Thursday, February 28, 2013

New Collection Pitch Dark Anarchy
by Randall Horton





Two poems from Pitch Dark Anarchy

Dear Reader (1)

before the cataclysmic end of the world
    whittles down to zero, before

grounding out idiot noise pushes
    in all motion skin color, before that

which cannot be defined: our terribleness
    calibrated on a triple beam scale .or.

call it residue running to the border.
    subjective but it is about subjects

(underneath always underneath) &
    language. after the betrayal. .or. a thing
of intrigue: an illusion
    caught in a soundraft. the recoil
before that final echo dimming the sun
    display(ed) for the (dis)placed

more clearly to see at the end of the world.

What Lil Soul Train Did Not Know Is in a Book

all matter boomerangs back—: color
    keeps intruding—: perhaps

it’s the misgeographic rerouting
    of center—: that place you run away from

up over the sun dancing—:

material tangible—:
    & object to be & is—: mental

developing change or motor-booty-
    shake to the half note:

of what we are: spiritual movement:
    at once & everywhere—: hands

reworking constructions of the verb
    to be: from one state to another—:

yellow light before the :r:e:d:
    a:l:e:r:t—: wait wasn’t optional

is what i told lil’ soul train bent
    between the lines broham couldn’t read—:

he might’ve been practicing to sing
    all up in there like against: telos

wasn’t no guns just a whistling
    tune—: a night cloud: a moon visible.


Praise for Pitch Dark Anarchy
(Northwestern University Press 2013)

Randall Horton takes up the experiment we are, as content as well as form, theory as well as practice, as searching, as research, as tilling and digging, as aeration and irrigation, on the ground and under until there is no ground except for what you hear, an ever ascendant bottom animating every line. Pitch Dark Anarchy; dark animateriality; new-strung, hard-thrown air. We who think we have it have to look for it everywhere because it’s everywhere, right under our noses, all up under our skin, right now in our hands. We, who? You. It’s your thing, if you feel enough to claim it. I mean you. I mean you.

Fred Moten, author of Hughson’s Tavern

Short Interview With Randall Horton


How did you come to write “Notes From a Prodigal Son #5”?

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped these poems and your new collection Pitch Dark Anarchy come to life?

I would only say that I pay attention to lyrical cadence and the sounding of things. But for me, each poetic process is different. I may favor aesthetic choices but try to remain blank each time I approach a poem. The only thing you need to know is that my poems are part of a larger series of epistles.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

I claim Gwendolyn Brooks as a literary mother but love Stephen Jonas, Ed Roberson and Nikky Finney, among so many others. I would say be on the look out for Lamar L. Wilson, Rickey Laurentiis, Phillip Williams, Niki Herd, Ching In Chen, Derrick Harriell and Delana Dameron. All wonderful poets.

What are you working on now?

At this moment, I am finishing a memoir titled Father, Forgive Me.

Randall Horton is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Haven in Connecticut and the author of Pitch Dark Anarchy, a collection of poems just published by Northwestern University Press. Horton is also author of two other collections: The Definition of Place (2006) and The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street (2009). He is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea González Poetry Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship. His creative and critical work has appeared in the print journals Callaloo, Sou’wester, Caduceus, and New Haven Review and in the online journal The Offending Adam. Randall is a fellow of Cave Canem and a member of the Affrilachian Poets, two organizations that support African American poetry; and a member of the Symphony: The House That Etheridge Built, a reading collective named for the poet Etheridge Knight. An excerpt from Horton’s memoir, Roxbury, is newly released as a chapbook. His poem “Notes From a Prodigal Son #5” appeared in the anthology After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery from Life-Shattering Events .

Monday, February 25, 2013

"Notes From a Prodigal Son #5"
by Randall Horton

     Father,
I needed seasons of dogwood,
the bloom of petals brushing
against an April sky, the way you
taught me to hoop ball in spring.

Yet I also craved wisdom from men
born under the emerald glare of streetlamps,
the aroma of hookers after blue-light sex
running through their heroin nostrils.

     Once,
I walked the pearl sand of Eleuthera,
stood in Hatchet Bay’s cove—inhaled
salted sea, believed life offered nothing
greater than the Caribbean’s blue glass.

I rode the backs of section 8 mules
through customs, not knowing which trip
would be my last, lived runagate style—
free like a prayer from your wife’s lips.

    Father,
The seeds I planted in those youthful years
have blossomed into a five-year sentence,
and it has taken the wring of time’s tourniquet
to bring me closer to a life I tried to bury deep.


Interview With Randall Horton


How did you come to write “Notes From a Prodigal Son #5”?

“Notes from a Prodigal Son #5” is part of a series of poems in my earlier collection The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street. I use the epistle to dialogue with my father as the symbolic prodigal son. I was incarcerated for a total of five years and that isolation forced me to think about my future. However, in order to have a future, I had to deal with the past. The only way to look at my past was though my father who was a great model and perplexed as to how I derailed my own life with drugs and incarceration. I needed my father to forge me.

