ISSN 2050-4020 n g l e A Journal of Poetry in English
Volume 3 – Issue 2 – Autumn/Winter 2014
Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Cover photo, ‘Sunset through hag stone on Cromer beach’, by Amy Wiseman © 2014, reproduced with her kind permission.
Endpapers, ‘Autumn’ and ‘Passionflower’, by Philip Quinlan.
Angle is edited by Ann Drysdale (UK), Peter Bloxsom (AUS), and Philip Quinlan (UK), and published in the UK by Philip Quinlan. [email protected] www.anglepoetry.co.uk
ISSN 2050-4020
Copyright © 2014 Ann Drysdale, Peter Bloxsom, Philip Quinlan, and authors as indicated. All rights reserved. This electronic journal may be freely circulated only in its entirety. No part of this journal may be copied, stored, retrieved or republished by any means.
4 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Contents
Editorials 8
Poetry - Part One
Lesley Quayle Brigitte Is Dancing 12 Ernest Slyman Reading in a Used Bookstore 12 Annette Volfing Beached 13 Jason Barry Driftwood 14 David Hathwell Shipwreck 15 J. B. Mulligan Notes to Everybody 16 Lazarus at the Wall 16 C. B. Anderson Escrow 17 Elise Hempel I Know Now Heaven 17 Before the Ablation 18 Robert Griffith Green Heaven 18 The Snowstorm 19 To Do 19 Jerome Betts Passing the Churchyard, 31st October 20 Karen Kelsay A Walk through Blenheim 20 Crossing the Divide 21 Janet Kenny Go Gently 21 C. P. Nield An Elegy for Rose 22 The Promise 22 The Jester and Jerusalem 23 Alan Wickes Sacra Converzione 23 Ray Miller Bad Faith 24 Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas Sonnet of Unrest 24 Matt Quinn First They Came for the Sonnets 25 Andrea DeAngelis Daddy Longlegs 27 Sandy Hiortdahl Wizardry 27 CSX 27 Ailsa Holland The Lake 28 Rosemary Badcoe On the Movements of Bodies 29 Rosanna Riches Meteorology 29 Rick Mullin Vale of Telephones 30 Gare Montparnasse 30 Tim Love Musée des Beaux Arts 31 The Poetry Channel 31 David Callin The Amorous Musician 32 The Norwich Beggar 32 Catherine Chandler Song of Praise 33
5 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Reviews
David Davis Norman Ball, Serpentrope 34 Ann Drysdale Anna M. Evans, Sisters and Courtesans 38 Philip Quinlan Marybeth Rua-Larsen, Nothing In-Between 40
Arsy-Versy: Ekphrastic Supplement (separate contents page within) 44½
Poetry - Part Two
Will Kemp Pheasant 45 Planting 45 Heaven 46 Stephen Giles Tutor 46 Jo Bell Almagest Disorder 47 Miracles 48 Jane Røken Doocot Paradise Blues 48 Ode to a Tapeworm 49 All Things Change, Nothing Perishes 50 Sean Elliott Re-watching Films 50 Ed Shacklee The Inkling 51 The Camel 51 The Jackalope 51 Richard Meyer The Mongrel 52 Kevin Casey The Office Scarecrow 52 The Snapping Turtle 53 Richard Meyer Night Lights 53 Annie Fisher A Tin of Tautology 54 Emily Dickinson’s Garage Rant 54 Kim Bridgford Well, Pinch My Toes and Call Me a Jelly Doughnut 54 David Hathwell Sure Thing 55 Will Cordeiro Doll 55 Garrett Biggs Playtime 56 Pluralism 56 Lou King The Flood of the Nile 57 Caleb Tankersley Left Eye 57 Alexandra VanDehey Motherland 58 Peleg Held Interval 58 In the Circle of the Golden Tortoise Beetle 59 Richard Epstein Algernon Swinburne Dreams of Going Out 59 The Poet Protection Program 60 Megan Grumbling Residence 61 Terese Coe Geomagnetics 62 Configuration 63 Peter Richards Logistics 63 Silenzio Onomatopeico 64
6 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Jason Barry Intuition 64 Michael Hallock Garden Life 65 Richard Meyer The Go-Around 65 Michael Hallock ‘Ron and His Father Planting Trees and Shrubs’ 66 Richard Meyer Disputation 66 David W. Landrum Washing the Pot 67 Wrestling with an Angel 67 Tan Yunxian (1461-1554) 68 Heidi Czerwiec Rachel 69
Contributor Biographies and Previous Publications 74
7 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Editorial
Not Kevin’s Fault
Nothing bonds like language. The cant of thieves, the backslang of schoolboys, the newspeak of managerial teams, the ever-changing adaptations of old words by young people eager to exclude the unhip. It’s all cool, demonstrably sick but hardly amazeballs. One of the best ways of holding a coterie together (other than a group hug, the idea of which chills me to the bone) is to develop a jargon that thrives like Leylandii, keeping us in and them out.
When I was working with undergraduates I enjoyed cherishing them through the first few weeks. I asked them to share their hopes and misgivings. Many of them were genuinely afraid of what this ‘creative’ element of their course might expect of them. They were unsure of their ability to write spontaneously, worried that they might not ‘get it right’. This was because they had arrived in my class by clambering up a ladder of examinations that required them to put set texts into a killing-bottle and dissect them according to the received wisdom. They were expert in the production of academic essays in which they demonstrated their grasp of literature without ever descending to the first person singular.
They put me in mind of battery hens. They were superb at producing results but were uneasy with the freedom of doing so on their own terms. It delighted me let them out and encourage their experimental foraging, from the first tentative scratches to the eventual uninhibited rolling in the dust, feet quivering aloft in al fresco ecstasy.
The special language formed along the way. One of the things we had to establish afresh each time was how we were going to handle group criticism. Some groups liked the idea of declaring the writer dead so they could talk about the work as they had done with Dostoevsky. I was uneasy with this. Then it was proposed that the writer should live (and so have a voice in the discussion) but that the work be credited to another, whose name was decided by means of a hilarious brainstorm that left everyone grinning like conspiratorial pranksters. All work discussed in seminars was thenceforth deemed to have been submitted by Kevin.
One situation arose often. Kevin would use words that, in his opinion, conveyed his meaning but others would interpret differently or address a subject in a way that others found objectionable, bringing their own baggage into the equation when discussing the piece and its effect on them. We agreed that, although it would have not been admissible in a ‘A’ level essay, it was a legitimate ingredient in forming a personal relationship with the work under discussion. It was valid and real, but, as one of the students pointed out, ‘not Kevin’s fault’.
8 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
It stuck. The NKF became an element in the discussions. Unlike an infelicity of grammar or awkwardness of expression, it had to be worked through separately or set aside. It was not always a negative; sometimes an individual Gräfenberg spot would be gently touched by a combination of words that made a special relationship between Kevin and his reader. Most often it was a word or phrase that was perfectly legitimate in Kevin’s context but was unfamiliar to his reader and produced a frisson of resentment—‘who’d get that?’ or ‘why couldn’t he write it so I would understand?’
Should we always, immediately, understand? Is it incumbent upon Kevin to make sure not to write something we don’t understand? I think not. Since there is no way Kevin can see into my mind (heavens forfend!) the poor sod is on a hiding to nothing if I so insist.
Poetry should make us want to explore. If the poem is interesting enough, we will seek enlightenment as to what Kevin may have ‘meant’ and the quest will feed our heads and add to our baggage.
I stubbornly refuse to be drawn into the wrangles over individual poets, let alone individual poems, as to whether they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The concept is meaningless to me. I do not have the academic portmanteau from which to draw out the critical language, like the flags of all nations from a prestidigitator’s pocket. I have great respect for those who do, but to me their prose is often as impenetrable as anything Kevin can produce, even on acid.
Once upon a time I suffered at the hands of a reviewer who took issue with me, gently at first, over metaphors and abstractions and then homed in on one word—paradiddle— which he said had turned him against the whole collection, forever. He repeated it several times even though he had killed it stone-dead with his first shot, just to make sure, kicking at it like a drowned rat in a gutter.
After the browbeating came the breast-beating. At first I wanted to howl—could he not see how it worked in the context, could he not hear how only a perfect proceleusmatic would answer the need of the established scansion? Then I began to wonder if it were truly a grievous fault.
I shushed my residual whimpers by deciding that it was, after all, only an NKF. That poor John had clearly been savaged by a paradiddle in childhood, or even by a taradiddle with which he was probably confusing it, like a Snark with a Boojum. This soothed like Mrs.Winslow’s syrup, although I have kept the review on a forgettery stick and now and then I show it to people like a battle-scar or a failed tattoo.
Kevin must be true, first and foremost, to himself. So, when I write, I will see my own paradiddle and raise me a ratamacue and when I read, I will be happy to accept that the pleasing buzz I pick up from another’s erotic poem may be coming from the triggered dildo in my own handbag.
Ann Drysdale
9 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Editorial
Thalassaphilia or, I’d quite like to go down to the sea again (if it’s all the same to you)
It cannot have escaped the notice of the sharp-eyed reader that the sea has always featured on our issue covers. There was no conscious decision or plan behind this, but as a great lover of poems (and music) of the sea, I have to say it pleases me no end that this tradition has emerged. If I say that I like tradition(s) in general it might invite accusations of conservatism, but it isn’t that which informs my view; rather, it is that traditions are organic things which grow out of, and develop over time in response to, need. And there is more often than not a sense of ‘rightness’ about things which grow up organically.
There is a great tradition of poems which are about the sea, or which take the sea as their central metaphor, and one can include in that canon poems of the littoral. Something about the scale of the sea, the liminality of the shore, and the shapeshifting nature of both provides an almost inexhaustible supply of motivating ideas, as also of lore and language. Equally, both the sea and the poems it inspires seem capable of limitless self- refreshment. At the risk of inviting a deluge (!) of submissions of sea poems, then, I will admit that some of my favourite poems in Angle to date have been in that vein. We have, indeed, some fine examples in this issue.
So I thought I would devote a few words to a poet who has, in the past, excelled himself in the genre—the former US Poet Laureate, W. S. Merwin—since, on learning that he has a new collection out this year, I recently went back over the earlier volumes on my shelf to rediscover some old treasures.
My mental maps, as it turned out, were fairly accurate, and after only a very few paces from the tree and a little light digging I confirmed that the best of the sea poems, as I had thought, are contained in Green with Beasts and The Drunk in the Furnace. Fortunately, Copper Canyon Press republished Merwin’s first four books as one volume (called, not surprisingly, The First Four Books of Poems), so, if I commend a few to you, you can fairly inexpensively check them out for yourself.
This, from the somewhat Anglo-Saxon-rhythmed ‘Leviathan’:
This is the black sea-brute bulling through wave-wrack, Ancient as ocean’s shifting hills, who in sea-toils Traveling, who furrows the salt acres Heavily, his wake hoary behind him, Shoulders spouting, the fist of his forehead Over wastes gray-green crashing, among horses unbroken From bellowing fields, past bone-wreck of vessels, Tide-ruin …
10 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______or this, from ‘Fog’:
… Ships were not shaped for haven but if we were There will be time for it yet. Let us turn head, Out oars, and pull for the open. Make we For midsea, where the winds are and stars too. There will be wrung weathers, sea-shakings, calms, Weariness, the giant water that rolls over our fathers, And hungers hard to endure. But whether we float long Or founder soon, we cannot be saved here. curiously echoed by this, from ‘Foghorn’:
… What does it bespeak in us, repeating And repeating, insisting on something That we never meant? We only put it there To give warning of something we dare not Ignore, lest we should come upon it Too suddenly, recognise it too late, As our cries were swallowed up and all hands lost?
This, however, will always be my favourite, ‘The Eyes of the Drowned Watch Keels Going Over’:
Where the light has no horizons we lie. It dims into depth not distance. It sways Like hair, then we shift and turn over slightly. As once on the long swing under the trees In the drowse of summer we slid to and fro Slowly in the soft wash of the air, looking Upward through the leaves that turned over and back Like hands, through the birds, the fathomless light, Upward. …
I could go on (there are at least a dozen more), but having nailed my colours to the mast I think it is time for us to splice the mainbrace, weigh anchor, hoist the moonsail, delicately and privily adjust the cuts of our respective jibs, and straightway make all speed o’er the gently, but insistently heaving briny that is issue 6. Not, however, before I say a special thank you to: Jennifer Reeser, Mike Juster, and David Davis for their help with this issue, and a big welcome to Peter Bloxsom, who has joined the Angle team.
Bon Voyage!
(cue Khachaturian – Adagio from Spartacus)
Philip Quinlan
11 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Brigitte Is Dancing
Her weary feet, un-stockinged, bare. Sea laps them, sucks toes, puckers heels, dispenses ease like linctus.
Haar snakes her long-bones, the salt wind tasting thigh and groin, sharp tongued, ice-silent, teasing a glim of hair.
She lifts her arms, soft hollows grey as underwings of moth, raises her eyes to shoals of stars, flings off her stillness, revolves on the threshold of night, naked as winter, breasts luminous, golden gourds, her body familiar with the sea’s long calling, its grace notes and shifting songs. Brigitte is dancing.
Lesley Quayle
Reading in a Used Bookstore
What lies beneath shimmers up and grasps the eye like a fish and tosses it into the sea. The cold wind blows and lifts a page. The ship rocks to and fro, teetering in my hand. The swells, the surge, the sunlit undulating waves roll and roll, beat against my brow. The white majestic sails billow and pop in my soul. A tremor strolls along the deck, spies inside me a spot of land.
Ernest Slyman
12 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Beached
Sandele Bay, The Gambia
In the afternoon, sky and sea froth white, like a pisco sour.
Loungers, shacks, fences—all wind-splintered, veined grey.
To get down, you pass the swamp palms, smell the sweet drying dung.
‘Sell juice to de turiss.’ ‘No Tories here, mate. It’s an eco-lodge.’
Lunch may or may not happen. I’m thinking, ‘Tripadvisor.’
Others have come for the yoga, and ‘for learning to give from the heart.’
At dawn, the bay is glazed. Greenshanks scatter, and sanderlings.
Each morning, we say, ‘Tangier or Cape Town?’ Then sprint.
A skull washes up, browned like a palm-nut, four teeth.
The mosque at Gunjur is still not finished; cement rises out of the sea.
The cook did come back, in the end. He’d got as far as Libya.
Towards Kartong, the dunes widen; cattle-cream, or pale papaya.
‘Next time we might drive down, through Western Sahara and all.’
Wet boxers and a bobble hat. ‘Give me your e-mail, my friend.’
Klaus blogs about his generator; he wears tartan trousers, three-quarter length.
A cobra spat at the watchdog. But it’s okay; the gardener washed out its eye.
Lamin sits hunched on a dune, sulking into the sunset.
Cold sand, punctured by crabs: they pour out at night, like dark stars.
Annette Volfing
13 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Driftwood
for Skip
A black-backed gull looks crosswise at the sea, scans the fading distance.
A tiger snail leaves her imprint on the sand. We, too, are becoming old.
Yet I try to learn the nature of diftwood, the iodine way of seagulls— how silt can make a fossil of the wing. Dearest, does a year still add another ring?
A stingray kite lines out above the coast and is summoned again swiftly.
Night unfurls between the dunes.
Jason Barry
14 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Shipwreck
Last night I sank a ship. Down it went. Just like that.
A trim little liner fitted for fun, decked and bannered like a shiny model on a pond suddenly shoved downward, fighting for buoyancy while its chambers flood until, unresisting, down it goes.
*
Though, remembering now, I suppose I merely watched.
It must have been some injury to the hull, but looked as if the open sky, heavy with the leaden blue of dawn, had simply pressed its weight against the open sea to make a greater emptiness.
*
A dozen baffled gulls circling invisible perches flew wider and wider until the sun rose up and absorbed them into its terrific light.
David Hathwell
15 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Notes to Everybody
The first two sentences are from, respectively: the last note (addressed to ‘everybody’) of Dmitri Kolesnikov, who took command of the survivors after the explosions aboard the Russian submarine Kursk; and Anne Frank, writer of a famous diary.
Do not despair. Believe in the fundamental goodness here. Words from the shadow-grave: a Jewish girl and an officer, each full-stretched beyond the narrow fist of a fearful heart to clutch and understand an essence past what minds refute and histories contain in echoed pulse of common blood, then shine that torch upon the tattered page for all to read.
From depth of earth and sea their truths release into our sky.
Lazarus at the Wall
I bear the cross of life beyond the grave without the joy or burden of my friend. I’m grateful and disturbed by what He gave my grieving sisters: I can never end (death coming once) but roam the centuries tombed in endless breathing, and touching all. The starving child whose bony mother cries: the young, blind-folded man against the wall: their trembling shakes me—time has not stilled that. I wail for watery milk, await the bullet— and gasp at bird-flight, wave-dance, starry span, bound in the flesh, human eternally, stigmata’d with our common pain and joy, forever at the wall between hell and heaven.
J. B. Mulligan
16 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Escrow
A metaphysical poem written in vain expectation that Paul Christian Stevens would go on editing The Flea.
I often dwell on persons now beyond me Whose absence is uncompensated loss, And Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani Approximates my feelings for the Boss
Who lives on high. Though I am not a Jew, My dearest friends are Jewish—some are still Alive and well. But what am I to do About my fellow Christians who think ill
Of me because I haven’t walked the straight And narrow? Maybe nothing: Let us see What comes of unacknowledged latent hate And who strides dry upon the Galilee
When storms arise. My protest has gone far Enough, and now it’s time to pour a drink And breathe the incense from a good cigar, To carve a quiet space where one may think
About the past and future. Buried friends Are welcome to attend, and so they shall, To castigate me or to make amends, From highest heaven or the depths of hell.
C. B. Anderson
I Know Now Heaven
I know now Heaven isn’t up but down and through a hidden battered door each night— no clouds, just smoky air, a saxophone billowing, falling, in the soft blue light. I know now how to get there—just descend the narrow winding stairs and feel my way along the walls of brick, turn left around another wall that’s splattered with graffiti. And there it’ll be—a beer already at my place at the nicked round table, and my mother waiting again with hers to simply chat. And when another set begins, once more the ashtray is full, I need to wake and rise: no need for tears, and only brief goodbyes.
Elise Hempel
17 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Before the Ablation
Who knew you were watching, listening all along beneath my life, since childhood’s sulks and sneers, just humming your complacent two-note song but jotting down the routes I took, my veers and wrong turns, my surge at school and then the years I dawdled, spurts in work and love, absorbing my missteps and indecision, a mime in wait, studying my every move. Who knew all this time, inside me, you were more my twin than the one I followed from the womb? With catheters, like whip and rein, the doctor will burn away a little piece of you soon, and from then on I’ll try to emulate your sense of direction, your sure and steady beat.
Elise Hempel
Green Heaven
The heart in its bone-house dreams of love and time, of quiet days and star-shot nights. It wants a green hill so far away and high among the rocks that death is lost on trackless scree and wanders in the waste forever. And here, where children never die, where loss and pain are banished, I’d build a new house of simple stone and timber. We’d pull our chairs before the fire, its blush proof against all chills. I’d clear my throat and hold your hand. We’d read the only book we owned, the one whose story never ends.
Robert Griffith
18 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
The Snowstorm
It snowed like this the night that you were born, a white and violent hush that closed the shops and set the streetlights rocking, red and green, above abandoned intersections. Cold blue light filled our window as nurses came and went, checking the soft twinned drumbeats of hearts soon to be sundered then calling home to husbands, wives, and children. Did they need eggs or milk? Firewood, candles, bread? The storm wore on and piled the trees with snow. Near dawn, you cried, and we wiped vernix white as wax from ears and eyes. We chafed your arms and warmed your purpling feet. You were perfect in your fury, this new world cold and harsh. I stepped outside, the quiet swelling softly as your lungs, and watched the snow obliterate the street, the cars, the parking lot. In all that white, a lone bird sang a querulous song. He seemed to ask how he could wake to find the world so changed, the light so incandescent.
