Clinton, Sholl, Aronson, et. al.

Betsy Sholl on “Hurdy Gurdy”

This poem began in a sense like its speaker’s complaint about the performance it describes¾an endless-seeming mess of noise with no shape.  Sitting in that jazz club as the “special guest” with his strange machine went on and on, I felt a tug, sensed something compelling would require me to write.  But for several drafts the poem was a mess of images, allusions, metaphors, no shape, no urgency.  I floundered until I realized the real subject was the speaker’s anxiety underneath her consternation.  Everything was being challenged–was meaning a hoax, a made-up thing, a form of sentimentality?  Was I being dense about the performance, missing the art, or was it really just noise.  And even if it was just noise, was there something I should attend to?  Walls were on my mind for obvious reasons–walls of noise, walls of resistance, fake walls, the unwillingness to consider that the two sides a wall creates are integrally part of each other.

My sister played avant-garde organ music for many hears, so I had heard a lot of atonal music, music composed for organ and children’s toys, organ and mechanical sounds.  I love free jazz, as much as someone with no musical training can.  So it frightened me to think maybe I had become conservative, just an old fuddy-duddy who can’t appreciate new art.  Or was this really a kind of scam¾the man wore a wizard hat, so maybe he was waiting to see how long we’d sit for his performance before calling it out.

These questions chased each other around my head, until I realized that the longer I listened, the more it seemed the sound was like some ground out of which shapes, scales and melody would have to come¾in our listening minds, if not from the player himself.  Chaos became the mother (or father) of beauty.   And don’t the two sides of any wall live in each other’s imagination, in a sense needing and creating each other.  For good or ill.

Rebecca Aronson on “Prayer Written on a Wide Veranda…”:

This poem’s title gives its context; I was at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference last summer, a wonderful, magical place, and for our last meetings as a workshop my group had agreed to share new drafts, based on one or a combination of the writing prompts we had given one another. I sat down in a comfortable chair on a veranda during an hour when most people were off doing something else, and I wrote. I had been thinking a lot about my parents and their health, and about conversations I’d had with my father a year previous about his illness and the end of his life, whenever that would come. I was thinking, too, about my own physical self—my body and all its betrayals—along with my desires and ambitions and  constant balancing which pushes one obligation or connection to the side so I can focus on another, and is always causing writing to teeter precariously on the very periphery of my life. The poem came out in an associative rush, pulling together several disparate lines of thought, including my gratitude for having time in that beautiful spot in Tennessee.  I revised it some—I always over-write my first drafts—but the structure and associations remain as they were. A snapshot of a moment for me, a kind of time capsule of concerns. I haven’t always written poems that were autobiographical (or not very much so, at any rate) or particularly narrative, but as I get older I find my poems reflect and clarify more of my real concerns, my actual experiences. Not strictly, and not without a fair amount of license and association, but enough so that they are useful to me in a different way than in the past.

Sydney Lea on “But-Cept”

“But-Cept” was occasioned not by that invented word, or by anything reminiscent of it, but by a photograph sent to me by the younger of my two “little” sisters.

There were five of us altogether, I the oldest, followed by two boys and those two sisters.The young man I refer to in the poem, the one whom I vividly recall as having said but-cept for except  as a child, died far too young of a brain aneurysm. He was in every way a sweet and open-handed person, generous to such a degree that some of his sketchier “friends,” and there were too many of that sort, often took real advantage of him.

My brother’s curse, as with far too many through the generations of my clan (though none of his siblings save for me, who have been in recovery from alcoholism for two decades), was substance abuse. Cocaine addiction, that scourge of the 1980s, did not kill him, but it surely can’t have helped his physical state.

It surely ravaged his spiritual state: he was a skilled and successful building contractor, and he died in paranoid certainty that “they” were coming to burn or otherwise destroy his spec houses. This was the most persistent of his debilitating fantasies, but scarcely the only one. His life in the final years was infernal.

