The New Formalist

Poetry Editor
Lamon Cull

Managing Editor
David Castleman

Contributing Editor
Jerry Jenkins

The New Formalist appears in January and July as a Web publication and once a year as a conventional print journal. A two issue subscription to the latter is $20. Please make all checks payable to:

David Castleman
Box 792
Larkspur, CA 94977-0792

Please submit no more than 6 poems at a time. Kindly paste your poems (plain text) onto the body of your E-mail message. Our E-mail address is:

thenewformalist@lycos.com

We do not encourage snail-mail submissions, but if you do not have access to a computer, kindly submit your work to the address below:

The Editors,
The New Formalist
Box 792
Larkspur, CA 94977-0792

© by respective authors.


XHTML & CSS design by Leo Yankevich

Wiley Clements

THE BATTLE OF FREDERICKSBURG

See them there in their ranks on the Heights of Marye in the morning,
riflemen set to repel any charge to their wall.
See him there, the gray chieftain, brooding, breast-burdened and quiet
in grief for the yesterday fallen, for those who will fall.

Hear them below in the town, the confident voices
of boys from the north and young officers new to their bars;
none knowing what scything awaits on the meadows above them,
what fecklessness rules in the minds of their leaders with stars.

Come away, for the outcome we know from the pages of history,
how the rebels in rags took the victory that day at small cost;
but weep for the loyal and brave, the lives that were wasted,
and sigh for the chieftain whose struggle was already lost.

UKIYO

Recall the night, warm after rain, in Tokyo;
a street in Shinjuku where beauty is for show
and sale; where teashops not for tea are lantern-lit.
At every doorway girls like silken flowers sit
or stand; kimonos scarlet, gold brocade, maroon—
so young, too young, they smile but do not importune
as you, by chance the only passer-by just then,
review their faces.
                           Bamboo flute and samisen
are playing softly somewhere out of sight—
You stop—
Your breath suspends, for alone there before a shop
a child so lovely tears come to your eyes unbid
is bowing toward you, small hands crossed, her face half-hid.
The image freezes: fixed forever is the night
the moment she looks up at you and smiles through fright.

In Memoriam: Gordon Dunham

Scarcely twenty years ago, amazed,
we saw the way you played defense, attack,
and deftly wove, across a table glazed
with lacquer, over squares of white and black,
your brilliancies at fifty cents a game.

Armed with your own invented tools of math,
'subjective probabilities,' you came
racing upward on the corporate path.
As if another Hallam, though untaught,
you won the wonder and profound regard
of presidents and chairmen; and you caught
with gentle grace in every deed and word,
the hearts of all of us who worked with you.

It seemed there were no goals beyond your reach;
your science saw the future clear; you knew
the mysteries of chance, the price of each
insurance risk we took; but even you
could not foretell a truck would lean and fall
to crush your wife, inside her passing car,
and both your children. With their going all
your light, your morning moon and double star,
went out. You lingered daily in the dim
saloon downstairs, two brandies on the bar
before you; burned your suits and ties, wore slim
and faded levis at your desk. Your hair
and beard grew long, so gray and so untrimmed
we saw a sad Walt Whitman sitting there.

At last the powers read your purpose right:
you left your title, office, and uptown
apartment; took the street, slept where you might,
played chess for wagers, winning new renown
among the denizens of cheap cafes.
For then you knew, by probabilities,
and by the fog your checkmates could not raise,
how soon your longed-for dying would displace
your being's burden and your soul's unease.

Forgive me if to save your treasured name
I name with it these verses, which I know
have little chance of bringing you the fame
you should have won had chance not brought you low.

Richard Moore

TRY, TRY AGAIN

So, Mr. Lish, you're back in school?
    Something I thought you knew, Lish:
the education of a fool
    just makes the fool more foolish.

"Well, sir, let me be foolish, then!"
    old Lish calmly replied,
"I'll dance about like other men
    who lived before they died."

THE ADVENTURE OF IT

Step father, latest lover—I'm the one.
  That charmer, wit, my longed-for son
  delights. . .but look: the little punster,
  closer examined, is a monster.

Because of fires in him that have long burned,
  he does things when our backs are turned
  that rouse the neighbors to a fury
  and threaten us with judge and jury.

