|
Always a bridesmaid …
That’s sort of how I feel about my poetry publishing history. Six chapbooks but no full-length book of poems. Oh, I put a manuscript together and entered it in various contests, but no luck. I’d like to try again, but first, I think I should learn more about constructing a poetry manuscript. And luckily, there’s help online. Here’s one source:
Order Out of Chaos: Revising Your Poetry Manuscript, by Nancy Reddy (Poets & Writers Magazine, November/December 2020)
And here’s another:
Thinking Like an Editor: How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript, By April Ossmann (Poets & Writers Magazine, March/April 2011)
Ossmann has good advice:
To achieve an order that maximizes strengths and minimizes weaknesses, it’s crucial to gain the editorial distance necessary to self-evaluate, to think like an editor. An exercise for achieving this is listing a minimum of two strengths and weaknesses per poem, as if preparing criticism for poetry workshop fellows. Some things to assess are syntax, diction, and voice; either too much or not enough description; the balance of abstract to concrete imagery or symbolism; the flow or rhythm; the presence or lack of tension or risk (narrative, dramatic, linguistic, formal, emotional); the capacity to surprise; line breaks; word choice (the best, most accurate, evocative choice for context); point of view; and the use (or misuse) of dialogue. Noting as many strengths and weaknesses as possible allows for the most objective evaluation of which poems are strongest and why. And now I’m going to work on gaining the “editorial distance necessary to self-evaluate.” Wish me luck.
And now I’m going to work on gaining the “editorial distance necessary to self-evaluate.” Wish me luck.
....................................................................................................................................
Speaking of marriage
After 50 years together, my husband and I have fallen into comfortable habits. We spend lots of time reading, mostly in English. But we know various other languages as well and often exchange words. How do you say it in Romanian? In Arabic? In French? That sort of talk led to the following poem, kindly published in June by Jim Lewis in
Verse-Virtual, which is rapidly becoming my favorite online journal:
What Words Do
You are yourself even while being
another – Abdelfattah Kilito
We speak all the languages, but in English
You on the couch with your profusion
of Turkish and Arabic books
Me in the chair, cat in my lap, Latin grammar
at hand
How do you say “grammar” in Romanian, French,
Italian, Spanish …
I bring up Google Translate on the phone
then turn on my online etymology app
Sure enough, they all go back to Latin
but Turkish and Arabic are another matter
entirely
It’s just one of the ways we two are -- ourselves
but with many languages, always checking
the dictionaries
Words hover between us, waiting to be
translated, waiting to be taken in by old minds
that may soon forget them
Calligrapher, writer, reader -- we are what
words we make, what words make us Read this, and two of my other poems,
here. Thanks, Jim!
....................................................................................................................................
After Poetry Month
April is all poetry, all the time. After all, it’s National Poetry Month, so there are plenty of opportunities to read, write, hear, and publish poems. Case in point: my friend
Zeina Azzam, a Palestinian American poet and poet laureate of Alexandria, Va., has posted poems on Facebook every day. And this year, given the tragic war in Gaza, she’s been concentrating on poems by Palestinian writers, including
Journey, by Lisa Suhair Majaj, a beautiful rumination on our path through life:
Already you’re walking down the road alone,
though you insist you can still turn back.
You’d rather not hear our grief-song,
so we offer silence, the one gift still possible.
Your body was the oldest home you ever knew.
Stalwart and reliable, it bore you across continents.
Now flesh proves traitorous, dead skin
sloughing like bark from a rotting tree—
though at the core, the wood still lives.
Don’t tell us what you see ahead.
Speak your way back to the beginning,
when it was still morning, and light undulated
off springtime fields like a promise.
You didn’t know then what roads you would travel.
You were young, and eager, and ready for life.
There was still so much time.
Now that poetry month is ending, I’m hoping Zeina will compile these wonderful poems and publish them -- a fitting tribute to the enduring poetic spirit.
....................................................................................................................................
Poetry as Community
I’ve been busy during National Poetry Month putting together a chapbook for the inelegantly named NaPoWriMo chapbook contest held each year by
Local Gems Press, which hasn’t left me much time to submit. So I’m grateful that Jim Lewis, editor of
Verse-Virtual, kindly published three of my poems in January. Here’s one:
I Dream of Equations
Gravitational Waves Create a Constant ‘Hum’
Across the Universe -- The Smithsonian, 6/29/23
Listen, the universe is humming.
Last audible rumble of the Big Bang
perhaps? Or the musical contribution
of angels who’ve forgotten the words?
Or, more likely, as scientists suspect,
what happens when supermassive
black holes spiral together to merge.
Whatever. I want to hear the hum,
gauge the frequency, the tone and pitch.
I watch the sky in ignorance, deaf
to the lapping of gravitational waves,
blind to any merger of black holes.
Physics, astronomy, and all the rest --
beyond my grasp, but how alluring.
I dream of equations chalked smartly
on a classroom board -- what secrets
they must hold, what treasures
of the intellect they suggest.
Tonight I watch for shooting stars,
treasuring their beauty even if I’ll never
understand the force behind them.
For my other two poems, check
here. And bear in mind that, as Lewis writes, “Verse-Virtual is … a community first. And then we are a journal.” Readers are encouraged to email the authors of poems they like, and then, as Lewis says, “Communication happens; friendships develop.” What could be better? Thanks again, Jim.
....................................................................................................................................
Buzzing with Books
Belated kudos to
Mike Maggio for his exceptional
Let's Call It Paradise. Not that he needs any kudos from me: The book won the
International Book Award for Contemporary Poetry in 2023--a well-deserved honor. Mike has moved the goalposts with these poems, exploring found poetry and collage poetry in works that examine, as he states, “the cross-pollination of social and political evolution.”
“Poetry depends on radicalizing the word, setting it on edge, turning it sideways, creating verbal revolution--all while saving meaning,” writes Maryland Poet Laureate Grace Cavalieri in her blurb for the book.
She might well be thinking of poems like “A Guide to the Signposts in the Garden of Eden,” which includes such messages as “Warning: / The Tree of Knowledge may be hazardous to your health. / Pick at your own risk.” Or the rather startling “#45,” which reads in its entirety: “Now you can wear your very own miracle. / The Spirit of Canada: / We bottled it. / A major new disturbance.”
*****
Reading the forthcoming Intrastate Lines, by Alexandra “Zan” Delaine Hailey, is at once heartening and heartbreaking. Zan, the daughter of Cathy Hailey, northern region vice president of the
Poetry Society of Virginia, died unexpectedly at an early age, leaving a collection of writing and art. The poems here are brief but evocative commentaries on life in all its complexity and beauty. Take, for example, number 8, in its entirety: “Dream against starstruck currents. / The moon awaits your embrace.”
The four-stanza number 20, a sort of ode to the interchangeability of friends and strangers, includes these lines:
Darling, follow me
into the next dimension
where the face I recognize
is the only one I know,
from skin to bone
and back out the skull…
Zan may have traveled into the next dimension, but she’s left us what Kathy Smaltz, Poet Laureate of Prince William County, VA, calls “a love letter to life”--a letter suffused with Zan’s creative spirit.
*****
Watching Bees, the new chapbook from the prolific
Michael Levin, is a potpourri of small marvels: observations of nature, family life, people and places, and current events, studded with classical and literary allusions. As Roderick Bates, editor of the delightfully named
Rat's Ass Review poetry journal, says, the book “bears witness to what it is to be human.”
In “Dancing with the Stars,” for example, Levin encapsulates his mother’s biography: “Three photos on a desk: / my mother at age eleven, then age / doubled; then beyond.” The poem ends with stark words: “But if we should be gifted with / full vision of that ballerina dance / in awe of sacrificial pain / we’d freeze.”
The book’s title poem describes a bee dancing through cherry trees, then bumbling from bloom to bloom. The turn comes near the end: “I’m looking / at a me who’s disregarded / by a bee. Whose eye sees less / acutely, seeking out a / hive.”
Unlike the bee, Levin’s eye sees acutely indeed.
....................................................................................................................................
Bzzzz …
And speaking of bees, DarkWinter Literary Magazine kindly published a bee poem of my own:
Tell Me, Bee
Experiments indicate that bees have surprisingly
rich inner worlds--Washington Post, 7/31/22
Good night, say the bees, embracingg
each other in a flower, clasping
each other’s feet.
They have worked hard today--
we know that about bees, know
they’re always busy.
But what a surprise that such tiny brains
are capable of thought and memory
and recognition.
Creativity too, I’d guess.
Their honeycomb an art.
Their buzzing a symphony.
Tell me what you’re thinking, bee
Tell me the secrets you whisper as you fly,
your dreams of sweet nectar fit for a queen
Tell me what it’s like to work together
for the hive, what it’s like to be
a being like you.
Tell me, bI must have been on an insect kick, because DarkWinter also published my “Myrmecology Report,”
here.
....................................................................................................................................
Double Helix
“In his masterful
This Mortal Coil, Eric Forsbergh explores DNA in a series of narrative poems that postulate why we are who we are and why that matters. The poems are arranged in groups of Sequence and Consequence, using often unexpected images and metaphors. In the opening poem, “Oracle at Delphi,” for example, Forsbergh writes, “Her cryptic utterance leaves / the sense of snakes inside your tunic” and goes on to say “Predestination latches to your skin.” No science book, the novice can still learn a lot about heredity in humans from these striking poems.”
That’s the blurb I wrote for my friend Eric Forsbergh’s new book, and I meant every word of it. A Vietnam vet and retired dentist, Eric holds a master’s level certificate in Biblical Justice and brings a lifetime of experience to his deeply intelligent poems.
In a time when it seems everyone is researching their ancestry, Eric writes numerous poems about his family. Finding a half-sister through DNA, for example, he regrets that it’s “Thirty years too late to ask” his father about her. And in “Gene Silencing,” about his grandmother’s cancer, he says “24 thousand genes grew her to fruition. / But a lone wolf mutated in her colon / and led to a metastasis of caliphates.”
Other poems address subjects as various as Neanderthals, covid, the Internet, drugs, and the Mexican salamander:
Axolotl
By Eric Forsbergh
Compared to the axolotl,
a foot or so of Mexican salamander,
we tower in our mastery. Yet
the axolotl packs DNA in tenfold quantity
to you and me. If only we could flourish
half its tricks. It regrows severed limbs.
Stressed, it stages metamorphosis.
Surgically implanted with a third eye,
in time, the axolotl gives it sight.
As a boy, I feared the neighbor soldier
home on leave, for what he did to me.
Recollection’s bed contorts into a rack.
Each memory is just another protein chain.
Could a surgeon release us into freedom?
Could she amputate a memory by cyberknife?
We’d end up like the axolotl, recovering
while a healthy stump of memory
regrows, fresh and newly pink.
I’ve known Eric for years. In fact, I was involved in the publication of his first poetry book,
Imagine Morning, published by
Richer Resources Publications, which kindly sponsors this blog. Eric and I meet regularly with a small group of other poets to share our work and get feedback. I don’t know where I’d be as a writer without friends like him!
....................................................................................................................................
The Human Whole
Submitting poems for possible publication can be a tedious business, especially when most of the time the answer is “thanks but no thanks.” Enter one of my very favorite online journals
Verse-Virtual, which is a community as well as a journal. Readers are encouraged to write directly to poets whose work they especially like, and the communication can lead to friendship.
My thanks to the journal’s editor Jim Lewis, who kindly published two of my pieces in the August issue. Here’s one:
Never Singular …
By Sally
Zakariya
With every step we take on earth,
they say, we’re walking on past lives.
And that’s not the half of it.
Today, as soot drifts through a sky heavy
with haze and smoke from wildfires up north,
I
imagine shards of other people’s memories
raining down from that famous cloud
where computers store their ones and zeroes.
Words, numbers, photos, snatches
of email conversations--I try to picture
who created them, who owned them
before they descended on me.
The boy studying climate change,
the couple exchanging love notes,
the woman on the brink of a breakthrough--
I almost catch a glimpse of them
surrounding me.
And there it is. We’re never truly
alone, never singular, never not a part
of the human whole.
Read them both
here.
....................................................................................................................................
A Voice from the Diaspora
Some Things Never Leave You, the new book by
Zeina Azzam, a Palestinian American poet and activist, tells a moving story of loss and love, of mourning and celebration … the story of an immigrant who savors memories while making a new home in a new country. She stakes her claim in “Bicultural,” the book’s opening poem:
I am a tree with grafts,
the hybrid with orange and red flowers
fed with morning sunlight
watered by rains that speak
a different language.
Similarly, in “At the Workshop on Identity and Ethnicity,” she laments that “We are advised not to write / anymore / about tabbouleh and hummos” and goes on to bid farewell to such Middle Eastern delights as mujaddara and cardamom-infused coffee. “A baklawa backlash is unfolding,” she concludes, “and I am starved for / metaphors.”
But metaphors serve Zeina well in this stunning book. In a section titled The Reach of Injustice, she calls on the moon to witness her woes. The section opens with “Iraqi Refugee Stories: Three Poems for Iraq.” Here is the first one of the three, in its haunting entirety:
Bring the moon with you--
it is the only witness
to our worn shoes,
the faces we left behind.
Tether it to your arm
and bring the moon with you
a lantern to light the river,
the way to our stories.
The book concludes with poems of understanding, love, and acceptance. One of my favorites is “Peacefulness at the River,” which begins “Each day the river calls out to me. / I make a pilgrimage of thanks / at its ragged banks.” Later in the poem, Zeina writes: “All I have to do is be present / at the river’s edge.” There, she finds “… peacefulness / and the bright clarity of water.”
The City of Alexandria, Virginia, is lucky to have Zeina as its poet laureate. I’m lucky to have her as a friend. And you’ll be lucky to read
Some Things Never Leave You, available from
Tiger Bark Press.
....................................................................................................................................
Let’s Chat
Okay, I admit it. I’m sorely tempted to play around with
ChatGPT and see what kind of poetry it comes up with. I wouldn’t try to pass off AI work as my own, but I could turn over an unsuccessful poem and see what an AI bot would do to improve it. Or maybe I should just keep revising …
At any rate, I’m obviously not the only person who’s thought about this. Recently,
American Songwriter asked ChatGPT to write a nursery rhyme about human history. Here’s the first stanza, complete with its somewhat limping last line:
In Ages Past
In ages past, our story begins,
A tale of humans, their triumphs, and sins.
From ancient times to present day,
Let’s sing a nursery rhyme about their way.
“The opening stanzas in the nursery rhyme are full of wonder,” American Songwriter says in its analysis of the piece. “A key line, in the beginning, is, They hunted, gathered, learned to thrive / In harmony with nature, they’d survive.
“But as the rhyme continues, it shows human beings begin to live less in harmony with nature and more in the business of technology and machinery. This, of course, has its great benefits and its big issues. Life is a balance, after all.
