Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

June 13, 2023 Brooke Palma

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

Welcome to a new Mad Poets blog, to be offered quarterly.

It’s a pleasure to write about the relationship between poetry and other art forms, to examine ways that a various creative arts relate to each other.

The term ekphrasis can be defined narrowly as writing that describes a work of art in another medium-- paintings, music, photography sculpture and the like. It can also refer more broadly to the alchemy that happens when one medium tries to define and relate to another. This could refer to poems inspired by the visual arts or music -- and also the reverse! To my mind, ekphrasis can also encompass hybrid works, like artists’ books, author/illustrator collaborations and graphic poems.

Many scholars have written about ekphrasis and there are great resources online. Though not scholar of the topic, I have had a practice of writing poetry and painting for many years. Both are essential to my creative life. These art forms interact, challenge each other and open up many questions and tensions.

My aim in this blog is to feature the work of various poets and artists, to let you know of interesting viewing opportunities and to provide some angles that might prompt your own writing.

Making It New: The Poems and Art of Catherine Bancroft

It’s an honor to feature Catherine Bancroft for this month’s ekphrasis blog. Her poetry and paintings are excellent and there is much to learn from her wisdom, from her many explorations of how these art forms interact.

Catherine’s recent prize-winning collection, The Square Where Ariadne Sleeps (2022), was the first to receive the AV Christie Series Chapbook Prize from Seven Kitchens Press. The contest’s judge, Nathalie Anderson bestows much praise: “The Square Where Ariadne Sleeps begins with artistry and mystery: the arrival of ‘a small package … marked Heavy’ that ‘spoke with the body of a woman’; the unexpected presentation of ‘a silver horse-shaped sewing machine’; the tantalizing promise of a chair that’s somehow not yet ready to be owned or sat in. Inexorably as dream, these poems anticipate, they yearn, they gesture towards a landscape of objects at once crucial and unreadable,”

**cover image: *Greek Woman* by Catherine Bancroft**

Catherine’s complex, nimble poems take up aging, yearning and loss while offering glimpses of memories, relationships, eros, joy and multiple perspectives. I admire how they swerve between elements of daily life and myth, how they speak to us through various voices.

Taking Our Time
I have furnished the space with my own small
bloom. Papers on a bed, clothes on a chair, books on a table.
It took longer than I thought
to gather them. The door opened.
A man and a woman with suitcases.
It’s check-in time for their room.
Their bewilderment.
The brown leaf still on the tree. A spring that hasn’t come.

They stood in the doorway watching me.
I stashed quickly what was left.
I tried in vain to smooth the bedspread. They’d seen
the wrinkles my body made. We used up Eden.
We who were supposed to leave by noon.
There’s no time to lose we can’t go on as we have been, Jane Fonda said.
The host asked her, Can someone be too old for Fire Drill Friday?
I’ll be 82 on December 21st for God’s sake, she said.
A woman in her nineties who was blind and in a wheelchair got arrested with us.

We’ve used up the sample soaps, left hairs in the sink.
The garden needs time to reset itself for the next to come.
Come leave what you’re doing, they call from downstairs.
Whose voice is it calling? Doesn’t matter.
Come leave what you’re doing, it’s time,

There is a collaged quality to some of her poems and Catherine relates this to techniques in her visual art. Cutting paper for collages contributed to a freedom in abstracting shapes in her acrylic portraits. She also experimented making artists’ books, which she found to be liberating. When younger, she reports having been a “worshiper of books” who would never think of desecrating one, but letting herself cut and rearrange words and images to create an artist’s book from an old text about roses released a joyous sense of “making it new,” joining together what had been kept apart. I see this quality in the texts of her poems, in their dreamlike elements and various voices.

Catherine is very interested in the power of dreams and referred me to psychologist Carl Jung’s Red Book, his notebook of dream illustrations. Of her writing process, she shares that sometimes she “…..takes a dream, lets it walk in the world and be porous. Dreams are a good counterpoint to the oppressiveness of society, the narrowness. They blow it all open and make you question your attitudes.”

Once a teacher of English and history in Philadelphia who pursued PhD studies, Catherine wrote book reviews for The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, and Ms. Magazine. She began making collages while taking courses at the Main Line Art Center, and wrote two children’s books with an illustrator friend, Hannah Coale, Felix’s Hat and That’s Philomena! More recently, Catherine has exhibited paintings at many venues, such as: Muse Gallery, 3rd Street Gallery, Saint Asaph’s Gallery, DaVinci Art Alliance, the Fackenthal-Pethick Gallery in Bryn Mawr, and the FireWorks Gallery in Camden. In 2022, Gladwyne’s Waverley Gallery featured a series of her poignant paintings based on photos of immigrants, Lest We Forget: Ellis Island Revisited. I keep these images in my mind’s eye as I read her poems.

**From *The Ellis Island Series* by Catherine Bancroft** **http://www.catherinebancroft.cullina.com/**

Matisse

When my father traveled to Europe, when my mother died, when he
fled sorrow.
When he bought into a group tour which he’d never done,
he brought back notecards – thick, good quality, dozens of them
from one artist, Matisse, from one place, Venice. As if nothing else
had wanted him.

I found them in a bursting envelope after he died.
A virgin mother and her child.

Sketches untamed.
Smudge charcoal studies for windows of
stained glass commissioned
by the nun who had been Matisse’s model.

Mother with her exuberant son.
The sun leaping.
He fingered them while his fellow tourists shopped.

He was touching her, them, the women who loved him.
She who let him leap as a baby upon the knee.
She who at a dance leapt in his eyes.

I admire Catherine’s brilliance and inventiveness, how her paintings and texts journey through myth and history, through objects and memory. She is a consummate maker who shares her wisdom and keeps experimenting. We have much to learn from her. I urge you to read her most recent, wonderful book.

We Are Makers

Sometimes slight preoccupied squawks. And I,
thyroid pill, rose-colored cup, pattering slippers,
in the night diary writing. Stow findings in the nest.
Thin window between.
One time I stood on the stool and slowly, gently lifted the shade.
Beak against metal, god knows it’s winter, black head, fate of the air
conditioner, any eggs.
We make homes for ourselves for many reasons in the cold season.
I hold my breath, listen to you.

To learn more, visit:
www.catherinebancroft.cullina.com
https://www.thesunlightpress.com/2019/09/15/a-conversation-with-artist-catherine-bancroft/
https://phillycam.org/show/2023/philly-loves-poetry/catherine-bancroft

Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A painter and teacher, she founded the We the Poets program at ArtWell, an arts education non-profit in Philadelphia (www.theartwell.org). Her poems appear in journals such as Apiary, Baltimore Review, Cagibi, East Coast Ink, 6ix, North of Oxford, One Art, Passager, Philadelphia Stories, Rockvale Review and Rogue Agent. Camera Obscura (chapbook, Moonstone Press), appeared in 2017 and Etching the Ghost (Atmosphere Press), was published in 2021. She received the Interfaith Relations Award from the Montgomery County PA Human Rights Commission and the Public Service Award from National Association of Poetry Therapy. Her paintings are on view at Cerulean Arts Gallery. To learn more about her work, visit www.cathleencohenart.com.

Mad Poet of the Year - Tonita Austin (aka Toni Love)

June 5, 2023 Brooke Palma

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Tonita Austin (aka Toni Love) serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2023.

Can’t Get You Out of My Head
by Tonita Austin aka Toni Love

your voice slides inside my mind like silk panties between my thighs
and I can't get you out of my head
so sweet and so unique I could listen to your sexiness until I fell off to sleep
for now I'll just imagine you laying your body across my bed
yearning to feel your touch your lips and waiting for the first passionate kiss
and I can't believe I'm capable of feeling like this
have I finally met my match, a romantic whose words are as sweet as a Hershey's kiss
or my soul mate able to touch me so deeply that I can't resist
your eyes, and your smile leave me yearning for your loving caress
imagining you and I hand in hand heart to heart
makes me feel warm and sticky like honey dripping down the back of my dress
I want you, you want me and we both find ourselves weak from the thought
of opening up our souls and hearts as they intertwine into an eternal rope of passion and ecstasy
you make love to my mind and I can't say no
I surrender all
you are my destiny
just lay my body down on your lavender-scented bed
cause I can't get you out of my head.

I wrote this poem when I was in a relationship and that person still thinks it's about him, haha..We're no longer together so I can be honest. This was written about an artist that I performed with a few times and admired, and I could tell that he was also attracted to me.

At the time that I wrote this poem, my boyfriend at the time felt that he wanted space, and wanted us to take a break. During that break, I had a brief, passionate affair with this person. Only he will know who he is. :)

Tonita Austin also known as “Toni Love” is a gifted poet, singer, activist, and writer born in West Philadelphia. While attending Columbia University, Tonita was a student of Amiri Baraka and performed in Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls” as the Lady in Orange. Her writing is influenced by both experiences. She is a contributor to the anthology The Black Body and featured poet in the 2018 and 2020 Winter/Fall edition of the Philadelphia Arts and Urban Literary magazine. The Restoration EP is her first published recording; Toni’s Room is her first published book. Toni currently resides in Media, PA. For more info, visit www.tonitalove.com and https://tonilove.hearnow.com/.

Review of Bird/Diz [an erased history of bebop] by Warren Longmire

May 31, 2023 Brooke Palma

Bird/Diz [an erased history of bebop]

Bunny Presse

$13.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Jazz is an elusive art to capture in words. How can a poet hope to capture its complexity, or its unwillingness to be trapped in mere description? In his second book, Bird/Diz [an erased history of bebop], Warren C. Longmire accomplishes this feat through a fascinating collection of erasure poems focusing on two influential jazz musicians, Charlie “Bird” Parker and John Berks “Dizzy” Gillespie. Performing his unique poetic alchemy, Longmire captures the essence, the ecstaticity of jazz. Quite simply, he transforms words into gold.

Although Bird/Diz amply celebrates both Parker and Gillespie, Longmire writes erasure odes to other jazz greats who may not be as well known. In “An Open Mic. Hood Bar Full of Black Folk,” he employs erasure poetry to great effect as he celebrates the unsung former saxophone player, Henry Minton, who

opened this small club for people.
Meet and relax and if you like
play there. Even
the kids on the sidewalk danced.

On the opposite side of the page is a beautifully rendered erasure of this article which celebrates the joy of jazz. In this poem, Longmire also celebrates the continuity of jazz, through the evocative image of kids dancing on the sidewalk.

