OUR THEME THIS MONTH:
POETRY in honor of
interNATIONAL POETRY MONTH

Mid-wife

A poem is as new as beginnings,
as fresh as the first day at school.

A poem is as bright as our admiration
for courage, our respect for freedom.

A poem is as early as the first leaf,
as white as the most swan-white cloud.

A poem is a drop of rain, a little
convex mirror with the prime of day in it.

A poem is so raw, so young that it has grown
no first, second or third skin.

– Dilys Wood, All rights reserved

April 15, 2015

Poetry is that particular way of organizing our thoughts and imagination into music, emotion, image and story. Through poetry we live hugely, with more beauty, and we seek to break the limitations of our minds, to understand the powers that are living us (to borrow from Auden) and…

No writer or poet, no matter how well known, is free from the blow of having work rejected. No matter how carefully the poems have been selected, the magazine studied and read carefully, all submission rules followed, the rejections will still come. It is just as likely to be rejected from a small publication as a big one.

The old advice – and I’ve been submitting poems for over 40 years – was to have another look at your poem, polish further and send out somewhere else. This still holds good but there might be nothing wrong with the poems at all. Maybe the magazine was full, perhaps your work was long-listed but didn’t make the final cut for all sorts of reasons nothing to do with the poem, such as it didn’t fit in with the other poems chosen, or there was another one on a similar theme. So…

Coming up to the spring, our first poet from Massachusetts today describes a local May Day festival and how her family missed it. 

Then a serious poem from Charlie Gracie, writtten in a collaboration with Irish sculptor Brendan McGloin, as a memorial to those who died in a hotel  fire in 1980.

Nikki Anne Schmutz from Utah offers a poem that seems more dispirited but in a more light-hearted way, using repetition and exaggeration to get her message home.

After these we need something a little more laid back, perhaps this small irrestible piece of philosophy from my friend the late Angus Calder, about perceptions of the outside world, and how the glory of it all makes up for a “razory edge of cold”

You can check out all these fine poets by looking them up.

Please send more poems folks: I can solicit poems but it would be nice…

San Francisco Bay Area poet, Ann Emerson, was one of the first two people I invited to join in the collaboration we now call The BeZine. It was originally named Into the Bardo, in reference to the Buddhist state of existence between death and rebirth; so named because of life-compromising illnesses.

Ann was a gifted poet, but she didn’t find that out until after she was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer. She discovered her voice in a hospital poetry class. Ultimately she studied with Ellen Bass in Santa Cruz, California. 

After diagnosis, Ann survived for an almost consistently tortured six years. Physical pain. Trauma. Fear. Chemo. Poverty. She had signs posted around her house that said, “Live!”

While Ann spent a lot of time in the hospital, her home was a cabin in the Redwoods of La Honda, a stone’s throw from the log cabin where Ken Kesey and the Merry…

Poem 76) For Holly Magill (Falafel, giraffe, squidge, toss, cellulite, congeniality)

How do you construct

a falafel for a giraffe?

Well you squidge it

and toss it

until the outside

is the texture

of cellulite.

Then climb a tree

with your offering

hoping for congeniality.

 

 

Poem 77) for Sarah Pritchard (repsonse to Sarah’s art piece)

He had taken his anger

bunched and thrown it

at the wall.

The resultant pieces

made sense,

a wedgewood carpet

of the broken

left the viewer wounded.

He walks over them

for a week

breaking the pieces further

then he lifts them

and places them swiftly

on clay.

He has always known

the order

always felt the pieces

were meant to fit together

into something freer than an urn.

 

Poem 78) for Sarah J Bryson (gasp, weft, snare, dais, extreme, lure)

We gasped.

When had he become the weft of our days?