David Kelly-Hedrick: “There are so many great poems out here and each one is like a transit pass for the soul, valid, permission given, full access granted, to roam. I like holding onto these scraps of paper and the movement given. I like being in the swirl of poetry.”
Erik Tschekunow: “As is evident in the subject matter of this, I spent five years in a federal prison for an addiction-fueled offense. More than anything else, poetry helped get me through my bid.”
“Of California, the Wild” by Breonne StiglitzPosted by Rattle
Image: “Night Train” by Gerrie Paino. “Of California, the Wild” was written by Breonne Stiglitz for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2024, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “There is a dreamy, cinematic quality to this image that I felt was perfectly captured by ‘Of California, the Wild.’ I found it effortless and satisfying to imagine this ‘golden sepia-toned starlet’ looking out the train window until the natural landscape fades and ‘the trees turn / to telephone poles.’ There is magic in the way the poet contrasts the glamour and glitz of Hollywood (“the neon signs/that curl fingers inwards”) against the still-wild California land. The poem ends with a haunting reminder that the train is an agent of time–once relentless and vibrant; now frozen, just a memory.”
Mather Schneider: “I don’t like trying to come up with something clever for these things. I write poetry and prose when there is something I want to put down. I don’t like writing for the hell of it.”
Doug Ramspeck: “I wrote this poem in the fall, while being distracted by a bear with her two cubs as they climbed the oak trees outside my office window and fed on acorns and sometimes napped.” (web)
Kirk Robinson: “I’ve always loved poems—like David Clewell’s ‘A Heart for Patricia’—that take a single, well-worn idea and then run at it from angles until it’s new again. When a friend of mine spoke those words of advice about mechanical things, I happened to hear a decent line in my head. Then I sat down, and I made a break for it.”
Ryan McCarty: “I keep rewatching this video of University of Michigan campus police pepper spraying a crowd of my students, colleagues, friends, and community members. Most of my life (but especially the last dozen years or so) have been spent watching the cops who are doing the beating, the spraying, the kneeling, the dragging. But this time I can’t stop looking at one cop near the pepper sprayer. They’re looking upward, toward the east and some trees where I know hundreds of birds nest, and the sun had just risen. Can poetry help us understand that moment? Can anything?” (web)