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“Autumn Glory and Candy Wrappers”

poetry books reading poetry

New to me is Matthew Rohrer, a New York City poet who has a whiff of the old New York School, given his casual verse and non sequiturs (minus Lana Turner and the season of falling). I just finished his collection, Surrounded by Friends. Here is a review, as posted on GoodReads, everyone’s favorite Amazon-owned reading site to revile:

 

If you write poetry, you read poetry. What’s weird is how reading some poets’ work inspires you with ideas of your own, while reading others inspires…nothing. It doesn’t mean the poet is BAD if they do not inspire — in fact, they can be depressingly talented — but the inspirational ones are often writing approachable stuff like a particularly docile and friendly horse happy to come over to the fence and munch carrot or cube from your hand.

Yes, yes. It all looks so simple, kind of like imitating Hemingway in short story writing. Then, when you go there, you see that your work is very un-Hemingway, so maybe there’s some hidden complexity in the simplicity’s weeds. That happens with the poets that inspire, too, but hey, at least it gets words churning in the brain and marching on the paper (or screen).

As you might have guessed, Matthew Rohrer is one of these approachable guys. Short poems. A bit off-the-wall poems. A little this, a little that. Some non sequiturs thrown in. Unusual word pairings. Thoughts local and worldly. Lines three to six words short. By way of two examples, I give you these:

Where I Lived

I live up here,
you live down there,
he said, touching first
my forehead then
my sternum; come up
and see me sometime,
and flicked my nose
as he said this,
traveling up from where
I lived to where he lived.
He also said, every time
our family saddled up
to depart, see you in the
funny papers, which was
another place he mistakenly
believed I lived, when I lived,
as everyone knew, in an
enormous mitten with a beetle,
a mouse, a hedgehog, a hare,
a badger, and other increasingly
large creatures of the forest,
and waited there for a stranger’s
kiss to set me free. His own wife,
my grandmother, knitted it for me.

Autumn Glory

Looking at old pictures
I’m on fire
don’t show your dad
how it says Legalize it
on the other side of the hill
now we are older
it’s like that whole place
shifted out from under us
the self is the constant
past which time flies
until a cloud melts
through the wall
it is a translation
of an abstract painting
into a feeling
I don’t even have
I have a slight fever
while feeding the kids
and in a dream
they eat candy
on top of me
and when I wake up
autumn glory and candy wrappers

Wallace Stevens: When Weird Is Grounded in Normal

poetry reading poetry

wallace stevens

“The greatest poverty,” Wallace Stevens once wrote, “is not to live in a physical world.” This observation came decades before the SmartPhone, the Internet, and the iPad, meaning, if Stevens were to return today, he’d find the entire planet a “third-world nation”–impoverished, indeed!

Ironically, Stevens used the physical world for fantastic leaps by using metaphor to couple reality with the imagination. Delmore Schwartz called him “an aesthete in the best sense of the word.” Marianne Moore crowned him “America’s chief conjurer.”

Stevens finishes his poem “In the Carolinas,” for instance, with this surprising proclamation on the physical world: “The pine-tree sweetens my body / The white iris beautifies me.” The effect of such unnatural naturalness might explain his poetry.

Note, for instance, how far afield Stevens goes from the physical world while still hewing close to his own realities in another famous poem:

 

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded centuries.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

 

Everything’s normal here, right? And not. We have familiar colors, white night-gowns, and lace socks. But we have reality skewed, too. The house is haunted, the old sailor is drunk, and people might just dream of such realities as “baboons and periwinkles” (what a pair!) if they’re not careful. Best of all, and most memorable, you can catch tigers in “red” weather. For readers, it’s all familiarly strange–a quintessential Stevens poem.

Only Wallace Stevens could look at the abject ordinariness of a blackbird from thirteen angles. In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” one of his most famous poems, readers might well surrender all hope of interpretation and take succor on his delicious turns of phrases alone: “twenty snowy mountains,” “of three minds,” “small part of a pantomime,” “A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one,” “the beauty of innuendoes,” “barbaric glass,” “thin men of Haddam,” “noble accents,” “the edge / Of one of many circles,” “bawds of euphony,” “the shadow of his equipage,” “The river is moving,” and “It was evening all afternoon.”

