Category Archives: Great Poems Online

Jeff Mock: “The God of Simple Vision”


It’s not easy to write a poem critiquing fundamentalism without falling into the same black-and-white thinking as one’s opponents, only with heroes and villains reversed. Outrage, however righteous, can work at cross-purposes to the subtler techniques that give a good poem its depth. Complexity and ambiguity leave room for the reader to inhabit the poem, and give her a reason to reread it. On the other hand, there are times when a loud, clear voice is the only way to do justice to a serious topic.

This poem by Jeff Mock, a creative writing professor at Southern Connecticut State University, skillfully navigates these pitfalls. Rather than presenting a counter-polemic, he redescribes the Christian conservatives’ triumphalism as a tragedy, where repression of the unfamiliar and inexplicable makes them blind to the very thing they seek. It originally appeared in LocusPoint, in a group of his “god/goddess of…” poems that I encourage you to read, and is reprinted with his permission.

THE GOD OF SIMPLE VISION

Complexity blurs the silhouettes of everything,
Even on a grand scale: you may, from a distance,

Mistake a sassafras leaf for all
Of North America. You may mistake it
For the mashed peas your mother served you

Before you knew right from wrong.
You may mistake it for the guard who all night

Paces the watchtower and scans
The borderlands. One man’s stranger
Is another man’s threat. Some

Unlucky victims, it’s true, are more
Unlucky than others. And while Heaven does not

Belong in the realm of politics, you may mistake
A sunflower for your Lord Jesus Christ
Walking, arms outstretched, toward you through

The Electoral College and perfumed gardens
Of America. It is simple, really: nothing

Outside is inside. You may not be of two
Minds, not when just a modicum
Of grade-school theology will direct

Your every step to the midway where you’ll find
The con artists and carnival tricks

And moral flag-waving, the lurching
Haze. Every stranger is a shadow
On your heart. Subtract charity and you all

Come to your Lord less than equal—
You are separate. Across the gulf of difference,

The grief of other victims is authentic
And utterly strange. Their grief cannot
Touch you, nor their love. So love gives out

And is merely a funeral without a body,
Which you may well mistake for a miracle.

Poem by Ruth Hill: “She (Ode to a Roadside Weed)”

I love the wordplay and sound patterns in this charming poem by Winning Writers subscriber Ruth Hill. Listen to it on YouTube in this video from Writers Rising Up, a nonprofit that encourages environmental stewardship through the literary arts.

She
by Ruth Hill

She is hot pink,
so I say, “She..she…”
Come along with me, burgundy…organdy.
Flaring like a flame, flamenco flamingo.
Daring like a dame, demonic durango.
She is feather soft, plumes aplenty, boas flowing.
She daft on dunes, and bending,
she, leaning and gleaming.
Oh, how you catch the light!
you shimmering cocktail, Zinfandel infidel,
nubile Nubian, ruby Reuben.
Sunrise has kissed your silk-strung necklace
with dewdrops of amethyst mist.
Sunset bathed you, bronze and brazen in the breeze,
pivoting pirouette.
Blonde hair bouncing, sumptuous, voluptuous,
parking like an arcing rose, all bramble-scramble.
Side of the road hitchhiker, biker, femme fatale,
wish I could defer you
from preferring the disturbed at the curb.
Roping wild lopers, you, with your wild lasso.
Sowing your wild oats, barely barley,
wheedling your way in, under someone’s skin.
Look how you set the hook…
how you make the hound dogs howl!
They are afraid of you, so afraid,
into a braid or earwig surprise, demise;
but I have eyes for you, tenderize.
They mace you,
but you brace a trace they can’t erase,
then face the race, all vivid and livid.
I will miss you,
when nothing but your descendants remain.
No one can replace your lost grace.
She, Sheila, Sheba: Shalom, Salome, vamp by the ramp.
Silicon desiccant for butterflies, and others, when you fade:
flash o’ flesh, dreamy cream puff, fluff!
Wind lifts your sisters’ blue flax skirts: flirts!
Little ladyslippers loan you their yellow stilettos.
Ripening next to freckled bromegrass,
scarlet hairs on paintbrush,
carmen pistils on fuchsia fireweed,
little girl in bloomers: vixen,
foxtail fixin’.

