Sometimes I no longer desire to teach the way I have been teaching–not because I am ungrateful, but because I wish to do a fair day’s work. I wish I could have nothing but independent studies, work from the morning until the late afternoon–9 conferences a day (One hour for lunch) five days a week. By the end of the week, I could see forty five students in an intensive, close hour where they would get far more from the experience, and so would I. Once a week, for another two hours, I could meet with them all together and we could break bread, have a reading and a party–maybe even a dance. Everything about my life, all its pains and losses, its odd twists and almost impossible paths, has been a call to communion. I have something to teach, but not in this sad thing we call a “class [...]

(an excerpt from ‘Comics Poetry: Beyond Sequential Boundaries’) Can one see, indeed, that a painter or a poet never starts a painting or a poem before they have been carried to see it more or less by their spirit, in its simultaneity of principle elements…? ~ Rodolphe Töpffer, Réflexions et menus propos d’un peintre genevois Finding connections between comics and poetry has been my focus for a few years now. It’s an interest shared with a field of talented creators including Matt Madden, Warren Craghead, Bianca Stone, Paul K. Tunis, Alexander Rothman, Derik Badman, Summer Browning, Michael Farrell, Eryon Franklin, Franklin Einspruch and Julie Delporte, to name too few. Given this growing commitment to comics and poetry, (evident in recent , , and ), this article discusses comics theory, its relevance to experimental forms and possibilities for the future of comics poetry. Existing comics research often borrows concepts from narrative [...]

The Pieces A group poem If my hand had fallen into yours earlier, I might _______still be holding you. I’ll always remember what you told me: In order to build a castle, learn how to build a ____________________________house first. I’m excited and nervous at the same time. I can’t wait to come home. Listening to your echoes surrounding me. I’m sick of this jail because of the lockins. Curiosity and patience grow longer ____Awaiting an answer that feels like eternity. I look out the window at night And see the brick wall and the shadow Behind the security lights which Light up the premises to form a sparkle Which reflects off the shiny razor wire. I’ve realized that it’s not the time here that’s bothering me ______But the time I’ve lost with you. ____________________________________I need a new pen… This is my everyday life. I long to carry your burdens. ____________________With [...]

from on . ______________________________________________ Grace Miceli is the author of American Girl Doll, ok cool, Feminist Art Coloring Book, and Teen Angel Sticker Bitch, among others. She holds a B.A. in studio art from Smith College. Her visual art has been widely acclaimed online and IRL, and featured in each just as thoroughly. Please visit www.gracemiceli.com to visit her world. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Brittany Perham TRACKING THE MARVELOUS Poem of the Week: Yahia Lababidi Possibility and Grace Poem of the Week: Joseph Fasano

They Used to Dance On Saturday Nights By Gillian Devereux Aforementioned Productions, 2012, 34 p. ISBN 978-0-9823741-4-6 The carnival performers in Gillian Devereux’s They Used to Dance on Saturday Nights (Aforementioned Productions) are always, like Robert Lowell’s prostitutes, “freelancing out along the razor’s edge”, always subject to the fatalities of their trades—knife throwing, tightrope walking, sword or fire swallowing. Entertainers are only as lucrative as the opacity of their parlor tricks and/or the chance genetic mutations of their tragedies. Freaks may “share a stomach or a torso”; may “frolic”, frighten” or “fold their bodies flat as farmland”, or an armless girl may have “a beauty in [her] strangeness that could ruin a man”. Images may be unexpectedly lovely, or transcendental: a dancing bear “soft as snow piled on pine boughs”, the salmon it’s tossed in its captivity leaping up into freedom and the constellations. Spectator and performer are a working [...]

I became a teacher by accident. In 1995, I was asked to do a one day school visit in Paterson, New Jersey. I was phoned by Susan Amsterdam, one of the co-ordinators of The Passiac Community college Theatre and Poetry project. This is not the official name, I have never remembered the official name, but Maria Mazziotti Gillan founded and runs it, Susan co-ordinates it, and it is the only program of its kind in New Jersey, insofar as it serves strictly the urban population of Paterson and brings poets to the schools for one day visits. Susan works with the librarians of the various grade schools and high schools. Many noteworthy poets such as Lorna Decervantes, Gary Soto, and Sean Thomas Dougherty have participated. Susan has one of the most affected mid-Atlantic accents of all time, fully as affected at Marie Dressler when she used to play the put-upon [...]

Leah Umansky: In your second book, Swoon, you have a sequence of poems around “Women.” Now, in Woman Without Umbrella, you have a similar sequence at work. Did you know when you finished Swoon, that you would have a similar sequence in your next collection? Victoria Redel: The sequence in Swoon I saw in the way a visual artist might consider a sequence of gesture drawings—which seemed to me an extension of the overall notion I had for Swoon to try and render the many faceted and simultaneous aspects of a woman–mother/lover/thinker/daughter. In contrast I see Woman Without Umbrella as having a kind of narrative arc and so the thread of poems using the same titles is a consideration of time. And though “Woman” in the title is singular I think of this as a book inhabited by many women both contemporary and historical. To answer the second part of [...]

