Tuesday Mar 19

FGE - Poetry October 2009

Ralph Angel - Poetry

Ralph-Angel.jpg Ralph Angel is the author of four books of poetry: Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 (2007 PEN USA Poetry Award); Twice Removed; Neither World (James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets); and Anxious Latitudes; as well as a translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song. His poems have appeared in scores of magazines and anthologies, both here and abroad, and recent literary awards include a gift from the Elgin Cox Trust, a Pushcart Prize, a Gertrude Stein Award, the Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize, a Fulbright Foundation fellowship and the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association. Mr. Angel is the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Redlands, and a member of the MFA Program in Writing faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Originally from Seattle, he lives in Los Angeles.
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You're the Rub
 
Murmured in loneliness, round and round. 
Let’s not go inside. It doesn’t exist. The cliffs drop off, and the ocean’s
a friend—on the boardwalk
enough people alone
have died. 
So relax, take your feet
off—nobody’s
missing. There are many parts
of the mind. On that old
open day we let out our long green grass. A night’s passed
and you expected it
to be there. 
You’re the rub—the love
that loves the love. I like especially the puddles
and your wire. I like your mud. 
I like your part
of it.

 

Doug Van Gundy - Poetry

Doug-Van-Gundy.jpg DOUG VAN GUNDY’S poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including The Oxford American, Ecotone, The Louisville Review, The Fretboard Journal, and Goldenseal.   His work has also been featured online at From the Fishouse: an audio archive of emerging poets. Doug teaches English at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon and plays fiddle, guitar, and mandolin in the old-time music duo Born Old.  His book of poems, A Life Above Water is published by Red Hen Press.
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 Slagheap
 
The playground beside
my elementary school
was built on a slagheap
over the lateral shafts
 
of the old Norton mines. 
The sealed-off seam that ran
under the baseball diamond
still smoldered as the result
 
of some decades-old fire,
hundreds of feet below,
keeping the surface dirt so warm
that no matter how deep
 
elsewhere, snow would never
stay on the infield and the grass   
behind the bleachers lay exposed
and green, even in January.