David Kowalczyk is a writer living in Oakfield, New York. His poetry and fiction have appeared in seven anthologies and over one hundred journals and magazines, including Taj Mahal Review, Moloch, California Quarterly, and Istanbul Literary Review. He was founding editor of the late Gentle Strength Quarterly and has taught English at Arizona State University.
The appeal of the slightly rancid smell of loose meat and onions, the Pony Burger at Bronco’s Drive In.
My attempt to eke out a living in an indifferent locale. There must be a world beyond the world, a door at the intersection of Saddle Creek and Leavenworth that I haven’t tried yet. Baker’s Supermarket is the place to be.
Before the baby boom, everyone thought being old was cool. Looking through a movie book I see how Casablanca was advertised. The sophisticated portrayal of the problems of two world-weary adults who smoked cigarettes and liked old tunes. Sleek line drawings of the principals and the caption, Have you seen it yet?
Too cheap for fast food, my dad drove us past the fifties’ leftover franchise, its atomic architecture intact. Someday, this would be my guilty pleasure.
As a kid I expected authority to see past appearances and recognize talent raw. On the fourth floor of Central High I thought I could be quiet and alone but my work in Studio Art would bring me attention. The visiting artist, a weaver, praised my selection of yarn colors.
The present tells the truth of the past. Lying on the bunk beds in my room, my divorced mother whispered confidences to me: what if one day the men you trusted walked out, and suddenly, you woke up?
James Cihlar is the author of Undoing, and his poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Quercus, Bloom, Minnesota Monthly, Northeast, The James White Review, Briar Cliff Review, Verse Daily, and in the anthologies Aunties (Ballantine 2004), Regrets Only, and Nebraska Presence (Backwaters Press). The recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship for Poetry and a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, he lives in St. Paul.
Xylophone tones roll up the river, each note a mirrored dust, a goalpost, as daughters bounce off summer’s
shoulders, the idea of mars never quite landing & a WWII navigator remembers his windless map of stars.
Something hidden comes out readied for a moment in the middle of us: the family station wagon’s
wooded sides riding Swan hills, sun’s noon gown kept at respectful distance. The rest of the thought lost
in the grass, as an ice bucket shifts its portable Saturday mid-rift of imaginary silver birds & dark crickets.
Diana Adams is an Alberta-based writer with work published in a variety of journals including Boston Review, Drunken Boat, Oranges & Sardines, The Laurel Review, MiPOesias, Shampoo, Pindeldyboz, Poemeleon, Del Sol Review, Perihelion, Bayou, and Spire. Her second book of poetry, Theaters of the Tongue was recently published by BlazeVOX Books. She is the poetry editor for Del Sol Review.
Her clothing comes from beyond. Meaning I don’t know where or how
only that sewing can be extra-terrestrial at times.
Stitches are both random and pattern, like perfume
or illusion’s shoes, silver bead slippers. Due to her fear of nature
birds bring grapes, fish, balls of mesh. Love occurs,
under stale star light my marionette freckles.
Diana Adams is an Alberta-based writer with work published in a variety of journals including Boston Review, Drunken Boat, Oranges & Sardines, The Laurel Review, MiPOesias, Shampoo, Pindeldyboz, Poemeleon, Del Sol Review, Perihelion, Bayou, and Spire. Her second book of poetry, Theaters of the Tongue was recently published by BlazeVOX Books. She is the poetry editor for Del Sol Review.
almost unbearably late, in a collection of verses peopled with clutter, with broken, used objects begging for resale, reanimation, old things busy deluding themselves that they had once lived,
at just the right moment, you might say, after pages cluttered with people who have failed the poet or whom the poet has failed, a kind of grace arrives through the visitation of a dead cat via the touch
of its sister’s paw on the poet’s leg. And I, who am not moved by cats but who once loved a man who dearly loved a cat, that man years gone, the beloved cat now ancient yet breathing, am moved,
reminded how the deceased never return, but the living often do, coming back to themselves after long absences, desperate wardrobe and address changes, an absurd hairstyle, untold uncollectibles.
Ron Drummond is a poet living in New York. His chapbook, Why I Kick At Night was the winner of the 2004 Portlandia Group Prize. His work is represented in the textbook Literature as Meaning, the anthologies Poetry Nation, Poetry After 9/11, This New Breed, Latin Lovers and Saints of Hysteria, along with many literary journals. His translations, in collaboration with Guillermo Castro, of poems by Olga Orozco have appeared in U.S. Latino Review, Guernica and Terra Incognita.