40 Years of Book Love: The 1980s in Poetry


My impending 40th birthday has occasioned this look backward through the decades at the books that shaped my identity. The first post in this series can be found here. (Update to that post: Adam read it and bought Gockel, Hinkel and Gackeliah for me for only $36.95 on Alibris. What a guy!)

My book consumption ramped up in my middle-school and teenage years, so I’m going to cover poetry and prose in two separate posts. I was a lonely, precocious young person with a smaller budget and more time to reread books than I have now, so my relationship to those favorite volumes had an intensity that gave this budding writer a good training in close reading. I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about my main influences: Anne Sexton, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden. Below are a few of the lesser-known collections that found their way into my soul, with excerpts.

There are no acceptable photos of me from this period.

Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale, edited by Marya Zaturenska
Teasdale (1886-1933) was an American lyric poet, a contemporary of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I stumbled upon her final chapbook, Strange Victory, in the Stockbridge, MA library when I was about 10 years old, on summer vacation, and was thrilled and stirred by her tragic yet unsentimental voice. She used rhyme and meter in a well-patterned but not rigid way. The darkness in her poems is pregnant with a spiritual presence that will endure while our little lives come and go. It’s a consolation for those sober-minded enough to face it. Perhaps that was the terrifying yet desired presence I sensed just beyond the looming nighttime trees and star-clustered sky of Western Massachusetts, where God seemed a lot closer than in the city. This poem says it all for me.

Return to a Country House

Nothing but darkness enters in this room,
Nothing but darkness and the winter night,
Yet on this bed once years ago a light
Silvered the sheets with an unearthly bloom;
It was the planet Venus in the west
Casting a square of brightness on this bed,
And in that light your dark and lovely head
Lay for a while and seemed to be at rest.
But that the light is gone, and that no more
Even if it were here, would you be here,–
That is one line in a long tragic play
That has been acted many times before,
And acted best when not a single tear
Falls,– when the mind and not the heart holds sway.
****

Rupert Brooke: The Poetical Works, edited by Geoffrey Keynes
Romantic poet who died young in World War I. Plus he was smokin’ hot. What more could a teen girl want? Though the first half of this poem seems a little cliche to me now, the second half still raises goosebumps. That’s the kind of love I always wanted, and have found: a comrade in arms who marches with me, jauntily, into the great unknown that waits for us all. (Adam might not appreciate the implication that he has “scarlet lips”, though.)

The Wayfarers

Is it the hour? We leave this resting-place
  
Made fair by one another for a while.
Now, for a god-speed, one last mad embrace;
  
The long road then, unlit by your faint smile.
Ah! the long road! and you so far away!
  
Oh, I’ll remember! but…each crawling day
Will pale a little your scarlet lips, each mile
  
Dull the dear pain of your remembered face.

…Do you think there’s a far border town, somewhere,
  
The desert’s edge, last of the lands we know,
Some gaunt eventual limit of our light,
  
In which I’ll find you waiting; and we’ll go
Together, hand in hand again, out there,
  Into the waste we know not, into the night?
****
Contemporary Poetry: A Retrospective from the Quarterly Review of Literature, edited by Theodore and Renee Weiss (1974)
Lest you think my tastes ran entirely to Edwardian schmaltz, this anthology was also a close companion of my high school days. It may have been a gift from St. Ann’s School classmate Alissa Quart, or one of the precious freebies I picked up as an intern at the Poetry Society of America, where my tasks included returning improper submissions in SASEs and shelving their burgeoning and disorganized collection of review copies. This book gave me glimpses into modern subcultures and ways of speaking that were new to me, all the more fascinating because I lacked the context to understand them fully. So much of the content looks unfamiliar to me now, that I suspect I focused on a few favorites and reread those while skimming the rest. Some of those old friends were:

Yehuda Amichai, “As for the World”
Edith Sitwell, “Dirge for the New Sunrise”
Richard Wilbur, “The Good Servant”
Charles Tomlinson, “Mad Song” and “Obsession”
W.S. Merwin, “Song With the Eyes Closed”
Raphael Rudnik, “A Letter for Emily”
Howard Nemerov, “Brainstorm”
W.D. Snodgrass, “Inquest”
Richard Hugo, “Keen to Leaky Flowers” and “Bluejays Adjusted”
M.L. Rosenthal, “Liston Cows Patterson and Knocks Him Silly”
Harvey Shapiro, “National Cold Storage Company”
Herbert Morris, “The Neighbor’s Son”
Michael Hamburger, “Friends”
Frederick Feirstein, “The Anti-Life: A Fantasy”
Phyllis Thompson, “The Last Thing”

You can buy this book for one cent on Amazon. And you should.
****

Darker, by Mark Strand
My 9th-grade English teacher introduced me to Strand’s koan-like poem “Reasons for Moving”, after which I snapped up this early collection at the sadly now-defunct Gotham Book Mart. (First published in 1968, the 1985 reissue by Atheneum, which I own, appears to be out of print, so I’ve linked to a Strand compendium that includes it.) This book seemed innovative to me because the weird, horror-movie images were not mere poetic similes, but were actually happening in the narrative of the poems. A more predictable writer might say his neighbor’s face is menacing like a hawk’s, but Strand says this, in the apocalyptic final poem, “The Way It Is”:

…My neighbor marches in his room,
wearing the sleek
mask of a hawk with a large beak.
He stands by the window. A violet plume

rises from his helmet’s dome.
The moon’s light
spills over him like milk and the wind rinses
  the white
glass bowls of his eyes.

His helmet in a shopping bag,
he sits in the park, waving a small American flag…
****

The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, by Richard Hugo
I’ve always been sensitive to the vibe of a place, and Hugo was a master at putting those intuitions into words. His free verse has a stately, compact quality that feels like formal poetry, an echo of iambic pentameter holding up the poem like the indestructible old girders of the abandoned factories he elegized in “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg”.
****

Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987, by Diane Wakoski
I won the high school poetry award from the Poetry Society of America the same year (1988) that this collection won their William Carlos Williams Award, and we both read at the award ceremony at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park. What a head rush! Wakoski’s talky, vulnerable, raw, female voice was a good balance for the high-modernist male poets that mainly influenced me during this period. At the ceremony, she read the powerful poem “Joyce Carol Oates Plays the Saturn Piano”. I remember feeling awed and discomfited that a writer so much more famous and old than myself would still be haunted by self-comparison to other writers, and by the feeling that she had let time slip away from her — ironically, because her younger self cared more about external validation than about devoting herself to art. “I promised myself/that if, by 40, I had won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry/I would let myself play the piano again,” she begins, going on to say that when she reached that milestone with no Pulitzer in sight, her hands had forever lost the flexibility to play as she had done at 20. Upon hearing that Oates has taken up piano, the speaker feels:

…Envy?
No. Past that.
A sense of failure?
Perhaps. For I gave up something
I loved/ to attain something
unknown, and now I have neither.

Wakoski was 45 when she wrote that poem. That seemed a lot older to me in 1988!

In Memoriam: Martin Steele


Winning Writers lost one of our most prolific and imaginative subscribers this year, the writer Martin Steele, who passed away in February after a battle with cancer. (We only received the notice this week.) Martin won several prizes in our contests over the years, representing only a small portion of his vast output of prose-poems, humorous tales, ghost stories, and poetry on subjects from African wars to tennis.

Probably my favorite piece of his writing is the flash fiction “The Girls in the Tree“, which we reprinted on this blog last year. Some of his war poetry can be found here and here. Also check out his Poet of the Week page at Poetry Super Highway.

If you’ve been touched by his work, please sign his guestbook on the website of Beth Israel Memorial Chapel and make a donation to the American Cancer Society.

