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The Third Millenium
all the good air gone
with the ghosts
live wire and chatter
long for a face
a voice, a torso with arms,
legs, gone the
words, books, love
notes, business lies
scattered to the
air—bugs
tend flowers while
some mammals, wrapped in
aluminum, live without joy
on riches and letters of
the alphabet building
clouds floating
around the
O-zone.
Copyright 2005 by Joan Blake
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Joan Blake's "The Third Millennium", is primarily concerned with constructing an atmosphere rather than a narrative or an argument. It appeals to our intuitive ability to perceive connections that we may not be able to explain analytically. John Ashbery is one of the most well-known writers in this style, elements of which can also be found in Mark Strand's early collection Darker.
We're taught to decipher poems by looking for the "real" meanings that the surface images represent: the moon is like a woman's face, the fallen leaf is a metaphor for death. For Blake's poem, I think this technique would miss the point. Trying to match up the "aluminum" or "letters of/the alphabet" to literal features of 21st-century life would prematurely arrest the free association of images that these words are meant to provoke. I will share some of my impressions of the poem below, but these should not be considered an authoritative key to its meaning(s).
The overall mood that I got from the poem was one of unreality and isolation, worsened by technology. I was immediately grabbed by the opening lines, "all the good air gone/with the ghosts", with their strong repetition of "GO-" sounds. The words "gone" and "ghosts" cannot help but arouse feelings of loss. Even before we know where we are in this poem, we are already nostalgic for somewhere else. There was a time before this fog descended, but those better days have slipped away somehow.
"Live wire and chatter/long for a face" suggests that this is going to be a poem about how email, phones and other long-distance communication have replaced authentic relationships. The loss of "good air" reminds us of the pollution that often goes along with society's so-called progress.
But then we get images of scattering and dismemberment—"a torso with arms,/legs, gone the/words, books, love/notes, business lies/scattered to the/air"—that for me brought back those post-9/11 scenes of office debris littering the streets around the World Trade Center site. This allusion lends an additional dimension to the "ghosts" and the spoiling of the air.
In a few brief lines, this stanza manages to evoke several recognizable, interconnected ideas, but so fleetingly that we scarcely understand what memories are producing our emotional reaction. Moreover, the poem still works without any interpretive overlay, as a direct experience of disconnection, confusion and loss.
The second stanza paints a picture of the pleasant but meaningless fantasy-land into which "some mammals" have retreated, while the larger world deteriorates as we have already seen. "Wrapped in aluminum" reminded me of the stock figure of the crazy person who wears tinfoil to keep the aliens from hearing his thoughts. It's shiny, high-tech, but actually flimsy, not offering the protection that these characters seem to expect. Could there be a sadder indictment than saying that we "live without joy/on riches"? In the "letters of/the alphabet building/clouds floating", I saw language and symbols, the things that make us more than mere "mammals", becoming unmoored from meaning and productivity. This stanza had a more universal feeling; its mood comes across perfectly without the need for connections to specific events and problems.
It's hard to explain why I found the last lines, "around the/O-zone", to be a letdown. As readers of this column know, I demand a lot from last lines, but that's because they set the tone for how the reader will remember the poem. Did the journey end at a destination or just stop? Maybe the destruction of the ozone layer is an overly familiar concept, maybe the unusual capitalization and spelling hinted at a double meaning or pun that I didn't get, or maybe the final period made the poem less open-ended than I wanted. Whatever the reason, I didn't feel that "O-zone" had enough significance in this context to warrant the emphasis placed on it.
I would have preferred to continue the poem's dominant mood of floating disconnection and unresolved questions, rather than bringing it to a sudden stop that doesn't feel necessary. A change as simple as removing the final period and bringing "ozone" up to the previous line might suffice:
live without joy
on riches and letters of
the alphabet building
clouds floating
around the ozone
One could also experiment with various adjectives in front of "ozone" to create a more specific mental picture. Around the blue ozone? Around the thin ozone? Many options are possible, depending on the final impression that Blake wants to leave in the reader's mind. Overall, this was an intriguing poem that managed to do a lot in a small space.
Where could a poem like "The Third Millennium" be submitted?
These upcoming contests came to mind:
Poetry Society of America Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 23
https://poetrysociety.org/awards/annual-awards/2020-individual-awards
Highly prestigious awards program for unpublished poems on various themes; poems like "The Third Millennium" might be a good fit for the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award for lyric poems on philosophical themes. You'll need to join PSA to enter the Hemley contest and some others, but it's a good deal.
Beullah Rose Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: January 1
https://smartishpace.com/poetry-prizes/
$200 prize for work by women poets, from the literary journal Smartish Pace
Milford Fine Arts Council National Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: January 31
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Milford-Fine-Arts-Council/103514274805?ref=stream
$100 prize for unpublished short poems (10-30 lines, maximum 40 characters/spaces per line); no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the December 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
The Three Great Secret Things
Gentle, profound coming-of-age story about an orphan boy in postwar America and his introduction to the mysteries of sex, love, art and faith. The boarding-school setting allows insightful readings of literary classics and Christian beliefs to be skillfully woven into the narrative. Readers of all ages will feel for young David Lear as he matures from observer to author of his own life, with help from a strong-willed, unforgettable girl. This book is the sequel to Leaving Maggie Hope but can be enjoyed on its own.
The Tipping Point for Best Selling Authors
In this 2016 post from his blog Dying Words, a resource for mystery and thriller authors, crime novelist Garry Rodgers interviews nine best-selling indie and self-published writers about the strategies that took their book sales to the next level. Some common themes: build a mailing list, focus on your niche, and keep putting out new titles that are well-written and professionally edited.
