Poetry at the Point - Poetry Readings May 22, 2007

Cherry Pie Press authors Martha Ficklen, Nanora Sweet, Donna Biffar, Helen Eisen and Colleen McKee will read at the Poetry at the Point series sponsored by the St. Louis Poetry Center on Tuesday, May 22, 7:30 p.m. The event is at The Focal Point, 2720 Sutton Blvd in Maplewood. (The Focal Point is located one block east of Big Bend & Manchester. Parking is free on nearby Marietta Street.) The event is free and open to the public.

Contact Becky Ellis at cherrypiepress@yahoo.com for more information.

[Click on the image above to see a readable-sized version of the poster ... yeah, yeah, I know, bifocal time...]

The Permeability of Memory

Helen Eisen's long-awaited chapbook, The Permeability of Memory, is coming out this week! The poems spin transformations out of love, survival, the brutality of war, the passage of memory through time and generations, the durable power of humor and art. Helen Eisen’s unique voice and unflinching eye carry her poems into a new country of lyricism and renewal.

If you have never read Helen Eisen's poems, you owe yourself the treat of exploration. The poems are relentless in pushing the envelope of honesty. They are witty and kind and gentle in a world that often is not. Here is passion, and here is compassion. Here also is a sly and hard-edged look at things exactly as they are, stripped of myth. Helen Eisen's poems will leave you in love with language, and polished by her ferocity, humor, and clear vision.

Here is the first poem in the book, the first step on this amazing journey --

Chai

(Signifies life and the number 18 in Hebrew)

Life had a life of its own
after the war, inhabited and other
than the life of this world, spun
at a different rate, and traveled within
another orbit.

When I stepped out, into the world,
the sun shone; when I stepped back
in, to the other, the dark was alive
on its own. Night and day, parted
and pulled, as one, by lives enduring

after, and lived before
a war, under another sun; before
the trees, before whole forests
were felled and split for kindling
fueling an armored hate.

In America I breathed
another air, different than there,
other than here.

The poems navigate dangerous history -- the poet's own history, and the history of our common world. Helen Eisen understands what it can cost to survive, and that endurance can be both a gift and a burden. Her gaze is unwavering, her heart generous.

we were running and lost one shoe . . .


(for my mother; for Roz and Anja)

I could not protect my mother
I could not bring back or fix the past
Those figures she drew
Were so weighted with paint
On a space the width of a thread
The canvas collapsed of itself
Broke what she saw
In my hands

I ran away instead
Speeding faster than thought
And no one knew where I was
But the crowds amassed
Behind a skein light as a spider’s web
Glinting from the same fibrous
Thread my mother had sketched
And hidden in her hands

These are stories of survival and of loss; these are poems of great hope.

The City Girl Learns About Birds and Trees


(for Steff)

A few months before your death
I became aware of the mourning dove’s call—
That silken coo of grey pearl
With tail and wings

(Little by little I learn)

Today in Tower Grove Park
I found a Gingko tree
Gingko biloba
One of three in a row—
Fan-like leaves fallen
Minute elephant ears listening—
Their heart-shaped globes
Of pale orange, pale yellow
Lying nearby

There are mallards in the pond
Tall grasses
The last of the gorgeous white lilies
A weeping willow, pine trees, dead bamboo
In the center of the lake the mist from a fountain—
A teenager takes off her shirt in the sun
Her bra is black lace
I smile and think go girl as she runs
Toward her friends

A mulberry tree stands near another tree
With heartbreaking, luminous, yellow leaves—

The sun is leaving behind
A memory of itself
Repeating thousandfold—

Helen Eisen's The Permeability of Memory (ISBN 978-0-9748468-4-2) is available locally in St. Louis at Left Bank Books, or send an email requesting an order form to cherrypiepress@yahoo.com.

Click here to view a flyer and order form for The Permeability of Memory. Click here to view the press release.

HELEN EISEN is the daughter of Polish Jews who survived Hitler’s Europe. Born in a DP camp in 1946, she crossed the Atlantic on a freighter with her parents and arrived in New York in 1950. Her poems have appeared in The Original Coming Out Stories 2nd edition, Natural Bridge and Breathing Out: Poems by Loosely Identified.

My Hot Little Tomato

Colleen McKee's chapbook, My Hot Little Tomato, is ... hot off the press! This one is a delight to hold -- the cover artwork image is lusciously detailed with the texture of cloth, and the inner flyleaf is a two-layered combination of black netting and red tissue paper.

Colleen's poems are about food and love, nerve, rebellion, and passion. The introductory prose piece is a riff on ketchup, using the music of language, down to its etymological roots, and cultural history to establish a personal history: "If it were not for ketchup," she begins, "I would not be alive." And from there she follows ketchup through its origins (a meandering path involving fish brine and China) to her own origins.

