The Muse - An International Journal of Poetry 1.1 (June 2011)

ISSN 2249 2178
Chief Editor
Pradeep Kumar Chaswal

Editors
Dr. Mohammad Arif Deepak Chaswal

The Muse- An International Journal of Poetry
Published online at www.themuse.webs.com
Copyright The Muse 2011

The Muse
An International Journal of Poetry

Volume I
Number I
June 2011

1

The Muse-An International Journal of Poetry
Vol.-1 Issue-1
June 2011
Copyright notice
Copyright. The Muse, 2011
No contents of this journal can be used without the written permission of the Chief Editor
of The Muse-an International Journal of Poetry.

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN):- 2249 2178
Cover/design
Deepak Chaswal
Al Beck
Disclaimer
Opinions and views expressed by the poets/writers are not necessarily those of the editors. The
contributors were advised to submit original and unpublished (both print and online) poems/research
papers, if any contributor violates the condition he/she will be responsible for the consequences
emanating thereof.

While information presented here was believed to be accurate at the date of inclusion, nature and
circumstances are changing constantly. The Muse-An International Journal of Poetry does not accept
liability for any decisions made or actions taken on the basis of this information, text, images, and
other content.

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Contents Page No.

Editors Note 7

Poetry 9-72

A. D. Winans
ILLEGAL 9
SIGN OF THE TIMES 9
Alan Lindsay
Striation: Lines in the Sand Cliff 10
Your Name 11

Benjamin Myers
POEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE 12

Carrie Allison
Drive to Catechism 13

Dalel Sarnou
A Lullaby of Hatred 14
A scar of you 15

Hal OLeary
Free Verse 16

Judith Prest
Telegrams From God 17
Why Poets Are Late for Work 18-19

Linda Appleby
In the Beginning 20
Snowball Fight 20

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Mike J Gallegher
Bookends 21
Interlude 21

Raj Vatsya
Slow Consumption 22
Exile of Autumn Leaf 22-23

Sam Eisenstein
Coma 24-25

Valentina Cano
Cold War 26

Adam Bogar
FOUR HAIKU 27

Anca Vlasopolos
Those Never Written 28-29

Boghos L. Artinian
The Unknown Snipers 30
The Cardiologist 30

Chris Tanasescu
A Man Consists of Sun 31

Devreaux Baker
Re-inventing Language 32-33

Hugh Fox
MOZART 34
YOUD THINK 34
NOT A THOUGHT 35

Kathleen Spector
Will You Go 36

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Michael D. Sollars
Relative Constellations 37-46

Paul Lobo Portuges
Stones from Heaven 47-48

Richard Oko Ajah
Black Eagles of Dark Forest 49

Shradha Kamra
The Door...... 50

Victor W. Pearn
Living Inside Confucius Wall 51
Natural shape 51

Adrienne Wolfert
Street Lamp 52
Point of View 52

April Avalon
From The Heart 53
Madness So Sweet 53
In Lines 54
Life 55

Carl Scharwarth
Death of The Past 56

Christina Murphy
Down to the rivers of gold 57

Gale Acuff
Fountain City, Tennessee, 1964 58

Jennifer C. Wolfe
Flower Child 59

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Kenneth Pobo
POMPEII 60
DINDIS ALLERGIC ATTACK 61

Michael Lee Johnson
Hookers on Archer Avenue 62-63

Philip A. Ellis
Our Children 64-66
Married Life 66-68

Rebeca Sara
Four Haiku 69

Thomas Zimmerman
A Glimpse of the Tragic Vision 70

William John Watkins
MORTAL/MARTIAL/MARITAL WOUNDS 71-72

Research Papers and Essays 74-103

Joseph Powell
PET TREES & DANCING BAY PONIES 74-96

Felix Nicolau
How Dangerous is Digital Literature? 97-100

Byron Beynon
''The Welsh-poppy flame of the sun''
A Tribute to Raymond Garlick (1926 - 2011) 101-103

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Book Reviews 105-111

Book review of Al Becks Curiositys Cushion by Pradeep
Chaswal 105-108

Book review of Millie Niss City Bird by Joel Weishaus 109-111

E-Interviews 113-121

An E-Interview with Hugh Fox by Pradeep Chaswal 113-116

An E-Interview with Al Beck by Pradeep Chaswal 117-121

List of Contributors 123-135

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Editors Note
The Muse-An International Journal of poetry is started with the vision to become a
storehouse of quality contemporary poetry and representative criticism on poetry. The aim
and scope of the journal is global and universal as it strives for welcoming poems, critical
articles, book reviews and essays on poetry from every nook and corner of our planet. For
our maiden issue we have received large number of submissions from USA, United
Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Poland, Hungry, Algeria, Nigeria, Romania, Russia, China,
Philippine, South Africa, Lebanon, India and the list goes on. We are overwhelmed by the
response.
We extend our special thanks to Professor Hugh Fox and Professor Al Beck for their
interview and warm cooperation in this regard. We are also indebted to Dr. Felix Nicolau for
Romanian translation and dm Bogr for Hungarian translation of our press release. We are
thankful to Phillip A. Ellis and Chris Tanasescu for circulating our press release in the literary
circles of their respective countries. We are also grateful to poets, critics and reviewers who
have sent their works for our maiden issue.
For the last one month our team has been busy in finalizing the June issue. Now June 2011
issue of The Muse-An International Journal of Poetry is before you. Read and enjoy.

Cheers for poetry!
Cheers for life!

Editors

POETRY

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ILLEGAL
A. D. Winans
She sits alone in her small hotel room
six months pregnant
forced to give head for soup and bread
no heat, one wash clothe, one towel
one urine-stained washbasin
an immigrant without a visa
an illegal caught in a legal trap
she gets up
heads for the door
hears the night manager whisper whore
suspended in silence floating
face down in the bowels of the
American dream.
SIGN OF THE TIMES
A. D. Winans
Market Street once
The queen of the city
Now a gaudy whore
Worn with time
I pass the Hamburger Palace
The home of the ninety-nine cent burger
Its doors closed down
Its windows streaked with grime.
Inside streaks of mustard and ketchup
On the counter
A crushed soft drink cup
Lies in dirt
A paper napkin floating ghost like
On the back of the wind

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Striation: Lines in the Sand Cliff
Alan Lindsay
Those parallel erosion lines the river made in the sand cliff centuries ago
remain somehow in the delicate wallwe could pull it down
with just our hands: a loud yell, an avalanche; yet there it stands
undisturbed except where dogs and swimmers have dug dry sluices in the form
still it stands; its ageless indifferent triumph over the infernal patience of gravity
remains. I try so hard to find some cause for wonder in this
elaborate breastwork, these years of patient labor this
abstract aeolian rushmore of lines that are
just therevariegated, beautiful, evenly spaced parallel lines
like type on the page of the cliff, like lines of graffiti
the river wrote in the soft wall as slow centuries
of water evenly receding drew themselves along, as time does,
as water does, informing us with the infernal patience of gravity,
informing usplease give me your handinforming us of nothing
we did not already understand about time and about water and the pull of the earth
about forces so delicatelike the forces of sound in a wordso delicate
you do not feel them, no, you cannot feel them
work.

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Your Name
Alan Lindsay
A whisper of mist, the plunk of the rain: the sound
invades the heart, shivers a universe, urges
love and fear like two dull leaves
huddled in a seed feeling the ache
for moisture heat and air open to live
in the warmth of the sound; at the sound of the name the heart-
seed anchors, strains to the notes; the hearts
shell breached at last by the damp

osmosis of the sound, of the chant, of love, my love,
your name, my love, is wetness is rain is the whisper
in wind bursting in play. Come, my love

at last, today, find me in the dark with the pulse
of your flesh. I will hear the air shiver away
as you pass, I will whisper the sound with my hands.

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POEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE
Benjamin Myers
This is the line;
its existence is
an onion; its shape
is time; this is no
longer the line; it is
inevitably the body
which is either child
or memory; incarnation
humming the heat
from stomach;
nothing is
ending.

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Drive to Catechism
Carrie Allison
I am trapped,
strapped in.
I am speeding
in the dark,
a bullet spinning
into the void.
I grip the sides
of my seat,
eyes squeezed.
My mother
beside me
drives, careening
into the rain,
eyes glassy
and empty,
a dolls eyes.
I mumble
freshly memorized
commandments
while the cage
around me
hurls out of control,
dark and long,
the barrel of a gun.

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A Lullaby of Hatred
Dalel Sarnou
Hatred has grown within me,
The growing of horns around Thee.
All those nights I cried desperately
Grab me to the chagrin, to the sea
Of tears, of groaning, of remorse.
I regret my way having lost me in pieces
I was there like a blossom in prairies
Happy in liberty around me love roses
Hitherto I smell those Sapin breezes
Yet, you stand in my way as a dark mountain
Of hatred, of anger, of fury with no reasoning
Torment, you're but a heart that is long stoning
Life is a lit that lambently lights loosely
And Death is but darkness that dooms desperately
Between Life and Death, our souls are hanging fearfully
Dread moments come to us with a wake up call suddenly
To tell us about an absurd morrow replete with tears badly
Crooning the morrow would scar in you every ain smoothly

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A scar of you
Dalel Sarnou

I know not why these words fly away out of me
Know not why my voice starts now shivering
And I cant remember but the tears of bloods on me
Remember the dreariness of the pain Im still feeling
You came into my life with your cant and hypocrisy
To crash it over and over and over, never stop hurting
The presence of your shadow in my life smothers me
And you, like a ghost, keep on wearing, jeering and fearing
Ill always suffer that scar of you in me and my history
Worse than a nightmare, than a horror, youre being
Beg you to go away; on me you never have mercy
All you do is pour salt on my hurt and deepen my scar.

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Free Verse
Hal O'Leary
Let not there be a doubt, I am averse
To everything they choose to call, free verse.
For me, it has become the devil's curse
On poetry, and making matters worse,
It's naught but prose.

In dictionaries, metric is most used,
Along with rhyme, (the terms are often fused)
To tell us verse should never be confused,
Or ever used with free. We're not amused.
Give us repose

If we are free to do most anything,
And all our words, we do not choose, but fling,
Then lyricism loses all its ring,
And though we write, we do no longer sing.
I do propose.

Although it's true we cannot close the door
On charges that we live in days of yore,
It's time to claim, as we have done before,
Free Verse? An oxymoron, nothing more.
With that, I close.
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Telegrams From God
Judith Prest
poems are like
telegrams from God
snaking like lightning
down through clouds
bubbling up
from the depths

flashes of light
bursts of steam and spark
from the core
from higher places
rearranging
molecular structure
revealing
the genetic code
of the soul

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Why Poets Are Late for Work
Judith Prest

Im sorry I was late, but
the dam broke and I was
swimming upstream
in a torrent of words.

I discovered a poem
trapped in a pocket of light
and I had to rescue it.

Im sorry I was late, but I
got impaled upon a particularly pointy
thought shard
and it took some time
to remove it to the page.

I took a wrong turn and
got tangled
in a thicket of images.

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I was herding
a cluster of
furry black poems
and you know
how long that takes in the dark

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In the Beginning
Linda Appleby

Stars had not begun to shine
When you took your place in the firmament
Water had never turned to wine
Abraham had yet to pitch his tent
His sons and daughters glimpses in his eye

And the moon bowed down in recognition of a star
And the silence swam like tears
No wise man had ever walked so far
In the beginning of years of years
When the word became flesh, a breathing avatar

So sing of the holy ages while you wait
And play the flute, like Krishna
Since God is man and dead is hate
And show the thousands where the loaves and fish are

Snowball Fight
Linda Appleby

It was too cold to write
Til the new moon put a stop to it
Cutting a crescent in the black sky
That was ice
Each twig wrapped in white fur
Breath like a steam train pouring a living mist
Layers of it, there were
A sub-layer of ice
A coat of frost

Snow made in the image of man
Two primitive balls, some sticks, a scarf
He challenges nature in a snowball fight
Who is the boss?
The silhouette of the tree marks the horizon
The sun shines through the clouds

Winter of the soul
Where the heart hibernates
Round as a dormant mouse
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Bookends
Mike J Gallagher

Four and ninety years apart, stand my bookends,
an uncle, now grown old, a grandson, not yet two.
Between them, stacked, are tales of war, none won,
of nations born and great empires undone;
stories of romance, of broken hearts,
joy of births, painful deaths;
dispersal of our island race,
the blooded drag of clan's embrace;
weariness of a world worn down,
hope of a world cheerily young.
Distanced by an ocean, a disparity in age,
my bookends could now, and ever after,
our cares and worries soon assuage
were we to share their laughter.

Interlude
Mike J Gallagher

Drop your pen, give in,
draw close to the window
whence comes the sound.
Out there in the smog
of a damp April evening
A mistle thrush sings
of pleas and urgings,
of broody clucking
of soaring joy.
Maestro mocking
my empty page.

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Slow Consumption
Raj Vatsya
Dripping from teeth of hungry wolves
sporadic memories flow, drift
ingest, digest
life juices dissolve
slowly
Masquerading as friends
leeches attach
sanguine beads drip, flow
slowly
Every debt imposed, self-imposed
increased as paid
slowly

Exile of Autumn Leaf
Raj Vatsya

For meagre remuneration
palpitated her tiny heart, lungs
feeble muscles toiled
wrestled smidgens off air
offered bounty in gratitude
Needles pierced skin
day after day
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sun imbibed green of flesh
little by little
Of use no more
autumn leaf could be taken out
and shot
Merciful tree sent her
in permanent exile

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Coma
Sam Eisenstein

He remembered
the screech of tires
a vein pulsing in his head

Comforting sound
of many rubber wheels
the smell of exhaust

An immense expanse
of jeweled crystal
he shared with ghosts

His wife, the children
parents herding sheep
tall buildings collapsing

Foul tastes
far back in the throat
a cough not completed

Inner dialogue
with world figures
Cosmic peace

All languages his
and instant transport
to distant destinations

From deep underwater
the crystal began ascent
annoying his inner ear

Then: frighting
the hosts of figures
who fled in a crowd of bubbles

The container began to melt
rather than shatter
yet left shards

Embedded in skin, groin
body's outlying parts
unused to sensation

He groaned musically
mimicking sheep bleating
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in a lost meadow

He saw faces above him
eager for language
a telling pointed finger

They watched his eyes
for signs of recognition
body's coherent movement

As the crystal womb melted
the mouth of his wife
swam into his sight

Opened to her smile
of familiar wrinkles
appealing irregularities

His heart leaped
to meet her lips
and form his own

She said then clearly
I'm your daughter
all that's left

With that he knew
he had traveled
with light speed

Over years in which
his wife had stumbled
and fatally fallen

He now bitter
fully aware
knew this awakening

Came too late
far from any home
he could know

He willed reentry
to a fully reconstituted
many-faceted crystal

Into which he fled
with the relief
of finality
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Cold War
Valentina Cano
The attention he paid her
was a sliver of fingernail,
a knife blade in the light.
No one would have known
the silence held warm syllables
in its folds, no one could
have seen the reflection of
crinkling fire in his veiled eyes.
She did.
The lapping waves
made of stillborn notes
froze her feet,
clutching her attention,
pinning her down.
His breath pooled about her.
His skin a beam of
turbulent light,
a kaleidoscope of clouds.
She walked by him.
He drew back
and released her into
the afternoons gray shell.

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FOUR HAIKU
dm Bogr
blunt opposition:
sharp blades of shivering sunbeams
chipped by pathway-dust
xxxxxxxxxx

flame-sphere-lit sky
flux of blustering lightrays
crimson sun-onset
xxxxxxxxxx

pine in shine-sweep
nothing save the sun and she:
Pinea-privacy
xxxxxxxxxx

tick-tack of time stops:
near the distance, a sharp blur.
parallels X-ing....
xxxxxxxxxx

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Those Never Written
Anca Vlasopolos
at my mothers cutting board i
learned what came first
or rather what came inextricably
together
the hen my mother dissected for at least
three of our dinners
meat being so very dear
held deep inside her a pouch
of eggs like amber beads
going from penpoint to almost full size
so when i too go
should there be reason to cut me up
will all these bottled
stored
nearly forgotten
poems
i didnt write
bunch up
like hen eggs clusters of hanging grapes
or line up
neatly
a string of maiming
debris
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waiting to be sheathed
into perhaps
unlikely
pearls?

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The Unknown Snipers
Boghos L. Artinian

I will never know

how many times snipers had had me

clearly in their view,

yet for some reason had refrained

from pulling the trigger

to let me cross the green-line

twice a day, in fifteen years

of civil war.

For that kindness many thanks

to the unknown snipers!

The Cardiologist
Boghos L. Artinian

Clad in a Hippocratic gown,
And effecting a compassionate frown,
He is half plumber,
Half electrician,
Busily thriving
On clogged vessels
And bizarre circuits
That envelope
A muscular pump!

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A Man Consists of Sun
Chris Tanasescu
A man consists of sun
light if hes a vegetarian
(its the photosynthesis
that fed the leaves he lives off)
and time if he eats meat,
the two biological clocks
clashing inside as the eater
and the eaten dance in the dark;
a woman is made of moon
stones if she drinks only spring
water as tides of masculine seas
suck in the river of her sashay
and public places, when drinking
the new wine of her wedding.
The solstice approaches the city,
steamy beams enter
the foliage, and the homes of relatives
where we nod keeping time
Dont breathe, any extra beat?
This worlds no contraceptive.

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Re-inventing Language
Devreaux Baker

Tell me something I havent heard before
How bridges in Paris are rusting bolt by bolt
and rivers are tired of their secrets
How night loves to wash your body

Empty words from out of your pockets
and rearrange stars if you have to, but tell
me something you have never told anyone

How the object of your desire never sleeps
and your heart is made of glass that shatters
each time you break bread with your father

Tell me how you invite transgressions into your bed
and slip knots around the waist of afternoon
so twilight never leaves your side

Weave syllables into a net that stretches
from the flea market on the outskirts of this city
all the way into the back alleys of your childhood

then speak to me in the language of your birth
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so I may finally understand the things lost to me in translation
and hold them in my hands like saltless tears
or small fires burning in wilderness

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MOZART
Hugh Fox

Dying at thirty-five, at thirty-five I would
have still been teaching at Loyola University in
L.A., never have moved to (MSU) Michigan,
never have gone to Brazil and met wife #3,
30+ years with her now, six kids with my
three wives, my granddaughter Beatrices
birthday today, four years old, party at our
house, this Jewish couple from Ann Arbor,
him from Montreal, her from Russia, their
daughter, Caroline, just hitting four last
week, another couple, friends of my daughter
Alexandra, Beatrices mother, with a cute little
blondie daughter, Marylane, him from England,
the wife from Chicago...kids and presents, all
three wives there...Mozart, how did he ever
write so much in so few years?

