Monthly Archives: June 2023

Edmund Conti, ‘The Straight Skinny’

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To say that only I am fat,
To say that I am only fat,
To say only that I am fat,
To only say that I am fat,
Is not to say, however, that
They equally are definitive.

One statement says fat’s mine alone,
One says no other trait I own,
One just has a plaintive tone,
And–overlooked and overblown–
One just splits the infinitive.

*****

Edmund Conti writes: “I guess this began with the observation that ‘only I am fat’ and ‘I am only fat’ have different meanings depending on the placement of one word. Which made me wonder if placing ‘only’ in other parts of the sentence would change it again. Which it did. Why did I use ‘fat’ as a trait? Well, it’s an easy rhyme and people can relate to it—in themselves or others. Also, it gave me a good excuse for the title.
I thought writing the second stanza would be trickier, but the rhymes just fell into place. And noticing the split infinitive and using it saved the poem. Assuming it was worth saving.”

Edmund Conti has recent poems published in Light, Lighten-Up Online, The Lyric, The Asses of Parnassus, newversenews, Verse-Virtual and Open Arts Forum. His book of poems, Just So You Know, released by Kelsay Books
https://www.amazon.com/Just-You-Know-Edmund-Conti/dp/1947465899/
was followed by That Shakespeherian Rag, also from Kelsay
https://kelsaybooks.com/products/that-shakespeherian-rag

His poems have appeared in several Potcake Chapbooks:

Tourists and Cannibals
Rogues and Roses
Families and Other Fiascoes
Wordplayful
all available from Sampson Low Publishers

Photo: “Why Am I So Fat?” by morroelsie is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Richard Fleming, ‘The Railway Line – in memory of John Simpson’

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We walked together side by side,
at dusk along the disused line,
restless and glad to be outside.
I had Woodbines, you brought cheap wine.
Fifteen, unthinkingly alive,
truants from our suburban drive,
we talked excitedly of life
how we had cracked it, knew the score.
We worked the cork out with your knife
then drank sweet wine and wanted more.
We smoked our fags, ignored the cold,
could not imagine being old.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “The Railway Line is an old poem, rescued from the archives, that remains dear to me. In it, I’ve attempted to recapture the heady recklessness of my early teenage years when the world seemed full mysteries, and friendships were more intense than those I later formed in adulthood. John didn’t make it past his early twenties so he remains, in my memories of him, forever rebellious and young.”

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

“railway lines” by apdk is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Review: ‘Burial Grounds’ by Brian Gavin

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Gavin’s poems are quiet, elegant reflections on people—alive and dead—in danger of being forgotten, in towns not in the mainstream of modern life. His verse is quietly formal, usually rhymed, always rhythmic. Sometimes as brief as a sonnet, as with my personal favourite ‘Grand Opening’: an ex-serviceman, mopping floors and putting the coffee on at 4 a.m., running a business at which (apparently) four previous owners have failed, but simply doing what has to be done…

It isn’t so much hope behind these doors
as work to do. (…) He reaches for the light.
He sets his OPEN sign against the night.

There is an inherent mournfulness in these stories of people in places which once thrived but are now hanging on without major farming or industrial or commercial opportunities. Many poems are about people towards the end of their lives, or even later as the title suggests. And even when youth is included it shows up as a teen alone on a swing on a November evening, working her phone:

and nothing moves, but for the falling dark
and the quiver of her thumbs at work.

Railway stations close, businesses relocate, fires happen, towns empty out… but people are still there, poorer, aging, their prospects reduced. The overall tone is an almost religious attitude of accepting where you are, fighting the good fight, doing what must be done… moving, as we all must, into life’s inevitable landscape of burial grounds.

*****

Brian Gavin is a retired Distribution Manager who started writing poetry 10 years ago. His poems have appeared in The Journal of Formal Poetry, Peninsula Poets and Snakeskin Magazine, and in the Potcake Chapbook ‘Careers and Other Catastrophes’. He lives in Lakeport, Michigan, USA, with his wife Karen. ‘Burial Grounds’ is available from Kelsay Books.

Susan McLean, ‘Morbid Interest’

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How unpleasant to meet Mr. Poe.
It gives a young lady a chill
when, just as she’s saying hello,
he asks if she’s lately been ill.

It was mid-afternoon, yet he seemed
to be tipsy or mildly sedated.
How oddly his mournful eyes gleamed
when he heard that we might be related.

He muttered some rhymes for my name,
saying nothing could be more inspiring
to a poet desirous of fame
than the sight of young beauties expiring.