To Do
There are placemats to be wiped down and set, blue as lakes, on the dining room table. Bills lean in their cubby like tired travelers in a bus-stop shelter, and the dog waits patient as a monk by his bowl. The needs of the world stack high as dishes in the sink, and the work of days and years is the work of sorting coins, washing clothes, and making beds. We look for more. We ask for rapture as if it’s a little fire that follows us from room to room, bringing its small light to everything we do. But what would we have without the quotidian, those humble concerns that fill our lists, that fill our thoughts at night? The days, like empty doors, would gape on an infinity of nothing, a void so profound it swallows all our light and hope. But we are blessed. We have our tasks and chores. We roll the trashcan to the curb, wheels growling happily through the driveway’s chat. The morning’s brisk, and we look up to see the sharp blue sky of autumn, the sere leaves falling all around.
Robert Griffith
19 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Passing The Churchyard, 31st October
Inside the railings’ black iron cage, the stones Stick from the hummocked turf like crooked teeth Outlined with moss and scrawled with lichen-stains.
Sheep rub their sides on names and dates of death.
They crop and cough, a mist-wreathed munching flock Near the town’s heart at night, sepulchral shapes That startle walkers who with no qualms look Through ribs of carcasses in flesh-hung shops.
Jerome Betts
A Walk through Blenheim
Across the field, a partial hedgeline planted three hundred years ago, still winds its way between an ancient English oak, and plum. At sunset, their silhouettes turn granite-gray, revealing several spheres of mistletoe displayed like ornaments, in higher boughs. Their filigreed twigs take on a ruby tint. In wintertime, sparse greenery allows a view of zigzag branches, errant arms extending over broken walls. The damp and barren limbs against the muted scene; December’s light hangs like a shaded lamp,
Illuminating what the summer’s hidden: The undergirding, ridged and gnarled and dark, a mass of wood, an artwork in itself, three centuries of weathered, aging bark.
Then, I recall your picture as a youth, the flawless skin, your fragile spirit, how I never saw the strength beneath your charms, until a later season would allow.
Karen Kelsay
20 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Crossing the Divide
We knew beforehand we would put you down On Wednesday evening. So we made a pact: To spend two days inside the house. You found A windowsill, remained aloof, and backed
Against the smudgy glass behind my dresser— With space enough for you, but not for us. And I considered it to be a lesser Evil than a darker place. I’d fuss,
Extend a finger, stroke your ear, and speak. But with each touch you’d turn your head, withdraw. The contact, causing pain (prognosis bleak). Distance, was the cruel unwritten law.
You woke me up the night before you died, To lick my face. Then, moved away and stirred A little, several inches from my side. And for a full five minutes, loudly purred.
Now, looking back (it’s only been a week), Your gesture seems a selfless, sweet, good bye, The way you pressed your nose against my cheek, The night before we scheduled you to die.
Karen Kelsay
Go Gently
A poet who aspires to write despite the closing in of night must keep the content rather light to spare the young from shock and fright.
The future lies behind you but don’t let them know the gate is shut. Pretend you are a saintly nut. Just give them the director’s cut.
Pan out on wide horizons where the radiance imparts a glare. Most definitely do not share a cupboard that is nearly bare.
Don’t damage their elated trust in love and light and worldly lust. You had your turn and now you must retreat discreetly, dust to dust.
Janet Kenny
21 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
An Elegy for Rose
Her frail breath calls through the chemical hours: ‘My body is broken, make up my bed, A deep cup of reed leaves lined with reed flowers,
Feathers and flickers beyond human powers And cram it with anguish when I am dead.’ Her frail breath calls through the chemical hours:
‘Furnish with letters, my Saint Christopher’s Medal, an unleavened morsel of bread, A deep cup of reed leaves lined with reed flowers.’
A creature of proud civility cowers. The elegant brain has ruptured and bled. Her frail breath calls through the chemical hours:
‘Is life a race of unmerciful hours To capture with toil, with furious dread, A deep cup of reed leaves lined with reed flowers?’
A reedling weaves space from whispering towers: A grail for white eggs, for wings of soft red. Her frail breath calls through the chemical hours A deep cup of reed leaves lined with reed flowers.
The Promise
Emerald is the true colour of frost, The promise of winter starker than loss, The joy of forgetting not worth the cost. Emerald is the true colour of frost. The slow horizon is soon to be crossed; The stone colossus corroded by moss. Emerald is the true colour of frost, The promise of winter starker than loss.
C. P. Nield
22 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
The Jester and Jerusalem
I build a castle in the air, Composed of every motley ache For sense within my backward stare To body forth a crown and break—
Composed of every motley ache— The lineaments of never there. To body forth a crown and break I feel, perhaps, my soul could dare
The lineaments of never there To laugh in one blue diamond court. I feel, perhaps, my soul could dare The knights and ladies of my thought
To laugh in one blue diamond court At architects who like to doubt The knights and ladies of my thought. Cross out the brimstone grid and shout
At architects who like to doubt The sense within my backward stare— Cross out the brimstone grid and shout: ‘I build a castle in the air!’
C. P. Nield
Sacra Converzione
for Matthew
We talked into the night. ‘Denial’, you said, ‘repudiating self, remains the only way to God.’ Ah yes, I thought, the lonely, briar-choked road that half-starved pilgrims tread— ‘But what of beauty and desire, the garden of delights.’ I poured another glass of red; ‘pleasure is my path to heaven instead, I feel no need to plead for special pardon.’
But when, like figures etched on glass, the saint and seraphim stand at my side, I sense their shadows mirroring my own, a faint reflection of the almost known. Intense— faith’s fickle rush; and then the aftermath, a Godless world, the bleak, monotonous path.
Alan Wickes
23 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Bad Faith
Most often I spot them way off in the distance: something in the gait and the weight of their symptoms is bearing the stamp of repeat prescriptions. Alarm bells screech, I turn on a sixpence to cross roads inventing a previous engagement, catch a flower arrangement, bend to tie laces, bury my head in shop windows replete with cheap trinkets. I tread light on my feet for dejected spirits can make cock-crow visits and patches of ice combine with the rain to throw me off-balance; I clutch at displacement before facing ex-patients again.
Or else my elbow shudders at fingers as a ‘Hello stranger!’ wraps round my shoulder. I spin to a name that I can’t remember; a diagnosis, a drug or simply disorder. The furrowed flesh of distress and despond; the failure to bond and exasperation with trial separations from errant husbands, scars and bruises borne by the infants; the rooted abhorrence roared at the parents have emptied my empathic slaps on the back— all of that dirty laundry is packed into yellow bags for waste disposal; I no longer dance to the non-judgemental. What’s once contemplated can’t be unthought; they take me at face value; I sell them short.
Ray Miller
Sonnet of Unrest
I guesstimate the distance from the frond to roots entrenched and tangled deep beneath the tombstone where my mother sleeps. Beyond the counterpane of greenery; a wreath beside her grave adorns an easel made of wood that venerates another life. Misunderstood, today I choose to wade among the dead instead of facing strife at home, the struggle of who’s wrong or right; small differences that escalate from loud and louder still until eclipsed by night— yet there is comfort stepping through a crowd reclined, where no one speaks when right beside, hereafter leaving differences aside.
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
24 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
First They Came for the Sonnets
I
They bring one over and say: This one says you know ’im.
But I say no, I don’t know any poems.
II
It doesn’t even rhyme! someone shouts, another screams Queer! and I watch as he picks up a stone, and I don’t interfere.
Then it’s thrown. I turn away, hurry home.
III
I try to save as many as I can, I stay up nights and cram them into my head, but it is dark in there, and they must stay quiet, and I cannot feed them.
Some get lost, some fall apart. Some die.
Continued
25 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
IV
It happens at work: a broken corner of a poem slips dead from my lips. Nobody speaks.
But all day there are looks.
When I get home there is just time to destroy the few books
I have left.
V
Shown the instruments of torture, I do not hesitate.
I give them all up— every poem.
I apologise for not knowing more.
VI
The operation is painless.
VII
Some nights I think I hear them in my dreams, scrabbling, unravelling.
But when I wake there is nothing.
Matt Quinn
26 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Daddy Longlegs
Your eyebrows are spider legs you pull out of too-porous skin; reluctant, they insist on growing back again.
The boys, they used to rip the daddy longlegs’ legs out one by one to watch it move with less and less freedom and more and more pain.
Pluck your eyebrows to invisibility and you will have no expression of your own then the boys will leave you alone.
Andrea DeAngelis
Wizardry
Gardneresque, we call his hair, White-blonde, Merlin-straight, a black pipe held close, head tipped sideways: what Grendels roamed his mental sphere, Sunlight Man, Goat Lady, who spoke to him in whispers that day as the big Harley crossed the Susquehanna bridge, as he leaned into the turn on Route Ninety-Two, headed to the university, but sailed instead beyond us?
CSX
Steel wheels Thunder onward: Train speeds through the hollow, A coal god’s fierce, joyous whistle, Nightly.
Sandy Hiortdahl
27 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
The Lake as this was my first visit I walked in slowly swam naked to the middle felt the cold water slide silk under my arms between my legs
I floated on my back let the sun warm my face my breasts my toes as I trod water weeds stroked my feet fish skimmed my arms leaves from a weeping willow boated on the surface the water below was murky
I panicked lifted myself out hovered above put the water in an aquarium let its sediment settle examined it from all sides gathered the leaves into a heap on the bank to stink let the waterweeds dry out pruned the overhanging trees lined up the rocks from the beach into three neat rows pinned the dragonflies and the pondskaters onto a board where the contrast between the colours of one and the drabness of the other was most noticeable
Ailsa Holland
28 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
On the Movements of Bodies
About the time that Newton wrote Principia and every spinning object settled down to orbit in its newly designated way the dodo died. Some pig or dog or crab-eating macaque scoffed the last surviving egg. The hatchling would have waddled up to watch had Isaac shown with diagrams and pantomime how its sternum lacked the strength to let it nest above the scrub, that gravity would grasp its bones and dislocate the stubby wings, suck the last remaining bulbous beak into the swamp where motion’s laws hold evolution, paused.
Rosemary Badcoe
Meteorology
My weather forecasts are not derived from mechanism or law, instead I look at historical trends: my ancestor reading by candlelight in Nordic-winter darkness, skating across thick river-ice to get to the Christmas market.
And I look at historical trends to formalise hand-me-down mind sets caused by skating across thick river-ice to get to the Christmas market and relationships with mossy rocks and damp gods.
I can formalise hand-me-down mind sets caused by meteorology divined from open pinecones, cows lying down, relationships with mossy rocks, and damp gods, through binary, the computerised cold-front arrows of my ancestor.
By meteorology divined from open pinecones, cows lying down, I meet the weather systems halfway as they mix, scatter through binary and the computerised cold-front arrows of my ancestor, pointing me to where I should be, where I will be warm.
I meet my ancestor halfway as they mix, scatter weather forecasts not derived from mechanism or law, pointing me to where I should be, where I will be warm, with my ancestor, reading by candlelight in Nordic-winter darkness.
Rosanna Riches
29 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Vale of Telephones
Do not attempt to contact Mr. Jones directly. He will come to you in time. Be patient in your vale of telephones, your world of ethernets and loading zones. The future we envision is sublime. Do not attempt to contact Mr. Jones by any means. Becalm your rods and cones. Go dark. Go light. Explore the paradigm. Be patient in your vale of telephones, prescription sedatives and milestones. You’ll have no closure now. No perfect rhyme. Do not attempt to contact Mr. Jones who bides in transubstantial blood and bones. Ask not for whom the Bells of Ardor chime. Be patient. In your vale of telephones alarms are nullified and dial tones don’t signify. The lines are caked with lime. Do not attempt to contact Mr. Jones. Be patient in your vale of telephones.
Gare Montparnasse
We’ll meet at my hotel on Rue de Lille. Or are you waiting on the Quay d’Orsay this time? I can’t explain it, but I feel the mistral that surprised us in Marseille, that same confusion rising from the Seine to complicate the bookstalls and the crowds as Saturday unfolds to autumn rain. I navigate another bank of clouds and tell you once again about the rose. About the postcard at the flower store. Gare Montparnasse. A photograph that shows a train ‘that crashed down from the second floor one hundred years ago today. It’s true!’ I bought it, and I bought a rose for you.
Souvenir de Paris, October 22, 1995
Rick Mullin
30 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Musée des Beaux Arts
From Belgium’s pre-war fields he saw a boy who fell through centuries, his technique failed, not finding love while Jews, unnoticed, died. The weary ploughman’s pleats, unruffled, match his measured furrows not the puffed-up sails, old masters pleased young Wystan thought to rhyme.
His craft sailed far from Europe’s tumbled myths, conversion in its wake. Invited back to Oxford, limestoned wrinkles deepened, touched a crazed belief that prayer, not God, would help him suffer, slipper-shuffling from the bar each night to find his cottage in Christ’s grounds.
He left Kirchstetten farmhouse one cold day, his life’s sole purchase. We know only that he found a Gasthaus, somewhere to go. Clocks kept ticking, heaven harvesting the gold, a blinding influence that makes us fail to see young stowaways thrown overboard.
The Poetry Channel
Once more we sail beyond dawn’s harbour walls, pose laughing in the prow’s romantic spray; our site’s not shown on any chart, and yet our winking, wine-breathed pilot knows the way.
Our masks prepared, we dive into the wreck, set on our course. We talk in signs, defy our age, rise heavy to our craft. They want to see us stripping off—we can’t be shy.
No mast-tied hero—we’re all equal now, we all have lines to change, the licensed power to dream. By setting good examples we achieve our 3 cliff-hangers every hour.
Of course there’s no surprise—back home we’ll add addresses to our lists, unload our cache which later polished up in workshops is revealed—but gently so—as last year’s trash.
Tim Love
31 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
The Amorous Musician
After that hasty exit in the landau— the unexpected voices in the hall, the knotted sheets, the Gräfin at the window—
I said Auf Wiedersehen to snowy Lindau, now grown too warm, despite the chilly nights, for that was not my first enforced glissando.
So, whistling a debased gavotte en rondeau, I took the road for Italy, where I have made myself a pretty little nest, parlando
Italiano like a native—Quando va da casa il tuo marito?— and mastering the art of innuendo as I have seen the worldly-wisest men do. The amorous musician alternates between crescend-o and diminuend- oh.
The Norwich Beggar
Out of Tombland he came, loping, at a sort of unarticulated trot, as though long acquaintance with pavements and doorways had stiffened his joints beyond ordinary unbending.
In a voice made hoarse by too much sleeping out, and mindful of too many little kindnesses not done and not received, he asked for change. So passionate a please I had not heard, had not thought it such a mighty word with power to move beyond polite requests to wait and pass the salt and mind your head. ‘Just another quid mate. Oh please mate. Please!’
Then he was off again, dressed all in black, down to threadbare socks in bursting trainers: a malcontent, an uncomplacent soul, debating with himself of practical matters.
David Callin
32 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Song of Praise
Rejoice! soars from the carillon, a song of praise. How can I sing—since you are gone—this song of praise?
A morpho flutters in the forest of Manaus, a cyan blue ephemeron, his song of praise.
Atop a bare ombú, a pampas meadowlark trills to the sapphire cabochon a song of praise.
Between the rising and the setting of the sun, enfolded in an antiphon, a song of praise.
She deals in tar & tallow, turpentine & twine, lifts one last chanty to the dawn—in song she prays.
Catherine Chandler
33 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Review
Norman Ball ‘Serpentrope’
White Violet Press, 2013
If I told you that most of the poems in Norman Ball’s Serpentrope are metered and rhymed, with four-fifths of them sonnets, you’d probably get the wrong idea. So we’ll consider that a bit later. Instead, let’s begin with the eclectic nature of the book.
I believe Serpentrope is the only poetry book published to date that contains poems on the topics of: Civil War battle fatigue; formal poetry in its relation to a famous wardrobe malfunction; and Aleister Crowley’s Cult Of Lam. The poems often display a love of detail—historic and current—as in this excerpt from ‘Observations of a Civil War Surgeon As Night Falls’:
Cattail and catgut duel within the marsh that clads the Susquehanna east of York. Two minstrels, facing off, interpret harsh conditions with guitars. The river’s fork
accompanies with stiff, percussive reeds. …
Ball’s poems stem from an obvious intelligence, and that seems appropriate. Often they mimic the way that neurophysiologists characterize our thinking process: as the firing up of nodes of meaning that excite other nodes in a sort of spreading activation, until a whole pattern of nodes—perhaps previously unconnected—fires together, leading to new connections and novel insights. None of this, according to the theory, is sentential. Sentences come later. This mental commotion underlying conscious thought is echoed in Ball’s poetry in passages such as this from the poem ‘Formal Spats’:
… … One dares
not ride a colleague’s time-worn rhyme. Left-hand feet may dangle. Diction may rankle, stubborn with vague intent. Relax. Sonnets can’t meet the rent with a metered stick. … …
Or this, from ‘It Was A Totter From The Start’: … The duty steeped itself in stand-up time, a rope to drag the day upon itself
34 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
with busying to coax the febrile mind from thought, to book, to browse, to empty shelf. …
Many of Ball’s poems employ puns, allusions, and apparently unrelated content. The result is that they often excite neurons in our minds that, at least for me, are firing together for the first time. This type of mental fireworks can be fatiguing, and it may be that the best way to read Serpentrope is to limit oneself to two or three poems a day.
I may have mentioned that Ball’s poems take on a wide variety of subjects. Serpentrope includes poems centered on: the cartoon character Dilbert rendered in a Hilbertian sonnet; dropping poems by airplane on Afghan villagers in wartime; and ballerinas with bulimia. And often the poems render their subjects in witty, punning, allusive lines. Like these in an excerpt from the poem about Dilbert, the cartoon engineer working in a cubicle in a large corporation:
… … Dilbert stirs this pot with lead
balloons. His poker-face is barely drawn by nine. Outside the box, Big Bosses rake trapped miners over coals while overhead a phosphor-fingered entity has sawn animal spirits squarely down to size— three taut frames. Dilbert’s zeppelin subsides.
Of course, like real-world explosions, explosions of meaning can do damage if not controlled, and Ball is an explosives expert. These poems are nearly all contained in meter and rhyme, and now that you have a feel for the content, it can more fully be revealed that most of them are in sonnet form. The interplay between the subject matter, the allusions, and the forms adds another dimension to the experience of reading Ball’s work—a dimension that I believe elevates the wild content by the mere fact of being under such control.
Given the eclectic nature of Serpentrope (I should mention that it contains poems on the subjects of: belly fat; the fate of a member of the band REO Speedwagon; and the turbulent life of the prophet Isaiah), it should be noted that the book also contains some recurring themes.
The most explicit is that of the snake Ouroboros, a topic treated in several of the poems and the subject of an essay included as an appendix to the book. The image of the snake with its tail in its mouth, sometimes curled protectively around the earth and sometimes a part of it, has, according to Ball’s essay, fascinated him for years. In the poem ‘Ouroboros,’ Ball portrays the snake in a menacing way:
… … The proper name’s Hell—
35 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
that cool, wrapped bitch—trite circle. Let her clasp sweet tail in teeth. All gray divides sell
foot-in-mouth diversions. I will have my foe just-so. Discrete obsession. Damn all demons who arrive. The golden calf, zirconia stalking horse, is lamb
I dressed for slaughter. … …
But it is not always so. Sometimes the snake is a hoop snake rolling along, and sometimes it is a snake completing a cosmic circle.