In one of the non-erasure (prose) poems found in this collection, “Sarah Vaughn (1959)” captures his search for videos of jazz musicians on You Tube: “3 mins and 31 seconds into the earliest recording of Sarah Vaughn I can find and I am so bored.” This video is the build up to Vaughn’s performance at “the swanky ballroom of Playboy mansion” where comedian, Marty Ingles, is holding up the show: “Marty is STILL talking, now on an imaginary phone having a fake conversation with a Chicago tollbooth putting a lean on his house.” Finally, Vaughn gets her opportunity to wow Hugh Hefner and his friends as the reader’s and Longmire’s interest pique into a fabulous crescendo:

The song she sings for the Playboy Mansion is similar.
“Misty.” How she’s as helpless as a kitten in a tree. A sleight-of-hand
man who appears after says:
Well look, Hef, of course I love her. She’s the best.
The girl hits me right in the middle.
Right in the jangling purse I have hidden inside my breast.

In several of these poems, Longmire erases the name of the jazz musician themselves. In “Playing and Talking. Eating and Drinking,” Longmire uses this erasure to compare the musical styles of both Gillespie and Parker. An erased Dizzy’s “neck inflates balloon. All of which is no matter. No physical. That’s just the way he played.” “Sometimes [erased Parker] became the idea of trumpet. Playing less unison section [erased Parker] set on translating it to modern for club, work, eventual band, and nobody.” Another element of this poem to mention is that the erasures themselves are two different styles mirroring the different styles of Gillespie and Parker. Gillespie’s erasure is mostly blacked out with just the relevant words uncovered. In Parker’s erasure, the article text has zebra lines running through it where the relevant words are boxed in. Needless to say, this book is as much a visual treasure as it is a written one.

The whole ebb and flow of erasure and celebration comes to a glorious counterpoint in “Boy, That Cat Sound, You Know? He’s Fast Becoming My Favorite!” The erasure on the left side of the page is a picture of Gillespie’s head covered by text. The poem starts with the source text: “Including Verve. Including Quincy Jones and Jones for short. Including Dizzy. Picture of Dizzy called “The High Priest of Bebop. Taken in Nice.” It then goes on to say what has been excluded “Excluding indications of arrangement (most scratched with exacto)”…”Excluding initial before anger/Excluding ‘has subsidized after anger’/Including anger. Capitalizing it.” This poem has such a rhythmic forcefulness and obvious love of jazz that I am left stunned every time I read it.

Bird/Diz ends on such a joyful note with “Dizzy Gillespie (1981).” As a poet, Longmire is a celebrator of Black life and culture and an uplifter in a time when that is so necessary. Every time I read this poem it puts a smile on my face. With lines such as “Starting with a cane bangled with cowrie luck, you can sashay an old body like fringed skirt. You can have a fat booty at 70 and conduct. You can strut a most obvious joy.” In this work, you can feel the joy jazz brings Longmire and us all. If you ever get a chance to see Longmire perform, it is a multimedia sensory experience you will remember for a long time to come. The same can be said for this amazing collection, a tour de force, and one of the most beautiful books to come along for quite some time.

Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt Press) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone Press) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in several anthologies, including Moonstone Featured Poets, Queer Around the World, and Stonewall’s Legacy, and several journals, including Impossible Archetype, Mobius, Peculiar, Poetica Review, and Voicemail Poems. He has taught classes titled A Chapbook in 49 Days and Ekphrastic Poetry and hosted poetry events throughout Philadelphia.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Daulton Reppert

May 29, 2023 Brooke Palma

I Got Lucky
by Daulton Reppert

I grew up here,

And some parts are nice,
Sure.
Not the parts we belong to.

But I've been among the monsters
delving to the depths with
seventh street sinners

And I was dancing with my demons
under the streetlight massacres of our innocence

I was there
As a part of the places they told us never to go

And I was there
In the dark corners buried under bridges built by men who will one day live under them.

And I got lucky
And I am SO lucky,

Because
The moment you realize
that nobody
REALLY gives a damn about you,
Is the moment a part of your childhood dies.

See fundamental parenting consists of
Sharing is caring
Don't tell lies

And if you have nothing...
Nice to say...

But a serrated tongue is a celebrated feature for those who were not taught these basic things.

Not everybody had something to share
but the shirt on their back
and the story that goes with it,

Sometimes
lying is life or death

but the truth
was a guarantee
That the sun doesn't rise tomorrow.

And if you don't have anything NICE to say,
Then ask

Ask
what they did to deserve the cut of your tongue
and the puff of smoke
shaped just like you
standing where you once stood

Ask
what you did to deserve
the way your first loves treated you
when they gave you up,
or ran away,
or kept the baby they didn't want

Ask them

Ask why they didn't give a damn
about where you were when the street lights turned on

Or when the cops were taking our friends away

Or when you discovered the love
a drink
could breathe into the broken space between these jagged ribs.

You ask them and watch

See how they refuse to answer.

Though if you ask and they do speak up
you make damn sure
That you are ready to hear
what they have to say

Because they don't care about you
Or your feelings.

But don't you dare
let THEM ask
"where did I go wrong?"

Because when you asked them the same,
You never got an answer,
So why should they?

What are your poetic muses? What calls you to the artform?
I feel as though I've been writing forever. I was a young kid, maybe 10 or 12 when I started experiencing signs of depression and that's common unfortunately, but writing always helped. It started out as journaling and then I picked up guitar and it became music and what is music but poetry with a tune? Ya know and every teenage emo kid had writing. I hadn't ever considered the form I have now because 'slam poetry' always had kind of a negative stigma but I'll never forget the day one summer, I was lying in bed after waking up just before noon. I laid there scrolling social media when I happened upon the poem “OCD” by Neil Holborn. It was like nothing I'd heard before and I was hooked. I began searching for more and I've found so many fantastic poets, though Button Poetry gets kind of a bad rap, I discovered some of my favorite writers through them.

You are a parent. When do you find time to write? What gets you motivated to turn the blank page into a poem?
It's all about the small moments. My mind is constantly in art form, ever thinking and ever flowing. A good friend of mine Cord Moreski, he was with myself and Florence (my partner and other half of the magazine) and we had a conversation about this exact thing. We talked about life and how anything and everything can be an experience, and thus, a poem. Astigmatism, fear, love, sadness, turning the other cheek, being petty and loving it. That's a poem he kept saying and it is exactly how I see the world. It takes less than thirty seconds to open my phone and throw a thought into my notes. And that's a poem. I can build onto it, or when I feel very strongly I can write the whole piece in one go. Some of my favorites are ones that I've written in minutes. And all of my writing is solely experience. If I don't feel it I don't write it. I can't bs a poem about the moon or what it's like to be happy because I don't always know. But you bet I can tell you what it's like to watch my best friend throw his life away on a drink or watch my hero experience depression for the first time in his life. It's brutal. But it's honest. And I was raised to be an honest man.

Being vulnerable like that, there's nothing quite like it. To open your soul and let a room full of strangers stare in, knowing what they're seeing as you stare back. It's freeing in a way I can't even begin to describe and THAT'S what brings me to the empty page time and time again.

What other mediums do you work in? I believe you play music as well. Is there overlap in the different creative processes?
Generally I'm just poetry these days. I help where I can with the magazine and we have a show we do hosted at Nowhere Coffee Co. in Allentown, and it's an incredible thing. I try and do features where I can and I'd love to work on other projects in the near future. As far as overlap, absolutely there is. Music is my getaway, ya know? There's not a moment in the day that I'm not singing to myself, thinking of songs that I love, finding new music, or enjoying nostalgia. Every silent second of my life is filled with music, and like I said before, all music is poetry. Every piece I write is a potential song or poem. Every concept and idea is art to me, music.

Music is something that saved me from more than a few breakdowns, and poetry is a close second. With that in mind, I don't think it's possible to keep them apart.

You are half of Poetry as Promised Literary Magazine. Tell us a little bit about this project and the kind of work you are hoping to publish.
I am half, technically. I don't do a whole lot of the work. Minor details here and there like helping with some design choices, helping decide what to accept or deny, things of that nature. Otherwise Florence is the primary care for this project and they do such a wonderful job. We have a few ideas for project related to the magazine but those are for the future more than anything. These ideas will involve me a little more than the magazine, but there is a lot to look forward to from P.A.P.’s magazine, and we hope everybody is as excited as we are. As far as what we publish, I mean we are so enthusiastic to support all art. We only have a few rules, but generally anything and everything is welcome. Poetry, short stories, photography and illustrations, anything.

The rules being:
1) Consent is key, if it's questionable it will be rejected.
2) Oedipus is not our friend. Mothers are beautiful but please don't tell us if it goes deeper.
3) And age is VERY important. We don't want incriminating pieces or anything predatory, please.

We work hard to foster creativity, love, and acceptance within our community, so this is the least we can do to protect our readers and contributors.

Where can readers find more of your writing/listen to you read your work?
Unfortunately right now the only way you'll hear my work is on some social media or at our show/shows we attend. I would absolutely love to put a book out as many of my friends have, but I'm just not there yet. I'm working hard to get enough together so I finally can put a book out, and I hope everybody will be excited to get a piece when I do. I haven't quite decided on how else to put my work out there just yet but I am, as most poets are, desperate for people to see me, as silly as it sounds. I genuinely love having people remember the poem’s name or talking to me about what a line meant to them, so hopefully soon I'll have a way to share that.

Daulton Reppert is 26-year-old poet born and raised in Allentown, PA.

Spends most of his time working and taking care of his family

He’s been writing since he was a teenager but started performing at Billy Mack's No-Mic Open Mic at the Coffee House Without Limits. From there he pursued performing further but ended up having to take a hiatus. He later came back to writing and performing through attending the NJ Renaissance shows and is back better than ever.

John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he works as a licensed clinical social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and several of his poems were chosen to be exhibited in Princeton University's 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices art show at the Lewis Center for the Arts. He has been nominated 3x for a Pushcart Prize and serves as the Local Lyrics contributor for The Mad Poets Society Blog. His debut chapbook Roadside Oddities: A Poetic Guide to American Oddities was released in early 2022 and can be purchased at www.johnwojtowicz.com. John lives with his wife and two children in Upper Deerfield, NJ.

Review of There Is No Cure for This: Ocean & Moon Poems

May 24, 2023 Brooke Palma

There Is No Cure for This: Ocean & Moon Poems

Independently published

$11.95

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Abbey J. Porter

Amy Laub’s most recent collection, There Is No Cure for This: Ocean & Moon Poems, is aptly named. I get the feeling that the writer is indeed gripped at the core by a force that won’t let go.

The book is divided into two parts: “Ocean Poems” and “Moon Poems.” I’ll confess, I am not the biggest fan of “nature poetry.” On top of that, I was skeptical of an entire 68-page book focusing, in theory, on two subjects. But as I dove into the collection, my doubts were swept out with the tide.

