All those lost streams are somewhere trailing and dangling off the end of some rusty neuron’s dendrite. Probably lost to the booze, fevers and other sad, hypoxic moments. What can you do? I reply, “Whatup”.

At fifty-one I have to wear my colloquialisms ironically, or risk the wrath of betters, like my good dog Sadie, and all four of our children. My wife sometimes offers me the pun-induced stink eye, but obviously her judgement’s in doubt by definition. And I love definitions, and dictionaries. They get to wear the state parade clothing of bibliophile museums and official bonafides. I can’t remember the other reasons, but I know they involved strong feelings and superfluous adjective attachments.

Wait, I’m hiding behind the silliness again. Here’s to remembering to remember.

Here’s to all the details that escape us, from and about those who leave. I miss my friend Pete, I miss my old Captain Johnson, I miss my Grandpa Roy. I miss every single forgotten joke I ever let drop-slip offside the edges of my conscious mind. What right do I have to forget any glad moment?

Equivalents (Lost Roads Publishers, 2013) cover photo: Gina Alvarez

I re-read this poem 3 times before pausing. The relationships between characters and between the initiating art works combined for much more than just the sum of their parts, and the prose style choice for this work seems perfectly matched. This was my first contact with Baran’s work and so I went searching for more.

Jessica is a busy artist. She hosts a site at jessicabaran.com, works as an adjunct lecturer at Washington University in St. Louis, columns as an art writer at Riverfront Times, co-curates the fort gondo poetry series (with poet Jennifer Kronovet) in St. Louis and recently published her second full-length book of poetry titled, Equivalents (Lost Roads Publishers, 2013). Other publications include Baran’s first poetry collection, Remains To Be Used (Apostrophe Books, 2010), a chapbook titled Late and Soon, Getting and Spending (All Along Press, 2011) and inclusion in The Harp & Altar Anthology (Ellipsis Press, 2010), edited by Keith Newton and Eugene Lim.

Baran also has an interview of the artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt forthcoming in BOMBlog (BOMB Magazine’s blog) next week, be sure to go check that out. I will update this site with the link when the interview goes live.

Ok, enough preamble. here’s that powerful, ekphrastic poem I promised you.

—

Neversink

I am going to tell you who you are. That your voice, claimed as mine, will drown. I wonder about the weight of your voice versus mine. I wonder what it would feel like in my hands. Would it be a suitcase of mirrors or a glass box full of lead? Would it be a sheet on which you painted all of your wrong thoughts—the ones you had candidly in the night, behind your eyes, unuttered as your limbs twitched? It was a dreamless night. All the houses went black. Words are something that can be applied after the fact: the fact of two people crossing the street. The fact of you weaving your hands around my waist. You push your fingers through button holes. Holes sometimes signify the fact that a thing can be lifted and moved. You move me. I speak for you. This is a kind of collaboration. I’ll never know the exact weight of this movement, but I do understand its gravity. Like a grave, it is safe from worms. Like your hair, it looks like a wispy, meaningless alphabet. Like the person crossing the street, I am assigning you and it castaway roles. I am happy with metaphors—I am heavy with them. I am happy to be the drawer in which all of your hard-earned things fit.

after Carlos Reyes, Matt Mullican, and John Smith, on display at the Hessel Museum of Art, March 24 – May 26, 2013. The Center for Curatorial Studies and the Hessel Museum of Art are located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, about 90 miles north of New York City.

Neversink is included here by permission of the author.

William Olsen
photo by: James Ferreira

A great poem finds that difficult balance between the particular and the universal. The lines can represent an intimate, temporal detail and then transcend that specificity. I have thoroughly enjoyed the time I have spent this week looking at both the small details and in the shared experience of humanity waving through the Dune Grass.

The perspective was something that Olsen brought to life for me. The opening camera starts on the surface of one thing trying to become another, then immediately re-imagines the scene, again and again.

