ars poetica

I Work to Drive the Awe Away, yet Awe Impels the Work.
-Emily Dickinson

Not everyone needs a church of lives
to lay one’s own against. I have found
my words are shy with too much talk
in the air. They ride in on privacy.
Only in solitude can I hear them
beating round my head.

If He knows the number of hairs
on my head He knows my heart beats
rarely sedate or temperate. There are days
the fierce sacred morning leaves
me cleaved open - I write to keep breathing.

So much death beyond this window, night
does not walk away from me. When words
retreat even the desk is confusing as the cries
in my mind. I rearrange and rearrange
until what I write is where I want to go.

—Valerie Martt Wallace

A Note on the Use of Metaphor

In the living room, perched
on the curtain rod above the open French door
is a female house sparrow. It is stunned
by the alien landscape
it has chanced onto
and the impenetrable
patch of clear glass sky
it has now flown into
three times. It glances here,
then there, perhaps feeling
for a moment its own end
rising in its throat. My wife pleads
with it, explains how
to fly down and out, then laments
that her words cannot speak
to its tiny body. At last, we drape
sheets over two wide brooms to form
tall gods and approach the bird,
these majestic beings looming above us,
until it flutters, turns down,
darts out into the spring air.

—Len Anderson
____
previously published in Good Times.

MR. JONES MAKES POETRY
                         Based on a painting of the same name by Raoul Hausmann, 1920

With your coffee grinder and your vacant
blue stare, you look almost human,
Mr. Jones, almost capable of desire.

On the table, a green cylinder
calibrates the span of your palm,
a reassuring gesture of precision,

while the armless mannequin
is an extra body, should yours wear out
or lose the power to produce combustible words.

The mannequin has a knob instead of a head.
It stands ready to stand in, an understudy,
while each side of your symmetrical

mustache, Mr. Jones, mirrors the curve
of the coffee grinder’s handle.
When cranked, the mustache moves on invisible gears,

each side alternates up and down like a piston,
and produces heat,
something actually alive.

—Kim Roberts

Ars Poetica

Daredevil always, I took mine off first:
elbowed out of my shirt, shimmied from my skirt,
unshouldered my bra, dropped my panties—all
my garb tossed defiantly to the porch floor—
thus, stark in my naked geometry I stood,
shivering behind our trellised bougainvillea,
as Sunday cars sharked along Hermosa Avenue.
“Your turn,” I began, but you’d already fled
behind the front door with your devising friend
who clutched my clothing to her chest.
I heard the latch snap loudly in its groove,
then your footsteps fanning out to other rooms,
as wildly you locked every entry to our house.
Sister, the sizzling curses I spit out that day
strung you up and quartered you until you bled
throughout eternity like a slaughtered pig.
Never had newly borne words tasted so true or good:
Traitor! Sewer-slut! Scorpion shit! Shrew-lips!
I stood, one forearm smothering my breasts,
the other hand cupped over that darkened place
no eyes but mine had ever grazed before—
I called upon the gods of domestic revenge,
jazzy gods, bug-zappers, the gods of execution—
until my laughter overcame me like thunder.
I wept, roared, choked on my nascent fury:
what a sight I offered to wide-eyed drivers
who circled the block once, twice, and again
to see the girlish apparition of mottled flesh
screaming out lungsful of invective.
When I grew hoarse, you let me back in.
Too late: my smoking voice lingered on the air,
my oaths lodged upon the vines—ruby-eyed,
razor-toothed, almost divine.

—Maurya Simon
____
previously appeared in What Will Suffice: Contemporary American Poets
on the Art of Poetry, edited by Christopher Buckley and Christopher Merrill
(Gibbs Smith, 1995).

WHAT IS POETRY?

"...that which cannot be paraphrased?"
Well, so is a rock. Scissors. Paper.
Rock. Scissors. Paper. Mind.

Put your hands behind your back.
Just cup your palm for mind.
Choose one of the four. Be sly.

One. Two. Three. Go.
Paper beats rock. Wraps it up,
as history's lines wrap lies. We're stoned.

One. Two. Three. Show.
Scissors cuts mind into paper dolls.
(Descartes throws up before multiplied I's).