YOUD THINK
Hugh Fox
Youd think Id be used to it by now,
May first, the whole world around me
flowering-greenig, old stuff by age 79,
nicht wahr? , but its still miraculous
for me, as if I were age five again,
oak trees that live hundreds of years,
sleep and reawakening, why shouldnt
I have eight hundred years of
seasonalization?
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NOT A THOUGHT
Hugh Fox
Beatrice, 4, the Phi Betta Kappa Sorority doll-
legs, even my mother back fifty years ago
in Highland Park, my father retiring at seventy-five,
Elizabeth Tayhor, Queen Victoria, even myself
a year ago not really multi-dimentionally what
mortality-dimensionalizing was coming down the
road.

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Will You Go
Kathleen Specter
Ask me to uncover the bones of my blue twin
Who was drowned in poisoned air,
To separate the real from the something else
Like oil on water
He was taken to the death baths,
Saw the light of unlighted visions;
Tears have long since soaked the salt from my eyes.

Now that my grief has grown old with me
Things go through my mind when I cant sleep:
The cold rain; the wind as we were made to dig his grave;
My father weeping beside me, falling to his knees,
Struck in the head with the butt of a gun.
I wake with an image like a beating heart,
The mirror on the wall showing a face hardly mine, hardly not mine.
Face of a man who tries to forget he is living.

My waking is haunted by listening, but to what?
The spaces between notes, something
More damning than silence browning the photograph
Of a boy that could be me or him.

In this life I am frightened of waking
To the cold walls, water-stained ceiling,
And smokestacks belching black against the sky.
Our fathers tears are gone, as is the darkness
In which I lost you, brother
Understand I am trying to go on
Without history.

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Relative Constellations
Michael D. Sollars
Nocturnal, inarticulate murmur;

Is this the moment before or after?
The long awaited toll of the clock,
The long duration between seconds,
The time when the kookaburra bird,
The crows inconsequential cousin,
Ludicrously laughs aloud as the sun dies;

Not quite yet, as first falls across the room,
A whisper
A murmur
A rhythm
A drone
A moan of paralysis.

A new droning, almost imperceptible,
Fills the silence above my bed,
Trapped within the interval of a moment,
Sings from above, like the lost nightingale,
Wind tip toeing across hedge rows,
Its voice whispers, without wavering, but hypnotic.

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High overhead,
Rafter hung,
The image races, blurred;
Aeolus bladed,
Arms extended,
Sinister slayer;
His blades strike me
As three arms at first, and then only one in a whirl,
Turning and turning in the collapsing room,
Round and round spin the fans blades,
Ancient or antique, styled with porcelain grommet,
Artful crystal blades, spinning back the contours of time,
Counterclockwise, against times march, overhead.

Still hum, blank filled, incoherent, indistinct,
Crawl cocooned memories,
Of what? I know not, at first at any rate;
Greek chorus or chaos, Im uncertain.

Stepless somnambulist, sleep I;
Still, at first, none, not one thought,
Mind milling about across empty mental miles;
Suddenly then thoughts leap free,
I succumb to times snare, prey to the memory hunter lodged inside,
Evanescent hues played by hums and hymns of ethereal worlds.

New night canopy now stretches vast overhead, yard by yard,
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Webbed by silver glow, distant luminescent essences,
Multitude of star points, devoid of design and meaning.

Still as stone, dumb to thought,
I stare perplexed at the night ceiling,
The fan continues its incomprehensible murmur,
And the poet finds only the much forgotten of the least learned;
Stellar names lost, lights extinguished.

The Seven Sisters of Platinum Pleiades, hunted eternally by Orion,
Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Pegasus, Orion, Virgo, Phoenix, Andromeda, Cassiopeia,
Once ago familiar constants,
All fallen forever from memory, gone beneath the horizon to dark sleep;
Even my own Libra lost,
Her scales tipped toward oblivion.

Suddenly a horn bellows, followed by a chorus call of new stars;
Curious clusters of brilliant sparks strike the firmament
Born beneath but eternally risen;
Orphic tablets beckon, pull at me,
As the new stars demand to be named,
Christened anew,
Celestial constellations, birthed for forevermore,
All dated deaths;
They belong to me now, and I to them,
Twelve new signs, twelve sad losses;

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Beckon! The horn demands.
Stop! No more, I scream.

Who is it again blows his thunder horn?
The bright Child Warrior, Blake, fallen in February frost,
Stands uniformed anew in immortal blue,
The deepest and truest of all blues;

First and always son,
Birthday, wedding, altar candles,
All blown out by one who handles,
But evermore a glowing sun.

Now takes his proud post as nights brightest star,
Seraph, the firegiver, stargiver;
Those among us await his nightly artful creation,
Lighting first one signal fire and the next,
Until all heavens leap ablaze.

Horn trumpets another note of the ages!

Roll call commences, constellations ballet onstage, one by one
Past names and new stars, Milky Ways amphitheatre
All of magnitude and minitude, bright and dim, answer:
Young Brother, dull red, fallen to March madness,
Friend of boyhood, blue-white gem, defeated by Aprils melancholy,
Serious Scholar, yellow-white globe, undone by Mays menaces,
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Volatile Genius, red giant, succumbed by Junes Jester,
Virgin Goddess, azure blue jewel, caught by Julys cancer,
Pedant Professor, bright crimson flame, harmed by August angst,
Uncle, doomed by Septembers chance shot, appears dim in the wests low sky
Childhood friends with forgotten names,
Orphaned by Octobers perchance, sparkle anew in mild milk clouds,
Imposter, dull dwarf, destroyed by Novembers neurosis,
Silent Searchers, blue-rich twins, succumbed to Decembers dread,
Physician, harvest orange fireball, dealt the January joker,

Deeper in infinitys far dark fathoms lie other lights,
Incalculable numbers, clustering about,
Configuring artfully, forming vast arrays;
Poets proud, Sarah, Sylvia, and Anne,
Yes, the Three Graces, still rowing toward home.

More distant, beyond the skys faint harbor lights,
Painters Palette, sweeping, spiral galaxy filled with visionary whirls,
Brushed by Van Gogh, Greco, Crevel,
Daswanth, Rothko, Bugatti, Watanabe;

Novelist Nebula, nearly visible, unite
Constellations Crane and Hemingway,
Mishima and Kawabata, Pavese and Mayakovsky;

Even more remote and farther lie oldest fires,
Burning Antigone, Ophelia, Juliette,
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Loyal Daughters, now Celestial Sisters.

A lost voice, echoing from Times vault, whispers:
A crowd flowed over London Bridge,
so many,
I had not thought death had undone so
many.

Still suspended under Aeolus racking wind, bedridden within the infinite duration of
a lingering moment; sudden thoughts crystallize out of the void like springs late snowflakes
and overpower the memory gather; a child clutches his small fingers around a new Christmas
telescope, as he trudges off alone, bound to a cold December night hilltop; refracted light
illuminates the cosmic scene; no father appears, even long after the sun and moon are lost to
the west; double, double toil and Hubble trouble manifest in the scopes mirror; gravity fails
as the boys dreams drift skyward, riding on the wings of the bird boy, only soon to fall when
the switch of the dreaded earthly force is flipped back on.

Apparitions shadow, always guarded by light and dark, suddenly shouts: He who
gained a telescope, only to lose the world.

The same boy, and later man, feverishly searches dreams through imperfect, even
warped lenses. Love and death circle as twin stars, mistaken as one perfect sphere. Then he
spies sights fault: processional ritual observed as apparition of ecstasy and beneficence,
followed by focus of cruel certainty, and finally ultimate aberration, maleficent flaw.

But then I pass with fortune like ordinary light through the polished prism glass and
emerge from my prison resin; gutter gulag and guillotine guilt decanted; my hidden colors
spraying apart like royal ribbons.

The figure comes clearer, a self stranger running and running, miles and marathons.
He races for the horizon, only to find it receding step for step. The moon floats in flight. But
he is slowed and then staggered in his steady steps as he wonders for what, the to and fro. He
deserts the oval track for longer, drifting elliptical roads.

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No, I shout, tossing thunderbolt back,
Against an onslaught of mean memory;
But recollections argue forward,
Seeking existence at their own peril.

Leave me, free me;

An instant of clarity rushes me,
Four elements, thats all, no more;
Do away with the periodic chart;
Slice, dice, cut with Ockhams razor;
Theres Fire, hot sundae eucharist topped with grace,
Theres Air, trailing clouds of worry do I come;
Then water, water, here and there, but nowhere;
And Earth, meadows of melodies, mountains of misplay;

Restless trance, slumber silence,
On a pillow of plucked powder down.

Conflicted again!

Troubling letters cluster together like teammates for a yearbook memory. ROYGBV
lean shoulder to shoulder. What does it spell? I must have known once. The thing and the
forest of symbols once held meaning, but I have lost the lighted intersection where roads
meet. I have drifted too far from center, and now any certainty of orbital return becomes even
mathematically incalculable.

The poet, a grave figure at times, a grave digger at all times;

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No Wood of Thorns
Impresses those outland spherical souls,
To be fed on by harpies;
Try instead,
Queen of Thorns
Garden of Thorns
Path of Thorns
Rain of Thorns
Veil of Thorns
Nest of Thorns
Crown of Thorns.

The play of the spheres, commences,
Orchestra performers,
Planetary measures, cosmic scales,
Music of harmonious performance,
Strings of violins, notes of flutes and clarinets;
Cornets and trombones, drums and cymbals,
Flood one ear and the other;

The Dark Queen constellation rises;
Dignified by deliberate gait of grace and grandeur,
She moves unchecked across the sky,
Through space and moment, one to the next;

Vain queen of beauty,
Gentle and alluring,
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Wearing seductress smile;

Her luminous ascension darkens others,
Silences all galactic song;

Scent of lavender trails her gown,
Clothed in soft cotton crimson, a nuptial shroud;
Hair adorned with peacock jeweled crown;
Beckons with emerald stone, eyes the tinge of tomorrow,
Commands the earthly board, dispatches piece by piece,
Angel of sweet sleep and lullaby lies;

From high above, far beyond the Queen,
The Mover of all moments and movements,
Stirs and waits without impatience,
Desiring no thought,
To consider and reconsider,
For visions or revisions.

From sovereign seat, the Mover sees:
Clockwise grind the cutting blades,
Slicing air, trimming time,
Cleaving young, slitting old,
Chopping this, slashing that;

Measure once, cut once,
Across mortalitys mark.
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In the room, discords demon brother clamors,
Dissonance threatens near and far;
Louder, closer drones disquiets din,
Dispatching harmony, harboring destiny;
The way appears, milky and ethereal,
Vast clouds of friendly sky-lined lights,
Starsteps back.

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Stones from Heaven
--for the children of Haiti
Paul Lobo Portugs

"What crime what sin had those young hearts conceived
That lie bleeding torn on a mothers breast...
The human race demands a word from God." --Voltaire, " Poem on the Lisbon
Earthquake" (1775)

the flesh of the city blends its blood with the dust of earth's grave
the devil quake broke the bones of their beds with its terrorist bomb
they could see the day light of death in the beaten air
feel it in their prayerful souls as the some time glad day sun fell
into forever's darkness and all the all reeked with the ashes of fear
where is the loving God of married hallelujahs?

all the poor man's houses falling falling "amid the deepening gloom"
into a tomb for sons of promise and green daughters
their pleasure and pain drowned in a ghost of tears
lost like raindrops on the grey face of the bottomless ocean
vanished like the passing shadows of stories in the imagination of clouds
why oh darkened God of stones God of the Word God of Heaven?

in the once bright light of a schoolyard's promise silence now bleeds
where young eyes yesterday shouted from their books a belief in tomorrows
now the living dead carry their bodies with loving worms
on the gallows of their bent backs wander the veins of the beaten streets
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chanting horror's verbs black angels mourning the flesh of graves
where is the open hands of God the prodigal Father?

they lie down forever in the weather of their sorrow with the innocent dead
weep for the seed of their breathless children in the blood lit city of gospels sorrow
no glad to be home families no wined friends with hope's holiday songs
no loving child's prayers or whispered shut eye no sweet good nights
no these good soldiers of Jesus' hosannas are the inspired blind no more
to the womb of endless night no to the forsaken God of their brambled loins

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Black Eagles of Dark Forest
Richard Oko Ajah

Black Eagles of the evil forest
Are the brides of feathers,
Blessed with pacy paddles
For transport into high rocks
Where their sacred treasures
Are cloaked like black gold.

Black Eagles of the dark forest
Are clothed with rubber clogs
Whose snazzy skins are nourished
With its preys blood and body
Killed to satisfy their Sisyphean
Instincttheir luxury.
Black Eagles on High Rocks
Who scream like a woman in travail and
All corners of our commonwealth penetrate
Through with lustful eyes which are
Deadly weapon for mass destruction
And escape-route to their hunters
Aim

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The Door......
Shradha Kamra
I pass by here
unbiased each day
to feel you closer
until its gray.
with no other way
to unlock the door
neither the recourse
nor the roar
i put down my desire
to take this side
to stand at the door
to look inside.

As I turn around
Forwarding back
again to recover
the complete lack,
with still moves
and running eyes
I suddenly stop
and once more rise.
I turn around
to the previous side
to stand at the door
to look inside.
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Two poems
Victor W. Pearn
Living Inside Confucius Wall

A few have lived here before
in peace and harmony,
where moonlight still shines
brilliantly orange in Octobers haze

And along Gu Lou street you may
hear the clomp, clomping, sound
of old horsespulling tourists
to and from the Confucius Temple.

Here there are intricate
roof patterns and those
ancient eaves, built to overlap

fill in space, as if sky and eaves
were loverstouching over and
under.

Natural shape

tyrannosaurus rex
crouching
head twisted to the right
ferocious jaws
stretched open
his unyielding body
prepared to pounce
a landscape rock at jining university
an igneous stone
clouds change shape
form a temporal wispy illusion
transparent mist
in moonlight

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Street Lamp
Adrienne Wolfert
The street lamp
distances the moon,
stars dont stand a chance.
Night , the siren,
sings our false voyages.
Point of View
Adrienne Wolfert
At the bottom of the lake
the drowned watch
looks like a fellow species
to the incurious fish.
Scholars sift the sand, discover
each civilizations grave atop the other.
Eternitys the name we give
the casual castaway of what is over.

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From The Heart
April Avalon

I'm here in the corner, devoured by cold,
My little ribbed shell hides a desperate sigh,
It holds an enigma for you to unfold
Until I'm asleep to your breath's lullaby.

My soul is rushing beyond the extremes,
Revealing the vibe that is hard to appease,
But once you discover the door to my dreams,
My consciousness lives through a moment of peace.

Whenever my lips start exploring your skin,
They bleed unexplainable bitter remorse -
My poison leaves stains, and it feels from within,
But lips ever sealed do appear much worse.

Madness So Sweet
April Avalon
Pearls of fantasies shine in the waters of hope
That February turned tears to.
We will certainly free weakened hands from the ropes
If wonder is all that we do.

Let us build a small ship as a shelter-to-be
And paint it in colors of spring.
It is madness so sweet to spend life on the sea;
I will turn to a siren and sing.

In the song of my heart that will beat twice as fast,
Your own inner voice will reveal.
Reminiscence I'll crave is for ages to last,
I'll gift you a moment to steal.

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In Lines
April Avalon
Invisible scars.
The blades of your hands.
Repeating old lines of my own.
The well-hidden sense.
The hopeless romance.
The eyes that could gift me the dawn.

The days go by.
Three months till July.
Love, listen, I'm honestly striving
To perpetuate
My fortunate fate,
Still learning the art of surviving.

But I am too weak,
Frail fingers do seek
A chance to entwine for a moment
With yours, then lose hold
And feel this strange cold,
Indulge in a beautiful torment.

The same tragic theme.
I've reached the extreme.
It seems I'll be waiting for ages
Of riddles and signs,
Of love fixed in lines,
Of counting papers and pages.

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Life
April Avalon
The words I hardly figure out
And all our mornings are about -
A cigarette, tea flavored menthol,
The train, the underground noise...
And then - in turn: your eyes, your voice...

A warm embrace, so quick yet tender,
So evanescent, yet desired,
The lurking verses, eve-inspired -
A perfect mix, and I'll surrender.
You'll leave around half past five...
That's it. And, well, it is my life.

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Death of The Past
Carl Scharwath

Enlightened moon an abortion of nighttime creation,
cries energy in summers final luminance.
Grave yard headstones manifest elongated shadows.

Cement souls embedded in the humid grass,
the distant, lonely house exhales the past.
History impregnates the air through tiny stucco cracks.

Curb adorned in one broken old television set,
the future anchored in its rusted satellite dish
No one ever dies here anymore, where have they gone?

Displaced suburbia manifests abandoned dreams,
a neighborhood raped in shuttered factories.
Polluted smoke replaced with the whiteness of lonely clouds

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Down to the rivers of gold
Christina Murphy
Down to the rivers of gold
in autumn light once green
with promise, we will bring
our hearts to the fading season
of youthful light lost in regret

Everything heads to conclusion:
carefree, unaware, and gripped
in dying; it is the passage, the weight,
the hearts burden of knowing loss
and the souls requisite of forgiveness

Better dreams shall hold us soft
in the mercy of remembrance
the green to gold, the gold to silence
the currents of the river moving us on
to the changes that hold our fate

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Fountain City, Tennessee, 1964
Gale Acuff
At the end of her street is a dead end,
Grandmom says. I want to see it, I say.
There's nothing to see, she says. I want to
see what nothing looks like, I say. She laughs
but I don't know why. I want to hit her
for laughing at me, for laughing at all,
whatever the reason. Don't make me mad,
I think, but I don't say it because she
might not take me to the end to see what
an end that's dead can do and I'm not brave
enough to go there by myself. Maybe
when I'm a little older. I'm 7
now, not a baby, but not a grown child.

