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August 17, 2016

“Love Poem to Los Angeles” by Luis J. RodriguezPosted by

Luis J. Rodriguez

LOVE POEM TO LOS ANGELES

with a respectful nod to Jack Hirschman

1.

To say I love Los Angeles is to say
I love its shadows and nightlights,
its meandering streets,
the stretch of sunset-colored beaches.
It’s to say I love the squawking wild parrots,
the palm trees that fail to topple in robust winds,
that within a half hour of L.A.’s center
you can cavort in snow, deserts, mountains, beaches.

This is a multi-layered city,
unceremoniously built on hills,
valleys, ravines.
Flying into Burbank airport in the day,
you observe gradations of trees and earth.
A “city” seems to be an afterthought,
skyscrapers popping up from the greenery,
guarded by the mighty San Gabriels.

2.

Layers of history reach deep,
run red, scarring the soul of the city,
a land where Chinese were lynched,
Mexican resistance fighters hounded,
workers and immigrants exploited,
Japanese removed to concentration camps,
blacks forced from farmlands in the South,
then segregated, diminished.

Here also are blessed native lands,
where first peoples like the Tataviam and Tongva
bonded with nature’s gifts;
people of peace, deep stature, loving hands.
Yet for all my love
I also abhor the “poison” time,
starting with Spanish settlers, the Missions,
where 80 percent of natives
who lived and worked in them died,
to the ruthless murder of Indians
during and after the Gold Rush,
the worst slaughter of tribes in the country.

From all manner of uprisings,
a city of acceptance began to emerge.
This is “riot city” after all—
more civil disturbances in Los Angeles
in the past hundred years
than any other city.

3.

To truly love L.A. you have to see it
with different eyes,
askew perhaps,
beyond the fantasy-induced Hollywood spectacles.
“El Lay” is also known
for the most violent street gangs,
the largest Skid Row,
the greatest number of poor.
Yet I loved L.A.
even during heroin-induced nods
or running down rain-soaked alleys or getting shot at.
Even when I slept in abandoned cars,
alongside the “concrete” river,
and during all-night movie showings
in downtown Art Deco theaters.
The city beckoned as I tried to escape
the prison-like grip of its shallowness,
sun-soaked image, suburban quiet,
all disarming,
hiding the murderous heart
that can beat at its center.
L.A. is also lovers’ embraces,
the most magnificent lies,
the largest commercial ports,
graveyard shifts,
poetry readings,
murals,
lowriding culture,
skateboarding,
a sound that hybridized
black, Mexican, as well as Asian
and white migrant cultures.

You wouldn’t have musicians like
Ritchie Valens, The Doors, War,
Los Lobos, Charles Wright &
the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band,
Hiroshima, Motley Crue, NWA, or Quetzal
without Los Angeles.

Or John Fante, Chester Himes, Charles Bukowski,
Marisela Norte, and Wanda Coleman as its jester poets.

4.

I love L.A., I can’t forget its smells,
I love to make love in L.A.,
it’s a great city, a city without a handle,
the world’s most mixed metropolis,
of intolerance and divisions,
how I love it, how I hate it,
Zootsuit “riots,”
can’t stay away,
city of hungers, city of angers,
Ruben Salazar, Rodney King,
I’d like to kick its face in,
bone city, dried blood on walls,
wildfires, taunting dove wails,
car fumes and oil derricks,
water thievery,
with every industry possible
and still a “one-industry town,”
lined by those majestic palm trees
and like its people
with solid roots, supple trunks,
resilient.

—from Rattle #52, Summer 2016
Tribute to Angelenos

__________

Luis J. Rodriguez: “As the city’s second Poet Laureate, chosen by Mayor Eric Garcetti in the fall of 2014, I’ve read poetry, lectured, and/or facilitated workshops in more than 100 venues in the Los Angeles area, to around 13,500 people, including libraries, schools, book fests, community festivals, graduations, and more. This City of Angels is indeed a city of poets. And these poets do more than just sing the city fantastic. Many draw attention to the social gaps, the poverty, the police killings, the deteriorating schools, mass incarceration, climate change, homelessness. They are bards of beauty and bounty, even when these are lacking. And they often point out viable ways out. Poetry is the essential soul talk we rarely find in this society, where most words are to inform, instruct, or to sell you something.” (website)

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August 1, 2016

Zeina Hashem Beck

« 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner »

 

3arabi Song by Zeina Hashem Beck3arabi Song is a song of sorrow and joy, death and dance. Yes there is unrest, war, and displacement in countries like Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Egypt. But there is also survival, music, and love. Iconic Arab singers like Umm Kulthum, Fairuz, and Abdel Halim Hafez, inhabit these poems—they mourn and celebrate. So do children, parents, refugees, and lovers. These poems want to hum you stories that straddle the personal and the political, in an English riddled with Arabic words. The voices in them want to mourn for loved ones and broken homelands, but they also want to sing, as Asmahan does, “inta inta imta—you you when / will you know I love you.”

