Columbia College Chicago Digital Commons @ Columbia College Chicago Court Green Publications 3-1-2012 Court Green: Dossier: The horS t Poem Columbia College Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/courtgreen Part of the Poetry Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Columbia College Chicago, "Court Green: Dossier: The horS t Poem" (2012). Court Green. 9. https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/courtgreen/9 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Publications at Digital Commons @ Columbia College Chicago. It has been accepted for inclusion in Court Green by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Columbia College Chicago. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “Read good poetry!” —William Carlos Williams COURT GREEN 9 COURT 9 EDITORS Tony Trigilio and David Trinidad MANAGING EDITOR Cora Jacobs SENIOR EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Jessica Dyer EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Elizabeth Chereskin, Leif Martinson, and Thomas Nowak Court Green is published annually in association with Columbia College Chicago, Department of English. Our thanks to Ken Daley, Chair, Department of English; Deborah H. Holdstein, Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Louise Love, Interim Provost; and Dr. Warrick Carter, President of Columbia College Chicago. Our submission period is March 1-June 30 of each year. Please send no more than five pages of poetry. We will respond by August 31. Each issue features a dossier on a particular theme; a call for work for the dossier for Court Green 10 is at the back of this issue. Submissions should be sent to the editors at Court Green, Columbia College Chicago, Department of English, 600 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60605. Work received outside of this submission period will not be read. We do not accept e-mail submissions. Please supply a SASE for reply only; submissions will not be returned. Three-year subscriptions are available for $25. Single issues are available for $10. Court Green was founded in 2004 by Arielle Greenberg, Tony Trigilio, and David Trinidad. Acknowledgments for this issue can be found on page 246. Court Green is distributed by Ingram Periodicals. Copyright © 2012 by Columbia College Chicago. ISSN 1548-5242. Magazine design by Jehan Abon, Columbia College Chicago Creative Services. Printed in the U.S.A. CONT NTS POEMS Elaine Equi 8 In Black and White & Royal Feathers Joanne Kyger 10 Three Poems Shanna Compton 13 Big Pink Trees & Planets Are Pretty Big Vincent Katz 15 The Chauffeur House James Schuyler 17 Blue windows & Other Uncollected Poems James Cihlar 40 Light and Dark Todd McCarty 42 Fall for You & Window with Exposed Girders Nick Twemlow 44 Double Rainbow Melissa Broder 47 Mamala & Ciao Manhattan Aaron Smith 50 What Christians Say During Sex & Other Poems Guillermo Filice Castro 56 Telemundo Telenovela Dolly Lemke 58 Two Epithalamions John Koethe 60 Alfred Hitchcock Shannon Tharp 64 Vertigo in Spring & Other Poems Amy Gerstler 67 Merrythought & Womanishness Christopher Davis 69 Examine Her Life & Paper Music Maxine Scates 71 Boy & Other Poems Daniel Khalastchi 76 Hormone Elevation Sonnet: Evan Lavender-Smith 78 Huge Trouble Charles Jensen 79 A Review of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight in the Form of a Ghazal Lee Ann Roripaugh 80 Fibonacci & After the Caravan Fire . Sandra Simonds 82 Fourteen Sonnets Erica Bernheim 96 The Fatal Lozenge & The Aged Gymnast Pauses Before the Vault Benjamin S. Grossberg 98 To My Old Dog Stephen Danos 99 Nebraskattack & Other Poems Steven Toussaint 103 Early & Twelfth Maggie Nelson 105 My Suicide & Other Poems D.A. Powell 109 Valley of the Dolls Bo McGuire 110 Tallulah Bankhead: Recollections of Valor Tim Dlugos 113 From Journal Graham Foust 124 Social Wrench & Other Poems Bernadette Mayer 127 Soule Sermon DOSSIER: THE SHORT POEM Bernadette Mayer 134 “i am a common merganzer” James Schuyler 135 Short Poem & Miss Blank Ron Padgett 137 Clap Trap & Lynn McClaskey Shanna Compton 139 Q Platform Mary Ann Samyn 140 In Answer to Your Burning Question & That’s One Way to Think of It Elise Cowen 143 from Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments Jeanne Marie Beaumont 157 Our Omen & Sales Invoice Laura Kasischke 159 Binoculars Andrew Hudgins 160 Broadcasting Winter Rye Rachel Zucker 161 Fish Dream & Other Poems Nicole Wilson 164 “In the attic again” & “Kept in a canister” Jan Bottiglieri 166 The Eye Casey Thayer 167 Tanka Susan Cataldo 168 The Fast Food Restaurant Jordan Stempleman 169 Downtime & Other Poems Jim Cory 172 so thanks Scott Keeney 173 Death Tim Dlugos 174 Bubbles & Other Poems Kathleen Ossip 179 Answer to a Kind but Impossible Proposition & “Ah happy home . .” Larry Sawyer 181 So Toyota Margot Pappas 182 Pink Rose: & Discontinued Poem