The Trees Stand Watch
Last month as I lay ill
and dying still,
my neighbor's trees
kept watch
Their bony arms raised
to the skies
defying winter's wrath,
blackly outlining
starkest cold felt deep
within the marrow
of my bones,
and without as well
Then the birches, with March,
heralded false Spring briefly,
with a fuzzy show of slightest green
worn off again in hours
by the ice-storm
I felt surround my heart,
my soul, my everything
Birch is hard-wood
and so am I, so together
we stood strong,
weathered the non-season
Refusing to give up the ghost,
die, as expected;
we toughed out the weeks
until real Spring
Deigned to put in
her appearance
and now the trees stand watch,
their branches lovely,
dancing full of leaves
and grace and hope,
and yet, like sentinels,
they guard my being,
not allowing death
to steal in and make off
with anything
I am loath
to give up
just yet.
Copyright 2008 by S.E. Ingraham
Critique by Jendi Reiter
In this month's critique poem, "The Trees Stand Watch", S.E. Ingraham writes with a simplicity and cleanness of style that befits the narrator's stripped-down spiritual condition. A crisis can force us to abandon the luxury of ironic distance, the fear that our emotions will seem too sentimental if we don't surround them with elaborate artistic tricks. Sincerity is born of desperation.
Illness foregrounds our animal nature and its limitations, sometimes a rude surprise for the artist accustomed to exploring the seemingly infinite territory of the imagination. Here, the narrator learns how to remain present with her painful body by finding kinship with the strong, protective, long-lived trees.
With powerful directness, the first stanza introduces the primal antagonists at work in the poem, death and solitude ("Last month as I lay ill/and dying still") versus life and caregiving ("my neighbor's trees/kept watch"). I think it's significant that we know this detail, that these are the neighbor's trees rather than the protagonist's own property or simply "some trees". "Neighbor" instantly connects the trees to companionship and a kind of unconditional solidarity with strangers in need, as in "love thy neighbor as thyself".
The word "still" in the second line adds no new information to "ill and dying"—one could even call it redundant—and yet I feel it is the pivot of the whole stanza. Some words do extra duty in a poem, common little words with so many meanings that they add layers of significance without calling attention to themselves. The internal rhyme "ill/still" gives a poetic cadence to what would otherwise be a very plain-spoken sentence. "Still" as adverb suggests the long, slow death that we dread—"still dying". "Still" as adjective, meanwhile, sets the tone of stillness, of patient observation. The invalid comes to reinterpret her unwanted immobility in light of the more positive steadfastness of the trees.
The subsequent stanzas flesh out the connection between the speaker and the trees with realistic sensory details. These feel like the genuine observations of a bed-ridden person who has been studying the trees from her window, day after day, perhaps noticing their moods more closely than she ever did in her busy, healthy life. The reader's heart experiences a sympathetic pang as recovery is glimpsed, then lost again: "a fuzzy show of slightest green/worn off again in hours/by the ice-storm/I felt surround my heart". The security reached at the poem's end is earned by this moment of looking into the void.
Something in the rhythm of the final lines falls flat, for me. Perhaps it is because the last seven or eight lines lack the physical imagery that enriches the rest of the poem. The concluding words do not seem strong enough to be stretched out over this many lines. The qualifier "just yet", as the speaker's final word, undercuts the triumph of survival. I would have liked to see a continuation of the parallelism between the condition of the trees and that of the speaker. What sensations experienced by the now-healthy person are analogous to the trees' springtime vigor and delicate beauty? Instead we shift to an abstract explanatory mode after "sentinels", losing some of the sensory grounding that makes this poem succeed.
Though the seasons as metaphor for our mortality are a familiar poetic trope, Ingraham makes it fresh because she is interested in the trees in their own right, not simply as reflections of the human character's feelings. Her real subject is the natural cycle of rebirth that comforts us in our weakness by reminding us that we have companions on the journey.
Where could a poem like "The Trees Stand Watch" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Princemere Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: September 30
$250 prize for unpublished poems, from the literary journal of a nondenominational Christian college
Second Light Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
British writers' group for older women poets offers 300 pounds for poems by women over 30; previously published work accepted
This poem and critique appeared in the September 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The True
By Sarah Kornfeld. A darkly humorous cautionary tale for the post-truth era, this work of narrative nonfiction recounts Kornfeld's quest to comprehend the life and death of her former lover and mentor, renowned Romanian theatre director Alexandru Darie. Passionate and enigmatic, Darie was generous with his attention but secretive about the alcohol abuse and political trauma that fatally affected his health. Visiting Romania shortly after his death in 2019, Kornfeld falls under the sway of a volatile young woman who claims to have been his girlfriend. The onset of COVID in early 2020 adds another layer of distance and mystification to their correspondence, as Kornfeld, back in America, becomes enmeshed in elaborate online negotiations to produce a book and TV series about Darie. When the whole enterprise is revealed to be a hoax, Kornfeld must face how grief led her to search for answers where there were none—a parallel to her country's plunge into simplistic conspiracy theories and quick-fix politics.
The Twin Bill
Launched in 2020, The Twin Bill is a handsomely illustrated online quarterly that publishes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction about baseball. Editors say, "We celebrate the rich history of the game while also recognizing its vibrant present through essays, fiction, poetry, interviews, and visual art. We welcome writers of all levels and experiences."
The Uncapping
By Tim Mayo
A friend once told me this story
as I was on my way to a wedding.
It happened deep in the woods
on a ridge somewhere west of where
he lived: a woman he once loved
led him there down path after path,
reading signs only she could see,
to show him a secret place in the earth,
shown to her many years before.
It was capped with a nondescript rock
no one would have ever noticed,
which still took all her small weight
to push aside showing the entrance
to an ancient beehive chamber.
Inside: a circular stone wall rose
from the earthen floor, then arced
inward to form a dome making it
seem impossible to scale back up.
He couldn't believe they climbed in,
so that small opening—its light—
became the only link between them
and the outer world—that they stayed
waiting in the dark, as long as it took,
to see how the buried past hunched
its earth and stone shoulders over them,
and then, they made the difficult
climb out into the rest of their lives.
