One of the joys of being involved in poetry on the web, especially in the hey-day of web-boards in the early to mid noughties, was occasionally someone would post-up a poem which was simply astonishing. It was a privilege to switch on your computer and be one of the first people to read something wonderful. Great poems are not always written by famous poets; the problem with that is there is a tendency for them to slip away into obscurity because they don't end up in a 'collected works' or canonised by being included in a major publisher's epoch-defining anthology.
Mike Alexander
Recent decades have seen poetry in America divide itself along tribal affiliations, between formalist and free-verse aficionados. Mike Alexander cuts across this and writes equally well in recognisable form or free verse. For formalists, however, Mike's efforts as an administrator of the web-board at Sonnet Central will always be remembered for creating a place which helped fuel the early noughties 'sonnet-boom'. I have chosen this example, partly because it is an great example of how to employ traditional form in a contemporary context. I also like the way it hangs about in the shadow of what is intelligible. Its ambiguities remind me of Ashbery.
OLD SNAKE
Night rolls up in a camouflage pick-up,
two-toned green, currency & key lime pie;
the silhouette inside waves hi or bye.
The motor sputters, but not to a stop.
Light fails, where water towers may succeed.
Against the service road, an old cow lows.
Old money, from ante-bellum shadows,
will rise again, to make the pastures bleed.
A caddy, silverado cold, a burst
of headlight, also rolls up slow & waves.
Its a dry county here. Baptism saves.
I wave as well, fighting the devils thirst.
Old Snake has shed this coil, after all.
I shun his bed until the funeral.
RETROGRADE. Mike's latest collection is available from P & J Poetics.
David Anthony
Remembered Wings
Year after year their timing was the same.
As early summer took the place of spring
my swallows cam, and briskly gathering
would breed then raise their young and so proclaim
hope's renaissance. They darted sharp as flame
between the earth and sky, remembering
old haunts despite long miles of wandering.
This year I waited but they never came.
Autumn's a time for leaving: cherished things
are embers as remembered flames burn low,
and vanish with the chill the first frost brings;
a time to grieve, though now it isn't so:
never to greet those brave arriving wings
spares the pain of parting when they go.
David was also an administrator Sonnet Central. In some ways the contrast between David and Mike's sonnets demonstrates how diverse talents were welcome at Sonnet Central. David's poems show that you don't have to be edgy to be good. His best work reminds me of Edwardian poets - like Edward Thomas. I remember clearly getting up one morning before the rest of the family, switching on the computer in the half light and finding an early version of this poem sitting there. I tried to pretend to myself that I might have been the first person to read it; somewhat amusingly, Eric Blomquist and Mike Alexander both claimed the same thing further down the thread. You can read it here.
M. A. Griffiths
I only ever came across M. A. Griffiths on-line as either 'Maz' or 'Grasshopper'. It was clear from her posts on the Sonnet Board that she had prodigious talent. She was supportive of others too. Without her willingness to include some of my work in her Ezine, 'Worm', I doubt I ever would have had the confidence to seek publication more widely. Only the efforts of a group of poets who knew her 'on-line' prevented her work from disappearing completely after her untimely death in 2009. It was only when the hundreds of poems scattered across different web-boards were collected together that it became clear that she was one of the most gifted poets writing in Britain in the early 21st century. The fact that she still remains relatively unknown and no mainstream publisher has produced a 'selected works' I find baffling.
First Woman
As Lilith prowls her realm, the night yields stars
to settle in her hair like sleepy bees
and by their light she counts the latest scars
gouged in the planet's pelt by human greed.
She laughs at dusty sacred books and stories.
Who wrote those tales, but spiteful men who lied?
A leopardess, she stalks and glows and glories
in stealth and strength and in her fine fierce line.
She couched with Adam first, before soft Eve,
and she desired equality, forbidden
by that stern Word which cast her out to grieve
in wilderness - but Lilith made it Eden.
She tore the fruit then tongued its bitter pips
and spewed the world's sweet forests from her lips.
Mike Alexander
Recent decades have seen poetry in America divide itself along tribal affiliations, between formalist and free-verse aficionados. Mike Alexander cuts across this and writes equally well in recognisable form or free verse. For formalists, however, Mike's efforts as an administrator of the web-board at Sonnet Central will always be remembered for creating a place which helped fuel the early noughties 'sonnet-boom'. I have chosen this example, partly because it is an great example of how to employ traditional form in a contemporary context. I also like the way it hangs about in the shadow of what is intelligible. Its ambiguities remind me of Ashbery.
