SPC Sacramento Poetry Center
POETRY NOW
JULY-AUGUST 2010
Free | An interview with Robin Ekiss | Margaret Hoehn’s new book reviewed
featuring MARY BETH
ASARO LAURA
BAUMANN ROBIN
EKISS TAYLOR
GRAHAM BAXTER
JACKSON KIT
KNIGHT JOHN P.
KRISTOFCO LYN
LIFSHIN GARY
LUNDY
THINGS ARE HAPPENING AT THE POETRY CENTER!
MICHAEL S.
MORRIS JOYCE
ODAM DIANE
WEBSTER ANN
WEHRMAN A.D.
WINANS LINES FOR Q
In a special four page section, fellow poets pay tribute to Quinton Duval, who many knew simply as Q, a talented poet WWW.SACRAMENTOPOETRYCENTER.ORG with a generous spirit.
IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS (clockwise) Sandra Senne, C.E. Chaffin, Allegra Silberstein, Elsie the Poetry Bomb, Christopher Buckley, NSAA and Christian DeWild Band (at the R25 event), S.A. Griffin and Bob Stanley, Lorraine Perrotta, and Gene Bloom.
AMANDA
WYNN
JULY / AUGUST 2010 | POETRY NOW | 1
POETRY NOW
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
POETRY NOW, the Sacramento region’s literary review and calendar, is published by the Sacramento Poetry Center (SPC), and is funded in part with grants from the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission. Submissions of poems, artwork, reviews, and other work of interest to the Sacramento poetry community are welcome. Note that work submitted may also appear on the SPC website. POEM SUBMISSIONS Submit poems and a 30-50 word bio to Cynthia Linville: clinville@csus.edu. Electronic submissions preferred. Submissions may be mailed. Send with an SASE to address below. DISTRIBUTION POETRY NOW is distributed in area bookshops, Sacramento City and County libraries, and by mail to member-subscribers. If you are interested in receiving Poetry Now, or want multiple copies to share with others, please contact us. EDITOR: Trina Drotar BOOK REVIEW EDITOR: Emmanuel Sigauke INTERVIEW EDITOR: Lisa Jones INTERVIEW CONTRIBUTOR: Dorine Jennette POETRY EDITOR: Cynthia Linville STAFF: Linda Collins, Sandra Senne
BOB STANLEY Quinton Duval helped me get my first teaching job. “Q” somehow balanced the hectic One night before a reading, I told him that I had just life of a teacher with the calmness graduated and was looking for teaching positions, of a poet-philosopher. not expecting a response. “We’ve got an opening at Solano College,” he offered. “Call this number and talk to Kathy.” A week later, after a brief chat with Kathy (the dean), I had three morning classes and my first teaching assignment. Between classes, that first semester, I chatted with Quinton in his cozy, full-of-books office. He lent me books, and we’d talk about poetry, teaching, writing, and music. “Q” somehow balanced the hectic life of a teacher with the calmness of a poet-philosopher.
DESIGN/PRODUCTION: Richard Hansen
Frank Graham hosted S.A. Griffin’s Poetry Bomb and reading in May, and a dozen Sacramento poets added their poems to the collection. According to S.A’s wife, Sacramento was one of the best crowds they had on the 8,000 mile tour. The First Wednesday reading in June featured Sue Thomas, Paco Marquez, Sandy Thomas, and Trina Drotar. More than thirty people attended this reading. Special thanks to Robert Foster and Amanda Graham for allowing the use of this space. The next First Wednesday reading (July 7) will be a special Quinton Open Mic Memorial Reading beginning at 6p.m.
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: Frank Graham
SPC THE POET TREE, also known as the Sacramento Poetry Center, is a non-profit corporation dedicated to providing forums for local poets—including publications (Poetry Now and Tule Review), workshops, special events, and an ongoing reading series. Funded primarily by members, SPC is entirely run by a volunteer board of directors. We welcome your input and your interest. BOARD OF DIRECTORS:
Bob Stanley, President Tim Kahl, Vice President Sandra Senne, Treasurer Frank Graham, Secretary Kate Asche Paco Marquez Brad Buchanan Theresa McCourt Linda Collins Rebecca Morrison Lawrence Dinkins, Jr. Jonathan Schouten Trina L. Drotar Mary Zeppa CONTACT INFORMATION: 1719 25th Street • Sacramento, CA 95816 info.sacpoetrycenter@gmail.com • 916-979-9706 www.sacramentopoetrycenter.org
Upcoming readings include: Emmanuel hosts the release of Tiger’s Eye on July 12. Third Thursday on July 15 in The Sacramento Room. Frank Graham’s Sactown Poetry Bands on July 19. Tim Kahl hosts Rob Schlegel and Dorine Jennette on July 26th. Tule Review will be available this summer, and the reading has been scheduled for August 2. For updated information and complete details, please check our website, our Facebook Group page, or sign up for the weekly reminder email by sending your name and email to tnklbnny@frontiernet.net. Thanks to Danyen Powell, this will be our first full summer with ceiling insulation at our space. Can you believe we’ve been there five years? Danyen was instrumental in constructing the new fence around the R25 space. “Good fences build good neighbors,” said Frost. Up until now, I always thought that was a xenophobic line. Our whole complex is transformed. Good fences build good arts communities, and the groups at R25 came together on the weekend of June 5 and 6 to celebrate not only the new fence, but music, art, theater, and poetry in the first R25 Crossroads Festival. Come on by 25th and R — Monday nights at 7:30! Bob
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A PUBLICATION OF THE SACRAMENTO POETRY CENTER
POETRY NEWS
Summer/Fall 2010 Poetry Workshops with Bob Stanley, John
Tule Review
Allen Cann, and Julia Connor began May 27
Summer 2010 Issue now available The Poetry Center’s literary journal has a new look and new editors. Now perfect bound with a full color cover, the current issue, edited by Linda Collins and Theresa McCourt, features 38 poets. Tule Review is published twice yearly and is sent free to all members of the Poetry Center (one of the many good reasons to join now!) The Summer 2010 issue will debut at a Monday Evening Reading on August 2nd at the Poetry Center. See the website for more details.