Yet still he comes, comes still, comes with his mother—
  him only—she will bring no other.
  It's fate.  It's nasty, brutish, clever.
  I didn't choose him.  Does one ever?

Although he's not the bargain I had thought,
  caveat emptor, he is bought,
  wrapped in the joy she could confer
  in part because he came with her.

Wasn't my wish once more to be a parent?
  Bring me this knave, then, nasty, arrant!
  Lucifer, stoke that inner fire!
  Good son, bad son, the fate entire!

FORE AND AFT

                 This lady whom I adore,
                   this graceful craft
                     both fore
                     and aft,

                 so small for that cargo, immense,
                   shipshape and fit,
                     of sense
                     and wit:

                 the way she came on with her verse
                   (there were so many
                     much worse),

                 then lastly that lively posterior,
                   no, not to any
                     inferior.

THE LIFE AND THE WORK

God dammit her pentameters are witty!
  Then why is she so flitty,
  ready to give so proper a
coup de grâce to our mad little soap opera?

Wants the excitement, needs the drama maybe.
  Out of each sudsy scene
  a poem of hers comes clean;
I think she'll throw the bath out, keep the baby.

TO THE FOREGOING

                       Past lovers of
                          my love,
                       to hear her tell,
                       ya're all in Hell,
                     where she has sent ya,
                     condemned in absentia.
                   O condemnation dreaded,
                   I wonder where I'm headed.

DOWN BUT NOT OUT

"How deadly to be married,"
she sighed, "when love's miscarried.
Well then, divorced at last,
I'll recreate the past.

No husband, then, will flout me
with things he knows about me.
Come, lovers, clasp and kiss.
Your ignorance is bliss."

Moore Moran

UTAH DAWN

Like piled books the mesas lie,
their pages dark, convincing, spare,
unedited raw history
shrinking the soul that wanders here.

The sky throbs, quickens and unfolds
great limbs of light that shock the air
to living pulse. Cold shelf lands glare;
a stern library silence holds.

Alert and panting on the butte,
the wolf awakens to her thirst;
in hunt's expectancies immersed,
she quickly scents the alien boot,

and reads the bighorn and the hare,
archives astir, and tinged by hues
of river mist from canyon floor,
lurks deep in rainbows that can bruise.

THE GYPSIES

The tribe, prophetic, showing wine-raw eyes,
Left yesterday, the children piggyback
Or at the pendant breast: hoard that complies
With haughtiness or hunger or with slack.
Beside the carts, battered by time and miles,
The men on foot go, each with a brass gun;
Their wily faces quick with forebears' smiles,
Who, like them, lived by flimflam on the run.
The cricket listening on the barren lea
Sings louder as they pass, and Cybele
Who always loved them summons a new moss
To the charred rocks, and fashions a few flowers
Before them as they once again recross
The unscheduled empire of ancestral hours.

Patricia Cloud

MAY HOUSE

A roadside curve resolves here on the right
Into a patch of peppers and green wood,
Which seems to mark off where the last house stood.
But there's a mailbox on the edge of sight,
Above a path of pebbles in the light;
And if you go past where a neighbor would,
And cross the threshold of the green, you should
See just a roof and panels gleaming white.
Two ragweed in the center of the stair
Say: "Those who lived here passed without a sound,
And recollection goes against the grain,
For time is breeding something on the air,
An unfamiliar humming's in the ground
And every living thing is its refrain."

SLEEP OUT

My sleeping on the grass outside our house
Was not intended to upset the kids,
Or any of the neighbors, or my spouse,
But it is not surprising that it did.
It was not what I know my husband thought:
A lack of love for him or for our home.
The neighbors just assumed that we had fought.
The children stared and wondered and kept mum.
I should say firstly that I came inside
The only night it actually rained.
And also that my father had just died.
It was not something I would have maintained.
I felt, however, that I had to show
Something. What, and to whom, I did not know.

Jared Carter

SEVEN SISTERS

These roses here are older than the house—
Someone had planted them when this was still
A country lane. When homes began to fill
The empty lots, 'possum and field mouse
Fled these parts, but certain old perennials
Kept coming back each spring. I think of them
As witnesses—each thorn and flower, each stem
Recalls a past that seems almost millennial.
Their names are all forgotten now, except
This bush beside the gate. A neighbor said
It's called "The Seven Sisters." Buds of red
And white emerge, as though within a net,
And then unfold—and gradually one sees,
Among the other stars, the Pleiades.

