Brian Richards and Byron

"What interests me is that Byron would be way down in the order of poets who have influenced me. Shelley and Blake among his contemporaries, but B is one of the few who made poetry out of his disgust with the ruling powers, and it is that affinity that made me offer this pairing." --Brian Richards.




"It's easy to be a Romantic," the poet said, "if you don't have to mind the evidence." What some come to do (e.g., Byron, Dorn, Richards)  is hard, head against rock of the world, the hard tasking of the self to maintain a vision of the otherwise, especially in a day when miscreance and inanity seep from every crevice in the culture 24-7 (though, to be honest, some of that includes reruns). Even worse, this meagerness and confusion of the spirit for centuries (many millennia) consistently parades itself as the ethical and intelligent (even spiritual) norm. Gravitas, indeed. They facilitate larceny on the citizenry, they infect nations with their confused rapacity for wealth and power, they cower from the imagination like a boy masturbating in the corner (to no avail), they spread their dissemination in thickening layers so that they, themselves in the end might believe them (also to no avail), they speed a significant portion of their time decorating their bunker, and they of the few good reasons to applaud death's agency, . . . . though they tend to last too long, while many poets die young . . . but not without comment!

But, of course

                           it might be thought that

when the Antiquities Advisory Board heads told the VeePee Something

Needed To Be Done to save Babylon and Nineveh from being

sacked again

                        they were informing the fox

that the chicken ladder had been

left down.

                   Not

                            so. Il Consigliere had

long before been briefed on the Op to

procure for his new offices inside the mountain under

Camp David prelapsarian golden oldies.

                                                                   Only the Primary

Client had Mossadim to encourage the curators in separating

the ancient from the ersatz.

                                                Just a little

tidying up of the mess liberation

necessarily makes without

line-item expense to the Budget. 


                                           --Brian Richards

***********************************

DON JUAN, Canto IX: i-ii.

        Oh, Wellington! (or "Villainton"--for Fame

      Sounds the heroic syllables both ways;
    France could not even conquer your great name,
      But punned it down to this facetious phrase--
    Beating or beaten she will laugh the same,)
      You have obtained great pensions and much praise:
    Glory like yours should any dare gainsay,
    Humanity would rise, and thunder "Nay!"

                      

    I don't think that you used Kinnaird quite well
      In Marinèt's affair--in fact, 't was shabby,
    And like some other things won't do to tell
      Upon your tomb in Westminster's old Abbey.
    Upon the rest 't is not worth while to dwell,
      Such tales being for the tea-hours of some tabby;
    But though your years as man tend fast to zero,
    In fact your Grace is still but a young Hero.

                                                            --Lord George Gordon Byron

***************************************

Bio: lives in a shack without pipes or wires on a ridge overlooking the Ohio River.

Books:

BREAKING AND ENTERING, Lily Press, 1974

LOOSE FISH, Black Book, 1978

EARLY ELEGIES, Bloody Twin, 1992

LONG SONG WATER POND. Anthology. Bloody Twin, 1999.

ONLY THEN MAY THE DAY BE KEPT, Pavement Saw, 2003

ENRIDGED, University of New Orleans, 2011

New work appears periodically in HOUSE ORGAN.

Jesse Glass and Chivers

"We are passing from a morning horse innocence to unusual vices, and we are not ready."
                                                                                                --Edward Dahlberg

The country I come from, Dylan sings, is called the Mid West, but is best known otherwise. My own home state even liked be considered the "heart" of America, perhaps for the ripe irony, for they are an ironical people, though of course entirely unknowing. The name comes entirely from its shape, which looks not so much like a downward curved organ as the snapshot of a spade as it just begins its plunge it heartless steel into barely worked earth. (I.e.,  Joe the Plumber came from up ol' I-25, but where he's going brings out the toxins in speculation, like spring the flowers along the interstate.) Oh, the country I come from is called one thing but known, if at all, for its paucity of spirit, ambient haze of confusion draped smog-like against horizon's trees, and the necessity to hate in order to attain a minimal sense of a being, if not identity, though without any actual object for that hate, they create one with maniacal inventiveness (e.g., KKK, John Birch Society), and those unable to enter into such inanities are given to nervous disorders and disruptions of the bowels. Any citizen thereof with an intelligence that might  eventually result in a thought is trapped in the gullet of dyspepsia.  The country I come from, indeed.

