DECEMBER 2012

FEATURED POET: Changming Yuan, 4-time Pushcart nominee and author of Allen Qing Yuan, holds a PhD in English, teaches independently, and edits Poetry Pacific in Vancouver. Yuan's poetry appears in 619 literary publications across 23 countries, including Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Cave Moon, Cortland Review, Exquisite Corpse, Hawaii Review, PANK and World Literature Today.  Poetry submissions welcome at poetrypacific.blogspot.ca

et cetera

we, yuan ii, by the grace

of god, emperor and autocrat of

all english words, king of dreamland

grand duke of assonance and

consonance, author of

allen qing yuan, architect of

george lai yuan, last scribbler of

poetic lines, et cetera et cetera

et cetera et cetera etc

herein proclaim ourselves as no extra ordinary line

but a yellow-skined ellipsis

H: For Hengxiang Liao

inspired by a fence in hell

you were invented long ago

to connect every human

for a tall ladder of hope

that we can stand high

against the blue horizon

like the Babel Tower growing to reach Him

where I can find a home in the fame hall

where I can settle my soul in heaven

8: Sudden Fortune/Prosperity/Power/Sacrifice

first, a curved 1 from Indians

then, it was twisted until it became an S

ready to seduce, re-presenting itself like a 5

before the Arabs connected

her two closed circles

piling them one above the other

as if to round up

all sudden Chinese fortunes

WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS WRITING PROJECT:
Look at them on: What kids can do

We're still writing and publishing student work.  Students wrote letters to judges last month.  More poetry is on the way

WRITE YOUR POEM:
What do you do to jump start your motivation?  Jumping jacks?  Whatever keeps you in the habit of creating, make it simple and attend to it every day.  Tend the poems like seedlings.  The seasons change.  The moments will come again, even when it seems you are writing in the snow. Peter Guber tells a story of Zhang Huan, a performance artist who collects ash around the temple and then packs it into a mold.  When the mold gives way the sculpture stands five seconds at best before it is blown away by the wind.  Poems stand for those five seconds, and somehow that is why they start to endure.  Make sure to keep writing.  

November 2012

FEATURED POET:

Esther Altshul Helfgott is a nonfiction writer and poet with a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington. Her work appears in American Imago: Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences, the Journal of Poetry Therapy, Maggid: A Journal of Jewish Literature, The American Psychoanalyst, Drash: Northwest Mosaic, Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer's Disease, The Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Review, Floating Bridge Review, HistoryLink, Pontoon, Raven Chronicles, The Seattle P.I., FragLit & elsewhere. Her chapbook, The Homeless One: a poem in many voices (Kota, 2000) is a poetic docu-drama about homelessness & schizophrenia. Esther is a 2010 Jack Straw poet.  Find her at:
http://www.estherhelfgott.com/

Reading with Alzheimer's

Sprawled out
in the recliner
wearing
a tie-dyed shirt
the kids
gave him,
a Middle Eastern
yarmulke
on his head,
he holds
a book of stories
in his hands,
turns
the pages
as he always did:
carefully,
respectfully,
leaning, learning
words the brain loses
before he under-

stands.

10/29/05, 3 am

As I Sit In Class

 

I think of him
wanting
to come home,
how I pinned
my business card
to his undershirt.
On the back
I wrote:
You're in Adult Day Care.
I'm going to class.
I'll pick you up
at 1:30 p.m.He reads the words
with me. I kiss him
goodbye,
give the nurse
a plastic baggie
filled with tylenol
and a just-in-case Ativan.
In class,
Jeanne, Mary
and I
write
and talk
about writing.
We read Bill Stafford's
What's In My Journal
while my first cell phone
sits unringing
but ready
on the desk by the door.

11/4/05, 8:45 pm

WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS WRITING PROJECT:
Look at them on: What kids can do

We're still writing and publishing student work.  Amber Ortiz, an alumni of the project presented her book at Heritage University last month.  More to come.

WRITE YOUR POEM:
What if you saved your Halloween costume, put it on now and wrote a poem in the costume? Maybe read your favorite poem?  What associations change?...just make sure not to go to public...never know what will happen with a poet in disguise...write, dance, find your way to take those minutes and create.  Let us know what you think

 

FEATURED POET: Peter Marcus.  [Jack Estes reports:] I'm writing to tell you about a new collection of poetry from Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press. The title is DARK SQUARE, and it's written by Manhattan poet Peter Marcus. Although this is his first collection, he's had most of these poems published already in some of the country's best poetry journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Southern Poetry Review, North American Review, Iowa Review, Harvard Review, and over a dozen others. In other words, his poems have withstood the test of modern editors. I'm not surprised. They're stunning, very personal and still accessible, very thoughtful and still clear. 

Peter is a psychologist as well as a poet, and that background naturally comes out in many of the poems. He has traveled widely, also, and his poems reveal his intense interest in and eye for the various cultures he has witnessed: Mexican, South Asian, Eastern European, Central Asian, American Southwest. The book also includes love poems and poignant poems of family.

