December 2014

FEATURED POET: THOMAS HUBBARD  A retired teacher, he performs spoken word and writes flash fiction, poetry, essays, book reviews, grocery lists. Fiction in Yellow Medicine Review; RedInk.  He currently is serving on editorial staff for Raven Chronicles; the Cartier Street Review; indie publisher, Gazoobi Tales Publishing.  Most recent chapbook, Poems in a Foreign Language, out this month from Foothills Publishing.)

Ways of Thinking

Walk in the park some afternoon. 

As your gaze encompasses 

path, nearby trees, horizon, 

sky, birds, grass, the mother, 

you are within it all, you are 

universe, watching itself. 

Now picture your car, computer, 

your books and personal stuff

things giving you security? Suddenly

you’re walking through the park. 

Separate from everything you see. 

Two exclusive ways of perceiving 

or thinking. You can’t do both ways 

at the same time. Learning this 

in the heart makes it possible 

to do one, then the other, and 

walk in two worlds.

Our ancestors’ languages developed 

from the first way of thinking — walking

as a part of the park. Invaders’ languages

developed from the second way, with

the park as something to be mastered. 

But our invaders fail all by themselves, 

ludicrous in their arrogance and cruelty. 

Failing as we watch. Out of resources. 

Wallowing in pollution. Unsustainable.

The second way leads to chaos. So...?

Learn your ancestors’ language.

 ― Thomas Hubbard

The Cabin in the Woods

Raining, with thunder and lightning and
an occasional singular hailstone on the tin porch-roof.
Makes the forest mysterious.

Cooled enough now to turn off the box fan. But
the forest wants me in there amongst its bugs and shady ideas,
in there walking the paths of questionable righteousness.

The forest wants me to rub against it in the rain,
slick and sweaty and a little besmudged.

The forest must surely be female. I feel her pulling me and grinning, "Come on, Thomas.
Come on in, we'll make ourselves comfortable."

Rain washes away the forest's inhibitions.
Trees waving at me with abandon,
"Come on, Thomas, just down the hill and in through this path.
Can you see it?

If I look out the window she'll have me.
It'll be all over.
Even if I just peek....

(pub. Riverbabble #25 summer 2014)

 ― Thomas Hubbard

WRITE YOUR POEM:
What are you doing with the notion of space in your poem.
By its nature as a form a poem leaves space on the page.  Beyond that, however there is the distinct between the rural or urban.  From Han Shan to Sam to Thomas, certain poets reach for a different interior space.  They don't claim it as superior.  They simply remember it apart from mechanized compression.  

Beijing was and is an urban center.  Urban centers drive the poetry of the East coast in the U.S.  Without deserts, forests, rivers and oceans there is nothing left to open up on the page.  As you sit down to "remember and define" as Sam offers in his book Habitation consider the space on your page.  Are your words rocks against an ocean of space?  Are your words horns honking on predefined roads?
Write your poem in the frost of a window.  Let it fade into the morning.  Look out the window.

Black Marsh Eclogue

Although it is midsummer, the great blue heron
holds darkest winter in his hunched shoulders,
those blue-turning-gray clouds
rising over him like a storm from the Pacific.

He stands in the black marsh
more monument than bird, a wizened prophet
returned from a vanished mythology.
He watches the hearts of things

and does not move or speak. But when
at last he flies, his great wings
cover the darkening sky, and slowly,
as though praying, he lifts, almost motionless,

as he pushes the world away

 ― Sam Hamill

November 2014

FEATURED POET: LIZ DOLAN. A Secret of Long Life has been nominated for the Robert McGovern Prize. Liz Dolan’s first poetry collection, They Abide, was published by March Street. A six-time Pushcart nominee and winner of Best of the Web and finalist for Best of the Net, Liz has received an established professional in poetry fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts and has been chosen for residencies at The Atlantic Center for the Arts and Martha’s Vineyard. She has also won fiction prizes from The Nassau Review, The Master’s Review and The Cobalt Review’s Baseball Poetry Prize. Liz serves on the poetry board of Philadelphia Stories. She is most grateful for her ten grandchildren, all of whom live one block away; they pepper her life.

A Secret of Long Life has been nominated for the Robert McGovern Prize. Please check it out at Cave Moon Press

The Spelling Test

Teach your brother to spell
Sister Caritas said.
So each night Michael and I
fifteen months apart, sparred
at the enamel table over
i before e and double b’ s.

How I relished folding up
my sleeves like Sister,
tossing my braids
as if they were a veil
and stabbing his decieve,
occassion and bubles
with my red pen.

He’d rip the papers to shreds
and convert them to confetti.
Each session ended in poisoned barbs,
You dumb ox, I’d hiss.
Ass kisser, he’d sneer.

