Workshop by Billy Collins

I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title.
It gets me right away because I’m in a workshop now
so immediately the poem has my attention,
like the Ancient Mariner grabbing me by the sleeve.

And I like the first couple of stanzas,
the way they establish this mode of self-pointing
that runs through the whole poem
and tells us that words are food thrown down
on the ground for other words to eat.
I can almost taste the tail of the snake
in its own mouth,
if you know what I mean.

But what I’m not sure about is the voice,
which sounds in places very casual, very blue jeans,
but other times seems standoffish,
professorial in the worst sense of the word
like the poem is blowing pipe smoke in my face.
But maybe that’s just what it wants to do.

What I did find engaging were the middle stanzas,
especially the fourth one.
I like the image of clouds flying like lozenges
which gives me a very clear picture.
And I really like how this drawbridge operator
just appears out of the blue
with his feet up on the iron railing
and his fishing pole jigging—I like jigging—
a hook in the slow industrial canal below.
I love slow industrial canal below. All those l’s.

Maybe it’s just me,
but the next stanza is where I start to have a problem.
I mean how can the evening bump into the stars?
And what’s an obbligato of snow?
Also, I roam the decaffeinated streets.
At that point I’m lost. I need help.

The other thing that throws me off,
and maybe this is just me,
is the way the scene keeps shifting around.
First, we’re in this big aerodrome
and the speaker is inspecting a row of dirigibles,
which makes me think this could be a dream.
Then he takes us into his garden,
the part with the dahlias and the coiling hose,
though that’s nice, the coiling hose,
but then I’m not sure where we’re supposed to be.
The rain and the mint green light,
that makes it feel outdoors, but what about this wallpaper?
Or is it a kind of indoor cemetery?
There’s something about death going on here.

In fact, I start to wonder if what we have here
is really two poems, or three, or four,
or possibly none.

But then there’s that last stanza, my favorite.
This is where the poem wins me back,
especially the lines spoken in the voice of the mouse.
I mean we’ve all seen these images in cartoons before,
but I still love the details he uses
when he’s describing where he lives.
The perfect little arch of an entrance in the baseboard,
the bed made out of a curled-back sardine can,
the spool of thread for a table.
I start thinking about how hard the mouse had to work
night after night collecting all these things
while the people in the house were fast asleep,
and that gives me a very strong feeling,
a very powerful sense of something.
But I don’t know if anyone else was feeling that.
Maybe that was just me.
Maybe that’s just the way I read it.



"Workshop" from The Art of Drowning, by Billy Collins, © 1995. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

I See He Sees by Chella Courington

An upward draft
catches Mama’s hem
at forty-first & twelfth
raising it in waves
around her knees & over her thighs
a pink-striped dress
dances like the awning
at Lida’s Cantina
when a man at the corner
clutching a boy’s hand
sees Mama naked
under her flying skirt
& I see he sees
wondering why
she doesn’t hold it down
& he sees me see him
winking
before the light turns green


First Published in _Permafrost_ 28 (Summer 2006) under title of "Second Memory."

Ode to Joy by Chris Abani

John James,14,
refused to serve his conscience up
to indict an innocent man.
Handcuffed to chair, they tacked his penis
to the table
with a six inch nail
and left him there

to drip
to death
3 days later.

Risking death, an act insignificant
in the face of this child’s courage,
we sang:

Oje wai wai,
Moje oje wai, wai.

Incensed
they went
on a
killing rampage.

Guns
knives
truncheons

even canisters of tear-gas,
fired close up or
directly into mouths, will
take the back
of
your head off
and many men
died singing,
that night.

Notes caught,
surprised,
suspended
as blows bloodied mouths,
clotting into silence.

From _Kalakuta Republic_. London:SAQI, 2000.

Toi Derricotte

The Weakness
by Toi Derricotte

That time my grandmother dragged me

through the perfume aisles at Saks, she held me up

by my arm, hissing, "Stand up,"

through clenched teeth, her eyes

bright as a dog's

cornered in the light.

She said it over and over,

as if she were Jesus,

and I were dead. She had been

solid as a tree,

a fur around her neck, a

light-skinned matron whose car was parked, who walked

on swirling

marble and passed through

brass openings--in 1945.

There was not even a black

elevator operator at Saks.

The saleswoman had brought velvet

leggings to lace me in, and cooed,

as if in service of all grandmothers.

My grandmother had smiled, but not

hungrily, not like my mother

who hated them, but wanted to please,

and they had smiled back, as if

they were wearing wooden collars.

When my legs gave out, my grandmother

dragged me up and held me like God

holds saints by the

roots of the hair. I begged her

to believe I couldn't help it. Stumbling,

her face white

with sweat, she pushed me through the crowd, rushing

away from those eyes

that saw through

her clothes, under

her skin, all the way down

to the transparent

genes confessing.



From Captivity by Toi Derricotte, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Copyright © 1989 Toi Derricotte. From the online Academy of American Poets.

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Wintering by Alicia Ostriker

7. WINTERING

I had expected more than this.
I had not expected to be
an ordinary woman.
--Lucille Clifton

It snows and stops, now it is January,
The house plants need feeding,
The guests have gone. Today I'm half a boy,
Flat as something innocent, a clean
Plate, just lacking a story.
A woman should be able to say
I've become an Amazon,
Warrior woman minus a breast,
The better to shoot arrow
After fierce arrow,
Or else I am that dancing Shiva
Carved in the living rock at Elephanta,
Androgynous deity, but I don't feel
Holy enough or mythic enough.
Taking courage, I told a man I've resolved
To be as sexy with one breast
As other people are with two
And he looked away.

Spare me your pity,
Your terror, your condolence.
I'm not your wasting heroine,
Your dying swan. Friend, tragedy
Is a sort of surrender.
Tell me again I'm a model
Of toughness. I eat that up.
I grade papers, I listen to wind,
My husband helps me come, it thaws
A week before semester starts.

Now Schubert plays, and the tenor wheels
Through Heine's lieder. A fifteen-year survivor
Phones: You know what? You're the same person
After a mastectomy as before. An idea
That had never occurred to me.
You have a job you like? You have poems to write?
Your marriage is okay? It will stay that way.
The wrinkles are worse. I hate looking in the mirror.
But a missing breast, well, you get used to it.

From _The Crack in Everything_. Alicia Suskin Ostriker. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.

Politics & Poetry

When Gloria Steinem writes of Senator Clinton in _The New York Times_, January 8, Steinem's prose is rich with anaphora and elements of poetic style.

Click on the above: Politics & poetry

In the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited and read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

The Moose by Elizabeth Bishop

For Grace Bulmer Bowers


From narrow provinces

of fish and bread and tea,

home of the long tides

where the bay leaves the sea

twice a day and takes

the herrings long rides,



where if the river

enters or retreats

in a wall of brown foam

depends on if it meets

the bay coming in,

the bay not at home;



where, silted red,

sometimes the sun sets

facing a red sea,

and others, veins the flats'

lavender, rich mud

in burning rivulets;



on red, gravelly roads,

down rows of sugar maples,

past clapboard farmhouses

and neat, clapboard churches,

bleached, ridged as clamshells,

past twin silver birches,



through late afternoon

a bus journeys west,

the windshield flashing pink,

pink glancing off of metal,

brushing the dented flank

of blue, beat-up enamel;



down hollows, up rises,

and waits, patient, while

a lone traveller gives

kisses and embraces

to seven relatives

and a collie supervises.



Goodbye to the elms,

to the farm, to the dog.

The bus starts. The light

grows richer; the fog,

shifting, salty, thin,

comes closing in.



Its cold, round crystals

form and slide and settle

in the white hens' feathers,

in gray glazed cabbages,

on the cabbage roses

and lupins like apostles;



the sweet peas cling

to their wet white string

on the whitewashed fences;

bumblebees creep

inside the foxgloves,

and evening commences.



One stop at Bass River.

Then the Economies

Lower, Middle, Upper;

Five Islands, Five Houses,

where a woman shakes a tablecloth

out after supper.



A pale flickering. Gone.

The Tantramar marshes

and the smell of salt hay.

An iron bridge trembles

and a loose plank rattles

but doesn't give way.