Miss Dickinson’s were a must-have: complex like soufflés, souls or casseroles, no simple assemblage of milk, sugar, cornstarch and you stir and stir until veins paint your arm with ardor and tedium. It will get viscous and boil, the bubbles voluptuous, reluctant. Result is not the paradigm at work here – you could have bought pudding, saving yourself time for art. Take preventative measures (plastic wrap) or a skin will form atop. This is “organic”: everything desirable. We desire to have not wasted our time when the end is not what we expected, to give a day dignity when it provided none. Be willing to let things burn. Patience: watch them cool.
Patty Seyburn has published three books of poems: Hilarity (New Issues Press, 2009), Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998). Her poems are forthcoming in Boston Review, DIAGRAM and Hotel Amerika. She is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach and co-editor of POOL: A Journal of Poetry, based in Los Angeles.
Persistent Voices, An Anthology of Poets Lost to AIDS, Alyson Books, 2010 Theory of Devolution, University of Illinois Press, 2002 ______________________________________
David Groff
Philip Clark and David Groff have just joined forces and edited an anthology of poems by poets lost to AIDS. The collection is entitled Persistent Voices and has been published by Alyson Books. Some of the forty artists featured are Tory Dent, Melvin Dixon, Tim Dlugos, Jaime Gil de Biedma, Essex Hemphill, Leland Hickman, David Matias, Paul Schmidt, Karl Tierney, and Assotto Saint. The span of voices is smart and exhilarating.
Eight years ago Groff’s own first book of poetry received one of the National Poetry Series awards (selected by Mark Doty) and was published by University of Illinois Press. Groff’s Theory of Devolution appeared at a time when poetry was finding its expressive way beyond being elegiac or politically shrill. The finding was of something that resisted erasure. It was equally of something that would access vitality. Groff’s collection hit the right note, and for those who might not have picked it up I offer a few observations.
*
From Fire Island and the tide waters of Baltimore to facing east into the Pacific near Big Sur, the ocean certainly makes ebbing and flowing look easy: easy come, easy go. David Groff’s Theory of Devolution is a collection of meditations that run the poetic scale from molecules of sweat to exploding stars. The poet is searching for an original elementalism beyond guises and formulaic schemas of fact: vegetable, bestial; races, nationalisms, clothes; the living and the lost. Each individual seems rapt in a borrowed body: a calf’s placenta, a discarded umbilical cord, delicate bodied crabs, a kicked open pumpkin, a miscarried brother, the unharvested eggs of a lesbian friend with cancer, fish. And how can one who seems oneself to be a tenant be “possessed” by another?
What a grandiose and fearful puss I am.
The dead belong to the living blah blah blah.
It’s the kind of ownership an adolescent
possesses over Bobby Sherman in the dark.
(“Ron’s Been Dead Four Years”)
In human gambles and adventures, none seems higher risk than that of human affection. For Groff, such attempt at coupling is the “jet propelled elastic band of Wile E. Coyote.” Human beings collide and are locked together as mysteriously as oceans. But it is not how particles of an element mysteriously lock together that is at the center of Groff’s attention in this collection.
This is a mediation on later…when an element is unlocked and set adrift. Either, cut off—as in cut off and adrift beyond escape, or as a reveler cut off full of grief and adrift with inescape.
Theory of Devolution
His body’s as gone as bodies can be,
steel-casketed in some Ohio cemetery
I will never make a point to visit,
though I like the way graveyards level you,
let you feel a part of something bigger,
like gay volleyball.
(“Ron’s Been Dead Four Years”)
Drifting is everywhere. There is smoke, carcasses of horses in a flooded river, a dream of drowning, a floppy penis beneath a hospital gown, a glide that turns to bobbing, falling, the religious calling of a father, and the romantic reverie and grief of a someone who finds it strange to be calling himself a man:
…all we can do is
Admit how small we are in scale, admire
The coast and maybe wade past it,
Or sit in the rocky sand and finally
Lean back and fall asleep in an outsized landscape
Under a close sun. Maybe life in fact if not in deed
Lasts longer here, thanks to the beauty
That may in fact rub off on us, making the dull
Progress of the body primary, the sun
A name for a kind of contentment…
(“Facing East Near Big Sur”)
There is real human terror and inspection of the beloved as carrion. One poem is about what function to find for a death mask stored face-down on the speaker’s nightstand. Also in these poems are brave passes of the angst of reaching for the lost element. And there is sadness:
No holiday wonder I awake with the edge of sadness that—silly me—
I think is mine alone, my private port wine stain.
