Mort, Silano, Friman, et. al.

Jo-Ann Mort on “Destinations”:

This poem began exactly as I write it. For some unknown reason, I flashed on to an earlier time of travel, when flights to Israel were kept undercover in European capitals, due to fear of terrorism. Upon arrival in Israel, you were scrunched into this completely overstuffed old terminal where everyone grabbed for their luggage to get to their destination. There was a lot of chaos that most people thought was part of the experience. But back then–the time in which the poem opens, the early 1980s–part of the experience was also about fear, danger, and chaos.

Honestly, I have no idea how I went from landing at the airport to spending a day in the country up north. But once I was up there, I let my mind sift through different memories of driving along the Northern Israeli border. Whenever I’m in Israel (and I’m usually there several times a year for long periods of time), the sensory reality of so much coming at me at once, including roads that should seem foreign appearing familiar, roads that could be dangerous feeling safe, being with my family (my first cousin and her kids are the ones in the poem) combined with everyday life, when families go out on rides and kids are kids.

I titled the poem Destinations not because of all the travel in it, but because travel itself is a destination. Once you begin to go somewhere, you never know where you will end up. The scenery I describe was marked with Israeli tanks. This is a flashback to the early 2000s in this stanza–I was driving from a meeting at a college near Kiryat Shmona, on one side of the Northern border, back to my cousins’ home on the other side on the Mediterranean for dinner. A rush hour drive, but with tanks. A simple task in a very complex world. It’s all about taking the risk of travel and then, we find our destination(s).

 

Annette Barnes on “Master Class”:

In pre Covid days various departments of London’s Royal Opera House offered workshops. I attended three, writing poems about each of them. The workshop run by the Costume Department, its aim to teach us how to make a patchwork pillow cover, gave rise to Master Class.

 

Martha Silano on “I was trying to weigh darkness”:

 Like most poets, there are poems I may struggle with for decades, and there are those that come out pretty much, in the words of Galway Kinnell, “as if handed down from God.”

I was trying to weigh darkness” is of the latter tendency. It was early October of our collective pandemic year, and I was responding to a writing prompt created by Ronda Piszk Broach. There were several steps/instructions, but it appears I only paid attention to one: repeat a word over and over. I may have tinkered a bit, but the only edit I can find is that I chopped off the last three words of the penultimate stanza, and the entire last stanza:

… was it a stranger

 why are they called strangers

don’t talk to a black dog cross the street

it is a spook is it human is it friendly is it leashed 

 

Why did I cut these lines? I think because we (here in the western United States) had just experienced the most harrowing fire season of all time, a time when the air was so polluted we could not venture outside, let alone be inside without an air filter. For that reason, I chose a closing image relating to charred grass.

 

However, revisiting the redacted lines today, I recall I was attempting to enumerate various darknesses, including the fear of dark-skinned people. Also, to point out that many of us fear darkness, but it’s an irrational fear. That so much of what we know and live is darkness, you’d think we’d have become accustomed to it by now, and yet “we” (white people) have not. The darkness of space and night and birds and clothes, and yet a white person might cross the street when they see someone with dark skin coming their way, might dehumanize the black person. That sentiment is made more obvious in the stanza I cut. I can’t recall exactly, but I may also have removed those lines because I didn’t want to overstate it in a heavy-handed way. But really, “is it leashed” – that was Floyd and all the other black men and women killed for being black. I also think I cut it because I was afraid of being too obvious, but what I don’t know yet is whether the fear of darkness the poem describes drops a big enough hint that what I am mostly talking about is fear of those who have dark skin. I guess that’s for the reader to decide.

 

Stewart Moss on “Mid-March”:

This poem emerged from the convergence of elements as I sat in my study one March afternoon last year: the arrival of spring embodied in a newly blossoming cherry tree in my neighbor’s yard; an ancient family story (possibly apocryphal) that had been told at holiday gatherings since I was a child about my grandmother as a little girl living in the Pale of Settlement being sent via horse & wagon to buy schnapps for the weekly Shabbath dinner; and W.C. Williams’s evocative “Danse Russe,” a poem I’d loved from the first time I’d read it years earlier. The “If … then” structure of the Williams poem also provided me with a convenient way to synthesize these diverse factors and — as my poem wove its way forward — led me to feel a simple gratitude for being alive. This was also during the early stages of the pandemic, when the ability to experience gratitude would prove to be a vital source of psychological survival in the many months that lay ahead.

 

Alice Friman on “The Encounter”:

It’s not unusual to see a pride of lions in Tanzania. But one lone lioness meandering out of the forest at the crack of dawn, was for me. That was twenty-eight years ago, and I still remember not only the sight but the thrill of it. I wrote many poems about my trip to Africa in 1993, but I never wrote about that morning. It was as if I couldn’t find the gist of it, what that sight meant—the kernel of which I could transcribe into a poem.

