Recent publication(s): Chain ghazal: Chickens

I've been in a dry place and haven't been writing much poetry lately. I hang out now and then at the Sunset Beach section of The Waters – where, besides participating in NaPoWriMo, one may write 7 poems in 7 days at any time in the company of a small but nurturing group of people who cheer each other on. In January I tried a 7/7 and lasted three days. One of the three poems was an attempt at a hybrid ghazal/pantoum, though it came out more like a blues. The first draft had 3-line stanzas; the later version has four, with the third unrhymed to give it the feel of a ghazal's first two shers.

Gene Doty published it in the March issue of The Ghazal Page, and notified me a few days later that Carol Rumens, who writes a weekly column in The Guardian, had asked to use it as her "poem of the week." It appeared there on March 18; when last I looked there were over 200 comments, including many imitations and parodies. On March 20 it was posted on 3quarksdaily, which I'd never heard of, but my son says Azra Raza is his friend's wife's friend's cousin, so obviously it was a put-up job.

I'm feeling somewhat overwhelmed by all this. I had intended to give NaPoWriMo a miss this year, but now I am energized and will be participating – for which I am immensely grateful to Gene and Carol.

My Poetry Archive: Cartographie Curieux, The Centrifugal Eye

Cartographie Curieux is a new zine with an unusual slant: The editors are "interested in the curious geographies that everyone must navigate as they travel through life. We are obsessed with finding ourselves and we are looking for some good maps to get us there" poetry, fiction, visual media, etc. The zine, which is in blog form, officially launched on May 25, and my poem Trail to the Treasure of Al the Awful was the first and so far the only post. Do go to the submissions page and scroll down to where it says "Some maps we’d love to publish". Perhaps you'll be inspired to submit. I'm very curious to see what other cartographies will appear on this site.

The Spring/Summer issue of The Centrifugal Eye is themed "J Is for Jabberwocky: A Glossarium of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Allegory, Myth & Legend in Poetic Form." Two of my poems, World-Saving Poem and Return of the Zed-A, are in the Science Fiction section.

My poetry archive: Lyre Lyre and Infinity's Kitchen

Lyre Lyre is a fairly new ezine of surreal bent; they made me the portfolio poet for issue three, with four poems: "Old Sugar-Spike is dead," "This just in from the footfarm," "Shards of bottled ivory" (a homophonic translation based on Arthur Rimbaud's "Le bateau ivre"), and "The five bats of unhappiness."

Infinity's Kitchen has separate online and print magazines. Issue 5 of the former included my shaped poem Spooked. The print version is so far out I was surprised they'd accepted my work when I saw the company I was in. My very-tame-by-comparison contribution was an antonymic translation. The idea, which I got from a book on Oulipo, is to replace most of the words in an existing poem by their opposites, or the words don't have opposites, something in that direction. Here is the poem; I'll leave you to identify the source:

The Penultimate Going

Straightening, straightening out the narrowing plane
The warbler listens to the warble-ee;
Ideas coalesce, the periphery can drop,
Rank stringency is bound below the sun,
The wine-bright ebb is bound, and nowhere is
The free-for-all of guilt resuscitated;
The worst have no acquittal, while the best
Are void of apathetic listlessness.

There's no proof any concealment is afoot;
No proof the Penultimate Going is afoot;
The Penultimate Going! Softly these deeds are in
When a wee archetype in Corpus Coeli
Oils your hearing; outside rocks of the ocean
A haze without lamb's mind or the foot of a mouse,
Closed eyes crammed and merciful as the moon,
Is resting its fast shins, while irrelevant to it
Unwinds the light of cheerful fish of the sea.
The first time daylight rises, you're unaware
That a single second of warm insomnia
Was pleased to sweet dreams by a static coffin,
And what smooth bird, its moment gone square long since,
Prances away from Golgotha to be killed?

RIP: John Mella, with thanks

John Mella, founding editor of Light Quarterly, died on April 16 at age 70.