and continue through Nov. 2 in the Rancho Cordova, Southgate, Belle Cooledge, and Valley Hi / Laguna libraries, and the Poetry Center. Check the SPC website for details. nnn
SPC is now on Facebook. Join our Group Page! nnn
Congratulations to Lisa Jones and Marcelo Hernandez for being accepted into the Squaw Valley Writer’s Conference. nnn
Congratulations to Carol Louise Moon for her many recent awards. nnn
Some of the upcoming Monday Night readings hosted by the Poetry Center
SPC celebrates the release of Tiger’s Eye with a reading on July 12 featuring Joyce Odam,
Monday, July 12 Tiger’s Eye Release Reading
Gordan Preston, Laura LeHew, Cleo Griffith, Tom
Monday, July 19 Patrick Grizzell, Mario Ellis Hill, James Israel, Jackson Griffith, Robert Grossklaus, Jennifer & Michael Pickering
Goff, and Karen Clausel nnn
Get Poetry Now by PDF instead of a print copy. Send your name and email
Monday, August 2 Tule Review Reading
to poetrynoweditor@ gmail.com.
Monday, August 23 Shawn Pittard, Christina Hutchins, Gregory Randall, Toni Wilkes, Roy Mash & Mary Petrosky
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TRINA L. DROTAR Special thanks to the contributors for their poems and remembrances of Quinton. Each contributor graciously agreed to waive the publishing of their bio in order to accommodate all of the poems honoring Quinton Duval. Our next issue will feature a new section on small presses and local authors. This will be a continuing feature, and I would like to hear from those of you who run small presses or have new publications out by small presses, as well as awards local authors and/or books have received. If you have a book you’d like us to consider reviewing, please contact the editor. If you know of any special readings or poetry-related events/news, please forward the information to the editor for inclusion in the next issue. The deadline will be August 5, 2010. The editor has a new email address: PoetryNowEditor@gmail.com. This is not for poetry submissions. That email remains the same. The Sacramento Poetry Center has a new email address for general inquiries: info. sacpoetrycenter@gmail.com.
of SPC readings and
Many thanks to all of the people who worked so hard on this issue.
events, Send your name
Trina
and email to tnklbnny@
—
frontiernet.net.
Trina L. Drotar’s email: PoetryNowEditor@gmail.com.
Get email announcements
See the SPC website for more details
The SPC website
SPC Poets’ Workshop
is updated weekly, and you’ll find information about The Sacramento Poem (submission deadline December 1, 2010), the SPC Poetry Contest (submission deadline July 15, 2010), upcoming events, and past events, among other items.
Every Tuesday Time: 7:30pm to 9pm Location: Hart Senior Center Facilitator: Danyen Powell Contact: (530) 756-6228 Cost: Free
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EDITOR’S MESSAGE
Discounts on UC Davis Extension writing courses SPC members now receive a special 10% discount on all UC Davis Extension writing courses! For more information, go to the SPC website or call (800) 752-0881.
JULY / AUGUST 2010 | POETRY NOW | 3
POEMS
THE THIRD EYE OF ISLAM By Baxter Jackson
DRIVING THE PIANO By Laura Baumann
Zabeeba Zawhat? Za-bee-ba Say it again: za-bee-ba What can it be? What does it mean? It sounds vaguely obscene Found all over the Middle East, in every season In Arabic, it actually means raisin Don’t look for it in the supermarkets though, you’re more likely to see it on the metro than you are in Toledo, Ohio 5 doses a day of religious inculcation plus years of Islamic prostration equals epidermal accumulation On a Muslim man’s head, a callous is like a key to the heavenly palace brought about by the notion of social devotion and awarded with communal deference and general reverence Small wonder some fake it till they make it with just sandpaper and soot the payoff is huge and hey, the mark is cool to boot Zabeeba
Lynn and I couldn’t wait to be teenagers. We borrowed purses and car keys to take turns driving the piano like a bright red Mustang convertible. We couldn’t imagine kissing the stupid boys at school. We pictured tan lifeguards and boys in bands, with feathered hair, like the ones in Tiger Beat. Lynn and I tried on red lipstick and blue eye shadow while wobbling in oversized black heels. We sang loudly to the Captain and Tennille, fluffing up our Farrah- Fawcett-hair. SKATING THE TABLE By Laura Baumann
NOUNS/VERBS By John P. Kristofco
The meeting dragged by, in tedious monotony, so I decided to figure skate across the conference table.
lovers love and liars lie, earth receives the rain like world absorbs the words we speak, our tongues, the air we take and give; it is a simple syntax, in the end: dust to dust, ashes to ashes; from and to us nouns our verb form dashes
My suit dropped off, revealing a skating dress of glittering purple sequinsmy hair, a crafted updo, complete with jeweled tiara. Weaving among coffee mugs and agendas, I flowed like a graceful ballerina, until knocking over a diet soda. Deciding a toe loop would impress them, I jabbed my toe pick into the icy table, vaulting into the air. My coworkers began scoring from 1 to 10 on skill, transitions, choreography, performance, and artistry.
Then came the axel — the only jump you take off on going forward. I made sure to smile at a stern faced judge. Finally a loop jump, with the sensation of falling over backwards on my head. Hate to brag, but I nailed it!
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ANCIENT CHINESE CURSE By Laura Baumann
THUNDERSTORM AT NIGHT By Diane Webster Even through closed, sleeping eyes lightning impresses like flashbulb snap meant to freeze the moment until thunder rattles, loosens, scatters everything mobile jumps in fright like the cat sleeping at my feet jumps a chain reaction through me like touching electricity so after the next lightning flash I whisper, “Here comes another one,” as if she didn’t see and know the next crashing blow in one, two, three seconds…now traveling farther way in ripples like dreams snuggling us deeper beneath protective blankets.
Three Chinese curses of increasing severity: • May you live in interesting times • May you come to the attention of those in authority • May you find what you are looking for
An ancient Chinese curse reads May you live in interesting times but already I have had enough drama in this life. Jinx me that I may know the trials and tribulations of three months’ salary worth of emergency savings. Afflict me with the calamity of well funded and diversified 401Ks and Roth IRAs. Plague me with the scourge of a forty-year-long loving, monogamous relationship.
