Ragan performs on the Weill stage at Carnegie Hall
for Lyric Recovery Festival™ , April 29, 2000.
Musically-Infused
Poetry in an Age of Prose
What
is 'lyric'?
The
Multiple Voices of the Lyric Color Wheel
The
Carnegie Program
The
Post-Performance at Carnegie Bar & Books
Acknowledgments
The
Book
The
Tour: Photos from legendary Gotham Book Mart
LyR's
Return to Carnegie
The
LyR Carnegie Poems
Musically
Infused Poetry in an Age of Prose
Not Cause -- Cause
for Celebration
(Lyric Recovery(tm) is a p h i l
o p h o n e m a(tm) affiliate)
After twelve sessions in New York, Paris and Prague --with more envisaged for Montreal, Vienna, Barcelona and elsewhere -- Lyric Recovery(tm) is recognized as a multilingual force of innovation and a preserve of excellence. In this age of prose, the event originated to:
-- reinfuse poetry with the music indispensable to it, while encouraging reach, craft, dimension and intensity
-- free the lyric voice from its academic definition as an 'I' reference, a single speaker relating his experience of the world
-- extend the lyric's potential far beyond its ostensible material confines as the poetic province of love and death
-- demonstrate the lyric's multilingual, multicultural reach as the poem's heartbeat heard from and all over the world
-- produce, present, engender and reward lyric excellence
Lyric recovery: Not
cause -- cause for celebration.
Typically defined as "a single speaker relating his experience of the world," the term evokes for many Wordsworthian pastorals, Byron's Childe Harold or Frost's elemental Yankee loner. Yet John Berryman, the master of "shipwrecked syntax," navigated the lyric's powerful currents as the "voice of the other." In James Ragan's Hunger Wall, Galway Kinnell's Book of Nightmares, it is the spillway of brute force, the collective undertow of horror.
Through the intimate bonding of sound and meaning, the lyric poem draws the deepest emotional, the keenest sensual response, its enunciated breath the music that "joins the liberties of sleep with the intensity of extreme wakefulness," (Valéry) the rhythm and sonority that "respond to man's immortal need for symmetry and surprise." (Baudelaire)
Lyric is mesmerizing in any language, however rudimentary one's linguistic, thus, mental apprehension. Once emotionally allied with the piece, the listener imputes his own meaning, as here to a stanza in Suvicnai ("Shoo-veets-NYE"):
Voc mani sloka,
sloka tedü,
nu sonic lennia
kim debai.
Edevi kum battoy
sis bajani,
nev husko fai ranne
dari mijü.
O nev nev ranne
faisi dari mijai.
The lyric poem's first stirrings are rarely verbal; it arrives by emotional sensation, by the internal color, texture, smell of a mood, by an image, pitch, cadence, hum, by the savor of a long vowel. "The poet is occupied with the frontiers of consciousness where words fail, but meanings still exist." (Eliot) This is the zone we inhabit when we enter into dialogue with the poem to transliterate our non-verbal exchange onto the page. Poet accounts solely to poem as the final arbiter of its completion; poem scrutinizes and challenges poet.
Rilke's Apollo is headless, limbless, yet every contour of muscle and bone radiates a gaze and a smile.
Denn da ist keine
Stelle,
die dich nicht
sieht.
Du mußt dein
Leben ändern.
For there is no
part of him
that does not see
you.
You must change
your life.
Only by surrender to the dialogue can we create anything true, anything of lasting value. By recovering the lyric, we acknowledge needs and reaffirm values that alter, enlarge, transcend ourselves.
In eleven sessions in New York, Paris and Prague, Lyric Recovery™ has sought to extend the lyric to full potential, presenting, engendering and visibly rewarding work marked by reach, craft, content and musicality. The 12th culminates with this festival session at Carnegie Hall.
Huddled since mid-century as "global village" around a dominant source of imagery, sound, even meaning, we must make uncommon use of language to ferry us beyond its perimeter to the essential, shared harmonics.
(Lyric Recovery™
is a p h i l o p
h o n e m a ™
presentation.)
The Multiple Voices of the Lyric Color Wheel
Eliot suggested that the first voice of poetry is that of the poet talking to himself, the second, his voice addressing an audience, the third, his attempt to invent multiple voices -- none his own -- which address one another. Anticipating the argument tat a love poem is devoted to a private audience of one, he contents that good love poetry is always meant to be overheard; his flat assertion: when a lover wants privacy, he writes prose. He orders these verse modes into three valences: non-dramatic, quasi-dramatic and dramatic. While they forma tidy triangle, the true shape may be hexagonal.
Valéry's single voice in La Jeune Parque is intense theatre. Moreover, most agree that the tormented girl ("And what shriveled leaf persists in quivering between you, islands of my naked breast?") is not a voice assumed or persona invented by the author for effect, but rather, his own affect breaking a fifteen-year silence. Of course, the theatre has forms of self-address or reverie ("Soft, what light through yonder window breaks?") overheard as soliloquy or solo aria.
Eliot likely would have allowed room for multiple voices to occupy the first and second verse modes as well, each speaking to and for itself, past or unperceived by the other. Conversely, multiple voices can speak as one: Eliot's chorus in The Rock. Adding these counterpart valences to his primary ones produces a six-sided color wheel of voices, all of them potentially lyric.
While even the general reader acknowledges the reorientation of novelistic voice from Jamesian talking heads to Woolfe's interior monologue, writers still falsely consign the lyric to balmy Wordsworthian pastorals or Frost's elemental Yankee loner, thus, the classic definition of a single speaker relating his experience of the world.
Collected since mid-century
around a dominant source of imagery, we must make uncommon use of language
to reach beyond it to the essential shared harmonics -- while those who
insist on privacy write prose.
Features James Ragan
and Galway Kinnell were joined by the 10 finalists who read in the final-round
selection for judge Dana Gioia, and by 20 other performers appearing in
a program of more than 50 poems and songs, which included new settings
of work by Yeats, Valéry, Rilke, Apollinaire (and Ragan), along
with original pieces, in nearly a dozen languages, real and invented. Singers
included all vocal categories; music instruments included piano, cello,
violin, flute and alto flute. Full details, along with bios of the features,
judge Dana Gioia, and the performers, appear on the event web site: <www.geocities.com/lyricrecovery>
The 30-page large-format program is available for purchase ($10) by writing
to p h i l o p h o n e m a(tm) at Box 1141, Cathedral Station, NY 10025.
