Soft Exposure ... Listen. Speak. Beautiful!

American Life in Poetry: Column 327

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Some of us have more active fantasy lives than others, but all of us have them. Here Karin Gottshall, who lives in Vermont, shares a variety of loneliness that some of our readers may have experienced.

More Lies
  

Sometimes I say I’m going to meet my sister at the café—
even though I have no sister—just because it’s such
a beautiful thing to say. I’ve always thought so, ever since

I read a novel in which two sisters were constantly meeting
in cafés. Today, for example, I walked alone
on the wet sidewalk, wearing my rain boots, expecting

someone might ask where I was headed. I bought
a steno pad and a watch battery, the store windows
fogged up. Rain in April is a kind of promise, and it costs

nothing. I carried a bag of books to the café and ordered
tea. I like a place that’s lit by lamps. I like a place
where you can hear people talk about small things,

like the difference between azure and cerulean,
and the price of tulips. It’s going down. I watched
someone who could be my sister walk in, shaking the rain

from her hair. I thought, even now florists are filling
their coolers with tulips, five dollars a bundle. All over
the city there are sisters. Any one of them could be mine.

   
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2010 by Karin Gottshall, whose most recent book ofpoetry is Crocus, Fordham University Press, 2007. Poem reprinted from the New Ohio Review, No. 8, Fall 2010, by permission of Karin Gottshall and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2011 by ThePoetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

This Wednesday, Soft Exposure features Robert Walker and Anna Claire Hodge

This Wednesday, June 22, Soft Exposure brings you a double header! That’s right - we’ll be listening to the wonderful works of 2 featured writers, Robert Walker and Anna Claire Hodge. 

We’ll be at our usual spot, Infusion Tea in College Park, 1600 Edgewater Drive, Orlando. Come out to listen to the readings and share some of your own words with a warm and welcoming audience. The reading and open mic will run from 7 to 9, and I’ll have the open mic sign-up sheet out by 6:45. Join us in celebration of the Central Florida literary community!

Robert Walker began writing poetry while playing bass in the cover-band ManHole (an all male group that played songs originally recorded by Courtney Love’s mid-90s band Hole). After ManHole split, sighting artistic differences, Walker enjoyed a brief solo career opening for Ru Paul. After a scandal involving George Michael and a public restroom forced him out of the music business he became a High School teacher in rural Florida, where his colorful tales of life on the road lead to him being known as the “eccentric” English teacher. Robert is a graduate of the Virginia Tech MFA program, and his poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Ashe’: The Journal of Experimental Spirituality, Knockout, 5AM, Limp Wrist, Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Mipoesias, Pearl, and Poet Lore. Robert’s debut collection, The Buoyancy Of It All, was published by Lethe Press in May, 2011. Robert claims no responsibility for any historical inaccuracies in this biography.

Anna Claire Hodge is nothing if not a brave poet, as she takes on the daunting task of confronting her own untranslatable song with poem after poem embodying Fanny Howe’s statement that the point of art is to show that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.

In this way, the speakers of her poems confront family history, heartbreak, illness, solitude. They take pills, they comfort loved ones. They make out against counters, they long for relief from day to day life, they watch Sex and the City. They go swimming, they ponder frailty. They do so in settings that are never merely pastoral or personal - the Blue Ridge Mountains, for example, and parts of Florida become mythic landscapes within which grief and love are inextricable from lake water or sugarcane fields.

Furthermore, these landscapes are inhabited by objects as unlikely as a stuffed toy eagle, as symbolic as a funeral program, as delicious as candied hibiscus, as permanent as a tattoo. In Anna Claire’s hands, these artifacts and others are reinvented as metaphors for a world that is as magical as it is earthly, as brutal as it is generous - a world within which the speakers of Anna Claire’s poems perpetually yearn to be located.

Ultimately, though, it is the genuineness with which Anna Claire bravely invites us into her world that pulls me back to her poetry. It is the way in which her speakers allow themselves to be both wounded and healed, but it is also the guardedness that accompanies such openness that makes Anna Claire’s poems as haunted as they are grounded. Her speakers, I think, would agree with Helene Cixous that: “The more you let yourself dream, the more you let yourself be worked through, the more you let yourself be disturbed, pursued, threatened, loved, the more you write, the more you escape the censor, the more the woman in you is affirmed, discovered, and invented.”

