Terrific reading last Wednesday, featuring the powerhouse poetic couple Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, at the Felician University Little Theater!! Many thanks to our features for sharing their moving poems, to all who read in the open mic and to our wonderful audience. Poetry lives in Rutherford, NJ! The good doctor would be so proud.
Our next reading is on May 3, featuring David Messineo. Hope to see you there.
And remember to send in your writing for RWB 16! Submission deadline for essays: May 1, 2023. Click this Submittable link to submit.Submission deadline for poems: July 4, 2023. Click this Submittable link to submit.
Join us on April 5, 2023, at 7 p.m. at The Felician University Little Theater, 230 Montross Avenue, Rutherford, NJ 07070, for a fantastic poetry reading featuring Ilya Kaminsky & Katie Farris, plus the best open mic in New York and New Jersey!
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odesa, Ukraine. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press), which was The New York Times’ Notable Book for 2019 and was a National Book Award finalist, and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press), and is the co-editor and co-translator of many other books, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins). His work received The Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Katie Farris’s most recent book, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, from Alice James Books (US) and Liverpool University Press (UK), was listed as Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 10 Poetry Books for 2023. She’s also the author of the hybrid-form text boysgirls (Marick Press, 2011; Tupelo Press 2019), and the co-translator of many works, including A Country in Which Everyone’s Name is Fear, which was one of World Literature Today’s Notable Books of 2022. She’s a Pushcart Prize winner.
At the event, the featured poets will bring their books to sell. We’ll also have copies of our Red Wheelbarrow #15 for sale. Or, if you prefer to order online, you can do so here.
The RWB Poets welcome you! Drop by to listen to our features, read in the open mic, and qualify to submit to our annual journal. See you all in person on April 5 at 7 p.m!
The Red Wheelbarrow (Volume 16) is open for submissions of poetry and essays from poets who have read their poetry as a featured poet or at the open mic at the monthly Red Wheelbarrow Poets reading series from July 7, 2022, through July 6, 2023. You are also invited to submit if you participated in any of the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Workshops during the same period.
Please indicate in your cover letter when you’ve read with us or that you’ve attended the workshop to qualify. Simultaneous submissions are OK, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
When you submit, please complete the online form for one paragraph of relevant biographical information.
Limit your bio paragraph to approximately 120 words.
In the bio refer to yourself in the third person using your preferred pronoun (he, she, they).
We plan to publish and release Volume 16 in the fall of 2023.
PLEASE NOTE: THERE IS A SEPARATE DEADLINE FOR POETRY AND ESSAYS. ESSAYS ARE DUE MAY 1st. POETRY IS DUE JULY 4th.
Submission Guidelines for Essays Please submit 1 (one) essay in a single Word document. The only acceptable file formats are .doc or .docx. No pdf or other file types will be accepted.
Format for the Submission Document
Submit one Word document containing 1 (one) essay. Topics may include but not limited to: William Carlos Williams, New Jersey or Rutherford history, art, or poetry scenes, book reviews, writing craft. We’re pretty flexible.
Maximum length: 2,500 words.
Use Garamond, Times, or Times New Roman 12-point font.
Do NOT use headers, footers, or automatic page numbering in the document.
Do NOT use the footnote feature in Microsoft Word! If you want footnotes, do it manually.
Your name should appear above the essay. Do NOT use All caps.
If your submission relies on a special layout, please be aware of the print area this edition can allow: page printable area width is 4 3/4 inch by 6 3/4 inch length.
Submission deadline for essays: May 1, 2023. Click this Submittable linkto submit.
Submission Guidelines for Poems Please submit 5 (five) poems in a single Word document. The only acceptable file formats are .doc or .docx. No pdf or other file types will be accepted.
Format for the Submission Document
Submit one Word document containing 5 (five) poems.
Use Garamond, Times, or Times New Roman 12-point font.
Do NOT use headers, footers, or automatic page numbering in the document.
Do NOT use the footnote feature in Microsoft Word! If you want footnotes, do it manually.
Your name should appear above the first poem. Do NOT use All caps.
Each poem must have a page break at the end. Your poems should each start on a new page of the document.
If your submission relies on a special layout, please be aware of the print area this edition can allow: page printable area width is 4 3/4 inch by 6 3/4 inch length.
Submission deadline for poems: July 4, 2023. Click this Submittable linkto submit.
This year marks another premiere for The Red Wheelbarrow! We are excited to announce our 2022 nominees for The Pushcart Prize:
Jim Klein for “Nail Clipping”
Janet Kolstein for “Google Earth: Alexandria”
Michael Mandzik for “Regent’s Park”
Zorida Mohammed for “Fearful of Blood He Selects Me”
Barbara O’Dair for “Am I Right, Or Am I Just Gorgeous”
Bridget Sprouls for “How We Think Is a Body”
Congratulations to these poets and their terrific poems! All of them are available in The Red Wheelbarrow #15, a great gift for the poetry lovers on your list.