On the left, a red light

swims through the dark:

a ship's port lantern.

Two rubber boots show,

illuminated, solemn.

A dog gives one bark.



A woman climbs in

with two market bags,

brisk, freckled, elderly.

"A grand night. Yes, sir,

all the way to Boston."

She regards us amicably.



Moonlight as we enter

the New Brunswick woods,

hairy, scratchy, splintery;

moonlight and mist

caught in them like lamb's wool

on bushes in a pasture.



The passengers lie back.

Snores. Some long sighs.

A dreamy divagation

begins in the night,

a gentle, auditory,

slow hallucination. . . .



In the creakings and noises,

an old conversation

--not concerning us,

but recognizable, somewhere,

back in the bus:

Grandparents' voices



uninterruptedly

talking, in Eternity:

names being mentioned,

things cleared up finally;

what he said, what she said,

who got pensioned;



deaths, deaths and sicknesses;

the year he remarried;

the year (something) happened.

She died in childbirth.

That was the son lost

when the schooner foundered.



He took to drink. Yes.

She went to the bad.

When Amos began to pray

even in the store and

finally the family had

to put him away.



"Yes . . ." that peculiar

affirmative. "Yes . . ."

A sharp, indrawn breath,

half groan, half acceptance,

that means "Life's like that.

We know it (also death)."



Talking the way they talked

in the old featherbed,

peacefully, on and on,

dim lamplight in the hall,

down in the kitchen, the dog

tucked in her shawl.



Now, it's all right now

even to fall asleep

just as on all those nights.

--Suddenly the bus driver

stops with a jolt,

turns off his lights.



A moose has come out of

the impenetrable wood

and stands there, looms, rather,

in the middle of the road.

It approaches; it sniffs at

the bus's hot hood.



Towering, antlerless,

high as a church,

homely as a house

(or, safe as houses).

A man's voice assures us

"Perfectly harmless. . . ."



Some of the passengers

exclaim in whispers,

childishly, softly,

"Sure are big creatures."

"It's awful plain."

"Look! It's a she!"



Taking her time,

she looks the bus over,

grand, otherworldly.

Why, why do we feel

(we all feel) this sweet

sensation of joy?



"Curious creatures,"

says our quiet driver,

rolling his r's.

"Look at that, would you."

Then he shifts gears.

For a moment longer,



by craning backward,

the moose can be seen

on the moonlit macadam;

then there's a dim

smell of moose, an acrid

smell of gasoline.



From The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. See Poets.org

Old Maids by Sandra Cisneros

My cousins and I,
we don't marry.
We're too old
by Mexican standards.

And the relatives
have long suspected
we can't anymore
in white.

My cousins and I,
we're all old
maids at thirty.

Who won't dress children,
and never saints--
though we undress them.

The aunts,
they've given up on us.
No longer nudge--You're next.

Instead--
What happened in your childhood?
What left you all mean teens?
Who hurt you, honey?

But we've studied
marriages too long--

Aunt Ariadne,
Tia Vashti,
Comadre Penelope,
querida Malintzin,
Senora Pumpkin Shell--

lessons that served us well.

Coal by Audre Lorde

I
is the total black, being spoken
from the earth's inside.
There are many kinds of open
how a diamond comes into a knot of flame
how sound comes into a word, colored
by who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open like a diamond
on glass windows
singing out within the crash of sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
in a perforated book - buy and sign and tear apart -
and come whatever wills all chances
the stub remains
an ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
breeding like adders. Other know sun
seeking like gypsies over my tongue
to explode through my lips
like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
bedevil me

Love is word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am Black because I come from the earth's inside
Now take my word for jewel in the open light.

On A Night of The Full Moon by Audre Lorde

I

Out of my flesh that hungers
and my mouth that knows
comes the shape I am seeking

for reason.
The curve of your waiting body
fits my waiting hand
your breasts warm as sunlight
your lips quick as young birds
between your thighs the sweet
sharp taste of limes

Thus I hold you
frank in my heart's eye
in my skin's knowing
as my fingers conceive your flesh


I feel your stomach
moving against mine

Before the moon wanes again
we shall come together.

II

And I would be the moon
spoken over your beckoning flesh
breaking against reservations
beaching thought
my hands at your high tide
over and under inside you
and the passing of hungers
attended, forgotten.

Darkly risen
the moon speaks
my eyes
judging your roundness
delightful.

"The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe

[First published in 1845]

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.'

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
`'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door -
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; -
This it is, and nothing more,'

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
`Sir,' said I, `or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you' - here I opened wide the door; -
Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore!'
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, `Lenore!'
Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
`Surely,' said I, `surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore -
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; -
'Tis the wind and nothing more!'

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door -
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door -
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
`Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, `art sure no craven.
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore -
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning - little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door -
Bird or beast above the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as `Nevermore.'

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only,
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered - not a feather then he fluttered -
Till I scarcely more than muttered `Other friends have flown before -
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.'
Then the bird said, `Nevermore.'

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
`Doubtless,' said I, `what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore -
Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore
Of "Never-nevermore."'

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore -
What this grim, ungainly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking `Nevermore.'

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
`Wretch,' I cried, `thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he has sent thee
Respite - respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -
Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore -
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels named Lenore?'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!' I shrieked upstarting -
`Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!

Afterlife by Joan Larkin

I’m older than my father when he turned
bright gold and left his body with its used-up liver
in the Faulkner Hospital, Jamaica Plain. I don’t
believe in the afterlife, don’t know where he is
now his flesh has finished rotting from his long
bones in the Jewish Cemetery—he could be the only
convert under those rows and rows of headstones.
Once, washing dishes in a narrow kitchen
I heard him whistling behind me. My nape froze.
Nothing like this has happened since. But this morning
we were on a plane to Virginia together. I was 17,
pregnant and scared. Abortion was waiting,
my aunt’s guest bed soaked with blood, my mother
screaming—and he was saying Kids get into trouble—
I’m getting it now: this was forgiveness.
I think if he’d lived he’d have changed and grown
but what would he have made of my flood of words
after he’d said in a low voice as the plane
descended to Richmond in clean daylight
and the stewardess walked between the rows
in her neat skirt and tucked-in blouse
Don’t ever tell this to anyone.



From My Body: New and Selected Poems by Joan Larkin. Copyright © 2007 by Joan Larkin. Used by permission of Hanging Loose Press. On American Academy of Poets. ord

_The Dream Songs_, #4, John Berryman

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
'You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.--Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.

--Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast . . . The slob beside her feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
--Mr. Bones: there is.



From The Dream Songs by John Berryman, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1959, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969 by John Berryman. Used with permission.

Moon and Earth, Alicia Ostriker

Of one substance, of one
Matter, they have cruelly
Broken apart. They never will touch

Each other again. The shining
Lovelier and younger
Turns away, a pitiful girl.

She is completely naked
And it hurts. The larger
Motherly one, breathlessly luminous

Emerald, and blue, and white
Traveling mists, suffers
Birth and death, birth

And death, and the shock
Of internal heat killed by external cold.
They are dancing through that blackness.

They press as if
To come closer, to obtain
A reunion. What divides them

Will always be as invisible as glass.
The girl will always appear to be serene
As a young actress. She does not shed a tear.

The blue-clad woman moans,
Sings to herself, and following
The daughter’s distant

Movements as best
They can, back and forth, in turbulence
Or in calm, rising and falling,

Her waters
Make the image
Of everything.


Alicia Ostriker
_A Woman Under the Surface_

Bleeding, May Swenson

Swenson's shaped version of "Bleeding" with the gash of white space zigzagging down the center of the poem is not preserved in my blog version. But if you click on the above title, you'll go to the Washington U site where several of Swenson's poems, including "Bleeding," are displayed in their shaped version as they originally appeared in _Iconographs_, 1970.