One. Two. Three. Whoa.
Mind beats rock, beats against rock
until world relents, and the matter settles

grit on the tongue. Two. Three. So.
Paper slices mind in tissue samples,
soul's salami, soul's Salamis of utter

defeat to a Kleenex-thinness of thinking,
how can a tornado drive a piece of straw
through a roof beam? But deep down

you know, you really know how,
if you've ever played the game before.
If you ever saw a page behead someone,

yet leave the heart furiously beating.
This is the praying mantis, death-in-life,
which leaps from leaf to leaf, life to life

and the dead all turn their heads
360 degrees when they are inside it.
And lovers are the only ones will ride it.

—W. B. Keckler

BOUSTROPHEDON TABLET 1

What does death matter if the energy continues to flow

Figure with decorated amphora as brain the permeating water

Appears to be bottomless knowing which is impossible

Masks have animals widening cavities without reason to

Someone killing someone awakens beside themselves, scattered particles

Images in drowning victims the seen we've greatly magnified

Many speak the shapes submerged and feral choreography

Self or tile forgets slack tide the whole idea subsumed

Dancing nudes pronged with dildo goving over memory hills

Markets weird affairs joining slaves touch masters yawning

Are these idyllic erasures the opposite surface polished our ears

Misses near language's a lattice of texture by ripened

May be traced to a film which develops appearances

Alive longing parasitic inhabited known but seen never

Imagined a bull's-eye blazoned on noise from Big Bang

Crackings vast the given is whosoever changes resemblings crossing

Having only a feather's weight the axiom is silence's tool

Soul the god's itself reveals number a division cell during

Matter is peripherally a centrifugal essence the rushing voice

Sleep core becomes everyone filling timing the inevitable is space

                     (lines to be read alternately left-to-right then right-to-left...
                                 or traditionally)

—W. B. Keckler

FOR KASIMIR

The punctuation of erotic cries shows, wet paint in the museum,
you want to photograph the proof, the grand stairway of entry
where the leaves stick to your shoes before we awake in gilt twitters
like the wrong Buddha on the right year, you open in the terminal
after a thunderstorm, the people are only music, forgive them.

                                                  ~ ~ ~

A man twisted and gyred in the fires of metaphors, he was on the news,
we saw him return always, on the windiest bridges, on the parapet
where the police had cornered him, on a branch of a tree in a poem
two thousand years old, he would never give up, a skin memento,
he was a spider-monkey in the tree of philosophy, screaming
like the bull of Heliogabalus until we could no longer hear his cries
in the traffic of our time, which was clearly in his key.

                                                  ~ ~ ~

                                                  You were leaving me,
it was an interesting lecture, The Cloud versus The Phallic, I was intrigued,
I found myself invested, holding stock, my skeleton worn to your shape
like those stairs in Benares, swaled almost to the shape of a woman's sex
I bent to kiss them and where were you just now, here's baba ganoosh
and sushi in sweet little alcoholic travel cases, because you're like that
aren't you, and I know how to sing along. The mortal lovemaking clouds.

                                                  ~ ~ ~

I mean the window shivers and laughs at the crucial moment
between something and everything you leave, I bend my pinky
into the problem, there is no "crucial moment," no crisis, no passion
that hasn't already survived us, nested elsewhere in the cosmic fluid like a swan
as fickle Zeus was, a shower of gold, a great waster of time, a better god
for this art, but why make love to a critic, anything that needs sick understanding.

                                                  ~ ~ ~

The rooms continue to mouth your damage, the nipples of it,
which is the ancient mother really, is wet sand. I walked there beside you,
without memory, the indivisible sound the ocean is continually trying
to make, like Cy Twombly invading Roman history with crayons
you are warmer, you are very close, now drink him down and find
at last the divine animal he conceals, love him lost, be grateful.

                                                  ~ ~ ~

The present has a flesh-hinge but denies it is a book. I have learned
unforgettable things, the fingers must be steel inside the painting,
the fingers must steal inside the painting, the kleptomaniacs of space,
like the white peasants in Malevich, who went ahead, brooming
all the snow of vision in preparation for Suprematism, cleaning out clouds
that chimed as if they were high crystals or vodka, or dead lovers, or lovers dead
to touch, how can I not love such peasants, those janitors of the avant-garde,

the only love of the New Year, a color's cold staring back.

