The New Formalist
ISSN:1532-558X Volume
VII, Number 2
Poetry Editor
Leo Yankevich
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Don Barkin
The Sun
I was raised by that black engine the sun.I’d feel his furious eye on me
between the branches of a tree
and know I wasn’t anyone.
The only time I saw him rest
was sunset when he heaved a sigh
at one more working day gone by
and went down darkly in the west.
Now I’m a man and he’s still here
—I’ll feel him glaring down at me
like an owl in a tree.
Though when I turn to meet his stare
he shuts my eyes with too much light
as if to say that all I know
about what gave me life I show
by turning on a lamp at night.
Lost in Woods
The footprints in the snow were mine. “Oh, fuck.”—I thought it was what someone else had said
that stunned the silence like a hatchet stuck
in wood. By morning I’d be numb or dead.
The way that night comes on in woods is dark
fills up the tops of trees like falling snow
until the sun is buried to the spark
that gives a fireplace its dying glow.
I walked out on a road no one had plowed.
A man stood on his porch beneath the light
and smoked and heaved the smoke out in a cloud.
Then he went in and shut his front door tight.
With all the roadways buried deep in snow
he knew that there was nowhere else to go.
David Castleman
the priest in her habit
Moon-lipped players celebratethe preacher & his cat,
none of them surmising
what’s beneath his hat.
Their virtual morality
illumining the night
nobody’s worrying
a bit about their plight.
Quasi-religiostic
hubris rings untrue
& moon-blanched players idolize
the preacher & his clue.
In a seedy Romanesque society
religion’s onlyracial politics
and pulpit-meisters
bravely stir the mix.
The pulpit-meister
descants on riches
God gives in heaven,
and dreams of britches.
The pulpit-meister
craves innocent eyes
penguinly habits
of nuns can’t disguise.
The pulpit-meister’s
proud chuckling laughter
leads little children
singing to slaughter.
Enabled by our virtual morality
God’s law is thatpoliticians
be cultists
and the soul’s morticians.
Epitaph on a cur
Pinocchio with a nose-job, dubious past,our well-oiled Pentagon’s projectile of
megalomania’s murderous love,
sophomoric Georgie Bush is dead at last.
Was a puppet ever his mother’s son
and his father’s beloved enemy,
a strength for his brother in rivalry
and a dad for his kids, all men in one?
Did ever a puppet strive for neighbors
and disdain to assist the bad, the cruel,
those who would butcher the goose for its jewel
and throw children a pittance for labors?
We toy with a dragon’s talon on a string,
yanked from the imploring impotent thing.
Sally Cook
We Feast
Some vegetables, sliced thin and strippedRemind us of the lives we’ve led;
All stiffly-spined and tightly lipped,
Dehydrated, and underfed.
A savory soup that can’t be sipped,
The words we wish that we had said.
Those crudités we, careless, dipped—
The bitter wine, the pasty bread.
Revenge that has been nicely whipped
Lies cold upon its icy bed,
Displayed upon a plate that's chipped
And cracked; when truth and love seem dead.
No comfort. Every glass that’s tipped
Anesthetizes us instead.
Gary Dop
Unferth, the Sword-Dane
Before Grendel gored a Daneand long before his lifeless arm
hung high in Hrothgar’s hall,
young Unferth on his first night
at guard in Heorot, greatest of meadhalls,
held fierce Hrunting, his father’s blade,
and before his father his father’s blade,
a sword unfailed in Scylding battle.
He watched the sun wane and mead end
before the first of the fell nights.
Hrothgar’s feasts were famed among men,
and his scop’s tales of sword-wielders
of the All-Wise and warriors long dead
filled the mead-house. The feast ended
as all feasts are fated and fiery Unferth,
dreamer of battles, bore the watch.
The hall-guard’s eyes, heavy as mail,
were fated to close and cast no vision
on gluttonous Grendel, the greatest of creatures
spawned from Cain, killer of kin.
The ogre walked in a wayward cloud,
and none awoke that night except
the warriors who watched the wicked beast
steal their limbs and savor their flesh
before their eyes, their faces loosing
blood and turning as white as the moon
that watched this fate fall on Heorot.
Unferth woke to the wasted lives,
thirty Danes their death-remains
strewn about the hall, Hrothgar’s hall.
The soldier turned, his sword drawn,
to find in the dark the demon that dared
take from the king his truest hoard,
the mighty thanes, men of battle.
He tried to follow the seething breath
the heavy feet the foul stench
of rotten hide that hung a cloud
which seemed to fade by the seconds that fell
like blood on the floor as Unferth moved
toward a shadow stirring just beyond
a wide beam in the back of the hall.
Before he could see he slashed Hrunting
through the brute he thought before him
and found he’d killed his kin, a brother
who wounded by the creature had crept to his knees
to crawl to the light but caught the wrath
of young Unferth and old Hrunting,
the famed sword, his father’s blade,
and before his father his father’s blade,
the only blade blood-stained
in the sad hall except for the swords
of the dead, their blood having dripped from their bodies
to linger in silence on their lifeless steel.
Inside Unferth a second shadow
birthed blame the beast immortal,
he that comes to curse all men,
Grendel’s kin, to gut them from within.
Soon the thanes those spared their fate
woke from the dark to the death in the hall
None spoke to the soldier-guard
who had dropped his sword and dressed the wound
of his dead kinsmen crying in the silence
for the great wheel, unforgiving fate,
to turn back and bless the night.
He’d failed his king He killed a thane.
Hrothgar the brave boldest of Danes
lifted the boy and looked in his eyes,
the eyes that closed when the creature came.
The Ring-giver rested his arm
on Unferth’s shoulder and spoke to the hallow
inside the soldier where the son of warriors
had buried himself to bare his sin
away from the clan he’d cursed with his blade.
The king turned toward Hrunting
lifted the sword, and the Lord of the Scylding
wiped the blood on the wool of his tunic
pronouncing the wergild paid by the sovereign.
The sword returned to the soldier’s hand,
and no man in Heorot heard of the death
from the mouth of the king more than that morning
which held its darkness for twelve years
before Grendel found Beowulf.
Where is the scop to sing of Unferth
who fought battles feats for Hrothgar
in the cruel years of the creatures reign,
swinging his sword, swiftest of blades,
blade of his father and his father’s father?
As Grendel ruled grave Heorot
Unferth served his soldier-king,
keeping the land clean of Jutes
clear of Franks and free of Frisians
their invading swords swiftly falling
in flesh mounds, men fated
to meet the guard who Grendel bested.
Where is the scop to sing of Unferth
his wild eye wielding a fire
that bred fear in the face of his foe
so much so that swords and spears
dropped midair, and men would run
to peak or river to pitch themselves
to their fated end, a fate better than
the fire of hell in the face of Unferth
who slew his hundreds serving his master?
In the fifth winter, a Friesan warrior
faced Unferth. The fierce one
they called Scynscatha, their king’s best
and lord of battles he had lifted the heads
of many a foe who found themselves
at the foot of a giant their giver of fate.
Unferth faced him fearing no death
greater than the death that Grendel gifted
to Heorot’s guard gravest of Scyldings.
