Welcome to the second-to-last Poetry Column before 2012…and then, according to the Mayan calendar, who knows what’ll happen.
Enjoy the poetry while you can!
Joyce Brinkman, Indiana’s first ever Poet Laureate, joins the column this month with three vivid poems and a great interview. Ms Brinkman has had such unique experiences all over the globe, and they all seem to relate back to poetry. Who else has a poem in stained glass and another poem written on a wall in El Salvador? Check out her interview for these stories and more!
Associate Editor JP Reese brings us three poets and a great interview with Sam Rasnake to follow up on his interview in Connotation Press’s Fiction column last month. JP writes,Sam Rasnake was kind enough to consent to a wide-ranging interview this month covering the state of Internet journals, the poet's craft, the idea of crafting the personal into the universal, and the art of combining music, painting, and film to create poetry that harkens back to the past yet feels utterly new. He also gives readers a glimpse of his newest project, the third section of a continuation of a six part series entitled Tales of Brave Ulysses. Sam has also given us five of his wonderful new poems to savor. Sam's poems contain an innate beauty in their masterful use of nature as a backdrop for an exploration of the human condition in all its complexity. I have long admired Sam's work, and I am pleased to share his writerly aesthetic and lovely work with Connotation Press's readers.
Kira Clark's work in this issue is work that examines loss, both overt loss as in "Either Way it is Terrible," which speaks to the death of a loved other, and covert loss in "If you are there then you are not." The lines make startling connections for the reader between the abstract thoughts of the speaker and the concrete details of the scene: "If you are there sobbing and rioting, /then I am experiencing movement through the object/ that is giving up so/ teach me how to take an ax in my hands,/ won’t you? " These are poems with depth and a certain strength beneath the sadness of letting go.
Not a musicologist, I do know enough to recognize a fine composition when I hear (or see) it. As I read jazz-poet Michael Vander Does' piece, "IN THE RAILWAY STATION/POSTCARDS FROM THE JUNGLE," I could feel my smile begin to widen with every riffy line and cadence. The poem is a mastery of dips and swerves, of repetitions as reminder, of call and response which swings from branch to branch inside modern history and comments on its transgressions from the outsider's viewpoint while a sly voice reminds us, and itself, we are all complicit in the dance of death and destruction, communion and desire.
Associate Editor Mari L’Esperance brings us two great poets and a compelling interview with Lynne Knight. Mari writes,Lynne Knight is a beloved Bay Area poet whose work is depthful, imbued with grace, and always gratifying in its attention to craft, language, and image. Through her poems, Knight shows us that what finally matters most exists in the understory, the interstices, and the transient. Along with her poems, we are also fortunate to have an interview with Knight, who discusses, among other things, her creative path and process, formal poetry, writing in later life, and her passionate relationship with France and the French language.
William Kelley Woolfitt’s poem “The Slaw Woman” is a feast of images both strange and luminous. This poem zings with life: upon my first reading I was hanging on to my seat as the poem carried me across and down its bright rungs, one to the next to the next. With lines like “Architect of casseroles and gelatins” and “She brings and blooms for him a fistful / of blackberries,” I was instantly smitten and hungry for more.
I’m also thrilled that Associate Editor Nicelle Davis joins us with two poets and interviews accompanying both. If you’ve ever wanted to read an interview that starts, “How do you look at dog poop and see a poem?”, and I’m nearly certain all of us have, you need to check out her interview with Mr. Busby. Nicelle writes,Lee Busby and Katrina K Guarascio’s poems found my editorial desk as I was knee deep in the muck of life—literally knee deep. The dog had shat on the rug, my three year old had shat on the rug, and the washing machine had thrown up all over my house. After cleaning up the two-inch layer of poop and soap suds, I sat down to read and write. I couldn’t help but wonder – with all the ordinary chores and challenges of life I had to wonder – why, why do I continue to make time for poetry? The poems of Busby and Guaracio quickly answered this question—because poetry is in everything. The poets remind us with their work that to avoid poetry is to avoid the intrinsic beauty in every situation—they demand we see the beauty in sleeping sons, dog shit, and scabs. Blessing and great thanks to these two poets.
Happy reading!