Then he asked if I had a bad cough
or a semi-conversable crow.
I informed him of where to get off.
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Poe.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “In my teens, I was a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe‘s short stories and poetry. I loved his eerie subjects and crooning, incantatory lines. I memorized his poem ‘To Helen,’ and I parodied his iconic ‘The Raven.’ But in grad school, I read his essay ‘The Philosophy of Composition,’ in which he wrote that “the death . . . of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” Hmmm. At that moment, it occurred to me that all of those dead women of his stories and poems might be less an outpouring of personal grief and more a product of an agenda. Years later, when responding to a challenge from the British journal The Spectator to write a poem modeled on Edward Lear’s ‘How pleasant to know Mr. Lear‘ but about another author, I imagined how Poe might seem to a young woman being introduced to him.
This poem, which was originally published in Light Quarterly, was later reprinted in Per
Contra and in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Illustration: DALL-E

Formalist poet A.E. Stallings elected the next Oxford Professor of Poetry

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Congratulations to Alicia Stallings on winning election to one of the most prestigious poetry positions on the planet – the Oxford Professorship of Poetry! A thoroughly deserved success for one of the absolute best poets writing today. And how nice for all of us, that a formalist is recognised as the best choice. Her term of office begins in October and runs for four years.

Here is the University’s report on it: https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/oxford-people/professor-of-poetry

Odd poem: Henri Rousseau, ‘Inscription pour La Rêve’

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Yadwigha dans un beau rêve
S’étant endormie doucement
Entendait les sons d’une musette
Dont jouait un charmeur bien pensant.
Pendant que la lune reflète
Sur les fleuves [or fleurs], les arbres verdoyants,
Les fauves serpents prêtent l’oreille
Aux airs gais de l’instrument.

Yadwigha in a beautiful dream
Having fallen gently to sleep
Heard the sounds of a reed instrument
Played by a well-intentioned [snake] charmer.
As the moon reflected
On the rivers [or flowers], the verdant trees,
The wild snakes lend an ear
To the joyous tunes of the instrument.

*****

Henri Rousseau‘s last completed work, ‘The Dream‘ is huge – almost 7′ x 10’ – and is remarkable for a couple of reasons: it features his Polish mistress of decades before, and it was the first of his pieces to bring him wide-spread acceptance. Completed and sold in early 1910, it was exhibited for six weeks in the early spring, was praised by poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, and gave him long-sought recognition. He died in September of that year.

Picasso and Matisse understood and admired Rousseau’s work, but many people did not. Rousseau wrote the poem to help viewers understand the painting; he also wrote in a letter to art critic André Dupont, “The woman asleep on the couch is dreaming she has been transported into the forest, listening to the sounds from the instrument of the enchanter.”

‘The Dream’ is one of the most striking pieces of art on display in MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.

Melissa Balmain, ‘Shopper’s Life List’

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Nine thousand quarts of orange juice
Five thousand loaves of bread
Eight hundred fifty bars of soap
Three hundred lipsticks (red)
A gross of bras
A score of scarves
A dozen wallets (black)
Ten cars
Eight dogs
Six cats
Three homes
Two canes
One granite plaque

*****

From Walking in on People © Melissa Balmain, 2014. Used by permission of Able Muse Press.

Editor’s note: If this poem doesn’t look like formal verse to you, and the only structure you see is the declining number of the items listed, then read it aloud to pick up the swing!

Melissa Balmain writes: “As you might guess, this one came about when I’d been doing some birdwatching. I considered starting one of those ‘life lists’ that birders have—then thought: what if there were other kinds of life lists? I never did get around to listing birds.”

Speaking of shopping, Melissa Balmain’s third poetry collection, Satan Talks to His Therapist, can be preordered from Paul Dry Books (and from all the usual retail empires). Balmain is the editor-in-chief of Light, America’s longest-running journal of comic verse. Her poems and prose have appeared in such places as The American Bystander, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Lighten Up Online,The Hopkins Review, Poetry Daily, Rattle, and The Washington Post. Her other poetry collections are Walking in on People (chosen by X.J. Kennedy for the Able Muse Book Award) and The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy Tale Reboots for Adults.A member of the University of Rochester’s English Department since 2010, she lives nearby with her husband and (for now) one of their two children. She is a recovering mime.