Laub’s nimble, many-faceted perspective engages the reader and keeps the poems from becoming repetitive. The poet demonstrates a deep appreciation for and fascination with her subjects, and an agile imagination in characterizing them. The sea is “a salt blanket,” “a mother’s blanket of water,” “the lumberjack ocean.” Likewise, the moon is “an aspirin,” “a hole into heaven,” “a motorcycle headlight.”

In her opening poem, “There Is No Cure for This,” Laub describes a certain inevitability in nature:

There is no cure

for pebbles and bits of shell
stranded at low tide,

no way to change how they clink
and whisper when the surf returns.

Her gratitude for these processes is clear—particularly in the poem’s last line, “Thank God there is no cure for this.”

But Laub’s connection to the water extends far beyond mere appreciation. In “Into the Water,” my favorite of the collection, she describes entering the ocean:

I exhale the last from my lungs,
oxygen seeps in from brand new gills…

My body steers itself
with translucent fins;
it has always known how to do this

The poem suggests a longing on the narrator’s part to join the underwater world—and an innate ability to do so.

That longing resurfaces in “I am Walking into the Waves,” in which she says,

The odds of survival
among the claws and jaws
and teeth of the deep
are far richer than on dry land
among poisonous bipeds.

She juxtaposes the watery world with that inhabited by people. Even the dangers of the ocean do not compare to those posed by humans, and while the “claws and jaws…of the deep” seem a part of nature, “poison” in this context suggests a perhaps-unnatural toxicity.

Indeed, in “On a Beach,” Laub describes settling down to live “among the rocks” and becoming part of the ocean’s cycle. After embodying various creatures and other sea elements and even being consumed as part of the ocean’s natural processes, she concludes with:

I am a pearl, pried out of my shell,
hanging on a string between two others
around some lady’s neck.

This ending—to be relegated to such an unnatural state—seems a true, sad death.

Throughout the book, Laub writes in plain, straightforward language—no “50-cent words” here. Yet she can be fanciful and creative with that language, as in, “moon twinks a trillion tossing bits.”

In describing the moon, Laub seems to try on different possibilities regarding the celestial body’s role and stance relative to people. One such possibility is of the moon as guardian and comforter. In “Going to the Moon,”

she lifts me,
settles me on her hip,
wraps one arm around

But while Part II of the book is ostensibly dedicated to poems about the moon, the ocean creeps back in, refusing to be sequestered. In “What I Do When I Am Inland,” Laub writes,

I am moon slapped at the kitchen sink,
washing goblets and plates and knives,
while many miles east of here
the ocean scours her rocks.

Even when her body is far from the ocean, her mind is drawn there.

“Moon on Vacation” touches on the relationship between moon and sea:

The moon is tired. She wants a vacation.
She wants no more ocean to drag around,
immoderate train of a wedding gown

One gets the impression that the water is ultimately what grips the poet most strongly. Yet even for her, it maintains an element of mystery. In “The Ocean, that Old Flirt,” she says of the sea, “We prowl its ragged edges/ knowing almost nothing about it.”

She expresses a similar sentiment in “Moon Everywhere”:

The National Aeronautics
and Space Administration
knows absolutely nothing
about the moon.

These elements—ocean and moon—seem to be knowable by humans only through experience, imagination—and, perhaps, poetry.

Abbey J. Porter writes poetry and memoir about people, relationships, and life struggles. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte, an MA in liberal studies from Villanova University, and a BA in English from Gettysburg College. Abbey works in communications and lives in Cheltenham, Pa., with her two dogs. You can visit her online at abbeyjportercomms.com.

Source: http://madpoetssociety.com/blog

Profession: Poet

May 22, 2023 Brooke Palma

Profession: Poet is a quarterly blog feature exploring craft and identity in poetry by Hanoch Guy, who writes poems in both English and Hebrew.

Writing poems of despair and hope

Our lives are full of sensory experiences.

You feel cold or hot, one or more senses are activated, such as sight, sound, touch, taste, smell.

You have vibrations that consist of electrical and chemical reactions.

What are ways to translate these feelings into a poem? What are the different ways to shift into verbal expression?

Among the pathways are degrees of breath.

The breath of life holds keys to portraying emotions.

Writing a poem of depression may translate to holding your breath while ecstasy may be expressed through swift, shallow breaths.

What do you feel when reading the poem aloud?

Pay attention to the pitch and tone and volume of your voice, high or low or flat, soft or loud.

There is a whole arsenal of verbal devices to utilize as conduits of emotions. These may seem quite basic, but they are the materials of language, used to convey the complex and intangible.

Some of this arsenal consists of the basic parts of speech and the components of sentences, such as subjects, adjectives, verbs, adverbs. What is the subject when writing about emotions?

How do you use adjectives that describe emotions in a way that is particular to the situation you are describing?

This requires a deeper look into your own emotions. Are you angry or furious, sad or despairing, joyous or ecstatic? What are the shades and temperatures of your emotions? What are the sensations in your body and where in your body are they most noticeable? Do you feel aggressive, indifferent, numb, cold, sweating, tart, sweet, sour, bitter, grim, withdrawn? Loving or hateful? Where is that love or hate directed, toward yourself or others?

Investigating your emotions on deeper levels and being specific about your experience of those emotions gives you access to a well from which you can draw out your poems.

How do you use adverbs and verbs that describe emotions in a way that is particular to the situation you are describing? Even the articles and prepositions you choose make a difference in the tenor of your poem.

Explore how each of the five senses enhance paths to emotions.

What do you feel when you touch, smell, hear, see, taste?

There is a great deal more on poetry of emotions that we may explore in the next blogs.

Let me offer you two of my poems tackling emotions.

Geography of depression

Rock blocks.
Cave darkness.
Feel my way through
slimy walls
between flying bats.
Eels bind my feet.

Trapped on a treacherous
mountain slope.
Black fog gags.
A hairy hand shoves me off
the cliff.

Holding on for dear life
to a wild dog
along a snowy field,
icy wind cuts.
I fall into a hole.
An Eskimo spears me.
What kind of a fish
is this?

A sack
over my head,
hangman
tightens the rope,
mumbles curses.

Late bus

Quiet ride from Jerusalem,
we made salad with olive oil.
Coffee burned my tongue
I wanted to say to Nilly

plead
I
She looked at me
with deep brown eyes.

I dragged my suitcase
to the last bus
on the old road.

Please tune in for the next blog on spiritual quests through poetry.

Hanoch Guy Ph.D, Ed.D spent his childhood and youth in Israel. He is a bilingual poet in Hebrew and English. Hanoch has taught Jewish Hebrew literature at Temple University and poetry and mentoring at the Muse House Center. He won awards in the Mad Poets Society, Phila Poets, Poetry Super Highway and first prize in the Better than Starbucks haiku contest. His book, Terra Treblinka, is a finalist in the North Book Contest. Hanoch published poems in England, Wales, Israel, the U.S., and Greece. He is the author of nine poetry collections in English and one Hebrew book.

Mad Poet of the Year - Tonita Austin (aka Toni Love)

May 8, 2023 Brooke Palma

The Day I Left God
by Tonita Austin aka Toni Love

I laid the red carnation on top of her casket
Collapsing through showers of grief
The sight of them lowering the flesh and bones of my mother
Into the cold hard ground was too much for my fragile womb to bear

I had prophesized years before
That her life would end when her decayed lungs could take no more
Tobacco
Stress
Worry
Fear

Yet I still was not prepared
God was not supposed to take my mommy so soon
I did all the right things
I was baptized and attended church
I paid my tithes
Helped the elderly, sick and poor
Volunteered and served my community
I got good grades, graduated from college, supported myself
And although I wasn’t perfect I tried to do every righteous thing I could do

Stayed by her side like a good daughter should
Took her to doctor’s appointments
And brought her clothes and food when she was unable to move

I was so good how could he take my mommy so soon?

Every day I walked into the cancer center I stopped in the chapel to pray

Please wait until my baby is born before you take my mommy away
Every day
On my knees I would pray
Please God
Please God
And he took her anyway

Standing over her casket tears flowing too fast to even wipe away
I sobbed again for her grandbaby comfortably swaying in my womb
Anxious to see the light of day
Not realizing the would never get the chance to wrap his little
Hands around her face and say
I love you mom mom

Day by day the anger filled up every space left in my perforated heart
How dare my God leave me to do motherhood alone?
Without my mother to tell me how to hold him when to feed him
When to worry and when to let go
How cruel can he be to leave me mourning during the most beautiful time in my life?
Just two months before I would walk down the aisle and become someone’s loving wife

With each contraction my unborn child had no choice but to drink in my tears of pain grief and anger
My soul cried out why
And received no answer

I found myself sitting in silence once again
Praying to find the strength to go on
So I did what I felt God had done
I banished love and left my soul deserted
Back in the cemetery in the cold hard earth I left my faith in God and buried it deep

And I walked away
And I wept
The day I left God

I chose this poem because May is usually a time when everyone is focused on Mother's Day and I wanted to share this poem for anyone who finds themselves grieving the loss of their mother or mother figure. My mother was diagnosed with late stage lung cancer six months before I found out that I was pregnant with my first-born child. I spent most of that time as her caregiver and whenever I would visit her at the hospital, I would stop at the chapel to pray that she would at least live long enough to see my child born. I was in my first trimester when she transitioned and was angry at God for not answering my prayers.

I wrote this poem on my journey to healing both the loss of my mother and my faith in God.

Review of Lost Autographs by Peter Baroth

May 3, 2023 Brooke Palma

Lost Autographs

Moonstone Press

$15.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

Signatures and autographs are markings, regularly inked, of distinctive qualities and interpretations that are often just as much a reflection of the author as the recipient. Embodiments of current contexts as well as historical perspectives, the signature adopts numerous forms, whereas the autograph is often personalized and gifted. Peter Baroth’s deeply personal Lost Autographs has all the markings of the star quality often associated with the autograph. It’s a gift of a collection, and one that continues to give with each reading.

Lost Autographs, by Peter Baroth, was originally published in 2015 by Moonstone Press (and, I believe, recently reprinted in 2022). Throughout the collection’s 96 pages, Baroth invites readers into the folded ink of the narrator’s world and, simultaneously, writes as if the reader is the intended beneficiary of each narrative poem’s retold story. The intimate and deeply powerful collection is divided into three parts – origins, end/beginning, and travels.

Part I (origins) includes sixteen poems and explores a range of topics all linked through a historical lens that gifts autographed insights into the author’s youth and family. Select pieces include:

THE SEVENTIES
Yeah, that was the decade.
I was much older,
playing out my Dandy Don Meredith riffs
on the playing field.
My first goal, first French kiss, so many firsts.

THE CELLO
The cello was something that I started when
I was in the third grade
I chose it one day

THE PLANT
When I take I-95 to or from Philly,
I inevitably look for the Boeing Helicopter Plant,
the site of the last third of my father’s career.