CYNOSURE

There is, when you come home and seize the doorknob,
a cicada flattened on the door, and the shell of its grub—
seventeen years in darkness—stuck inches below.
It has just molted—been born again, as though
delivered up by all that waiting. Now, not even air
and light are as strange to it as simply being there,
exo-skeleton left behind, no longer a stunned thing
but one awake to the unbidden grace of wings.

This is no mystery to those of us who have grown up
in these parts, only another sign, like the brown cup
of Queen Anne's lace nodding along the lanes, or bees
drifting among windfallen apples, beneath old trees.
The dog star blazes, the dry grass begins to turn
pale yellow. Cicadas call Nero's tune: Let it burn.

Look closer. This one has eyes on the sides of its head,
like a goat: a pitiless gaze, abstract, blood red.
But it's one more voice, if it manages to steer clear
of the crows in the evergreens. Welcome its being here,
call back to your friend, who follows, leading
the dog on a leash, "Be careful!" —and while reading
the morning paper, forget about the fledgling stuck
to that odd place, waiting to try its precarious luck.

Later, you realize, halfway through the usual day,
it is the solitary visitor, come all this way
to the door of the place where you are the host.
You have only to step outside and see it up close,
hold a magnifying glass this time to its eyes,
look for some band or mark that identifies—
and be able to say that you were not dreaming,
"I saw this creature, and it had this meaning."

But of course it's gone, when you go look again,
the shell, too, as though it had never been.
You search through the grass. The wind stalls
and the screen door bangs shut. A crow calls.

TORNADO WATCH

Only that note again, rising in the stillness of trees—
cicada soaring and swelling toward fullness, then falling
away—only that lack of wind in the grass, in the leaves,
that humming as though a god were near, and close to waking.

Arise, then, out of an old dream, summoned, after long slumber
under the earth, where roots nourish and intertwine. Arise
to the sharp clatter and bounce of hailstones, and thunder
announcing a time of neither dark nor light, of greenish skies

glowering in slow, pendulous fall: some long-sought breast
almost unbuttoned now, about to open, reaching to touch down
in great sprays of earth. Arise singing chaos, and the rest
will follow, while veils of rain and lightning rake the town.

Leo Yankevich

THE LAST WORDS
OF NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI—1527

When I die I hope to go to hell,
not to heaven. Down there I shall,
for longer than eternity,
enjoy the regal company
of many a pontiff, prince or king,
but up there I'd be suffering
among the poor and pious handfuls
of martyrs, beggars and apostles.

KANT'S SHADOW

It stalked him to the end of fear,
like clockwork, down each Gothic street
of Königsberg, as if it knew
precisely when their hands would meet.

METAPHYSICS

This is the last goodbye, the final salute.
From beneath the cover of a flag
the ensign is assisted down the chute
so neither flank nor limb can catch a snag.

Then at last his sunken eyes see light,
and he sets foot into the promised land.
Effulgent plankton there redeems his sight,
Elysium of bright seaweed and sand.

How glorious his underwater grave,
even though above, the stone-faced captain
sees a guilty spectre in each wave,
and dejection overwhelms the chaplain.

And the crew? They're busy swatting flies,
the smoke from guns still burning in their eyes.

Amie Sharp

ROCKY MOUNTAIN SONNETS

1 Trail Ridge Road

Fall out into the windowless vault of the sky.
There's no precise word for this June-winter blue.
The tundra will need a century to get over you
if one foot strays off the path as you try
to grasp the clouding immensity—14,000 feet high—
a citadel of aloof grace that stares through
this ending morning with supremacy (as if you knew
what the mountain was thinking). And the wind’s cry

magnetizes the storm-mass and draws the chill
deep into your being as the swollen surge
ripples into afternoon lightning. The sparks soon will
strike rock, shining in your eyes. Blinking, you'll merge
the blue and gray reflections, and stare, shivering until
you realize: lightning strikes are as final as words.