 

Praise for 3arabi Song

Rarely does poetry seem to matter more than while reading the work of Zeina Hashem Beck—a poet of immense talent and passion who is clearly at the beginning of a long and important literary career. 3arabi Song is a book of displacement and connection, of gravity and grace, and the human music that binds us all together. It’s a tribute to the Arab world and Arab singers, to refugees and refusal, to hope and home, to sorrow and song. Like no other collection we’ve read, these poems feel absolutely necessary. This little book will break your heart and then mend it.
—Rattle Editors

“Give me your pain and I will break it into quarter notes.” From the beginning, 3arabi Song opens the broken world and finds the shards beneath shimmering with beauty and hope. These poems ache with the music of reverie, balm for a torn country where grief and loss are as common as prayer. War, ritual, songs on the radio, lovers, friends and family all echo in this haunting collection, the poems calling us to return over and over, to endure, like the mother who urges, “‘Don’t be afraid, just sing it,’ …/ ‘Sabbouha means Sabah means morning,’/ she said. Not mourning with a ‘u.’ Yes, that thing that shines.”
—Dorianne Laux

These poems are brilliantly balanced between languages, between nostalgia and news, between Self and Other. I could read them over and over like, well, playing a favourite Fairouz record, but here the words are the music and the words recreate a world I love, savour and mourn.
—Marilyn Hacker

Sample Poems

•“This Country: Ghazal for Abdel Halim Hafez” in Rattle online
•“Pantoum for Sabbouha” in Rattle online
•“Ya’aburnee” in Rattle’s Poets Respond
•“Ghazal: Back Home” in Rattle’s Poets Respond
•“Adhan” in 32 Poems
•“3arabi Song” performed live with the Fayha Choir in Lebanon, live on YouTube:

About the Author

Zeina Hashem BeckZeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her first collection, To Live in Autumn, won the 2013 Backwaters Prize. She’s also the author of the chapbook There Was and How Much There Was, a smith|doorstop Laureate’s Choice, selected by Carol Ann Duffy. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Forward Prize, and has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and The Rialto, among others. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Dubai, where she has founded and runs PUNCH, a poetry and open mic collective. Zeina is a strong performer of her poetry, and has participated in literary festivals in the Middle East, the United Kingdom, and the United States. (website)

 

Details

Cover art by Yazan Halwani
“Arabic Musicalligraphy,” ink on paper, A4

ISBN: 978-1-931307-30-7
Cover price: $6.00
Chapbook: 40 pages
Size: 6″ x 9″

 

June 27, 2016

“Have You Ever Woken” by James B. NicolaPosted by

James B. Nicola

HAVE YOU EVER WOKEN

Have you ever woken up, after a loss,
and gone outside, and found there such a mist
of morning—of mourning—that you thought you
were somewhere else, that the loss wasn’t lost,

and then you heard a voice from far away
whisper your name, then, vocative, pierce through
the mist and guide you back to what you knew
once, where you were, how things had been? You toss

left, toss right, and wake up again, only
to find there is no mist, no voice, no day,
there is no Is, because there is no We
anymore? You have? I have too, and say

I’m your friend, even if we’ve never met,
here to help you forget, and not forget.

—from Rattle #51, Spring 2016

[download audio]

__________

James B. Nicola: “I majored in music at Yale, concentrating on songwriting, but after graduation developed a career as a stage director. Twenty years later, I directed at Yale—but since I was not a student, I didn’t have a key to all the practice rooms or common rooms where pianos were beckoning. It was unbearable to be in New Haven, where I had written music and lyrics daily for years, without access to a piano—and out came lyric poetry. I remember my first verse, a sonnet, in October 2000. And I’ve been writing (or rewriting) poetry every day since. What started as a wonderful discipline for a stage director, though, has turned into a way of living and looking at the world; the time spent undisturbed, focusing inward while expanding outward, has become a spiritual ritual I don’t believe I could do without.”

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May 31, 2016

“Only the Stink Will Linger” by K.A. GhaziPosted by

K.A. Ghazi

ONLY THE STINK WILL LINGER

assemblies of terminal men stampede
across all bound geography
with such whimsically brutal cruelty and force
trampling and crapping on endlessly
throughout the land, madly floundering around
their meager boundaries held together
by so much piss and artillery;

each one tethered to some grand bellwether,
feeding heavy at the hell-sprung trough of
enmity, greed, and rendered pleas.

alas, this transient rampage of brute punchinellos,
of gluttons of plunder, parading about
with a belching pandemonium of lumbering grunts

does not distract the indefatigable fact, oh men,

of graves beckoning your names
where it is deep and cold and implacably quiet

save the catastrophe of insects and worms
redeeming this earth of your gargantuan refuse
with your pleadingly delicate (but oh so fertile) screams.