—W. B. Keckler

How to Write Poems #510

Spelling is very important.
She was excited about
the bottle of gin, but
disappointed when
what came out of it
wouldn't grant
any wishes at all

—F. J. Bergmann
____
a version of this poem appeared on espressostories.com
with the title "Spell."

How to Write Poems #86

See, you take a language
you don't even know
and make up whatever
you think it looks like
it could say. Schickelgruber
becomes "shackled grubs"
or "sickle groove." Or "chick
leg rubber." Words are
squirming Rorschach splats
and you have a condition
not described in the DMS-IV.
Pictograms and hieroglyphs
are more, or possibly less,
accommodating. Barcodes are
the most challenging.

—F. J. Bergmann

How to Write Poems # 49

Rip a page from a defective
dictionary, or a dull novel. Cross
out the words you don't need,
like unnecessary or egregious;
words you don't like, such as
homeland or atrocity; words you
don't want, like heart or knife.
You may be left with nothing
but articles or pronouns,
those monosyllabic grunts
indicative of something
like passion, or pain.

—F. J. Bergmann

Ars Poetica

Poetry is an act of omission, until meaning narrows
into one knifeblade moment, dwindling to
a spark. The fine horse trots away
over the distant hill and the
horizon is empty,
the fog falling
just before
dark.

—F. J. Bergmann

“MYSTERY SURROUNDS BIRD DEATHS”

“Police said an estimated 200 birds, some of which dropped out of the sky
and pelted passing cars, wound up strewn along the highway about 4 pm.”
                                            —The Washington Post, March 31, 2000

As if a drop in barometric pressure, a hormonal dip
in the brain, some change in magnetic fields, as if

coded by one gene in one cell, one muscle’s electric firing,
the starlings came like snow sliding from roofs, muted brass,

they were stutter and flare. Black armbands stepping in a parade,
mallets drilling, a low rolling drum, they were

sheets snapping, coins clattering, beads slipped
from a string. They came like one hundred horns

and one hundred bells, the roar of the guillotine, they were
a shout from the stands. They were steel taps hammered,

toe and heel, the snap of a dancer’s fan. Hand on face,
knife on wood, without knowledge or forethought, they fell

like double-hungs, a kicked-out keel, and their long slide
was a skid on black ice, cards or pages bridging back.

They cleave. As if they couldn’t see the road curve
or the road rise, the long line of brake-lights flashing

or time the sun or the glare, as if they took
such pleasure in their dive, the green swerve of the world,

they couldn’t come out. Caught in a draft of synapse and nerve,
air shot from the bay, they were horses’ hooves, a squall of wings,

they were a sudden keening, as if they could descend so fully
into being, as if they are what they are, as if they are nothing else.

—Joelle Biele
____
previously appeared in Gulf Coast last year.

ARS POETICA

Sir, we have read
without compensation

and no more than usual
recourse to your rum

your entire oeuvre.
We have some questions:

Why no tempo?
It's all one glissando,

as though rubbing sticks together
could generate passion.

We divided on the issue:
What aspect of your work

is the most heartless?
The poisoned floss,

the severed necks
of old women? Others

chose the headlong
celebration of rules

or the brokered hypocrisy
of your critique of sin.

—Tad Richards

the naming, by Karl Kempton (20.5k .pdf)

of ink, by Karl Kempton (30.3k .pdf)

monument valley

luminous dark blue monument valley
full moon night silhouettes
they galloped in deep red powered soil

the dust covers the mind window
with index finger i write peering through
letters whose words can never approach
even in the humblest bows her experience,

“I still can not know how my
nine year old daughter held on
to her horse twenty years ago.”