We're walking and holding hands, or she holds
mine. If she lets it go it will fall to
my side. I'd hold hers back but I'm afraid
of her, I'm not sure why, maybe because
she's so old. She can't walk very fast. I
could break free and run ahead. I'd hear her

calling me. I'd probably ignore her
and see what the dead end looks like all by
myself. I'd be a man then. Like she is.

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Flower Child
Jennifer C. Wolfe
I saw the creased white business card
Lying in the sand of the parking lot:
It looked as though it had been run over
By tires immersed in fresh tar.
Flowers and Friends, its name stared
Up at me in neat, black letters.
I stared at the card, mesmerized by
Thoughts of childhood zoo conservatory trips.
As a summer wind rifled through my hair,
I pondered how long it had been,
Since someone had arrived at my doorstep,
Holding flowers clenched in their hand.
My last bouquet had been an apologetic,
Rumpled assortment from the local supermarket;
It reminded me of yellow dandelions
Intermingled with pink cake frosting roses.
I thought it looked somewhat pricey,
Especially when lovelier wildflowers
Could just have easily been picked
Along the side of the road for free

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POMPEII
Kenneth Pobo
Your beauty is like a calendar
with August missing. When I said
if youre late again, Ill stuff you
in a pre-digital TV, drop you
in the Delaware River. You
were on time. Oh hairy-toed one,

oh hairy toad one, I called you darling
just when a horse from a farm
in the long ago showed up at my door.

You didnt say it back. I waited
for a century to crumble
like the gardenia I pinned on

my prom date. Youre cold
and Im Pompeii sniffing
a smoking mountain.

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DINDIS ALLERGIC ATTACK
Kenneth Pobo
I order bisque in a posh
Michigan Avenue restaurant,
forget to ask is lobster in it,

I cant breathe,
my eyes squeeze shut,
Im going to pass out,
in the ambulance
some woman holds my hand,
says just hang in there,
honey, just hang in there.

I become a code, a quick blast
of fix. Some say that in
a near-death moment
we see ourselves rising
toward the light. I saw nothing.

When breath returned,
my lungs were two
planets circling the sun,
both full of life.

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Hookers on Archer Avenue
Michael Lee Johnson

Late evening, early morning,
I search the night for whores,
young, bloody with desire.
Night streets are silent streets
except for hookers and their Johns.
One wants the dart of groins
the other green eyes in dollar
sacred treasures-
snatch the wallet, a consecrated craft.
Both hit the streets quickly
satisfy needs quickly.

Im an old buck now rich with memories
more than movement, still talk, take porn shots,
with a peeking eye, snoop around
department store corners,
and dumpy old alleyways.
My hair is gray, my teeth eroding,
thoughts toward prayer
A.M. Catholic Mass,
then off in early morning
to the mailbox, a lethargic walk,
I pick up my social security check-
comforts my needs.
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Evening settles into bed time
with a western romance novel,
ambushes, excitement,
old transgressions stretch
and relax.

No desires, homage
to the day, to the night.

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Our Children
Phillip A. Ellis
Though you are not fertile,
these poems are our children,
and, as we settle them into bed,
and as we bring them to rest,
you will kiss each one good night
and retire to my arms.

But you are not here with me,
and these poems are all crying for you,
as if you had never been,
and, like an infant monkey
clinging to galvanised wire,
to a mother that never calms,
they are clinging to my knees and plead
to mefor you.

As I try to lay each one in bed,
and as soon as one is settled,
those who had gone before climb out
and come crying to me.
They will not sleep and dream.

I do not know what to do with them:
they will not be calmed.
They cling to me, who am but wire,
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and they seek a succour that cannot come,
and they seek a comfort I cannot give,
and I am alone as you are elsewhere,
and I am as one sorrowing
for a wife who will not return,
for a wife who will not come home,
for a wife who will not take up these children
into her arms,
and lead them into sleep and dreams.
And, as we settle them into bed,

I am alone with them;
you are away.
you are a waiting researcher,
marking in records the poems that will cling to me,
marking in records the poems in a misery
that your ears cannot hear,
and that my ears cannot forget.
and you are away.

Though you are not fertile,
these poems are our children,
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and, as we settle them into bed,

But you are not here with me.

Married Life
Phillip A. Ellis

We are the couple brought together, writing
these poems, with first one line, another line
turned on its head, the way an ox would plough
along one line then turn, return
the way it came. And, writing these, I wonder
whether such oxen ever felt a sense
of peace, and cooling muscles once the work
had ended, whether they found satisfaction,
relief, an oxen sense of purpose, almost
meaning to life. You need your rest? Then rest,
O ox: your work is well, and done, and finished.

But if these lines were lines of sonnets, maybe
iambic sonnets, not free verse, then maybe
your hands would hold the rhymes, all predetermined,
ready to broadcast through the furrows, scattered
by hand the way the seeds of other ages
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were scattered, sowed. And maybe, in these sonnets,
the sense would swell and fill the lines with shoots
so cleanly green and fresh, the earth itself
would seem to sing the sonnet's sensibility,
seem to announce the poetry itself,
with a wine's voice. I think the oxen dream
of such a voice, so sweet, so honeyed, rippling
encouragement when ploughing furrows, first
one way and then another, then, at end,
O ox: your work is well, and done, and finished.

And would you guide the ox that ploughs our land?
With me behind it, making sure the plough
itself will never turn, and leap and break
the line the furrow makes within the soil
we turn over. I know this, know that something
about us, making us as one together,
a singled team, that toils and works the soil
together, sowing seeds so shoots of green
can rise and grow to fruitful wheats we harvest,
with some to feed the oxen, some to sell
and some to sow again, until the end
when we will never sow again, our children
inheriting our toil, our legacy
until at last the line is dead, the soil
is also dead and barren, sun like one
who withers with a look of anger. Would you,
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knowing this, guide the ox at all? Or would
you take your leave and, breaking my heart, leave me
with fields unploughed, the oxen lorn, heartbroken
and yearning your fair voice? I can't believe
I'd want to live, or even shift the plough
along the furrows, only allow weeds
to rise and grow upon the fields until
they fell to entropy at last, the poems
forgotten, rotting, dust, and nothing more.
.................................

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Four Haiku
Rebeka Sra

lips of petal bride
kissed into purple berries
by springtime sunlight
+++
hovering white faith
silken prayers in the wind
cherry blossom
+++
twirling flowers
carry dreams of captive bird
on winged winds back
+++
metallic light-twang
pale Sun dressed in fumes, rolling
above the winter road

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A Glimpse of the Tragic Vision
Thomas Zimmerman

How serious it seems: the universe
so multiform, a zillion-petaled bloom
of clashing forces, ocean to immerse
and drown each spark of thought, enormous room

with furniture too big to reach to sit
and rest upon. So we assert ourselves:
heroic anagnorises will knit
our strands of fate. Some books upon our shelves

affirm it. Goat-song. Tragedy. To lives
to suffer. And to die. The art we make
portraying this ennobles us and gives
us bittersweet release. Rebirth. Just take

Osiris, Dionysus, Christ: the grief
of death and joy of life beget belief.

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MORTAL/MARTIAL/MARITAL WOUNDS
William John Watkins

First wounds go deepest
clear to the heart and that
thrill of mortality,
"God! I will not survive this,",
this Other,whose death
means more to me than mine!"
but even first wounds close,
and open, over time.

At first the bleeding is profuse,
the pumping of the heart is clearly seen,
life spurts and squirts
wetting everything within reach
before the dozen natural forces that congeal
blood into clot, scab, scar
begin their unseen irresistible work.

Sometimes, the wound's so wide
the flow so copious and continuous,
it dies of its own exuberance
before anything can be done to stabilize it.
Others knit and seem to heal,
mature toward scar and even skin again
until trauma breaks them open one time more.
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Always when it does, there is the hesitation,
the numbness that creeps slowly into pain
and the first weeping drops before the flow again,
sometimes with the first wound's thrill,
but never with the first's velocity.

Those that have gone all the way to scar a dozen times
split easiest from the unexpected blow,
bleed least, close quickest, do not turn
gangrenous, necrotic, terminal.

The broken open scar lasts longer,
means more than the superficial heal,
the surface close that leaves
unsuspected abscesses,
cancerous pockets that open only to the grave.

Crosshatched with scars, we find
even wounds have their life cycles
and the years reveal
for all its pain, the wound,
however battered,
better than no wound at all.

RESEARCH RESEARCH RESEARCH RESEARCH
PAPERS PAPERS PAPERS PAPERS
AND AND AND AND
ESSAYS ESSAYS ESSAYS ESSAYS

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PET TREES & DANCING BAY PONIES
Joseph Powell
Professor
Dept. of English
Central Washington University

