Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Alegria Imperial: “Spangled Seasons”


This poem by Alegria Imperial, a Canadian writer of Filipino descent, was first published on Rick Lupert’s Poetry Super Highway website. “Spangled Seasons” appealed to me, not only for its musical sounds and distinctive verbs, but because it features some memorable places in my old hometown, New York City. Visit Alegria’s blog jornales for more poetry and meditations on the writing process.

Spangled Seasons

Under hazed New York
spheres, spring sousing Riverside, earlier
cocooned in the Moor shedding off
mover’s trip, bundled molehills against
walls –once sparks we strung
onto a nebulae over
nights on Federal Hill—you and
I trudge on.

Trails we looped
between Chesapeake,
Susquehanna and
the Hudson, Venus sputtering
on Pennsylvania woods these,
too, we tucked abreast in
memory, if Manhattan
spares us.

Our cherry
noon-s have leaped into infinity
from finiteness; as well warbled
peace from cypress groves at
Inner Harbor, dandelions mirroring
our masquerade, a yucca spurting
by the window squirrels flying
a trapeze on pines mocked,

ends of days orioles
griped about—we plucked to
spangle our seasons. Soon mere
revenant: Baltimore winters we
skidded, wincing but
un-bruised. I posed for you
that summer cicadas plunged
into passion deaths, smearing

wind shields Fells Point’s
mists we eluded fogged.
Tall suns now spear
mornings at the Moor, we flex
our years on West Broadway: summers
on a mountain lake maybe, a bowery at
Brooklyn Gardens in the fall, sunset
behind Grant’s tomb perhaps, or by

Shakespeare’s lagoon, divining
on its surface the play
of wind on our
dreams

Frannie Lindsay: “The Thrift Shop Dresses”


My delight in thrift shops and tag sales goes beyond bargain-hunting. I enjoy the writerly speculation about the backstory of clothes and knicknacks, and the sense of gratitude to mysterious strangers who left this one-of-a-kind object here for me to find. On a more somber note, after a friend of ours died of cancer last summer, I feel good seeing some of his shirts having a second life in my husband’s closet.

That’s why this poem by Frannie Lindsay resonated with me. The column is reprinted by permission from American Life in Poetry, a project of the Poetry Foundation. Read a sample from Lindsay’s first book, Lamb, on the website of Northampton’s own Perugia Press, a fine publisher of poetry books by women.

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American Life in Poetry: Column 304

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

After my mother died, one of the most difficult tasks for my sister and me was to take the clothes she’d made for herself to a thrift shop. In this poem, Frannie Lindsay, a Massachusetts poet, remembers a similar experience.


The Thrift Shop Dresses

I slid the white louvers shut so I could stand in your closet
a little while among the throng of flowered dresses
you hadn’t worn in years, and touch the creases
on each of their sleeves that smelled of forgiveness
and even though you would still be alive a few more days
I knew they were ready to let themselves be
packed into liquor store boxes simply
because you had asked that of them,
and dropped at the door of the Salvation Army
without having noticed me
wrapping my arms around so many at once
that one slipped a big padded shoulder off of its hanger
as if to return the embrace.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Frannie Lindsay, from her most recent book of poems, Mayweed, The Word Works, 2009, and reprinted by permission of Frannie Lindsay and the publisher. The poem first appeared in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Vol. 34, no. 1, Winter 2009. Introduction copyright ©2010 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Two Poems by Thelma T. Reyna


Poet and fiction writer Thelma T. Reyna’s new chapbook Breath & Bone is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in April. I’ve already pre-ordered my copy; get yours from their New Releases page. (Books are listed alphabetically by author.) She kindly shares two poems from this collection below.

A childhood home marked by mental illness can sometimes be the crucible in which a writer is formed. Perhaps the need to make sense of the impossible hones one’s mental powers to find or invent extraordinary conceptual connections. There’s a fine line between the extreme coping strategy we call madness and the one we call art. That line, I think, is made of self-awareness and self-integration.

