Mar 1 2013

Featured Poet: March 2013 Vol. 5 # 6

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Nick Ripatrazone
 
Nick Ripatrazone is the author of four books: Oblations (prose poems, Gold Wake Press), This Is Not About Birds (poems, Gold Wake Press), The Fine Delight: Postconciliar Catholic Literature (literary criticism, Cascade Books) and This Darksome Burn (novella, firthFORTH Books). His criticism appears regularly at Shenandoah, Pleiades, Iowa Review, Colorado Review and HTMLGIANT. His writing has received honors from Esquire, The Kenyon Review, and ESPN: The Magazine, and has been featured at Verse Daily.
 
 
 
 
This is how you remove a hook
 
from a trout: smooth your hand down
like petting the fish, and then squeeze
 
so the mouth opens, like a door.
Not that you would squeeze a door,
 
Rachel, I am talking about the action
in different ways, since I know
 
you do not always like these trips
(early morning, the rubber
 
of waders against thighs,
claustrophobia in the current)
 
and I want you to know
I appreciate your participation,
 
but, really, that trout will die
unless you learn to move
 
with a mixture of speed and care.
Catch is less important than release.


 

Sisters of Mercy
 
Beneath a 1986 Chicago Bears
sweatshirt, thermals, and bleached
Polo dress shirts, I found
a folded nun’s habit.
I lifted the habit and the fabric
settled down, brown and full.
The white coif was a bit wrinkled.
I searched the box for a rosary
but only found costume necklaces.
 
A woman stood behind a table,
bills stuffed into a fanny pack.
Could this be? Might she
have gone from convent to cul-de-sac,
traded morning prayers and early supper
for Pilates and PTA? I wanted
to ask, but someone tried to barter
the price of a butter plate. The owner
said absolutely not: all prices firm.
Nothing left to interpretation.


 

This Is Not About Birds
 
We followed molted feathers toward the corner of the barn
where a swallow’s coffee-colored, cup-shaped nest sat
in the rafters & small, sloped heads of nestlings rose & fell.
Outside they fluttered while scuttling along the shingles &
then swooped overhead; forked, cream-spotted tails shuttering
through wind. Yesterday a lone bird stooped over the wobbling
blades before rolling away, & we followed the swoop
until it rested on the roof & promised that one day it would be
on our table, center gutted, a prize for us to eat.
 
*
 
So we stuffed into the pickup, NRA stickers worn to beige, &
fired wayward shots to rouse the swallows from their nest &
we spun through the field, tires toughing it out but we shook
while keeping our rifles out the window. Waiting. None of us
had ever shot anything before (anything that moved/breathed/lived)
but it was as good a time as any.
 
*
 
Was there ever a time that was not as good as any other times?
Was this decided by a certain group of people?
Was there a list of times that were good, & times that were not?
Was this the result of a comparison or a singular observation?
 
*
 
This poem should (must) end with a death. So here it is:
I, or someone with me, as we have formed a collective, raised
a rifle, waited for the swallow to spread its wings, be full-formed.
Then breathed. Then shot, a single fire, & so accurate
that the swallow dropped, wings collapsing onto the hollow
belly. Such a thing to steal flight from something. Such a
shame.


 

An American Werewolf in London
 
Six hours of early Depeche Mode in Ms. Gabriel’s Saab
 
was worth it to see my brother play college football.
 
No one knew he was dating my geometry teacher.
 
My parents were de-flooding our basement
 
so I hitched a ride and listened to her claim
 
that Wade was more mature than most men,
 
let alone other college sophomores. She brought two cases
 
of water bottles and pointed at each Whole Foods
 
we passed. I explained the rules of football
 
and she told me that academics were more important.
 
I liked bottle rockets, Def Leppard, and two-point
 
conversions, and watched Wade barrel through
 
the line while people asked if I was his son.
 
Afterward the teacher wanted to go out, so Wade
 
told me to watch a horror movie and said to close
 
my eyes during the bad parts. The teacher
 
said she trusted me to do the right thing.


 

Santo Domingo
 
Four on the pickup bed, red
shirts flushed from wind, hands
in back pockets & we follow
them past the boys shooting
at the dark backboard, ball
not bouncing but slogging.
We park at the market where
cattle hang upside down, gutted
& draining into milk cartons.
We step over the heads of bulls
& flies tickle our calves. Velocidad
maxima: men in sandals & ripped
jeans hold hands, leaning against
the pocked walls, Styrofoam cups
pitted in the holes. Carlos
walks us past them & shakes
one’s hand, skin lingering on skin,
& I kick aside bottles of Presidente
while the brothers of his lover sit
behind a sign with a white woman.
Where is he, Carlos asks, hand
on the rock (Esteban is an officer
& sets brush control fires
on the roadside–in the only photo
Carlos has ever shown of him, he
is pissing in the fire). The brothers
raise their shoulders & say,
in words I only half-understand,
what’s gone today is gone forever.
 
