O&s April 2009

VOLUME 2 ISSUE 2 APRIL 2009

O&S

Lane Timothy Michelle McEwen Panika M. C. Dillon Beth Edwards Kristy Gordon Christopher Arigo Jeff Danley Chin-Cheng Hung Alex Rodriguez Eileen R. Tabios Rachel Constantine Karen Hollingsworth Sean Patrick Hill Jane Varley

CONTENTS

90 Miles to Nashville oil on canvas 48” x 36”

Cover Artist

Lane Timothy page

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Alley Cat oil on canvas 60” x 48”

Poet

Michelle McEwen page

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POETS & ARTISTS 007 008 018 038 042 052 084 090 093 098 104 124

Panika M. C. Dillon Beth Edwards Kristy Gordon Christopher Arigo Jeff Danley Chin-Cheng Hung Alex Rodriguez Eileen R. Tabios Karen Hollingsworth Sean Patrick Hill Jane Varley Rachel Constantine

interviews

014

Claudia Emerson

art reviews

035 102

José Parra Wade Reynolds

poetry reviews

Publisher / E.I.C. DIDI MENENDEZ Creative Director I. M. BESS Poetry Editors DAVID KRUMP WILLIAM STOBB Interviewer GRACE CAVALIERI Reviewers STEVE HALLE GRADY HARP MELISSA McEWEN MICHAEL PARKER

005

Sandra Simonds

Columnists DAVID CADDY GRACE CAVALIERI

081 110

Kristy Odelius

Short Story Contributor KIRK CURNUTT

131

Rebecca Foust

A Collection of Favorites, 2008

short story

024

Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling

miporadio

048

Juliet Cook

Copyright reverts back to contributors upon publication. O&S requests first publisher rights of poems published in future reprints of books, anthologies, website publications, podcasts, radio, etc. This issue is also available for a limited time as a free download from the O&S website: www.poetsandartists.com. Print copies available at www.amazon.com. For submission guidelines and further information on O & S, please stop by www.poetsandartists.com

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Wonderfully Wild Woman Writes Winsome Wisdom:

WARSAW BIKINI by Sandra Simonds

Bloof Books, 2008

Review By GRADY HARP Sandra Simonds explodes on the scene as a poet who has the brazen audacity to describe the world as she really sees it! Not only are her topics drawn from her own occasionally too private experiences/fantasies, but she also has the courage to delve into areas most poets avoid – yelling secrets of others with one of the richest and most colorful vocabularies imaginable. She seems to delight in poking fun at every available thought others take too seriously, and the result of all this is poetry that not only sings, but also explodes like a crackling sky of fireworks and bursting stars. I AM SMALL but my life is enormous. Huge as angels. Huge as zookeeper’s heart. Who knows how large this zoo is when you take into account all the cages - arterial strings, penises nipples, sweat glands, furs, aortas, pins. Let’s get hitched in the roomy cage of the latest newly extinct species. He’s gone. There’s room. In this country they make lists (in hieroglyphics) of all the unions that will ever take place. There’s no way out of this one, Sam. That’s what they call a “nation.” That’s what they ask the syringe and turkey baster holding zookeeper

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to sedate the African elephants and artificially inseminate the black and white, blasé pandas. In other poems such as THE ACADEMY OF THE FUTURE: SCENARIOS AND MODELS she ingeniously mixes satire and raw humor together with some center target criticisms of education, the ‘Intelligentsia’, and wild fantasies. But beneath the brittle caustic veneer of this young medicine man of words lies a tender streak she attempts to shadow with humor, making the resultant poem more memorable. TOMORROW’S BRIGHT BRACELETS Winter lungs are white trees. Winter lungs are bare white trees. There are no ornaments because this isn’t Christmas. Put a silver ribbon in your hair. Put on all of your bright bracelets and walk out into the feathered snow. My eyes are pale like a crust of ice over a long river. What would the gift-givers say if they saw us now? What will they tell the world? And when you are home: Open all of the windows in your small house - take off all of your clothes, and then take off all of your underclothes and watch your flushed cheek turn gray in a mirror. Some of Simonds’ more powerful works are poems that address her childhood or her past experiences or whatever that arena is that feeds her writer’s imagination. YOU SHOULD PUT A NEIGHBORHOOD ON THAT recalls her school years including: ‘I’ve learned the way/ of the crosswalk, and Fran/ (the guard) who/ held the DO NOT CROSS sign./ Her face went puce/ her webbed/ feet never did finish/ her floral cross-stitch on which/ she sets the breakfast table/ to the sound of hornets’ acoustics/ across from the plant pumps/ so much Chevron fuel/ that half the town/ I fled, I fled, flowers/ in false cuttings.’ And with only this small taste of the feast Simonds produces page after page it is difficult to communicate the marksmanship of her verbal jabs and the extent of her at times glossolalia manner of writing. But communicate she does, and while it takes a poem or two to plug in to her unique style of expression, once there the reader won’t want to leave! Wonderfully Wild Woman Writes Winsome Wisdom