As of 2006 Light, a print magazine, was the main if not only venue for light verse in the US. The following poem, which appeared in the Autumn 2006 issue, was my first to be accepted by a literary magazine:

Orientation Speech

A compass
is an object about which it is not worth making a rumpus.
This wretched hunk of magnetite
can't even tell me which is my left hand and which is my right.
The location of north and south is a mystery which I have not the least interest in plumbing;
what I want to know is whether I'm going or coming.
Be so kind as to spare us
your lecture on the virtues of knowing the whereabouts of Polaris.
The wind bloweth where it listeth,
or so the Bible insisteth;
and what direction it bloweth from engageth me as little as how to tell splakes from wrasses.
Just give me a gadget that will point to where I put my glasses.

The poets on Eratosphere, a site which specializes in formal poetry, have got up a thread where members are invited to post their own poems which appeared in Light. It's quite a collection; take a look.

My poetry archive: Winamop

The latest issue of Winamop is out. This is a quirky little British zine that "was conceived on a whim, is run on a shoestring, ignored by the many, loved by the few and has continued unabashed since 2003." Just the place to send light verse - and the editor took three of mine, plus a collaborative poem written by eight of my relatives in 1947. Great to find waiting for me first thing on April Fool's day.

Publications update

Here's a brief rundown of poems I've posted since the last update in May:

The Fib Review (edited by Mary-Jane Grandinetti, who is also editor of Shot Glass Journal) is a zine devoted not to minor mendacities but to the fib, a form based on the Fibonacci sequence. I had 3 poems in issue #10: "The mailman cometh", "Gift of gab", and "Make your cooking colorful". (I can't the links to work; see "Index to published poems" at right.)

Curio Poetry is a fairly new zine, specializing in "poetry that explores the world at a micro-level: tiny spaces, instants, individual objects, scraps of dreams and memories, et cetera." Issue #3 contains 3 of mine: Summer libation; The sinister spoon; Floaters.

The December issue of Danse Macabre had my cranky holiday poem, "'Tis the season" - I'll post the link on the sidebar when the archive is available again. Two other poems, Literalness is the Devil's weapon; Visitation, were posted on the auxiliary site, Danse Macabre du Jour.

On New Verse News, see my double dactyl Laissez-faire (June 12, 2011) and Sonnenizio on a line by Edward Thomas (March 5, 2012).

The latter is the first poem I've written since last June; time to get in gear for National Poetry Writing Month in April!

Poetry archive: Shit Creek Review and Danse Macabre

Generally I avoid submitting to publications with "Review" in the title, expecting them to be stodgy, academic, and humorless. The Shit Creek Review, an Australian zine which is "biased towards formalism, but by no means dismissive of vers libre", is none of these things. I'm proud to have had my poem Kaleidoscope published there.

Danse Macabre, which styles itself "Nevada's first online literary magazine" and part of "the non-academic literary vanguard", has that elusive quality I look for first in a zine: quirkiness. (A rudimentary knowledge of French and German is a help in navigation.) Issue 34 includes my poems Film night and Medical students pay tribute to a cadaver donor. Scroll down to find them.

Poetry archive: Googlepoems and Puffin Circus

Googlepoems is a fledgling zine of "formal and informal verse about, derived from, or inspired by the great search" - i.e. internet searches. My poem Could I have a word is currently at the top (November 25, 2010). Enjoy the info on the sidebar!

Puffin Circus is another fledgling zine which has been publishing small monthly issues since August. (I have a fondness for puffins and a memory of seeing them ride the air currents down a cove on Runde, a bird island off the west coast of Norway, their orange feet tucked up behind.) Well, Puffin Circus was asking for winter poems for the December issue and I sent them two, "Vanguard" and "Snow and Ice." They're here, on page 5.

Organizing a book of poems

I'd been circling around the problem of organizing a manuscript for several years. My poems are all over the map, both thematically and formally. I tried several ways of grouping them by themes – political, humorous, nature/mystical, experimental, but nothing would work.

One day I realized that I had published 72 poems in sundry magazines, and it came to me to arrange those poems alphabetically by title and see what happened. What came out was a nice random mix. Subsequently I took out some poems that I didn't like all that much, and added some favorites that I've had trouble getting published – figuring that I might as well stop submitting them and just put them out there.

I decided on "Unglobed fruit" as a title poem, and that it should come last. I switched it around with "Unjubilee" and cut out everything in the alphabet after U. In the August issue of The Centrifugal Eye I found a lovely stitchery by Patricia Wallace Jones that seemed to echo several themes in the title poem. Pat was delighted for me to use it as a cover image.

