Search Results for: stroke

August 10, 2009

WHO’S TO SAY WHAT’S HOME by Kim CalderPosted by

Review by Angela Micheli Otwell

WHO’S TO SAY WHAT’S HOME
by Kim Calder

Writ Large Press
Los Angeles, California
ISBN 978-0-9814836-1-0
2008, 129 pp., $15.00
www.writlargepress.com

Kim Calder’s poems in Who’s to Say What’s Home are largely first-person narratives about living in the desert and pursuing mirages, specifically the promise that alcohol might sate every thirst. In the opening poem, “sunstroke,” a child wanders in the dust and envies the lifeless clay shards that are at home there:

. . . this is where I want to be,
face down beside a cactus in in the wind
the sand whipping over my ears,
the snakes moving past me in half-darkness.

In addition to the desert and sand being important motifs, fire is important as well. In “burn without screaming,” a monk sets himself on fire while another man reduces the narrator to “a pile of ash in the corner.” In “hold it tight,” however, fire is a purifying force, even though it burns.

Perhaps the purification – by alcohol, by fire, by pain – is supposed to make everything worthwhile, but these poems do not offer much in the way of hope. The poem “dear mr. bukowski.” asks Charles Bukowski, of all people, when things will get better, and in “burn without screaming,” the narrator indicates that if she fell to her knees to pray, she would spew bile “like the man in the next building vomiting / on his knees in front of the toilet.”

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August 1, 2009

“A Question About Horses” by Lisa LewisPosted by

Lisa Lewis

A QUESTION ABOUT HORSES

Last year, the year before—hard times. I leave my two mares on pasture
               while I think things through.
I pay the board, the horses graze, they stand in the sun, flicking flies away
               with their long tails.
They saunter to the water trough and swallow long draughts, their lips
               almost closed beneath the surface.
Sometimes I imagine the end of the world, and the horses and I are destroyed
               together, under deep water,
the mares’ strong legs pumping towards distant shore that melts where our
               graves might lie side by side, if only the rains would dry.

I don’t talk about my disagreement with the ideas I’ve read about horses and
               why they let us ride them.
So today when I walk into the autumn hayfield to check Jeanie’s shoes, I
               know when she follows me back to the barn
there’s no use telling anybody. Some of the wealthy young women from the
               college have driven out for the afternoon, as usual.
They can’t be expected to understand why I’ve stayed away through months
               of warm weather.
They ride under the dome of sky that purples like flagstone until the clouds
               blow curved upstream.
They have nothing to say to me either. I tie Jeanie and fetch my saddle and
               boots.
She turns her face toward me as far as the rope allows. I think I know what
               she means, but maybe she only wants hay.
I lead her outside and crawl up clumsy in my tight pants. It’s late afternoon
               so I watch our shadow
pacing circles comical as balloons in all seriousness. I reject science for
               informing me the mare can’t reach through her spine
and clasp me to her solid as a planet that spins in place. When I lead her back
               to the barn I know she is lonely without me.
She eats her grain and watches me from one white-ringed eye. She means to
               remind me of the beauties of multiple moons.
She says I should take my best guess about the music of the spheres.

I drive home worrying she’s too tired and will become ill. All evening I look
               up horse diseases in veterinary books.
I think of the the other mare, still neglected, and how everyone I know is
               afraid of her. I try to remember how it feels to ride her
and how she breathes on my hand through the wire when I visit her pen to
               say good night and promise to return.
The fear of the mares’ death is the fear of my own death except worse. If the
               horses die, my negligence
bearing down on them like a blizzard, their own will impervious to my
               wishes and yearning,
same as their hooves rush through heaps of dry clay as they gallop for mock
               terror at the glint of some window or hay rake,
they will be nothing but runaways and I a skeleton in skin. It will be almost
               as if I could cling with my fists
to their knotted manes and ride into the nether world. Don’t they love me?
               Don’t they feed from the bucket of my hands?
Doesn’t the smell of their hair matted thicker for the winter we may not
               survive bind to my blood so after we have stood together
like the profiles of leafless trees we have more in common than leather and
               grass?