The United States of Queer Bookstores
This 2024 blog post from Red Hen Press, a prestigious publisher of literary prose and poetry, recommends 50 independent bookstores—one in every state—that are owned by LGBTQ folks or active allies to the LGBTQ community.
The Universe
By Carol Smallwood
It must be true: the Universe has no edge or center as I've read
so it brings me security to make patchwork quilts at night;
it makes sense to cut up pieces to sew with needle and thread.
"You are not lonely when you sew," Grandmother often said
as she sewed apron after apron with evident delight;
It must be true: the Universe has no edge or center as I've read.
Other activities most likely should have been my stead:
quilt after quilt I've made at night sitting straight, upright:
it makes sense to cut up pieces to sew with needle and thread.
Mixing pattern with plain, varying width until ready for bed,
securing the needle easy to spot on a piece extra bright—
it must be true: the Universe has no edge or center as I've read.
Fleece, flannel, denim, have made many a patchwork spread
and those who receive them do express thanks forthright:
it makes sense to cut up squares to sew with needle and thread.
I've concluded I'll have no edge or center when I'm dead
and finding security sewing squares is better than fright.
It must be true: the Universe has no edge or center as I've read
it makes sense to cut up pieces to sew with needle and thread.
The University of Texas at Austin - UT Library Online
This large page of links to etexts shows what a wealth of classic literature is available free online. Choose from thousands of works of prose, poetry, philosophy, religion and world literatures. Some resources are limited to UT Austin users, but many are open to the public. Notable resources include Project Gutenberg, Bartleby and Banned Books Online.
The Unraveling
Eight thousand sunsets ago
you left for the wars of Ilium
I imagined you there Odysseus
taking courage from a song
the thrust of a staff
from a fierce verge of self
one expects kingdoms from.
Since then a flotsam of ill-omens
have washed these shores.
Out of desire and spite
I wove them darkly
into a shroud by daylight
ripped them skein by skein
in the bedding night of Ithaca.
When at last you found your way home,
my mistrusting heart refused you
so bitter it was
from a decade of waiting.
But the melting moment came—
you paused to touch the bedpost
you once carved
from the olive tree thrusting through the floor
a secret foundation
sustaining us where we loved.
Together we wept
offered gifts to the gods.
and you planted an oar
celebrating the passage
and the sorrow.
In a bronze twilight
we each told our story
holding back the night.
Now the shadow of a sundial
crosses your face
now your eyes are restive.
Like boundaries of a dream
they have no home address.
Tell me, dear wanderer
did you come all this long way
to revisit old terrain
inspect your own heart?
Copyright 2004 by Lou Barrett
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Characters in literary classics can become so much a part of our collective psyche that they seem like real people, whose lives continue outside the boundaries of the story. This month's critique poem, "The Unraveling" by Lou Barrett, imagines what happened after Odysseus came home to his wife Penelope. According to Homer's Odyssey, while she waited for Odysseus to return from the Trojan Wars, Penelope kept her suitors at bay by saying she would not remarry until she had finished weaving the shroud of her late father-in-law, Laertes. However, she secretly unraveled the shroud again each night so that the work was never completed. (Read more about Penelope.) In Barrett's poem, a different kind of unraveling is in store when her husband finally comes home.
The opening line, "Eight thousand sunsets ago," measures the beloved's absence in nights rather than years, the enormous number immediately showing us how vast and monotonous the time seems to the one left behind. Why "sunsets" instead of days or mornings? The "bedding night of Ithaca" is when she feels her husband's absence most keenly, and also when she unravels the day's work and perhaps broods on the futility of her actions.
The first two stanzas suggest that darkness has crept into every aspect of her routine. The morbid task of weaving "a shroud by daylight" alternates with the unraveling "out of desire and spite". The objects of these emotions are left nameless. Spite toward the suitors, surely, but her desire for Odysseus is probably also mixed with resentment toward him and the male world of war that lured him away. The emotions themselves may have become their own rationale, divorced as she is from meaningful connection with any man.
Yet Penelope still draws hope from the memory of her husband as a larger-than-life figure, who stands on "a fierce verge of self/one expects kingdoms from." (Fantastic line.) When he returns, the ritual-like gesture that finally melts her mistrust—touching the bedpost—establishes their love as similarly mythic, able to compete with the grandeur Odysseus sought in his voyages. Her realm and her achievement are momentarily equal to his. "The olive tree thrusting through the floor/a secret foundation" parallels the "thrust of a staff" in the first stanza, and the planting of the oar to symbolize that he now belongs to the land, not the sea.
Not long thereafter, though, Odysseus is restless again. "The shadow of a sundial/crosses your face." Do the days weigh as heavily on him as the sunsets did on her? Penelope begins to fear that his dreams "have no home address." Ever the patient one, her tone at the end is gentle and compassionate, not bitter and disappointed: "Tell me, dear wanderer...." It's as if she realizes that she has traveled further in terms of emotional maturity; after all his voyaging, he still doesn't know what he wants. "Did you come all this way/to revisit old terrain/inspect your own heart?"
This final question, like many of the lines in "The Unraveling," is fruitful with multiple meanings. One interpretation: The most important discovery resulting from the voyage was nothing "out there," but rather a deeper understanding of himself and the place he started from. Another, less cheerful interpretation: After everything we've been through, are you really going to reopen the question of whether you belong here? Was your course of action, like mine, circular and pointless?
This poem works so well because it is tightly structured around pairs of opposites: day and night, male and female, patience versus ambitious questing, land and sea. Each member of the pair vies for dominance and in so doing, reveals new aspects of its counterpart.