Then what better vision than Glass's lens: the dispossessed, swollen with light, fire in either eye, who writes (even in his long dying) in coffee and carbon, a pollen bearer of crumbs who we would best to attend (but most of that populous is happy only that he's on his way, not in theirs, which has never been considered at any length), a levitant above the sands whereon Whitman's skull rests, beached and bleached.

This apparently homeless prophet in a flaming chariot ("Ward 9" stamped on back) is followed, marvelously, by the a nearly "harmonic cacophony" in deep accord of praise (both of endearing affection and full support) of Love that Chivers sounds to realize the realm where everything rhymes (everything!), most importantly, with islands in the sea (how like being), with a wonderful silent music (words on the page) and the one of the most anticipated imperatives one might entertain. (Though not in the Mid West.)






DEAR DAHLBERG IM HIMMEL HERE I SIT WRESTLING
                                 .
the English language down to its knees
so it can mewl forth idiomatic Americanese


while the "trippers & askers" slink out of Weis’ Funeral Home
to panhandle quarters on the evening streets


before they return to lean in the lobby with cigarette butts
tweezed in fingers sutured to lapels in one grand Masonic gesture


of compassion for the maimed & humiliated, the degenerate
"disaffected youth" of your average American city who cannot hope to fill


the swiveling chairs of deceased secretaries, cab dispatchers & public accountants
in these decidedly no-brow times.


          & I rise from my diddling, the dictionary rattling
in my shopping bag; the waitress mildly concerned at the cruller crumbs I shake


from my rags right & left, takes count of the foreskins of napkins scrawled with shibboleths
          (once swollen with coffee I skimmed from my muttering lips)


          now dry as stubbed ashes in the gutter of my hand--
                    & sensing my Promise, forgives the non-tip…


                    For I carry a vision in my altar eyes
                    (two grails sunk in freckled flesh


                    gripped tight by a frowning fist of a skull)
                    I stagger alone; I sing with a twitching uvula


                    of the cancerous knot in my spleen & how it glows
          like a star in a tomb ready to ascend through my mouth


          & light some future operating room—a Catherine's wheel spinning sparks:
                              Kind thought for
                                        O
                              When I'm about to glide
          like Krishna in his flaming car I'll leave behind in the charity ward


these armpits reeking of old wax, this grease coating each strand of hair
like the plastic wrap on a copper wire, these fingers fluttering


fatman high over the Nagasaki of any scrap of paper I can shatter
carbon across in the soaring declensions I learned at my Mother's charred breast.

          I shall look down upon one square mile of asphalt
                    & attempt to describe it to the angels


          as they crowd around me in their leather masks
                    & earn their questioning looks as they pierce me


                    with trocars of light & pump
          my cavities full of silence harvested


                    from tektite-covered graves.
          & I shall forget Sir Thomas Browne's praise of the hortatory


& will warble where Whitman is a skull teething sand,
          for language breaks down when it is most needed


          here in the pre-post-American, globally harmed, Middle West. 


                                                                                             --Jesse Glass



**************************************



The Poet of Love
          --Thomas Holley Chivers

The Poet of Love receives divine ovation
  Not only from Angel's hands while here on earth;
But all the Ages echo back, with salutations,
  The Trumpet of the Skies in praises on his worth;
And all the Islands of the Sea
Of the vast immensity,
Echo the music of the Morns,
Blown through the Corybantine Horns
Down the dark vistas of the reboantic Norns, 
By the great Angel of Eternity,
Thundering, Come to me! come to me!


From the inflorescence of his own high soul,
  The incense of his Eden-song doth rise,
Whose golden river of pure redolence doth roll
  Down the dark vistas of all time in melodies--
Echoing the Islands of the Sea
Of the vast immensity,
And the loud music of the Morns,
Blown through the Conchimarian Horns
Down the dark vistas of the reboantic Norns,
By the great Angel of Eternity,
Thundering, Come to me! come to me!


