Month: May 2021

Special shout out to Preeti Shah, a recent poem-of-the-month winner at Brooklyn Poets, but a first-timer for the RWB, who audited the workshop and promised to bring a poem sometime soon.  We look forward to it.

Bridget Sprouls was back for a second week running and brought a poem of sadness and untethered regret called “Strange sad story,” having to do with a stray dog adopted or housed by the speaker of the poem and her partner. The backstory that Bridget shared with us at the workshop didn’t make it all the way into the poem, but the dismay, despair, and the sadness of the title are there in full, even in the description of the land where she lives.

Frank Rubino‘s poem, “There is a place where dreams are monitored” uses a wonderfully evocative piece of anaphora.  Several lines begin “You’re looking at a man who…” So, a poem about identity illuminated by stories, one about how youthful moral failings (cheating on the SATs, skimming money) can, an adult man, dog; another about a family cat; another about financial losses, and a surprising one about being lectured by the cops.  In a way, the poem mirrors the second thoughts and sorrow of Bridget’s poem – hers about losing a dog, his in part about losing a cat, but both of them churning over the facts, suggesting places where blame can land, and ruminating.

Raymond Turco brought a poem that Frank described as gnomic, called “We Are All Man,” that talks, very briefly, about the godly nature of man, and suggests that all speech names god.  Tom thought it was a ‘modern affirmation.’

Janet K‘s poem “In His Body,” like, but very unlike Raymond’s addresses the man/god relation, though Janet comes at it from the point of view of the saggy elder body, and the desire to be youthful if not young in a poem that is filled with vivid language, starting with the repeated beginning of stanzas one and two with the word “Fancy” as a  VERB!  “Fancy switching a jelly belly for a six-pack ….. Fancy striding on a skeleton of bonded bone…”  And the energy continues to flow in stanza three with the life affirming, healing grace of a television evangelist: “Yeah, baby./ Abandon the walker, ditch the cane.”   Finally, in the fourth stanza, the man/god thing comes out a lot of latent music: “If you funded the fantasy of inimitability/ you could look in the mirror at one of the gods/ and run your hands over the firmness of youth….”  The poem ends falling back into a bit of momento mori, considering how even a well-tuned body can and fail and fall, but holding on to what she calls the “fantasy of inimitability” by ending on the hopeful word, “Still.”

Shane Wagner‘s poem “Cedar Lane, to Woodlawn, to Long Hill” a poem set during a neighborhood walk along the path described in the title, that gets the question of violence by a zig-zag route, starting with a sock that bunches in the speaker’s heel, then goes back to the birth of his daughter, jumps forward to the a mature conversation about violence against women, then on to coded language used to describe other social ills, and ends with a boy pointing a finger gun at a dog and the speaker who points his own finger gun at the boy.  Susanna Lee said that the violence becomes clearer as the poem goes on, but investing the finger gun in an innocent with such political potency comes with some liabilities.

Rob G brought a poem called “Soul Wrangling” which is a fractured narrative about a newly married couple, an actual honeymoon couple, going into the Arizona desert on their honeymoon to search for the bones of dismembered children described by a person with an “unraveled mind…gilded with common sophistry.”  It’s an odd tale, and one that doesn’t fit easily into a poem that uses as much concision as Rob’s do.

My untitled poem beginning with “In emojis” distinguishes between the way sadness is depicted in emojis and how it appears on a real face, allowing the person who is crying to taste their own tears to “check the depth/ of your sorrow/ as they pass”.  Susanna Lee suggested it was about how to disassociate from sorrow. Janet K said that the long skinny look of the poem on the page was like ‘water falling.’  Rob G suggested the title “Salinity.”

Susanna Lee‘s poem, “Permanent Waves” talked about hair, the speaker’s hair, the speaker’s mother’s hair, and the speaker’s sister’s hair, but more than that, it talked about distinguishing the speaker from a sister who “let mom dress her up,/ allowed her hair to be permed,/ dressed in itchy white lace gloves/ and pinchy, black patent leather shoes, wore and easter bonnet with an elastic ribbon snapped under her chin.”  An immensely rich area to explore, but this poem stays away from the rawness of the emotion it strongly suggests, and may do itself a disservice thereby.

Tom Benediktsson‘s poem “Syzygy” was inspired by Jen Poteet’s poem about applying for a James Merrill fellowship from a few weeks ago.  Tom’s poem starts with a startling, even amazing evocation of a painter who invites the speaker into “a snoring father,/ a dirty kitchen and a room full of art.” Such celerity!  And the next two lines are even more tantalizing: “I bought an e-ray of his wife’s skull/ on which he’d painted a fish.”  Unfortunately, for this reader, the poem does not develop along those amazing lines, but turns into a recollection of a trip to Merrill’s Stonington Connecticut, specifically a restaurant called “Noah’s,” and though the poem circles back to “some strange starving fish” it never regains its strange wonderfulness.