If you don’t understand the poem, you well know the feeling of it being evening all afternoon because you understand evenings and you understand afternoons. You just haven’t understood how one could be the other at the same time. Until now.

Unusual word pairings are Wallace Stevens’ reality, and his readers are at once at home and off balance because of it. That’s why the greatest riches are found while living in his unique physical world. Read him and leave poverty to the SmartPhone addicts.

“Their Suddenly Forbidden Houses”

poetry reading poetry

Americans move a lot. Often it is jobs that uproot them and carry them, like seeds in the wind, to new pastures. Sometimes family concerns are the cause. Retirement, too, is often the driver once you’ve loaded all your earthly goods (and there are far too many) onto the cargo space of a moving truck.

When I was young and naive, I thought moving was a way to leave your troubles behind. If you hoped for a new life as a new person, I figured, you need only change your zip code.

Since then I’ve learned the lie in that theory. You can’t leave yourself behind. And you certainly can’t change who you are as a person like the flip of a switch. There’s hard-wiring to be reckoned with. There’s the lifetime experiences that resist the beguiling idea of a tabula rasa.

These thoughts rose to the surface when I read Howard Nemerov’s poem below. It’s a neat mix of concrete images and abstract thought, the artful blending that leads to the heart of any successful poem. Let’s take a ride with him:

 

Going Away
Howard Nemerov

Now as the year turns toward its darkness
the car is packed, and time come to start
driving west. We have lived here
for many years and been more or less content;
now we are going away. That is how
things happen, and how into new places,
among other people, we shall carry
our lives with their peculiar memories
both happy and unhappy but either way
touched with a strange tonality
of what is gone but inalienable, the clear
and level light of a late afternoon
out on the terrace, looking to the mountains,
drinking with friends. Voices and laughter
lifted in still air, in a light
that seemed to paralyze time.
We have had kindness here, and some
unkindness; now we are going on.
Though we are young enough still
And militant enough to be resolved,
Keeping our faces to the front, there is
A moment, after saying all farewells,
when we taste the dry and bitter dust
of everything that we have said and done
for many years, and our mouths are dumb,
and the easy tears will not do. Soon
the north wind will shake the leaves,
the leaves will fall. It may be
never again that we shall see them,
the strangers who stand on the steps,
smiling and waving, before the screen doors
of their suddenly forbidden houses.

 

Though much of the poem deals with inner thoughts, hopes, dreams, pleasant memories and bitter doubts, the end takes us to another truth: those we leave behind. It seems often that friends from one location become strangers once we’ve touched down in another. This despite our pledges to stay in touch, to visit, to remember.

Going away, then, often pulls us toward the blank promise of tabula rasa whether we wish it to or not.

And the north wind shakes the leaves….

Why Do YOU Want to Be a Poet?

poetry reading poetry writing poetry

If you had told me fifty years ago that I would someday be a poet, I would have laughed and replied, “Right. And I’ll be the pope someday, too.”

But here I stand, sans ecclesiastical garbs and kiss-the-ring, scribbling lines in the thin hours of the morning. What’s wrong with me? And what intrinsic reasons push me to do this, line by line and stanza by stanza?

I’ve given these questions some thought and decided it is a lot like teaching. Both teacher and poet are stuck in jobs that can never be fully mastered. Yes, over time you can become quite accomplished at either, given the tools and the tenacity, but the thought of conquering the tasks is ludicrous. The challenge will never dissipate.

And that’s what I like about both trades. The fact that you sometimes succeed and sometimes fail and always will. The fact that there are no hard and fast rules. The fact that you have to keep experimenting with new words in new ways.

Sisyphus comes to mind, in his dogged way. The hill and the stone. The job that can never be finished in any fully satisfactory way. Yes, there will be successes, but they will be as ephemerally fleeting as December sunshine. Here this morning, gone this afternoon. You may have a poem accepted in a journal of note and say, “Finally, I have arrived,” but you will quickly be disabused of the notion with the next day’s rejections. Three of them.

