Blitzkreig By John Gosslee Rain Mountain Press 2013 ISBN-13: 978-0989705110 70 pages The tree lay down on the garage roof and stretched. You have your heaven, it said, go to it. –William Carlos Williams, The Hurricane Maybe World War II ends earlier if white lab-coated William Carlos Williams scrawls “The Hurricane” longhand on the back of each issued prescription drug ticket? Mrs. Myrtle, patiently waiting in queue for Penicillin, flips her note to discover what I consider the philosophical equivalent of the sentiment “All Dogs Go to Heaven”. I assert Mrs. Myrtle would feel more alive, even for a minute. She might show the pharmacist or a child behind her recovering from whooping cough. She might read it to Mr. Myrtle while he sleeps fully-dressed, pretending to listen to The Ink Spots and Ella Fitzgerald’s chart-topping hit I’m Making Believe on the radio. Eventually everyone in Rutherford, New Jersey might [...]

There are many reasons why Karl Shapiro is no longer taught or on the lips of MFA students. First, he was part of the post-war formalist/structuralism/urban boom in poetry, but he had enjoyed great success (Pulitzers and whatnot), and he was a Jew. A Jew with a Pulitzer in the 1940s/1950s who was neither humble nor particularly unwashed and earnest (Shapiro…was dapper) was treated with some envy and contempt. Second, the Beats had visited him and not thought themselves properly treated (they expected a hipster jazz sort of poet because it was Shapiro–not Ginsberg–who first start writing in long rhapsodic free verse lines in emulation of Whitman). Shapiro became for them the symbol of stuffed shirt bougie poetics (as you will see from this poem, Shapiro was anything but. He was sexually open and using the long free verse line a good ten years before Allen Ginsberg came anywhere near [...]

Introduction for October: Being Unreal I don’t know about you, but my right-now life is laden with reality: bills, the 9-to-5 (necessary to pay said bills), the leaden thing that weighs on everyone at said 9-to-5 (making them mean and me mean), family, the failures of family, a slowing metabolism and no will or energy to exercise. It’s a maddeningly endless personal abyss. And the language that surrounds me every day–mostly sad, simple transactional language–fails. Yet the poems I’m sharing this darkening October month come from writers who somehow manage to slip out of the trance that keeps us subservient to reality, tethered to the mundane. When they lapse into consciousness, they are possessed as Nietzsche was when he wrote “No artist tolerates reality.” Those who are awake, if only momentarily, are the artists. And by artists, I mean these writers who feel and tinker until they’ve given form to [...]

Tupelo Press. 2013. 60 pages. “Memory remembers matter remembers/ Make make make make” –Lee Sharkey In The Book of the Dead, Muriel Rukeyser writes, “What three things can never be done? Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone.” In Calendars of Fire, Lee Sharkey refuses to be that historian or activist, tamed in middle age, no longer pained by injustice. In the title poem, she explains, “It was what I wanted, the sobering fire.” You may wonder how and why fire sobers, but then ask yourself, what do poets do best? They fight forgetting, silence, and isolation by paying attention—really paying attention, so much so that they make others nervous, including themselves. You may remember Tiresias from Greek mythology—the one who hit two mating snakes with a stick and became a woman for seven years. He was not only a blind prophet with a preference for burnt offerings but also a great [...]

If asked what my greatest ambition was, I’d admit it was still to write a great poem–not a great poem as per some throng of critics, or high powered literary figures, but great to one talented, intelligent, engaged reader who I trust to never let me down in terms of aesthetic judgment. This reader exists only in the mind, as a sort of faith. At times, this reader has found partial embodiment in certain individuals, but never full, and never in that “Admiring bog” Emily Dickinson joked about. The bog never liked me much and, at an early point in my so called writing life, I had to realize the in crowd might patronize me, even hold me in a sort of pleasant regard, but I am not idol material, and on those rare occasions when I have been “Worshipped” I did my best to dispossess my worshippers of that [...]

How to Write a Poem The day hath too much red in it— death licking her chops over the salty carcasses of abandoned ideas. But this week, I fell in love. It came over the hill hungry & surprising. And I will take the mysteriousness out of my best poem to appease apple pickers, students, mothers and all of Ohio. Finally, the poem is what you want it to be: a rose of splendor; a lover in an abandoned room marking time with a lover’s laughter. __________________________________________________ Mike Hackney is the author of five books, a grant recipient from the Ohio Arts Council and Ohio Arts Commission, and founder of the Almeda Street Poetry Group. Share this: Related Posts Poem of the Week: DéLana R.A. Dameron Poem of the Week: Josh Lefkowitz Poem of the Week: Dorothea Lasky Poem of the Week: Luke Johnson Poem of the Week: Don Mee [...]

Easy Math: Poems, Lauren Shapiro, Sarabande Books (Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry), pp. 65, $14.95, February 2013. Reading Easy Math by Lauren Shapiro is like being invited to an outrageous party where “the only escape/is realizing you’re already there.” It’s a come-as-you-are party, so readers are encouraged to show up with tousled hair, wearing…

If you read the Bible with no authority other than your love of story and your lack of “judgment” (meaning without the lust to prove yourself justified by an authority), it opens up to you like the long love between you and an old family member–like the way my heart opened up to my grandmother. In real peace, there is room for ferocity. In real feeling, there is room for contradiction. God instructs the heart not by certainties but by pains and contradictions. The Bible is full of pains and contradictions. Because I read the Bible and knew the story of Ruth, I knew how wonderful and brilliant Keats had been to yoke himself to that long ago figure standing and hearing the nightingale “amid the alien corn.” I didn’t have to look the story up, and it had the force for me it had had for Keats: the nightingale’s [...]