With the white lightnings of his still small voice,
  Deep as the thunders of the azure Silence--
He makes dumb the oracular Cymbals with their noise,
  Till Beauty flourish Amaranthine on the Islands
Of all the loud tumultuous Sea
Of the vast immensity,
Echoing the music of the Morns,
Blown through the Chrysomelian Horns,
Down the dark vistas of the reboantic Norns,
By the great Angel of Eternity,
Thundering, Come to me! come to me!

The three Maidens (Nornir) who dwell in one of the fair Cities of Heaven by the Spring of Urdar, under the boughs of the great tree Igdrasel, whose names are Udr, Verthandi and Skulld—Past, Present and Future. They are Liosalfar—that is, Light Alfs—and are brighter than the sun.

                                                                                                  --Thomas Holley Chivers




**************************************



Jesse Glass has lived and worked in Japan for 19 years.  Called "an over-looked American voice of the 20th century" by someone attempting to hawk a used copy of his 1982 book, Enoch, Glass continues to enjoy (and sometimes employ) mixed metaphors as he crawls in easy stages to the fame that undoubtedly awaits him.  Glass is currently involved in producing dry-point and etched editions of his poems and finds engraving copper plates good for the soul but hell on tatami mats.  An essay on visionary poetics is due to appear in N.Y.U.--Buffalo's Wild Orchids.  Books include The Passion of Phineas Gage/ Selected Poems and Lost Poet; Four Plays.

Glass is featured on Jack Foley's Cover to Cover (WKPFA), George Quasha's What Is Poetry? Project and Penn Sound.



Links:

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Glass.php (Jesse Glass at Penn Sound.)

http://jacketmagazine.com/34/glass-jesse.shtml (Two poems.)

http://www.poetryvlog.com/jglass.html (Reading and texts of "Asthma Song" "To Leo" and "To Diana Di Prima from Japan.")

http://www.jackmagazine.com/issue5/poetjesseglass.html (Two poems.)

http://qarrtsiluni.com/tag/jesse-glass/ (Translation of the O.E. poem "The Ruin"--reading and essay on the poem and process of translation.)

http://www.sugarmule.com/28Glas-j.htm (Three poems.)

http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/yin-yang-eat-at-me/14257233  (Yin and Yang eat at me.  A play about language.)  

Rhonda D. Robison and Dickinson

To be still in words. Yet alive. To the right of silence lies what? Either Sapir or Whorf wrote that one might think of a single thing without the interference of words, but the second two are entertained, words inevitably flow. Enter Bergson. Enter entropy. Enter enter. Perhaps sound is the absence of silence. Through the heart of silence, paradoxically, that "Blue--uncertain, stumbling Buzz," seemingly indigenous to it occasion, as is its owner's imposition, poses the one question without an answer. Ever. To anyone. Anywhere. Thus silence. Yet the words keep flowing: "just me and daddy / in a ratty room." Lovely.



stillness
(after emily dickinson & a wake)
                     --Rdr.

the push of lack
smacks a blue box
beyond shhhhhhh
cock-eyed to rock 
the body to mush


no--shush
no dead--really
just me and daddy
in a ratty room
with wacky blooms


a flock of fools
shifts--tenses
the hush hung on
a thread of being
meaning--telling



*************************


I heard a fly buzz
                 --Emily Dickinson

I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air-- 
Between the Heaves of Storm – 


The Eyes around--had wrung them dry--
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset--when the King
Be witnessed--in the Room-- 


I willed my Keepsakes--Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable--and then it was
There interposed a Fly--


With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz--
Between the light--and me-- 
And then the Windows failed--and then
I could not see to see--



***************************************

The page her playground, English professor and poet, Rhonda D. Robison., specializes in psychoanalytic theory and language-play. Her poetry has been published in a variety of media, including journals, such as Ekleksographia, Knock 27, Rue de Fleures, and Moondance; a collaborative chapbook, Other Sticky Valentines; and a film, Acadie. Her chapbook, ragbag, is due for publication by Nous-zot Press in summer 2011. Rdr. teaches English courses at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.


Links:

http://www.27ruedefleures.com/Summer_2007/index.htm
http://ekleksographia.ahadadabooks.com/reed/authors/rhonda_dean_robison.html
www.moondance.org/2005/spring05/poetry/poem6.html

Micah Ballard and Blake

Narrative unfolding in dream, or coma-lite, or in the interstices of sight-stream, or in wherever it is save memory ["One is always at home in one's past," as Nabokov notes] that the essences are more exact, have a truer heft, the dimensions more accorded to our understanding, or maybe unfolding in the snake's coiled cusp, viper breeding, gender seething, the dark unleaving of all our best intents, where the voice hears only its empty echo and miscreants prowl the marges, silent as the amputation of a phantom hand, etc.