I am at home, and they are where they are, sleeping standing up or lying
               down.
They bend at the knee, and the hooves curl beneath. I imagine them as if they
               were apples in an orchard,
russet darkened to the modest shade of reflected light. When I was a girl I
               wanted to make my room in a stable,
bedded in confetti of shavings or the crunch of straw. I knew I would protect
               the horses from night fears
as they protected me from the future life I couldn’t guess. I could hear their
               placid noises, resting as animals rest,
their dreams stealing hours from the present, poised above roofs and cupolas
               like weathervanes.
The difference between us now is the way I feel time passing, ripe enough to
               fill the nights of two years
with its odor like glass, which has no material odor, which I only claim to
               turn the question away from the horses
and how they couldn’t save me as I once believed but instead could be turned
               against me by humans made clever by cruelty and loss.
For whatever peace is had in abstraction, the peace of gods, I turn the
               question to the impossible
again, science transparency, ice vibrating inside its solid form like the chest of
               a mare
warm from a winter ride when you stroke it with the back of your hand.

—from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
Tribute to Cowboy & Western Poetry

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July 24, 2009

“Wild Bill Hacker” by Mikhail HorowitzPosted by

Mikhail Horowitz

WILD BILL HACKER
                    A Cyberwestern Ballad

Back when the Info Highway was still a dusty trail
Before the cyberstage come through to speed a man’s e-mail
When renegades like Sitting Mouse would skin the hides off hackers
There was a fella ruled the roost of databank bushwhackers

For Wild Bill the big big thrill was access, total access
He’d broken into databanks from Timbuktu to Texas
He’d back-doored into NASA, Bell, and Pentagon computers
Planting half-breeded viruses to foil pursuing shooters

He’d roll a cybercigarette and offer you a toke
And then delete your mama with a single keyboard stroke
Why in the selfsame breath it took to log on, HOWDY PARD
He’d have the Pope’s unlisted phone and Brando’s Mastercard

They chased him through the Wild Web, those bounty-hunting hordes
They posted wanted posters on a thousand bulletin boards
They combed the random canyons, through gorge and gulch and gurge
But Wild Bill would slip away as quick as a power surge

Now Tombscreen, Arizona, was a tiny one-byte town
The Sloppy Disk Saloon was dark, the DOS Hotel shut down
They had a virtual cathouse, a microsoftcore dive
And Norton Utilities General Store, established ’95

The town attracted drifters, retired keystroke hands
And those who came to disappear in Hole-in-the-Net badlands
Scroll around you, stranger: as far as the eye can see
Buttes of burnt-out terminals, and a lone directory tree

Somewhere in that wasteland, that shadow memory ruin
Where incompatible coyotes howl at a phosphor moon
Up the eroded modem and down the cordless rill
Some kid named Gene of oh, 13, had backtracked Wild Bill

The setting sun was saving all its files in the west
The stars in heaven’s disk were being brightly decompressed
An unsuspecting Wild Bill was booting his machine
When an ominous message—SNORT MY SHORTS—abruptly scorched
                    the screen

I’ll flame your name in cyberhell, the desperado cried
Reaching for the hardware that he carried at his side
Tain’t no way, the weenie scoffed, I’ve sown a jillion glitches
To ride your hapless hacker’s ass like cybersonsabitches

As if on cue Bill’s modem up and blew its brains apart
His VCR began to char his phone began to fart
His fax was going wacky and his teeth, you understand
Were picking up transmissions from the local CB band

Concurrently and violently his laptop blew its top
His microwave exploded and his beeper wouldn’t stop
His Grateful Dead on CD-ROM was programmed to erase
With Yoko Ono’s Greatest Hits imported in its place

Well that was it for Wild Bill; there ain’t much more to tattle
They cheered at his comeuppance in the cafes of Seattle
They knew, from overkill-dot-com to Blogger County Jail
That Wild Bill was roadkill on the Information Trail

And as for Gene, that brainy teen? He left the Web last year
And lives with no ’lectricity. And as for this balladeer
They modemed his Muse to Santa Cruz to be tried for cybercrimes
Including using cyber as a prefix 40 times.