Our Red Wheelbarrow #15 is still making waves, and we’re still in a celebratory mood! It’s because this book, besides being the biggest one ever (100 poets published!), is a really special issue that includes a section of Rutherford High School poets. We were so excited to publish these young authors and hear their poems at the launch! Click here to read moreabout the 19 high school students and their Creative Writing teacher, Melissa Dougard.
And, if you don’t have The Red Wheelbarrow #15yet, or you know of someone who would like a copy, you can order it here.
Here’s to another 15 years of carrying on Dr. Williams poetic legacy, and thanks again for being a part of our community! Happy writing, happy reading, and happy fall.
Arthur Russell‘s recap of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Workshop ofAugust 2, 2022
How about that Marina Carriera reading at The Little Theatre at Felician U sponsored by RWB on Wednesday August 3? Great lyricism, great earthy (earthy = sexy) romanticism, and an important stand as a joyous first-generation Portuguese queer woman.
Pity the poor fool who wasn’t at the workshop Tuesday, where Janet Kolstein’s “I Used To Think” blew the roof off Zoom. It was a list poem of things the speaker “used to think” beginning with her previous belief that “a pot belly was gross” and very gradually moving from this comic instance into more and more serious material until we catch her admitting that dreams don’t come true: “I used to think you could live like an artist—/ not caring for jewels or cars,/ mortgages or debt – your hands your gift,/ you clothes speckled with paint…” She ends with a great sigh, saying, among other things: “I used to think . . . that my parents would always be living/ and time was a great Buddha sleeping with one eye open.” Someone pointed out that the poem doesn’t talk about the things the speaker thinks now, only what she ‘used to think’ and this creates a wonderful poetic state (or space) that allows something like nostalgia for delusion to become the emotion of the poem. Janet’s poems don’t go out in these notes, so if you weren’t there, you’ll have to wait till it’s published someplace BIG!
Yana Kane’s poem, “I did not want” is a curious pairing with Janet’s “I Used to Think” Yana’s poem is also a list poem, where the ellipses that begin each stanza signal that each stanza is part of a list beginning with the title’s words “I did not want.” And like Janet’s poem, Yana’s poem also addresses the past, but in a very different register than Janet’s, because Janet talks about personal history and the feelings associated with leaving innocence behind, but Yana focuses on feelings associated with extinction (i.e. group death) through the example of the extinct Passenger Pigeon, whose final member “Martha,” as the epigraph tells us, passed away on September 1, 1914, and was stuffed and put into the Smithsonian Institution. (Interesting, too, how Janet’s “Buddha” has one eye open, and Yana’s Martha is known for her “glass-eyed visage”) However, the speaker of the poem, which one might suppose from the title that bridges into the first line, to have been Martha, is not Martha, but, as we learn in the final stanza, another stuffed animal “one case over” from Martha’s, and although the speaker may also be extinct, we don’t know who they/she/he is. The bigger unanswered question might be what the story of the bird and the speaker as stuffed animals is a metaphor for? Human extinction? Or just how humans do not learn from their mistakes.
Brendan McEntee’s poem “In Lavender” is about a summer day sitting in an Adirondack chair in a patch of lavender out on Long Island. The poem has an O’Hara sort of present tense that grants us easy entry while setting the scene: “When the wind drops, the heat shows./ There’ll be rain later. Right now, it’s me in lavender…” Brendan’s style seems to be to put us in a place—a seaside, a graveyard, or here, a public garden—and tell us about the moment to moment in a way that suggests but doesn’t discuss the underlying thing that brought him there. Recently, his poem described a father and son driving silently around a graveyard until the father is ready to leave. In this poem, Brendan alludes to garden rules—“We’re not to pick the plants, or touch them/ or do anything that disturbs this universe.” But then, semantically exonerated because the lavender touched him, not the other way around, the speaker gathers a palmful of lavender smell and breaths it between his hands. And that awareness of and respect for rules and his use of the word “universe” very subtly freight that solitude with sadness, a sadness he never discusses, but carries in this diction, and gives a home in the solitude of a garden. I admire the way what he never says becomes the real feeling of the poem. And this is what I mean by connotation, suggestion or implication, one of poetry’s latent powerhouses.
Ana Doina works differently, denotatively; everything the poem wants to say, it says outright. In “Painted Stones” which, like Brendan’s “In Lavender” takes place in a leisure-time outdoor setting, she carefully narrates a walk in the woods taken by the speaker and a painter of stones. Eventually we learn that the painter of stones lost loved ones in the holocaust, an historical surprise, a narrative surprise, but not poetical surprise, and learn that the stones stand in for people lost in the horror (in other words, the painted stones are explicitly the metaphors for the people; the poem reports on those metaphors without having metaphors of its own). And this is a poem that tells us exactly what the underlying feeling is: “You believe/ the ciphered language is enough to hide/ the bitterness of your heart/ from any chance intruder” or the “refuge” and “safety” the painter found in the woods, and the rolling cadence of the final stanza describing the “fear that a loved face/ might have been lost, consumed/ by the hate-fueled fires/ of the war that orphaned you.”
Speaking of bitter hearts, Howard Prosnitz’s “After Reading Yeats” draws a distinction between the “pleasure” a reader can derive from a “gut punch” line in great poem and the “delight” the speaker feels remembering the early death of an Irish boy who literally punched him in the gut while they were both in junior high school a half century earlier. The cruel joy it celebrates—“the delight/ in knowing that the bastard died young”—is quite inexplicable and alienating. Happiness today for the forty-years-ago death of a fifty-years-ago childhood combatant? Fuck mellowing with age. Those seeking revenge, the Japanese proverb tells us, “should dig two graves, one for yourself.” In this poem, Howard has buried the speaker’s bully and has unearthed the speaker’s bitter, vindictive heart. I wondered if Howard meant to invoke the “alienation effect” described by Bertolt Brecht, in which familiar contents are presented in an unfamiliar way to get a new effect so that the audience does not empathize with the story of a drama and can think profoundly about the issues it raises.
In “United We Stand,” Don Zirilli presents a sardonic view of the “stand your ground” laws that excuse homicide when a person feels threatened. Most famously, this type of law led to the exoneration of Trevon Martin’s killer in Florida. The poem uses an ordinary font for the speaker of the poem and italicized font for material he has copied from internet sources related to people who have “stood their ground,” thus exposing the stupidity of such laws.
Raymond Turco’s poem “The Gods Who Rule the Earth” very effectively borrows the cadences and register of a public speaker exhorting a crowd. What he is exhorting them to do is not clear to this reader, but the rhetorical framework is very strong; even without knowing what the poem is about, we can feel the oration in a crowded square.
Frank Rubino brought “Radio in My Pocket,” a poem that seemed to me to follow a sleepless man around his house carrying either a transistor radio or a phone streaming a radio station while he wonders the midnight usual: who he is, and how men, who can erect an empty swimming pool shell in a desert, are different from animals, who can ‘read sand dunes.’ The speaker’s wife is sleeping, and there appears to be something sacrilegious about approaching her with his radio, source of the “sonics, semantic, information” of the outside world, in his hand. He is a deeply thoughtful man who reads the runes in the flotsam of his life.
John J Trause delighted us with “Gretta in the Yum-Yum Palace” a poem in the long tradition of poems about girls in gardens, with the quasi-important distinction that John’s “girl” Gretta may be a full-grown lady, and that her “garden” is a candy shop. Still the net effect of the effervescent, alliterative verses describing all sorts of candy (“There are the goo-goo clusters,/ and fluffer-nutter Sundays, the hot fudge brownies,/ and here the krispy krunch and crackled krokant…”) is not very different from a profusion (or orgy) of flowers. When you read it, have a box of chocolates handy.
My own poem, “Fallow, He Reported, When She Asked,” is a narrative poem in the form of iambic pentameter quatrains rhymed abab (cdcd and so on), that tells a fragment of a tale about a man named Bob who has come down from the prairie to the plains to visit his Aunt Sally, only to find that her barn was the scene of a grisly killing. A philosophical or moral discussion on the porch of Sally’s house ensues. Someone said it had an air of Robert Service’s poetry most famously, “The Shooting of Dangerous Dan McGrew.”
Nick Davis’s prose poem “When Summer Was Good” (not attached) addresses the youthful summer before the departure of a father.
Remember, this is August, the month for Nicole Sealy’s Sealy Challenge—read a book of poems a day for 31 days. So far, I’ve read Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing With Feathers, Howard Nemorov’s New and Selected Poems (1961); Monica Youn’s Blackacre; Marina Carriera’s Tanto Tanto; and Marwa Helal’s Ante Body. In addition to individual collections, I plan to mix in a few of the journals that I receive in hard copy, which I too infrequently read from cover to cover. You might want to read RWB 14 that way, if you haven’t already. RWB 15 is in the works now, due out in October, and you don’t want these puppies stacking up like New Yorker magazines.
If you haven’t already purchased Marina Carriera’s Tanto Tanto from which she read several love poems at the August 3 RWB reading, please do. You’ll be supporting Marina as well as her publisher, CavanKerry Press, a North Jersey joint that has also provided several features for our reading series.
Arthur Russell‘s recap of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Workshop ofJune 28, 2022
Just a word before I get to the workshop, about Howard Nemerov, former poet laureate of the United States (1988), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his collected poems in 1978, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Bollengen Prize, and the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. How did we ever forget this guy? And speaking of forgetting, I got my copy of Nemerov’s New and Selected Poems (1960!) when I was invited to raid the library of one of our great (and not frequently enough remembered) New Jersey poets, Madeleine Tiger, when she moved out of her house in Bloomfield, and it, the book, has sat on my bookshelf unread for a dozen or more years since then until alphabetical swelling required a shift of volumes and Nemerov fell onto the floor. I love the guy! Not just for his mid-century swag, but for the steady formalness of his mind and his willingness to announce a theme and go for it. The poem, “Runes” in this volume, is a fifteen-part poem in which each part has fifteen lines—and Nemerov tells you in line one of part one (no less exactly than Milton announces his purpose in line one of Paradise Lost), exactly what he’s going for: “This is about the stillness in moving things.” And from there, he’s off, talking about “winter seeds, where time to come has tensed/ Itself,” and Ulysses, and sunflowers, and how winter makes water a captive “in the snowflake’s prison”—on and on with an unapologetic embodiment of ideas past and present in things, things, things. Of course, you can’t read that first line without hearing an echo of Eliot’s “still point in the moving world”—all of the Midcenturies had to be aware of Mr. Big, but Nemerov had his own point to make and his own, to me, accessible way of making it. I literally had to stop reading for the day when I read part X of the poem, which, if you’ll indulge it, I’ll quote in full. It embodies the idea of thaw, since one of the themes of the larger poem is seasonal change and begins with a direct address to “white water”:
X
White water, white water, feather of a form
Between the stones, is the race run to stay
Or pass away? Your utterance is riddled,
Rainbowed and clear and cold, tasting of stone,
White water, at the breaking of the ice,
When the high places render up the new
Children of water and their tumbling light
Laughter runs down the hills, and the small fist
Of the seed unclenches in the day’s dazzle,
How happiness is helpless before your fall,
White water, and history is no more than
The shadows thrown by clouds on mountainsides,
A distant chill, when all is brought to pass
By rain and birth and rising of the dead.
I particularly love “history is no more than/ The shadows thrown by clouds on mountainsides.” So limpid for an image about clouds, so cloudless, so uncomplicated and complex, and such a lesson to learn in times when the shadows seem to hide the mountainsides. This is great stuff; And there was more great stuff at our workshop on Tuesday, including, but not limited to…
Claudia Serea’s poem, “Claudia, listen,” starts in the title with the speaker’s mother’s voice asking the speaker to listen to the sound of a nightingale (introduced by its Romanian name, “privighetoarea”). It’s a brilliant move starting that way because ultimately the poem is about hearing the mother’s voice as much as (or even more than) it is about the nightingale’s song. Interesting, though, the thing that reminds the speaker of her mother’s direction to “listen” is not a nightingale at all, but a branch of a bush “tugging on [her] sleeve”. The nightingale is gone, and, as Don suggested, the memory of the mother has become the nightingale, as in the myth of Philomel.
Don Kreiger brought a political poem called “Juneteenth at Carter-Howell-Strong Park” that was preceded by an italicized explanation that the Juneteenth holiday is a remembrance “of the past and ongoing disgrace that is America.” Having announced its perspective so confrontationally, the poem proper is freighted with its politics as it describes a visit to the eponymous park in Frenchtown neighborhood of Tallahassee, Florida, and that politics is made personal because the speaker tells us he grew up in Tallahassee but never visited Frenchtown as a kid. Yet, here he is, visiting as a adult who can spend $20 for a hat and $20 more for “a case of coke and a lemon” and then, with or without his burden of soda pop, “[take] a turn round the pond/ shirtless in that Tallahassee sun.” What he finds, perhaps predictably, is a town looking pretty shabby, with “rusty metal roofs,” “an overgrown lot,/ a pickup on flat tires, the driver’s door/ lying on the engine.” The park itself is a more welcoming place, filled with birds on or around a lake, and men on the benches around the lake, men who wave hello to the speaker, and even offer him a beer. So, is this visit to Frenchtown a form of ceremonial penance for a white person performed on the occasion of Juneteenth? If so, how interesting that the poem reenacts the segregation of his youth; his is a visit without any human interactions; though he buys a hat and a case of coke, he speaks to no one. He never even returned the wave to the men on the benches, or responded in any way whatsoever to the man who offered him a beer. This hopeless isolation and separation are reinforced in the last line of the poem, where the speaker cannot even understand the offer of a beer unless it is repeated. The bleakness of this vision of race in America is as unremitting and grim as Clarence Thomas’s.
Frank’s multiverse/poem, “I grew up with my mom’s meatloaf” brings together a vision of fetal development in which ontogeny recapitulates both philogeny and forest life; it is enacted in a natural landscape (a forest) and lives as both a political act (there are different Parties) and a personal narrative (chronic pain). In somewhat the same fashion as Don Kreiger’s “Juneteenth”, Frank’s poem announces its political stakes at the start. Don’s came as a sort of pre-poem “argument” about a “depraved” America, while Frank’s comes as a footnote to the title, a footnote that quotes in disbelieving wonder from Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and leaving decisions concerning the legality of abortion to the individual States. Frank’s footnote is a straight quote from the opinion of the court, but the fact that it comes as a note to the title “I grew up with my mom’s meatloaf” carries the emotional weight of living in a moment when everything Americans have come to rely on for the last 50 years has been overturned, and in that sense, it’s quite brilliant. The poem never mentions Frank’s mom or meatloaf again, but the point is made, with the added implication that meatloaf is a crazy stand-in or avatar for the bloody, dangerous butchery of illegal abortion to come. The cadence at the end, “Our government has failed” fell too heavy handedly for most of the group, but the density and complexity of Frank’s achievement is pretty awesome.
Tom Benediktsson’s “Grannie’s Revenge” is a free-verse (free-range) narrative about an absurd dinner party with Grannie as the host who has spiked the professor’s food with knock-out drops (a “mickey finn”). The professor, possibly Grannie’s kid, is accompanied by the professor’s graduate assistant dressed up as a chicken.
Some of the finer points of ethics discussed at the dinner and in the poem were out of my ken, but I know a free-for-all when I see one, and this one was entertaining.
Kellie Nicholiades brought “Blood for Gas” , a narrative (narratives are a big big deal in poetry today) which someone in the group described as an ‘essay on giving blood,’ an it certainly was an eye-opening experience that most people have never had, so the information was welcome, but as usual, with Kellie, the joie de vivre is in the voice, the sure-footedness that comes from having one’s facts straight, and the eye to know what we need to know if we want to know about humanity. Check it out.
Brendan McEntee brought “The Tyranny of Aceticism” a poem that spoke about stripping all of the life’s indulgences away through the metaphor of a house that is disassembled to leave an empty pit where the foundation was, and a person employed to take on the sins of others standing where a birdbath should be. This be some cold shit.
Shane Wagner’s “Your Touch” was a beautiful poem about needing and accepting help from an intimate. Set in couplets (like so many of our poems tonight), the poem begins, “When I was spiraling/ I was afraid to ask for help.” What I love love loved about the poem was that it doesn’t really try to explain what “spiraling” is except to say that it involves the inner rehearsal of the past that accompanies sleeplessness. And to this, the intimate brings an intimacy of legs and arms and bellies that “holds” the speaker “in place,” and help him to “slow.” The bare bones of the situation are so elegantly handled. The ending, when the intimate falls asleep, and the spiraling continues is only a little wry. The surcease was crucial and welcome.
Howard Prosnitz is back with another Fishman poem. The last one was about camp life in Nazi Germany; this one, in seven rhymed couplets, in the 3rd person, is called “Fishman in Love” and is ostensibly or nominally, about love, however Fishman’s love is not very emotional; it has a bandy-legged, arms-length satirical, even snide, talking out of the side of your mouth feel, right from the start: “Late in the afternoon/ Fishman visits the moon./ Not alone in the dust/ A girlfish answers his lust.” Tom found its energy attractive. I was left wondering what was at stake for the speaker. The poem reminded me of a misogynistic remark my father made about boy/girl relationships when I was a teen: “Platonic? Yeah, “play” for me; “tonic” for her.” I still cringe when I remember it.
Tracy Tong’s “Revlon Toast of New York (325) Never Discontinued” was an ode to a shade of lipstick full of love, nostalgia and great lipstick names: Burnt Toast, Strawberry Jam, August Romance, Love Potion and Cherry Bomb. Cheers!
Nick’s poem “Sestina reworked Prompt1” was no sestina, but a powerful free verse anti lynching poem, in which the soul of a lynched person is sent back to live its life and “tell the world that you still had work to do” and that “we” the managers of the afterlife “reject their offering.” The ending is bold and emotional: “Go home and live oh mighty soul/ Go the Fuck home and live!”
Carole Stone brought a light narrative verse arranged in tercets in the voice of a grandmother attending a granddaughter’s piano recital and going out with the family for Chinese food afterwards. It turns out the kids can use chopsticks but grandma can’t, so she goes for the fork. Though we love specific details, they need to advance the poem to earn their place, and for me, granular details like the name of the restaurant, San Tung Restaurant, and the name of the opera from which aria the granddaughter played, had come, “Die Meistersinger,” seemed to add unnecessary weight without enlivening the anecdote.
Come back next Tuesday, and we’ll do it all over, and don’t forget to come to the LIVE RWB reading on 6/7 at the Little Theatre at Felician University in Rutherford at 7 pm. It’s gonna be great!
Arthur Russell‘s recap of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Workshop ofJune 21, 2022
Super workshop last Tuesday.
Don Zirilli brought a poem called “2 Samuel 3:38” with an epigraph quoting that biblical verse, concerning King David’s mourning the death of Abner, killed by Joab (in verse 28 of the same chapter) in which David, who has cried at the funeral for Abner tells his servants to pay attention to this great loss—and then the body of the poem follows in three free verse quatrains that seemed to branch off in three not-obvious directions from that stem. First there is an acorn rapping at Norma’s window which she mistook for the call of a suitor, and the speaker of the poem is unable to get an explanation from her as to why. Second the speaker was present at the collapse of a church that went unnoticed by 21 people walking into the bar next door. Third, the speaker speaks of his mule, who is both humble and demanding, and “sometimes… needs a kick.” The theme of not noticing, and of needing to be reminded is strong enough in the second and third stanzas, a little harder to track in the (Norma) first. Tom said “the individual stanzas are tight, but there’s a riddle at the heart of the poem that requires great patience.”
We had a new workshopper this week, Tracy Tong, (Hi, Tracy) whose poem “Helene” seems to follow the speaker’s train of thought as they sit in an apartment, listen to steam hiss and growling motorcycles pass, remember the dementia of an aunt who has passed away, and a conversation with their mom about a French sitcom. The poem suddenly develops a strong emotional thrust five lines before the end, when it asks, somewhat plaintively, “How long can I randomly google how long/ Can a moth-orchid persist/ In mid-winter. Babies cry/ In the womb, why” before ending with the evocative, intriguing, and yet only distantly approachable: “Where to burn five miles/ Off 11218, the red denim roses”. No period, no question mark, maybe the truest broken off thought in poetry. Poems that assemble thoughts this way get the great benefit of multiple turns and shifts and of genuine thought, but also carry the burden of making their own senses. By the way, zip code 11218 includes the Windsor Terrace and North Kensington portions of Brooklyn, where I spent a ton of time working at the Hollywood Car Wash on the corner of Church Avenue and Coney Island Avenue. Surprising, notwithstanding the tv show 90210, how evocative of place a zip code can be.
My poem, “Tiki Torches Very Reasonable at Costco,” presents a series of aggressive confrontations with the social order, recommending lawlessness at times, and asking the reader to recognize that their privilege is built on the suffering of others. Don Z said it “succeeds as a political poem because of attitude, not virtue.” Tom said that the speaker of the poem was an asshole who is saying ‘you think you’re not an asshole, but you are,’ implicating everyone. Don Kreiger said that ultimately, it’s a list poem, so ordering the list is what matters, and he saw some opportunities for modifying the order to enhance the overall thrust of the satire.
Jennifer Poteet has been working on a book of poems about her mother, recently one about how she was a familiar face on Montclair’s Church Street. This one, “The Judaism I Knew” talks about her mother as the proponent of a not very observant form of Judaism that left the speaker a little bit at sea, maybe wanting more, maybe wanting more of any explanation. Don K called it “the start of something” suggesting it could be much more if the shards of memory were connected to a “transformation”.
Howard Prosnitz’ “Fishman” was about a particular Jew or an emblematic Jew named Fishman during WWII. In a single stanza of short, irregularly rhythmic lines, it had a hint of song to it, some rhymes (shaker/ maker), irregular intriguing half rhymes (taxi/Nazi, speck/kike) and one perfect rhyme (heir/air). The point, rhetorically, was elusive, but the music was enchanting.
Frank Rubino’s poem, “I flew out to the pine-green woods” is about the speaker’s brother, whom the speaker has come all the way cross country to visit, and yet he regards his brother’s life and home from the outside: “I looked at my brother’s house from the clearing…” The speaker is ambivalent about his brother at least in part because of the brother’s passion for guns, and hunting (he has a skinning room he calls the “Meating Place). The speaker could do without the guns but remembers as “fun” shooting at cans of expanding foam insulation. The poem is in couplets with a couple of monostiches. The monostiches, such as “& I saw a good house with food and new appliances” are isolated for emphasis; the couplets make the poem easy to read, but so far lack oppositional completeness, the way that couplets can measure the way forward by opening and swiftly resolving little bits of learning and allowing us as readers to assimilate them before moving on. If all brother poems are versions of the story of Cain and Abel, this poem is written from the perspective of a meditative Abel standing outside Cain’s home and wondering what the heck.
David Bragg brought a poem called “A goose observes a train at dusk” – a goose POV monologue that is also a critique of human activity, in particular the human addiction to light. All the stanzas are seven lines of roughly equal length, but nonmetrical. The poem has great lines: “Why/ do they not welcome the darkness/ that comes to shelter them from peril?” and “I would soar the long distance/ to the cold egg moon/ and wander the black lake of night,/ bobbing for sunken stars.”
Elinor Mattern was back (hi Elinor) with a poem about an illegal abortion in 1963 (timely, right?) called “A is for After, 1963.” The poem, in the third person, speaks about a 12-year old, carried, after “the procedure” (which is never explicitly named) “out to the car.” And as the narrative moves towards the rest she needs, a story, not explicitly named, of a possible unpunished rape, possible unpunished incest, emerges of which “she can only remember little bits,” including “a stranger in the living room,/ her mother crying, the lights of the bridge twinkling outside the car window.” The poem’s strategy of speaking in the third person, but adopting the limited knowledge available to the young girl pushes what might be an unbearably horrible story to a distance where it can live, but that strategy also has costs in terms of immediacy.
Finally! We got to hear a Kellie Nicholaides poem, called “D’s Deli and Liquor in Carlstadt” a poem that, along with its speaker, wanders into the eponymous liquor store and starts recording. It’s a kind of ode, a kind of celebration of the accidental moment, including the customers and counterman she knows and the strangers she only kind of knows. Of course, the liquor store setting conveys a slice of life that carries it’s own complex societal and emotional landscape, but Kellie deals with these lovingly. Welcome back, Kellie!
Yana Kane’s “Peapod” got great reviews from the group; a prose poem (or, as DZ said, “just prose”) it recounts a childhood memory of being introduced to picking and shucking peas. In the fourth paragraph, the speaker reveals that “this is my earliest memory,” (could we have known the stakes earlier? Is the description of the process joyful enough to sustain us till then?), and the final stanza converts the peas that the speaker plants as an adult into a Garden of Eden without an “angry God.” It’s an excellent start.
Barbara Hall’s poem “The Tulip Tree in Four Parts” is an elegy of sorts about the tree in the neighbor’s yard, a subject beautifully addressed in Zorida Mohammed’s “Two Pines” (See RWB 14). Barbara’s poem, Part I, begins with the phone call informing the speaker that the tree is coming down tomorrow, because it just got too big. Part II delivers the tree to its executioner with a series of onomatopoeic “buzzes” “CRACKS” “Grrrs” and “SPLATS” and ends with a baby opossum falling from the tree. Part III anthropomorphizes the birds into town criers who spread the news of those who have “lost their perch” while Part IV delivers a eulogy for the tree: “Erased: the tulip tree and trunk. —/ Erased the tulip stump from the earth.” Eulogy within elegy is traditional last step. Here is how Dylan Thomas handled the move in his “Refusal to Mourn the Death By Burning of a Child in London;” “Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter.”
Most of the group loved the onomatopoeia. With its sound effects and overt emotionality, it would make an excellent illustrated children’s book.
Come back on Tuesday, y’all. We’ve got plenty more poems—some we didn’t get to on Tuesday, and new ones—to read and love on. Poems about recent SCOTUS decisions are welcome!
Arthur Russell‘s recap of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Workshop ofJune 14, 2022
The workshop is here so a poet can present a poem to their peers and get to hear what those peers think (1) what the poem wants to be, (2) how the poem goes about becoming what it wants to be and (3) how the poem is doing on that journey. There’s praise for what’s made an impression and “shakes” (or suggestions) for things that may not be working.
In this conception, the poet doesn’t participate during the discussion. They’re Tom Sawyer at their own funeral, but at the end we open the discussion to questions from the poet, such as “I was trying to imitate Robert Frost’s The Road Less Travelled; did that come across?” Or, “What did you mean when you said my reference to the War of 1812 ‘took you out of’ the poem?” Or, “I’m a little concerned that the poem is too personal, to self involved; did anyone feel that way? Or, “What about the title? No one said anything about the title. Does the title work?”
We don’t encourage the poet’s advocacy on behalf of the poem or explanation from the poet because those things don’t benefit the poet; sometimes when the poet talks about the backdrop to the poem, or the circumstances it was meant to address, we just say: “oh, that would be good, put it in the poem” because the poem is the poet’s ambassador to the world, and the poet doesn’t generally get to accompany the poem out into the world providing an introduction or post script (although it was pretty common in Milton’s time to have an “argument” before the poem, and I’ve always been charmed by fiction with ‘in which’ headings as in “Chapter 17, in which Tom eats a snake.”
We had a searingly good workshop on Tuesday, charred on the outside, rare on the inside.
Brendan McEntee brought “At Sunken Meadow.” Poems that start with a place name are great because they give the reader a little ground to stand on, but they still don’t limit what the poem can do. They suggest an openness to what the poet noticed, and Brendan’s poem was like that, about the speaker standing on the beach throwing rocks, noticing a gull, noticing the clouds, noticing two boys walking by “carrying a bucket awkwardly between them” and picking up a fragment of their conversation, which may or may not be significant before “the rest of their conversation is lost to the waves.” Brendan does that very well.
Don Zirilli’s poem was “Fool Me Twice” and it was a difficult formal poem, a sestina, which uses the last word in each line of six, six line stanzas where the last word appears in a different prescribed sequence. The seventh and final 3-line stanza features all six of the end words in medial and line end positions for a saturated burst of whatever the poet was getting at (think last minute of a fireworks display). The form is immensely difficult, primarily because of the challenge of making the repetitions interesting, but also because Don has chosen to present his sestina in the form of iambic pentameter. Don’s poem’s six end words were “twice” “oath” “know” “time” “fool” and “heart.” What struck me about the poem was how the first stanza has an almost metaphor free-statement of the poem’s theme – how we humans fool ourselves, particularly when it comes to marriage, when it comes to knowing ourselves or others. As the poem moves on, it becomes more allusive and more reliant on metaphor, personification of the elements, and becomes less plain spoken. This can be delightful, but it can also make the poem more elusive.
Howard Prosnitz’s “THE L-SHAPED ROOM” presents as a first person narration, with the eponymous L-shaped room as its topic. But this L-shaped room is a metaphor for the difficulties quotidian and existential of fitting into and being comfortable with living.
Susanna Lee’s “Steel Rains” comes hard after the tragedies of war, first anchored in references to the Ukraine war, and then in relation to gun violence in the US. The poem has a strong iambic bounce, some strong iambic pentameters (e.g. “Upon the baby’s cheek, the mother’s tears,” and “they’d bring to murder him, his kith and kin”) but varies line lengths and moves away from meter entirely with lines like “lips and kisses” or “Never surrender!” Another noticeable feature of the poem is its irregular use of rhyme, such as “Courage, bravery, all that’s good./ A fighter earns the right to fatherhood.” We talked about how the poem creates expectations with regard to matters like meter and rhyme, and how the savvy reader will notice changes and expect them to be significant.
My poem “There Are People Who Lack Decent Housing” joined Don’s and Susanna’s this week as poems that used iambic pentameter; mine was a blank verse (non-rhyming iambic pentameter lines) essay on the persistence of class divisions and the limitations of empathy when the world is seen from a partially self-aware position of privilege.
Tom Benediktsson’s poem “Who You Talkin’ to In There” starts out as a kind of philosophical or possibly epistemological discussion about sources of authority in “our tradition,” a discussion among the speaker, and “Daniel” “Mark” and “Janelle” who may be in a class in which the speaker is the teacher or may not. Midway through the poem, the discussion becomes a groan-worthy tale about how someone named Harvey boiled a chicken down to its bones which he then reassembled to a chicken skeleton with wire for a science project in the eighth grade. It was grotesque and funny, but what interested me was (1) how it raised the question of poetic authority: “In our tradition the inner voice is god.” This is a direct invocation of the Romantic norm which replaced the Enlightenment norm of verifiable fact with allegiance to subjectivity. That’s the artistic world we live in to this day, where identity is a font of authority. In a way, this was the same subject I tackled in “There Are People Who Lack Decent Housing” which follows this declarative by immediately declining to be a member of the group: “I am not one of them.” Maybe this is a new “old farts poetics.”
Claudia Serea’s “Veined hands reach into my dream” is a poem that uses the eponymous hands in the eponymous dream to draw together elements of the speaker’s life, attachment to their parents, their overseas past, their gardening present and a sense of the nearness of death.
John J. Trause’s “Lemon Yellow Limoncello” was a concrete sonnet based on a 14-times repeated four beat iambic line with an internal half rhyme between “lemon yellow” and “limoncello” made concrete or “chromatic” by having all of the lines highlighted in computer yellow. The last line breaks down visually to what might be the stem of an upside down (i.e. empty?) Limoncello bottle or an emblem for fractured sense, or possibly, a visible musical symbol for retard or slowing down, to bring an end to the chant that has gone on for the thirteen previous lines. Brilliant stuff.
Jen Poteet’s “Church Street” is an ode to the speaker’s mother, a regular fixture on a particular street in Montclair, a woman who knew everyone (and their dog) and was known by everyone (and their dog, for whom she carried treats in her “enormous purse.”
I have to apologize to Carole Stone. She sent her poem “Au Clair de Lune” by email, and we discussed it, but I can’t find it on my computer, so please forgive me.
Thanks again to everyone: we had more poems than we could get to, and we’ll keep chugging along next week. See you then.
The Red Wheelbarrow Poets 
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