01-18-07

—Karl Kempton

WORKING METHOD
fragments from:
"Ana Buigues' Selected Wrytings 2002-2005"
http://noemata.net/ab/
http://noemata.anart.no/ab/
ISBN 978-82-92428-48-1
ISBN-10 82-92428-48-8
Net.books: støttet av Norsk Kulturråd - supported by Arts Council Norway

Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 18:16:03 -0000
Sender: "WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines"

From: Ana Buigues
Subject: working method

1.write it down

2.email it

Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 18:19:57 -0000
Sender: "WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines"

From: Ana Buigues
Subject: working method

1.inspiration sometimes comes when cleaning email that has been piling up in
my inbox for the last year

2.reading outdated emails, calls for papers that i missed, letters from nice
people that i couldn't even answer, kiss off letters i received in response
to some job applications, and drafts i started and never finished, makes
one realize that time flies.

3.this apparently mindless task becomes a triggering point for deep
reflection, and reconsideration of one's life and work.

—Ana Buigues

For Rachel, Just before Speech

We are the body moving toward demise;
we are the soul, remnant of another life.

And always, rain tapping on a zinc roof
is the sound of fingers thrumming flesh.

Always, I return
to the things of this world, tethered.

You, who have come to me
from something, somewhere, I cannot name;

you who have a voice that does not speak
any language I know, yet unfurls bright wings,

alighting in each corner of this house;
you who are mine and not mine,

tell me the answers
while there is time.

—Shara McCallum
____
previously published in Image: a Journal of the Arts & Religion
& then reprinted in Evensong: Contemporary Poems on Spirituality

CURIOSITY PIECE
“...it is surprising how the morning air gives one ideas!”
--Scenes de la Boheme

Facing the blank of the wall,

turning toward the window, distracted
by a Puccini aria blasting from a Speedpack box
at the Car-O-Van blocking the sidewalk--
a neighbor is packing up a life, all the odd
whatnots, curious thingamabobs,
those whatchamacallits. No passerby veers
from the bellow of the taped tenor,
from the pell mell of the sidewalk--each stops,
has to stop, heads ticking back and forth.

Words drift this way and that

in from the fussy street, and I am distracted
as another curiosity piece enters the scene--
a sea blue‘52 custom Ford pickup
pulling up to the curb, a woman
in a cracked black leather jacket,
in low slung jeans and velvet high tops,
hair a slick of purple pomade, singing,
singing along in a froggy single-speaker rattle
to La Boheme.

Flightless bird beneath a storm-scratched sky,

I try to chip out my own sound
beneath this canvas of noisy spring flyway,
but I am distracted by Our Lady of Lourdes
churchbells chiming in almost midday
and something else I am getting up to do
that I forget in an instant, yet something
curiously more important now
than facing the blank of the wall--

where corners web with dust.

—Andrena Zawinski
____
appeared in Vermillion Literary Project Magazine

CALL HER:
Morning,
circling Lake Merritt in Oakland, California
and imagining Paris, France

This morning circling Lake Merritt, the birds
rouse the imagination with squawks, honks,
raspy cries. Slick cormorants line log booms
beating wings at mist, clumsy pelicans
slap at the water’s sheen, everything
awake on a snake of lake-light crawling
the gnarl of tree trunks--and Angelina
turns beneath her blanket on dewy grass,
turns there to kiss her lover on his cheek
as they rise there, as he calls out her name
like an urge, like a drive, like a hunger.
So in this poem name him Romero,
because you can. Imagine them instead
as they dance lakeside, Bois de Boulogne.

They dance lakeside at Bois de Boulogne
in Paris, France--dance with the same fluster
as birds circling in a raucous laurel
of wing beats, coos. But this is not Paris
but Oakland, California, and they
are homeless where sentries of city doves
preen at water’s edge on the lake wall’s lip
along a ducky little waterway.
This could be Bastille Day, could be Paris
dressed in pomp and flair, a firecracker
sky flushed in a blush of hoopla. Lovers
are the thing there. If you are not in love,
you will be, or steal into someone else’s,
too much Bordeaux too early in the day.

