An Interview with Frank X Walker

Conscious Narratives: Exploring Historical Poetry with Frank X Walker

By JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp

I had the pleasure of being introduced to Frank X Walker, also a Spalding University MFA graduate (2003), while attending a panel discussion in 2009. I mentioned to Spalding faculty member Jeannie Thompson that I was currently interested in the persona poem for an alternative approach to my study of the life of Mary Jemison. Frank happened to be in the ballroom of the Brown Hotel that day, and Jeannie said, “Well let me introduce you to someone!” The result was a deep appreciation for not only his poetry collections, but the example he sets for us all regarding earnest research when representing the life of our heroes and heroines.

A founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, Frank X Walker is the editor of America! What's My Name? The "Other" Poets Unfurl the Flag (Wind Publications, 2007) and Eclipsing a Nappy New Millennium. He is the author of six poetry collections: Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (University of Georgia Press, 2013); Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride (Old Cove Press, 2010); When Winter Come: the Ascension of York (University Press of Kentucky, 2008); Black Box (Old Cove Press, 2005); Buffalo Dance: the Journey of York (University Press of Kentucky, 2003), winner of the 35th Annual Lillian Smith Book Award; and Affrilachia (Old Cove Press, 2000).

A Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Fellowship recipient, Walker's poems have been converted into stage productions by the University of Kentucky Theatre department and Northern Kentucky University's Theatre and Dance Department and widely anthologized in numerous collections; including Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. III, Contemporary Appalachia, Spirit and Flame: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art.

He is the first Kentucky writer to be featured on NPR's This I Believe and has appeared on television in PBS's GED Connection Series, Writing: Getting Ideas on Paper, in In Performance At the Governor's Mansion and in Living the Story: The Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky. He contributed to Writing Our Stories: An Anti-Violence Creative Writing Program Curriculum Guide developed by the Alabama Writer's Forum and the Alabama Department of Youth Services. He co-produced a video documentary, Coal Black Voices: the History of the Affrilachian Poets, which received the Jesse Stuart Award presented by the Kentucky School Media Association, and produced a documentary exploring the effects of 9.11 on the arts community, KY2NYC: Art/life & 9.11. A multidisciplinary artist, Walker's visual art is in the private collections of Spike Lee and Bill and Camille Cosby.

Walker is a native of Danville, Ky., a graduate of the University of Kentucky, and completed an MFA in Writing at Spalding University. He has served as founder/Executive Director of the Bluegrass Black Arts Consortium, the Program Coordinator of the University of Kentucky's King Cultural Center and the Assistant Director of Purdue University's Black Cultural Center. The University of Kentucky and Transylvania University awarded Walker honorary Doctorates for his collective community work and artistic achievements. He is the recipient of the Thomas D. Clark Literary Award for Excellence, Actors Theatre's Keeper of the Chronicle Award and a Recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship in Poetry. He has held board positions for the Kentucky Humanities Council, Appalshop and the Kentucky Writers Coalition as well as a government appointment to Cabinet for Education, Arts & Humanities and the Committee on Gifted Education. He has served as vice president of the Kentucky Center for the Arts and the executive director of Kentucky's Governor's School for the Arts.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: I was introduced to your work in the fall of 2009 upon reading Buffalo Dance and When Winter Come. These historical poems travel through and beyond the scope of social justice in order to create the profound sense of empathy the reader feels for York. What happened in the very beginning of this journey that inspired you to explore this man’s story?

Frank X Walker: My initial journey with York and my initial interest in historically based persona poems began with the embarrassment of acknowledging my own ignorance. After attending a Chautauqua presentation given by Hasan Davis in the character of York, I tried to rationalize how it happened that I had never heard his name before, given his Kentucky connections, given my background in African American culture and history, given the fact that I was living in the same city and walking the same streets, and given his significance to the success of the expedition. I wasn't sure if the education system failed me or if had failed myself. I thought I was familiar with the Lewis & Clark story, but the more I learned about York and the other young men from Kentucky who participated and other important details regarding their interactions with Native peoples, the richer the story got.

LoVerde-Dropp: In the poem “Revisionist History,” York brings to light the omission of his own role in the journey in the lines,

            The truth seemed to stretch so

            that by and by I seem to disappear from they tongues

            as if I had never even been there

            as if my blackness never saved they hides.

            Them twist the tales an leave out my parts in it

            so much so, that directly I become Massa Clark’s boy, again

            just along to cook

            an carry.

Here the speaker offers at least part of the explanation. Now in regard to your discovery of the revised history of York’s role in the expedition, I’m wondering if you experienced similar serendipitous events that led you to begin researching the lives of Isaac Murphy and Medgar Evers.

Walker: It would not be a stretch to say something similar happened in each case. Part of my interest in all of them is admittedly what I perceive as erasure. In Murphy's case, the degree to which African Americans participated and in many cases dominated thoroughbred racing is so invisible that it rarely comes up, though it wasn't my motivation for pursuing his story. And Medgar Evers' invisibility in a larger discussion of the Civil Rights that is often condensed to something as simple as 'MLK had a dream and Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat' is equally unfortunate. 

LoVerde-Dropp: In When Winter Come, the sequel to Buffalo Dance, you begin including voices other than York’s to tell his story. These voices manifest in the form of The River; Watkuweis; Sacagawea; William Clark; York’s Nez Perce wife, his slave wife, stepmother (Rose), father (Ol’ York), hunting shirt, hatchet, and knife. You state in the prologue, Another Trek, that these voices “provide the emotional undercurrent” in this second book. Could you talk more about this?

Walker:   Buffalo Dance is told in one voice, York's. By the time I was ready to write the sequel I had traveled more extensively throughout the Northwest reading from the first York book and had enjoyed significant exchanges with Native American scholars and members of the Nez Perce tribe which gave me a chance to hear another side of the story. I believed the sequel could get closer to the truth and be more authentic if other missing voices had a chance to contribute. I also believed that adding female voices would humanize the narrative even more.  Those new voices were the emotional undercurrent I was referring to. I have seven sisters and was raised by women so I know from experience that women see the world differently than men. I wanted to add their acute, honest, insightful perspectives to what had always been offered as a counterweight to an overtly patriarchal and predominantly white superman mythos.

LoVerde-Dropp: Your third book of persona poems, Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride, emphasizes the fierce devotion within Murphy’s circle as much as it does his rise to fame. I am thinking specifically of the poems “Keeper of the Flame” and “Too Heavy,” which were attributed to his wife, Lucy. What were you able to borrow from your devotion to your own family in order to create voices so real?  