How did writing this poem affect your recovery?

Writing this poem helped in the process of seeking forgiveness. After incarceration, I still had to deal with the pain of having let so many people down in my life. The “Prodigal Son” poems became the vehicle through which the healing could begin.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this poem come to life?

I would only say that I pay attention to lyrical cadence and the sounding of things. But for me, each poetic process is different. I may favor aesthetic choices but try to remain blank each time I approach a poem. The only thing you need to know is that this poem is part of a larger series of epistles.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

I claim Gwendolyn Brooks as a literary mother but love Stephen Jonas, Ed Roberson and Nikky Finney, among so many others. I would say be on the look out for Lamar L. Wilson, Rickey Laurentiis, Phillip Williams, Niki Herd, Ching In Chen, Derrick Harriell and Delana Dameron. All wonderful poets.

What are you working on now?

I have just had a new collection published, Pitch Dark Anarchy, from Northwestern University Press. At this moment, I am finishing a memoir titled Father, Forgive Me.

Randall Horton is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Haven in Connecticut and the author of Pitch Dark Anarchy, a collection of poems just published by Northwestern University Press. Horton is also author of two other collections: The Definition of Place (2006) and The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street (2009). He is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea González Poetry Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship. His creative and critical work has appeared in the print journals Callaloo, Sou’wester, Caduceus, and New Haven Review and in the online journal The Offending Adam. Randall is a fellow of Cave Canem and a member of the Affrilachian Poets, two organizations that support African American poetry; and a member of the Symphony: The House That Etheridge Built, a reading collective named for the poet Etheridge Knight. An excerpt from Horton’s memoir, Roxbury, is newly released as a chapbook.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

"Sir Winston Churchill Knew My Mother"
by Satyendra Srivastava


Sir Winston Churchill he knew India
He knew
Because India was to him the Kohinor
Of that Empire on which the sun never sets
Sir Winston also knew the town
Which his people had built for their comfort and ease
Cutting and carving it from the Himalaya’s lap
– That child of the icy summits – that town
Which is called Mussoorie
Sir Winston knew where that town was and why
Because he had walked its long street rising and falling
Which had reminded him – somewhere somehow –
Of Princes Street in Edinburgh, another
Extremely beautiful town in the British Empire
And Sir Winston knew this too that
Also in the town called Mussoorie
A wave had risen
Shaking the foundations of Britain’s Empire
The kind of wave that would seem to him
Just the folly of that crazy naked fakir of
India’s national struggle
And Sir Winston knew this too that
In India some women who
Worshipped that same naked fakir as a father
Had laid down one day in the town of Mussoorie
In rows in the road and prevented the units
Of soldiers of the British Empire from going further
And among them had been some women who
Heavy with child could have given birth at any moment
Therefore exactly for this reason I
Went to Hyde Park Gate as soon as
I reached London
Stood in front of Sir Winston’s shut house
Bowed respectfully, then spoke out loudly
‘You, Sir Winston, knew my mother
Pregnant in her eighth month
Having received my father’s blessing
She too laid down in
That road in Mussoorie
From where the army units had to return –
I am the son born from that mother’s womb
And Satyendra is my name
And I have come to tell you
That I have now arrived in England.’

Copyright © 2006 by Satyendra Srivastava. Reprinted from Sir Winston Churchill Knew My Mother (Ambit Books 2006) by permission of the poet. Appeared in the anthology After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, in the chapter Recovery from Exile.

Satyendra Srivastava was born in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, India. He studied at the University of Poona from 1953-57, and the University of London from 1962-77, receiving his Ph.D. in history in 1978. He lectured in Indian Studies at the University of Toronto from 1968-71 and at the University of Cambridge from 1980-2003. With many published collections of poetry in Hindi, as well as plays for the stage and radio, he has also been a columnist for various Indian Publications. He writes in both Hindi and English. He has traveled widely to read his poems: from the U.S., Japan, and Russia to South Africa, Israel, and Egypt, among many other nations. His collections of poetry published in English are Talking Sanskrit to Fallen Leaves (Peepal Tree Press 1995), Between Thoughts (Samvad 1998), Another Silence (Samvad 2003), and Sir Winston Churchill Knew My Mother (Ambit Books 2006) from which three poems were reprinted in the anthology After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events. He has received several awards for his writing. He lives in London and Cambridge and frequently travels back to India.

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An Interview with Satyendra Srivastava

How did you come to write “Sir Winston Churchill Knew My Mother”?