He and I were less than two years part in age, and like many siblings in such positions in the family pecking order, we had our scraps and fusses, some pretty damned dramatic, to be sure; for the most part, however, our relationship was more a simmer than a full-blown fire. As adults we got over our adversarial behavior toward one another, yet sadly a certain rivalrous edge abided just under the surface civility.

Thus, when my brother was taken  so abruptly, I felt dreadful remorse, having never entirely cleaned the slate of our childhood and adolescent animosities. “How in hell could I have ragged him about that?” I would wonder…and there were many, ludicrously petty thats. Too late, I recognized my own love for the man, and recognized the essential sweetness of his soul.

The photo of him at about five, with his open expression and warm smile, brought on an emotional flood, and somehow I recalled that word, but-cept, and wept out loud.

As father myself to five children, and now grandfather to seven, I have yearned somehow to sustain the fundamental innocence of my genial, five-year-old brother in all of them for as long as I  could. This is certainly still possible with one of my granddaughters, four, and with her cousins of three and of three months; but already the nine-year-olds, of whom there are three, and the eleven-year-old have transitioned away from such guilelessness.

Needless to say, that shift is inevitable, even of course necessary… but-cept it does break my heart just a little.

All this is what my poem is”about.”

Matthew Lippman on “Blond for All the Boys”

My friend and colleague turned me onto Frank Ocean’s “Self Control” and I was smitten with the song, so much so, that I listened to BLONDE incessantly for a week. Dave introduced me to the song in a my classroom. We are High School English Teachers at the same school and when he put it on we both sat there and listened. One of the coolest things in the world is listening to music with someone. Not doing anything else but listening. No words or sounds, just letting the music get inside. That’s what we did. I thought we were both going to cry or it felt like that. The vulnerability in the room was a dinosaur. That’s what I was trying to capture—the hugeness and sweetness of the moment. It’s impossible to do of course, because the space is too big and mysterious when it’s happening. It happened, though, Dave and I just sitting at a table letting Ocean’s song work its magic on our hearts. My whole life I have been trying to celebrate these tiny moments and that’s all this poem is about—that moment and vulnerability and tenderness between a couple of guys who don’t know one another all too well but found the capacity to, for a second, be in love.

Rebecca Aronson on “Prayer Written on a Wide Veranda…”:

This poem’s title gives its context; I was at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference last summer, a wonderful, magical place, and for our last meetings as a workshop my group had agreed to share new drafts, based on one or a combination of the writing prompts we had given one another. I sat down in a comfortable chair on a veranda during an hour when most people were off doing something else, and I wrote. I had been thinking a lot about my parents and their health, and about conversations I’d had with my father a year previous about his illness and the end of his life, whenever that would come. I was thinking, too, about my own physical self—my body and all its betrayals—along with my desires and ambitions and  constant balancing which pushes one obligation or connection to the side so I can focus on another, and is always causing writing to teeter precariously on the very periphery of my life. The poem came out in an associative rush, pulling together several disparate lines of thought, including my gratitude for having time in that beautiful spot in Tennessee.  I revised it some—I always over-write my first drafts—but the structure and associations remain as they were. A snapshot of a moment for me, a kind of time capsule of concerns. I haven’t always written poems that were autobiographical (or not very much so, at any rate) or particularly narrative, but as I get older I find my poems reflect and clarify more of my real concerns, my actual experiences. Not strictly, and not without a fair amount of license and association, but enough so that they are useful to me in a different way than in the past.

Alexis Rhone Fancher on “Sweet Tooth”:

When I lived in DTLA I’d wander the city, shooting photographs, often ending up at The Artisan House, on 6th and Main, in time for happy hour. If I sat at a certain table near the window, I had a perfect view of the apartment building across the street, its wide foyer, as well as a view of the windows above. Every day at 5pm a beautiful man would ride up on his Shimano bicycle, dismount, and walk his bike into the building. Several minutes later he would reappear in an upstairs window. The day I shot this photograph, I remember thinking, “If he were mine, I’d ride him like a stolen bicycle.” Then I wrote it down.

Author: Plume

Plume: Issue #92 April 2019