POETSWEDNESDAY & More

Our Government Has Failed Us

I am too shocked to post anything. This may be the worst catastrophe our country has seen since 911, the crash of "29" and the depression that followed it. Our representatives owe us more than this. Passing the Bill would have been an attempt to help. Good luck Main Street. Did you really think that Wall Street had no connection to Main Street?  We'll see what happens, but it doesn't look good.

Adele Kenny's New Chapbook

Finishing Line Press Announces

The Kite & Other Poems from Childhood

A New Chapbook by Adele Kenny

 Free Shipping for Orders Placed

Between September 26 through November 7

 Shipping Date: December 8, 2008

Order now for December gift-giving!

 This collection of two dozen poems written by Adele Kenny between the ages of four and ten is a delightful look at childhood from the perspective of a child. The poems invite adult readers to remember their own childhoods and are appropriate for even the youngest readers – a perfect Christmas, holiday, or special occasion gift for the child in you, for family members and friends, and for the children in your life.

Your pre-publication order will help determine the size of the press run, so thanks in advance for ordering now!

To Order:

Click on this Link www.finishinglinepress.com and Order Online Using PayPal

(Authors are listed alphabetically, so scroll down.)

Or

Print and Send This Pre-Publication Order Form with Your Check or Money Order To:

Finishing Line Press

POST OFFICE BOX 1626

Georgetown, Kentucky 40324

Title: The Kite & Other Poems from Childhood by Adele Kenny

Number of Copies:  ______ @ $12.00 each (shipping is free for orders placed before November 7, 2008)

Order Total Enclosed:   ______________ (checks & money orders made payable to Finishing Line Press)

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 Sample Poem

The Kite

             By Adele Kenny (Age 9)          

The wind was like an old man breathes.

It coughed outside the house.

So Daddy made me a flying kite

That scurried through clouds like a mouse.

We watched until the kite string broke

Then Daddy said to learn                                                                                                          

That things of the earth all fly away

That the kite was having its turn.

I wanted to cry or maybe yell

But I try not to do those things.

Then Daddy said the kite was free

And had its own blue wings.

I would rather have kept it and taken it home

To play knights and make it my shield.

But the kite was gone, no getting it back

And there we were in the empty field.

Photo by Caryll Balzano

Daniel Zimmerman, a native of Buffalo, New York, has taught English at Middlesex County College in Edison, NJ, since 1979. A founder of Niagara-Erie Writers, a consortium of artists and small presses in Buffalo, and former artist-in-residence in that city, he has also worked as a landscaper, reporter, and freelance writer. He served as associate editor of the issue of Anonym that first published Ezra Pound’s last canto, and as editor of the single-issue magazines The Western Gate and Brittannia. The Institute of Further Studies included his fascicle, Perspective, in its series, a curriculum of the soul (Canton, NY: 1974). He collaborated with American/Canadian artist Richard Sturm on a livre deluxe, See All The People (lithographs, serigraphs and embossings: Toronto: Open Studio/Scarborough College, 1976). His dissertation (State University at Buffalo, 1984) explored the poetics of William Blake and John Milton. In 1990, he received a Mellon Fellowship to study visionary poetry at the Graduate School, City University of New York. In 1997, he invented a new, anagrammatical poetic form, Isotopes. From 1996 to 2001, he edited College English Notes for the New Jersey College English Association. He has published several collections of poetry, including the trans-temporal collaboration blue horitals (with John Clarke: Amman, Jordan: Oasii, 1997), ISOTOPES (London: Frame Publications, 2001), and Post-Avant (Columbus, OH: Pavement Saw Press, 2001; introductory note by Robert Creeley). His work has recently appeared in Chain, Tinfish, Deluxe Rubber Chicken, House Organ, Snakeskin, An Exaltation of Forms, and ETC: A Review of General Semantics.

[email protected]

From the back yard by Joe Weil

 

  I was in the back yard this morning playing my Irish tin whistle, and minding my own business when two sparrows landed on the glass top table and looked up at me before flying off again. I felt like friggin Orpheus! The sun rose over the flood wall. A crow cawed in the field which I discovered is filled with wild basil, thyme, and oregano. Any time I want, I can pull up a bunch, and breathe the smells in. If Mary Oliver had shown up and written a poem about it, I would not have been at all surprised.