Go to our website at www.pleasureboatstudio.com for an image of the cover and for ordering information. Peter's book is now available from Pleasure Boat Studio for $14.95 (www.pleasureboatstudio.com). If you order one before Dec. 1st, we will pay for shipping. What a deal!! You can also get this book from amazon.com or bn.com.

Dark Square

We all die dreaming something of this world:

its eggs, dust, feathers,

and its body of bread.

             On moonless nights

the whole house sways

with sleep.

            At dawn, a marlin arcs and wavers

toward the Mexican sun.

Murmuring children pass

through the graveyard gates, carrying little pines

Peter Marcus

Statue of Eros Without Wings Dark Square

I think there was no joy
in what was fought for.
Welts where the wings were.
A few feathers of a hen
after the fox has run.
What of the wholeness his body
wanted to belong to? Bone-yellow
hunk of torso bolted to a pedestal.
The radiance used up.
Only his heart lost within stone,
working like wings: that pitiful
flapping as he plummets.

Peter Marcus

Write your poem!
Alliteration or allusion?  Given Western cultures traditions around referencing religions, how does it influence your poems?  For all the Romantic traditions of Poe or Blake, how does this filter into your poem?  Try out a couple of ideas.  Write them down on a credit card bill envelope.  Put it in the mail....

 Rustling Wrens on Amazon

We hope all is going well.  We still have some website challenges, but hope to smooth out the potholes of the cyber superhighway.  It took a little past August, but we are thrilled to release our work with Denise Calvetti Michaels.  This is a great collaboration we are in with Solid Ground helping mitigate poverty in Seattle.  We are also grateful to 4Culture for helping bring this work into the world.  Let us know what you think at cavemoonpress@gmail.com

Please check out out her blog for all the events related to her new release!   Rustling Wrens blog

Here are a couple of her poems!  She's also going to be at the Washington Convention Center this
Friday at 7:00 September 7, 2012.  

Photo of the School at San Gabriel Dam, 1920

Barefoot girls wear cotton dresses, thin as whispers.

Boys in dark overalls are the restless image of James Dean
—blond hair slicked back, stray strands falling forward into their eyes.

Perhaps the teacher asks the children to say cheese, the long note
that unifies them like a song, like an anthem, the depression
and the war to come.

The boy who will become my father wears a long-sleeve shirt
and smiles for the camera as all the children do.

Maybe my grandmother packed his knapsack with salami and goat
cheese, dried figs and apricots—abundance a concrete thing—reach
for it and it’s passed down.

He still recites, for me, at ninety, his first lesson once written in chalk:
Travel and read. No one can take this away from you.


- Denise Calvetti Michaels


We Were Traveling South

On Highway 101
down the Oregon coast
with our little dog, Jazzy,
and all that one carries

Torn typewriter ribbon
dredging light
tendril clues

and the questions, Angie, my youngest, asked,
about my writing,
how I begin,
and the answer that came to me later,
crossing the border into California,
when this story came back:

Once upon a time we tired of picking lettuce
and wandered away, down a furrow,
sun disappearing behind distant hills marked by shape-shifter oak,
my brother and I imagining buffalo, mustang,
and a coyote howling.

When I turn back, my grandfather is lost
to me in a glint of shimmering topaz.

This is nothing I could say I had language for
—not in the Piedmontesse dialect of my grandparents
—not in English or Italian.

First I’m a brown-eyed girl
trying to hold open the gaping mouth
of the sack that scratches my neck,
itches my skin,
smells of dust,
catches my buttons.

- Denise Calvetti Michaels

Afzal Moolla
South African Poet who writes for people listening while working with non-fiction and the occasional novel.
This is a part of a larger epic poem

1.

Hidden between fragmented shades,

mingling within the folds of thought.

Dreams ceaselessly wander on,

soaring above the day's tumult.

Hope burns the fabric of today,

as this afternoon fades.

2.

The immigrant.

Seeking solace. 

Seeking a home.

The immigrant finds,

Rotten prejudice. 

Fungal anger.  

The immigrant,

alone, hoping for,

A solitary chance. 

To belong. 

The immigrant,

alone, always,

An outside entity. 

Eternal outcast. 

A viral threat. 

A reeking odour. 

The immigrant,

ever alone,

and alone knowing,

that no place exists,

but that lost home. 

3.

Searching.

Searching in the debris of the past,

scraps of casually discarded emotion.

Searching,

in hastily trashed yesterdays,

an inkling of moments flung away.

Searching,

in heaps of rubbished words,

that tiresome sigh of defeated thought.

Searching,

in the layers of moulted skin

the wilting self that once was true.

Searching,

in the reflections between the ripples,

for the whispered pangs of roaring desire.

Searching,

in the blank eyes streaming endlessly,

an echo of the faintest sigh of new life.

Searching.

May, 2012- Michael Lee Johnson