He met Scynscatha with his sword to the chest
from thirty paces the thane’s blade
flung turning as fate’s wheel
blade to grip blade to grip
blade to the chest of the chosen Friesan
who saw himself in the sword’s reflection
as his blood covered the blade and the sight
of his eyes as he died.
After all battles
the thane would give his gold and glory
to the Scylding lord who saved the gold
but kept no glory while Grendel lived.
It is no secret, the swordsmen longed
for his own death. He dared to stand
in the hall at night with no sword.
When the mighty men met to fight
the beast, he stood seeking his death
cursing Grendel and groping the air
to find the beast to beg to die,
but without a sword the seething fiend
left him, in the night knowing this man
was more slain with more life
than the sharpest claw, this killed the soldier
each night, never a morning
without bodies to burn and deepen
the sting in Unferth who slew his hundred
but never the one.
All knew of Beowulf
before he came, the bravest of Geats
known for his hands which held the strength
of thirty warriors and won gold
for their great king. When Grendel’s slayer
stepped in Heorot the sword on Unferth
grew heavy with a fear not faced
in Hrothgar’s hall. If the horror lived
and Beowulf died all believed their hope
would be gone, and Grendel may as well
feast on them all, the favored Geat
was the gravest end or the greatest man,
and Unferth the dead dared to taunt
Beowulf and question his quarrel with Breca
the contest, the swim, and the claim to glory,
Unferth questioned to quicken the warrior
to bend the Geat to grasp the battle
he faced and forget his fame from old.
In words of weakness he wielded his wisdom
and gave the gift the Geat would need
to face Grendel the fear of failure
and the loss of name lead Beowulf
to tear the life from terror’s seed.
Beowulf bested the beast and bore
the glory to Hrothgar and gave a gift
to Unferth, the death of Grendel, his bane.
Unferth was silent and savored the death
as a salve on his wound that split open
when Grendel’s mother gored Heorot
and returned the dread. Beowulf spoke
and armed the men to meat the wench
and steal her life to save the Scyldings.
Unferth and Hrunting, hero and blade,
rode to battle in Beowulf’s train.
In the wicked place the poison of evil
reeked from the trees rained in the mist
and spoiled the air, some swordsmen were sick
and others faint, but fear was lost
on Beowulf and no man or beast of evil
would hold him back from bearing the head
of Grendel and his mother. The moor was quiet
for a moment and Unferth moved his hand
to his hilt and drew Hrunting, the swift
blade of Unferth, the brave and unbrave,
the boldest and cursed and kin to all scorned.
He bequeathed the blade to Beowulf and turned
to walk away from the warrior’s shadow
and swore to never swing the sword,
blade of his father and his father’s father.
Unferth returned to the realm and Hrothgar
and waited for the Geat to great them with his news
of Grendel’s mother murderer of Scyldings.
Beowulf came to Hrothgar and heard the praise
of the king and his kin and conferred his tale
of the sea witch and the sword of giants
that bettered Hrunting. The hero returned
the blade to Unferth bestowing his gratitude
on the failed guard and giving his blessing
to the blade and its master. Beowulf, in his time
left Heorot to the Danes, Hrothgar to rule
his meadhall again and marshal his men
to glory and gold.
Unferth, on the night
of a tired moon and the turning to spring
when Grendel had died the guard of old
good Unferth gathered his sword
to his side and walked to the woods and left
Heorot to the warriors and women and kings.
No thoughts of gold and glory for the man
who slew his hundreds and saved his king
from more shame. Where is the scop
to weave the tale of weary Unferth?
They found his sword in a fallen tree
pointing to the sky beside the sea.
Where is the scop to sing of the fire?
They piled high a pire for the blade
and lit its fire to light the north
and honor a Scylding who served in the dark
and gave his body to the broken waves
that lick the land, the land of Danes.
He told his tale to the tide that whispers
to the morning mist of the mourning of a Scylding,
Unferth the swordsman, swiftest to pain.
Phillip A. Ellis
Night Passenger
The sound of passing cars; I dream, or thinkI dream. I cannot tell, the air is thick
and into something kin to sleep I sink,
and something makes me hope I won't be sick.
The dashboard lights are cold, I cannot read
them. Numbers swim, I do not care to know
the engine’s details, even time and speed
what fuel is left, how far is left to go.
The summer’s air congeals in coldness, far
from coast and ocean, far from dawn and light,
and so the road continues in the car,
from sleep to waking, sleep, through all the night.
I know that time is passing, cannot care
as coldly flows the inland midnight air.
Anna Evans
End of Summer Visit
My mother in law is staying, and I’m dying:I cannot spend one more hour at the mall,
another day when every word I’m saying
must be repeated. I’ve had enough of all
her tactless, or plain stupid observations,
her nineteen fifties prejudice toward gays
and all unlucky folk not born Caucasian.
I dream up painful deaths in several ways.
But then I see her reading with my daughter
or how she laughs when her son makes a quip
about her deafness, or how, in cold water
she’ll wash the dishes—anything to help.
What if she speaks her mind, won’t be called old?
It’s now the night draws in, and soon the cold.
Nigel Holt
Towers of Silence
At Granicus, great pyres consumed the Persian host,ripped out the clog of baleful dark that clutched the field
and the great king of Macedon shrank like a ghost
when the burning of a soldier on a shattered shield
was written off as filthy Yauna sacrilege:
the holy flames were tainted by the touch of men
and sacraments of barbarous sinners from the edge
of the lord Padshah’s realms were foul like Saraken.
Ten thousand Greeks scoured Issus field for stone
to fabricate the dais to hold the Persian dead:
two towers of crushing silence, to fill the empty sky
and appease the gods that leave us determinedly alone
except as whirls of birds which darken overhead,
and cackle at the peace no king will justify.
Yauna: Persian for ‘Greek’ from
‘Ionia’
Saraken–Sarkenoi (Greek) for ‘Sharqeen’ (Arabic)-Arab (Saracen)
Saraken–Sarkenoi (Greek) for ‘Sharqeen’ (Arabic)-Arab (Saracen)
Riverrun
‘…And Agamemmnon dead’. The vessel joltsas the small hull uproots another corpse
from missions never destined by default
to reach there. The retch and burst, the coarse
guts, which brim with writhing crowns of leeches,
jettison their chthonic spoor and sink
back to the world of unctuous slime and faeces;
we sail on, sun-high to our mortal sins.
So dead, will the quarry be so too?
Shall passing change of fluids, blood, prove ill
-suited to survival in this noon,
south of fatal tropics your anger willed
in the journey to your settlement of hurt,
my love, my hate, my faith, despair, my Kurtz?
Kathryn Jacobs
The Way of All Flesh
Think of your average unobtrusive scar.Maybe the skin feels just a little thick
beneath your finger. Always, if the tear
puckered a little where it felt the stitch,
you’ll find a foreign, stretchy-plastic bit.