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Panika M.C.

Dillon Panika M. C. Dillon hails from Fairbanks, AK and Austin, TX. She received her MFA in creative-writing poetry from Sarah Lawrence College.

burn that muffle, that fog burned off the roads into my lungs. depressed breathing, it’s called. depressed breathing, it could be called. you’re sitting on my chest again, you’re sitting on my chest & the words, the words don’t come, or don’t come the way you want them to. you want them, too. I say, I can’t breath like this. I say, I can’t breathe, like this will take the weight off. take the weight off, I have no words. I for you, I have only the fog & roads of my lungs & that’s not enough. that’s just not enough.

Beth

Edwards

www.bethedwards.com

“I wish to depict human situations without being obligated to the logic and restrictions of the human form. I am using vintage dolls as stand-ins for people positioned in settings meant to evoke pleasure and joy. At times, these characters inhabit ideal interiors appointed with mid-century furniture and modernist art; in other pieces, they are relishing nature.”

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Beth Edwards was born in Decatur, Alabama in 1960. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art and her Master of Fine Arts from Indiana University. She has exhibited at the Gallery NAGA in Boston, the Clark Gallery in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the Leonard Tachmes Gallery in Miami, the Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee, the Plus One Plus Two Gallery in London and is represented by the David Lusk Gallery in Memphis. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including the Howard and Judith Tullman Collection in Chicago and the Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis. Her work appeared on the cover of New American Paintings in 2001 and again in 2004. She has taught at the University of Dayton and currently teaches at the University of Memphis. Which artist/photographer do you admire or has had the biggest influence on your work? The artist who has had the greatest influence upon my work is Edward Hopper. When I look at Hopper, I know I am looking at someone who has guided me profoundly at various points in my work. I feel a deep debt to his down to earth, American aesthetic. His iconic images are the result of hard work.Hopper is a kindred spirit. But the artist that I admire the most is definitely Matisse. I came to his work much later and it continues to grow for me in waysthat are hard to even describe. Matisse’s work is usually characterized as being about sensual beauty. The more deeply I engage with Matisse, the more I am struck by his work’s unconventional power – its rawness. His work has been one of the greatest revelations for me as an artist. How do you bring emotion across to a flat surface? Happiness is the emotion that I am interested in conveying. Happiness is obviously fleeting, occurs from a myriad of factors and is not credited with much significance. In my work, I have always been interested in the parts of life which are often overlooked, aspects of

life which are largely invisible. I am interested in making paintings that are literally in pursuit of that emotion through the images themselves. The characters exude joy and are visibly taking pleasure in their surroundings. I wish for the paintings to be pleasurable to make although there is obviously a lot of hard work required to make a painting. It is important for me to connect with the emotion in the making of the image – at least sporadically. And I wish for the viewer to feel deeply happy looking at the painting. Whose work would you acquire if you were a collector? I do collect art. Collecting art is an addiction. My husband and I have collected the work of Chris Uphues and Helen Beckman of New York, Jennifer Moses of Boston, Jean Koeller of Dayton, Ohio, Laurie Hogin of Chicago, and Adam Jaynes and Carlos Estrada-Vega of Los Angeles. I also have a passion for Japanese prints of the Edo period and have collected several of those. I regularly collect the work of current and former students. If money was not a consideration, I would collect the work of Amy Sillman, Stanley Whitney, Will Cotton and Lisa Yuskavage. I take immense pleasure in living with art that I

Q&A

learn from and enjoy on a daily basis.

How does your environment influence your work? It is impossible for one’s environment not to affect one’s work. Currently, I work in a studio that we built onto our home. It is a domestic setting and my work is about domestic environments. There is a direct relationship between the two. I have two walls of windows in my studio – my yard is very lush in the summer. My work is about finding pleasure in one’s circumstances. I live much more modestly than my characters, but I share their ability to appreciate their surroundings.