Anna Claire is the nominee of both an AWP Intro Journals Project Award and the Best New Poets Anthology. Her poems have appeared in Blue Earth Review, Breakwater Review, Makeout Creek, Miracle Monocle, and forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry. She is an unabashed fan of hip hop, red lipstick, and flavored vodka.

American Life in Poetry: Column 326

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I am especially fond of what we might call landscape poems, describing places, scenes. Here April Lindner, who lives in Philadelphia, paints a scene we might come upon on the back side of any great American city.

Our Lady of Perpetual Help
  

The burnt church up the street yawns to the sky,
its empty windows edged in soot, its portals
boarded up and slathered with graffiti,
oily layers, urgent but illegible.
All that can be plundered has been, all
but the carapace—the hollow bell tower,
the fieldstone box that once served as a nave.
The tidy row of homes that line this block
have tended lawns and scalloped bathtub shrines.
Each front porch holds a chair where no one sits.
Those who live here triple lock their doors
day and night. Some mornings they step out
to find a smoking car stripped to its skeleton
abandoned at the curb. Most afternoons
the street is still but for a mourning dove
and gangs of pigeons picking through the grass.
Our Lady of Perpetual Help is gray,
a dead incisor in a wary smile.
A crevice in her wall allows a glimpse
into the chancel, where a sodden mattress
and dirty blanket indicate that someone
finds this place a sanctuary still,
takes his rest here, held and held apart
from passers by, their cruelties and their kindnesses,
watched over by the night’s blind congregation,
by the blank eyes of a concrete saint.

   
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation,publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2010 byAble Muse Review and April Lindner, whose most recent novel isJane, Poppy, 2010. Poem reprinted from Able Muse Anthology, Able Muse Press, 2010, by permission of the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

American Life in Poetry: Column 325

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Many of us have attempted to console friends who have recently been divorced, and though it can be a pretty hard sell, we have assured them that things will indeed be better with the passage of time. Here’s a fine poem of consolation by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, who teaches at Penn State.

One Day
  

One day, you will awake from your covering
and that heart of yours will be totally mended,
and there will be no more burning within.
The owl, calling in the setting of the sun
and the deer path, all erased.
And there will be no more need for love
or lovers or fears of losing lovers
and there will be no more burning timbers
with which to light a new fire,
and there will be no more husbands or people
related to husbands, and there will be no more
tears or reason to shed your tears.
You will be as mended as the bridge
the working crew has just reopened.
The thick air will be vanquished with the tide
and the river that was corrupted by lies
will be cleansed and totally free.
And the rooster will call in the setting sun
and the sun will beckon homeward,
hiding behind your one tree that was not felled.

   
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation,publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2010 by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley from her fourth book of poetry, Where the Road Turns, Autumn House Press, 2010. Poem reprinted by permission of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

American Life in Poetry: Column 324

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Here’s a fine poem by my fellow Nebraskan, Barbara Schmitz, who here offers us a picture of people we’ve all observed but haven’t thought to write about.

Uniforms
  

It is very hot—92 today—to be wearing
a stocking cap, but the adolescent swaggering
through the grocery store automatic door
doesn’t seem to mind; does not even appear
to be perspiring. The tugged-down hat
is part of his carefully orchestrated outfit:
bagging pants, screaming t-shirt, high-topped
shoes. The young woman who yells to her friends
from an open pickup window is attired
for summer season in strapless stretch
tube top, slipping down toward bountiful
cleavage valley. She tugs it up in front
as she races toward the two who have
just passed a cigarette between them
like a baton on a relay team. Her white
chest gleams like burnished treasure
as they giggle loudly there in the corner
and I glance down to see what costume
I have selected to present myself to
the world today. I smile; it’s my sky blue
shirt with large deliberately faded Peace sign,
smack dab in the middle, plus grey suede
Birkenstocks—a message that “I lived through
the sixties and am so proud.” None of the
young look my way. I round the corner and
walk into Evening descending.

   
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation,publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Barbara Schmitz, whose most recent book of poems is How Much Our Dancing Has Improved, Backwaters Press, 2005. Poem reprinted from theSouth Dakota Review, Vol. 47, no. 3, 2009, by permission of Barbara Schmitz and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

American Life in Poetry: Column 323

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Joe Paddock is a Minnesota poet and he and I are, as we say in the Midwest, “of an age.” Here is a fine poem about arriving at a stage when there can be great joy in accepting life as it comes to us.

