Christopher Phelps

The following is from a series of Pi Poems, or Cadae—the alphabetical equivalent of the first five digits of Pi (3.1415). Pi is a transcendental number that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter approximately equal to 3.1415926535897. In poetry, it has been used as the basis for a syllabic form that obeys the following distribution of syllables and stanza lengths, resulting (by line length) in a kind of sonnet: xxx __________(3) x ____________(1)___________ } 3 xxxx _________(4) x ____________(1)___________ } 1 xxxxx ________(5) xxxxxxxxx ____(9) xx ___________(2)___________ } 4 xxxxxx _______(6) xxxxx ________(5)___________ } 1 xxx __________(3) xxxxx ________(5) xxxxxxxx _____(8)___________ } 5 xxxxxxxxx ____(9) xxxxxxx ______(7) from Cadae: The Pi Poems 1 The music stopped for a moment then— when we began to savor in its absence silence— started again, maybe a bit louder than before or maybe we only heard it as such, a [...]

Assumption, The Climb, the Premise, the— What drama _____of the size of signs, of sighs Seized at zero. A dry soul is best _____because combustible— But to stand _____beyond witness, burying the sun _____or else writing fire _____along a circumference of unclosing —this is my faith & my reason. I enter history As a secret agent or stone effigy _____dedicated to communism _____but eaten away by music. My chorus _____vacuum-crowded, I _____beg to begin— If now _____is a precipice, then A human voice predates the universe. Everything sends, never to receive This message Premonitory to a shriek—of Shredded _____immensité the vocable, irrevocable _____Proof. _____________________________________________________ Andrew Joron is the author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010) and translator of the German fantasy writer Paul Scheerbart’s The Perpetual Motion Machine (Wakefield Press, 2011). Joron lives in Berkeley, California, and plays the theremin in the dark ambient quartet Cloud [...]

[Then there is this dream with its other bright edges] Then there is this dream with its other bright edges, a piece of paper spread over the flowering field, thin as a reflection. You know what’s wound tight there, wanting to undo. Even when you don’t look, it is still there, all brazen and sting, all blast-net of stars: a single-walled room that is eating itself, one big hole of hallway, pale and crustacean. And inside it, the milk-film bristles with light. Inside, you keep filling with water, and the water keeps filling with copies of you. _____________________________________________________ Niina Pollari wrote two chapbooks of poetry, Fabulous Essential (Birds of Lace 2009) and Book Four (Hyacinth Girl 2011). With Judy Berman, she is editing the essay collection It’s Complicated: Feminists Write about the Misogynist Art We Love.

The 8th of May: A Vow Made for the 7th of May Upon seeing a video of a man in North Carolina firing his rifle into a sign asking citizens to Vote Against NC Amendment One. There are oaks that remember what we would forget—the burn of the rope, how a body takes on more weight the moment it breathes its last, how the earth below shoeless feet grows hungry for the slaughtered. There are rooms where paint has been rolled over blood, where the body’s salt has been vacuumed into bags of dust, where the veneer of a nightstand still bears the imprint of a living hand’s last message. Ghosts of children and men and women hang from fences, linger in the corners of dorm rooms, courtrooms, churches. This is how we deal with it around here, he said, after emptying his gun into a plea for equality, and [...]

Here’s a question: What to do with (how to view) a poem you can’t help but think of as perfect? Here’s one that falls in that category for me, “The Doe” by C. K. Williams, a latter-day sonnet: Near dusk, near a path, near a brook, we stopped, I in disquiet and dismay for the suffering of someone I loved, the doe in her always incipient alarm. All that moved was her pivoting ear the reddening sun shining through transformed to a color I’d only seen in a photo of a child in a womb. Nothing else stirred, not a leaf, not the air, but she startled and bolted away from me into the crackling brush. The part of my pain which sometimes releases me from it fled with her, the rest, in the rake of the late light, stayed. Now let me qualify “perfect.” I don’t ask perfection to [...]

Christopher Phelps: You mention in the introduction that you “had a hunch these poems existed but could never have imagined their scope.” Was there a specific conversation or event or book that inspired you to put together an anthology of faith-, religion-, spirituality-, belief- and non-belief-themed poems from LGBTIQ poets? Kevin Simmonds: I can’t remember the exact moment I decided to pursue this, or why, but I’m certain my decision had much to do with Bryan Borland. He started Sibling Rivalry Press and, in my limited interaction with him, I had a strong sense that he could make this anthology possible. Bryan wants to gather and sustain the LGBTIQ community through our literary works. As far as I’m concerned, he’s doing something new in the publishing industry. Unlike many past and current queer publications / publishing houses, SRP actively strives to publish all kinds of writers, regardless of prescribed and [...]

In a word, Jason Schneiderman is a poet of the helix. In his new book, Striking Surface, he turns and returns a fine Merino wool finer. By refrains; bits of anaphora; tonally and topically, he returns to his concerns in cycle after cycle, rending or revising earlier understandings, and leading new ones up new twists. Scattered throughout the book’s three sections are cycles that include “The Children’s Crusade,” “Stalinism,” “Ars Poetica,” “Physics,” “Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha,” and “Hyacinthus.” The middle section of the book is entirely a cycle: an unforgettable family of elegies that address his mother’s death with tenderness and probity, in a casual voice talking through grief without flinching and without sentimentality. From “Elegy I (Work)”: “Whatever dead is, you are, and how you must hate that, / busy fixer of problems, busy stitcher of crafts.” Soon we learn the role crafts played before death—how they were a [...]