Walker: I feel confident in how I perceive human interaction especially between women and men. I'm old enough to have loved and lost enough times to have become wiser for it.  When I craft collections of persona poems, I'm building from source material gathered from memory, research and imagination. It’s the emotional currency that comes from a first person voice and the imagination that keeps it from just being another history text. I'm fortunate to have survived enough personal experiences to create the authenticity that I want my readers to experience.

LoVerde-Dropp:  You’ve now released your fourth book of historical poetry, The Unghosting of Medgar Evers – how has your approach to the persona poem evolved over the past decade?

Walker: My approach to building a narrative driven by persona poems or what I now refer to as Historical Poetry, has definitely evolved over the four collections. I think I can say with confidence that multiple voices, especially those voices in opposition, lend more authenticity to the narrative and create a greater sense of truth for the reader. I've learned that much of what we accept as history is often simply the point of view of the one individual who wrote it down. I've learned that there are great rewards in spending the time, money, and effort in the research. I'm a better human being having encountered these men, their families and their stories.

LoVerde-Dropp: What do you feel are the most important lost details about the life of Medgar Evers that Turn Me Loose has restored to public consciousness?

Walker: I would hope that Turn Me Loose helps push Medgar Evers' name back into the conversation about civil rights. I think more people know about the details of the tragedy of Emmett Till than know about Medgar's assassination and even fewer know how responsible Medgar was in bringing the Till case to trial. I hope the book corrects some of those injustices.

LoVerde-Dropp: I get a sense of this the most in the poem Arlington, which is written in the voice of Medgar Evers’ wife, Myrlie. Each tercet is like a note higher than the last as the poem, which withholds its only period until the very last line, thus resisting both closure and complicity. Arlingtonreveals the incongruity between the ceremony offered upon Evers’ death and the reality of the lack of acknowledgement that should have honored his life.   This poem also integrates craft on a larger scale than what your readers are used to seeing, and I am wondering if you chose the tercet for this extended metaphor for a particular reason.

  

Walker: The tercets in this poem are intended to extend the image of the triangularly folded flag directly onto the page. Additional efforts, which include contemporary forms like the contrapuntal and hinge poems that are used throughout the collection, allowed me to illuminate the juxtaposition of voices that are in dialogue throughout the collection. I really worked hard on raising the craft in this last collection to something worthy of the narrative, where in the past I had been more concerned with just getting the narrative right. It was important to me that there was as many rewards for the reader looking for poetry as there was for the reader looking for a history lesson in these pages.  

                       

                                    Arlington

During the flag ceremony

                        soldiers folded, creased, tucked,

                        smoothed, and folded again

                        with such precision and care,

                        I imagined they were wrapping

                        a body

                        a red, white, and blue

                        mummy

                        which they passed, and saluted

                        and honored so much so

                        everybody stopped looking

                        at the casket

                        by the time they placed that triangle

                        of husband in my arms,

                        they left no doubt

                        I was holding his future

                        and what we were burying

                        was only his past.

LoVerde-Dropp: The topic of social justice appears in your role of editor as well as writer. The August 2013 issue of Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture is themed “The Lost Ones” and cites “the wake of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case” as the inspiration for its title. In this regard, you have a voice, unlike writers with compartmentalized public and private personas, that is steady and consistent. What can you tell us about how this carries over into the classroom when you are teaching in a University?

Walker: I don't try to hide the fact that I see myself as an artist/activist and teacher actively engaged in the world around me. I encourage my students to tune into what's happening in their own worlds and to consider what they are or can be emotionally invested in and to use that emotion as a starting point or an emotional center for their own work. I also use some of my own work in the classroom. When the students can make the connection between the writer and the work and have access to the entire backstory, they really understand the writing process, especially how authentic emotion vs. sentimentality can impact a piece of writing.

LoVerde-Dropp: Could you talk a little bit more about this – teaching the difference between authentic emotion vs. sentimentality – as it applies to creating a more three dimensional backdrop, especially in Historical Poetry?

Walker: Many students mistakenly initially believe that receiving an emotional reaction from an audience after sharing the details of a tragic event makes it a good piece of writing, which could spiral a peer workshop away from craft and into a tragedy contest. This evokes a kind of sentimentality that has more to do with the subject and less to do with the quality of the writing. When they fully understand the historical context, the motivation of the speaker, the possible emotional state during that poem as it relates to the other poems and other variables in a series that portrays the subject as a multi-dimensional character it is truly instructive.

LoVerde-Dropp: You also write in other genres besides poetry, and you are currently working towards finishing a fiction novel.  What was it that prompted you to explore the lives and circumstances of these men and women in the form of historical poetry as opposed to the biography?  

Walker: I like the under-the-skin-closeness of poetry. I like getting so deep inside a character's head and heart that you start to imaging what they dream about. That would be breaking the rules in a biography. You're not supposed to take those kinds of poetic licenses. And I also love the fact that a small collection of poetry, can take you as close or even closer to a subject as a thick biography or book of history.

LoVerde-Dropp: You noted that African American poets Kevin Young, Natasha Trethaway, Tyhimba Jess, Marilyn Nelson, and Adrian Matejah, among others, have also contributed to the genre and that an effort is being made to convince libraries, bookstores and publishers that Historical Poetry deserves its own shelf space. What exactly is it about Historical Poetry that draws you in so closely?

Walker: I think I’m drawn to the fact that the poetry is doing more than what most people expect of poetry, that it is misbehaving, that it has taken on a level of activism that allows it to break new ground and is creating new poetry fans.

LoVerde-Dropp: You’ve stated, “I feel that the research and character studies necessary to building the authentic narratives in the historical poetries made for an easier transition back into fiction.”  This brings me back to your current fiction project; what can you tell me about its inception and storyline?

Walker: This novel project comes out of a group of stories I've been carrying around with me for a long time. The one I'm focusing on in the current manuscript is probably closest to the life I've lived these fifty plus years but is still fiction. It’s a coming of age tale and an exploration of black masculinity that centers on a father and son separated at birth, both of whom become writers. After a secret interracial relationship results in an unplanned pregnancy in a state institution in rural Kentucky, the father is charged with rape and sentenced to twenty years in prison and the mother is transferred to a home for unwed mothers where she is forced to give her son up for adoption.  The story really begins when the father and son's lives cross for the first time twenty years later via an exchange of letters just before the father's release from prison. As much as I enjoy the craft of poetry I must admit that I've been excited about having a project that has allowed me to bring these characters to life on the page and to take everything I've learned about writing and things I've experienced in the real world and repurposing it all in an imaginary space on a much bigger screen.