Another theme in the book is that of human relations. Serpentrope does not contain a love poem as I understand them, but there are multiple renderings of soured or difficult relations between couples. The concluding lines from the poem ‘Endure’ are one example:
… … We gratify what synapses are lit. Hullabaloo is all that floats above—mere atmosphere. What anchors? That’s a fixity less clear.
The reader of Serpentrope will soon see that Ball is no sentimentalist.
Poetry itself forms another theme in the book. There are multiple poems on the topic of poetry, a theme that first appears in the inscription that begins the book:
Teach a man to write poetry and he will starve forever.
Ball begins the poem ‘Twickenham Stadium’ by stating ‘I’m not so much a poet as a wit,’ and then proceeds to compare himself and his work to the career of the American baseball player Harmon Killebrew, a Hall of Famer who, nonetheless, had some years with low numbers of runs batted in. Poets writing poems about poetry can be trying, but Ball pulls it off—in this case, with extended comparisons between his work and baseball. Let’s consider two techniques that I particularly admire in Ball’s work. The first is the clever enjambment, and the second is the killer concluding couplet. One of my favorite poems in the book is the sonnet ‘At the Funeral of a Former High School Crush,’ which begins with the wonderful enjambment
I memorized her purple halter top to bottom. …
36 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
The poem then describes time shared together in physics class, and concludes with this couplet that brings us back to the funeral of the title:
They found her with her head arrayed in glass flung forward like a weightless, prescient gas.
I love that couplet. And many others in Ball’s book. One more example. In the poem ‘Slither,’ that begins with a quote from Coleridge referencing Ouroboros, the narrator learns that a walk with his lover is actually her way of finding a suitable place to terminate their relationship. She has chosen the bookstore where they met to end things in Ouroboran fashion, and the poem itself concludes:
… All along, this princess had availed a serpent-guide. I was the frog to her formaldehyde.
Serpentrope is a book of formal poems that really doesn’t feel like one. It treats a wide variety of topics (I should mention that Serpentrope contains poems on: the antediluvian apostasies of G. H. Pember; the difficulties in Ireland; and the nature of testimony in the aftermath of the mortgage meltdowns). There are wonderful gems, couplets, and full poems that sparkle and explode. Serpentrope is a virtuoso performance by a poet of wide- ranging intelligence whose careful use of form adds considerable impact to his work.
David Davis
37 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Review
Anna M. Evans ‘Sisters and Courtesans’
White Violet Press, 2014
This collection is like a box of chocolates. There—I’ve said it; probably the lamest opening gambit in the reviewing game. I can hear the long slow sigh and the half-hearted preparation of a thousand simultaneous Sicilian defences.
Tant pis. That’s the way I approached the book; a collection of almost forty sonnets which, by very definition are small confections of identical size, sitting separately in notional paper cups beneath an index that, like the inner lid of the box, denotes what is to be found in each of them. Reading the list I found my fingers hovering in exquisite indecision, my head choosing among familiar descriptions, deciding between a nut cluster and a fruit ganache, knowing to some extent what to expect from each of them, but prepared for surprises in the combination of flavours and the choice of chocolate— dark, light and all intensities in between.
Our poet has poked two fingers in the eyes of the workshoppers who cry, ‘Don’t give too much away in the title’ and who condemn such an approach as ‘too telly’. I found it honest and charming, but maybe because the subject matter here is like a direct transfusion from Anna’s world to my own. Every title rang a bell; not one of them elicited a ‘Huh?’ Each one begins ‘My Life as a …’ then names a female archetype and delivers a first-person narrative as though from an individual of that ilk. Simple, dangerous, and to some extent foolhardy. But it works.
The reason it works is because the voice is unashamedly Anna’s and it is speaking to the echoes of history that we have accumulated throughout our own lives and tucked away in corners whence they pop out and surprise us in conversations and quizzes. Things we had forgotten we knew.
Sometimes she tricks us when we are too clever. When the Tudor Abbess mentions ‘The Queen’ it takes a quick adjustment of expectation to realise that she means Mary and not Elizabeth. The whole book is a delightful challenge. She never speaks as a named character, always as notional spear-carrier, one who would probably have no lines in a historical drama. What HBO did with two soldiers, named just once by Julius Caesar in a war memoir, Anna does with her female supernumeraries. It is every bit as clever and the head-game is on from the outset.
One of the things I dreaded while I was waiting for my copy to arrive was that this might turn out to be a document of feminist tub-thumping, with poems that ricocheted like bullets from Valerie Solanas’s gun. I was deliciously disabused. The women in these poems are, for the most part, witty and wise, aware of the world that shapes their lives and well versed (yes) in ways of using it to their own ends. The can-can dancer and the ‘docta puella’ are fine examples of this.
38 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Others, like the Norse spae-wife, display a modern understanding of an earlier world and it never occurred to me to take issue with that. It is a good example of the essential female wisdom that begins with observation and passes through questioning to accommodation. Even the few ‘victims’ state their cases quietly and without histrionics. The nameless girl, living in fear in the Jim Crow South, hurt my heart. The little temple prostitute who finds her own way of making love from a life of sex, impressed me with the serenity of her submission, overlapping as it does with that of other female role-players in the religious life of their times. The triumph of the May Queen strikes another place on the skin of that drum, while the morganatic wife of Genghis Khan, rings a crystal note of her own.
There is much to amuse, much to laugh aloud at, many moments for punching the air and some for closing the book to think for a while. And all in equal-sized poetic portions, each sonnet effortlessly crafted (never over-crafted) with content dictating form within each one, as it should.
I have spent time with a poet I am pleased to call ‘sister’, not least because she has touched often upon my own inner courtesan.
A word of warning. Do not eat too many at a go. They are self-contained and perfectly enrobed and to guzzle a fistful at once will diminish their individual impact and lie heavy on the digestion. These are poems to be enjoyed at leisure. Make them last. This is a collection that answers best when allowed to sit on a bedside table, beckoning, rather than made to stand to attention in a bookcase. It is an accumulation of small pleasures; I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Ann Drysdale
39 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Review
Marybeth Rua-Larsen ‘Nothing In-Between’
Barefoot Muse Press, 2014
In the nicest possible way, I have a serious reservation about this collection: It’s too short! But, having aired that thought, there is something to be said for leaving the audience wanting more, and that’s the feeling I’m left with here. This volume contains 31 poems, whereas I could have easily swallowed 40-50, and still had room for some gooseberry fool, or rhubarb crumble. Nonetheless, on the upside, it excuses me for being brief and to the point in my review.
The collection takes its title from the opening poem, which is an exemplar of a particular pared-down mode which Marybeth Rua-Larsen excels at, and which I unashamedly admit is my personal favourite:
The bluest blue is green
so green it leans from sky
to sea with nothing in between
…
This is the kind of work which highlights the important difference between obscurity and elusiveness. Obscurity gives me an itch in the middle of my head which I can’t scratch. Elusiveness, as evidenced here, I find satisfying, and it makes me want to read over and over.
In some ways, the next poem (a triolet entitled ‘Hanging the Wreath’) has the same effect. The triolet is not everyone’s cup of tea, and it’s easy to do badly, but when it’s the right thing, it’s the right thing:
I nail it to the door; it doesn’t swing or fall or blow away; I make it stick, unlike our holidays, your latest fling, I nail it to the door. It doesn’t swing, like you, proposing with a diamond ring— and then surprised by No; I’ve learned the trick: I nail it to the door; it doesn’t swing or fall or blow away; I make it stick.
40 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Poetry 101, Rule 1: NEVER write a poem about a cat. Unless, that is, you come at it from left-field and you know how to write a pantoum. This, from ‘Hide and Seek’:
A mouse, a cat, some hide-and-seek, a lap you lay your head upon and rub or bite before the lick, or kiss before the slap. Beethoven’s playing in the back, the fight
…
C minor drifts across the dining room. Your whiskers twitch, those cheesy bits, a lure, persist: the arching back, the hiss, the plume. We bleed to feed. We need no cure.
…
With an interlocked, repeating form such as this it is difficult to abbreviate for the purpose of quotation, but the above stanzas demonstrate what lifts this poem: the seeding of that extraneous Beethoven detail which later blossoms as a floaty C minor chord. Equally, the fairly straightforward monosyllabic, full rhymes are supported by all sorts of other mid-line resonances which carry the poem forward and break up the regular, predictable outline of the form.
Poetry 101, Rule 2: NEVER include two cat poems in the same collection. Unless, that is, you are T. S. Eliot. Oh, or unless you are Marybeth Rua-Larsen, who gets a free pass for being able to infuse the all-too-familiar iambic pentameter line which such compelling jazz rhythms as these, from the sonnet ‘Orphan’ (in any case, the poet informs me that the small furry animal in question was a squirrel! Memo to self: never make assumptions.):
…
I know I shouldn’t pet or stroke or speak— just feed. Avoid the intimate. Resist. When you’re released, these fits of pique will spur you on, you wild, gray thing.
Insist on free, content, like me, to be bitten, scratched, and wake each morning blissfully unattached.
There’s an art to enjambment. This is it. There is also an art to making music out of successions of vowel sounds; here, they way they switch back and forth has a syncopated feel, complete with hi-hat flourishes, and that little touch of naughtiness in the closing couplet tops off the cake nicely.
41 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Another form which is not for the faint-hearted is the Fib(onacci). This, from ‘The Grimm Girls at 45’:
1. Cinderella
Lip. Trip. She scolds the new drip for his drop in sales. Her slippers can’t compete—she hails all employees to the factory to re-gild shoes while her prince sings the blues with her best friend, and she schemes to overthrow those Jimmy Choos. also shows that the form creates a problem for the editor, since that last line of 21 syllables just won’t fit on one line. I am not, to be honest, convinced about the point of such an artificial form, but again, in the hands of a ‘mistress’ (?!), the form is made subservient to her will to good effect.
The poem ‘Untitled’ is another in that pared-down, somewhat elusive mode:
Unsong the morning Preen it from its pinks Unstar the fallen Their light no longer keeps
…
Well, chacun à son goût, but such things are most definitely my dish of fish. I know I am probably in the minority, but I don’t want poetry to use the language of everyday speech; it ought to be playful and take liberties.
If Poetry 101 introduced students to a Rule 3, it would probably be: Don’t include more than one triolet in the same collection. The usual exception would apply in this case to ‘Secret’, which I won’t quote from here. When (not if) you buy the book, you’ll see what I mean.
A favourite poem of mine, ‘Amnesia’, I won’t quote from either, because you can read it in full in Angle issue 3, you lucky things. Needless to say, it being a favourite of mine, it is another of those pared-down, elusive poems. While we’re on the subject, you can also read the impressive(ly titled) ‘On Standing Too Close to an Impressionist Painting and Having It Turn to Dots’ in the very same issue. Same mode, for my money, and a fitting poem to end the collection with.
42 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
But let’s back up a little. Is that an ovillejo I spy in ‘Lovesick’?
Your note makes leaving a cliché, so stay. Imagine blood in stone. Draft ‘we,’ with me, and plot romance. Let love transcend. Pretend we braved this story’s lovesick end. Most happy endings are despised, and loneliness is best disguised, so stay with me. Pretend.
An unusual repeating form. The kind of thing where, I guess, you start with the last line and work backwards. But this poet is adept with repeating forms; the trick being to avoid the repetition seeming gratuitous, as is achieved here.
Happily for me, there is also a late run of poems in my favourite mode. ‘The Trick to Heat’:
The trick to heat? you beat it wring sickly smoke to flame crush white licks into blue and rant about the good old days.
… the ghazal, ‘Sing My Name’:
…
My tilt-a-whirl’s gone blue—reverse and spin I stagger back to you, gin-sling my name
Cayenne and honey dripping in the flames Before I cool, buffalo-wing my name
Burn rue with lavender and sandalwood I’ve worked my hoodoo magic, sing my name which transmutes the ‘connected disconnectedness’ of the classical form into a series of jazz riffs;
43 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
‘Make It Come Calling’, which you can read in full in Angle issue 5; ‘Rockabye’:
…
Forgive me. I can’t hear you Forgive me. I won’t lie My bones will bleach to coral Released in rockabye and, last but not least, ‘Hands’:
To smooth the hair, to hush the lips To squeeze the flesh below the hips
To feed the fire in small degrees To test the strength of no and please
…
A veritable cornucopia of delights! (We still say things like ‘veritable cornucopia’ where I come from.)
Well, I promised to be brief this time. If I’ve passed over a few poems in this collection, that’s only because I wanted to indulge myself by focusing on my favourites. Nothing here is sub-par, however. Marybeth Rua-Larsen has that rare thing some poets have: an unmistakeable voice which is all her own. It is musical, whimsical, capable of being light- hearted and serious all at the same time, naughty, playful, elusive, and wonderfully, jazzily rhythmical. You will not be disappointed in this book, except if, like me, you get to the end and find yourself wanting more. Buy it.
Philip Quinlan
44 arsy-versy
Angle ekphrastic poetry supplement
Autumn/Winter 2014
Contents R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Philip Quinlan Introduction 6
Poetry
Barbara Lydecker Crane Meeting Saint Malo 8 Burt Myers Sonnet after Shakespeare 9 Charlotte Innes A Friend Sends Me a Postcard of a Painting by Augustus John 10 This 11 Claudia Gary Ex Nihilo 12 Indefinable Matter 13 Rosemary Badcoe With Bodycolour 14 David Anthony Boy Soldier 15 David Callin One of Giotto’s Frescoes from the Capella Scrovegni in Padua 16 Ed Shacklee Memoirs of the Widow Mantis 17 Jane Elkin Bodhisattva Guanyin 18 Jane Røken Apocalypso 19
Feature
R. Nemo Hill from Magellan’s Reveries 20
Interview
Finding the Music with Claudia Gary 34
Poetry
Janet Kenny Nabokov Hits His Stride 48 Joshua Martin Gas 50 Kate Wise Il Sonno dell’Innocenza 51 By Heart 52 Lesley Ingram Portrait of a Butterfly Whisperer 53 Swan, Walking 54 The Richest Man 55 Maryann Corbett Portraits of Shakespeare 56 Nathan Tompkins Cú Chullainn and Ferdia 57 Peleg Held Kirtan 58 Peter Wyton Hearts Are Trumps 59 Escher Dreams 60 Robert Walicki Napalm Girl 61
N 4 T
R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
N 5 T Philip Quinlan R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Mimesis, or anti-mimesis? That is the question. Or, rather, it isn’t. Perhaps it is given to few of us to live our lives as if they themselves were works of art—in the manner, say, of a Derek Jarman—but nonetheless there can be few lives which are untouched by art. Art is, and always has been, a fact of life. It is as wrong to say life imitates art as it is to say art imitates life. In either case, one would be guilty of what Ryle called a ‘category mistake’. All life may not be art, but all art is most definitely life.
What the relevant question might be—in the context of what we must, for want of another generally accepted term, call ekphrastic poetry—is: is it purposeful or worthwhile for art (poetry) to imitate (describe) art? And the answer to that depends upon how one construes the word ‘ekphrasis’. Of course, it literally means ‘description’; but then again, ‘virtue’ literally means ‘property or quality’ but has acquired the meaning ‘goodness’. Surely ekphrasis has come to mean something other than (mere) description? I hold the view that there can be little purpose or worth in a poem which merely describes or imitates another artwork (any more, of course, than there is in a poem which merely describes or imitates day-to- day life); whatever one takes as one’s inspiration or motivation, the worth or pupose of the poem entirely depends on what it makes of its material, not how well it describes or imitates it. Strictly speaking, then, the answer is negative; but, for me, the question is simply irrelevant. Imitation is not what I’m looking for.
In any case, does ‘description’ necessarily imply imitation (or inventory: that ubiquitous modern disease of categorisation, identification, and enumeration)? No. If one were to ‘describe’ a piece of music to another human being, one would hardly recite a list of sample values taken from a digital recording of a performance, even though such a list would constitute, in a technical sense, a complete description (inventory) of the single waveform (imitation) to which, say, a performance of a symphony had been reduced (to an arbitrary degree of accuracy). That kind of description is nothing more than a recipe for reconstructing the original, given the right equipment. In human terms, a description of a piece of music is of use only insofar as it attends to the experience of hearing it (e.g., the opening of Mahler’s 1st Symphony, ‘… beginning darkly with a mysterious, veiled sound of widely-spaced strings in octaves and harmonics giving a feeling of suspense and expectation.’) In that sense (essentially subjective, rather than objective) I can, then, cautiously allow description back in.
N 6 T Philip Quinlan R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
I also believe that—with the assumption of reasonable commonsense, general knowledge, and imagination on the part of the reader—the ekphrastic poem should not require an image of an original artwork to give it sense (nor vice versa: a painting needs a gloss about as much as it needs a rub down with emery cloth and three coats of limewash). Indeed, I would go further and say that such poetry need not, necessarily, confine itself to the inspiration afforded by individual works; artists, their bodies of work, art forms and genres seem equally fair game to me. And surely the definition of ‘art’ can be taken to include, for instance: garden design, book design, photography, cookery, architecture, typography, calligraphy, dance, television drama, origami, crop circles (whether the result of human or extra-terrestrial agency!), or even heraldry (and the exquisite language which goes with it). The list is long, if not endless.
Just as the best novels give one a sense of characters who lived and breathed before page 1, and a world that will continue to exist beyond the last chapter, so the best paintings (to be restrictive, for convenience of expression) give one a sense of, or a curiosity about, what lies beyond the frame. That is the kind of poetry I would like to see in our occasional ekphrastic supplement, arsy-versy. The key thing is to ‘go beyond’, or (as the cover photograph would suggest!) to ‘go behind’.
I could have saved many words here by quoting a sentence which nicely sums up the above, and for which I am indebted to the poet and painter, Rick Mullin: ‘Ekphrasis is not about what the poet gets out of the painting, but what the painting gets out of the poet.’ Yes, by George! Three toots on the vuvuzela and a capricious little jig! That’s it!
There is a wonderful Northern English idiom, ‘to go cheeky daft’. It means, more or less, to take liberties; in the present context, ‘going cheeky daft’ (apart from giving another point to the cover photograph!) means using poetic licence, as well as the latitude suggested above. An ekphrasis need not be a slave to the original; write what you see (hear, feel, imagine, or imperfectly remember), not what you ‘know’ is there. All poems are fictions; good poems are fictions based on truth; great poems are fictions based on truth in search of a greater truth.
N 7 T Barbara Lydecker Crane R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Meeting Saint Malo
Ennui and I had wandered every wing before I ambled into one room more— Medieval Reliquaries, where now I creak in desultory solitude. I groan at the sound of children in encroaching roar
and turn to leave. But then a statue brings a second look, my longer gaze. For sure, it’s no Adonis; yet the visage speaks with an impish little smile carved in stone, this ‘Saint Malo,’ this fisherman on shore.
I almost see him cast his net of string out from his bobbing, wooden boat. He wore a grin that burst to chuckle when a sleek mackerel sprung his grasp. In baritone, I think he’d sing for all that he adored.
The statue’s signage tells a startling thing: It’s said that Malo walked on water. What lore— this simple soul, transcendent and unique! On rare occasion, dreaming, I explore the chilly mirror of a pond, or soar
with whistling swans above it in the spring. What might have shone from fisherman Malo, within his reservoir of slight physique, was a brimming heart as his uplifting core. I’m whistling now–and flying out the door.