Stop bleeding said the knife
I would if I could said the cut.
Stop bleeding you make me messy with the blood.
I'm sorry said the cut.
Stop or I will sink in farther said the knife.
Don't said the cut.
The knife did not say it couldn't help it but
it sank in farther.
If only you didn't bleed said the knife I wouldn't
have to do this.
I know said the cut I bleed too easily I hate
that I can't help it I wish I were a knife like
you and didn't have to bleed.
Well meanwhile stop bleeding will you said the knife.
Yes you are a mess and sinking in deeper said the cut I
will have to stop.
Have you stopped by now said the knife.
I've almost stopped I think.
Why must you bleed in the first place said the knife.
For the same reason maybe that you must do what you
must do said the cut.
I can't stand bleeding said the knife and sank in farther.
I hate it too said the cut I know it isn't you it's
me you're lucky to be a knife you ought to be glad about that.
Too many cuts around said the knife they're
messy I don't know how they stand themselves.
They don't said the cut.
You're bleeding again.
No I've stopped said the cut see you are coming out now the
blood is drying it will rub off you'll be shiny again and clean.
If only cuts wouldn't bleed so much said the knife coming
out a little.
But then knives might become dull said the cut.
Aren't you still bleeding a little said the knife.
I hope not said the cut.
I feel you are just a little.
Maybe just a little but I can stop now.
I feel a little wetness still said the knife sinking in a
little but then coming out a little.
Just a little maybe just enough said the cut.
That's enough now stop now do you feel better now said the knife.
I feel I have to bleed to feel I think said the cut.
I don't I don't have to feel said the knife drying now
becoming shiny.

From Iconographs by May Swenson. Published by Scribner Copyright © 1970 the Literary Estate of May Swenson.

The Paper Nautilus by Marianne Moore

For authorities whose hopes
are shaped by mercenaries?
Writers entrapped by
teatime fame and by
commuters' comforts? Not for these
the paper nautilus
constructs her thin glass shell.

Giving her perishable
souvenir of hope, a dull
white outside and smooth-
edged inner surface
glossy as the sea, the watchful
maker of it guards it
day and night; she scarcely

eats until the eggs are hatched.
Buried eight-fold in her eight
arms, for she is in
a sense a devil-
fish, her glass ram'shorn-cradled freight
is hid but is not crushed;
as Hercules, bitten

by a crab loyal to the hydra,
was hindered to succeed,
the intensively
watched eggs coming from
the shell free it when they are freed,--
leaving its wasp-nest flaws
of white on white, and close-

laid Ionic chiton-folds
like the lines in the mane of
a Parthenon horse,
round which the arms had
wound themselves as if they knew love
is the only fortress
strong enough to trust to.



From The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. Copyright © 1961 Marianne Moore, © renewed 1989 by Lawrence E. Brinn and Louise Crane, executors of the Estate of Marianne Moore.

"Anna Claire" by Chella Courington

I adore Anna Claire.
She has soft brown hair, deeply violet eyes.
I ask Jesus to make mine just like hers.

We seal a pact in blood--
best friends forever--
prick our index fingers,
press them so tight
the tips turn white.

September we bury photos
taken in a booth where we played hooky.
We grin, hug, kiss, and wave.

We share Saturday night basement parties.
Mostly girls dance with girls
but some boys, like Billy Frank, break in.

Anna Claire calls him a clod with two left feet.
When he walks away to put on Johnny Mathis,
she grabs my hand, drags me to the side.
'Chances Are' is our song.

He calls Anna Claire a downright bitch,
sometimes to her face, more often to mine.
He usually sounds full of himself
like the time he asks me to the drive-in,
says I better go or he’ll nab a real girl.
Anna Claire laughs,
ugly jackass.

He’s okay, not a dreamy Troy Donahue
but other girls want him.
I don’t turn him down.
Anna Claire flies into me,
says not to do anything I don’t want to.
You’re just a yellow-bellied sapsucker.

She’s right.
I want to dance, sing, talk away the days with her.
At fourteen I desert Anna Claire,
move to another world
where real girls do exactly as they want.


“Anna Claire” was first published in the anthology _Regrets_. Ed. Martha Manno. Seekonk, MA: Little Pear Press, 2006.
The poem was written in August 2003, the summer I returned to writing poetry after more than a 20-year lapse.

Dream Song 29 by John Berryman

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.


From The Dream Songs by John Berryman, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1959, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969 by John Berryman. From poets.org

SUBSEQUENTLY by Chella Courington

You gave me a cactus pear
after our daughter
tumbled
off the boat and you
swam
under spiral blades
to raise her
from the bloody floor
a rose anemone
waiting
for spring
not for you.

Did you jump
for her
or did the white lady
with silver hair
like the moon
reach up
and pull you
overboard
into an ocean
not salty
enough
to bear your gamy
carcass
spitting it back to me
night
after night?

In darkness
I dive
past star feathers
and sea pansies
searching for my child
not for you
until I find her
asleep
in a conch shell
skin
luminously pink
unsuited
for sun.


This poem appears in the recent issue of Karamu, edited by Olga Abella and published by Eastern Illinois University.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins

As king fishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.


from poetryfoundation.org

"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" by Walt Whitman

Reproduced here is the first stanza of Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" from bartleby.com. Hit on the above link to read the rest of this magnificent poem.

1
OUT of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child, leaving his bed, wander’d alone, bare-headed, barefoot,
Down from the shower’d halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows, twining and twisting as if they were alive,
Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories, sad brother—from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon, late-risen, and swollen as if with tears,
From those beginning notes of sickness and love, there in the transparent mist,
From the thousand responses of my heart, never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous’d words,
From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
From such, as now they start, the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
Borne hither—ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man—yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them—but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing.

Syrinx by Amy Clampitt

Like the foghorn that's all lung,
the wind chime that's all percussion,
like the wind itself, that's merely air
in a terrible fret, without so much
as a finger to articulate
what ails it, the aeolian
syrinx, that reed
in the throat of a bird,
when it comes to the shaping of
what we call consonants, is
too imprecise for consensus
about what it even seems to
be saying: is it o-ka-lee
or con-ka-ree, is it really jug jug,
is it cuckoo for that matter?—
much less whether a bird's call
means anything in
particular, or at all.

Syntax comes last, there can be
no doubt of it: came last,
can be thought of (is
thought of by some) as a
higher form of expression:
is, in extremity, first to
be jettisoned: as the diva
onstage, all soaring
pectoral breathwork,
takes off, pure vowel
breaking free of the dry,
the merely fricative
husk of the particular, rises
past saying anything, any
more than the wind in
the trees, waves breaking,
or Homer's gibbering
Thespesiae iache:

those last-chance vestiges
above the threshold, the all-
but dispossessed of breath.

since feeling is first by e.e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Ellen Bass: "Gate C22"

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching—
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after—if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now—you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

Ellen Bass

The above poem is taken from _The Human Line_, forthcoming next month ( June 2007) from Copper
Canyon Press. Bass also has published several non-fiction books, including _The Courage to Heal_.
In 2001 she won the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry.


THE MARRIAGE

I wake to his erection
like a gun in my back.

It forces me to lie still
breathe shallow.
His arm over my shoulder
pins me to the mattress.

He’s dead asleep.

Why don’t I lift myself
out of the bed, walk
out the door, out
of his life into my own?

Sun slants through venetians
turns the comforter
into bars of shadow.

He rolls over
away from me.

Still I lie.


THE DIVORCE

The wife got the furniture
kids during the week
SUV and dog.

The husband got the house
kids every other weekend
car and timeshare.

Who were they thirty years ago?
She in lace and he in wool
repeating vows
snatched from movies.

Each 24 hours thereafter
they moved imperceptibly
until countless revolutions
eclipsed the girl in white
boy in blue

The Missing Persons Bureau
admits defeat in this case.
"No trace of them exists.
They vanished into air."


First published in _Leaf by Leaf_ (Spring 2007),
Evergreen Community College.

WAS IT MORE THAN A KISS

me over your arm
my hair like Rapunzel's
swinging out the window
red clover lured bees
one flower to the next
you sucked juice from a mango
fleshy fruit dad called it
merchant marine who thought
life began in Mozambique or Malibu
anywhere but hovered over two kids
never still long enough to please
mom packing peanut butter sandwiches
dropping us at Evans Elementary
before she climbed
three floors to her classroom
hung with posters of Shakespeare & Petrarch
waiting for the first bell
kids in starched dresses & creased khakis
slid into desks older than mom
hearts with initials
RM & JC carved in wood
caked with grime
years of restless fingers
scratched letters over letters
palimpsest of love
inscribing what had been inscribed
glossing what could never be glossed
two people met at the turn
clasped & fell away

Published in _Leaf by Leaf_ (Spring 2007).
Evergreen Community College.