 

Some weeks ago, quarantined at home, and stuck in my boredom, I grabbed an old book from my shelf—Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa—and opened it at random. And there it was, the idea around which that moment of twenty-eight years ago lived and around which a poem might be built.

 

What I was looking at was not just a lioness, but the first lioness padding nonchalantly onto the world’s stage: the raw power of darkness emerging, ready to take its rightful place. The other creatures parting before it, making way. For me, that lioness was being created before my eyes as I watched. Nothing less than that.

 

Todd Fredson on his translation of Tanella Boni’s Three Poems:

Tanella Boni’s Là où il fait si clair en moi / There where it’s so bright in me won the 2018 Prix Théophile Gautier from the French Academy. The collection interrogates cultures colliding within the 21st century geopolitical landscape. The speaker has tentatively returned to her home country, Côte d’Ivoire, after self-exiling in France during the ethnic and political violence that ravaged Côte d’Ivoire in the first decade of the new millennium. She returns to a new violence which has arrived in West Africa as al-Qaeda’s Maghreb faction and the Islamic State in West Africa expand. She also confronts the racism embedded in rising nationalist movements in Europe and in the US. The poems here are from a section titled “Autant en emporte les rêves” / “Might take the dreams as well.” It examines the experience of crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa to attempt to migrate secretly into Europe—that “migration crisis,” as it’s reduced to in European and American media. This has been the most dangerous migrant route in the world for the past several years with tens of thousands dead at sea.

 

David Huddle on “Bear Sometimes Thinks He’s Dead” & “Shelf Life”:

Bear Sometimes Thinks He’s Dead

I have to hope that no bear ever encounters the poems I’ve written out of bear-consciousness.  It’s foolishness that I’m up to with this bear poem, and I mean to celebrate what I imagine a bear’s voice might tell me.  In this case, I’m very well acquainted with a hermit thrush that inhabited my back yard for two or three months several years ago.  You’d think a hermit thrush would be fascinating to observe, but that was not the case with our hermit thrush.  I never heard its call, and I never saw it do anything especially unusual.  And yet, and yet, what can I tell you–I came to love that creature and still find myself missing it. whenever I remember its presence just beyond the window glass through which I viewed it.

 

Shelf Life

Well, I’m not seventy-six now–I’m seventy-eight, I have three grandchildren, and I’m doing my best just to survive the pandemic without letting the coronavirus put an end to me.  It’s been years since I entered a department store, and I doubt I’ll ever enter another one.  Even so, if I find myself walking down the aisle of a sweater department of one of those megastores, I plan on looking straight ahead, keeping my hands in my pocket, and making my exit ASAP.

 

 

Kelle Groom on “Twelve Wings” and “Mother of the Holy Hope”:

I originally wrote the poem, “Twelve Wings,” after searching far in the woods of Provincetown for the smallpox cemetery. I found it, stood in the hollowed out basement of the smallpox hospital built in 1848, numbered graves beside it.

Jenner, a country doctor, had announced a smallpox vaccine in England in 1796, but it was a long time before the vaccine was in general use. People recalled the contagion of inoculation, the earlier version of vaccination with smallpox itself (instead of Jenner’s non-contagious cowpox). Not only were deaths associated with it, but those who were inoculated were still contagious for a time and went about in public places. Smallpox spread through breath, tiny droplets in the hair. Usually from a person no more than 6 feet away. Though contaminated items could carry it as well.

Vaccination was too expensive for the poor. People lived in dread of smallpox. If one caught it and survived, she would be immune. In 1801, Provincetown sought to combat this fear by various decrees. No dogs or cats allowed outside the home, on threat of death to any animal on the loose. Groups of six or more people outlawed, no church services, and school closed. Ultimately, the pest house in the Provincetown woods was shut down in 1873. Vaccination and isolation used instead. The last case of smallpox worldwide in 1977.

When I read about 19^th century Provincetown, the closed schools and churches, decrees against gathering, the threat of contamination through breath, keeping a distance of 6 feet, all the fear, it was hard to imagine. What a time, I thought. Long gone.

“Twelve Wings” became an essay, “Destroying Angel.” But I came back to the poem, after nearly a year of living in quarantine in Provincetown from COVID. I wondered if I could revise “Twelve Wings,” so that it could be looking at both the 19^th century smallpox plague and the COVID plague of our time. In revision, I wanted to surprise myself. To let the poem appear before me, and see what it had to say. So, I turned the poem upside down: the last line became the first, etc. The revised poem felt more connected to this time – the not knowing – which also feels closer to how it probably felt to live in Provincetown during that other time too.

*

In October 2018, I received a dream residency to Civitella Ranieri, a 15th century castle in the Umbrian region of Italy, due to the recommendation of Mark Strand, who had become a mentor, after selecting me for a 3-week residency with him at Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2004. While in residence at Civitella, we went on several fantastic field trips. Ilaria Locchi, the Program Assistant, took us to see the tiny 17 c. church of La Madonna del Bagno, just outside Deruta, and said this was her favorite place to visit.

Inside are more than 700 majolica votive tiles on the walls, depicting many misfortunes and illnesses resolved due to the Virgin Mary’s intervention. Each one inscribed: PGR (‘Per Grazia Ricevuta’, for grace received). I’m drawn to the acknowledgment of suffering here through time, and to devotion, grace, and the miraculous. “Mother of the Holy Hope” contains my own votive tile, in two lines on the illnesses of my parents, which appeared in writing about the church and the gratitude inside.

 

Jody Bolz on “Pandemic Fugue”

What began as obsessive thinking last March—shape-shifting imagery that circled and intensified over the months that followed—became “Pandemic Fugue” in October. Throughout the spring and summer, I’d scrawled sentence fragments on pages…notes about the local beauty and the global horror: the uncanny high-altitude blue of the sky, the hopped-up birdsong, a lone fox trotting down a street in DC, the empty city and the wailing sirens, the harrowing dispatch from a friend who survived weeks in a coma only to attempt a paranoid escape from the ICU.

In the fall, I realized that the recurring images I’d failed to subdue might submit to some kind of order. A promising thought! I found myself composing quickly but in increments: sonnet-length sections of what—a fugue? A sequence of near-sonnets? I wasn’t sure whether it was either or both. In any case, it’s barely a beginning, just one of many partial accounts of a year that changed the way we think about our lives.

 

Martha Silano on “I was trying to weigh darkness”:

 Like most poets, there are poems I may struggle with for decades, and there are those that come out pretty much, in the words of Galway Kinnell, “as if handed down from God.”

 

I was trying to weigh darkness” is of the latter tendency. It was early October of our collective pandemic year, and I was responding to a writing prompt created by Ronda Piszk Broach. There were several steps/instructions, but it appears I only paid attention to one: repeat a word over and over. I may have tinkered a bit, but the only edit I can find is that I chopped off the last three words of the penultimate stanza, and the entire last stanza:

 

… was it a stranger

 

why are they called strangers

don’t talk to a black dog cross the street

it is a spook is it human is it friendly is it leashed 

 

Why did I cut these lines? I think because we (here in the western United States) had just experienced the most harrowing fire season of all time, a time when the air was so polluted we could not venture outside, let alone be inside without an air filter. For that reason, I chose a closing image relating to charred grass.

 

However, revisiting the redacted lines today, I recall I was attempting to enumerate various darknesses, including the fear of dark-skinned people. Also, to point out that many of us fear darkness, but it’s an irrational fear. That so much of what we know and live is darkness, you’d think we’d have become accustomed to it by now, and yet “we” (white people) have not. The darkness of space and night and birds and clothes, and yet a white person might cross the street when they see someone with dark skin coming their way, might dehumanize the black person. That sentiment is made more obvious in the stanza I cut. I can’t recall exactly, but I may also have removed those lines because I didn’t want to overstate it in a heavy-handed way. But really, “is it leashed” – that was Floyd and all the other black men and women killed for being black. I also think I cut it because I was afraid of being too obvious, but what I don’t know yet is whether the fear of darkness the poem describes drops a big enough hint that what I am mostly talking about is fear of those who have dark skin. I guess that’s for the reader to decide.

 

Charmaine Crockett on “Spit of the Universe”

I have always been interested in the migratory patterns of humans. How do we move with — and become moved by — events, those entangled currents of time, place and circumstance that we think define us?

 

Hidebound as we may be, we also embody shapeshifting. Our identities are constantly being re-defined as we navigate the tumultuous waters of human existence where essences are constructed, manipulated and repurposed to meet external dilemmas. My prose poems are exploratory journeys into the solubility of lived experience from the perspective of a bastard child.

 

“Spit of the Universe”, part of a larger body of work that is a memoir embedded in a political, spiritual, social and natural history of the Earth, took shape in a poetry class led by Dr. Susan Schultz, where I faced an existential crisis of sorts: should I continue to skirt the shallow waters and skip lightly over powerful poetic yearnings, or should I take a deep dive into the murky core and use the wise tip of a pen as my beacon? I chose the latter. And hardly a drop of revision. I was called to explore the colonial —both real and imaginary — lands of my prebirth, and the entire verse plopped out onto the page with an urgency that surprised even me.

 

Jay Hopler on “knell”

 I was laying in a hammock when I heard a squirrel make a noise. It was one of those delightfully bitchy noises that only an aggravated squirrel can make and I wondered what that sound would look like if I phonetically transcribed it. What it looked like was “chit-a’ click-chit.” Then I wondered what would happen if I followed the sounds that I heard within that sound. That’s how “knell” happened. The “chit-a’ click chit” came from the world, a gift for which I am grateful; the rest was just an invention I needed to get at some music.