This is a political poem. My mother was very politically conscious and a great follower of Mahatma Gandhi. Early on she became involved in demonstrations against the British Government in India during the country’s Independence struggle. The poem portrays a lady who, on one hand, was a very traditional Hindu wife and mother, but, on the other hand, was also proud of her beliefs and anxious to take part in her country’s fight. In the poem, Sir Winston Churchill becomes a symbol of Imperialist Britain. Like millions of people, I respect Churchill’s stand against fascism but, needless to say, totally abhor the ideal of imperialism he espoused. The poem reflects the plurality of feelings the man evokes in me and in many Indians of my generation.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this/these poems come to life?
To go through such deep feeling, where even all suffering and pain becomes academic, but poetry absorbs all the suffering. As for me, poetry is a unique medium talking directly to anyone—heart to heart, and allowing one to share and invoke view and feeling, especially the deep feeling which is always with me in the presence of my memories. It comes alive even politically, as is the point with “Sir Winston Churchill Knew My Mother.”

What are you doing these days?

Traveling is my passion. Visiting different countries and meeting people then listening to their poetry and reacting to them and reading my own poetry to them is my happiness. I still keep in touch with my Cambridge University students and socialize with them and sometimes help in their research. I am presently working on a new book which will include poetry and prose pieces depicting my recollections of the many people and cultures I have absorbed since coming to Britain in 1958 and in the course of my world-wide travels.

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Monday, February 11, 2013

After Shocks Poet Stellasue Lee
Conducting Workshop in Michigan Feb. 16



An Intimate Writer’s Workshop with Pulitzer Prize nominee Stellasue Lee and Cheri L.R. Taylor.

Saturday, February 16, 2013, 9:00am - 7:30pm

Royal Oak, Michigan (Location details will be sent upon registration). This workshop is sponsored by Blushing Sky Writing Services. You may register at Blushing Sky Workshop Registration

Schedule for the workshop:

9 A.M. Breakfast, Introductions

10 A.M. Stellasue Lee: Speaking in Tongues, a crash course in how to create individual and distinct personalities on the page by giving each voice its own energy. Both the male and female muses have decisive character traits. Find out how easy it is to make them shine in their own spotlight.

11:45 A.M. Cheri L. R. Taylor: Icons and Images; In this workshop, you will explore common images and their (often cliche’d meanings). You’ll never see these symbols the same way again.

1:15 P.M. Lunch and Book Signing

2:30 P.M. Stellasue Lee: Pathway to the Unconscious, a process by which you can pass through the doorway to your unconscious mind and bring to light what you really think. We are after all, our own actors, stage-manages, directors, and ticket-takers in life. We can change the plot anytime we wish by looking at what matters.

4:15 PM Cheri L. R. Taylor: Indulging the Senses: In this workshop you will explore one of the senses in a journey of descriptive fascination.

6 P.M. Wine & Cheese, Reading Circle.

Stellasue Lee's work is published in numerous literary journals. Two of her books have been entrants for the Pulitzer Prize, Firecracker Red, a powerful collection of poems set squarely in the earth, and Crossing The Double Yellow Line, a journey of sharp turns and hair-pin curves. Her work has appeared in three more volumes, After I Fall, a collection of four Los Angeles poets, Over To You, an exchange of poems with David Widup, and 13 Los Angeles Poets, the ONTHEBUS Poets Series Number One. (Bombshelter Press.) Dr. Lee received her Ph.D. from Honolulu University. Now Editor Emeritus at RATTLE, a literary journal, she works privately with students all over the US. Stellasue was born in the year of the dragon.

If you'd like updates on the weekly postings to this blog, please LIKE the Facebook page at Poetry of Recovery's Facebook page.

A Poem by Stellasue Lee

While Setting the Table

Daydreams are a form of reality, someone told me once, a separate
dimension where fiction and fact blend like eggs and sugar beaten

into a sunny concoction, grainy in substance with sticky qualities.
Maybe it was my daughter, as she whipped heavy cream by hand,

or rolled a lemon pepper pasta she hand-crafted and cut into wide
strips, then served so happily with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.

I breathe in this scene, call family to the table where we all can sit
gladly, waiting for the door from her kitchen to open, and wearing

my red-checked apron, she will appear offering her latest creation.
I won’t tell anyone this is only a dream. I don’t even want to think

about the accident. From her kitchen, some sweet melody I can’t
recognize, will float around the dining room—so different from

the rhythmic beat, beat, beat of one lone drummer as we entered
a garden where we gathered to scatter her ashes among vibrant roses.

Interview With Stellasue Lee

How did you come to write “While Setting the Table”?

It was around Thanksgiving. I had been thinking about a previous Thanksgiving at my daughter’s house, how much she loved to cook, how much pride she took in growing her own herbs and vegetable. Everything was from scratch. And how beautifully it had been presented. I didn’t know I was going to write about her death, or that experience in her home, or how beautiful her auburn hair looked with just a puff of flour at her left temple. Oh, but that’s for another poem, isn’t it.

I always start the way I teach my students, “show up to a blank piece of paper with nothing on your mind and start where you are, describe what you see until you come to a line that takes you outside of the room.” I had been reading an article on String Theory… the book was just to the right of my chair, and so, seeing that book, it made me think where I had heard about String Theory before, and someone told me that daydreams are a form of reality… someone I believed and trusted, and I thought it must have been my daughter.

How did writing this poem affect your recovery?