A PUBLICATION OF THE SACRAMENTO POETRY CENTER
BOOK REVIEW is an inspiring collection of This is not even a romanticized view of life, but an beautifully crafted poems. The poet encourages us to see honest message about what it means to be human, and hope in the least expected places, even in broken glass. to be alive, this process in which we should be willing to The collection starts with the poem “What Softly Calls “drown in the sadness and beauty of this world / in order Back,” which reminds us that “the world reaches out / to live.” In “Travelling without a Map,” one of my favorite to comfort itself.” This search for comfort, the need to poems in the collection, the persona ponders about the register a presence, is not a passive one. The poet tells us nature of human relationships, remembered in the context that “even the parts we thought / were mute are more of travel. A physical journey remembered parallels the poem / than we could have imagined.” It’s the complexity emotional journey in the persona’s personal relationship. of life often disguised by plainness and unpredictability. All Even though the couple inhabits different and increasingly things around us, trees, grass, rocks, birds, are full of this divergent emotional plains, the persona realizes that richness of life; they sing it, whether we pay sometimes in travelling, it is often difficult to attention or not, but in not paying attention separate departure from arrival. After a while, we lose out on a lot that would enrich us. it does not matter whether one is arriving Important messages about life are or departing because these two “can flow / everywhere, even in the language of our side by side without touching / as they leave wounds or in “those long / silences that each other behind.” This poem reconnects to we have endured,” which are not silences, the idea of how silence can draw two people but “psalms and blessings / and offerings of closer to each other, thereby helping them encouragement / and hope.” All we need achieve emotional reunification. to do is learn to hear what silence is telling These poems are full of hope, reminding us us. When we reach this point of hearing the to pay attention to the objects we often ignore, inaudible, of seeking sound where silence which might enrich our understanding of life. rules, we will be closer to discovering the The message is written in everything around hope that abounds around us. us, how the random spill of apples from Five Prayers of Apples In “The Topography of Motion,” the poet a torn grocery bag can lead to thoughts of by Margaret Hoehn tells us that motion always tells a story. Any “the sudden / and ordinary way that beauty Spire Press, 2009 form of movement is important as it goes / or loss appears in our lives.” Even artists like ISBN: 978-1-934828-07-6 hand in hand with change. Life is motion. To Cezanne (invoked in the title poem) have live is to be in a constant state of movement, and it doesn’t always deciphered these subliminal messages from simple, matter whether the movement is a going (somewhere) or a almost invisible objects. The poet here asks if loneliness return. Departure becomes indistinguishable from arrival. allowed the artist to hear the stories of apples, stories of Even memory is in a constant state of transformation; “gratitude and despair.” Triggered by the loss of rotting what matters is that the motion continues to “chime” and apples, the art of Cezanne, as celebrated by the poet, was a every moment is “a bird/already flying beyond reach.” search of beauty so intense that also it sought to make time Here we see the consistency of movement, and the deeper stand still, or to “stop the world from turning,” to help an concentration needed to decipher the movements that epiphany reveal itself. I detect in these poems the need to imitate the beat of life, whose progression like that of the take a more active role in the making of meaning in order seasons, forever departing, but always returning. to understand our world. These poems celebrate life, whose manifestation is I enjoyed these poems, which are full of music. On sometimes seen through even the most fragmentary piece the page they simple, but as you reread, because they are of evidence and various “intricate puzzle[s].” The world rendered beautifully, you are taken to a higher level of demands that we constantly fit the puzzles of our lives thinking. This simplicity is not even deceptive, it doesn’t together. Perhaps this task should make us appreciate life desire to be, but it is something deliberate, something more, and ,as the poet does, “by will alone…make this meant to lift you to a higher level of understanding, or exquisite, / fractured world almost whole.” Of course, if no new understanding is attained, at least to a new there is no perfection, but there is the satisfaction that the way of thinking about apples, silence, shadows, darkness, episodes of life we have so far puzzled together help us travel, relationships, and rivers. Margaret Hoehn is a gentle desire more puzzles which come as hours, days, months, philosopher, raising questions, answering them, and raising years. That, the poet seems to be saying, is the ultimate more and not answering them. appreciation of life. REVIEWED BY EMMANUEL SIGAUKE FIVE PRAYERS OF APPLES
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JULY / AUGUST 2010 | POETRY NOW | 5
POEMS ENTER THE DELUGE By Ann Wehrman tell you how entire continents universes of light and darkness mass through one side of my mind out the other raven laughs, hunts, has seen such changes come to nothing before come to this concrete below welcome the sands concrete pours through my head lava, earthquake, tsunami great rolling waves green-white water shards of shell fish in my mouth pour out through every orifice drain and fill me chunks of time weeds of your hair tangle in mine your scent mixes with salt, turns to tears choke on this change you and me no time to think it all through the next wave is upon us I vanish within A KISS By Ann Wehrman I am so small I can live under your collar in your pocket or your hair do you want to get rid of me, or would you want me there?
THIS RANGE OF SEEING By Joyce Odam
SPEAKING IN BLOOD By Joyce Odam
I remember stars in the black night. But who can count the memory of that many stars?
The words are all red this morning, red for love, and lack of love, and for the word itself. Look how intense they appear on the page—shaped like that—awkward like that, meaning what they mean, even as they question what they mean. How fierce they are, as if to win by their very boldness —their red persuasion.
