Innisfree 10, spring 2010 THE INNISFREE POETRY JOURNAL An Online Journal of Contemporary Poetry The Lake Isle of Innisfree I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core. —William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) With Innisfree 10, we continue our series of Closer Looks at the poetry of an exceptional contemporary poet, this time with a generous selection of poems from the books of John Koethe. 1 Innisfree 10, spring 2010 As usual, you can enjoy this issue in three formats: (1) online, here at www.innisfreepoetry.org, (2) as a PDF download, and/or (3) as a handsome trade paperback, at cost from Lulu.com, an online publisher. Just navigate to the Current Issue page, where you can begin reading the issue or click on the “PDF Version” link to download the PDF of the entire issue for reading or printing, or click on the “Print Version” link to go to Lulu.com, where you can order a copy of the issue. Using print-on-demand technology, Lulu will ship you one or more perfect bound copies of Innisfree 10. NOTE: To join the Innisfree mailing list, to update your address, or to remove your address, please send an email to [email protected]. The Editor [email protected] 2 Innisfree 10, spring 2010 THE INNISFREE POETRY JOURNAL An Online Journal of Contemporary Poetry Masthead Editor, Greg McBride Greg McBride’s chapbook of poems, Back of the Envelope, appeared from Copperdome Press in 2009. He won the 2008 Boulevard Emerging Poet prize. His work appears in Arts and Letters, Boulevard, Cimarron Review, Connecticut Review, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review Online, Hollins Critic, New York Quarterly, River Styx, Salmagundi, and Southern Poetry Review. A retired lawyer and Vietnam veteran, his website is at www.gregmcbridepoet.com. Publisher, Cook Communication Cook Communication provides support for new writers who seek publication of their work and publishes the work of emerging and established poets in the pages of Innisfree. Its website is at www.cookcom.net. 3 Innisfree 10, spring 2010 THE INNISFREE POETRY JOURNAL An Online Journal of Contemporary Poetry Submission Guidelines The Innisfree Poetry Journal welcomes submissions of original, previously unpublished poems year round. We accept poems for consideration only via email from both established writers and new writers whose work is excellent. We publish well-crafted poems, whether in free verse or in traditional forms, poems grounded in the specific, which speak in fresh language and telling images. And we admire musicality: we welcome those who, like the late Lorenzo Thomas, “write poems because I can't sing.” The Innisfree Poetry Journal welcomes submissions of original, previously unpublished poems year round. We accept poems for consideration only via email from both established writers and new writers whose work is excellent. Innisfree's current acceptance rate is six percent. We publish well-crafted poems, whether in free verse or in traditional forms, poems grounded in the specific, which speak in fresh language and telling images. And we admire musicality: we welcome those who, like the late Lorenzo Thomas, “write poems because I can't sing.” Deadlines: February 1 for the spring issue, August 1 for the fall issue. 4 Innisfree 10, spring 2010 Details: 1. In ONE Word document, submit a brief bio and up to five poems attached to an email addressed to [email protected]. (If you do not have Word, please use rich text format.) Format all poems flush with the left margin—no indents other than any within the poem itself. 2. Include your name, as you would like it to appear in Innisfree, in the subject line of your submission. 3. Simultaneous submissions are welcome. If a poem is accepted elsewhere, however, please be sure to notify us immediately at [email protected]. 4. Please submit only once per issue. Assurances: By making your submission, you assure The Innisfree Poetry Journal that the work is your own original creation; that it has not been published, electronically or in print; that it has not been accepted for publication elsewhere; and that you are 18 years of age or older. Rights: By accepting a poem, Innisfree acquires first publication rights, including the right to publish it online and maintain it there as part of the issue in which it appears, to make it available in a printer-friendly format, to make the issue of Innisfree in which it appears downloadable as a PDF document and available as a printed volume. All other rights revert to the poet after online publication of the poem in The Innisfree Poetry Journal. 