Many of her poems begin in places equally mundane as the exploration of ketchup. She's at a desk, on a bus, doing something totally ordinary, and then the poem unhinges and transforms the world. Here is Blue Like An Orange:

I dream I am riding the bus
with a pumpkin on my lap—no pass
or pocketbook, no notebook, map
or keys. I only hold the pumpkin,
a perfect size, not so large
I have to stretch my arms
to keep it in its place, but not so small
that it could roll or bounce beneath the seats.
I wear a dress the color of lettuce, iceberg
to be exact. I like that it is scalloped
like leaves around the hem. I have no plans
for my spherical squash,
no thoughts of pie or lanterns,
salted seeds or soup. No, no plans at all.
I look out the window with something like interest
though there is nothing to see, no foliage,
no fences, no birds or bustling men,
only a sky with that light
peculiar to October,
light like a golden ball
sunk in a deep blue pond,
this gold so blue so bright it wavers,
common, strange, unasked for grace.
Little kids behind me
sling their bodies across my seat to Ooh,
you’ve got a pumpkin! Oh, can I
pet your pumpkin? Of course,
I say. Of course. I continue to stare
at the sky as these children—strangers to me—
touch for the sake of touch. Somehow I know
the bus has turned yellow, that yellow
only buses can be. I sit
with the sun in my lap. My soul
laps up the sun.

Here's another of my favorites:

Surveying This Sunday Morning

1.
At breakfast, I biograph
my body: bone-colored silk
slip on my breasts, rain-cooled air
on the back of my neck, the certainty
of coveted affection. I catalog
my curves, dreams
spread out like cards.

2.
A cup of cold tea.
A half-eaten peach
on a baby-blue plate. Nails
polished Chinese red.
More a painting than a poem,
more a still life
than a scene.

3.
The rain is a simmering pan
after the flame’s turned off
and the jumping water
returns to itself.

Out past the sunrooms’
wide-open windows,
a sad eroded prairie
of a vacant lot,
patches of mud
like shapes on a map—peninsula,
province, cluster
of islets—I pull on my boots
and see where they go.

The love poems are tender, wry -- always aware of the hard edges but never letting go of the soft moments of optimism.

From Moving on the 4th of July:

The embroidered sheets have gone blank.
All of yesterday’s mail is marked resident.
Without you, I fold papers and blankets

As if meaning is always in order. . . .

and then, finally --

Let us turn from love instead to lightning bugs.

Look how they spin semaphores of desire, green
As new leaves, reel in our faces
In the midsummer night.

They don’t have to make decisions. Their bodies
Have made them all for them.
All they have to do now

Is to hang like stars in the gauzy air,
Wait on more light, wait for love,
Or something like love, wait
Just to see what comes next.

Colleen McKee's My Hot Little Tomato (ISBN 978-0-9748468-5-9) is available locally in St. Louis at Left Bank Books, or send an email requesting an order form to cherrypiepress@yahoo.com.

Click here to view a flyer and order form for My Hot Little Tomato. Click here to view the press release.

Colleen McKee earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where she currently teaches English, and Women and Gender Studies. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared in many publications including Poetry Daily, Flyway, and Bellevue Literary Review. She is co-editor of Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women's Encounters with Health Care in America.

Chapbook cover designer, Barbie fan!

And here is Gaye Gambell-Peterson, designer extraordinaire of two of the Cherry Pie chapbooks covers (Rotogravure, and soon-to-be-released The Permeability of Memory). She has recently admitted to a Barbie fetish, and is seen here on her way to a fundraising event for the local St. Louis Poetry Center.

Jane O. Wayne, From the Night Album

Jane O. Wayne, a local poet with a 10,000-foot view of life, has a new book out from Pecan Grove Press: From the Night Album. Jane read from the book at the final poetry event in this season's River Styx series at Duff's to a packed house.

Jane Wayne is a poet who approaches her work with a gloved hand and a hammer -- she's dedicated and serious about her work, about poetry and what it might mean, what it might do, and she comes at it via mundane acts such as ...walking into a room, opening a drawer, looking at an old photograph. She comes at it with a dignity and dedication that make small poems into vast journeys of the interior. "I think of myself as a domestic poet," she said during the reading: her poems reflect interiors, objects, furniture. But that's where the domesticity stops. "Things...speak to me," she went on. And they do. "Nothing is ordinary. The ordinary is often extraordinary." Yes, it is.

Jane's new book is available locally in St. Louis at Left Bank Books. If you're not lucky enough to be near an independent bookstore, you can of course find it on Amazon.

Her book is reviewed by Aaron Belz in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/entertainment/reviews.nsf/book/story/BBA3D56F9608D136862572BD000F9D93?OpenDocument

Natural Bridge #16, Responding to Women Writers

Natural Bridge
The new issue of Natural Bridge is out. Nan Sweet is the issue's Guest Editor and the topic is "Responding to Women Writers." Nan invited contributors to echo women writers or write in response to the work of women writers. The resulting collection includes excellent poetry and stories on topics including China after the Cultural Revolution, a woman soldier in Iraq, and America's Great Depression haunted by immigration from Austria.

Nan Sweet brings to this topic a history of thoughtful consideration of the role of women in writing. As an Editor, she's keenly aware -- I know this from many personal conversations with her -- of the responsibility and opportunity an editor has to open doors and cast light, and how that can change the look of things. It's a chance to do some deep exploration of what literature is, and how it's used. In Nan's case, I know she approaches the task with a history of scholarship, a love of the written word, and a well-traveled delight in international literature.

I saw many of those same qualities shine through in Nan's own poetry (Rotogravure, her chapbook published last year by my own Cherry Pie Press). It's a privilege to see the editorial work she's doing now.

Many of the women writers that contributors have chosen to respond to have also worn the Editor hat at various points, and been able to bring their own knowledge and passion to bear on the literary arena: Marianne Moore, Adrienne Rich, Allison Funk and Annie Finch come immediately to mind.