“The rhyme ends with hope, as it also provides a lesson to readers: be bold but do not be ignorant of the past. Each is supremely important as we move into a new future.
“With hope, in a century or two,” American Songwriter concludes, “that have more good things to say about human life.”
Hmmm. Let’s wait and see.
....................................................................................................................................
Meanwhile …
Now that I’m in my 80s, I can’t help thinking about what’s coming. No rush, but … Anyway, I’ve written a few poems about the end times, including this one, which was recently published in the 2023 Spring/Summer issue of
Maryland Literary Review:
Invitation to the End
By Sally Zakariya
So much to treasure here and now--
the smooth teacup in my hand
the conversation of sparrows at the feeder
the breeze carrying the scent of spring
Each one a small instance of goodness--
so many every day--but the stern arithmetic
of age tells me I approach the end
In sleep, some weightless part of me,
freed from the tired body, welcomes
a limitless cosmos, studded with stars,
suffused with the solace of love
Awake, I do not question the truth
behind my dreams
....................................................................................................................................
Why Poetry?
It’s
a good question. The poetry class I’m taking now
is reading
Frank O'Hara and
Mary Oliver, a delightful combination. One
of our first assignments was to write two small
poems that talk to each other; one in the voice
of the lover and one in the voice of the desired
one (which, by the way, didn’t have to be a
person). It set me thinking about my love of
poetry, which stood in for the desired one in
this assignment.
For me, poetry only drops in from time to time,
but I want more. I want poetry to be a constant
guest in my mind, in my heart. Instead, I get
occasional bouts of inspiration, which sometimes
lead to chapbooks, and I’ve just published a new
one.
The wonderful
Kelsay Books has graciously published my
All Alive Together, also available on
Amazon. The title comes from a comment a
friend made while we were talking about the
accumulating ills of the world. And yes, we are
all alive together here on this fragile planet
and beyond, should there be life somewhere out
there.
“Sally Zakariya’s poems spotlight our easily
shatterable life on Earth,” says
Zeina
Azzam, a Palestinian-American writer and
activist who is currently Poet Laureate of
Alexandria, VA. “In the path to healing,
Zakariya enjoins us to ‘look up and listen’ to
nature--the crows, the sky, the planets she
imagines singing to each other.”
Speaking of crows, here’s a poem from the
collection:
Crow
Consciousness
By Sally
Zakariya
Strutting
smartly on the
lawn in sleek
black suits
like
Philadelphia
lawyers or
Mafiosi
the crows
convene,
converse, sharp
eyed,
heads nodding.
What do they
know, these
clever birds?
Oh, sure, they
recognize the
guy who gives
them peanuts.
And they know
how to make
simple tools to
reach
out-of-reach
food.
But that’s not
all. Aware in
the world,
crows know their
place in the
scheme ¬
of things. Why
else that shrewd
chortle,
that penetrating
gaze?
Why else would I
sense crows have
something
important to
say? Something
about the taut
line
between spirit
and earth, about
thought
and memory and
the great sky.
Maybe someday I’ll publish a full-length book of poetry. In the meanwhile, I
hope you’ll enjoy this slender volume.
....................................................................................................................................
Revise, Revise
That’s the message on a postcard from the
Poetry
Society of America that I keep posted front
and center on my bulletin board. And it’s good
advice for any writer, perhaps especially for a
poet. Reviewing the final proofs of my new
chapbook, I had to fight the urge to revise
poems yet again. Nothing’s ever exactly right,
is it?
I’ve been rereading
A Poetry Handbook, by the great Mary Oliver,
who has wise words indeed on the matter of
revision. “One of the difficult tasks of
rewriting is to separate yourself sufficiently
from the origins of the poem--your own personal
connections to it,” she writes. “Without this
separation, it is hard for the writer to judge
whether the written piece has all the
information it needs--the details, after all,
are so vivid in your own mind.” But on the other
hand, Oliver continues, “because of this very
sense of ownership, the poem is often burdened
with a variety of ‘true’ but unhelpful details.”
As she explains, poems may begin in experience
but they’re not “exact reportage” of that
experience. “Imaginative constructs,” she says,
poems “do not exist to tell us about the poet or
the poet’s actual experience--they exist in
order to be poems.”
Exactly. When I write about a childhood
experience and my sister tells me I’ve got the
details wrong, I tell her, “This isn’t history.
It’s poetry.” Or, as John Cheever said far
better than I ever could, “I lie, in order to
tell a more significant truth.”
So keep on revising, preferably with input from
your poet friends. And remember, as Oliver
advises, that “out of writing, and the
rewriting, beauty is born.”
....................................................................................................................................
Harmony on the Page
Music, dance, nature, memories … these are the threads from which Cathy Hailey weaves her graceful poems in
I'd Rather Be a Hyacinth. Hailey, Northern Regional Vice President of the
Poetry Society of Virginia, has dedicated the book to her late daughter Alexandra “Zan” Delaine Hailey, herself a poet, artist, and dancer. And Hailey’s mothering instinct, evident in her long involvement in youth poetry, is made clear in the title poem:
In Life …
By Cathy Hailey
Hyacinths, purple--
baby blooms adding stress, weight--
instinct maternal.
Tulips variegate
orange-yellow, dancing, coy,
above troupes of green,
singular pride, joy
even with no breeze.
In life, I’d rather
be a hyacinth,
embrace the role of mother
live the labyrinth,
loved by a brood of florets--
barycenter of orbits.
Here, and in the other poems in the book, Hailey writes in the haiku sonnet form, which she describes as “a marriage of eastern and western poetics styles.” It consists of four haiku followed by a couplet and uses the abab cdcd efef gg rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet.
The collection includes a number of ekphrastic poems inspired by ballet performances. “Falling Rose,” for example, reflects the Rose Adagio from Act 1 of Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” and ends serenely with the rhyming couplet “Though each suitor gifts a rose, / Beauty falls into repose.”
Hailey’s lyric poems also touch on personal memories, such as “Romance Remembered,” which begins: “Tea kettle whistles, / inviting afternoon tea. / Mom reminisces.” Touchingly, it concludes: “She reminds me to write all / before she cannot recall.”
As Maryland Poet Laureate
Grace Cavalieri notes, “Clarity and prosody. East and West, formalism and liberation, all come together in
I'd Rather Be a Hyacinth. There’s nothing more beautiful than harmony on the page.”
....................................................................................................................................
Food and Love
After 50 years in print publishing, it’s hardly surprising that I like having my work appear in print poetry journals, which are increasingly rare. Hurrah, then, that one of my poems will be available in actual ink on paper in the March 2023 issue of
Non-Binary Review, a quarterly themed literary journal from Zoetic Press. The theme for the issue is food.
Deviled Egg Love
By Sally Zakariya
Jack Sprat in reverse, my father
had a love affair with food--
not so my bone-thin mother.
She was all portion size and no
dessert--if there were lamb chops
for dinner she’d cook one each,
no seconds.
If they argued I never heard it,
but I could taste the tension
at the dinner table.
Always wanting more, he clipped
recipes from Gourmet magazine
although he knew he’d taste them
only in his mind.
When mother visited her maiden
aunts, he’d take us kids for cheesecake
at Blue Mirror Grill.
He grew up with sweet potatoes,
pecan pie, pancakes, a pitcher
of melted butter on the table.
What do you cook for a man like
that to celebrate? No baker, one
year Mother made a birthday
baker’s dozen of his favorite
deviled eggs.
The best present ever,
he said.
Like to hold poetry in your hand? The final issue will be available for sale on the
Zoetic Press website on 1 March.
....................................................................................................................................
Rhymes with DNA …
My poet friend Eric Forsberg has turned his medical mind to deoxyribonucleic acid, familiarly known as DNA. A Vietnam vet and retired dentist, Eric has written a collection of poems about heredity; that is, about the genetic information we inherit that shapes our characteristics. Tall and blond like father? Check. That sort of thing. But as a thoughtful poet with a scientific bent, Eric is far more nuanced. Here’s one of the poems from his collection:
Gene Silencing
By Eric Forsberg
siRNA: a lab-made protein to silence a specific gene.
Somehow, the Twin Towers crossed my mind today:
that mountains could collapse.
Girders plunging, skewering the subways.
Ten-foot panes of glass exploding on the streets.
Three thousand dead it was,
as I recalled my grandmother
curled up cursing, rasping at me not to talk
as carcinoma multiplied its knuckled fingers
choking her intestines.
All of it, pre morphine lollipops.
All of it, before that one gene could be silenced.
Genes by the thousands grew as her fruition.
But the lone wolf mutated in her colon,
into a metastasis of caliphates.
Like an al-Qaeda operative,
that gene might now lie silenced,
darted with an
siRNA,
barely breathing,
a black sack on its head.
How long before it coughs up
its encrypted mother lode?
At times, I saunter
familiar avenues of memory.
Clusters of events reside
inside each family member’s shop,
each with its attenuated light:
gin rummy played into the night,
the way she squeezed my cheek,
the look when she approved of my new girl,
textures of her borscht.
But now, my recollections
stagger the streets, speckled and embedded
by the shattered glass of her agonies.
And even now I feel
her fingernails digging in my wrist.
Eric tells me he’s compiling a manuscript of his DNA poems. Poetry publishers
out there, keep an eye out.
....................................................................................................................................
‘Our Changing Earth’
"Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns,” says the United Nations. “These shifts may be natural, but since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels, which produces heat-trapping gases."
Climate change is a timely, and vital, topic, and The Poet Magazine has published a two-volume collection of poems entitled
Our Changing Earth, containing 198 contributions from 193 poets in 46 countries. And yes, I’m one of them:
The New Thaw
By Sally Zakariya
Permafrost at the top of the world
isn’t so permanent these days.
Already the earth is hummocked
and cratered from thawing wedges
of solid ice.
Already decaying plants and beasts
are belching out carbon and methane
into the atmosphere.
Already scientists are mining ancient
DNA from long-frozen mammoths
in hopes of cloning new ones.
Already a tiny worm has awakened
from thousands of years of icy sleep
and reproduced itself.
What old-new life will come next
amid this warming climate?
We survived a thaw millennia
ago. Will we survive this time?
Eric (see above) writes about more than DNA. His poem “The Smell of Snow” appears in volume 2 of this collection, as does mine.
....................................................................................................................................
Poetic History
“I wanted this book to be about a history, a unique cultural and social experience, with a sincere poetic feeling, if not expression, as well,” Richard Eric Johnson told me about his new book
Free Air Berlin: Of a Wall and a Walnut Tree. And Eric, as I know him, got that and more in his fifth book of poetry.
Filled not only with sharp, stunning poems but also a chronology and list of recommended reading, among other features, the book tells the story of the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall. Eric lived in West Berlin between 1968 and 1974 and has returned frequently on research trips, motivated, as he says, “by the idea that history can be presented through the poetic form.”
Indeed it can. Eric tells the story in four parts, from Wall on the Way to Wall Gone Away, in his typical succinct manner. For example:
Until We Meet Again
Barriers in place
go no further
people cars trains
stuck in time
coiled razor wire glow
bad present
faces tense
eyes perplexed
anger multitudes frustration
shout deafened ears
cold heart finger tips
trigger-touch guns
silent wet eyes
lips blow kisses
across The Wall
Eric’s strength is to say a great deal in very few words. He and I meet monthly to exchange poems, a particularly valuable experience given how different our writing styles are. As an editor, I spent years tightening up other people’s writing, Xing out extra words right and left. Yet my own poems often suffer from a totally unnecessary verbosity (see what I did there?), which Eric generously helps me trim.
There’s a lot to be said for brevity. Years ago, asked “What in modern life is the particular function of poetry as distinguished from other kinds of literature,” T.S. Eliot replied: “Takes up less space.” Okay, maybe there was more than a touch of sarcasm in that answer, but I wonder if Eric may have been listening.
....................................................................................................................................
An Online Community
My new favorite poetry journal,
Verse-Virtual, recently published not one but three of my poems. Here’s one:
Quantum Notions
Thinking about science it seems
I could walk through walls or trees--
through the ephemeral elementary
particles that make up everything
drifting, darting, always in motion
a universe of movement
a world of happenings
not things
Could it be that the flesh I feel
when you take me in your arms
is not just the dance
of one to another, but also
an internal congruence
atom to atom
We two constitute a random event
one of an infinity of interactions--
a tiny collision in an uncaring cosmos
perhaps, but what a fortuitous one
earth!
You can read the others
here. My thanks to Jim Lewis, editor of this fine “online community journal of poetry.”
....................................................................................................................................
Word into Word
Some years ago, my friend
Elizabeth Freire, a brilliant sculptor from Brazil (see “The Dreamer” at right), asked me to help translate a poem she had written in Portuguese. Because I don’t know the language, she gave me a rough translation:
Stones speak.
Each of them has its own language
shape and size they wish to turn into.
Some choose to become monuments,
others choose to be cut into pieces,
and some choose to be colored.
To decipher them is to bring out what is already there.
It is hard work, a work of patience.
One needs time for them to reveal themselves.
One needs time to get to know them.
I’ve often wondered about translating poetry. Reading the work of Swedish poet
Tomas Transtromer, for example, I can appreciate his taciturn, enigmatic poetry but I’m curious what it sounds like in the original. The same goes for translations of poetry by contemporary Russian writers. I have fewer questions about translations of Chilean poet
Pablo Neruda, but only because I have a nodding acquaintance with Spanish.
What do translators do? The prolific poet
W. S. Merwin, who has published nearly 20 books of translation from such languages as Japanese and Italian, has called it “the impossible art of translating poetry at all.” One problem, he says, is that “we want the translation to be exactly what it never can be: the original.” (See more in his
Selected Translations.)
How to do the impossible? I didn’t even try. Instead, intrigued by Elizabeth’s words, I thought it would be nice to include the sculptor herself and to be a bit more specific about the stones. So I took the liberty of writing my own adaptation/extension of her poem:
The Stones Speak
The
stones speak to
the sculptor,
each
in its own
language.
Listening, she
understands.
The
stones choose
their own shape
and size,
their
own destiny.
The
granite chooses
to be a
monolith,
standing strong.
The soapstone
chooses to be
carved,
transformed.
The
marble chooses
to flaunt its
rosy color.
To
decipher the
stones’ desires
is to bring
out
what has been in
them since
the
world was new.
The sculptor’s
work is hard,
but she is
patient.
She
takes time to
know the stones.
She gives them
time to reveal
themselves.
Thanks, Elizabeth, for letting me collaborate with you on this little poem.
....................................................................................................................................
Playing the Odes
And speaking of (well, mentioning) Neruda, reading his
Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon for a class this spring, I started playing with odes--poems in praise of just about anything. I started with a bunch of printing and punctuation pieces: odes to the index, the ampersand, the parenthesis. Here’s one that (thank you,
Verse-Virtual) got published:
Ode to the Asterisk*
O little star, little star!