Just a great group of working poets working on their poems. (We miss you, Jim.)

—Arthur Russell

We had a very welcome surprise guest at the workshop, Bridget Sprouls, whose poem “Fresh Pasture” closely observed the aftermath of a farmyard accident, a lamb kicked by a steer. The direct, unadorned simplicity of the narration allowed us, the readers, to care, to worry about the lamb, so that the next line, also unadorned, locked us into the moment.  The poem follows the lamb, who “sat quietly,/ breathing perhaps a little faster than normal;” the two adverbs, “quietly” and “perhaps” did a lot of work, which is unusual for adverbs, keeping the tension high.  And the concern we felt for the lamb reached a high point as the poem paused to educate us a bit about the lamb’s usual routine—experimental chewing and calling for milk—to then let us know that “Today she didn’t chew.  She didn’t baa for milk.”  Just a lovely poem. Some of us thought the last line was unnecessary, precisely because we knew that from the careful caring exposition, but that’s for Bridget to decide.

Janet Kolstein’s poem “Topanga” (no included in the package) was just amazing as looks back at youth go.  It was about that time in the early 1970s when Topanga Canyon and Laurel Canyon in California were magnets for the indy pop musical idols of the day, but those were just the backdrop to the young speaker’s place in that charged universe, and ended with; “I was always going back to New Jersey/ when summer was over/ and I needed a job as cashier or behind a counter,/ and there was our home in Halcyon Park as a backup/ where I could secretly lick my wounds when I failed.”

John J. Trause brought an untitled poem that began “I picked a flower in Britain once,/ the color of your eyes.”  It was written in ballad meter with the second and fourth lines in each stanza rhyming and an added internal bonus rhyme in line three.  It was hypnotic metrically and hilariously sensual.

Tom Benediktsson was back after a few weeks away with “Freely Fly” a poem that anthropomorphizes an “LL Bean Wicked Good flannel shirt.”  I can’t summarize it, but it was wildly imaginative, satirical and just plain nuts. Welcome back, Tom.

It really was comedy night; not just JJT and Benediktsson either—Don Zirilli‘s poem “Stand Up” was shaped like am actual comic’s standup routine, starting with a quick reversal of an old comic’s standby: “I just flew in from New York/ and boy is the sky tired.”  And throughout, Don pushes the routine towards a slightly more surreal kind of humor; one section tells a joke about a snake who gets hit in the face by a dandelion stem; another tells a castle-with-a-moat joke; and it ends with a twist on a typical stand-up ending: “You’ve been fantastic./ I loved you in another life.”  My only wonderment was whether any of this material was beyond the ken of today’s standup comics.

Brendan‘s poem “Ta Republique” also featured a moat, albeit one around a sandcastle, a sandcastle on a beach outside a convalescent home whose windows were filled with sick people “some in wheelchairs, some bandaged, some with their fists to their mouths, their sounds lost/ to the flash and scream of a fighter jet, heading in.”  And the overall picture was jarring, arresting, and disturbing, but in a memorable way.

Ana Doina‘s poem, “The Cruelty of Youth” was a narrative about a summer idyll that was not ideal.  The speaker went swimming every day with a childhood friend of the speaker’s mother, and the friend goaded the speaker to swim the whole width of the lake, until one day, having had enough of that, the speaker challenges the friend to talk about his youth, spent as a child victim of the Nazi Josef Mengele’s cruel experimentation.

Jen Poteet brought a poem called “Wildflower or Weed” about dandelions.
Susanna Lee brought a sonnet called “Corona Stole Our Love Sonnet” that focuses on a guitar.

Claudia Serea’s poem “If this fever were an old-fashioned war” a direct address to a sick child, that includes the kind of fantastical storytelling that parents allow themselves to indulge in when it’s their kid and their kid is sick. Very nice poem.

Raymond Turco‘s poem was an Italian original and an English translation that had been accepted for publication.  We loved hearing Ray read it in Italian, and then we tore into the English, which had one of Ray’s unexpectedly strong metaphorical twists at the start: “In search of my son’s heart,/ I find it transplanted.”  We loved wondering what that could mean and where the poem could go.

Turns out I’m posting these notes just fifteen minutes before our next workshop. So, if I gave anyone short shrift, I apologize.  Our workshop, as Frank says, is the best thing anywhere.

—Arthur Russell