—from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
Tribute to Cowboy & Western Poetry

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June 7, 2009

“On Submitting Poems: By Any Means Necessary” by Bruce CohenPosted by

Bruce Cohen

ON SUBMITTING POEMS: BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

I wish I could tap together my ruby red L.L. Bean slippers and post questions to a Wizard of Oz Poetry Editor so I could unravel the esoteric truths and mysteries about what factors, what esthetics, he really considers when deciding whether or not to accept my poems, what the deal breakers are. To think that “famous names” on submitted poems don’t influence the decision making process strikes me as naïve, although I noticed a few magazines are now requesting that poets not place their names on the poems themselves, which is a very democratic idea. An anti-nepotism movement has been gaining momentum in all aspects of life in America. I’m not yet decided where I fall on that argument. Political graft has never bothered me as long as those crooked politicians support the arts and I believe friends should help friends; who could argue with that? I also wish there was Instant Messenger for poetry submissions. At the very least, for a small fee, magazines could offer same-day response service, like the better dry cleaners. This might be a wonderfully innovative way for magazines to generate revenue, keep subscription costs down and thereby increase readership. Screeners could even receive a small salary. Because I doubt these things will be coming along soon, I’ll take a mundane, less creative view of submitting poems to literary journals and throw in my two-cents worth to boot. I suspect we, poets, (fiction writers seem more patient and mature. I know; I’m married to one.) have a love-hate-mild infatuation-voodoo-pin relationship with editors of literary journals. They have the power, of course, to make us rock-star famous, as much as poets can be rock-star famous. We want them to love us, find us sexy and attractive, admire our quirky sensibilities, and naturally, publish our poems. Sometimes we are so delusional we even hope that editors will solicit our work in the future, or grace their periodical covers with our cool, pouty photos, but let’s not get too carried away here. Not only do we wish for them to publish our poems, but we want them to drown us with a lavish confetti-filled praise parade, let us know that we are indeed, the genius the literary world has been waiting for. No writer since the advent of the printing press has approached the brilliant insights and deep human understanding that we have. No one, to date, demonstrates the linguistic talent or musical ear or explores so marvelously the world the way we do. No one else can break hearts with the simple stroke of a pen. We would like, please, to have that acknowledged. Aside from our intellectual brilliance and keen artistic vision, we would like to be interviewed on CNN to provide our vision of world politics and sports, both college and professional. Why not invite one of us to ring the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange? Of course it is always nice when editors add in the fact that they understand why our genius has been overlooked for so long: the average editor is simply not perceptive enough to appreciate the true level of our, how shall I say this, genius. And we poets simply love our feedback, by snail or electronic mail, by phone, carrier pigeon, or telepathic signals. Some of us even accept transmissions in our dreams, as long as you don’t reverse the charges. (Does that date me?)

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April 30, 2009

BUNDLE O’ TINDER by Rose KelleherPosted by

Review by Mary Meriam

BUNDLE O’ TINDER
by Rose Kelleher

The Waywiser Press
P.O. Box 6025
Baltimore, MD 21206
ISBN: 978-1904130-33-8
2008, 88 pp., £7.99
www.waywiser-press.com

Why do we read poems? Poems can be songs, prayers, chronicles, confessions, memories, meditations, complaints, portraits. Poems give us contact with the world and help us feel less alone. Reading a poem can be a moment of pleasure in an otherwise painful world. Sometimes poems speak for us when we can’t find the words, when it all seems too terrible. Here’s where we can be thankful for Rose Kelleher’s brave, strong book of poems, Bundle o’ Tinder. This book wrestles demons to the ground and pins them there, crushed.