EARTH MOTHER
What I know of my German grandmother
is shorthand and scant,
Dying as she did,
riding her motorcycle,
struck by a drunk driver,
nearly 30 years before my Chicago birth

Whether writing on a personal experience or of those known only through shared stories, Baroth’s masterful manipulation of the written word turns everyday experiences into extraordinary gifts that transcend time. The collection is an exercise in both presence and recollection.

Baroth’s remarkable ability to craft sparse language into richly detailed story is evident throughout the collection. Individual lines are like textured creases that offer multi-sensory experiences. Stanzas encourage readers to linger and appreciate a moment personally signed by an increasingly familiar voice sharing unfamiliar and signature experiences. It’s easy to lose oneself in each poem for an extended period and yet still pick up on new details with each subsequent reading.

Part II (end/beginning) includes eleven poems (several set in Philadelphia) that are simultaneously reminiscent and perfectly present. Each drops the reader in a moment strikingly real such that endings and beginnings blur and all that remains is now (or then). Pieces include:

JAZZ FOR JUSTICE ROBERTS
Makes me think of my time in West Philly,
Learning all of the Black Arts I did there,
he bongo sessions ‘til daybreak,
the relaxing pimps in their bars
at three in the afternoon

WHITE COATS
Well, I’ve been to the end of the United States
and what did I see?
A mirror of an ocean,
somehow a reflection of my soul
or perhaps of some recumbent deity above

PHILADELPHIA HIPSTER
But hey,
here comes the renaissance up Broad Street
Like a rusted rattling Yellow Cab barely under control.
Like a gliding, barreling Philadelphia Flyer
headed for the wall.
Because you know what?
You just sold your first painting!

Whereas Part II (end/beginning) pieces focus largely on Philadelphia, Part III (travels) includes eighteen pieces that take readers on a tour of extended sights and destinations. Pieces explore oceans (“CHILD OF THE ELEMENTS,” “A.C. OFF-SEASON,” “SUMMER SMILE”), airports (“PILOT’S LICENSE”), the South (“SOUTHERN SWING, FLORIDA”), the West (“MEDITATIONS ON CALIFORNIA AND HEAVEN,” “A LITTLE BIT OF THE DREAM”), and dialysis appointments (“DIALYSIS TEDIUM,” “THE SURVIVOR,” “THE BIG D”), with additional signature settings in between.

Like any good memory, the collection’s sum is indeed greater than the individual parts. The work has a rhythm both soothing and soul-searching. Both sweet and sour. Personal and memorable, like an autograph. With autographs left in near and far corners, the collection shines as it lingers.

In “OUTLAW FEELINGS,” the speaker writes:

She’s a lawyer now – Wendy – in Vermont,
I think. A gay marriage advocate,
God bless her,
and I’m still scribbling this finger candy
into little verses and doing not much else.
But if the snow’s nice this season,
I’d like to do a little skiing.

Finger candy indeed. In response, I close with a wish. A wish that Baroth continues to scribble, to spin narratives, and to share his signature work in autographed form. For readers of this blog, I can’t promise autographed copies of Lost Autographs, but you can gift yourself a copy here.

Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She loves words, experimental poetry, and the change of seasons. She’s also a fan of late nights, crossword puzzles, and compelling underdogs. She has authored several chapbooks and full-length poetry collections, with stories, poems, and essays published in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. Sample works include Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility, A Collection of Recollections, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups. She is currently working on her first series, which (not surprisingly) includes a novel in verse. She is the 2022-2023 Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate.

Review of The Poet's Pocket Guide to Steady Employment by Bill Van Buskirk

April 26, 2023 Brooke Palma

The Poet's Pocket Guide to Steady Employment

Parnilis Media

$12.95

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by guest blogger, Ray Greenblatt

In this poetic collection I sense a predominant theme. The poet’s persona is growing, wanting to learn how to fully be himself and to discover the lessons of the world. He learns in different ways: through his family, his wife, his friends, and finally-–having gained the confidence and insight—by himself.

Out of the many rich poems Bill Van Buskirk offers us, I am drawn to his intimates and what they have to say. Let us begin with “GRANDFATHER’S ADVICE.”

Beware the language of slaves.

It is spoken everywhere—
welter of prohibition,
peevish command,
muttered grunt of deference,
sacred vow of retribution—

**************************
Wonder, marvel, savor, mourn—
these strange verbs, these renegades
will befriend you in tight places.

Others have gone before.
They have seeded the language
with treasure—molten ruby, frosted jade.
If you find it, it will wake you up
and something small will change
in a thousand years of talk.

“Slaves” are the people who don’t think for themselves, only ape what they hear. People defer, prohibit, or seek retribution since they are insecure. Van Buskirk’s strong string of words—wonder, savor, marvel, mourn—is truly “renegade” in nature but leads to a life of freedom. If you can truly digest these concepts, they will be worth jewels (ruby, jade) to you. Grandfather is indeed wise.

“ICE KING” is laid out on paper in a beautiful way: stanzas of four slanted lines; to me it feels like sliding smoothly on a slick surface. Dad speaks to son.

But that’s what the winter’s for…so you can deepen into it.
But I miss the thing that held him up—

          confidence, a stake in the moment, supple vigor…
                   him carried off before his time, me learning
                              the wrong lessons—to freeze too deep and call it safety—
                                       to be a stance without a story, a pose without a pulse in it.

           Listen, he says, my life was a song without an echo—mute
                    unready to be sung. You’ll know it by the rising heat,
                              wild and unbidden like a sun or my unspoken love.
                                        It is not for you to say when life is over. Live it

         like an epic with the end in sight:
                    crammed with contradiction,
                              too much wine,
                                        and with a death in it.

The poetic lines are long because this is a lecture of sorts. Replacing the comma, the use of a dash gives more of a dramatic punch to a line. Dad admits he has made mistakes, but life should be lived fully, no matter what happens. “Winter,” he states, is a challenge, a risk but also a noble “epic.” This message is not unlike what grandfather, in a previous generation, has told the young man.

His father, in “MY FATHER AND JESUS,” takes him to a surprising new place in the son’s journey, to a religion the son never thought his father believed in.

a flare so bright and sweet
it could have only seemed
a garden—wild with scent,
bright as fireworks
in a moonless Fourth of July—
full blooms of high summer—
hydrangea, zinnia, rose.

In this place
lungs are not the only things that breathe,
heart not the only thing that pulses.

In this place
I turn to him,
call him by his name
in all its fullness—

William, Harold, Father, Thou—
and conjure him a world
so bright and warm
he never even notices
how still he has become.

The relationship between father and son has not been easy. However, after long thought, the son has matured enough to understand how his father found peace. The son imagines his father in an ideal place: a garden that is warm, sweet, “wild with scent,” “bright as fireworks.” Superlative images! The son can finally bless his father in this kind of heavenly Eden, where the elder is finally fulfilled.

We leave the immediate family in which the poet grew up and now move into the family he attempted to make for himself. However, in “VALEDICTORY ,”his wife has died early in their life together. In a unique poetic approach, her ghost teaches him how to live with loss.

When I die a hole will grow in your imagination.
It will take the shape of my form.|
The dreamer will try to make good
what is missing.
He will do his best.

But this wound, it is a tender thing.
Raw winds will howl through your stomach.
I won’t minimize the pain.
I won’t dramatize it either.

Make of mourning a full-time job,
grief just another force of nature:
wind, glacier, desert, sea.
You will love it sometimes.
It will take the shape of my form.

Tears will come.
They will change as seasons change.

She prescribes that he must enter into the mourning, fully feel it, before he can put it to rest. Sometimes he will feel horrible: “Raw winds will howl through your stomach .” Van Buskirk’s use of a series—“wind…sea”--is penetrating. She repeats herself to emphasize the ordeal: “I won’t minimize . . . I won’t dramatize.” And she knows he will miss her, repeating an entire line: “It will take the shape of my form.” But one day he will be whole again.

By the time of the poem “ALCHEMY 101,t”he poet has matured, teaching himself how to survive in the world and to thrive. The only “magic” here is how to focus yourself to be the actual you.

Present yourself to all
you know and trust. One thing will lead
to another. Be the vast welter of yourself—

its contradiction, its magnificence. If your guts
squirm like snakes in a pit, if your stories tie
themselves in knots, let them. If you are lost, then

you are lost. Don’t hunker down
into a biography. Present yourself to all that you are not.
It will shape you.

How has he “magically” changed? What has he learned? Simply be yourself. Be open with everyone. Again, it will take courage: “If your guts squirm, like snakes.” A very vivid image! “Don’t hunker down into a biography”: meaning, don’t be a predictable person by conforming. Enjambment also works well for the poet: “One thing will lead/to another.” It reads perfectly on the page as if turning a corner to finish the thought.

So many of Van Buskirk’s poems that appealed to me most you could call eloquent oratory. He has lived in the best and worst of times, wanting to illustrate what he has learned. In the hands of a master poet like him they can be extremely powerful. To conclude, I want to change pace with the poem “LAZURUS, ON HIS SECOND DEATHBED, REMEMBERS.” This poem lives through its imagery. Here is the poem in full.

At first I was horrified,

but there it was—a tingle
in the heavy ooze—something
I could feel like gravity
rotting on the slab,

a sudden shock of inhalation…recognition—
it was me—stench, heat, cold slime
on the move—worms in retreat maybe,
and a swarm—Bees? Flies? Bats?—
chitter-buzz-and-hum-all-at-once, sort of like
thoughts.

Then, bit by bit it all came back—the old geography—
inside-outside in the dark, the violent cresting arch
of backbone; then the seizure, the final rigor
reversing itself.

I never wanted this—
my throat on fire croaking
its new first word—Again.

“Horrified”—imgine what a person brought back to life would feel! His body had begun to deteriorate: “rotting on the slab,” “stench. heat, cold slime.” Almost comically, new life causes “worms in retreat.” At first he just feels “a tingle in the ooze.” Then marvelous onomatopoeia: “chitter-buzz-and-hum-all-at-once.”

A later image reminds me of a movie scene in Young Frankenstein when the lightning bolt strikes the monster: “The violent cresting arch of backbone.” Then his brain begins to work; “thoughts” is the word isolated by itself in its own line. Like a child he uttered his first word, so different from a baby, “Again.”

There are so many other fine poems in this collection—”GRANDAD’S TRIP, “ “AKHMATOVA’S TRIUMPH,” “ SENSE!,” “NAMING DAY,” “SURF MUSIC,” “MUSE AT THE WEDDING”—that wrestle with the fundamentals of life and wring your heart. Let us wait anticipatorily for Bill Van Buskirk’s next collection. Better yet, take in one of his dynamic public readings!