The Sumerians formed you
with a wedge-cut reed, and now
you stand for almost anything
but “star.”
From ancient days to medieval times, show insertions,
deletions, or corrections.
Victorians turned to you to suggest discreet passage of time--the lights
are dimmed, the curtain drawn ***.
In comics you join a jumbled host
of signs and symbols to take the place
of naughty words.
And, of course, you signal the footnote--
that oh so scholarly way to cite a source
(or maybe add a few sarcastic words).
How much we ask of you, little star! h heavy tasks for your six sweet
symmetrical arms!
O keyboard hero, glyph of glyphs,
what must the heavenly stars think of you,
their tiny namesake come down to earth!
*From the Greek nother of my many corvid poems, “Crow Consciousness,” was published along with it. You can find them both
here.
....................................................................................................................................
Poetry for Ukraine
it’s National Poetry Month, but this is a good time to look beyond the “national” part and focus on the poetry. These days, it’s hard not to write about the tragic war in Ukraine, the first war in Europe since World War II; Ukraine, where more than 10,000 civilians have been killed in the city of Mariupol alone; where nearly two-thirds of all the country’s children have been forced from their homes; where the European Union, the International Criminal Court, and a host of journalists and other observers are documenting rapes, torture, execution, and other war crimes.
How can poets everywhere not write about Ukraine? British writer
Robin Barratt, editor and founder of
The Poet Magazine, has compiled an impressive international collection of writers who want to support Ukraine through their poetry. The result, Poetry for Ukraine, includes work by 254 poets from 53 countries. My small contribution:
Leaving Ukraine 2022
by Sally Zakariya
The turn of winter, the cusp of spring
snow trampled, smudged, bloodied
Around you a dirge of shrieking sirens
percussion of artillery shells
Beneath you the beat of train on tracks
as you flee from a broken city …
flee seeking shelter in another land
with a cousin you barely remember
Now a curtain of dust and smoke
clouds what is left … the rubble …
the deaths … the duty to resist
Everything once was blue as morning
“From award-winning multi-published poet laureates, to emerging poets exploring words for the very first time; from university professors, actors, psychologists, artists and journalists, to students, domestic workers, librarians, teachers and care-workers; from high-schoolers, to the over eighties,
Poetry for Ukraine brings together [poets] from around the world, all showing their support for Ukraine,” says Barratt.
Buy a copy for yourself and one for a friend
here.
All profits go to the Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund.
....................................................................................................................................
My Friend the Poet Laureate
It’s not every day that a member of my small poetry group is published on the Academy of American Poets’
poem-a-day email newsletter and is appointed poet laureate of Alexandria, VA. But my friend Zeina Azzam has achieved both of those impressive milestones. Zeina, a Palestinian American poet and activist, is the author of
Bayna, Bayna: In-Between, published by The Poetry Box and reviewed here not long ago.
“Where else in our homes can we find an international assembly, a veritable United Nations, than in our spice cabinets?” asks Zeina, discussing her poem
Nine Spice Mix."The nine world spices in my poem, an exuberant bunch, travel across borders and blockades to lift up Palestine and celebrate the Palestinian palate.”
Nine Spice Mix
By Zeina Azzam
This spice mix is featured in many of the dishes in this book, lending them a uniquely Palestinian flavor.--Reem Kassis, The Palestinian Table
First they tango on my tongue,
nimble couples careening,
then together
form an Arab-style line dance
stepping, stomping, swaying.
West Indies allspice dazzles,
berries tangling with cinnamon sticks,
while cloves, Indonesian natives,
lead with a spirited solidarity solo.
Coriander seeds offer greetings in Hindi
as others toast comrades in languages
beyond borders and blockades.
Lifting up sisterhood, sun-wizened nutmeg
starts a sibling dance with mace.
Cumin demurs, then surprises
with subtle exultation.
Queen of spices cardamom,
host of the party, gives a nod to flavors
in hiding: lemony, sweet, warm,
fragrant, nutty, pungent, hot.
Encouraged, feisty black peppercorns
shimmy center stage, organizing
the unique union of nine
for a vivacious global salute.
Ummm. Delicious. Congratulations, Zeina!
....................................................................................................................................
In the Woods
After a somewhat disheartening round of rejections (something I’ve had plenty of time to get used to), I was thrilled to have three pieces accepted for a new journal,
Wood Cat Review, whose aim is “to serve as a showcase for new and emerging writers whose work captures the spirit and experience of the wild.” Here’s one of them:
Overlook, Great Falls, Virginia
by Sally Zakariya
They come in twos and threes
families, weekend walkers, visitors
from flat dry lands, kids running
ahead, dogs straining at the leash
breasting the brisk air
And yes the falls are breathtaking
worth a few selfies at least before
checking email and walking on
missing the trio of hawks
that wheel high against the blue
the woody fringe that rings
the shagbark hickory
the sharp smell of the water
with its rush and roar
telling the rocks who’s boss
My cat Monty is sleeping on my desk, possibly dreaming of becoming a wood cat. If he could read, he could find my other two poems
here.
....................................................................................................................................
All that Jazz
Reading
Riffs & Improvisations, the new collection of poems by
Gregory Luce, was like stepping into a time machine for me. The beat pulses powerfully, lyrically from the pages, from the first poem, “Music to It,” to the last, “Return to a Love Supreme.”
If I could just
put music to it
this feeling
that drives me
through the
Metro station
wanting to dance
and glide
like a
disembodied
spirit
seen and
not seen
between
all these other
bodies …
So begins the collection, taking me back, way back, to when I was single and living in Washington, DC. We haunted Blues Alley and the late-lamented Bohemian Caverns in those days, feeling the music pound in our souls. Or, as Luce puts it in “Double Bass
The plucked notes of the bass
mimic my heartbeats and then
the bow draws out a long
low moan the way your hand did
drawn across my back.
These are love poems--love of jazz, of a partner, of the city. Holding lived experience up to the light so readers see the transcendent in the ordinary … that’s what the best poetry does. In a 2016
interview with Delphi Quarterly, Luce says, “I seem to get a great deal of my inspiration in times of quiet reflection or observation” and goes on to explain that he wants “readers to take a fresh look at the things around them, even the seemingly most mundane, and see their unexpected beauty.” Take, for example, his short poem “Improvisation: ‘Better git in in your soul.’”
Better embrace it like Mingus’
bass, stroke it, caress it, pull it in,
draw it like smoke, drink it
like old bourbon burning
all the way down.
Then give it back.
Luce, who grew up in the Midwest, has been actively involved in the DMV poetry scene for years. (That’s District, Maryland, and Virginia, not Department of Motor Vehicles.) He serves on the board of directors of DC-based
Day Eight, whose mission is “to empower individuals and communities to participate in the arts through the production, publication, and promotion of creative projects.” One of those projects is
Bourgeon, which showcases visual, performing, and literary arts, including, of course, poetry.
Thanks for your many contributions to poetry, Gregory Luce. And thanks for the music.
....................................................................................................................................
Thanksgiving Coda
And speaking of thanks, shouldn’t every day be Thanksgiving? OK, that’s a corny thing to say, but think about it. Think of all the things you’re thankful for, even in dark days, even when all’s definitely not right with the world. Some days it’s hard to come up with much of a list, but even then, I’m grateful for the urge to write, no matter the result. A few years ago, I put it like this:
Gratitude Journal
bySally Zakariya
I’m grateful for the obvious
(family, friends, health)
but also the more obscure –
for the difference between
what something is and what
it appears to be and the space
in between and the circuitous
routes we take in that space.
And for the space between words,
between music notes--pauses
that can say so much.
And then there’s the vast space
between Saturn and its rings,
revealed when the spacecraft
Cassini flew near, then dove
into destruction in the planet’s
atmosphere.
And most of all I’m grateful
or the curiosity and itch
that drives us humans
to see things differently
to write poetry and music,
to reach beyond our own
small planet.
....................................................................................................................................
The Guardian
The dead shouldn’t be left alone “like a piece of luggage in a locker someplace,” says Rabbi Shloma Freed of West Hollywood’s Chevra Kadisha Mortuary. Someone should stand watch, and for observant Jews, that person is the Shomer, or guardian, who safeguards the body of the deceased until burial.
“More generally, the term Shomer has been used to describe an individual who acts as a guardian in the context of both daily routines and significant life events,” writes Ellen Sazzman in her new poetry book
The Shomer. “The goal of the Shomer,” she continues, “is to witness, to attend, and to protect those who can no longer protect themselves. Under the best of circumstances, the Shomer gains a glimpse into the liminal, into what happens in the space between love and loss, hunger and fulfillment, forgetting and remembering.”
And that’s just what Ellen does in her accomplished poems, from the book’s first lines (“To Chaya”),
Before I can tell her I love her, before
I am with her and the eyes, the eyes
are closed at Torchinsky’s Funeral Home …
to the closing prose poem, “The Fast,” she keeps watch over family, love, history, and belief with an eye that is both tender and confident and sometimes humorous. (“Men like a little fat to grab hold of as long as it’s tender,” she writes in “Brisket Wars.” “Learn to make / the bloody recipe. Be generous. Brisket’s a forgiving cut, a very forgiving cut.”)
I’ve been in classes with Ellen for years and can’t read her poems without hearing her distinctive voice, seeing in my mind’s eye the picture she draws:
My Father’s Last Visit to Marconi Beach
by Ellen Sazzman
Five months before his fluid-filled lungs drown
further breath, a nurse’s aide the sole witness
to his death, we watch Father challenge the tide
for what seems like hours, his knees so swollen
he can barely stand. His unspoken wish:
to submerge into the numbing Atlantic,
to swim beyond the whitecaps following
his long-gone brothers’ flickering shadows
crooning riddled shanties. He clutches
the waistband of his too-big trunks. Waves knock him
hard against rocky sand. Already battered
by disease and its harsh cures, he lurches
up again. Finally he sits, lets the breakers
take him under. We jump fast, drag him out.
(Note how the break before the final couplet lets you know that, yes, this is a sonnet.)
Published by Finishing Line Press, The Shomer
is Ellen’s first book of poetry but not, I hope, her last.
....................................................................................................................................
The Plumber
Even the most everyday events can find their way into poems. Clearing out clogged drains is a pretty uninteresting task, but the plumber who helps us is anything but. I wrote about him recently, and
Third Wednesday was kind enough to publish the
poem:
Plumbing
by Sally Zakariya
The plumber comes to deal with the shower
We see him once or twice a year
this slight, dark man from Ethiopia
When he’s done he joins us for a cup of tea
strokes the cat, murmurs in its ear
I want to ask him about the civil war
raging in his country but instead
I say how I admire the churches
cut from living bedrock
They’re built by angels, the story goes
I picture cherubim with hammers and chisels
carving a haven for the spirit
I’ve never been to Lalibela, he says
I hope someday to go there
Meanwhile he scours down clogged drains
to clear away the detritus of life
The same link will take you to another of my poems as well. Thank you,
Third Wednesday.
....................................................................................................................................
9/11 + 20
It changed everything. We remember where we were when we heard the dreadful news and saw the towers fall, images etched forever in our memories. Now, 20 years later, we’re inundated with pundits, politicians, and historians telling us what it all meant then, what it means for America now and going forward.
It’s worth listening to people who lived through it. Julia Frey, whose poem “For Ron, Dead Ten Years” appeared here a few months ago, was there when the planes hit and wrote about it--a gripping first-hand experience:
Very quietly Ron said, “You know, I think the Towers are going to go. Maybe we’d better get out of here.”
We suddenly realized that if either of the Towers fell at a certain angle, our building was directly in the line of fall. Above the raging flames, the perpendicular steel I-beams were beginning to bulge out, softening in the heat.
Again his unnaturally quiet voice, “I can’t stay here. If the Towers fall on us, I’ll die of fright.”
Her book, Balcony View: Living at Ground Zero after 9/11, is now available in a 20th anniversary edition from
Amazon.
That day I was in my office just a few miles from the Pentagon. Sometime later, I wrote about the experience in a poem that also appeared here a while ago and was published in the 2020 anthology
Written in Arlington, edited by Arlington Poet Laureate Emerita Katherine E. Young and published by
Paycock Press:
September Song
by Sally Zakariya
It seemed like the ruination
of everything yet we went on
some things got better, some got worse
and we were left marveling
at what we could handle, wondering
what would come next
Three miles from the Pentagon
we saw a rain of objects, stuffing
from airplane seats, floating,
drifting, insubstantial yet
consequential, some landing
on the office roof while inside
we watched it all unfold
in real time on the screen
Years later we are still wondering …
wondering after a summer
of destruction overseas, disparity
at home, slaughter of innocents
in the streets, dreading now
what could come next
Also from
Written in Arlington is this moving day-after poem by my friend
Jackie Jules:
September 12th
by Jacqueline Jules
Muscled men with sun-drenched skin
were out the next morning at 9 a.m.
fighting weeds with gas-powered blades.
After hours of watching the smoking rubble
of collapsed buildings on a TV screen,
it was a comfort to sit at a stoplight
and watch men sweat
over bushes and green grass
in the bright September sun--a comfort
to see others resuming jobs as if
the lives we led on Monday still mattered.
Yesterday's siege of smoke and sirens
had not touched this tree-lined street
too far from the Pentagon to smell the flames.
I drove on familiar roads,
flanked by buildings and sidewalks
unchanged by the dark voice on the radio
reporting the dead and missing.
Except for light traffic, the streets
appeared to lead back to Monday's
aggravation over a broken copier and
cheap toilet paper in the ladies--
not stories of spouses who saw the plane hit,
children who felt the rumble in their classrooms.
I drove on, recalling the wide blue eyes
of the woman on the lobby couch,
silent tears inching down her cheeks
while the dark voice on the radio
reported smoke at the Pentagon,
swallowing the world
we knew before.
That world, “the world we knew before,” has been changed in huge and heart-breaking ways--and in subtle ways that continue to affect our lives. Twenty years on, we commemorate those who were lost. And we muddle on.
....................................................................................................................................
Stargazing
You don’t have to be an astronomer to be entranced by the night sky. I’m a sucker for stars, so when he talks about constellations and planetary motion, I listen with awe to my husband, who knows enough about the sky to design and make sundials and astrolabes.
Measurement and instruments are his domain; words are mine. My thanks to Gregory Luce and the good folks at
Day Eight for publishing four of my poems, along with a gorgeous photo by Rochus Hess, in
Bourgeon, a beautiful initiative to bring arts and audiences together around literary, visual, and performing works. Here’s one of my poems, which appeared online in late May:
Star Light, Star Bright
“The universe is under no obligation to make
sense to you.”--Neil deGrasse Tyson
I never asked the stars to spell your name
or said the sun should rise especially for us,
and when the full moon went into eclipse
I never thought night darkened just for us
and us alone.