Light Pollution, Match.com Potlatch No man is an island. Some men are on islands. Some men are on two. Odysseus flicked his phone awake began to type: “Penelope, my darling, I —” Calypso came into the room. Phone disappears into pocket, on silent. Whisper I to you: “Come on the drift of the moon. The light flies from our windows and our streets to space It hits tiny bits of dust, bounces back aground, hits your eyes; hits my eyes.” Or eyes stare at the dull impeded glow of the skies. Penelope marries a suitor. Odysseus moves in with Calypso. Nausicaa sits on the beach; the stars they are shining she thinks and looks up and counts them. Twenty-eight. Twenty-eight points of light, she thinks, how’s that for a metaphor? It’s her twenty eighth birthday, and Odysseus has messaged her. A million pixels of light in her eyes, a picture [...]

Horsetails The cirrus above were horsetails running from the smoke stacks as we latched flaps and buckled coats, holding out for incredible thunderings, standing long as the mud of the dirty Susquehanna where girls lose virginity to four wheel drives and lift kits. We go on working despite our Sunday ghosts and rotisserie traditions. Here mothers use food stamps for cigarettes and children learn to talk to rabbits or fall asleep to infomercials. Parades drum on to resemble community but the trailer parks know better, sharing lovers and thirty packs, having yard sales for angry fixes while school boys are mauled in saw mills and two keg bars. ______________________________________________ Zach Fishel‘s second chapbook, Thorn Bushes and Fishhooks, will appear from NightBallet Press this fall. His poetry has twice been nominated for the Pushcart, and at present he teaches environmentalism in New England.

Reading Goat In The Snow Emily Pettit’s lush lines unfold and unfold and unfold. She’s a master of the short line, gorgeously complex in her use of dark themes (strongest being a version of intense human anxiety) and poignantly reveals these themes in an unselfconscious, direct voice. The distinctive “leaping” I find in so much great poetry of our generation (the feeling of non-sequitur logic and negative space between lines), is conquered by Pettit. But what’s so powerful about her poems is that she never loses the initial thread which allows each poem to remain entirely distinctive and unique, rather then forgoing sense. Each individual poem, like a planet in a solar system, orbits; sometimes harkening back to others nearby. Her poems are introverted planets, with extroverted survival skills, in a chaotic universe. * No one, I think, is quite as masterful at titles as Emily Pettit. In her book [...]

Characters: Wallace Stevens Marianne Moore Elizabeth Bishop W.H. Auden James Merril Robert Lowell Introduction Lowell: Why are we here? Can someone tell me this, please? Auden: A little testy, aren’t we? Lowell: Testy? Of course. I was not planning on being summoned from the grave today, and in fact had plans this afternoon with my dead first wife. Bishop: Do you mean Jean? Lowell: Yes, I mean Jean. We were going to visit Boston, MA, so that I might once again visit the stomping grounds on which I bullied my classmates and earned the nickname “Cal.” Bishop: Short for “Caligula.” And you’re proud of this? Auden: Proud? He’s positively beaming, the old bully. Stevens: Bully indeed. I agree with Mr. Lowell, this is a most wretched occasion for being summoned. The malady of the quotidian? I meant to say the malady of the long dead. Merrill: An elegant turn of [...]

Photo by Carolyn Baskis No Use Crying I don’t know who decided that idiom. You wanna cry, cry. What, are we all so wealthy that we can afford to pour milk over granite tabletops and not think about the cost of such behaviors? Do we own and operate dairy farms? No, we don’t – not most of us. Sucks. So go ahead, let fall your tears (or an apropos typo: let fall your fears) and cry, weep, howl, shriek, rage until you are at last sponge-ready and eager to clean and begin anew. But you know what else you could do? Go get some juice. Spill that, too, in arcing droplets that ape the sun. Add an asparagus spear, a broccoli floret, a Brussels sprout; arrange accordingly. Look at this interesting composition you made! All textured and nuanced – and to think that it started from a mild milk tragedy. [...]

We could say we long for someone, or we could better say that someone has triggered our longing. Certain mechanisms exist in the human brain that when brushed by a combination of memory and bodily functions, demand interpretation. Feeling is situational interpretation. The same chemicals and hormones, and even, to an extent the same physical manifestations that define being “in love” also accompany the fight, freeze, and flee complex of fear: increased heart rate, dilation of the eyes, blood flow to the hands, feet, lips, and genitalia, a rise in blood pressure, an increased sharpness yet reduction of our focus to the matter at hand. We must interpret these sensations as either love or fear depending on the situation and all our past experiences, and very often, we waver between our interpretations: this is the basic fodder of romantic comedies. Boy meets girl: fight, freeze, or flee (usually some combination [...]

WHEN AT A CERTAIN PARTY IN NYC Wherever you’re from sucks, and wherever you grew up sucks, and everyone here lives in a converted chocolate factory or deconsecrated church without an ugly lamp or souvenir coffee cup in sight, but only carefully edited objets like the Lacanian soap dispenser in the kitchen that looks like an industrial age dildo, and when you rifle through the bathroom looking for a spare tampon, you discover that even their toothpaste is somehow more desirable than yours. And later you go with a world famous critic to eat a plate of sushi prepared by a world famous chef from Sweden and the roll is conceived to look like “a strand of pearls around a white throat,” and is so confusingly beautiful that it makes itself impossible to eat. And your friend back home—- who says the pioneers who first settled the great asphalt parking [...]