrum by
Ella Braniger
Early you come with grace, in a dream, faceless, point to a distant forest. Then rise from heavy golden plains, like misty morning haze, and my hidden heart drum, rhythm of hooves, beats hard. A quiet, neverending strumming. Until you belt forth a carol, and purple crocuses inside me turn up. Your song burns like fall leaves aflame.
Even the sun cries with dark joy. Not for me, but for the winter ahead.
I lean in, removing all vestige of you; rise from the fire, pull a curtain against the tide of your coming.
Ella Braniger is a Visiting Professor of English at Wabash College, where she teaches writing. Her chapbook, No One May Follow, was published by Pudding House Publications in 2009. She has also published over fifty micropoems, and more than a dozen poetry sequences in journals such as Sycamore Review; MARGIE: The American Journal of Poetry; Modern English Tanka; Altas Poetica: A Journal of Poetry of Place in Contemporary Tanka; Ribbons; Chrysanthemums; red lights; Magnapoet; and Eucalypt.
Orpheus by Kendall Dunkelberg
How do you leave the land of the dead for which there are no maps or manuals? Can you walk upright like a man or crawl on your belly like a worm or a mole? How can you leave the one you love, the one whose arms were once bony and strange, whose cheek turned ever away from yours. When you arrived here, everything was dark, lifeless, and cold. Eventually you fell into that deep, comforting slumber of familiarity and forgetting, as your own flesh grew thin and ethereal and you lay beside your bride, dry and brittle like the husk of a locust, until you woke to the sound of heavy rain on the roof, no, on the earth above, a pounding rain that seemed to last forever But now, the only sound is of sparrows scratching in the dirt and chirping to one another signaling the end of the storm and the sun rising somewhere far, far from here Now you remember you were granted leave for this visit, but only under certain conditions. Now you remember, you must return to the living, bringing Eurydice,
and yet you already sense her reluctance and your growing impatience; you already know you will turn too soon, only to see her lovely face fade back into the mists, her face nearly restored to its former beauty, a memory to haunt your final days.
(from the forthcoming Tree Fall with Birdsong, Fernwood Press, 2025)
Kendall Dunkelberg is Professor of English at Mississippi University for Women, where he directs the low-residency MFA program in Creative Writing and is department chair of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy
Nynke Salverda Passi
My husband sat down on the flowered couch. He was handless and heartless He lost his mouth His fists flew like two black crows around the room. After pecking at the hard soil of my forehead, the soft ground of my womb, the black fists planted themselves firmly in the bruised green earth of my fertile flesh, growing pain quickly, efficiently into a wild bush blooming with purple roses.
It was the heart of winter. I grew roses from my skin His eyes were craters I looked away so I would not fall in. His face was the empty moon, pulling and pushing. I became fragile, layers of lace-trimmed water, a moving substance without face. Time cut off my hands.
His fists blinded my eyes. I grew burls and fissures, leaned sideways No wind could have bent me straight.
The Opposite of Love by
He hid his loneliness in the suitcase of his chest so he could travel lightly, get out before soiling his perfect clothes with the dirt of my grief and pain. I buried myself in a hole in my own earth deep beyond ice or snow, beyond freezing or burning.
Nynke Salverda Passi was born and raised in the Netherlands. She's the founder and director of MIU’s MFA in Creative Writing and the Soul Bone Literary Festival. She has been published in CALYX, Gulf Coast, and the anthologies The Anthology of New England Writers, River of Earth & Sky, Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace, and more. She was a finalist in the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize of The Missouri Review in '14 and '22.