Frank X Walker has taught in writing programs like Fishtrap in Oregon and SplitRock at the University of Minnesota and currently serves as Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kentucky where he serves as the founding editor of PLUCK!, the Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture. 

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp is a full-time instructor at Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia and serves as Secretary on the board of directors for the Georgia Writers Association. Her article, “Accessible Poetry” appears monthly on the Georgia Writers website http://www.georgiawriters.org/. JoAnn received her MFA in Creative writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Her poetry has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Public.Republic.net, and Bigger than They Appear: Anthology of Short Poems.

               Photo by Noah Dropp

Cloudmother by Siobhan Harvey

When a child starts school, so too the
parents:

this is a truth Cloudmother can’t
escape.



Here are others – when a teacher favours
a child,

so too the parents; when a classmate
befriends a child,



so too the parents; when a label owns a child,

so too the parents. The mother most of
all.



The handwriting lessons that failed to
prepare her for life;

the teachers who saw careers in

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

Hélène Cixous, a French writer, wrote Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. The book was published in 1993, and she has written many others, but I continue to reread this one because her secrets of writing are fascinating.

She says writing is a "strange science of farewells. Of reunitings."  The reader is plunged into the book with a marvelous speed.  "Writing in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us. Strangely, it concerns a scene...we are the audience of this scene...witnesses to an extraordinary scene whose secret is on the other side." This sentence is key to the beginning of the writer's voice because each person has a unique extraordinary scene that they have witnessed. It awakens consciousness.


The School of the Dead

Writers commonly begin writing soon after encountering loss or death, according to Cixous.  "The first dead are our first masters, those who unlock the door for us that opens onto the other side, if only we are willing to bear it." In her philosophy, death is the key to understanding life.  

"We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world that the world isn't what we think it is. Without that, we know nothing about the mortality and immortality we carry. We don't know we're alive..."

And in addition, writing makes us foreigners even inside our own families. "When I write I escape myself, I uproot myself." She cites many examples of writers and artists who explore "the other" in their work, and who are essentially unknown or absent to their families in the process of writing. The same is true of reading, she claims. It makes us strangers in joy. Of the writer Montaigne, she says is true of many writers: "No sooner do we enter than we take flight. In the first paragraph we already have a series of directions. And each one of them will be pursued, none of them will be abandoned by the text."

She uses examples of Edgar Allen Poe who said that we pine away during the process of writing, we erase ourselves, seal ourselves up inside a tower. This is an allegory for what happens in creation. It happens symbolically and literally in many stories.  Poe she says executes the narrator.

"The only book worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write." Cixous says, "We have to become two to say that to ourselves: I the living one and I the dying one."  and "We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown."   In this way, writing becomes an act of discovery for the writer as well as the reader.   She continues, "...books are exactly those steps that should lead us to the point where oppositions meet, and coinciding, suddenly open up to what Kafka would call 'the Holy of the Holies.'"  And this is the place where the writer must take everything off, shoes, clothing, and all expectations to approach the place of the "last hour" where we are going in the direction of truth, and if we cannot speak it, because it cannot be spoken, at least we can "unlie" and avow the unavowable.

The School of Dreams

"All great texts begin in this manner that breaks: they break with our thought habits, with the world around us, in an extreme violence that is due to rapidity. They hurl us off to foreign countries. In fact, dreams are the route to the place of the dead without our dying." Dreams are a sacred place. She continues to explore her thoughts about farewells and reunitings in this section of the book. Dreams send us places against our will, we flee ordinary times and places and enter the extraordinary. Time collapses. "Dreaming and writing do have to do with traversing the forest, journeying through the world, using all the available means of transport, using your own body as a form of transport."  In the same way, good books transport us.

She writes that dreams instruct the writer in four ways to write without transition, with speed, with fear (a better way to approach the concept of "conflict" because it takes us deeper into what is at stake, and with magic. All of this comes to the turning point, the place of transformation.

Avoid interpretation, she writes. Interpretation is death for the dream. One must enter it and leave it free. "We must let ourselves be carried on the dream's mane and must not wake up--something all dreamers know--while the dream is dictating the world to us." The dream takes up down to the depths, and here is the next lesson for writers.

The School of Roots

Cixous remarks on a strange association between women, birds and writing. She finds it in the Bible, and in several texts, and she connects it to the discovery of hidden joys and the passage of all frontiers. Writers need to look to his or her roots: to the name that they have been given, to their birth certificate, to the place where they were born and grew up, and to what fed them in their life.

As an example, the beginning of her book begins with the letter H. I is part of the letter, and it can be considered the "I" or writer. It represents the language the writer is born into, and each language bears the culture and thousands of emphases and meanings carried by the language. H is a significant letter in French. The other part of the letter H, the second I stands parallel. Perhaps it is the "other" that the writer also becomes, or it is the reader.  It signifies the language of the other. Notice there is a connection between the two that "forms a passageway between two shores." Between one language and another, between the breath of the writer and the breath of the reader, it forms the shape of a ladder, and it is this ladder that we use to descend and ascend as readers and writers. H is the first letter of Hélène Cixous' name.

These are her secrets of good writing, and I have only provided a short glimpse at her book's structure. She fills in these ideas much more thoroughly and provides examples of various texts.

Cixous, Hélène. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Columbia University Press, New York. 1993.


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Book Review by Julie Gard: Night Train Red Dust

Book Review 

Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range 
Reviewed by Julie Gard 
New World Finn, Summer 2014

In Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range, Sheila Packa fearlessly explores the Finnish and Northern Minnesota roots of her life and language. Family history, landscape, industry, and the animal world are all essential elements of the poet’s psyche and vocabulary.

In “My Geology,” language is excavated, hard-earned and fiercely chosen: “I claim my words from the broken / English, damaged roots, / Finnish syntax and geomagnetic fields.” Access to language and a place in history is claimed not just for the poet, but for her entire community. Packa’s voice is bold and Whitmanesque in poems like “Zenith City,” which is a playful, polyphonic tribute to Duluth, and “Strange Highway,” which encompasses multiple generations and experiences:


 I travelled with the magnetic pull of iron
around river now reservoir now pit
 fell on the frozen ground
 where horses and carts
carried out logs and carried
in steam shovels
 on the Vermillion Trail

This “I” is powerful in its range and inclusivity as the poet claims and unites multiple identities and experiences.

