Friday Nov 22

On Hiatus

A Note From Kaite Hillenbrand, Poetry Editor: October, 2012

I love it when a joyful little pocket of life opens up to me. A farmers market. An outside bar in a river’s harbor. A patch of warm sunshine on the porch in the middle of a fall day. A few weeks ago, we decided to take a day off and show the world our heart-eyes. We picked a place for brunch, and just before we got there, I saw a little red sign for a gem, mineral, and fossil show. We ate delicious fried chicken and then followed more little red signs to the show at the West Virginia Geological & Economic Survey. We walked around the show for hours, looking at petrified wood, stones and gems, metal casts of leaves and fossils of fish. I came away with a beautiful necklace by a local craftsman, and my pal came away with two little picture plaques, hard as stone, made from compacted silt at the bottom of a river. They look like the most beautiful pictures of a flock of birds and a grassy beach entrance. Some days, you’re the lucky ones and the world lets you know it.
 
I’m excited this month that our new Associate Poetry Editors are now active members of the team! First, Associate Editor Mia Avramut brings us beautiful poems and a lively, engaging, intimate interview with poet Mary Stone Dockery. Mia writes:
 
My friends read her. My acquaintances read her. My enemies read her (not really, I have no enemies, but you get the idea). So, on a torrid summer day, I cracked the spine of her book, “Mythology of Touch”, and devoured it.  Unrelenting, the poetry singed, aroused and comforted, so candid and so gritty. I was smitten. Here it is, for all of you, a fresh set of unsettling, spunky Mary Stone Dockery poems, and an interview for the ages. Enough said.
 
Associate Editor Doug Van Gundy brings us stunning work by two poets this month. Doug writes of them:
 
Jen Coleman’s two poems in this month’s issue push back the boundaries of what is possible in a love poem, making room for Atmospheric Science, mosquitoes, and Independence Day.  I love the oddness in her work, and the deftness with which she moves from image to surprising image.
 
Jill Khoury’s smart poems elicit an exciting and unusual visceral response in me, something balanced between pleasure and unease.  She skillfully, playfully, arranges quotidian details – dog-eared cookbooks, torn pants, hair clippers – to create an almost joyful sense of menace.
 
J.P. Reese brings us the work of two great poets. J.P. writes:
 
Heather Bartlett's poetry puts the lie to the claim made by some that someone with an MFA typically spits out cookie-cutter poetry.  Her work is bold in its empathy and insight and unusual in its juxtaposition of format and theme. I love both poems but especially love the intensity of  "Go Like This," with its surprising imagery and word choices that create a final, telling resignation and self-knowledge. These are wonderful, sad poems.
 
Burgess Needle's two poems in this issue have a gentle humanity to them that touches the reader without spilling over into bathos.  It is extremely difficult to write a poem whose theme is the horror that was the holocaust without slipping into the expected, the clichéd, but Needle manages to give the subject a new life through the eyes of a boy and the gentle men he observes working different kinds of ovens in a bakery, their "… white hairy arms /Never quite powdered enough to hide / Pale blue numbers…" and his second poem, "Banana Tree," makes its mark by implying that absence is sometimes what creates presence for an observer.  Although set in the tropics of Thailand, the poem put me in mind of Stevens' speaker in "The Snowman" who  "… beholds [the] / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
 
Associate Editor Nicelle Davis brings us a wonderful interview and poems by Stan Galloway. Mr. Galloway’s poems, as Nicelle so aptly puts it, “read as reflections—little mirrors filled with beautiful images.” His poems fill the senses, bringing life to a spring day or even a memory. In his interview with Nicelle, Stan calls himself a “conversationalist” – “I prize the interplay between what I write and what others have said,” he writes. I love that about poetry – the conversation of it, the connections it gives us. I’m glad to have Stan in the conversation.
 
I’m also happy, and a bit sad, to bring you our last (at least for now) interview by Associate Editor Mari L’Esperance. Mari brings us stunning work by and a wonderful interview with poet Ishion Hutchinson. Mari writes:
 
The poems in Ishion Hutchinson’s first book Far District(Peepal Tree Press Limited, 2010) are informed by history, memory, and the landscape of Jamaica, where Hutchinson is from. I’m pleased to share with Connotation Press readers two new and evocative poems, along with a brilliant interview, in which Hutchinson ranges across a variety of topics, including his generative process, his reading and how it informs his writing, his early introduction to literature by dedicated teachers, and his movement toward and through new work. “…hear the leaves gnashing / where the trees are glinting shades forgetting / their journey to this place of morning.”
 
I hope a wonderful pocket of life opens up for you today – and maybe our column can get you started. Come on inside!