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The following are the scheduled mad Poets events for the week starting on December 22nd:
Poetry Aloud and Alive (Hosted by Mike Cohen and Dave Worrell
Big Blue Marble Book Store
551 Carpenter Lane
Philadelphia, PA 19119
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
Local Lyrics hosted by Amber Renee appears on the 3rd Monday of each month. In it, Amber features the work and musings of a local poet.
Teacher
By Chris Kaiser
With a grizzled face and flat feet, you punctured my world.
We sipped brandy on your back porch while cursing the Zodiac for its capricious whims.
We punctuated our speech with peerless precision until our brains bled like hemorrhagic suns.
That day, when our brains splattered on the walls and ceilings and down our faces, I watered the garden with my tears.
I wept for my family, yet cocooned, and for yours, long gone.
The horizon floated for hundreds of miles in each direction.
Our feet sparkled as if they got tangled in the live wire that connected the somnambulant community.
You saw my future but couldn't heal the rift.
The knife drawer hung open like the lips of a pubescent boy eyeing cleavage.
We might have had too much to drink that night, or maybe just enough.
You said my virgin birth was a memorable phenomenon, especially when the torrent of dead leaves funneled into a dry rage.
Gravity and history were the only two things keeping me down.
You taught me well, but it was time to move on.
I sliced off your face and planted it in the garden next to the Buddha.
It was like being beaten to death with my own dream.
Q and A
Give us 1 poet you'd want to sit and talk to.
Shakespeare. I don’t believe the mostly illiterate man from Stratford wrote the Shakespeare canon. My research suggests the poet was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. His biography fits nicely into the events of the plays and sonnets. I remember as an undergrad asking a teacher the meaning of something in a Shakespeare play. She said, “We don’t know. There are lots of things we don’t know about the plays.” I remember being flabbergasted because I just felt that the poet bled his life all over the page, that his plays and poems were directly related to his life experiences. But the academic thinking is that Shakespeare wrote most of his stuff as literary exercises, not necessarily as biographical minutia. I don’t accept that line of reasoning. Right now there is no smoking gun that proves or disproves Shakespeare authorship. The case for de Vere is circumstantial, but the accumulation of evidence is overwhelming from my perspective. So I’d really like to sit and talk with Edward de Vere to hear his story. I feel for any artist who was essentially divorced from his work and erased from history.
Philosophy has a big impact on your work. Are there any specific philosophies or philosophers that inspire your work more than others?
I like the existentialists and the absurdists. Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre are the three biggest influences on my thinking, although Nietzsche really is in a separate category. I’ve always been an atheist, but the belief in a higher power (and thus in meaning) has become even more absurd as I age and experience the injustices and indignities of living. I like to think we are better human beings when we recognize the brutality of nature and accept our role in the community to soften those harsh effects. I like to think that art and poetry can make personal what is in effect highly impersonal.
What about theater? You have a background in theater. Does that affect your work in any way?
I like to tell a story, and I like using dialogue, or at least thinking in dialogue. Often my poetry is like putting together a puzzle, much like directing a play. I have various different parts of a poem scattered about and I have to bring them all together in a way that makes sense. Writing a poem often seems like a hopeless enterprise until I rearrange the various pieces in a way that makes sense. I remember many plays that just seemed like we weren’t going to open, but something magical happens at the last second and it all comes together. My writing seems to mimic that process.
A lot of your work is darkly funny. How important is comedy to you as a writer?
I wish I was funnier than I am. I love to laugh and make people laugh, but my sense of humor doesn’t always come through in my poetry. Probably hanging out too much with Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre.
Where do you think poetry fits into our world?
I wish the reach of poetry were more pervasive than it is in today’s world. It seems that poet laureates are more symbolic than anything else. I think many excellent writers move into TV and movies. When I’m watching a really good TV show or movie, I often hear poetry in the dialogue or monologues. Two recent examples include season one of True Detective and season two of Mr. Robot. There was some stunning writing in those two series. Also, the reach of theatre has diminished as TV and movies have risen in popularity. But there are some playwrights who write beautiful poetic dialogue, such as Sam Shepard, Shakespeare, Tom Stoppard, and Tony Kushner. I often wonder why I write poetry because of its limited effect in our society. But I continue to write because when you hit the mark, it’s a beautiful thing.
If someone was coming out to hear you read, what is one thing you would want them to know about you?