 At times the broad, bold scope of the poems narrows to a single perspective, such as in “North Star: “In Hanko, Finland / a young woman boards / the vessel in the Baltic / for a ship across the Atlantic. / The North Star shines in the sky.” A grandmother’s journey begins and so does the poet’s journey, as described in “Old Music,” as “an egg inside an egg.” The long road of adaptation and blending of old and new ways is detailed in this poem: “My grandmother remained at the border / unable to cross into the new language. / She pushed us over.” The poet takes her mother “into the American vernacular, / drive[s] her language to its destination, / play[s] the volume on high / in a minor key, old music.”

Night Train Red Dust is rich with metaphors for writing, for how language, once claimed, can be worked with. In “Blind Pig,” dedicated to the poet Lorine Niedecker, we find the poet “[i]n the distillery / underground, / work[ing] to make ruinous / beauty.” Mining itself is both physical reality and metaphor in Packa’s poems, “all excavation” and “working below the surface “ (“Metaphor/The Mine”). Writing is one of many forms of creation and industry.

These poems pay careful attention to animal as well as human experience, often showing their commonalities. For example, the poem “Neighbor,” about a woman abandoned by her husband at the side of the road, appears right before “Grouse,” which is about a bird “along a deserted road,” “between shadow and light.” Fear and endangerment resonate throughout both poems.

Recurring themes of speech and silence are extended to the natural world in “Timber,” where in the voices of wolves, the speaker:

heard not the day’s wind
but the wind of many years
arriving, departing
light falling between worlds
into dust and wings
away from motors and wheels
into a strange music for way-finding

The present is never just the present, and one world leaks into another. Concrete and vivid imagery is often used to capture a sense of impermanence. “The Cost” is a pared-down, resonant poem that describes the transience of all things, including writing itself: “I write myself / in the river, in the wind.” In “Elements,” the speaker loses and finds herself in forms such as charcoal, light, water, and stone, constantly shape-shifting. The poem “Red Star” links humanity to space and a coffee tin to a “distant star” that is “burning through the elements -- / or giving birth.” The magic and mundane are one.

Altogether, these poems vividly capture personal and collective experience and serve as a powerful example of how a writer can help to shape the identity of a place. The collection ends with haunting traces, silence, and smoke. Language emerges from and disappears into wind, “[e]ven after all the ink” (“Dictate of Wind’), yet Packa’s words leave a lasting impression. As in “Consanguinity,” “Her incantations come.”

Julie Gard is a published poet, and teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin in Superior, Wisconsin.  Recently, she learned that her new manuscript is a finalist in the New Rivers Press book competition.   Visit her website at http://www.juliegard.com/

Visit the website for New World Finn to subscribe and read the interesting articles about Finnish-American and Finnish culture:  http://www.newworldfinn.com/

Link to the entire issue: http://www.newworldfinn.com/NWF_PDF/2014_3_NWFc.pdf

For links to order Night Train Red Dust: http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/05/my-geology.html

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Poems: Charles Wright

Now that Charles Wright is the 20th United States Poet Laureate, many people unaware of his poetry will finally read some of his poems.

The Poetry Foundation offers a selection of Wright’s poems:
A Short History of the Shadow
Black Zodiac
Clear Night
Lives of the Saints
Miles Davis and Elizabeth Bishop Fake the Break
Northhanger Ridge
The Appalachian Book of the Dead

You can read 50 of Wright’s poems that appeared in Poetry or listen to him read and discuss his poetry in some 1992 recordings.

Promising New Online Journals

bird online

It seems like just about every time I turn on my computer I receive a notice about another new online journal. Needless to say, since anyone can start an online journal—and often without expense—there's a good deal of disparity in the quality of these journals. Some are quite dreadful; others are very good. So it's important to check out the masthead to note the credentials of the editors and staff. Check out the Archives if there are past issues. Note the poets and poems that have appeared in past issues. Note the format of the journal. Is this one where you'd be proud to have your work displayed?

I've gathered a list of seven fairly new or brand new online journals that seem to be doing a great job. In order to get on my list, the journal had to meet certain criteria:

• reveals identity of the editors 

• is visually attractive and easy to read—no black background with white or colored fonts

• does not use a pdf format

• does not post poems side by side

• does not use a single page scroll-down format

• posts poems by a single poet on a single page or one poem per page

• has easy and clear navigation through the journal

• uses social media to promote the journal—ideally should provide Facebook and Twitter links for poems        

Titles are linked to the website. Number of issues per year is indicated after the title. Reading period appears on second line.

Dialogist: Quarterly Poetry & Art—4x
all year

Driftless Review—2x
all year

Four Way Review—2x
November 1 – March 1 for  spring issue; April 1 – October 1 for fall issue

Posit—3-4x
all year

Tinderbox Poetry Journal—4x
all year

Tupelo Quarterly—4x
all year but they close submissions once they fill the upcoming issue or reach 300 submissions. Check their Submittable page to confirm that submissions are open.

Waxwing Magazine—3x
all year

'Chemotherapy' by Mary McCallum and 'In the corner of my mind, a boy' by Frankie McMillan

Chemotherapy by Mary McCallum



who knew she was
there

hidden
inside that thing that turns

her girl upside
down and inside out

(poison, really, a
small inefficient

killing field) let
loose in a body still

young enough to
smell of milk

in the morning, one
the mother must

return to sit
beside and stand over

to stroke the soft
cheek, catch the soft

vomit, be steel to
all that

What I've Learned About Poetry: A Manifesto of Sorts

It begins with an ache. 

Nothing is too small not to notice.

Let it tell you what it is. 

Fall into a crack.

Create a motion.
Stay in the body. Write inside.
Stay in the body of earth. 

Consider the object to be a symbol and then a tool. 

The beginning must lead the middle to the end. 

Leave room for shadows or ghosts.

Remember the workings of tiny gears inside the clock.

Repeat in a way.   

Be thorough in whatever you are doing.
Stay true. 

What you are given more than suffices.

If you are going in the right direction, the universe will synchronize and give you a gift.

Time falls away from the beginning.

If a sacrifice is needed, it’s the ego. 

Simplicity is your direction.    

The ending happened before you stopped. 

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A Poet's Glossary

Looking through A Poet's Glossary, by poet Edward Hirsch, certainly offers many possibilities for writing prompts.

Hirsch has put together a very international collection of terms from A (as in abededarian) to Z (zeugma).

You might try writing a Bedouin women’s ghinnawa (highly stylized verses) or a style of gentle banter that originated as a sung verbal duel in the West Indies called picong.

There are also the more familiar terms that we were introduced to in school.