Where could a poem like "The Unraveling" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
National Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 31
Traditional themes welcome at this competition sponsored by one of Britain's leading poetry organizations; top prize 5,000 pounds
Briar Cliff Review Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: November 1
Style and content are a good match based on past winners
Third Coast Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: November 15
$1,000 prize from well-known literary journal, judged this year by Pulitzer finalist Sydney Lea
In addition, these journals would welcome poems on classical themes (note that both are highly competitive):
The New Criterion
Conservative, high-modernist review of the arts and culture
First Things
Catholic intellectual review of religion, politics and literature
This poem and critique appeared in the October 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Unsealed
The Unsealed is a free online community for people to write and exchange inspirational open letters that reveal strength and encourage compassion. Sports journalist Lauren Brill founded it to provide a space where people of all races, genders, sexual orientations and socioeconomic backgrounds can be heard and supported, while also motivating and educating others. The site offers contests, free workshops, and pen pal relationships to seek advice on personal topics.
The Update
By Joshua Corwin
I tread transgressions
against how far I've come
as a kid diagnosed
on the autism spectrum
at the age of 5
and processing delay
at 6
along with anxiety disorder
and ADHD—
I don't want to repeat
circles, with my feet.
One smaller and the other
—reminds me of my mind.
Neurotypical.
[also, alcoholic—
Thank God I'm sober,
but that's
another story.]
Like a pacifist in rage
I need to accept my brain chemistry.
But persevere.
Circles.
Those feet
make them.
Quake.
And color loses its vivacity...
Like the squeamish self I am—
(Just
see me at the doctor.
Please.
Don't.
I'm embarrassed,
by how I fade.)
O, it's so hard
to fit in
when you're hardwired
to differ.
Range
like a spectrum of shapes:
I circle,
but I transcend.
But because I do,
I have these fits
{usually every 3 months or so,
sometimes once a year}
It comes from acting
typical
when you're
atypical.
—did I tell you I had to learn
thousands of idioms?
[I thought...
when someone
said, "it's raining
cats and dogs,"
That it was.]
—flashcards of rules...
I don't want to rock back and forth,
as I pass on going out the door,
because I am now the floor...
unable to speak
when I have so much to say...
That happens every now and then...
and my feet repeat themselves in circles...
around a shape—a square or rectangle or circle perfect:
the kitchen table, where Dad is late
because he's paying the bills,
so I can get the therapy I need,
and the speech therapy
—to learn idioms...like..."it's raining cats and dogs"
—I feel like "it's raining cats and dogs":
the words and screams of atypicality,
in dysfunctional
familiac ways—words invented
I have so much to hear.
I have so much to say.
I'm trying to not repeat the circle and fall on the ground...
But perhaps. Putting on the guise
and persevering like I do.
Perhaps, I need to fall.
Perhaps, I need to circle.
How else could I draw the line
of when it's time to stop the update?
[This poem first appeared in Placeholder Press, "Archive", December 31, 2019.]
The Valley of Hearts Delight
By Mary Lou Taylor
From the vantage of lush hillsides
Santa Clara Valley unveils fields
of yellow mustard in wild disarray
between row upon row
of pale pink cherry blossoms.
Plum trees offer the first whisper
of spring, the valley bursting
with delicate, fruity scents.
A drought ended, brought on
the first celebration, the first
Blossom Festival, invitations
to view the blossoming.
Hundreds responded. Invitations
are out again forty years later
for this true celebration—music,
vintage cars, food, arts and crafts,
poetry—and memories of a peach,
pink and white world.
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories
Every story is a masterpiece of voice, setting, and emotional depth in this collection of short fiction from the 1970s and '80s. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Allan Gurganus, Mary Gaitskill, Ron Hansen, Chris Offutt, Susan Power and John Edgar Wideman. This anthology stands out for the genuine diversity of its authors and subject matter (race, class, gender, location, historical period) and the absence of intellectual anomie and cynicism: something truly human is at stake in every tale.
The Volta in Flash Fiction
In this craft essay, fiction writer Cole Meyer, an editor at The Masters Review, suggests structuring a flash fiction piece like a poem with a "volta"—a shift of thought or mood that gives the piece its tension and forward movement.
The Voodoo Doll Parade
The profane becomes sacred under this poet's unflinching attention, in earthy poems about illness, sex, and prayer (and sometimes all three tangled up in bed together). The heart of this chapbook is a series of unforgettable narratives about homeless and mentally disabled clients of The Dining Room, a soup kitchen in Oregon where the author volunteered. This book was selected by Terry Wolverton for the Main Street Rag Author's Choice Chapbook Series.
The War Poetry Website
British site features bios of leading WWI poets, links to anthologies, and well-crafted poetry about contemporary conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.
The Web of Language
The Web of Language is Dennis Baron's blog focusing on newsworthy issues in grammar, language usage, and technology. Topics include the history of gender-neutral pronouns, America's politically motivated bans on using foreign languages, what makes a brand name a racial slur, and the interpretation of hate-crimes statutes.
The Weeds
By Gil Fagiani
Last of the old-time Yankees,
the Weeds never mixed
with their suburban neighbors
and kids said the younger brother was psycho,
pulling a knife on trick-or-treaters
when they knocked on the door.
A fence thick with vines and branches
blocked a view of their yard,
vibrant with snorts, grunts, moos,
clucking, cawing. I once spotted
the elder Weed driving his pick-up truck
with a live deer in the front seat.
When the peacocks came,
their piercing cries echoed
through the neighborhood
He-lp! He-lp! He-lp!
At first, thinking someone needed a hand,
I ran down and rattled the gate door,
but the younger Weed waved an ax
and scared me away.
I got used to the peacocks' cries,
saw them parading on the sidewalk
by the Weeds' house,
their upright purple plumes,
the rainbow eye
of their erect tail feathers.
One day a police car stopped
and two cops asked about reports
of a man shooting at pet dogs,
when the peacocks cried
He-lp! He-lp! He-lp!
What's that? the cops asked.
Sounds like somebody’s in trouble, I said,
pointing to the Weeds' house.