My poetry isn’t always accessible. It doesn’t always follow a traditional narrative form. So be prepared to crease your eyebrows and tilt your head in bewilderment
Chris Kaiser’s poetry is featured in Action Moves People United, a music and spoken word album in partnership with the United Nations. The Sebastopol Center for the Arts in California also awarded him a prize for erotic writing. He is retired from medical writing and has won several awards in journalism. He has written, directed, and performed for the stage. He lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA, USA.
AMBER RENEE, she/her, 26, writes from her home in suburban Bucks County, Pennsylvania. A fool hopelessly in love with the pursuit of psychic knowledge, she often writes autobiographically; though without sacrificing her distinctive off-rhythm canter. 'Thoughts on This Most Recent Episode' was her 2016 full length collection of self-published poetry ruminating on her thoughts & illnesses. Currently she is working on a musical album of poetry.
In Their Words is a monthly feature where Steve Delia and Mike Cohen interview poets from the Mad Poets Society and beyond to get their perspective on art, life and poetry.
On July 25th, 2019 Steve and Mike sat down with poet, dancer, singer, and professor of Russian literature Sibelan Forrester. In the first part of the interview, Sibelan talks about the influence of Russian poetry on her own work, as well as the importance of desire and honesty in writing.
Click here to see Part 1 of the interview. For the full interview in 4 parts, visit Mike Cohen’s Youtube channel.
Sibelan Forrester is a poet and translator who has published renditions of fiction, poetry, scholarly prose and songs from Croatian, Russian and Serbian. She hosts the Mad Poets Society's First Wednesday reading series at the Community Arts Center in Wallingford, PA. Her book, /Second-Hand Fates/, was published in 2016. In her day job she is professor of Russian language and literature at Swarthmore College.
Steve Delia and Mike Cohen have worked collaboratively and independently as poets and supporters of the arts in the Greater Philadelphia area. Mike Cohen helps to run the Poetry Aloud and Alive series at the Big Blue Marble Bookstore, and has had his fingers in many poetic ventures over the years. Steve Delia is the author of 6 chapbooks of poetry, and has read in a variety of venues, including the Philadelphia Writers Conference and on WXPN. Steve and Mike have also appeared throughout the Philadelphia area as the Dueling Poets.
POeT SHOTS is a monthly feature published on the first Monday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ray Greenblatt
POeT SHOTS #2, Series C
COLUMBARIUM
Legend says doves saved the Altneu synagogue
In Prague in 1558, really
Angels in disguise who hovered cooing
Along the roof while the ghetto burned.
You can imagine the faint creak as their wings fanned
The flames away from Europe’s oldest shul
The obdurate roost of tradition
After each purge, but not why children
Never felt the same blessed shuddering
When the Germans stoked their kilns in Terezin.
The ancient poor called themselves lucky
In Rome to have if not an ornate tomb
For the body then a small hole in the wall
For its residue in a row of such holes,
In a stack of such rows, like the better off
For their birds. In 1944 those children
Not yet ash stood as in a fire line and passed
Box after box from the shed with the arched doors
And tired brick, a spur track to the river,
The Russian tanks getting close. Perhaps
There never was a way to contain such truth.
Though as they scattered handfuls of gray silt
To cloud and clot the current they must
Have fluttered a little, carried in the wind
As when a flock is released and wheels
With calm restraint over a city’s spires and eaves
Before returning to its niches. The humble
In the ancient temple sacrificed pigeons
Instead of lambs on the altar, all
They could afford for their burnt offering,
Their holocaust, Greek from Hebrew, the word olah
Meaning that which goes up. Perhaps when you stand
In the synagogue on a Friday night
Once the crowds disperse, listening to the past
Quietly murmured in a dead language
You are that small opening, that repository
Of memory, which is its own homing
Crossing the impossible distance like a dove.
A columbarium is a room where funeral urns are stored. This poem traces centuries of Jewish hardship culminating in the most devastating event that could befall anyone. These strong lines strike nerves and reverberate: “The obdurate roost of tradition.” “To cloud and clot the current they must/have fluttered a little.” “Once the crowds disperse, listening to the past/quietly murmured in a dead language/you are the small opening, that repository/of memory.” Dust becomes birds becomes soul becomes, perhaps, hope.
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 hosted by Amber Renee appears on the 3rd Monday of each month. In it, Amber features the work and musings of a local poet.