Women writers who are the subject or inspiration for poems, essays and stories in this special issue include:
Helen Adam, Kim Addonizio, Anna Akhmatova, Gloria Anzaldùa, Charlotte Brontë, Julia de Burgos, Jayne Cortez, Emily Dickinson, Hilda Doolittle, Denise Giardina, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Hildegard von Bingen, Shirley Jackson, Julian of Norwich, Emma Lazarus, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Rosalie Moore, Lady Murasaki, Joyce Carol Oates, Marge Piercy, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Anne Sexton, Gertrude Stein, Ruth Stone.

The contributors include Catherine Rankovic, A.E. Stallings, Kelli Russell Agodon, Anne E. Michael, Terri Witek, Barbara Crooker, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Annie Finch, Sandra M. Gilbert, Mary Ruth Donnelly, Erin Elizabeth Smith, Rebecca Dunham, Helen Eisen, Rachel Hadas, Tess Farnham, Allison Funk, Jane O. Wayne, and others.

On Thursday, January 25, 7-8:30 pm, the journal will launch Issue 16 at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid in St. Louis's Central West End. The launch event will include readings by contributors and by the editors who helped assemble this noble issue. If you can't be there, you can order your copy of Natural Bridge (a bargain at $8) and ask Left Bank to ship it to you -- 314.367.6731.

Literature for the Halibut

For anyone who missed it – or heard it but would like to listen again – the January 11 “Literature for the Halibut” show is available on the KDHX website. You can listen to Nan Sweet, and many of the folks who helped edit the Natural Bridge #16 special issue on women writers influencing women. Catherine Rankovic reads from one of her great essays, and I read a poem (ok, it is about a dead insect...) and talk about Marianne Moore as an editor.

http://www.kdhx.org/programs/literatureforthehalibut.htm

Thanks again to Nan Sweet for the idea for this issue, and the muscle and music to carry it through.

Kiss Me Cold, by Donna Biffar

Just out, Donna Biffar's chapbook, Kiss Me Cold. This is the latest release in the Midwest Women Poets Series from Cherry Pie Press. It's a beautiful collection of poems. I love Donna's work -- it's edgy, brutally honest, and finely crafted. Here's one that sets my teeth on edge:

Breakfast

each morning the same want,
eggs, brown, from a nearby farm,
indiana maybe,
all natural, this need,
clenching the warm yolk
between my teeth, wet
food, muscle, sweat,
what i want, what shudders, breaks,
beneath the shell

She has a keen and sensitive eye for form. She plays with the sonnet form and comes up with something interesting --

Wordless Sonnet

What words are spoken here?
through soft and foreign seasons
the language of flesh, kiss. Now this
landscape of monkey vines and oak,
the one eyed birdhouses,
two poison berries on a tree
we cannot name.

But this is not our garden. Borrowed,
as your body, mine,
beneath a sky we’ve seen
and haven’t seen—soundless
among the frozen moss,
the harsh-barked trees, our words thin
in the hard freeze, budding, even now.

Her poems walk a tightrope between passion and guilt, following two married people drawn into an affair. There's tension in the subject matter and in the syntax and line breaks. The poems are haunted by the attraction and its darker side, and Donna Biffar uncovers loneliness and loss with a deft hand and a direct hit. The language in these poems is powerful and exciting, honed down to its sharpest edge. It has the power to illuminate lust and to acknowledgment its animal heart.

One of the ways I pick chapbooks to publish is to read the poems over, daily, for a week. If they still surprise and excite me at the end of the week, I know the writer's on to something. I never get tired of her sense of sound and her instinct for line breaks. Donna Biffar is definitely on to something. That was evident, in fact, from the first poem in her collection:

When Conversation Thins

Something animal in his hand
when he shifts gears
and we shift
from office talk to flesh.
Our bodies go with it.
Something red in his face
when he thinks of telling
his vegetarian wife, her hard face frosting pink
like the frozen beef discs we see
at the drive-thru window.

He talks about Vietnam, opium,
the organics of LA
he’s left for the Midwest,
where animals become us.
I tell about butchering,
the dead eyes,
the grinding body parts.
It’s what beasts do—
thinning
when they cannot eat each other.
We want to taste what keeps us here.
The scent of flesh
gets in, but the brake lights flare.
And the sharp fall air,
the exhaust we’ve ignored
slips through. It’s not summer

anymore. We argue over who pays.
We drive back. He sits at his desk,
and I sit at mine, and fluorescent lights
glare at each of us chewing,
checking what reflects
in the foil wrappers,
the grease shining on our fingers,
residue of what we’ve
done.

Donna Biffar's Kiss Me Cold (ISBN 0-9748468-3-X) is available from Cherry Pie Press. Email cherrypiepress@yahoo.com for an order form or a list of previous chapbooks in the series.

Click here for a flyer and order form for Kiss Me Cold. Click here for a press release.

Donna Biffar also has chapbooks available through another local press, Snark. Check those out too.

Gilgamesh by Derrek Hines

In bringing the epic of Gilgamesh to us, Derrek Hines says he "added material in an effort to recapture for the modern reader some of the vigour and excitement the original audience must have felt."

By golly he certainly has, and it's wonderful. He's turned what was essentially an oral poem-epic into something crisp that chirrs and whizzes in your ears if you read it aloud, and also sits comfortably and tightly on the page.

Here's how he starts off:

Here is Gilgamesh, king of Uruk:
two-thirds divine, a mummy's boy,
zeppelin ego, cock like a trip-hammer,
and solid chrome, no-prisoners arrogance.