Ray Greenblatt has been a poet for forty years and an English teacher longer than that. He was an editor of General Eclectic, a board member of the Philadelphia Writers Conference, and is presently on the staff of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. He has won the Full Moon Poetry Contest, the Mad Poets Annual Contest, and twice won the Anthony Byrne Annual Contest for Irish Poetry sponsored by The Irish Edition. His poetry has been translated into Gaelic, Polish, Greek and Japanese.

Local Lyrics - Featuring J.C. Sutton

April 17, 2023 Brooke Palma

WELCOME TO MY BARBIE WORLD
by J.C. Sutton

I doubt that I could be a bit more famous!
Designers wowed by bathing suit all strapless!

I inspired outfits, accessories, and bling!
More millions of me sold than Burger King!

Catch a trailer, won’t you? for my movie?
Very cool and oh so very groovy!

I tower over baby dolls while I enthrall
their mommies! To my worship called

by breasts and legs and pretty, pouty lips
by teeny heels and oh-so-swivel hips.

Genital free, though. Of course Ken is too.
What oh what can all those mommies do?

Don’t ask me. Like Oz’s lion,
I am heartless. Keep on buyin’…

What calls you to the literary arts
Being alive pretty much sums it up.

What are your muses?
I've yet to run across a better description than this one, by David Wagoner (lots of google on ohio-born poet & novelist)] Saw it posted in the window of an independent Miami bookstore in the mid-90's. Wrote it down right then. Still so now...

MUSE

Cackling, smelling of camphor, crumbs of pink icing
clinging to her lips, her lipstick smeared
halfway around her neck, her cracked teeth bristling
with bloody splinters, she leans over my shoulder.
Oh my only hope, my lost dumbfounding baggage,
my gristle-breasted, slack-jawed zealot, kiss me again.

Much of your work draws on historical narrative. What works for you about this medium?
The poems aren't subject to history - or anything else. When the muse kisses I just get it on paper (yellow legal pad every other line first best choice) as best I can before I put it on the computer screen and work on it from there.

With prose and poetry alike, whatever it is takes at least! 3 go-rounds before it - and I - am anything like ready to let go and launch.

Yes, the two novels I've published (barely pre-pandemic and last year) are drawn on historical narratives.

Actual memoirs (dreadful writing, fascinating inside tidbits to fact-check) inspired the French Revolutionary era's Until the Guillotine: A Tale of Two Royals.

Actual life-as-lived-and-observed inspired Beau & Eros, one woman's coming-of-aging tale, from the Fifties to a fiftieth college reunion.

You have a new book out. Tell us a little about “Until the Guillotine: A Tale of Two Royals”
See above. Better still, visit my self-publisher website www.WordsworthPublicatons.com It’s all there – and there’s even a blog coming soon!

Over breakfast at a writing conference, you casually mentioned having met Jim Morrison of The Doors before he was famous. Can you tell our readers a little bit more about this chance encounter?
It happened before he became a Door. I had to add "Claim to Fame" to original title, "The Night I Met Jim Morrison", when one too many listeners asked if I wrote it and/or did it really happen? It's too long for here, but am happy to share if you message me through the website 'contact' page.

As a working editor and former book seller, what advice do you have for polishing work for publication and moving it onto the market?
Never underestimate the need for an editorial eye that's not in the head of a friend or relation. Ask any writer worth the read and they will tell you nothing emerges just the way they wanted the first time through. That's what drafts are for. And editing. And rewriting. By self and other/s.

The move onto the market is a different breed of cat entirely, although it starts with a finished, edited, polished poem, essay, short story, full-length manuscript, etc.

The stigma attaching to self-publishing has, thankfully, diminished. (Quick plug here: the Little Egg Harbor branch of Ocean County Library will be doing a self-publishing panel - probably next year, date not firm. Your blogger will be a panelist as will this interviewee.)

As for agented, with the funneling of what was once an array of publishers to next to none, going the traditional agent query route hasn't gotten any easier.

Direct queries to smaller, more independent publishers are worth pursuing - especially for poetry. Any approach has to be based on thorough research into your choices, what they're known for, and, crucially, what they ask of you and your work.

Where can we read more of your writing/buy your books?
Website is the place to buy "direct from publisher" – including the e-book. And “big A” can’t send signed first editions.

My poetry's been included in something like a dozen anthologies published by Philadelphia's Moonstone Press.

A recent essay appears in dorothyparkersashes.com, an online literary magazine. (Forewarned: it appears in the "libido" themed issue). A favorite essay appears in Peter Murphy’s More Challenges For the Delusional (Diode editions, 2018).

I do a lot of spoken word, but night-drive limitations keep me closer to Tuckerton, NJ than I'd like. (Have such fond memories of the open mics at Marlton Barnes & Noble where I worked pre-retirement - shoutout to Anna and Bruce and all those great voices!)

Contact: J.C. Sutton (she/her) 609-857-5345 suttonjc.writer@gmail.com

www.WordsWorthPublications.com

J.C. Sutton is a working editor, published poet, and award-winning novelist whose writing life has embraced arts reviewing, magazine work, copy and ghostwriting, and a freelance business. She is also an ecology volunteer, active in community theater, poetry and book groups.

Review of Choose Your Own Beginning by Amy Saul-Zerby

April 12, 2023 Brooke Palma

Choose Your Own Beginning

Be About It Press

$14.99

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Katch Campbell

Some options:

A. A borderland, in its loosest definition, is a place where two entities (usually nations or societies) border each other. As a methodology, borderlands studies question what happens when distinct societies rub against each other or contest lands in between.

B. Relational Autonomy, in its paired down definition, is a feminist theory that espouses independence requires relationships and interconnectedness to fully encapsulate the female experience. One cannot experience autonomy without also understanding interdependence.

C. Theories of adult psychosocial development from researchers such as Levinson, Valliant, and Neugarten.

D. All The Above

These above concepts all presented themselves to me during my readings of Amy Saul-Zerby’s new collection, Choose Your Own Beginning. While I admit, having a background in both medicine and literature is the most likely reason why these and not something else, I assert they are good “Beginning(s)” for new readers of this collection to ‘begin from.’

A. Borderland

Zerby’s poems create a sense of shifting borders between the speaker and self, the speaker and relationships, and between the speaker and reader. While the border may shift to create texture and control urgency, Zerby’s authority over language and form grounds the reader. The second poem:

I CAN LET ANYONE INSIDE ME IF I WANT TO

can fuck you without
either of us taking off
our shoes & pretend like
it didn't happen.

i could never do what you do
says a stranger after
the reading. says
you're very brave

i don't bother telling her
that i'm not really, i've just
been thru so much worse
than stage fright

A. Relational Autonomy

Over and over throughout Zerby’s collection the reader experiences the push and pull of wanting to be in relation to self, others, world, and yet having internal demands that the narrator not be dominated by their external. Examples include the title poem,” CHOOSE YOUR OWN BEGINNING,”” IF I TELL YOU I LOVE YOU,” and

JFC

this is brutal
trying to fly but
idk today

o, my lost suitcase!

quiet love of
my fucked up life

i’m in it until i’m notin love w

the idea of myself
but also not at all

god forgive me for ever
haven’t wanted

to swallow you
don’t want to be scared

anymore but the world is
still here, you know?

C. Theories of adult psychosocial development

There is a sense of time passing as one reads through this collection. As if the narrator is one person and as if the poems pass somewhat sequentially through a series of steps toward mid-adulthood. The moments that lead to identity, toward intimacy, and onward, a path toward what Valliant calls, Integrity. The first two stanzas of:

TOUCH THE SKY

not because
we’re running out
of time
but because
we can
start to see it
passing

not that we’ll die
without it
but that
you never know
until it’s
too late

The final poem, “ON HAVING BEEN IN LOVE FOR NEARLY HALF MY LIFE,” with expanded and contracting stanzas appropriately reads like a summary of what has gone before, what is happening now, and what is to come. A life being honored, remembered, and created in real-time. Amy Saul-Zerby puts it all on the line, in her book of 29 poems.

Katch Campbell is a connector. With a master’s degree in Science and an MFA in poetry, she creates metaphors for her patients and others about the world around us. Her work is an inquiry on the atrocities we commit consciously and unconsciously against each other and the universe. Katch serves as Vice President and is a permanent faculty member at the River Pretty Writing Retreat, a bi-annual workshop in the Ozarks. She has co-led immersive poetry trips to Slovenia and Italy and used to edit for ZoMag.com.

Mad Poet of the Year - Tonita Austin (aka Toni Love)

April 10, 2023 Brooke Palma

I Remember You (basement duet for Queen B)
by Tonita Austin aka Toni Love

We sang into West Philly-bred microphones
Scents of stale beer and cigarettes floating under our basement borne concerts
Roberta Flack
Natalie Cole
Teena Marie
They were us we were we and we were free
Imagining concert halls filled with fans gasping for gardenia scented motions of us
We danced swaying under water pipes and wooden rafters
Dressed in summer swag, tossing braids and permed ponytails while we bumped hips and dipped knees
We were stars on the dust filled unfinished basement stage
It was all we knew
We were inseparable until you strayed
We went our separate ways
You succumbed to painful nights soaked in old men calling for you to dance again
Asking for alley romance and offering snow dust dreams and green smoke behind masks
You danced to stale music with no voice
Now you’re gone and with you our Webster street duet
Yet
I still hear you
We walk together in a parallel universe
Pushing my stroller under the suburban sunshine
I think of my sister pushing through the door at the crack of dawn
Both rising to meet our children
Both trying to define success in the way we could see
Yet
I still see you

Walking alone waiting on the bus stop in clothes wrinkled in the scent of cigars and whiskey
As I secure the seat belt of my luxury car at the corner of my single home
We both sit cloaked in sadness
I walk with you though you don’t see my journey
Resting in the sorrow of acceptance that I could not save you from yours
I remember you
I see you
I carry you
I sing for you
I write for you
I swing my hips for you
I inhale smoke filled rooms and sip beer through a straw for you
I plant my feet and grab the mic in remembrance of you
You support me
I carry you
I love you
I remember you
I REMEMBER YOU

I chose this poem “In Remembrance (a basement duet for Queen B)” for this month because it was written for my best friend Bev, whose birthday is in April. She lived on the opposite end of the block in West Philadelphia, where I was born and raised, and we lost her at the age of 41. She transitioned way too soon. She got the nickname Queen B because everyone knew her and she walked around the neighborhood like she was royalty. I was the smart, quiet teenager with hardly any friends, and she was the loud, charismatic, funny teen with lots of personality and she introduced me to the cool people on the block. When I was hanging with Bev, people treated me like I was with royalty. My brothers were DJs so there were always turntables set up in our basement and Bev and I and whoever else came over from the block would put on our favorite albums and sing, drink beer and laugh. She wanted to be a star and she had such a beautiful light within her. Each time I walk on a stage, I think of her and this is one of the poems I wrote in remembrance.

