Public Poetry

THE LADY VICTORY by Jane Vincent Taylor

The poems of Jane Vincent Taylor's The Lady Victory are a journey through the lives of the forgotten--residents of a home for unwed mothers and children. These powerful poems articulate their voices in a memorable way.

Here's the title poem:

The Lady Victory

At the end of a horseshoe drive
circling a statue of the Blessed Virgin,
the Home stood waiting.

Without signs, you knew
to slow down. March winds
blew the crowns of old salt cedars.

Call it southern Gothic
haunted by gossipy spirits,
guilty girls, our hidden for-bearers.

Mother sat in the silver Buick,
beautifully pressed, a polished
cotton skirt cut on the bias.
Dad had turned from telephone man
to sad unsinging
Perry Como in a small town suit.

I shivered in the backseat,
dressed to the nines, three months along
in my blue unbelted shirtwaist.

Staring out at Our Lady of Victory
I wondered why
she looked so pale and helpless

having won some war or other,
having come to stand
so high on stone.

This poem, ironically titled because the scene depicts is hardly one of victory, evokes the scene that the reader enters: Our Lady of Victory, a home for unwed mothers and children, in which the residents defy the odds to grow into peace and find a place of hope in the world.

THE TRUTH ABOUT DEATH by Grace Mattern

One of the things I admire the most about Grace Mattern's The Truth About Death is the way the poems hold grief in a fierce clench, and wrench that grief into beauty.

This poem, "Sense Data," is a good example of how Mattern's technique works:

Sense Data

Trees backlit by morning sun
rising beyond the brook,
the reds and yellows of leaves
patterned with their own shadows.
Last night the house was noisy
with pops and cracks as if
the wood floors were adjusting
to your lost weight.
For two days your odor
was the stink of disease.
Now your car smells like smoke,
our son and his grief.
Your skin was sweetest
and stayed sweet at the curve
of bicep to shoulder, my hand
under the sleeve of your shirt.
Fear tastes like metal, tears of salt,
grief sour on my tongue.
Death is green bile bubbling
over your final smile.

The bitterness in this poem is startling, almost washing over the tender recollection of "your final smile." But this is grief, and grief is hard, and these poems are powerful.

CADUCEUS by Sorina Higgins

I find myself deeply moved by many of the poems in Caduceus by Sorina Higgins: the poems encompass heartbreak and faith in equal measure.

"Stigmata" is a characterisic example:

Stigmata
to G. S.

Oh Lord, will You tell me: What good is grief?
What is the value of this litany, these names
like rotten beads fumbled by mumbling fingers
over and over, the terrible list always the same?

Do You not see the skin of mourning, withered
into age-brown wrinkles, hanging on the skeleton
of loneliness, or the mouth of sorrow that knows only
senile whimpers, useless dribbling undertones?

Whittled down to the diction of solitude,
bereft of loveliness, the shrinking body's
pain can wallow at the self-bent heart--
or else, transform the hands and feet to agonies

like Yours. Perhaps nearly a century of loss
need not condemn, but can resemble something like a cross.

Nicely done.

SPOT THE TERRORIST by Lori Jakiela

A narrative collection about the working life of a flight attendant: this subject matter is promising on the surface. But Lori Jakiela's memorable collection Spot the Terrorist!--by turns absurd, poignant, and brutal-far surpasses the term "promising."

"Working the Red Eye, Pittsburgh to Vegas" captures the varied tones of Jakiela's work:

Working the Red Eye, Pittsburgh to Vegas

The man in the emergency exit row
has been drinking
from his own bottle of duty-free vodka
and because he was quiet about it,
kept his clothes on , and didn't hit
his call button even once
no one notices until we land in Vegas
and he refuses to get off the plane.
He's sure we haven't gone anywhere.
"You people think I'm a sucker," he says.
"I'm no sucker. I paid good money for this."
He boarded in Pittsburgh, my home country.
In Pittsburgh, we have two dreams:
to go to Vegas to live
and to go to Florida to die.
The gate agents call the police.
The pilots are pissed.
The A-line flight attendant
with the fake French name
twirls a pair of plastic handcuffs and says,
"These make me so-o-o hot."

My father, who stopped drinking years ago
but never found his way, loved Vegas.
He'd carry a sweatsock full of good-luck
nickels through security
and get stopped every time.
He died at home in a rented hospital bed
in Pittsburgh, not Florida.
"Sir," I say to the drunk on the plane
who squeezes his eyes shut
so he doesn't have to see me.
"Please put your shoes on."

"Fuck you," he says. "I'm not going anywhere."