Pulls women like beer rings.
Grunts when puzzled.
A bully. A jock. Perfecto. But in love? --
a moon-calf, and worse, thoughtful.

The words tumble and hop with energy. The language is tight, with turns that alternate between dry humour ("Pulls women like beer rings.") and the strung-out and character-revealing ending to both these stanzas. This Gilgamesh is immediate and fully present, both mythic and real.

Hines can get beautifully and evocatively lyrical without losing any of the compression and energy that makes this stuff zing. Here is a brief passage between descriptions of two very different sexual encounters.

Soft-mouthed as a gun dog
dark retrieves these few sounds:
a clatter of supper plates,
the dry thresh, like a woman's stockings,
of palm fronds,

the rustle of moonlight, rinsing itself
up to its wrists in the river.

What Hines is so good at is ratcheting up the energy by presenting an image that is intensely palpable ("Soft-mouthed as a gun dog") or visually specific ("zeppelin ego") and then bringing you to a full stop with either a slow-down of the rhythm ("and solid chrome, no-prisoners arrogance.") or an image that, with light repeated vowels, literally immerses itself, but only so far, then stops ("moonlight, rinsing itself / up to its wrists in the river.").

Beautiful stuff.


Gilgamesh, by Derrek Hines

Colleen McKee featured on Poetry Daily

Colleen McKee, whose title My Hot Little Tomato will be appearing from Cherry Pie Press early next year, is featured on Poetry Daily for September 28, 2006. Congratulations Colleen!
Poetry Daily: www.poems.com
Colleen's poem in the archive: http://www.poems.com/inthemck.htm

Poems you gotta read: Frannie Lindsay, Catherine Rankovic

My favorite recent find is Lamb, by Frannie Lindsay. It's just out from Perugia Press, an excellent press with a good track record. I liked one of their earlier books, Red by Melanie Braverman, and I like the breadth of the press's taste, evidenced in the selections they print from year to year. Perugia's books are carefully (and fairly) selected, and beautifully printed. But I digress...

Lamb is deeply elegant, gorgeously crafted, and at once both painful and redeeming. Lindsay's poems about father and daughter and the violation of borders are difficult to read because they are brutally honest -- yes, that is exactly the way it is, yes you do have to look at it. They are compelling -- you can't stop reading -- not because of the subject matter but because they are damned fine poems. Lindsay's special grace is that she doesn't stop at blame and anger, but instead circles round with a hard-won compassion for a father who, finally, is brought down by age and sickness. Instead of forgiveness, there's compassion.

Each poem has a stunning detail or two that made me feel I was holding the poem in my hands, not just reading it.

Drinking Hour

He has trouble getting his fingers to curl
around the stem, for he has not had wine
in over a year, not any, and now
there's a table right here where his glass
can rest between sips of ordinary merlot,
and I have steadied him,
bone by bone, into the family's
oldest chair. And he blinks his lips
the way the skinny kitten, a feral, blinked
its eyes when I gave it the antibiotic and water
through a dropper, one tear at a time.

Most of Lindsay's poems are fully felt, fully rendered, and so multi-faceted in their understanding of the inevitable, the guilty, the loved. Here is the ending to a poem about -- at least on one level -- a horse whose last day has come:

...And the mare,
who stands hour by hour in her stall
like a fire-damaged piano
knows all

about frost on the hay,
the achy barn door that reached
as far as it could every single day
with willingness, leading the same
enormous morning in.

I do love these poems. I hope Frannie Lindsay writes many, many more of them. There is instruction in these poems for what makes us human, and they are rich with love and surprise. I can't resist quoting just one more...

Clean

She stood in the tub beside me again
a little slouched over her workaday belly

teaching me how a grown-up girl
must always clean herself:

she made a paw of her washcloth
and rubbed it back and forth inside,

she had me try it too in front of her;
then she helped me climb out

and dried me until I could stop
my shivering; she folded my peach-

colored towel over hers

I leave the poem instructed by where she puts full stops, simple commas, line breaks, enjambments. These are poems I'll go back to many times.


Next on my list of favorites is a writer local to St. Louis. Fierce Consent and Other Poems by Catherine Rankovic (WingSpan Press) is fierce, funny, quirky, and individual. Reading her poems, you walk, jerk-step, through her life and (if you're a writer too) your own. Her poems are not contained easily, and many reach out and grab the reader either through direct address (to the "Reader") or through a no-holds-barred wrestling match in which language and destiny battle it out. (Rest assured, language comes out the winner.)

How many writers will feel themselves caught in the heat-waves of this encounter:

...She went to hear a poet, and afterward went
up to him, said she wrote poetry, too, O
fatal youthful idiocy.
He'd nothing to say to a female
trembling with destiny, underage
and looked it, but "Run along, little girl."
God's good; she never heard nor read his name again.

God, interestingly, makes several appearances in these poems. He's one of the most interesting stage characters yet:

When two people love each other,
God rejoices, and settles back.
This is fun,
this is the kind of thing He works for.
He calls for beer and popcorn,
has tissues there for the tender scene,
cheers for the one who's wrong in the argument,
is amazed what they've made chocolate mean,
and only in their bitterness
or resignation suggests He's there,
but He can never have a kiss, His mom
never made Him wear idiot mittens,
He has no grandfather; His exquisitest
roses stay unboxed exactly where they are.