The Post-Performance at Carnegie Bar & Books
About 100 guests joined the post-performance event at Carnegie Bar & Books just behind the hall on West 56th Street where they voted for their favorite poem, bought new release books by Kinnell and Ragan, and heard violin-playing marionettes and poetry from the semifinalists and others, more songs, and informal addresses by officials from The Yeats Society, The Czech Center, The Dome and Dana Gioia.
In addition to the onstage presentations of a Waterford pitcher, Ceska crystal vase, and hand-made Italian music box to Kinnell, Ragan, and Gioia, other presentations were made afterwards: a first-edition Sonnets to Orpheus (Rilke) restored by Jennifer Jestin went to Galway Kinnell, music boxes to the winners of the high school category, and a special citation to composer Paul Winston from The Yeats Society.
(Photos pending.)
With thanks to the artistry of:
Paul Winston (instrumental obbliggati and piano), Gilbert
High and Dariusz Ocetek (baritones), Patrick Dillery and Margaret Lancaster
(flutes), Gene Hahn (violin), Ed Klinger (percussion), Richard Johnson
(trumpet), Roxanne Beck and Phoebe Yadon (sopranos), Stacey Helle (mezzo),
Michael Boyce (tenor), Robert Scott, Adam Merton Cooper, Margo Berdeshevsky
(poetry), Maureen Holm (poetry/music/translation), Viktor Tichy (translation),
Patrick Haon (translation/essay), Vit Horejs (Czech recitation and violin-playing
marionette), Jennifer Jestin (restoration of first-edition Sonnets to
Orpheus, Insel Verlag, Leipzig, 1923), Kathleen Bishop (Shakespeare
recitation and stage direction), Sharon Chu and Alex Kveton (sculpture);
the poetry analyses of evaluators:
Dan Lewis, Larissa Shmailo, Frank Portella, Victor Asaro,
Larry Mallory, Margo Berdeshevsky, Maureen Holm;
the on-site assistance of:
Patricia Franz, Erica Bunin, Pati Sands, Leslie Robinson;
the advertising or other sponsorship of:
The Academy of American Poets, Argosy Rare Books, Art
Times, Bauman Rare Books, Carnegie Bar & Books, Ceska Crystal, Coda
Music Technology, The Czech Center, The Czechoslovak-American Marionette
Theatre, Ellen Bryant Voigt, La Fête de la Poésie (Québec),
Gotham Book Mart & Gallery, Graywolf Press, Gryphon Books, Tom Hair,
HarperCollins, Herodias, Houghton Mifflin, The Hudson Valley Writers Guild,
Insel Verlag, International Woodwinds, The Irish Arts Center, The Juilliard
Bookstore, Kate's Paperie, Labyrinth Books, The Language Works, Liberty
Partnership Program, Linear Arts, The Lyric, Madison Avenue Bookshop, New
York Dance andArts Innovations, Patelson's, The NYS Dept of Ed, Paris/Atlantic,
Paris Free Voice, The Poetry Calendar, poetrycentral.com, Poets & Writers,
Poets House, Rattapallax Magazine, Rattle Magazine, Rhino Records, Ripples:
The Art of Water, Riverside Copy, Robin's Books (Philadelphia), Romancing
Provence, The Saratoga Arts Council, The Schedule, The Honorable Senator
Charles Schumer, Shaw Realty, Steve Sherman Photo Studios, Sitegeist, Strand
Books, Troubadour Magazine, The University of Georgia Press, Waterford-Wedgewood,
The West Chester University Poetry Conference on Form and Narrative, WBAI,
WNYC, The Yeats Society of New York;
the extraordinary interventions of:
Ram Devineni;
and with a year-long kiss to an unnamed hero.
The
Book:
The contestant poems
were submitted by the producers and many were published individually in
literary journals including Rattapallax, Paris/Atlantic,
Rattle and The Lyric.
Headwaters Press, NY
is publisher of the award-winning collection from Carnegie, which includes
essays, poetry from the features and from The Carnegie 22, with photographs
by Elena Kondracki, Ann Sgarlata and Margo Berdeshevsky. The 48-page book
has been released in two editions, a hand-sewn edition on fine paper, bound
in a Florentine print ($22), and in a printed, saddle-stapled edition ($9).
Write to Water to Wine to Waterford®, Box 1141, Cathedral Station,
New York 10025.
The
Tour:
Finalist and semifinalist winners were announced and sponsors
acknowledged in a half-page ad which appeared in the September/October
2000 issue of Poets & Writers. Throughout the Summer, individual
poets were booked by the producers as individual features in various venues
in the metropolitan area.
Bookings were arranged for New York and New Jersey area
winners to appear -- up to a dozen at a time -- in various other venues
in Manhattan and upstate, including Baggot Inn, Cloister Café, Gotham
Book Mart & Gallery, Cornelia Street Café, etc., sometimes together
with the LyR Carnegie musicians and with speaker/editor George Dickerson.
Most were sponsored by Poets & Writers with a grant from the
New York State Council on the Arts.
The photos which appear here were taken on October 25,
2000 during the reading at Gotham, New York's oldest and most prestigious
independent book store. Bertha Rogers (Beowulf), Michael T. Young
(Transcriptions of Daylight) and George Dickerson (Selected Poems)
who also participated are pictured, along with Nicholas Johnson, Reese
Thompson, Susan Scutti, Diana Manister, Mark Nickels, Rob Wright, Stella
Padnos, Jay Chollick, and Evan Eisman.
Fierce demand for performance
dates and Carnegie's own greatly expanded use of Weill Recital Hall prevented
LyR's return to Carnegie this Spring. However, the Lyric Recovery Festival(tm)
2002 will be widely publicized shortly after signing and a call for submissions
to the international competition will follow in this publication and elsewhere
in due course.