If you knew your time was up what would be the last image you would leave us with? I hope I am painting the kind of paintings that I would be if my time was up. I, like most artists, am interested in the development of artists’ work as they approach the end of their lives. Morandi’s last paintings almost evaporate. Bonnard’s last painting, “The Almond Tree”is a quiet and very humble final picture. I hope that I can retain some of my belief in the importance of humor, goofiness and sensual beauty at that point of soul searching and stock taking.

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Hot Dog! Beth Edwards

oil on canvas 32” x 38”

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Happy Day Beth Edwards

oil on canvas 32” x 38”

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Summer Beth Edwards

oil on canvas 42” x 60”

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Lucky Lad Beth Edwards

oil on canvas 40” x 60”

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Grace Notes: GRACE CAVALIERI INTERVIEWS CLAUDIA EMERSON

CLAUDIA EMERSON is a gifted and beloved teacher. She writes poems that are unequalled in American letters for their intricacies and intensity. Each book is a cauldron of power. She was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for the book, Late Wife: Poems (LSU Press, 2005,) the most personal and intimate of her works. Claudia is now appointed Poet Laureate of Virginia. Her newest collection, Figure Studies: Poems, was published in 2008 (LSU Press). She is also the author of the poetry collections Pharaoh, Pharaoh, and Pinion: An Elegy all volumes published in Dave Smith’s “Southern Messenger Poets” series. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, New England Review, and other journals. Among honors,Emerson is the Claudia Emerson photo credit: Barry Fitzgerald recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. She is professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

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GC: How does the Poet Laureate of Virginia dust the state with poetry consciousness? CE: As Poet Laureate, I have continued to do many of the things I did before the appointment—judge local poetry contests for the public library, for example, and mentor emerging poets. Since the appointment, I have received many more inviations to visit schools, book clubs, and writers’ groups. One of my favorite trips was to the Greenspring retirement community in Northern Virginia. The audience may have been retired—but they were not retiring; I found them wonderfully engaged and welcoming, very interested in hearing poetry and talking about it. I have also begun a website called Virginia is for Poetry, and my plan is to make it a gateway to poetry resources in the state.

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Virginia is very rich in poetry, with some of the best writing programs in the country as well as several stellar literary magazines and small presses, Shenandoah and Virginia Quarterly Review among them, and I have already put links to various programs and publications on the website as a beginning. GC: When you start a poem, what do you expect to happen? CE: I tend to think about a poem for a good long while before I write it, and I try not to “expect” anything for fear I’ll jinx it. I have to be ready and able to lose the kind of intellectual worrythat expectation connotes to me. But if everything goes well, I can expect a kind of loss of self in the writing, and I can also expect to be very compulsive about working on it until it’s right, or as good as I can make it!

Grace Notes Claudia Emerson

GC: Does each of your poems have a main event? CE: Not exactly. The poems can have a controlling metaphor as the center of gravity, but often the main event or the original subject is off to the side, or dealt with in another poem in a sequence, something I have been drawn to for much of my writing life. GC: If you were to write your memoir, what age would you choose to begin your journey? CE: I’d probably begin not with memory but with my birth narative, the story my mother tells me every year on my birthday—how I was born in an ice storm so severe even the doctor couldn’t get to the hosptial, etc. She takes great joy in the telling, and while I know it’s the work of the imagination, I see parts of the story as though I am remembering, and for

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some reason I see the scenes in black and white, probably because all my childhood photographs are black and white. GC: While writing, what do you reject from the poem? CE: At first, absolutely nothing. I am an obsessive brainstormer and note-taker; my process is very messy involving pages of notes handwritten, then more notes typed, then those printed out and scribbled over—all of this before I begin to commit to line and form. As I continue to write my way through the ideas, I will of course make choices— consider what to cut, how to better work the form. GC: How is your dignity of the rural world carved from the difficult/the hard lifestyle? CE: The early inspirations for my work