As a college student, I remember a pivotal moment in a class taught by a novelist and
critic. He asked this question: Where do you go for truth--religion, science, philosophy,
novels, psychology? Of course, truth is contextual, personal, multi-layered, elusive, but its
an intriguing question, especially as a speculative topic in a literature class. I was a
psychology major at the time with the uneasy suspicion that psychologys answers were too
easily packaged. My response to the truth question for the last thirty years has been poetry
(though its clear to me now that literature operates on its own system of elisions, of tried and
tired metaphors as reductive as a syndrome). I feel that poetry has revealed more about the
exigencies of life and death, of hope and dread, of love and hate, of men and women, of race
and reconciliation, and the poignant articulation of what it means to inhabit and embrace a
world weve damaged. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that poetry can render men more
amiable, more generous and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapors of the little world of
self (28), and for me, this has been true. By writing poetry, I have been invited to see
beyond those dull vapors and the confines of the self. Wallace Stevens shows us that
perception is necessarily personal, and the apprehension of otherness is the beginning of
empathy, of global awareness, of humanity. For years poetry has been my way to understand
the human condition, especially its dark underside. Poetry has been a vital tool in shaping my
relationships, my delights and sorrows.
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Others have expressed their allegiances to this art form in similar and emphatic ways.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in his Biographia Literaria when discussing Shakespeares
depth and energy of thought that Poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human
knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, and language (19). Matthew
Arnold is more guarded about the broad influence of poetry, but his estimation of its power is
similar: If it is said that Goethe professes to have in this way deeply influenced but a few
persons, and those persons poets, one may answer that he could have taken no better way to
secure, in the end, the ear of the world, for poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive,
and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance (161). Of course,
most high praise for poetry comes from poets who have felt its effects profoundly. However,
for most people in America, the word poetry cant even be said without an imaginary or
literal eye-roll, the suspicion that somebody is wearing pink underwear and might want you
to touch it. The prejudices against poetry have a variety of causes and effects often
pronounced by people who ought to be more amiably disposed to its charms and uses.
Unfortunately, poetry and sentimentality seem to be intertwined like those two snakes
suggesting a pharmacy. It is difficult to disassociate one from the other because fiction
writers and comics and other glib social commentators rather enjoy the embrace. In
nineteenth century America, there was a demand for sentimental poetry which made its way
into popular magazines and could be snipped out and put into a frame and hung on a kitchen
or an outhouse wall, into poetry anthologies, into inspirational books, into the emotional
lexicon of the age. In his weirdly eclectic collection of favorite passages from a multitude of
books, Ralph Woods includes in his A Treasury of the Familiar a large sampling of extremely
bad poetry which had tickled his fancy. He also includes fine poems by Keats, Blake,
Coleridge, and Gray, but generally the choices are blushingly sentimental. The two poems
chosen from Emily Dickinsons work are mediocre and project platitudes her startling mind
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was not prone to. Woods makes them worse by giving them his own sentimental titles. The
first is #919 in her Complete Poems:
If I can stop one Heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain
Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in Vain. (433)
He uses the 1924 version of this poem published in Martha Dickinson Bianchis The
Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Bianchi eliminated the capitals and added punctuation,
but Woods went even further in his editing. He titles it Helping The Handicapped, which
fatuously narrows the poem, and he changed unto to into and the his to its. The
poem has a fainting robin problem, is overly general, and presents a kind of stereotype that
Dickinsons poems generally avoid or at least grapple with more completely. In her
introduction to the book, Bianchi saw the fainting robin as a synonym for the universe
(viii) which makes the robin reference a little more likeable but still quite a stretch, but seeing
the robin as the handicapped is beyond absurd, besides misrepresenting Dickinsons work
and being patronizing to the handicapped. The second poem he calls Chartless which
cozily endorses a God and heaven that many of her other poems do not. This lack of taste in
a reader and editor who thought of himself as extremely well read, who wanted to preserve
his intellectual garden which he had tended over his lifetime, was probably common at the
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end of the 19
th
century and the beginning of the 20
th
. And it is not uncommon today; for the
book is still available and has gone into three printings.
The sentimental public image of poetry includes both poems and poets. The
demographics of poetry changed after the advent of Romanticism where peasant poets were
celebrated as natural geniuses who tapped an inner resource without much learning, and some
highly educated poets hankered for the uncomplicated emotional directness of peasant poets,
sentimentalizing their wise simplicity. In one sense, this was a good thing. It opened up
poetry to everyone, encouraged many people to find meaning by writing and reading poetry.
Yet there is a difference between those who use poetry to find or construct meaning and those
who use it merely to illustrate the trite blessings of conventionality, of the status quo, of
religious dogma. In a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Robert Frost described the act of
composing a meaningful poem: A poem is never a put-up job so to speak. It begins as a
lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to
begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness. It finds its thought and
succeeds, or doesnt find it and comes to nothing. It finds its thought or makes its thought. I
suppose it finds it lying around with others not so much to its purpose in a more or less full
mind. (22). The process he describes here is generally not how sentimental poets compose;
their language is merely a fulfillment of what they already know and feel. There is no
discovery, no thought hunting for its meaning; they generally are not driven by doubt, by
contradiction, by a need to understand their own complexities. Any writer worth reading
examines the conflict between received reality and the way the writer has experienced it.
Helen Vendler wrote that writers can betray themselves as artists, and their art itself by
papering over the actual with the agreeable or the socially enjoined (283), and novelists are
just as prone to this betrayal as poets are. Or perhaps poets are even less prone to it because
there isnt a commercial incentive to write the sentimental and stereotypical for readers who
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enjoy having their own prejudices confirmed. Poetry books rarely make much money for the
poet or the publisher unless they are written by famous people, and these books are generally
sentimental like the poems of Suzanne Somers or Jewel. Poets who write with an
inspirational or religious agenda may be able to find a publisher and an audience, but only
within a narrow group looking for that kind of validation of their own sensibilities.
Historically, the poets job was more elevated that it is today. Plato has Socrates say in
the Ion that poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally
possessed (33); when they compose poems they are divinely inspired and lose their reason.
Similarly, in The Republic, he finds poetry a little dangerous because it feeds and waters the
passions instead of drying them up (51). He also says that poetry is a higher thing than
history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular (60). He excludes
poets from his ideal republic because they keep us in touch with the baser parts of our
psyches which reason cant quite conquer; poetry is thus a threat to a free and virtuous ideal
society. It is quite clear in The Republic that Platos grudge against the popularity of poetry
in Greek society is an attempt to make a little more room for philosophy and philosophers. In
our culture, both poets and philosophers have been banished to butler for the rich and famous
and are kept in slim padded rooms.
Although Albert Cook tells us in his edited version of Shelleys A Defense of Poetry
that this defense was a mode of argument practiced in the schools and given as assignments
to schoolboys, it is clear both from Philip Sidneys Defense and the tone of Shelleys that
both poets are concerned about the cultural lack of respect that poets and poetry gets. At the
beginning of his Defense, Sidney complains that the highest estimation of learning
[poetry] is fallen to be the laughingstock of children (5), and later in the essay, he says that
poetry. . .is among us thrown down to so ridiculous an estimation (8); he then goes on to
show how important poetry was to all incipient cultures, that it was the way each culture
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preserved its rituals and history, whether oral or written. He feels that poetry was the first
light-giver to ignorance and first nurse whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed
afterwards of tougher knowledge (4), and its present state of disregard and abuse is rather
ungrateful. In Sidneys day, there were religious critics who picked up Platos argument
about poetry corrupting its audience and turning people away from the Ideal or God. Sidney
felt compelled to respond, but assumptions about the virtuous aims of poetry have remained
fairly consistent from the Greeks to present. In his letter about The Divine Comedy, Dante
wrote to his patron that the role of poetry is to remove those living in this life from the state
of misery and lead them to the state of felicity (82). That is a tall order, but the use of poetry
as a teaching tool, as a vehicle for our edification and happiness, has a long history.
In the age of reason before romanticism, Shakespeare described the poets activity in A
Midsummer Nights Dream as:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. (5.1.7-12)
Here, the poet is a kind of inventive prophet who looks comprehensively at the world
and synthesizes what he sees until he creates something, a shape out of nothing, and gives it
local context. The modern reader would read fine coupled with frenzy as an oxymoron
which suggests an acquired and refined taste that controls the wildness inherent in
possibilities. However, in the 16
th
century, poetic frenzy was a common Neo-Platonic term
among poetry critics; in the introduction to Sidneys Defense, Lewis Soens notes that this
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frenzy is the poets ability to perceive supernatural and ideal truth (xx); it also has a
religious connotation and seems indistinguishable from the inspiration which created the
Psalms (xxii). It is a synonym for inspiration, but the sense of frenzy as temporary
madness was also current in the 16
th
century. For Shakespeare, the poet tries to align the
ineluctable need for religion with the baser facts of our existence; he tries to reconcile the
irreconcilable; he submits to the tension and yet must yoke the opposites together to create a
form, to give it a location and a name. The resultant poem is a marriage of alien forces
requiring a superior will and imagination. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that . . . the test of a
first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time,
and still retrain the ability to function (69). Shakespeare clearly assumes that its the poets
job to do this.
In the midst of the Romantic Movement, Shelley was enthusiastic about the role of
poetry in the world: It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers
of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words.
They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive
and all penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its
manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of
an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon
the present. . . . Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world (46). This is a
grandiose claim, and the works of superbly talented poets today which are full of the electric
life which burns within their words cast little light to mainstream culture; they are more
unacknowledged than ever, and the legislation they sponsor would hardly light a match.
Yet it is partly because of the Romantic revolution that poets become idle dreamers,
purple recorders of nature, self-absorbed fools who oversimplify and have a dull disdain for
the history of ideas, not to mention work itself. In The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel
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Hawthorne writes that the fishes went gleaming about, now turning up the sheen of a golden
side, and now vanishing into the shadows of the water, like the fanciful thoughts that coquet
with a poet in his dream (164); here poets are idlers beside a pond bewitched by
metaphorical fish as they slide in and out of view, not knowing which to choose because they
are all so lovely and golden. Hawthorne is doing the real work while the poets are dangling
grass stems from their teeth as they dream in the sun, (or the saloon in this case), afraid of
real fish in real ponds. His use of coquet is particularly revealing. It literally means a
flirtatious man, and its connotations suggest to trifle, dally. Its French root is derived
from coq suggesting a cock, and the Latin word coco meaning to cackle. Poets are
dreamers and triflers, dalliers who like to make a lot of noise with a sexual agenda.
This image has persisted among prose writers into the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries with various degrees of snide generalization and rather nasty caricature. In New
Stories from the South, The Years Best, 2003, Mark Winegardner published a story called
Keegans Load that satirizes two poets: one is a fraud, the other is real, yet they are
both rather ridiculous. The story is a satire of academe, so one would expect most people in
the story to be frauds in some way. However, the poets are presented in the most grossly
stereotypical and lopsided terms. Of course, poets can be objects of ridicule like other people
involved in a somewhat odd vocation or occupation, but it is exceedingly rare to find even
casual references to poets in anything but derogatory terms. Furthermore, in these
persistently Romantic times, there is a need to separate the poet from the poem, to place the
value on the product and to de-emphasize the biographical oddities or social quirks of some
poets. I know this sounds New Critical, and knowing something about biography and
historical context is useful and sometimes necessary, but often this extra effort is used to
excuse bad writing.
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Winegardners prejudice about academic poets is most obvious in the characteristics
that these two poets share. The real poet is quickly sketched at the beginning of the story
as our poet took banjo lessons, divorced her husband, and finished her book of poems about
taking banjo lessons and divorcing her husband (287). She lives in a retro-kitsch duplex
and when she comes up for tenure has more published work at that point than anyone in
department history. (Poems are short, the chair was rumored to have said. Anyone can
publish poems (296). The fraud poet is described as being against the war but was drafted
and went and had come back and spent time in an ashram, a kibbutz, a seminary, and a
zendo (290). He had taught high school on an Indian reservation and in New Orleans. Five
pages later, it is revealed that the fraud writes a novel about a man whod gone to Korea,
become a sniper, and come home with his body intact but his soul broken prismatically.
Hed spent time in an ashram, a kibbutz, a seminary, and a zendo, and had wound up as a
high school history teacher in a city resembling New Orleans (295).
Winegardner obviously thinks that poets are generally imprisoned by their own
autobiographies, that they arent creative enough to make something up and give it a local
habitation, but this is a foolish criticism. The best fiction usually contains large chunks of the
writers own autobiographical hide grafted onto a fictional character or a variety of
characteristics from people he knows stitched into his characters. It is true that some
predominately lyrical poets can seem too self-involved, but to claim both poets suffer from
the same writerly affliction of solipsism is entirely too easy and stereotypical.
The fraud poets novel was titled Samurai with Breasts which was not explained
anywhere in the text (295). There is a tendency among postmodern poets and persistent
surrealists to applaud elliptical juxtapositions and non-sequiturs, to eschew narrative and
logic of any stripe. Random language and wild leaps of imagery are not the sole province of
poetry, as close readers or listeners of songs by the Beetles and Bob Dylan would attest.
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However, there are plenty of poets who still prefer to make sense, who see their work as
naming their local habitations, who struggle with aligning the spiritual world with the
mundane.
Winegardners poets can only write about themselves in the most stubbornly literal
way; their thinly veiled autobiography is self-indulgent and tasteless. His academic poets are
charlatans who are self-absorbed, have no sense of audience, no sense of cultural propriety,
are opportunists, and, like children, love the sounds of their own voices. He reserves his most
savage attack for the fraud poet who couldnt be more inane, and of the hundreds of
academic poets Ive known, he resembles none of them.
Winegardners fraud poet trembles at commencement while reciting his occasional
poem about a Charlotte shopping mall developer to whom we were giving an honorary
degree (287); his occasional poems were a blend of the earnestly literal with enough
mystical babble to kill an adult horse (301); his Poetry Reading Voice [was] stilted, self-
conscious, in awe of its own profundity (288); his books came out from a vanity press and
the last one from the press of a former student who printed it in his parents basement (290);
many of his students seemed honestly to mistake Keegans incoherence for depth (290);
Keegan tries to get the fiction writer to recommend his novel to her agent, finally gets his
student to publish his book, then tries to nominate himself for the Nobel prize; he reads poem
after poem at his third wifes funeral, saying some poems were written for her but were
recognized as coming from books that predated her, and he had copies of the poems that he
read at the funeral available after the service. A writer responds to Keegans novel by saying
I just blurted out the truth: that he needed to revise the whole thing, with an eye toward what
a stranger might find interesting (297). We get the feeling that this is Winegardners main
point and advice to all poets. However, the qualities of the fraud poet in Winegardners story
are only slightly inflated characteristics of those found in the American public consciousness.
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A fairly recent novel on the best seller list was Lief Engers Peace Like A River which had a
few compelling characters but generally pushed a romantic version of the West and was
occasionally infatuated with its own sentimentality. The young girl in the novel loves to
write rhymed verse and later becomes famous for it with several best-selling volumes (when
was the last time any verse was on the best selling list, rhymed or free?). Enger
characterizes the girls early years in the following passage: Swede opened her mouth and
couldnt find a word in it. While loving all things Western, I doubt the facts of horse and
saddle had ever occurred to her as real; they were simply poetry, though of the very best
kind. Hammerhead roan and dancing bay pony and, now I mention it, Texas stock saddle--to
Swede such phrases just loped along, champing and snorting and kicking up clover. And
rightly so. Take away such locutions and whos Sunny Sundown? Just a guy out walking
(39). The dangling modifier in the second sentence (his sister loves things Western) is a kind
of Freudian slip which helps to explain the definition of, and role of, poetry here: it
empurples existence, romanticizes and makes our daydreams exotic, it yeasts reality which of
course we have too much of. This image is more of Hawthornes gleaming fish with golden
sides. The novel would have been improved had Enger kept his gaze more closely fixed on
the guy out walking rather than speeding away on hammerhead roans and mincing about
with dancing ponies.
Poetry in the common lexicon is synonymous with exaggerated extremes: poetry of
motion, poetry of silence, poetry of love, poetry of life. Poetry can be construed as some
kind of distilled essence, some concentrate in pure form, as it is in the literary genres, but
generally its merely fancy phrases loping along without the shadow of reality riding beside
them. And there is such self-confidence in extolling these extremes that the rightly sos are
embedded in the reverent tones, in the dismissive awe. In the bio blurb for the novel, Enger
credits his interest in poetry to his mothers reading Robert Louis Stevensons poetry to them
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as children. His indignation with modern unrhymed verse only proves that his mothers
influence in this regard wasnt very deep: the best modern poetry is more interesting and
linguistically charged than Stevensons poetry which is too often sentimental, endorsing the
English status quo; so its clear that he just hasnt taken the time to read it. Of course,
Stevenson did write some wonderful verse for children, but is hardly a model of poetry for
adults.
Besides this general sense of excess, there is the image of poetry in our culture which is
more metaphor than reality. When Daniel Boorstein uses the term in his essay Technology
& Democracy, it has been detached from its realities, its best examples in literary history, to
mean a willingness to charge into uncertainty, to enter uncharted territory and take a look
around, to risk. He discusses American democracy and says To prepare ourselves for this
view of American democracy there are two sides to our personal need. One is on the side of
prudence and wisdom; the other is on the side of poetry and imagination, . . . what I would
call the exploring spirit (122). This view is certainly more complimentary, but it is equally
dismissive. Poetry is as much about prudence and wisdom as it is about the exploring spirit.
Boorstein has merely endorsed a romantic clich that puts poetry into an exotic box.
However, most cultural images of poets and poetry are more consciously derogatory.
In a short story called The Worm In The Apple, John Cheever describes a character
named Rachel who will become so wretched and so lonely that in order to express herself
she will fall in love with an unstable poet and fly with him to Rome, where they will live out
a miserable and boozy exile (286-287). She ultimately marries a German immigrants son
who gets a PhD in Physics from MIT and who is taken on in the department, and Rachel
then becomes happy in Cambridge. Merely mentioning a poet in a story is short-hand
characterization for disaster and wretchedness. And arent all poets unstable and boozy,
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and hellbent on being miserable, like Cheever himself? It takes some hard-working,
mathematical chap like a physicist to bring stability and respect into ones fictional life.
Even in nonfiction, the word poet is synonymous with someone who overpaints, who
gushes, who manipulates others with purple lies, who has a traitors soul which is a far cry
from the person Shelley describes in his Defense of Poetry. In The Omnivores Dilemma,
Michael Pollen attacks people who write the inflated language on product labels which he
calls Supermarket Pastoral; he says that grocery store poets do everything they can to
encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief (137). For him, a poet is someone who
exaggerates, and grocery store poets are especially insidious because their exaggerations
aim to cover toxic sprays, bad husbandry, chemical fertilizers, fecal feedlots, and inhumane
slaughterhouses. Poets no longer legislate the truths about human existence but its lies. Even
Pollans use of the word pastoral does not accurately reflect the complexities of the literary
genre. Admittedly, there is a nave quality in pastoral poetry, but it is a deliberate naivet, a
tongue-in-cheek fancy, which poets themselves have rather hotly criticized---from Sir Walter
Raleigh to William Carlos Williams to C. Day Lewis. Pollan accurately criticizes
corporations for using quaint and cozy pictures of nature on their milk cartons when the milk
actually comes from cows stuffed in a feedlot whose access to pasture (the USDA
requirement for organic) is a sniff of the alfalfa field nearby, but the fact that he equates
poets with the frauds of commerce is like comparing journalists with a writer of jingles.
But sentimental clichs about poetry and poets are more widespread than their
presentation in novels, nonfiction, and short stories. In the few movies that have dared to
even include a poet as a character, however minor, poets are dressed in the same stereotypes.
One obvious example is Frank Capras Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Deeds is the ostensible
hero of the film because of his blank-faced honesty, his empathy, his disregard for money,
and his child-like enthusiasms; however, the other characterizing details are a collection of
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clichs about mentally challenged but hyper-sensitive poets: he writes doggerel on postcards
and records Hallmark card sentiments; he dreams of saving a damsel in distress; he lives in
Mandrake Falls (a little joke for English majors); whenever he hears a funny name he has to
make a rhyme for it, though he is stuck on Buddington; he has an imaginary girlfriend he
talks to about his pet trees; when he gets drunk with the New York literati, they snicker at
him all night long until he finally punches one in the nose and earns some degree of respect,
so they get even drunker and chant back to nature, clothes are a blight on civilization, back
to nature. The next morning he has no idea where his clothes are. Capra and the
screenwriter, Robert Riskin, have a great deal of fun with this hopelessly nave fool, as well
as the effete, cowardly snobs of New Yorks poetry scene. Perhaps the aim was to pick on
such a small segment of the population that the box office couldnt possibly be affected as it
might be with a miserly Jew, another heartless business man, an angry black man, a nagging
housewife, or a cruel stepmother. Mr. Deeds is the grossly naive hero whose values are in the
right place, whose disdain for money makes him seem eccentric, and he even gets threatened
with being assigned to an insane asylum because he wont defend himself. In the end he does
and rather eloquently, but his characteristics are those of a laughable but sincere fool whose
integrity has elephantitis.
Garrison Keeler also likes to sport with sentimental clichs about English majors and
poets. The fact that he edited a collection of his favorite poems suggests that he does indeed
have an abiding regard for the product of poets and English majors, but he favors the easy
joke which he repeats a little more than occasionally. He conducted his show from New
Orleans which aired on National Public Radio July 17, 2004; he was reading through a list of
people from New Orleans--home of jazz, mimes, poets, etc.--and each had a humorous
apposition after it; for the poet, it was Life is a dark hole. Hey, you going to eat that? His
criticism is a bit more sophisticated than Capras and Riskins. He clearly objects to the
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sentimentality of darkness, that common assumption among the purveyors of literary
excellence which asserts that moaning about the meaningless universe, about inhumane
humanity, about the fickleness of love, about the warranted depression we cant take enough
pills for, about the thoroughness of greed and hatred, about global racism and universal
suffering, about, about. What these critics and poets dont seem to understand is that poetry
which only documents our woes in the bleakest terms is as sentimental as the poetry that
persistently looks on the sunny side of things, that is always smelling roses through the
aromas of fertilizer, that gets fuzzy and soft about the vagaries of the human drama, that
chronicles the persistence of hope and charity in any slum it encounters. In a story called
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula LeGuin has noted this penchant for
discovering bleakness: The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and
sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual,
only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and
the terrible boredom of pain. . . But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace
violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer
describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy (278). This treason is widespread
among people who wish to write literature, and in a sense, this is quite understandable.
Popular culture and the mass markets feed on silly, indulgent novels like Robert Wallers The
Bridges of Madison County or Nicholas Sparkss The Notebook. As a way to separate
themselves from this sappy bunch, serious writers move to the other side of the dance floor,
that underlit corner where the drugs come out, where theres more than a little groping, and
sneers are a kind of induction rite. Yet it is much more difficult intellectually to find what
holds, what can sustain us in times of despair, what values can stand the test of experience
and a clear look at the world. Many, many poets today are afraid of joy and delight, fearing
that they might be accused of stupidity. Keeler thinks they deserve to starve for this fear, that
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their whining about the horrible universe shouldnt earn them any bread. All the bread
should go to the sunshine poets, the rosy writers.
Stevens rejects this treason, this gloomy sentimentality, in his poem called Gubbinal:

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad. (85)

The poem criticizes people who cant see nature as a catalyst for imaginative exercise,
for experiencing delight, for seeing beauty. Stevens has made it clear in other poems like
The Idea of Order at Key West that we compose our own realties, so he cant really argue
with the poets he addresses, the people who read the world and sun as ugly. Yet, he does. He
loves the world, that savage source, and the imaginative equipment weve been endowed
with to turn the sun into a flower, a tuft of feathers, an animal eye, a seed. If people
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cant delight in this life-sustaining phenomenon, then there is little help for them; they are left
with a sad and ugly outlook.
Poets are made so uncomfortable with the cultural clichs judging them that they also
criticize themselves and devalue what they do. Edwin Arlington Robinson, one of Americas
greatest poets of the late nineteenth century, wrote a sonnet called Dear Friends in which he
suspected his friends viewed his efforts as bubble-work too small for you (2). He
challenges those who might call it this to do better if they can, knowing full well they
couldnt. But its a rather lame challenge, too meek and ready to believe its bubble-work
himself. In another sonnet called The Clerks, he calls poets the clerks of time who as
they decline are tiering the same dull webs of discontent,/ Clipping the same sad alnage of
the years (14). He is too willing to slight his own marvelous achievement, to trivialize his
remarkable skill. Sylvia Plath wrote that For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of
writing prose (3); she echoes the implication in the Hawthorne quotation and deliberately
devalues her own magnificent lyrical abilities. Of poets writing in the twentieth century, she
had one of the most finely tuned ears for language, despite the darkness of her poems which
can seem a little too personally ingrown.
In a poem called Osso Buco, Billy Collins wrote:

I am swaying now in the hour after dinner
a citizen tilted back on his chair,
a creature with a full stomach--
something you dont hear much about in poetry--
that sanctuary of hunger and deprivation.
You know: the driving rain, boots by the door,
small birds searching for berries in winter. (49)

Collins is eager to agree with Garrison Keeler who has had him on his show several
times to read his cheery poems. Collins has deliberately chosen to side with our cultural
stereotype when he knows better; hes appealing to his budding audience of non-poetry
readers, saying stay with me and well be fine, no more driving rain and berries, no more
black holes and starvation. Please pass the salt. Collinss poems are generally entertaining
and clever and imaginative, but we wish he might get a little more serious, that he played the
fop a little less often, that he represented American poetry a little more fairly, that he more
readily acknowledged its breadth and scope. Calling poetry a sanctuary of hunger and
deprivation is a very selective reading of our grand anthology, one that smacks of smugness
and privilege.
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Hart Crane made a comment which illustrated an alternate view of sentimentality when
reading poetry. He was referring to his poem called Chaplinesque which analyzed
Chaplins The Kid. The poem begins:

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts. (386)