OLD SNAKE
Night rolls up in a camouflage pick-up,
two-toned green, currency & key lime pie;
the silhouette inside waves hi or bye.
The motor sputters, but not to a stop.
Light fails, where water towers may succeed.
Against the service road, an old cow lows.
Old money, from ante-bellum shadows,
will rise again, to make the pastures bleed.
A caddy, silverado cold, a burst
of headlight, also rolls up slow & waves.
Its a dry county here. Baptism saves.
I wave as well, fighting the devils thirst.
Old Snake has shed this coil, after all.
I shun his bed until the funeral.
RETROGRADE. Mike's latest collection is available from P & J Poetics.
David Anthony
Remembered Wings
Year after year their timing was the same.
As early summer took the place of spring
my swallows cam, and briskly gathering
would breed then raise their young and so proclaim
hope's renaissance. They darted sharp as flame
between the earth and sky, remembering
old haunts despite long miles of wandering.
This year I waited but they never came.
Autumn's a time for leaving: cherished things
are embers as remembered flames burn low,
and vanish with the chill the first frost brings;
a time to grieve, though now it isn't so:
never to greet those brave arriving wings
spares the pain of parting when they go.
David was also an administrator Sonnet Central. In some ways the contrast between David and Mike's sonnets demonstrates how diverse talents were welcome at Sonnet Central. David's poems show that you don't have to be edgy to be good. His best work reminds me of Edwardian poets - like Edward Thomas. I remember clearly getting up one morning before the rest of the family, switching on the computer in the half light and finding an early version of this poem sitting there. I tried to pretend to myself that I might have been the first person to read it; somewhat amusingly, Eric Blomquist and Mike Alexander both claimed the same thing further down the thread. You can read it here.
M. A. Griffiths
I only ever came across M. A. Griffiths on-line as either 'Maz' or 'Grasshopper'. It was clear from her posts on the Sonnet Board that she had prodigious talent. She was supportive of others too. Without her willingness to include some of my work in her Ezine, 'Worm', I doubt I ever would have had the confidence to seek publication more widely. Only the efforts of a group of poets who knew her 'on-line' prevented her work from disappearing completely after her untimely death in 2009. It was only when the hundreds of poems scattered across different web-boards were collected together that it became clear that she was one of the most gifted poets writing in Britain in the early 21st century. The fact that she still remains relatively unknown and no mainstream publisher has produced a 'selected works' I find baffling.
First Woman
As Lilith prowls her realm, the night yields stars
to settle in her hair like sleepy bees
and by their light she counts the latest scars
gouged in the planet's pelt by human greed.
She laughs at dusty sacred books and stories.
Who wrote those tales, but spiteful men who lied?
A leopardess, she stalks and glows and glories
in stealth and strength and in her fine fierce line.
She couched with Adam first, before soft Eve,
and she desired equality, forbidden
by that stern Word which cast her out to grieve
in wilderness - but Lilith made it Eden.
She tore the fruit then tongued its bitter pips
and spewed the world's sweet forests from her lips.
Rose Keheller has developed a memorial site containing useful links to Maz related material on-line. You will find details of 'The Poetry of M. A. Griffiths' published by Arrowhead Press. Tucked away in a link is a summary of current research into the chronology of Maz's work.
Rose Keheller
Rather than cut and paste Rose's poem here, I think it is much better to insert a link to 14 by 14. That way you get some nice graphics and her reflections on what makes a sonnet a poem. An early draft of this appeared in Sonnet Central in 2006. I do miss the openess of web-boards in the days before 'tweets' and 'likes'. It's less than clear from Amazon which of Rose's two books are still in print. If I were you I would buy any that are still available...now.
Janet Kenny
I filched this from Rose Keheller's website:
“A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.” —Randall Jarrell.
Rose Keheller
Rather than cut and paste Rose's poem here, I think it is much better to insert a link to 14 by 14. That way you get some nice graphics and her reflections on what makes a sonnet a poem. An early draft of this appeared in Sonnet Central in 2006. I do miss the openess of web-boards in the days before 'tweets' and 'likes'. It's less than clear from Amazon which of Rose's two books are still in print. If I were you I would buy any that are still available...now.