2 Mills Lake

Along the gorge's edge, the glacier-carved,
suspended path forms a jagged staircase.
We traverse the thinned air of elevated space,
and listen, past the sounds of our thudding hearts,
to the controlled anarchy of falling water.
We're granted passage—to glimpse the birthplace
of a stream, to set eyes on veined, scored rock encased
by wildflowers—exchanged gifts in which we have no part.

So canopy yields to expanse and the trail's end brings
the sound of lake waters lapping against the shore.
The silver-blue spread beneath the Keyboard of the Winds
draws the eye to that summit consciousness ascends
before passing into clouds. And still we want more
insight into the silent living of majestic things.

SONNET TO ST. LOUIS

I've left you, unforgiven city, so why do I
still hold my dreary days against you?
Not for your gleaming metal curved against the sky-
line, sculpting the sole glory in the hazy view.

Above the brown river, the gateway to the West,
as always, shines a welcome banner for barges
and border-crossing gamblers.  Did your professed
founders (Chouteau and Laclede, carving

your reputation and then abandoning it
to death) dream that on some future night this
resplendent alloyed landmark would stand and emit
these flashes?  Yet the arch-topping pulses dismiss
 
low-flying planes in reddened grief, as if to let
the city beg: take what you remember, and forget.

LOVE POEM

My torpid love, submerged beneath the surface,
calls your halved blue-green spark to resurrect
this heart and ignite embers the mind has left
behind. Desire’s catalyst, dormant in this place
between pattern and freedom, finds wave-crests fated
to shine in twilight. Fire kindles in the clefts
within these words, in hidden meanings you’ve kept.
The passions we’d entombed can balance

sea and flame.  Turn me now past the drought of words
and awaken something sleeping, our foreign
storm that possesses, seethes, and bursts in a surge
that marries us again.  The ocean's in our union,
encompassed by our eyes, our forgotten
torrents reborn—our secret from the world.

Tim Turnbull

NEW ROMANTIC

Sometimes the world's so full of silly clutter
it seems to be just scenery and props
for a dreadful play; the dialogue is mutter,
the actors in it merely hams and fops.

On other, brighter days the sense of utter
desolation lifts, the penny drops
and it strikes me that we're all in the gutter
but some of us are gazing at the shops.

Melanie Wright

RETURN TO ESSEX

"Sir John of Wrightsbridge," our great grandma said,
"in Essex," father to a string of Wrights
crossed years and ocean to her postered bed,
a mythic line. Adventures, songs and fights:
tales for the night, tucked up in afghan soft
and knitted by a loving long gone hand,
imagined English yeoman's craft and croft,
a Narnia far from this prairie land.

Years on, in Brentwood, by M25
across from Old MacDonald's petting farm,
"Wrightsbridge" scrawled upon a rusting sign;
I stood transfixed, her story sprung alive.
Knots in the yarn of mythic history's charm,
circle complete: a spiral, not a line.

TARIK

His eyes, now green, now blue, slide sideways. Gone
his gaze, now turned to some far inner place:
a magic space, this homeland of my son
where joyfully he lives in glowing grace.

The complex codes of colours used to build
fantastic towers of interlocking blocks
prove everything that happens there is filled
with magic reason's rigid logic, locked.

How patiently unravelled every string,
how carefully each puzzle piece is fit,
how lovingly each story told in turn.

Would he be happier if he learned to sing
in unison with others, and to sit
in tidy rows, and let his homeland burn?

Tom Riley

HYPERGRAPHIA

Hypergraphia struck, and he wrote.
(Many writers are in the same boat.)
        15 pages a day
        from his pen got away.
And the end product? Nothing of note.

SILENCE ANSWERS

His habitual fault, it was pride:
this at any rate can't be denied.
        But I'll ask it aloud:
        why on earth was he proud?
Silence answers, revealing and snide.

George Held

AUGUST MUSE

Once August casts long shadows on the lawn,
Drawing night's blinds on day's living room
Too soon after supper to leave you time
For pruning trees or picking pears, you’re drawn
To den and writing pad to try to spawn
New verses, for despite the evening's gloom
Your muse seems somehow in that room
Just then, close to the ear as in the morning,
When you're used to writing or, rather, taking
Dictation. You know the frequency's right
When your pen flows and your eyes lack sight,
When you hear the words in your head rumbling
Like a prophecy, and you write with ease
Until the Muse tunes you out, and you must cease.

