RWB Workshop Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, 8/15/17

Zorida Mohammed


If I Died Today, I Would Not Mind.

 

I am sitting on my kitchen porch steps amidst my flowers,

in high summer, as peaceful as Ferdinand the bull.

The red dahlias that have survived many winters tower over me.

Bronze maple leaf hibiscus, as well as ordinary ones of different colors, surround the porch.

Echinacea have lost their rosy pink petals, and rounds of dark, spiky seeds

now sit atop the tall stalks waiting for whomever will eat them.

Bleeding hearts, with their ferny foliage, live in the shadow of the blue columbine,

the seeds spilled from its papery pods into the surrounding soil.

The irises and lilies are all strappy leaves;

their stick-like green stalks are all that’s left of their blooms.

The lady slippers, grown from seeds snuck in from Romania

by a friend’s mother, are so prolific I weed them like weeds.

The geraniums and snap dragons require frequent pruning to keep up their show.

The oleander cuttings that I’ve stuck into the composty soil

have sprouted new growth. The plant given by a friend

will now be potted up to grace the home of another friend.

Numerous other flowers are being short- changed and will go unnamed.

WCW – National Translation Month: Martin Woodside

Wednesday, September 6, 2017, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Free

Martin Woodside is a writer, translator, and founding member of Calypso Editions. He spent 2009-10 as a Fulbright Fellow in Romania. Martin’s work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Kenyon Review, Asymptote, Guernica, The Cimarron Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Poetry International. Martin’s published five books for children, a chapbook of poetry, and a full-length collection of poems, This River Goes Two Ways. He edited Of Gentle Wolves, an anthology of Romanian poetry, worked with MARGENTO to translate Gellu Naum’s poetry for the English language collection, Athanor & Other Pohems, and contributed to Ruxandra Cesereanu’s anthology of contemporary Romanian Erotic Poetry, Moods & Women & Men & Once Again Moods. For more, visit martinwoodside.com.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – August 1

Poem of the Week 8/1/2017

Claudia Serea

Ode to beer

Beer the color of summer,
dusk-colored beer
with golden feet
and foamy beard,

blue-collared beer,
honest
and filling,

loud,
and gregarious,

and cool,

here’s to you.

I love you more than wine
because you’re cold
and clear,
waiting on ice
on a hot day
with, or without shade,
with, or without a lime,
or a beach.

Because wine is pretentious
and water too plain,

and you’re humble,
and taste of grain.

Because nobody writes you odes
although you buzz,
pop, and fizzle,

and rise from yeast
like life.

Because your name is simple.

Because you hail from Mesopotamia
where Gilgamesh drank you
with Enkidu.

Because you’re best sipped
in the haunts of the Old City,
on a terrace in Bucharest
or Madrid,

with a brother
or best friend.

Here’s to you, old god
who takes the tiredness away
after a long day walking,

who takes the years
we’ve been apart away,

and makes us young,
laughing,
happy again

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NYC Poetry Festival 2017

On July 29th, 2017, the Red Wheelbarrow Poets read at the NYC Poetry Festival on Governors Island.

 

Wayne Miller
https://youtu.be/Si_2L5BGMgs

 

Stuart Leonard
https://youtu.be/_nEXtJP-ohk

 

Zorida Mohammed
https://youtu.be/Ihl1wM-xF9g

 

Claudia Serea
https://youtu.be/7LtLZYH-UWU

 

Arthur Russell
https://youtu.be/S5gm_nnewQg

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – July 25

Poem of the Week 7/25/2017

Della Rowland

Some Moment Shining As Your Hair

What came together,
some moment strong and careless as your arms,
to overthrow my admirable adequacies?

What perilous relinquishing,
some moment green and hungry as my fears,
allowed desire to be my need?

Some moment,
small and covert as your moustached mouth,
made a song my heart beats out
in its unmeasured time,
despite the truth —
relentless as suspicion,
resourceful as a fantasy —
that all its red and silver lyrics
would both warm and disquiet you.

I think what came together once,
some moment shining as your hair,
will never wane
and will require surveillance,
a constant steeling against
some moment blind and glorious
as your eyes.

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WCW – Pamela Hughes

Wednesday, August 2, 2017, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Free

Pamela Hughes is the editor of Narrative Northeast, a literary and arts magazine that supports diverse voices and visions, the arts in New Jersey, and the environment. Her full length collection of poems, Meadowland Take My Hand, was published by Three Mile Harbor Press in January of 2017. Her poetry has appeared in Literary Mama, Thema, The Paterson Literary Review, The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, The Minnesota Review Isotope: A Journal of Science and Nature Writing; The Brooklyn Review, PANK Magazine and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College, where she studied with Allen Ginsberg. Visit her at http://www.narrativenortheast.com or www.pamelahugheswrites.com.

Greenwood

The cold this first fall
Like when we first fell

In love, the light still
Warm but the wind chilled,

Like a fresh cube dropped
In the great blue drink

Of sky, stirred by some
Round god for us edged

Now to bear it, life
On life, as we knifed

Through thick groves of graves
In search of a way

Out, the gate now closed,
Our steps all but one.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – July 18

Poem of the Week 7/18/2017

Arthur Russell

Improvisation

I love my guitar, but I haven’t learned
to improvise.
However you conceive
of boundaries on the other side
of which something like my facility in speech
would begin to emerge in music, on guitar,
I’m just a trained monkey.

I can muck around with volume, rhythm,
syncopate a song, but when it’s my turn
to take a solo after a chorus,
the scales that match the chord elude
me, or I need to start at the tonic
or I’ve lost the beat, which is so not me,
or I simply have nothing to say.

I stopped writing this poem
the last two days to take out my guitar. I can’t believe
I would need to write a
poem
about a problem that clogs my music.
That’s like complaining to your mom about a bully.

I took out Jobim’s Corcovado for which I have a nice arrangement.

This doesn’t sound like poetry, does it?

I figured out the keys
it moves through, worked the scales in those keys up
and down the fret board,
and found snatches of melody to dip
into when I got to those bars.

God, this is killing me; it’s so embarrassing.
My music-literate friends
would read this and say: “What an idiot!”

After two days, I had nothing but
the arrangement I’d worked out six years ago.
Then I went back to this poem.

I hate
the way it feels to hate a thing I love
because it won’t give me the thing I want from it
the most.

That last stanza
gave me no trouble.

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GV – It’s Getting Dramatic at GainVille

The Magic Circle returns to GainVille Café Friday, July 21. Our featured poet is ARTHUR RUSSELL, and our other feature will be a dramatic reading by JIM GWYN (who is an actor as well as poet), ZORIDA MOHAMMED, and MARK FOGARTY.

$8 cover includes coffee/tea, dessert

GainVille Café
17 Ames Avenue
Rutherford
201-507-1800

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – July 11

Poem of the Week 7/11/2017

Susanna Lee

Locust

I am locust.
Fear my jaws, my crunching song,
God’s call to reap what you sow.

God’s great abundance is not a mistake.
Sow what you’ll need.
Cede first fruits to priests,
then feed the good food to the mighty.
Gather the rest and eat your fill.

Are some grains less than perfect?
Allow the least to glean.
Seek those willing to get down on hands and knees
and pick the stalks clean.

Starve me, hated locust.
Leave nothing in the field, or my numbers will soar.
I’ll return with a vengeance year after year
with ravenous appetite.

I’ll darken your skies in an instant,
come to feast on memories,
unappreciated past harvests.

You’ll hear my horde hum
just beyond the horizon.

The approaching jaws of the tiny,
in terrifying numbers,
tot up your sins.

The deafening chomp wakes you to reason.
You’ve created your own destruction.

I descend in season so you shall know
you reap what you sow.

I am locust, servant to God,
His chosen vengeance
for man’s greed, selfishness, and sloth.

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WCW – Jason Koo

Wednesday, July 5, 2017, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Free

Named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine, Jason Koo is the founder and executive director of Brooklyn Poets and creator of the Bridge. He is the author of America’s Favorite Poem (C&R Press, 2014) and Man on Extremely Small Island (C&R Press, 2009). He earned his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston and his PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia. The winner of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and New York State Writers Institute, he has published his poetry and prose in the Yale Review, Missouri Review and Village Voice, among other places. He is an assistant teaching professor of English at Quinnipiac University and lives in Williamsburg. 

Greenwood

The cold this first fall
Like when we first fell

In love, the light still
Warm but the wind chilled,

Like a fresh cube dropped
In the great blue drink

Of sky, stirred by some
Round god for us edged

Now to bear it, life
On life, as we knifed

Through thick groves of graves
In search of a way

Out, the gate now closed,
Our steps all but one.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com