The Music
of Poetry
Zivanska
Unshelved
Elegy
for a Bird House
Firecraft
Fitzgerald’s
Trees
Frog Queen
in Fall
Ixion at Mud
St. Brendan
at Crosshaven
Stumbling
Running of the Pines
Untitled
(My lunchbox holds bones . . . )
The Work of
Hardening
When Gravity
Fails
Semifinalists
Accident
at Windsor Station
Cantus
for the Horses
Encounter
at the Butterfly Museum
Eternal Vigilance
Hansel,
Gretel and the Black Bird
Haunts
Inside You
Like an Old
Dog
Love
from a Blue Window in the City
Old Babyface
Streaming
The
Weeping of the Penny Whistle
The
Music of Poetry
And now -- after putting
forward a "unified theory":
(Imperfect Thirst, Houghton
Mifflin, 1994)
*
After the doors were
shut and the windows sealed
"Grass is burning.
Stags are in the wood."
And out into the green
night and salt arbors
Under a moon as low
as a mushroom scone,
what flint of fire
could set the night to gasp.
A crackling sound began
to grow into the roaring
and onions skewered
and spat above the fire spears.
into the throat and
further in, the heart of something
"The stags are gone.
Boars have killed their young."
And no one moved. The
king of bandits sheathed
(The Hunger Wall, Grove 1995)
*
Unshelved
(at Shakespeare & Co., Paris)
Black paws, blue china
saucer,
What makes for kind,
what makes for cruel?
Si je sautais, cette
feuille crispée dans la main,
What makes for ‘now,’
what makes for ‘ever’?
Enlèverait-elle
la page au moins,
When is time? When
is time?
Inter-quick-changeable
vision of the young,
Never woman by woman
so ardently sued for,
(Prior publ.: Paris/Atlantic,
Spring 2000)
*
Elegy
for a Bird House
I loved a man
The hands of the man
were a worker’s hands,
O house-maker, seed-giver,
And will the bird house
go under the sea,
What do we do when
there is no consolation?
My father too was a
maker,
What can we do when
there is no consolation?
All the madness and
innocence of my love
All the madness and
innocence of my love
the father will go
under the hill
*
Firecraft
How rich you are, an
urchin said to Wilde,
On the other roof,
camcorder monitors
Yesterday, we staggered
in a heat wave,
My computer, with a
banner, just
*
Fitzgerald’s
Trees
Hold moment of compelled
emanation
More time in a drop
Only blackberries early
*
Frog
Queen in Fall
Already, I’m sick of
apples and trying to match
Where there were leaves
there are leaves of a different color
direction. It is drier,
the wind. I hate it like
all electric. There
was a time when I wanted to keep
too private -- or embarrassing,
that I was not chosen
you understand risk
-- in your cities -- risk or what happens
were like counties
then -- like suburbs -- close together,
of them because, you
see, the queens were the real
collapsing on stairways,
ordering textiles in enemy colors,
was more beautiful
then and it’s not just childhood makes
queens, what makes
change -- and safety was not yet
The possibility of
being self and self, of the wind’s
understand risk or
regret. You imagine yourself the ghost
the incision -- or
the inner life of the amphibian. It’s not
me some inaccuracies,
some memory -- or do you know the word
beyond that -- filth,
disease -- and, of course, it reached
tragedians, to set
forth our little Cordelias, let
a lily or be the same
but more beautiful. I am not death
burned into something.
I heard the conversations of the
ten million poems of
courtly love and I think I have written
in my exhaustion. Sometimes
I think I am the end of the
their endless ancestry.
Do you see now?
are not like drawings
of frogs. You may have my story. The wind
you the truth. Reader,
this is fame -- the parts that have
to people in faraway
places, people who speak and cannot
(Work abridged in performance,
reproduced here in its entirety.)
*
Ixion
at Mud
I have succumbed to
the smell of sweating
bricks, a snap, a whinny,
and a mallard’s
the foals I want to
buck. I know that clay
for the many mistakes
I’ve made this year;
my heart turned to
liver, my heart turned to spleen --
I must be leaving for
the mud now, sidling
and she will bear our
children, and they
caked with piss-clay
and sullied fetlock tufts,
two hearts, too good.
I will keep their quivers clean
*
St.
Brendan at Crosshaven
Chill water, chill
rocks, chill turn of the tide.
Weeds rise and fall,
like closed eyes in the water.
Fisherman’s lamps is
a name for flowers lighting the water at the
Sea-gulls circle our
small craft with visions of a river.
In the moorgrass running
down to the sand, swept flat by the
Curlews call to curlews
of hard rowing short and ragged, breaking
Here we move more cautious
and more kind, more slow to close the
They shine on splendid
gates that skilfully light the sea from a safe
Sometimes they can
close a door to us, blow out the light of a pallid
At a day’s end, we
have not found what we rowed in to find.
Moon and tide push
us out.
Winter stays long.
We hear a tide turn
and run over the sandstones, feeling for its level.
The moon comes out,
silver in its old man’s eyes, rips the edges of
I shout the order to
row on.
*
There is a pond in
a fold of the hill
*
Untitled
(My lunchbox holds bones . . .)
My lunchbox holds bones,
that clamor as stones, a little lank from
Charity overtook them,
when they made me. My mother's face
Even in the womb, statuesque
sisters held parliament, gripping deep
Then daylight closed
in and eclipsed just as quick, and I went
Noon, lit, draped in
its shadowless suit, and made me seizure under
I remember the storm
of my middle hour, watching clouds roll all
*
The
Work of Hardening
Missing you,
Today I saw a man your
age
Gin-eyed cousins, passing
shots, singing...
Where are you sleeping
this night?
*
When
Gravity Fails
When gravity fails,
There’s a simplicity
about it that attracts
Eyes have become hooks
I can hang a sky on,
There’s something clean
about being afraid
Figures of speech,
too, are charming
Both of us drink from
too many glasses
When it does come,
your sleep is the sweetest thief I know.
The glance downward
causes the hand to reach up
Mornings-after require
more mornings,
Morning then recurs
like a bad cough.
The hand holding up
the mirror is your hand or my hand,
~ ~ ~
Accident
at Windsor Station
In the sodden winter
light I went
In the blue-capped
bedlam I searched for you
*
On June 18, 1815,
at a crossroads between Grande Alliance and Waterloo,
I
The rye tops have been
bleached in the heat
A girl in homespun
lies on her back
Grooms polish tack
Horses are tethered
in a long column.
A clutch of sunburned
men
II
Whistles.
Shouts.