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art (March 2023)

March 29, 2023 Brooke Palma

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

Welcome to a new Mad Poets blog, to be offered quarterly.

It’s a pleasure to write about the relationship between poetry and other art forms, to examine ways that a various creative arts relate to each other.

My aim in this blog is to feature the work of various poets and artists, to let you know of interesting viewing opportunities and to provide some angles that might prompt your own writing.

Each One Teach One: The Poetry and Art of Christina E. Johnson

***A House A Home A Journey: Variation of Housetop,*** Christina E. Johnson
(Exhibited at “Celebrating the Quilts of Gee’s Bend”, Swarthmore College, 2018)

One of Philadelphia’s local gems is Christina E. Johnson, a talented fiber artist, teacher and poet who lives in West Philadelphia. To quote her, “My art challenges traditional and stereotypical edicts, encouraging individual empowerment with the hope of assisting women to use their voices and art for continued social change. I believe in the motto, ‘each one teach one and then pass it on.’ ” (Philadelphia Folklore Project).

Christina’s artwork incorporates traditional African-American quilting techniques, for which she received a grant to teach and study in Ghana with local artisans. True to her values, she has spent years teaching and sharing her art in Philadelphia schools, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and other places. She has used her talents to create quilts and other fiber art pieces for children and adults with cancer as well as individuals with HIV and Alzheimer’s. She founded the Quilters of the Round Table and co-founded the Southeastern Pennsylvania African American Quilt Documentation Project to survey the region’s African American quilters.

When asked how visual art and poetry interact for her, Christina shared, “When I am particularly moved by something, my mind starts going about what I want to say to the piece that says something to me. I let the fabric speak to me. It’s a dialogue; we are speaking to each other and speaking to the public.”

Christina’s work is interactive. She is inspired by others’ visual art to write poems and her fiber art has spurred others in this vein. What follows is a sampling of her poetry and art as well as others’ ekphrastic poems that she has inspired.

Eye of the Storm
Swirling
Lifting objects too heavy for people to physically move
The air not contained by
Weather standards this time of year.

The Earth assaulted and wounded by an aerial attack
Round and round
Scary sounds, thumbing grinding and dissonant

The funnel, the funnel debris, water filled
Must land eventually
What damage done to all in view! Homes, cars, folks that could not hide.

Everything lost to a weather phenomenon
That strikes without warning and cares not for our fears or concerns.

No stability.
I am here.
Deal with me until I am gone
Only to return unexpectedly
Whenever.

Christina E. Johnson

Christina explores a variety of topics: family, aging and friendship as well as African-American history. She confided that for the first time she is being more political. Her quilt, “Mama Floyd” was recently accepted into a prestigious exhibit of African-American fiber arts (https://www.quiltmaniainc.us/content/uploads/2020/09/we_are_the_story_press_release_september_14_2020.pdf). “This quilt surprised me because it came from rage,” she said. Indeed, sharing it has led to deep discussions and sensitive writing by other poets.

Note to Mama Floyd
-after fiber art by Christina E. Johnson

Letters cut and stitched
like a ransom note, but no
this fading cry for Mama,

worth less than a twenty dollar bill,
blue knee unyielding as black asphalt
pressed against a neck.

These shreds of stitched fabric
shed as tears of another grieving mother
Justice never spelled at the grave.

Crowds gather flowers and signs
hard streets shout: Another Lynching!
Outrage and hope stir a courtroom,

a nation, whose unequal history
cries with the tragic gravity of bodies
begging the right to breathe.

Steve Pollack

***George Washington’s Slave***, **Christina E. Johnson**

Ona Judge, George Washington’s Seamstress Slave

Her face solemn
She watches, looking beyond the window
Where the wind has tossed aside the curtain.
She sees the road to be traveled.
Ready. Ready to move to a new home.
Her own home. A home without the
Hustle bustle of owners. Owners who bark orders.
Owners who do not pay. They just demand hours of hard
Menial work.
Though work she enjoys and will do when she is free.
Free to come and go
Free to charge so she might live.
There is luxury as she’s dressed for success.
She knows what she wants.
And the bird has sung. Gently, whispering a marching tune.

Christina E. Johnson

Blackbird Watching
(based on “George Washington’s Slave”, by Christina E. Johnson)

Blackbird watching from a sideways perch
Nameless creature within sight,
Let me listen to your silent song
Faceless soothsayer of night.
Buttoned, starched in proper dress
Cuffed for all to see,
Let me rise along your shadowed path
As I soar along with thee.
Blackbird warbling from a nearby branch
Open beak emits no sound,
Let me take your counsel deep within
Knees bent regally on ground.
Lace and trim I crisp for her
Fanning each appointed mark,
She is gowned, the lover known
While I await you in the dark.
Blackbird, teach me of your throated tune
Pray sing your song afield,
I’ll cloak you in my handiwork,
This craft I spin and wield.

Debby Swirsky-Sacchetti

Christina’s E. Johnson’s quilts have been exhibited at Art Sanctuary, the National Constitution Center, Swarthmore College, and Villanova University. She has received grants from the Leeway and Independence Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, and others.

Here are more links to the work of this wonderful artist. If you are moved to respond to her artwork with your own poems, please send it along to cpoems@gmail.com.

www.Blurb.com/bookstore/detail/440229

https://folkloreproject.org/artists/christina-johnson/

https://moodle.swarthmore.edu/pluginfile.php/436812/mod_resource/content/1/Swarthmore%20Gees%20Bend-Events.pdf

Review of Over Clouds of Cotton by Emiliano Martín

March 22, 2023 Brooke Palma

Over Clouds of Cotton

Independently published

$13.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by guest blogger, Anthony Palma

When one thinks of clouds, the easy meandering, organic flow of nature comes to mind. This flow moves gracefully, easily, and without interruption. It is therefore fitting that Emiliano Martín named his new book Over Clouds of Cotton, a work full of grace, ease, and craft that reminds us just how talented a writer Martin is.

Over Clouds of Cotton begins with a statement about how the book addresses “a variety of themes dealing with poetry itself,” something that is very clear throughout the poems it contains. Poems like “Wisely” and “Simple Wannabe” bring us into the rooms where poetry is being shared, capturing the good and bad of poetry in performance. Others, such as “To Write a Poem,” more overtly address the act of writing as an almost Zen-like endeavor. This poem in particular subtly creates a brief snapshot of the author at work, showing us where Martín’s work comes from, not a place of anger or excitement, but of peace.

Poetry is not the only subject of Martín’s work. Much of this collection explores the poetry of living. The poem “Serious Feeling” describes how life appears to end, “when we happen to fall / off / the tree branch of tenderness,” and like many poems in this collection, connects love and creativity as necessary parts of the human experience. Other poems such as “Way to Miss Her” describe love, loss, and memory. It captures those moments when we look back and think about what could have been, moments and emotions that are instantly recognizable, and infinitely relatable.

Other poems provide meditations on existence and self. For example, “Effervescence of Bubbles” deftly identifies a simple, everyday act as a moment of pure existence. Like in so many poems in this collection, the author wrestles with ideas beyond words, but translates them into lyric moments that are at once simple and as deep as the ocean.

What most struck me about this collection was its tone. From the beginning, Martín offers his thoughts in a unique, tranquil way, regardless of whether he is offering social commentary or quiet musings. This is because Martin seems to feel that we all are after a common end. We all pursue peace and harmony, as stated in “Agree to Disagree:”

Then we could simply make a point
to agree to disagree
and keep on breathing at ease
while enjoying it in peace.

It appears that, to Martín, all of the nonsense that occurs around us distracts us from what is really important, that we spend most of our lives disconnected from the people and things we truly love. By heeding Martín’s call we cut through those distractions, and by doing so find ourselves closer to the existences we were meant to experience.

This collection is meant for the dreamer in us all. In this world of confusion, strife, and decay, Martín’s work offers us inspiration and the hope that despite all that we have suffered through, we will all find our way.

Anthony Palma’s work attempts to bridge the gap between poetry and other forms while addressing issues of social justice, identity, and existence. His work has appeared in publications such as Rue Scribe, Oddball Magazine, and the Show Us Your Papers Anthology. His debut collection of poetry, flashes of light from the deep (Parnilis Media), is now available on Amazon. He recently published Horror, a chapbook. His latest project is Palmoetry, a YouTube channel of his poetry and performances that are sometimes enhanced with music. Be sure to look him up on social media at anthonypalmapoetry.

POeT SHOTS - "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke

March 20, 2023 Brooke Palma

POeT SHOTS is a monthly series published on the third Tuesday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ed Krizek.

The Waking

by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

“The Waking” is a villanelle by Theodore Roethke which Brings us in touch with life and death as well as simply living. The villanelle has its roots in French folksong from around the fourteenth century. The form is used particularly well here by the poet. Another famous villanelle is “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas.

In this poem, Roethke asks us to “learn by going” as we move through existence. He celebrates life: “God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,/…” Roethke also discusses the mystery of life: “Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?”. Still there is the ultimate conclusion to life when Roethke explains that “Great Nature has another thing to do/ To you and me;…so take the lively air.”

This is one of the truly great poems of the twentieth century. Every time I read it, I am struck by the simplicity and elegance of the poetic statements found within it. Many of you may be familiar with it. “The Waking” causes one to remember to savor life as we live.

Ed Krizek holds a BA and MS from University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA and MPH from Columbia University. For over twenty years Ed has been studying and writing poetry. He is the author of six books of poetry: Threshold, Longwood Poems, What Lies Ahead, Swimming With Words, The Pure Land, and This Will Pass. All are available on Amazon. Ed writes for the reader who is not necessarily an initiate into the poetry community. He likes to connect with his readers on a personal level.

Review of Museum of Things by Liz Chang

March 15, 2023 Brooke Palma

Museum of Things

Finishing Line Press

$15.99

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

It is inevitable as we move through our lives that we collect and dust off memorabilia that remind us of other people and other times. In Liz Chang’s riveting chapbook, she documents her Museum of Things. Each talismanic object, including a Peanuts lamp, wooden display shelves, and a children’s book, contains an art gallery tag listing the artist, active years, title, media, dimensions, provenance, and catalog number. By utilizing this format, Chang invites the reader to view her exquisitely rendered poems as pieces of art. Objects and lived experience fuse together in an distilled, intimate, and vital essence.

Chang begins with the poem, “It’s a Lamp, Charlie Brown.” Not just an ordinary lamp, this lamp of Peanuts characters symbolize her grandparents’ wishes “that I might always be/ uncomplicated, docile, faithful.” The lamp also serves as a magical vessel for her sorrows:

I do remember
gazing at the balloons that never rose
while my mother recounted how my classmate
in the hospital might die from third degree burns…
feeling grief
flow out of me and into
the balloons’ empty chambers.

