Flutter Poetry Journal

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.

Louis Jenkins Visit Preparation

Louis Jenkins's poems look like prose within a skinny book. He doesn't capitalize the beginning of each line, and his lines all have pretty much the same length. Jenkins's poems don't reference very many trees and birds and nature-y whatevers, but instead staples of modernity: shoes, football, CDs, drain pipes, and cars. These "normal' objects of everyday life allow Jenkins to reach closer to the average person. 

I especially liked the contrast between "The State of the Economy," whose straightforward language illustrate the frugality of people during a poor economy, and "Gravity," which broadens out from a simple drain pipe to a "what is life" concept. Both poems approach serious situations or ideas with common items and address their audiences directly. 

In "The State of the Economy," Jenkins focuses on searching for and conserving money in a list-like fashion without many poetic devices. The poem's narrator is less of someone concerned about existential truths and more of someone trying to make ends meet in ordinary ways. "I'm expecting a check sometime next week, which, if we are careful, will get us through to payday," Jenkins writes. The poem refuses to say phrases such as "the economy suffers" or "we struggle to buy food" but instead shows it through directions to the audience. The shortness and simplicity of the poem could fit into a casual email between one spouse and another. The last line, "On second thought, forget the newspaper" really highlights the desperation of the narrator to save money, especially since newspapers cost so little. 

"Gravity" takes a more investigative standpoint than "The State of Economy" and involves more abstract ideas and devices. The first sentence outlines a very concrete map of water from a sink, while the second sentence uses two different definitions of gravity and treats them as the same. Then, the poem transitions to a wider view of life as a detached whole and uses the metaphor of a famous Shakespearean line: "The world is a stage. But don't try to move anything. You might hurt yourself, besides that's a job for the stagehands and union rules are strict," Jenkins writes. 

I wonder, were these two very different poems from different "periods" in Jenkins's career? Or does he consistently write with a variety of styles?

MEA Weekend! and poems

Photoshop
Vibrant grass sharpens under the dial
A search for the glow in her cheeks
Reveals shades hidden by poor lighting
Sepia ages apples into pale sentimentality
The gradient scatters into checkered gray
Trees scrape away into postcard palms
Lies layering on a picture
Layers within layers
Until everyone and everything
Inhabits another world.

Balance
I like to believe that the balance
Leans towards more good than bad

But then why does fear
Edge its way through every inch of happiness

Telling me,
Everything evens out
And this will subside

One extreme met by another
Until ying and yang has stretched into a line
Tipping up and down
Failing to stay still.

(these poems are also currently in the Draft section of this blog)

THRUSH Poetry Journal

TRUSH Poetry Journal posts six issues each year on a cute little beige-colored website guarded by two thrushes under its navigation bar. Its July 2013 issue contains seventeen different poets, although many of the poets had titled their work as "Three Poems" and "Two Poems" which doesn't provide much variety on the outside. However, when I opened up the pages of every single poem in that issue, I saw that each poet had his/her distinct line structure and form. Cynthia Atkin scared me with her lack of true line breaks, while Joshua Young reduced himself to the very simple without any capitalization.  

Two poems stood out to be the most: "Vanishing Point" by Corianna McClanahan Schroeder and "Broad Wings Above the Tall Grass" by Tracy Zeman mostly because both pinpointed imagery very well. 

"Vanishing Point" begins with what many of us know too well: mornings and family members heading to work. Then, it transitions to the author "teaching" herself (and by default, the audience, too) the names of the organisms in her yard. Soon, ordinary birds and spiders weave into art that few people take the time to appreciate. 

Schroeder's "needles shuttering like chimes of light" and "red-bellied woodpeckers" with "checkerboard wings" combine multiple forms of imagery into a single poem, and sometimes even a single phrase or sentence. I especially admired how this poem scatters the narrator's thoughts throughout its descriptions, such as "There's too much to lose through the needle's eye" in the sixth stanza and "We were two breaths among millions--and I was nearly breathless." This dialogue between the narrator and nature places a human factor into the lines so that they avoid becoming a flowers-are-pretty-and-animals-are-pretty-too monologue. The density of lives in such a small space astonishes the narrator, much like how the density of description in the poem can astonish the reader. 

Zeman's "Broad Wings Above the Tall Grass" relaxes less than Schroeder's poem. The strange formatting and spacing inside lines set up punctuation-less caesuras and force the reader's eyes to move. This makes the poem feel active with life without the use of thick imagery. It also emphasizes certain words, such as "possess" and "swirling mass" by separating them with space but without totally disconnecting them in the way more traditional line breaks or periods would do.

Zeman's poem also doesn't aim to please with niceties: "swim in runoff & moss," "hedge-apple smashed roadside," and "to cut one's teeth on comfort" portray the rough sides of nature. The dead deer in the second stanza and old windmill in the third also suggest that nature exposes the weaknesses of what most usually see as beautiful. 

Robert Bly might as well be my neighbor's grandpa

"I don't understand the meaning of that last line."
"That was deep." 

These types of words usually come out of the mouth of a teen skimming through poems for homework, not a poet laureate reading his own work. However, tonight, Robert Bly poked fun at himself while maintaining the air of an experienced artist. 