Different parts of the scene take and then pass the lead, while the writer-as-witness moves among the cast. It also describes how a place, or a place poem, effects change on all who pass through.

Dune Grass

It is what sand would look like if it could just
escape itself and grasp the diffuse and clump around
pilings like stumps of teeth ground by tide,
risen to whatever inhuman trial it is

to have threadbare wind for a coat and a body
that has no eyes and no face to love,
bent in scarcely rooted supplication.
When have we not seen it praying

in its own loose unison of piety,
in its strength to waver and stay put and out return
the hulking one-time-only beachfront condos—
I’ll worship something that would return to all this.

Repeatedly this need to be somewhere real again
comes upon land with features that never settle,
this treasure so openly fragile it’s beginning
to dawn on me that we should all be singing—

no place like this anywhere in the world,
even the ground one stands on taken up,
what it means to escape damnation and holiness
and be forever risen into being used

right here at my glowing naked toes.
We walk right over all this we love the sight of
that in it we can love our transience,
our hills, their lakes no older than our species,

as it turns out earth never belonged to itself,
till even despondency seems hopeful evasion.
So why this trust, this sudden drop from bluff
to lake where sky resides and spars of buried trees

are disinterred from dunes, the beached hulls
of ghost barns are open houses, bare rafters
almost fallen in on their blessed ghost cows?
Why do ears settle on lone islets of seething birches,

tremblings near an even vaster trembling?
For however much I meant to find a human likeness
down on its knees, its hands churched together,
there’s more room than ever for the booming distances

and sand enough for wind to blow beyond
all of us who abandoned, betrayed, trampled repeatedly
haywire paths, shown nothing new, no, this,
right here where there is no dogma or heresy,

shimmering just a little above the earth,
in its strength to waver and yet stay put
lifted by sun and rain into being used,
hanging on and letting us come and go.

.

William Olsen currently teaches at Western Michigan University. He has published four other collections of poetry, The Hand of God and a Few Bright Flowers (Illinois, 1988), Vision of a Storm Cloud (Triquarterly, 1996), Trouble Lights (Triquarterly, 2002), and Avenue of Vanishing (Triquarterly, 2007).

Professor Olsen has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, A Nation/ Discovery Award, The Texas Institute of Arts Award and a Breadloaf Fellowship. He also serves as editor for the New Issues Press.

Dune Grass is included here by permission of the author.

“…What big eyes he had! What teeth!
In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,
sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,”

There’s also a great interview online by Barry Wood titled, ”Carol Ann Duffy: The World’s Wife“, hosted by Sheer poetry.

Duffy, U.K. Poet Laureate of 2009, is currently listed as Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Carol Ann Duffy

When the “father” poems came up, someone mentioned Starlight, by Philip Levine. If you haven’t read it, now’s the time.

This poem is still online at the Berkeley website. Also, you can enjoy the work direct from the author’s voice, at YouTube, in a post by Neil Astley.

“…my father’s voice, is not
his voice, but somehow thick and choked,
a voice I have not heard before, but
heard often since.”

Then the real fun begins, when all that lofty shit blows up.

Soapbox(Dismount.complete)

Some rooms of our home are not available at all times, and that is just the way things go.

The room in my home where I like to bang on my keyboard is a strange place, and is occasionally difficult to enter. The strange part is, I am the only thing that prevents my use of that space. I can build an obstacle out of almost anything. Today, I did not. Lucky for you, you cannot see me doing the happy-dance here at my desk.

Below is a record of one of my most recent obstacles.

-

boom

Small innocuous parse

peculiar portal

Every always nevery day

same old dis

dissertation de-iteration

Baby gates to and protect from

that thing most

hard to hear

Impossible to acknowledge, better to subconsciously ignore.