Too much Bordeaux too early in the day,
name them what you will--him Remy, call her
Adeline, because you can. That’s the thing
with poetry, it can pose lovers where
imagination wishes to have them
stir or waken or even dance around
in Paris. Here, part of the scenery
and art of invention, her hand in his
rests for now on her grumbling stomach
while a legion of pigeons guards the bank,
feet a polish of pink, eyes golden sequins,
garden varieties, yet necks lustrous
in a royal sheen of purple and green--
but this poem is not one for the birds.

This poem is not one for the birds, but
it is for that homeless girl blanketed
in this Paris of the imagination
wearing a wide-brimmed hat and scented
lavender, not at this man’s coarse and thick
hands grabbing mussels young gulls fuss over,
flurry of feathers caught in the brambles,
city doves strutting their velvet nightcoats,
pecking peanut shells she scrambles after.
She dances lakeside, Bois de Boulogne,
too much Bordeaux too early in the day
where a sweet rich napoleon calls her
with strong coffee all the muscle she needs,
someone else busy with birds in Oakland.

—Andrena Zawinski
____
appeared in Many Mountains Moving VII:1

THE POET DRIVING

The poet,
white knuckled
at the podium, drives
the crowd. And reeling,
as if taking on mountainous S curves,
or hydroplaning minefields,
the poet maps metaphors
in shag bark and hickory, staggering
the dappled sundown.

This could be
Kansas, Saigon, Mozambique, Peoria,
a road, bridge, underpass
where the poet dresses deathbeds
in thin sheets
of memory.
The clenched fist
becomes an open hand,
fingers that point
press into prayer.

And our silences
grow ravenous for this.
We choke down whole landscapes,
drink in cloud bursts, throb
with the starlit sky. We lean into the words
like a slow dance pinned to ourselves
like a corsage, like a lover, like a poem,
like the language
of applause.

—Andrena Zawinski
____
first appeared in The Pittsburgh Post Gazette

WRITING LESSON

“...all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it...”
--from Introduction to Poetry, Billy Collins

You knew you were in trouble
the second you put the plate on the table--
those sesame snow peas and truffles
you drizzled with kumquat and ginger
to impress your poetry potluck writing group--
when he said, Not Chinese again.

You knew you were in-for-it
when he called your poem a travelogue of Paris
grinding down the wrong track
with its Kunitz epigraph fumbling at the gears
as he blasted, The old man got to wear
that crown of Laureate just for his age.

You knew, despite your mince and trim
and folding in its metaphoric light,
this poem would be tied to the chair
with a rope, have the life beaten from it,
a flabby bunch of bunkum flattened
with his belting, Where is the cri de coeur?

And you knew in the way you know
in a half-wake state when you hear a train
in the distance barreling into your sleep
in a blur of whistles and grinds and whirs,
its metal scraping rails in a still night, deep
in dark, its muffled blue note wailing.

You knew you must be dreaming this
standing before a train coming on headlong
at you half-naked there, a train about to slice
through what you peeled down to--
an awful tutu, mismatched shoes, feather cloche
you shouldn’t be caught dead in.

Then this man with a train for a mouth
tells you this is not a well-lit poem
and the guy donning laurels in the first car
misdirected it--that it’s rocketing
down the wrong track on a collision course
headed right for Gare du Nord.

And you actually thank this man, talking
with a mouthful of train, for his observation.
But you don’t write a word for days
then weeks as you focus instead your eyes
on a wind riding dunes hitched to a slice
of tangerine light, shapeshifting sunset.

You put your ear to the movement of earth
beneath a frenzy of shorebirds pecking the eyes
from a head of a beached seal there. And speechless,
you listen for a fading blue note of a train
in the distance, off to somewhere far away.

—Andrena Zawinski
____
first appeared in Paterson Literary Review #32 with Allen Ginsberg Award Honors

STONE SOUP

Though I use words,
make from
and by words,
words are neither my clay
or my wheel,
my pot nor my spuds.
Words
are commonplace,
even in poverty
there are too many of them.

Pinch of salt,
pinch a rhyme -
it's forgers and spinners
call language a 'tool'.
And to call it a 'craft'
suggests
too set a goal
too honed a procedure.

Surely,
the poetic trick is
making a meal from
the saucepan.