The grooms hop behind
the guns
The French stand like
idiot children left at a cross-roads
III
More than blasted trees
*
Encounter
at the Butterfly Conservatory
I don’t depend on legs
I am no longer bound
free
female is dwarfed by
her all-in-leather man;
The couple readies
to leave
*
Eternal
Vigilance
Repeatedly, the gong
of a
Until dawn I'd looked
out
*
Hansel,
Gretel and the Black Bird
Noon's enterprise is
little more than catatonic
I remember, as far
back as this morning, and muse -
There was a story -
Hansel, Gretel and the Black Bird -
but then years pass
in this same fashion, and already mad from
*
Haunts
One day, in fall, a
toxin entered into me.
When my father, lowered
by a winch into the ground,
*
Hand that rocks the cradle
-Pastor Eric
I ogle hi-cuts at the
beach,
I learned to water
the meadow in me,
I grew to mistrust
the geyser of will,
When I enter, I long
to be
*
my hand understands
& hears without ear,
The tree of sorrow
parts to bear its fruit;
The surface grows hands,
isn’t any just -
voices grieve, thoughtroads -
It’s hard to be human.
Tired? Climb &
circle?
I change the room to
a rag, wash your face;
you promised our old
age together,
would anyone notice?
would the flies come?
mosaic eyes align,
seed & reseed you, barefoot,
handful, you in your
little coat sucked dry, your skin
*
Love
from a Blue Window in the City
I recall, your fingers
dripped to a glass inside your knee;
*
Old
Babyface
Somewhere,
And weighty years
Age beaches strange.
And how the coarsened
infant
and then rear up blood
minute
And then, as now,
*
Turn on Tavern on the
Green
*
The
Weeping of the Penny Whistle
The penny whistle begins
to weep
It weeps, monotonously,
like the water
It weeps like the wind:
it weeps in the distance.
It weeps in the sand
that has been drenched
It weeps in the trees,
it weeps with the birds,
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Water
to Wine to Waterford®
Photos from Legendary Gotham Book Mart
Galway Kinnell
James Ragan
Maureen Holm
Diana Manister, Staten Island
Special Mention
Mark Nickels, Brooklyn
Tobias Deehan, Manhattan
Third Prize
Joanna Smith Rakoff, Manhattan
Second Prize
Evan Eisman, NJ
Christopher Neenan, Rome, Italy
Tatamkhulu Afrika, Cape Town, South
Africa
Reese Thompson, Zaragosa, Spain
Robin Lim, Baguio City, Philippines
First Prize
Nicholas Johnson, Brooklyn
Outstanding Semifinalist Poem:
Content
Naomi Guttman, Montreal (and Hamilton,
NY)
Outstanding Semifinalist Poem:
Reach
Rob Wright, Philadelphia
Madeline Artenberg, Manhattan
Susan Scutti, Manhattan
Reese Thompson, Zaragosa, Spain
Outstanding Semifinalist Poem:
Craft
Mark Nickels, Brooklyn
Viktor Tichy, Fairfield, IA
Deborah Reich, Queens
Mia Albright, Manhattan
Outstanding Semifinalist Poem:
Musicality
Jay Chollick, Queens
Stella Padnos, Brooklyn
Peter Horn, Cape Town, South Africa
Galway Kinnell
that the music resulting
from any of the methods
of organizing English
into rhythmic surges
can sound like the
music resulting from any other,
being the music not
of a method but of the language;
and after proposing
that free verse is a variant
of formal verse, using
unpredictably the acoustic
repetitions which
formal verse employs regularly;
and after playing
recordings of the gopher frog’s
long line of glottal
stops, sounding like rumblings
in an empty stomach,
and the notes the hermit thrush
pipes one after another,
then twangles together,
and the humpback whale’s
gasp-cries as it passes
out of the range of
human perception of ecstasy,
and the wolf’s howls,
one, and then several,
and then all the pack
joining in a polyphony
to whatever in the
sunlit midnight sky
remains keeper of
the axle the earth and
its clasped lovers
turn upon and cry to;
and after playing
recordings of an angakoq
chanting in Inuktitut
of his trance-life as a nanuk,
a songman of Arnhem
Land, Rahmani of Iran,
Neruda of Chile, Yeats,
Thomas, Rukeyser,
to let the audience
hear that our poems
are of the same order
as those of the other animals
and are composed,
like theirs, when we find ourselves
synchronized with
the rhythms of the earth,
no matter where, in
the city of Brno, which cried
its vowel deep into
the night to get it back,
or at Ma’alaea on
Maui in Hawaii, still plumping
itself on the actual
matter of pleasure there,
or here in St. Paul,
Minnesota, where I lean
at a podium trying
to draw my talk to a close,
or on Bleecker Street
a time zone away in New York,
where only minutes
ago my beloved may have
put down her book
and drawn up her eiderdown
around herself and
turned out the light --
now, causing me to
garble a few words
and tangle my syntax,
I imagine I can hear
her say my name into
the slow waves
of the night and,
faintly, being alone, sing.
to let the ember’s
soft foot lie, my father
slapped the crystal
clear of wine and rising
tall as Janosik, full
of heart, whispered down,
of the brook we followed
the king of bandits
upslope through the
branched spires and thickets
into woods where only
mold and roses thorned.
we soured coals in
sprigs and ginger grass
and hidden as with
any intention the mind deceives to rob,
the sparks saw into
the burning earth
hooves of deer and
longer still to racing herds
as bacon fat dripped
longingly into laps of bread,
In my father’s fist
the long wind reed became a switch
that like the last
finger on a hand hooked
potatoes by the eye.
Wine took the aching down
shook that only nature
recognized as sound.
The grass had burned
to snapping darkness and to the last
sobbing tongue, my
father pointed down to silence,
his spearhead into
ground. None had known
that hidden in the
wet rock of the August clearing
a boar, alone and
sorry for its breed, had moaned and wept.
Maureen Holm
deep velvet red relief,
Proust at my bedside
with tea and madeleines,
Rimbaud on the roof
. . . prêt à sauter tomber voler?
braiding the tail
plumes of swallows.
Tears at the ready,
a gesture, a tone,
and I dissolve for
the taking,
with a heel of poîlane,
a guzzle of grape,
will oozing down my
vagabond thigh.