Miguel Gandert & "From Juarez"

One of my early poems, “From Juarez,” was based on a photograph by Miguel Gandert, a photographer who teaches at the University of New Mexico. Yesterday a dear friend who works there sent me Gandert’s University link that I include above.


FROM JUAREZ
(after a photograph by Miguel Gandert)

I'm Teresa Gutierrez. Look at me. Alive.
Not like my friend Cecilia Covarrubias. Shot
once in each breast and tossed in a field
where nothing grows.

The next day I ask my cousin to work
his magic. Tattoo the Blessed Mother.
Clothed with the stars and sun.
Spiked light down my back.

He lines and shades
week after week.
I flinch and turn away.
See our Lady of Guadalupe
rise out of my jeans.

Carry her with me.

To the maquiladora.
To dark streets after the second shift
crossroads where the bus stops.

Her mantle around me.


First Published in _Confluence_ (vol. 17, 2006), Ed. Wilma Acree

Poetry Contest Winner: "Cant Quit"

Dear Poet Lovers & Contest Entrants,
I was quite pleased with the large number of good poems entered in this year’s “Gravity & Light” contest.
After several weeks of mulling over the poems, the judges are pleased to announce this year’s winning poem:
“Cant” by Allison Hummell. Congratulations, Allison, for a memorable and surprising poem!


"Cant Quit" 


Why do you think you’re allowed
To be so bad?
God knows you’re the worst thing
I ever had,
A good boy grown into a bastard of a man.
The kind you want to knock down like a strike or spare.
The kind you want to throw all of their
Cigarettes down the sink.
The kind you want to break their sunglasses
And puncture their tires.
(Just like you punctured my poor blue heart.)
The kind you want to take off their shirt
Like you'd take the shirt off the lord if you could.
The kind you want to light on fire with a waterproof match
because they make you cry mercy.
The kind you want to hold their hand tight as Lennie held that other
man's wife.
The kind you want to make fall to their knees and bleed.
The kind you want to curse and meet again in hell
so you can do it all again.
The kind you cant quit. 
 
 
 
 


Annual Poetry Contest

Gravity and Light announces the second annual poetry contest. Poets may submit up to three poems, no longer than 40 lines each. Send cover page with name & address, & contact information: phone, cell phone, and e-mail address to: couring@sbcc.edu. Deadline for entries is April 30, 2007. Only electronic entries pasted into the body of an email are accepted. In the subject line, write Contest Poetry Sub. Winning poetry will be published at Gravity and Light in early May.

Writers at Work

I'm honored that one of my poems is featured at Writers at Work during February--the month of my father's birth 90 years ago! Please click on the link above.

Stories I Want to Tell

Peter all in blue
flies from Mr. McGregor
drops one shoe
in cabbage
another
in potatoes.

My hero
outwits this farmer
every garden turn.
Forfeits jacket
before slipping
under gate.

In my story
Peter finds me
outside with a pink suitcase.

But don’t mistake us
no Alice and Mad Hatter
no Grace and White Rabbit.

We are Chella and Peter
in a wood at dusk
far from family noise.

He tells me his grandfather
sacrificed his own tail
to save Otter.

I want to confess
my father shoots otter
bruises me
when mother’s not home.

I want to say
some pain is worse
than dying.

Peter holds my hand
under the harvest moon
stars floating downstream.

First Published: _Phantasmagoria_ (vol.5, no. 2), ed. Abigail Allen.

FROM JUAREZ
(after a photograph by Miguel Gandert)

I'm Teresa Gutierrez. Look at me. Alive.
Not like my friend Cecilia Covarrubias. Shot
once in each breast and tossed in a field
where nothing grows.

The next day I ask my cousin to work
his magic. Tattoo the Blessed Mother.
Clothed with the stars and sun.
Spiked light down my back.

He lines and shades
week after week.
I flinch and turn away.
See our Lady of Guadalupe
rise out of my jeans.

Carry her with me.

To the maquiladora.
To dark streets after the second shift
crossroads where the bus stops.

Her mantle around me.


First Published in _Confluence_ (vol. 17, 2006), Ed. Wilma Acree

SENTENCE PRAYER

May heathens roast in hell like chickens on a slow cooker,

prays my Sunday School teacher. I see Homer
Lee Masters, splayed on a grill, fingers dangling
over coals. Hear him crying like a shot dog.

Sweet Jesus, cleanse Homer of whiskey and loose women,

she asks at Easter, warning us about the sin
of slow dancing like that hussy Salome.
I see Mama lean on a gentle wind, swaying
in the kitchen to Sinatra’s croon

I’ve got you under my skin, deep in the heart of me.

Nobody’s going to shame my mama
so I beg Sweet Jesus for an angel
to swoop down and carry that teacher away
drop her in a fire with slow-cooking chickens.


Chella Courington
From _Oregon East Magazine_ (vol. 37, 2006)

When Monkeys Fly

Below me lives an actor. The director spots her long nose and skinny ass.
Casts her in a huge role, Richard III. She screams My life for a horse's ass.

The super accuses me of jamming the toilet and flooding the apartment.
Two hours you cost me, he yells and threatens to shove a firecracker up my ass.

A guy doing shots at the bar declares a butt like mine deserves headlights.
I reply excuse you big boy and knee him in the crotch. Life is full of ass.

At rehab they say apologize for behavior under the influence.
Apologize? Whatever I do drunk I'd do sober. They can kiss my ass.

Mr. Johnson pokes me with his chalky finger, and I rise out of my desk.
Moon Pythagorus and his disciples, dropping my Levis over ass.

Me? I love glutes au natural. No fancy tattoo, no lacy French thong.
Swinging my backside in open air, just denim rubbing against my ass.

Ghazal by Chella Courington first appeared in _Poemeleon_ (vol. 1, issue 1, summer 2006)

Iris Online: Jane Eyre

Here's a poem featured in iris online in 2005.


JANE EYRE TAKES TO CYBERSPACE


Tired of midnight screams in drafty rooms
she imagines a jaunt down lover’s lane
like a walk on the moors
to distract her dampened spirits

if she can make it on match.com
through questions
more questions than any governess agency
dares to ask.

She wants to speak the truth
though truth often brings her trouble.
So this time she’ll slip
into white lies.

Plain? Not Very
Exciting? Somewhat
Sexy?Very

Lying is fun.
She can turn herself into a babe
by clicking keys.

Who cares if Rochester waits for her
the other side of a burning house.

She’s sick of gloom
of being the model for every wallflower
in every century.

Longs to be a hot young star
even Barbie would emulate.

To shine in cyberspace.

Pyromantics

the father
shouldered
the boy
who twirled a baton
tipped in red
while the father
swallowed
long rods of fire
snuffed out somewhere
past lips
and over tongue
hidden behind teeth
yellowed from nights
tasting sulfur
as giants and dwarfs
with floppy orange shoes
snaked
into dollhouse windows
dangling toes
between me and the boy

and i was nine again
walking
over hot coals
dumped
from the grill by dad
who bet ten bucks
i couldn’t do it
and i said i would
if he would
and i did
and he laughed
wiping his hand across his mouth
me standing there in burnt feet
crying

with time came a vision
branding his back
as skin sizzled

his fingers
tapers in a church
that i lit
one by one
snuffing each flame
so he’d smolder
before me


Chella Courington
From _Oregon East Magazine_ (vol. 37, 2006)

Creative Writing Community Online

Dear Poets,

Following is a notice of an online Creative Writing Workshop at Cerro Coso Community College and facilitated by Professor Gary Enns. During the next couple of weeks, guest poet, Sterling Warner, who teaches at Evergreen CC & has just come out with a new book, will comment on posted work. This CWC is a productive, supportive community of writers and critics. Please
check it out.

