What ends with me? A set of genes, The notion that my slender means Might turn into a son’s estate, The hope that, at some distant date, Beside my grave, my line convenes
To recollect my days’ routines, My counsels, and the vanished scenes Whose witnesses would recreate What ends with me:
The consciousness that struts and preens In holding that its passing means An altering of our species’ fate, My thought possessed of untold weight. Yet, on that thought, the question leans– What ends with me?
*****
J.D. Smith writes: “After reaching a certain age and making certain commitments, I found myself coming to grips with never being a parent. As in other instances of following form, the repetitions of the rondeau gave me a way to enclose and develop my response to the situation.”
J.D. Smith has published six books of poetry, most recently the light verse collection Catalogs for Food Lovers, and he has received a Fellowship in Poetry from the United States National Endowment for the Arts. This poem is from The Killing Tree (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Smith’s first fiction collection, Transit, was published in December 2022. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science, and his seventh collection, The Place That Is Coming to Us, will be published by Broadstone Books in 2025. Smith works in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Paula Van Lare and their rescue animals. X: @Smitroverse
One month from when you met me, when you brought the first of many gifts, a 45 of plaintive praise and longing, who’d have thought that forty-five years later we’d survive on weekends, holidays, and summer breaks, a foretaste of the end in every start, anticipation ballasted with aches as we put love on hold and live apart?
You are a holiday. The working week unspools like toilet paper from a roll. My attitude goes airborne when we speak, and when we meet, my heart swoops like a shoal of fish. Would we have lost this giddy glow, living together? Better not to know.
*****
Susan McLean writes: “It makes me feel ancient to realize that for younger readers I will have to explain that a 45 was a record with one song on each side, which played on a record player at 45 revolutions per minute. Love poems themselves tend to feel old-fashioned these days, though this one is about a relatively modern problem, the long-term, long-distance relationship in which both people are employed full time at jobs far apart from one another. The form, a Shakespearean sonnet, mirrors the content, in that the rhymes are separated from one another until the end, when they are reunited. The poem was originally published in the online journal of female formalist poets Mezzo Cammin, and it later appeared in my second book of poetry, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.
Your hours of tears won’t let you follow Those who’ve left you alone. Tonight your head lies on a pillow, Not beneath earth and stone.
The dead won’t be returning, Not for all of your pleas, Not for all your candles burning. Get up off your knees.
The deceased, removed from their rest Can take up all your hours Until your mind, denied a fair rest, Is deprived of its powers.
The road set before you is rocky and steep, So seize the night’s respite and drift off to sleep.
*****
J.D. Smith writes: “Though I do not sing, play an instrument or read music, I had Brahms’ Lullaby in the back of my mind while attempting to deal with various losses, and the poem roughly follows its tune. In adjusting to a new reality (I hesitate to say “move on” or “get over,” phrases that smack of empathic failure), sometimes all one can do is rest.”
J.D. Smith has published six books of poetry, most recently the light verse collection Catalogs for Food Lovers, and he has received a Fellowship in Poetry from the United States National Endowment for the Arts. This poem is from The Killing Tree (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Smith’s first fiction collection, Transit, was published in December 2022. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science, and his seventh collection, The Place That Is Coming to Us, will be published by Broadstone Books in 2025. Smith works in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Paula Van Lare and their rescue animals. X: @Smitroverse
You can almost see Vincent Price, black-robed, hunched above the console of a jumbo organ in the bowels of his creaky haunted manse; or maybe a stadium of damned souls, strobed in lurid red and howling nettle-robed as they plummet into Pandemonium, pore and pith aflame. It’s no troubadour, undoubtedly, this vast atonal gob.
As with the Roach Motel, we’d check in, but never out—us or anything, since it can swallow errant planets whole, and still, however much the mass, can’t eat its fill. Though it’s larger far than Jupiter or Mars, we can barely see it, thank our lucky stars.
*****
William Trowbridge writes in Rattle, where this poem was published: “I’ve spent most of my years as a poet writing free verse, though lately I find myself turning toward form. Unlike those who see formalist verse as dry and effete, I find it can generate power by means of barriers to play against—‘the net’ as Frost put it, by which he also meant boundary lines. If you pour gunpowder in a pile and light it, a mere flash occurs. But pack it tightly into a container, and you can get something more powerful. And, as opposed to the notion that form is restrictive, I agree with Richard Wilbur that it often liberates one from choosing the easy word in order to discover the better, surprising one. I haven’t moved into this part of town yet, but I stop there more and more.”