I use the abstract words: millions, billions, but do not know how many this is. I am that tiny child-speck, dizzy from looking up into the sky from the sidewalk: sounds hushed, the chanting of the other children fading into a thin ringing of voices: I am lifting into the sky, dizzy with seeing. I am a slow twirl of wonder . . . so many stars. CALLING “SPIRIT” By Taylor Graham If I could, I’d dial your number, Rover. But you’re stuck in a sand-trap out there on Mars. I’d like to ask about your view. What does a Warrior Planet think about our embattled earth? Not Earth herself, but her childrenearthlings swarming all over her globe, causing mischief. You may be stuck in sand, but I doubt there are minefields on Mars. I’d like to talk to you, Spirit, but you’re out of service; solar panels tilted to gather power in a Martian winter. Shall we tilt our earthly panels sun-ward and talk to the heavens instead of bickering among ourselves? 6 AM POEM By A.D.Winans Lying here alone in bed A gnawing hunger in my belly Soon I’ll take my aching bones To the kitchen table Take my morning dose of pills Sad there is no woman to put them Next to my morning cereal
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ONE OF NIGHT’S DARK STORIES By Joyce Odam After dark, when street lights come on, tree shadows dance against walls— become pictographs, shadow-murals on night’s grim buildings whose walls are made beautiful by this—and sidewalks try to hold the trees from pulling through their circles. AMANADA SABOURIN, 1945 BAMs & HAMs By Kit Knight As soon as women came into the Marines, the men devised their own “cute” nicknames. We expected that—what man cares for women as a group anyway? When one of the men would call me a BAM, Big Ass Marine, I’d respond, “And you’re a HAM, the H stands for Half.” A PUBLICATION OF THE SACRAMENTO POETRY CENTER
LINES FOR Q: POETS REMEMBER QUINTON DUVAL
My Remembrance of Quinton Duval by Victoria Dalkey
For the last five years, I have had the pleasure to be included in a group of eight poets who meet every four to six weeks to discuss a book we have all read, break bread, and share poems we have worked on from assignments by members of the group. Quinton Duval was the heart and soul of the group, the one who was sure to bring an astonishing poem that was much more than a first draft. He was the only man in the group, but we never felt we had to defer to him nor did he ever treat us as anything but equals. He kept us on track when we got off on tangents, and he always called our leader, Kathleen Lynch, before the meeting to make sure that someone would bring a protein. Quinton would bring homemade dishes, and they were always delicious. He fed our stomachs and our souls. He was our song bird and every poem he wrote was, as his beloved wife Nancy said, a love poem. We miss him terribly and no one will ever be able to take his place in our hearts.
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CONTRIBUTORS
LISA ABRAHAM • KATY BROWN VICTORIA DALKEY CATHERINE FRENCH CAROL FRITH • SHADI GEX CINDY HURN SUSAN KELLY-DEWITT KATHLEEN LYNCH DENNIS SCHMITZ • MARY ZEPPA
LINES FOR Q By V. Dalkey The first night you were in the hospital I woke humming “The Nearness of You” a Hoagy Carmichael song of course one you would know and love and I thought of you lying ill and wished myself there with you holding your hand and humming – “It isn’t your sweet conversation That brings this sensation, oh no It’s just the nearness of you” – a song as simple and intimate as the ones you wrote to touch us and cheer us on dark nights when we are alone and longing for your company. And now you are the song we all sing when we’re going to sleep flashing in our minds like the red wings of the small blackbirds you loved.
Poets in photo, from left to right: Carol Frith, Susan Kelly-Dewitt, Mary Zeppa, Kathleen Lynch, Cathy French, Lisa Dominguez Abraham, Quinton Duval, Victoria Dalkey. Photo by Fred Dalkey.
DISLOCATIONS By Carol Frith Time and time’s dislocations, flowing silent and enclosed, dark wine in an underground river. It takes decades to remember. I’m out of energy today: time and time’s dislocations. My neighbor’s grape-colored rhododendron is shedding light— Lenten color, flowing in a river through the afternoon. So many purples in half-hearted sunlight, time and its dislocations almost audible in the heavy air. I think I’ll stay inside. Burgundy light flows like a slow river through this season: mingled wines of blended sorrow, of time and its dislocations: dark wine flowing like a river. JULY / AUGUST 2010 | POETRY NOW | 7
LINES FOR Q
A POET’S DAYS By Katy Brown
for Quinton Duval
Humans should sing the way birds do—with all of their being, affirming even in their entreaties. Life is provisional but is all the time. Quinton’s poems sing in that way. Quinton was rare for his equanimity, and in his poems, for his ability to sort our emotional intricacies. His poems love dailiness, all its nuances, its romances and forfeits. Beautiful poems that we’ll keep because they keep us.
He wrote his appointments in a calendar filled with poems and photographs. The days were crossed off until today.
—Dennis Schmitz
for doctor’s visits, birthdays, anniversaries. He had plans for next week. He’d crossed off the days before today,
LETTER TO Q, MAY 17, 2010 By Susan Kelly-DeWitt …a piece of the continent/ A part of the main… --John Donne Dear Q, This morning our feisty little dazzler of a hummingbird dropped by, with the thrum and whirr of those posh jade wings, and that off-kilter boutonniere of shy ruby. Then the local host, aerialist and stickler for tunes, Mr. Mockingbird, started in a cappella; so of course
On this day his heart stopped beating: the poems he imagined, still undrafted. He wrote reminders in his calendar
marking time on a poet’s calendar. He did not circle the day he learned his diagnosis: he had made an appointment with Charon written in invisible ink. All we knew was that his days were limited: he marked them off with red X’s. All of his language and learning and skill― all silent now: gone with him into the void. He wrote his appointments in a calendar and crossed off the days he had lived. DIVINING BY CLOUD, ANGEL, FLOWER By Mary Zeppa Spy the cloud in the shape of Q’s quarter moon. Spy the silver-blue, fit-for-kings cloud.