Every poem I write is a clue into who I am. I’m a mystery, maybe most of all to myself. I’m an introvert, so it’s really difficult for me to articulate what’s going on in my head. The thoughts just keep rolling around in there until I’m able to capture them in a physical form, and in this case, it’s most often in the form of a poem. It’s always a surprise. I write something and say, “Now, where did that come from?” And the things that just pop out… sometimes they are funny, sometimes they are just wrong. That’s when I think I must have heard that from my mother.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this poem come to life?

For me, it’s about being present. It’s important to make time in my daily schedule to show up to the page. Writers write. I’m not saying it’s easy, but necessary, and it’s so essential to be open, not to think “Oh, this is a good subject for a poem,” or “I need to write about…,” Discipline, process, whatever you wish to call it, is key. Master cellist Pablo Casals told an interviewer why, at age 90, he still practiced every day, "Because I think I'm getting better." Had I not made the time, showed up to the page, and started where I was, this poem would never exist.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

I think Raymond Carver is underrated. I was fortunate enough to have picked up a copy of Ultra Marine. I read it cover to cover, every poem, simply fascinated with his ability to be present. I couldn’t wait to get his next book Where Water Comes Together With Other Water. During the reading of that book, Carver died. 1989, his last book came out, A New Path To The Waterfall. I was lucky enough to read those three books in order, and saw what I thought was the growth of a writer. Since, his collected works have been released, All of Us, but in the early three volumes, I fell in love with this writer and his work showed me what it means to be present, live in the NOW, write, and to be unafraid.

With my students, I read their work (some of my students have been in their 90’s,) and marvel at such brilliant ability. I started a small publishing company to help them get their work out. Maybe I’m more judgmental than a larger publishing company would be, but these writers measure up. Jennie Linthorst has studied with me off and on for ten years. I just did a book for her called Autism Disrupted… a mother’s journey of hope in poetry. She’s doing readings around the country and is teaching workshops in healing poetry. Bob Buchanan will soon have a book out titled Beyond the Wall, what a wonderful writer! Most of my students go on to publish in literary journals. They are doing such wonderful work.

Of course, there are the well known. I like to pretend that if I got stranded on a desert island, there are 10 books I would need to survive: Ray Caver’s All of Us, Gerald Stern’s This Time, David Lee’s My Town, Philip Levine’s oh, anything by Levine, just anything at all, Stephen Dobyns, Velocities, James Dickey’s Poems, 1957-1967, Maxine Kumin’s Still To Mow, Yusef Komunyakaa,’s Neon Vernacular…. And, and I’d cheat too, somehow take more then ten, Szymborska, C.K. Williams, O’Hare, Neruda….. the list goes on and on. People who walk into my home, they always have a sharp intake of breath when they see my bookcase. It’s 10 ft. tall, and 15 ft. wide.

What are you working on now?

I did my last chapbook in 1996, Morning Comes With Its Bandages Of Light. I don’t remember how I came up with that title, but it’s a good one, I think. I have been encouraged by many people to put a body of work together from my father poems. I spent months agonizing over it. I finally got about 22 poems together. I’m working on a chapbook, 26 copies, numbered A through Z, plus 4 artist proofs. They are going to be printed on handmade paper, silkscreen cover and hand sewn. The title is Our Father, which since I have a brother, a simply marvelous brother, I thought that fitting. One of the two poems in Our Father was accepted for After Shocks. He returned from WWII with PTSD, and was riddled with survivors’ guilt. Imagine! A very young and artistic boy…I keep thinking of something he told me, “You live your heaven and hell right her on earth Kid. Better pay attention to the details.” So, to better pay attention to the details, I became a poet.

If you'd like updates on the weekly postings to this blog, please LIKE the Facebook page at Poetry of Recovery's Facebook page.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

"Change of Season" by Stellasue Lee

I’ve not wanted to leave the house lately.
I’ve been content as grass growing,
wild with color
and deeply rooted
as an old tree with new growth for spring.

I long for nothing—
dream of just where I am,
worry over the indoor plants,
and the camellias coloring the front porch,
the roses gathering strength from winter.

Oh, did I mention the coyote
walking down the middle of the road
at four in the afternoon yesterday?
And that I woke to rain today?
Did I tell you that I put a log in the fireplace

and when the embers turned bright orange,
I added all the court papers,
all but the final decree,
and watched as the whole thing went up?
They burned bright as a sunny day.


Reprinted from After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events by permission of the poet. Copyright © 2008 by Stellasue Lee. “Change of Season” appeared in the After Shocks chapter Recovery from Divorce.

If you'd like updates on the weekly postings to this blog, please LIKE the Facebook page at Poetry of Recovery's Facebook page.

Interview With Stellasue Lee

How did you come to write “Change of Season”?