“Missing Plaque” by QuesterMark is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Michael R. Burch, ‘Redolence’

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Now darkness ponds upon the violet hills;
cicadas sing; the tall elms gently sway;
and night bends near, a deepening shade of gray;
the bass concerto of a bullfrog fills
what silence there once was; globed searchlights play.

Green hanging ferns adorn dark window sills,
all drooping fronds, awaiting morning’s flares;
mosquitoes whine; the lissome moth again
flits like a veiled oud-dancer, and endures
the fumblings of night’s enervate gray rain.

And now the pact of night is made complete;
the air is fresh and cool, washed of the grime
of the city’s ashen breath; and, for a time,
the fragrance of her clings, obscure and sweet.

*****

Michael R. Burch writes: “I wrote the poem as the sun was going down over my son Jeremy’s pee-wee football practice. The first stanza is a pretty accurate description of the scene. However, by the second stanza I was letting my imagination run free. By the last four lines it was pure imagination. Or my wife would have killed me!”

Michael R. Burch is an American poet who lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife Beth and two outrageously spoiled puppies. Burch’s poems, translations, essays, articles, reviews, short stories, epigrams, quotes, puns, jokes and letters have appeared in hundreds of literary journals, newspapers and magazines. Burch is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The HyperTexts, a former columnist for the Nashville City Paper, and, according to Google’s rankings, a relevant online publisher of poems about the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Trail of Tears and the Palestinian Nakba. Burch’s poetry has been taught in high schools and universities, translated into 17 languages, incorporated into three plays and two operas, set to music by 27 composers, and recited or otherwise employed in more than a hundred YouTube videos. To read the best poems of Mike Burch in his own opinion, with his comments, please click here: Michael R. Burch Best Poems. 

Photo: “Ferns at night” by ikewinski is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Poem, ‘Honesty’

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Honesty’s doing nothing you’re ashamed
to talk of; otherwise you’re being gamed
by a smooth angel with a cloven shoe.
Man, know thyself; to thine own self be true;
accept you’re not some other one’s ideal
from their religion or philosophy;
accept your thoughts are yours, impure and real
with lust, greed, envy, anger, vanity–
normal in that we’re powered by an ape’s drive
that needed those traits to survive and thrive.
Whether you act on them’s different again.
Do nothing that, if done, would make you lie–
but don’t be shamed you’ve had the thoughts within.
Don’t stifle, don’t suppress, and don’t deny.
Acknowledge, but don’t act. In that’s no sin.

*****

Published in Snakeskin, January 2018

Photo: “Here is contained ‘Self-Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness,’ this being a Direct Introduction to the State of Intrinsic Awareness, From ‘The Profound Teaching of Self-Liberation in the Primordial State of the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities.’” by Wonderlane is marked with CC0 1.0.

Marcus Bales, ‘Lighthouse’

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She needed constant, searching light
And some firm continent
From which to dive into the night
To find what darkness meant.

She fought the horses of the tides
And they her urgency.
She caught their lunar reins and rides
Triumphant out to sea.

And now she knows the powers of
The dark sea’s character,
And scorns the note her former love
Moans out, moans out to her.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “Probably poets ought not tell this sort of story about their work. I found a stash of very old poems, carefully typed out on now-yellowed paper in a metal file box amid 5” Tandy floppy discs, and printed on a dot-matrix printer, a little faded, some months ago, and have started the often painful task of retyping them into my little electronic library of my work. Many of them are obviously student stuff, but this one seemed a little less studious than the rest. It brought back its context in my mind pretty clearly.
This is a very early poem, maybe sophomore year. I’d read someone’s comment that Yeats wrote about his friends as if they were characters in a Greek myth, and it had struck me as a sudden truth — to me, anyway. Nothing would do, of course, except to try the thing on my friends. Then a woman I knew gave me a copy of Adrienne Rich’s ‘Transformations’, which tells the stories of ancient myths about women, mostly, as if they had much more contemporary attitudes, and that seemed like a much better model than the Yeats tone and manner — and besides, Yeats had already done that tone and manner. So though the idea originated in Yeats, it is really Rich’s idea that I tried to follow, trying for the tone of metaphor in a contemporary voice. And Larkin was in there somewhere too, as I recall, having discovered him when asked to write a paper contrasting and comparing one of his poems to one of Wilbur’s. The Larkin was the one starting:
Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And that led me to many others, notably ‘The Trees’, with its amazingly unlarkinish  repetition at the end.
Steal from the best has long been my motto.”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ’51 Poems’ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “my father was the keeper of the eddystone light” by sammydavisdog is licensed under CC BY 2.0.