As the narrator grows older, the lamp also carries scars in the form of shattered balloons:

My father claims he bumped the lamp
one night while we were “disagreeing”
but what echoes inside my head
my fault, my fault, my fault

Conveying a poet’s mastery, this poem takes you through early childhood to its end. Chang’s poem captures the worldly, whimsical, and melancholy wisdom of Peanuts characters perfectly.

In “She Couldn’t Quite Explain It/ [It] Had Always Just Been There,” Chang describes the history of a relationship through a wooden display shelf found in the West Village “scouring the sidewalks on springtime Tuesday evenings,/ picking through the well-off’s castoffs, their casual/ disregard, rather than face our own crumbling.” As the narrator picks up the worn shelves, her partner makes his disapproval known, yet she realizes “Everything permanent he’d let me bring/ into our space was earthtoned—it [mint green shelves] was defiantly wrong,/ too loud and odd like me.” In this poem, the abandoned shelves mirror the cooling of the relationship. The narrator’s partner is ecstatic to buy a used copy of Crash Test Dummies’ God Shuffled His Feet. “I accepted his token mournfully, thinking/ this is a gift you give your middle school carpool lead/ or a lab partner—not someone who’s carried and lost your child.” The power of this poem is how naturally and subtly Chang builds up to this line. It took my breath away and made me reexamine everything I had read before. She confesses to the reader “I lost that CD long ago,” but the shelves “hang in the only room that’s mine.”

Chang concludes her brilliant collection with the poem, “The Moon and the Sun.” This poem beautifully extols the necessity for a diverse representation in children’s literature:

My father read to me from his passed down library
of Golden Books—books for little American children—
and I learned that stories weren’t about people who looked
like us. I felt my Asian-ness a secret, one
that the authors did not know or understand.

The narrator discovers The Weaving of a Dream, a Chinese fairy tale featuring three sons, that does reflect her experience, or more accurately, her father’s.

Of course, it is the youngest son who stays the longest,
remains loyal and courageous. My father is the youngest,
and when his mother faltered, he did not hesitate
to knock out his front teeth, swallow his cries,
as he flew over fire, stifle screams as he lolled in a vast sea of grief.

At the end of her father’s/the youngest son’s journey following his mother, he discovers “a palace of fairies and monsters. At night,/ the most beautiful fairy hangs a pearl to work by as a lamp./ It is elemental as the moon, this love of art and beauty.” As a child, the narrator would always help her father replace their “moon,” or the streetlamp. When they moved and as an act of love for the narrator and her grandchildren, he “took down the globe” and

He fashioned a lamp base from a bottomless bowl,
rewired the moon so it would not glow too hot,
gifted it to me many years later so I can read

to my daughters at night
by its light.

Rich, evocative, it is hard to believe Museum of Things is only a chapbook, since it contains so much, like the Louvre. The reader could spend many happy and fulfilled hours wandering its rooms and viewing its contents. For fans of pop culture, object art, and poetry, I would very highly recommend Liz Chang’s Museum of Things. It is a stirring work of art.

Mad Poet of the Year - R. G. Evans (March)

March 6, 2023 Brooke Palma

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have R. G. Evans serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2022.

MORE LIFE
by R.G. Evans

Whatever fire burns us first, they teach us the word No,
but on our own we learn the sweeter word More.
We cuddle with excess, shun moderation
(its skeletal cousin the scold).
Food comes first and lasts the longest,
even when lust crashes through like a lineman.
More cake, more kisses, more chocolate, more you.
In my time, I have wanted more days
to lie in the sand beside the warm Carolina sea.
I’ve ordered one more drink
when more was the last thing I should have.
Some years I have wanted more women
than any sane man’s life could hold.
And often when a sun like this one
slips down russet under a dark horizon,
I pray More time, the biggest no of all.
More. Say the word. A kiss into the air.
A gesture of farewell. O life. O now.
O every mortal gift. More, we say. O More.

It’s been an honor serving as the Mad Poet of the Year. Many thanks to the Mad Poets Society for the invitation and for featuring my poems each month. I end my tenure here with a poem from my first book, Overtipping the Ferryman, a poem that is a remembrance, a wish, an impossible dream—everything that makes poetry worth writing and reading.

R.G. Evans’s books include Overtipping the Ferryman (Aldrich Poetry Press Prize), The Holy Both, and Imagine Sisyphus Happy. His original songs were featured in the poetry documentaries All That Lies Between Us and Unburying Malcolm Miller, and his collection of original songs, Sweet Old Life, is available on most streaming platforms. Evans teaches creative writing at Rowan University. Website: www.rgevanswriter.com

Review of American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide (edited by Susan Barba)

March 1, 2023 Brooke Palma

American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide

Harry N. Abrams Press

$21.60

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

From Dolly Parton to Tom Petty and from Lady Bird Johnson to neighborhood garden clubs, the wildflower intrigues across time and often just in time. In its many forms, the wildflower has the potential to ignite and invite both imagination and exploration with and of all senses. It’s no wonder. Given their incredible ability to support ecosystems, pollinators, and awe – often all at once, as well as to ignite a full range of sensory experiences, the wildflowers’ variety is part of their annual and perennial appeal.

American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide captures and curates the wildflower and its many dimensions. The collection is edited by Susan Barba (also the author of the work’s Introduction (9)) and illustrated by Leanne Shapton. The 340-page anthology is a multi-sensory experience, with text as diverse (classic and contemporary authors across various genres, styles, periods, and places all sharing space and readership) as the work’s exquisite abstract watercolor illustrations.

Given the wildflowers’ broad appeal, it makes sense that so many authors have engaged with wildflowers through writing and in so many varied ways, including culturally, politically, and naturally. It similarly makes sense that one might choose the wildflower as the focus of a collection and field guide. What Barba has created and anthologized, though, is a bouquet of infinite surprises and that inspires both awe and admiration.

Henry David Thoreau (the subject of Lydia Davis’s essay titled Cohabitating with Beautiful Weeds (34)) may have “lamented that so few people noticed the wildflowers” (35), but Barba ensures otherwise. The collection offers opportunities and reasons to re-see. Pick one. Pick several. Pick all. No matter how many works one chooses and/or how one chooses to experience American Wildflowers, this collection will not disappoint.

The collection is as inspiring as it is informative, with authors that reach and teach with breadth as expansive as the wildflower itself. With pieces as varied as Sandra Lim’s Snowdrops (31), June Jordan’s Queen Anne’s Lace (39), Walt Whitman’s Wild Flowers (43), A. R. Ammons Butterfly weed (48), and Mary Siisip Geniusz’s Doodooshaaboojiibik (83), among dozens of others, the collection is both informative and inspiring. Organized by species and botanical family, the writings infuse connection with not only nature but also a diverse range of voices and perspectives, all while simultaneously highlighting the incredible breadth of nature’s work and wildflower-inspired writings. As Davis writes, every wildflower has a useful function (36), and the collection captures their utility along with their originality.

The work engages with the wildflower across seasons and at all stages of the life cycle.

From Devin Johnston’s Domestic Scenes (49):

A spray of toothbrushes,
stems in a mug:
a family portrait.

to Henri Cole’s Sunflower (67):

When Mother and I first had the do-not-
resuscitate conversation, she lifted her head,
like a drooped sunflower, and said,
“Those dying always want to stay.”

American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide offers an ideal reading for any season, stage, and state of mind. The anthology engages at the intersection of the breathtaking and the ordinary and straddles the lines often drawn between what is known and what is imagined. The collection delivers much more than a field of dreams. To read American Flowers is akin to taking a walk through a garden of finely crafted letters. The collection serves as a dictionary of both darling blooms and daring colors. The collection also offers a stem for all readers. Pieces vary in form (prose, poetry, letters, essays), time (the 1700s through the present day), location, and season. Readers can create then customize bouquets to suit all tastes as the collection’s pages bloom in unpredictable ways.

The work is also a testament to the power of nature, art, and the written word, in their many layers, hues, and shapes, to soothe, heal and unite – especially when cohabitating in similar spaces. The work is simultaneously contemplative and curious. The pages grow a garden of eclectic words, petals and ponderings, seeded with watercolor hues. Barba writes of a “hope that the anthology, devoted to writing about American wildflowers, will counter the ‘plant blindness’ of our dominant culture by exhibiting many of the flowers in the periphery of our vision” (10). Like with much of life. readers need only pause long enough, eyes open, to appreciate just how successful Barba has been. The collection not only brings plants at the periphery into lines of sight but also highlights the power of diverse voices united.

American Wildflowers is a field guide for all seasons. Both an experiment and a collection of experiments in form and function, the collection is timeless and timely -- a treat for all senses and seasons. Inhale. Exhale. Enjoy.

Found in Translation

February 23, 2023 Brooke Palma

FOUND IN TRANSLATION

I’m excited to get to write for Mad Poets about poetry in translation. If you’ve attended a lot of the First Wednesday readings at the Community Arts Center in Wallingford, you’ll have noticed that translators of poetry (often also poets themselves) present their work from time to time. It’s a task that fascinates me: the verbal texture of a poem is so important, but every language has its own, even languages as close as French and Spanish, or German and Dutch. Every language has things it does better than any other, and you can bet those things wind up in poems. How then can a translator bring the poem into a new language, keeping it a poem instead of a prose retelling?

And yet poetry has exerted huge influence through translation, from Classical Greek or Latin shaping the writing of the Renaissance—or Italian sonnets spurring Elizabethan writing—to the very spare form of haiku flowering in other languages, including American English. Look closely at any big literary movement, and you’ll find translation at its roots.

Louise Labé, Love Sonnets and Elegies. Translated by Richard Sieburth, Preface by Karin Lessing (New York: New York Review Books, 2014).Jerzy Ficowski, Everything I Don’t Know: Selected Poems, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer (Storrs, CT: World Poetry Books, 2021).

Where had I heard of Louise Labé? – Right, in George Steiner’s often wonderful, often irritating book After Babel, where he says that Rilke’s translations of Louise Labé into German have superseded the originals. Surely Rilke wouldn’t waste time translating someone who wasn’t pretty good, even if he wound up superseding her, so when I saw this little book I picked it up.

Louise Labé was a sixteenth-century poet, born between 1516 and 1522 in Lyon: she would add “Lionnoize” to her name (Lionnaise, in updated spelling). Why on earth hadn’t I heard of her before? I mean, I took French all the way through junior high and high school, went off to college thinking I might major in French, and was never allergic to poetry. I *had* heard of Pierre Ronsard (1524-1585 – almost Labé’s contemporary), probably because some of his poems were set as madrigal lyrics. And you have heard of, or at least heard, a bit of Ronsard too: Yeats’s famous poem “When you are old and grey and full of sleep” begins as very nearly a translation of Ronsard’s 1578 poem “Quand vous serez bien vielle,” though Ronsard says his addressee will remember with regret that he once wrote her love poetry, while Yeats tells the addressee that she will look back to recall how beautiful she once was. (And Yeasts doesn’t namecheck himself in his poem as Ronsard does.)

