Author Archive

My son found the following story on the NPR iPhone and sent it to me.

App:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128877656&sc=17&f=1008

Across Montana On Horseback, Poet Hands Out Poetry
by NPR Staff

- July 30, 2010

“Instead of talking to schoolchildren or promoting poetry through local libraries, Montana’s poet laureate Henry Real Bird decided to carry out his duty the true Montana way. The cowboy and member of the Crow Nation is on a 500-mile horseback trip, halfway across the state, handing out books of his poetry along the way.”

I hope you can access the whole article.

MONDAY MORNING POEM

Smell of spring in the air
Misty fog gives way to light rain
Cars spew deadly exhaust fumes
Windshield wipers flap
Like the wings of birds in migration
Stone faces hide behind steering wheels
Pedestrians looking like mannequins
Scurry across the street on the way to work
Board the morning bus pressed together
Like preserved butterflies between
The pages of an antique book

EARLY EVENING POEM

I stare into silence
Empty space has no vision
Restless ghosts
Eat my words

Bio:

A.D. Winans is a native San Francisco, a  poet and writer and former editor and publisher of Second Coming. His work has been widely published.   His latest book, Love – Zero was just published by Cross-Cultural Communications.Read more about Winans here:  www.adwinans.mysite.com

A response to Melissa’s “Bad Poetry” of July 28^th.

Maybe there’s no such thing as good poetry–I think it’s all bad stuff or unfinished stuff a writer really works hard at; revises over and over; scrapes and chisels away to watch the pupa in the cocoon turn into a butterfly, or as Michelangelo said, ” I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

You said: “  Poetry relies on all the loveliness of language–imagery, metaphor, assonance, rhyme, rhythm–that improves any kind of writing.”

I agree, however, perhaps the least of these is rhyme.  The aspects of poetry that in fact do improve any kind of writing are the ones you mentioned, and many other poetic techniques as well, such as musicality, meter, alliteration, enjambment, to name a few.

Many good fiction writers read poetry before writing.  Poetry can help set a mood, inspire lyricism, wit, jauntiness, somberness; it can give the writer a word, a phrase, an aspiration, a strong noun or verb, and lift your spirit to a place hitherto unimagined so that your pen can soar across the page.

It’s all bad poetry when you begin to write anything, the important thing is getting the thoughts onto paper so you have something to work with.

Nice one, Mel.

Today is Emily Bronte’s birthday.  The novelist and poet was born in Thornton, England  in 1818. She wrote Wuthering Heights in 1847, judged one of the great love stories of all time, although she never possessed a lover, proving once again how the human mind can imagine anything. She published under the name of pen name Ellis Bell.

Bronte said, “I have  dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and  altered the color of my mind.”

My poem, “Writing Your Way into the Story,” appears here today:

Writers News Weekly

http://www.writersnewsweekly.com/taxonomy/term/214

Poets submit if you have a poem about writing~good luck.

How the Poem Labors

to fill black and rusted cauldrons
between witches cackling
on the Rorschach test,
to fill Greek urns,
of incense-breathing musk
between handles curving inward.

How the poem labors
to fill trenches of severed heads,
the abandoned helmet my sister wore;
to fill mental miles
on the long road rutted,
to linger in orchids forever bound,
to fill coupling
with the tiredness
of love and doubt.

How the poem labors
with button-shirted words;
wearing gauze bandages
to salve the wound that never heals.

Appears in Curbstone Review

How Long Do Others Speak if We Have Already Spoken?
Title after Neruda

Get beyond it, my newly-found cousin says,
while my fork and knife remain
in the air and I  feel like the poached
salmon on the flowered plate,
the lemon bleeding citrus
through its skin. It’s hard to get
beyond having no grandparents,
aunts,  uncles, not even a birthday card
while your mother cruises,
your father dies, and your sister
goes craaaaaazy.  So I say,
“you’re absolutely right,”
before I lower my cutting tools.

Appears in In the Tunnel

Author’s bio: Lucille Gang Shulklapper has been a workshop leader for The Florida Center for the Book, and workshops facilitated through the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She writes fiction and poetry and her work appears in numerous publications, as well as in four of her poetry chapbooks, What You Cannot Have, The Substance of Sunlight, Godd, It’s Not Hollywood, and In The Tunnel.