Guillermo Filice Castro 184 New Stone Age Albert Goldbarth 185 American Koan & Other Poems Richard Fox 193 The Sprung Metronome Tara Betts 194 One that got away Gregory Brooker 195 Confessional Mode Jo McDougall 196 Style & Other Poems MRB Chelko 199 from The World After Czeslaw Milosz Guy Rotella 200 To Pray Charles Jensen 201 Planned Community & Take It with You Aaron Belz 203 My Last Duchess & Other Poems Craig Cotter 206 Green & KJ Mike Topp 208 Facebook Haiku & Other Poems Jeremy Halinen 211 He Sees Suzanne Buffam 212 from Further Commentaries Elizabeth Savage 217 Passive Voice & Other Poems D.A. Powell 220 A Brief History of Internment Patrick Culliton 221 Shine & Other Poems Jeff Tigchelaar 224 The Neighbors Are Trying & A Truth; or, A Rut (Berryman Erasure: Dream Song 18) Joseph Massey 226 On a False Spring & Other Poems Robert Creeley 231 One Day Elaine Equi 232 Caught in a Downpour & The Honeycomb of Sleep CONTRIBUTORS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 6 PO MS 8 Elaine Equi In Black and White X-ray of a day’s bones and teeth. Blonde flowers, black water, shadows at play. Hot jazz and cool jazz. Dominoes and dice. Spades and clubs, but not diamonds or hearts unless grey diamonds, grey hearts. The inner silver being that likes wandering the inside-out underworld of B movies, and silent movies, their quiet sister. There is nothing so clean and polished or dirty as black and white. Typography of the logos. Original sin. The Garden of Eden was black and white, the color added later. 9 Royal Feathers Rakish pheasants reeking of autumn. * Snowy Pegasus preening. * The owl of Minerva’s speckled coat. * Raphael’s resplendent green-gilded wave of wing. * Flannery O’Connor’s slow and lazy-eyed peacock fan. * Garish showgirls choked by ostrich boas. * Sharp Shakespearean sonnet-spewing quills. * Hawkish Apache’s beaded eagle crest. 10 Joanne Kyger Another Wonderfully Awful Birthday Has Passed Another wonderfully awful birthday has passed. “Night raids and drone attacks” will remain part of any forthcoming celebration. —Petraeus on the permanent guest list. Presents will consist of military planes for Israel to sweeten a deal to delay building illegal units for 90 days. Now the day is practically over at 3pm. Soggy potatoes in the chowder. Bodhidharma travels from India to China in 475 AD & becomes the 28th ancestral teacher after Buddha “You have an inconsistent, shallow, arrogant and conceited mind with little insight and few resources.” Therefore you are incapable of carrying out any kind of practice necessary for truth or peace of mind. Not 5 thousand or 15 thousand but 60 thousand barrels of oil flowing unimpeded into the Gulf water for a leak that can’t be fixed. Notice how subtly one can control the flow of the narrative. So aware of this moment’s almost cold wind. Dogen Gigen 1200-1253 plants Soto Zen in Japan. Hayao Miyazaki produces “My Neighbor Totoro” in 1988 Nature returns to a flow November 22, 2010 11 Overcast with the SF Chronicle Reading the Date Book, the funnies Sinking feeling. Is it a tooth? The echoing body approaching the dark night of the year like a movie thriller. Nix on one columnist, let’s try another— For the sake of privacy from Wiki leaks diplomats will get off the internet says Jon Carroll and meet in large parks, like Yosemite. Can you remember last night’s social situation?— so worthlessly demandingly and urgent In Austria they loathe the death sentence. They don’t want a Schwartznegger museum— he put Tookie Williams to death in California. Early twilight gets here so quickly “This is my original, constant, and true self” upon seeing the morning star on the 8th day of December from here you begin December 13, 2010 12 Active As active as an over-active imagination —that’s the wind you’re hearing now This reflection is meant to be refined by the simplest reduction led by the voice of winter wind reviewing history terribly old A story is told in a single breath so easy to remember it blows right through you December 29, 2010 13 Shanna Compton Big Pink Trees It’s too bad about your short season, but we’ll take what we can get— a few unusually warm weeks in April under pale hued cloudless sky. The buffed-up tributaries off the canal laugh to see you primping there in their gawkward mirrors, readying yourselves like parade floats. If only Dr. Seuss could see you now, buoyant and bouffant, perfumed up the wazoo, saying things like “Darling, I’m aching to fruit for you.” 14 Planets Are Pretty Big Some theories suggest our iron cores attracted and merged beneath the sunset stripes of a reducing atmosphere. Formed a system of two (coincidentally, obliquely met, eclipses total) eliminating wobble. Planets are pretty big. They don’t blow up instantly. Vapor squirts out, escaping under pressure. We utterly depend on our partner in space, odd bald rock, fond old cliché.