Ballard's piece glimpses shadows torqued into the business of being-and-not-being cruising the chthonic streets of the present, sliding through our future ruins, through the necrotic now. In Blake's vision, as well, people do not exit (except as "none" and "many"), but the dialectic is poisonous: the serpent vomits not beneath Mary's heel as foretold, but upon the sacrament, the consecrated which was, at any rate, always unattainable, always the source of sorrow.  Ballard ends with the acceptance that the world (or its center of order/significance/purpose) is precisely and only what it is, and is closely attended with uncertainty, in stark contrast to the shadows' avoidance (circling, skulking). Blake is horrified by the scene and turns and lives with the animals, even the lowest of the low (which seem clean after the conclusion of the vision).

WAYFARING

             --Micah Ballard

I see into them

as they see out of me

& dissolve the wattage

to avoid future legends

young pharaohs on Fillmore cracking dutches

it is a lonely frontier by contrast

forgotten game skulking around

big hearts, small temper

thine absence overflows

thine presence undoes

do not attempt to circle the inferno

a tremor in the throne

is a tremor in the throne

********************************

I SAW A CHAPEL ALL OF GOLD

--William Blake

I saw a chapel all of gold

That none did dare to enter in,

And many weeping stood without,

Weeping, mourning, worshipping.

I saw a Serpent rise between

The white pillars of the door,

And he forced and forced and forced,

Down the golden hinges tore.

And along the pavement sweet,

Set with pearls and rubies bright,

All his slimy length he drew

Till upon the altar white

Vomiting his poison out

On the Bread and on the Wine.

So I turned into a sty

And laid me down among the swine.

                

********************************

BIO: Micah Ballard was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Selected books include: Evangeline Downs (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006), Parish Krewes (Bootstrap Productions, 2009), Poems from the New Winter Palace (arrow as aarow, 2010), and Waifs and Strays (City Lights Books, forthcoming fall 2011). From 2000‑07 he directed the Humanities Program at New College of California and currently works for the MFA in Writing Program at University of San Francisco. He is co‑editor for Auguste Press and Lew Gallery Editions.

Links:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/31848115/selections‑from‑Micah‑Ballard‑s‑Parish‑Krewes

http://backroomlive.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/micah‑ballard/

http://chax.org/eoagh/issue3/issuethree/ballard.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elQVU063Leo

Mark Spitzer and Whitman

"What widens within you, Walt Whitman," amid your multitudes and musky munificence? In early morning's light, half-way across his bridge, Crane "stood over the sleepless river" and witnessed a phantom regatta enter the harbor, thereby acknowledging the efficacy of Whitman's vision in which he claimed that "a hundred years hence" others will see "the tall masts of Manhatta," sky-scrapers, hemmed by the masts of ships, as he presently sees it, as sunset on the ferry. (By the way, Crane might usefully be considered directly over Whitman's ferry, though going the opposite way [at opposite poles of the day], symbolically channeling the old bard. Interestingly neither reaches the other side in the text, yet in Ginsburg's imagination Whitman, speculatively, does, stepping onto the smoking bank of the future. All three solitary wanderers (wonderers), connecting only through the poetry of the mind

Mark Spitzer's take on Walt sounds another emptiness, where people are only virtually together "on the scene and at the set," live at 7:00, etc. Even Captain Tracheotomny, from Spitzer's earlier work, and the only human figure in the poem, is significant only for his robotic speech, not anything human, as Walt rides the thermals over a desert floor, eye on a ripening carcass. The old transcendentalist's America has morphed into a circus of strays and furtive movements through the arid liquidficaton of the present, wandering the "inglorious lack" in a flashback attack broadcast live (if you can call that living), set against the simple, but profound, good and livelihood of the catfish. Everything's moving and nothing is.  In "Salut au Monde!" Whitman accompanies himself and all men else to belt out a paean to the largess of existence. In "For and/or Not Withstanding," the shelf-life of such vitality has long since passed.