—from Rattle #17, Summer 2002

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April 15, 2016

Zeina Hashem Beck

3arabi Song
Zeina Hashem Beck
Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet whose first collection, To Live in Autumn (The Backwaters Press, 2014), won the 2013 Backwaters Prize. It was also runner-up for the 2014 Julie Suk Award, category finalist for the 2015 Eric Hoffer Awards, and has been included on Split This Rock’s list of recommended poetry books for 2014. Her work has been repeatedly nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, River Styx, Poetry Daily, The Common, Rattle, 32 Poems, Mslexia, Magma, and The Rialto, among others. Her poetry manuscript, Louder than Hearts, has been recently named runner-up for the 2015 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Zeina is a strong performer of her poems, and she regularly reads at festivals, poetry events, theaters, schools, and universities around the Middle East. She lives in Dubai, where she has founded and runs the poetry and open mic collective PUNCH. (website)

For the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize, we received an incredible 1,720 entries, and a great number of impressive manuscripts that deserve to be published. In order to maximize the impact of the competition, we’ve decided to also offer publication to three runners-up. 3arabi Song will be distributed to all 7,500+ subscribers along with an issue at the end of the year; one of the runners-up will also be distributed to each subscriber at random, so that everyone receives two chapbooks. All four chapbooks will be available for individual sale.

Runners-Up:

 

Kill the Dogs
Heather Bell
Oswego, NY

Ligatures
Denise Miller
Kalamazoo, MI

Turn Left Before Morning
April Salzano
New Castle, PA

2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize WinnerPosted by

Rattle is proud to announce the winner of the first annual Rattle Chapbook Prize:
 

Zeina Hashem Beck

3arabi Song
Zeina Hashem Beck
Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet whose first collection, To Live in Autumn (The Backwaters Press, 2014), won the 2013 Backwaters Prize. It was also runner-up for the 2014 Julie Suk Award, category finalist for the 2015 Eric Hoffer Awards, and has been included on Split This Rock’s list of recommended poetry books for 2014. Her work has been repeatedly nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, River Styx, Poetry Daily, The Common, Rattle, 32 Poems, Mslexia, Magma, and The Rialto, among others. Her poetry manuscript, Louder than Hearts, has been recently named runner-up for the 2015 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Zeina is a strong performer of her poems, and she regularly reads at festivals, poetry events, theaters, schools, and universities around the Middle East. She lives in Dubai, where she has founded and runs the poetry and open mic collective PUNCH. (website)

Two of Zeina Hashem Beck’s poems, not included with the manuscript, have appeared in our Poets Respond series: “Ghazal: Back Home” and “Ya’aburnee.” You can also watch her perform the chapbook’s title poem, “3arabi Song,” with the Fayha Choir in Lebanon, here.

For the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize, we received an incredible 1,720 entries, and a great number of impressive manuscripts that deserve to be published. In order to maximize the impact of the competition, we’ve decided to also offer publication to three runners-up. 3arabi Song will be distributed to all 7,500+ subscribers along with an issue at the end of the year; one of the runners-up will also be distributed to each subscriber at random, so that everyone receives two chapbooks. All four chapbooks will be available for individual sale.

Runners-Up:

 

Kill the Dogs
Heather Bell
Oswego, NY

Ligatures
Denise Miller
Kalamazoo, MI

Turn Left Before Morning
April Salzano
New Castle, PA

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October 23, 2015

“Things You Cannot Answer” by Margaret Donsbach TomlinsonPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, September 2015: Editor’s Choice

 

Painting by Sarah Oyetunde

Painting by Sarah Oyetunde. “Things You Cannot Answer” was written by Margaret Donsbach Tomlinson for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, September 2015, and selected by Timothy Green as the Editor’s Choice winner. (pdf)

__________

Margaret Donsbach Tomlinson

THINGS YOU CANNOT ANSWER

why in the night when the psyche goes widening over the long
and intricate landscape where sleep knits together the real and the unreal
do we not lunge awake to find the sun sizzling at the sea bottom?

where have all the dolphins gone? where the frolicking fish?
where can a small human being lie down that is not haunted by the absence of moments
in a life so crowded with them that every moment becomes a memory of moments?

when will the air drown us as surely as the white bubbles on the wave crests
hoard their sorrows in a foam of unrelenting and susurratious lack of melody?
when can we find a home in which no one before us has died or slept or awakened?

what is the story of red? what does the red tongue taste in a feast of water?
what is the story of blue? what does the blue nerve carry in its capillaried forest?
what is the story of gulls in the color-drenched crying of the ghost-ridden night?

how can the slide of one sand grain against another and the next against the next
erode our belief in beaches? how many do we displace in a daydream? how much
does an earth composed of such fine-faceted rocks loose and fused and melted cost?

who knocked on your window in the hours before dawn when the moon hung pregnant
below the clouded stars? who did you dream of? who will protect you if by morning light
a goat-footed myth beckons from the doorway? who oils the hinge of the daybreak?

—from Ekphrastic Challenge, September 2015
Editor’s Choice Winner

__________

Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “From the moment I read the first line of this poem, I knew it would be my choice—the sonorous, lilting rhythm already had Oyetunde’s dreamy sea captured perfectly, where ‘sleep knits together the real and unreal.’ I could read this poem again and again, just as I could stare at this painting all day.”

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