N 8 T Burt Myers R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Sonnet after Shakespeare
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, desiring fame and fortune, each in turn, I study the old masters and I learn that art subsists on haughtiness and hope.
And scope? The young apprentice, for his part, allows desire to spark, ignite, and burn to incandescence no one man could earn, then turns the ash and embers into art.
A journeyman, like me, who learns to cope with fate and failure, not so strong or smart, who buries his desire deep in his heart, whose art too often stoops to shopworn trope,
remembers how the drive to art inspires, loves, more than what he makes, what he desires.
N 9 T Charlotte Innes R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
A Friend Sends Me a Postcard of a Painting by Augustus John
Inspired by ‘The Blue Pool’ (1911) by Augustus John
Dark girl, with moonscape on black vest, green dress—greener than the dull scrub— thumb in her half-shut book, she’s dreaming.
Maybe in this harsh, quarried place where the yellow book is brighter than the yellow, blasted rock,
she’s waiting, car stalled, for another car or donkey cart (this might be Greece) or someone, maybe you, to come.
No, she’s staring at her foot—bright flash of white stocking. The black shoe points upward. She’s deciding something.
N 10 T Charlotte Innes R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
This
Inspired by ‘A Surd View for an Afternoon’ (1970) by Robert Smithson
If I were to plot this, there’d have to be a circular graph, a spiral mirror sketched at the center of criss-crossings to reflect each lost knot of tenderness— shadows of narrow spikes, razor-edged.
I might also note the trapezoid squares furthest from the graph’s center, measuring lopsided people who believe (like me) tweezers are just like corkscrews, since to pluck or gouge a heart has much the same effect:
liquid islets whose delicate tracking systems I’d draw towards inverted trees who seem to bury their heads so they can’t see their roots waving. Maybe they’re attuned to something lost beneath ancient shells, clicks from old binders,
crack of stripped sticks in children’s swordplay, edge-of-the-desk sounds I can’t quite hear— just as my words fan out like sand or silt tipped over cliff edges, obscuring rocks, seaweed, salt. I mean, the curving lines
around a central pole—fog-jammed channels, the unlocatable island I’ve sought for so long— would be erased. Through islets, tree roots, pole, the criss-crossed space, I’d draw a thick line: zero degrees. There is no other way.
N 11 T Claudia Gary R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Ex Nihilo
Frederick Hart's portico sculptures at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C.
Between the lines was where we lived before this episode of light, vibration, sound, that roused us from a stone’s dim corridor.
In dark we never listened to the whir of planets, as their orbits interwound between the lines of where we lived before.
A rush of comets woke us. Then a roar of asteroids impelled us from the ground and roused us from the stone’s dim corridor
with thoughts of waking, walking through a door that did not yet exist. Stars drew around, drawing the lines to where we lived. Before
our hands stretched outward, we were metaphor, words not yet become flesh, thoughts still unfound and unroused from a stone’s dim corridor,
until time settled in and brought the spore of life and breath. We are no longer bound between the lines of where we lived before you roused us from the stone’s dim corridor.
N 12 T Claudia Gary R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Indefinable Matter
Edgar Degas, ‘Head Resting on One Hand, Bust, c. 1885/1888; indefinable matter, containing plaster’ —National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
You’re sleeping through it all. While Edgar’s eyes are measuring, his hands are shaping, texturing what’s indefinable.
You’re missing his finesse. Your thoughts concealed, collar upturned, all but your shoulders, head and hand submerged, your shining face
dozes and dreams unbothered in wax, on a rough-cut workbench. No need to flaunt the evidence: you’ve done the things that mattered
and now can sleep through all the fuss, the care, the modeling that tweaks and pinches everything once indefinable.
N 13 T Rosemary Badcoe R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
With Bodycolour
Red chalk and pencil drawing, with bodycolour, by C. Landseer, 1813. L0020561. An écorché figure (life-size), lying prone on a table: the right arm hangs down below the table. —Wellcome Library, London
Latissimus dorsi, she recalls, scratching a line along his chest as she leans white-clad across the bed. She’d learned the bone of fist,
the weight of arm against a windpipe. He knew of knives but not the ease of chloroform, these stone-honed fingernails,
ten precise incisions carving hollows. And now his skin is folded under like a tablecloth, one arm unzipped,
peeled back. He’s cold, was always cold. For all the red of muscle there’s no flesh beneath the outer shell, no blood. She searches
for his heart, finds stones of hardened bile inscribed—this my father, this my brother and slightly softer, patched with scars: my lover.
N 14 T David Anthony R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Boy Soldier
He posed for the photographer with pride: a soldier leaving home whose childish grace betrayed his fourteen years, although his face gave little clue to how he felt inside. I think his mother looked at it and cried— it caught his spirit. Time could not deface that image, nor time’s challenges displace his fortitude, till all was swept aside one vivid day—the day my father died. Some people say our lives can only be like marks upon the sand, indifferently reduced to nothing by the evening tide. Still, these remain: a quiet memory, a fading photograph, and part of me.
N 15 T David Callin R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
One of Giotto’s Frescoes from the Capella Scrovegni in Padua
Look at these angels hanging in the mourning air, suspended in a necessary grief.
He has been taken down. His mother leans over him, holding him close,
as if she is encouraging a battered boxer between rounds or a great triathlete—
images suggestive of comfort. She has none. She does not know what he’s got up his sleeve,
his clever trick, his shrugging off of death. She makes no theological leaps.
There is only now: the broken body of the son and all the funereal extras.
Are the angels in on it? I doubt it. Look at that one screeching to a halt.
N 16 T Ed Shacklee R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Memoirs of the Widow Mantis
after Ivo van der Ent, ‘Miss Mantis’
The man was an insect, a beast. Devil-may-care and the color of kelp, driven by instincts that no one could help, he displayed no concern in the least if the date was fiasco or feast, and arrived, debonair, pre-deceased; an eager groom who hastened to his wedding like John the Baptist off to his beheading.
The heroine here, not the villainess, I endured all his pre-coital silliness. He had sex on the brain, not romance: if I starved, would the kids have a chance? He’d love me and leave me, the old song and dance. It was fate. So I purred, ‘Prey, advance.’
N 17 T J. C. Elkin R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Bodhisattva Guanyin
Hollow dry lacquer, 16th C. Ming Dynasty —The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
Guarding the exit—Jewel In the Lotus. Mystery Princess draped in gilt silk. Manicured, tasseled, lounging barefoot.
Pendulous lobes heavy with cares gleaned from the cries of a suffering world. Infinite, peaceful, wise beyond words,
Goddess of Mercy, blessed, enlightened. Mary for Buddhists you’re sometimes called. Do you also hear Christian prayers?
Salve, Salve Regina Guanyin. I entrust you with my secret.
N 18 T Jane Røken R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Apocalypso
salute to Allen Ginsberg
Because this world is on the wing and what cometh no man can know, take courage, hear the wild dogs sing.
Across the cosmos snake-gods fling constellations that burn and blow: Because this world is on the wing
it won’t catch fire. Ignore the sting of harsh nettles where lilies grow. Take courage. Hear the wild dogs sing,
the voice of Moloch, everything! Fly the riot flags, watch them flow, because this world is on the wing.
Climb up the clocktower, coil the spring; the machinery aches to glow! Take courage, hear the wild dogs sing
their shanties, madness on a string, and the waltz of the yodelling crow. Because this world is on the wing, take courage. Hear the wild dogs sing.
N 19 T Feature R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
N 20 T Feature R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
from Magellan’s Reveries
by R. Nemo Hill
with photographs by the author
N 21 T R. Nemo Hill R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Third Reverie of Magellan
Men
N 22 T R. Nemo Hill R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
‘Men who bring no tools with which to serve …’
Men who bring no tools with which to serve. Men whose desperate oath is: ‘We will serve’.
Dried and salted. Blistered until brittle. Boiled in lye and weevil. Casked. Preserved.
Bastard son of a slave of a nameless ship’s cook! ‘Your beard stinks of the smoke of those who serve!’
The psalms of the orphaned, who turn the half-hourglass: ‘Water. Sand. God of our Time, we serve.’
Praise barber’s pelican, red wine and oakum, turpentine, quince jelly, pitch. All serve.
Castilian, Basque, Sicilian, Português, ‘Al cuarto! Al cuarto!’ ‘On deck! On deck!’—to serve.
Ass-back to the railing, bowel’s exposed to all—. ‘Leviathan, your dinner’s served!’
We teach the rats to dance on dead calm nights. Which man believes he gets what he deserves?
At last you’ve won your reeking ship, Magellan, this tub of vinegar your rage would serve.
N 23 T R. Nemo Hill R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Fourth Reverie of Magellan
Vessel
N 24 T R. Nemo Hill R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
‘Confess on land. Once anchors lose their hold …’
Confess on land. Once anchors lose their hold, we’ll harbor no shore’s sins in this ship’s hold.
In every wave an image of a world that never was much more than wind can hold.
Thistle-eaters, cannibals—beware. The vessel’s judged by what the vessel holds.
A sandbank strewn with skeletons of whales where swirling tides divulge what maps withhold.
Land of Fire. White Bay. Bay of Toil. Cape Desire. We name what we can’t hold.
Five pitch black caravels, five hundred tons afloat, white sails, alone, ablaze— Behold!
With neither moon nor stars, the Hand of God cannot, tonight, know how much dark it holds.
Wrapped in sailcloth, lashed to lead and prayer—. Now whisper: Now whisper: ‘what the sea takes, Now whisper: ‘what the sea takes, let the sea hold.’
Taste the wind, Magellan! Breathe the blast! It’s asking—How much can the future hold?
N 25 T R. Nemo Hill R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Ninth Reverie of Magellan
Heart of a Drowned Sailor
N 26 T R. Nemo Hill R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
‘The sailor’s name bleeds blue beneath the surface ...’
The sailor’s name bleeds blue beneath the surface. With ink, the needle breaks the tender surface.
At noon we felt it, near. At noon we felt it, near. Our maps’ reply? —a sudden blank, a blue unbroken surface.
On board, it’s scurvy’s swelling gums; ashore, it’s betel’s blood that stains each smile’s surface.
The breath of heathen pirates pearls, descends. By Christ’s last breath, alone, the saved re-surface.
From Thieve’s Lagoon swift proas fly to greet us in flocks. Their white sails skim the sapphire surface.
The men stare rapt for hours at all that’s melting; then kneel, heads bowed, to swab the deck’s hard surface.
We arm ourselves with a mirror’s polished steel— these Giants cringe before their naked surface!
They say the heart, torn from a shipwreck’s ribs, sinks far enough to settle on deep’s surface.
Why do you wake again, Magellan, choking— your arms, without you, rising to the surface?
N 27 T R. Nemo Hill R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Twelfth Reverie of Magellan
Spice Wars
N 28 T R. Nemo Hill R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
‘Bright Phoenix, aromatic heart of spice ...’
Bright Phoenix, aromatic heart of spice, release the perfume at each end of spice!
Serrão, how I devoured your letters!—gathered scattered scents of sun-swept slavery’s spices.
Green, the outer rind. Bright red, the mace. Within—the nutmeg. So we’ll split the spice.
“You can’t uproot our rain. Though cutlass strip our slopes of stem, of seed—they’ll bear you no spice.”
Ten thousand leagues of damask red with blood— at night my dreams by wretched sea salt spiced.
Their cries are theatre; they merely play at war, as at conversion. We are, for them, a spice.
Starved for gold. Reduced to eating lice. Dark hedge of clove. Bright tower of spice.
Then from ‘Ternate with its burning summit’ an ash descends—and men, hands stained with spice.
This spear’s sharp tip, Magellan—poisoned? peppered? All pleasure wounds. Whose weapon is this spice?
N 29 T R. Nemo Hill R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Fifteenth Reverie of Magellan
The Burden of Water
N 30 T R. Nemo Hill R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
‘Its sailors’ tears cannot exhaust salt water ...’
Its sailors’ tears cannot exhaust salt water. It does not wet the hands, this wailing water.
The vanquished seek reprieve: they’ll live as slaves, hands cupped forever, forced to carry water.
The foothold we expect to be there—isn’t. We will be washed, then washed away by water.
My shoulders ache. My shattered knee gives way. Strapped to my back is the wave that walks on water.
A thousand souls converted! As many dead! Both bread and excrement dissolve in water.
Two volumes once sufficed: of Maps, of Scripture. It tests the Word, this third—this Book of Water.
“The Captain’s pledged 100 ducats to the first man who espies what isn’t water.”
What journey does not end where it began? No raging thirst, no bracing myth of water.
You’d rule the rain, Magellan—yet dare not shed these swollen squall-drenched robes, their weight of water.
N 31 T R. Nemo Hill R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Nineteenth Reverie of Magellan
Hexagram
N 32 T R. Nemo Hill R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
‘From star to star to star, like starlight, thrown ...’
From star to star to star, like starlight, thrown— wave-thrust, wind-pitched, storm-flung, driven, thrown.
“As handkerchiefs will wipe our brows of sweat, so by our arms will the faithless be o’erthrown.”
Read the drenched, the scattered. On the verge, so yarrow’s cast, so sea-splashed dice are thrown.
Your charts resume, Faleiro, their unknown: bright leaves to your Cumaean cyclone thrown.
I can’t refuse the gypsy’s gifts—. Ten wands. Cloud beneath the mountain. Water on the throne.
Mark the empty curvature of hands whose muscles echo lances lately thrown.
The dancers jerk, as if their baubled wrists were yanked by strings, each movement puppet-thrown.
Is this the dark from which, in the beginning, the fiery all-fortunate was thrown?
This burst of flesh, Magellan, yoked to bone— into chaos, into order, likewise thrown.
N 33 T Interview R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
N 34 T Interview R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Finding the Music
Philip Quinlan in Conversation with Claudia Gary
N 35 T Finding the Music R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
PQ Welcome, Claudia, and thank you for agreeing to participate in this discussion. It’s fair to say that we have had an extensive correspondence, prior to this interview, on the subject of music and poetry, and that within that we’ve found some areas of agreement and some areas of disagreement. However, it is clear that we agree on one thing: that music and poetry have a close relationship, and that when we speak of the ‘musicality’ of poetry we mean something far more than that it makes (or can make) a pleasant sound. Apart from being an accomplished formal poet (as your contributions to this issue attest), your particular forte is in setting poetry to music, in relation to which several questions immediately suggest themselves:
First of all, what is the motivation behind setting a poem to music?
CG Thank you so much for this conversation, Philip!
For one thing, the earliest poems are considered to have been sung, with no fixed distinction between the words for ‘song’ and ‘poem.’ When the two art forms are reunited, both are invigorated. Also, songs have the potential for a wider audience than poems. How many of us ever would have heard of Bob Dylan if he hadn’t set his poems to music?
Personally, before I was in kindergarten my mother, an artist, read poems aloud (notably those of Robert Louis Stevenson) and taught me to sing ‘rounds’ (canons) with her, such as the English folk song ‘White Coral Bells.’ She also encouraged me to improvise harmonies with whatever music might be on the radio. If this was a way of keeping me occupied at times, it certainly worked! After hearing me play familiar songs by ear on a toy piano, my parents sought out a piano teacher and a real piano. The first teacher included a composition exercise in each lesson. From about age seven onward, I was also involved in choral singing. So I guess I always assumed songs were something to write as well as sing.
Then along came Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, and so on, and I was hooked on the idea. But what I’ve written since studying composition is vastly different from the first ‘song’ I wrote at 14—thank goodness! Back then it was pure inspiration and intuition. Later, by learning some of the methods that composers used throughout history, I definitely gained more tools.
There’s another motivation now, too: I’d like to promote the idea that there’s new life still to be found in classical forms of music. These are musical traditions that went out of style during the 20th century. But so did poetic forms, and look how they’ve been revived!
N 36 T Finding the Music R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
PQ Given that poetry has its own, innate music, is the work involved one of translation (‘finding the music’) or new creation?
CG There are elements of both, but overall I think of it more as a conversation.
In terms of translation, I do look for ways the music can express or enhance some aspects of the words. This is analogous to the sort of form/content coherence that’s desirable in a poem. For example, in my recent setting of a poem by Micheal O’Siadhail, ‘Scenario,’ I used the word ‘turn’ as a place to shift from a descending to an ascending sequence of notes; I also set the word ‘now’ across a sequence of three notes (since the poem deals with time’s complexity); and I took the word ‘jazz’ as an opportunity to introduce a new harmonic shift. In the much earlier ‘Nature’s Bequest,’ a vocal canon based on two lines from Shakespeare’s fourth sonnet, I used the word ‘lend’ as a takeoff point for the second voice. And in ‘If Only,’ a 2012 setting of my own sad poem ‘A Subjunctive Voice,’ there is a recurrent counterpoint of descending arpeggios in the vocal line against ascending ones played by the cello. I wasn’t thinking of it at the time, but this seems to work reasonably well as a portrayal of resilience.
Beyond such ‘translated’ features as these, the music tends to take on a life of its own.
Among their similarities, poetry and music each have many ways of dividing time (number and type of feet in a line of poetry, or number of beats in a measure of music) and space (visual or tonal). In the case of music, there are various ways of dividing an identical tonal space—an octave, for example, can be divided into a third and a sixth, or into a fourth and a fifth, or into a series of single steps, among other ways.
Also, both poetry and music unfold in time. But in the context of a song, they don’t necessarily unfold or develop at the same pace or in the same ways. So a song’s development is, for me, a kind of multi-level conversation. The first two levels are between the poem and the music, and between the vocal and instrumental lines within the music. The latter conversation sometimes takes the form of counterpoint.
PQ Can any poem be set to music? If not, what do you look for?
CG Maybe any poem can be set to music, but probably not by me! First I need to connect emotionally with the poem. Next, the words must seem
N 37 T Finding the Music R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
capable of ‘singing.’ I might look at a poem’s first line and say it aloud, to see if I can imagine a musical line, a melody, emerging from it. If so, I play with that and see what it requires in order to be singable, based on what I’ve learned from Bel Canto training. Play, of course, is the spirit in which all of this has to be done!
I also look for strong, evocative images in the words, and avoid things that may be confusing, such as complex syntax, misleading homonyms, or an excess of abstract language. If I feel that the first line of the poem can give rise to a melody that’s intriguing, pleasant, and memorable, then I go on to the rest of the poem and work with that. Sometimes it’s OK to excerpt, cut, or shorten lines—if the poet agrees.
PQ The poetical cognates for rhythm (metre), melody (pitch cadence), dynamics (stress), and even tone colour/timbre (diction) aren’t hard to understand. But since poetry is essentially linear, where music has a vertical dimension, how do you see harmony in poetry?
CG An analogy to harmony in poetry? I’ve always thought rhyme played that role. Whether it’s full or half rhyme, I think it strikes the ear as a kind of harmony. And that type of harmony is what sets up the expectation of another rhyme at an appointed location (according to the poem’s form)— or rather, at an appointed time. You might assume that in music the harmony occurs all at once, and in poetry it takes place over time. But in music, too, as I learned when studying composition, what the ear hears is not only ‘in the moment’ but also cumulative. This affects the perception of a line of music, even though it’s not played all at one moment. It leads, for example, to a ‘sense’ of harmony or dissonance, not only in arpeggios (broken chords), but also in melodies that contain notes that would or would not harmonize if they were played together.
PQ The great difference between poetry and music, it seems to me, is that while poetry (being made of language) appeals at least in part to the intellect, music makes its appeal directly, and solely, to the emotions. Do you think one can usefully speak of a musical ‘language’? Does the notion of ‘duende’ (emotional authenticity) have any resonance for you?