As for payment, how low can you go? Compared to other trades, especially in the corporate world, the teaching profession pays poorly. And compared to writing other genres, writing verse brings negligible monetary rewards (unless “complimentary copies” now earn interest at banks).

In her poem, “But I, Too, Want to Be a Poet,” Fanny Howe has some fun with all this. Which brings me to another point. If you’re going to write poetry, let your hair down now and then. Have some fun. Laugh at yourself. Like Cherry Garcia ice cream at midnight, it’s sometimes necessary.

 

But I, Too, Want to Be a Poet
Fanny Howe

But I, too, want to be a poet
to erase from my days
confusion & poverty
fiction & a sharp tongue

To sing again
with the tones of adolescence
demanding vengeance
against my enemies, with words
clear & austere

To end this tumultuous quest
for reasonable solutions
to situations mysterious & sore

To have the height to view
myself as I view others
with lenience & love

To be free of the need
to make a waste of money
when my passion,
first and last,
is for the ecstatic lash
of the poetic line

and no visible recompense

How Voice Escorts Us into the “Interior of the World”

essays on poetry Ken Craft poetry reading poetry teaching poetry updates on a free-verse life voice word choice

It seems fitting that Tony Hoagland’s farewell book to the world would tackle the concept of voice. If any poet knew of what he spoke, Hoagland was the man. Whether you read his poems or his sage essays about poems or writing poetry, you “heard” Hoagland and felt as if you were lucky to have found an open seat in his seminar.

The last seminar you can attend is The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice. The posthumous collection of essays stands as a short, “Hey, wait a minute,” on the matter of hard and fast rules about poetry writing. Chief among them? Your poetry must be as concise as possible to succeed.

The old adages sound logical, but Strunk and White weren’t poets, either. What about voice? With due diligence, Hoagland demonstrates that voice often requires colloquialisms, idioms, asides, etc. — the stuff that leavens our daily speech.

If executed with purpose, voice quickly bonds writer with reader, who is more than willing to forgive linguistic excess in exchange for a temporary soul mate capable of providing an insight or two on the world.

Hoagland provides many examples of poems, some complete and others frustratingly not, to back up his words. Here’s an excerpt he uses from Lisa Lewis’s poem, “While I’m Walking”:

 

Once I saw a man get mad because two people asked him
The same question. The second didn’t even know of the
first;
Anyone would’ve called the man unfair, unreasonable,
He stormed at the person who approached him
That unfortunate second time, and it was nothing,
Where’s the restroom? or Where could I find a telephone?
He was a clerk, and the second person, a shopper,
suggested
He “change his attitude”…

But though it ruined their day it improved mine, I could rest
Less alone in anger and wounded spirits. That was long ago,…

 

Hoagland comments, “Lewis’s plain linguistic style might be described as ‘prosaic,’ that is, verbose and unpoetic, yet it compels us because her speaker tells more truth than we usually get, and she does so with a bluntness that tests the conventions of decorum. Lewis is a narrative-discursive poet in style, not a poet of lyrical language, but there is a rhythmic, businesslike terseness in her storytelling and thinking that is riveting in is purposeful informality. Her speaker captivates us for the duration of whatever she wants to say. That’s what a voice poet wants to do: hook us and then escort us deep into the interior of the poem, which is also the interior of the poet, which is also the interior of the world.

“In a world where, socially, we often feel stranded on the surface of appearances, people go to poems for the fierce, uncensored candor they provide, the complex, unflattering, often ambivalent way they stare into the middle of things. In a world where, as one poet says, ‘people speak to each other mostly for profit,’ it is exhilarating to listen to a voice that is practicing disclosure without seeking advantage. That is intimate.”

And so the book leaves practitioners with an oxymoron of sorts. For voice, the poet must practice her intimacy, plan her informality, execute her natural voice for a casually-preconceived cause.

There are some writing exercises at the back of the book, if you wish. And some reader-writers will dive in. But others, like me, will find the book’s encouragement enough. Rereading a 168-page book is an exercise of sorts, too.