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Quilts

Mother plugged up the coffee spout
  
with foil after dinner
to keep the cockroaches out
  and laid a pile
of patchwork quilts on the chilly floor
  
for us to sleep on and urinate.
She hung them on the doors
  
next morning,
colorful, stinky banners hanging
  
room through room
to dry—rearranging
  
them next night so the most pissed
would be on the bottom of the stack
  
and we could sleep without the stench
of too much wetness.

Her black
  
coffee sometimes had a baby cockroach
drowned in its bitters. Got through the foil, I guess,
  
damned little fool,
got through the plug to mess
  
her brew, as we messed her quilts—
growing kids lying shoulder to shoulder
  
on the floor,
growing older,
  
still peeing, still wrapped in each other’s arms
to keep warm.

****

How She Died

Who knew it would be like this?
Strong woman, monster lady, mover of monoliths,
she liked to say, not mountains, but monoliths.
Tough momma since thirteen: monster lady, she
called herself, woman who built our house,
   leather
hands cooking dinner for seven when the
   hammer stopped
pounding and the sky purpled. Tough cookie
   without
a man, welts hidden, legs scarred.

But in the end she moved molehills. Her brain
dumped her, one side crumpling, wetting, when
   the going got
too tough too long, the other side pumping her
   to be strong.
The wet one won.

With time, her visitors, airy visitors, came
in pairs, night or day, perched in corners,
   smirking in
the dusk. They took off their heads, she
   said, and
sat beneath her dining table. Her cloudy
eyes shooed them away, trembled when
   they moved
near her wooden knees. She cursed at them,
   tough
momma, made them know she wasn’t ready yet
   for death.

With time, others waited outside windows, came
softly in the brazen light of day, stood by her
   sheets, floated
by her stone hands from a far-off time beyond
recall. These she’d truly loved. Her brain burst one
day in a wetness of recognition. Who could’ve
known she’d die this way? Who could’ve
   guessed love
would take the monster?

Two Poems by Kenyan Writer Stephen Partington


Happy 2011! I thought I’d start off the new year with these poems by Kenyan writer Stephen Partington, containing a tale of new birth and a message of hope for a more peaceful world. They’re reprinted by permission from his collection How to Euthanise a Cactus (Cinnamon Press, 2010).

This collection was one of four books chosen by the influential magazine The Africa Report for their Best Books 2010 feature. (One of his fellow honorees was Nelson Mandela.) The editor’s review states: “The political crisis in Kenya triggered by the botched 2007 elections seems to have caught talented young writers off guard. As prose writers search for their voices, it has been the poets who have confronted the crisis and tried to find meaning through it. Partington’s new collection is a towering manifestation of poetry’s strident return to the literary mainstream. Using media accounts of the violence, Partington points a disturbing finger at the living who remained silent and took sides—and took sides in order to silence.”

Praise Poem

We praise the man who,
though he held the match between
his finger and his thumb,
beheld the terror of its tiny drop of phosphorus,
its brown and globoid smoothness
like a charred and tiny skull
and so returned it to its box.

So too, we hail the youth who,
though he took his panga on the march,
perceived it odd within his fist
when there was neither scrub
nor firewood to be felled,
so laid it down.

An acclamation for the man who,
though he saw the woman running, clothing torn,
and though he lusted,
saw his mother in her youth,
restrained his colleagues
and withdrew.

We pay our homage to the man who,
though his heart was like a stone
and though he took a stone to cast,
could feel its hardness in the softness of his palm
and grasped the brittleness of bone,
so let it drop.

We laud the man who,
though he snatched to scrutinise
the passenger’s I.D.,
saw not the name – instead, the face –
and slid it back
as any friend might slide his hand to shake a friend’s.

And to the rest of us,
a blessing:
may you never have to be that man,
but if you have to,
BE!

****

Present at the Keelhauling

Kenya, late December 2007
For Sophie Mwelu Partington

What could so tiny a sailor have done
to deserve such punishment?
Did you fall asleep on deck, steal lemons,
mutiny?
I stand here like some bleeding heart lieutenant,
at a loss until

the doctor pulls you sternly round your mother’s keel,
and here you come, full-bloodied,
slick as kelp, so much the doctor cannot hold you,
ribbed and gulping with the joyful joy of lungs.

