"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
Carolyn Howard-Johnson is a widely published poet and the author of several marketing manuals for writers, including The Frugal Book Promoter. Her site The New Book Review features original and reprinted reviews, to help authors maximize the exposure of a good review. (This month, they've re-posted a review of my chapbook Swallow that first appeared on the Ampersand Books website.)
Carolyn's poem "Inevitably Walls" was recently accepted for the first issue of the literary journal Solo Novo Wall Scrawls. The journal is published by Solo Novo Press, Carpinteria, CA and North Wilkesboro, NC. Editor Paula C. Lowe says, "'Wall Scrawls' is inspired by an Iowa farmhouse wall. Eighty years abandoned and orphaned, it is a hive of letters, a busy kitchen of words. Every kid with a can of spray paint somehow gets here and leaves his or her native tongue on the walls." They've kindly given me permission to share it below.
Inevitably Walls
Near Jerusalem's edge razorwire
coils above concrete slabs that trace
an imaginary line across the brutal
desert much like a wall we found
years ago when we lost our way
in a dark forest somewhere
in Germany, cried when we
found it there—unexpected—and it
not so different
from one in Ireland we visited only
last year, walls to cleave Irish
from Irish. Foreign walls, chains-linked,
wire-barbed, Krylon smeared walls
not so different
from our own, that fence that crawls
from Baja, through mountain passes
along the Rio Grande. Walls. Feeble, useless,
unholy billboards. Even poets
7/1/2011 1:56 PMCarolyn Howard-Johnson wrote:
Jendi, thank you so much for this. It is always wonderful when poets support poets. And, I hope more of your poet friends will submit reviews of their books to www.thenewbookreview.blogspot.com. Submission guidelines are in the left column.