FOR AND/OR NOT WITHSTANDING

                                            --Mark Spitzer

fish exist
along with the true
 good gold of cats
 you always forget
 & then flashback

& the mayor is in jail for 63 months
& the big-ass hawk is perched upon the chicken coop
looking for a hen to scoop

& the wildred pups come out at night
to skitter around in the heart of downtown

& skating skating out on the cӧven
gliding sliding frictionless
there is something always walty
crossing the hiatus of 200 vultures
                        vortexing
the widening gyre

& as Captain Tracheotomy
                                        talks robotic
                 & as gospel glee
                                     rings down from Big Creek

this Season in Kirksville ends in a whimper

or, rather
the lone moan of coyote drone
shaloming in the gloam

―as if that’s it
and it is
in all its
inglorious lack

                        & that’s the flash, Slappy
                        live from Toad Suck
                        Arkansas

                        (July 14                         2000-sev.)

****************************

Salut au Monde!

            --Walt Whtiman

7

I see the battle-fields of the earth, grass grows upon them
            and blossoms and corn,
I see the tracks of ancient and modern expeditions.

I see the nameless masonries, venerable messages of the
            unknown events, heroes, records of the earth.

I see the places of the sagas,
I see pine-trees and fir-trees torn by northern blasts,
I see granite bowlders and cliffs, I see green meadows and lakes,
I see burial-cairns of Scandinavian warriors,
I see them raised high with stones by the marge of restless oceans, that the dead men’s spirits when they
            wearied of their quiet graves might rise up through the mounds and gaze on the tossing billows,
            and be refresh’d by storms, immensity, liberty, action.

I see the steppes of Asia,
I see the tumuli of Mongolia, I see the tents of Kalmucks and Baskirs,
I see the nomadic tribes with herds of oxen and cows,
I see the table-lands notch’d with ravines, I see the jungles and deserts,
I see the camel, the wild steed, the bustard, the fait-tail’d sheep, the antelope, and the burrowing wolf.

I see the highlands of Abyssinia,
I see flocks of goats feeding, and see the fig-tree, tamarind, date,
And see fields of teff-wheat and places of verdure and gold.  

***********************************************

Bio:

Mark Spitzer is a professor of creative writing in the Department of Writing at the University of Central Arkansas. He has translated books by Jean Genet (The Genet Translations, Polemic Press), Louis-Ferdinand Céline (The Church, Green Integer), Arthur Rimbaud (From Absinthe to Abyssinia, Creative Arts), Georges Bataille (The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille, Dufour Editions; Divine Filth, Creation Books) and Blaise Cendrars (Films without Images, Green Integer). Spitzer’s novels include Chum (Zoland Books), CHODE! (Six Gallery Press), and Bottom Feeder (Creative Arts). He has also published the following nonfiction collections: Season of the Gar (U of AR Press), Writer in Residence (U of New Orleans Press), After the Orange Glow (Monkey Puzzle Press), and Riding the Unit (Six Gallery Press). Spitzer has published two volumes of poetry as well. A former editor of the legendary Exquisite Corpse literary franchise, he now edits the literary annual Toad Suck Review. Spitzer has starred in the “Alligator Gar” episode of Animal Planet’s River Monsters series and is an avid fisherman. His paper on the history of Jean Genet’s pirated poetry was presented at the 2010 conference Jean Genet--"La censure dans la traduction littéraire" (sponsored by the Federation of International Translators) at the Odeon Theatre in Paris. For more information see his website at www.sptzr.net.

Links:

http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue12/poetry_spitzer.shtml

http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=3616

http://allwritethen.org/?p=334

toadsuckreview.org

Vincent A. Cellucci and Whitman

Whitman's water washes well the wandering wonderer in world's worship. Or perhaps, in world's worship, Whitman's wanderer washes well with water, wondering. In Vincent Cellucci's poem, a boy like a drunkard (or a drunkard like a boy) contemplates "mortared cylindrical depth" (and its potential horror) as the well of possibility/life/desire above the dim pool of the spending and the spent, his obscure fortune in the dark light floating below, within the "blurred basement of his creation." Though Whitman, ever the pollen bearer, approaches as levitant, lightly, languorously, and Cullucci crowds though in a bungled rush with dreamlike funk, both poets ask the same thing at well's rim, at the bar of the self, "which is ahead?"