When the cops arrived,
the younger Weed cursed at them,
shotgun in hand
and, after a brief standoff,
he was taken away in handcuffs
—to the funny farm, I heard—
and never seen again.
The Weight Journal
Launched in 2020, The Weight Journal is an online literary space for the best poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by high school students. Editor Matthew Henry ("MEH") is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet and the author of Teaching While Black (Main Street Rag, 2020). Read an interview with him about The Weight Journal in Frontier Poetry.
The Whole 9
Free online job board features calls for artists, writers, performers, and graphic designers, plus contests and other opportunities for creative people.
The Whore’s Child and Other Stories
Deftly drawn portraits of intimate relationships explore how the people closest to us may be the most mysterious. In the title piece, an elderly nun in a fiction writing class writes her memoirs in defiance of the teacher's expectations, but the exercise reveals that the true story is different from what she had thought it to be. Other pieces gently probe the strengths and weaknesses of long-married couples, and how they are held together as much by the fictions they believe as by the truths they know about one another.
The Wicken Bird
By Geoffrey Heptonstall
A glimpse of feathers in the reeds.
And the air carries the spring's return
where the rain tastes of the sun
when other birds are sought
from the world beyond.
An instinct conferring grace
over land and water
passing through nature's dreams
prepared for a life of flight.
The marshland melody foretells
a future watchful and winged,
an ancestral enchantment
woven in a thread of grass.
We search the sky for signs
only the clear eye can see
for the coming season
of beauty and strength in song.
In the bird world lovers are chosen
to bind desire in harmony.
All else is curious intrusion,
a cuckoo's egg of course.
The Wild
She would have sworn up and down
That there was nothing more common
Than the constant drip-dripping of the farm faucet.
The warm monotone of hot water against steel
Cancelled the emotion in the farmer's voice.
She didn't have a choice
But to sit there and wait
For one more syllable to explode.
And what a heavy load for such a young girl.
She'd been alive for eight years and still laughed like a child
But the scars on her thigh showed that she's battled the Wild.
Beneath the eyes of a woman, she wore a little girl's pout
As she lined her wall with shards of glass to keep the Wild out.
Scorpion corpses laced the side of the empty chalet.
Like trust, their bodies took an instant to break,
And an eternity to mend.
By then, the screamers from the barn
Refused to be reconciled with their laughing counterparts
By the simple reassurance of fun and games
Perhaps gone just a bit too far.
Her work was careful and clean. She didn't cut herself at all;
Couldn't afford to lose more blood after her terrible fall.
Hot, red innocence had flooded the land,
The day the Wild of home had knocked it out of her hand.
The sour aftertaste of fruits that don't belong in human mouths
Can only be rinsed out by the
Warm, warm water, so
The constant drip-dripping of the farm faucet
Remained more in demand than anything else.
It had taken eight years, but eventually,
She had learned to read
The cryptic braille of scabs that lined his forearm.
She could understand what he muttered
Under alcohol-stained breath,
And the worst part:
She would have sworn that there was nothing more common.
Copyright 2007 by Tabitha Wood
Critique by Jendi Reiter
I chose Tabitha Wood's "The Wild" as this month's critique poem to explore the potential benefits and pitfalls of multiple styles within a poem, and to illustrate how an author can create dramatic tension by withholding information. Fans of mystery and horror films know that the unseen menace is often the most frightening. The creaking door, the odd angle of light, put the audience in the shoes of the protagonist who gropes for clues to the identity of the threat. Our inability to piece the facts together mirrors her helplessness.
With cinematic pacing, Wood focuses first on the dripping faucet, leaving us to speculate what trauma could have turned this ordinary object so sinister. The entire experience of violation is contained within this image. It is an all-consuming wrongness that poisons the smallest, most prosaic details of the child's world. Wood understands that to describe the abuse with more specificity would be to step outside the perspective of the victim, who has no name for what has happened to her—it is simply "The Wild", the haunted forest of fairy-tales, from which the monsters of our collective unconscious emerge. The unspeakable is defined by a negative, "the sour aftertaste of fruits that don't belong in human mouths".
The imagery now takes a more fantastical, overtly violent turn: "As she lined her wall with shards of glass to keep the Wild out./Scorpion corpses laced the side of the empty chalet." Because she began with a realistic, emotionally understated setting, Wood can dial up the intensity without seeming melodramatic. The striking phrase "hot, red innocence" reverses the usual values we assign to these attributes.
The word "chalet" did confuse my mental picture of the scene, since this style of building is more common in alpine or beach resorts than on a farm. I also don't associate scorpions with any of these types of landscape, but rather with a desert environment. Perhaps we are not meant to read this passage literally; it has the feel of a child's embellished imaginings, where the farmhouse becomes a chalet (or castle) and dead grasshoppers could be dangerous stinging insects. This still doesn't fit with how I understood the poem's general structure, putting the real-life segments in free verse and the metaphorical interpretation in the italicized, rhymed couplets.
How wise of Wood to keep those "screamers from the barn" offstage, an obscene parody of the screams of delight from the child's "laughing counterparts" at play. As W.H. Auden said in his famous poem "Musée des Beaux Arts", "About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters...That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course/Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot/Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree." The outside world going about its business, ignorantly and indifferently happy, reinforces the abused child's isolation.
The ending follows the same "less-is-more" logic of the earlier stanzas. The child learns to read the scars on her abuser's body (a parallel to those on her own thighs?) and understand his drunken mutterings, but we're not told outright what she learns. An empathy, perhaps, that would seem like cheap and sentimental moral equivalence if outsiders like us verbalized it. We get a subtle clue in the last line: "she would have sworn that there was nothing more common." The worst part, for her, is knowing that abuse is so common that her tormentor was once a victim himself, perpetuating the pattern. What happened to her, unfortunately, is not a rare exception.