WHY NOT READ A POEM FOR BREAKFAST?

Why not read a poem for breakfast along with your oatmeal
and your bacon and eggs? After perusing The New York Times
satisfy your intellect on whimsical rhyme. Politics with poem-
we serve up the best, orange juice and sports verse, dress and undress–
poets sculpt as the muse. Any subject that’s in the news…

Refusal to Forgive

Would I  know you
with green whisperings for hair,
cyber-space eyes, your bones
white remains of obligations?

Do you still wear our father’s face?

I have become Mother,
with corseted morals and hair dyed mink.
My blue eyes turned brown like yours,
shoveling the pungent refuse
left by your husband’s dirty dealings.
Where is the brass marker
with our family’s name? It is gone
from our seats in the synagogue.

Your locker at the country club
has also been removed.
The city folded your name
into an origami bird and burned it.

You will find me by the sea;
wearing a hair shirt of grief and guilt.
Seeking me will be a slow hot secret,
like a snail trailing a crack.
Hot sand will grind calluses on your tender feet.

We will meet in an angry embrace,
crabs scuttling envy and greed,
still snapping blue at Maryland.

Butterfly curses will rise from your lips.
Praise will fall like anvils from my mouth.
Stinking like dead fish, we won’t get
close enough to resolve anything.

Alpha / Omega

They say: “everything comes to he who waits”
Age – definitely
Wisdom- still open for discussion
Happiness -intermittent

How did we get here so fast-
deep into the third third?  Time,
desire and decisions directed us forward.

Life is like a canoe, (narrow as a birth canal,)
buoyant in placid water, and then
rushing over unforeseen rapids of pain;
devastation, swamping us with negative surprises
(life jackets are not always provided).

Friendship is a reward for staying the course.
The paddle, thin, lovely and strong; but misunderstandings
sometimes make it a blade of destruction.

Now the journey is becalmed, but we
are still friends, hand in hand
waiting for the end, together .

Author bio:

Magi Schwartz is an independent poet writing in South Florida for thirty years. She gives readings, and conducts an interactive poetry workshop called “Imagine That” in both the public and private sectors of the community.

She is vice-president/ treasurer of the Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation. Schwartz is Poet Laureate of Hollywood, Florida since 1992. Her chapbook, Pieces of Glass, features poems about women.

“You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick….The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps…so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.”

~~~~Dylan Thomas

Night Poem

This poem can’t sleep.
It slips in and out of bad rhyme.
The lines bump, run on
come up short.
It hears explosions between syllables.
Smells death in the distance.
The poem blinks, rolls over
on its back.  Its lover
tucks her head on its shoulder
and the poem thinks, oh yes
now I can count my breathing
finish it in the morning.
But the poem can’t listen.
It keeps seeing faces
blank faces, white nothing
and silent screams keep the poem
running after itself.
Something, someone is dying.
The poem dodges looking for a place to hide
a fox hole, a haiku, a villanelle.
It just can’t sleep with all the goings on
all the young faces, the bodies blowing up
in darkness and repetition, all the bruised
words, the onomatopoeia, alliteration
gods, tyrants, poetry flags and enormous bombs
shaped like poems for the flash
and forget, of what is, or not
that keeps it awake this time.
Maybe a glitch, the poem thinks.
Maybe start over, free itself
find another truth in what ever
Godforsaken hell flashes
in the poem this time.

Mendocino Sky

For Bobby Markels

You are the matriarch, the muse..
Gymnast for moon people.
Ring master for effervescence.
Leap Frog for night turtles and rooster girls.
We cheer.  Rabbits wag their ears.
Mice are hula hoops in disguise.
We wait for the aha..
The song called Wind.

Author’s bio:

David Plumb’s new book is, Poetry on Strings with marionette maker, Pablo Cano.  Writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, New College Review, Homeless Not Helpless Anthology, St. Martin’s Anthology, Mondo James Dean, 100 Poets Against the War, Salt Press, UK and his weekly blog,Notes from a Wavering Planet Will Rogers said, “Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.” David Plumb says, “It depends on the parrot.”