One’s Ship Comes In
 

I swear
my way now will be
to continue without
plan or hope, to accept
the drift of things, to shift
from endless effort
to joy in, say,
that robin, plunging
into the mossy shallows
of my bird bath and
splashing madly till
the air shines with spray.
Joy it will be, say,
in Nancy, pretty in pink
and rumpled T-shirt,
rubbing sleep from her eyes, or
joy even in
just this breathing, free
of fright and clutch, knowing
how one’s ship comes in
with each such breath.

   
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation,publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Joe Paddock from his most recent book of poetry, Dark Dreaming, Global Dimming, Red Dragonfly Press, 2009. Reprinted by permission of Joe Paddock and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

This Wednesday, Soft Exposure features Lisa Pasold

Soft Exposure is back! This Wednesday, May 25th 2011, our wonderful feature Lisa Pasold will be sharing some of her latest work with us. Come on out to our usual spot, Infusion Tea in College Park, 1600 Edgewater Drive, Orlando, to listen to her reading and share some of your own words with a warm and welcoming audience. The reading and open mic will run from 7 to 9, and the open mic sign-up sheet will be out by 6:45. Frankie Messina of Apartment E will be guest-hosting the evening, since I will be out of town. It promises to be a fantastic evening so don’t miss out!

Lisa Pasold has been thrown off a train in Belarus, been fed the world’s best pigeon pie in Marrakech, has taken the wrong bus in Bohemia, mushed huskies in the Yukon, and been cheated in the Venetian gambling halls of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi. Her favourite game is roulette. As a journalist, she has perfected the fine art of jaywalking; her articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as The Globe and Mail, The Chicago Tribune, New York Living and Billboard. Lisa has written two books of poetry, Weave (2004) and A Bad Year for Journalists (2006) and most recently, a novel, Rats of Las Vegas.

American Life in Poetry: Column 322

 

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Cathy Smith Bowers was recently appointed poet laureate of North Carolina, and I want to celebrate her appointment by showing you one of her lovely poems, a peaceful poem about a peaceful thing.

Peace Lilies 
 

I collect them now, it seems. Like
sea-shells or old
thimbles. One for
Father. One for

Mother. Two for my sweet brothers.
Odd how little
they require of
me. Unlike the

ones they were sent in memory
of. No sudden
shrilling of the
phone. No harried

midnight flights. Only a little
water now and
then. Scant food and
light. See how I’ve

brought them all together here in
this shaded space
beyond the stairs.
Even when they

thirst, they summon me with nothing
more than a soft,
indifferent furl-
ing of their leaves.

   
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2004 by Cathy Smith Bowers, whose most recent book of poetry is The Candle I Hold Up to See You, Iris Press, 2009. Poem reprinted from A Book of Minutes, Iris Press, 2004, by permission of Cathy Smith Bowers and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

American Life in Poetry: Column 321

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

For me, the most worthwhile poetry is that which reaches out and connects with a great number of people, and this one, by Joe Mills of North Carolina, does just that. Every parent gets questions like the one at the center of this poem.

How You Know
 

How do you know if it’s love? she asks, 
and I think if you have to ask, it’s not, 
but I know this won’t help. I want to say 
you’re too young to worry about it,
as if she has questions about Medicare 
or social security, but this won’t help either. 
“You’ll just know” is a lie, and one truth, 
“when you still want to be with them 
the next morning,” would involve too 
many follow-up questions. The difficulty 
with love, I want to say, is sometimes 
you only know afterwards that it’s arrived 
or left. Love is the elephant and we 
are the blind mice unable to understand 
the whole. I want to say love is this 
desire to help even when I know I can’t, 
just as I couldn’t explain electricity, stars, 
the color of the sky, baldness, tornadoes, 
fingernails, coconuts, or the other things 
she has asked about over the years, all 
those phenomena whose daily existence 
seems miraculous. Instead I shake my head. 
I don’t even know how to match my socks. 
Go ask your mother. She laughs and says, 
I did. Mom told me to come and ask you.

   
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2010 by Joe Mills, whose most recent book of poetry is Love and Other Collisions, Press 53, 2010. Poem reprinted from Rattle, Vol. 16, no. 1, Summer 2010, by permission of Joe Mills and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.