It's risky to include different styles within a short poem, as Wood does here. Done right, multiple voices can add depth and tension as each provides a new interpretation of the same reality. However, it undercuts the writer's authority if she seems unable to decide on the right voice for her story.
I felt the technique was only a partial success in "The Wild" because the rhyming lines are not as tightly crafted or mature in their authorial voice as the free-verse section. Rhyming couplets with no evident meter are a common feature of beginning writers' work, and I find them less effective than true formal verse because they suggest a blinkered emphasis on end-rhyme to the exclusion of the other elements of a poetic line—a musical cadence, varied pacing and syntax, and diction that differs from prose. The line is not disciplined; as long as it ends with a rhyme, it can wander as long as it wishes (a bargain pushed to its absurd extreme by Ogden Nash's light verse). For instance, I felt "the day the Wild of home had knocked it out of her hand" was a mixed metaphor that Wood wouldn't have used unless forced to find a rhyme for "land". When she says "knocked it out of her hand" I picture a solid object being dropped, but the only possible referent for "it" is the "hot, red innocence," presumably a liquid, blood.
Would the poem work better without the italicized sections? I think Wood's intuition is correct that a more emotional interior voice is needed as a counterpart to the repression and confinement of the child's external situation. One reason these sections feel weaker to me may be that they over-explain, compared to the Hitchcock-like subtle terrors of the free verse segments. I would like to see more surrealism, more drama, more lines like "lined her wall with shards of glass" and "hot, red innocence". And perhaps no rhymes. In fact, try going further in the direction of psychological chaos with a fragmented and surreal style, as Belinda Smith used in the poem we critiqued in February, "The Telepathic Bruise", another narrative of abuse. "The Wild" is already a powerful poem, and will be even better when its parts cohere a little more harmoniously.
Where could a poem like "The Wild" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Abilene Writers Guild Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Texas poetry society offers $100 prizes in a number of genres including rhymed and unrhymed poetry, short stories, articles, children's literature and novel excerpts
Connecticut Poetry Competition (formerly the Brodine/Brodinsky Poetry Competition)
Postmark Deadline: May 31
Connecticut Poetry Society offers prizes up to $400 and anthology publication for unpublished poems
League of Minnesota Poets Annual Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Prizes up to $125 for poems on various themes or in traditional forms (18 categories in all); publication not included
This poem and critique appeared in the July 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Wishing Tomb
Winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Award in Poetry, this exquisite collection surveys the cultural history of New Orleans over three centuries, in poems that quiver and shake with music and surge with the violence of floods. End-notes provide background on the incidents that inspired each poem.
The Witch Boy
By Molly Knox Ostertag. This lovely middle-grade graphic novel features a youth whose magical skills transgress the gender roles of his community. All the girls in Aster’s extended family are supposed to become witches, and the boys, animal shapeshifters who defend them from evil spirits. However, Aster’s passion is for witchery. With the help of Charlie, a non-magical girl from the neighboring suburb, he uses his forbidden talent to fight a monster in a way that only he can. Charlie, who has two (off-page) dads, is uniquely sympathetic to Aster’s dilemma because she’s a female athlete struggling for equal opportunities at her school. Both children are people of color, and Aster’s extended family includes a variety of ethnicities. The artwork, in cozy earth tones, is clear and expressive, and not too scary for younger readers.
The World’s Wife
The wives of mythic figures get their say at last.
The Wrestler’s Cruel Study
By Stephen Dobyns. Poet and noir mystery novelist Dobyns branches out into philosophical farce in this ensemble-cast comedy set in early 1990s New York City, where wrestling matches re-enact early Christian disputes about the nature of evil, and anyone's life might unwittingly mimic a Grimm's fairy tale. What holds this capacious story together is the idea that truth is only manifested through artifical personae and constructed narratives—what wrestlers call their Gimmicks—and if there is free will, it consists of noticing your Gimmick and maybe choosing a different one.
The Write Life
The Write Life is a one-stop shop for information on how to make a living as a writer. Their annual "100 Best Websites for Writers" list showcases their favorite resources for freelancing, book marketing, blogging, literary craft advice, and inspiration for the long haul.
The Write Life’s 100 Best Websites for Writers in 2019
The Write Life, a writing resource site, compiles this annual list of their favorite websites in 10 categories: freelancing, inspiration, writing tools, blogging, creativity and craft, editing, podcasts, marketing and platform building, writing communities, and publishing.
The Writer Magazine
In print since 1887.
The Writer Magazine: Essays About Writing
The Writer Magazine is a well-established guide to writing, editing, and marketing your work. This page on their website collects links to their past articles with inspirational tips for writers. Topics include finding the heart of your story, balancing writing and parenting, and resisting negativity from your inner critic.
The Writer’s Almanac
A daily program of poetry and history hosted by Garrison Keillor, suffused with his characteristic nostalgia and humor. Each day presents a pithy new poem and recalls birthdays of famous writers and artists, unusual holidays and resonant historical events. Rich food for a literary mind. Sign up to receive the Almanac each morning by email. The website archives past issues.
The Writer’s Hotel at The New Guard
The Writer's Hotel is the teaching and editorial arm of the literary journal, The New Guard. The Writer's Hotel hosts a writing conference in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry each June at a "floating campus" in Midtown Manhattan between three hotels with a literary history: The Library, The Algonquin, and The Bryant Park Hotel. The conference includes virtual pre-study with Editors Shanna McNair and Scott Wolven and on-site workshops, lectures, agent speed dating, literary events, and student readings in the city at KGB Bar Lit, The Bowery, and Book Culture. Via The Writer's Hotel, TWH editors also offer a year-long course called "Private Study", which functions much like a low-residency creative writing course.