Seventeen years is a long time to be married to an undiagnosed, unmediated bipolar. I could go out to weed the roses for an hour, let’s say, and come back to find my husband manic, when earlier he had been calmly working on his computer. I think after the divorce, I became very attentive to minuscule things: the red in my upholstered chairs that I had never noticed, shadows cast on the walls by a tree, how the wood grain in my desk ran, everyday details. I had time to think, and I grew to trust the calm atmosphere, to let the pen take me wherever it wanted, and I loved that feeling of saneness. I woke each morning knowing I didn’t have to take the emotional temperature of anyone. It was heaven.

I always start the way I teach my students, “…show up to a blank piece of paper with nothing on your mind and write. Start where you are, describe what you see until you come to a line that takes you outside the room.” It was raining and grey mist made the room soft. I wasn’t really awake yet and I felt happy, truly peaceful. It was a strange and wonderful feeling.

How did writing “Change of Season” affect your recovery?

Every poem I write is a clue into who I am. I’m a mystery, maybe most of all to myself. I’m an introvert, so it’s really difficult for me to articulate what’s going on in my head. The thoughts just keep rolling around in there until I’m able to capture them in a physical form, and in this case, it’s most often in the form of a poem. It’s always a surprise. I write something and say, “Now, where did that come from?” And the things that just pop out… sometimes they are funny, sometimes they are just wrong. That’s when I think I must have heard that from my mother.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this poem come to life?

For me, it’s about being present. It’s important to make time in my daily schedule to show up to the page. Writers write. I’m not saying it’s easy, but necessary, and it’s so essential to be open, not to think “Oh, this is a good subject for a poem,” or “I need to write about…,” Discipline, process, whatever you wish to call it, is key. Master cellist Pablo Casals told an interviewer why, at age 90, he still practiced every day, "Because I think I'm getting better." Had I not made the time, showed up to the page, and started where I was, this poem would never exist.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

I think Raymond Carver is underrated. I was fortunate enough to have picked up a copy of Ultra Marine. I read it cover to cover, every poem, simply fascinated with his ability to be present. I couldn’t wait to get his next book Where Water Comes Together With Other Water. During the reading of that book, Carver died. 1989, his last book came out, A New Path To The Waterfall. I was lucky enough to read those three books in order, and saw what I thought was the growth of a writer. Since, his collected works have been released, All of Us, but in the early three volumes, I fell in love with this writer and his work showed me what it means to be present, live in the NOW, write, and to be unafraid.

With my students, I read their work (some of my students have been in their 90’s,) and marvel at such brilliant ability. I started a small publishing company to help them get their work out. Maybe I’m more judgmental than a larger publishing company would be, but these writers measure up. Jennie Linthorst has studied with me off and on for ten years. I just did a book for her called Autism Disrupted… a mother’s journey of hope in poetry. She’s doing readings around the country and is teaching workshops in healing poetry. Bob Buchanan will soon have a book out titled Beyond the Wall, what a wonderful writer! Most of my students go on to publish in literary journals. They are doing such wonderful work.

Of course, there are the well known. I like to pretend that if I got stranded on a desert island, there are 10 books I would need to survive: Ray Caver’s All of Us, Gerald Stern’s This Time, David Lee’s My Town, Philip Levine’s oh, anything by Levine, just anything at all, Stephen Dobyns, Velocities, James Dickey’s Poems, 1957-1967, Maxine Kumin’s Still To Mow, Yusef Komunyakaa,’s Neon Vernacular…. And, and I’d cheat too, somehow take more then ten, Szymborska, C.K. Williams, O’Hare, Neruda….. the list goes on and on. People who walk into my home, they always have a sharp intake of breath when they see my bookcase. It’s 10 ft. tall, and 15 ft. wide.

What are you working on now?

I did my last chapbook in 1996, Morning Comes With Its Bandages Of Light. I don’t remember how I came up with that title, but it’s a good one, I think. I have been encouraged by many people to put a body of work together from my father poems. I spent months agonizing over it. I finally got about 22 poems together. I’m working on a chapbook, 26 copies, numbered A through Z, plus 4 artist proofs. They are going to be printed on handmade paper, silkscreen cover and hand sewn. The title is Our Father, which since I have a brother, a simply marvelous brother, I thought that fitting. One of the two poems in Our Father was accepted for After Shocks. He returned from WWII with PTSD, and was riddled with survivors’ guilt. Imagine! A very young and artistic boy…I keep thinking of something he told me, “You live your heaven and hell right her on earth Kid. Better pay attention to the details.” So, to better pay attention to the details, I became a poet.

Stellasue Lee's work is published in numerous literary journals. Two of her books have been entrants for the Pulitzer Prize, Firecracker Red, a powerful collection of poems set squarely in the earth, and Crossing The Double Yellow Line, a journey of sharp turns and hair-pin curves. Her work has appeared in three more volumes, After I Fall, a collection of four Los Angeles poets, Over To You, an exchange of poems with David Widup, and 13 Los Angeles Poets, the ONTHEBUS Poets Series Number One (Bombshelter Press). Dr. Lee received her Ph.D. from Honolulu University. Now Editor Emeritus at RATTLE, a literary journal, she works privately with students all over the US. Stellasue was born in the year of the dragon.