The book has been called a followup to Edward Hirsch’s best-selling book How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry from 1999 which contained a useful but limited  glossary.

For example, Hirsch defines "couplet" as two successive lines of poetry, usually rhymed (aa), which has been an elemental stanzaic unit—a couple, a pairing—as long as there has been written rhyming poetry in English. 

We call a couplet closed when the sense and syntax come to a conclusion or strong pause at the end of the second line, thus giving a feeling of self-containment and enclosure, as in the first lines of “To His Coy Mistress”:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.

We call a couplet open when the sense carries forward past the second line into the next line or lines, as in the beginning of Keats’s Endymion (1818):

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness, but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

     Full of sweet dreams . . .

Ben Jonson told William Drummond that he deemed couplets “the brav­est Sort of Verses, especially when they are broken.” All two-line stanzas in English carry the vestigial memory of closed or open couplets.

In an interview, Hirsch explained his intent for the glossary:

I see this as a book for the initiated as well as for the uninitiated reader. People who don’t know much about poetry can find what they need to know about certain basics, like the nature of the line or the stanza, or the characteristics of a form, like the ghazal or the sestina. But there are also a lot of things in this book that even widely read readers of poetry may not know much about because they are outside our tradition. So, for example, you might not know to look up a form of African praise poem called the oríkì. If you care to think about praise poetry—what it is, how it functions—then the oríkì has a lot to tell you. To help the reader along different pathways, I’ve added “See also” at the bottom of every entry.

Curious about the abecedarian and zeugma?

Calvino and Artists Inside the Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino inspired the creators of Sophronia Two, featured at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis during the Northern Spark Film Festival on June 16, 2014.

The film in the tent was created by digital artist Joellyn Rock.  Shadow movements were created by her, improv actors, and audience. The graffiti angel (video, text and music - a live film created by software) projected large across the walls of the gallery space was created by Kathy McTavish. Shadow dancing was added by the audience.  Improv writing in the projection was done by Rob Wittig.  Other netprov writers contributed. During the show, Sheila Packa, Kathleen Roberts, Katelynn Monson, and audience participants added text to the live projection via handheld devices (through a textbox located at the Sophronia website http://sophroniatwo-13570.onmodulus.net/). Kathleen Roberts adopted the persona of the city of Ersilia and Katelynn became Zaire.  For a glimpse of the pre-show improvisational writing, see https://www.facebook.com/sophroniatwo?fref=nf
Live musicians, with an accordion and harmonica, also brought their talents to the festive all night event.

 Calvino: "The city of Sophronia is made up of two half-cities. In one there is a great roller coaster with its steep humps, the carousel with its chain spokes, the Ferris wheel of spinning cages, the death-ride with the crouching motorcyclists, the big top with the clump of trapezes hanging in the middle. The other half-city is of stone and marble and cement, with the bank, the factories, the palaces, the slaughterhouse, the school, andall the rest. One of the half-cities is permanent, the other is temporary, and when the period of its sojourn is over, they uproot it, dismantle it, and take it off, transplanting it to the vacant lots of another half-city. And so every year the day comes when the workmen remove the marble pediments, lower the stone walls, the cement pylons, take down the Ministry, the monument, the docks, the petroleum refinery, the hospital, load them on trailers, to follow from stand to stand their annual itinerary. Here remains the half-Sophronia of the shooting-galleries and the carousels, the shout suspended from the cart of the headlong roller coaster, and it begins to count the months, the days it must wait before the caravan returns and a complete life can begin once again."

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Group Reading for The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop

Please Join Us

Group Reading for The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop

Sunday, June 22 

JOEL ALLEGRETTI

ANN DEVENEZIA

LAURA FREEDGOOD

GAIL GERWIN

TINA KELLEY

ADELE KENNY

ANTOINETTE LIBRO

DIANE LOCKWARD

CHARLOTTE MANDEL

WANDA PRAISNER

SUSANNA RICH

KEN RONKOWITZ

BASIL ROUSKAS

MICHAEL T. YOUNG

SANDY ZULAUF

Bernardsville Public Library

1 Anderson Hill Road

Bernardsville

2:00 PM   Free

Refreshments

Contact Madeline English: 908-766-0118

Diane Lockward: dslockward @ gmail dot com

Directions

Lucifer In Las Vegas by Joanna Preston

tortoise: from the Greek, tartarchos; ‘god of the underworld’

i. The Fall


As I fell, I burned

through shame and grief

and disbelief and love –

words that trail like smoke,

like broken wings.

Only rage was left –

its silken tongue, its

crystal shell. I fell

through night and time

into the morning

of this world, and

kept on falling.

Once, I lived

by passion’s flame,

but I learned

Charles Wright To Be New Poet Laureate

The Library of Congress will announce this week that the next poet laureate will be Charles Wright.

He is the author of nearly two dozen collections of verse and known for blending modernism and the landscape of the American South.

At 78, Wright is retired from teaching at the University of Virginia. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard

East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
I flit from one thing to the next.
What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?
Tomorrow is dark.
Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.

The sky dogs are whimpering.
Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
up from the damp grass.
Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.

Wright's latest collection of poems is Caribou (2014)





Read more about the new Poet Laureate - http://www.npr.org/2014/06/13/321586882/charles-wright-the-contemplative-poet-laureate

This is Where a Post Title Goes. I'd Forgotten.

So, I'd be lying if I said it was planned, but it turns out a wedding & honeymoon is a pretty undeniable reason to go offline for six weeks. A few lessons learned: 

-The internet is not standing still. At times, it can feel like a morass o' molasses. But your social media formats (for me, it's Twitter and Facebook) are constantly evolving in terms of both posting formats and algorithms for display. All bellyaching aside, these changes are rarely noticeable when you're engaged on a daily basis. But it's striking when you step out of the slipstream, then step back in. My feeds became more democratized, less self-segregated, which was both better and occasionally annoying. 

-No one will guilt trip you because you disappeared. We were happy to have you there, we are happy to have you back. "Lost time" is negligible. 'Nuff said. 

-Do not let the internet drive your work when you're freelancing. In the past few years, I recall several times when I sunk days into writing essays sparked by online discussion...then promptly pitched the finished produce to a print venue. Nope. You're going to end up with the wrong tone, the wrong level of depth, the wrong sense of timeliness. I'm not saying you should avoid online publishing--there are great venues--but make sure what you have to say isn't something with a 24-hour shelf life. 

-The internet is a good thing. My writing community is larger because of the web; I have missed updates from far-away friends and poets. However, I can get everything done that I need to get done as a full-time writer in 2-3 hours a day online, through browsing and linking and commenting. Just gotta develop the discipline to stop there. 