Ten toes, ten fingers, you’re
statistically sublime.
Mum’s little stowaway for nine long months,
and just for now,
this instant as I swaddle you with all my hugs,
you’re mine.

“Swallow” Gets Downright Eucharistic on Logic’s Ass


Martha Rzadkowolsky-Raoli has written a fantastic review of my chapbook Swallow (Amsterdam Press, 2009) for the Ampersand Books website. She’s reverse-engineered these rather difficult and prickly poems to make clear the theology behind them. The miracle of writing: when our readers mirror back to us more than we consciously realized we had said. I wrote Swallow by mad intuition, but an astute reader finds “method in it” after all. Some highlights:

Jendi Reiter created a tidy poetry book in which swallow means everything you can expect swallow to mean. She exhausts the word; its mashed remains a mix of cow meat, desire, intestines, bird. If you read the book, and you should, you’ll experience the beating of the word. Swallow. How else to learn something new ?(about the parameters of language) — – something only poetry can do, and these poems do it….

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…By suggesting disparate contexts, these aphorisms maintain a collaged-world view. I like Reiter’s objection to a poetics bound by singular points of view. I like when word-artists comply with the rules of our new universe (a mess of sources coming at you from everywhere: billboards, email, the doorman). This kind of work feels real….

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…Reiter’s rhetorical tricks can remind me of the riddle-ish catechism I was taught. The relationship between premises in these poems get downright eucharistic on logic’s ass. Mysterious pronouncements sound as zany as any church stories of body-magic: The body jesus lived in, the jesus body that is the eucharist, and the jesus body that you put into your body….


Read the whole review here.

You know you want it now:


Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2010


“I do not intend to be inconsolable, but I do not intend to be deceived.” –Leon Wieseltier

Biggest Accomplishments

I now own over 75 Barbies.

It’s been a good year for the writing, too — 30 poems in 30 days, and several hundred pages of my novel and spun-off short stories. Thanks to everyone who has helped me take my career to the next level in 2010:

Massachusetts Cultural Council, 2010 Fellowship in Poetry
The Iowa Review Awards, 2nd Prize for Fiction
Stories published in the Bridport Prize Anthology and The Adirondack Review

My new poetry chapbook Barbie at 50 was published by Cervena Barva Press:

Best Books Read in 2010:

*Charles W. Pratt, From the Box Marked Some Are Missing: New & Selected Poems (Hobblebush Books, 2010)

Fans of Richard Wilbur will love this beautiful and wise collection by a former English professor who farms an apple orchard in New Hampshire. Read a sample poem here.

*Wesley Stace, Misfortune

A comic melodrama in the Dickensian vein, this picturesque saga of 19th-century England concerns a foundling boy, raised as a girl by an eccentric lord, who must discover his true identity in order to save the family estate from greedy relatives.

*Wayne A. Meeks, Christ is the Question

Renowned New Testament scholar calls us to go beyond the liberals’ reductionist “historical Jesus” and the conservatives’ ahistorical literalism, to find out who Jesus is for us today. Christ’s identity, like ours, is dynamic and defined by relationship to others, not a fixed nugget of truth we must unearth from the past.

Big Gay News:

Federal trial courts rule that California’s same-sex marriage ban, Prop 8, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act are unconstitutional!

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ban on openly gay soldiers is repealed!

Favorite Blog Posts:

The Biblical Problem of the Prostitute
I used to believe that Christians could affirm monogamous same-sex relationships without rethinking our other theological commitments. It is possible, but now I question whether it’s such a desirable goal. That is to say, are we merely interested in bringing one more group into the circle of respectability? Or does Jesus want us to identify with others who are marginalized as our families once were, and settle for nothing less than a radical theology that includes everyone?

Campus Extracurricular Groups Claim “Religious Freedom” to Discriminate
Non-affirming conservative Christians may well be an oppressed minority on college campuses, but they are the oppressive majority in the rest of America. This is not to say that two wrongs make a right. It’s just important to remember the wider context. CLS presumably wants its members to use their legal skills to block full civil equality for GLBT people when they graduate. Their gathering is not just about personal self-expression.
(See follow-up post here, too.)