 
 

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Feb 15 2013

Featured Artist: February 2013 Vol. 5 # 5

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Vianca Adams

Paarl, Western Cape, South Africa
Email: viancavdv@gmail.com



Vianca Adams is a mother of four living in Paarl, Western Cape, South Africa. Adams has no formal art training or background, She started drawing because somehow it made her feel less "broken." The work you see has been created  and composed of different mediums and materials. Initially, Vianca used whatever junk she found interesting and mixed bits of paints and food colouring because she is unable to afford art materials. As time passed Vianca rather enjoyed creating in this manner, "treasure hunting" in open fields, on busy streets and relatives' backyards. She is now crafting, making bowls, African drums, candle holders, cd racks etc. All from scrap!

 

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Feb 10 2013

12 Months of Essays on Poetry and Craft: February 2013 Vol. 5 # 4

 

Poetry That Moves:
 
A brief definition of the Active Image
 
Date 2/10/2013
 
This isn’t a new concept. In fact, it’s as old as poetry itself. Perhaps though, for the sake of this short essay, the term, which Kerry James Evans and I came up with independent of any perfunctory research, just might be: The Active Image.
 
How does the active image differ from the plain old traditional image? Pound’s imagism? Simple. The active image accomplishes the piecemeal creation of the moving image in the mind of the reader—it is controlled and measured, and moreover the twenty-first century reader has been programmed (thanks largely to cinema) to expect this type of image development as just one part of the standard progression of scene.
 
It accentuates the fundamental truth that nothing is static. Even if we assume sometimes that the paper on the desk is motionless, the walls and roof around us as stolid as vault doors, we are only taking for granted the subatomic writhing, sparking and quirking which is actually going on within every single thing our senses come in contact with, forgetting the ground is shifting beneath us, that the earth is hurtling the known world through space toward some unknown calamity.
 
Look, neither I nor Kerry were (are, or will ever be for that matter) prodigious geniuses. We were drawn to write poetry more out of a kindred emotional discontent, rather than any intellectual pursuit: an addiction to the sonic resonance of language (set into the motion of syntax and broken with the line) within the restless spirit of humankind. That sounds haughty, scratch it from the record.
 
How about, poetry did for us what nothing else could, and one night during graduate school back in Carbondale, Illinois, Kerry and I were throwing darts in his home office, drinking Miller Genuine Draft, and trying to unpack this thing we’d found so appealing, this device. We’d looked at Pound’s list of Don’ts: “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,” until finally Kerry landed on the term, to give credit where credit is due.
 
We settled that the image, at its most evocative, moves and participates in the play of ideas—in short, is active with a purpose. A very utilitarian example:
 
                        Green olive sunk in a martini glass
                        waits to be carried by a waitress
                        across the crowded bar to a table
                        to make the surgeon’s hand stable.
 
First: Green olive sunk in a martini glass: even when the verb is past tense, as with sunk, the motion is still implied, and the reader sees a replay of this happening in the present tense of the imagination. The object itself is all the reader has by the time the line break hits, and they’re left with a martini glass floating in the ether.
 
Second: waits to be carried by a waitress: the green olive is now waiting like someone shifting from foot to foot at a bus stop (note: the active image is often a mixture of character action and personification). There is both potential and kinetic energy at play in the verb, and at the end of the line we bring in the waitress—thus far we have zoomed out enough from the martini glass to incorporate the waitress station at the end of the bar.
 
Third: across the crowded bar to a table: now the scene is complicated or made fuller by the mention of two words: across and crowded. The reader is moving through the room, filling in the pieces, line by line, until the scene is ready, the table has been prepared.
 
Fourth: to make the surgeon’s hand stable: the revelation, of course, is the payoff—the joining of two forces, a symbiosis. It’s where the motion has led us both surprisingly and inevitably.
 
Now, one could make the argument that the second and third lines are filler, that the scene itself stands without them, that the waitress and the crowded bar are implicitly conjured in the reader’s imagination. One could make that argument, I suppose, but every great poem, every great story, is about a journey not just a destination, just as every impassible gorge needs a bridge to sway between its two sides, if we are to pass. The buildup gives resonance to any revelation. And not to mention, to favor the precision of the image and scene is to spend a little extra time developing it (purposefully developing it)—that the development, the building, is essential to animating the scene.  
 
Warning: the danger in overuse is no different than the danger in overusing any other technique: the stilted poetry of the one-trick pony. “Verb stacking,” Kerry James called it, which is quite simply an overload of action verbs used to sustain the motion of the scene for the sake of motion. Like most things that announce themselves, you know it when you read it. Its visual equivalent might be the indiscriminate use of stereoscope in any new film. 
 
I know craft-speak is good, wholesome fun, but I need to get back to writing poetry; so rather than parading out the army of historical and contemporary examples to make my case more compelling (the fodder of a much longer essay), let’s leave it at this: poetry has a few things it does uniquely better than other genres and mediums of expression: the editorial is more timely, the novel is more dogged in its pursuit of the narrative, the painting has more play between color, and the sculpture more dimension; music is more sonically nuanced while dance has more command over the human form; opera has a more expansive vocal range, drama has more momentary beauty and film has the ultimate collaborative power.
 