There’s something to be said for planets,
how they ride their measured rings
around the sun, and something to be said
for meteorites, those rocky tears
the cosmos sheds.
But let science say what can be said
about it all--it makes no sense to me.
I watch in wonder as the heavens
wheel and drink it in, enthralled.
So when you talk of perihelion
or perigee, event horizon or
ecliptic, I nod, then smile inside
and think, how lucky that the stars
aligned for us.
You can read all four
here.
....................................................................................................................................
Snow in August
Last month I posted a poem called “Winter Memory,” which was a finalist in the
Wingless Dreamer winter poetry contest and published in
Snowdrops. That title caught poet Mike Levin’s eye, and he sent me his own poem by that name:
Snowdrops
Michael H. Levin
Who’d think
these slender stems
could pierce gunmetal snow
presenting arms through gusts
that polarize the hollows of my bones
yet here
they rise--demure
white caps, pure offerings
of spring: extended by
a netherworld whose darker invites
bide their time below.
It may be summer now, but when fall comes, winter won’t be far behind. Read more of Mike’s work
here.
....................................................................................................................................
Revise, Revise
On my bulletin board, the postcard from the
Poetry Society of America reminds me daily to revise and then revise again. You know how it is. You write a poem one morning, then sit back and feel good about it. By evening, you see it’s not so good after all. And the next day … Well, let’s just say your terrific new poem needs some work. Maybe a lot of work.
Revision, in other words, is an integral part of poetry.
“Revision is my favorite part of the writing process,” writes poet
Maggie Smith on that terrific blog
Lit Hub.
“I relish the creative problem-solving more than
the rush of getting it down. If you’re like me,
your poem might go through anywhere from two to
two hundred drafts before you’re satisfied
enough with it to call it ‘done’ and send it
out. Each revision, ideally, gets us closer to
the poem we sense is there, waiting. The poem
that will do the psychic or spiritual work we
want it to do.”
"But,” Smith continues, “each revision can also pull us farther away from the initial spark of the poem. This tension, this push and pull, is what makes revision dynamic and exciting: we are hunting something but are not quite clear about what it looks like or how to find it."
Smith goes on to compare her published poem “At the End of Our Marriage, in the Backyard” with an early draft and finds that the two are surprisingly similar. What has changed, she writes, is sound and rhythm. “I’m looking and listening for consonants and vowels as I draft,” she says, “but also the rhythms of sentences.”
The moral of the tale, in Smith’s words: “The first draft of a poem is almost always the not-right words in the not-right order.” Read her essay
here.
....................................................................................................................................
In Between
I was reading a news article about the fragile Israel-Gaza ceasefire when my friend’s book arrived.
Bayna Bayna: In-Between, by poet and Palestinian activist Zeina Azzam, is a moving and powerful exploration of what it’s like to be an immigrant. “It reflects the feeling of being in-between identities,” Zeina writes, “between home and exile, between childhood and adulthood, between wholeness and loss, between living and dying … somehow always in-between.”
My family has been here for generations, so I’ve never had to feel the sad tug of a homeland left behind. But reading Zeina’s vivid, passionate poems, I feel a kinship with her and others who have been forced to leave the land they belong to, the land that once belonged to them.
Here is the first poem from
Bayna Bayna: In-Between:
Colors for the Diaspora
by Zeina Azzam
Blue-green watery globe
tugging to a red core
we are a distant comet,
white cloud of unburnished rocks,
frisking the heavens
for an arc
to earth, sea, home.
Green-brown Palestine,
cactus fruit and wild thyme,
olive orchards, cypress trees…
we travel on your mountain tops
tethered by voices from suitcases
and the yaw of blackened keys.
Blue-black night
silver stars of ancestors
traveling a displaced orbit
around a lost sun, repeating:
when will we see the colors of our land,
when will we land….
I know Zeina didn’t time the publication of her book to coincide with the disheartening news of new fighting between Israel and Hamas. She’s been writing her memories in poems for years. But the book appears at a time when, as Washington, D.C., poet E. Ethelbert Miller writes of it, “we are all Palestinians. We are all people of the blue-green watery globe.”
....................................................................................................................................
And Speaking of Memory
A little poem I wrote some years ago was kindly named a finalist in the
Wingless Dreamer winter poetry contest and is published in
Snowdrops. It’s spring now, verging rapidly into summer, but winter isn’t that far gone.
Winter Memory
by Sally Zakariya
For my father
Snow silent, white blind
I grasp the immensity
the distance from then to now
There is room under the waiting sky
for all that used to be
for all we had and never had
The smell of your pipe
the strength of your arm
the long life denied you
I summon them up
from the bleak expanse
as the snow falls
.
My thanks to Wingless Dreamer. Now it’s time to think about summer poems.
....................................................................................................................................
‘Something Like a Life’
Putting it out there. That’s what poets do, day after day, hoping someone, somewhere, will respond. I can’t count how many rejections I’ve received (well, I probably could, but I don’t really want to). But each rejection makes that out-of-the-blue acceptance all the more gratifying. Even thrilling.
That’s how I felt when one of my favorite online poetry journals,
Gyroscope Review, accepted my chapbook “Something Like a Life,” due out the end of April. Like a lot of my writing, the poems in this chapbook are about family and love ... not exactly exciting subject matter, but themes I think many people can relate to. If you’re one of those people, you can order a copy
here. Meanwhile, here’s the title poem:
Ode to Trash
by Sally Zakariya
Something like a life
spills from the bin
breakfast egg shells
yesterday’s junk mail
a torn glove and its mate
worthless alone
like many of us
We have the capacity
to love entirely, even
bits and pieces we’ve
discarded--outdated,
unneeded, unwanted
until it’s too late
Love is a process of loss
the off-hand see you
the tossed-out letters
the distance from the other
the final farewell
I take out the trash unsure
the bin is big enough
to hold it all--all the debris
and detritus, the mistakes
and missteps, unsure
if I can live without
what I’ve cast away
My thanks to Gyroscope editor Constance Brewer for her thoughtful work bringing this little book into being.
....................................................................................................................................
A Friend Writes …
Perhaps I should say “an email friend.” And perhaps it’s presumptive of me to call a woman I’ve never met a friend. But that’s one of the wonders of our interconnected cyber-society. Put something out there online, and you never know who, if anyone, will read it. But recently I got an email that began: “Thanks, first of all, for existing! And thanks for offering to let us lonely poets share a poem. I live in France where it’s hard to get much feedback. I hope someone will have thoughts on the poem below…”
The writer was Julia Frey, and my thoughts on her poem are that it’s a strong and visual narrative that tells a moving story. Here it is:
For Ron, Dead Ten Years
by Julia Frey
Today, I could swear I saw you crossing
the rue du Four a block ahead, in that black-visored cap
you wore before, and your worn bomber jacket
from the second-hand store in Trastevere market
complete with stab wound
and “Nicola” written in ballpoint pen on the label.
That summer we sublet in via Mamele,
though later we found a better Boob City, Jerusalem
breasting with cupolas. Rome too polluted to milk
for our long rambles. We came home coughing
from the catacombs.
Even then death hovered.
Today you looked just like you
before you were sick, confident profile
gangster chic, out of sync with the hesitant walk
you'd developed. When you took the last fall in New York
my shock, to come back to Paris and find
your letters kept coming, weeks after.
What on earth made you fall for
a nouveau pauvre Southern belle with worn-out
Persian rugs, an arm-long pedigree and a potty mouth?
Me the effete, you the resolute Bad Boy
from Brooklyn, bourgeois-hating, astoundingly reliable
in money matters. Always out to get laid.
You, who loved words too much to
defile with a one-night stand. To say fuck or shit
or read trash novels. You said it was the sex.
It kept us together
in beds and on beaches
for twenty-five years.
Now I'm a fresh fish drifting
in a different salt sea. I see France
from my bedroom. But beach-combing in Cannes I still watch
for a letter in a bottle. And I still go back to Paris
where certain days I
wear Nicola’s jacket.
When I asked Julia for a photo to accompany her poem, she sent this one, explaining it’s one she plans to use if/when she publishes a book of poetry and photos by her brother, a retired Associated Press photographer. “It’s not an illustration but a free association,” Julia wrote, “a photo showing a complex facet of disorientation in a foreign culture.” I couldn’t agree more.
Nuns on an outing in Florence, photo by
Cameron Bloch.
....................................................................................................................................
Biblical Truths
Poetry plays many roles, not least of which are healing and connection. Consider
Manna in the Morning, by Jacqueline Jules, just published by
Kelsay Books. In 40-some graceful poems, Jules reaches back to the Old Testament to bring valuable lessons to herself and her readers. It’s a book you’ll want to read with a friend.
But don’t take my word for it. “Manna in the Morning is, quite simply, a lovely book,” says
Erika Dreifus, author of
Birthright: Poems and
The Practicing Writer newsletter. “As she revisits holy texts, Jacqueline Jules gracefully connects ancient stories with modern times, gaining insights into her own quandaries and gently suggesting paths through which all of us may traverse our conflicts and crises.”
I grew up on the same Bible stories as my friend Jackie did (though through an Episcopalian, rather than a Jewish, lens), but it takes a special poet to gently tease out their meanings for modern-day life. What lesson might the parting of the Red Sea, for example, have for us today? Here’s Jackie’s trenchant take:
Crossing the Red Sea
Jacqueline Jules
The rabbis say
Reuven and Shimon
crossed the Red Sea,
eyes down, grumbling,
so engrossed in grievances
they missed the miracle
of the waters parting.
Fleeing affliction,
I’ve been guilty, too,
of seeing only
the mud beneath my feet,
dwelling on the bricks
and burdened backs of Egypt,
ignoring outstretched arms
ready to hold me until
I reach the other side.
Jackie relates these ancient stories with nuance and sensitivity, but not without humor. In “Joseph’s Fortune and Mine,” a tale of “good fortune following calamity” she reassures us: “But no worries, [Joseph] found success as a slave / in Egypt. Appointed head of household / until Potiphar’s wife brazenly pursued / his beautiful biceps.”
These are poems of faith and hope, of grief and consolation. Observing the sky in the gorgeously titled “Consolation of Clouds,” Jules feels sunlight streaming through clouds as if it were “fingers / reaching down / to wipe the tears / from my cheeks.” To which I can only add Amen.
Learn more about Jacqueline Jules
here and
here.
....................................................................................................................................
Poetry of Place
Look at a map of Washington, D.C., and you’ll see what might have been a perfect square but with a good chunk of land cut off by the Potomac River. Part of that chunk, which was ceded back to Virginia some time after the city was founded, is Arlington County. It’s an almost-urban suburb that probably has as much in common with the District as it does with the state. And it’s full of poets.
One of the best known is Arlington Poet Laureate Emerita
Katherine E. Young, who compiled an impressive collection of Arlington poems,
Written in Arlington, published by
Paycock Press. With its YouTube companion Spoken in Arlington, the anthology mirrors the county’s diversity in content as well as contributors. As Katherine puts it, “The poets whose work appears in Written in Arlington range from nationally known page poets to spoken word artists to high school students just beginning to write and perform, as well as a few ‘tourist’ poets who have written about Arlington while passing through.”
The bike trail, a local hardware store, the animal shelter, a pink house, hillbilly music, the cemetery, a couple of neighborhoods, a car covered with poetry magnets … these subjects and dozens more add up to a rich tapestry of place, add up to a community.
And yes (you knew this was coming), I do have a few poems in the collection, including this one:
September Song
Sally Zakariya
It seemed like the ruination
of everything yet we went on
some things got better, some got worse
and we were left marveling
at what we could handle, wondering
what would come next
Three miles from the Pentagon
we saw a rain of objects, stuffing
from airplane seats, floating,
drifting, insubstantial yet
consequential, some landing
on the office roof while inside
we watched it all unfold
in real time on the screen
Years later we are still wondering
…
wondering after a summer
of destruction overseas, disparity
at home, slaughter of innocents
in the streets, dreading now
what could come next
My thanks to Katherine, and to Arlington, for being part of such an endeavor, and such a place.
....................................................................................................................................
Bees, Again
When I retired and started writing poetry
instead of magazine articles, I joined a
writers’ group sponsored by the county’s senior
programs. A few months in, one woman asked why I
kept writing poems about insects. Why indeed? It
wasn’t on purpose, but the more I thought about
it, the more I realized that insects are not
uninteresting. As I wrote in the intro to my
resulting little book
Insectomania, “… who can fail to be
moved by a life cycle that starts with years of
grubbing, followed by a short span of mating,
and then death. Rather like our own lives, writ
small.” The poems weren’t my best, but I had fun
padding them with trenchant quotes on bugs and
Victorian naturalists’ illustrations of the
creatures. It seems I still write about insects
every now and then, and I’m delighted to say a
new literary journal called
Mycorrhizae
is publishing a poem of mine about bees in
its very first issue, now on the press.
Why I Do Not Trim My Mint
In the name of the bee--Emily Dickinson
In the herb
garden the mint slants
north, each stalk its own compass needle
Finding their
way, three bees hover over
the blossoms, drawn by the promise of pollen
Their busy buzz
lulls me as I laze
here on the porch, dreaming of blooms
and of the world
bees make possible
for us, a world of fields and fruitfulness
Cut the mint
before it flowers, they say
but where would these three forage then?
Mycorrhizae, you ask? So did I. It turns out a mycorrihza
is a symbiotic association between a fungus and a plant--a fit name for a
journal that describes itself as exploring “our lived experiences of place,
climate change, and nature.”
....................................................................................................................................
Meter and Rhyme
But Not All the Time
As anyone can no
doubt guess from
the title of my
blog, I’m not a
big fan of
strict meter and
rhyme--especially
when they force
poets to twist
syntax. Some
writers handle
this kind of
poetry well;
turns out I’m
not one of them.
Turns out, too,
that I’m not
alone in
noticing the
lengths people
can go to in
slavish
dedication to
meter and rhyme.
Recently, Patsy
Anne
Bickerstaff, a
Virginia poet
and author of
Mrs. Noah's
Journal,
sent me a little
poem she’s had
fun with. She
has used it, she
says, “just to
let everyone
know what they
didn't have to
do!” And like
me, she says
she’s “not
averse to verse
by meter and
rhyme … but not
bound to it
either.”
Autobiography, Chapter One
By Patsy Anne Bickerstaff
A poet there
was, once ‘pon a time,
Who verses forced to make them rhyme
Or into meter better fit;
Adept she did become at it.
Liberally she
used, “you see,”
So well it went with “thou” and “thee.”
Adjectives
beautiful and trite
And gay, she’d write with all her might.
Editors she oft
appalled
With rhymes that did not rhyme at all.
When offered
help, she cried, “Don’t start!”
“I do my writing from the heart!”
Tho’ she
submitted, o’er and o’er,
Rejections she received galore.