Straight Women, Gay Romance: Bridging the Gender Gap?
I feel a little sad that traditional male-female divisions persist even in queer culture. Some editors…suggest that the difference between gay male fiction and female-written M/M is that the latter is more romantic and sentimental. Men who want lasting love, who talk openly about their emotions with and for other men–are these still mainly a female fantasy, scorned by other men regardless of sexual orientation?

Marriage Equality Versus Fertility Cult
Gay couples are parents too. The only way to tell them apart is to elevate procreative ability to a spiritual ideal. Inadvertently perhaps, this attitude wounds and discourages potential adoptive parents, reinforcing our fear that infertility is a kind of failure, an exclusion from the highest level of sacred marital union.

Thursday Non-Random Songs: Offbeat Christmas Mix


Tired of endless replays of “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Frosty the Snowman”? These lesser-known gems came to my attention in a newsletter from the graphic design shop Phil’s Fonts.

Clarence Carter, “Back Door Santa”

“I ain’t like ol’ Saint Nick, he don’t come but once a year…” Yow!

The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl, “Fairytale of New York”

Wonderfully sad, gritty urban ballad. “I could have been someone…Well, so could anyone.” Plus, how many Christmas songs do you know that include the words “you scumbag”? Not many, I hope.

The Ramones, “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight)”

If you find family celebrations triggering, this is the video for you. Love that 1980s hair.


Merry Christmas, everybody!

Doubt Series, Part Two: Trust in (Some of) the Word(s) of the Lord


Trust. It’s an inference from the seen to the unseen, from the past to the future. Though “live in the moment” is the spiritual catchphrase of our supremely distracted society, trust tells us to do the opposite. This mood will pass, it says; this person or situation deserves to be seen in context, not judged on a surface reaction.

In order to learn from our teachers at a deeper level, we have to trust them. I first realized this when I took voice lessons in my 20s. Before then, I thought of my teachers as the people who gave me assignments, which I would figure out for myself, or decide not to complete if I didn’t consider them worthwhile. I really wanted to learn to sing, but unlike schoolwork, I didn’t even know what the necessary skills were or how to acquire them. My voice coach used a delightfully absurdist method that involved interfering with my normal control mechanisms (e.g. holding my tongue while I sang an aria as “glah glah glah”) to bring out the natural, relaxed voice. I couldn’t understand why this would work; all I could do was surrender to it, or not. Fortunately, I did. I not only learned how to sing, but how to trust.

Spiritual development happens the same way. All the human minds in the world, put together, can’t encompass the infinity of God. If we share our insights, though, we can get a bigger picture of God than if we each had to start from zero. Sometimes we can test others’ beliefs against our own experience, but (as with history, or science, or any other knowledge field) many times we also have to rely on second-hand reports.

The question is, which ones?

When I was preparing for baptism into the Episcopal Church, about 10 years ago, a conservative Catholic friend explained the magisterium to me as follows: The more we find that the Church has been reliable in areas of our direct experience, the more we realize we should trust the Church’s commands even when we don’t understand them so well. Later, Protestant friends would make a similar claim about the Bible.

For a long time, I was open to this, never to the point of believing in papal or Biblical infallibility (an incoherent concept, in my view), but generally feeling that as a Christian I ought to give tradition the benefit of the doubt. St. Paul’s words about grace in Romans 7-8 were lifesaving to me, and this encouraged me to hope that the rest of the Bible was infused with the same wisdom and power. Sure, I knew about the sexist, violent, tribalistic, unscientific, and plain weird bits of the Bible, but these were “a few bad apples”.

That was before I started hanging out with actual Christians.

My teachers in the faith were only human. They could have a gospel-inspired heart for the poor and a hardened heart toward unbelievers; a radically welcoming stance toward doubters and marginalized people and a smug liberal contempt for my “personal relationship with Jesus”.

But this complicates the issue of trust. Human psychology, like the Bible, being irreducible to a consistent philosophical system, it’s an oversimplification to say “Pastor X or Prophet Y was right about war, therefore he must be right about sexuality.”