ORANGES & SARDINES

were firmly in the landscape of southside Virginia. Growing up, I saw plenty of people living lives defined by the land and the weather. I leanred that even when people live in prescribed circumstances, defined by class and gender, they try to live as best they can, finding meaning in the land and in family. (I have also been interested artistially with animal consciouness and continue to be fascinated by how we interact with other creatures, particularly in rural areas.) The rural life I grew up around has changeda great deal, though, and the small family farm is no longer central to the agricultural economy of southside Virginia. I hope that the changing ways we think about farming will bring back the importance of local agriculture there, and that the value of such farming will rise not just in terms of how much

Grace Notes Claudia Emerson

money people can make, but also in terms of how farming families are regarded in general. GC: What is the sweetest thing the writer surrenders? CE: When the writing is at its best, I surrender the worries of the ordinary, the every day, even though those very concerns are often at the core of the poem that’s taking me away. GC: What is a balanced poem? CE: I suppose the notion of balance would mean for me that the poem has all it seems to need--and in the right measures. GC: In the act of writing, what is reverence? What is chaos? CE: Reverence in writing lies in carefully measured language,

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even when the triggering subject is chaotic, since poetry is for me the highest ordering of langauge. Chaos would be to abandon meaning, or efforts at meaning, and I find particualry chaotic poetry written according to some theoretical fashion. GC: Have you ever had a poem burst into existence in spite of you? CE: I can’t say that a poem has ever “burst” into being for me, but I have had insistent ideas, obsessions that would not be ignored. GC: What wisdom traditions do you cherish? CE: Life wisdoms? Forgive mistakes made in love; don’t take offense when you know none was intended; don’t trust arrogance; never be bored. As for writing? I have a quote on my desk attributed

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to Rita Mae Brown: Never hope more than you work. While Frost warned that we can’t worry a poem into being, I do believe in discipline and dedicating as much time as I can to writing—by giving myself time alone to think, journal, make the messy drafts I mentioned earlier. GC: Is it true you were once a mail carrier in a rural world? What did you think as you traveled the roads? CE: I actually drove a rural route in a little red and white Chevy S10 with a sign strapped on the back—Caution, Frequent Stops US Mail—86 miles, two thirds of it dirt roads. (The route was so rural in fact, that my stops weren’t really all that frequent, sometimes two or three miles between boxes!) I was part time, though, so the rest of the week I worked in a small used

Grace Notes Claudia Emerson

bookshop. The combination of slow days in the shop with plenty to read switched up by long solitary days driving through the tired but beautiful landscape of Pittsylvania County inspired the first poems I wrote. I read a lot of poetry then that I had read as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, but I came backto Frost, Roethke, Williams, Bishop, Whitman, and Dickinson as an adult maturing into a life not very fulfilling, so the resonances were both fruitful and sobering. I began to write with a ferocity I haven’t known in the same way since, often a poem a day, and within a year and half, I had a portfolio that took me to the Unversity of North Carolina at Greensboro for an MFA I completed in 1991. I was 34 years old, and the thesis I wrote there became (after a lot of revision of course) my first book in 1997.

Kristy Gordon

Kristy

is an internationally exhibiting fine artist. Born in Nelson, British Columbia, she has earned numerous prestigious awards, including Third Prize at the Portrait Society of Canada International Portrait Competition; two Awards of Excellence from the Federation of Canadian Artists; Best of Show in the National Art Premier, Elmhurst, Illinois; and a Juror’s Choice Award from the Orillia Museum of Art and History. Kristy Gordon’s paintings hang in more than 400 collections worldwide, including the Government of Ontario Art Collection.

Gordon “I paint people in simple poses with strong, psychological evocations. I resist the temptation to idealize or romanticize. Instead I allow the pure truth of the subject to take visual form on the canvas.”

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Q&A

Which artist/photographer do you admire or has had the biggest influence on your work? Rembrandt. I can look at a Rembrandt painting again and again and each time see something new and inspiring.  It could be the lighting and the chiaroscuro or the textures and paint quality.  There are just so many things that I love about Rembrandt paintings.

as I go, selecting the most appealing position of things such as exact placement of hands and hair.  I find that I normally call it “done” and then continue to look at it from a distance, or using a mirror, and make a few final adjustments to it before it’s really finished.  Sometimes, I’ll also put it away for a week and then look at it with fresh eyes and add some final touches before calling it complete.

How do you feel about formal training? I think that getting the fundamentals in drawing and painting techniques is extremely important, and most often academies and ateliers are the best place to get that kind of training. Although I also think that accredited post-secondary art schooling can provide many other benefits, so both are useful.