Notre Dame, m’enlèverait-elle,
André,
lourde, étourdie,
de la Seine?
Me voilà,
jeune parque d’un
certain âge,
poursuivie
par le serpent
qui m’emmène.
Turn out my pockets
for smug passersby,
cigarette butts, frizzled
scrags of hair,
worry-fingered rosary
of my whitening distress,
and suffer the image
effaced of its rhyme,
a hollowed-out vowel,
nub of prophetic gloss.
qui sait nager,
sinon l’écrivain?
What ‘later’ if purpled
with coward’s regret,
what ‘jumped-the-gun’
suicide, false starts of hope,
on the umpteenth attempt
between 20 and 40
to convince her to
let me stay?
which-one-who-him-why
his
tongue licks ooze
from thigh,
but the where still
always here,
that tree tunnel bridge
river boat,
until the hideous
filigreed summons
of window and ‘Should
I?’ sky.
nor even man by his
wooing more pitiful than I:
unrequitedly ruined
-- by a city.
Diana Manister
who built a bird house
on Staten Island,
a radiance that now
has disappeared.
containing in their
muscles and nerves
memories of wires twisted,
boards sanded,
pipes turned
and motors taken apart.
builder of bright
particular things,
did the shadow fall
here as well
on Staten Island?
Did our day end like
an old man dying
in a rented room?
and the man go under the hill?
Will the heart break
and the heart fail
and the house go under the sea?
And will the light
that was given be taken again,
and the heart go under the hill?
In darkness, how are
we to see?
builder of bird houses,
doll houses,
transmission-fixer,
valve-adjuster,
a radiance that now
has disappeared.
When the sun falls
into the landscape,
how are we to see?
could not save him;
wrenches lie on his bench;
nails of different sizes
are organized in bottles
in a row.
count for nothing.
When the shadow falls,
and the man who is
like the father will be taken in darkness,
and the light that
was given will be taken again,
and the house, and
the madness, and the love,
and bright particular
things,
will all go under
the sea.
July 4th, 1999,
New York City
(Special Mention)
Mark Nickels
advancing under Covent
Garden with
a bank of orange lilies,
and as the 20th ends,
in the city indisputably
its capital,
I gasp the same. Fireworks.
Before the finish,
they sent a drift
of willows up, massive,
coppery, lazy in their
fall, the towers
all but hidden by
these ember trees.
The least of circuses
are consequential.
If less so than bread,
one may feed
on the polity's undirectional
love.
are cool and blue,
the operators slender
in their shorts, well
cared for, with all
their vaccinations,
their eyes the color
that they chose. The
bursts have panicked
car alarms, which
wobble like an alien invasion
in a Fifties movie.
And interesting
the continuities:
the same saltpeter smell
as when the headlines
shouted French Guns
Open Up! - those flashes
could be coming
from the Somme. The
braying tugs
could well be hooting
on the Thames,
VE Day, or like an
oboe in an overture, Rameau.
Virgil, June and I,
to a museum, where
a 3D video of Nippon
goddesses unfolded.
Virgil vaguely watched,
an infant, his eyes
a lens unfocused,
while I stood behind
and tried to fit the
3D glasses to his head.
I must have wanted
to amaze, transfix him,
ensure that there
was nothing he would miss.
And then I knew I
'd forego none of this:
the whole as futuristic
as I could have
wished for, nine or
ten, and guessing
what the streaming
future would be like.
suggested, Looks like
you're trying
to write a letter?
Can I help?
But I'm not, or am
I, Virgil?
You are six months
old now, frowning
and Churchillian.
When you read this
I may be dead, or
frozen in the moon.
It is 1999, and I
always
write in light now.
Our wars are surgical,
though as random and
ham-handed
as they always were.
The circuses are instant
and marvelous to point
of dread, but tonight
the same as when the
Chinese Emperor
had charges packed
with gold, so that from barges,
his minister of firecraft
could incise
these willows on the
inky sky.
I'm not an urchin,
nor will you be. No one
is overawed forever.
See how in planes,
the passengers will
draw the shade, while outside,
inside sleeves of
cloud, every expectation
they ever held of
heaven. Sublimity
is never, maybe, what
this mammal wanted.
Even if it lost itself
in images forever,
legs folded on the
bank, there would still be pain,
the crossed sciatic
spears in back and legs
from shaking out the
rice all day,
or from shaking out
these letters, still
the only food that
keeps us ravening for life.
Tobias Deehan
meant to be pulling
out to sea
refrain tide
refrain tide
only if friendship
can vision
vanished trees of
New York
and feel a stronger
current along the sound
pushing against commission
none in time with
a beating
of a building entering
you
make color at moments
rain my hair down
rain my hair down
again hint to hills
and harvest
where memoir
memoir tulips hold
red metal fish
gave reason to pull
the line
other than
the blackberry harvest
shortening distance
to the bean.
white scars shade
the body
life of memory and
future wishes.
Ever to know you or
give blood or marrow
to the one who matches
beneath the skin
or hair
or trees.
(Third Prize)
Joanna Smith Rakoff
myself to myself,
match sweaters to my graying hair.
and they estrange
the wind from itself, from its earlier
a sister, burning
and creeping my hair, making it
it with myself and
the flowering trees -- when it seemed
but had to choose
something for myself. I’m not sure
afterward, when you
win out, the big pay-off. The kingdoms
kings upon kings --
my father no more or less than any
headache, brought
from what was then called far away,
asking the poets to
dinner. It is true that everyone
me think so. I am
progeny of shade. I see what is -- laudanum
a word; Do you see
why we learned to conjure? I liked it.
selection -- nothing
matters to youth. You do not
of your mother’s final
suicide; you imagine yourself
as clinical as it
sounds. That we are our secrets. Allow
"aphasia?" I tell
you -- I liked it. The streets in the town were
disgusting,
us out here, beyond
the tips of the trees. We are all wanting to be
down our rapturous
Pre-Raphaelite hair, to die and be
or some kind of costume,
or even a stuffed effigy waiting to be
queens --
the asking of permission,
asking others to listen,
them all. As metal
holds to metal, there are no more sorrys
pastoral -- all those
sparrows and squirrels and the men who make
them,
Do you see risk, as
it is -- the visceral -- frogs
is my elective --
look how it swims me to Greece -- shows
kicked away, the pictures
in drawers or boxes belonging
envision my ears or
the actuality of the slick of the frog.