More soon. Just thought I'd post while I still had a trace of my Maui tan. If you're going to be in Tampa later this June, or in Mississippi come August 1-2, come out and visit.

Bringing Poetry to New Places

I love unusual venues for poetry readings. A friend of mine, Sondra Gash, had a beautiful house tucked away on a back road in Lebanon, NJ. During the years that she lived there, Sondra hosted a few poetry salons each year. She did this to support her poet pals and to support CavanKerry Press, the press that published her collection, Silk Elegy. One side of the house was all windows overlooking a babbling brook and lots of trees and vegetation. It was a perfect spot for poetry. Sondra invited poets and other kinds of artists for an afternoon of poetry and conversation. The salons were wonderful. Recently, though, Sondra and her husband made the difficult decision that it was time to sell the house and move to a retirement community.

So Sondra and Ira moved to Winchester Gardens in Maplewood, NJ. One of the enticements to move there was that the Social Director suggested that she could continue her salons there. After a period of getting used to her new digs, Sondra put together the first reading. She invited me and five other poets to gather on Monday, May 19 for an evening reading. I was stunned by the beauty of this senior residential community. The grounds were beautiful with tons of flowers and the buildings were big old stone structures.

Above is the Great Hall where the reading was held. The furniture was rearranged so that the audience could sit in rows. We had approximately fifty residents turn out for the reading. They were engaged and enthusiastic.

With the assistance of the Social Director, Sondra prepared a program brochure. Inside was a photo of each poet and a bio.

This is just before the reading got underway. Left to right are Gail Gerwin, Ed Ryterband, Sondra Gash, Howard Levy, Teresa Carson, and Joan Cusack Handler. I'm standing at the far right. As I was sitting waiting for the audience to arrive, I saw a familiar-looking woman walk in. Much to my surprise that was Rose Spear, a woman I used to teach with at Millburn High School. She was a German teacher; I was an English teacher. I went over and we got reacquainted. It was an unexpected pleasure to meet up with a former colleague. Then the reading got underway, each of us reading for approximately ten minutes. What a pleasure to read in such an exquisite room.

Me reading three poems. Following the last poet, Sondra led a Q&A which was very interesting. I had the impression that some of the seniors would like to try to write some poems of their own. Then cookies were passed around and we engaged in some conversation with those who chose to come up and chat with us.

I'm not ready to move in, but I would definitely like to go back for another poetry reading or to lead a workshop.

Being There: The Emotive ‘Fly on the Wall’ in Ed Davis’ "Time of the Light"

by Anthony Fife

Observation, often passive, forms the nucleus of many of Ed Davis’s most striking poems in Time of the Light.  Through observation, often of everyday occurrences, Davis is able to bear witness, and funnel that newfound stewardship to the reader, in the elegant shuttle of social or metaphysical importance. The speaker in many of these poems is not satisfied, however, until he has allowed the scene to both arrest and, subsequently, fulfill his sought after evolution.  Davis’s characters channel what they find in the world into food for growth and self-transformation.

One such poem, “Shade," begins with a recumbent cyclist pausing en route to take in the scene of a handful of men beneath a shade tree “smoking and jawing like its 1951” (line 7).  The tableau is not particularly exciting, and the reader gets the sense that it is also not likely rare; perhaps these men meet semi regularly to mull over the day’s events, and take in the much needed relief the shade of the tree provides.  What is unique, however, is the immediate attachment the cyclist fosters for these men.

          The cyclist, for perhaps the first time, discovers that he is missing something in himself and, simultaneously, finds that something ’neath a shade tree.  Call it companionship—though community is maybe a more inclusive word—but whatever it is, the cyclist sees it and, at once, recognizes that he desires it.  Davis writes:

                 [M]aybe they'd invite me

                 to share their shade and sip

                 a cold one from their cooler;

                 or a glass of someone's grandma's

                 fresh-squeezed lemonade. (15-19)

Substitute any beverage for the beer and lemonade.  It is what the beverage represents (companionship or community?) that is important.  The ability to bond and, maybe even more importantly, to have someone to bond with, is what pulls the cyclist into his own head as he wonders what it would be like to share in the ritual.  It is no wonder Davis professes to admire the work of Wendell Berry, whose work often defines such relationships among initiates.  Unfortunately, there are insiders and there are outsiders; there is no overlap.

“Emergency Room Express Care: Princeton, WV, Xmas Eve, 1996” typifies the fly-on-the-wall perspective that leads, perhaps inevitably, to self-realization.  Davis writes:

                   They come not too injured,
                   but wounded enough,
                   clutching stomachs whose stitches

                   don't fully keep them closed,

                   faces denying pain bodies mime. (1-5)

A local emergency room is a den of suffering.  Wounds, sometimes horrific, are a common sight to those on duty.  The poem’s speaker, however, is no medical professional.  He is not so well versed in the manifestations of blood and pain to have developed blinders.  “I shut myself inside a book,” writes Davis (7), but the attempt to close himself off from the suffering is a failure.  Empathy trumps his discomfort and, through baring witness, the speaker is able to find the common strand that ties him, despite his immaculate health, to those whose bodies reject violently what transgression has befallen them. After a moment of silent, eyes-closed meditation, the speaker says, “Eyes open, I feel suddenly one/ with these Christmas casualties,/ though moments ago, I was a stranger” (20-2).  The transformation is nearly complete; the narrator is able to transcend both the bounds of his own body and its apparent lack of pain.  The unnamed “loved one” who he waits on suddenly, and unknowingly, becomes part of a much larger community.    

              “Dawn Singer in College Bathroom” is similar to “Shade” and “Emergency Room Express Care,” in that the narrator inadvertently discovers something, in this case a student singing ’60s R&B in a bathroom at 7:45 a.m., that highlights his life and how it lacks certain small fragments that, if found, will might make it whole.  What is missing in the makeup of this particular narrator is the ability to bypass the callused filter that labels as absurd the act of singing in a public restroom stall at a quarter till eight.   

            The inability to disregard social norms and articulate unbounded joy is more or less synonymous with the teaching of English Composition.  The narrator says:

                        I clamp eyes closed where I sit.
                        I am convicted by his sweet testimony
                        of being a prose-droning,
                        poetryless Standard English hack,
                        lacking the brashness to flute truths,
                        harmonizing brain with the body’s business. (7-12)

Grammar is a less than compelling subject; the teacher of grammar, then, can only be, the reasoning goes, a less than compelling person.  The tuneless narrator, in light of the bathroom serenade, believes this hype and applies it to himself.  “My armpits pour and my milky knees quake,” the narrator says, “while I contemplate teaching Comp I where I/ force-feed poor students syntax and grammar” (13-7).  The self-loathing is short lived, however, because “suddenly/ his song gives me grace, lifts the top/ right off my head and inserts a prayer” (21-3).  The transformation is complete.  Perhaps English class will be a bit more energetic today.    

