November, 2015

FEATURED POET: CRYSTA CASEY Crysta Casey (1952-2008) was born in Pasadena, California. She graduated from The State University of New York, Stony Brook, in 1976, where she was one of the founding members of The Women Writers Workshop. After college, she became the first woman hired by the City of Irvine, California, in Parks and Maintenance. In 1978, she enlisted in the all-new voluntary military, serving in the U.S. Marine Corps as a journalist, then as a self-declared “Resident Poet” until her honorable discharge under medical conditions in 1980. She moved to Seattle, Washington in the early 1980s, where she studied with the poet Nelson Bentley and collaborated with Esther Altshul Helfgott on the It’s About Time Writers Reading Series. Her first collection of poetry, Heart Clinic, was published in 1993 (Bellowing Ark Press). In 2004 she received a Hugo House Award from Richard Hugo House, and, in 2006, she was a finalist for Seattle Poet Populist. In 2010, Floating Bridge Press brought out a chapbook of her work, Green Cammie. Rules for Walking Out (Cave Moon Press, 2016) was the last manuscript Crysta completed and approved before her death at the Seattle VA in the spring of 2008. Crysta’s papers are housed in the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections. 


POEM FOR AN UNKNOWN SOLDIER

The flag at the park hangs
half mast. I asked a young mother
pushing a child on a swing,
“who died?”
“Orville Redenbacher did,
but I don’t think they’d fly a flag
for a popcorn man.”
I spoke with another mother
in the parking lot,
“Maybe it was
for the elections yesterday?”
she said, “That could depress
some people, but I don’t think
they’d lower the flag.
Somebody famous or local?”
I listened to the radio, waiting

for the news.

JIM

Jim is a Vietnam Vet. He watches television
and sleeps all day. He eats sporadically.
He doesn’t get out much, but one day decided to go
downtown to the V.A. Regional Office
and make sure he was going to get an American flag
on his coffin. The clerk took down his name
and service #. He came back and said,
“I’m sorry sir, but according to our records

you’re already dead.”


WRITE YOUR POEM

One's-Self I Sing

Walt Whitman

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Of physiology from top to toe I sing,

Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far,

The Female equally with the Male I sing.

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,

Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,

The Modern Man I sing.

??? What changed about poetry after Whitman?  The Modern Man is here and in Whitman's footsteps we confess to the world our personal interiors.  Crysta's interiors were clear as a mountain lake.  They just happened to be of battlefields forgotten

Is that the interior of a Buddhist landscape painting?  Does that interior reflect an urban cacophony?  A battlefield?  

Write your poem.  Take this time around solstice to light a candle and put words to the page.