He wrote to a friend that Poetry, the human feelings, the kitten, is so crowded out of
the humdrum, rushing, mechanical scramble of today that the man who would preserve them
must duck and camouflage for dear life to keep them or keep himself from annihilation. I
have since learned that I am by no means alone in seeing these things in the buffooneries of
the tragedian, Chaplin. I have tried to express these social sympathies in words
corresponding somewhat to the antics of the actor (386). He wrote to Gorham Munson that
Chaplin may be a sentimentalist, after all, but he carries the theme with such power and
universal portent that sentimentality is made to transcend itself into a new kind of tragedy,
eccentric, homely, and yet brilliant. . .I feel that I have captured the arrested climaxes and
evasive victories of his gestures in words (386). The suggestion here is that poetry, as a
metaphor for the depth of our inner experience, is the hungry, homeless cultural kitten on
Americas doorstep which has been nearly run over and starved by technological advances
and the humming scramble of our comings and goings. The man who bends for the
famished kitten, who can still love the world, has to find recesses in which to protect
the kitten and try to be contented with his random consolations. He is clearly an alien,
shadowy presence going against the grain of the traffic and exhaust of his culture. This
kitten-saving is a kind of game that enforces smirks. The man who wishes to make a
case for the value of poetry must duck and camouflage for dear life because there are so
many inevitable thumbs and verbal snubs pointed against it.
Cranes poem was written in 1921, and in 20011 the smirks are more like derisive
laughter. Poetry is a quaint anachronism, a sentimental entertainment from a bygone age.
Even people who purport to be enlightened see nothing wrong in brandishing the clichs of
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the poet/character who is kittenishly withdrawn from the world, selfish, egotistical,
insensitive to others in the pursuit of linguistic fame, pushing a product that is absolutely
useless, pathetically needy, too out of it to see the sources of his or her own literal and
figurative impoverishment, intellectually pudgy, fearlessly fatuous in the public readings of
his mock heroic squiggles, a chaser of butterflies, a fruity dilettante with bad hygiene. The
kitten metaphor is a detail from Chaplins movie. It is, however, an adequate image to
illustrate Cranes point about Chaplin: sentimentality is made to transcend itself into a new
kind of tragedy (386). The poverty and destitution of the kid is countered by his ingenuity,
his resilience, and his humaneness. The tragedy is neoned by the kids attention to the kitten
which becomes a metaphor for the kids own helplessness and need for a parent. This is the
strategy of newscasters reporting on tragedies in distant lands: the camera pans the
destitution, homelessness, starvation, and then ends on a child playing with a skinny pup or a
mother nursing a child with a face full of flies. The sentimentality seems to make the story
more poignant. When we do this in fiction, it reads a little like the ending of Grapes of
Wrath where Steinbecks Rose of Sharon suckles the nearly dead farmhand. It seems
excessive despite our logical mind insisting that it might be possible given what these
characters have been through. However, that new tragedy can fall flat on its sentimental
face and seem as deliberately orchestrated as a Christian charitys ad designed to bilk people
out of their money and emotions. Great poems and great art dont depend on such obvious
gestures and easy manipulations and juxtapositions.
Crane is right, though, about areas of human emotion being endangered by the
mechanical scramble of today, by the time spent on watching TV and playing video games,
by Internets chatrooms and pornography, its blogs and cams, but they are also endangered by
persistent cultural stereotypes that degrade an art form with so much potential to uplift and
examine, to address issues of identity, to penetrate social ambiguities. Poets are especially
adept at finding meaning in things that most people walk by, in those dark recesses, and we
need them to teach us how to see, how to feel, how to express what we see and feel. They
name what weve felt, and having a name to approach a complication is a long stride toward
addressing it. They use their reading and imagination and synthesizing abilities to expand
individual and cultural options. They find ways for us to embrace sentiment and enjoy it
without shame. They can make us slow down and appreciate our gifts, or blessings. They
examine our fears, our strengths, our limitations, our potential, our thinking in ways few other
observers can. Poets can help us still love the world when we dont really feel like it.
Crane pins his value on a pursuit of the heart and says there is intrinsic value in hearing that
kitten in the wilderness, that there are evasive victories in capturing gestures in words.
Even though his kitten as metaphor for poetry seems part of the problem, a regard for
otherness, for ways of understanding different points of view and experience, are exactly the
province of poetry. When Chaplins street kid grows up, hes probably not going to be a poet
because he will have been conditioned to fear it, to ridicule it, to misunderstand it.
A number of poets have written about the positive social effects of poetry. In Book 1
of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, William Carlos Williams wrote that It is difficult/ to
get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there
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(161-2). The fact that he was a medical doctor gives him some authority for making
generalizations about misery.
One only has to look at the way poetry is used in America to see that literary and pop
culture have found easy targets which, like most stereotypes, are hard to give up. Yet if we
examine how poetry is used by most of usat Weddings, funerals, after tragedies like 9-11,
after divorces and most unsettling life transitionswell realize that its power to console and
interpret is monumental. Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine, has written in an
essay called Poetry in a Visual Culture, that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so
that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we
more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy them (120). I have seen first
hand, from students and colleagues and friends, the power of poetry to transform us into more
thoughtful, more humane, and more generous people which to me are the criteria for living
more deeply, for inhabiting our lives fully.
Of course, there are readers and writers of poetry who are not shaken by its charms,
who despite reading large chunks of it will continue to be bitter, exclusive, derogatory, for
change in character is not so simple; it requires a native susceptibility, yet some of us may be
oblivious to what learning or knowledge has to offer. These people may become even more
crabbed and dark and cynical. Poetry magazine sponsored an exchange between poets
about whether poetry has a social function. Daisy Fried wrote that People who talk about
poetrys social utility often concentrate on content. They think, perhaps, that poetry Tells the
Truth, or Provides Solace. These notions make me queasy (298). For her, social function
seemed to center on politics and poetrys inability to make things happen; she wants to
separate content from explanations of why the poem is extraordinary. Of course, its
impossible to separate content from formor from any of poetrys strategies like tone,
understatement, obliqueness, metaphor, economy, or syntax--and Frieds queasiness seems to
come out of an implicit obligation as a poet to write socially significant poems. This would
feel claustrophobic to lyrical, confessional poets as if they were being asked to climb into a
time capsule with Robert Lowell and W. H. Auden, but the fear is groundless. Discoveries
about our own motivations and weaknesses and strengths can be just as personally edifying to
a reader as a meditation on free will or alienation. Major Jackson replied to Frieds comment
by saying Whether as a form of witness, as a medium which dignifies individual speech and
thought, as a repository of our cumulative experiences, or as a space where we purify
language, poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetrys
social value (299). Poetrys value is that it explores the human experience so that we
recognize ourselves more completely, that we understand more of why we did what we did,
and have a lozenge of language to chew on that gives off a sweetness with its beneficial
effects. Aside from all the stereotyping about poets and poetry, poets are people who
simultaneously live deeply in language and the human and natural worlds so that their
textures and rhythms, their nuances and needs illumine ours; they also inhabit and expand the
imagination in ways that assimilate and create experience so that we can understand and live
more fully.
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As an undergraduate I was wrong about the limits of psychology, and if I had gone
further into it then, I would have realized it. The psychologists are clearer about the value of
poetry than most poets are. Robert Caper, in his article What Is a Clinical Fact?, wrote that
psychoanalysts have a a sense of insecurity about whether or not we can even define in
words some of our most fundamental scientific notions, let alone communicate them to a
broader public, or even among ourselves. I don't believe that the solution to this sense of
insecurity lies in trying to make psychoanalysis more expressible in the scientific language
we have. I think we would do better to try to change the language of science into something
more psychoanalytic. At present only poets and artists are able to capture these kinds of
experiences so that they retain their meaning outside the context of the events immediately
surrounding them" (912). The real gift of both poetry and psychology is, finally, the
understanding of our own minds, our own hearts, with the language it uses to see itself.

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WORKS CITED
Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism, First Series. New York: Macmillan, 1902.
Bianchi, Martha Dickinson. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little,
1924.
Boorstin, Daniel. Democracy and its Discontents: Reflections on Everyday Democracy.
New York: Random House, 1974.
Caper, Robert. What Is a Clinical Fact? The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis
75 (1994): 903-912.
Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1978.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Ed. J. Shawcross. 2 vols. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1901.
Collins, Billy. Sailing Around the Room. New York: Random House, 2001
Crane, Hart. Chaplinesque. Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson.
New York: Oxford UP, 2000.
Dante, Alighieri. Letter to Can Grande Della Scala. Literary Criticism. Ed. Lionel
Trilling. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson.
Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1960.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Crack-Up. Ed. Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions,
1993.
Fried, Daisy. Exchange: Does Poetry Have a Social Function. Poetry 189 (2007): 297-
309.
Frost, Robert. The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1963.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. Ed. Seymour Gross and Rosalie
Murphy. New York: Norton, 1978.
Jackson, Major. Exchange: Does Poetry Have a Social Function. Poetry 189 (2007):
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297-309.
Le Guin, Ursula. The Winds Twelve Quarters. New York: Harper, 1975.
Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. Dir. Frank Capra Columbia, 1936.
Plath, Sylvia. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. New York: HarperCollins, 2000
---. Ion. Literary Criticism. Ed. Lionel Trilling. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1970.
---. The Republic. Literary Criticism. Ed. Lionel Trilling. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
Pollan, Michael. The Omnivores Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New
York: Penguin, 2006.
Robinson, Edwin Arlington. Sonnets. New York: Macmillan, 1928.
Shelley, Percy Byssche. Shelleys Defense of Poetry. Ed. Albert S. Cook. Boston: Ginn &
Company, 1891.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1954.
Vendler, Helen. Poems, Poets, Poetry. 2
nd
ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2002.
Williams, William Carlos. Pictures from Brueghel. New York: New Directions, 1962.
Wiman, Christian. Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. Port Townsend: Coppe
Canyon, 2007.
Winegardner, Mark, Keegans Load, New Stories from the South: The Years Best,
2003. Ed. by Shannon Ravenel. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2003.
Woods, Ralph. A Treasury of the Familiar. New York: Macmillan, 1943.

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How Dangerous is Digital Literature?
Felix Nicolau, Ph. D.,
Associate professor,
Hyperion University,
Bucharest, Romania

As a consequence of time getting more and more compressed, the future of literature
should belong to shorter species, namely poetry. If this proves true, a prominent attention
must be paid to digital poetry, for instance SMS-poetry. One of the basic principles of this
new type of creation is mixing and capsizing the lines of a poem, the invitation addressed to
the reader to take part in reshaping the structure of a poem. Forget about the classical
stereotypy regarding the immutable, geometrical structure of a poem. To exist digital means
to customize and manually reinstall the data of the poem.
After the first wave of theorists and authors of digital literature, we cannot insist
anylonger on the dramatic differences between the medium of publishing. The sheet of paper
and the monitor are basically the same. What really matters is the new facility the virtual
space offers to the writers. Exactly like forwarding or back-streaming a movie, the reader of
digital literature has the possibility to break the strict chronology and the rhythm of a text.
And this is only about the horizontal axis. But there are also the vertical and the oblique axes.
Basically, literature assumes lots of characteristics specific to video games. It is sufficient to
place the cursor on a node and immediately a picture or a graph will pop up announcing the
content which is to be accessed. Reading becomes this way not only interactive, but
spectacular, imagistic, too.

The toxic pleasure
Maybe the archetypes of digital literature were The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy. Gentleman, by Lawrence Sterne, and Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce. The former
belongs to the 18
th
century, the latter to the 20
th
one. Sterne envisaged the narrative
playfulness. He interrupted the narrative flow at will, dropped and resumed plot lines in a
manner that could seem whimsical. I was always amazed in front of this avanguardist
courage. Much in the same fashion, James Joyce stated that he built his novel after the logics
of dream. |Finnegans Wake would represent the nocturnal life, which ought to go berserk,
compared to the diurnal cycle of human activities. Actually, the 20
th
century author painfully
strove to defend his creation, if we compare him with his more relaxed foil in the 18
th

century. This shows that the temporal advancement doesnt coincide all the time with the
advancement of freeing the mind of prejudices.
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Jean Baudrillards suspicion, not to say awe, as to the virtual reality, has something in
common with the medieval witch hunting. Of course, the radical disillusion spoken about in
The Perfect Crime lures from the flashy screens of computers and of course simulacra
pervade our world progressively. But is not literature in itself an illusion that has been
fighting reality for centuries?
On the other hand, Pierre Lvys radical slicing of the knot by annihilating the
opposition between the real and the virtual, in his book Quest-ce que le virtuel, proves a far-
fetched levelling optimism. Not only these two environments are different, but they can
evolve such isolation that the virtual virtualizes itself up to the point where we reach a second
degree of potentiality. N. Katherine Hayles signalled this tendency in How We Became
Posthuman. The emerging issue is whether this transcending process is a negative one or not.
This virtualization to a second degree of the already virtual (in Ryan, 39) is so unsettling
only because it pushes Platos and Aristotles ideatic scaffolds one step further. How can one
get absorbed into virtual depends I think on the degree of intelligence and imagination.
Virtual can function as prosthesis for diminished intelligence and imagination. But Aristotle
in his Poetics indicated that we are attracted to the fictional world especially because it is
different from the real one. The fact that the contemporary human beings are not able to tell
fiction from reality, equates with them having no more an aesthetic sense. Taking virtual for
granted betrays a blatant misunderstanding of the condition of the game. Mimesis evolves
into fetishism.

Repetition is not necessarily boring
On the other hand, in postmodernist era the Freudian principle of pleasure overwhelmed
the opposing principle of reality. Pleasure is lived at maximum following a suicidal drive.
Virtual is no longer something else, as Susanne K. Langer put it in Feeling and Form (1953),
but it has become the ubiquitous and all-engulfing reality.
Digital literature, through its branched or even rhizoid structure of narration fights
exactly these intoxicating ways of approaching the virtual. When the readers are supposed to
cross nodes and choose pathways across, not along, a non-linear plot, the reading for
jouissance, as Roland Barthes called it, dwindles. To read means, in these conditions, to
select and reorganize. In order to construct a feasible literary work, the reader-as-an-author
has to move back and forth, up and down over the narrative chart. Of course, these intricacies
involve rationality, taste and self-awareness. That is why Gilles Deleuzes concept of
complex repetition excludes boredom. One can create better by resuming things already
mentioned. Actually, the notion of the refrain (or ritournelle) as formulated by Guattari and
Deleuze, reinvents the musical and pondering qualities of the Medieval Ages and the
Renaissance rhythms. The science of distinguishing new sounds by playing the same key
over and over again.
David Ciccoricco quotes Rimmon-Kennans essay The Paradoxical Status of
Repetition (1980), with the view of demonstrating the complexity and usefulness of
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readjusting data by means of repetition: Paradox 1. Repetition is present everywhere and
nowhere; Paradox 2. Constructive repetition emphasizes sameness; Paradox 3: The first time
is already a repetition, and repetition is already the first time(Reading Network Fiction, 55).
Without any doubt, repetition plays a significant role only in digital literature. The so-
called paradoxes are shocking only for the avalanche-like Western culture. Otherwise,
repetition means besieging sense, that is profound investigation and deeper insight. Of
course, before Deleuzes and Derridas considerations on repetition there was Nietzsches
doctrine of ever-lasting recurrence. It is mainly what David Ciccoricco calls the time and
time again of network fiction (3). Which is obviously different from the modernist
imperative: make it new! And even more disrupted from the postmodernist recycling of
myths, happenings, and characters. And this because in network fiction the principle of
repetition is intimately linked to relaunching the interpretation of the same literary work and
not to parodying or demythologizing a whole culture. This collaborative composition
envisaging the sense of immersion in an interactive text (Ciccoricco, 13) is much more a
paradigmatic than a syntagmatic one.
Anarchy or inventivity?
It has become a common place that fact that digital literature is to be read in leaps and
jumps. While admitting that network fictions are emergent and recombinatory (Ciccoricco,
7), like Marc Saportas Composition No. 1 (1962), where the box of narration meant 150
loose and unnumbered pages, some theorists warn about the lack of hierarchy in this literary
anarchic work. So, what would be the principle of composition of this art? In David
Ciccoriccos vision, the hypertext documents could be arranged in three main categories:
axial, arborescent, and networked (5). The first two ones are more hierarchical on account
of the main axis supporting their plots. The networked ones, being disposed into a system of
nodes without a dominant axis are freer and more anarchic. Advancing the concept of
rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus, 1987, Deleuze and Guattari recognized also the
heterogeneity of digital literature.
Heterogeneity doesnt mean lack of structure. The readers build their own structure of a
book and this one is only a visage of the multi-layered multi-faade rhizoid structure of the
network fiction. Of course, some readers will assemble a better structure than others, in
conformity with their cultural skills. The text becomes thus plurivalent, weaker or stronger, in
function of the quality of its players. A puzzle with many final images. Is this a simulacrum
or an opera aperta? What if the reality has come to be the simulacrum of the virtual? Maybe it
does not count that much. Maybe more important is for a book to incentivize the readers,
irrespective of the technical strategies involved. Otherwise, we should take for granted Dorris
Lessings piece of advice: when a books pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to
the reader as it is to the author then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had
its day, and start again on something new (The Golden Notebook, 21).

Key words: puzzle, node, rhizome, structure, virtual.
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How Dangerous Is Digital Literature?
The alarm signal was pulled by Jean Baudrillard who warned about the greedy nature of
the virtual. We have the right this prophecy, or, at least not to panic for the time being. The
virtual is dangerous for those who use it in mediocre activities. Thus, if we consider the
Gilles Deleuzes concept of complex repetition, digital literature can be apprehended as a
stimulus for a profound reading. The liberty to choose the narrative itinerary spurs the
cultural responsibility and enhances the capacity of voyaging across the literary labyrinth. In
order to generate such a performance, we need an initiated reader, able to read in a creative
manner, as a reader-author

Works cited:
Ciccoricco, David. Reading Network Fiction. 1973. Copyright 2007. The University of
Alabama Press, USA.
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. 2007. Harper Perennial. 77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
London, U.K.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality. 2001. The Johns Hopkins University Press,
USA.

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''The Welsh-poppy flame of the sun''
A Tribute to Raymond Garlick (1926 - 2011 )
Byron Beynon

Raymond Garlick, who died in Cardiff on March 19
th
was an important and influential
figure in support of Wales and Welsh writing in English. Significant achievements as poet ,
editor, critic,political campaigner and teacher,the last time I spoke to him was in March 2010
when he telephoned me about an article I had written on the letters he had received from R S
Thomas.I was a teenager when he tutored me at Trinity College, Carmarthen, he introduced
me to the works of David Jones, Idris Davies, Glyn Jones, R S Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Alun
Lewis, John Ormond and Leslie Norris; listening to him speak about these writers was an
inspirational and illuminating experience. I will miss the conversations and meetings we had
over the years at his flat off College Road (along with some meetings in London, Cardiff and
Swansea) as well as receiving his letters and cards (I have over a hundred) the earliest dating
back to 1978. His fascinating recollections of other writers such as Dylan Thomas, whom he
met a month or so before his death in 1953, and who he described to me as gentle, modest,
humble, a dedicated poet, or when in 1978 RS Thomas stayed with him for a couple of days,
and gave a superb reading to an audience of perhaps 300 in the new town library. He also
spoke of Roy Campbell's poetry as having a stronger influence on his own apprentice efforts
than anybody else's. Garlick was impressed by Campbell's exact craftsmanship, his striking
imagery, the almost crystalline quality of his verse.
He was conscious of how fortunate he had been to have known two major writers (RS
Thomas and John Cowper Powys) and been enriched by their friendship and was aware of the
strange coincidence that a book by each of them (The Stones of the Field and Obstinate
Cymric) was published a short distance from where he lived in Carmarthen , at Keidrych
Rhys's Druid Press in Lammas Street. He hoped one day that a plaque would be put up to
commemorate the Druid Press, adding that not every town sees the launch of a book by two
great writers. Garlick was fascinated by the shape and appearance of letters, words,
handwriting, carved and engraved inscriptions, samplers, alphabets, so it came as no surprise
that the cover image of his Collected Poems was an alphabet by Eric Gill, and carved by
Lawrence Cribb. I was with him in 1987 when a phone call from his publisher informed him
that the book was ready for him to collect at their office in Carmarthen.
As a child growing up in north-west London he spent holiday visits at his grandparents'
house in the village of Deganwy, it was there that a sense of place and freedom was
awakened in him. It eventually brought about a commitment towards Wales, London
suburbia was not for him. At eighteen his dream of attending Bangor University was realised.
There he was able to enjoy not only the north Wales landscape but he also met such
distinguished men as Sir Emrys Evans, Sir Ifor Williams whose life's work was the editing of
early Welsh poetry, and Sir Edward Lloyd. New friendships therefore, and later on teaching
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appointments at Pembroke Dock and in 1954 at Blaenau Ffestiniog brought fresh stimuli to
his writing and enabled him to meet writers of the calibre of Roland Mathias and John
Cowper Powys.
In 1949, still only twenty-three, with no Arts Council funding, he became one of the
founding editors of Dock Leaves (later renamed The Anglo-Welsh Review). The 1960s saw
him teaching in the Netherlands, again the experience brought a new dimension to his poetry,
it also brought further opportunities to travel in Europe. By 1967 he decided the time was
right to return to Wales and he eventually became Principal Lecturer in Welsh Studies at
Trinity College Carmarthen. He was also to edit the anthology Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1480-
1980 with Roland Mathias.
Reading through his poems gives one a sense of pleasure; the elegance of form, the
style and structure are all there, richly tuned words, skilfully conducted. A man of elegant
qualities and skills who played a central role in the advancement of Welsh literature in
English.