W.S. Merwin, “To Waiting”


Coming from a long line of clinically depressed women, I’ve often wondered whether my own tendency toward melancholy and dissatisfaction is primarily a biological problem or one that stems from underlying false beliefs. Do I need a pill, or a change of emphasis? The latter option is more my style. Contrary to the popular saying, I personally would rather be right than happy. In other words, I’d rather put up with some sadness while I investigate whether things are really as bad as I think they are. What you call dysthymia, I call the First Noble Truth.

Today’s poem on The Writer’s Almanac made me feel supported in that decision. Discontent is not always a fate to which we are condemned by our brain chemistry; it can be interrupted by simple everyday moments of redirecting our attention, starting with the few minutes it takes to read these lines.

To Waiting
by W.S. Merwin

You spend so much of your time
expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself

with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left alone for long

 

Nancy White: “Your Father, Your Son”


Nancy White directs the prestigious Word Works Washington Prize poetry book series, a contest that she won for her first book, Sun, Moon, Salt, in the early 1990s. She also taught English at my high school, St. Ann’s School, so I have a special affection for her. However, even if we were strangers, I would still have fallen in love with her newest collection, Detour (Tamarack Editions, 2010).

Detour explores the breaking apart and remaking of a woman’s identity in the middle of her life, through a son’s birth and a painful divorce. Subject matter that in a lesser poet’s hands would be merely confessional here takes on a haiku-like precision and open-endedness, intimate yet unbounded by the confines of one person’s experience. This feat is accomplished through White’s use of the second-person voice and the way she narrates major events obliquely, through peripheral details described with quiet beauty.

As a feminist and now the mother of a baby boy, I was particularly moved by the poem she’s permitted me to reprint below. I was concurrently reading the chapter on mothers and sons in Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, which addresses the same theme of trying to teach our children a more wholesome and emotionally well-rounded way of being men despite the pressures of patriarchy.

YOUR FATHER, YOUR SON

He carved the dusk with stories—his trick
to dive with lit cigarette and come up smoking,
or the girl he danced with late, her brothers
interrupting with a gun—but he never much

listened to you, no matter how you guzzled
his gruff heat, the musk of his overalls, the fine foul
language of his big male freedom. Four daughters,
no sons. He was all you had, so he’s still the man

to turn to, saying You took the dog in the boat not us.
You stayed late with the neighbors, called us liars,
didn’t care if we walked in the road. In you now
a bud, a son who will rise like weather,

poured from your genuine, unnamed ore, from his
genuine, unnamed ore. You say this one
won’t taste the blade that separates love
from its genderless shape. You swear it.

David Kato Prize for Poems About GLBT Rights: Spring 2012 Winners

This spring, I once again sponsored a themed contest as part of the Alabama State Poetry Society’s biannual awards. The David Kato Prize gives awards of $50, $30, and $20 for poems about GLBT human rights. (See my prior post about the Fall 2011 winners.) David Kato was a Ugandan gay activist who was murdered last year because of his human rights work. The ASPS and the Spring 2012 winners have kindly permitted me to publish their poems below. (UPDATED June 2: Third Prize winner added.)

First Prize

Coming Out
by Emily Grimes-Henderson

She came out of her closet
Left her husband
Lost her kids
And in the light of day
Recovered her true self
Says she knew when she was six
She was different
Nearly lost herself trying to fit
The world’s prescription
Said it was like looking through the
Wrong end of a pair of binoculars
You just can’t see a damn thing
Or find your way.
Now she lives with fear,
Frightened of reprisals at work.
Her supervisor telling her
“You’re the man!”
Wondering if soon she’ll join others
At the underpass
Punished for not fulfilling
The ‘mission’ of the
Company.
Punished for living
The truth of her life.