Janet Kenny
I filched this from Rose Keheller's website:
“A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.” —Randall Jarrell.
The next poem, by Janet Kenny, has that 'bolt from the blue' quality.
A wisp of old woman,
curved like a scythe,
tottered to me as she
fussed her shopping,
her walking stick hooked
on her chopstick wrist.
She spoke to me then
in a dried leaf voice.
Inaudible there
in that busy street,
swept by rude gales
from passing trucks.
I leaned closer to hear:
Mein eyes not gut.
time for bus, ven comes it?
“Which bus do you want?”
She smiled, shook her head
then sang to herself
and somebody else,
in — not German. Yiddish?
“Which bus?”
She leaned towards me,
her tiny claw reached
to stroke my face.
Du she said.
Du
And to prove that this was no one-off strike more of Janet's work can be found here.
K A Thomas
Rose Keheller quipped on her website that M. A Griffiths was probably the best poet that no-one had ever heard of. If that's the case, then the following sonnet has to be the best poem hardly anyone has ever read. Certainly, among the thousands of sonnets posted to Sonnet Central over the years, I never came across a better one...
Lusus Naturae
Mutter Museum, Philedelphia.
Each jar contains a teratistic child
preserved in situ. Skin, embalmer's gray,
looks curdled through the glass, like porous clay,
or maybe re-formed wax. They all are filed
according to defect. Each bottle styled
to emphasize deformities & play
on sensibilities. In this display,
formaldehyde protects what birth defiled.
One floating baby seems to nod in sleep;
a third hand oddly growing from its chest
drifts like anemones in tidal sweep.
Small fingers, tiny starfish, come to rest
against the glass. Against my heart, I keep
on looking, mesmerized, obscenely blessed.
Quincy L Lehr
Provocative, haunting, absurd, puerile, profound - Quincy's work can be of all these things. His longer poems switch from the sublime to the ridiculous in the turn of a page. What is great about them is their technical flair, political nous and readability. Contemporary poetry that is absorbing to read - we could do with more of that! I think I have a late draft of Heimat, his epic length poem, on my hard-drive because he asked for for some initial readers before submitting it for publication. A short extract can't do justice to the scope, vigour and genius of this modern tragicomedy. I am posting the opening section because it's a great evocation of New York, and I am sucker for poems about New York. Hart Crane, Ginsberg, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, there have been some great evocations of the NYC in modern poetry. Quincy's portrait of the city is a kind of acerbic paean, it has to be added to my list of favourites.
That’s the trick with a crowd,
………Get ‘em into the street and get ‘em moving.
And all the time, there were people going
Down there, over the river.
—Ezra Pound
I
Three continents, one island, and the sound
of salsa filters past the window sill,
through the bedroom, then ricochets around
this Williamsburg apartment, then it floats
toward Bed-Stuy and on to Clinton Hill.
Several voices in a single throat;
so many pieties within one church!
A multitude of sounds on every street,
cacophonies of brakes and engines, tongues
from near and far, so many pattering feet
ambling or thudding to get to the other side
of town in a cursing, almost heedless lunge.
It’s not quite home, but is where I reside.
How does one separate the elements
that come at once from many different sources
in rumblings of the city’s firmaments,
an echo that only deepens with each voice
added to its din, and unseen forces
driving the sound? I guess we have no choice
but listening, for, we, too, are in the rumble
beneath the beats that blare from stereos
and honking horns, and if we sometimes stumble
in hearing our own voices, it doesn’t mean
that we’re absent, and everybody knows
the sound that reaches us is rarely clean,
and memories mingle, too. So many eyes
observe one’s every movement from afar
or just across the bed. You realize,
of course, that in that gaze is you, as much
as seemingly intrinsic things that are
as tangible as teeth, as close as touch.
We’re what surrounds us—a light bulb’s sickly flicker,
dog-eared books, socks on the radiator,
a suitcase with a fading airport sticker,
items both quotidian and eclectic,
what came early, what came slightly later,
merging in a subtle dialectic.
And still, the city pulses in the dark,
with sound, with shapes, and always so much noise,
as real as sickness, mythic as Noah’s Ark.