If you'd like updates on the weekly postings to this blog, please LIKE the Facebook page at Poetry of Recovery's Facebook page.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

After Shocks poet Rachel Tzvia Back
in U.S. Lecture, Reading Series This Month

Rachel Tzvia Back, who lives in Galilee, will deliver lectures and readings in several cities in the U.S. this month under the title “On Language, Lies, and Truth-telling: An Israeli Poet’s Perspective.” She will be reading from all of her collections, including her most recent: A Messenger Comes from Singing Horse Press

Her earlier collections are Azimuth (Sheep Meadow, 2001), The Buffalo Poems (Duration Press, 2003),and On Ruins & Return: Poems 1999-2005 (Shearsman Boks, 2007). Three of her poems appeared in After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events

Ms. Back will deliver her lecture and reading in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Wednesday, Feb. 13, at 7:00PM at Temple Kol Ami, 15030 N 64th St., Scottsdale, AZ 85254. There is no charge.

Ms. Back will also deliver her lecture and reading at The University of Miami, Tuesday, February 19, with a reception at 7:00 PM, lecture and reading at 7:30 PM, both at the Wesley Gallery, 1210 Stanford Drive (across from Lowe Art Museum), Miami, Florida. The lecture and reading are presented by The Department of English and The Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies.

A sample poem from A Messenger Comes by Rachel Tzvia Back

Lamentation

          (for my father, on his dying)

(1)

In worded a world
how broken
from beginning:

sunburst and blossoms all
subterfuges
of creation ruses

of beauty –
fragrant thicket no less
complicit:

we exist
in a shattered vessel
shards at our bare feet –

Someone’s mother cries out
Stand still or
you’ll get hurt
– and

you try hard in the slivered
moment
not to move.

(2)

Day asks: What does it matter
putting this anticipated
loss

on the page our
un-readiness
for imagined emptiness

of after –
why
direct half-

worded sorrow to tell
his tale or
your own

inked in another – it's
just another
loss what

does it matter
it has always been
already

shattered –
Day asks
then asks again.

(3)

Because what
can be said?
In the end

the spoken stands
with bare spindly arms
around

its unspoken
brother what
fear

fastens
with tight knots to
your ravaged throat so

what you do
speak is always
poor and pale

shadows
of what
you do not.

(4)

You are dying.

But you do not say so
we do not say –
together

in steadfast
not-saying
alone

the winds orbit
echoing inner chambers where we
linger in

your researching
options thick
folders of studies

long letters to the scattered
family reports
of shifting numbers

platelets and neutrophiles
knotted
defiance of

your fall.

Reprinted from A Messenger Comes by permission of Singing Horse Press and Rachel Tzvia Back. Copyright 2012 by Rachel Tzvia Back.

Here’s one of Rachel Tzvia Back’s poems from After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events :

(their sons my sons) by Rachel Tzvia Back

Lost limbs again
         this time in a strawberry field

Early morning January sun rises
         gently talks softly to yesterday’s
                 rain lingering still at field’s edge

where perfect strawberries are ready for eating
         first day of the feast festival of the sacrifice
                 Ishmael taken to the hilltop Issac carried away

This time it is mother Maryam who does not know
         the boys her boys woke early to a school-less day
                 they are racing now through the strawberry field

The red fruit is full sweet with dew and dawn is
         collecting night’s blankets day is waiting to spread her
                 arms around us all in the fields and the boys cannot

say how or from where there was no sign a bomb would fall
         in the early morning family field the boys do not know
                 their legs are bleeding their bodies lie still their

limbs are scattered they are half-boys and dead boys
         none of them know how later before the funerals after
                 the hospital Maryam will return to the charred and
                                                                                             beautiful

bleeding strawberry field
         to gather in her scarf scattered flowers
                                                                     and flesh

Reprinted from On Ruins and Return: Poems 1995-2005 by permission of Rachel Tzvia Back. Copyright © 2007 by Rachel Tzvia Back.

An Interview with Rachel Tzvia Back

How did you come to write this poem?

All three of my poems in the After Shocks anthology – "Their sons, my sons," "When we no longer care" and "What has anchored us here" – were written in the first years of the Second Intifadah (uprising) in Israel and Palestine. My family and I had just moved to the Galilee, after living for years in the Jerusalem area, and until the intifadah erupted, there had been a feeling of hope, of the possibility of a new era in our very troubled region. In October 2000, the second round of violence began – fierce protest against the continuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. I was then a mother to three very young children, and at every moment I viewed and lived the violence that ensued – in Palestinian and Israeli territories alike –through the prism of young motherhood. This was, of course, the prism of my children's overwhelming vulnerability – indeed, all children's vulnerability. As the death ledgers began filling up with the names of children literally caught in the cross-fire, my poetry and heart became obsessed with the little ones who were living, and too-often tragically dying, in this bloody land.