The Writer’s Workout
Launched in 2014, The Writer's Workout is a resource site with features including a discussion forum, submission calls, prompts, a newsletter, and a literary journal called WayWords. For $1/month you can use their Achievement Tracker to organize your submissions and drafts. The site's editors say, "It's designed and tested to help you measure all your literary progress: the Achievement Tracker shows your total word count, competition wins, reading, editing, publications, and more throughout the year as well as your daily and monthly average word count. Seeing these totals and averages helps you develop constructive writing habits, encourages you to try different things, and provides a clear visual of your growth."
The Writers’ Union of Canada: Awards & Competitions
Canadian writers should take note of these quality fiction and nonfiction contests. Prizes are awarded for individual pieces, collections, writing for children and short-shorts.
The Year of Yellow Butterflies (The Blog)
This site is the blog companion to Joanna Fuhrman's book The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press, 2015), a collection of poems about fads and trends from imaginary pasts. Readers who wish to contribute their own prose-poems beginning "It was the year of..." may submit them through the blog contact form along with a short bio. Contributors to the site have included Maria Garcia Teutsch, Susan Lewis, Maureen Thorson, and a 5-year-old named Ian.
theNewerYork
tNY is interested in new, forgotten, and experimental literary forms of short fiction: aphorisms, flash-fiction, user's manuals, surveys, lists, punctuationless stories, upside down stories, inside out stories, lipograms, faux press releases, fake book reviews, dialogues, scriptcerpts, epigrams, and other absurdities. They publish an annual chapbook-sized anthology, as well as the Electric Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature, a somewhat searchable online collection of unusual flash prose and artwork.
There must be a way to listen
By Laurie Klein
like a small body of water,
reflective face, upturned: benign,
an entity of acceptance.
Water embraces the sunken. The near-dying
as well as the thriving stir, like plants
practicing grace as they lean on the current.
Let me be a haven, where shared sediments
settle. Where buoyancy reasserts itself.
Where you will beckon the weathered vessel,
and I will coax the reluctant toe.
We'll soften the chipped margins of shells,
castoffs, the chronically stony. Encompassed,
eased, the survivor rises
the way a trout breaks from silence, to surface,
old hooks and lines ingrown, jaws half-trussed—
wounds revealed, by one seeking a witness.
What was it the risen one said? Hark.
Flow and do likewise.
They Remember War
Writecorner Press editor Robert B. Gentry interviewed residents of the Oak Hammock retirement community at the University of Florida in Gainesville who were veterans of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Their oral histories are collected on this page on Writecorner's website.
Thief in the Interior
By Phillip B. Williams. This debut collection from Alice James Books is a formally innovative, visceral and intense collection of poems through which the American tradition of violence against gay and black male bodies runs like a blood-red thread. From concrete poetry collages to experimental sonnets, Williams makes us contemplate murder as a twisted outburst of intimacy across caste lines, and love as a battle cry. Winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Thirst
By Tricia McCallum
The sun was hotter.
You can tell.
Look at us squinting against it in photos then.
Everything washed out by the glare,
cheekbones, jawlines,
all detail surrendered.
Dazzled,
we could be anybody.
The gardens, look, they're parched.
It hurt to walk on the grass.
We lay in scorched backyards
slathering butter on our chests,
chain-smoking, eating fluorescent cheesies,
swilling bright red soda.
Everyone burned raw.
And we knew
nothing could go wrong.
Our lives lay ahead of us.
Men were above us,
landing on the moon.
This poem is reprinted from The Music of Leaving (Demeter Press, 2014). It was first published at Goodreads.com as the winner of their December 2011 poetry contest.
This Book Is Anti-Racist
By Tiffany Jewell. This social justice handbook for middle-grade and young adult readers offers tools for understanding your identity and social position, unlearning myths of American history, affirming yourself in a prejudiced world, and using your privileges to disrupt racism. Upbeat, energetic illustrations by Aurelia Durand create a mood of hope and momentum for dealing with tough truths. Jewell's background in Montessori education is reflected in her trusting and empowering young people to make mature moral choices.
This Gardener’s Impossible Dream
Light verse from the Georgia Poetry Society's former vice president, featuring both original works and translations of French poems by La Fontaine, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud.
This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon
This luminous collection of linked stories takes the risk of positing a universe where tragedy and confusion do not get the last word. The narrator's acerbic wit and unsparing assessments of human nature, particularly her own, earn credibility for the moments of grace that always break in to redeem her family's love-hate relationships.
This Time Last Year
By Pamela Sumners
This time last year a neighbor who always lingers
to talk asked me if we'd noticed the silence of the
chimney swifts and the nighthawks lately. I had not.
This year, with no hum of traffic, with just the shrieks
of little girls in their speckled-egg Easter leggings
tramping the fenced back yard, I do breathe in the full
orchestral range of the birds: the grackles with their
puffed-out pipe whistle plunging so rapidly deep
into a guttural caw, the chimney swifts' high-toned
chattering, able to call out while still on the wing,
foraging my deck for seeds, battling each other but
sharing with the sparrows. Their claws unfit for perching,
swifts lurch straightaway and bathe by doing a water glide
in flight, their pond in this case a blue plastic wading pool
we keep for the dogs. The swifts cling to the mortar joists
to roost overnight or for nesting, remembering the caves,
the sheer, creviced rock faces jutting over rivers,
the hollowed-out trees where their ancestors foraged. This
is a neighborhood of old trees, of houses with chimneys,
of Olmsted parks and meet-me-in-St. Louis wrought-iron
pickets, a perfect place for the little smudge-gray flyer,
with its cigar-shaped silhouette in flight and its fluid
sweep. They greet the surging dawn like fish singing
into the reef. Sometimes they've been seen in small flocks
funneling themselves into the flues like infinitesimal
tornados. They memory-hoard the dark, the cavernous
seclusion of primordial home, love their splendid isolation
in a way that the tenders of lawns, peddlers of provender,
the neighbor instinctually leaning over the fence to you, cannot.
They do not know that the chimney owners are living through
a goddamn featherstroke of history, now nesting with them, awake.