(Second Prize)
Evan Eisman
mud thwacked by hooves
and fresh sawn
lumber oozing pine
sap, yellowing alfalfa
whack. I want to stand
in the pen now,
barefoot in the steaming
mud, among
will pack and harden
between my soft
winter-toes. In the
mud I’ll make amends
wearing my elbows
red, bleating my knotty
stomach at the absent
green -- cramped,
for months the brittle
moth wings in my throat
have been swallowed,
crushed or clipped.
up to the pent mares
in the open where they
neigh, I will mount
white-bellied Hylonome,
will be centaurs,
and not one will ever know
the feel of mud on
soft soles, but four hooves
the heft of horse,
the mind of man, but burdened by
two livers, they will
be too bilious, but also, by
and I will soap their
bellies until they eat and drink and act
like men, and then
I will free them from the pen.
Christopher Neenan
Sea-gulls on the sea
wall, bitter with waiting.
A breath off the river
freezing our fingers to the rail.
rock’s edge, warm
like a window or an open door, a shelter from the
long haul of the sea.
whipping foam and
salt, a god in the body of a hare beckons us in.
the will and body
against the incessant
teeming of the sea.
moon’s eyes.
In the dark, cold
clangs like a bell.
Moon and tide turn
guides through the night.
distance.
sun and let its smoking
wick blacken the sky.
In lines we talk,
whispering over the waves’ wash.
Very little warmth
stirs in these night places.
clouds and shows a
stairway over the estuary.
Stumbling Running
of the Pines
Tatamkhulu Afrika
that I visit sometimes
even though
it is not on the way
to anywhere I need to be.
If it has a name,
I have not heard it,
no squiggle on a map
proclaims
that I do not dream
a dream to please
the child in me that
so demandingly survives.
Pines ring it, crowding
close, beginning to slant
a little as the winds
lean on them at their allotted times.
Pines are not for
writing poems about.
Where the beauty,
grace, hamadryad in the wood
of these still to
be lopped poles with roots,
their thrusting upwards
as through they would outstrip
the shaggy long johns
that pass for leaves, would consort
with an unearthliness
of stars?
They stay green all
the year round?
True, but all else
dies within the deserts of their shades
and who shall bamboozle
me that needles are not hairs?
Yet I must admit the
pines fit the pond.
Willows would be too
twee, silver poplars too
much of a celebration
that the pond would laugh at
with the steel chime
of its tight as a bellyskin
circlet of black water
even the birds shun.
It does not lead you
to it down long
slopes of needles
that would floor you like they were oil or blood,
does not slack the
armadillos round
the nuts that are
the quantum leap
from woodenness to
a passion you could share.
Suddenly you are walking
in the water as though
some giant cat or
witch’s familiar pissed
in your path and now
you think you hear it scampering somewhere
near.
Each time so tricked,
you step
back from the water,
shake
it from your shoes,
cup
it in a palm and it
is clear
as glass and cold
as death and yet
alive with a rhythm
that is iron’s.
Also then you hear
the sound,
gentle as a patting
of hands,
of small beasts drinking
in the round,
ringing you beyond
the light
of the torches your
mind flings, and you prowl
the pond with no hope
because
you have done that
so many times before.
Somewhere a flowing
water is entering it like new blood,
must be leaving it
somewhere deep or else
it would swell, but
there is no fall however small
that rings its tiny
bell, only this
resonance in my bones
as of bees, this
entrapping of my mind
in the black
deepening lacquer
of the pond, and I stare,
rooted in the stumbling
running of the pines.
Reese Thompson
lactose
when I return to you,
a blood baby, well-groomed with a clean
diaper.
Already so sick, I
go on, choke and spit.
flushed
like a broken rose,
about to die, withering red, rather impatient for
winter.
Her belly of bones,
restless with whining, the lank you go lactose
over.
as
gnarled trees in the
dirt - tomb raiding - nude as day when I was dug up.
Already so sick, I
go on, choke and spit.
shoeless
into the world, as
orphans cut away too soon, will go on, with the
burden
of bones, my father
in a lunchbox, a little lisp from converting to dirt.
a new sun. Life clung
to my gut like twining ivy, and I was an artist.
Already so sick, I
go on, choke and spit.
afternoon
and fought for the
measure of life due me. I ache for your stone.
A lunchbox of bones,
sleepless alone, a little drunk from hunger.
Already so sick, I
go on, choke and spit.
Robin Lim
I turn away from the
galena color of our baby's eyelids,
close my face to the
smell of hay and the copper of morning.
Now dry heart. Now
clenched soul.
Parts of me lie planted,
like corn in cracked earth,
on roadsides. Other
parts torn, discarded
I pray for you to
be whole.
I pry at my locks.
in a neat pine box;
not a cliché, just really
dead, his hair still
so black,
the wood still oozing
sap.
Kalinguya songs for
him.
"Today we sit together,
brothers and sisters, listening.
Together, listening
to nothing. You speak not a thing."
After three days of
the aunties, waving newspaper over his face,
to keep off the flies...
they will bury him
on a Filipino hillside.
This night I'll receive
a baby, into my shaking
hands. I remember too well
the night you received
our son,
sure hands, ocean-eyed.
You were the tree
I hung from,
and in pain I did
bite your flesh.
(after Nietzsche)
(First Prize)
Nicholas Johnson
everything is up for
grabs the way you glean directions:
the slow harvest of
piling fraction on fraction
to come up with whole
numbers and a new direction
not discoverable by
ordinary prepositions.
as if the spirit of
gravity were still operative
and it were possible
for the hand
to attract something
clear without being grabby.
but legs hanging over
the edge of a roof make me nervous.
Getting the picture
and framing it
is never perfection
but a beginning,
and when you lie beside
me,
I feel like a mirror
with a hundred eyes.
But that doesn’t make
you nervous.
you’ll fall off the
roof or the bed.
There are reflections
to contend with,
but reflections are
only the complications of light.
if you don’t examine
them too closely.
When you do, there
are visible bruises
you can question,
but don’t expect an answer.
to prevent dying of
thirst.
Sleeping then becomes
the lord of the virtues,
but there’s a strength
found in avoiding it.