The three poems all emanated from very specific moments in those years of violence – moments reported in the news ("Their sons, my sons"), moments of deaths that were practically on my doorstep (("What has anchored us here"), ), and moments of terrible clarity of how the violence had changed and hardened me too ("When we no longer care").

How did writing these poems affect your recovery?

The word "recovery" is a hard one for me to connect to, so I answer this question with some hesitation. "Recovery" – such as it is – resides for me in telling the truth, my truth, and of feeling that perhaps my poetry speaks also for those who cannot. Recovery is in daring to speak at all. Recovery has continued for me in reading these poems at various venues, in Israel and the US, in an effort to reach others, in an ongoing desire and commitment to being a voice of dissent. Moments of recovery have presented themselves when I have felt my poems impact on another, when my poems have moved another's heart toward reconciliation and compassion.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped these poems come to life?

The poems start, almost inevitably, from a single image or single sentence. The line "When we no longer care", for example, was reverberating through me in the summer of 2001 – I would hear it as I drove to work and back, afraid to turn on the news and hear of the next round of Israeli bombings in the territories, or the news of another Palestinian suicide bomber in Israel. The single image or line simmers and simmers (to borrow from Whitman), until it boils over. As for the rest of the process, I'm afraid I can't say much – I have a type of black-out regarding the exact process of writing most of my poems. I can't really remember how it happens.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

Emily Dickinson is always my favorite, my poetic buoy in the vast sea. And she is always new to me… Another poet who is new to me and whose work I've been reading recently is Antonio Machado – I've been reading his poems in Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Willis Barnstone, translator). And I've been reading a great deal of the Hebrew poet Tuvia Ruebner whose work I'm translating now – he's not new to me, but my current level of engagement with him is new. He's a wonder, well worth reading (new translations of his work can be found at http://exchanges.uiowa.edu/four-poems/).

What are you working on now?

I’ve just sent off my new collection, which has just been released by From Singing Horse Press
http://www.singinghorsepress.com (edited by the wonderful Paul Naylor). The collection is called From A Messenger Comes . The title is lifted from a passage I read in Leon Weiseltier's seminal scholarly work Kaddish – on the history and evolution of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning. The extract – which is my new book's epigraph – goes as follows:

     A messenger comes to the mourner's house. "Come," says the messenger,      “you are needed."      "I cannot come," says the mourner, "my spirit is broken."      "That is why you are needed," says the messenger…

The book is a collection of elegies for my sister and my father. It is very much a book of a broken spirit.

Rachel Tzvia Back – poet, translator and professor of literature – lives in the Galilee, where her great, great, great grandfather settled in the 1830s. Her poetry collections include Azimuth (Sheep Meadow, 2001), The Buffalo Poems (Duration Press, 2003), On Ruins & Return: Poems 1999-2005 (Shearsman Boks, 2007), and A Messenger Comes (Singing Horse Press, 2012). Ms. Back's translations of the poetry of pre-eminent Hebrew poet Lea Goldberg, published in Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama (Toby Press 2005) represent the most extensive selection of Goldberg's poetry in English and were awarded a 2005 PEN Translation Award. Back has translated into English poetry and prose other significant Hebrew writers, including Dahlia Ravikovitch, Tuvia Reubner, Hamutal Bar Yosef, and Haviva Pedaya. Ms. Back is the editor and primary translator of the English version of the anthology With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry (SUNY Press, Excelsior Editions, 2009) – a collection named "haunting" and "historic" by American poet Adrienne Rich. Ms. Back’s poems have been anthologized in After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events . A Messenger Comes
by Rachel Tzvia Back

From Singing Horse Press
http://www.singinghorsepress.com
5251 Quaker Hill Lane
San Diego, 92130

Sunday, February 3, 2013

The Children's War and Other Poems
by Shaindel Beers

Shaindel Beers’ second collection, The Children's War and Other Poems, will be released February 15 from Salt Publishing. Three ekphrastic poems from the collection appear below, along with the children's artwork from which the poems derive and also praise from Marilyn Kallet and Okla Elliot.

About The Children’s War and Other Poems

In the first half of The Children’s War and Other Poems, Shaindel Beers views artwork by child survivors of war, and she creates the voices of the children, their families, and the humanitarian aid workers sent to help them. From there, the book opens out into an exploration of war at home and the war within ourselves, exploring violence in mythology, domestic violence, and wars that occur, sometimes, within our own bodies. The collection acts as a survival guide, showing that hope exists even in the darkest of places and that perhaps poetry may be a key to healing.

Ms. Beers is running a promotion on Facebook between now and February 15. For every 50 "Likes" on her Facebook author page, Ms. Beers will give away a signed copy. All you have to do to be entered in the drawing is click "Like" at Shaindel’s Facebook page. You may also order The Children’s War and Other Poems at Salt Publishing

Praise for The Children’s War and Other Poems

Shaindel Beers’ The Children’s War and Other Poems is a poetry survival kit. It offers beauty and balance, provides necessary news of how to survive the war against innocence, how to start over — from a child’s point of view, and from a woman’s. The poems lend perspective that is both global and intimate. The children’s war, as we keep finding out, goes on not just in alien lands. It is the war at home. Yet voice is strength, too, and a marvelous poem like “Azure” is the antidote, a way of seeing hope, as if for the first time.