“Give me a cold can of beer, the jukebox playing loudly on a Friday night, and an old toothless couple arguing over the tab, and therein lies poetry... ”
My Pabst Blue Ribbon spills out on the table
And runs a little while, until it slows
And oozes toward the corners of a mat,
Which I soak up with napkins. How life flows
Is not dissimilar from this, in that
We slow down when we're forced to, or we're able,
Under the spell of long commutes and days
That keep us looking down at blinking phones,
From phones to roads, to phones then back again,
While random texts distract us from our plans
Of getting out alive while we still can;
Of starting over, moving on by choice
And not by way of circumstantial severing,
Knowing full well that 'how' we'll leave means everything.
Q&A...
1. Give us one poet, dead or alive, you'd want to get together & spill a couple beers with.
Bukowski. We'd both be spilling beers accidentally, then pouring out 40s purposely for the dead poetry critics who gave us nothing but snobbery and muck through the centuries. We'd probably toast a few old friends too, then come to fisticuffs over who has the better last name.
2. Listening to anything lately that's been speaking to your soul, musically?
Of late (back in summer that is), it's been Nas' "Lost Tapes 2." Super-hyped that a new Gang Starr album is out, which I've heard a few tracks off and can't wait to cop in full. Elliott Smith is always my go-to; dude's a poet on wax. Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Beatles, and way too many hip-hop artists to name. Depends on my mood really.
3. Let's get broad: Where do you think poetry fits in the world?
'Everywhere' would, in short, be my answer. Poetry shouldn't adhere to any one society of thinking or rule of excellence; it's the word, alive on the page; the poet penning verses while the world is crashing down around him/her like a meteor shower. Poetry serves those best who don't give one fig for fitting in anywhere. Give me a cold can of beer, the jukebox playing loudly on a Friday night, and an old toothless couple arguing over the tab, and therein lies poetry; or on the flipside, let my eyes gaze on the bluest ocean, with gulls bobbing up and down on the waves, and a sunset that takes its color from every shade of red imaginable, and whatever the moment whispers to me will be enough. Poetry fits into this world because it is this world; it's the truest reflection of the human experience conveyed through words. How cool is that?
4. Okay, your adoring fans are listening: What do you want the people to know about you?
I once challenged Shakespeare to a rap battle in a dream...he won of course. When I read poetry in public, the temperature of the room must be exactly 70 degrees Fahrenheit and a bowl of Wawa hoagies must be present, with all the meat and vegetables taken out so that the rolls remain like empty husks of yeasty goodness. I write poetry i write poetry i write poetry. A book or 5 is on the way. I also rap. Check out this guy Taliesin aka Big Tal if you like hip-hop; I heard he's pretty good.
James Feichthaler's poetry has appeared in print and online journals in both the US and UK, most recently in Toho Journal and E-Verse Radio. The self-proclaimed 'forrealist poet' is the host of The Dead Bards of Philadelphia, a poetry reading series that occurs every 4th Thursday of the month at The Venice Island Performing Arts Center in Manayunk, PA. You can follow James on Twitter @forrealist_poet and find The Dead Bards of Philadelphia on Instagram and Facebook.
AMBER RENEE, she/her, 26, writes from her home in suburban Bucks County, Pennsylvania. A fool hopelessly in love with the pursuit of psychic knowledge, she often writes autobiographically; though without sacrificing her distinctive off-rhythm canter. 'Thoughts on This Most Recent Episode' was her 2016 full length collection of self-published poetry ruminating on her thoughts & illnesses. Currently she is working on a musical album of poetry.
POeT SHOTS is a monthly feature published on the first Monday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ray Greenblatt
POeT SHOTS #1, Series C
I have appropriated the windy twittering of aspen leaves
into language, stealing something from reality like a
silverness: drop-scapes of ice from peak sheers:
much of the rise in brooks over slow-roiled glacial stones:
the loop of reeds over the shallow’s edge when birds
feed on the rafts of algae: I have taken right out of the
air the clear streaks of bird music and held them in my
head like shafts of sculptured glint: I have sent language
through the mud roils of a raccoon’s paws like a net,
netting the roils: made my own use of a downwind’s
urgency on a downward stream: held with a large scape
of numbness the black distance upstream to the mountains
flashing and bursting: meanwhile everything else, frog,
fish, bear, gnat has turned in its provinces and made off
with its uses: my mind’s indicted by all I’ve taken.
A poet’s poem—it sings symphonically! Fresh language: “drop-scapes of ice from peak sheers,” “shifts of sculptured glint,” “mud roils of a raccoon’s paws.” Just chew and slosh around those phrases in your mouth—best tasting dark chocolate! The many continual colons allow the poem to roll on like a mighty river. A sequence like ”frog, fish, bear, gnat” underscores the power of our English language to use its many monosyllabic words.
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.
After several dormant years, the Mad Poets Blog is making a return. Welcome both to those of you who enjoyed the blog before, and to those of you visiting the blog for the first time. We aim to make this blog a place where you can get information about The Mad Poets Society, see work by local and established poets, and find inspiration for poets and enjoyers of poetry alike.
Here’s what to expect from the blog in November:
Mad Poets Planner - A weekly (every Friday) post that brings you information about the Mad Poets events, coming up in the following week.
POeT SHOTS - Poems by established writers accompanied by commentary from Ray Greenblatt - Nov. 4th.
A monthly feature of work by local poets curated by Amber Renee - Nov. 17th
Starting in December: Video of interviews with local writers conducted by Mike Cohen and Steve Delia
To your right is the Planner for the week starting on Sunday, November 3rd. Be sure to subscribe to get emails about the newest content we post!
LOVE IS NOT ALL by Edna Millay
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
Sonnet is an Elizabethan poetic form; but this one uses contemporary language and sensibility. The theme of love is tested by forms of possible death--starvation, exposure to the elements, drowning, TB, contaminated blood, broken bones . . .What may be a worse trial is directed toward the soul when "a man is making friends with death . . . for lack of love alone." Yet the poet reaffirms her belief in love: "I do not think I would."
HELEN OF TROY DOES COUNTERTOP DANCING, by Margaret Atwood
The world is full of women
who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I've a choice
of how, and I'll take the money.
I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it's all in the timing.
I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything's for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge
to step on ants. I keep the beat
and dance for them because
they can't. The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and languorous
as a looted city the day after,
when all the rape's been done
already, and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage
to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion.
Speaking of which, it's the smiling
tiresme out the most.
This, and the pretense
that I can't hear them.
And I can't, because I'm after all
a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slab of ham,
but I come from the province of the gods
where meanings are lilting and oblique.
I don't let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I'll whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.
That's what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.
Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive
in my own body.
They'd like to see through me,
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look--my feet don't hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.
Modern--"Not that anyone here/but you would understand" she says directly to the reader.
Mythic--"I come from the province of the gods/where meanings are lilting and oblique."
Shocking--"Humid as August, hazy and languorous/as a looted city the day after."
Men beware: "They gaze at me and see/a chain-saw murder just before it happens."
Why should beauty, tenderness, vulnerability be destroyed?
The couple's tortuous trek: "walking, walking, west, west, and, and, last, last, worst, worst." Fragments capture the fits and starts of dying. "Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history." Yet their loving sacrifice for each other endures in history.
POET SHOTS # 3 (SERIES B) by Ray Greenblatt
Pasiphae, by Joanne Hayhurst
From the leathery leaves of olive trees nearby
an open window, a winter rain's been weeping
while her blood is slowly seeping onto
sheepskin where she lies in silence
of the birthing room. As if she's half
asleep or dreaming in the rain light
of a cave, where shadows without margins
merge and shift and sounds sometimes confuse,
there seems to be a whimpering from somewhere.
Rising, dreading, drawn beyond her will,
she shudders as blood trickles down her thighs--
she comes closer, sees the swaddling clothes,
the small stirring in the cradle. Time swallows
time: she's flung, fragmented, into
dark, through whirling worlds, free-falling--
as though her womb had filled with dross or stone,
she settles to the floor beside the cradle.
Beyond her will, fierce trembling hands unbind,
unwind the rags, the endless swathing--
naked now, exposed--a small thing, limp,
and wet, unfolding the old darkness
of a dream. A moan--his, or hers?--
Smother it or back away or leave it
here to dry and wither, disappear.
The small thing turns his head: dark eyes open,
seeking hers; in them wells the sharing
of their sorrow: his delicate long lashes,
the flesh, the downy hide, the muscular
perfection, the cord, the velvet flanks,
the fetlocks, hooves, a fine and graceful tail.
The baby's fingers tighten at her touch--
nails, thin as skin of grapes, pale as water--
his infant fist closes on her finger;
she brings him to her: hot familiar breath
upon her neck, his smell of rising yeast
or forest floors in summer. She rests her face
upon his face, on two furred nubs that will
become the terrifying horns. The queen
begins a heavy humming: old sounds
of the Aegean Sea and winter rains--
Maybe she expected it: the door's
flung wide and, oh, the animal howling.
A mother's love knows no boundaries--not even for something unearthly: "the downy hide, the muscular/perfection, the cord, the velvet flanks,/the fetlocks, hooves, a fine and graceful tail." Although a queen she has suffered so much, as he will: "in them well the sharing/of their sorrow."
POET SHOTS # 2 (SERIES B) by Ray Greenblatt
ON THE BALCONY by Emily Grosholz
We understood at last the native tongue
of the candle struggling to maintain
its story on the balcony, in the wind,
set opposite the quiet moon.
We felt ourselves grow darker with the wine
and an increasing reticence
that waited near us like the sleeping children.
Perhaps it was the music playing
deep inside the rooms behind the wall,
blues from south Chicago with no words
but those the flame supplied,
curved and falling like the wind in veils
or flights of stairways down,
a failure and advancement, always down.
Perhaps it was the blind wall with its traces
of ivy, advertisements, empty rooms,
pattern of our two dark heads by moonlight
broken by the candle's shifting tongue.
All our talk became a listening
and echoed from the wall
in letters and the seams of vanished stairs.
The moon, the candle, answered to each other;
we heard the small one gutter
in imitation. loving and unstable,
mocking and shaking, of the silent moon.
We listened till we half believed
it was the language of the dead,
their strange flat hands like ivy on the wall.
So distracted by the task of living,
we must turn for wisdom to the ones
who wear the past upon their faces
as the walls of houses do,
as the moon reveals itself in phases
moving from a scored white vacancy
into the baleful silhouette of fire.
We watched the flame embrace the wax,
the crumbling wall surrender to the touch
of ivy, sinking deeper in its scars.
Close behind, the music played,
the children slept enfolded in a dream,
their respiration like a lower
run of minor notes, descending scales.
Later the flame dropped off, so suddenly
we wondered, drunk and silent as we were,
why our light companion fled
and left us to our old abandonments.
Your darkened face, just after, lit
to features I could understand;
I read it with my mouth and hands
because my eyes were full of night.
The night is alive for lovers. All things become sentient--"candle," "moon," the voice of "music."
"All our talk became a listening
and echoed from the wall
in letters and the seams of vanished stairs."
"as the moon reveals itself in phases
moving fromscored white vacancy
into the baleful silhouette of fire."
POeT SHOTS #1 (Series B) - by Ray Greenblatt
TRYING TO RAISE THE DEAD by Dorianne Laux
Look at me. I'm standing on a deck
in the middle of Oregon. There are
people inside the house. It's not my
house, you don't know them.
They're drinking and singing
and playing guitars. You love
this song. Remember? "Ophelia."
Boards on the windows, mail
by the door. I'm whispering
so they won't think I'm crazy.
They don't know me that well.
Where are you now? I feel stupid.
I'm talking to trees, to leaves
swarming on the black air, stars
blinking in and out of heart-
shaped shadows, to the moon, half-
lit and barren, stuck like an ax
between the branches. What are you
now? Air? Mist? Dust? Light?
What? Give me something. I have
to know where to send my voice.
A direction. An object. My love, it needs
a place to rest. Say anything. I'm listening.
I'm ready to believe. Even lies, I don't care.
Say, burning bush. Say, stone. They've
stopped singing now and I really should go.
So tell me, quickly. It's April. I'm
on Spring Street. That's my gray car
in the driveway. They're laughing
and dancing. Someone's bound
to show up soon. I'm waving.
Give me a sign if you can see me.
I'm the only one here on my knees.
"Stars/blinking in and out of heart-/shaped shadows, to the moon, half-/lit and barren, stuck like an ax/between the branches." Simple words. Complex thoughts. Her lost love. Dead love. She is the lost Ophelia in so much anguish.
Ray Greenblatt (rgreenblatt71@comcast.net)
Therése Halscheid
will read her poetry and share her visual art
Wednesday September 7
7:00 p.m.
at the Community Arts Center
414 Plush Mill Road
Wallingford, PA19086
Open Mic will follow
The First Wednesday reading series at the CAC is sponsored by the Mad Poets Society. For more information see the web page (www.madpoetssociety.com) or contact First Wednesday series host Sibelan Forrester (610-328-8162, sforres1@swarthmore.edu)