Either way, you’ll leave the book realizing that there are more angles than you thought to “voice,” and more “types” of voice, too, such as “speech registers” and “imported voices” and “voices borrowed from the environment.”

Bottom line? Strunk and White were fine for your college freshmen writing course, but maybe not for your poems. Perhaps it’s time to make like Pygmalion and give voice to your art.

“The Silent Passion, the Deep Nobility and Childlike Loveliness”

poetry reading poetry

Photographic memories are  unnecessary. A small pad of paper will do, thank you. I mean for those times when you feel overwhelmed by the moment and can’t put it into words — yet.

For the time being, just make a note of the camping site: the rock walls and mountain ridges and forests. The stars. The camp-fire. The kids asleep in their sleeping bags.

After that, you can sing the lovely rock’s praises in the Key of Ode Major. When all is said and done, it might be good enough to make your readers think they experienced it, too.

 

Oh, Lovely Rock
Robinson Jeffers

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.
The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts
Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.

We lay on gravel and kept a little campfire for warmth.
Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay-leaves
On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay down again. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son’s face and his companion’s, and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall
Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire’s breath, tree-trunks were seen: it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fern nor lichen, pure naked rock… as if I were
Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange… I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling child. I shall die, and my boys
Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,
And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above: and I, many packed centuries ago,
Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.

Diane Seuss & the Sonnet Renaissance

poetry poetry books

Diane Seuss, whose element is poetry, has found a more refined element still. Sonnets. Or at least something sonnet-like. In her book, frank: sonnets, she delivers a generous serving of poetry stretching 130 pages long. Not something Petrarch or Shakespeare would recognize, but sonnets nonetheless, at least by modern standards, where poetic licenses can be had with a quick visit to town hall (bring your passport as proof of identity).

What makes a Seussian sonnet? Fourteen lines, mostly. In an interview, Seuss says she holds somewhat to the meter and rhythm clause, too, which is visually evident on each page, what with the line breaks staying close like sled dogs under the command, “Mush!” Voltas can be found, too. It’s Italian for “turn,” and signals a change in the poem’s direction.

Beyond that, though, the sonnets show little resemblance to what we were force-marched through in school. But boy, do they go down easy. Voice in spades. An easy style. A way with words. Each sonnet is double-spaced. Each shows a special knack for naming things – choosing the right specific nouns to help readers visualize just so. Sound devices, too, like alliteration, assonance, consonance. And yes, everyone’s favorite: metaphor in abundance, like roadside daisies.

The design is memoir-like. Seuss mines her past, her childhood, the death of her father. It moves on to her own coming of age, a relationship with a man named Kev, the birth of a child named Dylan. And the man on the book’s cover – Mikel Lindzy – a friend of Seuss’s who would be lost to AIDS during the 80s, plays a role in some poems, as does a man named Frank who makes cameos, too.

If you must know what it’s about, I’d say “life,” which translates to “pretty much everything.” To quote Traci Brimhall’s blurbed list: “poverty, death, parenthood, addiction, AIDS, and the ‘dangerous business’ of literature.”

Raw? At times. Bittersweet? That, too. Wry and funny? Yes. In short, the narratives and the voice in these sonnets win readers over and make of the them a willing confidant(e). What’s more, as is true with all good poetry books, once you finish you need not feel lonely (another theme, by the way). You can dive right back in. There are a lot of pearls on the ocean floor, after all, and sometimes you see new and better ones the more you dive.

You don’t have to be from the Show Me state to crave examples, so I’ll offer two (they’re untitled) no matter what your state of mind. They will give you the gist, I think, and if you’re like me, you’ll like what you see. For that matter, if you’re like me, you’ll say this is one of the stronger poetry collections you’ve read.

 

 

All things now remind me of what love used to be. Swollen cattails in lonely

places. Gluey conditioner in my hair. Firm books. Their variegated spines.

Swirl of words like a stirred cocktail, whirled umbilicus, pulsing asterisk.

The past is this: to have been young and desirous and to be those things

no more. In the future the cattails will explode without me. I pray they will

not go unseen. Who will ride the cemetery horse? Incorrigible blond forelocks

blowing in their eyes. The present tense: to take a loveless path is to court

a purple-blue emptiness, like a disco or a grotto. Or the cave where dead bodies

are stored in the winter, when a shovel can’t break through frozen ground.