At my advanced age I can't go gallivanting about the country giving readings, as any publisher would want, so I'll be self-publishing the book with Lulu. Editors of four of the zines I've published in have kindly written blurbs – which, much to my surprise, all fit on the back cover. At this writing I'm waiting for the formatted text. More later.

Belated discovery of publication in Poets Against War

I just discovered that Poets Against War published a parody of the national anthem I wrote in 2002 without ever telling me. I submitted it sometime in 2003 and it seemed to fall into a black hole. Turns out it was published on July 25, 2004. At the time I'd never had a poem accepted by a literary magazine.

The New National Anthem

My Poetry Archive: The Ghazal Page

The Persian-style ghazal consists of a series of thematically unconnected couplets (shers) with lines of equal length, unified by a refrain (radif) at the end of the second line of each sher (in the first, at the end of both lines). The radif is preceded by a monorhyme (qafia). Traditionally the writer's name occurs somewhere in the final sher.

I first became aware of the ghazal form in the wake of 9/11. On that day my son George, an ethnomusicologist specializing in Persianate cultures, opened at random his volume of the medieval Persian poet Hafez. Hafez is regarded as an oracle in the Persian-speaking world, much the same way Virgil was in medieval Europe. And George landed on a ghazal which spoke to him so powerfully that he made a rough English translation. The refrain (radif) was Do not be consumed by grief. I put it in the winter 2001 issue of Types & Shadows, the Journal of the Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts, of which I was then editor.

The foremost advocate and practitioner of the Persian-style ghazal in English was the late Agha Shalid Ali (1949-2001), who was dismayed by the prevailing fashion for defining a ghazal as a series of disjointed couplets with neither radif nor qafia. I have his own book of Persian-style ghazals in English, Call me Ishmael Tonight, as well as a collection he compiled of Persian-style ghazals by American poets, Ravishing Disunities. They are both delightful and inspiring, the moreso since so many of them depart from the traditional subjects of romantic love and mysticism; some are playful unto hilarity.

When I tried my first ghazal, I found it to be such a congenial form that I wrote several more. The disjointed couplets provide a great way to use the bits and pieces which inhabit my mind, and the monorhyme spurs odd connections. As for putting my name in the final sher, I have a triple advantage: I can use Esther, green leaf, or mirror.

Having written four that I felt were presentable, I cast about for a place to submit them for publication, and found The Ghazal Page. Gene Doty, a retired professor of Engish based in Missouri, goes by the editorial nom de web of Gino Peregrini. On his site he explores the ins and outs of ghazals in styles both Persian and Arabic.

I sent him my four ghazals, which he published in the October 2007 issue: Progress, Chocolate guzzle, Agenda, and Threnody. He added an editorial comment (below the last one) that floored me.

The following year Gino presented us with a series of challenges, i.e. everyone was to write a ghazal on the given radif. I participated in two of those: Clouds and Rain and Sugar .

Gino is also interested in exploring the possibilities of the ghazal form for variants, hybrids, and the like. The tercet challenge asked us to find a way of writing 3-line shers. I tried expanding the monorhyme into what I called a Welsh ghazal. Another hybrid, which was published in this year's April Fool issue, was Haibun: Failed ghazal with interruptions

The ghazal continues to be a form I turn to for inspiration, for instance when I'm stuck during National Poetry Writing month.

My poetry archive: Folly

The short-lived ezine Folly specialized in parody and satire. I daresay old hands know the identity of "C. Sharpe," the editor; I do not. Parody lovers will be grateful to Rose Kelleher for preserving it on her "Rambling Rose" site. The five issues boast contributions from a number of masters of light verse, and provide a wonderful diversion; they also bear the stamp of the Bush years.

(For those who write metrical poetry, Rose also maintains an annotated list of Venues for Formal Poetry on her site, listing print and web magazines that are either exclusively devoted to, or noticeably friendly toward, poetry written in forms.)

Back to Folly: The final issue, for October 2006, included two of parodies of mine which I believe marked my online debut in a literary zine. Both have backstories.