It was a privilege to have met him, and like many others I was fortunate to have known
him. I will let Raymond have the final words - from his poem August Country:

That's what Wales was, for me
as a child, an Edward Thomas land
of holidays, the blood's tree
warm with nightingales; the span of sand
a fortnight in year's infinity.

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For further reading by Raymond Garlick:
A Sense of Europe (Gomer 1968)
A Sense of Time (Gomer 1972)
Incense (Gomer 1976)
Collected Poems (1946-1986) (Gomer 1987)
Travel Notes (Gomer 1992)

R.S. Thomas: Letters to Raymond Garlick 1951 1999 (Gomer 2009)
An Introduction to Anglo-Welsh Literature (University of Wales Press 1970)
Ed. with Roland Mathias, Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1480 1980 (Seren 1984)
Raymond Garlick by Don Dale-Jones Writers of Wales Series (University of Wales Press
1996)
Optimism and Life-force: an Interview with Raymond Garlick (Roundyhouse Issue 15
December 2004)
Anglo-Welsh Literature by Raymond Garlick (Alun Books) republished in Roundyhouse
Issue 15

BOOK
REVIEWS

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Book review of Al Becks Curiositys Cushion
by Pradeep chaswal

Curiositys Cushion
Al Beck
Bookdogger Press 2010
ISBN 978-0-934852-85-2
192 pages, Price- $ 17.00
Curiositys Cushion is book no. 16 by popular poet, academician, curriculum
developer, professional American Folksinger and Korean War veteran Al Beck, who resides
in Monroe City, MO. A serious glance at the book makes the reader realize aesthetic power
of the book. The title Curiositys Cushion is suggestive and symbolic. It is an established fact
that one learns new things by curiosity and Al Beck is no exception. He declares My interest
in life evolved from a particular aspect of character. And that happens to be CURIOSITY
(A Final Autobiographitti 189). Curiositys Cushion is an extended intellectual debate
about learning and sharing the experiences of learning.
Structurally the book may be divided into four parts: (i) Poetry (free verse, tanka,
haiku, sonnets, experimental poetry and so on), (ii) Drawings, (iii) Essays, and (iv)
Phhototechnographics by Carmen Federowich. The book has epical undertones. Following
the epical style the poet starts the book with a prologue. Als love for nature is explicit and
philosophic:
We are Natures physical song.
May we share it with new, bountiful
fresh fruit and harmonious style. (In Retrospect 8)
Al has used humor, irony, satire, sarcasm, personification, and even elements of
surprise to mesmerize the reader. His portrayal of nature, external as well as internal, is
noteworthy. He is a philosopher poet. In Philoso-Fun, he says:
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Pull it out of lifes
sprying-pan and swing into
the fire of desire. (11)
Al has captivating lyrical powers at his command. He makes use of Greek method of
Chorus in Thats That song lyrics, The Empty Life song lyrics and Chew, Chew,
Chew song lyrics. In Thats That song lyrics, he sings in a reflective tone:
No, Ive never worn a silly mask
Im quite glad you happened to ask
But I have to preen to become so mean
Lifes been such a godless task
And thats that; yep, thats that (14)
Wit comes naturally to Al as leaves come to trees. He speaks wittily:
A long time ago
Someone once asked me
Whats Chemistrys
connection to Humanity?
I responded with
an inquiry of my own:
Are you searching for a key
to unlock creativity or insanity? (Thats That song lyrics 16)
Experience of life, literature and teaching has given Al an intellectual depth and
capacity to look deeper into the happenings in and around. In the present day world where
life is full of cut throat competition and self evaluation is mandatory, Al speaks in an
inspirational tone:
Lets not worry if our ideas arent working

. . . figure out what weve been shirking (The Empty Life song lyrics 23)
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Modern life is full of hustle and bustle. Al provides the key how to remain stress free.
It is humour which is the key to remain stress free. He opines:
Those who carry a
mental overload marry
Mrs. Discommode (The Empty Life song lyrics 25)
Al emphasizes that the right method of learning is the need of hour. He observes:
Learning is a home
where new ideas expose
through many windows (New Learning & Old Burning 34)
The poet is not satisfied with the present system of education and suggests constructive
and innovative changes:
In Education rigid stuff happens
if we dont deal with it.
New Weltanschauung dies awkwardly
in society s mental closet system.

Like any kind of muscle
inventive thinking needs exercise
or sure-fire it will atrophy.

Dissing dynamic ideas,
certain academic leaders
preserve a parochial pace.
Such a staid strategic attitude
ignores human creative power.

This is a fatal flaw
In civilizations future. (Wearing Heartaches Helmet 42)
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The poet portrays the present so-called intelligentsia in an ironic tone:
Gifted intellects
grow badly in shallow pots;
roots are tied in knots. (Wearing Heartaches Helmet 48)
As a mature educator he declares:
An ideal educator is
an inspirational catalyst
for futures flow development. (Wearing Heartaches Helmet 51)
In my opinion Al is a magician poet who leaves his reader spellbound. His sonnets
have the lyrical power of Wyatt. His poems are fresh and soothing. Portrayal of poli-goon
testifies to Als merit as a satirist of contemporary scene:
A gross poli-goon
always delights in howling
nonsense at the moon. (Reasonable Advice 126)
Al presents beautiful and unique comparisons. In Understanding Emerges he
observes:
A gentle critic,
like my loyal elderly cat,
will keep me awake at night (83)
Curiositys Cushion is a fine presentation of experiments carried out by Al. Poems
entitled Poems Design Sonnet-like and Als Sconnet are experimental in content and
style.
Poems like Worlds Game Is Wounded, Difficult Early Childhood, Hospital
Patients Distress, Disconnection, Time to Lose, and Heartless Haiku are written in
negative mood but are not depressing, rather they reflect poets reflection and observations
based on his experience about the dark side of Life. I feel that the poems contained in
Curiositys Cushion will inspire the readers to move in the direction of truth and light.
Loving, entertaining and instructive touch of his poetry is like a whiff of fresh air.
Curiositys Cushion will prove useful and of great interest for teachers, educators, planners of
syllabi, students, and lovers of poetry.

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Book Review of Millie Niss City Bird : Selected Poems 1991-2009
By Joel Weishaus

City Bird : Selected Poems 1991-2009
Millie Niss
Edited by Martha Deed
BlazeVOX Books 2010.
ISBN 978-1-60964-008-8.
157 Pages.
City Bird is a collection of poems, notes, letters and drawings by a brilliant woman
who died two years ago at age 36. Ironically, she didnt die from the systemic disease that
haunted her for many years, but from hospital-acquired infections following a bout of Swine
Flu. (www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/Poetry/city-bird-selected-poems-1991-2009-by-
millie-niss-edited-by-martha-deed-192.)

The disease that had become a daily struggle to Millie Niss was Behcets Syndrome,
named after Turkish dermatologist, professor and writer, Hulusi Behet (18891948). A
systemic inflammation of the blood vessels that can be fatal, Niss lived with it during years of
writing, teaching, and creating works of digital art, sometimes in collaboration with her
psychologist mother.
After Nisss death, in 2009, Martha Deed put together the plethora manuscripts of
poems, drawings, emails, and even a few letters into a book which seems to inhabit the ghost
of her daughter. In turn, even though she had attended school in France, and traveled in
England, the body of work in City Bird seems to be inhabited by the spirit of New York, the
city in which Nisss life was centered.
I suggest that all good poetry is in some sense regional, as you have to know where you
are, whats around you and beneath your feet, before setting out on the journey on which the
poem takes both writer and reader.
As I read City Bird, I was reminded of the New York School of Poetry of the late
1950s and the 1960s, its urban reportage, flat and gray as that citys streets. An epitome of
Modernism, one of its most celebrated writers, Frank OHara, said about his own poems, I
dont think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else, they are
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just there in whatever form I can find them. (The New American Poetry. Donald M. Allen,
Editor. Grove Press, New York, 1960. 419).
City Bird is modeled into highly literate, sometimes political, humorous, and in some
instances surrealistic observations. For example, The Epidemic begins:
It was the peak days of the Acquired Verbal Deficiency Syndrome
And the semioticians waiting room was full of patients
With rapidly falling signifier counts
Soon they would be ostracized
Intimate verbal contact was required to pass the virus but rumor had it
That mere sexual intercourse was enough(89).
Here we can see Nisss wicked imagination coping with her devastating illness. In the
touching coming-of-age poem, Do You Remember, Niss presents a portrait of a young
woman who, searching for romance, is ruefully disappointed---
Do you remember how you turned away from me
Each time you undressed in a bed-and-breakfast
That summer we spent together in England?
In retrospect, she sees that
What seemed the charming modesty of youth
Turned out to be the first sprouting of your gay identity
Which could not look at me and see both
A lover and a woman. (Do You Remember. 82).
Taking another, less personal more political and didactic course is An Ecological
Dilemma, which begins in Bangladesh, where honey hunting is a lucrative trade that
consists in wandering / barefoot / through the jungle / in search of honeycombs. However,
its a dangerous business, because of wild tigers who eat half a dozen honey hunters every
year.
In consequence, this prompts calls to limit the tiger population / one of the few
healthy groups of wild tigers / in the world.
As with wolves in the Western United States, who, when the winter is hard and wild
game scarce, may attack domestic animals; or bears whose habitat is invaded by campers
who leave easily-snatched food around---Niss neatly concludes with environmentalisms
human/wildlife dilemma:
people or tigers:
a hard choice
shaking the basis
of environmentalism. (An Ecological Dilemma. 87).
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It is only a hard choice because most humans have lost sight that they are a member of
one species in the vast network of the living world, and that understandinge.g., science and
philosophyconfers more responsibility toward it, not just more opportunity to exploit it.
This seems to me the shaky basis of our present environmentalism at its self-destructive
anthropocentric core.
Even as Bangladesh (and Indian) tigers await their Final Solution, a poem titled The
Snail reminds me of Kafkas humorously nightmarish short stories. Here Niss describes a
snail, curled in / With no antennae to observe the world, awaiting, (t)he SS men who are
coming to take you away / To a death camp.
We are all suspect and you do not know
Which one of us will give the whispered word
Which seals your fate.
With Niss chillingly accurate, highly-functional dark humor afoot, we learn we are at
a gathering of the sick and their supporters, where (y)ou feel cornered as you are
surrounded / By women who liken you to their schizophrenic sons.
Stony-faced you are persuaded to try a canape
It is after all a cocktail reception
But you see uniforms everywhere
And the Gestapo hide behind the cash bar. (The Snail. 96).
The snail has metamorphosed into the poet, revealing herself to us in the way she has
of covering her tracks in order to open a larger, non-ego-oriented terrain.
For those giving us easy answers to complex problems, and who legislate policies that
ask no sacrifice from themselves, at the end of her poem, Medical Exam, Niss challenges:
heaven charges rent
hell is still free
make your choice now (102).
Millie Niss was an urban poet who knew she contained the ancient genes of wild
creatures. Thus, the title, City Bird, was well-chosen, as its signifies someone, who even in
a life tragically shortened by illness, flew free.

E- INTERVIEWS

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An E-Interview with Hugh Fox
(Interviewed by Pradeep Chaswal)

(Hugh Fox is Professor Emeritus from Michigan State University, archaeologist, editor,
writer, and iconic poet of international fame. He is located in East Lansing, MIchigan right in
the mid-west of the U.S., next to Lake Michigan. He has 120 books published. Peter Berg has
set up a SPECIAL COLLECTION of the work of Hugh Fox in the Michigan state University
Library. Born in Chicago, 1932,polio at age 5,cured with new pre-Saulk experimental
medicine,childhood immersed in opera, violin, piano, musical composition, art by his ex-
violinist-turned-M.D. father, and frustrated actress mother, then 3 years of pre-med and a
year of Medicine, dropped out of medical school and got a B.S. (Hum.) and M.A.(English)
from Loyola U.in Chicago, first trip to Paris, London, Florence, Rome, Amsterdam, etc., then
a Ph.D. in American Literature from the U. of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign).Married Peruvian
poet Lucia Ungaro de Zevallos. Prof. of American Literature, Loyola University in Los
Angeles (now Loyola Marymount University) , 1958-1968,Professor in the Department of
American Thought and Language, Michigan State University (1968-1999) now retired,
Professor Emeritus. Fulbright Professor of American Studies/Literature, U. of Hermosillo,
Mexico, 1961, U. Catlica and Institto Pedaggico, Caracas, 1964-1966, U. of
Florianpolis, Brazil, 1978-1980. Married Maria Bernadete Costa M.D. 1 yr. studying Lt.
Am. culture at Mendoza Foundation (Caracas) with Mariano Picon-Salas.One year in
Valencia, Spain. Organization of American States Grant to study Latin American
Studies/Argentinian Literature, U. of Buenos Aires, 1971. John Carter Brown Library
Fellowship, Brown U. , 1968 (Studies in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish
economics and avant-garde literature). OAS grant as archaeologist, Atacama Desert, Chile,
1986.Lectures in Spain and Portugal 1975-76. Founder and Board of Directors member of
COSMEP, the International Organization of Independent Publishers, from 1968 until its
death in 1996. Editor of Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry,
1968-1995. Latin American editor of Western World Review & North American Review
during 60s. Former contributing reviewer on Smith/ Pulpsmith, Choice etc. currently
contributing reviewer to SPR and SMR.120 books published, the most recent Defiance
(Higganum Hill Press, 2007) (poetry), Finalmente/Finally (Solo Press, 2007) (poetry),
Opening the Door to French Film (World Audience, 2007) , Rediscovering America (World
Audience, 2009) (archaeology), Alex (poetry chapbook, Rubicon Press), Peace/LaPaix
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(Higganum Hill,2008, another poetry chapbook), The Collected Poetry (World Audience,
2008...540 pages), Icehouse & The Thirteen Keys to Talmud (Crossing Chaos Press in
London, Ontario. A novella and sci fi novel, 2009), Revoir (s.stories, All Things that Matter
Press, 2009), Gesangvoll/Songful (Pudding House Chapbook Series,2010), Icehouse
&Thirteen Keys to Talmud (Crossing Chaos Press, 2010), Depths and Dragons (Skylight
Press in England, 2011), In the Beginning (Muse It Up in Canada,2011), Epilogue (Luminis
Press, 2011), etc. etc. etc.)

1. As the focus is on technological and management studies and the stream of
humanities is considered as traditional one in contemporary society, how do you rate
the future of Poetry? Is it bleak or bright?
I think there is less and less concentration in the schools and homes on any kind of high
culture, not just poetry, but classical music, painting, whatever. What I am surrounded by on
the campus at Michigan State and in the town of East Lansing, Michigan, as well as when I'm
in Boston or Chicago or Brazil or anywhere else, is everyone walking around writing
messages or talking on phones or working on computerization. Everything is become tech-
oriented, and although I listen to classical music all day every day (WKAR radio from
Michigan State University), there isn't any other music station that has anything on but pop
crap...kind of hick-stuff, worse than classic jazz, kind of a step back into pop nothing. It's the
same way in university libraries. Everything is portable (or library) computers. History
vanishes, the "real" world vanishes, it's all trivialization.

2. How poetry took birth in you?
My father was an M.D., but had really wanted to be a violinist. My mother was a secretary
but was an actress at heart. I was an only child (in Chicago) and they started me off with
violin lessons at age 6. With P. Marinus Paulson, not a famous composer, but a great
composer. He taught me violin at the Curtiss Music School in Chicago, and showed me how
to compose music on a piano, chords, melodies, formats. Then my parents heard about
Zerlina Mulhman Metzger from Austria, an opera teacher on the north side of Chicago and I
started going up there twice a week for opera classes. She had a group called THE ALL
CHILDRENS' GRAND OPERA, and when the Metropolitan Opera came to town and they
needed children for childrens' choruses in CARMEN and BORIS GODUNOV, we were those
choruses. The stage doorman got to know me and said "Fox, any time you want to come in to
see anything, I'll let you in free...," so I never missed a ballet, a symphony concert, a play,
ANYTHING at the Civic Opera Class. Also I was taken to the Art Institute full time and sent
to schools run by Irish nuns from Ireland who were maniacally involved with
literature/poetry. Then I went to Leo High School and again the Irish brothers from Ireland
were literature-centered. So I was immersed in the arts and ended up editor of the high school
newspaper, started writing, writing, writing...eventually got a B.A. and M.A. in English from
Loyola U. in Chicago, a Ph.D. in English from the U. of Illinois and got involved with the
whole writing world in the U.S. and abroad.

3. How far society affects the creative process of a poet?
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The influence of the world around me is of primary importance. Luckily I still maintain
contact with lots and lots of poets and I've been blessed by having contact with magazines
like THE MUSE. I get poems accepted almost every day. And I've had five novels come out
in the last three months. I'm dying from cancer so I'm not writing anything more than poetry
right now, but I always seem to find places out there interested in my work.