CG Music definitely appeals to the emotions—but I think it appeals to the intellect as well! Whether in a song or instrumental music, if a theme is set out and variations are created, that sort of play appeals to both emotions and intellect. So do harmony and counterpoint.
N 38 T Finding the Music R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Of course it also depends on what kind of emotion you mean. A moment of creative discovery, whether in composing, writing, painting, scientific work, or any other field, brings joy and excitement. I think this can be the most interesting emotion in music, because it’s entirely earned through, and within, the music, rather than being overlaid from external sources.
As an example of emotion that’s overlaid on music, rather than earned within it, we all tend to be attached to songs we heard (and may have danced to) during adolescence. Such attachment often has little or nothing to do with the musical aspects of those songs, but it can last a lifetime. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing! But it’s very different from what I described just now.
The notion of duende is appealing. My first memory of associating emotion with music was on hearing Beethoven’s 5th Symphony for the first time, when I was a young child. It gave me a sudden strong sense that there was a reality beyond the day-to-day events of my own life. That caused me to wonder: ‘What is behind this music that’s so urgent?’ And I was driven to find out!
I knew the music was composed by ‘someone,’ and wanted to know more about that person. Since this was on Side 1 of a Leonard Bernstein Young People’s Concert recording, and Side 2 consisted of Bernstein talking about Beethoven’s creative process, I listened eagerly to the lecture. But, as learnèd as Bernstein was, his lecture didn’t seem to answer the questions that Beethoven’s music posed to me. I felt that the composer spoke directly to me through his music, and that I’d have to figure it out somehow despite the lack of words. By ‘figure out,’ I didn’t mean ‘decode,’ but rather find out what was behind it. Learning later about Beethoven’s life and reading some of his letters went part but not all the way. I’ve always felt that the purest language was right there in the music. In a way, mu sic was my first language and English my second.
PQ From our previous discussions I gather that we both take it as a given that poetry ought to be beautiful. Some would dismiss ‘beauty’ as a meaningless abstraction which is purely subjective. For me, beauty in itself is concrete and universal; true, there are subjective differences as to what is beautiful, but even then humanity has reached a fair degree of consensus. What makes a poem or a piece of music beautiful for you?
CG The poet Richard Moore, who taught English at the New England Conservatory of Music, wrote in his essay ‘The Uses of Poetry for Musicians’:
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‘How can one make a beautiful reflection of an ugly world, which is yet true to that world? An account of the ways in which this paradox has been resolved becomes an account of the triumphs of artists.’
Moore also said in this essay that an understanding of poetry can help musicians speak more comprehensibly about music to non-musicians.
And Frederick Turner explores the concept of beauty quite wonderfully in his book ‘Beauty, the Value of Values,’ as well as in some of his more recent essays.
I agree with them both, but I’m not sure I can define what makes a piece of music beautiful for me—although I know it when I hear it! It might be something that inspires tears of joy; or a revelation of surprising depth in something that had seemed simple; or rediscovery of a melody that seemed to be lost. This happens for me in some of Schubert’s songs, or those of Beethoven. Some music seems to heighten life’s meaning. Then again, this may happen because I’ve had the opportunity to sing some of those songs, and also to sing in the midst of a choir that was performing, for example, Mozart’s Requiem or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Being one voice in a choir, and learning to hear, simultaneously, the individual voice and the complete piece, is an amazing experience; once learned, it can help develop the ear, the mind, and even the identity. In some ways it seems to epitomize life.
PQ I tend to be quite synaesthetic. You tell me that you don’t find a strong connection between visual images and music. Could you expand on that?
CG The closest thing I can perceive to visual images that are actually produced or ‘earned’ by music are geometric images that I imagine as analogies to the play of intervals in the music itself. I’m not likely to think of a melody based on seeing a beautiful landscape or any other visual image, though I realize some people are.
But there are also images that many people associate with certain music, which have nothing to do with the music but are superimposed or overlaid onto it. Those who saw Disney’s ‘Fantasia,’ for example, may, whenever they hear Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, think of certain animals frolicking in a pasture; but that isn’t necessarily true for those who did not see the movie. Such is also the case with other selections used in that film, and many Hollywood films. One very unfortunate instance of this is ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ for those viewers who had never heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony before seeing the movie.
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PQ For me, the making of a poem begins only very broadly with a ‘subject’ in mind, but far more particularly with an emotion. After that, sound, then words. Meaning definitely comes last. I tend to write music the same way. How much, in your poetry and music composition, are you ‘led by the ear’ rather than, say, formal procedures or rules?
CG A great deal! My way of starting a song, as I’ve mentioned, depends very much on intuition. As for a poem, I often start with a phrase that catches my ear and imagination. It may encapsulate sound, sense, and emotion. In either poetry or music, what often makes me write down a particular phrase as something to pursue later is an ambiguity or richness, together with a sense that there’s something more in it that may be worth exploring.
PQ Is there any connection, do you think, between a commitment to tonal composition in music and a commitment to writing in form where poetry is concerned?
CG Yes, I do think so. One of the greatest values I find in form, both for music and for poetry, is its ability to set up expectations which can then be met with fulfillment, disappointment, or surprise. And that helps to drive the song’s or poem’s interaction with the reader or audience.
As for tonality, there is a definite way it interacts with us physiologically, since our ears are governed by the same physical laws that govern, for example, a vibrating string. This is why, although not all people can ‘carry a tune,’ for those who can, the same characteristics of harmony and dissonance are heard fairly universally, provided people are taught to recognize them.
Per our earlier discussion, I agree with you that serialism hasn’t replaced tonal music. And I have no trouble with dissonance if it is eventually resolved and not used to excess. But I think atonality, much like free verse, closes rather than opens creative possibilities. Tonal music, like formal poetry, offers a structure in which to develop meaning. Just as a given poetic meter gives a context to metrical variations, and a song’s rhythm gives meaning to syncopation, so also a clear tonal ‘home base’ gives meaning to tonal exploration. With such a home base, one can wander away—that is, modulate to other keys—and then return. Without it, such a journey has no clear meaning, since there can be no homecoming. So, tonal composition has a certain quasi-narrative potential that isn’t available in atonal music.
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PQ I must say, I find the ‘blank page’ of poetry rather daunting, whereas a page of music manuscript, with its enticingly ready-ruled staves, seems already replete with possibilities. Do you find one mode of composition easier than the other? The French composer Henri Dutilleux once remarked that ‘The hardest thing in music is knowing what to do next.’ I find, frankly, that the hardest thing is knowing what to do first and last! [Laughs] Seriously, though, how do you begin to write a poem or a piece of music? What sort of initial ideas do you have about the overall shape? Do you like to be surprised along the way? How do you think musical ‘closure’ relates to poetical ‘closure’?
CG I don’t know if I find either mode easier than the other, but I love having both available—as I suspect you do as well! I’ve enjoyed hearing some of your own chamber music recently. What I’ve heard of your music has a lovely orchestration, much more so than mine!
The reason I’m not so much involved in orchestration has to do with my present focus on songs. In some chamber music and symphonies of Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, and probably others who have written both songs and orchestral music, you may have heard traces of their own songs. Following that kind of development is probably my equivalent of reading a detective novel.
When I start writing a poem, it usually has at least a meter associated with it. If my poems often ‘want’ to be sonnets or villanelles, that may be because I’ve already written so many in each of these forms. I try to remain open to reconsidering the form until a poem is finished (or published). I’ll probably never write poems in ‘all’ the forms, but there are some I’ve recently tried for the first time—sestina, sapphics, and ‘mirror’ poems.
As for the content, I try not to lock anything in too early there, either. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised to find that certain stanzas work better when swapped, or that a line somewhere in the middle of the poem needs to trade places with the title. Or, maybe what I thought was a villanelle would be better as a shorter poem, such as a triolet. I’m more likely to whittle a poem down than to add to it. I revise each poem at least a few times before it seems right. And yes, surprise is good! If I discover nothing in the process of writing a poem, how can anyone discover something when reading or hearing it?
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Often I share final drafts in a critique group with several poets whose work I respect. We are merciless—no flattery allowed!—but we are also free to disregard any or all suggestions.
In writing music, I also revise a great deal. After selecting a poem (or excerpt), I draft the beginning of a melody and then explore it using harmonic and canonical exercises. This is part of what I learned about 30 years ago in a private seminar based on lessons and exercises that Bach, Mozart, and others taught their students, as well as early music and Schenkerian analysis. As with formal poetry, there are certain imposed restrictions that enhance the process. For example, a song must be within a single vocal range, the vowels must be placed in a way that enables the voice to produce them as clearly as possible, the words must be given at least a good chance of being understood by an audience, and the pacing and rhythm of the song must help to communicate the meaning of the poem. So there are a lot of rules, none of them arbitrary! Still, within these restrictions there seem to be endless possibilities.
What helps me keep a song or other piece on track is to focus on the concept of conversation. And besides the two conversations I mentioned earlier—between the music and the poem, and between the vocal and instrumental lines of the music—there’s also a third one going on, which is the song’s interaction (through its performers) with the audience.
In terms of ‘closure,’ I would like either a poem or a song to end with an idea that encapsulates, even illuminates, the journey through which it reached that point. After all, rhyme and meter provide poetry with mnemonic attributes. Shouldn’t music have these qualities as well? Ideally, the ending can refresh the memory of an entire work in the space of a few seconds. As with lines and stanzas of great poetry, the melody of a great song is memorable after one leaves the auditorium. This is much easier said than done! But I do think it’s still possible, and I think classical forms continue to provide a framework for memorable and vibrant music, just as they do for poetry.
PQ Well, it’s been a fascinating discussion for me, and sadly we can only reproduce so much of it here, although I hope it will continue privately. Before we close, however, we ought at least to include some actual musical examples. So far as my own efforts go, the opening music for this interview (an excerpt from a sketchy setting for your poem, ‘A Subjunctive Voice’) will have to suffice. You challenged me to do this, and I felt bound to try, although I haven’t written any serious music for about 14 years, and never a poem setting. All I would say about it is that, uncharacteristically
N 43 T Finding the Music R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
for me, I immediately knew I wanted a ‘thin’ sound (so as not to get in the way of the words?), and for some reason I was put in mind of Purcell (‘When I Am Laid in Earth’, from Dido and Aeneas, and ‘Now Winter Comes Slowly’, from The Fairy Queen, in particular). I successfully captured the sound I heard in my head, but I confess the technicalities of vocal melody lines are somewhat beyond me, so I substituted the flute, with which I am familiar as a former player.
So, Claudia, thank you again for agreeing to participate in this discussion, and here are some musical examples and links for our readers to pursue and enjoy at their leisure.
CG Thank you, Philip! I’ve enjoyed this very much, and I hope the musical examples will be helpful. I’ve already described aspects of a few of these songs—'If Only,’ ‘Nature’s Bequest,’ and ‘Scenario’—near the beginning of the conversation. ‘Artist of Light’ and ‘Song of Creation’— based on a poem and a translation, respectively, by Frederick Turner—are longer and more ornate in their instrumentation. ‘The Promise,’ based on a poem by Frederick Feirstein—via Youtube, with apologies for the poor sound quality and silly images (please consider listening with eyes closed)—is a song followed by instrumental variations. This hints at a route I may pursue at some point into longer instrumental works. But for now, there are many more songs that I hope, and in some cases have promised, to write.
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Links, Credits, and Lyrics
Scenario
Music (c) 2014 Claudia Gary. Poem (c) 2007 Micheal O’Siadhail; published in Globe (Bloodaxe Books, 2007). This performance: Claudia Gary, soprano, with synthesized violin and cello. AUDIO LINK
In a rim’s touch and turn Our moment’s wheel of now Already become what was. All that’s to come still jazz, An unknown latent in know-how; Our past a future we learn.
Nature’s Bequest
Music (c) 1981 Claudia Gary. Poem: William Shakespeare, Sonnet 4 (lines 3-4). Note: This song (notation and synthesized recording) was first published in Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, ‘Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed,’ edited by D. Gilson, August 2014. This performance: Claudia Gary (soprano). AUDIO LINK
Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend, and, being frank, she lends to those are free.
If Only
Music (c) 2012 Claudia Gary. Poem (‘A Subjunctive Voice’) (c) 2006 Claudia Gary, published in Humor Me (David Robert Books, 2006). Note: One word on line 11 was changed for the song (‘word’ --> ‘note’). (Premiered June 2012 at West Chester University Poetry Conference with Ernst Reijseger, cello.) This performance: Claudia Gary, soprano, with synthesized cello. AUDIO LINK
This is a sorrow you spend on yourself chanting to ease its sting. If only you’d heard the song before, if only, if only, you sing. One mind’s music lost on another ends with a broken string that stutters, reaching for one last note: if only, if only, you sing.
Essay: The Uses of Poetry for Musicians, by Richard Moore
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Artist of Light / Song of Creation
(PLEASE NOTE: ‘Artist of Light’ and ‘Song of Creation’ conclude Claudia Gary’s song cycle ‘Compos Mentis.’ The former song changes key at the end because it leads into the latter. The stand-alone version of ‘Artist of Light’ does not change key.)
Artist of Light Music (c) 1994 Claudia Gary. Poem: ‘Glass’ (excerpt) - (c) 1991 Frederick Turner; in April Wind (University Press of Virginia, 1991). This recording: premier performance, May 10, 1995, Barnes and Noble, NYC; Steve Hartman (clarinet), Eugene Moye (cello), Claudia Gary (soprano).
... Artist of light, of glass, please do not graze me, even lightly, lest I break; yet you have shown me that I flow.
Song of Creation [‘The Creator Speaks’] Music (c) 1993 Claudia Gary. Poem: ‘Schoepfungsliede’ by Heinrich Heine, Translation: (c)1993 Frederick Turner. This recording: premier performance, May 10, 1995, Barnes and Noble, NYC; Steve Hartman (clarinet), Eugene Moye (cello), Claudia Gary (soprano). (Since the translation is forthcoming in another journal, the following is a brief excerpt.) AUDIO LINK
Why truly I created all the world … … Creating was my convalescence, creating made me whole and sound.
The Promise
Music (c) 1996 Claudia Gary. Poem (c) Frederick Feirstein. Song commissioned by the Western Slope Chamber Music Series, Western State College of Colorado; premiered February 13, 1996. Harvey Harriman, baritone; Laura Schumann, violin; Martha Watson Violett, piano. YOUTUBE LINK
One day I’ll return, on my old raft, the wind taking shape from my face as water takes shape from a fish; and on my chest your name, and your watch on my freckled wrist. But promise when I come, no talk of where I went or what I’ve done, or the self-despising fool I’ve become. Only of possible dreams, No dreams: real water and sky, and dances, and flowers, and fruit where only the dreamless die.
Shall I Compare Thee … ?
Music (c) 1992 Claudia Gary. Poem: William Shakespeare (Sonnet 18). Performed by John Howard, violin; Elizabeth Kellogg, cello; Claudia Gary, soprano. Note: Song first published in Sparrow (The Yearbook of the Sonnet), edited by Felix Stefanile, in 1993. YOUTUBE LINK
Acknowledgments:
Claudia Gary would like to thank the poets and musicians listed above for their help and encouragement. She also would like to thank Philip Quinlan for providing an occasion to write down ideas that had been percolating for days, months, and decades; for his patience with revisions; and also for his skillful and diligent restoration of certain recordings (notably ‘Artist of Light/Song of Creation,’ originally made on a tape cassette in 1995).
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N 47 T Janet Kenny R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Nabokov Hits His Stride
An ironical rant against rhymed translation, in Pushkin stanzas
‘Some paraphrases may possess the charm of stylish diction and idiomatic conciseness, but no scholar should succumb to stylishness and no reader be fooled by it.’ —Vladimir Nabokov
How he raged when stylish diction in translation overruled honest meaning, making fiction out of wisdom. Tricks that fooled trusting readers who were cheated of their birthright. Undefeated he declared a war on style. ‘Yes, by God, I’ll show them, I’ll show what Pushkin really wanted. Show how Russia tore apart those who tasted foreign art, never happy, always haunted out of place in every land. I will help them understand.’
Nabokov wrote a free translation, Eugene Onegin, was the task. Swiftly came the accusation that his version wore a mask. Pushkin’s dance of life had lost its patterns, music, and acrostics, ‘That’, he said, ‘is tommmy rot! Let me tell you what it’s got: Character is what I’ve mastered. I reveal Onegin’s soul as indulgence takes its toll on that selfish little bastard. I show a man who had it all then lost his world beyond recall.
Continued
N 48 T Janet Kenny R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
He’d travelled, eaten, fornicated, tasted, seen, and read the best. Back at home the style was dated, nothing there could pass his test. Young Tatiana wrote a letter full of love to this pacesetter. “I am unworthy”, Eugene said. And stricken, she wished she were dead. He flirted with a silly pretty girl, loved by his poet friend whose duel with Eugene brought an end to life and poems. Little shit, he shot his happiness as well and spent the next few years in hell.
And now I must admit I linger with Tatiana, grown to be a paragon. But on her finger now she wears a ring, for she is married to a prince, much older than herself. When Eugene told her in a letter of his love, he found she was no turtle dove. She pointed out his early failure to appreciate her heart, and now it was too late to start again. Respect and not regalia kept her faithful. His mistake was to reject the real for fake.
So we find sophistication is the enemy of sense. Lovers in the wrong location fall the victims of pretence. Eugene and Tatiana could have loved and lived. Indeed they should have. She knew better. He was shaped by snobs whose silly ways he aped. He could have been an intellectual giant with a perfect wife, and lived a shared idyllic life, instead of being ineffectual. That is why I took the time to show you Pushkin without rhyme.’
N 49 T Joshua Martin R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Gas
after the painting by Edward Hopper
By road and trees, sycamore and black track, dusted yellow, my husband checks the muddy amber level. He writes down the inch after every car that comes and sometimes when they don’t.
For games we guess the model and year by the sound of cars coming, and think up names for the Mobil Pegasus that squeaks in the wind.
I found him once, by the tall red pumps after hours with lights on, looking at fuel.
Besides re-learning who I was he didn’t want his old days back; neither candles blown, nor labour cries nor bells, but for a stranger to remember us and be one of the four a day that stop and fill up at 18 cents a gallon.
Of all of us, the price was the one thing that stayed.
N 50 T Kate Wise R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Il Sonno dell’Innocenza
—Giovanni Dupre, Siena
Late summer; swifts fizzed through prosecco’d air. We close, signore, signori. Diamond leads pulled shut on shrieks of birds, tourist and child below, filtering beams of dust, slow, down onto her marbled sleep. And as we turned to leave, her alabaster chest rose, fell, soft. Was still. I stopped, not daring breath; smiling at hope and possibility.
Midwinter, and we draw the blinds against nightsky plaid with aeroplane trails; trees’ fingers clasping cold stars for company. Before we move to shut his door and leave, we stop; stooping over his dreaming sleep; breaths held in love to hear that he still breathes.
N 51 T Kate Wise R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
By Heart
Yes I remember ‘Adlestrop’, the pain—forced to learn by rote and perform under Mr. Martin’s sneering watch; embarrassment not
unwonted (which I’d had to look up in the Dictionary), and how the class returned his smirk as my hand was first again when asked
what a haycock was, being a Country Girl (or at least from the ru-urban fringes), and how for that minute I closed my eyes and
could see it all, wished I could be there in hazed sun and shire birdsong; anywhere but that room; dying. Someone cleared their throat. The spell broke.
N 52 T Lesley Ingram R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Portrait of a Butterfly Whisperer
after ‘The Collector’ by Maggie Taylor
The quiet of her trapped room is cracked by little wings tapping on silence, rippling its meniscus like an undercurrent of panic.