Somewhere beyond this block, the building’s ridge,
the tumult that resolves to equipoise,
traffic’s streaming over Brooklyn Bridge
to here, to far beyond a suburb’s glow
in a partly cloudy sky, seen from the air
between the clouds that lie like drifts of snow
against the distant ground. An intimation
of interlocking parts against the bare
expanse of sea occurs in observation.
This is what emerges—America,
Africa, Europe, and a Brooklyn street,
torrents of seeming esoterica
resolving to a homeland that surrounds
art deco motifs, syncopated beats,
and subways rumbling underneath the ground.
But something stinks. It seems a little glib,
sufficient for the head but not the strokes
beating from the heart behind the ribs—
a catch in the tempo, a ring that’s somehow flat
like stale beer or an old, unfunny joke.
But let’s look closer, and try to make sense of that.
Dave MacClure
Dave was a moderator at Sonnet Central when I first started posting there in 2001. The range of his work is remarkable. His lyric pieces have a wistful quality, yet he is also able to turn his hand to satire and light verse. His 'Agnes' poems are a delight. Written in Scots. Agnes is a female character, a kind of female Ralph C Nesbitt, who pronounces on everything from Scottish Independence, Democracy, Yuppies and Karaoke. For personal reasons, as Dave explains on his site, he stopped actively promoting his poetry in 2006, and little of his work has been published, which is much the pity. He works in the Middle East, and this experience is reflected in the following sonnet:
Nightfall in the Souq
When - as the shadows lengthen and the light
of day gives place to sodium, and I,
for lack of purpose, walk towards the night,
unmindful of the multitudes who ply
their multifarious trades, who make, who mend,
who dignify the evening, who collect
to celebrate acquaintances, who lend
and borrow, who regale me, who respect
my solitude, who while away the hours
in company, who dream, who merely sit -
the call to prayer from a hundred towers
commingles with the market's hubbub, it
intrudes on my somnambulance, where dwells
a recollection of Cathedral bells.
Mary Meriam
The only writer here that I have met face to face is Quincy L Lehr. At the time, back in 2007, he was co-editing 'Modern Metrics', a small press in New York specialising in beautiful chapbooks. Since then it has developed into Exot Books and it still produces nicely designed chapbooks, including mine. When we met, Quincy very kindly gave me a present of a clutch of current 'Modern Metrics' titles, including 'The Countess of Flatbroke' by Mary Meriam. I have kept in touch with Mary occassionally ever since. She has a unique talent, both as a poet and an editor at Headmistress Press. I was delighted and honoured to be included in the anthology she edited, 'Irresistable Sonnets'. The following poem is from 'The Countess of Flatbroke', I loved it the moment I first read it, and never tire of re-reading it.
Something Good
I waltz with Julie Andrews in her blue
desire dress one summer night, and we
are floating from the castle garden through
the edelweiss and falling dreamily
in love in the gazebo. "Nothinh commes
from nothing. Nothing ever will," she sings
to me alone, while silky darkness hums
along in harmony with lovely things.
For here you are, you're standing there, in truth
you're loving me and touching me with your
soft womanhood. So somewhere in my youth
inside of Julie's sound of music, pure
confusion slowly melts, and any doubt
dissolves as Julie guides my coming out.
Peter Moltoni
The ring-road is a cold-molasses drift.
I slalom through the Sunday morning crawl,
accelerate against an amber, shift
a lane to navigate a snarl, and bawl
a curse as rain begins; it’s nip and tuck.
Meantime my mind is practicing a graphic
reconciliation; then my luck
gives out. I’m cordoned in a stall of traffic.
The light remains interminably red;
ten carlengths back, a million miles from her,
I hear the jet-thrust roaring overhead.
The scathing gibes of self-reproach recur.
My past and future’s on an outward jumbo.
The wipers whisper, “Dumbo, dumbo, dumbo . . . ”
There are some poems that strike a chord immediately, and remain memorable - I remember clearly coming across this when it was posted to Sonnet Central by 'Spindleshanks' back in January 2003. It was only when it appeared in its final form in 'Worm' and '14 by 14' that I realised that the prize-winning Australian poet Peter Moltoni and 'Spindleshanks' were one and the same.