Yes, the Bible is the place where I’ve found transformative forgiveness and comfort, and a vision of full equality for all people. It’s also the place where I’ve found condemnation of innocent people, and justification for oppressive social structures.

I’m at a point where I feel comfortable using the ethics of Jesus, as found in the gospels, to judge and prioritize all other Biblical texts. But then what remains of the Bible as a unified thing? The unraveling can be compulsive. I still read the Scripture passages each morning in the Daily Office, but with the mind of that combative high-schooler I used to be. I might like to believe the promises of vindication in the Psalms, for instance, but a little voice nags me that I have no basis for this, no reason to trust these words merely because they’ve historically been part of the same collection as other documents that I currently find convincing.

Oh, taste and see?
 

Charles W. Pratt: “Evening Meditation in a Cathedral Town”


Charles W. Pratt’s From the Box Marked Some Are Missing: New & Selected Poems (Hobblebush Books, 2010) is the most delightful poetry collection I’ve read this year, and I read many. The comparison that first springs to mind is Richard Wilbur, as both poets have more than ordinary gifts for writing formal verse that is light-footed, elegant, and full of surprises. Think of a Fred Astaire dance routine, or a Bach minuet: the underlying order is there, but never belabored on the surface. There’s no egotism or careerism in Pratt’s displays of skill. Not that I have anything against “confessional” poetry, but it’s also refreshing to read an author who echoes an earlier age, when poems could be reticent about personal details yet full of emotion.

From the Box… was the first volume in Hobblebush Books’ Granite State Poetry Series, which publishes authors with a connection to New Hampshire. Many of Pratt’s poems concern his work as an apple-grower, describing the farming life with humor, wistfulness, and reverence. There are also poems of family life, European travel, meditations on aging and and the mystery that lies beyond.

The poem below is reprinted by permission. This one stood out for me because of the mood, delicately balanced between modern empiricism and timeless wonder, and the intricate pattern of the rhymes. Note the deft double meaning of the closing line.

EVENING MEDITATION IN A CATHEDRAL TOWN

Transparent on transparency,
A lacewing on the windowpane.
Pale green traceries of vein
In the lancets of its wings sustain
A membrane too fine for the eye.
As tranquil on the mystery
Of glass as if taught by its wings
How to put faith in invisible things,
In slow sweeps back and forth it swings
Its frail antennae thoughtfully,
Like compasses that leave no mark:
Geometers imagining the arc.

In the cathedral treasury
I’ve gazed, unmoved, at the Virgin’s shift,
Draped like dead insect wings—enough,
The histories repeat, to lift
That heap of masonry so high.
Others believed in it; now I
Where the great stained windows raise
Their winged parabolas of praise
Day after day can bring to graze,
Sheepish, my agnostic eye.
Such precious straining of the light
Surprises stone and souls of stone to flight.

Small concentration of the evening air,
Lacewing, I look through you and glass to where
Beyond the fields the late sun condescends
To denseness, and its true brightness bends
And bursts to beauty where the transparent ends.

Becky Dennison Sakellariou: “Stoning the Pool”


Becky Dennison Sakellariou is a poet who divides her time between New Hampshire and the village of Euboia in Greece. Her new collection, Earth Listening (Hobblebush Books, 2010), is a lyrical tribute to both landscapes and the fruit that springs from their stony soil. Among those fruits, metaphorically speaking, are the gifts of wisdom and acceptance of the passage of time. Somehow the heart stays open to love and beauty as mortality is faced. She kindly shares this poem below.

Stoning the Pool

I left all words
on the kitchen table
when they called my name.

I love words.
Words are the way
each idea comes to my tongue.

This idea needs no savoring.
Cancer tastes of fear
and fear will not

translate into echoes,
cadences, syllables.
The nurse said

all will be well
which is what I often tell
my friends who are in despair.

Her words sat
in the outer bowl of my ear,
rolling back and forth

like marbles in a dish.
All is well was gone,
disintegrated at a word.

Who will come?
Who will call my name?
Is this the Grove of No Shadows?

What shapes sleep
beneath the silky surface
of this body of bloody water?

Who will excavate my grave
littered with olive pits,
fig seeds and shattered potsherds?

Who will stand
for the final libation?