The crowd at Wiley Hall consisted of many gray hairs and balding heads, so I (and the other SPA poetry students there) stood out a little. Across from me sat another young face, who, before the reading began, slowly strummed a guitar made of more duct tape than wood. I usually come to Wiley Hall for lectures on the shape of the universe and mathematical cryptography, so the contrast between STEM geeks and poet geeks definitely hit me the moment I walked in. 

Introductions for Bly lasted almost twenty minutes, as I wondered if the guy had actually managed to show up at his own poetry reading.

Finally: 

If the auditorium shrank down to Bly and his friend holding his mic next to him, it would just need a furry rug and a fireplace to feel like a living room. Bly looked a lot older than I expected, and the depth, tone, and age of his voice matched that of a Robert Burns poem. His Norwegian heritage surprised me, since his voice had tricked me into thinking of him as Scottish.

"That's enough wisdom for tonight," he said quickly after reading several poems, before his friend holding the mic reminded him that he had planned more poems to read. Moments like this sent trembles of laughter through the audience. 

Here's a clip from my iPhone of him reading (to the audience, and more surprisingly, also to himself):

Bly ended the evening with the namesake of his latest poetry collection, "Stealing Sugar from the Castle." 

We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.

We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder's plan of the castle of sugar.
Just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.

I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.

I don't mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

"You're a thief!" the judge said. "Let's see
Your hands!" I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

When Bly read the beginning of the third stanza, he stated that "Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall, / Which is lit with singing, then fly out again" represented the brevity of life. In this poem, the narrator explains that little things, such as a single grain of sugar, a single word, or a glimpse, can cause happiness. "We are poor students who stay after school to study joy" means that the narrator does not have a constant source of joy that he/she may take for granted, and so happiness must spring from unexpected places, such as "being shut out of the warm hall." The narrator diminishes him/herself to the size of an ant, so that the "grain of sugar" that he/she obtains can seem bigger. This figurative idea could transfer to reality by advising people to focus more on the positive and less on the negative, so that positives take up more mental space. I love the breaking of alliteration and rhythm in the line "I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot," because it lets the word "idiot" really sink in. 

Bly has the whimsical wink of a purposely grumpy grandfather. As he read this last poem, I considered his age and hoped that he would continue a "sentence" of "a thousand years of joy."

Later, he signed books during the reception:

Chris Martin Visit Preparation

(So this Chris Martin is Chris Martin the poet, not Chris Martin the Coldplay singer? Ohhhhhhh....)

Initial observation: like the pigs and Sleeping Beauty's fairies, Martin's lines in his poems clump into trios. The single line at the end acts like a landing point, so I wonder, does he ever struggle fitting his poems into 3n+1 lines?

His poems move along like trains pulling cars of different shapes and sizes. The different faces inside flash by one after another, because enjambment and a lack of periods prevent eyes from resting on a single element for too long. His poems brim with tired laughs at life, with lines such as "Moonlighting as both / Actor and director in a film / About the fantastic terror / Of existence, a comedy / Of course, and you get so fucking lost" in "The True Meaning of Pictures." "Jokes for Strangers," too, speaks of deeper truth while using words with light-hearted connotations, such as in "All twenty-first-century / Day long I compose these jokes / For myself and strangers."

Martin isn't afraid to use polysyllable words like those in "I Am Not a Cinematographer" with "Disembodied, a woman's narrow / Currinesque nose bifurcating the slope" or in "Blood on the Tarmac" with "Vaults its merciless / Incomprehensibility from the shallow." Martin also gives us heavy glimpses of brief moments. "A blossom of birds issues / From an abandoned skyscraper or traffic / Enacts its unwitting algorithms / Of pulse, it is in" not only contains four short lines of the poem "American Music" but also two complete pictures of birds and traffic, each worth the usual thousand words.

Some of Martin's poems contain more narrative than others. The first half of "Grandpa Was a Salesman" makes the reader question the purpose of the title of the poem, as it jumps from "At Fire Island, the gleam / In the glasses of the Business Man Business / Man peddling Duracell AAS" to "About a robot made entirely / Of panthers, yesterday I" to "Constantly until my braces / Were removed, my dad." Like the train analogy earlier, the constant blending of completely different scenes allows Martin's poems to act like a dream. The dreamer doesn't react to any discrepancies or drastic changes in plot while asleep, much like how Martin maneuvers smoothly through his ideas.

Another Poem of the Day for 10/7

Not Waving But Drowning
by Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

----------------------------------------

I chose this as the poem of the day because it reminded me of Mary Merrill's poem of the day, "Richard Cory," and because I had recently read a short story that referenced this poem. In the story, which was also titled "Not Waving But Drowning," a girl received a prediction that she would die like this. In the third and fourth lines of this poem, the dead man says what he had failed to say during his life: everyone around him had perceived him incorrectly. This poem lacks quotation marks for the dead man and the people around him referenced as "they," and the purpose of that may be for this to sound more straightforward and direct than a dialogue. The repetitiveness of several phrases also makes this poem a little bit singsong-y, which contrasts with the topic of the poem and makes it even more morbid.