Today through a trach,
my brother spits out muddled syllables
his left side paralyzed, his lips trembling.
When I massage his neck and shoulders
I test him still,
Where are my fingers, I ask.
Here,
           here

                      or there?

 ― Liz Dolan

For My Best Friend 1950

In the cellar was buried the dismembered body
of the cherry-cheeked child butchered by the super of 598.
And even though I thought it a myth to keep girls like me
tethered, I still hugged
the curb as I skipped by. And hugged
it even more closely on that day in June
when your father and mine
bolted up the slate stairs to the roof bellowing,
Get the bastard, get the bastard. Pressing my flesh
against ochre stucco, I, wall-eyed and slack-jawed,
saw your trembling five-year-old body
brindled by the ruby rays of the stairwell’s
stained glass, your flaxen hair buried
in your mother’s corn-flowered house coat,

the X of her arms like crossed swords guarding you.

 ― Liz Dolan

WRITE YOUR POEM:

Too Soon

You understand that this is a draft
and that my tears keep screwing up the line

You were the only one who heard the chord
of my line breaks.  Awkward first steps

where modern poems offer not meter.
They offer few rules.

Han Shan offered no confessions
The Tao understands only still waters

Still, you left yesterday and I cry.
This is all a draft.  There is no tomorrow

There is no scrubbing the audio
filling the effects
sanding the burr
tuning to 440
grand flood lights
thunderous applause
perfected rehearsals.

You are only gone.
Please come back.

 ― Doug Johnson

We write in context.  For all the artifice of language, rules and infinitives, our poems die when they only live in  a grammar book.  Liz wrote "My Best Friend"  My best friend died yesterday in a car wreck.  She was the first one to recognize my efforts.  There is no distance from that event.  The river of the internet will wash by.  We will talk of cats, grandchildren and politics.  Poetry has always been the fleeting record of a drop of water rushing by.  Write your poem.  Someone needs your words.

October 2014

FEATURED POET: Terry Martin earned a B.A. from Western Washington

University and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. She’s been fortunate to make her living reading, writing, and talking with students for 35+ years. An English Professor at Central Washington University, she is the recipient of CWU’s Distinguished Professor Teaching Award and the CASE/ Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year Award. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared in hundreds of publications and she has edited books, journals and anthologies. Her first book of poems, Wishboats, won the Judges’ Choice Award at Seattle’s Bumbershoot Book Fair in 2000. Her second book, The Secret Language of Women, was published by Blue Begonia Press in 2006. She lives with her family in Yakima, Washington.  Check out her latest release The Light You Find at Blue Begonia Press

Howling Like a Coyote

Are you authorized to speak

For these apple trees

Felled by roaring chainsaws

Acre after acre?

Are you able to explain

What the orchard means to do

With hundreds of stumps

Left in graveyard rows?

What it intends to make

Of this emptiness?

What do you know

About the fierce whirring

Of windmill blades on blue days,

Pickups parked along the irrigation ditch,

Smudge pots rusting away in weeds?

Who gave you permission

To look at beer cans and

Tumbleweeds rolling through?

At the For Sale sign in the widow's yard,

Faded laundry flapping on her line?

Ask yourself if poems are enough,

Or if you'd be better off

Slinking into the sagebrush

And howling like a coyote? 

― Terry Martin

Root Canal

The even heaviness of the lead apron

presses down, down.

Then he enters, minty breath and aftershave,

tips my chair back again, shines a bright light,

props my mouth wide open,

shoots in novocaine,

begins poking and prodding and pulling

and I’m as surprised as he is

when tears begin pouring down my cheeks

but, mouth propped, can’t tell him why.

Am I hurting you? he asks, alarmed.

I shake my head ‘no,’ signal him to continue.

I can’t tell him that the body remembers

what the mind longs to forget

and for a moment I’m you.

Surgeries, chemo, radiation,

and finally hospice, and the buttery light

of your living room where, in those final days,

you depended on me to do for you

those things you used to do for me.

The stuttering drill mocks me.

Should I stop? he asks again.

Embarrassed, I shake my head.

Keep going, I want to say.

We’ve all got to just keep going.

Instead, I rub the pastel hem

of my paper bib like a prayer.

― Terry Martin

WRITE YOUR POEM:

When was the last time your best poem came from your eye doctor?  All of us accept our blink of an eye photography.  All of us accept our blink of an eye letters in email. 

The thing is the  photograph all came to us because of a French artist and chemist Daguerre.  In 1832 he finally completed the developing process through a happy accident. He started the process after meeting someone through his eye doctor.  