METAMORPHOSES AND THE CWC PRESENT
The Online Creative Writing Workshop
with Poet Sterling Warner
October 29-November 11

All are invited to participate online, contribute creative writing,
discuss craft, and/or ask the poet questions, so encourage your
students to join, and log in yourself! Feel free to forward this
message. Here are some directions:

HOW TO JOIN AND PARTICIPATE
----------
1. Click the CWC Moodle site link on the following
page:
http://www.cerrocoso.edu/metamorphoses/cwc.htm

2. Follow the directions on the right of the screen to
CREATE A NEW ACCOUNT and become a participant.

3. Email me here to let me know that you've joined. I
will add you to the workshop group so you can participate.

From: Gary Enns

What is Poetry? Video including me

Here's a video of three poets in the Santa Barbara area made by Jonathan Cline.

Go to http://current.tv and search for topophilia.

The first video that shows will be "What is poetry?"

Watch it & vote.

Thanks, Chella

my poetry for a change: Immaculate

heavens, i haven't posted for more than six weeks! "what happened?" you ask, dearly faithful reader. well, august turned into september: students, essays, committee meetings knocked & i answered. but now i've returned to gravity & light with my own poems, newly published & ready for blog exposure.

disclaimer:btw, these are long lines arranged in couplets. if the format breaks the lines into long/short, know that the short lines belong with what's above it.

IMMACULATE

Mama warned me if I slept with a boy before marriage the Virgin Mary would snatch
me away. Where to I was never sure. Maybe New York or Los Angeles. To a bedroom

of satin--sheets so smooth I’d slide into Heaven. Tony was my first. Tall with a dimple in his
chin, he liked to pinch my butt up the stairs to civics. Twenty-four steps with him right behind.

In March he gave me a broken heart on a silver chain. Kept the other half in his front pocket.
A good luck charm he said. Never thought about being swooped up by Mary when I kissed

Tony. Felt him grow in my hand like giving birth to something I wanted to know.
Mama believed virgins hung the moon, though not a soul in our family ever stayed that way.

Cousin Raylene was living proof. Did whatever she wanted. The Virgin never messed with her.


_Soundings East_ vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006).

Vespers by Lousie Gluck

In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come
so often here, while other regions get
twelve weeks of summer. All this
belongs to you: on the other hand,
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible
for these vines.

From The Wild Iris, published by The Ecco Press, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Louise Glück. All Rights reserved.

Marie Howe

How Many Times

No matter how many times I try I can't stop my father
from walking into my sister's room

and I can't see any better, leaning from here to look
in his eyes. It's dark in the hall

and everyone's sleeping. This is the past
where everything is perfect already and nothing changes,

where the water glass falls to the bathroom floor
and bounces once before breaking.

Nothing. Not the small sound my sister makes, turning
over, not the thump of the dog's tail

when he opens one eye to see him stumbling back to bed
still drunk, a little bewildered.

This is exactly as I knew it would be.
And if I whisper her name, hissing a warning,

I've been doing that for years now, and still the dog
startles and growls until he sees

it's our father, and still the door opens, and she
makes that small oh turning over.


From THE GOOD THIEF (Persea Books, 1988)

Tin House Dorm

At Reed College, the dorm where Ted & I stayed reminded me of the school in _Harry Potter_ as well as Flowers Hall at Huntingdon College, my teaching post previous to SBCC. Gothic architecture with big redwood rooms. Mike Land, dear friend & also a participant at Tin House, took this photo with me & poet Susie Dunn in the foreground.

D.A. Powell

I just spent a week studying with the imminent poet, D.A. Powell, at the Tin House Workshop in Portland, Or. He is a wonderful teacher as well as poet. In appreciation of the week in his workshop, I post the following poem from his most recent collection, _Cocktails_:

[the cocktail hour finally arrives: whether ending a day at the office]


the cocktail hour finally arrives: whether ending a day at the office
or opening the orifice at 6am [legal again to pour in californica]: the time is always right

we need a little glamour and glamour arrives: plenty of chipped ice
a green jurassic palm tree planted. a yellow spastic monkey swinging

a pink classic flamingo impaled upon the exuberant red of cherries
dash of bitters. vermouth sweet. enough rye whiskey to kill

this longing: I take my drinks still and stuffed with plastic. like my lovers
my billfold full of rubbers. OPENs my mouth: its tiny neon lounge



From Cocktails by D. A. Powell. Copyright © 2004 by D. A. Powell. Reprinted from Poets. org.

SECOND MEMORY

Like Marilyn in her glory
an upward draft
catches Mama’s hem
at forty-first and twelfth
raising it in waves
around her knees and over her thighs
a pink-striped dress
dances like the awning
at Lida’s Cantina
when a man at the corner
clutching a boy’s hand
sees Mama naked
under her flying skirt
and I see he sees
wondering why
she doesn’t hold it down
and he sees me see him
winking
before the light turns green.


"Second Memory" by Chella Courington appears in _Permafrost_ (vol. 28, summer 2006), published by the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Anna Akhmatova

Russian (Ukranian) poet, Anna Akhmatova, was born June 23, 1888. According to Joseph Brodsky, who introduced _Poems_, selected & translated by Lyn Coffin, Akhmatova's father forced her to write under an assumed name: "When her father learned that his daughter was about to publish a selection of her poems in a St. Petersburg magazine, he called her in and told her that although he had nothing against her writing poetry, he'd urge her 'not to befoul the good respected name' and to use a pseudonym. The daughter agreed, and this is how 'Anna Akmatova' entered Russian literature instead of Anna Gorenko" (xiii).

"Lot's Wife"
by Anna Akhmatova
Translated by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.


From Poems of Akhmatova, by Anna Akhmatova and translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Published by Little, Brown & Co. © 1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Granted by permission of Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agency. All rights reserved (poets.org, linked above).

"Blackbirds" for My Father

This is a recent picture of my father and me taken during my visit in Alabama. Below is a poem written in his honor and published in the inaugural issue of _Poemeleon_, an online journal of poetry edited by Cati Porter. Click on the above title "Blackbirds" to visit _Poemeleon_.

Blackbirds

Like a canopy of darkness
they shadow the ground for miles
on currents that lift them
back to their roosts.

Years later I ask my father
if he gathered us
to watch thousands
swoop down on trees
sit wing to wing
until morning branches cracked
under their weight.

At daybreak did they leave the oaks
bare?

He says we never saw them abandon the hollow
catch a new wind to an unharvested south

but often would pile into the car to see their return
black streaks on the upward drift
of a September afternoon.


Chella Courington
June 2006

Visiting my dad in Rural Alabama

We spent three weeks with my dad in Albertville in North Alabama at the tip end of the Appalachians. The locals like to eat lunch at the Albertville Candy Store, a kind of general food/trinket store on Main Street. In the back the older ladies play bridge three times a week.




Here's a typical daily menu. BTW, the Candy Store serves lunch Monday through Friday. Come as you are.

wishes for sons

lucille clifton is one of my favorite poets. she speaks so honestly about being female.

wishes for sons
by Lucille Clifton

i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
I wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn't believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.


Copyright ©1991 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted from Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., 260 East Ave., Rochester, NY 14604. Poets.Org

Stephen Colbert Addresses Graduates at Knox College

It’s that wonderful time of year when students graduate from college & wonder: what now? Stephen Colbert, one of my faves, gave the commencement speech at Knox College, June 3. While the text can be accessed by clicking on the above hot link title, here’s an excerpt:

There are so many challenges facing this next generation, and as they said earlier, you are up for these challenges. And I agree, except that I don’t think you are. I don’t know if you’re tough enough to handle this. You are the most cuddled generation in history. I belong to the last generation that did not have to be in a car seat. You had to be in car seats. I did not have to wear a helmet when I rode my bike. You do. You have to wear helmets when you go swimming, right? In case you bump your head against the side of the pool. Oh, by the way, I should have said, my speech today may contain some peanut products.

My mother had 11 children: Jimmy, Eddie, Mary, Billy, Morgan, Tommy, Jay, Lou, Paul, Peter, Stephen. You may applaud my mother’s womb. Thank you, I’ll let her know. She could never protect us the way you all have been protected. She couldn’t fit 11 car seats. She would just open the back of her Town & Country—stack us like cord wood: four this way, four that way. And she put crushed glass in the empty spaces to keep it steady. Then she would roll up all the windows in the winter time and light up a cigarette. When I die I will not need to be embalmed, because as a child my mother hickory-smoked me.