—Marilyn Kallet, author of The Love That Moves Me, Director Of The Creative Writing Program, University Of Tennessee.

What Shaindel Beers offers us in this fine collection is a poetic humanizing and individualizing of the impersonal and ubiquitous violence that saturates the contemporary world. From a young Chechen girl who takes joy in the happiness she causes other passengers on the bus to a child drawing the cat she could not protect in the attack that killed her entire family, these poems show us unexpected reprieves from suffering alongside unfathomable new depths of horror. Given the ekphrastic nature of Beers’ project, we also feel something of the war journalist’s documentation in addition to the poetic humanizing effect. The combination is emotional and heady stuff. These poems are rare in that they have an aesthetic, emotional, and political impact in equal measure. You would do well to read them many times.

—Okla Elliott, author of From the Crooked Timber

Three Poems From The Children's War and Other Poems

From an Eight-year-old Darfurian Girl’s Drawing

The tank, bigger than the hut, fires
and all of the colors explode from the hut.
Why is this man green?
Because he is from the tank.
Why is this woman red?
Because she was shot in the face.
And why aren’t you colored in?
Because it is like I wasn’t even there.


After a 13-year-old Darfurian Boy’s Drawing

Women flee from their houses as smoke rises
like terrible angels and men in green herd them
like cattle. What are the men doing to the women?
Forcing them to be wives. Their houses are gone.
Yes, when you are thirteen,
to be a wife is having a house, a man.
But he is right; the women with the soldiers
are warm and brown; their hair flies around them
as they run. The women who will not be wives
are outlines, uncolored, upside down
in the foreground.

Painting by Azerbaijan War Survivor Sasha Morohov, age 9

The Red Cross nurse is smiling and beautiful.
The way I remember my mother in dreams.
The nurse is beautiful because she is not from here.
Nothing here is beautiful any more. Even the sun is sad.
So I did not paint it in the picture. Only its three rays
peek out. Two golden like the sand of Azerbaijan.
One red, like the nurse’s lips. Like the cross on her hat.
Her satchel. The sun’s rays reach out to touch her. Only her.
The sun does not even see me here, under it, crying.

Order The Children’s War and Other Poems
at Salt Publishing


Interview with Shaindel Beers

How did you come to write these poems and this collection?

The impetus for this collection was a Slate.com article called “The Art of War” by Dr. Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault about artwork done by children in Darfur. The article delved a bit into the history of art therapy being used for children during war-time, and I was instantly hooked. I felt compelled to write these poems. Soon, I was not only writing poems about children’s artwork in Darfur but from WWI, the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, and many other wars and atrocities that have taken place since then. The images are so powerful, and it was fascinating to read the children’s accounts and those of the counselors and aid workers who were trying to get the children to tell their stories and heal through art.

How did writing these poems affect your recovery?

I feel like the artwork is part of the recovery process for these children, and I’m trying to help bring it to a larger audience, or maybe just a different audience. Some younger readers might not even know about some of these conflicts, so if they feel compelled to look up background information, they might get a history lesson. I’m a big believer in the adage that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

War also disproportionately affects women and children, and I open the book with the quote by E.M. Forster, “I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.” I know it’s naïve to hope that a single book of poetry can make a difference, but I hope that someone reads it and thinks about war from the children’s perspective – they are the least powerful, and yet the ones left the most bereft by war. If just one person thinks differently, then I will feel like I did important work in writing this book.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped these poems/this collection come to life?

This is the first project I can say I really became obsessed with. I looked at archives of artwork online and ordered books of children’s artwork and really tried to spend a lot of time with these pictures and with the stories of the children. When I felt like I wasn’t delving deeply enough, I took online writing workshops that gave me daily prompts and then directed my prompts to this project. I really wanted to make myself get these poems on the page and out there. I first started the project in 2008, and I’ve done a lot of twists and turns on the way, but the book is finally here.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

Richard Jackson was a huge influence on my work as far as poets I personally worked with as a student. I consider Anne Sexton and Eavan Boland my feminist forbearers, in a sense. There are so many great poets out there now, and I find a lot of them by being an editor and publishing them. Poets I’ve published fairly recently whose work I want to find more of and encourage others to find more of are Temple Cone, Anne Barngrover, Ronda Broatch, Hannah Stephenson, Karina Borowicz, Amy Groshek, and Rebecca Lehmann.


Shaindel Beers’ poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, in Eastern Oregon’s high desert. A Brief History of Time, her first full-length poetry collection, was released by Salt Publishing in 2009. She serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary Magazine. Find her online at Shaindel’s web page. She lives in Pendleton, Oregon, with her partner Jared and their son Liam.

Order The Children’s War and Other Poems
at Salt Publishing