I thought of you, and that virtuoso gang of old choristers, who
Spy King Q the First in his chariot, drawn by oxen as blue as their blood.
by now you must have found. I picture the lot of you crowded around some infinite campfire’s galactic blaze, hoisting a few glasses of otherworld wine, as you cook up that dreamy asparagus
* Such angels as I knew left me bemused, limp by the side of the road. Q knew them all, knew the names of their dogs, ran with the heavenly crowd.
and potato number you nonchalantly served us a few months back. Even a body without a body as we know it will zero in on certain basic constellations— to eat and drink whatever is offered, of fellowship, good wine, asparagus, and stars. (As you would say, it’s all nectar.) So I know you’ll stab anything and everything you can with that strange new beak of invisible heart.You’ll stir it up, heat it to boiling, and write a few more great recipes for song. 8 | POETRY NOW | JULY / AUGUST 2010
* Flower by the river road, wild-river flower crushed by the heel of a child rescued by Q for his buttonhole. Hand-to-hand combat with God. A PUBLICATION OF THE SACRAMENTO POETRY CENTER
QUINTON DUVAL REMEMBERED FULLY ALIVE By Kathleen Lynch for Quinton
DEATH OF A LEMON TREE By Catherine French
Today I loved everybody. Not in the generic I’m-a-good-person way, but actually. Acutely. I loved the baby-faced dentist as he lowered the air-drill burr into my mouth to grind away uneven tips of my molars.
The same March frost that took the last lurid spectrum of lemons, also found the tree’s hidden heart Took that too. Overnight, it turned, Weakening as I slept, then raced through the petty pace of day and night, each hour the exact likeness of a lemon, solid rind with longing beneath slowly rising to full sour song. Reality’s a hell-bitch. And a Wonder.
The grating whirr made enamel dust puffs float like winter breath, rise, evaporate. More of me disappearing, I thought… then feared, what if the soul is in the teeth, but my mind, which always chats me up, even on idle, countered, No. More people lose their teeth than their souls. This is the most fully alive I’ve felt since you left. I loved the beaming receptionist who also handles X-rays, and loved, as I passed her room, young Zosha who usually cleans my teeth, bent over another patient. She never looked up from her task, intent on her thorough tendering. When leaving the parking lot, I loved the semiAsian, semi-blind old man who tapped his way to the alley’s edge and waited as I exited. I hadn’t seen him behind the shrub, but he stood, safe, all his remaining senses attuned. I loved the ragbag woman at the corner, filthy, wrecked, talking loudly to no one, though maybe she saw a compassionate listener I could not detect. I love the birches outside my window. In a way, I think of them as people, bending to every weather. Lately, when they are smitten with glisters of rain, I speak your name aloud in my silent room. Most of all, I love the mirage people, those who closely resemble you. When I see them, I think… Oh! Then… oh. They crop up everywhere now— bus stops, restaurants, grocery aisles. This is the new mystery of you—being “gone” yet achingly present. I count that among your many gifts to us: poems, love, great laughter—things that abide. Like the sound of your name—that particular, cherished song.
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for Q
Every year for 40 odd years its bright and bitter precepts translated first to bud, then to fruit, channeling cold stardust, mud and sun to that simple shape. Which we feasted on. Which we pressed in our fists hard as we could to taste its joyous bite. Beastly and supreme answer to the Nothing. And I took what it gave, Loved how my fingers burned from its motherlode, how fragrance blesses skin, how its clear wash of severity stung where the barbed branches scratched. That damning frost whispered so quietly that I woke late to find its branches stripped, the quick gone, only brittle silhouette left. Which will need to come down, every spiked branch. The muscled trunk, too, will separate from the ground it fed and took from. (stanza break) But not yet. Stay – Consider your fractious limbs Cleared now from their work , Their tireless gleaning of thin air. Stay here a while before you disappear into evening. Stay and trace the shape of what you were tangled outline: Thicket of barbs, restrained riot of wood that modestly offered neatly contained rebellions of hard light.
JULY / AUGUST 2010 | POETRY NOW | 9
TWENTY WORDS – POETRY WORKSHOP WITH QUINTON DUVAL By Cindy Hurn
CIRCLE, FOR QUINTON
Take a moment to listen between the missing lines. Hear your heart as the beats count down, pulsing under scars that whisper I’m still here.
1983. You walked into a classroom, unknown voices, uncertain words. Soft spoken, gentle humor, you sifted through layers of our lives.
Are you really, deeply listening? Through cracked pane of window glass the clang, clang of train rumbles past in competition and your mind chases the iron tracks. Scratching pens on poets’ pads a cough, a sigh, a noisy worry; a tall red drum rests in the corner silent. Yet even that - the lack of drumming, distracts. Take a moment and relax. Can you hear those ten words or better, twenty? The ones that if you had to choose you could not live without? Now - Focus. Jot them down quickly. Don’t judge them; let them fall like scattered cells of finished skin children, laughter, thunder, rain, mountain, feathers, silver bark, lovers, sunlight, autumn, meadows, spring, elk, green, dog, blue, horse, gold, stream QUINTONLAND By Lisa Dominguez Abraham Parachute silks rustle and fold as you thump down. Weight them with a rock, no need to recycle here. Follow mariachi music down the hill through crazy yellow field mustard. A woman gathering warm laundry from the line will see you pass and abandon her chore, placing shirts in a wicker basket then smoothing her hair. A fisherman will fold his string of trout into an ice chest and walk to meet you, offering you a swig from his thermos of whiskey and hot tea.
By Shadi Gex
Scrapes of metal legs on tile, desks rearranged, forming the pattern of our semester and our lives. Sitting in a circle, we read poems of our beginnings, hearts beating too fast, skipping beats in time. No pretension, just intention to journey with us, allowing ears to see the way words work to form patterns in our lives. You saw beauty in my memory. “Write,” you said, “just write.” Keep looking for moments that mean more than just this circle, just here, just now, our fragile moment in time. And so I have. Your circle ever widens.
They heard you were coming. Main Street is festooned with crepe paper flowers and a fragrant mole simmers on someone’s stove. The town folk are setting up picnic tables in the city park, telling jokes as their missteps and regrets from the other world fall away. What matters is your arrival, strolling to the tune of guitars and birdsong as everyone stands—the orphan, the shepherd, the mariner—all with glasses of chilled wine raised to toast your safe landing. 10 | POETRY NOW | JULY / AUGUST 2010
A PUBLICATION OF THE SACRAMENTO POETRY CENTER
INTERVIEW
THE POETRY OF ROBIN EKISS INTERTWINES PRESENT-DAY DOMESTIC LIFE WITH OBJECTS, PERSONALITIES, AND OBSESSIONS FROM THE PAST.
