Flutter Poetry Journal probably flourishes during this time of year, because its dark header and Gothic background wallpaper fits well with Halloween. The editor of the journal mentions on the first page that she had recently redesigned the website to its current look. However, I don't feel like the straight and even font of the poems matches the tone of the rest of the website, so hopefully that could be adjusted in the future. Each one of their issues has a picture to accompany it, and the one that in the October 2013 issue might give me nightmares. I looked back at previous issues, and thankfully they don't always have such terrifying images for their poems.
Most of the poems in the October 2013 issue don't scream joyfulness. "Regret" by Dave Malone starts with a pleasant image: "Western Oklahoma blooms blue sky," but later the poem darkens with "slants of sunshine grow brittle" and "the ash sky, burnished once in hope." I find the difference in line size between the first and last stanzas intriguing; shorter lines encourage simplicity, which helps set up concrete background, while longer lines allow more room for continuous thought and reflection. I looked up Leonard Cohen on Wikipedia, and turns out he's a musician. So, why did Malone say "lines of Leonard" instead of "lyrics of Leonard"? In Malone's biography, he states that he likes alliteration, but both "lines" and "lyrics" begin with "L." Perhaps I'm concerned with a detail too small to matter.
"Skin Like Bedsheets" also has a Halloween-ish tone, with references to bones and knives. The haunting quality of the poem comes from the contrast between the strict comfort that the narrator's mother offers near the beginning and the metaphorical digging into a person's insides at the end. The bed referenced in the poem may represent the narrator, and "When my mother made the bed, she pulled it tight" could mean that the narrator's mother secured the narrator under a firm childhood. The impersonal "goose-down stuffing" in the last line shows that the narrator has been "stretched" to perfection so much that she feels that her true personality, or "heart" and "soul," have disappeared.
To read my response to Thrush Poetry Journal, click here.
Your two journal responses suggest both energy and insight. They're quite different, aren't they, until you get to the dead animals in Thrush. As for Jenkins, I don't know how his work has changed over time. He has written many, many prose poems. It would be a good questions if he reschedules, which I hope he will.
ReplyDelete