Here's the thing.  It was a slow artistic process.  It was a slow collaboration. Cooking for hours for your family.  Long drives in the desert with your friend. The poem is a daguerrotype of words.  It creates an image through slow development.  A poem offers that chance. What memories do you craft.  Check out Liz Dolan's poem in her upcoming release from Cave Moon.  Her and Terry have crafted daguerrotypes of love.  Write your poem.

The Spelling Lesson

Teach your brother to spell

Sister Caritas said.

So each night Michael and I

fifteen months apart, sparred

at the enamel table over

 i before e and double b’ s.

How I relished folding up

my sleeves like Sister,

tossing my braids

as if they were a veil

and stabbing his decieve,

occassion and bubles

with my red pen.

He’d rip the papers to shreds

and convert them to confetti.

Each session ended in poisoned barbs,

You dumb ox, I’d hiss.

Ass kisser, he’d sneer.

Today through a trach,

my brother spits out muddled syllables

his left side paralyzed, his lips trembling.

When I massage his neck and shoulders

I test him still,

Where are my fingers, I ask.

Here,

           here

                    or there?

― Liz Dolan

September 2014

FEATURED POET: Lawrence Matsuda was born in the Minidoka, Idaho Concentration Camp during World War II.  He and his family were among the approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese held without due process for approximately three years or more.   Matsuda has a Ph.D. in education from the University of Washington and was:  a secondary teacher, university counselor, state level administrator, school principal, assistant superintendent, educational consultant, and visiting professor at Seattle 
University (SU).

In 2005 he and two SU colleagues co-edited the book Community and difference: teaching, pluralism and social justice, Peter Lang Publishing, New York.  It won the 2006 National Association of Multicultural Education Phillip Chinn Book Award.  In July of 2010 his book of poetry entitled, A Cold Wind from Idaho was published by Black Lawrence Press in New York.  His poems appear in Ambush Review, Raven Chronicles, New Orleans Review, Floating Bridge Review, Black Lawrence Press website, Poets Against the War website, Cerise Press,Nostalgia Magazine, Plumepoetry, Malpais Review, Zero Ducats, Surviving Minidoka (book), Meet Me at Higos(book), Minidoka-An American Concentration Camp (book and photographs), and the Seattle Journal for Social Justice.

In addition,  eight of his poems were interpreted in a 60 minute dance presentation entitled, Minidoka performed by Whitman College students in Walla Walla Washington (2011). 

Please check out his latest book 

Glimpses of a Forever Foreigner: Poetry and Artwork Inspired by Japanese American Experiences

WWII Route to Freedom

Idaho does not accept our dead.

Twin Falls mortuaries

turn away Minidoka Japanese.

Dr. Abbot calls Aunt Amy’s time.

Medics in whites gently slide

her from the bunk

for a journey to Salt Lake City,

first excursion outside prison gates.

Cousin Hisako snatches

shadows passing in her dreams.

Don’t worry, Amy whispers, 

tell Tetsuo I am fine.

Tetsuo, her son, a U.S. soldier,

volunteers from Minidoka

to defend freedom in Europe.

He takes aim and blasts a padlock,

gates of Dachau swing open.

Nazis have no coal,

crematoriums silent,

odors of death permeate the air,

something like a mixture

of chocolate pudding, urine,

feces and rotting meat.

Naked bodies stack

like tangled tree limbs,

pungent fluids trickle down drains.

In Minidoka coal rages in potbelly stoves.

When did we hear of crematoriums?

It seems we knew.

It seems we always knew.

When our boys came home

we knew for sure.

WWII Route to Freedom appears in Raven Chronicles, Volume 19, Winter 2012-13. 

― Lawrence Matsuda

They Turn Their Eyes Away

Minidoka barbed wire

snags hope like tumbleweed.

One thousand miles away

Shoichi Okamoto, at Tule Lake California*

twists and falls, a bullet in his head,

cost of disbelief of a guard.

The soldier walks free,

fined a dollar for “unauthorized use

of government property”.

Wind blows alkaline dust

through the tarpaper barrack.

Bachan prays for freedom,

strikes her singing bowl.

Minidoka crumbles in her dreams

when black rain splatters Hiroshima

and sunlight sparkles silver

through thin barrack doors.

Freedom will not be open arms

and welcome banners.

Red rose petal showers 

reserved for real Americans.

We are the vanquished foe

walking thorough the victor’s lair,

gauntlet of 1000 eyes.

Anxious to pass unnoticed

in our yellow skin,

we will turn away from

Remember Pearl Harbor remarks.

Mushroom clouds inhabit

the irises of our eyes. 

_______

*  Japanese American Concentration Camp during World War II

They Turn Their Eyes Away appears in

The Seattle Journal for Social Justice , Volume 11, Issue 1, Summer 2012.  Seattle University School of Law.