ROBIN EKISS on THE MANSION OF HAPPINESS Ekiss ruminates on a doll’s eyeball caught in a floorboard crack and on strained mother-daughter relationships, on the body’s frailties and the origins of moving pictures. Ekiss imagines her way inside Houdini’s marriage, inside Descartes’s train compartment, inside doll houses and bird cages and the littlest whirling gears of time. Fascinated by the disjecta of history and the little hitches of circumstances that attach the past to the present, Ekiss writes everything from intricate music-box lyrics to extended sequences. Her scales vary not only in the sense of space but in the sense of music: Ekiss’s ear for the line is one of her finest gifts. Robin Ekiss’s poems and prose have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, American Poetry Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, the Black Warrior Review, VQR, and elsewhere. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for emerging women writers, Ekiss has received grants, awards, and scholarships from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and residencies from The MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Headlands Center for the Arts. Her first book of poems, The Mansion of Happiness, was published by the University of Georgia Press VQR Poetry Series.
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Interviewed by Dorine Jennette JENNETTE: The last time I saw you, you were within a few weeks of the birth of your first child, and you were joking that you might have to reconsider all the mothering poems in The Mansion of Happiness very soon, once you had entered the next phase of mothering yourself. I know it would be silly to ask you to commit to some specific baby-era aesthetic, but do you have any preliminary thoughts on any changes to your work, now that you are a parent? Do you feel yourself approaching poems differently at all? EKISS: It’s all so new, I can’t say for sure how having a child is going to change the work at this stage. But I do know that it’s already changed my thinking dramatically. I find myself looking at my son when he’s asleep and thinking even more about my own mortality, knowing he’ll outlive me in a way I thought only my poems could. Instead of being reassuring, I find this incredibly terrifying. And once I’m able to get some sleep myself, I may actually be able to write a poem that goes there, that is, when I can find time to write. Having a baby has destroyed any illusion I had that I was in control, and has completely wreaked havoc on my ability to focus. They say it gets easier, and I’m banking on that! JENNETTE: Speaking of the artist and mortality, if what you write or invent outlasts you, other people can write about it— and about you. Or they can reference you as a way to write about other things. Your collection The Mansion of Happiness, for example, features poems like “Edison in Love” and “Portrait of Houdini with Wife.” Such poems strike me as exceedingly difficult to write—I find that many poems that attempt an intimate position with respect to a high-profile figure achieve only a sense of intrusion. Yet you seem to have the knack of
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FOR ME, THE PROCESS OF WRITING A POEM OFTEN STARTS IN DISCONNECTION, OF NOTICING THE UNCANNY RESONANCES THAT RESULT FROM A CLASH OF SCENARIOS, HISTORIES, PERSONALITIES, IDEAS THAT MIGHT ON THE SURFACE SEEM FAR REMOVED OR REMOTE FROM EACH OTHER. poems that wander into the strange land of the past, and find somewhere there the mind of a friend. Can you speak a bit about your approach to working with that kind of material? To the gap, if you think there is one, between the lives of private people and the later imagining inspired by their works of art and invention?
JENNETTE: Considering myth, emotion, and rational rhetoric together brings me to the question of attentional states, of your craft as a writer in holding and managing the reader’s attention over a long stretch. Composing long sequences, such as the title series “The Mansion of Happiness,” or “The Bones of August,” the long poem that forms the second section of the book, presents real challenges in structure, sustaining momentum, etc. Can you speak to your strategy of sequence assembly? EKISS: I’m generally a short-distance runner, not a marathoner, but occasionally, the depths of obsession keep me moving forward. I’d say, like writing any other poem, when it comes to more expansive poems, I really don’t have a sense at the beginning that a long poem or a sequence is going to occupy so much mental space (and page space). It generates its own momentum, and is always surprising to me. I often find the hardest part of writing a poem isn’t starting, it’s knowing when to stop, to feel as if I’ve exhausted all the emotional or conceptual territory a given poem is demanding (or am willing to step away 12 | POETRY NOW | JULY / AUGUST 2010
JENNETTE: I like this idea of obsession as a driving force behind the poems, and it resonates with what many artists say about their working process. I wonder whether you’d be willing to talk a little bit about the specific nature of your artistic obsessions, to describe your experience of the
ROBIN EKISS POEM
EKISS: For me, these figures and others like them live entirely in the imagination; while rationally, I know they were real people, with real lives, the “realness” of their lives isn’t at all what interests me, but rather, I’m compelled by the outsized and wholly imagined myth of them. I’m drawn to them as emblems of human experience, finding in them a kind of representation against which to test my own knowledge of the world. I think readers can relate to the temptation of curiosity about others’ inner lives and resources, whether we’re talking about individuals uniquely in our own circles (as is often the case for poets who write from a more overtly “personal” perspective) or about well-known figures from the wider channels of history. That brand of curiosity creates, for me—and I hope, readers—a kind of intimacy with an unknown past. Ultimately, I think the poems say more about my own emotional state and the state of rational, rhetorical thinking than they do about any single person, even ones as compelling as Houdini or Edison. The lore that’s been handed down about these men is often so embellished, it’s inevitably relative . . . just as what we can know about anything is by nature relative.
before doing so), and in certain cases (like “The Mansion of Happiness” or “The Bones of August”), I struggle to have the patience to prevent myself from not foreshortening the results. It takes a certain degree of willingness to live in ambiguity to write any poem, and that’s never more true than in writing a long(er) one. I find that piecing it all together isn’t much different for me than when I write short poems: sustaining a thread of logic (or illogic) presents the same challenges no matter what the word count, although understandably, it almost always takes more time to settle.
Edison in Love Thomas Edison loved a doll
with a tiny phonograph inside because he made her speak. Is there any other reason to love a woman? Did she say the ghost of my conception or something equally demure? It’s hard to be sure how he feels; when he holds me, I fall apart. I’m projecting here. He didn’t feel her first transgression was in having no expression. René Descartes, too, traveled alone with a doll-in-a-box he called his daughter. Francine, Francine… is it better to be silent and wait for everything we were promised? Or should we love them back, the way a train loves its destination,
as if we have the machinery necessary for it? A PUBLICATION OF THE SACRAMENTO POETRY CENTER
productivity those obsessions push for. For me—just to give you something to bounce off of—the obsession often begins as an image or half a line or a snatch of melody that gets stuck in my head and won’t get out until it gets worked out. Or some feeling that there is a connection between two objects or two ideas, but no idea yet what the connection might be. Then once there’s a draft, the nature of the obsession is along the lines of a puzzle: the poem isn’t working, and I am compelled to tinker with it (or whack at it) until it is working. What are the mechanisms of your artistic obsessions? EKISS: It’s so interesting to hear you describe your process as being akin to finding the connections; for me, the process of writing a poem often starts in disconnection, of noticing the uncanny resonances that result from a clash of scenarios, histories, personalities, ideas that might on the surface seem far removed or remote from each other. It’s as you say, though: a kind of puzzle that requires concentration to connect the dots, or to acknowledge the disconnections. Poems begin for me, too, in fragments: of language, of circumstance, of phrasing, in images that I find haunting or strangely familiar, though I can’t articulate why, and in how those intermingle and marry with each other, and, especially, in how those spur memory. It’s a fluid association, not always linear or direct, which is the beauty of poetry as a medium: it allows, even thrives, on those sorts of associations. Obsession, for me, is an associative quality, one that drifts, refrains, and returns me again and again to the page. JENNETTE: I love that idea of obsession as an associative process, vs. obsession with one specific person, place, or thing. Care to leave us with a reading recommendation or two? What’s great that we should know about? EKISS: There are so many great new books of poetry out there, but a few that are hot off the presses come to mind first, like Nicky Beer’s The Diminishing House and Alexandra Teague’s Mortal Geography, or Camille Dungy’s eye-opening anthology of nature poetry by African-American poets, Black Nature. I’m also looking forward to a number of books that are coming out later this year—and should definitely be on everyone’s radar . . . like Dilruba Ahmed’s Dhaka Dust, Rachel Richardson’s Copperhead, and (obviously biased here), my husband’s first book of poems, Keith Ekiss’s Pima Road Notebook. Almost all of these poets write with a consciousness bound to place, something that interests me in the abstract, but rarely governs my own work.
ROBIN EKISS POEM Portrait of Houdini with Wife The pleasure of contrast: not chained up
in an oilcloth sack underwater,
holding his breath, but composing himself for the camera, in his only suit. You have to understand photography— unforgiving mirror, unlike oils that soften the hard edges of a man’s face if you want them to, or velvet curtain shielding the pine box during an escape. The audience imagines his bones contracting to a splinter. That’s not at all how it’s done— the camera’s lens blanketed by cloth to keep it in the dark; any halo of light ruptures the film with shadow. His eyes already turn inward to that place we’re going. She thinks about escape too: at the horse butcher, in line like the others, or arguing over the price of bread at the Market of Innocents. Adam’s rib is forever hidden inside her chest as the force of blows hibernates in a boxer’s fist, but she, at least, is smiling when he says, We have such a small family, meaning your body won’t open to me— it’s shackled inside its cage: love and rage, whose bars are meant to be broke
For more about Ekiss’s work and a calendar of upcoming events, please visit www.robinekiss.com.
WWW.SACRAMENTOPOETRYCENTER.ORG
JULY / AUGUST 2010 | POETRY NOW | 13
POEMS I SAW HIM ACROSS THE SWANS By Lyn Lifshin before I touched him: the Boston Gardens, a free concert. Something stayed so at the art retreat — to have him across the table and later in my bed near the octagonal tub seemed unreal. His “Baby Won’t You..” a drug, his fingers on the strings, foreplay. No matter his last love said “you mean you think I enjoy this?” and it stung so he wondered if he could ever again. Those June nights blur but not the waiting for him, so many women hypnotized by his blues. I hated cigars but for that short time it didn’t matter. Or the rum he spilled in my Maverick or Woodstock nights he played until dawn, drinking and hollering and singing and laughing, me the only one not a music star — I keep the sketches he did of me like sacred relics and the one a famous cartoonist did of us together and play his records, feel him singing in the stained glass room just to me
THE DEVIL By Mary Beth Asaro
SHE SMIILED By Michael S. Morris
You blame me when things go wrong and explode up in your face. You curse my name when the environment changes, economy burns and buildings left to crumble. You say I hate you cuz the black book says so.
Sometimes my wife steps in the room I look at her as though I remember her in youth when we would hoe gardens and go for rough walks She stops by and I remember a river we jumped into with our clothes on relieved to be HERE! Our love was water beneath a swan floating in the vortexing light of a silver spring mountain moon She says Hi and I usually think: who is she today? Who is this person with her life? She says gotta go for there are meetings volunteer groups, girlfriends, men-friends she says Hi Stranger and hugs me sometimes I don’t recognize my wife. Sometimes she is this person or she is that mother or that daddy’s daughter, or a poet I remember the poet. But not of words She was color surrounded by sunshine wild on gray and spurious mornings
Truth is I luv ya cuz ya just my soul mate. You love too fast and hate too long. You are an action movie I can’t stop watchin’. You die in your own hands while I do nothing but watch.
