What superpower would you have, if you got to pick? For years, I’ve said I’d pick the ability to heal or make happy. I still can’t decide which one I’d pick. But looking at the reality of my life, given that I haven’t become a doctor or nurse or any other type of care-giver, it occurs to me that I must’ve picked happiness-bringer. I do try to spread happiness. I smile at people and try to get them to smile. I show respect. The best, though, is being around the people I love and feeling how happiness in any of us makes the rest of us happier. It’s possibly the best chain reaction ever. It makes for strong, lasting relationships, and it ripples out into the world. And all you have to do is try to make someone else happier – and yep! You’re happier yourself. If you could see the lightness in hearts, you could see its vast beauty. Sharing poetry is one way I try to spread happiness, and I’m happy to have some great poetry to share with you this month! Associate Editor Julie Brooks Barbour introduces our lead poet this month:
These poems by Paul Scot August are haunted by desolate structures: a “shuttered canning plant” and the twisted pier on a lake. There is also spiritual desolation in these poems, but the speaker faces it head on—plunging feet into icy water or standing on the rails just after a train passes, “prepared for the darkness ahead.” Here is the risk of failure. Here’s a ticket out but the speaker dares to stand still and look back.
Ms Barbour also shares work by another poet with us. She writes:
“Alone / has always been too much to bear” states Michael Levan. Throughout his poem, we feel the necessity of connection, whether it’s with a sleeping child down a hallway or with alien beings light years away. These lines take us through the desire to reach out and be heard, to feel a sense of purpose, that we’re not just casting light on an empty shore.
Associate Editor JP Reese introduces three of our poets this month:
A firm control of sensory images in the hands of an accomplished poet can instill awe in a reader. Matthew Thorburn’s poem, “The Shrine Island” is about love of place and reverence for language. The poem covers a world of dark happenings while still aware that along with pain there is light; the poem celebrates spoken language that “ …sounds like / the sweep of a brush dipped in dark / ink, a fast foaming river, water / birds rising on glossy black / wings…” His poem “Prayer” examines our fundamental inability to truly grasp the truth and meaning of existence. The poet wants a sign that the beloved is indeed “that light swaying, swinging / between trees, that light /growing faint, drifting deeper / into the shadowy woods…”
Rich Ives says of these two stand-alone prose poems that they are “…part of a group of ‘meditations’ falling in the middle ‘Book’ of a long three-part novel … called A Cloud Where the Ceiling Had Been.” I always love to read work from poets who also write fiction. The language is poetic no matter what genre; they simply can’t help themselves, and these two sections, “Temple Dance” and “Stool,” from Ives’ novel are a fine example of the poet as novelist where “The persistent wind [is] painfully busy murdering a scarf caught along the fence-line…”
I am a sucker for irony and black humor in poetry. Anna Weaver offers both in her poems “<open letter to anyone writing about love” and “no bones.” The seeming erasure of all the pain and hurt in “no bones” reminds me a bit of both Bishop’s “One Art” and Wallace Stevens’ “The Snowman” with its “…Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is…” Read Weaver’s poems and enjoy her wit and her craft.
We have three poems by Changming Yuan to share with you this month. I love the wide-eyed discovery in these poems and their openness to life and ideas. I do love the discovery of a new word, too. Many times I’ve found myself repeating a word like a refrain, and I have a picture on my computer titled “Callipygian Owl” from a website defining old words in part through pictures of owls. So I delighted in the poem “Word Journey,” in which the speaker finds a new word and explores it. Wonderful!
Here’s to the best chain reaction ever. Enjoy some happiness!