The narrator's weary observance of the traveler's weariness is complicated by memories, both affectionate and hard, of the speaker's father. There is a great deal going on in this poem, emotionally, beneath its narrative surface, and the result is one of richness.

WESTERN MOTEL by Wendy Drexler

The wry humor and sense of the solitary individual against the wide-open world are what make Wendy Drexler's Western Model compelling to me.

Here's one fine example:

Parking Lot

Cyclone fence, the daylight spill
of grocery bags casually snagged
empty on the bare corset of a branch.
I look out at the weak light of November.
A starling on the Norway maple
in the parking lot shakes
itself out all over, spangle-singing
into the wind's wide mouth.
I eat a bacon cheeseburger in the car.

It's hard to imagine a starker scene, the "bare corset of a branch," sitting by the cyclone fence, under the wind's wide mouth, as the speaker eats a bacon cheeseburger. This is humanity's place in the world, encapsulated. This brief poem is a powerful reminder of that fact.

THROAT SINGING by Susan Cohen

Susan Cohen's Throat Singing is a gorgeous book: the poems indeed are full-throated songs. I admire the skill and richness of these yearning poems.

The title poem, "Throat Singing," is an apt illustration of Cohen's skill:

Throat Singing

he can make his bass
notes rumble with the pulse
of hoof beats on the Steppes

while his larynx also squeezes
the freakish whistle of thin air
heard in the highest passes

and his words ride hard rasping
where have you gone my ponies
where have you gone my country

as he scrapes his hopes together
across the chords
tensed in his throat

but so much straining
as he oscillates the octave
between what he has and what he wants

drives his blood until the veins
leather to reins around his neck
and throat singers die young

with the effort of singing
so many notes at once so much
longing wears out their hearts

These couplets flow down the page, and flow through the mouth of anyone reading them aloud. Powerful stuff.

My websites--now mobile-friendly

Since joining ranks of smartphone owners by buying an iPhone 3GS, I've noticed that a lot of the websites I visit are optimized for mobile display--and the various websites I host are not.

Not any more.

Over the past couple of days I've tweaked the layout of my sites to make them display equally well in a desktop browser or a mobile browser. If you are looking at one of the poetry books I've published, a "purchase link" in a mobile phone will take you to a mobile version of the book's Amazon page. If you are looking at the same page in a desktop browser, the link will take you to Amazon's standard website for purchase. Seeing that effect is pretty neat.

This improvement was ultimately achieved by adding a slightly modified layout Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) for iPhone, and by adding a few lines to my sites' HTML to determine which type of browser was accessing the page. I got things working with my current HTML setup, some Googling, and a lot of trial and error of different design tweaks. Seems simple, right?

In one sense, yes, it's simple--a few dozen lines of text. But don't be mistaken: it's not a small project. The two business I run, poetry publishing and software development, host a dozen separate websites under various domain names on a Mac OS X server in my office. My sites have hundreds of static HTML pages, as well as three separate blogs running under a dynamic server setup, Blosxom.

Fortunately, my setup is designed so that large-scale changes are relatively easy to implement. When I started doing web sites for my business a decade ago, I used a popular HTML tool, Dreamweaver, to generate much of the HTML for my sites, although I used other tools as well, such as exporting HTML from Microsoft Word. Like many people using such tools, I had little understanding of HTML, but just wanted to get my web pages on display. Dreamweaver also has useful features for managing website structures, uploading pages, and more.

After a few years of this approach, which over time had generated several dozen web pages, I found it to be unwieldy. Because of the mishmash of tools I used to create web pages, I found that making any significant changes to the design of my websites was difficult: I often had to make changes to each individual page, which was time-consuming. Worse, some of the HTML was incredibly hard to change because under the hood it had vast amounts of unnecessary markup (especially the HTML generated by Word).

Finally, desiring to do a significant redesign of my sites and to make their long-term maintenance simpler, I bit the bullet and spent weeks diving into the HTML of my websites, ripping out all unnecessary HTML markup and formatting, leaving just basic HTML for each page's text, a simple page layout template applied by Dreamweaver, and a new styling tool I had recently discovered, CSS, which puts all formatting commands into a single file which are then applied by the browser when the web page is displayed. Instead of changing the formatting of dozens of individual pages, I can make changes to a single CSS file and then have those changes reflected in the site.

That's the structure I use to this day, and on this project to convert my sites to a mobile layout, it saved my bacon. Rather than develop a separate mobile version of my sites, I simply did some modifications to the core Dreamweaver template (to add some commands to detect the type of browser), and added a second mobile-specific stylesheet.