To shock she tried, with language blue;
The S.O.B.’s sent that back, too:
“Sorry, we
accept this not;
Can’t tell we you’re saying what?”
....................................................................................................................................
Block Party
June 19, of all days … the African-American girl
across the street chalked some moving words from
MLK on her family’s driveway and down onto the
street, and a nameless neighbor complained. The
county sent workers to power wash the words out.
Most of our neighbors were outraged, and
families descended on our block with chalk and
paint and Black Lives Matter signs. Rains have
washed some of the words away, but each time,
the chalk team replaces them. The county,
rightly, has apologized.
Juneteenth Words
There comes a time when silence is
betrayal.--Martin Luther King Jr.
Justice for
all--wise words chalked
in bright yellow down the driveway
spilling onto
sidewalk and street
Words we must
heed in these days
of reckoning, of
reassessment
of long-delayed
reparations
Black lives
matter--words washed
away by county
workers with power
hoses on this
day of all days
Saddened and
outraged say neighbors
who grab chalk
and paint to make
words bloom from
house to house
Silence is
betrayal--it’s time
for us all to speak up
My thanks to
New Verse News for publishing my little poem the next day.
....................................................................................................................................
‘The Literary Life’
How has the
pandemic
affected your
work? Most
writers no doubt
have their own
answers, but an
interesting
collection of
responses to
that question
can be found in
the July/August
issue of
Poets and
Writers
magazine. “What
We Found in
Writing: Authors
on Creativity in
Quarantine”
includes essays
from 13 writers.
Here are brief
excerpts from
five poets:
-
“I think
creating during these
unfathomable times is both
impossible and necessary for me.
… There is some breath, some
distance, maybe there is even a
sense of possibility in
despair.”--Ada Limon, author of
“The Carrying “(Milkweed
Editions)
-
I write now
to tell off the pandemic, in a
way. To prove that writing as an
act can and will endure. It
might not ‘save’ us, but I do
know it will always be here for
us.”--Victoria Chang, author of
“Obit” (Copper Canyon Press)
-
“These days
distractions drive my drafts.
I’m easily distracted on the
page and off--too close to the
moment, too anxious about it, to
write with any real
intention.”--Nicole Sealey,
author of “Ordinary Beast” (Ecco)
-
“I feel
lucky I think of poems as things
that sometimes live on the page
and sometimes just happen around
me and never find the
page.”--Gabrielle Calvocoressi,
author of “Rocket Fantastic” (Persea)
-
“If, when I
return exhausted from a ride, I
momentarily forget that I can
weather through this, too, I
remind myself of the words of
one of my teachers, the late
poet Philip Levine … ‘The
process of writing poetry
depends on being alone in a room
and being comfortable being
alone for long periods of
time--amongst reveling in
solitude and slow
time.’”--Janine Joseph, author
of “Driving Without a License”
(Alice James Books)
....................................................................................................................................
Writing While Young
Calling all teachers and parents. In these
strange new days of ours, a great way to engage
bored and lonely young people is poetry …
writing about themselves, about the world, about
themselves in the world.
Just in time comes
Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems,
by Marjorie Maddox, a professor of English and
creative writing at Lock Haven University who
has published an impressive 20 collections of
poetry and prose. Written for young writers, the
book bristles with writing tools and ideas
designed to show kids that “poetry” isn’t a bad
word. “Chat with personification, dance with
iambic, fish for sestinas, and text with a
triolet,” Maddox writes on a welcome page. “In
27 poems plus Insider Exercises, this book will
jump-start your writing.”
Chapters on how to see, hear, taste, smell,
touch, and “befriend” a poem lure the reader
into the poetry world, where Maddox provides a
bevy of explanations and examples of such poetic
elements as simile, alliteration, enjambment,
and couplet. She then moves on to exercises
designed to limber up the reader’s poetry
muscles. Here’s an excerpt from one I like:
Exercise 7: The Short and Long of It
Here’s an
experiment: Copy a poem that you like, twice,
but take out the line and stanza breaks, so the
poem appears as one big block of words. Give one
copy to a friend.… Now, this part is secret.
Without showing a friend what you are doing,
each of you rewrite the poem with completely
different line and stanza breaks.… How do the
same words now seem a bit different? You may
notice that you read a long line more quickly
than a shorter one and that you tend to
emphasize words at the beginning and the end of
lines.… Next, take a poem that you wrote earlier
and rewrite it with different line and stanza
breaks. What happens? Which version do you like
better? Why?
You don’t have to be a
beginner in the poetry game to see how
eye-opening an exercise like this can be. Try
it. I did and was tempted to keep going in this
useful and alluring book
....................................................................................................................................
Pollack and Poetry
Poets are
Zooming these
days about their
work in
Heron Clan
Poetry Anthology
VIII, due
out this month
from
Katherine James
Books. The
series, begun in
1999, features
poets from all
over North
Carolina, as
well as the
United States
and abroad. This
year, editor
Doug Stuber
included one of
my poems in the
anthology:
Measured Flow
Scientists reveal the physics of Jackson
Pollack’s
painting technique.--
Brown University, 10/30/19
Drizzling honey on my breakfast toast
I watch it pool in spiral like a snake.
Coiling
instability scientists call it.
So, what did
Jackson Pollack know
of fluid
dynamics when he poured paint
on canvas to
make art?
Did he
experiment or did he just intuit
the way thick
liquids tend to curl
when poured from
up above?
You might think
any kid could do it,
but no – no
random swirls in Pollack’s
art, no mere
splatters, drips, or drabs.
It’s measured
flow, say physicists
who tried it.
Instinct or intellect, Pollack
harnessed
science for his art.
Toast in hand, I
ponder how to harness
science for my
poems, to taste creation
in the
discipline and skill.
My thanks to Doug
and all the herons
in the clan!
....................................................................................................................................
Poetry and Plague
Can words heal? I’m not sure, but they can
definitely help. As the world worries its way
through the terrifying corona virus pandemic,
I’m thankful that it’s National Poetry Month.
Each day my email bursts with poetry, words that
take me out of myself and give me comfort,
meaning, and hope. Some poems bring wisdom and
wit; some provide new perspective; all provide a
way toward connection in a fractured world.
These are the daily poems I receive:
-
Poetry Daily, a partnership
between the Daily Poetry
Association and George Mason
University
-
Poem-a-Day, from the Academy of American Poets, which offers lots of specials for Poetry Month
-
Knopf Poetry, a daily poem
in April from the Knopf
Doubleday Publishing Group
-
The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith,
poems “hand-picked” by former
U.S. poet laureate Tracy K.
Smith, from American Public
Media in partnership with the
Poetry Foundation
-
The Writer's Almanac, from
Garrison Keillor
Closer to home, my friend
Zeina Azzam, a poet and Palestinian activist, is
posting her own selection of poems on Facebook,
one each day during April. Her post so far have
included wonderful pieces by Pablo Neruda, Jane
Hirshfield, Wendell Berry, and others.
Another friend,
Mike Maggio, Northern Regional
Vice-President for the
Poetry Society of Virginia, presents poetry
each April day in a feature called
30 for 30, sponsored by
Potomac Review. This year, which he’s
calling Re(En)Vision, Mike has asked poets to
take an original poem, delete every fifth word,
and revise the poem, presenting it in stanzaic
form (couplets, tercet, quatrains, etc.). The
results are intriguing.
Finally,
Katherine E. Young, former poet laureate of
Arlington, Virginia, is posting a poem each day
this month on Facebook. The poems are drawn from
Written in Arlington, an anthology of
Arlington poets edited by Katherine and
forthcoming from
Gargoyle Magazine/Paycock Press.
A daily dose of poetry may not cure covid 19,
but don’t you feel better?
....................................................................................................................................
Meanwhile, Somewhere in the Universe …
The latest issue
of
The Poeming
Pigeon, an
annual print
journal brought
to you by the
wonderful folks
at
The Poetry Box,
has taken the
cosmos
as its
theme. The issue
includes a poem
of mine:
Immigrant Star
Alien Asteroids Are Here, Scientists Say. Get
Used to Them.--New York
Times, 5/21/18
Spinning from the interstellar
nursery, it joined our solar system,
a foundling from another star, t
taking up residence with Jupiter,
sharing the planet’s orbit
but like a willful child circling
the wrong way.
Call it an immigrant, torn
from its mother, wandering
through space to find a home.
Linked now with our largest planet
in orbital resonance.
Now we can
search beyond
our own sun to the far reaches
of the cosmos, track alien bodies
back to the big bang. If our solar system
can take in migrants, surely we can too,
welcoming them to join with us i
in synchronicity.
....................................................................................................................................
An eagle’s view
Academic
career, Army life, government positions,
international consultant--Minnesota-born Daniel
N. Nelson draws on a wide range of experience in
his new book
Minnesota and Other Poems. Published by
Atmosphere Press, Dan’s collection spells
out a full life in clear-cut, taut lines. “Dan’s
spare poems leave you searching for the rest of
the story: context, history, and future,” says
Eric Forsbergh, author of
Imagine Morning. “His poetry provides an
eagle’s view of what seems like a Minnesota
winter landscape, but on further examination
often draws you in with observations of the
fullness of living never quite realized, or
intimacy lost.”
lucy
By Daniel N. Nelson
ok it was cheap chardonnay
but talking to you not
over miles
but within reach
and seeing your
eyes again
one san clemente evening
to tell listen
feel
touch
understand
never with you
but always near
if i whisper
you’d hear
far more
Minnesota is Dan’s second collection in 25
years (his first, “Performance and Other Poems,”
is now out of print). Let’s hope we don’t have
to wait another quarter-century for more.
....................................................................................................................................
Goodbye to Mick’s
A while ago, my
husband and I
took a leisurely
Sunday drive and
stopped for
lunch at a
sports bar
outside
Fredericksburg,
VA. We no longer
drink, and we’re
not big sports
fans, but we
loved Mick’s--a
cheerful,
handsome place
with great food.
Naturally, I
wrote a poem.
When my poetry
group praised
the piece, I
thought briefly
of sending it to
the restaurant’s
manager.
Naturally, I
didn’t, but
then, when
Toho Journal
Online
published the
poem in its fall
2019 issue, I
thought maybe I
really should
send it. But
alas, it turns
out Mick’s
Sports Bar has
closed up shop.
So with thanks
to Toho and a
sad thought for
the bar, here’s
At Mick's:
At Mick’s
By Sally Zakariya
in a different life I’d work at Mick's
wait tables maybe tend bar
get myself a scatter of tattoos
I’d have to learn to drink again
serve loaded mac ’n’ cheese on a don’t-
touch-it sizzling platter--crisp bacon
and chives and triple cheese on top--
serve six-buck margaritas on Mondays
I could learn to drink again
know all the
regulars hey howya doin’
goin’ someplace nice this summer
not quite in Fredericksburg but
hanging on the
edge in one of those
nothing special
strip malls
but
Mick’s--Mick’s is special
with its
halfway-up rock walls
its oblong
shamrock bar in the center
its step-up
booths and keyhole chairs
its TVs on every
wall--well
maybe not for
everyone but
you could feel
like you belonged
and I could
too--if I decided
to learn to drink again
The other day, I tasted decadently rich mac and
cheese at another joint. Who knows what I’ll
write next?
....................................................................................................................................
After the Turkey
Even though the turkey and its leftovers have
been dispatched, I’m still musing on the many
things I’m grateful for. As I put it in an
unfinished (and perhaps unfinishable poem) not
long ago,
I’m
grateful for the obvious
(family,
friends, health
but also the more obscure--
for the difference between
what something
is and what
it appears to be
and the space
in between and
the circuitous
routes we take
in that space.
And for the
space between words,
between music
notes--pauses
that can say so much. .
But right now, I’m also especially grateful for
the subjectivity we all bring to the poems we
read. Good, not good, memorable,
forgettable--depends on who’s reading the piece.
That came home to me recently when The Poetry
Box, which published my recent chapbook
The Unknowable Mystery of Other People,
kindly nominated
Requiem for a Nobody for a 2019 Pushcart
Prize. I can’t say I would have selected that
particular poem for nomination myself, but thank
you very much, Poetry Box.
....................................................................................................................................
That Naked Country’
“Like
Woody Guthrie
one finds Philip
Raisor holding
back the end of
the world,”
writes E.
Ethelbert Miller
of Raisor’s new
book
That Naked
Country.
“His poems slow
dance with the
past, from the
American
Revolution to
another black
body lying on
the ground.”
“Raisor reminds
us that we have
choices,” Miller
continues.
“History is
still our home.”
And it is
history that
confronts Raisor
and his wife in
Civil War
photographs on a
bedroom wall:
Under “The Dead
of Antietam”:
photographs by
Alexander Gardner (1862)
By Philip Raisor
On the walls of our bed-and-breakfast hang
stark images that lift us into yesterday’s dead.
We intended otherwise: naked play, late sleep,
a guided tour of the battlefield, aided by
Podcast,
a weekend away from the timeless chores of
living.
But history has its own way of waking up, if
only
to turn with a groan. Do you know how hard it is
to outlive antiques? I see the boy, that’s all
he is,
his gaping mouth praying its rebel yell, the
body
ignored by its soul. I see, though I close hard
against my eyes, the vacant stare of mutilated
bones crisscrossed in a long gully of failure.
I hear--how do I hear?--the crenulated wave
of wounded black grass stacked against cannons,
and your hand on my chest falls away in defeat.
If we came to see maps and hills and fences
that peace has reclaimed, we have been shown
that sometimes nothing can be salvaged.
And we, my love, like light slanting across
these frames, born in thunder too far back
to be heard, wonder if what has been lit
burns eternally. Until now, I have never
doubted the routines of earth, the perfect
fall and rise through all that waste. Tonight,
as the moon eases past this window toward
its usual burned-out campfire, I will fear
the ghostly shadows, I will fear that before
dawn the sun could get lost in the dark.
Professor emeritus of English at Old Dominion
University, where he initiated the creative
writing program, Raisor is the author of nine
books of poetry, as well as a memoir and a
critical work on the poetry of W.D. Snodgrass.
That Naked Country is available for pre-order
from
Standing Stone Books.
....................................................................................................................................
A Rich Collection
After reading Marjorie Maddox’s extraordinary
new book
Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation, I
blushed to recall the poems I wrote after my own
father’s death. Unlike her stunning descriptions
of her father’s failed heart transplant, I
realized my pieces were simplistic, verging on
sentimental. Maddox, a professor of English and
Creative Writing at Loch Haven University, no
doubt could give lessons, and I could use them.
But simply reading these pages is a tutorial in
metaphor, line, sound, and the guts of poetics.
The five-part book concerns marriage, love, and
spiritual matters as well as the transplant of
the title. But to me, the heart of the book is
its central section, “Body Parts,” a
tour-de-force likening 39 organs and appendages
to everything from a stingray (the lung) to a
dog’s tongue (the pancreas). Here’s …
The Bladder
has had its bad days, but adjusts.
