Emily Vogel

Pool: 5 Choruses By Endi Bogue Hartigan Omnidawn, 2014 ISBN 978-1890650926 It troubles me when readers and writers of poetry insist that “postmodernist” poetry doesn’t make any sense, inherits no concept of consequence, and ultimately leaves all sense of meaning uncertain and equivocated. The fact is that good postmodernist poetry simply succeeds at depicting certain ideas in a way that demands the reader to twist (as the phrases do) his or her own imagination so that they might only skirt the meaning enough to get a hint of the overarching intent. And no, the reader may never succeed in harnessing exactly what the poet meant. But good postmodernist poetry at least allows the reader more agency in determining the meaning. As Derrida insists, it allows the reader “free-play.” Endi Bogue Hartigan’s latest collection “Pool: 5 Choruses” is not only what I would refer to as an opportunity for free-play, it [...]

The Food Pantry Don’t have to go to the food pantry anymore. Got a job bringing people to the food pantry. ____________________________________________ Dave Roskos is the editor of Big Hammer Magazine & Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books. He lives in his home state of New Jersey where he works as a Life Skills Specialist in the mental health field. His most recent chapbook, INTENSIVE CARE, was published by Black Rabbit Press in 2010. Share this: Related Posts Poem of the Week: Emily Vogel Poem of the Week: Mark Wunderlich Poem of the Week: Frank Montesonti Introduction to Unlocked Poem of the Week: Lauren K. Alleyne

Like I Said Okay, so it’s Sunday. I didn’t go to church. I’m an Irish Catholic, I know about sin, but I was tired and just didn’t feel like getting dressed. On Thursday night, I fell and broke a slat from the garden fence. My hip still hurts – the bruise is as big as my Yorkie’s head. That would have been enough, but this morning the vacuum coughed up a hairball and quit. The only food in the fridge is a bearded yogurt. The washing machine refuses to spin. There’s no clean underwear left, so I’m not wearing any. Like I said, I was tired; I didn’t feel like getting dressed, so I didn’t go to church and abdicated rights to all that grace. I put on a pair of dirty jeans, a dirty shirt, and sat outdoors all morning. I did nothing but talk to my dogs, watch [...]

Pictures of a Fireman Grandma said his eyes rose like moons above the rim of his glasses when he leaned over the table at the pool hall the first time they met, called every shot. I remember him descending from a cloud on a ladder of flames with a woman in his arms, clipped from the front page of the Newark Evening News and framed on their living room mantle. Or as he was in the photograph I found in an attic album of him tending register behind the bar of a speak-easy, his eyes dark, cheeks flushed, grinning back at the camera as if he owned the place. I see him seaside, sometimes, up to his knees in weekend surf, his white, button-down shirt flapped open like the wings of a Great Egret, fishing pole bowed, tip sparkling like a cufflink on a cloud as he tugs at the [...]

Green Light In the dark, the green light glows from my father’s radio. Outside, rain, and the sound of rain under 18 wheels. Along the highway, the truckers speak to each other in long all night drawls of almost finished sentences. I think the voice of the midnight universe is always vaguely southern: West Virginia, North Carolina, Shiloh, Vicksburg, moving on up all the way to Cleveland, and down to some great swamp where dead cedars rise, where a Heron barely stirs. I am thinking how pain calcifies in the heart, how great cathedrals in the cave of someone’s closed eyes are being formed—drop by drop, on the lime stone walls of trout streams, in the caves of Kentucky, all the way through to Pennsylvania. Is a man alone, stretched out upon the pallet of his bed? Is he ever less than a landscape, an outcropping of rocks, voices, wires, [...]

April 11th, 2012: I wake up at 5 am, inspired, and begin to scrawl some hasty haiku on the back of an envelope. It is rare that I am awake before my husband. It is still a kind of grayish-dark outside, and I am lonesome that I’m the only one awake, but also secretly luxuriating in this time alone, which is unlikely since I’m usually either teaching students or spending time with my husband. It’s peculiar: the house so tranquil and quiet, the world still dead with sleep. The haiku I’m writing are ambitious, a bit philosophical, perhaps a tad macrocosmic. I’m pleased with them. As I finish with the last one, the coffee-maker sputters to a halt, drips, and emits a breath of steam. I pour myself a cup of coffee. I have had the nagging suspicion that I might be pregnant for days now; in fact I felt [...]

This evening at Catholic mass, while everyone bowed their heads to pray, I asked Jesus not only to help me be good to my husband and my family, but also what he thought about my poetry. I heard a voice, perhaps in my head, or perhaps funneled out the church ceiling which said, “your poetry will touch a few hearts, but it won’t help you in heaven.” Granted, I am aware that it is a bit presumptuous to ask the son of God what he thinks of your poetry. But it had me considering the worth of poetry, and what it means in the grand scheme of things, in relation to other aspects of life, that when you weigh them for their importance, are likely more spiritually imminent. I mentioned this to my husband, the poet Joe Weil, and he said, “You were listening. That is exactly what I would [...]

What inspires us to write poetry? I would think that the commonly accepted assumption about poets is that if one is a poet, he or she has always been a poet. The obvious question which should follow this then is “Can someone be a poet without having any knowledge of poetry?” “Are we born poets?” Let’s begin with this: Most primary, intermediate, and secondary schools include some study of poetry in their curriculums, and yet for the majority of these schools, this is not the primary focus, nor is it rendered a very crucial one. I suppose my first encounter with poetry was a poem written in a photo album of my formative years by my father and mother: “I drop, you catch,/ I cry, you fetch,/I kvetch, you kvetch” (cleverly scrawled next to a picture of me, naked, crawling along the carpet). Of course, this isn’t Pulitzer worthy by [...]

The distinction between what it is that constitutes the “amateur” poet and what constitutes the “expert” is slippery, yet should be considered in an extensive discussion. To begin, let me address the amateur’s typical testimonies: “I write to express my emotions,” or “No, I would never show my poetry to anyone!” The truth is that all poets want readers. One of the differences between the amateur and the expert is that the amateur feels he is at the risk of exposing something “personal” about himself, and is hesitant because he feels he will either be made to feel vulnerable or will be relegated to the subject of ridicule, while the expert, on the other hand, disguises and crafts his poetry through a language and imagistic lens which allows him to remain distanced from the poem, and what the poem speaks to. If a novice poet wants to be recognized, it [...]

One of the most curious aspects about poetry is that the element of “truth” presented in any given poem is never stable. With this in mind, the truth that the reader must accept at face value is constructed by the poet out of his or her organic impulses, and must be credible simply because the poet pronounces that it is. A question with which I have been wrestling for years is the idea that the poet and the “speaker” are possessed by two distinct and disconnected identities. What I find fascinating is that I can read a poem about death, sadness, and strife, and in some cases, the suffering of the speaker, and then meet and converse with the poet who always seems to be a contented and well-adjusted individual. This might evince the possibility that the speaker is not always espoused to the poet, but is rather something of [...]