I'm not sure if my setup for websites of this scale--hundreds of static HTML pages with a similar design--is optimal, but it continues to work for me; I don't use Dreamweaver's design functionality much anymore, but I continue to rely on its site management features, which are robust. Migrating to a different kind of site setup, for instance using some kind of dynamic content management system (CMS), seems like a formidable and complex task of uncertain reward. So I'll most likely continue with this present setup, as I am far from outgrowing it.

POISON SONNETS by Joseph Heithaus

What I like the most about Joseph Heithaus' Poison Sonnets is the sheer vigor and power of its sonnet form: these are not delicate, refined lyrics in love with their own elegance. Instead, they are physical, full of intense images and striking rhythms.

Consider "Cleave":

Cleave

It echoes among the first words, Adam, Eve,
the butchery of her birth, the rib cleaved
from the man's breast. Imagine the blood
trailing as it might on the sleeping Adam,
down his smooth belly onto his dull pud
and what he thinks when he wakes and stands
to face her, bone of his bone, flesh
of his flesh, name of his name. Woman,
he offers the air with a flourish
of fear or hope or love before he, the man,
cleaves to her, as in cling to, hold fast, abide.
The word is split between splitting asunder
and holding like faith, it's me, you, caught under
God's cleaver, split, naked, clinging, trying to hide.

This is a bold poem, and I greatly admire the skill it shows in evoking the creation myth in a fresh light.

BETWEEN GODS by Donna Lewis Cowan

I like the physical qualities of Donna Cowan's poetry in Between Gods. The intense descriptions of these poems also yield intense feeling in the reader.

Consider "Broken Sonnet":

Broken Sonnet: Eve Upon Awakening

You sleep, a shadow bent in careful candor
soft-grown among these chaoses of green,
and I awaken, my midnight visions mounting
the trees. Your fingers slip my hair; you wean
a decadence from my spring soul, counting
half-conscious strands that multiply and pour
hung ripeness on your cheek. What was that fruit
that picks from me the ripeness of this orchard?
Should I maintain these nights are merely duty?
O grief!...that tepid fingers are replaced
by tighter passions, your body's firm embrace
like a grounded planet. These lilies - upright, ruly -
cock their napes away like holy bells.
We shall make lithe blossoms remember themselves.

"We shall make lithe blossoms remember themselves"--what a strong line. It's a powerful way to end the poem.

RUNNING RED, RUNNING REDDER by Beau Boudreaux

I like the sly humor and hard edges of Beau Boudreaux's Running Red, Running Redder; they win the reader over with endless surprises.

Consider this poem:

The Lit City

Asleep in a mangrove I dream
I built the town out of spit
and newspaper, struck a match to its
outskirts, and let the flames dance in.
The mirror in the park now a black lake
and in it my face looking out, past
the brick red swans deep in smoke, past
the singed grass. A slow wind stirs
bright ashes. It takes the heat into itself,
changes it—the moths, amber throated
hummingbird, dandelion seeds, all blaze
with a scorched sheen. What fire’s
done to me I’ve done to myself:
everything kindled, the luminous grows—
even the coral and anemone sparks,
blooming beneath the black drum of earth.

Good stuff.

UNDER MY SKIN by Liza Hyatt

I am moved by the way Liza Hyatt's poems in Under My Skin burst from yearning, their energy harnessed through sculpted lines into works of considerable power.

This poem, "Give Me," is an excellent example of what I am discussing:

Give Me

Give me wild roses.
I will hang them from rafters,
as if the sky is a garden
growing down to us,
dying in mid-blossom.

Give me irises, morning glories,
purple alfalfa, hyacinth.
I'll press them, tear them,
paste petal scraps
to mosaic a lost summer night.

Give me a body whose blood
is warmer than poppies in sun,
whose cells are
bits of earth glued together.

Give me a shadow.
Wherever I walk I will find discarded things
and my shadow will pick them up -
a blue-green marble,
broken robin shells,
glass made of ashes,
gutterfuls of crabapple pink.
I will bring these home,
arrange them in a wicker basket,
never throw them away.

Give me a road that twists backward
while going forward, a journey
toward what I am trying to flee.
In the future, I will come to my childhood,
take from my mother's bureau
a ring box holding baby teeth,
traces of blood still on them.

Give me the middle of the world.
I'll walk to the silted river and
hunt for fossils from the Mesozoic sea.

Give me muddy boots and flying dreams.
I won't weed the garden or clean the house.
I hide snakeskin and lady-slippers in the Bible.
Come winter I will seek the rainbows which endure
in the sheer wings of cicada and housefly corpses
strewn on never-dusted windowsills.

Give me memories that can't be forgotten.
Give me a coffin and give me a star.
In an empty drawer lined with silk,
I keep a swallowtail that died wings spread.
Sometimes I put it in my palm,
let go, watch it glide.