But once the husk is sand-papered away,
by far the most important part of it
grows inward, wart-like; anchoring the play
of mobile muscle. Which is doubtless why
survivors look so stiff. The doctors say
consoling words, and shrug. We calcify
from inside out, until we feel our clay
rattle about, too shrunken for our skin:
a drum-tight shell, devoured from within.
Michael Johnson
The Horologist’s Lament
Gone are the greasy axlesplinesyour father thumbed like pages
in the good book of labor; the aged
cedars from their cradlestones;
the nations who homed here—lost
like air in the mouths of clouds.
Gone the rusty bones of old gods
and gone the woodland ghosts.
Gone, to sound, in stead of words,
when you nestle to Time’s chest:
the lilt of childhood laughter burst
from his breast like startled birds.
Do Not Go Gently
Do not go gently to write the coveted silence of a shepherd’srounds. Write the tales echoed
in his nightwatchman’s ear. Tune the cadences
of rafter bats and cooing coveys in the distance—
wish a tongue run ragged and overflowed.
Do not go gently to write the silence—
that sweet madness in Beethoven’s ears, that once-
beautiful burn he hammered to heavencode
the quiet. Hear what tune, what cadence,
calms you, what banter of mice in the glens
soothes, what lilting croon comprises your ode
to joy, and do not go gently into silence’s
covenant. Knowing night’s dark romance,
its dusk, its winged players and what fires glowed
there now gone, tune the cadence
of starstuff. Knowing we only owe penance
for wordlessness, for our voices swallowed,
write, but go not gently so. Bear silence
only to give ear to the tune’s decadence.
In Praise of an Electric Fence
Dare you to piss on this fence,older brother said. Don’t worry,
it won’t hurt. Glen’s common sense
spoke otherwise, but not knowing Gary
to lie before, he dropped trou and pissed
up the pole until he hit electricity.
Gary laughed, just once, then winced
and knelt alongside, saying, I’m sorry—
I didn’t mean it. And Glen looked
at his brother, saw he meant it, and said,
You mean it? Course I do. You touch
it, then, Glen said. And because he did
mean it, and felt he needed so much
absolving, he reached out and took it.
David W. Landrum
Two Epigraphs:
1. Upon an Abandoned Lover of Mine
You’re like Vivaldi’s music: quick, then slow;the allegro con brio always last.
You write the same theme for each concerto,
same notes, same variations on your past.
2. Upon Henri Riviera’s Isle de la Cygnets
Two rows of sycamores beside the Seine,their branches flung wild, like a Maenad’s hair,
trunks mirrored in low puddles left by rain,
limbs shaking in a chilly rush of air.
Two women walk along the muddy shore.
A dog trots just behind them. Paris fades
under an orange sky. Old barges moor
at dockside. Earth’s a gathering of shades.
Hungry
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
The lean and hungry look: he thinks too much
and food for him is not the final end
of labor; nor is bread broke with a friend
of any consequence. You'll see him clutch
a cup of wine, chew meat, and yet his touch
is light at public feasts. His mind will tend
toward calculations we can't comprehend
of treason, murder, sedition, and such.
Like a wolf under the moon, his quiet thoughts seek
their prey. He stalks his victims in the wide,
stark territory lodged inside his brain—
that open steppe, a snowy, huge terrain
where calculated, cold silences speak
and violent machinations safely hide.
Indifference
She hardly ever praised him. When he earnedhis Ph.D., she had nothing to say,
gave him a shrug, dismissed all he had learned,
seemed bored upon his graduation day.
When articles he wrote got into print
she nodded but would not take time to read
what he had worked so arduously to invent.
She never gave his labor any heed
and showed no interested in the things he said—
important to him but vexing to her.
Their conversations lapsed, their words went dead.
His interests always struck her as a bore.
Now, frantic, she has learned that he has found
another woman who can recognize
accomplishments, whose praise centers around
her ardor at his scholar’s enterprise.
The words she held back would come in cascades
should he return. She knows she would repent
her silences, give long-due accolades,
appreciative and not indifferent.
But there is a great gulf fixed, silence that looms
between them, woven from her withheld praise,
and her indifference—long, mute book that dooms
her future to a string of wordless days.
Eric D. Lehman
Venice
Beyond the crowded streets in a hidden squarebeside a silent church, an old sailor
rests on a bench, dreaming of lost glories,
watching flower petals whisper circles
and escape down crumbling pastel alleys.
He finds some comfort in this miracle
of two labyrinths intertwined, of flaked paint
on drowning cafés with red wine and cheese,
of papal pigeon clouds in lonely trees.
Some thought that past splendor was a monster.
Perhaps the cracked canals tell him that now
this tilting city perched on empty seas,
this once proud titan aching for her youth,
finds real grace, for only death brings beauty.
Divorce at Chichen Itza
Pyramids map the jungle of our separation;stone demons, snakes, grim eagles, skulls,
and ancient bloody warriors, watch us
as we ascend steep rock steps and ruins,
the remnants of blind chaos or poor fate,
the end of something terrible and great.
Our avoidance of the subject leads to rows
of broken columns, pillars of slow grief,
weathered stones, the tombs of kings,
and striped iguanas staring at the sky-blue space.
Sunlight swells over bright rubble, green leaves,
and your ivory shoulders, neck and face.
A rapprochement is impossible, an excavation
of vows unreal, so instead we focus on
brown hanging vines in cenote wells,
proud stella, carved frowns of anger,
and masks with eyes that search our faults,
masks we now must wear ourselves.
Rick Mullin
Lutetia
I might stumble on the flagstone quayand slip the black embankment to the Seine,
or clutch my coat and amble on my way
envisioning your face. I’d count to ten,
inhale the rain and press my face on yours,
dissolving in your scarf, your red embrace.
In either case, I’m lost. The night detours
of Paris take the ghost and leave no trace
but visions and a vignette cast in time--
a kir royale, rouge lipstick on the glass,
a street in Montparnasse, a petit crime
of conscience, call it love and let it pass
for city lights reflected on a wave,
for worms that twist like cables in the grave.
Hopper
Hopper paints monotonous haiku, emptybedrooms, light and curtains in midday breezes,
awkward figures over and over, surely
getting at something
pure and true. America. Midnight diners,
tiny brownstone Brooklyn apartments state his
premise. Spotlit aliens touch the rigid
hand of a student.
Ochre walls in cadmium daylight build a
gabled house suggesting the Bates Hotel in
Psycho. Railroad sidings and lonely phone poles
resonate longing.
He endows interior landscape: T-shirt
zombies, grasses rendered in opaque yellow.
Collie sniffs the whippoorwill’s sundown echo.
Infinite distance.
Fossil in the Meadow
It’s underneath the lowest canopyof burnt and burning umber and sienna
on the Northeast Corridor. You’ll see
where cattail roots are pinning its antenna,
weaving tripod segments in the heath.
It’s not a flattened fifty gallon drum
discarded by Cyanamid beneath
the Andropogon gray. It’s Kingdom Come.
It penetrated twilight’s eiderdown
of dusty slate–Pulaski Skyway threw
it headlights as it slipped around the girth
of cagework oil tanks. It rolled and drew
its heat ray, but the microbes went to town
All Hallows’ Eve and laid it in the earth.