Empty, it’s a cup fit for a pint,
later, a dish rounding up liquid.
Filled to the brim, it’s the yellow belly of a
chameleon
ready to burst.
Winner of the Yellowglen Prize,
Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation
bristles with memorable lines. Describing the
hospital waiting room, for example, Maddox
writes “… its stucco walls vacant / of the pain
we hang upon the gray / and graying we soon
become.” In “Ash Wednesday,” she speaks of the
ash-cross on the forehead: “…to wear like a
bindhi this medal of our not winning / each day
we wake to the worlds / we are and are not.” And
in the poem “Disconnected” is this moving
stanza:
In the transplant waiting room,
a child asks her mother,
“Will Daddy love the same people?”
and I startle at the complications.
Among my favorites in this impressive collection
is the poem “My Mother Gives Me a Tape of My
Father’s Dance Band,” which ends with these
lines:
… Joy cracks
his rhythm in notes too strong to stay
in the grave, too staccato to listen
to sounds good-daying
in the bass of a previous page,
two-stepping still, though long
since played
The eleventh book by the prolific
Marjorie Maddox, this is a rich collection
indeed.
....................................................................................................................................
Muslim Wife
And now for something a little different: My
chapbook “Muslim Wife” is due out momentarily,
not as a stand-alone publication but as one of
three poetry collections published together in
Delphi Volume Seven. The brainchild of M.E.
Silverman, founder of
Blue Lyra Press, these three-in-one volumes
are designed to widen the distribution of a
poet’s work. “Our goal is to have each poet in
the volume gain new audiences by being exposed
to the other two poets’ readers,” says Silverman
on the Blue Lyra website. Included in this
volume, along with my chapbook, are “Grandmother
Mountain,” by Martha McCollough and “Refuses to
Suffocate,” by Marjorie Power.
It’s tempting to read the titles of these three
chapbooks as a single sentence (Grandmother
Mountain Refuses to Suffocate Muslim Wife), and
once you do, it’s difficult to forget it. But
these are three different collections, each with
its own tone and message, each drawing (we hope)
a new group of readers. As for me, I’m not a
Muslim, but I’m married to one, which entitles
me (I trust) to the title of my chapbook. This
poem from “Muslim Wife” is about the reed pens
used by my husband Mohamed Zakariya, a noted
Arabic-script calligrapher:
Reed
It’s the right proportion of skin to meat
you say, holding the slender reed pen
then cutting the chisel point and opening
the slit that holds the ink
It grew somewhere in Egypt, where reeds
have always grown, where they sheltered
the baby Moses, where they were chosen
by Pharaoh’s scribes
to record the history of dusty dynasties
on papyrus, their wide eyes ringed with
kohl as they walked sideways on the
walls of the tomb
You hold the pen like a lover holds flesh
or the memory of flesh, with a quiet
resolve, touching ink to paper to record
a different history
....................................................................................................................................
Not
in ParisIf this were Paris, I’d be on vacation. (They say
the city virtually empties out in August, you
know.) I’m not in Paris, alas, but I’m still
thinking about being elsewhere … somewhere away
from the heat and humidity and hassle of
Washington in the summer. I’d like to think my
phantom twin is on vacation, somewhere on the
continent perhaps. She’s often off somewhere,
after all. Never here, though I sense her
ghostly presence sometimes. Reading about the
phenomenon known as
chimerism ade her feel more real to me. I’m
grateful to
Contrary Magazine for publishing my poem on
the subject in their Summer 2019 issue:
Chimera
By Sally Zakariya
Recent advances in genetic analysis have
revealed
that
chimerism is common.--Tim Flannery,
New York
Review of Books, March 7, 2019
Phantom twin who
never was
X and Y alike in
DNA
blood type both
A and O
chimera--two
eggs merged
and married in
the womb
The Greeks
imagined you
lion / goat /
snake mingled
a mythical
amalgamation
I sense you
hovering
a distant,
doubled being
an almost self,
unseen
and out of reach
You murmur from
afar
me / not me,
same yet not
complex
consciousness--
after all, which
one of us
is a single
thing alone
....................................................................................................................................
Writing Promptly
I’ve never been much for writing from poetry
prompts, but this summer, in lieu of going to
San Marino or Southern France with my phantom
twin, I signed up for something called Weekly
Writes (poetry version) from
The
Common, an online journal that bills itself
as “A Modern Sense of Place.” Five weeks in,
I’ve been pleased and surprised by the writing
prompts (three each week), exemplar poems, and
insightful commentary from the editors. A prompt
from Week One called for a poem “composed solely
of, or dominated by, a series of questions.”
Here’s one of the admittedly imperfect poems
that resulted:
Questions about My Quartz
Watch
By Sally Zakariya
In a crystal we have the clear evidence of the
existence
of a formative life-principle.”--Nikola Tesla
How does the quartz make the watch
If the battery dies, can the secret vibration
in the quartz still give birth to a steady
pulse?
When the crystal grows in the dark cave
does that constitute proof of life?
Is it true the movements of wave and wind
and celestial bodies exhibit natural vibration?
Can these movements be considered the breath
of the universe?
And is that why our thoughts hover in the air
between us
vibrating to our natural frequencies, suspended
on our shared breath?
....................................................................................................................................
Under the Sea
My
super talented niece Paulina Berry, scientist
and artist, has created a truly delicious
children’s book:
A to Z in the Deep Dark Sea, now available
for pre-order as an e-book. Her illustrations of
the denizens of the deep? Pure visual poetry.
....................................................................................................................................
A Moving Journey
Sometimes you get the
feeling you know a person you’ve never actually
met. It’s like that with Sarah Russell. We “met”
online some years ago, swapping poems and
comments on
Goodreads, and now that I’ve had a chance to
read her moving collection
I lost summer somewhere, I almost feel she’s
been writing not just her life but mine. And
other women’s too.
Published by
Kelsay Books, Russell’s collection takes the
reader on a deeply moving journey through
childhood, marriage, motherhood, and on. Her
often brief poems show a deft touch: “Our fights
were a barrage of arrows / going to the softest
places, / as if everything depended / on the
outcome,” she says in “Early Marriage.” Just
four short lines, but a volume of meaning.
Equally striking is her three-stanza “Choice,”
which begins with the poet holding her
daughter’s hand during what could only have been
an abortion and ends, “ ‘The baby would be in
college now,’ / she said to me the other day. /
‘I know,’ I said.”
A retired professor and
editor, Russell has had a second life as an
accomplished
doll maker. In creating her dolls, she draws
on her studies of myth and legend, imbuing her
small sculptures (it seems almost a slight to
call them merely “dolls”) with the same spirit
and empathy she brings to her poetry.
Reflective, elegiac, powerful – the poems tell
hard truths about hard topics like miscarriage,
cancer, abortion, and divorce, and give gentle
reminders of the soothing power of nature, the
comfort of love. And the inevitable advance of
age:
The novel in my head
has only time to be
a poem without
last lines
to tell the
reader
if she learned
to love
the baby, if
what the gypsy
said came true,
if the letter
was from him.
So ends her poem “In my
70s.” And if the gypsy told Russell she would be
a gifted poet, it did indeed come true.
See more of Russell’s work on her
website.
....................................................................................................................................
Mozart
and MeNo, not the music
(though I revel in it). What has brought me to
feel a special kinship with the great composer
is
Mozart's Starling, an entrancing book by
naturalist and ecophilosopher
Lyanda Lynn Haupt, which tells the story of,
yes, Mozart’s pet starling. I read a review of
Haupt’s book one evening and quickly ordered a
copy. Eying my wind-up tin songbird but
imagining a real bird on my shoulder, I couldn’t
wait to write a poem, which was published in the
July 2019 issue of
Burningwood Literary Journal:
Mozart’s Starling
By Sally Zakariya
I read somewhere that
Mozart had a pet
starling
He called the
starling singvogel
or was that an old German toy
He taught the
bird to sing a song
or was it the
other way around
And did the bird
really come
when Mozart
called or did it
secretly wish it
belonged to
Constanze of the soft breast
nstead of Wolfie
(Johannes
Chrysostomus Wolfgangus
Theophilus Mozart to give
the man his
proper name)
If I had a
starling I’d call it
Constanze and ask it to sing
a song about the
brief musical
career of
Mozart’s starling
an avian
concerto from
one composer to another
Of course, it would have been wiser to read the
book before writing the poem, but I’ve ordered
Haupt’s
Crow Planet and vow to read it through
before dashing off any crow poems.
....................................................................................................................................
Something Special
When the blurbs on the back of the book are by
three former poets laureate, you know you’re in
for something special. And
Mere Being , by Barry D. Amis, is special
indeed. Barry, long active in the Poetry Society
of Virginia, brings a musician’s ear as well as
an academic’s knowledge to his poems, which have
fascinated and delighted me for years in the
monthly poetry salon Barry chairs. And I’m not
alone. Here’s what reviewers say:
-
“In poems
well-honed and riveting, Barry
Amis bears witness to the
world’s struggles and
enigmas.”--Carolyn
Kreiter-Foronda
-
“There is uncommon linguistic
agility in Barry Amis’ work that brings words
like ‘cradle’ and ‘cactus’ into insightful
proximity …”--Sofia Starnes
-
“One
could do worse than trip in the
tradition of Gerard Manley
Hopkins and Charles
Wright.”--Ron Wright
Barry’s nimble, sometimes
almost puckish, way with words sets his work
apart: “lovely of impossible architecture” he
writes of Petra, the ancient Jordanian city
carved into red rock. “Sailing between poetry
and despair / the convocation of hazard
chastens,” he begins his poem “Lost Horizon,”
one of my favorites. Later in the piece he
confesses “I tend toward improbable in the
absence / of divine,” setting the reader up for
the poem’s one-line concluding stanza: “We won’t
be saved.”
Here is another from
Mere Being :
Pensées
By Barry Amis
These are the hours
and we are the
vessels.
Clothe me in the
full
trappings of
Paradiso
or comfort me in
measureless dark
places. Each
day’s
suffering craves
a
Beatrice. Each
night’s
gathering offers
milk
and pudding.
Waiting
is irrational.
Athens
and Jerusalem
debate,
heaven and hell
am I.
The last
dwelling
place summons,
humility and
love
are the
threshold.
About us these
bones
strip, innocence
lost.
The terra
mater
of canceled days
terrifies.
....................................................................................................................................
Whitmania
In his brief “Poets to
Come,” which
Mark Francis called “a simple eloquent
clarion call to arms for poets and artists,”
Walt Whitman urged “a new brood” of “orators,
singers, musicians” to look to the future, not
the past, to look at possibilities, not
problems. And this year, in honor of the
bicentennial of Whitman’s birth, poets and
poetry groups across the nation have been
celebrating this great American voice. Among the
celebrations:
Poets to Come, a 495-page anthology
published by
Local Gems Poetry Press. Here’s my
contribution to the volume:
Reading Walt Whitman at
McDonald’s
By Sally Zakariya
McDonald’s afternoon … unexpected jazz
… low sun slicing in on French fries
blooded with ketchup … two graying men
with coffee … young man by the window …
trio of teenage boys posing and preening …
Whitman wrote of these men, or men like them
in Memoranda During the War, wrote
of bringing pencils and paper and consolation
to the wounded of both sides, walking among
regiments of iron cots, a shaggy buffalo
of a man, a man of generous heart
All Nature so calm in itself …
he wrote … yet
there the battle raging … Is this indeed
humanity—these butchers’ shambles?
Reading, I imagine the war-torn grief
buried beneath Walt’s bare ellipses
Closing my eyes, I am with him in a field
hospital here in Virginia … closing my eyes
I see a soldier so young he has hardly lived
at all lying limp on a stretcher, a farm boy
muddied with the red earth he once plowed
the earth where the bullet felled him
the earth he will lie in tomorrow and forever
I imagine we hold his hand … we wash his brow
we help wind bandages around him … the whitest
cloth … the tightest weave … folded thick
against
the blood … folded thick to hold life in
The weak sun breaks through the smoke of war
trails pale fingers of light across his ravaged
face
A wing of shadow passes and his eyelids flutter
and when he cries Mother we say
She is here … she is coming
And
because you can never have too much Whitman, let
me recommend a new book:
Walt Whitman Speaks. Subtitled “His Final
Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the
Promise of America,” this inspiring collection
is drawn from the nine volumes of commentary
faithfully recorded in the last years of the
poet’s life by his young friend Horace Traubel
and selected for the Library of America by
Brenda Wineapple. Not a book to read through
start to finish, this volume is best dipped into
from time to time to see what insights you’ll
find. Quotes to remember: “The best writing has
no lace on its sleeves.” “If America is not for
freedom I do not see what it is for.”
....................................................................................................................................
A Poet’s Poet
His first two books of poems were published in the 1960s by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books. At around the same time, he created and directed a puppet theater called the Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company. And after he became a Sufi Muslim in 1970, Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore published an astonishing 40 more poetry books. Now this fine and luminous poet, this sweet spirit is no longer with us. After his death from cancer in 2016, his family has gathered his last poems in Holy Door in the Ground. Here is one from a series:
Aphorisms to Death, 1
by Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore
We must be patient with every
incapacity
for they are the machinery of Allah
taking us to a
quietude
where yellow
pastures slope down
to a cobalt sea
and sunlight
glistens on the sliding
backs of its
slippery
currents
Raised Episcopalian and married to a Muslim, I come to Abdal-Hayy’s work at a slight, but only a slight, remove. It doesn’t matter whether you say Allah, Jehovah, or Yahweh, God is God, and devotion to the Almighty is the heart of Abdal-Hayy’s writing. Not long after his death, my husband’s students gathered to read some of his poems, and I contributed one of my own:
To the Poet Who Is Not Here
for Daniel Abdal-Hayy
Moore, 1940-2016
You are not here but you are not gone.
We read from
your poems tonight in a room
of offerings, of
seekers.
Light falls from
the crystal chandelier
like beads of
dew nurturing dry soil.
Your words lift
winged from the page,
birds to the
heavens.
You who have
always had one foot
in the other
world, we rejoice at your joy,
O singer of
saints.
We linger on
your lines, gather the gifts
of your wisdom,
share in our mind’s eye,
if only for a
moment, your sight
of the Beloved.
“For me the province of poetry is a private ecstasy made public,” Abdal-Hayy said, “and the social role of the poet is to display moments of shared universal epiphanies capable of healing our sense of mortal estrangement--from ourselves, from each other, from our source, from our destiny, from The Divine.”
We miss Abdal-Hayy, but he has left a treasure of writings to remember him by.
....................................................................................................................................
Revision Revisited
The Poetry Society of America postcard on my
bulletin board says, “Revise, revise”--words
writers live by. The way we generally approach
revision is to cut, cut, cut. But poet
Diane Lockward suggests another approach.