(“Laundry”)
But Groff is neither provincial nor maudlin. A poem about laundry—the small demand routinely met–is one of the strongest in the book. His universal mind is also one that gives voice to wit and comfort:
…you hear the subway’s regular purr
and bluejays who aren’t tiny Isaiahs screaming
but just the usual Brooklyn cantata,
the kind of music you could hum to a friend.
There, now. Are you better now?
There’s a million men on my right hand, and a million on my left, There’s a million men above me, And a million underneath. And it’s dark and it’s quiet, and it’s warm and it’s damp, And we’re lyin’ still like lumber, still and breathing… But not one in all those millions will ever speak a word, Not one, not one in all those millions will ever speak a word: For our lips are shut forever, And our tongues are down our throats, And our eyes are wide as rat holes Eyes black and filled with nothing, Filled with nothing but the dark — Oh god, oh god! not a word from all these millions in the dark! For we’re resting and we’re sighing, And we’re waiting for an end, Waiting for the end to come.
And we’re stacked up on each other Under pressure in the dark, Till our bones crack through each other, And we fuse and join like lovers, Rotting slowly hard together in the dark. Like clay and mud we’re fusing, fusing in the dark, And our flesh and bones are turning into shit. While we’re waiting here and thinking, Oh god! how hard we’re thinking in the dark…
And man, it’s one tremendous thought, A thought that sounds like prayer: God! oh god, oh god! Coming bubbling, bursting up like prayer, Oh, God! Dont you hear it all the time? Saying, We’re here! We’re here! Whispering day and night together, We’re here, we’re all down here, we’re here! Whispering forever, We’re all down here, oh god! we’re here! While the earth revolves around us: Sliding, cracking, heaving, groaning, Folding up like boiling mush – Continents and oceans grinding, Grinding everyone to slush!
The waters far above us, And the mountains pressing down, And rains of fire blowing, blowing burning sparks that fall, Falling fires falling through the stone and darkness Till we burn with life and death — But we cannot move a muscle Not a twinge can cross our face, For we’re lying packed here thinking: This is such an awful place! Thinking one, silent, roaring thought: This is sure an awful place! god, oh god, oh god! But — we thank you for this place! We thank you, thank you, thank you, God! We sure do thank you for this place!
Since there’s neither hell nor heaven, But the world is all there is, And it has to start and finish like a thing, A thing like you, a thing like me — And it seems to have no purpose, like a thing — A thing like you and me, oh god! But to bring us into being, And then to leave us here! With our thoughts that never stop, Like consciousness, like prayer! So we lie here stuck together, Calling out, Oh god! oh god! oh god! If you listen hard and long, If you listen carefully, You will hear us calling out, God, oh god, oh god!
And you know it’s where you’ll be: Packed in shit and garbage With everything that’s been, Every thing that’s ever been! And waiting for the others, God, oh god! And thinking thinking thinking: We’re here, oh God! forever! Packed into shit and garbage With everything thing that’s ever been! We’re here, oh god! forever! We’re here, we’re here, we’re here!
* Text first appeared in Christmas Carols and Other Plays.
Jascha Kessler has published seven books of poetry and fiction, as well as six volumes of translations of poetry and fiction from Hungarian, Persian, Serbian and Bulgarian, several of which have been awarded major prizes.
In a penetrating conversation, the poet sits down with Ben to discuss art, sexuality, AIDS, death, and the new collection he co-edited with Phillip Clark, Persistent Voices: An Anthology of Poets Lost to AIDS.
David Groff is a poet living in New York. His 2001 collection, Theory of Devolution, was a National Poetry Series selection, and he was co-editor of the 2009 collection, Persistent Voices: An Anthology of Poets Lost to AIDS. Groff’s work has been published in The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, New York, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Chicago Review and North American Review, among others.
I think I’ll go out and embarrass myself by getting drunk and falling down in the street. You say I choose sadness that it never once has chosen me. Maybe you’re right… — Jenny Lewis