But back to Louise Labé! The book is an odd combination, giftwrapped with additional texts, perhaps to serve poetry fans and more scholarly readers (students, teachers) at once. It opens with super-brief biographies of Labé, Sieburth and poet Karin Lessing; then an artsy (rather than scholarly) introduction by Lessing, adapted from what she wrote earlier as she was translating a bit of Labé. You’re sure to get an artsy introduction when you invite a poet to introduce a poet; this one cites liberally from the book itself, a kind of appetizer from bits of the main course. It also makes me think it would be worth reading some of Lessing. Then there’s a very detailed chronology that which includes not only events (some presumed, with very approximate years) from LL’s life but also historical events in her city of Lyon, achievements by other writers of the sixteenth century (mostly Italy and France: Lyon became not just a center of trade but also a passage of Renaissance literary culture Northward into France: translations of Petrarch etc.), and then after her death, for which we do know the year (1566), some history of her posthumous reputation—up to a 2006 book that proposes that Louise Labé herself was a mystification, made up by male poets in Lyon at the time and furthered by her publisher! The editor of the book (presumably Sieburth) just leaves that there for the moment, and the translations follow.

Richard Sieburth is a very erudite professor who has also translated Maurice Scève, a Lyonnais poet of LL’s era of whom no one has proposed that he was made up. I’ll leave the question of LL’s actual love life and its relationship to her poetry (as the sonnet is a genre of love par excellence)—but the book handles it in a way that doesn’t feel quite satisfying. Women written out of the record for all sorts of reasons, and Labé seems to have been discounted for some centuries due to a reputation for immorality, not poor literary quality.

The translations open with a long and somewhat tedious introduction by Labé herself, addressing her book to a well-educated younger woman whom she urges her to make good use of her advantages in this enlightened age to pursue knowledge. So at least if Labé was a fraud, the fraudsters were advancing a feminist program. She also points out that when you reread something written before you re-feel all that inspired the poem, not a typical thought about poetry.

The first of the love sonnets looks frighteningly Italian: Labé is showing that she can write in Tuscan, just like Petrarch. Lucky for me—lacking all but madrigal Italian!—the original poems start looking very French the moment the next page turns, though the original spelling is preserved. Sieburth strives to retain meter and rhyme, but not compulsively; plenty of lines don’t scan, but perhaps that’s all for the best in an anglophone translation today, where perfect regularity might become monotonous. He’s not padding lines to make them long enough, though there are additions here and there. As always in a rhyming translation words and ideas must change: compare

Labé:           Dans le mol lit le repos desiré
(literal:        In the soft bed the repose desired)
Sieburth:    The desired rest of my downy bed

Labé:           J’ai chaut estreme en endurant froidure
(literal:        I have heat extreme while enduring cold)
Sieburth:    The colder I feel the hotter I burn

Labé:           Puis quand je croy ma joye estre certeine
(literal:        Then when I believe my joy is certain)
Sieburth:    Then, convinced my bliss cannot be denied

-- You’ll notice how much better Sieburth’s line sounds than my literal (though it would scan better if he lowered stylistic standards and contracted “cannot” to “can’t”), and how nice “-vinced” sounds close to “bliss.”

All the original sonnets are in the classic decasyllable form, and Sieburth stays close. French metrical verse, then and now, both gives a syllable to “mute” vowels (final -e) and takes a single syllable for adjacent vowel sounds in separate words: “mon povre ame amoureuse” has only seven beats, essentially losing the “e” of “povre” and the “e” of “ame” but counting the final -e on “amoureuse,” enunciated with a sort of schwa sound in recited poetry. Somewhere Robert Frost claimed that Anglo poetry was all loose or strict iambics, pointing to how we don’t really notice the way a line opens even if it’s a formal poem. Sieburth will shift from iambic (starting ta-PUM) to trochaic (starting PUM-ta) as he moves down a poem, versus the French line that counts syllables. I admire Sieburth for (mostly) not adding words just to make up the syllable count, and for not using archaic syntactic inversions a rhyme to enable. On the other hand, Labé’s lines are all perfect… shouldn’t we get to enjoy that in English? Every time I paused in reading I felt my own thoughts start giving in to the seductive power of the decasyllable, which the Anglo reader perceives as pentameter, meter of Shakespeare and Milton. Labé uses it throughout the book, though the twelve-beat alexandrine would be preferred in the next generation and for hundreds of years after.

But here’s one example:

Pour le retour du Soleil honorer,
Le Zephir, l’air serein lui apareille:
Et du sommeil l’eau & la terre esveille,
Qui les gardoit l’une de murmurer,

En dous coulant, l’autre de se parer
De mainte fleur de couleur nompareille.
Ja les oiseaus es arbres font merveille,
Et aus passans font l’ennui moderer:

Les Nynfes ja en mile jeus s’esbatent
Au cler de Lune, & dansans l’herbe abatent:
Veus tu Zephir de ton heur me donner,

Et que par toy toute me renouvelle?
Fay mon Soleil devers moy retourner,
Et tu verras s’il ne me rend plus belle.

To honor the Sun upon his return,
Zephyr clears the sky with a gentle breeze:
Earth & water now wake from their sleep
In which one did cease its murmurings

As it sweetly flowed, and the other slow
To clothe itself in iridescent flowers.
The birds in the trees now sing for hours,
Easing the minds of those who pass below:

Now the Nymphs do dance & play about
In the moonlight, trampling the grasses down:
Zephyr, won’t you share your joy with me,

That I too be renewed by your company?
Zephyr, make my Sun turn his face to me,
And see how beautiful he’ll make me be.

(It’s weird to be reading something in older French: you sort of translate it into modern French as you read, so this bilingual edition feels like two versions with a third ghost version between them—be it in French or in the reader’s own reflexive English. And yet if you know French it’s pretty clear despite looking odd, right?) In the last line of sonnet XV, “Et tu verras s’il ne me rend plus belle” feels just like “And just see if he didn’t make me more beautiful,” though “beautiful” is hard to rhyme (“dutiful” won’t cut it here); I can’t help feeling that “And SEE how beautiful HE’ll make me BE” overdoes the EE sound. But my proposal, “And just see…” is too contemporary, whereas Sieburth gives us “the Nymphs do dance & play about”—nice old-fashioned syntax that fits well. Notice too that every time Labé uses only two rhymes for all eight lines of her first two stanzas—more than an English poem can manage without sounding forced. (The two final tercets share three rhymes, making for more variety.)

Here’s another lovely sonnet: “XXIII” (next-to-last in the cycle of XXIV):

Las! que me sert, que si parfaitement
Louas jadis & ma tresse doree,
Et de mes yeus la beauté comparee
A deus Soleils, dont Amour finement

Tira les trets causez de ton tourment?
Ou estes vous, pleurs de peu de duree?
Et Mort par qui devoit estre honoree
Ta ferme amour & iteré serment?

Donques c’estoit le but de ta malice
De m’asservir sous ombre de service?
Pardonne moy, Ami, à cette fois,

Estant outree & de despit & d’ire:
Mais je m’assur’, quesque pat que tu sois,
Qu’autant que moy tu soufres de martire.

What good is it now, that you so perfectly
Once praised the golden tresses of my hair,
Or that the beauty of my eyes you compared
To two Suns, from which Love so expertly

Drew the darts that into your heart did fly?
Where are those tears once shed & now no more?
Or that Death on which you solemnly swore
You would love me for the rest of your life?

Or was it all a cruel ruse on your part
To pretend to serve me, enslaving my heart?
Forgive me, Love, if I speak so free,

For I’m beside myself with rage & grief:
But I’d like to think, wherever you may be,
You’re every bit as miserable as me.

That nifty enjambment at the end between Labé’s first and second stanza feels very modern. The final line in Sieburth’s translation is good: the longer word “miserable” avoids the chunk-a-chunk of a too-regular iambic meter of too-short English words, and flickers between four and three syllables in length, further turning the metrics subtle.

Labé’s three Elegies follow the sonnets, and they’re enjoyable too, though more to chew than the poems of fourteen lines—each elegy goes on for three-plus pages.

Sieburth follows the translations with ten pages of notes, and then a 25-page Translator’s Afterward. Like Lessing in her Preface, Sieburth enjoys playing with language, and if you don’t mind that the afterward is both informative and enjoyable. referring again to the fact that Labé’s very existence had been doubted in a recent book, Sieburth declares that he does not disbelieve in Labé—both because it’s hardly plausible that a large number of people would have collaborated in a fraud without SOMEONE spilling the beans at some point, and more significantly because he finds no other poets in that era capable of writing what Labé has written: her personal approach comes through in the otherwise standard turns of the genre. He amusingly calls Labé, in her late twenties when her work was published, “an older woman.” On the whole, however, the book worth a read, especially if you are interested in French poetry, women’s poetry, or translation of metrical poetry.

Poet and translator Sibelan Forrester has been hosting the Mad Poets Society's First Wednesday reading series since 2016. She has published translations of fiction, poetry and scholarly prose from Croatian, Russian and Serbian, and has co-translated poetry from Ukrainian; books include a selection of fairy tales about Baba Yaga and a bilingual edition of poetry by Serbian poet Marija Knezevic. She is fascinated by the way translation follows the inspirational paths of the original work. Her own book of poems, Second Hand Fates, was published by Parnilis Media. In her day job, she teaches at Swarthmore College.

POeT SHOTS - "Today" by Daniel G. Hoffman

February 21, 2023 Brooke Palma

POeT SHOTS is a monthly series published on the third Tuesday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ed Krizek.

Today

by Daniel G. Hoffman

Today the sun rose, as it used to do
When its mission was to shine on you.
Since in unrelenting dark you're gone,
What now can be the purpose of the sun?

This month includes Valentine’s Day. It is a time when some of us consider romantic love and what it means. This short poem by Dan Hoffman for me encapsulates love for a partner that is everlasting. The poem was written after the death of Hoffman’s wife of almost fifty years, Elizabeth McFaland, who was the poetry editor of Ladies Home Journal and an influential poet in her own right. While the poem is sad, it is loving at the same time. Love does end with death.

Dan Hoffman was the Consultant to the Library of Congress on poetry in 1973. This was before the position of Poet Laureate was created. Dan lived in Swarthmore and taught at the college there as well as The University of Pennsylvania. He was a great friend to Mad Poets and read for us a number of times before his death in 2013.

Think about your loves. Can you feel the way Dan Hoffman does about his?