Return after Hiatus

I'm pleased to announce that Jim Bennett has added my blog to Poetry Kit, a central place for locating blogs on & about poetry. Since the first annual poetry contest, activity has been low with the end of school and my dad's fall. I'm glad to report that I am writing a fair amount, looking forward to more creative time when Ted & I return to Caifornia.

Winners of the Gravity & Light Poetry Contest

I want to thank the numerous poets who submitted poems for the first annual Gravity & Light Poetry Contest. All submissions demonstrated excellence. The judges, however, selected two poems as their favorites: “Administering My Dog’s Cancer Therapy, I Think About My Sons,” first place, by Cati Porter & “ Bermuda Grass in Lincoln Park,” second place, by Brandon K. Wallace. Both are published below.

Administering My Dog’s Cancer Therapy, I Think About My Sons
Cati Porter

My thumb and forefinger pinch a pill as I thrust my fist
back into his throat. His teeth, a bracelet of blunt
tines, rake gently over my wrist.
I pull out my hand sticky with his saliva
and hold his mouth closed
and stroke his neck
until I am certain he has swallowed.

At seven years old he is two years older than
my oldest son. He is my oldest son,
I tell myself, but of course, he is not.
He is just the dog, I remind myself daily,
because, if he were my son,
I would okay the endoscopy, biopsy
the lining of his stomach. I would make the drive
into the next county for intravenous chemotherapy.

Once he ate reluctantly from my hand chicken breasts
boiled for him on my stove. If he were
my son, I would not hand-feed him
the breasts of dead chickens. I would slice
off my own, boil them
pink to white in my very best pot.
I would shred them, feed them to him
warm, if only to keep him through the night.



XXXVIII
The 1980s
Bermuda Grass in Lincoln Park
Brandon K. Wallace

The sound of black musicians on guitar- Earth, Wind, and Fire combining the
elements in a gravitational groove, pulled into the dizzy of a neutron dance.
A lipstick, cherry bright as the light of a smile, red Thunderbird, the
blackenized Barbie turned inside out, pulled up into the alley, against the
crosspatch, metal fence behind the house with shaved top and delicate cement,
only the slightest bit of grass growing through the cracks where we played Red
Light/ Green Light Red Green Red and Green Lights flashing, blending together
in backgrounds of black and sunshine yellow, the red appears in pores and
freckles in the brightness of the sun with the distant green tops of trees, the
green of the electric carpet against which I used to rub to feel the current.
Rows of houses, claustrophobically close, creating closeness and warmth, Coca
Cola and Pepsi, in red bottles with white lines, sprite in green and lemon
yellow, juicy fruit and Ronald Reagan, Jesse Jackson in wool overcoats holding
signs, campaigns for change. Change.
Harold Washington, change, the color of his suits. Kinetic movement, promise
and vision.

Thought the readers would like a view of me, Chella Courington, and my favorite fiction writer, husband Ted Chiles.

(Photo taken in January 2006)

TIKI by Andre Breton

TIKI

Je t'aime a la face des mers
Rouge comme l'oeuf quand il est vert
Tu me transportes dans une clairiere
Douce aux mains comme une caille
Tu m’appuies sur le ventre de la femme
Comme contre un olivier de nacre
Tu me donnes l”equilibre
Tu me couches
Par rapport au fait d’avoir vecu
Avant et après
Sous mes paupieres de caoutchouc.

Andre Breton

TRANSLATION: TIKI

I love you across the seas
Red as the egg when it is green
You move me into a clearing
Gentle with hands like a quail
You rest me against the woman’s belly
As against the mother-of-pearl olive tree
You give me balance
You put me to bed
By the fact of having lived
Before and after
Under my rubber eyelids.

The Devil’s Beatin’ His Wife by Chella Courington

“If you could choose, would you want it to rain all the time or shine all the time?”

I draw hopscotch squares on the concrete sidewalk in front of grandma’s house. Since my sister’s two years older, she always talks to me in questions, trying to trip me up and make her seem smarter. So I just throw questions back to let Julia know I’m smart too.

“Can I turn off the rain when I want to?”

“Nope, you gotta carry an umbrella. “

“Can I play in the rain on summer days when it’s so hot my hair’s all sweaty?”

“Yep, but only in the backyard and you gotta wear your swimsuit. No running naked like we do under the hose. “

“Can I tell the sun to go behind the clouds?”

“Nope, you can’t tell the sun to do anything. He’s bigger and stronger than anybody except God.”

“Can I ask the sun not to melt the snow?”

“Nope, you can’t ask the sun any questions. He has too much to do to fool with a dumb girl.”

“Well, smartie pants, I’d rather have rain and sun together to heat me up and cool me off at the same time.”

“Yeah, well that means the devil’s beatin’ his wife!”

“That means what? “ I yell, scratching a one and zero in the top square.

“You heard me. The devil’s beatin’ his wife.”

“I don’t believe you. The devil’s not married to begin with.”

“Yeah he is. They just never tell us about it in Sunday school. His wife looks just like my first-grade teacher. A long pointed nose with glasses and she smells like chicken poop. They say she fries bad girls in hot grease and then stuffs them in a barrel.”

“If he has a wife, why does he beat her?”

“Because the devil ‘s the meanest man in the world and beats up anybody he wants to just like the baddest boy in school. “

Ever since Halloween, Julia tries to scare me with stories of mean people who like to kidnap and torture kids. “You’re telling a fib,” I scream at her.

“If you don’t believe me, go ask grandma. “

So we leave the sidewalk and run into the house. Grandma’s in the kitchen, snapping beans at the sink and looking out the window at butterflies around the crepe myrtles. She knows things we don’t. She says flowers are named after girls who smell sweet and act sweet. That butterflies are the spirits of loved ones in heaven. “Grandma, does the devil have a wife?” I blurt out before Julia can open her mouth. Just because she’s older doesn’t make her smarter and she can’t scare me now with grandma near.

“Well, hon, I don’t know about that though I kinda doubt it. He’s way too mean and ornery for any woman to put up with, no matter how irritating she is.”

“What about Mr. Wells? You said he was mean as a snake. He has a wife.”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t always mean. Plus he was good-looking. A wife will forgive a heap of sins from a good-looking husband.”

“Do you think the devil ever looked good?”

“Absolutely never. I know it for a fact. But I’ve always heard tell that, if you see sunshine through rain, the devil’s beatin’ his wife. And who can argue with what my own grandmamma told me when I was your age. She always said ‘rain flickers like Christmas lights when it falls through God’s sunshine.’ Girls, go look out the back door! “

Raindrops sparkle in the sun. Behind them a yellow and red rainbow reaches from the sidewalk to the other side of the backyard, and I know my grandma is the smartest and sweetest person on earth and my sister will never be a flower!


Note: This children's story, based on a folk expression, first sppeared online in _Penwomanship_, linked in the header.

KGB Bar in NYC

Ted & I are in NYC, celebrating my March birthday belatedly and visiting one of my dearest friends, Lisa Williams, author of _Letters to Virginia Woolf_. Monday night we went to the KGB Bar in the Village to hear Kay Ryan read. She, of course, was wonderful with witty & intellectual work! The bar itself is an old workers bar: marble steps lead upstairs to a small room. A perfect way to enjoy National Poetry Month! BTW, remember to send in your poems for Gravity and Light's First Annual Poetry Contest. See previous posts for guidelines. Be well & keep writing.

POETRY CONTEST PROGRESS REPORT

I'm pleased to report that entries have started to roll in for the first Gravity & Light April Poetry Contest. Eminent local writers have agreed to read all poems in early May and announce the winner May 12.

Keep those poems coming! Good night and good luck.

APRIL POETRY CONTEST

Okay, here goes. Out of respect to April as National Poetry Month, this blog, known as Gravity and Light, will sponsor a month-long poetry contest. The expectations are few: no rhyming, no poem over 50 lines, fresh and surprising, concentrated and imagistic. Deadline: April 30. So, there we are. Please send entries in the text of an email to: couring@sbcc.edu Good luck and good writing! May the Muse bless our Olympics of Poetry! Best, C Courington

LET DARKNESS COME

Here's a piece written as a freewrite several years ago.