Little plastic hangers from new pairs of socks is the third in a series of poems on that subject. The first was a collage of quotations from various prose and poetic sources; the title is the first line, from one of Don Aslett's decluttering books. The result was startlingly apocalyptic, so much so that I challenged myself to do another collage in a more meditative vein. After that, I decided that I should really generate a poem using my own words. The poem in Folly is the result.

(Little plastic hangers #1 is in the current issue of Pemmican. It won't be archived, so read it while you can. If I find a publisher for #2 I'll post the whole series.)

My last duke was the culmination of a game played on poets.org. The participants took turns suggesting an object for each player to write a poem about. When we got up to 25 objects, we challenged ourselves to write poems using all 25. This is mine.

My poetry archive: IPBC - Fall day in the park

In August 2007, another poem received an honorable mention on IPBC. Of this poem I remember that, after a string of rather dour poems, it came to me in Quaker meeting that I should make this one a poem of celebration. Writing it felt like a victory.

Fall day in the park

In the lapidary light
of the sea, I am a flatfish
prostrate on the floor
of a cathedral, the eyes
on my back attuned
to the coruscation
of corals, polyps, bryozoa
swaying in the current’s sunlit blue.

Now on dancing eddies
I levitate in celebration,
vault and sweep and skew,
pitch and bank and camber
a hymn to overarching glory.
Then I sink again, canting
like a falling leaf, and rest

in the mud, where one day soon
my center eye will contemplate
the bare ruined reef while the other,
the wandering one, keeps watch
for the green ghosts hovering
amid the welter of weeds.

My poetry archive: poets.org, IBPC, and getting started with poetry online

In 2003, during one of my sproradic bouts of poetry writing, I decided to look for an online poetry forum. The only one I knew of back then was poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets. I signed up, but then discovered the forums weren't active, and forgot all about poets.org — and poetry — for a couple of years. Then suddenly on May 23, 2005 — five years ago today — I received notice that the forums were active again.

There was a mad scramble as all the old members tried to post years of pent-up poems. I looked on with dismay, but the furor died down in a couple of months, and I timidly posted an old poem, which was thoroughly misunderstood. I went on posting old poems and gradually gained confidence. Then in the fall a weekly poem spark was instituted, which I faithfully participated in. One spark was a sestina, and I wrote a rambling one about how I would write a poem if I could find my pencil.

A short time later it occurred to me to try a sestina using the notes of the medieval Gregorian scale — do, re, mi, fa, sol, la — as end syllables in lieu of end words. It was such a departure for me that someone opined, when I posted it, that I must have been smoking pine needles again. Not only was it well received, it was one of three poems chosen to send to the monthly Interboard Poetry Competition — where it won first prize for December, 2005.

Gregorian Sestina was my first publication in a literary venue. The link will also take you to judge-of-the-month Ravi Shankar's comments, below the poem itself.

My poetry archive: The New Verse News

The New Verse News publishes at least one poem each day related to the current news from a progressive standpoint. The editor, James Penha, is a New Yorker who has lived in Indonesia for the past eighteen years, and has taught English at the International High School in Jakarta. He has just published a chapbook collection of Indonesian folk tales, Snakes and Angels.

Of course in a zine such as The New Verse News, topicality has to trump craft. Still, I'm impressed by the consistently high quality of its verse; there's so much bad political poetry out there. If you need to vent about what is going on in the world, give it a try; if you're new to publishing poetry, it's a good place to get your feet wet. Responses usually come within a couple of weeks.

I found The New Verse News when I was just starting to submit poetry for publication. On October 30, 2006, I sent an angry poem which I obscurely felt had a Halloweenish feel to it. Within a few hours I got a response, something like this: "Trust me, we don't usually respond this fast, but once in a while we get a poem that is just when we need just when we need it." Sanctuary was posted on October 31. It's still my favorite of the poems of mine James has published. The others are listed below, latest first:

Tea Party with Walt
Paradelle: U.S. Congress and Copenhagen
Dissolute Sonnet
Noam Chomsky Vindicated
The Two Prophets
Plus Ultra
Same Old Story
Thanksgiving

My poetry archive: Tilt-a-Whirl

As of this writing I've published 65 poems in sundry magazines. The majority are available online, a number of them in issues that are still current. My previous attempt to "archive" them on a website was axed by att, and I've been trying to figure out how best to provide access to them on this blog. I'd also like to voice appreciation for the magazines that have published them, and think I will essay a sort of narrative.