Poetry though, is more methodical than any other genre of writing, more present in the imagination than any other medium, and more precise in its ability to create an image, to build a scene, line by line, and the active image (so far as I can tell) is the key to setting that scene in motion.
 

  
 

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Feb 1 2013

Featured Poet: February 2013 Vol. 5 # 3

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Luke Johnson
 
 
A native of Ithaca, New York, Luke Johnson is the author of the poetry collection After the Ark (NYQ Books, 2011). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Shenandoah, Southwest Review, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He is an Associate Poetry Editor at storySouth (www.storysouth.com) and a graduate of the writing program at Hollins University. He lives in Seattle, Washington. (personal website)
 
 

Above Oxbow Dam
            Rupert, Idaho
 
Even the gas stations are beautiful
in Rupert, but not for the obvious reasons.
 
Not the Snake River feeding
reservoirs that feed automatic waterers
 
sputtering arcs over potato crops
yards from the diesel pumps,
 
not ranges clawing the horizon
like distant kingdoms of thought.
 
Not the woman with her grandson:
him crouched next to a truck-sized puddle
 
swatting gravel at brown water,
her tugging him back by his overall-bib
 
when he edges too close. A man
in a patchwork leather coat
 
tapping ashes on the bars of his Harley.
We’re not here together, mostly.
 
It’s a tale the land is telling: we are
momentary, always on the verge drawn
 
both ways. It’s the fisherman,
one week earlier, sucked back from his raft
 
into a diversion dam. The water there
stays deep and dark. It is feeling only.
 
It is the place running over itself.
 
*Appeared in New England Review
 
 
 

Shooting Below the School Building
 
Holy is the muzzle-flash, the blood-speck
on my thumb’s knuckle where my hand met
 
the gun’s recoil above hoof and paw prints
tracing snow, thickening only to disappear.
 
Earth held ice around us. No halo here
but trigger-guard, no prayer but aim.
 
The iced creek—where our students escaped
to grope or smoke, hiding joints
 
in a stone-sunk ammo-can—gurgled
its small life. We left their stash and kept
 
shooting bottles. The art-teacher (his guns) told me
Our kids plain don’t care: when in Pennsylvania
 
five young girls died, a grown-man killing
in a one-room school, one of our students joked,
 
some laughed. You can’t teach against that
sort of senselessness, he said, bracing.
 
One of the girls, speaking only German,
did escape, not understanding
 
the shooter’s words, but running
to a nearby farm while others offered to die
 
so their classmates might live, knowing
the meaning of salvation. I didn’t
 
hit much, but kept reloading, stripping gloves
and fixing rounds to chambers, tossing
 
my spent shells into the creek. No balm
but repetition: fire and re-load, like writing
 
words on a blackboard until they’ve lost
meaning, not glancing backwards, but trusting
 
the hand to spell each sentence the same.                       
 
*Appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review




Summer Service
 
Do not pity him. Do not treat him like furniture.
Robin, the autistic boy from the congregation
 
who liked to watch our ceiling fans go.
Talk. He’s a boy. He seemed less
 
fixed on revolution, searching instead
behind the blade, the space for an instant
 
obscured then revealed over and over, knowing
he’d seen the blank ceiling-patch before,

but believing it could change, or just liking
its blankness, the communion between boys
 
and what seems like magic. I would find him
Sundays after sacraments: neck craned back
 
feeling the blades change speeds, and as the wicker
sank in the blade’s middle, Robin soon
 
came less, as if the fans were a miracle
disproved, a once great prizefighter
 
swinging at ghosts. He will leave
and we will move. The fans gutted or left
 
as decoration, a relic of hot days after prayer
when the fans spun impossible, and boys loosened
 
ties as if all they needed to believe was air.
 
*Appeared in New England Review


 
Wedding Night that Wasn’t, with Thunder
 
Surely, in this other life
we would have let the filament sour.
Rain: the forest-rustle turns drone: a sound
that goes with emptiness, deep and hollow.
Inside my tent is damp.
A spider restrings its web
beneath the rain-fly. I’ll watch it work
again, knowing its venom
and quiet, knowing it continues
despite me. In the morning
I’ll clear her spun web.
 
*Appeared in Quarterly West
 
 

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Jan 15 2013

Featured Artist: January 2013 Vol. 5 # 2

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Ann-Marie Brown
Montreal, Canada
Email: ambpaintings@hotmail.com
Website: www.orangeartgallery.ca
Website Boxer Series: www.galeriedavignon.ca

Ann-Marie Brown is a Montreal-based painter who is building a reputation as the newest addition to the wax-painting genre. Ms. Brown spent her twenties gaining diverse experiences that included religious studies in Europe, critical theory studies in Canada, and travels to far off regions of the world including Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia. Before moving to Montreal, she spent several years on a remote stretch of coast, an hour by boat from Vancouver, immersing herself in the art and craft of her chosen medium. Ann-Marie has devoted the last decade to working professionally as a painter in oil and wax. She joins the ranks of artists who have contributed to reviving the medium’s popularity, such as fellow Canadian Tony Scherman.

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