4. What are your views on contemporary experimental poetry?

I like it. Friends of my like Glenna Luschei and Richard Kostelanetz are totally involved with
experimentation. Never a simple, straight poem. And I have fun with them. The same with
Lynn Strongin in Canada. Always new doors to open, new word-games to play. I myself
sometimes play the same games, sometimes go back to Bukowskian straightforewardness.
Variableness. Keeps the game going.
5. What is the social relevance of poetry in the contemporary milieu of globalization and
technology?
Poetry is more relevant today than it has ever been, because so much of the human soul has
been totally secularized and nothing could be worse than to completely blank out the forests
and winds and personal histories, the families, lives, futures, pasts, the beauties that surround
us everywhere and the horrors that also confront us, which is the essence of the poetic vision.

6.What are your views on contemporary scenario of poetry?
Actually the contemporary scenario is slowly becoming more and more universal. Instead of
being national, local, confined, now, thanks to computerization, skype and all the rest, slowly
the world is becoming poetically one, not only sharing visions and languages, religions, past
cultures, all moving toward a more and more visionary future;.
7. Would you please throw light on your latest book of poetry?
In my latest book of poetry (REINSPIRITING published by Mad Hat press in North
Carolina) I have become more totally-visioned than ever. Seventy-nine, dying (slowly) from
cancer, seeing life in a total context full time. No more nastiness, selfishness, trying to push
anyone or anything around, my daughter just told me the other day "I've never seen anyone in
the world easier to get along with." Because I live full-time aware of the transience of
everything around me, my voices inside me saying "Enjoy, enjoy while you can, all the
streets and houses, hills and rivers, faces, friends, children, grandchildren, sunrises and
sunsets, because you are about to sunset yourself."
8. Would you like to share with the readers some important incident or experience in
your life?
Perhaps the most important experience in my life was when my parents enrolled me in THE
ALL CHILDRENS' GRAND OPERA in Chicago. Run by Zerlina Muhlman Metzer from
Vienna. Singing classes twice a week for years and years, beginning when I was about ten
years old. And when the Metropolitan Opera from New York would come to Chicago and
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perform at the Civic Opera House, when they put on an opera with a childrens' chorus like
CARMEN, our group would perform the chorus.
And the doorman at the Civic Opera House told me, after a year or so, "Fox, come and see
whatever you'd like, ballet, opera, symphony, plays, whatever...I'll let you in free...just stay
backstage and enjoy from the stage-side." So I was totally immersed in all the theatrical
arts....which gave the whole direction to my life.
9. What is your advice for the young poets?
Listen to your inner voices and connect them to your pens and notebooks or computers
(however you write), don't think that poetry is dead because it isn't. The world is filled with
new poets, new magazines, new audience. Poetry is the music of the soul and it hasn't been
killed by the Bytesville Monsters.

10. Your message for the poetry lovers and readers?
Don't let ANYTHING distract you from the inner voices that are still speaking about the
eternal values, purposes and visions of all of human history. Be NOW, be with it, listen to the
vision-words and never forget the visions that they are portraying for you.

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An E-Interview with Al Beck
(Interviewed by Pradeep Chaswal)

(Al Beck is a popular poet, academician, curriculum developer, professional American
Folksinger and Korean War veteran, who resides in Monroe City, MO. He is Professor
Emeritus at Culver-Stockton College. He continued to exhibit internationally as well as
regionally (1956- 2011 ) with diverse media including- Clay, Papercasting, Glass Fusion,
Photography, Printmaking, Painting/Assemblage. He has 17 books of poetry to his credit-
Gnomes & Poems - Lorien House Press, 1992; Sight Lines - Lorien House Press, 1996,
Songs From The Rainbow Worm - LHP, 1997, Beaucoup Haiku - Lorien House Press,
1999, God Is In The Glove Compartment, LHP, 2000, Survival Weapons, Lorien House
Press, 2001, Warm Verse, Cold Turkey - LHP, 2002, Rapping Paper, Mythic Thundermugs,
LHP, 2003, Conversations With Lizard's Bones and Wizard's Stones, Lorien House, 2003,
Lifepsychles, Lorien House Press, 2004, Beyond The Scars and Gripes, LHP, 2005,
Eclectricity, Lorien House Press, 2006, Carpe Needs A New Diem, 2007, Right Brain's
Bloomin' Again, 2008, Lessons From An Open Mind, 2009, Curiosity's Cushion, 2010, An
Awesome Possum Shares Wild Wisdom, 2011. He has published numerous articles, poems
and drawings in national and international Journals and magazines.)

1. At which age you wrote your first poem? Were there any incidents in your life that
made you want to write?
There are a number of recollections which might be the answer to your question.
First, I was a very young lad as I began to enjoy the actual sounds of words. When I first
discovered the word BooHoo (for crying) I also remember making the words which also
sounded like it: Moo (cow) You (pointing a finger Do, Sue (a friend's name) Zoo (animals
lived there). And this kind of word-connection by sound was quite influential in my singing
songs as a child. I am certain I must have added a line or two...of my own to a popular
folksong...."Row-Row-Row-Your-Boat Then I'll Row some more...until I get to shore" And
by the time I was given my first guitar as a very young teenager, I already knew many songs
by heart because I was locked into enjoying rhyme. At this point in my life I have written
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over thirty songs of my own and have played the banjo (my more recent instrument over the
past 40 years) while singing my own songs.

2. Almost all your poems are published with a drawing why is it so?
The thin line between my day-drawing and daydreaming leaves little else to be desired. Its
an active grooves depth of inspiration which does have its admitted limitations.

3. How will you define the creative and poetic process in you?
The image will tell you what it wants to be. By thinking too much, an artistic adventure
becomes an intellectual exercise. There is a re-emerging consciousness in art of the mystical
connection between the Visceral and the Visual. It transcends Reason and touches Aesthetics
at its primordial roots. It is true that once we become less judgmental, our sense of
assessment rises quickly. Then, as we move away from assessment, our ability to discern
develops more keenly. And as our discernment is left behind, we inevitably find our deepest
strength in curiosity. A person may have certain unique sensations through primary senses -
feelings which, in fact, exist outside of conscious events. This phenomenon has often been
described as "reality" beyond reason. Art is a vehicle for this powerful dimension of human
experience. The paradox is that Art is also an elusive and fragile truth.

4. Apart from being a poet you are also an artist, teacher and a curriculum developer.
What are your views on the role of poetry in curriculum?
There is so much more to the learning process that we have not dealt with in our school
systems (Developing Curiosity, Inspiring Creativity, Introducing the Language of Innovation,
and so much more connection to the right brain than merely stuffing information into their
brains). In the 50 years I taught on the High School and College levels, I was the odd fellow
giving students an out-of-the-box approach to pedagogy. Growing up is a very challenging
life-activity. The introduction of Poetry into the character of human communication must
begin
even before pre-school programs have lured young people into the learning process.
Folksongs, (I am an American Folksinger, by the way) and other word-fun must be
introduced
as soon as communication is connected. The role and responsibility of the poet in the world
today must reach into a bag of entertainment and help open up the young mind to this mental
game.
5. Which poet you have liked the most? Why?
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Your question is a bit too tight for a fair response. There are a few poets which inspire and
entertain me: Here they are....
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Shakespeare, Robert Burns, Mary Oliver, Lord Alfred
Tennyson, Anne Sexton, John Ciardi, Billy Collins, Edward Lear, E.E. Cummings, Noel
Coward, Robert Bly, Emily Dickinson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert
Frost, Shel Silverstein, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Kenneth Koch, and I could go
on for another dozen or more. Every poet I have mentioned is a unique and entertaining artist.
He or She has a very special facet of inspiring the reader (me). We begin to taste life together
in his/her comfortable, yet
creative voice. I continue to look forward to more poetic "friends" even now

6. What was your first favourite book?
However, I do remember the thick, slick pages with both drawings (in color) and verses
which accompanied them. I spent many hours flipping through it.
BUT, I cannot remember the name of the fun-filled book. Sorry, but Age does sometime run
away from Recollection.

7. According to you what is the role and responsibility of poet in the present day world?
There is so much more to the learning process that we have not dealt with in our school
systems (Developing Curiosity, Inspiring Creativity, Introducing the Language of Innovation,
and so much more connection to the right brain than merely stuffing information into their
brains). In the 50 years I taught on the High School and College levels, I was the odd fellow
giving students an out-of-the-box approach to pedagogy. Growing up is a very challenging
life-activity. The introduction of Poetry into the character of human communication must
begin
even before pre-school programs have lured young people into the learning process.
Folksongs, (I am an American Folksinger, by the way) and other word-fun must be
introduced
as soon as communication is connected. The role and responsibility of the poet in the world
today must reach into a bag of entertainment and help open up the young mind to this mental
game.

8. What advice you wish to give to the young poets?
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Imaginations power is essential to any young persons future success. Reaching into ones
dreams is only rewarding when both interdisciplinary and innovative activities are constantly
encouraged. The delusion of merely good grades for a post-graduation filled with lifes great
opportunities is an academic bias. Its learning misread.

9. Readers have observed that majority of your poems are full of humour and positive
energy. What is the inspiration behind it?
Being bright, while emotionally blind, is a living limbo of a different kind.
insight is a form of understanding where information is a blend of
acumen and inspiration.
All aspects of communication are alert, including intuition and insight.
Understanding must also include empathy and compassion.
Aesthetics is also an essential characteristic of wisdom. A forsaken
emotional focus can interfere with understanding.
The Friends of Understanding are: Entertain, Enlighten and Educate
(the 3-Es).
I have urged my students to have two thoughts as they focus on
their education program: the first is to "have fun" and the second
is to "work hard". It is essential that both of these continue inspiring
them during their entire lifetime.
Humour is an essential aspect of having fun. And Positive Energy
is essential for working hard. Every human being needs both of these
to feel (and be) successful

10. What message you wish to give our readers and poetry lovers?
THE HUMAN BEINGS THREE POWERS

The complexity of human connection to the earth evolves from the nature of their three
unique powers: Spiritual, Affective and Cognitive. Although these three often blend in
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positive as well as negative circumstances, each has its own characteristics and needs to be
equally addressed in the development of a more perfect human race. Each aspect of humanity
must be equally respected and the future of the species will have the opportunity to not only
survive but give life a richer, more effective meaning. The present situation on earth has
created some difficult and dangerous connections between these powers. Cognitive Science
tends to encourage an aspect of intelligence which focuses on Competition, Political Power
and Greed.
Affective Attitudes deal with Aesthetics, Creativity, and Collaboration. The nature of
Spiritual Power, ideally, should be bringing these two other human attitudes into a
relationship which permits the Brain to become a force of Reason, Resolution and
Restitution.

LIST OF
CONTRIBUTORS

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A. D. Winans is a native San Francisco poet, writer and photographer. His
work has appeared internationally and has been translated into eight languages. He is the
author of numerous books of poetry and prose. He edited and published Second Coming
magazine/press for 17 years. In 2002 a song poem of his was performed at New Yorks Alice
Tully Hall. In 2006 he was awarded a PEN National Josephine Miles award for excellence in
literature. In 2009 he was awarded a PEN Oakland Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2010
BOS Press published a 365-page book of his selected poems from 1970-2010.

dm Bogr (born in 1984) from Budapest, Hungary. He is currently about
to receive his MA in English Languge and Literature form Kroli University of Budapest. His
main concern is researching the works of Kurt Vonnegut and other (mostly American)
authors, he is a member of the Kurt Vonnegut Society. He writes poetry, chiefly haikus..
Translating literary works from and into Hungarian is also included in the scope of his
interest, and besides all these, he makes paintings, graphics, and mixed media works of art.
As of now his list of publications includes two studies on John Milton and Herman Melville
respectively. As far as poetry is concerned, the Hungarian journal NapKt published two of
his haikus, while a haibun of his appeared in the Newsletter of the Hungarian-Japanese
Friendship Society (MJBT).

Adrienne Wolfert (BA Barnard College, MFA Vermont ), has won many
prizes and awards for poetry in her lifetime. Her poetry books are "7Day World", "Natal
Fire", "Discovery of a Human Fossil", and "Songs of the Dybbuk", Her poems are recorded
in the , Library of Congress via William Meredith. She was an exchange AMERICAN
writer with Peredelkino, the Russian Writers Retreat. An editor of "Poet Lore" for many
years. Her poems are called poems of "stature and excellence" by Louis Untermeyer and
"energetic and striking" by William Matthews who edited '" Songs of the Dybbuk". She is
now editing and collecting another book. She taught writing at Fairlfield University and
Sacred Heart University, she also ran the Creative Dramatics Program for the School
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Volunteer Association of Bpt. CT. Right now her poetry is being performed by 2 actresses in
San Francisco
Dr. Alan Lindsay is the Chair of the English/Fine Arts/Foreign Languages
Department at NHTI--Concord's Community College. I taught for several years at Tamkang
University in Taiwan. I have an M.A. in Fiction Writing and a Ph.D. in English from The
University of Notre Dame; I've published the novel, A. (Red Hen press, 2004) and the story
"Idling" (in the collection "The Crucifix Is Down," Red Hen Press, 2005), and the book
"Death in the FUNhouse" (Peter Lang, 1994). My poems and stories have appeared in "New
Works Review," "Wired Arts" and other journals. I am a member of Granite Playwrights Ink.
Anca Vlasopolos is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Wayne
State University in Detroit, Michigan. She has published the award-winning novel The New
Bedford Samurai, the award-winning memoir No Return Address: A Memoir of
Displacement, a collection of poems, Penguins in a Warming World, three poetry chapbooks,
a detective novel, Missing Members, and over two hundred poems and short stories.
Nominated for the Pulitzer for The New Bedford Samurai and nominated several times for the
Pushcart Award in poetry and fiction. Associate editor of Corridors Magazine. Her website
has links to her work online. www.vlasopolos.com
April A. has been writing for almost five years, getting inspiration from various experiences
seen by the eyes of a thinker. The purpose of her creativity is urging people to see beyond the
bounds, to be themselves, to speak their minds loud, not to be afraid to differ from the crowd.
She creates to destroy. To destroy the naive beliefs. To destroy the stereotypes. April lives in
St. Petersburg at the moment and hopes to succeed further both as a poet and a songwriter.

Benjamin Myers, (Ph.D. from Washington University), is Associate Professor of
English at Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Benjamin Myers' first book
of poems, Elegy for Trains, won the 2011 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry from the
Oklahoma Center for the Book. His poems may be read in Measure, Ruminate, The Chiron
Review, The New Plains Review, and many other journals.
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Boghos L. Artinian is a physician in private practice in Beirut and has been
there since 1975. His first published poem is called "Pacing in the Tomb" and was published
in the Saudi Medical Journal, 1986. He also published two poems, titled "Rightly Foreseen"
and "Panspermia" in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 1987. Since then he has
published over fifty other poems in various journals.
Byron Beynon: Lives in Wales. His work has appeared in numerous
publications including The Seventh Quarry, the Independent, Quadrant (Australia), Landfall
(New Zealand), Planet, New Welsh Review, Poetry Ireland, Agenda, Wasafiri and English.
He has read his work at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Hay Festival, Cork (Ireland), The
Dylan Thomas Centre (Swansea) and the Swedenborg Hall, Bloomsbury, London.
He was involved with the Dylan Thomas Centre in co-ordinating the Wales' contribution to a
Young People's anthology entitled Fifty Strong published by Heinemann. He has been co-
editor of the poetry magazine, Roundyhouse. A sequence of his poems appeared in a Painters
and Poets exhibition in London, inspired by the work of Vincent Van Gogh. His most recent
collections include Cuffs published by Rack Press (2008) and Nocturne In Blue
published by Lapwing Publications. Some of his work is to be featured in a forthcoming
anthology Evan Walters: Moments of Vision published by Seren Books.
For further detail please see the Literature Wales website:
http://www.literaturewales.org/writers-of-wales/i/129541/desc/beynon-byron/
Carl Scharwath has been described as the "running poet" by bothThe Orlando
Sentinel and Lake Healthy Living Magazine. His interests include raising his daughter,
competitive running, sprint triathlons and taekwondo (he's a 2nd degree black belt). His work
appears all over the world in publications such as Paper Wasp (Australia), Structo (The UK),
Taj Mahal Review (India) and Abandoned Towers. He was also recently awarded Best in
Issue in Haiku Reality Magazine. His first short story was published last July in the
Birmingham Arts Journal. His favorite authors are Hermann Hesse and Edith Wharton.
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Carrie Allison is a writer in Independence, Missouri in the United States. Her
poetry and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of journals and magazines including I-70
Review, The Mid-America Poetry Review, and Kansas City Voices. Mid-America Press
published her chapbook of poetry Pointing Toward Home.

Chris Tanasescu is a Romanian poet, academic, critic, and translator whose work
has appeared in Romanian and international anthologies and publications. He is author of
four poetry collections and recipient of the International Library of Poetry Award (2001), and
the Ronald Gasparic Poetry Prize (1996) among other distinctions. His poetry performance /
action painting / rock band Margento won the Fringiest Event Award at Buxton Fringe (UK,
2005) and the Gold Disc in Romania (2008), and has released two multimedia CDs and a
concert movie; Tanasescu is currently a Fulbright Visiting Professor at San Diego State
University, California.
Christina Murphy is a poet from Huntington, West Virginia, U.S.A.
Christina Murphy's poetry appears in a number of anthologies and journals including, most
recently, ABJECTIVE, MiPOesias, A cappella Zoo, PANK, Word Riot, Splash of Red, Blue
Fifth Review, POOL: A Journal of Poetry, Caper Literary Journal, and Counterexample
Poetics. Her work has received two Editors Choice Awards and Special Mention for a
Pushcart Prize.