Didn’t matter what had been said before, then

something said by a voice

who was expected to deliver polite but

reciprocal encouragements;

just another poly-amicable pancake, ordinary exchange

Two people walked into a bar, accidentally at almost the same time. That made a total of five folks all in, not counting the staff. You should know, it was a jazz club. Or a poetry reading. Or an ACLU meeting in north Texas. You get it, right? It doesn’t matter where. The point is that these people wandered about seventeen miles off the beaten path, liked it, then kept going, got thirsty and decided to step inside for a drink.

Things were said. X told Y that he was offering cake to someone who preferred pie. Also, the tribute he thought he’d recently placed, was not even left at the correct grave. Algernon was buried in Potsdam, not Waxahachie.

Y became paralyzed, and had no idea how or why.

Ten months later, it started to make sense.

X had said, “yes, do that, keep going, tell me more.”

The unexpected compliment had almost killed him.

One example is, “Violent Blossoming Cities Ask How to Hear the Song,” which is hosted at a blog titled, Gaga Stigmata.

Amy King

“…the sacred springs greener envy and the dolls of youth 
turning brittle as the doves of war
melt onto the shield of pleasure versus method—
all based on the fountain’s goblet full 
of a wild colt’s dissolving ink,
sheathed in a nest of sequins. The architecture of how
things come to be proves mostly unable 
to escape the marketplace, …”

Another great three poem sample is available at Milk Magazine, including “WE WILL NEVER FULLY RECOVER, THE SUBTLE AIR AROUND and BIRD UNDER WATER.”

Amy’s latest book titled, “I Want To Make You Safe” was released in November of 2011. This collection is a rare combination of empathy and the artful love of language, filled with life.

These four poems are from a new manuscript, still in progress. Brent has a distinctive voice, ready to engage the reader with his view of the world, and lead them in unexpected directions.

Brent Armendinger

One of these poems, puts a face on the newest type of modern warrior, the drone pilot. Here is an excerpt from, “The Flight Cage.”

“…holding the bird with his invisible string,
as if the war were not unkind. The casualties—

what is a casualty if not swallowed
by its facelessness—the digital idea of death

comes flapping across the water.”

Previous books by Armendinger include Undetectable and Archipelago. Amazon’s link for Brent’s work can be found here.

Ali Shapiro - July 2011

Here is another author who brings new life (and death) to this point of view. Ali Shapiro has a poem online at anderbo.com titled, “FIRST DAY FARMING.” The first line wastes no time before wading directly into the action.

“Is this why I’m slaughtering these chickens…”

The poem continues with competition between two writers for all the best descriptions, and comes to life with the shared experiences.

“…disgusting and numinous and ridiculous all at once, it was you I would call first, to bring you closer?”

Ali Shapiro is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Michigan. She’s won a number of awards for her writing and other exploits, including two Dorothy Sargeant Rosenberg Poetry Prizes and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in RATTLE, Redivider, Linebreak, and the Southeast Review. She also publishes literary reviews in MAKE magazine.

I also need to say thank you to David Harris Ebenbach for introducing me to this writer’s fine work.

Hannah Stephenson

I found yet another good reason to enjoy the Contrary Magazine site today. Hannah Stephenson has a poem there titled, “The Twin,” which led me to her blog, THE STORIALIST. The blog is both ambitious and generous. Bookmark it and come back often, this writer is always working.

Here is one of the many poems at Hannah’s blog that impressed me.

Landscaping

(included by permission of author)

Let us shape the land so we can look out at it. Or we can lift our hands from it and still shape
it with our gaze, as a pianist lifts her palms from the keys to better track melody on the page.

Let us smear Vaseline on our eyes, hold up our extended thumbs and index fingers to make
a frame. We can prune the dead grass from our vision, censor it. The entire forest could be

one topiary if you get far enough from it, one head of broccoli. Our eyeballs make walls
around whatever we stare at. Because we cannot see everything at once, we feel desire.

-

Another poem from Hannah was recently published at HuffPost Arts titled, “Fraction.” This poem begins with an unexpected Jimmy Kimmel tweet, then moves on to remind us how quickly we all disappear from view. The clock is ticking, we better get busy.