“Too often we
start revising and hacking away at the poem
before it’s even fully written,” she writes in
Some Revision Ideas for Poetry Month. “We
quit before we’ve given the poem life, before
we’ve discovered its full potential, before
we’ve found its real material.”
Instead,
Lockward says, consider expanding rather than
cutting your poem. For example, take 10 words
from a poem you admire and try to fit them into
your poem. “Make them make sense within the
context of your poem, adjusting your context as
needed,” she says. “Or let the words introduce
an element of the strange, a touch of the
surreal.”
Lockward cites a number of other ways to
approach expansion, such as inserting negative
statements, adding color and metaphor, putting
something in “that seemingly doesn’t belong,” or
personifying an inanimate object.
It’s worth trying.
........................................................................................................................................
The Magician’s Wife
Journalist, artist, student of spirituality--Charan Sue Wollard, like Walt Whitman, contains multitudes. In her new book, The Magician's Wife, the poems flow from whatever her eye falls on: a bicycle tour, a peach on the windowsill, a legless beggar in India, a beetle, a child who will not speak. The book is new off the press from Richer Resources Publications, which also published Wollard’s In My Other Life (and which sponsors But Does It Rhyme). Wollard, former poet laureate of Livermore, California, has a rare gift for telling stories with power and insight. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., unfolds from the perspective of a 17-year-old tending counter in a drugstore. A gas pipe explosion is recounted in what remains: a bowl of carrots, a broken clock, an unread newspaper. In other poems she captures the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the “small kindnesses … that separate any of us / from inconsequence,” the poet struck silent by the “loud clap of nothing / the thunderous void.” Perhaps Wollard’s “theory of everything” best describes her approach to her work: “eyes open / to every / impossibility.”
drowning
By Charan Sue Wollard
he wades into the water
despite warnings of danger
one instant raising his Nikon to capture
terrible roils charging the shore
perhaps to cast light
on how one thing leads
to another and another
without pause
a wave catches him by the ankle
drags him under its blue tide
a day before further
down the shoreline
at the South Tower
of the Golden Gate Bridge
a boy on a field trip glimpsed surfers
in the waves below
climbed the high rafters
took a reckless ecstatic leap
in the end--
if there is an end--
the man dies the boy emerges
dripping triumphant from the Bay
if I could ask them
one question
it would not be why
(I like anyone cannot fathom my own death)
if I could ask them one question
it would be
what
what did you find
what did you find
in that dark cold deep
....................................................................................................................................
Dancing Angels
My prolific friend Eric Johnson has come out with his fourth book of poems: Watching Angels Dance by Candlelight. To read these poems “is to waltz, tango, and two-step to the insights of a master poet,” says Loose Moose Publishing, and I couldn’t agree more. “Johnson brings the life experiences of Saigon, Berlin, and Indianapolis into his word craft. The world is his oyster and the streets are his theater.” One striking poem from the book is the response of Johnson, himself a Viet Nam veteran, to the memorial to that war in Washington, D.C.
'V'
By Richard Eric Johnson
Black rock shining
Fifty thousand
and more names--
Monument or tombstone?
Frederick Hart’s soldiers
Stare and survey the V:
V for Viet Nam
Victory
Valor
Vengeance
Verisimilitude
Verification?
Why not ‘E’ for eternity.
Or an amazing
maze of marble
With no way out?
A journey over there
For a pilgrimage
here.
Names and
memories
Etched black
rock shining
Of their dreams.
We remain
Dreams of ourselves.
....................................................................................................................................
The People Poems
My good friend poet and children’s book author Jacqueline Jules and I meet every month to read and critique each other’s recent work. “Oh, another of your people poems,” Jackie would say as I handed over a few more poems about, well, people … some of whom I knew in childhood, some relatives and acquaintances, and some I had simply observed. (After all, in the old days before we were more carefully correct with language, British poet Alexander Pope famously said, “The proper study of mankind is man.”) I decided to gather some of my “people poems” together as a chapbook and shop the manuscript around. The result, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, was a finalist in the 2018 Poetry Box. chapbook contest and is available until February 20 at a pre-release discount price of $10. Here’s one of the poems:
Requiem for a Nobody
By Sally Zakariya
Unknown, unsung, no obituary
to spell out the bare facts of his life,
just one of the many to perish alone
on the street, hand still outstretched
for help that
would not come.
Lord have mercy on his soul,
&nb his nameless soul.
Death knew his name, called him by it,d
where he slipped by mostly unseen, /> wrapped in
a tattered gray blanket.
Death found him where he waited,
cheeks fallen in, eyes dimmed,
invisible to people bustling by.
Once someone tied his shoes, held
his hand, kissed his baby cheek,
but there will be no Pieta for him.
Lord have mercy on our souls,
our oblivious souls.
Did I say discount? Did I say February 20? Here’s where to order: The Unknowable Mystery of Other People. Thanks for the idea, Jackie – and thanks, Poetry Box.
....................................................................................................................................
Words to Write By
“Sometimes the poems come so fast that certain
words are actually placeholders for the real
words that are supposed to be there,” said poet
Li-Young Lee, “and the work is to go back and
figure out which words are the placeholders and
which words are destined.” In other words, as
the postcards that come every year from the
Poetry Society of America say, “Revise,
revise.”
........................................................................................................................................
The Fine Art of Blurbing
A poetry blog with the delightful name
Blogalicious recently addressed the fraught
business of writing blurbs that will, the idea
goes, encourage people to buy and read a book.
Written by poet and publisher
Diane Lockward, the post points some stern
fingers at bad blurbs – those that say too
little, those that make wild claims, those that
are little more than quotes from the book. “I
like blurbs that tell me something specific
about the collection, something that will let me
know if it’s for me or not,” writes Lockward in
The Blurbification of Poetry Books. “I
intensely dislike generic blurbs that could have
been pasted onto the back of any number of books
and give no evidence that the blurber even read
the book being blurbed.” Reading her post
reminded me how much we poets support each other
– and depend on each other. I’m enormously
grateful for the good people who have written
blurbs for my chapbooks and am ready to return
the favor.
.....................................................................................................................................
Fish and Apples
It’s snowing as I write this, tiny flakes that mean business. I like watching snow but not being out in it, and my mind turns to other seasons. Summer canoeing on Pleasant Pond at my aunt’s old cabin in Maine. Fall in the backyard of my childhood, picking up apples and tossing them for our dog Dusty to fetch.
Maine brings me to a poem by my friend Eric Forsbergh, author of Imagine Morning and a frequent contributor here. Eric, by the way, is no rank amateur: Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, former poet laureate of Virginia, has called his poems “insightful, lyrical, and compassionate.” He’s writing mostly about DNA these days. (I sense another book of poems on the way.) Meanwhile, he’s made a few tweaks to a poem that first appeared in Imagine Morning and sent it here:
Of a Fish Laid Onto a Dock
By Eric Forsbergh
Disproportionate, the glass eyes
are fixed.
And what if
they could
follow you
as you prepare
to lift
the solemn
texture of the flesh?
It flips against
the boards,
rapid slapping
dying down.
Nothing bleeds,
not slender
articulations
of white bone
lips
torn
to free the
barb.
Gills in garnet
fronds fan out
flexing open
shut open shut:
the act of
drowning.
Until you cup
your hand prayer-like
behind its
slippery head,
touch with your
thin-honed knife
and push.
And
then there are apples … This morning I peeled
and chunked a big batch of Fugis to make
applesauce like my mother used to. As usual, I
ended up with a pile of stems, which I swept
into the trash. But I haven’t always done that,
thinking how they reminded me of runes. The
resulting poem appeared in the Fall 2018 edition
of The Federal Poet, a publication of
The Federal Poets. First convened in 1944,
it’s the oldest continuously active poetry group
on the Washington D.C. area.
Apple Augury
“If
you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you
must first invent the universe.”
-- Carl Sagan
Between the
birds and worms back then,
we lost half the apples from our backyard
trees and rushed to gather the ripe ones
that survived.
We loved the trees, their branches spread
like open arms, their sweet and heavy fruit,
their sturdy trunks two stalwart sentinels
on the lawn.
We loved the applesauce and apple
goody Mother made each year, loved
helping her put up stewed apples
for the wintertime,
rows of jars lined up next to tomatoes
and corn and watermelon pickle on the
curved shelves beneath the cellar stairs --
homey cornucopia.
A is for apple, the alpha fruit, the first
one babies name. Apple primeval,
fruit of the
tree. How many seeds, how
many sins.
Peeling apples
for a pie these days, I scatter
the stems and look for answers in the runes,
a kind of apple
augury, like casting the bones
to see what’s
coming next.
....................................................................................................................................
A Loss
Prominent Israeli writer, novelist, journalist,
and intellectual
Amos Oz died in late December. Even reading
him in translation, you sense the spare beauty
and tension in his words. The January 14 issue
of The New Yorker includes a moving Oz story
from 1963, “All Rivers.” The careful, almost
clumsy, way the narrator tells his story,
forever worrying about what came first, shows Oz
at his most empathetic yet controlled. Read it.
But what I will remember most about Oz is what
he is said to have replied when asked why he
wrote about sad people. “Happy people,” he
said,” tell their own stories.”
.....................................................................................................................................
Mature Love
In the sweet heat of romance, young lovers may not realize how greatly their feelings for each other can endure and grow over time. But looking back on 40-some years of marriage, I know the love I feel for my husband now is not the same love I felt when we first married. It’s stronger, deeper, different … more mature. My Poetry Society of Virginia friend Pia Taavila-Borsheim comes to the idea of mature love from a different angle. After many years as a widow and single mother, Pia celebrates a late marriage in her new chapbook Love Poems, a clear-eyed, sensual homage to, yes, mature love. I recommend all the poems in this wise collection, but I especially like the many in which Pia turns her eye upward to the skies and the birds that fly in them. Here’s one of those poems:
Two Birds
By Pia Taavila-Borsheim
Across our northern skies, two birds
charge and
wheel, the smaller sleek
in hot pursuit.
Perhaps the larger
skulked to raid
the newborn nest.
Perhaps a tuft
of food its beaked
desire lured.
Whatever the cause
of this flight's
rage, they grapple, peck,
fall and swoop.
The chaser nips
the other's
tail, ignores the odds,
defying physics,
brave in sheer
revenge, aloft.
I watch them wing
throughout the
morn, then turn to walk
long-rutted
fields. Briars, hawthorn
rise to snag.
Their gnarled beauty
hosts a single feather, black.
But perhaps my
favorite poem in
Pia’s collection
is “Love Poem
for Aging
Couples,” which
ends with these
gently elegiac
words: “You
raise your hands
to stroke / my
head and start
to sing: a
paean, a
lullaby, a
dirge.”
....................................................................................................................................
Telling the Truth
Epigrams succeed where epics fail, says a Persian proverb, and Egyptian-American poet and essayist Yahia Lababidi began taking those words to heart as a young boy. Before the days of Twitter and memes, Lababidi began distilling what he calls his soul’s dialogue with itself into aphorisms, pithy statements of principle or even truth. In Where Epics Fail., Lababidi’s second book of aphorisms, truths abound:
We cannot know ourselves without knowing the
natural world.
You can’t bury pain and not expect it to grow
roots.
They are not virtues if we are overly aware of
them.
Our vices make a
hell of solitude, our virtues a heaven.
Rebellion is adolescent; acceptance is maturity.
I’ve selected these aphorisms at random from the book’s 800 or so. In fact, that seems to me the best way to approach this collection, rather like the classical practice of sortes Virgilianae, or divining the future by opening one of Virgil’s works at random and interpreting the passage you find. Take, for example, the first aphorism in the book:
A poem arrives like a hand in the dark.
What poet has not felt that touch, has not yearned to feel it again? Or turn to page 204 and
consider the first two aphorisms:
Maturity is to care more for a precious few
things, and much less about much else.
Maturing is sweetening.
I’d like to think that Lababidi, like Pia Taavila-Borsheim, was contemplating mature love. But clearly the meaning goes further. As he has written elsewhere, “Aphorisms are headlines, yes, but they are also the entire stories, inviting readers of sensitivity and conscience to breathe life into them, by living at a higher level of consciousness.”
Can a few well-chosen words salve the wounds of our increasingly divided world? I’d like to think that, too. Lababidi’s words are a kind of peace offering, reminding us, as one reviewer said, of the strength and purpose of silence.
....................................................................................................................................
Murmuring
On my bucket
list, if I had
one, would
definitely be
watching a
murmuration of
starlings.
That’s what it’s
called when
hundreds,
sometimes
thousands, of
starlings fly in
swooping,
intricately
coordinated
patterns through
the sky. Seeing
a murmuration in
person would be
amazing, but
meanwhile I’ve
watched videos
on YouTube,
including one
that’s
especially
mesmerizing..
And (you knew
this was
coming), I’ve
written about
the phenomenon,
too. Here’s my
poem, which
appears in the
current issue
(volume 31) of
riverSedge:
Murmuration of Starlings
By Sally Zakariya
Dancing in the eastern sky
a bird cloud pulses out
draws in,
widening
and turning all
together--
a swirl of
starlings,
wings in
synchrony,
each bird
imperceptibly
invisibly,
communing
with the birds
nearby,
balancing
uncertainty
and consensus
A rule of seven, science
says, and more a
matter
of physics than
biology--
each small group
poised
on the edge of
transformation,
like crystals
forming, liquids
turning into
gas, metals
becoming
magnetized.
But what a
wonder, this
murmuration--a ribbon
of flight
unfurled against
the sky, eddy
and churn
of a thousand
wings
thrumming with life.
Many thanks to Dover’s clip-art book “Bewick’s
Animal Woodcuts” for that handsome starling up
there. And thanks as well to the lovely folks at
the
Creative Writing Program.at the University
of Texas Rio Grande Valley, which publishes
riverSedge.
....................................................................................................................................
At the Traffic Light
“Thanks for reading
my poem,” the email
began, but thanks
really are due to
Michigan poet Claire
Weiner. “I’m a
clinical social
worker and
mindfulness teacher
when I’m not writing
poetry, short
stories, and
creative
nonfiction,” she
went on to say. You
can see that
thoughtful
background in the
little drama playing
out at the traffic
light in the poem
she sent us:
A Cold Tuesday in Mid-March
By Claire Weiner
Today holds no mercy for her--
the woman with the bad dye job
who struggles across Carpenter Road
with a shopping cart of groceries in plastic
bags.
She’s come from the discount food market
or maybe from CVS, using coupons
to buy groceries--cans of soup, crackers,
a small jar of peanut butter, an iridescent
orange
rectangle of cheese, along with her cigarettes.
The cart isn’t supposed to leave
the parking lot, but she’d be doomed without it
As it is, she has barely enough time
to cross with the green light, the March wind
blows
against her, her sweatshirt insufficient for the
feeble sun
and occasional snowflake.
