Richard Newman: “After mowing lawns, my first job was playing upright bass for our civic theater orchestra. My first show was a Cole Porter review, a great way to learn how to stitch words and music together. Around that same time, my own band was playing in bars. I was 16, and we were paid the door, a pizza, and as much beer as we could drink. I’ve been a professional musician and songwriter since then, playing in orchestras and bands, though the last decade I’ve travelled the world and rarely play with others. The last songs I’ve written were for my young son, and my last ASCAP royalties deposit barely paid for an iced latte in 2017 when I was in the Marshall Islands. Nonetheless, I’m still drawn to song forms in poetry, especially sonnets (little songs), villanelles (country peasant songs), and triolets (clover leaf songs). Even when I don’t take on a traditional form, I often work in meter. Rarely do I mix the writing process in poetry and songwriting. One can get away with lines in a song that look banal on the naked page, but it works the other way, too. Lines of poetry often sound ridiculous sung out loud. I’m equally drawn to story and song. Even a triolet for me contains a narrative impulse. Singing our stories is the best of both worlds.”
Patricia Smith: “I was living in Chicago and found out about a poetry festival in a blues club on a winter afternoon. It was just going to be continuous poetry, five hours. It was the first event in a series called Neutral Turf, which was supposed to bring street poets and academic poets together. And I thought, I’ll get some friends together and we’ll go laugh at the poets. We’ll sit in the back, we’ll heckle, it’ll be great. But when I got there, I was amazed to find this huge literary community in Chicago I knew nothing about. The poetry I heard that day was immediate and accessible. People were getting up and reading about things that everyone was talking about. Gwendolyn Brooks was there, just sitting and waiting her turn like everyone else. There were high school students. And every once in a while a name poet would get up. Gwen got up and did her poetry, then sat back down and stayed for a long time. And I just wanted to know—who are these people? Why is this so important to them? Why had they chosen to be here as opposed to the 8 million other places they could have been in Chicago?” (web)
Doc Mehl: “In songwriting, poetry, or prose, I strive for (and rarely achieve) poignant simplicity. Genius is overrated. Simplicity is its own form of genius.” (web)
“Ghazal of Bones” by Ebuka StephenPosted by Rattle
Ebuka Stephen
GHAZAL OF BONES
Who can love me better than the ligaments love my bones?
I’m fragile now, my heart can’t bear the weight of brokenness, those pains from fractured bones.
I heard the night feels lonely, too, when the birds choose to leave their nests. I feel the same way but only skin cuddles my bones.
One morning, I lifted up my veil. I saw a Bible, opened it & it showed me a valley of dry bones.
Perhaps I’ve opened a lonely verse different from the psalms that sang of rising dry bones.
I need these miracles but nobody to go these extra miles for me. I only soak my beads for God to strengthen my bones.
Who can calcify me from envy of those who never chew the ripe fruit of forlornness? Those who never dreamt of lonely bones.
& dreaming is always real until it’s not. In a cadaver room, I saw my twin me being loved by formalinated bodies. They showed me skeletons that were made with their bones.
All night, every bone in my body tells me to get a deep sleep. They said I’m Adam, that one day a bone will be made from my bones.
Ebuka Stephen: “Poetry is a way I reflect on life. It allows me to explore my feelings and enjoy it. I’m attracted to ghazals, so I hue mine with elegy. I’m currently studying human anatomy at College of Health Sciences, Nnewi in Nigeria. I dedicate this ghazal to the dead bodies and bones in every cadaver room, and in commemoration of World Anatomy Day, celebrated every October 15th.”
Gabby Wenzel: “In a poem, I can run without legs and be in the sunshine under the clouds. My imagination does the thinking and my hand does the writing. It’s so fun!”
Jeff McRae: “I’m a semi-pro musician born into a family of musicians, music teachers, and music lovers. But I’m the only one of us who also writes. I play all kinds of music—from traditional jazz (dixie) to theater—you name it. I gig maybe 50 nights a year. Music and poetry are intertwined in so many obvious and subtle ways. I love how music and poetry are both structured and improvised, sometimes simultaneously. I love how poetry is so often described by the language of music but it is music that captures the ineffable serendipity of life in a way poetry never quite can. In my own work (and life) music and musicians have been inexhaustible, thought-provoking primary sources. I grew up surrounded by Bach, Beethoven, the Beatles, and by the music my parents made. I idolized the guys in my dad’s bands. I devoted hours and hours and hours to study and practice—both poetry and music. They cross-pollinate. I found my footing as an adult on the bandstand when I realized I could hold my own, had something worth saying, worth listening to—when I realized I could play—and it continues to be the arena of becoming. Same for poetry. Playing with words sometimes results in interesting connections and ideas that make sense, too—where I figure out who I am. Poetry and music have been through lines, horizon notes for me. Now, one of my great joys is listening to my kids mess around with Bandcamp, improvise on our piano, and pick out songs on the same guitar passed down to me all those many years ago.”
Eric Kocher: “A little over ten years ago, my friend Mark made a joke. He said that I should try to be the first person to publish a poem in Sky Mall Magazine. There was something about shopping for the most inane, kitschy stuff on the planet while flying 30,000 feet above it, just to avoid a moment of boredom, that seemed to be the antithesis of poetry. The words “Sky Mall” got stuck in my head—lodged there. This is almost always how poems happen for me. Language itself seems to be in the way just long enough to build tension before it can open into a space that pulls me forward. These poems finally arrived while I was traveling, first alone, and then the following year with my wife, as a new parent in that hazy dream of the post-pandemic. Writing them felt like going on a shopping spree, of sorts, so I tried to let myself say yes to everything.”