Tom Riley
Ciceronian Sonnet
Cicero in the Forum, head and tongueAnd hands: conclusion of a great career.
His presence proves his fierce words truly stung,
So he should be content with being here.
This long has been the great man’s proper sphere.
This long has been the home of eloquence.
Toward this spot did the clever speeches steer
This man of parts, bereft at last of sense.
And even here the public speaker vents,
Though far more silently than was his habit.
Gentle flies buzz. The sunlight is intense.
The great man is more helpless than a rabbit.
And he proclaims, to all who stand and see,
A message: “Never mess with Antony!”
Pilgrimage to a Skeptic Sage
“I cannot stand to think on my own.For the knowledge of ages I groan!
Won’t you teach it to me?
I shall strive earnestly….”
“You’re assuming that something is known.”
Wrong Damn Thing
I’ve thought the wrong damn thing, so I must pay:My good deeds can’t undo my cerebration.
Oh, what a deadly game the neurons play!
I’ve thought the wrong damn thing – so I must pay
A heavy price. The world is cold and gray,
Though I attempt a tropical vacation.
I’ve thought the wrong damn thing, so I must pay!
My good deeds can’t undo my cerebration.
Joseph S. Salemi
To Writers of Erotic Verse
When composing verse to VenusMark the ictus with your penis;
If you’re female, keep caesura
Wide and open, to insure a
Ready linkage in the meter—
Then enjambment will be sweeter.
Remember that erotic spendings
Climax best in feminine endings,
And that feet will scan much better
If you keep elisions wetter.
A couplet, like a couple, functions
Best with lubricated junctions.
Vague, uncertain, aimless strophes
Won’t win any stud-farm trophies;
Solid, straight, trochaic thumping
Simulates coition’s pumping.
Readers like a steady motion:
Tight and firm, but slick with lotion.
The Girls in the Cave
Moreover, I said, you must not wonder that those
who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to
human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper
world where they desire to dwell.
—Plato, The Republic VII, 517d
(trans. Benjamin Jowett)
One often dreams of lovely girls—Plato, The Republic VII, 517d
(trans. Benjamin Jowett)
With silken skin and golden curls,
Whose bodices and skirts well flounced
Reveal a curvature pronounced;
Who exude mists of murky sex
From languid eyes and perfumed necks,
And who, considered as a whole,
Inflame the currents of one’s soul.
And yet to leave the realm of dreams
And come to earth, it often seems
The girls with whom one can connect
Are always spoiled in some respect.
One notices in every femme
A skein of flaws within the gem.
Amanda’s lovely, but in truth
I can’t abide her crooked tooth,
And though Bettina’s breasts are pert
Her fingernails are lined with dirt.
Cassandra’s hair falls in cascades
As lustrous as the richest jades;
However, she does not wash well
And often has a pungent smell.
Young Donna’s velvet-smooth caress
Can put my hormones into stress—
Still and all, her raucous laugh
Reduces my desire by half.
Edwina’s hips can undulate
Like jello on a shaken plate,
And yet her Puritanic mind
Makes sex with her an awful grind.
I’d go on through the alphabet
Describing how each female pet
Falls short in some important ways
To merit one’s unstinted praise,
But now I think I’ve made the point:
Real women always disappoint.
This proves what Plato used to teach
About the One and Many. Reach
Upwards toward that ideal form
And make of it your guiding norm—
But here in time, a multitude
Of pale reflections serve as food,
And men do best in their sojourn
To sample every dish in turn.
John Alfred Taylor
Too Late
Nothing is now.The words
Being spoken are past, stand out
Solid, a sword
From the lips
Irrevocably frozen, too hard
To take off their edge.
They cut
New shapes in the air, acknowledge
Time goes one way
Only.
Love can snap in a single day,
Hate last longer,
A bloom
That took years wilt in a moment’s anger.
The Diet of Worms
Despite the rainbow promise, this is sure:The liver fluke and lamprey will endure:
Thus when the lamb and lion lie together
Only one will rise to sniff the weather.
"Nothing Too Much"
Athenians told each other,Then voted
To take Sicily. Meanwhile their mothers
Were getting drunk, chanting
Weep for
Adonis. Nicias tried to be daunting,
Reminding the men of the cost,
But they
Were ready to bet the farm. They lost
Later, but right now worried
About
Herms missing phalluses, then hurried
Off to their war, singing
The paeon
Leaving the Piraeus, oars winging
The triremes, all glitter and flash,
Unfinished
Business behind. Gutter-bred trash,
Informers for pay, had fingered
Brazen
Alcibiades. He’d wanted to linger,
Be tried at once, no
Herm-
Breaker he, but that was too slow,
The war couldn’t wait.
In Athens
Trial and suspicion, hemlock and hate,
And a fast police boat
After
Alcibiades. He’d be the goat
He knew for certain, so turned
His coat
And ended in Sparta, bridges burned.
On Sicily the siege went sour,
Then worse.
One last change to escape. The hour
Of the eclipse Nicias thought
A bad
Omen passed. The army stayed put,
Then watched their ships lose.
The rest?
Read Book Seven of Thucydides.
Note: While the Athenians were deciding to launch
the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, their women celebrated the
Adonia, ritually lamenting the death of the god Adonis. More
ominous, the ithyphallic images of Hermes standing guard over
households and public places were vandalized: this put a shade on
the whole enterprise, since Hermes was the patron god of travelers.
Alcibiades was a natural suspect because he had already committed a
bit of harmless sacrilege. Despite his demands for an immediate
trial, his political enemies put it off till the expedition was
already at sea. After his desertion, and Lamachus’ death in
action, the only Athenian general left on Sicily was Nicias, who
had been against the Expedition from the beginning and believed in
omens almost to the point of paralysis. In the end much of the army
was massacred at the River Assinarus, with most who lived to be
taken prisoner dying in the quarries used as concentration camps. A
bare remnant returned to Athens.
There Is No Defense
There is no defenseFrom the inane.
It gathers shapeless, immense
On every channel.
How can one fight
The silt that chokes the runnel,
Muddies the bright burn,
Thickens the stream?
No way at all to turn
The turbid stuff. Only
One solution
—Decide to stay lonely,
Don’t go with the flow,
Find other food
Than the bottom feeders you know.
Jeffrey Woodward
In Very Winter
There is a path, narrow through underwood,That severs, for a moment, vine from bough.
I tried that tangle once, its cold withstood;
My foot should falter, risking its turns now.
Untimely fruit, deep in that desert scene,
Baffles with notice of a quick decay.
The hurried blood, the wits besot with green,
Wells at the branches where the foot would stray.
Yet how, in very winter, sudden spring
Should show with spray, and thrush and cricket call,
Why foot, with fainting step in answering,
Through timeless wood should to a meadow fall,
I hazard not who, once in that strict park,
Kept to a path skirting the underbark.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241)
You, who beqeathed a fierce mythologyOf ice and fire to filial recall,
Who in your sagas sang the violent feats
Of your bold migratory Viking stock,
Discovered in astonishment one night
Of combat that your transitory flesh trembled.