Rick Mullin
The past few years have seen Rick Mullin publish a clutch of books that have pushed back the boundaries of formalist poetry. Subject matter has ranged from Beat culture in Huncke, a book length sonnet sequence based on the journal of the young Charles Darwin, a collection of Canzones dedicated to the Rolling Stones, and work based on the life of the expressionist painter Chaim Soutine. Rick is an accomplished painter as well as a groundbreaking poet.
There are many things to admire about Rick's work, his keen eye, technical verve, cultural nous and a a deft touch which always seems to settle on a 'cool' turn of phrase that evokes the particularities of place. The following piece from Rick's chapbook Aquinas Flinched (Exot Books/Modern Metrics, New York 2008) displays all these characteristics.
Watching Women and Dogs on the Campo S. Maria Mater Domini
And yet another thin-dark beauty dressed
for summer with an English pit-bull - yes,
I ogle, follow sunlit cotton lines
from shoulder down to thigh. I watch her slap
the white dog's flank, imagining her breasts
so olive-firm, such ripe commodities.
I'm slumped and drinking something red and sweet
decanted from the ancient plastic vats
beneath the register. It's fine, I guess.
And at the table next to me a woman,
lobster-baked, a Campo veteran
with clamshell rings (she's a war or two)
has closed her eyes. She's very beautiful.
Venice, June 30, 2007
Ray Pospisil, 1953 - 2008.
Grace Note
I wonder if I'll die tonight.
Why else would such a golden light
envelop me from off a lake
of last night's rain as I awake
on summer morning? Why the sound
of sparrow choir song around
me? Why would stormy nightmare squall
of tumbling down a narrow hall,
and growing ever darker, fight
its way up to this golden light?
And why would all the glow reflect
off glass to clear the old neglect
of buildings looming overhead,
if not dispersing lifelong dread
to let me hear a note of grace
for just a golden morning space?
But next day I awake below
a single shaft of light. And so
the grace was not a parting gift,
a lightening of bulk to lift
me up from earth, but something I
can hold within and multiply,
as long as, like some money found,
I spread the golden light around.
Provocative, haunting, absurd, puerile, profound - Quincy's work can be of all these things. His longer poems switch from the sublime to the ridiculous in the turn of a page. What is great about them is their technical flair, political nous and readability. Contemporary poetry that is absorbing to read - we could do with more of that! I think I have a late draft of Heimat, his epic length poem, on my hard-drive because he asked for for some initial readers before submitting it for publication. A short extract can't do justice to the scope, vigour and genius of this modern tragicomedy. I am posting the opening section because it's a great evocation of New York, and I am sucker for poems about New York. Hart Crane, Ginsberg, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, there have been some great evocations of the NYC in modern poetry. Quincy's portrait of the city is a kind of acerbic paean, it has to be added to my list of favourites.
That’s the trick with a crowd,
………Get ‘em into the street and get ‘em moving.
And all the time, there were people going
Down there, over the river.
—Ezra Pound
I
Three continents, one island, and the sound
of salsa filters past the window sill,
through the bedroom, then ricochets around
this Williamsburg apartment, then it floats
toward Bed-Stuy and on to Clinton Hill.
Several voices in a single throat;
so many pieties within one church!
A multitude of sounds on every street,
cacophonies of brakes and engines, tongues
from near and far, so many pattering feet
ambling or thudding to get to the other side
of town in a cursing, almost heedless lunge.
It’s not quite home, but is where I reside.
How does one separate the elements
that come at once from many different sources
in rumblings of the city’s firmaments,
an echo that only deepens with each voice
added to its din, and unseen forces
driving the sound? I guess we have no choice
but listening, for, we, too, are in the rumble
beneath the beats that blare from stereos
and honking horns, and if we sometimes stumble
in hearing our own voices, it doesn’t mean
that we’re absent, and everybody knows
the sound that reaches us is rarely clean,
and memories mingle, too. So many eyes
observe one’s every movement from afar
or just across the bed. You realize,
of course, that in that gaze is you, as much
as seemingly intrinsic things that are
as tangible as teeth, as close as touch.
We’re what surrounds us—a light bulb’s sickly flicker,
dog-eared books, socks on the radiator,
a suitcase with a fading airport sticker,
items both quotidian and eclectic,
what came early, what came slightly later,
merging in a subtle dialectic.