Let Darkness Come

The route to darkness meanders down through nightmares that entangle and cloud the light. Buried emotions attack the jugular vein, scream deadly slogans, tackle us when we least expect it. I had a friend who spent the last ten years of living, looking for outs to his clinically depressed existence. He tried suicide almost as many times as I tried new lovers from overdosing to carbon monoxide to slamming his Harley into the side of Compass Bank. I talked him back into life almost every time. He’d grin like a devil sick of sin: “Yeah, I’m crazy. You’re crazy. We all are.” He pulled me down on him. Then he’d walk into a dark room and begin the descent over and over and over again. I look back at those early mornings when he’d take me on his Harley around Monte Sano, a winding mountain road. And I remember the last time he called me at 4 a.m. Sunday. He said he was walking alone into the darkness and asked if I would join him. I was scared, knew he spoke a language I didn’t understand, and immediately drove over to his place—near county highway 9. When I got there, about fifteen minutes from my apartment, everything was dark. The door was cracked; I walked in. The silence was deafening. Nobody was there. I knew in my bones Jimmy was gone forever and drove home to sit by the phone until I heard something. His cousin called at 10—Jimmy shot himself in the head at Lake Guntersville near the state lodge. His body was slumped against a picnic table. I felt cold, my jaw locked, and I slammed down the phone.

BLURBS ON _SOUTHERN GIRL GONE WRONG_

The following are the blurbs on my first chapbook entitled, _Southern Girl Gone Wrong_, published by Foothills Publishing of New York in fall 2004. When I returned to writing poetry in 2003 after almost a 20-year hiatus in the world of academic writing, Perie Longo was my mentor and guide, giving me the needed advice and encouragement to keep writing. My dear friend and colleague, David Starkey, is my model for seeking creative challenges and pushing myself to grow as a poet. His productivity inspires.

"No one writes of sexuality more sweetly or bitterly, when taken by even the most holy, than Chella Courington. Her poems sizzle under southern sun and make you want to go take a cold shower. Her talk is tough, sensual, sparse yet laced with lyricism and love for the family, in the end, and all things southern that come from staring truth in the face. Startling images are there not for effect, but rise out of suffering, and like her, we are 'saved' by memory's exquisite touch."

--Perie Longo
Author of The Privacy of Wind

"In Chella Courington's 'Jesus Loves Me' the speaker fantasizes about making love to Jesus. The experience she describes is both sinful yet oddly innocent, and that atmosphere of naiveté and abandon pervades the poems in_ Southern Girl Gone Wrong_. Courington's world is lush, humid, sensual and inviting: once you enter it, you'll want to stay."

--David Starkey
Author of Open Mike Night at the Cabaret Voltaire
and Fear of Everything

BTW, my chapbook can be purchased online at Foothills Publishing, linked to the right. Thanks for supporting poetry!

SNAKE CHARMER

Jake tickles my cheek with his tongue, and I lean against
him. Sliding over my shoulder like the Virgin’s mantle,
he rolls his muscles to the drummer’s beat. A whore
mama calls me and says anybody in a strip joint sleeps
with the Devil. Her Jesus is about covered dish suppers
and long dresses. Mine’s not cooped up in the Boaz
Baptist Church drinking juice and eating saltines. He’s in
the clubs, witnessing to the night people. When the sax
man plays “Amazing Grace,” Jake curls around me. His
head sways from side to side, biting my lip before
the music fades, and everybody’s washed in light.




Chella Courington
Published in _Desert Voices_, (volume 4, issue 1) December 2005

Stories I Want to Tell

Peter all in blue
flies from Mr. McGregor
drops one shoe
in cabbage
another
in potatoes.

My hero
outwits this farmer
every garden turn.
Forfeits jacket
before slipping
under gate.

In my story
Peter finds me
outside with a pink suitcase.

But don’t mistake us
no Alice and Mad Hatter
no Grace and White Rabbit.

We are Chella and Peter
in a wood at dusk
far from family noise.

He tells me his grandfather
sacrificed his own tail
to save Otter.

I want to confess
my father shoots otter
bruises me
when mother’s not home.

I want to say
some pain is worse
than dying.

Peter holds my hand
under the harvest moon
stars floating downstream.



Chella Courington
Published in _Phantasmagoria_(volume 5, number 2)

Bush on Top

Bush is on top, and the grammar cops are out. No health care for the poor, no drug care for the elderly, no choice to the ladies. But sure as hell no comma splices, no run-on sentences. And fragments! Crucify Faulkner. Heaven forbid. Grammar matters. How else can we distinguish rote learners who believe in arbitrary standards from everybody else? Too many funny tongues out there not to detain them in rules. People speak Spanish and Arabic and German and Slavic. Grammar matters. Just look at those Appalachian folk, nestled in woods where banjos still duel. They speak the King’s English. All those double negatives of Shakespeare never went out of fashion. They maintained the standard. They don’t know no different. Hooray for Shakespeare! Give me my own tongue. 2006. Grammar books on The New York Times best-seller list. Check out the authors. Any of these books by persons of color? Who’s clamoring for the maintenance of the old guard? It just rubs me the wrong way when folks start bandying about rules of grammar. Sure (ly). Business letters need to be as clean of grammatical unconvention as possible. They’re directed to one of the most conservative elements in the United States of American: Business. An industry that works in cliché: judges everything by the cover. Not to sound like an anarchist but grammar is not organic: grammar is made by usage. So what if your English grandmother said “Give the cup to John and me” and you say “give it to John and I.” But like much in this predictable life, an emphasis on grammar in 2006 is not surprising. Grammar cops work in cahoots with Homeland Security.

Writing in the Dirt

Daddy still doesn’t know me after forty years.
Thinks I ought to praise Jesus and live five miles away.
He reads a poem I wrote about a penis.

Throws his arm high like Moses with a staff.
Stomps out the back door
mumbling in his wake.

Later I hear him tell mama
"That girl of yours writes in the dirt."

I turn my face to the wall.
Cracks of plaster deepen
every time the house settles.

Red clay shifts to quicksand
swallows me whole.

My poem floats beyond the live oak.


This poem by Chella Courington was published in the recent issue of _In the Grove_.

My Turn to Watch Granddaddy's Body

He’d sit in a cane rocker on his dirt yard
shirt cuffs flapping yell to mama
girl bring me some tea.

Lucky for him she adored her daddy
otherwise that old goat
would’ve died a lot sooner.

A mining doctor he bled the sick
for money they never had called them
stupid animals.

When they couldn’t pay he bartered
for crops coal corn liquor
loved devil’s brew more than himself.

I thought some angry miner might
kill him with a bad batch instead
he died in his sleep at ninety.

I didn’t like him alive don’t care
what happens to him now but in respect
to all the dead I’ll stay my time.


Chella Courington
First appeared in _King Log_ and reprinted in _Southern Girl Gone Wrong_

Like branches of white ash, antlers

lie in spring snow in the foothills.
Close to me every year, he drops them
somewhere along the ravine.

March, I find them in tall grass
honeysuckle braided through tines.
Bees gather. Another season
his rack vibrates in red cedar
mobiles of bone clank till dawn.

I long for him to emerge
yet he never comes
leaving his musk before the fall.


Chella Courington
First Published in _NILAS_ (December 2005)

ANTELOPE MEDICINE

Eyes full of moon
she studies me
behind the porch screen.

I smell of tobacco.
She of sage.

I breathe her in
feel my body bend to hers.

Over plains we race

spin through air
on legs lithe and strong
lifting into sky

until my lungs ache and
I fall back into sweet grass.

She covers me till morning.


Chella Courington
First Published in _NILAS_ (December 2005)

THE POULTRY PLANT

I spend long hours in this hot muggy room breaking the necks of chickens. Not with my hands like grandpa who swings the bird round till the neck pops. My machine chops off the head. Drops that blade and splatters blood every five seconds. Fresh blood that tastes salty and sweet at the same time. It bothered me at first. But the pay’s good. What I don’t like is the line chief. During break he tells me he knows when a girl has her period. He can smell her. Says he broke up with his last girlfriend cause she bled so much. He makes me feel dirty like I need to wash with lye. One day he follows me out to the car. Says he dreams about me. Likes to taste me in his sleep. Don’t tell him my dream. The one where he’s hanging with the chickens while I work my machine.