Rankovic's reach is wide and probing, and crushingly close to the bone when she looks closely at the life around her. Here's this one, witnessing a crowd leaving a bus:

These are God's people also, spilling from the bus,
their pink polyester clothing edged
with dirt as with rust, and bow-legged, bow-backed,
permed unprettily, at home a skirted sink
serving as a vanity, the white-trash hordes
of upstate and outstate as I'm white trash from Wisconsin.
Their hunger, if not literal, is for a crude,
accessible beauty, the protractor's
French curve, the velvet painting, gold-
toned base metals, a caesura in the pain of living ...

My favorite poem, and one that, after the preceding self-mocking fandangoes and delicious belly dances echoing the tone and language of everyone from Berryman to e.e. cummings, succeeds in bringing me to my knees, is The Shadow. It's appropriately placed as the penultimate poem, uncovering a hard-won understanding of the thin and temporary -- and mocking -- victory of the artist's "fierce consent" to achieve something in this world. In this poem, Rankovic knows her shadow well -- but not quite as well as it knows her:

...I am cobalt blue; gray in sunlight;

no one else when knelt to
kneels to you. I am closer than anyone on your pillow

and always you lay your cheek on mine....

Assigned to you, to dog you
with what your body does, to double your crimes, to lie about your figure,

to flatter you and to counterbalance radiance...

These poems are tender, fierce, courageous and well-honed, alternately mad as hell and funny as hell. If this is where poetry is going, we may be ok after all.

Cherry Pie Press - poems you can live on

I love poetry. I read it. I collect it. I write it. Sometimes the form teaches me restraint and force at the same time, and a lesson on how to combine them in daily life, once the poem is left behind on the desk or in the book. Sometimes the words alone give me strong wings, or at least enough courage to make it through another day at the office (my day job...). Occasionally I find a poem that has the power to pick me up off the road, turn me around, set me down again in a slightly different direction.

Finding a poem I love is one of the best feelings I know. There are a few that I go back to over and over -- they mirror a yearning, a sound, a stillness, an unmet reach that is in me, wanting to be better tuned and better strengthened, wanting to recognize and be recognized. The compulsion to go back over a poem that touches me in this way is very like the pull on a divining rod. Surprising, compelling, subtle, and intoxicating in its mystery. A good poem is a friend who can articulate what you need to hear -- not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear. It's a pair of shoes you hope you can grow into.

Over the last few years of working with a local writing group, Loosely Identified, I realized many of those writers had given me 'divining rod' poems. I wanted to be able to put them on my shelf and have them available whenever I needed them. This is where the story of Cherry Pie Press begins -- out of my desire to see those poems nicely laid out on fine paper, and always available on my own bookshelf. If there's to be greed in the world, let me direct mine at poems.

And so I started Cherry Pie Press, with the goal of getting those poems into print.

I started with Martha Ficklen's poems, because I have for many years been head over heels in love with her poetic voice, and because she was gracious enough to be my first experiment in print. In 2005, I printed her chapbook, The Palm Leaf Fan.

Next was Nan Sweet's Rotogravure, a collection of poems that touch on feminism, the local history and geography of St. Louis and its neighborhoods, family, and Nan's own beautiful crafting of form and voice, deliciously abstract in its architecture but always on solid ground and filled with memorable objects. Her vision is a fully drawn trajectory across distances of land and time, making history into a personal experience.

Printing Nan's chapbook provided the additional pleasure of fulfilling a partnership -- it was Nan's encouragement and drive that had led our Loosely Identified writing group to self-publish an anthology, and it was that same encouragement that enabled me to see the possibilities of turning that groundwork into an independent small press that could continue the work of getting good poems into print.

The third chapbook is Kiss Me Cold, by Donna Biffar, and it's at the printer right now, available later this month. Donna's deft handling of craft and her awareness of the music of poetry gives me goosebumps, and her voice is as direct as anything on this planet. In her poems, words are knives.

Quick on the heels of Donna's book will be a chapbook by Helen Eisen, and early next year one by Colleen McKee.

Most, but not all, of these writers are from the Loosely Identified group. Eventually I hope to publish beyond that perimeter-- writers with the same strong chutzpah and nerve, the same haunting voices that make me want to read a poem over and over. I like the range of voices I've heard in Loosely Identified, and the Cherry Pie chapbooks will traverse similar terrain -- a radical lesbian poem next to an angry political poem by a senior and seasoned voice next to a saucy gimme-that-man seduction poem. We read 'em, then go out for coffee together.

The goals of Cherry Pie Press include getting good women poets in print, especially women from the midwest. Writers on both coasts seem to have ready outlets, and those outlets tend to be drawn to the sort of voices that arise from the coasts. In my experience, the midwest cultivates a different voice, which I have grown to love deeply. It's hard to characterize but it tends to be a little less flashy but sometimes a little more blunt and brutal. It tends to avoid temporary fads. It tends to avoid falling solidly in line with any particular "school" of poetry. It knows how to value what's local and keep an eye on the vast flat horizon that leads to everywhere else in the world. It's not afraid to moan and howl and to hear that sound willow off over the infinite and flat horizon.

The chapbooks are called, appropriately, the Midwest Women Poets Series. So far geography and that ability to be pungent and direct is the common thread. Each writer has a slightly different audience, and I'm hoping that this will result in readers expanding their interests, and that once they find a poet they like they'll try out other writers in the series.