It was love at first sight when I met you.You fight so strongly for your moral, religious principles ‘til you become blind by the extinction of everything else. I lust at your methods of making murder a righteous act of God. FINALLY LOVE By Gary Lundy I am your Adam. trek back toward setting sun You are my Eve. how am i to convince this love that keeps me stranded No creature has never made me in the attic awaiting your return feel this way like you when I say i cannot imagine I love to watch you pull how difficult our world might have been the trigger and self had we not met destruct. nor how i managed to forestall loving you for the lost decade tell me what i am to do Frank Dixon Graham fear struggles wraps its fingers Insurance Agent around my throat Business, Home, Life, Auto throws me to the ground unconscious never mind i should be writing about important things Call me for your insurance needs! the attack on the mosque in iraq but i cannot put myself near there 3001 Douglass Blvd, Suite 142 • Roseville, CA 95661 my skin elopes in wonder 916.606.4303 frankdixongraham@aol.com at a mere whisper of your shadow Cal Ins Lic 0G91117 passing across my sleeping body
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A PUBLICATION OF THE SACRAMENTO POETRY CENTER
CONTRIBUTORS has been published in The Poet’s Haven, Snow Island Review, and The Furnace Review. She grew up in Darlington, SC, and graduated from Francis Marion University with a BA in English-Liberal Arts and a minor in Creative Writing. LAURA BAUMANN grew up in Minneapolis, MN. She is an attorney at the CA Secretary of State’s office. Her poetry has been published in Rattlesnake Review and Poetry Now. She’s read her work in the Poetry at the VOX series and participates in the SPC’s Tuesday Poetry Workshop. TAYLOR GRAHAM’S poems have appeared in numerous journals and in the anthology, California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present. Her book, The Downstairs Dance Floor, was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. She’s a finalist in this year’s Poets & Writers CA Writers Exchange. BAXTER JACKSON is an English Teacher at the Nizwa College of Applied Sciences in Oman. When he’s not teaching he enjoys exploring his surroundings, traveling in the Middle East, and freelance writing. His work has appeared in Lonely Planet and Matador Travel. MARY BETH ASARO
is the author of Urchin to Follow (The National Poetry Review Press, 2010). Her poetry and prose have appeared in journals such as the Journal, Coconut, Court Green, Puerto del Sol, and the Georgia Review. She lives in Davis, California. DORINE JENNETTE
was born in RI, lived in PA, where she attended college, then lived in Citrus Heights. She now lives in the high plains of northern NV. She’s listed in Who’s Who In America. JOHN P. KRISTOFCO is from Wooster, OH, and is professor of English and dean of Wayne College in Orrville. His poetry and short stories have appeared in over 100 different publications, including Folio, Sojourn, Cimarron Review, and Rattle. He has published one collection of poetry, A Box of Stones, with another, Apparitions, due out soon. LYN LIFSHIN has published over 120 books including three from Black Sparrow: Cold Comfort, Before it’s Light, and Another Woman Who Looks like Me. She has edited four anthologies and is the subject of a documentary film, Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. Her web site is www.lynlifshin.com, and her most recent book, Katrina, is forthcoming from Poetic Matrix Press. GARY LUNDY is a professor of English at the University of MT Western, in Dillon, MT. His poems have appeared in Harpur Palate, Aura Literary Arts Review, Prairie Winds, Timber Creek Review, and The Tule Review. More poems are forthcoming in Parting Gifts, Poetry Flash, Main Street Rag, and Heeltap. MICHAEL S. MORRIS was born inWaterbury, CT, and is currently a 30-year resident of Sonoma, CA. A painting contractor by day, Michael has written two novels, a book of short stories, and published approximately KIT KNIGHT
NON-RELATIONSHIP/RELATIONSHIP By Amanda Wynn
130 poems in over 60 journals, magazines, and anthologies. His chapbook, A Wink Centuries Old, was featured in Minotaur Magazine (51). Joyce Odam’s most recent chapbooks are Noir Love and Peripherals. Her work has been included in the local anthologies Landing Signals, The Sacramento Anthology: One Hundred Poems, and Watching From The Sky. She is a two-time winner of CFCP Golden Pegasus Award. She now edits Brevities: A Mini-Mag Of Minimalist Poems and has a passion for the relevance of art in one’s life. Diane Webster lives in CO and works in the production department of her local newspaper. Drives in the mountains help rejuvenate her being and help her find ideas for poetry. Her poems have been published in Bellowing Ark, the Aurorean, Icon, and Philadelphia Poets, among others. Ann Wehrman is completing a second BA in Music (Flute) at CSUS, where she earned a MA in English/Creative Writing in 2005. She has published poetry and fiction in small presses and college literary journals, and she served as Poetry CoEditor for Calaveras Station Literary Journal over the past two years. A.D. Winans is a widely published poet. His work has been translated into nine languages. In 2006, he won a PEN National Josephine Miles Award for excellence in literature. In 2009, PEN Oakland presented him with a lifetime achievement award. Amanda Wynn is a 17-year old senior at Sacramento New Technology High. She has never been published before and is working on her senior project about writing and publishing poetry. Her mentor, Bob Stanley, helped her create and edit poems.
You’re nothing old and nothing borrowed Something I’ve never even considered as fact A wandering eye across a classroom I’m caught in the look on your face, the little smile you keep there. You play with my hands too long to be an accident, Stare too long to be a mistake Come to close to drop the gaze Stand too close to walk away. My lips have touched your skin but it wasn’t a kiss, my face brushed yours but it wasn’t real You’ve hugged me so long I felt attached, why aren’t I just making a decision You’ve got no idea how captivating those little secrets I want to know You leave me hanging by a strand you mend and break A final decision that’s never too late. WWW.SACRAMENTOPOETRYCENTER.ORG
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SPC Sacramento Poetry Center
POETRY NOW
JULY-AUGUST 2010
A PUBLICATION OF THE SACRAMENTO POETRY CENTER
REMEMBERING QUINTON DUVAL
POETRY NOW THE POET TREE, INC. 1719 25TH STREET SACRAMENTO, CA 95816
NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION U.S. POSTAGE PAID SACRAMENTO, CA PERMIT NUMBER 1956
TRIBUTES FROM | LISA ABRAHAM | KATY BROWN VICTORIA DALKEY | CATHERINE FRENCH | CAROL FRITH SHADI GEX | CINDY HURN | SUSAN KELLY-DEWITT KATHLEEN LYNCH | DENNIS SCHMITZ | MARY ZEPPA
16 | POETRY NOW | JULY / AUGUST 2010
The Sacramento Poetry Center presents
THIRD THURSDAY
BROWN BAG LUNCH SERIES
SPC
The Poet Tree, Inc., also known as The Sacramento Poetry Center, is a non-profit corporation dedicated to providing forums for local poets— including publications, workshops, and a reading series.
Hosted by Mary Zeppa and Lawrence Dinkins. Noon. Central Library, 828 I Street. Sacramento