William Trowbridge’s tenth poetry collection, Father and Son, was published by Wayne State College Press Press in April. His poems have appeared in more than 45 anthologies and textbooks, as well as on The Writer’s Almanac, AnAmerican Life in Poetry, and in such periodicals as Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Plume, Rattle, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Epoch, and New Letters. He is a mentor in the University of Nebraska-Omaha Low-residency MFA in Writing Program and was Poet Laureate of Missouri from 2012 to 2016. For more information, see his website, williamtrowbridge.net.
Always to long for someone else’s gift— To blow that blistering alto sax, to lift Into the flash-bulbed air
For a reverse slam dunk while stunned guards gawk, To have a punster’s cheek or porn star’s cock, To capture, share by share,
Gold-plated Wall Street fame, to meditate Beyond nirvanic depths or radiate Beatitudes of prayer
Like any frescoed saint, even to make A perfect triple-decker dark-fudge cake Or master the éclair—
Means answering a roguish shout we follow Down some smashed-bottle alley to a hollow Recess, a doorway, where
If luck has tailed us on that lonely walk, When we knock, because we have to knock, No one will be there.
*****
‘Someone Else’s Gift’ was first published in Literary Matters, and then in Best American Poetry 2024. As I was unable to capture the original indentation, I have taken the liberty of introducing line spaces as an alternative way of clarifying the structure; it will sound the same when read aloud… – RHL
Stephen Kampa has three books of poems: Cracks in the Invisible (Ohio University Press, 2011), Bachelor Pad (Waywiser Press, 2014), Articulate as Rain (Waywiser Press, 2018), and World Too Loud to Hear (Able Muse Press, 2023). He teaches at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL and works as a musician.
Time was, we spent our muscle and our nous propping an aging house against the pummeling of its hundred years. Clean paint, neat gardens, upkeep rarely in arrears, sober as Donne. Yet now each year afresh burdens us with new failings of the flesh:
Legs that once mounted ladders without qualm tremble. Nor are we calm confronting pipework; torsos will not shrink, backs bend, or shoulders fold to grope below a sink. Hands shake; eyeballs glaze over. What appalls is that our bodies buckle like our walls:
plaque in arteries, soot in chimney stacks, stubborn and troublous cracks in teeth, in plaster. House! Ought we to call ourselves—and you—new poster children for the Fall, for that hard doctrine grumbling down the ages that Sin’s to blame, with Death and Rot its wages?
Entropy as theology—would Donne jape at it? Wink and pun as in his randy youth? Or solemnly robed in his winding sheet, sing Mutability, spinning into the praise of God in Art the fact that all things earthly fall apart?
Or pull from air some bit of modern science, yoking (even by violence) thermodynamics, shortened telomeres, transplants, genetics, sex, the music of the spheres? Strange physics and wild metaphors—all grand, but Rot and Death, plain woes we understand,
are better fought with checkbooks than with verse. We’ll sit, these days. We’ll nurse our beers, while able bodies stir their dust. A distant siren whines—we sigh; it whines for us. Let plumbers, painters, carpenters begin this season’s round of battling Death and Sin.
*****
Maryann Corbett writes: “Last summer, Clarence Caddell was just beginning work on a new magazine, The Borough, and was planning a second issue while the first came together. He had in mind an issue centered on Donne, and he commissioned me to contribute a poem. I’d read the wonderful biography Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell not many months before, so a lot of the life was fresh in my mind–but it was also the season of endless repair that is the eternal truth of owning a house that’s 113 years old. It wasn’t hard to pull together a poem about the woes of home ownership with tidbits that “everyone knows” about Donne–his worldly-to-holy conversion, the familiar line about his yoked-by-violence metaphors–under an allusive title, and in a stanza form a bit like one of his. (Alas, this blog can’t show you the indents that would best imitate Donne’s way of laying out a poem. You’ll have to imagine all the trimeter second lines indented and the hexameter fourth lines hanging out farther left.) In the end, Clarence had to use the poem to fill out his first issue, so it sat alone, unassisted by an issue theme.”
Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry.
I hold you on my lap; I think you’re dead. Next to us hangs a rusty, creaking swing. I look down as my white dress blooms with red.
Such fun to pull the seat right back, then fling it free. You’re two, I’m four, so I’m to blame; now I’m screaming bloody murder to bring
someone to the garden to witness my shame where swaying grimly like a tolling bell the swing is the proof of the deadly game.
It’s a story my mother liked to tell while tracing the faint white mark on your brow: how she found me soothing you after you fell.
The truth is, I can’t remember why or how I hurled that dead weight directly at you. Did she wonder at all, as I do now
if I pushed it so hard because I knew the swing’s unpredictable to and fro showed love and jealousy can both be true?
You never reproached me, but even so I still bear the scar of that reckless throw.
*****
Louise Walker writes: “The Swing was my second effort at writing a poem in terza rima; my first was a complete disaster, written in response to an assignment set by Cahal Dallat during a course I did with Coffee-House Poetry earlier this year. That novice attempt followed the rules of the form perfectly, with 3-line stanzas rhyming aba bcb cdc ded efe fgf gg. However, my poem was pompous, stilted and vacuous. It also took me an entire day. The next morning, a memory from early childhood came to me and I thought I would try terza rima one more time. To my surprise (and joy!) the poem called ‘The Swing’ came very quickly, was a pleasure to write and didn’t require my usual endless revisions and tweakings. What’s more, I found that the terza rima form became a little engine for generating my poem – for example, searching for a rhyme for ‘you’ threw up the word ‘fro’ which made think of the swing as a metaphor for the oscillating feelings of a child when a younger sibling arrives. I also found that the chain-like effect of the form, swinging back for rhymes, and then forward, suited the subject matter perfectly. Deep in my subconscious, the terza rima form had been working its magic overnight!
I was not at all delighted to get the terza rima assignment at first, but I learnt such a valuable lesson: sometimes one has to write a really bad poem to be able to write a decent one. ‘The Swing’ became an important poem in my recent debut collection ‘From Here to There’ published by Dithering Chaps, which has at its core my journey from childhood, through the death of my brother in our twenties, then onwards.”
Louise Walker was born in Southport and now lives in London. After reading English at Magdalen College, Oxford, where she was a member of the Florio Society, she taught English for 35 years at girls’ schools. Her work has been published in journals such as Acumen, Oxford Poetry, South, Prole and Pennine Platform. Highly Commended in the Frosted Fire Firsts Award and longlisted in in The Alchemy Spoon Pamphlet Competition, in 2023 she was shortlisted in the Bedford Competition and won 3rd prize in the Ironbridge Poetry Competition. Commissions include Bampton Classical Opera and Gill Wing Jewellery for their showcase ‘Poetry in Ocean’. She has recently published her debut collection with Dithering Chaps: https://www.ditheringchaps.com/from-there-to-here Instagram @louise_walker_poetry
Bears are frustrated by their lack of speech, Their claws leave blackboards shrieking for repairs, And that’s why bears are seldom asked to teach And almost never get Distinguished Chairs Unless they come across one unawares Whose rich upholstery they quickly shred. Some of them have been known to have affairs With a man or woman lured into their bed— This often ends up badly with one dead, The other executed for the crime, Or given a life sentence in a zoo. Bears are familiar with existential dread, Bears put their pants on one leg at a time: The problems bears have are your problems too.
*****
Charles Martin writes: “The poem is written in a variation on the Spenserian Sonnet form, which I have been writing for several years now. In this case, I enjoy the contrast between the strictness of the form and the raucousness of its subject. As I recall, I began it on a morning walk, and I think finished it shortly after the walk ended.
“The poem will next appear in The Khayyam Suite this spring, published by The Johns Hopkin University Press, which has published my last two collections of poetry, Signs & Wonders and Future Perfect, both of which are still in print. (Future Perfect has a sonnet sequence written in the Spenserian form.) Poems have recently been published in Literary Matters, The Hudson Review, Classical Outlook, and in Best American Poetry, 2024.”