I have seen such spaces. I have been alone in them. Sound of water lapping.

Animals calling to each other. Echo of my own breath. Smoke pouring

from my mouth in the cold. Memory, interloper in the corner who means to kill,

heavy rock in its hand. And poetry. This poem right now. This one-night stand.

 

 

 

I fell in love with death, he isn’t mean, his kisses wet and sweet.

Broken pocket watch, strange chain, like an extra in a Western

who appears at the edge of the screen perched atop a lame horse.

Thinness at the hips, the incubator of is breath. Mother tongue

in his mouth. Kinky, but in the most earnest, heartfelt way: he

sucked my fingers while I read him Peter Pan, itself a children’s book

about dead children. His only perversion is innocence, doesn’t try

to ruin Christmas but ruins it anyway, young uncle in the disturbing

T-shirt who just can’t get into the spirit of the holiday. Try, some

female relative whispers in his ear through her lipstick, just try.

He wipes away her kisses, disingenuousness not in his repertoire.

Can’t fake it. If his eyes are hollow it’s because he’s feeling hollow.

If he’s in the mood he calls me at twilight from some meadow,

Describes how the sun digs its own grave, the copper afterglow.

Yes, You Can Judge a Town by Its Public Library

opinion poetry

Most people judge a town by its school system. I judge it by its library.

How big is it? How versatile is its stock of books? How convenient are its hours, seven days a week?

Some towns I visit have beautiful fields for baseball, football, soccer. Some even have hockey arenas and sprawling golf courses. Lots of green that costs lots of green, but me, I like to see the green buying books, providing computers, hosting community events and readings. All at the town library.

A great library sends a signal: We care about the intellectual and artistic health of our citizens. Sports are great and have their place, but we open many, many doors to far away lands and new frontiers. We are the antidote to fake cries of fake news. We are, in fact, the enemy of fascism and anti-intellectualism.

Granted, no matter how vast and lovely, no library can cater to every taste. Thus, the inter-library loan system. Yes, I buy books and try to support writer royalties, but I’d quickly go under financially if I purchased every book I wanted to read.

Enter inter-library loan. Almost 90% of the books I seek can be found via this system. Place a hold, wait, and soon enough, the book arrives in port. Your home library.

Downsides? Not many. Some books get written in, and depending on the scribe, that can be an annoyance (though I have, on occasion, become as fascinated by the annotator as I have by the author).

Other books are marred with food and drink stains. What on earth causes people to eat chocolate, sticky buns, or cake and frosting while reading a book? Sugary fingerprints are not cool. Nor are dog-ears, the ghost of bookmarks past.

But these are minor inconveniences. Overall, there is no greater institution than a public library. It is deserving not only of your patronage, but your charity. Give a donation each year. Give everyone free access to the wonders of fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and every Dewey Decimal-ed piece of nonfiction out there. Doing so makes you a soldier of democracy, knowledge, light. There is no better way to fight the dark forces around us.

It’s a dangerous world, after all. Always has been and always will be. And the Fifth Rider of the Apocalypse? It’s Ignorance. Public libraries are the best ways to combat it—the swords to smote it down. An informed public is the enemy of authoritarian weeds, wherever they may sprout.

Patronize and support your town’s library, and if it’s suffering from want and neglect and lack of taxpayer dollars, create a committee to turn that intolerable situation around.

Sooner rather than too-later.

Larkin in the Dark

poetry poetry books poetry criticism

By definition, an aubade is “a dawn song expressing the regret of parting lovers at daybreak” (Edward Hirsch, A Poet’s Glossary). In his aubade, Philip Larkin had little use for lovers. Maybe it was his state of mind, though. After reading it, I learned this was his final poem. Fitting, that, because in 50 lines, the chill of reckoning with our own demise gets about as raw as you will ever read it. Larkin speaks of “the total emptiness for ever / The sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always.”