When unexpected terror struck
You felt a coward crept into your soul.
There in the dark of Iceland the stinging salt
Wind heaved the sea to mountains, your house shook;
Surrounded by the shrieking Norns, you drank
Unforgettable dishonor to the dregs:
Over your pale face the shadow of the sword
Falls, as it fell so often in your book.
Translated from Spanish by Richard
O'Connell
Jared Carter
The Letter
A man dying of an incurable disease receives a
letter addressed to him in an unknown hand. “Some hideous
well-wisher!” he exclaims, tossing the envelope in a corner.
Later he retrieves it, thinking it might contain money.
He slits one end of the envelope but the letter
is stuck to the inside of the flap. The glue is tenacious; the
piece of paper remains fast. Losing all patience, he jerks it free
with such force that it turns inside out. He cannot decipher the
inverted message.
Worse, the letter is stuck to his hand now. The
doorbell rings. It is the doctor, who has come to try one last
remedy. Hoping to reverse the progress of the disease, he persuades
the dying man to climb up into a large mirror hanging over the
fireplace.
But the man cannot go all the way into the
mirror’s depths. The letter, still stuck to his hand,
prevents him from entering. Finally he shakes if off, passes
through to the other side of the mirror, and disappears in the
shadows. The letter drops to the floor.
The doctor picks it up and at first can make
nothing of the strange characters. But he holds it up to the mirror
and sees that it is a bill, in his own handwriting, for services
rendered. Realizing that he can never collect, he goes on about his
rounds.
Rejection Slip
It was just a few lines—a brief sketch in
prose—written some fifty years ago, when he was first
starting out as a writer. In all that time he had been unable to
publish it. He still liked it, but no one else did. No editor had
ever given it the slightest notice.
He could still remember sitting in his college
room, in the spring of his senior year, and typing it out while the
steam radiators hissed and clanked. It was a dreamy piece about
what he planned to do, and what he hoped to achieve during the
years ahead.
When he was approaching his eighth decade, he
sent it to a wise and perceptive editor. “It’s not a
work of art at all,” came back the reply. “It’s
your epitaph. Change the tense and it’s perfect. I wonder why
it took you so long to notice.”
The Desert
Prolonged exposure to extremes of heat and
sunlight can cause madness, even death, yet there is said to exist
one group of nomads who roam across the desert unceasingly. Its
members have never been studied. Only one thing is known about
them.
Before leaving each campsite, they mix
quantities of sand with colors extracted from desert flowers, and
begin to spread out a series of intricate lines and inscriptions.
Such diagrams are obscured by the wind within minutes after the
tribesmen ride away.
These images, thought to be prehistoric in
origin, have never been sketched or photographed. Their purpose
remains obscure. Over the years the wish to examine them has lured
many expeditions onto the desert. Their fate is unclear, for none
has ever returned.
Certain adventurers are reported to withstand
the heat and the mirages until they stumble across dunes streaked
with traces of color. Of these, a handful are alleged to have
survived, and to have pushed on into the more severe, inhospitable
regions.
According to legend, perhaps once each century
an explorer manages to come face to face with the
wanderers—if indeed it can be assumed that such a tribe even
exists. It is far more likely that all those who venture upon the
desert perish without exception.
David Castleman
Sherlock Holmes’ CANCER CURE
Clouds and the unvarying noon walked the
world’s horizons as Mary Watson and her husband, Dr John
Hamish Watson, companionated by their blazing hearthstone. Dr
Watson puffed his pipe idly, meditating profoundly, almost
meditating himself into a snooze, and Mary knitted a tiny
sweater.
Mary said, “Jim?”
Dr Watson said, “Dearest?” He
suppressed a choke, “Shouldn’t you,” she said,
“ask Sherry for particulars concerning his cure for cancer?
People, it’s true, have applied it advantageously, and yet I
think they’ve interpreted Sherry’s laconically
delivered instructions too creatively.
“Creativity, like salvation, in truth is
applied sparingly, and Sherry is, I think, more preoccupied with
his achievement than he is concerned with its application,”
she said.
He said, “The pitfalls of genius, my
dear.”
She said, being femininely certain, “When
we would play God, it’s well to do it God’s way, even
if it slights the ego.”
He thought, his lips fluttering, “Depends
whose ego be slit.”
He said, “An excellent notion, my dear,
I’ll do it presently.” He hid his yawn behind his hand,
as you have done.
Dr Watson asked his friend, Sherlock Holmes,
“Why did you discover this cure for cancer, although all
cures have resisted all research forever?”
Sherry said, “Chaucer’s dictum was
to make a virtue of necessity. I’d felt myself stricken with
a cancer of the colon. One doctor had been wholly uninterested,
being sufflaminated by jealousy.
“Conscientiously I experimented on the
animal closest to hand, and found relief using dried black figs,
pomegranate juice, green tea, broccoli sprouts, and the
contemplable artichoke.
“Also I explored other thistles,
nettles.
“Nettle leaf, called by the high—hat
boys urtica dioica, was early on my list, a matter of serendipity,
I suppose.
“My instructions must be followed exactly,
humanly speaking.
“Each morning for three weeks drink a
fresh pot brewed strong albeit not so strong it recedes your gums
and bloodies your eyes, and eat yams because nettles tax the
heart.
“Abandon coffee absolutely.
"Henceforth consume one pot every Sunday
evening, continuing to eat yams,” Sherry concluded.
John said, “But that’s too
simple!”
Sherry said, “The universe is simple for
those who understand it, and yet actually it was bloody
work.”
Sherry
Fine almost as a mist, rain was sneaking through
the skies on its journey along the streets and across farmstead and
woodlands to the sea. It is not uncommon for a medical man to be
unimaginatively contemplative so it was not uncommon for me to be
pondering vaguely as my gaze probed out through our windows above
Baker Street, that we mortals duly seep through our various lives
much as the significant particles of rain seep through the surfaces
of our earth toward and temporarily among the pouches of the
sea.
My tobacco-clouds fed the stuffy haze in the
roiling rooms as the fagots spoke in the fireplace, chunking and
coughing, and my mind was alone and free. One infatuated moth spun
about a taper and I could hear its wings applauding, clap clap. It
was enough to bear.
“And yet, my dear Watson,” the
voiced words crashed, “it is not unreasonable to suppose that
those multitudinous individuated adhesions of hydrogen and oxygen,
yclept water, when compared to our estimable selves must be
considered deficient in their vital natures because they lack the
most sublimely elevating characteristic we call arrogance.
“Did we as a species and as comprehended
individuals fail to arrogate we would be definably the less.
We’d be as contemptible as any healthily arrogant man must
equably consider his natural inferiors to be.
“Deprived of hubris genius is only an
itch.”
My head slammed as if snapped on a tether, and I
was as irritated as I had every right to be. It always annoyed me
to discover that my most private thoughts were so transparent to
Holmes.
As it did typically, my irritation evaporated
almost immediately as I perceived his facial features fastened in
an empathic childlike concern, his posture held forth in a hunch of
solicitude. He was good at hating, and he hated that his friends
had pain.