Nothing seems
to be missing: your mouth opens
and the eyes close,
and all the pictures slide
down the walls as
the hooks come unfastened.
to steady itself,
and I can see you on the roof
under the milky paths
of the more visible stars.
but the failing of
gravity is countered
by the litter of butts,
empties and forgotten puns.
Voices grate like
slate pencils.
But there is still
the pleasure of pleasure in a face.
and now, even everything
will never be enough.
Saint Patrick's
Day, 1909
(Outstanding Semifinalist
Poem: Content)
Naomi Guttman
to meet the tall black
engine, hoping
to see you well and
greet you
with the children
in my arms. I'd baked
a cake and set the
house in order, but
when the steaming
locomotive tore through
wood and plaster crashing,
the station master
shoving us aside,
(Bougez! Bougez! he cried),
I thought only of
us, the ones aground.
Another woman and
her children died waiting
for their man who,
when he saw their bodies
hollered like a horse
gone wild.
as best I could and
when I couldn't find you
headed home feeling
barely saved, perhaps abandoned
by calamity. I've
wondered since if indeed
you did arrive and
see us chalky, scared, relieved:
Did we remind you
of a promise made in youth
and never kept, things
being what they are in life --
all compromise? Once
you said that misery
is preferable to boredom,
and when I think of this
I hear that man's
desperate cry.
Did you hear it too?
Cantus for the Horses
(Outstanding Semifinalist
Poem: Reach)
Rob Wright
50,000 men and
10,000 horses were killed in an afternoon.
blond. Milkweed pods
and thistle down
as fine as the unnamed
fluff on a baby’s neck
fly. The hay is ripe.
Time for the first
cut
but horses and soldiers
have been trampling
the fields
so that for miles
it looks
as if a squadron of
ships had been dragged
by a drunken giant
up this hill and down
that.
knees up
as if left for dead
and well she might.
Flies light
take off
light.
and lather leather
burnished chestnut
by the backsides and
thighs of scarlet riders.
The smell of soap
and pond water is a comfort
but not one of them
foul-mouthed and stinking
of sweat, dried grass,
hot wool
would admit to this.
The ground has been
scoured to dust
by prehensile lips
snapping
clodding
Bridles and blankets
off
they’re oddly naked
and feminine
even the odd stallion
with a prick pink
as a coronation gown.
with brass hats, like
firemen
ride cannons to the
front.
The mud stains on
their backsides
are the shape of crocuses.
The grooms point to
horsemen
cantering up the valley
road
polished pretty, chrome
flashing
sweethearts signaling
through the haze.
French horses coming
over at mid-day
as if for tea.
The cannons fire.
Instantly
the ear squeezes down
a puckering sphincter
except for the central
ringing
and a worm-hole of
pain.
like barn kittens
looking for a nipple.
The cannoneers work
like midwives
trading buckets, rags
wiping out steaming
holes.
Shot is carried in
a blanket
like an iron ‘Christ
the child.’
Men are barely clear
the barrel
when the firing hole
is touched.
A tree branch, three
horses
brass kit, sabers,
riders
fall
as if on cue.
and take a volley
up the middle.
A cannoneer who has
found the time to strip to the skin
waves them off. They
stand
and take another.
The
horses
fall
slowly
legs
body
neck
last the head
like a rug full of
dust.
The midwifery at the
guns goes on
sulphur smoke, smoldering
grass
air as thick as a
bathhouse, mad laughter
stops
not by command
but as if everyone
had run out of things to kill
at the same instant.
more than the tatter
of bone and wool
more than the legs
sprouting up like weeds
what I see are
horses. One has fallen
not ten feet from
the water carriers
belly up, eyes reflecting
the wide sky
legs moving slowly
still running.
(in memory of Frida
Kahlo)
Madeline Artenberg
my wings are real
after so many dreams
I rest folded atop
a girl’s ebony hair
like a black and orange-spotted
comb.
Her amor looks astonished
as if a Spanish lady
had replaced
the eighteen-year
old girl,
ring-pierced septum
and small silver circles
through her eyebrows,
trailing down the
ears.
to fly under this
false sun.
No one has cut me
from cardboard
placed me on this
dark canvas
I make my own way
bounce off four walls
flutter from host
to host. The young
he proudly announces
that girlfriend and butterfly
have spent one hour
together.
People run with fingers
extended
swat the air to capture
some flutterings;
"Stay, stay with me
even for a minute," they say.
But I’ve chosen this
particular one
skimming her tattoos
before landing steadfast.
I lift off, warning
her,
"Always stop to look
in the mirror;"
spread my wings
like a pair of black
eyebrows
joined beneath a third
eye.
Susan Scutti
cathedral bell.
The sky is technicolor
blue,
the brick wall a byzantine
red.
Chaotic sheets twist
around my hips and
thighs.
at the building across
the courtyard,
up at the watertower
shaped like a pulpit,
a black silo set against
the orange, ghostly New York sky.
I thought about the
time I lay
awake most of a night
admiring you.
Now I linger, imagining
you in your life:
the silent man unlocking
a door on Great Jones as two trucks pass;
the burning cigarette
rising to your parted lips;
a dog's bark;
the slamming door.
Intact,
your heart is beating
as
you climb the stairs,
strands of gray hair
falling
across your temple.
Reese Thompson
from my third-floor
window, so I shut the shade
and turn on the lights.
nothing has changed,
even the thin scaffold,
skeletal round my heart's renovation,
must await its worker's
arrival at lunch time and dinner.
They're underpaid
and hungry, letting the foundation
splinter - little
progress all the same.
how easy things come
about and are predictable. like
the sun in the morning
will never fail to cross
from the dewy frost,
fierce into its blankest hour - wide -
just as I have, cut
my path into manhood, all the time,
at my own risk. I
remember, as far back as this morning,
to my dim beginning
and muse - how easy things come about
and are predictable,
like a boy, an eventual
man - without question.
they tell to the inmates
when they're first abandoned.
The muzzle-bound,
bib-wearing set of kiddies on a carousel,
icig the same forest
for years, unclaimed. waking every
morning with hate
on the breakfast plate, a cup of coffee
and a dead father.