    Why don’t I write a poem about it? Pastoral poems take us back to the obvious. We become awed by the sheer fact of natural matters. Look: Grass! Tree! Junco! Sparrow! Jay! Look: deer nuzzling the fallen crab apples, their coats honeyed as the soft morning light. There is always a chance people, mean, heartless, normal folks, will say: “so what? Big deal! I see crows every day.” But do you? Are you sure?

    A pastoral poem always risks being absurd because the poet is awed by the obvious. It’s as if you had lived with a woman for thirty years and then noticed, all of a sudden, that she lives with you, that her existence matters greatly. To be surprised by the obvious is one of my favorite experiences: It’s six am. There’s a coffee sitting beside my book of John Clare poems. The sun helps the white pine cast its most flattering shadows. The ground hogs are not so ubiquitous, and the chill in the air means fall is pulling in and due to arrive momentarily. I need to wear a sweater now when I sit at my table. The other morning my breath turned to smoke as I played, and I was elated.

    My friend Joe Salerno once complained to me that poets write too often of human relations. Even when they write about nature, they do so in a way that stains it with the human. It always pissed me off when Mary Oliver wrote about grass hoppers eating sugar from her hand--as if she was the earth mother. I don’t believe her. I’ve seen Mary Oliver. I’m not a grass hopper, but no way, I’m taking sugar from that woman.

    So what made me so happy this morning that I almost wrote a nature poem? I think it was the absence of me as I exist in the world of human relations. My tin whistle sounded good. The sparrows were a nice surprise. There were no geese on the hill, shitting every where. I didn’t have to please anyone, regard anyone. I realized that, even if I lose my job, and end up homeless, I have a whistle, and I can still stare at the world around me. All the bad things that have happened to me, including the deaths of most of my family, the absence of a wife or children, are not so bad, at least in moments like this—when I’m playing and the sun rises over the flood wall, and Mary Oliver doesn’t show up to make it all palatable and understandable to poetry addicts who turn nature into one more appointment, one more thing on their “busy” schedule. I’m not busy! I have escaped the American criteria for a “meaningful” life. Later, I will have to go to school and teach, but I think I’ll tell my students to learn how to be alone—to stare into space. Jesus was right: consider the sparrows. They neither sow nor reap, and yet God feeds them. Of course, this only lasts for an hour at best, and I wouldn’t eat what sparrows eat. I’d sooner take a lump of sugar from Mary Oliver’s hand! Slianthe’

NJ Poetry Calendar

 

http://www.pccc.edu/home/cultural-affairs/poetry-center/n.j.-poetry-calendar

William Carlos Williams Symposium Sept. 20 & 21

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS SYMPOSIUM in Rutherford
With poetry readings, panel discussions, and visual presentations featuring ROBERT COLES,
BILL ZAVATSKY and many others.

Saturdy & Sunday, September 20-21, 2008
Doors are open both days from 9:00 am until 10 pm.

Williams Center for the Performing Arts
One Williams Plaza
Rutherford, NJ

$ Donations

Contact: lorenkleinman@yahoo.com

www.williamcarloswilliams.org

Two Poems by Steven Worowski

AS THE SPIRIT LEAVES THE BODY

As the spirit leaves the body and flies around the room,

I will still love you.  You and your family Allegheny,

your Algonquin eyes.  Yet my family kneels, praying

toward my beaten body where I no longer live.

I sail.  I swoop now.  I fly in rings and ribbons.

I curl and dash with tails of personal history.

I circulate the room as air itself.

Then I dip through the chests of heart broken parents,

Squeezing past the tears of mothers, burning moist.

I push through the biceps of silent fathers,

singed and sighing.

My spirit has left my body.  Good riddance.

Will you remain helpful to my spirit

though I am helpless to my corpse?

I will not stop loving you.

I will not stop loving you.

                                                Steven Worowski, 2006

 

EVERYTHING WE DID WAS WRONG

There was a dim light in our eyes

that still couldn’t help us recognize

that everything we did was wrong.

Everything we did was wrong.

We stuck sponge inside the bell

we stripped heaven into hell

Everything we did was wrong.

Everything we did was wrong.

We tattoo’d trouble on our arms.

we disconnected the alarms

because everything we did was wrong.

Everything we did was wrong.

The loser doesn’t win

All will die free of sin

Though everything we did was wrong

Every last little thing we did was wrong.

                                    Steven Worowski 2006

Jennifer Diskin

http://www.hauledupnotebooks.blogspot.com/

Jennifer Diskin

http://www.hauledupnotebooks.blogspot.com/

Joe Weil

http://www.answers.com/topic/joe-weil

http://www.myspace.com/joeweil