****

Second Prize

Fayettenams of the World
by Lynn Veach Sadler

Fayetteville, home of Fort Bragg.
They still call it Fayettenam.
Even today, when the Mayor
wants to put up a monument
to the vets of ‘The War in Vietnam’!
Hell, he also wanted to, not long back,
create a ‘Sister City’ with Vietnam.
We put the kybosh on that.
That’s a ‘sister’ thing, all right.
But he’s sure a persistent fool.
Now he wants Fayettenam’s Peace Conclave
to be represented on the committee
dealing with the ‘recognition issue.’
That’s ours–the way we vets
will be recognized.
The Peace Conclave is
Quakers and females and such.
I can tell the fool one thing–
there’s a lot of talk going around
that Fayettenam will burn
if he invites Fonda.
We’ll take a lesbian before that dame!
Wanna know somethin’ else?
Clooney. Pretty boy Clooney.
Our Boy George.
Well, he’s never been married, you know.
Always out there somewhere in the world
stirrin’ things up.
He needs to fight for the rights
of the right kind of people.
Maybe the next time
they put him in jail–
where he belongs, him and his causes
and his pretty self–
he’ll come out with less flesh
where flesh really matters for a man.
They’ll carve off a part
that will make his flesh
match his so-called spirit,
gay spirit, I mean.
You can’t be safe anywhere anymore.
They’ve just come out
with that Army padre in Afghanistan
masquerading as a man
who has now turned female.
Of maybe it was the other way around.
That’s the problem with that he-she mess.
You can’t keep them straight.
I’d kill my kids before I let
them do all that kind of switchin’.
I bet old Sonny Bono’s spinnin’ in his grave
over that so-called daughter of his.
Some chastity Sweet Chaz has!
I always thought Cher was weird.
She’s bound to be
at the bottom of the family screw-up.
Screw-wrong maybe I should say!
I just don’t know
what the world’s comin’ to!”

****
Third Prize

Coming Out
by Janet Johnson Anderson

I have come down
From the hillsides,
Poor as air,
With nothing left to sell
But my courage.

What cannot be used
Or carried,
Has been left behind,
Insignificant
For this territory ahead.

How many I have buried
Shallowly,
In this rocky country.
Emotions, whose intolerable slowness
Caused me to stumble and fall,
Whose presence
Did not wake me in time.
Oh, nothing destroys the character
Like pure conjecture,
Years of uncertainty in these woods,
The agility of surrender,
Has confused me,
But no longer.
I am no longer waning,
Transcending morning,
Illumined in the shade
Of Heaven’s confidence,
I come singing
Humanity’s evanescent song.

****
Honorable Mention

David’s Blood
by Ramey Channell

they know we are harmless
yet danger stalks us
fear and hypocrisy
feed on our breath
messages of hate
signed with our blood
and the world is unbuilt
with each mindless death
and we become scapegoats
in this absence of light

they know life is fragile
ascending on frail wings
love so easily shattered
while conscience is sleeping
enveloping darkness
obscures hope and justice
and the world is unbuilt
and wings are broken
and losses confirmed
and they know we are harmless

Gemini Magazine Is My Happy Place


My poem “Depression Is My Happy Place” was published today in Gemini Magazine, one of my favorite online journals, as an Honorable Mention winner in their 2012 poetry contest. You may enjoy it (or you may not) below. Also don’t miss the 2nd Prize poem by my friend Gerardo Mena, “A Nursing Home Boxer to a High School Volunteer”. Tony Mena is not only a talented poet; he’s a decorated Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran and a musician. Check out his website.

Depression Is My Happy Place

that lake waits anytime
for me to slip
under its threaded green hush
i don’t need summer or parking
to arrive
where my hurtling family
is already one less

depression is easy to get to
even on holidays
the standards are lower than church
or kindergarten
you can run with scissors there
but you probably won’t bother

it’s my tight light box
where i turn back the sun
to a pale hum

i don’t need fattening pills
or fermented dizzy bottles
i can spin it on my own
straw into lead
because a lead house
never blows down or burns

side effects of depression may include
eating more or less
than people in magazines
sleeping more or less
by yourself
sudden loss of interest
in what your mother thinks

it’s my soft dust pillow
under the boxspring where grandma money
refuses the bankers’ conjurations
of brown fields into winking green numbers
racing round the globe
like a tornado-spun house

it’s my black screen
i won’t trade

there may be a cost-saving generic
alternative to depression
ask your doctor about marriage
smiling often and wearing a good suit
may cause people to leave you alone
did you know that your natural skin tone
adds a layer of protection at no extra charge
(some restrictions may apply)

depression is not recommended
for unattractive women

Poem by Freddy Niagara Fonseca: “Books”

Freddy Niagara Fonseca is the editor of the anthology This Enduring Gift: A Flowering of Fairfield Poetry, featuring work by 76 talented poets who all happen to live in Fairfield, Iowa. He’s given me permission to share this lovely poem of his from the anthology. It puts into words why I feel such delight and magical connection when I find a well-thumbed book in a thrift store bin. E-books have many advantages, but they can’t do that.