And still, the city pulses in the dark,
with sound, with shapes, and always so much noise,
as real as sickness, mythic as Noah’s Ark.
Somewhere beyond this block, the building’s ridge,
the tumult that resolves to equipoise,
traffic’s streaming over Brooklyn Bridge
to here, to far beyond a suburb’s glow
in a partly cloudy sky, seen from the air
between the clouds that lie like drifts of snow
against the distant ground. An intimation
of interlocking parts against the bare
expanse of sea occurs in observation.
This is what emerges—America,
Africa, Europe, and a Brooklyn street,
torrents of seeming esoterica
resolving to a homeland that surrounds
art deco motifs, syncopated beats,
and subways rumbling underneath the ground.
But something stinks. It seems a little glib,
sufficient for the head but not the strokes
beating from the heart behind the ribs—
a catch in the tempo, a ring that’s somehow flat
like stale beer or an old, unfunny joke.
But let’s look closer, and try to make sense of that.
Dave MacClure
Dave was a moderator at Sonnet Central when I first started posting there in 2001. The range of his work is remarkable. His lyric pieces have a wistful quality, yet he is also able to turn his hand to satire and light verse. His 'Agnes' poems are a delight. Written in Scots. Agnes is a female character, a kind of female Ralph C Nesbitt, who pronounces on everything from Scottish Independence, Democracy, Yuppies and Karaoke. For personal reasons, as Dave explains on his site, he stopped actively promoting his poetry in 2006, and little of his work has been published, which is much the pity. He works in the Middle East, and this experience is reflected in the following sonnet:
Nightfall in the Souq
When - as the shadows lengthen and the light
of day gives place to sodium, and I,
for lack of purpose, walk towards the night,
unmindful of the multitudes who ply
their multifarious trades, who make, who mend,
who dignify the evening, who collect
to celebrate acquaintances, who lend
and borrow, who regale me, who respect
my solitude, who while away the hours
in company, who dream, who merely sit -
the call to prayer from a hundred towers
commingles with the market's hubbub, it
intrudes on my somnambulance, where dwells
a recollection of Cathedral bells.
Mary Meriam
The only writer here that I have met face to face is Quincy L Lehr. At the time, back in 2007, he was co-editing 'Modern Metrics', a small press in New York specialising in beautiful chapbooks. Since then it has developed into Exot Books and it still produces nicely designed chapbooks, including mine. When we met, Quincy very kindly gave me a present of a clutch of current 'Modern Metrics' titles, including 'The Countess of Flatbroke' by Mary Meriam. I have kept in touch with Mary occassionally ever since. She has a unique talent, both as a poet and an editor at Headmistress Press. I was delighted and honoured to be included in the anthology she edited, 'Irresistable Sonnets'. The following poem is from 'The Countess of Flatbroke', I loved it the moment I first read it, and never tire of re-reading it.
Something Good
I waltz with Julie Andrews in her blue
desire dress one summer night, and we
are floating from the castle garden through
the edelweiss and falling dreamily
in love in the gazebo. "Nothinh commes
from nothing. Nothing ever will," she sings
to me alone, while silky darkness hums
along in harmony with lovely things.
For here you are, you're standing there, in truth
you're loving me and touching me with your
soft womanhood. So somewhere in my youth
inside of Julie's sound of music, pure
confusion slowly melts, and any doubt
dissolves as Julie guides my coming out.
Peter Moltoni
The ring-road is a cold-molasses drift.
I slalom through the Sunday morning crawl,
accelerate against an amber, shift
a lane to navigate a snarl, and bawl
a curse as rain begins; it’s nip and tuck.
Meantime my mind is practicing a graphic
reconciliation; then my luck
gives out. I’m cordoned in a stall of traffic.
The light remains interminably red;
ten carlengths back, a million miles from her,
I hear the jet-thrust roaring overhead.
The scathing gibes of self-reproach recur.
My past and future’s on an outward jumbo.
The wipers whisper, “Dumbo, dumbo, dumbo . . . ”
There are some poems that strike a chord immediately, and remain memorable - I remember clearly coming across this when it was posted to Sonnet Central by 'Spindleshanks' back in January 2003. It was only when it appeared in its final form in 'Worm' and '14 by 14' that I realised that the prize-winning Australian poet Peter Moltoni and 'Spindleshanks' were one and the same.