I wait at the light in my late model car with
heated seats,
full of nonessential purchases from Target and
wonder
what would happen if I offered her a ride.
But what would she do with the cart?
When the light changes, I step on the gas.
Weiner’s work has appeared in Tuck Magazine,
After Hours, Burningwood Literary Journal, Muddy
River Poetry Review, and other publications.
We’re glad to be added to the list.
....................................................................................................................................
Unknowable Mystery
While my new
chapbook
Personal
Astronomy
was still at the
printer, I got
the exciting
news that
another chapbook
manuscript, “The
Unknowable
Mystery of Other
People,” was
accepted for
publication by
The Poetry Box.
A finalist in
that publisher’s
2018 chapbook
competition,
this collection
is all about
various people …
friends, family,
strangers, and
in between. It
won’t be
published until
sometime this
winter, but
meanwhile,
here’s one of
the poems:
Hospital Lobby
I’ve been to all of them, he says,
rocking back and forth, arms
wrapped around himself, every
shelter in the city, naming
them one by one, intoning
like a Biblical prophet
in a B movie. All of them.
Everyone looks away,
away from this embarrassment
in frayed sweatpants and bedroom
slippers. Every single shelter,
rocking harder and deeper
like water coming to a boil.
All I want is money for the bus,
money and something to eat.
It takes a hospital official, brisk
in suit and badge, to lead him
away, promising a hot cafeteria
meal. Everyone is pleased.
Smiles of satisfaction. Problem
solved. Embarrassment gone.
I can’t make it on my own out
on the street, he says, but
now no one is listening.
Soon to be a motion picture? Well, no, but
ordering info, etc., to come. While you’re
waiting, you can still get a copy of
Personal Astronomy.
....................................................................................................................................
Ordinary/Extraordinary
I’ve
been trying to catch up on some of the books
about poetry that I might have read as an MFA
student. I never was one, though, which explains
why, in my 70s, I finally picked up
A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry, by
Gregory Orr, who is called by the Poetry
Foundation “the master of the short, personal
lyric.” The book is an absorbing guide to
writing and reading poetry, from the interplay
of order and disorder in a poem to the wonderful
ways poets use rhythm, sound, and imagination to
bring their works alive.
One section that struck me particularly was a
passage on, of all things, syntax. Citing the
“dislocations and deeper entanglements of the
American poet Hart Crane,” Orr quotes a
difficult passage of Crane’s “Voyages” and calls
it “an extremely expressive use of syntax, one
that mocks the skeletal parsing of sentence with
an image of fleshly, ecstatic flowing.
I couldn’t really follow the Crane passage, I
confess, so I felt better when I read on. ”I
would add, just to be clear about this,” Orr
writes, that I’m not really able to make any
ordinary sense out of these lines, even though I
think they’re rather amazing.”
Exactly. I have a friend who writes poems that
are striking for their sounds and images, but I
can’t always make “ordinary sense” out of them.
Even so, I think they’re extraordinary.
....................................................................................................................................
Between Storms
Randall Jarrell
once described a
poet as someone
who “manages, in
a lifetime of
standing out in
thunderstorms,
to be struck by
lightning five
or six times.”
Most of us who
try to be poets
check the
weather reports
regularly,
hoping for
inspirational
lightning.
Things can
sometimes be
pretty
uninspiring
between storms,
though, and
that’s where I
find myself
right now. In a
lull.
Yes, my chapbook
Personal
Astronomy
is imminent (yay), and yes, I have another
one coming this
winter (more on
that later). But
now, in that
aforementioned
lull, I’d like
to feature work
by a couple of
other, more
inspired, poets.
.....................................................................................................................................
Open Doors
One such poet is
my friend
Rebecca Leet,
whose new book,
Living with the
Doors Wide Open,
is now available
on Amazon. In
this collection,
Rebecca brings
her journalist’s
skills of
observation and
her experience
of a life well
lived to a
collection of
engaging and
accessible
poetry. Her
poems touch the
universal behind
the everyday,
the sometimes
difficult truth
behind fallen
leaves, a
remembered piano
composition, the
burial of a
beloved dog.
Rebecca’s tone
ranges from the
bemused to the
elegiac: “Time
has tattooed
itself / across
my flesh,” she
writes in one
poem; in
another, she
hopes to “yield”
one day with the
grace of a
falling leaf.
“Stay facing the
sun that warms
you,” she
whispers to a
rose that, like
many of us, is
“a few petals
toward autumn.”
Mothering Backwards
By Rebecca King Leet
I’m sorry, she says, what
are your
daughters’ names?
Those,
twenty-five and twenty-six,
for whom she’d
drawn down
Social Security
each month
to ensure they’d
go to college. And
whose University
of Virginia sweatshirt
and William and
Mary tee she’d worn
proudly. She’d
sit stone still, listening
to each story
Caitlin and Kristin shared.
I don’t remember
– what
are your
daughters’ names –
asks the woman
who was my mother
of the woman who is her mother now
.....................................................................................................................................
‘The Body that Smiles’
“I heard the owls tonight,” my friend Janet
Dinsmore emailed me recently. Janet, who has
attended a series of poetry classes with me,
told me she has been looking for her voice in
poetry for many years. She was standing outside
her cottage near the Chesapeake Bay one evening
when she heard the owls.
Gift
By Janet Dinsmore
Owls are communing
in the soft dark
wooh wooh, a soprano
then an alto
and another
I smile on the gravel road
actually I am inside the body that smiles,
the body smiling with my face
mouth curved happy up
unbidden, unintended…
the independent inner one
on its private
unpredictable
purer path
.....................................................................................................................................
Trifecta
Rejection. Rejection. Rejection. It’s hard to
keep submitting work for publication when
everything comes back “thanks but no thanks.”
And then suddenly comes acceptance of not one
but
three poems at the same time! In the same
journal! Thank you, thank you
Foliate Oak Literary Magazine. for
publishing “Artic Fever,” “Still With Us,” and
“Bathtub Buddha” in your May issue. It’s enough
to make me keep on writing, keep on submitting.
Bathtub Buddha
By Sally Zakariya
Watching the water swirl down
the drain
I think of Australia –
does it really circle the other way
in the southern hemisphere
left hand one way, right hand
the other?
Do the gyres cancel each other out
when they collide at the equator
clogging the
drain
bathwater rising
a flood of soap and bubbles
bathing the earth?
No it can’t be – the world
is too steeped in dirt and grime
to be cleansed so easily.
Even the rain
that showers down
from Heaven
can’t wash the stains clean
without help from our tears.
.....................................................................................................................................
Speaking of submission …
What was good advice in 2014 is still good
advice today. Cruising through calls for
submission recently, I happened on a piece by
poet
Katie Manning , who, when she’s not writing
herself is teaching others to write at Point
Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. Manning’s
good advice is straightforwardly titled
How to Submit Poems for Publication.
In sections called 1) find literary journals, 2)
follow directions, 3) cover letters matter [sort
of], 4) keep good records, and 5) keep
submitting, Manning gives a quick course in the
art of getting your poems out there and in print
or online.
“If you’re not one of those rare, lucky poets
who have poems accepted on the first try, don’t
worry,” she writes. “Most of us took a long time
to get a first poem published, and sometimes
even well-published poets have dry spells.
Submitting poetry can be discouraging, but keep
doing it.” Words to live by. After all, as
Manning observes, it’s a numbers game. The more
you submit, the more likely you’ll get one of
those good-news acceptance emails.
.....................................................................................................................................
There’s still time
If you’ve been meaning to order my forthcoming
chapbook
Personal Astronomy but haven’t gotten around
to it, never fear. The chapbook is slated for
publication in mid-August, and there’s still
time to reserve your copy. The poems “express a
stargazer’s wonderment, doubt and acceptance of
the extraordinary grounded in an ordinary life,”
says one reviewer. Another calls the collection
“a poetic journey into the microcosm of love and
relationship juxtaposed against the backdrop of
the universe in poems that are as lucid and
ordered as the constellations they invoke.” Buy
a copy and the stars will shine on you.
.....................................................................................................................................
Coming Soon(ish)
My forthcoming chapbook “Personal Astronomy” is
now available for pre-order from
Finishing Line Press. I’d like to think
people will enjoy the poems inside, and I’m
hoping they’ll like the cover illustration as
well. It’s a detail from a star chart by Johann
Elert Bode (1747-1826) showing the constellation
Andromeda. (That’s her, reclining among the
stars.) When I first mentioned
"Personal Astronomy". here a couple of
months ago, I included a poem that will be in
the chapbook, “Constellations.” Poet Dianne
Silvestri responded with a poem of her own.
(Dianne, by the way, wrote the charming “Summer
Treasure” in
Joys of the Table..)
“Since you invited correspondence,” she wrote
me, “I am drawn to send you a poem of mine I
recently resurrected which I thought of as I
read your ‘Constellations.’”
August Midnight
By Dianne Silvestri
The ranger locked the gate
at sundown, our group inside
to camp at Bluffton Game Preserve.
We unrolled sleeping bags
like planks to bridge the road,
lay wide-eyed to observe
unobstructed midnight sky
of August set to astound us
with one shooting star after another,
all sites on the map overhead
firing meteors in rapid succession.
No one died while asleep
in the middle of that asphalt.
When we awoke the next morning,
in fact, we were all more alive.
Dianne Silvestri, author of the chapbook
Necessary Sentiments, has poems published in
Zingara Poetry Review, Poetry South, The Main
Street Rag, The Examined Life Journal, The
Worcester Review, The Healing Muse, Inscape,
THEMA, American Journal of Nursing, and
elsewhere. A past Pushcart nominee, she is
copyeditor of the journal Dermatitis and leads
the Morse Poetry Group in Massachusetts.
.....................................................................................................................................
Ten Words
Dianne writes that she “resurrected” her poem,
which got me thinking of all the old, dead lines
I’ve buried in the depths of my computer. Once,
for a while, two friends and I played a poetry
game involving ten words. We’d take turns each
month choosing words at random from whatever
book or magazine lay nearby and then we’d each
come up with a poem that included at least seven
of the words in some form or other. Here’s one I
wrote more than a decade ago, drawing from the
following words: lantern, drag, dimension,
scowl, thaw, reserve, inquiry, docent, copper,
and capillary.
Insomnia, 4 AM
The end of the world comes
when you’re awake
the dark clamor,
the rush of wings,
the taste of
copper in your throat,
the jagged wire
of dread dragged
through your
veins and capillaries.
You don’t get to
sleep through this.
The moon may
hang a jaunty lantern
outside your
window, but you see the scowl
on its face, you
grasp the sheer dimension
of the final
freeze.
No welcome thaw
to come. No cozy sleep.
Not even dreams
of sleep.
When the end of
the world comes
you will still be awake.
We didn’t come up with great stuff, but it was
interesting to see what different directions the
same batch of words inspired us to take. Try it
and you’ll see.
.....................................................................................................................................
From the Recipe Box
A recipe box is a little history not just of
dishes you love but also of the people who
taught you how to make them. Take dessert: Even
though I try to stay away from cakes and pies
these days, that wasn’t always the case.
Flipping through the recipes in my box brings
family members and old friends sweetly to mind.
My thanks to the Mississippi University for
Women for including this poem in the Fall 2017
issue of
Ponder Review:
Their Desserts
By Sally Zakariya
Robin, who couldn’t hide her
innocence, maker of poppy
seed cake,
unhappy in love, leaning toward the nunnery
last I heard
Jeanne of the
freckles and flaming orange hair, never quite
one of our group
and remembered mostly for her
carrot cake
Willie,
practical Midwesterner who did it all a year
ahead
and better, who
served flaky almond pastry from her
Dutch forebears
friends and
family all filed together in the old recipe box
under Cakes and
Cookies along with others -- Mother’s
there of course
no baker, still
we relished her peach skillet pie and apple
goodie, sweet
memories neatly recorded in her own left-
leaning hand
Nancy, too, big
sister who settled into a domesticity I envied
but failed to
emulate (I never make her pecan pie but savor
the recipe)
and you, Aunt
Betty, your spice cake topped with tangy lemon
sauce deserves a poem of its own, warm and
pungent, starting
with the same
simple stuff as all the rest -- flour, butter,
sugar, eggs
-- but how
various the cooks, how various their desserts
.....................................................................................................................................
Man Overboard
I’m
always delighted to see new work by poets I
know, even if I only know them through
publishing. Case in point: Michael H. Levin,
whose delicious poem “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”
(after the movie by the same name) appeared in
Joys of the Table. Levin’s new collection,
Man Overboard, is now available for preorder
from
Finishing Line Press.
“Michael Levin’s
poems are a captivating collection of dramatic
slices of life netted over the course of
decades,” writes one critic, and another adds,
“Levin’s poetry circumnavigates the globe like a
time-traveling Indiana Jones and sticks a shiny
fork deep into earth’s volcanic heart.”
The title poem, which first appeared in Poetica
Magazine, tells a tragic story with Levin’s
characteristic economy and Imagination
Man Overboard
(C.G.R., d. 2004)
By Michael H. Levin
Dark head bobbing in a
chevron wake
disconnected as the space surged
you slipped through the O
of our grasp.
Cool as Wisconsin, you forgot
safe dreams are toxic, that fear is how we fly
--
stood off, maneuvering. We scan your log now
seeking its theme.
Cold virtues are an ancient curse --
they reek of Artemis and Mimë.
To wall one’s heart with denial, is to
starve the self away.
Our saving grace is to open
like glories; for openness is all
the earth we have, we dots on the
sliding gray plates
of a following sea.
.....................................................................................................................................
Bon
Appetit
Don’t forget to “Like” our
Joys of the Table Facebook page. And check
back often! We’re adding poems and recipes from
time to time and would love to hear from you.
....................................................................................................................................
What Are You Writing?
Why should we get all the
bylines? Submit your latest poem—just one for
now—and we’ll publish the poems we like best in
an upcoming blog post. Simultaneous submissions
are fine, but please let us know if the poem is
accepted or published elsewhere. Send your poem,
plus a few lines about yourself, in the body of
an e-mail message to:
poetryeditor@RicherResourcesPublications.com
|
|
You
Are Here
Welcome to
But Does it Rhyme?
We're a
small, but hopefully growing, band of poets who
like to talk about our craft and share what
we've written. We'll highlight favorite poets,
review new books, and explore the process of
writing poetry from inspiration to conclusion.
(We might venture into essays and short fiction,
too.) We hope you'll like our blog — and
contribute your own thought and poems.
Sally Zakariya, Poetry Editor
Richer Resources Publications
Charan Sue Wollard
(LivermoreLit)
Kevin Taylor
(Poet-ch'i)
Sherry Weaver Smith
(SherrysKnowledgeQuest)
Richer Resources Publications/em>
INVITE US TO YOUR INBOX!
Would you like to
receive our monthly newsletter? Sign up
here.
|
|
|