― Lawrence Matsuda

WRITE YOUR POEM:

Pablo Neruda wrote love poems.  Pablo Neruda wrote about justice.  All of his poems had an inherent transcendental beauty.  There is no way to get around the political nature of certain poems.  If your poems inflame the hearts of the majority then you're poems bring crowds and applause.  If your poems inflame the hearts of the minority then you are ignored until lines get drawn.  He succeeded with love poems as a young man.  He had to flee as an old man.  

Write your poems.  Write for transcendent beauty.  Notice everything around you.  Ignore the audiences.  Beauty brings about a reaction.  Be willing to stand in your own beauty.

Leave me a place underground,

                              XXVI From: ‘Las Piedras del Cielo’

Leave me a place underground, a labyrinth,

where I can go, when I wish to turn,

without eyes, without touch,

in the void, to dumb stone,

or the finger of shadow.

I know that you cannot, no one, no thing

can deliver up that place, or that path,

but what can I do with my pitiful passions,

if they are no use, on the surface

of everyday life,

if I cannot look to survive,

except by dying, going beyond, entering

into the state, metallic and slumbering,

of primeval flame?

August, 2014

FEATURED POET: Sam Hamill is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including Destination Zero: Poems 1970–1995 (1995), Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems and Translations (2005), and Measured by Stone (2007). Influenced by Ezra Pound,William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, and Hayden Carruth, Hamill “presents a model of honest, consistent, undisguised political engagement: he articulates not only a vision of peace with justice, not only his relish for work to achieve that vision, but his sense of the role that poetry can play,” as Publishers Weekly noted in its review of Measured by Stone. Hamill has also published several collections of essays and numerous translations, including Crossing the Yellow River: 300 Poems from the Chinese (2000). Hamill’s own poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Hamill has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Mellon Fund, and has won the Stanley Lindberg Lifetime Achievement Award for Editing and the Washington Poets Association Lifetime Achievement Award.  (Bio adapted from the Poetry Foundation)

Make sure to check out his latest collection Habitation by Lost Horse Press release party at Elliott Bay Bookstore September 2

What the Water Knows

What the mouth sings, the soul must learn to forgive.

A rat’s as moral as a monk in the eyes of the real world.

Still, the heart is a river

pouring from itself, a river that cannot be crossed.

It opens on a bay

and turns back upon itself as the tide comes in,

it carries the cry of the loon and the salts

of the unutterably human.

A distant eagle enters the mouth of a river

salmon no longer run and his wide wings glide

upstream until he disappears

into the nothing from which he came.

Only the thought remains. Lacking the eagle’s cunning

or the wisdom of the sparrow, where shall I turn,

drowning in sorrow? Who will know what the trees know,

the spidery patience of young maple or what the willow confess?

Let me be water. The heart pours out in waves.

Listen to what the water says.

Wind, be a friend.

There’s nothing I couldn’t forgive.

Sam Hamill

Border Song

For Esteban Moore

Sometimes I like to read

the poets of the borderlands,

slowly from their native tongue,

my scant Spanish failing at each turn,

the gists and piths of poetry.

There are images, there are tones,

that crosses the rivers

of time and space and cultural bounds

to touch the heart of one

who struggles in the journey.

Poetry is made of flesh and bone.

What is a nation, what is our song,

and what is a man, a woman, but

a tear and a smile, un abrazo fuerte

por favor, tender and temporal,

wine in the cup, a song in the ear,

when the struggle itself is everything.

It is what we know and what

we have to work with―bare hands,
dreams that restore

big hungry hearts and minds

made whole by what we share:

mi pan, mi agua, mi canto amor.

Sam Hamill

WRITE YOUR POEM! 

The prophets have their secrets

And their certain magic.

I am not a prophet.

I know only the ordinary.

That is my Tao.

Sam mentions in various interviews that poetry by its nature cannot claim to be apolitical. If you are a seeker of the Tao, then where does that put your poetry? The recent events in Ferguson, MO really beg a deep painful silence alongside the protests. Consider Deng Ming-Dao's comments. "In the case of a personal attack, the follower of the Tao would ask if so could they have prevented it? Of course, they would defend themselves, but even then, their self-defense would come from long solitary training and not from frantic outer directed violence." (365 Tao: Daily Meditation San Francisco, CA: Harper)

So read the Tao above. Read Harlem below. Center yourself in the tension. Write a poem that reflects a mirror. If it still beats the heart of others, then write a new poem. When you write the mirror poem put one copy on a leaf before they fall. Float it down the river. Write your poem. It is the lack of a mirror that grieves the souls of our children and elders.

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up

      like a raisin in the sun?

      Or fester like a sore—

      And then run?

      Does it stink like rotten meat?

      Or crust and sugar over—

      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags

      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes