Lucky duck that I am, I was able to spend another four weeks (Jan/Feb) at the Playa Artist Residency program. That’s the pink view from my desk there one afternoon. Once again, I brought some literary journal reading to catch up on — and once again I read some stuff I feel moved to share, to encourage MORE reading. And literary magazine subscribing. And enthusiastic (re)sharing.
Crab Orchard Review continues to be a reliable source of memorable poetry! From the Winter/Spring 2014 issue (19:1), I want to recommend “Deer Rub” by Sara Eliza Johnson, with its sharp couplets of terrific imagery and its canny movement from the deer, widening to a consideration of war at a global level, and panning over seamlessly to a more interpersonal notion of warfare. What a poem!
Another poem I really liked from that issue was “Nuclear,” by Steven D. Schroeder. I just got a kick out of all the wordplay, and how that “play” was part of a larger manipulation of tone that veered from technicolor fifties and sixties imagery and allusion to the philosophical darkness of the nuclear age. It’s also a poem that does some things I aspire to do in poems — and of course it is also interested in history, which I am, and interested in a part of history I’ve also written and thought a lot about. Right in my wheelhouse!
Finally, “Killed Boy, Beautiful World” by Lauren K. Alleyne. This poem articulated so well, so perfectly, the mashup of agony and beauty that is living, especially in a world that can seem full of nothing but death. It’s a poem that ends either in a moment of transcendence, or a moment of surrender. I’m not sure which. But, wow, it’s a poem I’ll be sharing with others for a long time to come.
These poems are not yet available online — eventually, Crab Orchard Review will post a PDF of the issue online, but don’t forget that YOU, TOO, can have great poems delivered TO YOUR HOME by subscribing to COR, or other journals.
Another journal I brought out to Oregon with me from my gigantic New Hampshire home-pile was Measure (8:2) from 2013. For those who don’t know, Measure is a journal devoted to poems written in traditional form(s)/meters, like the sonnet, or rhymed/metered couplets, etc. There were three particularly fun parodies/responses to famous poems. Kathleen Naureckas wrote a kind of rejoinder to Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse,” taking on the point of view of the parents. The first line: “They fuck you up, your girls and boys.” Alan Nordstrom brings us “Sonnet 130a,” again with an interesting switch in point of view — not the “Master,” not the “Mistress,” but their dog. Martin J. Levine re-imagines Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for death” as “Stop for Death,” in which Death gets stuck in traffic.
Finally, I wanted to mention a poem from the October 2014 issue of Poetry that I kept paging back to, drawn by the rhythms, the dynamic lines/stanzas/syntax, the sometimes weird images. I’m not sure what else to say about “In the Woods” by Kathryn Simmonds except that it totally had my number.
I’ve gotten into a habit from my youth — I cut these poems out of the magazine pages and scotch tape them into my current writing notebook. It’s nice having good work close at hand. Thanks, poets, for writing it.
Liz Ahl 