Give me the world
where no one knows what happens to life as it dies.
I cry for newborn birds wind-dashed to pavement.
I sing inside the black caves of hollow trees.

Give me today as it turns into tomorrow.
The summer leaves are beginning to dry,
turn sanguine and fall
and I am outside,
gathering them up,
binding them back on the trees.

Through a litany of "give me," this expansive poem opens its arms to the world's abundance. It's an affirming, invigorating work.

I WANTED A CITY by Janet Marks

Coming to poetry late in life, Janet Marks demonstrates a richness of perspective that poetic technique itself cannot provide. Her vision, which encompasses both the breadth of the past and the pressure of the present, comes through in her book I Wanted a City.

Consider "A Walk in Golden Gate Park":

A Walk In Golden Gate Park

Bouquets from a New Zealand tree
paint the crushed red brick with snow
the cherry trees have loosed their blooms
and the gold climbers in my garden
shower the stones with spent coin.

I think of ruses to people my present
with those loved and let go in love
I hold them in wrinkles of my empty palms
in caverns beneath my breathing
against the cold of this northern summer.

I reach for the steel stays of my mother.
Her voice of loss grips me to her
whose hand I have unclasped
and clasped and let go.
My father comes to say there is too much rain
on the grave where his bones whiten.
The children I have spawned
have learned to swim alone.

The black tree fern gathers the spaces
into large branch fronds.
I pick up bits of rock eucalyptus acorns spruce
needles. There is no eye no thread
in the spaces of this afternoon.

Thinking back to her childhood, and thinking of her own children, the speaker of this poem deeply inhabits the present, what is immediately in front of her eyes: "there is no eye no thread/in the spaces of this afternoon." This subtle poem opens up deeper meanings.

SAILING ON MILKWEED by Jeanine Stevens

I admire the sheer vivacity of In Jeanine Stevens' Sailing on Milkweed. It's hard to tell the difference between memory and narrative, the past and the present, in this volume.

Consider "After Reading Tintern Abbey" as an example of Stevens' craft:

After Reading Tintern Abbey

And I have imagined a swift breeze
that recalls childhood memories.

Now pale, slippery to grasp
that place where I sat on the church lawn

choir practice over, already late for a worried
mother with chops on the stove.

But, oh! the green blades bending,
the pipe organ's quivering reverberations,

a presence passing in the rustling grass
rushing to linden groves dangling with stars

The experience of the poem evokes powerful memories for the speaker-memories that themselves become a form of poetry. The circle completes, powerfully.

TRAVELLING LIGHT by Glenn Freeman

Glenn Freeman's Travelling Light is a vibrant collection tinged with shades of blue; lurking benath these poems exuberant surfaces is the sorrow that powers so much music. It's a provactive combinbation.

Consider "Autumn Happy Hour":

Autumn Happy Hour
~after Denis Johnson

Late fall's warmth lingers a week or two too long, the leaves
spinning down. The tumbler of Octoberfest like honey
in the afternoon light, long shadows of loss & grief
slipping toward dusk. The garden's in decay.
Brittle vines. Rotting pumpkins. Leaves dried like paper.
Everything bends as if to drink from the light
below the light we see: the glass of amber
in the setting sun, a kind of resin through which the birds flit.
Juncos, out of place in the warmth, scavenge at garden's
edge. Bob Marley sings of Zion. And as beer gives way
to beer, as the cardinals, finches, and wrens
sing their syncopated chatter, as the susurrus leaves play
in crescendo and descrendo, you'll search again in vain
for words for this kingdom come, this hallelujah, this amen.

Amid the celebratory tone of this poem there is a hint of melancholy, darkening and deepening its tonal mood. I admire the richness of the poem, its varied shades of light and dark.

BREATH CONTROL by Maryann Corbett

Maryann Corbett's Breath Control is an elegant collection that explores the contrast between touch's intimacy and a wider view of the world. I admire the gentle skill of her work.

"Security" is a characteristic example of her style:

Security

It's got to be here. Where I had it last.
The sense that things would work. That, settled down
into the nursing chair, the dumb-beast body
would bend to the task, the milk let down to soak
the nightgown front, the baby's wet gums O-ringed
fast to the nipple in that ecstatic hold
that bit by bit lets up, the fist uncurling
to sleep, slack as a sandbag, warm on the shoulder--
held a minute, before the handing down
into the crib. That under the sleeping breath
the round of prayer would run wordlessly on
making God happy. That storms, colic, and winter
would end. That no one really wished us ill.

"Security" here is defined both in personal terms, and by implication, historical terms as well. We can offer a child some sense of security in our homes; can we do so in the wider world? That's the difficult question this poem deftly poses.