For years, Nan and I and some of the other women in the Loosely Identified group have had ongoing discussions about poetry editing -- "po biz" as we've come to call it, or the business end of poetry where editing decisions are made and heroes are born. More often than not, it is heroes who are born, and they tend to be male. That's not in itself a bad thing -- a look at the editors of poetry publications in St. Louis (River Styx, Boulevard, Delmar, Margie to name just a few) turns up editors -- exceptionally fine editors -- who are all men. Natural Bridge has different guest editors, and in fact Nan Sweet is editing the upcoming issue #16 with a theme of women writers and their influence on other writers. Sou'wester is co-edited by Alison Funk. So women do turn up in the editorial role, but not by a majority.

Nan and I co-edited the Loosely Identified anthology, Breathing Out, and in doing so paid careful and deep attention to the process we used, and to maintaining the collective involvement of all the writers in the editing and production work of the book. Producing a book with all 21 authors working as full-fledged partners in every aspect of the process is no mean feat. But it is possible, and exhilarating, and exhausting. And it changed forever the lives of some of those writers. That was a very different experience than either Nan or I had in working with male editors in the past. Both types of experience have their valued place in the world, but we realized we'd been a quart low on the female kind. It was nice to balance things out a bit.

From that experience, Cherry Pie Press emerged, with a goal "to fortify and delight." I want to encourage writers who think they might want to publish but don't see a ready outlet, or haven't been able to successfully navigate the editorial world out there. Poems are necessary. When we published Breathing Out, we printed 300 copies and thought that might be overly ambitious. Luckily we were proved wrong. We ended up printing a second run -- another 300 books -- and quickly sold out again. There's an audience with an appetite for the kind of poetry being written here, and Cherry Pie counts on feeding it.

Gerald England's New Hope International poetry review site posts a review of Breathing Out:
http://www.geraldengland.co.uk/revs/ba003.htm.

Finding Jane Kenyon at last

Finding Jane Kenyon at last

Otherwise: New and Selected Poems. Jane Kenyon, Graywolf. 1996.


I avoided Jane Kenyon for a long time, and it wasn't her fault. I skirted the nearly cultish admiration that followed her death, mistrusting it. There's so much baggage there -- cancer, early death, marriage to Donald Hall, a great poet in his own right. What hope was there for the poems, standing alone without all that context? It doesn't take more than a few personal losses and a few experienced or observed illnesses to drive a reader to madness, either obsessively seeking out or obsessively avoiding those little pockets of the poetry world that feed on the same.

Well, it's been over ten years, time enough for me to get over it. No point in rejecting outright, without examination, someone's entire body of work simply because I'm worn out (who isn't?) with a world of sickness and death.

And so, dear Reader, I read the poems. Like the fabled plums in the refrigerator, consumed in the privacy of a dark and empty kitchen, they were delicious.

It's too bad they're surrounded by that circumference of death and admiration. This collection even has a lovely and respectful afterword by Donald Hall, tying a knot in that string. It's good to have the information about how the poems were pulled together, and how much of the arrangement was Jane Kenyon's own doing. And it is a beautiful thing to see so intimately inside a marriage of both minds and hearts -- how difficult is it to weather a marriage where both people have the same ambitions and the arena is small, and how much more difficult to weather the losses of this physical life. The baggage is beautiful, and fine leather, but still it is . . . baggage. I may be overly sensitive to the idea of attaching such baggage to women's poetry. Lots of excellent men poets have their own baggage that is well known and forms some kind of circle around their work -- the world of poetry has its share of illness, bad marriages, suicides. But usually with men poets, the work stands alone in terms of how it is published. The myths and suitcases accompany, but in separate containers. Why is it that Berryman, for example, can be suicidal and clinically depressed and his poems are great (nonetheless) but with Plath, Sexton and now Kenyon one is left wondering if the poems depend on the baggage? (They shouldn't -- the poems are absolutely able to stand on their own. The fact that we won't let them says more about how women are read than about how women write.) It's hard to find Plath-Sexton-Kenyon published without some reference to the baggage accompanying, in the same vehicle (foreword, afterword, etc.).

Willa Cather was right to order all her letters burned. If she was depressed or distraught, we'll never know, and we'll read her as gladly as ever.

So, I'm sorry to have avoided Jane Kenyon all this time, but I had good reason. And I'm glad to have gotten over it, because her poems are very good.

She has a lovely sense of structure, with sounds and near-rhymes accumulating. She uses structures that I can tell she's crafted carefully, but that usually are not a "traditional" or received structure. The positioning of the near-rhymes and line breaks is carefully different, except in rare cases where the end rhymes fall happily in tow, usually at the end of a stanza. The poems read beautifully aloud.

Drink, Eat, Sleep

I never drink from his blue tin cup
speckled with white
without thinking of stars on a clear,
cold night -- of Venus blazing low
over the leafless trees; and Canis
great and small -- dogs without flesh,
fur, blood, or bone . . . dogs made of light,
apparitions of cold light, with black
and trackless spaces in between. . . .
The angel gave a little book
to the prophet, telling him to eat --
eat and tell of the end of time.
Strange food, infinitely strange,
but the pages were like honey
to his tongue. . . .


At the Summer Solstice

Noon heat. And later, hotter still. . . .
The neighbor's son rides up and down the field
turning the hay -- turning it with flourishes.