Charles Martinis a poet, translator of poetry, and essayist. The Khayyam Suite is the fifth of his eight books of poetry to appear in the Fiction and Poetry Series of the Johns Hopkins University Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Literary Matters, The Hopkins Review and, in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Ingram Merrill Grant, a Bess Hokin Award from Poetry magazine, and a Pushcart Prize. His residencies include the Djerassi Foundation and Ragdale, and he served as Poet in Residence for five years for the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. His translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses received the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets, and he has also translated The Poems of Catullus and the Medea of Euripides. He is the author of the critical introduction to Catullus in the Hermes Book series of Yale University Press and of numerous essays on, and reviews of, classical and contemporary poetry.
When our Quiz Bowl team of eighteen-year-olds snagged a berth in the finals, held in New York City,
my small-town Minnesotan brain cells dizzied— at last I’d be some place that mattered. Swag
was my teammate Anne’s fixation: knockoff bags peddled in Chinatown, affixed with glitzy
Kate Spade labels. Anne bought a sack of six, then forgot it on the airport shuttle’s shag
seats; someone swiped it within minutes. Kate, I learned a fact of womanhood that year:
even we knockoff girls, cheap, desperate to look like someone else, to imitate
a finer woman, have our value; we’re wanted, wanted, until we disappear.
*****
Jenna Le writes: “The anecdote narrated in the first ten lines of the poem poured out of me easily and naturally enough. It was an anecdote that had been knocking around inside my brain for many years, but it wasn’t until I sat down to write the poem that the incident’s metaphorical meaning — that is, the epiphany contained in the poem’s last four lines — seemed to crystallize in the air in front of my eyes — and, to me, made the whole poem worthwhile. Honestly, until I sat down to write the poem, it had never even occurred to me that such a slight-seeming anecdote might have any metaphorical meaning at all. I sat down to write the poem more or less on a lark, and then the sonnet form just sort of took over and forced me to look deeper, to see more depth in my own material. This is one of the reasons I love the sonnet form.”
Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022), the last of which is the collection in which “Purses” appears and which can be purchased here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo185843950.html
Poems used to rhyme. In time, the couplets were dispensed. Incensed, today’s poet rebels from rhyming schemes, It seems. The writer, newly shedding the shackles of quatrains, Refrains from even a modicum of lilt.
And built now from unpaired diphthongs, His songs have lost a measure of glue. It’s true. No longer does the ear delight In flight of fancy, in teeter-totter, Like water on the endless sand, the to-and-fro, And no, this tide will not abate.
Of late, I find that poems no longer draw me in. They’re thin.
*****
Doc Mehl writes: “For the last two decades I’ve written rhyming western poetry, and I’ve performed both the poetry and my original western-themed music at cowboy poetry events in the western U.S. and Canada. I’ve recorded two spoken-word CDs of my rhyming poetry, and several CDs of my original music. I’m not averse to free verse. (OK, I must pause momentarily to savor the rhyme in that sentence.) Still, the author of a free verse poem ought to be able to convincingly answer this question: “Why do you maintain that this work should be categorized as poetry rather than prose?” In this poem (“Poems Used To Rhyme”), I liked the gamesmanship of sneaking the rhyming word of each “couplet” into the beginning of the second line rather than at the end of the second line. The resulting poem might first appear to be a tongue-in-cheek free verse poem about why rhyme is important. Still, the magic of the closely juxtaposed rhyming words can’t help but rise from the ether.”
Newly transplanted from Colorado to Black Diamond, Alberta, Al “Doc” Mehl traces his family roots to central Kansas, where his grandfather raised six children on the family homestead. His debut music CD is titled “Asphalt Cowboy,” and his second music CD titled “I’d Rather Be…” was released in 2008. Doc Mehl has also published a CD of original poetry titled “Cowboy Pottery,” and a second spoken-word poetry CD titled “The Great Divide,’ named 2013 “Cowboy Poetry CD of the Year” by both the Western Music Association and the Academy of Western Artists. In 2020, Doc published his first collection of poetry, “Good Medicine: Read Two Poems and Call Me in the Morning.” And in 2022, Doc released two new CDs of music, “West of the 22” and “Tried and True. Doc’s poems and musical lyrics have been featured on the website http://www.CowboyPoetry.com, he has been published in the poetry journal “Rattle,” and he was a first-place silver buckle winner at the National Cowboy Poetry Rodeo in Montrose, Colorado in 2009.
Form in Formless Times 