Women Wishing Wells and Whitman  

                         --Vincent A. Cellucci

Women at the bar wishing wells

the vagrants have coins the drunkards

spend theirs on wells ~ Penises purse pennies

roll and sack of semen spent like change

so many wishes never come

at last call comfort crawls to white azaleas

bed stains trailed towards matressing snores

it's easy to abhor mortared cylindrical depth

especially when a boy with no illumination

discovers the blurred basement of his creation

(might have lost him to the cavern)

I motion to those heaping buckets of water

cause of pulley’s design and elaboration

of leverage sustenance that saturates hydrates

highlights the mission of procreation  I think

Whitman had it right when he wrote: no more

heaven nor anymore hell than there is right now

urge and urge and urge

always the procreant urge of the world

Whitman urges this poem forward

I share the boy's allure of copper

or nickel ~ The fulfillment of desire

the completion and security of the first sip

of water out of the first city well

a desire forced by necessity

instead of whim ~ The precious success

when the wish submits and returns

by the bucket load an unrequited take

contaminates the well and the population

desires the rope and knot make it a double

knot or triple or quadruple tied tight

the night is the land settled on our city

nothing moves without first weaving

I’ve written nothing nice nothing

new just one true well

established position a young boy crowds

the circumference of a well

wishing he could multiply his body

like paper figure fences the girls cut

in school and surround his source

each fist clenched each fist clutches

the image of a man on metal

the treasure a currency

he will sacrifice his own

father or brother to abandon

in order to hear the plop

as metal breaks the water

he imagines the coin’s spins

displace the water settles

amongst familiar busts

that never reveal

heads or tails ~ If we do

anything we wish well

            --from: An Easy Place / To Die (LitCity Press, 2011)

*********************************

 from Song of Myself

                    --Walt Whitman

3

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.
To elaborate is no avail, learn'd and unlearn'd feel that it is so.

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.

I am satisfied--I see, dance, laugh, sing;
As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread.
Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?

***********************************

Bio:

Vincent A. Cellucci is the College of Art + Design’s Communication across the Curriculum Studio Coordinator at Louisiana State University.  He received his MFA from Louisiana State University and went to Loyola University New Orleans for his B.A. in English writing.  This past year he co-authored and presented: “Improving Concept Statements in the Interior Design Junior Studio Course” with Professor Jun Zou at IDEC, published his article “Trail of Livelihood: Using Textual Representation in Design Presentations” in Batture, and collaborated with the Louisiana Division of the Arts to develop and host three Artist Communication Workshops.  He has a background in the studio arts and he has been published in Exquisite Corpse, moria, New Delta Review, The Pedestal, and Presa.  An Easy Place / To Die is his first book of poetry; he also contributed, edited and produced a collaborative (including Andrei Codrescu) audio novel, The Katrina Decameron, which was released on iTunes in late 2010; and he is the founder of River Writers, a downtown Baton Rouge reading series.

Lana M. Wiggins and Byron

Knowing the progress of love, in Eros the Bittersweet Anne Carson translates Sappho's "bittersweet" as "sweet-bitter" because that formulation is both accurate to Sappho's language and the mysterious narrative of love. Like Sappho, both Lana Wiggins and Byron, sadly, know their subject only too well and they sound the depths of the long, seemingly forever empty, bitter stage as time and the world pass without personal consequence beyond the dreadful reminder of absence to which they continually "wake." ("What's in your wallet?")

Oubliation

     --Lana M. Wiggins

All week long, I've avoided you.

Tried not to think of your alabaster chambers

against the isochromatic watershed of my regrets,

or the ease in which you power-lifted me

off your shoulders like the albatross I knew I was.

But the spin down of spring break

with a little rain and nowhere to go, nothing to do

makes you the mariachi band at my window

at 2:47 in the morning.

It's been 100 years since you left

carrying your own weight in a tinderbox

of swirled cream and melted chocolate,

headed for a Congo hut and fortunate insights

that would complete my oubliation.

Without articulating the particulars

or exposing the curdled mess I've made of myself,

I want you to know I still suffer your loss.