BOOKS

Sometimes, when I think of the vast
wisdom ever contained in books—

countless scriptures of all creeds; scrolls in
indecipherable languages; tomes of science;

the great Library of Alexandria destroyed by
fire centuries ago, priceless knowledge gone;

thousands of books burned by the Third Reich;
books still held secret at the Vatican;

hieroglyphs in Egypt and whatever Atlantis
must have contributed to the written word;

books simply lost and never retrieved;
others molded, fallen apart, discarded,

and all the many books I’ll never be able to read in a
life-time even if I lived a thousand years;

and when I think of all these while browsing
at garage sales, used bookstores—(o, the good

feel of an old book and the sense of care for
books you surmise some previous owner had;

to see his or her name written on the title page,
sometimes with the date of purchase or gift)—

yes, then I tend to hold a book in my hands a little long
sometimes, deliberating whether I’ll buy,

and I read again what’s on the flap; scan a
few more pages; find a keen phrase here and there;

ponder on the title, the design, the author’s
name, weighing it all in my hand . . . And

page after page of long-forgotten lore, myth, and
adventure slowly take shape and mingle with

my own memory of myth in the back of
my mind, passing through my skin, stealing

into my bones, my heart, holding me spellbound
for a life-time it seems, and somehow beneath

my feet the deeper caves and mysteries of the earth
open wide where I glimpse that which

I cannot name but know that it exists;
and I’m feeling so strangely rooted and connected

to all cultures, beliefs, poetry, romance, peace,
wars, and history . . . and I may take the book home,

maybe not—it doesn’t matter, for as I’m
standing here, simply lost in time for a while,

some power is reclaiming everything I thought
was lost to man one time, and I see the

Great Communicator of it all in all these
many chapters, paragraphs, sentences, words

working their way with a purpose, meaning,
and conviction across so many ages,

and suddenly it seems that everything is all here now,
and really never was gone at all, as long as

books have ever existed, and readers found them,
and as I close the book, walking out to get some fresh air,

there’s all the magic in the air as of old still, and
I can live with that, and be an open book to all.

Poetry by A.C. Clarke: “Woman Made of Glass”


A.C. Clarke’s “Woman Made of Glass” won the 2011 Grey Hen Poetry Competition for women over 60. This contest offers a top prize of 100 pounds and is now accepting submissions through April 30.

I came across this exquisite poem while updating our Winning Writers contest database listings. The author and contest sponsor have kindly given me permission to reprint it here, since it’s no longer available on their website.

Woman Made of Glass

She can’t remember a time
before she knew to be careful.
No-one told her. She knew.

Her mother used to squeeze her hand so tight
she felt it crack. She’s never risked touch since,
spent childhood dodging

the heavy arms of aunts,
washing the smears
of fishmouth kisses from her skin.

She saw a glass frog once, its guts
clustered in its belly like pale grapes,
its small heart pittering:

took to covering herself –
high collars, sleeves to wrists,
thick tights. Like an old maid

said her mother. No boyfriends yet?
the aunts would dig. Afraid of heat
she’d hurry past lovers fused

mouth to mouth in a doorway,
likes cool places still,
country churches on weekday afternoons,

the saints in the windows filtering light
through sightless eyes.
Old glass is her favourite: its pieced

stories jewel-bright, simple, remote
as fairy-tale. Does she notice
how sometimes it bulges towards the base

thick and opaque, as if all these years
it’s been sneaking out of the leaden cames
slipped down, let itself go?