The tractor dips into the low clovery place
where melt from the mountain
comes down in the spring, and wild
lupine grows. Only the boy's blond head
can be seen; but then he comes smartly
up again -- to whirl, deft, around
the pear tree near the barn. Brave . . .

bravissimo. The tall grass lies -- cut,
turned, raked, and dry. Later his father
comes down the lane with the baler. I hear
the steady thumping all afternoon.

So hot, so hot today. . . . I will stay in our room
with the shades drawn, waiting for you
to come with sleepy eyes, and pass your fingers
lightly, lightly up my thighs.



This is just the first two stanzas from Twilight: After Haying

Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?

The men sprawl near the baler,
too tired to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)

P.J. Tracy, Mystery Writer!

Mysteries by P.J. Tracy

I like a good mystery, especially if the writing is knockout-quality. I recently read Monkeewrench by P.J. Tracy and was pleasantly impressed. The characters are vivid, the writing is great, and the structure is astoundingly tight for a first novel. To complicate, P.J. Tracy is a mother-daughter team, writing from two different states (Minneapolis and California). I'd love to know how they coordinated the writing effort so well. The book is nearly seamless, and most of the chapter endings have a little twist and lift that will make it impossible for you to put this book down.

My sole criticism is that the characters are very close to that border between vivid and cartoonish. Monkeewrench is a software development company and its members are each unique and compelling, and their physical and psychic individualities are the sort that work well in a novel but fall just short of translating into characters who could live in the physical world. That's a minor criticism, and I was interested to see how the characters would be protrayed in subsequent books.

I read the second in the series, Live Bait, and it is really really good. The Monkeewrench characters are there, but they are secondary characters and that role suits them well. A pair of detectives who played a central part in Monkeewrench take the foreground in Live Bait. Magozzi, the dominant character of the pair, is a strong personality with a compelling set of strengths and human frailties. He has sharp instincts and is willing to trust them as much as the trusts the hard facts. His partner is a good foil, often talking through possible and impossible scenarios, even ridiculous ones, often providing these as fodder for Magozzi's instincts and intellect to struggle through. The partner is very earthy and physical, and unashamedly and charmingly in love with his wife. That's a good counterpoint to Magozzi, who sticks to a spartan and healthy diet (occasionally succumbing to the partner's offers of rich and wonderful foods) and goes home to an empty and emptied house, which he has left in the condition it was in when his ex- left him.

Live Bait is based on a series of murders in Minneapolis that show some obvious linkages but there are enough anomolies that the reader knows a solution won't be forthcoming. Senior citizens are murdered, one by one, and it soon becomes clear that most are Jews who spent time in the World War II concentration camps. But they weren't all in the same camp, and one senior citizen is Lutheran with no apparent link to the others.

As the detectives struggle to put the pieces together, racing to prevent more murders, since they are happening with an alarming regularity, some of the cops and detectives seem to be struggling with their own private dilemmas. One cop is related to a murder victim and has left the police force after the murder of his wife; his world is collapsing on him and when we first meet him he is interrupted in an attempted suicide. Another is wondering if he's a good cop or not, struggling with something he did and what his motives might have been. Another character, the estranged son of one of the murder victims, plays the role of a hopeless drunk but is clearly caught up in his own struggle with an internal moral compass.

The mystery unfolds, and once you think you've got it figured out it takes a twist again -- I don't think any reader will successfully outguess P.J. Tracy, and that's the way it should be. The twists are compelling and, once revealed, believable. But as the mystery is solved, the secondary plot line about all those moral compasses is the part that captured me. You can read this as a simple mystery and enjoy it a lot, but you can also read it as a mini-philosophy on the question of what it means to be a good person, and whether it is possible to be good in the midst of overwhelming evil. Each character resolves his or her own struggle with what it means to be a good cop, or to be a good person. I felt very connected to the characters as this all played out, and by the time the true "heroes" are identified -- those who remain "good" despite all pulling to the contrary -- they are the sort that really are the heroes of real life. They're not the primary characters, and not the ones you'd pick out as shiny. One of them is nowhere close to perfect. But they have understood, and held on at all costs, to what it means to be a good human being.

That, and the excellent writing and fully-honed characters, make Live Bait a must-read. You'd do well to start with Monkeewrench, but if you only have time for one, make it Live Bait.

Here's the official P.J. Tracy website: http://www.pjtracy.net/content/index.asp

Louise Welsh and Marilynn Robinson

Summer Reading List

Summer slows down. As I look forward to cooler crisper weather I also get my reading list ready. I'm one of those old-fashioned chicks -- a red apple, a glass of wine, a good book, a pug in my lap. (Pug? They slip into just about any activity around here. Get used to it.) When the leaves start their slow burn into hickory gold and sassafras red, it's time to pull out a few books, relax in a lawn chair, and enjoy the glorious absence of mosquitoes.

What I read over the summer was pretty good. I found some "writers for writers" -- the kind of writing that subtly but insistently pulls you to read the same paragraph over and over, enjoying the textures of it and wondering how the heck the author pulled that off. For readers who are not themselves writers, this kind of book is simple and pure pleasure, but for those of us who are fascinated by writing itself this kind of book is passion incarnate, a wicked and private delight.