Thistlefoot
By GennaRose Nethercott. In this extraordinary work of Jewish magical realism, the American great-great-grandchildren of legendary Eastern European witch Baba Yaga inherit her chicken-legged hut, and find themselves tasked with laying the ghosts of the pogroms to rest. The story is undergirded by a traditionally Jewish vision of death and the afterlife, in which being remembered by your descendants is the most important form of immortality. The Yaga descendants, whose magical powers have their hidden roots in Jewish survival skills, must do battle with the personification of genocidal forces that would erase not only a marginalized people but even the memory of their existence. And there is a traveling puppet show, and a monster-hunting band of queer rock musicians, and a lesbian romance with an animated graveyard statue. What more could you ask for?
Thoughts on Structure
In this 2011 essay from the Ploughshares blog, poet and writing professor Weston Cutter urges writers of free verse to give more conscious thought to the reasons for their structural choices. Visual components such as stanza breaks, line breaks, and margins should be chosen to enhance the meaning and sound of the poem.
Three Declarations
1.
How we position ourselves
for our inner audience:
you the reconciler, I the fighter
who besets you and is embraced
finally, all I've ever wanted
from anger. You see honesty
in me—after water, it alone
saves us. I will always be
the rattlesnake sidewinding
your desert, the wash flooded,
then dry, the acid pool that burns
you down to life's essentials.
Come closer, I say. Wash your hands.
2.
Our story truly began when you plucked me
too young to bloom from a dry bed—tequila spines
drawing your blood. You anchored a desert
garden with me: evening primrose, the invader,
ice plant with its jelly bean leaves, pink pussytoes
for gossip—even yucca, that loner, as a sentinel.
And always, the romance of the yucca moth.
Dizzy with love, you would divide me, sink me
in pots for others to plant, in all 200 countries.
But I say, don't return me to any bed but yours,
keep me where light is a scar. Sun-lover,
I need to burn in summer. Your hands
make my home, my rebirth. Come now. Dig.
3.
You, the bight of refuge
at the base of a canyon,
scatter of pebbles in front
the seep chill on my back
and then it comes: rills
sinuous down a pommel
of sunset stone
I climb up your black lip
slip into the cut wall that holds
me as rain lathers down
sandstone my bed and water
my lit curtain I open
my mouth to you
Copyright 2004 by Beth Partin
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Beth Partin's "Three Declarations", traces the many facets of a romantic relationship by recasting them as features of the southwestern desert landscape. The three sections represent a journey from tension and mistrust to openness and sensual communion, where images of water serve as signs of the relationship's renewal. This emotional movement is paralleled by a change in diction from one section to the next. The abstract language of the opening lines yields to a more physical narrative about a garden, which in turn dissolves into the run-on lines depicting the couple's passion at the end.
The relationship described by the poem is complex and not always easy to characterize. In what sense is the speaker like a rattlesnake, a wash both flooded and dry, an acid pool? These natural phenomena seem to have little in common. All three, however, disrupt the calm sameness of the desert with their mutability and their dangerous potential, just as the narrator wants to provoke her lover into a passionate response. Like flood waters, anger is not solely to be feared, as it is also a source of regeneration. The pitch-perfect last line of the first stanza works as both a tender invitation and a threat. Wash your hands, dear...in "the acid pool that burns/you down to life's essentials."
In the second stanza, the tables are turned, as the speaker's lover now tries to change her. She describes herself as a plant in a garden that he planned, a place of beauty and diversity that nonetheless chafes her with its limits. "Our story truly began when you plucked me/too young to bloom from a dry bed—tequila spines/drawing your blood." These lines reveal a wealth of mixed feelings: the spiny plant fights back against the gardener's act of mastery, yet the plant has been rescued from a "dry bed" (double entendre surely intended) where it could not bloom.
This stanza is filled with far more affection and fruitfulness than the previous one. Replacing the antagonism is understanding of the other person's motives: "Dizzy with love, you would divide me, sink me/in pots for others to plant, all 200 countries./But I say, don't return me to any bed but yours". What is going on in this stanza? I'm guessing that the narrator is upset by how her lover objectifies her, perhaps shows her off to other men, like his prize flower. Though she knows he's acting out of love and pride in her, she'd rather be treated like a person.
The last lines of the stanza move the couple toward reconciliation. "Come now. Dig." echoes the distancing, challenging "Come closer." of the first stanza, but now the speaker is open to being molded and changed herself, as well as changing the other person.
The first two stanzas could be seen as a back-and-forth struggle for control of the relationship, with the parties swapping the active and passive roles, whereas in the third stanza they have moved beyond the boundary fights. The couple's separate identities wash away in an ecstasy of rain that refreshes and perhaps reshapes the canyon stones. The musical third stanza is full of "S" and "L" sounds and other soft consonants that mimic the sounds of the rushing water and falling pebbles ("rills/sinuous down a pommel/of sunset stone").
"Three Declarations" is a well-crafted and lyrical poem that could be submitted to prestigious literary journals. It might work better with a different title, though. What are the three declarations? The first stanza's "Come closer." and the second's "Come now. Dig." are likely candidates, except that there is no parallel ending for the third stanza (nor should there be—the current ending is just right). Calling the stanzas themselves "declarations" doesn't give us much useful information about them. The restrained, unsentimental tone of the title "Three Declarations" is preferable to one that gives away too much about the poem (e.g. "Our Marriage"), but I would prefer something with a little more personality.
Where could a poem like "Three Declarations" be submitted? The following journals and contests may be of interest:
Texas Review
This journal favors conversational narrative free verse; see website for submission guidelines
Atlanta Review 2004 International Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: May 10
See sample work on the website of this acclaimed journal
Alligator Juniper's National Writing Contest
Postmark Deadline: October 1
Handsomely produced journal from Prescott College in Arizona offers $1,000 awards for poetry, fiction and essays
This poem and critique appeared in the April 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