Dalal Sarnou is a university lecturer (at the English dept, Mostaganem
university) and a young academic researcher interested in postcolonial studies, Orientalism,
Feminism, Islamic feminism, CDA and DA, Arab women writings in particular. She has
already published two academic papers on Huda Barakat and Ahdaf Soueif, and has
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published a series of poems on electronic websites. Now, she is working on the perception of
the diasporic consciousness in the works of Arab American women writers.
Devreaux Baker has published three books of poetry including Light at the
Edge, Beyond the Circumstance of Sight and Red Willow People, Wild Ocean Press, San
Francisco, California. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a MacDowell Poetry
Fellowship, the Hawthornden Castle International Poetry Award, the Helene Wurlitzer
Writing Fellowship and three California Arts Council Awards to produce "Voyagers:
Original Student Writing for Public Radio". She has conducted writing workshops in the
United States, France, Scotland and Mexico. She is a 2011 Pushcart Prize for Poetry
nominee.
Felix Nicolau (born in 1970) is a Romanian associate professor, Ph. D. He
teaches English literature and Comparative literature at Hyperion University, in Bucharest.
So far he has published many books of poetry, literary criticism [Homo Imprudens, 2006,
Anticanonice (Anticanonicals), 2010 etc], and two novels [Tandru i rece (Tender and cool),
2007, and Pe mna femeilor (In Womens Hands), 2011]. He is a constant contributor to
various Romanian and international magazines.
Gale Acuff has had poems published in Ascent, Ohio Journal, Descant,
Adirondack Review, Worcester Review, Danse Macabre, Poem, Maryland Poetry Review,
South Carolina Review, Florida Review, South Dakota Review, Santa Barbara Review, and
many other journals. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse,
2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse,
2008). He has also taught university English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West
Bank, and currently teaches in Southwest University of Science and Technology, Mianyang,
Sichuan, China.
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June 2011
Hal O'Leary is an eighty-five year old veteran of WWII who has come to
realize that all wars are fought to enrich wealthy elite. As a Secular Humanist, and having
spent his life in the theatre he believes that it is only through the arts, poetry in particular, that
we are afforded an occasional glimpse into the otherwise incomprehensible. Hal has been
inducted into the Wheeling Hall of Fame and is the recent recipient of an Honorary Doctor
of Humane Letters degree from West Liberty University.
Hugh Fox is Professor Emeritus from Michigan State University,
archaeologist, editor, writer, and iconic poet of international fame. He is located in East
Lansing, MIchigan right in the mid-west of the U.S., next to Lake Michigan. He has 120
books published. Peter Berg has set up a SPECIAL COLLECTION of the work of Hugh Fox
in the Michigan state University Library. Born in Chicago, 1932,polio at age 5,cured with
new pre-Saulk experimental medicine,childhood immersed in opera, violin, piano, musical
composition, art by his ex-violinist-turned-M.D. father, and frustrated actress mother, then 3
years of pre-med and a year of Medicine, dropped out of medical school and got a B.S.
(Hum.) and M.A.(English) from Loyola U.in Chicago, first trip to Paris, London, Florence,
Rome, Amsterdam, etc., then a Ph.D. in American Literature from the U. of Illinois (Urbana-
Champaign).Married Peruvian poet Lucia Ungaro de Zevallos. Prof. of American Literature,
Loyola University in Los Angeles (now Loyola Marymount University) , 1958-
1968,Professor in the Department of American Thought and Language, Michigan State
University (1968-1999) now retired, Professor Emeritus. Fulbright Professor of American
Studies/Literature, U. of Hermosillo, Mexico, 1961, U. Catlica and Institto Pedaggico,
Caracas, 1964-1966, U. of Florianpolis, Brazil, 1978-1980. Married Maria Bernadete Costa
M.D. 1 yr. studying Lt. Am. culture at Mendoza Foundation (Caracas) with Mariano Picon-
Salas.One year in Valencia, Spain. Organization of American States Grant to study Latin
American Studies/Argentinian Literature, U. of Buenos Aires, 1971. John Carter Brown
Library Fellowship, Brown U., 1968 (Studies in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish
economics and avant-garde literature). OAS grant as archaeologist, Atacama Desert, Chile,
1986.Lectures in Spain and Portugal 1975-76. Founder and Board of Directors member of
COSMEP, the International Organization of Independent Publishers, from 1968 until its
death in 1996. Editor of Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry,
1968-1995. Latin American editor of Western World Review & North American Review
during 60s. Former contributing reviewer on Smith/ Pulpsmith, Choice etc. currently
contributing reviewer to SPR and SMR.120 books published, the most recent Defiance
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(Higganum Hill Press, 2007) (poetry), Finalmente/Finally (Solo Press, 2007) (poetry),
Opening the Door to French Film (World Audience, 2007) , Rediscovering America (World
Audience, 2009) (archaeology), Alex (poetry chapbook, Rubicon Press), Peace/LaPaix
(Higganum Hill,2008, another poetry chapbook), The Collected Poetry (World Audience,
2008...540 pages), Icehouse & The Thirteen Keys to Talmud (Crossing Chaos Press in
London, Ontario. A novella and sci fi novel, 2009), Revoir (s.stories, All Things that Matter
Press, 2009), Gesangvoll/Songful (Pudding House Chapbook Series,2010), Icehouse
&Thirteen Keys to Talmud (Crossing Chaos Press, 2010), Depths and Dragons (Skylight
Press in England, 2011), In the Beginning (Muse It Up in Canada,2011), Epilogue (Luminis
Press, 2011), etc. etc. etc.)
Jennifer C. Wolfe is a forty-three year-old female writer with five publishing
credentials: a poem "If" included within the Century College (White Bear Lake, MN) Spring
2008 Student Lounge literary magazine along with three poetry manuscripts, Kick the Stones:
Everyday Hegemony, Empire, and Disillusionment, published as an eBook by BlazeVox
Books, New York, October 2008, Yukon Rumination: Great Fun for All in the Land of Sarah
Palin's Joe Sixpack Alaska, published as an eBook by BlazeVox Books, New York, June
2009, and Healing Optimism, and Polarization, published as an eBook by BlazeVox Books,
New York, February 2010, and two poems, "St. Patrick's Day" and "Roller Coaster"
published within the online edition of Scrambler Magazine, Issue 39, June 2010. In June
2011, I will have my newest poetry manuscript, Somewhere Over the Pachyderm Rainbow,
published by BlazeVox Books, New York. Somewhere Over the Pachyderm Rainbow is my
first print publishing. I am listed within Poets & Writers' magazine online Directory of
Writers at: http://www.pw.org/content/jennifer_wolfe
Joel Weishaus was born in New York. At age 19 was Assistant Traffic
Manager for a Madison Avenue advertising agency. In 1964, he moved to Berkeley,
CA,where he was a student in the University of California, Department of Oriental
Languages and Literary Editor of the student newspaper. In 1971, he edited On The Mesa: An
Anthology of Bolinas Writing, (City Lights Books). That year, too, Cranium Press published
his translations: Oxherding: A Reworking of the Zen Text, with Woodcuts by Arthur
Okamura. In 1977, he moved to Santa Fe, NM. That year he received a grant from the Mary
Roberts Reinhart Foundation, and a 9-month writing residency at the Helene Wurlitzer
Foundation, Taos, NM. During the early 1980s, he spent four years sculpting and studying
post-structuralist theories. In 1984, he became a features writer for Artspace: A Quarterly of
Contemporary Southwest Art. In 1985, he was appointed Adjunct Curator of Video Art at the
University of New Mexicos Museum of Fine Arts, in Albuquerque. In 1991, his forty texts
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for a project with photographer Patrick Nagatani, The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico,
were exhibited by the Albuquerque Museum, for which he was awarded a grant from the
Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. The next year, the Stanford University Museum of Art
had the exhibion, his prose poems now titled The Deeds and Sufferings of Light, and in Fall
2010, 12 of the text were on exhibit at the University of New Mexico Art Museum as part of
the Desire for Magic exhibition. From 1998 until 2000, he was a writer-in-residence at the
University of New Mexico's Center for Southwest Research. He moved to Portland, OR in
2000, where for seven years he was Research Faculty in the Department of English, Portland
State University, developing Digital Literary Art projects.
his homepage is: http://web.pdx.edu/~pdx00282. His on-line work is archived at Virginia
Polytechnic Institutes Center for Digital Discourse and Culture:
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/weishaus/index.html
Joseph Powell is a professor of creative writing at Central Washington
University. He has published four books of poetry, co-authored a book on meter, and a book
of short stories. He has won a National Endowment for the Arts award for his poetry. His
most recent book of poetry is Hard Earth.
Judith Prest, LMSW, is a poet, collage artist, creativity coach. Her
work has been published in Mad Poets Review, Chronogram, Akros Review, Slightly West
and Earths Daughters, and has appeared in the following anthologies: Beloved On The
Earth (Holy Cow Press, 2009), Moments of the Soul (Spirit First, 2010), Layers of
Possibility (Palabras Press, 2007) and Peer Glass (Hudson Valley Writers Guild, 2003).
Judith lives in rural upstate New York.
Kathleen Specter is a writer and teacher living in the DC metro area. Her work
has appeared in the NH Governors monograph on domestic violence (2001) and the journal
Conscience, as well as Aegis magazine. She has received the following awards: the Daniel
Morin Poetry Prize, Ruth Ellen Dodge Award, Dick Shea Memorial Fund, Richard M. Ford
Memorial Award, and Mayberry Award.
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June 2011
Kenneth Pobo teaches English and creative writing at Widener University in
Pennsylvania. He has four books of poetry and thirteen chapbooks of poetry
published, the most recent being Closer Walks from Thunderclap Press (2011). His work
appears in: Word Riot, Public Republic, Stickman Review, Bananafish, and elsewhere
Linda Appleby was born in Cambridge, UK, of Welsh parents. She went on to
Somerville College Oxford after school at The Perse in Cambrigde. She studied Philosophy,
Politics and Economics, then took an MA in Cultural Studies, specialising in psychoanalytic
theory. After that, she took a teaching qualification in English in a multi-cultural society. She
taught for 17 years at North Warwickshire College, living in Nuneaton with our two sons.
She came home to Cambridge some time ago and has been writing poems and short stories
for a few years. She has had some poems published, in 'Monkey Kettle', 'Urthona', 'Harvest'
and 'Crossing the Sahara By Scooter', for example. You can see more of her work on
www.lindaappleby.com.
Michael D. Sollars, PhD, is an associate professor of English and assistant
dean of research at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas, USA. He is a poet,
essayist, and fiction writer. He has written extensively on world literature, including editing
the extensive volumes Dictionary of Literary Characters and the Compendium of Twentieth
Century Novels and Novelists. His scholarly focus lies in the area of Modernism, especially
Samuel Beckett, Eugene ONeill, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. He is a member of
many scholarly societies including the Eugene ONeill Society. Sollars_md@tsu.edu
Michael Lee Johnson poet, Itasca, Illinois. From Which Place the Morning
Rises, and The Lost American: from Exile to Freedom are available at:
http://stores.lulu.com/promomanusa. Original version of The Lost American:
http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0-595-46091-7. Published in 24
countries. His web site: http://poetryman.mysite.com. All books available on Amazon.com:
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http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-
keywords=michael+lee+johnson. Borders: http://www.borders.com.au/book/lost-american-
from-exile-to-freedom/1566571/. You-Tube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih5WJrjqQ18,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMmyjFKJ5fQ.
E-mail: promomanusa@gmail.com
Mike J Gallagher lives in County Kerry, Ireland. His poetry,
prose and songs have been published extensively in journals and anthologies throughout
Europe, America, Japan and Australia. He won 2008 Samhlaocht Poetry Slam, the 2010
Michael Hartnett Viva Voce Contest and is currently a nominee for the Hennessy Award. (
photo of Mike (left) and his uncle Patrick Gallagher (right), whose birthday is the subject of
poem 'Bookends'). He has edited a number of poetry and prose books and is the editor of
thefirstcut, a new e-zine.
Paul Lobo Portugs -reared in Merkel, West Texas, until saved by UCLA, the
American Film Institute, and UC Berkeley. Teaches creative writing at University of
California, Santa Barbara. Taught creative writing at UC Berkeley, USC, SBCC, and the
University of Provence. Proud father of two sons. Books include The Visionary Poetics of
Allen Ginsberg, Saving Grace, Hands Across the Earth, The Flower Vendor, Paper Song,
Aztec Birth, The Body Electric Journal, The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson. Poems are
scattered in small magazines across the Americas, Europe, and Asia . Poetry videos include
To My Beloved, Kiss, The Lonely Wind, Fathermine, and Of Her I Sing. Received awards
from the National Endowment, the Ford Foundation, the American Film Institute, The
Rockefeller/Bellagio Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission.
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Phillip A. Ellis is a freelance critic and scholar, and his poetry
collection, _The Flayed Man_, has been published by Gothic Press; Gothic Press will also
edit a collection of essays on Ramsey Campbell, that he is editing with Gary William
Crawford. He is working
on another collection, to appear through Diminuendo Press. Another collection has been
accepted by Hippocampus Press, which has also published his concordance to the poetry of
Donald Wandrei. He is the editor of AustralianReader.com, Melaleuca, and Breaking Light
Poetry Magazine.
Professionally a Research Physicist, S. Raj Vatsya (Ph.D., Physics) located in London,
Canada, has pursued his interests in writing poetry, plays and other literary genres both in
English and Hindi. His other interests include directing and acting in theatre and movies. His
writings have been published in magazines and book collections; recited on stage and TV;
and the plays and movies have been presented on stage, TV and auditoriums. He has written
scripts for, directed and acted in several plays and art movies; and written script for a Hindi-
English feature film, Love in Canada. A collection of his Hindi free verse, Pili Batti Lal
Batti, has recently been published. A collection of his English free verse, Journey, and an
English novel, Across the Bridge, are currently being prepared for publication.

Rebeka Sra is from Budapest, Hungary. She is currently about to
receive her MA in Hungarian Languge and Literature from Kroli University of Budapest.
She is interested in art history, currently she is dealing with William Blakes graphics and
prints. Besides these she has been writing poems since she was 7, especially haikus, but she is
also concerned about essay writing and doing research, mainly in the field of philosophy,
psychology, aesthetics and art history, mythology and history of religion. She won the 1
st

Prize at the Sakura Haiku Contest of ELTE Botanical Garden. She is in love with fine arts,
she paints and draws. She is into street art since 2006 under the aliases LeChat and . She has
had a number of exhibitions since 2008. Synthesis, marginality, perception these are her
main interests, visually and textually alike.

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Richard Oko Ajah lives in Lagos, Nigeria with his family. He earned a First
Class degree in the University of Uyo, Nigeria where he teaches French and literature. He
obtained distinction in M.A degree in the University of Ibadan, Nigeria where he is currently
completing his Ph. D on travel and diasporic writing of Tahar Ben Jelloun, the Moroccan
writer. His areas of interest are African, Maghrebian and comparative literatures, and
cinematography. He has presented papers in conferences, published articles in learned
journals. As a bilingual poet, he has published his poetry works in journals in Nigeria and
abroad. Song of Heroes is acclaimed to be one of the poems of high promise in Journal of
New Poetry. His Plaintes dun enfant noir et autres and other English collections will soon be
published.
Sam Eisenstein is a professor at Los Angeles City College. His life has been an academic
one, teaching in the same community college, LACC, for over fifty years. He has two
children. The boy is an opthalmologist, who specializes in Laser surgery. The girl is a
veterinary, with her own clinic where she works on small animals in a small town in Northern
California. His wife Betty is an interior designer, specializing in boutique bathrooms. He has
six novels in print, from the publishers Green Integer and Red Hen. He is fond of fantasy and
the surreal. Science fascinates him. He is an atheist.
Shradha Kamra is a young poet from India. She has keen interest in writing. She is planning
to publish her poems in the form of a book.
Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits
three literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan (USA).
His latest poetry chapbook is entitled Nights Your Wife Is Gone

Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever free time
either writing or reading. Her works have appeared in Exercise Bowler, Blinking Cursor,
Theory Train, Magnolia's Press, Cartier Street Press, Berg Gasse 19, Precious Metals and will
appear in the upcoming editions A Handful of Dust, The Scarlet Sound, The Adroit Journal,
Perceptions Literary Magazine, Welcome to Wherever, The Corner Club Press, Death Rattle,
Danse Macabre, Subliminal Interiors, Generations Literary Journal, Super Poetry
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Highway and Perhaps I'm Wrong About the World. You can find her here:
http://coldbloodedlives.blogspot.com
Victor W. Pearn was educated at the University of Illinois, Springfield (BA), and
the University of Colorado, (MA). His poems have been read on the Writers Almanac four
times by Garrison Keillor. His first collection of poems Devil Dogs and Jarheads was
published in Ithaca, NY at Busca, Inc., in 2003 by Michael Cooper. He recently returned
from teaching English at Jining University in Qufu, China. Some of his latest publications
are - Light Across the Alley, short fiction novel, Kindle Books 2011, Dream Season, My
brother Gary and the 1957 Ashland Panthers, nonfiction, Kindle Books 2011
William John Watkins is a Professor Emeritus and a member of the founding
faculty at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey. He has published more than 500
poems in such magazines as Rhino, South Carolina Review, Hellas, and Commonweal. His
sonnet, "Wife of My Youth, Look Back, Look Back", won the 1994 Hellas Award. His short
story, "Beggar in the Living Room", was a Nebula Award finalist, and his poem. "We Die as
Angels and Come Back as Men" won the 2002 Rhysling Award. His hobbies are racing
motorcycles off road with his son, Chad, and teaching himself to draw realistically.

Featuring Featuring Featuring Featuring
Poems Poems Poems Poems by by by by
A. D. Winans Adam Bogar Adrienne Wolfert
Alan Lindsay Anca Vlasopolos April Avalon
Benjamin Myers Boghos L. Artinian Carl Scharwath
Carrie Allison Chris Tanasescu Christina Murphy
Dalel Sarnou Devreaux Baker Gale Acuff
Hal O'Leary.htm Hugh Fox Jennifer C. Wolfe
Judith Prest Kathleen Specter Kenneth Pobo
Linda Appleby Michael D. Sollars Michael Lee Johnson
Mike J Gallagher Paul Lobo Portuges Phillip A. Ellis
Raj Vatsya Richard Oko Ajah Rebeca Sara
Sam Eisenstein Sharadha Kamra Thomas Zimmerman
Valentina Cano Victor W. Pearn William John Watkins
Research Papers and Essays Research Papers and Essays Research Papers and Essays Research Papers and Essays by by by by
Joseph Powell
Felix Nicolau
Byron Beynon
Book Reviews Book Reviews Book Reviews Book Reviews
Al Becks Curiositys Cushion by Pradeep Chaswal
Millies Niss City Bird by Joel Weishaus
E EE E- -- -Interviews Interviews Interviews Interviews
Hugh Fox interviewed by Pradeep Chaswal
Al Beck interviewed by Pradeep Chaswal

The Muse - An International Journal of Poetry 1.1 (June 2011)

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