I gawked at him, prior to reaction.
“Arrogance is not lovable,” he
proceeded, “but is in humans admirable and is unfortunately
enviable to those who would feign its charm.
“Cats cause us to laugh because we ascribe
their arrogance to their psychological littleness, while our own
arrogance we ascribe as being a tribute to the truth. Of course if
we become unattractively reflective we may to our misfortune cease
to arrogate.”
Reaction occurred, and I responded pleasantly,
“Bugger your godforsaken soul, Holmes. You can be an
unmitigated pain in the...”
“As you decide, my dear friend,” he
interrupted, dwindlingly. His gaze shrugged again to the embers and
the flames in the grate. He was not smoking any of his pipes, his
cigars or cigarettes.
My gaze returned through and in the windows
above Baker Street, the scurryings in the streets, horses smoking
at both ends, red beady eyes of the watchers from the sewers. The
man in the window watched me warily, disappointed. Where did his
gaze go when I went away? Whose arms in the night gave him solace?
Which delusions did he defend when they were challenged?
He too was applauded by a moth, clap clap, in a
room lit warm by winter fire. He looked like no man’s fool,
strong enough to capitulate, talons sheathed ably.
The moment gone, I turned toward Holmes.
“All of the literature informs us of the hollowness of
arrogance. Every respectable ethicist condemns it unreservedly.
Explain that, please, my dear Holmes.”
“Let us consider philology,” he
evaded, knowing I knew the moment had gone, and knowing I knew what
had become of it. He was wearied of my incessant stingings.
“Let us consider our expressions: the literature,
respectable, ethicist. Each expression manifests cleverly
disingenuous defensive maneuverings, and each is a prim
hypocrisy.
“I would call it the illiterature,
rather,” he concluded wearily.
His gaze followed again the beckoning of ember
and flame, and without looking he understood I continued to watch
him, to weigh him. He said, “It is natural that we would deny
those guiltiest secrets we feel are almost invisible, and it is
intelligent.”
Once again I had the tiny epiphany that he was
an unblooded virgin, and that he would die without understanding
the social truth that our bodies belong to our species.
As he shuffled off toward his bedroom and his
bed, presumably for an hour of reading during which sober
inevitability he composed his mind into a necessary pattern, I
watched his back receding. His was an impressive back to follow,
and like Disraeli he was a majestic vestiges whose ancestors once
delved mysteriously in the temples of Solomon.
My eyes and my thoughts reflected his design as
he limped off, and I thought that if any man had earned a good
solid sleep it was he who had that day proved unequivocally and
with a startlingly lucrative discretion that the celebrated maniac
Jack the Ripper was in fact our illustrious and o’erbuttoned
Queen whose sharded self had skulked abroad the briefly-sequenced
bellings of the nights to wreak sanctity on those poor poisoned
laboring whores of England.
She had slunk forth in her ruin, enlisted by a
small god whose name was red. That Holmes had been permitted to
hypnotise our Queen dumbfounded me, and in the presence of such
living monuments of potency...
My concept of world tilted...
And it was not that he had been permitted to
hypnotise her, but he had contrived it so that hypnosis was
demanded of him regardless of her ineffable dignity, regardless of
the dignity of England...
Lamplight appeared from his doorway, and it was
too dim for reading. His fiddle appeared among the nightly sound,
tentative, mournful as bagpipes, chaste. I wondered if he would
select his familiar cocaine, or if it would be heroin.
Silence meant selection.
I had made the heroin pure.
Death By Texas
Old Joe booted in the door. He ran into the
inferno as the ceiling behind him collapsed. His clothing sprouted
little cyclones of smoke and little dancing flames.
The little girl huddled terrified, her eyes dark
waters with a few fish. She tried to crawl inside herself in a
corner beyond screamings. Joe gathered her and cradled her in his
arms. .
He plunged through the window somersaulting to
the roof below as the roof behind him exploded down. He slid on his
tail and fell to the blessed hard earth, landing behind his right
shoulder and rolling with extended elbows to defend the
child.
Her mother ran forth and ripped the child from
his grip and scurried away. Joe lay, rolled a few times, scarcely
conscious of the roar of collapse as the dregs of the heavenly
lifted church gave in altogether.
One of the assembled primates said, “Glad
that weren’t no stained glass he busted.”
A fellow replied, “Them’s holy.
Jesus hisself did ‘em.”
Today was Sunday. The church had been stuffed
with folks worshipping for the view. A candle touched cloth, and
flames played wildly. Panicking, folks trampled folks, and the
children, locked upstairs for decency, were forgotten until the
adults were adequately saved.
Joe, in passing, heard screams, saw smoke and
fire, came running although these decent people reviled him. He ran
upstairs and rescued the children, heard a further screaming, he
thought, and returned upstairs to discover that one child had been
segregated for an especial punishment to bring her closer to
God.
As the grand plain old church crumpled he heard
her, he thought.
Joe had lived forever in town. Mostly the good
citizens of Bugview ignored him because he didn’t talk good,
didn’t pose, didn’t opine aloud. He was big and
gentle.
Joe was sheriff. He’d not wanted the job
but it was foisted on him in a curious momant, circumstances being
the treacherous pincers they are, biting a man on his fundy like an
ouroboros.
Every town has torturers, commonly boys and
wives. Bugview was a rowdy town, subscribing to the notion that
“nothing is certain except death and Texas,” and the
torturers enjoyed teasing the sheriff because he dared not
retaliate.
Boys trod his garden, spilled his wife’s
groceries, spat by his feet, shot his house. Joe felt helpless, and
he gnawed his teeth cruelly. He dreamt of pastures new.
Johnny was the worst of the sadistic boys.
Johnny smiled before witnesses, and had special regard for Joe who
didn’t smile falsely, who didn’t laugh hollowly.
Honorable men disgusted Johnny, whose daddy owned the local mill
and the judge and the best houses.
Johnny tossed rocks from concealment, and from
concealment tossed cagily orchestrated slurs. One evening, when the
moon was dimmer than a blind man’s eye, Johnny shot at
Joe.
Joe responded naturally, without measuring, just
as you’d have done. Joe shot at the flash, and invisible
JoImny was dead as yesterday’ s potatoes.
The town raged Joe’s response was thought
precipitate.
Joe was told, amid glib smirks, that
Johnny’s famous brother, the world’s handiest
gunslinger, called Ben, was arriving for vengeance. Some helpful
soul had telegraphed.
This too was a Sunday, the day of the fire. Joe
walked home. The saloon beckoned and he stepped aboard.
Being reviled he was ignored by the bar. Finally
he said, “Fred,” to the conscientiously unconcerned
tender.
Fred, who was a sneerer, sauntered over, said,
“What.” It was a yawn.
“Whiskey. One finger,” said
Joe.
Fred poured a finger of Old Snotgut. Fred
sneered. .
Joe placed a dollar on the bar, walked out, the
finger untongued.
One Monday the red morning was a glory when the
sun rolled forth, and Joe, as was his custom, met the arriving
stage. Ben stepped from the horse-drawn cabin, surveying the town,
eyeing Joe’s badge.