A fairly new magazine which has recently taken a couple of my poems is Tilt-a-Whirl: A Poetry Sporadical of Repeating Forms, a zine devoted to forms in which one or more lines or other elements are repeated. These include many French forms, ghazal, pantoum, sestina, etc; for a full list see the Cheat sheet on the site. (She adds new forms to the list as she finds them.) The zine is edited by Kate Bernadette Benedict and is a spinoff of her better-known zine, The Umbrella.

Issue 2, which is still current, contains my pantoum, Halo, as well as Arrgh poetica, a Treinte-sei. The latter is a 36-line form invented by John Ciardi, which I would never have dreamed of attempting had I not been experimenting with oddball forms while involved in a challenge. (Kate told me in accepting it that she had resolved not to publish poems about writing poems, but felt impelled to make an exception—partly, I suppose, because the form was new to her. It was new to me too, and poetry writing was the easiest subject to practice on.)

Back issues of Tilt-a-Whirl will be archived by form, rather than by issue; thus, when issue 3 comes along and the above links to my poems are outmoded, you can find them under the form in the archive.

Thank you, Unsplendid!

I do like to try new forms now and then.  When I'm participating in a challenge such as National Poetry Writing Month, trying a new form is an excellent point of departure.  The results tend to be, well, form-driven, and are best put away for a few months or years until I have enough distance to discern if they're worth posting to a poetry board for critique. 

Most journals devoted to poetry in forms to which I have submitted seem to favor a rather narrow range of forms; or maybe they just haven't thought my experiments in oddball forms were good enough. 

In any case, I was delighted to find Unsplendid,  "an online journal of received and nonce forms".  The editors will consider any form included in Lewis Turco's Book of Forms, plus nonce forms which you invent yourself.  When they accepted my rondel prime, Legacy, for their issue 2.2, I felt I'd found a friend.   

And now they have published Unjubilee — a favorite child that I've had difficulty finding a home for. 

This was a poem for NaPoWriMo 2007 which still mystifies me. It seems to be sort of an accentual-alliterative rondeau.  In writing it, I don’t think I was consciously going for accentual-alliterative, and am not sure I even realized until now how much alliteration is there.  But for some reason I felt it would be incomplete without the caesuras (indicated by spaces within the long lines). 

The Bible has always been a source of inspiration, though my use of it is hardly traditional.  "Unjubilee" builds on the idea of Jubilee described in Leviticus 27, which aimed to redress inequities in wealth every 50 years by canceling debts and returning land to its original owners.   I conferred with Douglas Basford, an editor of Unsplendid, about adding a note with the biblical reference, but we both felt that the page as set up was so beautiful and clean that we couldn't want to clutter it.

Best American Poetry Online

My poem Descort on a Truism, published earlier this month in Drunken Boat, is featured on Best American Poetry Online, a newish blog by CE Chaffin.  Each week Craig proposes to examine a recent poem published online, with a brief interview of the poet.  He would be glad for suggestions. Mine is the entry for Feb 21; check out the others as well!     

Featured poet in THE CENTRIFUGAL EYE

I'm the featured poet in the February 2010 issue of The Centrifugal Eye, "Troblems and Prubbles: All Mixed-Up."    http://issuu.com/centrifugaleye/docs/tcefeb10-troblems

There's a little box at the top where you can type in the page you want. My interview starts on page 6, poems on p 14, essay on p 18, a couple more poems on p 38 in the "Misheard poems" folio.

The focus is mostly on my use of the absurd.  I also talk about what I learned about writing poetry from translating and composing; my struggle to come to terms with Quaker attitudes toward the arts; and what I discovered about my poetics from having a daughter with Asperger's syndrome. 

Many thanks To Eve Hanninen and the editorial staff of The Centrifugal Eye for this opportunity to take stock of where I am as a poet.  And to K. R. Copeland for her witty illustrations of two of my poems.    I don't know when I last had so much fun as in the process of back-and-forthing with Eve while the whole thing took shape.

PS.  There's a malfunctioning link to my Types & Shadows column, "A ministry of uselessness"