            Davis’s fly-on-the-wall poems culminate in “Transubstantiation,” in which the passive narrator is no longer content to stumble upon scenes and allow them to force their shape upon him.  In this case, the narrator overtly seeks an experiences and, as reward for his efforts, is given new life. 

            Seeking out a wild place, the narrator says, “I plunge through creek toward the place/ where the great blue heron flew” (1-3).  Only three lines in and, with this one act, the narrator has been more active in the shaping of his own destiny than the narrator in the three aforementioned poems combined.  The result is a complete physical and psychological transformation in which the narrator becomes a great crane.  Davis writes, “While I gape, my arms flicker/ fire before morphing to feathers./ Lord-a-mercy, I’m growing wings!” (11-3). Not content to merely possess wings, he must also use them.  Finding himself amongst a flock of cranes, the narrator says:

My tissue wings stretch taut,
pocket the air while I rise,
trailing hollow reeds legs,
rowing up-current, gaining altitude.

We are flying, and we are singing together,
our wings sing. (21-6)

Making the case that the transformation is psychological and not physical would be easy.  Regardless, whether “Transubstantiation” is about a man who transcends the bounds of gravity or merely of his own mind, he is a man quite unlike the narrators in “Shade," “Emergency Room Express Care” or “Dawn Singer”; he is not a passive bit of clay upon which chance meetings leave their imprint. 

            Ed Davis’s narrators are various and complex.  One thing they have in common is that, with help, they reach a higher plain of existence.  An important difference, however, is that though most elevate their vantage through sheer luck and longing, at least one seeks out his fortune.  Davis portrays dynamic characters who are most themselves while being acted upon by the presence of others.  But a truly overt act can take place, and when it does the actor transcends through sheer will of the spirit.

Ed Davis's Time of the Light can be purchased from Main Street Rag.

* * * * *

An Interview with Ed Davis [Conducted Via Email]

The first poem in the collection, “These Poems," is an introduction of sorts.  Would you mind talking about this poem and what it does to shape the book?  Also, when was this poem written, and why?  Was it written much like any other poem and just happened to fit, or was it created to serve this specific function? 

ED: You’re right, it is an introduction. Although I wrote the poem at least five years ago, it still feels “recent” to me. It came to me, as many poems do, while hiking Glen Helen Nature Preserve in Yellow Springs; but unlike most, it arrived fairly complete. Almost all poets share this uncanny, even sacred, experience of a significant work arriving fully-formed as opposed to the long, tedious (somewhat obsessive) process that midwifing poems usually is. Naturally it doesn’t happen often enough. The poem is a good one to perform first at readings as a sort of prelude or invocation. It feels mystical to me, perhaps due to its origin, though it’s very concrete and reveals, I believe, much about me personally as well as a sort of poetic credo.  It seems to be about faith. 

Right off the bat, with the first poem, you begin defining specific relationships — “These Poems”, “Uncle Frank and the Boy," “Shade," “Boots, Repaired," “My Hands at Fifty-five”  —  some between people, some otherwise.  Each of these poems includes some type of dependence.  Would you please discuss that dependence and how it, perhaps, defines the relationship?  Though similar in this way, they all have, or so it seems to me, a contracted or expanded focus which also makes them, the poems and the relationships, quite different from one another.  These are just a few examples, of many, and happen to be the first five poems in the book.  Would you please speak to how relationships form the nucleus of some of your work?  Is it possible to write a poem that doesn’t include some type of relationship?  How does a poem like “Shade," which is very much of the moment — kind of a snapshot — fit with the other poems I’ve named that are hard fought, earned relationships taking place over great time and space?

ED: At first the word “dependence” surprised me, but the more I think about it, the more it fits. The older I grow, the more I feel the interdependence of all things, especially people. Introverted and solitary by nature, I’m nonetheless quite aware I write poems for people to read and hear. But not all of them. Many more are written for myself, my own growth, personally and in the craft. “Uncle Frank” is a direct celebration of a boy’s depending on a good man (and, indirectly, Mother Nature). In “Shade,” the outsider observes a tight-knit community, depending on their neighbor to share a lot more than his tree and property (and, again, Nature shares with humans). The narrator of “Boots” feels companionship, even love, for the tools of his “trade.” So you’re right, of course. As solitary and private as some poems (and their narrators) can be at times, the “world is very much with them.” I think of my hero Wendell Berry and how focused all his creative work, prose as well as poetry, is on the tight human circle:  family, then community. The Big World, including God, seems a distant third, since all nature, all non-human things, are infused with spirit. Same with my poetry, I think. Relationships are key. As I used to tell my college composition students, “I’m much more interested in our pursuing what unites rather than separates us.” Conflict isn’t my favorite relationship.

Your poems seem to almost alternate between the urban/suburban and the rural.  This makes sense, given your background.  Would you please discuss how region shapes the physicality of your poems?  How is the physical shape of a poem (the poetic line, stanzaic form, etc.) conceived differently, if at all, by regional concerns?

ED: You’re right:  they divide themselves into rural and urban; for example, most poems set in the West Virginia of my boyhood are quite rural in their people, settings and theme, despite the fact that I was always a townie and never lived in the country. Do regional concerns affect the physical form of my poems? You might have discovered something there. To the extent I’m reproducing speech (as in the dialect poem “God Knocks”) or a very Appalachian setting and theme (as in “Roots and Branches”), lines do seem much affected by their subjects:  tending toward natural pauses, including drawl, in the former; and to rural mountain sprawl in the latter. Thanks for that insight! 

While on the subject of form, the poems in your collection don’t seem to concern themselves much with traditional forms.  Or consistent traditional meters, for that matter, though throughout the collection there certainly are hints of both.  What is it about the lack of given rules that attracts you to that freer poetic mode?  If you do bypass given form and, therefore, all the inherent rules of tradition, what are your rules?  What guidelines do you place on yourself or your work to guide you where you want to go?  Where do you want to go?