Edward Wier

DANCING WITH MERRIDETH

Her red locks fly like flocks above her head,
Across the pounding pulse of drums and bass.
My feet feel unrelated, born of lead,
With best intentions; rhythm without grace.

She ducks, then dipping, spins into the light,
As ankles, arms and hips bolster the beat.
I'm trying to be loose but feeling tight,
And wonder where my mind and body meet.

She swishes, swirls, then sweeps across the floor,
Looks over to remind that I'm there;
I'm counting one and two and three and four,
While wishing I could be so unaware.

The music ends; we duck out of the flow;
And finally make a move I think I know.

COLD FUSION

Force equals mass times acceleration,
My love. We all obey natural laws;
And romance? No match for rank relation,
Configured by cold consequence and cause.
Inertia, momentum, and gravity,
Take no regard for poetry or paint.
Forget righteousness and depravity;
They only add old fuel to new complaint.
Red hearts are not gold thrones of affection,
But bloody muscles, beating us alive;
And if you feel some sacred connection,
Don't mistake it for the will to survive.
You can't tell me cold fusion isn't real;
How else do you explain the way I feel?

ONLY SEX

She said the escapade was only sex,
And should not be considered serious;
The plain result of natural effects,
Not esoteric or mysterious.
That she was not expressing sentiment,
Or celebrating intercourse at heart;
A primal want was seeking compliment,
And so she found her fitting counterpart.
The lucid truth I heard was bold and bare,
Exposing me, but I was not convinced;
My flesh agreed with words that sounded fair,
But in some knowing, inward place, I winced.

We spend ourselves and hope to shun the debt,
But sex is never only all we get.

Contributors’ Notes

Wiley Clements lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, in retirement after a long career—first as a military journalist, later as a developer of health maintenance organizations (HMO’s). He was editor (1998-2002) of The Susquehanna Quarterly, an online magazine of formal poetry.

Richard Moore has ten published volumes of poetry, one of which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His newest collection, The Naked Scarecrow, was published by Truman State University Press, New Odyssey Editions, in the spring of 2000.

Moore Moran's poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Yale Review, New Letters and elsewhere. His first book of poems, Firebreaks, won the 1999 National Poetry Book Award and was published by Salmon Run Press.

Amie Sharp lives with her husband in Riverview, Florida, where she teaches English.

Jared Carter spends most of his daylight hours pruning trees, mowing empty lots, and sprucing up old houses in the inner city of Indianapolis. He has published three books of poems with the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Iowa Review, and The Kenyon Review.

Leo Yankevich's poems have appeared in scores of small press magazines, most recently in Chronicles, Blue Unicorn, Iambs & Trochees and Romantics Quarterly. He lives with his wife and three sons in Gliwice, Poland.

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.

George Held, with Katherine Mayer, translated two sonnets from the Hungarian by Lorinc Szabo that appear in the 2001 issue of Modern Poetry in Translation. His latest collection of poems is Beyond Renewal (Cedar Hill, 2001).

Tim Turnbull has a pamphlet, What was that? due out with Donut Press in London in July and a first full collection, The Man from Uncool, next year. He has had poems published in a number of literary magazines included Rialto, the Printer's Devil and Magma, and has performed his own brand of stand-up poetry all over the UK.

Edward Wier’s poetry has appeared in The Formalist, Orbis, SPSM&H, Whiskey Island, The Atlanta Review, The Lyric, Troubadour, The Ledge, The Door, Windhover, Acoustic Musician and Guitar Review.

Melanie Wright was born in 1962 from the union of a literature major and a developmental psychologist, and from an early age shared their lifelong love affair with words. A latecomer to poetry, previous publications have been in archaeological and archival fields. A transplanted American, she lives in Colchester, England with her Gibraltarian partner and their three small children.

Archives

Volume IV, Number I
Volume III, Number 2
Volume III, Number 1
Volume II, Number 2
Volume II, Number 1
Volume I, Number 2
Volume I, Number 1

Formal Poetry Publishers on the Web

the sonnet scroll
Mandrake Poetry Review
Light
The HyperTexts
Iambs & Trochees
Expansive Poetry Music Online
Edge-City Review
Candelabrum Poetry Magazine

Poets

Jared Carter

Richard Moore