In Kelleher’s poem, “Lourdes,” compassion is in full force. Lourdes is a grotto in France, with spring water that many pilgrims believe can heal. With great gusto, Kelleher writes:

Burst the spigots. Overflow.
Send mercy surging down the mountainside,
washing over every borderline.
Don’t just stand there. Go

These commanding lines are just one (more…)

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April 25, 2009

LAWRENCE BOOTH’S BOOK OF VISIONS by Maurice ManningPosted by

Review by Casey Thayer

LAWRENCE BOOTH’S BOOK OF VISIONS
by Maurice Manning

Yale University Press
P.O. Box 209040
New Haven, CT 06520-9040
ISBN 9-780300-089981
2001, 80 pp., $16.00
http://yalepress.yale.edu

The Yale Series of Younger Poets has a long history of highlighting the most promising new talents in American poetry, among them John Ashbery, Jack Gilbert, James Tate, and Robert Hass. However, perhaps due to a need to find “the next big thing” or the difficulty in predicting what kind of poetry will survive the test of time, recent Yale Series judge, W.S. Merwin, has given preference to experimental over solidly-constructed, formal, or traditional poetry (witnessed by his choice of Sean Singer’s Discography as the 2002 winner or his pick of Loren Goodman’s Famous Americans a year later). In one case, however, Merwin’s taste for the strange, poetry that he describes as “not commonplace, familiar, or of an expected kind,” paid off, leading him to choose Maurice Manning’s collection Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions as the 2000 winner. Despite the pitfalls that often plague “experimental poetry,” Manning’s first book builds an engrossing narrative and commands enough authority in voice to excuse his wilder forays into formal experimentation.

The book begins, after an opening lyric, with “Dramatis Personae,” hinting that Manning’s goal is not to craft separate, standalone poems, but instead to create a dramatic narrative surrounding a recurring cast of characters, among them “The Missionary Woman,” whom Booth eventually falls in love and starts a family with, “Black Damon,” Booth’s “pastoral comrade,” “Mad Daddy,” Booth’s father and the narrative’s villain, as well as a supporting cast of other family and community members. Though we begin mostly with Booth’s adolescence, Manning does not follow a chronological narrative. Instead, he slowly builds up his images (most notably, the flaming horse and the Great Field) and shifts forward and backward in Booth’s life in order to end on the two moments of highest drama, the death of Black Damon and the exit of Mad Daddy.

By giving it this structure, Manning reinforces the “vision” aspect of the book, encapsulated in its title. (more…)

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March 5, 2009

A STRANGER HERE MYSELF by Niki NymarkPosted by

Review by Ted Gilley

A STRANGER HERE MYSELF
by Niki Nymark

Cherry Pie Press
P.O. Box 155
Glen Carbon, IL 62034
ISBN 978-0-9748468-7-3
2008, $10.00
http://cherrypiepress.blogspot.com

In A Stranger Here Myself, Niki Nymark endeavors to convince us, as poets will, that life is a serious business, and while the reader may enjoy her judicious (but hardly original) splashes of salty, pleasurable reference to love and laughter, with their light seasoning of motherly “wisdom,” it’s the more serious poems that linger in the heart, and bring the lasting pleasure.

The first, brief section, chiefly love lyrics, is more soft than tender. These are followed by a middle range of longer poems largely concerned with family history and Nymark’s Jewish heritage. The volume closes with a return to the lyric form that takes us, in poems such as “I Regret Nothing” and “Not What I Signed Up For,” out the back door and into the moonlight, secure in the knowledge that the author is okay with life, but feels a little rueful. This is the poet, coasting. What she signed up for was “a life collecting/ocean glass and wisdom” and not the one she’s stuck with, in which she’s not as smart or as tall as she’d like to be.

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