Looking for the emergency exits between stanzas? Larkin has blocked them off. Religion and the afterlife, you say? “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.” Logic, you cry?

 

And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

 

Ok, then. Larkin is clearly trapped himself here. With a lover called Death-in-Waiting,  yet, and apparently he’s beginning to see the light “through a glass darkly.” Dawn brings no succor, in other words. Simply a cold, unrelenting realization:

 

Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

 

Man. It’s enough to make you wish you were never born, just so you don’t have to die. It’s that good. In the spirit of November, not known for renewal and new life, let’s take it all in, then:

 

Aubade
by Philip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

The No-No of Playing Favorites

poetry The Indifferent World

tolstoy

Je regrette, but it’s true. I play favorites among my children. No, not those children. My poetry children.

What’s weird is, often a published author’s favorite poems are not ones that ever saw the light of poetry-published day in a journal or magazine. You will not find them on the book’s acknowledgment page, in other words. Like good soldiers, these poems enlisted, went out over the transoms to the publish-me wars, but fell in battle, struck by blind editorial eyes.

It could be coincidence, in my case. Not all of the poems in my freshman effort, The Indifferent World, were treated to equal doses of marketing. Some were written closer to deadline, and therefore did not become staples at Submittable. Others may have just gone to the wrong editors at the wrong time.

“Wrong editor” can be defined a few ways. He or she could be a.) the editor of a journal whose style and subject tastes are not an exact fit with your work, b.) the editor of a journal who never even saw your work because a front-line reader slap-dashed it into the rejection pile through a hasty reading or none at all, or c.) the editor of a “reach” journal like The New Yorker or Poetry, where the air is fine and thin and fully invested in the safe, the established, and the well-known. If you send to the latter, especially those with reading fees, you’re suffering trickle-down financial losses over time. (Note, however, that the two magazines I just cited do not charge reading fees, bless them.)

Or maybe, just maybe, playing favorites means you like a poem that speaks to your own unique sensibilities more than others’. Is that a bad thing? Does that violate the writer-reader contract, wherein the two parties are invested with equal powers? I like to think not. I like to think that a poem that resonates in a special way with its author will always appeal equally to a certain reading demographic of poetry lovers out there, too.

Here, for instance, is one of my favorites from TIW. It’s about Tolstoy, for one, and I’m the number one fan of the man not from Tennessee (try Yasnaya Polyana). It was a late entry, too, so I’m not sure how much marketing it got, but it was one of a set of narrative poems in the book that I was partial to.

In case you’re one of the three dozen or so people in the world who do NOT own a copy of my book, here it is: the death of Tolstoy reimagined:

 

Astapova Station by Ken Craft

I think of Tolstoy, November of his life,
steel wool beard caught
on the sheepskin of his collar. He’s stealing into night,
steam from the engine of his lungs
twisting gaunt and ghostly
through the air, rising, dwindling, clinging
to sky: the breaths of a lifetime.

The old writer still shows an instinct
for drama, abandoning wife, estate, every past chapter
for a train, an iron deus ex machina
that sways his body til dizziness forces him to the refuge
of Astapova. Here he can restore order, touch paper schedules,
see the starch of a station master’s uniform.
But first, he lies down—a moment
like all others, he thinks—on an oak bench burnished
smooth by passengers.

Tonight their spirits
mingle, restless, eyeing the great
clock like suspicious policemen. Tolstoy lifts his feet, hears the clunk
of his self-made shoes echo from the rafters. There’s dried mud on his soles,
caked pieces of Russia falling
on guttered slats of wood. The weight of fever
begins to climbs his chest. It stretches its claws to his temples,
rests on him, rapid heartbeat blanketing heartbeats
through the night.

He starts, thinks he hears Sofya’s voice. Did he sleep? To board
the train! Is it still here, then? Is that it—black and abandoned,
frozen to cold tracks? Is it this—oblong, silver
car blinking in snow, readying to open its doors?

Tolstoy’s mouth opens, breaking
mucus, a milky thread between the lips. His tongue is a fullness,
but he must know: arrival or departure?
The window! The red and black sign reading “Astapova”!
The stationmaster’s warm hand closing his eyelids.