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
The Red Wheelbarrow Poets 
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