Joe eyed Ben, and each understood.
The gaping yammering primates of the town
gesticulated.>
Ben nodded to Joe, and strode to the saloon,
which was the hotel, whorehouse, casino, and purveyor of essential
and circumstantial gossip. Just as the mother is the hub of a
family, so every town has one room which acts the hub.
As Joe walked his rounds later that morning Ben
stepped down from the tabled bar and stood beside the bubbling
malodorous water-trough. Ben said, “You know why I’m
here.” Ben spoke low and pleasant, like any gentleman who
pursues bullies.
Joe replied, “I reckon.”
Ben said, “Let’s do it,
then.”
The two men walked toward the center of the
dusty street. Sound slipped away as time entered ethereal worlds
and the men became automatons without essence. They became what
they did, only.
Each man drew his gun and aimed exactly, and
Joe’s gun moved as if the merest thought, and, barked. From
the base of the foul water-trough a small mouth appeared and
drooled a coil of spittle onto the gray dust of the street.
Joe stood.
Far, far less than a second later Ben’s
gun spoke, a bark heard by every gaping creature in the town. The
windvane above the livery stable, the cock swung four times and
stopped, and a new hole appeared among its tailfeathers.
Ben said in his deep, low voice, “Johnny
always was a jackass.”
Ben murmured, “Mom said he was conceived
orally.” Ben smiled apologetically, being a gentleman
embarrassed.
Ben said, “It’s my pleasure to have
met you, sir. I’ll be leaving on the morning
stage.”
Joe now experienced a friendliness new to him.
The ostensible altercation was like the knocking at the gate in
MACBETH, waking sleepers to a cleared reality. The town smiled. The
grudge was gone. Little Jessica and her mother, Mrs Toadbody,
cheered as he passed.
Fred, the sneerful tender of the bar, invited
him in for a free drop, laughing like a brother. Fred poured four
fingers from his best bottle, saying, “How bout a shiner,
Joey?”
Joe said, “Thanks.”
Joe placed a dollar on the table, poured the
whiskey on the floor, and walked.
Joseph S. Salemi
The Chattering Chatrooms
I once had a friend who never finished her
doctoral dissertation. It wasn’t that she lacked scholarship
or intelligence—on the contrary, she was a well-read and
perceptive person who knew her field quite well. Her chosen
dissertation subject wasn’t any more difficult than usual,
nor did she have a recalcitrant advisor. All the signs pointed to
my friend completing her doctoral work in due course, without any
glitches. All except one, that is.
My friend had a pathological compulsion to talk
about her work. She could not resist going on, in mind-numbing
detail, about what she was planning to research and write. She
always managed to find some new aspect or nuance or petty fact that
she had to thrash out in endless discussion with her friends and
colleagues. It was maddening to listen to her torture herself with
doubt and hesitation and tentativity and the judicious balancing of
every alternative. She would blather on forever, like one of those
boring old New Yorker articles that never seemed to
end.
When I tried to explain to her that she
didn’t need to engage in all this palaver, she retorted that
she was being conscientiously thorough, and that her work was too
important to be handled in a less than absolutely meticulous
manner. I said “Listen, honey—there are only two kinds
of dissertations: those that are finished and those that
aren’t. Screw the details. Get you ass in gear and write the
damned thing.”
She never did. She was sucked into a morass of
questions, doubts, tangents, and pointless talk. Hers is a common
horror story in academia.
There’s something similar going on in the
poetry world. We are afflicted with the Chattering Chatrooms. The
internet hosts scores of websites where aspiring poets gather to
gab endlessly about anything and everything concerned with poetry.
And in many cases, this directionless gabbing becomes an end in
itself.
Some of the subjects that come up on these
chatrooms are so banal and trivial that one begins to wonder if the
whole thing isn’t being staged as an elaborate hoax:
What’s the best time of day for you to write? Where do you
get your ideas? Should you use past or present tense? How do you
deal with writer’s block? And people will plug away at
these inane questions for page after page, as if they were actually
significant.
In addition, a great deal of what passes for
literary discussion on these chatrooms is just mutual
congratulation and posturing. Somebody proudly trumpets the fact
that he has had a haiku accepted in Rat’s Ass
Quarterly, and suddenly an avalanche of Congratulations!
Kudos! Hooray! and Awesome! pile up like tuna in a
kill-net. Others triumphantly announce how many of the
chatroom’s members have appeared in a given publication, as
if they were scorekeepers at a hockey game. The atmosphere is that
of a kindergarten where stars are being handed out for the
completion of little tasks. Can people really be that desperate for
recognition and praise?
Some of my readers will immediately object that
many chatrooms provide a venue for critique and commentary on
posted poems, and thereby serve a useful advisory and didactic
purpose. This may be abstractly true, but in the real world it is a
very hit-or-miss proposition. There are three main reasons for
skepticism on this point.
First, much commentary on these chatrooms is
designed primarily to build up credits, and not necessarily to help
you. People make throwaway comments on your poem just so that they
will be eligible to get comments on theirs. A lot of the remaining
criticism is purely tendentious, serving merely as a vehicle for
someone to grind an axe or spout from a soapbox. And a good
percentage of it is covertly malicious, allowing some frustrated
little nerd who works in a cubicle to vent his spleen on an
anonymous person’s work. Do you really need such
commentary?
Second, many chatrooms are just on-line versions
of a high school cafeteria, where posturing and acting out and
clique-building are the main activities. Drama queens strut,
narcissists pose, and bullies terrorize. Rather than offer real
critique, these chatrooms frequently degenerate into turf-war
battlefields where in-groups maintain their hegemony as ruthlessly
as drug-lords guard their sales territory. This in turn leads to
all sorts of venomous bitching, catfighting, and hate-filled
rivalries. What sane poet would choose to be a part of that
hell?
Third, there is the inescapable
consensus-mongering. I am reminded of the old joke about a camel:
It’s a horse designed by a committee. Poems that come out of
chatroom workshops have all the earmarks of compromise and
split-differences. Since you’re getting advice from dozens of
people, your resulting poem (as like as not) will be a pastiche of
platitudes designed to offend no one. And it will be one hell of a
worldwide audience to please! The cantankerous Joycean drunk in
Eire, the aging hippie broad in Greenwich Village, the pompous
academic twit in Ann Arbor, the vegan crank in
Seattle—whoever has a computer and is signed up in the
chatroom workshop will have something to say about your poem.
Yes, yes, I know… there may be a highly
competent poet out there commenting on your first draft. But even
this can be dicey. Is this highly competent poet your kind of poet?
Does he share your aesthetic presuppositions? Is his style
compatible with yours? Is he a person of good will who is favorably
disposed to strangers? If none of these things is true, what
possible value can his comments have for you? Wallace Stevens was a
great poet, but his advice would be of no use to someone whose
ideal versifier is John Donne.
