FEATURED POET: Jerome Gold PhD—is the author of fifteen books, including The Moral Life of Soldiers and the memoir, Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility. Russell Banks said about this book: “I’ve finished reading Jerome Gold’s terrific book cover to cover without a break… It’s a powerful and very tenderhearted book without a soupçon of sentimentality. Unforgettable!” Mr. Gold’s novels include Sergeant Dickinson, about which the New York Times Book Review said: “[It] belongs on the high, narrow shelf of first-rate fiction about battlefield experience.” He has published stories, essays, reviews and poems in Chiron Review, Moon City Review, Fiction Review, Boston Review, Hawaii Review, and other journals.
He is the founder and editor of Black Heron Press.
EVERYTHING THAT FELL
We mowed down the forest with bulldozers,
cleared the red soil of everything that grew.
All that soft wood, all those porous stalks,
those ropey vines and spiked leaves—
In two months, we burned everything that fell
and that was everything.
One day in the middle of this a man
running from fire of a different kind came
out of the shade of the remaining trees.
He wore the classic black pajamas
and an expression of bewilderment.
He ran back into the forest, and out again.
The place where he could hide was gone.
The place to which he had adapted his life, focused
his memories—gone. What must he have thought?
Had his wife given birth here (there had been a village)?
Had he met here with others to plan an ambush?
Did he call out the names of his parents, his brothers?
You might say his death was a result of his
failure to adapt to a changed environment.
In those days we had all gone feral.
—Jerome Gold
ICARUS
for Roy McCready
From the ground I might have seemed
an angel falling out of orbit
or a tiny meteor aflame
spinning on it lopsided axis
arc-ing downward to a terrible rendezvous.
Inside, beginning to burn, I sat,
unable to reach an ejection handle,
anticipating the melt and crackle of my eyeballs.
My brain, working at light’s speed,
fastened finally on the solution to my problem:
I would ride the plane into the sea,
the sea would douse the fire,
I would climb out and be saved.
I held to this desperate idiocy for an
electric moment’s fraction before my plane exploded,
loosing me into hot sunlight
where my parachute snapped, rippled,
opened and set me down in brine
that doused my burns. The helicopter
arrived before the enemy and I was saved,
though somewhere in the tangle of shouting and harness,
drumming rotor blades and lathering water,
and the fearful hammering of cannon
I lost my Navy-issue .38-caliber
revolver
which
as I healed in hospital in San Diego,
the FBI, in a confrontation classic in irony,
dispassion, and the agency’s determination
to extinguish evil in all its guises,
accused me of stealing with the motive of
profit, or nostalgia, or
providing aid to the enemy.
WRITE YOUR POEM
accused me of stealing with the motive of
profit, or nostalgia, or
providing aid to the enemy.
Gold provides us with an ironic punchline too outlandish to make-up even for a fantasy prose writer. It is also given to us, not in a heavy handed fashion, like too much syrup on some pancakes. It comes from a bare knuckled, witness style of poetry.
We saw much of the same thing with Crysta Casey's poems. Although our passion and emotion can enter into the writing of a poem, there is something to be said for the dispassionate observation of the event that adds power and meaning. Hemingway did it for prose about war and in places T.S. Eliot did the same, although there was still a sense of style and flair with Eliot's work.
Write two versions of your next poem. Write one full of gushing emotive adjectives. Write another as if you were a dispassionate robot observing the event. What shifts do you have to make? Scribble your poem on a napkin at breakfast in the coffee shop. Stuff it in your pocket for later.
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