She promises them nectar, immortality. When, in an iridescent flash of vanity, they open their wings in unison, she whispers cyanide with a sigh as sweet as a kiss.
She arranges them daily, selecting the prettiest to lift her mood. They grip to her shoulder, her skirts, and her ribbons tie live butterflies to her bodice buttons,
just enough so they can smell freedom fluttering round her face.
On her painted backdrop a single orange monarch pinned to its sky, glows like an inflamed heart.
N 53 T Lesley Ingram R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Swan, Walking
after ‘Woman with Swan’ by Maggie Taylor
I gasp at the river’s choke. Its wind wheezes through my wings calling me home, ruffles my powdered down in a flurry of dander.
She, as usual, notices nothing but numbness in her wet feet. She paddles through the grass with my stolen grace, believes she’s dancing the tragedy of a swan’s requited love.
Yet, she is parading her pet like a husband whose feet are hobbled with the webbing of a sudden wedding.
My yoke is slip-knotted neck to fingers, feathers to skin
by a piece of string as long as its tether.
I have no song to sing.
N 54 T Lesley Ingram R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
The Richest Man
after ‘Small Boat Waiting’ by Maggie Taylor
Money is everything. Even the dead must pay their way. They queue in silence dying to cross, crossing to die, thirsting for the river. Their boat bobs mid stream, a tethered cloud playing pretty with its reflection, while the ferryman pauses
to consider his riches, his endless ferrying, whether whoever defined eternity had him in mind at the time.
On the other bank, where shadows flare their promises of afterlife, his wealth stays safe from temptation. One day he’s sure he’ll recollect its purpose, its location.
He catches the glint of a fee flat on the tongue through some soul’s teeth, tugs his boat after him, holds out his hand for the fare.
N 55 T Maryann Corbett R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Portraits of Shakespeare
‘To find the mind’s construction in the face ...’ —Macbeth, 1.4.12
The Cobbe: the poet of my fantasies. Face framed in courtier’s lace. Sensitive mouth. Aquiline nose. And owned by his Fair Youth! That Latin motto, whispering mysteries—
Contrast him with the Chandos: shirt untied, pirate’s earring. Drilling me with his stare, he takes my measure as a character. He’s workmanlike. He’s workmanlike. And what if both have lied? The dumpy Droeshout with its double seams of chin, eye-bags, and balding pate, all sitting awkwardly on a mismatched torso, fitting neither its doublet nor my airy dreams: that was the likeness Jonson praised as just.
Poor leaden truth! Our dreams are all we trust.
N 56 T Nathan Tompkins R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Cú Chullainn and Ferdia
After three days of duel, one on one battle, at the ford of Dee, he carries him to the bank, the bronze body is limp in war weary arms, head hung back, slain eyes open, one arm reaches for the water’s surface,
smelted tears lurch down metallic cheeks, for his best friend, for his enemy, as they reach the bank. Soon he will fight some more to defend his home, but now, he weeps for the man he killed.
N 57 T Peleg Held R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Kirtan
Outliers slipping in, we are drawn to the drumming down where stamen, cunt, and eight-armed blue sing beneath our minds and all our reasons coming round and round. round and round. Robed, into the saffron dusk like moths blent in the bark of this burning room, risen in their masks, the singers shunt the chant from primate teeth to pinky-tip to forehead where it plants a yearning seeded in the ash and blood, a strange reprise— today’s black words—now lit in moon returning.
Both tongue and groove, each bridge, each branch, these heart pine floorboards wait the dance upon their back, dust of skin and salt and semen, wine of womb and second chance spread like a poultice across the heaving chest, dried and dropping to the cracks between where rhythm fills the dark-blessed straits, east to west, east to west, a blackline mantra being sung from Kali’s mouth, an arrow through our circle.
N 58 T Peter Wyton R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Hearts Are Trumps
Millais’ portrait of the three daughters of Sir Walter Armstrong, 1872 —Tate Britain
As clothes-horses go, they are each wearing enough layers To lag an industrial boiler. Troops parachuted down to Arnheim, Dangling under less material than there is squashed beneath This ornate games table. The age of crinoline must surely Have been trying, even to the most fashion conscious. Bustles, half-cages, padded rolls and corsets combined To closet girls in solitary confinement more effectively Than all the suffocating moral shackles of the day. How might a man approach these mobile wedding cakes With passion aforethought? Forget the condom. Bolt cutters would have been more use to a determined Lothario. It could have taken several hours unravelling to reach The target area, inching past barricades of wire and whale-bone, Hampered further by the tendency of your intended conquest To witter incessantly, in drawing room conversation mode, About the recent discovery of the Marie Celeste, a mystery No less impenetrable than that facing an exhausted suitor, Floundering amongst stays and leg o’ mutton sleeves In search of satisfaction.
N 59 T Peter Wyton R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Escher Dreams
Angels and devils intertwine, squat frog mutates to soaring bird. Recoiling from the serpentine, angels and devils intertwine, dimensions quiver and combine, relativity is blurred, angels and devils intertwine, squat frog mutates to soaring bird.
Deft hands which draw deft hands which draw ever-illusive fantasies, meld paw to claw and claw to paw, deft hands which draw deft hands which draw, yet contradict artistic law. Genius itself manoeuvres these deft hands which draw deft hands which draw ever-illusive fantasies.
N 60 T Robert Walicki R S N ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T
Napalm Girl
for Kim Phuc
You can’t see her skin burning from the grayness of a photo, or the color of a thousand degree sky,
but they have just bombed her village and a nine year old is running, her clothes, a vapor trail in the heated air, her scream, in a museum now— climate controlled, guided audio tour, her cries behind a trapped frame, behind glass thinner than air.
She can’t run away from this moment of yellow smoke, looking back, at the houses behind her that fold into a wall of flame then disappear.
She says she heard them above her, the helicopters swooping like ravens, their thundering footsteps in the sky.
It’s been 40 years and she’s still running toward you, the gravel road bleeding with her cut feet, giving the fire she wears to you,
to keep it or cast it into the wind.
N 61 T
Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Pheasant
I hear that hiccup-croak in the morning then spot him darting across the lawn like a squat pen-pot and quill before clattering off towards the Colonel’s woods, barely able to clear the wall— an odd sight in that starched collar and tie, tweed jacket made from all the colours of autumn, and cheeks red as a parson’s on hearing his wife say the word sex.
Planting
All day long we’d work in lines, planting saplings a stride apart: Frank the seasoned pro out front, spade raised high then guillotining air and earth in one clear fell, the bonsai pine heeled in at once,
Chris never far behind, an eye out for woodcock or grouse, Reg always last, a droplet hanging from his nose as he nodded towards the bonfire in his NHS specs to ask, Intit time for a waarm?
What they made of me I never knew, a lanky boy with a love of logging and those crisp mornings in the Colonel’s woods, kicking mud off my boots and knocking back strong tea the way men do.
Will Kemp
45 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Heaven
I’m sprawled across a sun-lounger at dusk—hands behind my head, feet dangling over the edge— conscious only of the truncated T of a buzzard wheeling up a spiral staircase of air and that pale ghost-cloud far above, its fine swirls oozing into the outer reaches of the blue, the kind I’d like to dissolve into when at last the time comes for my body to remain below— a tiny speck in a deckchair in the garden perhaps, head lolled forward in a tattered Panama hat as Test Match Special twitters on from the wireless, with England clinging on to a draw.
Will Kemp
Tutor
This autumn I have outgrown my youth. That stench of hopeful flowering. I am complete. Each October they come back to me, with the clock’s thudded dousing of spring’s optimism. Half-asleep, they horseshoe round my study, gawping at the lines across my brow ground in by two centuries of books. I tell myself I love them all, that I can see my own friends among their noise and clutter. And I truly can, when I squint and listen hard.
We have a mountain top to reach together before Christmas. Some of the youngest will not make it there unharmed.
Stephen Giles
46 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Almagest Disorder
Already they had Mad Eye from so many hours of reading Latin left to right, and simultaneously Arabic from right to left but when the scholars settled to translate The Almagest, majestic planetary treatise laying out The Music of the Spheres, the juniors got headaches and were violently sick. They got off lightly. Those old beards who, stooped and squinting, grasped the perfectly proportioned settlement of sun and moon, the unimpeachable arrangement of diapason and diatesseron; those men who memorised the fifteen circles representing elements and music, colour, goodness, God and Man, calculated harmonies of distance between seven planets, glimpsed the earth as core inside a hanging ball of stars, and who had seen the great spheres of philosophy and space encased in one another like a twelve-bird roast, these—most learned in a magisterium of learned men— were not surprised when they began to levitate.
At first they lifted just a little. As their studies deepened each took off completely, whirling in an orrery of brains around the library, until the crash. Dusting off their sleeves like one who has an apoplexy in the marketplace, they took a little wine to help the vertigo and, mastering themselves, found as they had known they must, that each man had his orbit ranked according to his goodness; venials in the place of earth and elders outermost, revolving sagely by the higher shelves.
So spinning in their little courses of disorder and serenity, these bookish moons and fireballs, Platonists and Ptolemaics measured in their own hand-span the chiming trigonometry of seven heavens, heard the monochord of mundane life; and catching, as it passed, a weightless inkwell took up their pens and tried once more to explain.
Jo Bell
47 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Miracles
Whatever twist of meat and matter’s necessary to a baby or a toenail, tumour, muscle, marrowbone, we carry it; a whim of lobe or follicle. As proper to its own needs as the eyeball the staphylococcal boil nourishes its charge, cushions milling thousands in a fleshy cradle; hitches a lift on the obese, unclean, the acned or not-quite-immune, the plain unlucky. The bunion’s as entitled as the bone, the cyst as wholesome as the heart; essential to its self and thriving in its way, indifferent to glamour. Each part’s sufficient to its task; and in its host that which disgusts is strong as wonder, the ulcer on its own terms as miraculous as the teat.
Jo Bell
Doocot Paradise Blues
The reverberations sting like snake bites. Full of fearsome creaks and crackles, I wait high in the doocot tower, above the valley of rifles. You are on my mind. How long? I lost count.
In the evenings small, semitransparent angels come to make their nests inside the wattle walls. They ask me, please, is this paradise? I tell them, yes. But secretly, I’m not so sure.
Come, rest on my mind. All I hear is rabid gunfire. I do not pray. Sometimes I keen. What goes on, I have no way of knowing. The angels ate my last deck of cards.
Should you and I meet when the mad season is over, we will walk hand in hand some day in other valleys, other paradises. If not, wouldn’t the world already have come to an end?
I think of my two young heifers roaming the foothills, on their own now. With luck, their shyness will keep them safe. Moo-eyed, I scan the horizon, watch for a sign.
Jane Røken
48 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Ode to a Tapeworm
Eldritch. Pallid ghost. Ectoplasmic ribbon of myth-stuff, rife with more than a mere suggestion of danger: in the thirties, they say, you killed a Danish missionary in Argentina.
Like a high priest, the old professor carries your heavy glass sarcophagus over to the window for a better view. I read your name tag, penned in a spindly copperplate hand: Taenia saginata.
Despite myself, I’m filled with reverence; not only for your size, which is remarkable, but first and last your ineffably dignified poise, semitranslucent in the turbid formalin soup.
I wonder, did you survive your landlord? Were you exorcised with his terminal throes? Or did he survive you and pined away, gutted by the loss of his most intimate companion?
How comfortably you must have snuggled against the silky soft lining of his bowel; how well you have dined on this eucharist, how satisfying the elevation of your host.
Did he ever speak to you, or you to him? What nocturnal confidences did you exchange under the silvery-cool Argentinean stars? No one knows. Nor does it matter now.
Hail to thee, Midgard Worm! triumphantly true to the divine design for your species. Assassin by holy irony! innocent slayer of Christianity’s spearhead in foreign lands.
Jane Røken
49 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
All Things Change, Nothing Perishes
In the middle of the road two pigeons quarrel over a cast-off condom.
Around the bend three speeding cars: kreck, kreck, kreck.
Mother crow and her child alight to dine on road pizzas.
Later in the evening a skinny old fox wolfs the leftovers.
After a wet night the condom is no longer an object of contention.
Picked up by a tractor tyre it comes to rest in the sugar-beet field.
Earthworms size it up, shrug, set to work.
Jane Røken
Re-watching Films
Re-watching films you feel that given twenty years your viewpoint slowly alters.
Take Jaws: I used to thrill when three men fought their fears and won on distant waters but now I like the Mayor, staunch with the island’s trust to make the summer pay:
Ignore the shark—why scare the tourists? Won’t it just get bored and swim away?
Sean Elliott
50 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
The Inkling
The Inkling is an infant Thought, or else a dying Vision. Its rival breed, the Brood, seems blurred, and murmurs like a pigeon. Some are groomed by Prufrocks until doomed to indecision, some are drones, some worker bees in search of a position. Others grow entrenched and fight a slow war of attrition, want everyone to cater to their delicate condition, or bark without a bite because they lack the right dentition. Most eat themselves, like starved Ideas, balloon past recognition, coil in knots, are boiled when caught, or spoil before fruition.
My own’s a sporty coupe without a key to its ignition. Designed to race, but parked inside, it fears to chance collision, as tigers idle in the tank, too tame to budge a smidgeon.
The Camel
I sometimes fancy I’d look very stylish on a dromedary, but camels can’t imagine seeing themselves beneath a human being.
The Jackalope
A marvel of the taxidermist, belief in jackalopes is firmest in ivory towers, kindergartens, taverns, crazy as a coot prospectors’ caverns and states where hare and deer are commoner— isn’t that a strange phenomena?
Ed Shacklee
51 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
The Mongrel
I always hear him on my daily walk, howling with a kind of human shout inside a fence behind that gray-stone house where no one seems to enter or come out.
Sometimes I glimpse a length of chain, a dark and frantic eye, or hank of matted hair. Far down the street, above the city noise, his wailing follows, lacerating air.
Richard Meyer
The Office Scarecrow
And I will fashion a scarecrow inside this conference room, lash it firm to this vinyl chair with coarse lengths of sisal twine. And it will sit in my stead, transcribing empty notes on splayed corn husks, silent in its wisdom, patient and resolute— a steadfast fixture of the company. The gourd for a head will sit at a slant, showing interest and concern in equal, judicious measure, while the rush-stuffed vest conveys to all its corpulent success. And when it begins to rot and decay by degrees, slow fiscal year on year, the slouched attitude, slump and bleeding stain will mark only the accumulating burdens of obligation and of care.
And I will happily trade places with this counterfeit, and spend my days pegged to a field, taking counsel with the crows in the still, easy hours at day’s end.
Kevin Casey
52 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
The Snapping Turtle
These same boys made ogres of the boulders cast along the shore of the park’s small pond, turned sticks to swords while aunts and mothers kept half an eye, muttering with the ducks.
A few Mays later, they’ve shed their chaperones, ride three-speeds under oak leaves newly-fledged, thick and shiny in the morning sun. They share a small meanness with each other, preparing for the colder world that’s beyond the park, refining their pronunciation of swears, bickering like hens over anything at hand, and so they don’t see the turtle until they’re almost upon it: massive, dark and rough—an upturned mountain root, duckweed-speckled, slippery with algae, its undersized shell like a chewed-up nail.
The hooked mouth opens, revealing flesh as pink and fresh as a newborn curled in a sleepy knot, and then the death-rattle hiss, more ancient than the grave, lunging at the stunned young men, now standing silent. Dropping their bikes, they run home to find aunts and mothers, and for at least one more Spring morning are made children again.
Kevin Casey
Night Lights
Evening crumbles, smolders gray. The lawn becomes a level bed of ash and fireflies a random spray of sparks that flash their little yellow light close to the ground, or maybe up to shoulder height for those less earthly bound. They blink awhile, then disappear.
All night the stars burn steady, bright, and clear.
Richard Meyer
53 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
A Tin of Tautology
This product has no added sugar or sucrose, The contents do not contain anything sweet, Cook slowly, not quickly, and not very fast, At an in-between temperature (moderate heat).
It will help you maintain a healthy digestion, It will aid and be good for your innards and guts, It may contain traces (a miniscule fraction) Of small, tiny seeds, hard-shelled fruits and tough nuts.
Store and retain in a cool, dark location, Keep in a cold, chilly, shadowy zone, Recycle this tin—it can go round and round And rotate till the cows and the cattle come home.
Emily Dickinson’s Garage Rant
Because I could not stop the car— I drove into a tree— I thought you said you’d fixed the brakes When you did the MOT.
You can take your differential And stuff it up your sump— I’m going to sue! Flange nuts to you— And Death to this oily dump!
Annie Fisher
Well, Pinch My Toes and Call Me a Jelly Doughnut
Actually, don’t. I would prefer another kind Of moniker: Kefir, a Crepe, Croissant (Some other type for the specialty gourmand), Espresso. Don’t reach out for pinch or paint,
As far as toes go. It’s an awe-struck no-show. What kind of news brings out this odd remark, Like kissing cousins put on Noah’s Ark, Eccentric closeness marking what they know?
Collectibles of human hair! The words To television songs from 1950! Someone’s had a baby; flung the shards Of a marriage in the old burn barrel. Touch my arm; look in my eyes. Try lofty. Try handshakes. Cardamom, then Caramel.
Kim Bridgford
54 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Sure Thing
You’re a brick, Yes, a hard red block that you can trust, Unless it’s accidentally cracked Or whacked to dust.
Or rather you’re a diamond, Superbly tough and brilliant once it’s ground, Providing it’s been mined And found.
No—you’re an elixir, Whose wholesome powers to restore and mend Magically arrest decline Until the end.
And I’m a voice That tells you what you always surely knew: That language is prepared to lie When you ask it to.
David Hathwell
Doll
I cradled her, blonde child at rest, Adjusting limbs and offering a drink From my own breast; When tilted up, she roused with swiveled blinks.
I took her tiny, outstretched hands In mine while she continued batting lashes. To her demands For pretty things, I gave her ribbons, sashes,
And necklaces out of my drawer. I teased her hair and mussed it up by turns, Though pleased her more When I had kissed her mouth. She knew no words,
Yet cried for me to hold her close. I fondled her as only Father could, Undoing clothes. I changed my doll. My doll changed childhood.
Will Cordeiro
55 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Play Time
I smell something like rotten milk wafting from your purse. Probably the dark matter you’ve been storing inside.
You let the children play with it, oblique & ambiguous. I hear them in the neighborhood, throwing it like a ball.
They bounce it on the playground & one day it will snap. Or shatter. Or form the presence of an absence, tearing this world to shreds.
80% of the universe is made from the unknown, but only I seem to know what that really means.
Pluralism
Strangers often smirk at me And give the momentary feeling I might not be human.
Jesus has a beard, And I have a beard. So I must be
Recycled As flamingoes are thrown Into a river of wine.
Garrett Biggs
56 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
The Flood of the Nile
A river of inconvenient inundations, the Nile from my eyes flows, leaving warm and salty visitations glistening past my Sphinx’s nose: rapids faster, sandbanks slower, beyond sight, stretching for miles, the Upper and the Lower into snapping jaws of crocodiles.
Behind the shallow depths I long for cataracts to grow, causing constant current deaths, staunching the ceaseless flow. Aswan’s deploying concrete to get in the water’s way, but until the dam is complete I will drown out every day.
Lou King
Left Eye
A little prophet, young Tiresias baptized his pupil. Dilated and green his eye captures all light through the mucoused membrane, casts tea-leaf visions that he’ll scream out every half hour, begging the nurse to withhold the cold, slimy medicine, explaining that to be blind is no curse, the telepathic nature of children— how his optic nerves entwine the future. They nod, wipe his forehead, and pry his lids to dump grit and chemical filth over the myths of healing, what they take, not give. But he smiles as they blow out the lights, clean his memories like church organ pipes.
Caleb Tankersley
57 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Motherland
My mother made me quesadillas for breakfast every day for two years with salsa, or avocado from the yard-tree, or chicken if it was a pay week. She had a rope of circular burn scars on the white belly of her forearm and a thick white ridge from her left temple to chin that I didn’t notice until we moved to Serra Mesa and my cousin asked me what had happened. My mother took the bus to the hardware store five days a week to work ten hour days. She would come home with paint in her hair always late, but never too late to open the door and tell me and Sam and Steph and Sandy that she loved us in two languages. I love you, te amo, I love you, te amo. I slept between my cousins for two years to keep me from rolling off the bed until one day we took a plane to what she called ‘home’ and I had to sleep on my own again in a pink room with vaulted ceilings in a bed that felt too wide. My mother stayed home with jewels in her hair. We both forgot our Spanish. I never saw my aunt or cousins, and I was fed steak and broccoli by a man with a thick silver ring, matching the one my mother now wore.
Alexandra VanDehey
Interval
Between the wold we can’t know and the world we remember, by the weave of its bond and the bind of its heather, stands a wall in the sun, a respite September. In the wold we’ll be known by a world that remembers, by the twine that we wound round the wound at the center but at the base of this wall in the sun here together leave the wold you can’t know and the world you remember for the weave of this bond and the wind in the heather.
Peleg Held
58 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
In the Circle of the Golden Tortoise Beetle
A sunspark wakes in the cradle of your carapace fueled by morning glory feeding and the heat of your descent.
Set your fire on marimba arms. Her sleeve is rolled in waiting, fresh from soil and seedling, veins dusted in marigold’s gentle consent.
Three-tiered, thrice-blessed— founded on air bounded in ergot, and the sojourn of skin— your waters fill the channels written in centuries under your wings as you flow from aureus ether to the ground of blood. Again.
Peleg Held
Algernon Swinburne Dreams of Going Out
The king is dead. Oh, no, he’s not. He’s resting, What with his busy week, dissolving monks And roasting papists with a garlic clove And celery stalk apiece. He raised the tax On gingham. His monopoly on dust, More valuable than mail, he auctioned off To the new Chancellor of the Campanile. The belles, the belles: they’re gathering out front, Leaning against portcullis rails, in wigs As high as cotton candy and as pink. Teased and tormented in the cages above The gate, the entertainment, curled like shrimp, Moans, and the would-be guests whistle and stomp. The ball begins with Taffelmusik. Bits Of quarter-note-shaped ice bob in the punch Just long enough to clarify the king’s Intentions: he would dip the band in tar, The perfect pitch a torch unto the blind, And all be spared who buy a savings bond.
Richard Epstein
59 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
The Poet Protection Program
No more dactyls, never a dactyl, they advised me. You must change your life. If not, if you let on you know whose torso that was hacked from, you’re a goner. If you must, be missed, then be prepared: you are a dead poet, a name, your rep, anthologies of what you said; and what you might have done, you won’t. You may observe the beggared moon, the way it fits, entangled in the trees midwinter sends at midnight. But say nothing.
I can write a different verse, a prose of fits and starts. Hot taps, cold showers. I’ll bet I can do the sinuously mellifluous periods, the byzantine gravity-free construction of those whose libraries, like their concubines, are kept for show, not use. Formal gardens. Plumy tilth. I can be a magpie dedalian artificer of crackerjack miniatures, a head-lamped Fabergé who mines the thesaurus for uncut stunners and bodies forth a facet for every season. I can do shopping lists. 1 lb honey-cured bacon. 2 pkgs green beans (frozen). Magical fruits, limp leeks, the nectarines sent Hank J Jr in dreams as he associated the terrible accident and dread vastation. Bran Flakes.
I tried it. Gave rhyme up. Pared. Mute, made all my meters feet and inches. Read the backs of jelly jars and fabric softeners. Touched no one, no how. Celebrated love with my mouth shut, like everybody else.
And moved. And moved again. I didn’t say where I was going. But they knew, who sent an agent over with his standard contract to stare at martial shadows, which I think hide broken spondees. Or an anapest.
I shall wait here. The air is full of strange motions and apparitions, all the ghosts of rooms I shall not write in. I shoot blanks, buckshot, wad-cutters, dum-dums. I have thrown books through the windows. Let the bright sky in.
Richard Epstein
60 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Residence
On whim I settle here mid-flight between landing and foot. A breath, is all, a moment here to rest against the banister, where height slants surfaces and sills, tilts books and shelves, clutter and careful place. From here, sun reels from floor to face, from living room through neighborhood the light is moving; I am moved to grant all come-and-go gestalt more stake in my belonging, laud how suddenly the moonsnail blue barn two doors down, a balm I’ve loved as home, for months now leaning more and more on futile two-by-fours, has gone: For weeks, slow workmen slough its rubble hue, too shunt to see as blue or balm, to rented bins. I’ve watched them bend. They work in shifts, plain sight, unlike the mystery custodian who’s finally cleaned away the wingspread sparrow hull, for month after improbable month petrifying near a pane across the way. So I too live in lapse and breath, feet’s loft just over earth, each jut of lover’s bones relearned as distant else, and in the cracks, those briefest blooms I’ll never know by name, spare yellow flowers soft as wrist that I’ve convinced myself smell of lemon and sea. Now flown above them, perched, I know each gone of bird, book, blue as no less plain than day: And I know I could stay indefinitely here, at home mid-flight, this fleet rest between foot and landing in a place as sure as light, as I am living here all at once for now, for good.
Megan Grumbling
61 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Geomagnetics
Kathmandu, Nepal
It unleashes itself along geomantic lines and soundings, through the dark bank of wild dogs under bridges, in through the warped frames of windows that never close flush with the wall, down from the top of Shivapuri where the awol American soldier gone native lives like a saddhu, where Keith does Tibetan translations on a hillside lush with sal and laligura, where Katie weaves in Boudhanath, not far from the chang house garden where Richard is meditating or waiting for a Nepali or Tibetan to come by and dispute an arcane point of theology, where Tsering’s family lives in two small rooms in the back of the Tibetan Dragon Café, and every day she crosses the Bishnumati River at the white bridge near the house where Yvette and her half- Vietnamese daughter Sylvie speak French and Nepali and trace the tanka bought from a passing Takshindoo lama for fifty rupees, dark with the smoke of yak-butter lamps and a crack in the paint where Chenrezi, god of compassion, could conceivably come through, up over the narrow rutted road across the red brick Chetrapati Bridge where the burning ghats join the Bishnumati and the ochre Bijiswari road leads to Swayambhunath, over the steep hook where the Inji with the unlikely name of Terris Temple paints tankas, having studied the art for twelve years in a mountain cave with a refugee master from Lhasa, who grinds his paints from gemstones, who tells you never to wash the yak butter out of a blanket or clean a tanka of decades of prayers, where one day next door you come home to the gift of Sarasvati, Hindu goddess of music and wisdom, playing her vina on an antique woodblock rice paper print left by the door by a nameless lover.
Terese Coe
62 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Configuration
Michael and Valori
His business shirts she pieced on a quilt, blue on a ground of white, stripes in trapezoidal patches floating on the light.
Abstractions like untethered dashes drifting to a sea, measures of the infinite beyond geometry.
Terese Coe
Logistics
The maintenance crew on Sisyphus’s mountain take no pause. Flickering arc-light through the night it’ll be all right it has to roll.
Fed by the maintenance crew maintenance crew out of fertile foothill fields where scarecrows, crucified before the spectacle, crushed by their introverted conscience, yearning to be so dynamic, sneer at the illusion of influence.
Peter Richards
63 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Silenzio Onomatopeico
Anya, daughter of an Eskimo chief, died. There was a gathering of clans and families. A team of dogs, tied to her funeral sleigh, drew her with them over a prepared thinness where they plunged through and down into the icy Arctic waters.
Those present sang the traditional song to the lasting fascination of comparative ethnologists- Anya dyin’, Anya dyin’ Annie Annie Anya dyin’ …
Then respective spokespeople for the families, clans and dialects ran proudly through the thousand words for snow.
As they mushed and pushed back to their nomadic ways her father remained. He would go no further. His old heart broke and folded into an infinite geometry of silence.
As the white flakes settled on and around his still form, O the white and clear, O the still and O the one last word to fill his quiet mind with snow.
Peter Richards
Intuition
Phone call after phone call that autumn afternoon: everyone said it was the worst damn thing. And I said I’d felt it, knew she’d do it soon. Phone call after phone call that autumn afternoon. In the hospital’s intensive care room, I almost said it was a last blessing. Phone call after phone call that autumn afternoon: everyone said it was the worst damn thing.
Jason Barry
64 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Garden Life
A late freeze took my Georgia bluebells home— Fig shadows put my spiderwort to bed; Firewitch dianthus bristles in the loam Near where small cobalt irises now spread.
Impatiens take their darkest hours in stride— Orange poppies face the music of the sun; Hydrangeas’ fates may well be cut and dried; Spring’s wild phlox creeps like a cost overrun.
I water, so black wasps come out to play— In all these years I’ve never once been stung. They flicker through the fine, prismatic spray Like notions on the tip of summer’s tongue.
I plainly see death climb my tallest spruce: Some earthly darkness wants to see the stars; I elegize this tree for grace and use— Blood brother to the wood of my guitars.
I never see light strike the chloroplast That liberates the oxygen I breathe, Nor match the wild green wisdom of the past With any tended hybrid I bequeath.
Still, seeking my full flower, I persist— For rue, for balm, for bane, for common sage; For all the beauty striving to exist: A rampant rose, a pepper in its cage.
Michael Hallock
The Go-Around
On a star-filled carousel, its spiral arms flung wide and spinning fast as hell, we’re taken for a ride.
Richard Meyer
65 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
‘Ron and His Father Planting Trees and Shrubs’
Ron and his father planting trees and shrubs; Me, passing by: It’s 1968. I know Ron from a couple of high school clubs. He is already a man by height and weight.
They make a world I’m only passing through, Significance blooming from their worthwhile task. I’m just a boy on Summers Avenue Postponing questions I’m afraid to ask.
I’d missed the bus, as was my pattern then: Dawdling over one more game of chess With a boy also outside and looking in, Though we’d never think to call it loneliness.
I’m late, and miles from home, yet slow my walk To watch Ron lift a small, white-flowered tree Into a cart. He and his father talk, Look around the yard and, with a nod, agree.
I crave their good and rooted lives, although I have no wish to labor after school. I zig-zag through the only life I know Past bad dogs and the bully Jimmy Poole.
At my house I am free to read all night; No firethorn bush or dogwood there to lift. No need to know how much a tree needs light. I only know I have been set adrift.
Michael Hallock
Disputation
Relentless waves collapse against the rocks that wall a jagged, undiminished shore. The water seems undone by granite blocks, and yet each wasted wave is followed up with more. Undaunted water rolls, and rolls, and rolls on in. Both rock and wave contest where land and sea begin, and both display their might, and both are always right. The ancient quarrel roars and howls all day, all night.
Richard Meyer
66 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Washing the Pot
‘We're all going to wash the pot.’ —James Joyce, ‘Grace’
Excrescence and geography mark it: Indian turmeric, Ethiopian teff, black pepper from the Maldives, sauces from Tabasco Island, Thailand, braunschweiger from Germany, and miso from Japan. Embedded traces of them linger on in microscopic fissures, bubbles, eggs of crusted ebony iron welded in black surfaces with branding. There were times I cooked in it for lovers—liaisons in cabins, with the smell, sizzle and heat of bacon popping, postlude to the sounds of love. A serviceable vessel it has been these years. Washing may take away the slick coating, the food scraps, but the scrub will never get down past the surfaces made mellow and made deep in fires of lust, passion, indulgence. Histories are etched in flame upon it. Hang it up, store it on a bright hook. Its sooty shape can speak a volume of the things I’ve taken in.
Wrestling with an Angel
Marquis of Queensbury rules? Uh-uh. No way. I’ll kick you in the balls and shins. I’ll get my thumb into your eye. I’ll not obey the rules or let old-school conventions fret my conscience. I will bite and I will spit, tear at your ears and lips and pull your hair, get in a kidney punch or two and hit below the belt. Expect it. Be aware I will not follow protocol against a heavenly opponent. Since I’ve got you in the ring, I’ll strike at Providence through you—since you resemble Him a lot.
Jacob said, ‘Bless me and I’ll let you go.’ I won’t let loose! Just thought you ought to know.
David W. Landrum
67 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Tan Yunxian (1461-1554)
female physician of the Ming dynasty
At 96, I wish I could call forth the stream of patients, women mostly, I have healed these years—the tender virgin girls who came with rashes on their secret parts; women with periods not right or for whom sex caused pain; those who could not conceive a child. Ashamed to open up their treasury of womanhood to a male physician’s touch, they flocked to me, some with a reddened part quite easily cured; some with menstrual trials; others, more seriously, nearly mad in the aftermath of a difficult birth— the things the men who practice healing arts record as ‘women’s complaints.’ That I was a wife and mother made me empathize with them and their distress; and I could cure the womb, vagina, breasts. My son will cut the woodblocks for prints of the book I wrote. The Sayings of a Female Doctor lies a manuscript. The booksellers will not publish a text by a woman, even one who served for years, to whom nobility, the royal court, the wealthy looked for cures. Self-published, it might see the light of day. With no apprenticeship, no study with a master healer (who must be a man), I’m scorned. My voice from eighty years spent in the medicinal arts will cease, will go unheard, and my advice will quietly die, unpublished. Slender chance my own copies will sell. The merchants who run bookshops won’t give up space for my title in their stalls. These silences—a woman’s voice is stilled not out of death and not from a disease of body, but of body politic. I hope healing will come to this soft plague, this lack of voice, this blockage, this complaint.
David W. Landrum
68 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Rachel
Based on the life of Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750)
I. Spinster
We take up the thread the way Rachel takes a spool of thread to spin to lace or a brush to vein a painted flower, the way her father takes up forceps to grip a baby’s head. a baby’s head. Bloemengracht, among the homes suspended above the lovely flower-lined canal, the doctor’s house in situ: within, Rachel sits and pins her lace, plays the linen bobbins like a miniature spinet. Perched to catch the thin light, her head in cap appears to float above the bodice of her dress behind the window’s watery glass. Already her ovaries unfurl like rosebuds suspended in her torso. When the silver bell rings, she quickens.
The door reveals visitors to view the renowned curiosities of father’s jars kept snugged inside their cupboards. Physicians? If so, the great man himself will host. But there are those for whom the specimens are strange entertainment. These are those, two students, sons of local burghers. Welkom. As they walk the aisles of cabinets, hushed as church, Rachel takes up a pen to sketch— the nib’s inky scratch distracting her from the endless murmurration rising from the jars’ inhabitants.
Continued
69 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
She concentrates so hard to ignore the whispers rustling all those pairs of lips she does not notice the two young men have woven back around, and now they watch her sketch. It takes a tick for her to hear their praise of detail— the fine threading of the vessels, the filaments of lung and leaf— refers to her. The fine vessels of her skin dilate; flush with blood her face blushes beneath its cap. To divert them she offers her father’s special pleasures— things concealed in cabinets’ back rows—because, he frowns, Not everyone need see them. See these? she says: tableaux of fetuses posed to weep for mortal man into placental handkerchiefs. A pantaloon-clad child’s leg that seems to tread upon a piece of syphilitic skull (in this her father’s hand): one known to all who loved whoredom. And next to them, a head resting on a ruff, brain case perpetually agape, tangled skein of gray matter and nerves on the verge of unraveling.
Unnerved, they leave.
When Rachel hangs the baby’s head inside the specimen jar suspended by a thread of horsehair into a preservative of balsam, brandywine and Berlin blue, it mews and whines that it’s unwholesome to be thus on display: We’re dead. What need have we of fancy caps to clothe our poor heads? But you do, she says. I’m trying to save your souls with lace which, like our Lord, is grace defined by absence. (At this, they titter.)
Continued
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She rubs her nose then stops and smells her fingers. No, listen, she shakes her head, each tatted hat I harrow Hell for you. You harrow any hope of marriage, you mean. It makes you weird, another pouts. It makes us weird. You smell like a spinster: stale, like decayed roses. Red with anger now she pours in the liquor to submerge its lips, but not before one musters up a cruel last quip: Mothers mother only death. On their shelves, the breathless heads nod and bob on their thin stems, whole bouquets from buds to full funereal blooms.
II. Female Flower Painter
Girls don’t, especially those with no paint running in their veins. But mother arranges it, insists it will put roses in her cheeks.
Already at eighteen, she’s outgrown Aelst’s studio, wishes to shed it like a too-tight skin. She shrugs. It makes her skin crawl, the crunch of so many tiny mandibles feasting on the flora. feasting on the flora. He likes her freshness. Under him she’s learned new fictions, new forms of fixation: the worm-eaten leaf, the moth-nibbled petal, the real flowers long since faded. A vanitas for Calvinist living rooms. for Calvinist living rooms. Today’s new voice: a snake, slank and sun-warmed, green dalliance among the greenery. His whispered sibilance suggests you’ve learned enough from his tableaux.
Continued
71 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
You’ve digested him whole, the way I swallow an egg. She twists the bristles of her brush, unconvinced. Listen: years from now a portrait depicts a nameless woman whose easel cradles a still-life signed by Aelst. They’ll call her Art, in the glory of her creation, but really, who else could it be? Who else out-Aelst’s Aelst? out-Aelst’s Aelst? As he sibilates he wreathes around her slender wrist, a bracelet of living emerald. When she takes up her brush to begin, his weight makes her composition radiate off-center. For months she paints the most startling bouquets: hothouse roses paired with poppies, Queen Anne’s lace and chicory blue, precious tulips alongside weeds. Cradled alike in crystal, thrust buds and loose petals, drooping, spent. To thank her lanky muse, few insects everywhere chewing up the scenery. Instead, she limns jewel-eyed reptiles, tongues aflicker—this floral Eden of hers she means to be tasted.
The apprentices are thrilled and scared; Aelst, dumbfounded. But his patrons love her work, place orders before each canvas can be stretched.
When Rachel next takes up the thread of a single-horsehair brush she adds, reflected in the vase’s crystal chinks, her face: afloat in cut glass, winks.
Continued
72 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
III. Denouément
She waited late to marry—her Meneer a painter too, and a merchant of lace. Over their Baroque world, he cast his webs, and she wove him into hers.
Her urge to keep painting outweighed the weight of knowing, young, what old mothering could birth. Of her bouquet, seven precede her death though much worse outcomes come from blooming late.
Denoué: to untie the thread. Did she conceive of them, preserved in jars all capped and cuffed and posed? Or did she suspend them from memory’s fine horsehairs where, at last, they bob without complaint while she takes up her brush to, at last, just paint?
Heidi Czerwiec
73 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 ______
Contributor Biographies and Previous Publications
C. B. Anderson was the longtime gardener for the PBS television series, The Victory Garden. His book of poems, Mortal Soup and the Blue Yonder, was published in 2013 by White Violet Press.
David Anthony was born in Ffestiniog, North Wales, brought up in Hull and educated at Hull Grammar School before studying modern history at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He is drawn to the creative tension between form and content so he mostly writes in rhyme and metre. His life has been spent in the near aura of famous poets: Dafydd ap Gwilym, greatest of the Welsh bards; Philip Larkin, one-time librarian of Hull University; Andrew Marvell, a fellow-alumnus of Hull Grammar School. Still hoping that one day something of these poets will rub off on him, he now lives with his wife in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, a stone’s throw from the churchyard where Thomas Gray is buried. His website is: http://www.davidgwilymanthony.co.uk.
Rosemary Badcoe is co-editor of the online poetry magazine Antiphon, www.antiphon.org.uk. She has just completed an MA Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.
Jason Barry is a writer and poet based in Boulder, Colorado. He is the co-founder and poetry editor of The Bacon Review. His recent poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Fat City Review, Citron Review, and Bareback Lit, among other journals. In addition to writing poetry, he is a regular contributor of criticism for Coal Hill Review—an imprint of Autumn House Press.
Jo Bell was formerly director of National Poetry Day, and is now the UK's Canal Laureate, appointed by the Poetry Society and the Canal and River Trust. She runs the highly successful online writing community 52. Jo lives on a narrowboat in the English Midlands. Her next collection, Kith, comes out in spring 2015 with Nine Arches Press.
Jerome Betts comes from Herefordshire, but has lived in Gloucester and Northampton and now Devon. His work has appeared in a variety of print magazines and anthologies as well as UK, European and US web venues such as Amsterdam Quarterly, Light, Lightenup OnLine (which he recently guest-edited) The New Verse News, Per Contra, Snakeskin and Tilt-A-Whirl.
Garrett Biggs lives and writes in Denver, Colorado where he attends the University of Denver. His most recent work has been published in Corium Magazine.
Kim Bridgford was the director of the West Chester University Poetry Center and the West Chester University Poetry Conference. As editor of Mezzo Cammin, she founded The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project. She is the author of eight books of poetry, including Bully Pulpit, Epiphanies, and Doll. She was a Ucross fellow.
David Callin has had poems published in a few magazines, both online and off. He lives on one of Britain’s offshore islands, regrettably not for tax reasons.
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Kevin Casey is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and received his graduate degree at the University of Connecticut. His work has been accepted by The Orange Room Review, The Milo Review, Small Print Magazine, Tule Review, and others. He currently teaches literature at a small university in Maine, where he enjoys fishing, snowshoeing and hiking.
Catherine Chandler is an American/Canadian poet, translator, editor, and teacher. Among her awards are the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award and the Lyric Quarterly Prize. Her poem, ‘Discovery’, recently was a finalist in the 2014 Able Muse Write Prize for poetry. She is the author of Lines of Flight (Able Muse Press, 2011), which was shortlisted for the 2013 Poets’ Prize. Her second full-length collection, Glad and Sorry Seasons, was published by Biblioasis Press (Windsor, Ontario) in 2014. Catherine currently divides her time between her homes in Saint-Lazare, Quebec and Punta del Este, Uruguay.
Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in Able Muse, Agenda, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Arts Quarterly, Cincinnati Review, Measure, New American Writing, New Walk, Orbis, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, Stinging Fly, Tar River Poetry, Threepenny Review, and the Times Literary Supplement, among others and numerous anthologies. Her poem, ‘More’, was heli-dropped in multiples across London as part of the 2012 London Olympics’ Poetry Parnassus.
Maryann Corbett’s third book, Mid Evil, won the Richard Wilbur Award and is forthcoming from The Evansville Press. Her two previous books are Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter, a finalist for the Able Muse Book Prize, and Breath Control. Recent work appears in Barrow Street and Southwest Review, among others, and is forthcoming in Able Muse and Mezzo Cammin.
Will Cordeiro received his MFA from Cornell University, where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate completing his dissertation on 18th century British literature. His work appears or is forthcoming in: Crab Orchard Review, Cortland Review, Copper Nickel, Drunken Boat, Fourteen Hills, New Walk, Other Poetry, Phoebe, Raintown Review, Sentence, South Dakota Review, Unsplendid, and elsewhere. He is grateful for residencies from ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, Ora Lerman Trust, Petrified Forest National Park, and Risley Residential College. He lives in Tucson, Arizona where he teaches at Pima Community College and the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Barbara Lydecker Crane has published two collections, Zero Gravitas (White Violet Press, 2012) and ALPHABETRICKS (for children, Daffydowndilly Press, 2013). In the U.S., her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, Light Quarterly, Measure, and eight anthologies; in the U.K., in Angle, The Flea, Magma, and 14 by 14. She’s received a Pushcart nomination and was the winner of the 2011 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest.
Heidi Czerwiec is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Dakota, where right now a blizzard is creating white-out conditions outside her window. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Self-Portrait as Bettie Page (Barefoot Muse Press, 2013) and Hiking the Maze (Finishing Line Press, 2010).
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David Davis has been a member of the Powow River Poets in Newburyport, Massachusetts since 2005. He is the Poet in Residence at the Joppa Flats Audubon Center in Newburyport, and published Crossing Streams On Rocks, his first collection of poems, in 2013. Davis is currently editing an anthology of poems written en plein air (in the open).
Andrea DeAngelis is at times a poet, writer, shutterbug and musician living in New York City. Her writing has recently appeared in Tin House, Moth + Rust and Blue Monday Review. She has just completed her first novel, Pushed. Andrea also sings and plays guitar in the indie rock band MAKAR (www.makarmusic.com).
J. C. Elkin is the founder of the Broadneck Writers’ Workshop in Annapolis, Maryland (www.broadneckwritersworkshop.com). She is the author of World Class: Poems Inspired by the ESL Classroom and other works of prose and poetry appearing in such journals as Kansas City Voices, Kestrel, Ducts, Steam Ticket, Empirical, and Imitation Fruit.
Sean Elliott lives in Margate and teaches Creative Writing for the Open University. He wrote his PhD on Robert Lowell. His first poetry collection, Waterhouse and the Tempest, was published in 2009 and his second collection, The Status of the Cat, has just been published by Playdead Press. He is also the author of Restoration Drama (Greenwich Exchange, 2013) and is currently writing a book on Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Richard Epstein had a contributor’s note in Angle issue 1. Not much has changed.
Annie Fisher is a storyteller based in Somerset. She enjoys writing light and ‘lightly serious’ verse and has had poems published in a number of on-line and print magazines including Snakeskin, Lighten Up Online, Ink Sweat and Tears, South and Other Poetry.
Claudia Gary writes, edits, and composes (tonally) in the Washington DC area. A 2014 finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award and semifinalist for the 2013 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, she is author of Humor Me (David Robert Books, 2006) and several chapbooks. Claudia has presented poetry and music panels at the West Chester University (Pa., USA) Poetry Conference, and teaches workshops and classes at the Writer’s Center (writer.org) and elsewhere. She also writes articles on health for The VVA Veteran, VFW, and other magazines. Her personal website can be found at http://www.pw.org/content/claudia_gary.
Stephen Giles was born in East Yorkshire and now lives in the East Midlands. He has been shortlisted for several poetry awards including the Virginia Warbey and the Plough, and been runner-up for the Troubadour and Ware Festival prizes.
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a six-time Pushcart nominee and Best of the Net nominee. She has authored eight chapbooks along with her latest full-length collection of poems: Epistemology of an Odd Girl, newly released from March Street Press. She is a recent winner of the Red Ochre Press Chapbook competition for her manuscript, Before I Go to Sleep, and according to family lore she is a direct descendent of Robert Louis Stevenson. www.clgrellaspoetry.com.
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Robert Griffith is the author of four collections of poetry: A Matinee in Plato’s Cave, winner of the 2009 Best Book of Indiana Award; Poisoning Caesar; and Necessary Alchemy, winner of Middle Tennessee University’s Chapbook Prize. His most recent book is The Moon from Every Window (David Robert Books, 2011), which was nominated for the 2013 Poets’ Prize, and his work has also appeared in magazines and journals such as Poetry, First Things, River Styx, The North American Review, The Sewanee Theological Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Oxford American, among many others. He is the Associate Director of the University of Evansville Press, the Director of the Harlaxton Summer Writing Program, and the editor of Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry.
Megan Grumbling’s work has appeared in Poetry, Crazyhorse, the Southern Review, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere, and has been awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and a Robert Frost Award for Poetry. She lives in Portland, Maine, where she teaches writing, reviews theater for the Portland Phoenix, and helps edit the literary journal, The Café Review.
Michael Hallock is a poet and songwriter from Pittsburgh, PA. His recent poetry appears in The Tower Journal, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and is forthcoming via Architrave Press. He likes to garden, fingerpick and sit with his wife, basking in the background radiation from the Big Bang.
David Hathwell is a former English teacher living and writing in the Bay Area. He has degrees in English, from Stanford and Columbia, as well as an advanced degree in music theory, from CUNY, and is now a piano student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His work has appeared, or will appear, in The MacGuffin, Cider Press Review, Slant, Measure, Cordite Poetry Review, California Quarterly, and The Chaffin Journal.
Peleg Held was a former member of Voices in the Wilderness as well as several other failed campaigns for basic human decency. He is a carpenter in Portland, Maine where he lives with his partner and children (primate and other).
Elise Hempel’s poems have appeared in many journals over the years, including Poetry, Able Muse, Measure, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She is the author of the chapbook Only Child (Finishing Line Press, 2014), and in 2009 she won an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award for a sonnet published in Spoon River Poetry Review.
R. Nemo Hill’s most recent book is a collection of poems, When Men Bow Down, published by Dos Madres Press. He is also the author a novel, Pilgrim’s Feather (Quantuck Lane), a narrative poem based on a story by H. P. Lovecraft, The Strange Music of Erich Zann (Hippocampus), and a chapbook, Prolegomena To An Essay On Satire (Modern Metrics). In the early eighties he was convicted of locking himself overnight in the basement of the local post office, and licking all the stamps. He is the editor and publisher of a very independent press, EXOT BOOKS (www.exottreasures.com/exotbooks).
Sandy Hiortdahl is a recipient of the Sophie Kerr Prize and The Ghost Mountain Award. She has an M.F.A. from George Mason and a Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America. Her work has appeared this year in THEMA, The Summerset Review and Barely South Review, among others. More may be found on her website: www.sandyhiortdahl.com. She’s on Twitter: @hiortdahl.
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Ailsa Holland won second prize in the Open Category of the 2014 Hippocrates Award for Poetry and Medicine. She was longlisted for the Café Writers Poetry Pamphlet Commission 2014. Her poems have been published in Angle, Ink Sweat & Tears and And Other Poems. She is 2014 Poet in Residence at Tegg’s Nose Country Park, Cheshire and the founder of Moormaid Press.
Charlotte Innes is a British-born poet and writer now living Los Angeles. She has published two chapbooks of poems, Licking the Serpent (2011) and Reading Ruskin in Los Angeles (2009), both with Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has also appeared in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2006 (Houghton Mifflin) and other anthologies, and in many journals, including The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, The Raintown Review, Rattle, Free Inquiry, and New Trad. She has also written about books and the arts for many publications, including the Los Angeles Times and The Nation. And she has taught creative writing, English, and journalism in schools and colleges in and around Los Angeles.
Lesley Ingram was born in Yorkshire and lives in Ledbury. She has been published here and there in various magazines and anthologies, and her first collection will be published by Cinnamon Press in 2015.
Karen Kelsay, native of California, is the editor of Kelsay Books. Some of her poems have been published in Mezzo Cammin, The Nervous Breakdown, Raintown Review, The Lyric, and Trinacria. Her full length book, Amytis Leaves Her Garden, is available at Amazon.
Will Kemp won the Debut Collection Award and Envoi International Poetry Competition in 2010. Cinnamon Press published his first collection, Nocturnes (2011), his second, Lowland (2013), and will also publish his third, The Painters Who Studied Clouds (2015). His poems have been published in national journals and well placed in national competitions (e.g. 2nd in both the Poetry Society’s Stanza Competition 2011 and the Keats- Shelley Prize 2013).
Janet Kenny is an old poet who started in New Zealand, zigzagged back and forth and came to rest in Queensland, Australia. Before she settled there she sang professionally in the UK and played ‘let’s pretend’ to the strains of Humperdinck, Offenbach, Verdi, Mozart, Rossini and many others, and played it straight for Bach. She tilted at a few windmills. Her poems have been widely published. Her last book’s title, This Way to the Exit, doesn’t look as funny as it used to.
Lou King is a previously unpublished poet. Neither does he have any qualifications in creative writing. He is in his late twenties, and lives in Australia.
David W. Landrum’s poetry has appeared widely, most recently in Mojave River Review, The Literary Bohemian, Skylight, Windhover, and Disorder: A Mental Illness Anthology. He teaches English at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, USA.
Tim Love’s publications are: a poetry pamphlet, Moving Parts (HappenStance, 2010), and a story collection, By All Means (Nine Arches Press, 2012). He lives in Cambridge, UK. His poetry and prose have appeared in: Stand, Rialto, Oxford Poetry, Smiths Knoll, Journal of Microliterature, Short Fiction, etc. He blogs at http://litrefs.blogspot.com/.
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Joshua Martin is a young poet who studied creative writing at the University of Gloucestershire. He has performed at and co-headlined readings at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, has scripted a sequence of videos played for 1500 citizens including his local MP and mayor, and has recently had work published in the journal Obsessed with Pipework. He currently lives in Gloucester.
Richard Meyer, a former English and humanities teacher, lives in the home his father built in Mankato, a city at the bend of the Minnesota River. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including Able Muse, The Raintown Review, Measure, Alabama Literary Review, Light, and The Evansville Review. His poem ‘Fieldstone’ was selected as the winner of the 2012 Robert Frost Farm Prize, and he won the 2014 String Poet Prize for his poem ‘The Autumn Way.’
Ray Miller has had stuff published in Antiphon, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Prole, Message in a Bottle and a few more that don’t spring to mind readily.
J. B. Mulligan has had poems and stories in several hundred magazines over the past 35 years, and has had two chapbooks published: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, and an e-book, The City Of Now And Then. He has appeared in several anthologies, including Inside/Out: A Gathering Of Poets; The Irreal Reader (Cafe Irreal); and multiple volumes of Reflections on a Blue Planet.
Rick Mullin’s work has appeared in several journals and anthologies, including The Raintown Review, American Arts Qaurterly, Unsplendid, Irresistible Sonnets, and Measure. His epic poem, Soutine, on the life of the artist Chaïm Soutine, was published in 2012 by Dos Madres Press, Loveland, Ohio, and Dos Madres published his first collection, Coelacanth, in 2013. His book-length poem, Huncke, was published in 2010 by Seven Towers, Dublin. His chapbook, Aquinas Flinched, was published in 2008 by the Modern Metrics imprint of Exot Books, New York City. Another chapbook, The Stones Jones Canzones, was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press. He works as an editor for the American Chemical Society.
Burt Myers has had recent work published in Measure, First Things, The Raintown Review and other journals.
C. P. Nield’s poetry has featured in New Poetries IV (Carcanet) as well as a range of leading journals such as The Spectator, Standpoint, The New Humanist, Magma, Ambit, Acumen, Agenda, The Rialto, Poetry Wales and The Warwick Review. He was one of the winners of the Keats-Shelley Prize in 2006.
‘An Elegy for Rose’ was previously published in Dappled Things.
Lesley Quayle is a poet, folk/blues singer, and retired sheep farmer, currently living in the wilds of rural Dorset. Her latest collection is Sessions (Indigo Dreams, 2013), featuring the landscapes of the Yorkshire dales and the characters (mainly musicians) who inhabit it. She plays the guitar badly and the bodhran with enthusiasm.
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Matt Quinn lives in Brighton, England. First They Came for the Sonnets is his first published poem. He looks forward to one day having a list of previous publications to fill out his bio.
Peter Richards has been published, almost exclusively on line and it doesn’t get much less exclusive than that. There is a tendency to avoid ‘the right places’ although it may be sour grapes or just something that looks like sour grapes or simple confusion with regard to the directional causality behind this avoidance. He snuck into New Formalist and Snakeskin anyway, and The Shit Creek Review will take some beating both in name and nature.
Rosanna Riches is currently in her final year at the University of Gloucestershire where she has been studying Creative Writing. She lives in the Forest of Dean and competes internationally with the women’s GB Kendo team.
Jane Røken is Norwegian, lives in Denmark, and writes poetry mostly in English. She likes to think of herself as an internationalist. Her writings have appeared in many different places, most recently Antiphon, Mobius, Snakeskin, Star*Line and International Times, and in the anthology Making Contact (Ravenshead Press 2012, eds. Badcoe, Badcoe & Nash).
Ed Shacklee is a public defender who represents young people in the District of Columbia. His poems have appeared in: 14 by 14, The Flea, Kin Poetry Journal, Light Quarterly, Per Contra and The Raintown Review, among other places. He is working on a bestiary.
‘Memoirs of the Widow Mantis’, was previously published in Ablemuse.
Ernest Slyman lives in New York City. He is a playwright, poet, novelist, cartoonist and humorist. He was born in Appalachia - Elizabethton, Tennessee, and attended East Tennessee State University. His work has appeared in the Young Women's Monologues From Contemporary Plays: Professional Auditions for Aspiring Actresses (edited with an acting introduction by Gerald Lee, Ratliff/Meriwether Publishing). His work has been published in The Laurel Review, The Lyric, Light: A Quarterly of Light Verse (Chicago), The NY Times, Reader’s Digest and The Bedford Introduction to Literature (edited by Michael Meyer, St Martins Press), and Poetry: An Introduction, (edited by Michael Meyer, St Martins Press).
Caleb Tankersley is a PhD candidate at The University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. His work has appeared in Cutthroat, decomP, Big Muddy, The Knicknackery, and other publications.
Nathan Tompkins is a poet and photographer in Portland, Oregon. He has been published in anthologies, art and literary magazines, and is the author of two chapbooks: Junk Mail of the Heart and The Dog Stops Here.
Alexandra VanDehey is currently a student at Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, Illinois, majoring in English and minoring in French and philosophy. Aside from a poem published in the 2013 edition of Olivet’s literary magazine, Tygr, ‘Motherland’ is her first professionally published work.
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Annette Volfing is an academic teaching medieval German literature. Her poems have appeared in various magazines, including: Other Poetry, The Interpreter’s House, Magma, Smiths Knoll, Snakeskin and the Oxford Magazine.
Robert Walicki’s debut chapbook is A Room Full Of Trees (Redbird Press). His work has appeared in HEART, Stone Highway Review, Pittsburgh City Paper, The Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, Grasslimb, and on the radio show, Prosody. Most recently,he has won first runner up in Finishing Line Press’ Open Chapbook Competition in 2013 and was awarded finalist in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition(2013). He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife where he curates a monthly reading series, VERSIFY.
Alan Wickes grew up in Northumberland. He studied History of Art and English Literature at Manchester and Open University. His work has been published in the USA and Australia as well as in UK, including appearances in: Aesthetica, Znine, Worm, Loch Raven Review, The Chimera, Envoi, Raintown Review, Shit Creek Review, Soundzine and The Hypertexts. His sonnets have won Ware Poets national competition twice, in 2004 and 2009. Cannon Poets awarded first prize to his poem, ‘Parting Shots’, in November 2006. His chapbook, Prospero at Breakfast, was published by Modern Metrics in November 2007.
Kate Wise fits poetry in around being a solicitor and mum to two under-threes. She has recently been published in StepAway magazine, and New Trad Journal, and was commended in the 2013 Cafe Writers competition and placed third in the Ware Poetry Open Competition 2014. She mainly ‘writes’ whilst swimming.
Peter Wyton, having now actually seen his poem in Jon Stallworthy’s New Oxford Book of War Poetry (see previous anticipatory bio in Angle issue 5) and finding himself in the index lodged between Wordsworth and Yeats, is now sitting with a big stupid grin plastered all over his face.
‘Escher Dreams’ was previously published in Orbis.
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Acute, possibly oblique, but never obtuse