—Sue Stanford
____
An earlier version published in Poetry Scotland's Open Mouse, Feb '05

TROCHA-SPONDALOOPIAN SONNET

          The Spondee

No such foot exists in English,
     SOME SAY.
Tell them otherwise? They’ll whistle
     NO WAY.
Even if you’re heading north to
     GREEN BAY--
Driving through a freezing blizzard
     ALL DAY
Stuffed inside a green and purple
     DOWN COAT
Fighting off a virus plus a
     SORE THROAT
They will still be adamant-- but
     DON’T GLOAT,
Don’t insist their hocus pocus
     WON’T FLOAT.
Even though they know that they are
     ALL WET,
Don’t expect that they’ll admit it—
     NOT YET.
Just relax, and it’ll happen,
     NO SWEAT.
Could it take another decade?
     YOU BET.
They will say, How silly of me,
     HO HO!--
(Will they add they’re very sorry?
     HELL NO.)

—Marilyn Taylor

In Memory of the Nissan Stanza Wagon, 1982-1996

                                   —for Ron Wallace

You hardly ever see one nowadays—
they’re nearly gone. Endangered, anyhow,
because of the intensifying craze
for S.U.V.s, the industry’s cash cow—

but some of us remember how it felt
to climb into that barren, boxy space,
yank and snap the fraying safety belt
and dream of glitz, and speed, and careless grace—

all the things our Stanzas never were,
by any stretch. But as we chugged
along the same old road, year after year
(handicapped, some said, by what we dragged

behind us from an unenlightened time),
we could sense a subtle turnabout:
our Stanzas were acquiring some acclaim
in circles with considerable clout.

Perhaps it was because we knew our beat
so well, the basic letter of the law,
while improvising several ways to cheat
a little, cut some corners, raise the bar

on all the disagreements, groans and whines
about what Stanzas could or couldn't do.
So if one comes your way, check out the lines
and brakes. Make it yours. And make it new.

—Marilyn Taylor
____
previously published in SUBJECT TO CHANGE (David Robert Books, 2004)

Cover Letter

Dear Sir or Madam: In this envelope
please find some poems that I have written.
I send them to you in the earnest hope
that you will read them and be wildly smitten.
In fact, you’ll jump up, cheering, from your chair
And holler out, Hey, get a load of these!
We’ve got the poems of the decade here,
we’d better print them in our journal! Jeez,
is this a little miracle, or what?
And then you’ll fax or phone me right away
to tell me that you’re breaking out a split
of Taittinger, to toast your lucky day
     and call me back to say you might as well
     FedEx my check this minute, what the hell.

—Marilyn Taylor
____
first published in the journal FREE VERSE

ON TRYING TO LIKE A POEM I DON’T UNDERSTAND

the title seems clear
enough tho even after
7 readings, I’m not
sure what it mans.
Somehow, there are
boys and grasshoppers
and capitals in the
middle of a line.
Someone not there
is wanting something
so much he could do
anything to get it.
Adjectives and
jesters stud the poem
somebody must have
understood to give
it a prize. Somebody
in the poem is having
nightmares. Or they
could be dreams. In
fact, every image in the
poem could be what
ever you want it to be

—Lyn Lifshin

LIKE A DARK LANTERN

I move thru the first
floor at 3 AM, past
the cat who is curled
in a chair half made
of her fur, turning
her back on air
conditioning, startled
to find me prowling
in the dark as if I was
intruding on stars and
moon and the ripple
in water that spits
back the plum trees.
Grass smells grassier.
The clock inches slowly
toward the light. A
creak of wood and the
soft scratch on the blue
Persian rug the cat claws
gently merge with some
night bird I’ve never
seen like a poem that
goes along and suddenly,
at the end, like a banked
fire, explodes into the
wildest flame that finishes
off everything that has
come before it perfectly

—Lyn Lifshin

THE FIRST WEEK AT THE ARTIST’S RETREAT

When I went to
type rain fills the
morning
it came out
pain
You would have liked, you
always saw things
as unfolding (said you
never knew past the
next plane
ticket where
I’ve been living in a house
with paper partitions,
like in Japan, keeping
everyone separate
But I didn’t know that
when I started this poem

—Lyn Lifshin