5 THE INNISFREE POETRY JOURNAL An Online Journal of Contemporary Poetry Innisfree 10, spring 2010 A Closer Look: John Koethe Bruce Bennett 100 Joan Mazza 136 Jane Blue 102 Judith McCombs 138 Debra Bruce 105 Rachel McGahey 139 Phillip Calderwood 108 Claire McGoff 142 Ann Cale 109 Joe Mills 144 Michael Catherwood 110 Jean Nordhaus 146 Christina Daub 111 Scott Owens 147 Nancy Devine 112 William Page 150 Paul Fisher 113 Rhodora Penaranda 152 E. Laura Golberg 115 Jacklyn Potter 155 Erica Goss 117 Oliver Rice 168 Paul Grayson 118 Elisavietta Ritchie 170 Gabe Heilig 119 A.L. Rodenberg 172 Heather Hughes 120 Marybeth Rua-Larsen 175 Rich Ives 121 Tania Runyan 177 Rose Kelleher 123 David Salner 182 Douglas Korb 124 E.M. Schorb 187 Mary Ann Larkin 125 Lynda Self 188 Lyn Lifshin 127 Janice D. Soderling 190 Doris Lynch 129 Jim Solomone 192 Katie Manning 131 Jack Stewart 193 Laura Manuelidis 132 John Surowiecki 194 Bonnie Maurer 134 Sharlie West 201 Innisfree 10 THE INNISFREE POETRY JOURNAL An Online Journal of Contemporary Poetry A CLOSER LOOK: John Koethe Utterly recognizable, John Koethe's voice is unique among American poets. In language that is often discursive, often plangent, always mesmeric in its lyricism, he explores how we experience our lives, taking the reader along, absorbing him or her in the motions of a mind that wonders, describes, celebrates, and laments. Now approaching 65, Koethe's most recent collections, Sally's Hair (HarperCollins, 2006) and the just-published Ninety-fifth Street (HarperCollins, 2009), limn the contours of a life in retrospect: "The afternoon / Is full of memories and silent passion," the "Sadness of a world . / Held together by memory . ." He again posits the primacy of memory, as well as its beauty, beautifully: I love the way remembering lets the light in, as the sullen gray Of consciousness dissolves into a yard, a pepper tree, a summer day. And minor moments and details that had been buried in the past Take on the clarity of dreams, with a transparency they never had in life. ("The Lath House," Ninety-fifth Street) 7 Innisfree 10 A few comments on Koethe's books that illustrate his place in American poetry: To describe with uncompromising candor the inner life of a man adrift in the waning of the twentieth century is one thing, but to do it without a shred of self-pity is another. John Koethe, with a riveting and limpid intelligence, manages to do both. The poems of Falling Water are like no one else's. In them, even the most extreme exertions of consciousness are transformed into the luminous measures of beautiful speech. —Mark Strand, on Falling Water In this ravishing and haunted book, John Koethe comes face-to-face with the time when "more than half my life is gone," and must try to find the meaning of a "childish / dream of love, and then the loss of love, / and all the intricate years between." As funny and fresh as it is tragic and undeceived, Falling Water ranks with Wallace Stevens's Auroras of Autumn as one of the profoundest meditations on existence ever formulated by an American poet. —John Ashbery, on Falling Water John Koethe is an immensely literary and profoundly philosophical poet whose poems never seem literary or philosophical: they seem true—true to how it feels to have a mind, to live in its movement, to think and feel through a lifetime's accumulation of experience. Koethe sounds like nobody else, and Sally's Hair is his best book—at once his most intimate and his most worldly. —James Longenbach, on Sally's Hair The voice is sober, meditative, rising now and then to the austerely lyrical. The intelligence is lucid, unsparing, yet infused with love of the world, the only world there is. —J.M. Coetzee, on North Point North For more extended considerations of John Koethe's poetic achievement, I recommend Robert Hahn's critical writing, first, his penetrating essay, "Drawing by Michelangelo, Color by Titian: Of Originality, Influence, and the Poetry of John Koethe" (http://www.cstone.net/~poems/essahahn.htm),which appeared in the fall 2004 issue of The Kenyon Review, and second, Hahn's review of Sally's Hair (http://www.cstone.net/~poems/essakoet.htm), which appeared in the May/June 2006 issue of Boston Review.