Even if I prick my finger and fall asleep,

you gnaw on me like candy on enamel

and I wake clench-fisted and displumed

repressing voiceless sounds

only a blue-eyed dog can absorb.

*******************************

When We Two Parted

--George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron

When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning
Sank chill on my brow -
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame:
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,
A knell in mine ear;
A shudder come o'er me -
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well: -
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met -
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee? -
With silence and tears.

*******************************

BIO:

Lana M. Wiggins is the author of Notes from Refuge (Lana Maht Wiggins: Plain View Press, 2008) which chronicles her life in New Orleans pre and post-Katrina through poetic narratives. Lana holds a Master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of Louisiana and has been published in a wide variety of magazines, such as The Deep South Writer's Conference Chapbook, The Southwestern Review, The Smoking Poet, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Burlington Journal, Moondance, Dance to Death, Words-Myth, Rose and Thorn, and Knock, among others. Lana M. Wiggins currently lives in Lafayette, LA, where she teaches American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana.

Reviews for Notes from Refuge:

http://zintareviews.blogspot.com/2008/08/notes-from-refuge-by-lana-maht-wiggins.html

http://blog.roseandthornjournal.com/2009/05/27/book-review-notes-from-refuge-by-lana-maht-wiggins.aspx

http://www.plainviewpress.net/gallery2/pages/notesfromrefuge.htm

Bill Lavender and Browning

Age is what happens if you're lucky, right? Or is one a "tattered coat upon a stick," as Yeats had it? Browning's paean to age* in the persona poem below easily (too easily) rides the puffy clouds of belief. Lavender simply steps back and looks. The branches may be rooted in the stars, or the roots may branch through the chthonic blind alleys below. Lavender cooly notes the correspondence.


*I named my son Benjamin Ezra after both Pound and one of his favorite Victorians. Ben had me read several stanza of this poem at his wedding. The paean to age became an epithelium! (And Zara, the product of that union graced my home not 24 hours ago along with her cousin Wilgus, my first grandchild. She was contemplative, quiet and pleasant. Wilgus was wild and happy, when not confused after naps.Wow.)

["When a tree sheds"]

               --Bill Lavender

When the tree shreds
its leaves in the fall
the limbs begin
to resemble the root
thus also
the man in his autumn




********************************




from "Rabbi Ben Ezra"
                       --Robert Browning


Grow old along with me! 
The best is yet to be, 
The last of life, for which the first was made: 
Our times are in his hand 
Who saith, "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"


. . .


Poor vaunt of life indeed, 
Were man but formed to feed
On joy, to solely seek and find a feast: 
Such feasting ended, then 
As sure an end to men; 
Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?


. . .  


For pleasant is this flesh;
Our soul, in its rose-mesh
Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest: 
Would we some prize might hold 
To match those manifold
Possessions of the brute, --gain most, as we did best!


. . . 


What though the earlier grooves, 
Which ran the laughing loves
Around thy base, no longer pause and press? 
What though, about thy rim, 
Skull-things in order grim 
Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?



*************************************





Bio with links.

Bill Lavender began Lavender Ink in 1998; since then he has published 24 books and chapbooks. He is now the Director of University of New Orleans Press as well. His own most recent book of poetry is A Field Guide to Trees, recently published by Foothills. Memory Wing, his epic memoir in verse, is forthcoming from Black Widow in late 2011. Transfixion was published in 2009 by Trembling Pillow and Garret County Presses. Poems from this book have been published online in E*Ratio and Fieralingua, and in print in YAWP, Fell Swoop, and Prairie Schooner. Books also include I of the Storm (Trembling Pillow 2006), While Sleeping (Chax Press 2004), look the universe is dreaming (Potes and Poets 2002), and Guest Chain (Lavender Ink 1999). He is currently editing a volume of creative responses to Arakawa and Gins, has been a guest editor at Exquisite Corpse and Big Bridge, and has edited an anthology, Another South: Experimental Writing in the South, from University of Alabama Press (2003). His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous print magazines including Praire Schooner, Jubilat, New Orleans Review, Gulf Coast Review, Skanky Possum, YAWP, and Fell Swoop, and web publications including Exquisite Corpse, E•ratio, CanWeHaveOurBallBack, Moria, Big Bridge, and Nolafugees. He has published scholarship in Poetics Today and Contemporary Literature.