Chella Courington
First Published in the recent issue of _In the Grove_

Merry Christmas!

Christmas would not be the same without remembering Charles Dickens and _A Christmas Carol_. I love the book with all its horror and rebirth, and I have two favorite film versions: the Alistair Sims treatment and the Muppets rendering. So, here are the last two paragraphs from ACC:

"Scrooge was better than his word.  He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father.  He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.  Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms.  His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.  May that be truly said of us, and all of us!  And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Every One!"

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)

Edna St. Vincent Millay, born in 1892, was the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, in 1923, for her fourth book of poetry. Millay's command of the sonnet was distinctive as she shaped her sonnets with powerful lyrical music and personal voice.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)
Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

From _Collected Poems_ by Edna St. Vincent Millay, published by Harper & Brothers Publishers. Copyright © 1956 by Norma Millay Ellis.

Being a Writer: Part II

7. If you met a young or new writer, is there any advice you would give her?
First, I’d say, Write. No matter where or what. Letters, journals, email, chat rooms. And read everything you can get your hands on from poetry and novels to newspapers and magazines. Second, believe in yourself and what you have to say. Every voice is unique and worth hearing. Third, be careful with whom you share your work. Try to be sure of your reader’s reliability as a safe reader. There are too many critics jealous of creators and hence undermine their work. Fourth, when you find safe and close readers, listen to their response. As it is important for the writer to have a developed voice, it is equally important for her to be open to solid criticism.

8. Every job has its ups and downs, things that are the best and worst of doing that job. What is, for you personally, the very best thing about what you do? The very worst?
The best thing about writing poetry is writing poetry: the imaginative journey and play with language. Once I realized that not every poem has to be “the best,” I started to have fun. The worst thing about writing poetry? If one chooses to publish, rejections can devastate a poet. My rule of thumb is to keep a number of poems circulating to journals so that rejection becomes part of acceptance. A very sort of Zen approach.

9. Was there a moment in your life when you knew for certain this was exactly what you wanted to do? If so, was it some pivotal person or event that you can tell our readers about?
My desire to write poetry has wavered between devotion and abandonment. But, as I mentioned somewhere above, my eighth grade teacher first hooked me on poetry. In later years Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Allison compelled me to want to write.

10. How do you think your writing, in general, impacts on today’s woman? Or does it? What about tomorrow’s woman?
I am committed to writing from my body, telling the shifting truths about sexuality and abuse from a female perspective. I’ve written several poems about going through puberty, a topic often ignored in poetry. I’m enchanted by the poetic power of words like “labia” and ‘vagina” and think it’s important for them to be heard aloud in poetry’s hallowed and respected domain. At readings, women my age and younger say that it’s empowering to hear work that addresses the female body in joy and grief.

11. Do you believe being a woman affects how you write? Explain.
Definitely. You can tell from my role models and my concerns with the female body that my voice is shaped by being female.

12. Have there been women in your life who challenged or altered the way you view(ed) yourself? Your work? Your world?
Oh, yes. You know my literary models—Woolf and Allison. Women from very different times and locations who share a love for writing from the body and depicting the woman-centered life. Other influences include my best friend’s mother, who was an unconventional thinker in a small, rural Southern town in the sixties. She taught me that reading and tolerance were key to a fuller life. Another woman with a strong impact was a colleague who showed me that the love for women awakens us to our potential as thinkers, creators, spiritualists and professionals.

13. If there were no boundaries of time, money, distance or anything else and you could spend one hour with any woman at all, whom would you choose and why?
I would choose to spend the time with Dorothy Allison. In her essays, novels, and poetry, she reflects knowledge, wit, wisdom, and understanding for the human condition plus she’s from the rural South and knows the deep ambivalence of such tangled roots of love and violence.

Being a Writer: Part I

A women's magazine interviewed me almost eighteen months ago about being a writer. While the interview never was published, I think it offers insight into my love for words. I will publish it here in two parts.

PART ONE

1. Could you tell us a little about yourself and what you write.
Raised on Sand Mountain at the Appalachian end in North Alabama, I grew up with a love-hate relationship to the place especially during the sixties. Family and friendships were warm and turbulent, loving and violent. If you weren’t a white, Christian, conventional heterosexual, you were a misfit, what many Southern folks called “funny.” My desire was to escape my birthplace, though not the South particularly, as I moved from Alabama to Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina and back to Alabama. In 2002 I finally migrated west with a partner and two cats and returned to writing poetry in May 2003. Much of the poetry in my chapbook, _Southern Girl Gone Wrong_, emerges from my past, examining the contradictions of family and relationship and recalling the Gothic strain that runs through Southern writing from William Faulkner to Dorothy Allison.

2. How long have you been writing? Have you always wanted to be a writer?
I remember first writing poetry in the eighth grade when Mrs. Smothers asked the class to write about a creepy experience. My poem talked about being caught outside in a lightening storm with nowhere to go. While she didn’t read it aloud as she did Mary’s, I was hooked and wrote poetry for about ten consecutive years sporadically.

3. Has what you write changed much since you first started? Tell us about some of the changes.
Oh, yes. Age and experience put me in a very different emotional and mental place for my poetry today. When much younger, I focused on angst, mostly mine, often in abstract language that I thought sounded impressive. While much of that anxiety still exists, I try to use concrete images and down-to-earth language to convey feelings. I’ve always loved how Marianne Moore describes poetry: “an imaginary garden full of real toads.”

4. When you were a very young girl, do you remember what you wanted to be? Would the woman she has become surprise that little girl? Why or why not?
Born in the fifties in a provincial area, my models were housewives defined by husbands. Early I rejected that role, knowing that I wanted to determine my identity on my own and thought I wanted to be a lawyer, working to rectify injustices. While in college, however, I determined that law wasn’t for me and veered toward writing. Maybe the poet/teacher I’ve become would surprise the girl with lawyerly hopes but not the girl who loved books and writing.

5. What is your educational background? Has your education had any impact on your writing, either positive or negative? Has it influenced what you write about? Has it made being published any easier?
With a Ph.D. in British and American literature from the University of South Carolina, I think it has had mixed effects with the balance being positive. I’ve read a wide range of good poetry and fiction that provides a deep sense of how words work and studied for a year under a wonderful teacher/poet, James Dickey. The negative effect is that, as a younger writer, I felt that if I couldn’t be great, I shouldn’t write. Consequently, I abandoned poetry for about twenty years and disavowed a significant part of who I am. When I returned to it in 2003, I felt as if I’d come home. Concerning the influence of my education on what I write, I think it has given me the confidence to feel comfortable with almost any topic or form I choose whether autobiography or politics, free verse or a pantoum. While I think that a Ph.D. has not made it easier to publish poetry, I do think that the academic habit of sending out articles for publication gave me a certain kind of work ethic that makes me more aggressive toward publication, researching journals and sending out work on a regular basis.

6. Have you always wanted to be a published author?
In my early twenties, I wasn’t as keen about being published as I currently am though now, as then, I mostly enjoy the process of writing poetry and where it goes imaginatively. For me the most pleasurable publication is sharing work with friends and in readings, and I’m pleased that I’ve had several readings since returning to poetry. But I’m also pleased to see my work in journals as one kind of professional validation.

Memories

During the summer, I was gung-ho about my blog. I remember how excited I was to be linked at other blogs and still am. But September came and school started with classes to attend to. And I do love teaching. In the process, however, I've neglected Gravity and Light, stepping in now and then to post a poem and say I'm here. I have no holiday poem though I shall post a poem written about two years ago in honor of my father and recalls a time when my experience was still fairly unmarked by life's passing. So I dedicate "Blackbirds" to our memories.

BLACKBIRDS

Like a canopy of darkness
they shadow the ground for miles
on currents that lift them
back to their roosts.

Years later I ask my father
if he gathered us
to watch thousands
swoop down on trees
sit wing to wing
until morning branches cracked
under their weight.

At daybreak did they leave the oaks
bare?

He says we never saw them abandon the hollow
catch a new wind to an unharvested south

but often would pile into the car to see their return
black streaks on the upward drift
of a September afternoon.