Leslie Gerber: “One month about twenty years ago I started having a series of nightmares. I had not written poetry before, although I’ve been a writer of prose all my life. These dreams led me to write a series of poems. My wife, a very successful writer, looked at them and encouraged me to continue. Now it’s two decades and three books later and I’m still writing.” (web)
“How miserable I am!” he muttered, “my God, how miserable!” And joy gave way to the boredom of everyday life, and the feeling of irrevocable loss.
—Anton Chekhov, “Typhus”
He took to reading Chekhov late at night
and studied up on Fox Talbot and calotypes.
Watched the History Channel, anything
on Lincoln or the Civil War, Caligula,
who cut off tongues and fucked his sister.
After Chekhov, he’d head downstairs, putter
with a model plane or pull the lint out
of the dryer screen. Sometimes lie fetal
on the couch, make toast, unbuttered.
How miserable I am, he muttered.
Why Chekhov and not Kafka or Conrad?
Why Talbot and not Daguerre? Lincoln
and not Adams or FDR, John Wilkes Booth
and not Leon Czolgosz or Charles Guiteau?
Why model planes and not carved decoys
in the attic? All the while, he was affable
and focused, building a wooden box camera
and writing an early history of photography.
Grief, like photographs, inerasable.
My God, how miserable.
I’m thinking back on childhood. He sucked
his fingers, not his thumb. He seemed happy
but had trouble sleeping, afraid of the dark.
Aren’t all children afraid of the dark? Only
later came the other things, the unspeakable.
It reminds me of that deer we hit, the knife
my then-husband took to its throat, as men
do, letting one brand of suffering cancel out
another. That deer was a door to years of grief.
And joy gave way to the boredom of everyday life.
Chekhov’s stories are essentially plotless.
Mirsky wrote they are a “biography of a mood,”
and Chekhov himself hoped to write
with the objectivity of a chemist. Bored,
he traveled five thousand miles, three thousand
in a rickety carriage drawn by horse,
to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island. Chekhov,
in ill-health, suffering, trotting his way through
wilderness toward imprisoned sufferers, all to cross
Diane Seuss: “My ex-husband walked out on us during a blizzard in 1999, dragging his clothes in two garbage bags down the sidewalk and away. From then on, my son was the child of a single mother. He was also a photographer, a reader of Russian fiction, a heroin addict, and now an addict in recovery. I write about him rarely, and always with trepidation, lest I sentimentalize or simplify what has been, for both of us, an undiminishable journey.” (web)
Pierre Gervois is an NYC-based crypto artist using language to describe our society without judgment, emotion, empathy, or stated point of view. The elements of language appearing in his works are physically embedded in geometric figures of undefined scale, and lose their meaning should they be considered separately. His work explores the relations of power between humans, as well as between humans and their favorite physical object-markers of social status. This series is part of the inaugural collection of theVERSEverse.
Pierre Gervois: “I started painting abstract geometric shapes in 1988 and created around five hundred paintings and drawings of the very same rectangular structure. In 2018, I started to paint elements of language in my work. In May 2021, I minted my first work as an NFT and became part of this rich and diverse community of crypto poets. It changed my life as an artist. On the blockchain, in a double simultaneous motion and collision of two artistic traditions, conceptual artists using language are starting to think they might be poets, and poets realize their poems are artworks. With a gentle and loving hand, crypto poets extract words from their paper pages and give them new cozy homes in NFTs.” (web)
Angelica Whitehorne: “I read a tweet about kissing as you watch Orcas take back the ocean. I thought it captured the humorous gloom of our time. Let’s find romance while things are going down. It’s a celebration when Earth fights back. This poem is a conglomeration of a lot of news I’ve been digesting in the last couple weeks. Shein corruption, submarine explosions, the Supreme Court being supreme weeney heads. It always feels never-ending. It’s going to bring us down one day, hopefully we find time for some good kisses before we do.” (web)
Roselyn Chen: “I like to write poetry because it’s one of the few forms of writing where there aren’t many rules. You can express yourself however you like, and be as precise or flexible as you want. I think it’s the freedom and the fact that I can do whatever I want that draws me towards poetry. Poetry is a river, and there are an infinite amount of lakes it can flow into.”
Angela Russo Gartner: “My grandfather was turning 97 that winter and we all gathered at his house to celebrate, which ended up being his final birthday party. His wife (my grandmother), siblings, and close cousins had all passed away. He remembered a lot of stories from his past and would share those with us every time we visited. When I wrote this poem, I thought about him, and tried to imagine how it would feel to be the last one and carry all those memories.”
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz: “‘Op-Ed For the Sad Sack Review…’ was inspired, as the full title suggests, by a series of suicides that hit our community in 2008 and 2009. On the Best American Poetry blog, poet Jennifer Michael Hecht pointed out that ‘[o]ne of the best predictors of suicide is knowing a suicide,’ postulating that ‘every suicide is also a delayed homicide.’ At the time, I was feeling rather low, having experienced an epic number of career-stopping rejections without any signs of relief on the horizon. But Hecht’s essay reminded me I was part of a larger community, one that has never been guaranteed the easiest road in life, but is nonetheless beautiful and filled with people absolutely worthy of good and long lives. And if Hecht is right, the best way that we can prevent the poets and writers we love from killing themselves, is to make the promise to ourselves to keep living. And hence, my ‘Op-Ed’: a loving shout into, and hopefully out of, that void.” (web)