This entry is part of a series, Unlocked» , Unlocked» Ralph A dead dog. A deep hole. A piece of rope. I tied one end around the dog’s waist, the other around mine. Ralph (I’ve given him a name) went in first. We didn’t make it as far as China but we did come out in a strange city, a city unlike any I’d ever seen. Everything – the streets, the buildings, the doors & windows – was made of polished steel, everything. And it was bright, much too bright for my weak eyes. I soon went blind. Ralph (who by some miracle has come back to life, or perhaps he was only sleeping) was not cut out to be a seeing-eye dog but he’s doing the best he can. ______________________________________________________ Philip Hammial has had twenty-two collections of poetry published. His sixteenth collection, In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s [...]

LUPE’S DIAMONDS She had other nieces at least eight but mine was an expensive gift to never lose They were jagged freckles of light My aunts said let her wear her hair down no importa burnt red lipstick and diamond specks How I suffered from feeling blanched in a world inhabited by amber women who would never let me run around like a wetback in the snake high grass with heavy dust in the shoes my cousins and I hopped like grease shed our skin and listened for rattles: Have you seen my white son-in-law? who went to the drugstore for me The smell of the river is very old and my back is slight from the liberty of it When I suffered my aunt bought me diamonds two flecks of cartwheeling light to never lose and when I lost them in the river I got a second chance ________________________________________________________ [...]

We can enter a poem in an almost limitless number of ways–through its imagery, its social underpinnings, its meaning, its rhythms, its sentence structure, its line breaks, etc, etc. An arbitrary grid works like this: given these different ways of entering a poem, we can choose what we might want to steal from a poem: its line breaks, syllable structure, sentence structure, and use it to our own ends. This isn’t so much plagiarism as reclamation. We ransack the poem. We see it as a thing that has crashed down into our lives, as a whale washed up along our shore. We may as well use it since it is there. Basically, an arbitrary grid is a way of using our reading for the purposes of writing. Let’s take a poem from one of my former students: Brian Trimboli. One of the first things you might notice about Brian’s poetry [...]

Naked Except for the Jewelry “And,” she said, “you must talk no more about ecstasy. It is a loneliness.” The woman wandered about picking up her shoes and silks. “You said you loved me,” the man said. “We tell lies,” she said, brushing her wonderful hair, naked except for the jewelry. “We try to believe.” “You were helpless with joy,” he said, “moaning and weeping.” “In the dream,” she said, “we pretend to ourselves that we are touching. The heart lies to itself because it must.” From Refusing Heaven Prior to a random visit to the local library, I had never heard of Jack Gilbert. Though I make it a point to browse the new releases in contemporary poetry, it is a rare occurrence when a poet hooks into my psyche and refuses to let go. Jack Gilbert is one of those poets. Others include Robert Hass, Allen Ginsberg, and [...]

This entry is part of a series, Unlocked» The Northern Road 1. I should have known him but I had no prior experience with prophets. Something about the time of day felt still as _______the invisible press of tobacco, the rustle of upturned leaves in a thousand barns. Finality slides deeper. Uncut grasses roll and die. Commodified firewood fills the absence of orchard bones. Other attractions: winter anonymity, _______once done creeps into country, etches convoys in the woods. The prohibition of nostalgia is born in cellar holes and undone buttons. Ochre cigarettes paper the urinal. Letters above the caricatures. Please proceed in an orderly fashion toward the faith cures. Changes that would seem evidently _______paranormal such as _______the regeneration of lost fingers do not arise in the context of _____________________modern healers. Still it remains— glass in her wound. I never left the house I just took the door with me. [...]

MY SOLIDARITY We meet in a reflective trench and you are skeptical but then you begin to feel my solidarity like a short-haired snake between your legs. The snake starts to hustle, overweening the lip of pants. Let’s you and I never be cops to each other. Because we study elephant lore, and in all the annals of elephant adventures, there was only one cop. And he was shit. Elephant stories are like pop songs, one of the earliest forms of experiential autonomy. Yes their appearance is in the form of money, but they go into our mouths and we sing them beautifully and when our lives are ruined we sing them again at karaoke. And karaoke is one of the world’s greatest displays of total solidarity. Almond waves come out of my phone. Marzipan insurrection not just televised but broadcast. If you want to know the status of my [...]

, 2011. ISBN: 978-1934200490. 80 p. Today I write; I wait for the form around which I was formed. Laura Wetherington, “My poitrine made of clouds” Is order inherent or created? Does form come first or does the form-giver? Laura Wetherington explores structure – the visual, the functional, and the physical – in A Map Predetermined and Chance, published by Fence Books as C.S. Giscombe’s selection for the 2010 National Poetry Series. Visually, the map is her key. One poem is plotted like notes on staff paper. Others use typography to create meaning; words and phrases surface from the text as if two poems are unfolding at once. Thematically, Wetherington circles around the dictum “The map is not the territory” (Alfred Korzybski) or “The description is not the described” (Jiddu Krishnamurti). For A Map Predetermined and Chance lacks a standard cartographer. In this collection, “there is no narrator, no barrier.” [...]

After writing a poem (never during or before the poem), ask yourself these questions: 1. Why is my lineation the way it is and is that the right shape for the poem? 2. Are my images predictable? Do shadows fall? Do I express myself in idioms and cliches rather than in a true voice. Most often the idioms we employ without thinking are old metaphors/personification/figurative parts of speech we have forgotten are metaphors, personification and figures: shadows fall, winds moan, daylight breaks, thoughts leap, ideas “turn” in the mind. How do I edit these from my poem and either leave them out or find a less familiar or predictable way of saying them? If I am aware of them as idioms, how do I have fun with them and let the reader know I am aware of them as such? 3. Am I over-determining the reader’s experience of the poem [...]