ED: Though I write free not traditional verse, I’m obsessive about the integrity, length and especially rhythm of my lines. If readers see my poems as merely chopped-up prose, I’d be disappointed. A few important rules that I hope are obvious include the following. Lines must end on a significant (hopefully suggestive) word, compelling the reader forward (never a throwaway word like a preposition or article). And you’re right that, while my lines don’t scan as traditional verse, there’s tight, even strict rhythm, achieved more by intuition and “feel” rather than counting syllables. I also favor musical devices such as alliteration; and one-syllable, concrete words over multi-syllabic abstract ones. My experience performing in rock bands in the sixties, playing music by ear, which by definition is informal, improvisational and “free” (at least in the listening), influences my poetry much more, I think, than my formal literary education. In a way, my poems are the songs I’d write, if I could. But I’m a poet, not a songwriter, so what I’m after is concise musical language that both entertains, informs and hopefully moves readers through a tightly-controlled form designed to speak as directly as possibly to my audience.   

There is a great deal of listing or cataloging in this collection.  For example, ‘This is the things poems do’ (3-4), ‘These are the things hands do’ (8-9), ‘This is how the body changes form’ (23-24).  Can you please discuss how listing plays a part in your poetic imagination and, if at all, how maybe it is part of a poetic tradition you might be a part of and/or tap into?

ED: Lists are so generative! As poets, our job is to capture the ephemeral, the transcendent moment as it happens right before our eyes (even if it was from a day in our childhood forty years ago), and while the telling word and well-disciplined line are central to writing effective poetry, sometimes I just let ‘er rip and take it all, though I can feel a little guilty later. For a long time, I let the sprawling poem “Dawn Singer” linger after writing it pretty much as it appears in the book, saying to myself, “This won’t do. It’s way over the top. Gotta cut back.” So the day came to tame it, show it who’s boss and see if it could be saved. But I decided it was fine the way it was:  over the top, self-indulgent and messy. So be it. A lot of folks have told me they enjoy the poem. But I think that, except maybe for “He Could Write,” most of my list poems in “Time of the Light” are more tightly controlled and less “wild.” Revising can become self-censoring if we’re not careful. We can revise the heart and soul right out of the poem.

What is the rhetorical nature of the five sections of your book and how do these five sections interact?  Is there an implicit conversation between the different parts?  How has this shaped your expectations of what the reader will receive, both as they read and once they have walked away?

ED: Well, it’s sort of a greatest hits collection—poems spanning my entire poetic career, from the 1980’s right up to 2012. It includes most of the poems in my chapbook “Healing Arts,” but only one each from the chapbooks “Haskell” and “Appalachian Day,” none from “Whispering Leaves.” From the first, I envisioned the book as a repository for the (hopefully) best poems from four decades—but I also included newer poems that had gone over well in readings, such as “These Poems” and “Epitaph” as well as a few more obscure poems that fit the book’s overall theme as well as the section in which it’s located. Then I organized all of them into four sections—The Art of Living (concerned with people and relationships); The Nature of Art (ekphrastic poems about everything from rock, blues and jazz, to modern dance); The Art of Nature (mostly the fruit of many walks in the woods); and Spirit (poems which seem more directlycentered on the sacred). However, since I believe all poetry is sacred and about important relationships, there’s a great deal of overlap; there’s probably no single poem that couldn’t be placed just as well into another of the categories. And yet I feel the book has shape and movement, from lighter to darker, humorous to more serious, human to more mystical. The book’s four categories feel flexible, malleable, a little arbitrary, reflecting perhaps the free verse I’m so committed to. 

Who is your audience?  Who is the person or persons in your head that make up the ideal receivers of your work?  How do these phantoms help you create?  Do they have real-world counterparts?

ED: I think a lot about other poets, who’ve gained sacred places as judges in my head because of their strict discipline as well as their kindness and generosity—but mostly because of their values, which I’ve inculcated to lesser or greater degrees. I’m aware of them, though I don’t always listen to them. All rules are to be broken, one’s own and surely others’, but not without good reason, soul-searching and respect for one’s perceived audience. Not all experiments work. But all poets need to experiment. Some of the poems in “Time of the Light” began as rather bold experiments. For me, “Transubstantiation” felt new, raw and experimental enough to make me nervous the first time I performed it. However, with my audience’s acceptance has come my own; now that poem seems fairly conservative, perhaps even typical of my work. But breaking “their” rules is enervating and a big part of my process. I try not to write the same old typical Ed Davis poem over and over, though I know I’m not entirely successful. I take it on faith that if I can please the people I respect, I believe strangers who love poetry may be pleased, too. And while I hope my poetry may even speak to people who think they hate poetry, I’m under no great illusions there. I can only control what I place on the page; I have no control over any other outcomes, which seems to me a good philosophy of life as well as creative endeavor.  

Finally, this feels like kind of an unfair question, or at least an ambush, but this blog is titled Why Poetry Matters.  Well…why?

ED: Poetry matters because poetry is at the top of the literary food chain. If you love language — and we all do, despite what we may say, despite what well-meaning but misguided “grammarians” might have done to us in our formal education—you know that poetry gives you an experience that most prose doesn’t give you:  a more intense experience. Heard orally, poetry shoots directly from the brain to your blood if you let it, without mediation:  no need to understand it all, no need to feel every single sensual experience as it passes; just relax, as you would listening to a great piece of music the first time you hear it, and let it wash all over you, let it wash you, brothers and sisters, in the Spirit! And then, later, in quiet contemplation you can return, read and re-read silently, plumbing those depths to your heart’s content, gleaning insight, savoring nuances of the poet’s voice, tasting speech, appreciating the writer’s deep craft. But first:  pure joy. At least that’s the way it is for me. I love it that poetry has nothing to do with commerce, everything to do with the soul.

Ed Davis is a former professor of writing, literature and humanities. He served as the assistant director for the Antioch Writer's Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and has participated in writing conferences such as Taos Writers’ Workshop, Cleveland State University’s Imagination Workshop, Antioch Writers’ Workshop and the Novel-In-Progress Workshop sponsored by Green River Writers of Kentucky. He has published several books of poetry, two novels and many short stories. "Time of the Light" is his latest book of poetry. More of Ed's work is available at his website, www.davised.com.

____________________________________________________

Anthony Fife lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with his wife, fiction writer Lauren Shows, and their daughter Lucy.  Anthony accepted his B.A. and M.A. in English from Morehead State University and his M.F.A in Poetry from Spalding University.  Anthony teaches English at Clark State Community College and Sinclair Community College. Anthony’s taste in poetry is broad, but his main interests include personae poems and character sketches; in short, poems that place the focus primarily on one person's shoulders, and don’t let them get away with anything.