Rick Mullin
The past few years have seen Rick Mullin publish a clutch of books that have pushed back the boundaries of formalist poetry. Subject matter has ranged from Beat culture in Huncke, a book length sonnet sequence based on the journal of the young Charles Darwin, a collection of Canzones dedicated to the Rolling Stones, and work based on the life of the expressionist painter Chaim Soutine. Rick is an accomplished painter as well as a groundbreaking poet.
There are many things to admire about Rick's work, his keen eye, technical verve, cultural nous and a a deft touch which always seems to settle on a 'cool' turn of phrase that evokes the particularities of place. The following piece from Rick's chapbook Aquinas Flinched (Exot Books/Modern Metrics, New York 2008) displays all these characteristics.
Watching Women and Dogs on the Campo S. Maria Mater Domini
And yet another thin-dark beauty dressed
for summer with an English pit-bull - yes,
I ogle, follow sunlit cotton lines
from shoulder down to thigh. I watch her slap
the white dog's flank, imagining her breasts
so olive-firm, such ripe commodities.
I'm slumped and drinking something red and sweet
decanted from the ancient plastic vats
beneath the register. It's fine, I guess.
And at the table next to me a woman,
lobster-baked, a Campo veteran
with clamshell rings (she's a war or two)
has closed her eyes. She's very beautiful.
Venice, June 30, 2007
Ray Pospisil, 1953 - 2008.
Grace Note
I wonder if I'll die tonight.
Why else would such a golden light
envelop me from off a lake
of last night's rain as I awake
on summer morning? Why the sound
of sparrow choir song around
me? Why would stormy nightmare squall
of tumbling down a narrow hall,
and growing ever darker, fight
its way up to this golden light?
And why would all the glow reflect
off glass to clear the old neglect
of buildings looming overhead,
if not dispersing lifelong dread
to let me hear a note of grace
for just a golden morning space?
But next day I awake below
a single shaft of light. And so
the grace was not a parting gift,
a lightening of bulk to lift
me up from earth, but something I
can hold within and multiply,
as long as, like some money found,
I spread the golden light around.
I had only just become aware of the poetry of Ray Pospisil when the sad news of his death was communicated to me by Quincy Lehr. He, and his co-editor at Modern Metrics, R Nemo Hill, both wrote insightful memorial pieces, one in 'SCR and another in 'Chimera'. The two pieces are worth reading in full and contain further examples of Ray's unique poems. I began this thread with the thought that great poems are written by by complete unknowns, and that many good poets simply slide into onto obscurity never having been canonised by the back lists of Faber & Faber or Carcenet. It seems to me that both M A Griffiths and Ray Pospisil are victims of this. Furthermore, I don't see the situation changing at all. So read them while you can. Some of the great readings by Ray Pospisil which you used to be able to access from links on his memorial web-site are now defunct. One was to a poem called 'Amber-light' - a particular favourite of mine; it has gone, and I cannot find it in print - at least not in the retrospective collection 'The Bell' published in 2009. In Ray's case there is a certain irony in this, as many of his most powerful poems end with an all pervasive sense of oblivion, and many of the greatest poems more generally exist as unique utterances, partly because the silence inherent in each caesura haunts them like the ghost of their un-becoming.
K A Thomas
Rose Keheller quipped on her website that M. A Griffiths was probably the best poet that no-one had ever heard of. If that's the case, then the following sonnet has to be the best poem hardly anyone has ever read. Certainly, among the thousands of sonnets posted to Sonnet Central over the years, I never came across a better one...
Lusus Naturae
Mutter Museum, Philedelphia.
Each jar contains a teratistic child
preserved in situ. Skin, embalmer's gray,
looks curdled through the glass, like porous clay,
or maybe re-formed wax. They all are filed
according to defect. Each bottle styled
to emphasize deformities & play
on sensibilities. In this display,
formaldehyde protects what birth defiled.
One floating baby seems to nod in sleep;
a third hand oddly growing from its chest
drifts like anemones in tidal sweep.
Small fingers, tiny starfish, come to rest
against the glass. Against my heart, I keep
on looking, mesmerized, obscenely blessed.
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