At the top of my summer list were two books by Scottish author Louise Welsh. I'd only intended to read one book, but it was so good I had to go back for more. I read The Cutting Room first, directed to it by a strong review in The New York Times Book Review. It's a gripping book with an unsavory character who is impossible, finally, to dislike. Rilke is an auctioneer in Glasgow, a city with fascinating dark undersides that match the character. Rilke is gay, a lonely loner, and a little amoral about life in general. All those characteristics are portrayed in compelling, beautifully written, and humanly frightening detail. He falls into am auction job that involves clearing out an estate, and in going through the personal items he finds an object of questionable moral history involving a woman who may or may not have died in an act of sadomasochism masquerading as art. Rilke's amoral and outsider personality has a vulnerable and large heart at its center that leaves chinks in his outward coolness toward life -- and the bit of compassion he feels on his discovery leads him on a mystery and a self-discovery that propels the book forward.

The Cutting Room left me a little chilled around my own darker edges (and if you think you don't have any, you will be disabused of that notion by the end of the book as you, along with Rilke, discover chinks in your personal armor). But Welsh is very much a writer's writer, and even when her character is someone you'd rather not be in a room with, her prose is always the kind you'd want to bring home for dinner and an introduction to your parents.

I was hooked. Next I picked up Tamburlaine Must Die, Welsh's most recent book. It is slim, and although that usually infers a quick read, I was again so fascinated with the prose that I found myself reading paragraphs and pages over and over. The book is fiction but is so knowledgeable about the historical facts and ellipses its plot is based on that you will learn some very good solid history from it. It's about Chrisopher Marlowe (the author of the play Tamburlaine), the brightest literary star of Elizabethan England, and his still mysterious and unsolved death.

The book begins with Marlowe's recording of his last few and (unknown to him) what will be his last days. He begins: "I have four candles and one evening in which to write this account." How deliciously good even from the outset -- already I can sense his character, the time, the emotional timbre of the unknown situation. No wonder the book is slim -- who needs a huge number of pages when every sentence is pared down to a gorgeous and revealing essence? Do yourself a favor: return to 1593 and read this book.

Louise Welsh's The Cutting Room was her first published novel. She cut her teeth on short stories before that, and cut them well. Tamburlaine Must Die is her second novel, and the world will be graced if she has many more to follow.

Another author on my summer reading list was Marilynn Robinson. Again, I read one book and was compelled on to a second. Gilead: A Novel is Robinson's most recent and was my first read; from there I back-tracked to Housekeeping. Gilead is in the voice of a preacher, John Ames, who lives in Iowa -- he's old, knows he's near death, and wants to write down some thoughts to leave to his young son who's only seven. He addresses the entire book to his son, with clarity and spareness and restraint. In explaining why he's writing the book, he says "It seems ridiculous to suppose the dead miss anything. If you're a grown man when you read this -- it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then -- I'll have been gone a long time. I'll know most of what there is to know about being dead, but I'll probably keep it to myself. That seems to be the way of things." Ames wanders on, as an old man writing this sort of account would, and talks about his own past, how he met his son's mother, the personal history of the town they are in and the larger history it touches, through Ames's own father and grandfather, going back to the Civil War. As the curtain is pulled back, Ames also reflects on the sermons he has written -- tell me this isn't a little about any author's own natural anxiety regarding the future of their work! -- and some brief and startlingly simple glimpses of what it means to believe in God, day by day. The insights are beautiful, honest, and sharp as glass.

I'm reading Housekeeping now. This is another brief book that appears as if it ought to go quickly. But the writing is meditative, the voice of a child exploring her place in the world, her solid or not-solid presence in a life that removed her mother, left her with relatives incapable of holding anything tightly, and then again with an aunt who always, no matter how long she stays in the role of parent, has the personality and habits of a transient. The prose is hypnotic, and so compelling and tangible in describing the aftermath of a flood in the town that I will never look at water the same old way. There are pages that I've read and re-read. I might never finish this book. . .

Louise Welsh, bio and author information: http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth5689224102e1e19771kOm2B7EAD4

Midwest poets, arise!

Not that Ted Kooser really needs my help in defending his poetry, but why would the New York Times Book Review ask Brad Leithauser, who tends trippingly toward New Formalism and academia and also Poetry as Fun, to review Ted Kooser? Go figure. Isn't the realm of poetry broad enough yet to make room for something that can survive outside the east- or west-coast belly-button-gazing high-stakes (drumroll please) poetry towers?

It's not the first time Kooser's been smacked by a big-city snit at the NYTimes, but this is getting old. Not just Kooser, but non-coast poetry in general. I remember my first trek to the coasts -- 30 years ago, a venture to Massachusetts and what I hoped would be a society of poets. Well, not quite. A New York poet asked me where I came from and when I replied "Illinois" there was a blank stare. "Midwest," I then said, going up the ladders of abstraction to clarify. Ah, that did it. . . she looked at me in pity and tried to start a conversation about how there weren't, really, were there? any poets of significance from the Midwest -- but that's ok, I had lots of time to catch up. . .

Lots of us have run into this attitude. Poor Kooser. It probably means nobody will read his poems, or publish him, and if they do, he'll be the only one from the Midwest who really "made it." The rest of us poor flatlanders. . .

Are we to believe Marianne Moore wouldn't have written anything worthwhile if she hadn't left Missouri? Robert Bly is just a fluke. Gwendolyn Brooks hailed from Chicago, and cities that big can be excused from being midwestern. On the contrary, St. Louis, a pebble's toss across the river from my own midwest location, is home to a few MFA programs and a list of highly respected poetry mags: Boulevard, River Styx, Margie, Natural Bridge. It has a history of literature and poetry behind that, entertainingly memorialized as the ground we all (literally) walk on, the The St. Louis Walk of Fame.