I remember as far back as I can stand
and muse the obvious,
how easy things come about and
are predictable. like
a widow, her heavy purse, can persuade
the jackal to visit.
as night would descend on daylight, and
Hansel and Gretel
go giddy-eyed into the forest.
hunger
and paranoia, Hansel
and Gretel turn on each other. like survivors
in a lifeboat, the
outcome was inevitable. how owls' eyes at night
fool you to another
kinship and you forget the intentions of your
vengeance, ours is
a story of recycled victims. just as the sun never
fails to circle the
same practiced path every morning, we go on -
now adults - searching
for a way out of the forest. but my hunger
is a black bird that
will burn only at the chance to court fire! and
the hate whose home
it made in my orphanage, was all too
anticipated.
I muse - how easy
things come about and are predictable.
(Outstanding Semifinalist
Poem: Craft)
Mark Nickels
I expelled it then,
but not before an impress.
I sidestepped, shuddered,
froze, and turned
into a scarab, avoided
looking in the mirror,
and shaved by touch,
and shaved my head.
Altogether I became
a sliver, a shutter,
a shadow in the Prado,
a maneuver
to become someone
about whom nothing was known.
I fished, made inexpensive
meals for myself,
and recorded on a
tape broods of cicadas,
wastrels, new shelled
layabouts with husks,
eternal loafers, like
the dead, at once
companionable, and
disinterested.
Thinking of the people
I had met that day,
with love and fear,
and up all night
to welter in the wake
and by the haunt of others,
I reckoned the whole
thing a haunt:
my brain, the world,
the diorama clouds,
somehow love's hardware
damaged,
a signal curse of
watchers and of waiters,
descending in the
bitter blood of ancestors,
a fold in air I delved
out for myself,
an envelope to shelter
in.
was lowered by a winch
into the ground,
the others in the
family clustered while I stood apart
and dealt myself this
little wound.
At least it has not
worsened over time.
By indirection I survey
dimensions of this spell
of otherness, the
volume of the violence there,
and sourceless grief,
self-loathing in a short parade
that trails me with
its panoply of fireworks,
a train of invisible
pull-toys clicking, and whirring.
I hardly see it anymore,
a festival creche
for my Brooklyn fire
ants. Still,
when good things happen,
look into my ear:
two creatures in the
mind still slash and bite each other.
But I have weighed
these things, and now
I work. It is what
happiness costs.
rules the world.
the statues which
lend them substance
deflowered by the
waves,
but if I have to pick
a friend
to walk with every
day,
I am the dew on the
nettles
licking the tendons
of your feet.
play background music
of soil,
and trust the fading
empty heart
drawn in my breath
on your glasses.
the testosterone current
which kidnaps virgins,
holy books,
babies in wicker baskets.
the dawn you greet,
the air you breathe,
the milk in your breasts
without agenda.
When I swim in your
belly, I envy our child
the season before
fingernails.
adds voice, grammar;
this is love’s animal
before you;
enters & examines
your sleep;
home, in handfuls
of care, isn’t any deed;
I want: brown, green,
rain, cellar, cowslip, 5 fingers -
bare feet on the porch
rail, no underwear -
actsong in deep water;
the waves’ smallest
with no juice in it
& my paw beloves you.
Mia Albright
As you talked to someone
else, one shoulder leaned
into my evening.
Later, an adventure
of lost objects formed at my back;
I began to try to
remember the public names for flowers.
Began to collect the
world one thing at a time,
Like Conrad’s character
sipped the surface he swam in.
When I considered
your opinions as if they were your body,
I discovered what
it is to play with time is high.
The air tightens around
fall and opens around flight.
Not having you, time
and I became lovers.
Memory forward not
back.
I guessed you didn’t
want waves of arms, hands, fingers
Mouth and neck, to
drown you in a spoken breath.
You must insist your
aggression is the best.
I see you miss the
light stray across your lips,
While you explain
something superior to me.
You don’t know what
I mean when I shrug.
I can lose myself
losing somebody else
As if their address
were a slab of prize green marble.
Passion has never
forced you to breathe;
Nor will my storm.
Any more than a branch
of apricot petals
Ever forced anyone
to love.
(Outstanding Semifinalist
Poem: Musicality)
Jay Chollick
but not too deep into
the
muddied flesh,
I am an infant lying
in its
startled light, the
world
incomprehensible,
and painful in its
thwarting
of desire.
have not submerged
this
genesis--
the infantile still
flares and
beats its fist
and I am still so
many
chubby things,
still longing for
the breast
and for the succor
of its calm
to lie against.
Still quivering, a
child’s dread
lies prone
as youthful mocking
attitudes
keep washing up--
haphazard,
pale with salt,
though some parts
gleam--
transfigured,
but familiar.
seizes them,
turns mother-soft
and
welcoming, cries where
have you
been and clutches
the
irrational; the irritant;
the vagrant needs
that had shown prickly
surface
once, these phantoms,
like the cries from
children
torn they reassert
themselves,
they stretch their
tensile length
to agelessness
from the softest clock.
O how this world
roars into me! I shook
within the premier
blinding
of its light,
it was my child’s
youngest
dazzlement, still
potent now-- it’s
how
I saw, still see the
flower;
my eye and petal
open to the light
and there is belled
still into tender
ears,
love’s music
from the mother time
I’m teetering; a dizzy
land
united in a crumbled
and despairing
age with limpid
flesh;
still looking wonderingly
at my
hand, each digit free
and miracle--
but what is truly
strange is
backward into deepest
need:
old mouths still seek
a kind
and tender thumb.
Christmas trees, each
branch streamed in light like
a girl radiating,
each finger prickling heat-wise
and my words which
stream past my father's
hearing-aided ear
like a downhill sliding child
The infinite slowness
of sound to my father
Empty regions in thin
sheets like the universe
His ears lit only
by evening
the voluptuous awakening
of night in his ear
My words fleeing before
spoken
like fairies before
dawn
The girlish corpse
of sound in his ear
His ear is sound's
funeral
Peter Horn
in my dreams: when
was it I heard it
for the first time,
and now I cannot silence it.
running over the stones
in Jonkershoek Valley.
I weeps for all whistlers
who have died
in the long years
of hunger and birdshot.
with the blood of
passers-by
when the bombs exploded
in bars and churches.
it weeps in my dreams,
climbing the scales
of sorrow and madness.