The people who lust after the advice of famous
writers are more interested in fame and celebrity than creative
accomplishment. They superstitiously think that if they talk to a
widely published poet, some of the magic charisma of that poet will
rub off on their own work, and make it capable of similar fame. It
never occurs to these shallow people that fame isn’t a
commodity like canned soup. You can’t just go out and get it
if you have the right roadmap to the grocery store. Every great
poet’s accomplishment is idiosyncratic, and based on scores
of unrepeatable life circumstances and historical details that no
other person will ever experience again. So why would you expect
this particular famous poet’s advice to be of any practical
use to you in the writing of your poems?
Moreover, most of the persons registered in a
chatroom will not be top-notch poets. There’s nothing wrong
with that, but you have to keep in mind that someone criticizing
your posted poem might be a buffoon, or a rank amateur, or just
some teenage schmuck. Since the internet is profoundly democratic
and mostly anonymous, you have no way of taking stock of the person
who presumes to advise you.
What drives people to join these chatrooms, and
waste hours of their day in fruitless gabbing? It’s the
deeply sick need to cooperate and collaborate. Much American
pseudo-education now pumps “collaborative learning” as
a matter of course—students are expected to learn only via
the mediation and input of their fellow students. Sitting in
circles and chatting are now de rigueur in most American
classrooms, while solitary study is considered antisocial and
undemocratic. It’s an easy step from this absurdity to the
opera bouffe of the Chattering Chatrooms. As one chatroom
addict said to me, “How can I know my poem’s any good
unless lots of other people talk to me about it?” I wanted to
reply “If that’s how slavishly other-directed you are,
you’ll probably never write any good poems.” But I
didn’t say anything. Like the Greeks, I believe it’s
best to leave people to their fate.
Whenever I raise these objections in discussion
with some poets, I usually get a variant of the following reply:
Yes, but I need the feedback. Such an answer is a dead
giveaway as to the real reason why people frequent the Chattering
Chatrooms. They are lonely, other-directed, and profoundly
conscious of their inadequacy. They need the daily reinforcement of
discussion and debate, no matter how pointless, to help them
overcome their sense of failure and mediocrity. Just as that long
list of congratulations is necessary to help them ratify their
shaky self-esteem, so also are the endless threads of discussion,
which allow them to pretend that they are denizens of the literary
world.
But they’re wrong. All the Chattering
Chatrooms do is distract you from the business of reading great
poetry and then doing your best to emulate it. They swirl you into
a Charybdis of debate and one-upsmanship and posturing and
cliqueishness. They divert you from what you could be doing: your
finest and most characteristic work.
At best, the Chattering Chatrooms help you to
produce what might be called Ordinary Workshop Boilerplate—a
kind of all-purpose poetic Play-Dough that is acceptable to almost
everybody, and even to many magazines. If that’s what you
want, fine. The Chattering Chatrooms will help you to become a
McPoet. It’s better than nothing, I suppose.
But genuine poets who aspire to fulfill their
actual, irreducibly individual potential will steer clear of these
places. Like almost all modern contrivances, the primary purpose of
the Chattering Chatrooms is to disconnect you from the real sources
of who and what you are. You don’t need the distraction of
constant chatter and manufactured consensus. You need to read and
write.
Contributors’ Notes
Don Barkin has published poems in Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The Louisville Review, Verse, and other magazines.Jared Carter’s fourth collection, Cross this Bridge at a Walk, was the poetry selection among four categories of “Best Books of Indiana 2007” chosen by the Indiana Center for the Book, a program of the Indiana State Library.
David Castleman lives in Dayton, Washington. His poems, tales, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of small press magazines since the early 1970s.
Sally Cook lives a reclusive country life with her husband, political cartoonist Bob Fisk, and cats. She is both painter and poet. She has been the recipient of several scholarships and awards. Cook keeps a sharp eye out for the psychological portrait in both disciplines. An e-book of her poetry can be seen at the web site of The New Formalist and her review of Joseph S. Salemi’s book “Masquerade” appears in the current issue of The University Bookman.
Gary Dop is a poet, playwright and professor in Minneapolis, MN. He studied poetry with Ted Kooser at the University of Nebraska MFA program.
Phillip A. Ellis is an external student studying English at the University of New England, Australia. He is applying for a Summer Research Scholarship to study Christopher Brennan’s work, at the Australian National University, and he hopes to study Honours over 2008 & 2009.
Nigel Holt is a teacher who lives and works in the UAE. He has been published in a number of venues, the most recent of which are: Snakeskin, Contemporary Sonnet, and Umbrella, and has work forthcoming in Contemporary Rhyme. He is also co-editor of The Shit Creek Review with Australian poet, Paul Stevens.
Anna Evans has had over 100 poems published in various journals including The Formalist, The Lyric, The Evansville Review, The Edge City Review, Raintown Review and Light Quarterly. She is the Editor of the formal poetry journal, The Barefoot Muse.
Kathryn Jacobs is a medievalist and a poet. She has had poems in Acumen, Measure, Quantum Leap, Midwest Poetry Review, DeCanto, ELF, Candelabrum, Texas Poetry Journal, Mezzo Cammin and Mobius. Quantum Leap also recently selected her for their “Featured Five.”
Michael Johnson was born in Bella Coola, British Columbia, and lives in Vancouver. He drives a ’53 Ford pickup called “The People Eater” and plays rugby. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Weber Studies, the Pedestal Magazine, and the Malahat and Southern Reviews, among others. He’d be deliriously happy playing cricket for a living.
Eric D. Lehman is a Professor of English at the University of Bridgeport and has previously published essays, fiction, and poetry in various journals, such as Hackwriters, Nature’s Wisdom, Mastodon Dentist, Umbrella, Canopic Jar, Red River Review, Identity Theory, SNReview, Switchback, Venture Magazine, T-Zero, Entelechy: Mind and Culture, and Artistry of Life.
David W. Landrum teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Cornerstone University, a small liberal arts college in Western Michigan. He has published poetry in many magazines and journals, including The Blind Man’s Rainbow, Small Brushes, riverrun, Driftwood Review, Hellas, The Formalist, and many others.
Rick Mullin is a business journalist and representational expressionist painter whose poetry has appeared in several print and online journals including Relief and Shit Creek Review. He lives in northern New Jersey.
Richard O’Connell lives in Hillsboro Beach, Florida. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Margie, National Review, The Texas Review, Acumen, The Formalist, Light, etc. His most recent collections are American Obits, Fractals and Dawn Crossing.
Tom Riley has published well over 700 poems in venues ranging from The Lyric to Light to Anglican Theological Review. He teaches Classical languages and English literature in Napa, California.
Joseph S. Salemi teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University, and in the Classics Department of both Hunter College and Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y. His work has appeared in over one hundred journals and literary magazines in the United States and in Britain.
John Alfred Taylor holds a BA from Missouri University, a MA and a Ph.D. from State University of Iowa. He taught at Washington & Jefferson College, and is now Professor Emeritus. Over the years he’s had poems in Kayak, the Southwest Review, the Kenyon Review, New Letters, West Branch, and many other magazines.
Jeffrey Woodward’s poems and essays appear widely in North American and European periodicals. Among his credits are Acumen, Christian Century, Envoi, International Poetry Review, Lines Review, The Lyric, Plains Poetry Journal, South Coast Poetry Journal, Staple and many others.