How do you bring emotion across to a flat surface? First, I try to think about what I want to express with the painting, what I want to capture or say about the sitter. Perhaps an inner emotion or feeling, or it may be a more conceptual piece, then I select a pose, gesture and expression that embodies that theme.  Then, when I’m doing the painting, I’ll actually get into the mood that I want to convey in the piece. When we are in a certain mood, we naturally create brushstrokes and shapes that express that feeling, so this helps the treatment of the painting “feel” like the emotion that I want to express.

Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when creating art? Normally, I start with thumbnails or quick drawings to get a basic idea and composition, trying to think about what mood or concept I want to convey in the painting. Then I start to block it in with oil paint on the canvas, establishing the larger overall colour patterns. Generally I block in the light side and shadow side of the main forms, then work gradually more and more into the details, often finishing off with some glazes.  Since I work primarily from life, I will make adjustments to the pose and details

Which three other artists would you consider to be your contemporaries? Jeremy Lipking, Yuqi Wang and David Kassan.  I really enjoy the way each of them include themes in their work.  It is that combined with a beautifully painted work that has areas of tight rendering mixed with painterly expressive brushstrokes really impresses me.

Easter Sunday oil on panel 20” x 16”

Kristy Gordon

Graciela oil on panel 10” x 8”

Kristy Gordon

Woman and Mannequin oil on linen 28” x 22”

Kristy Gordon

Raven oil on panel 10” x 8”

Kristy Gordon

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Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling SHORT STORY BY KIRK CURNUTT

(Part One)

All her life Sis had been told to stop running around like a chicken with its head off, and now she was going to see for herself what that meant. It was her mother’s fault that at seven she’d yet to learn. Sis was old enough to work the teatcups in her father’s milk barn. She’d helped birth a foal and had once driven the tractor when a calf carcass had to be dragged through the pasture for disposal. She understood where venison and sausage came from and was never squeamish when she came across a putrefying squirrel or raccoon while playing at the creek. Yet even though Dorothea had grown up in the country, she was still a woman, and she believed in the gentler arts of dollmaking and appliqué and Theorem painting. Of all the facts of death on a farm, poultry butchering was one thing to which she’d never quite acclimated. “I know it’s silly,” Sis had overheard Dorothea tell Clinton, her

father, “but I want her to have a little innocence. A little girlishness. Just indulge me. It won’t cost us any to wait until she’s twelve. That seems the right age for a child to handle the chopping block.” To Sis’s disappointment, her father had agreed — though not, as he confided afterward to his daughter, because he necessarily shared Dorothea’s concern. “I just know enough not to run contrary to Ma,” Clinton explained. “It’s only five years, Sis. That’s a flash of time you’ll be too busy to ever even feel.” But five years was only two less than her age, and Sis didn’t believe anything was beyond her ken. Higher authorities apparently agreed. They’d intervened in the form of a sideshow attraction that rendered five years a moot point. Tonight Mike the Headless Chicken was coming to the Shelby County Fair, and nothing— not even a steep twenty-five-cent admission price—was going to stop Sis

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from being there when he took to the stage. In her father’s old bedroom in her grandmother’s house she toweled herself from a fresh bath. Once dry, she slipped into her underwear and sprinkled talcum on her chest. She was rubbing the powder into her belly when the door unexpectedly opened. The man she’d been told never to call Grandpa froze in the threshold, his eyes goggling like a horse’s. “Here’s your shoes,” he said, fixing his gaze to the ceiling. He set a pair of white Mary Janes on the uncarpeted floor. “Your grandma was saving these for Christmas, but the ground’s dry enough you can break them in tonight. No time to dillydally, though—I’m starting the car.” After the door closed, Sis could hear Horace’s voice over the thump of his heels. “You got to teach her to throw that bolt, Ethel. As much as my guts been hated around here, the last thing I need is her telling Clinton I caught her in nothing but her skivvies.” Sis didn’t wait for the rubbed powder to soften the pink speckles the hot bath had given her skin. The dress was as new as her shoes, but she was more excited about it. It was the first one she’d sewn on her own—mostly on her own, anyway. As long as she could remember she’d watched Dorothea work the treadle and bobbin on the Singer and now she was old enough to do it herself. Sis would’ve preferred her

Heavenly Shades Of Night Are Falling

first one be made of muslin, but Dorthea had said, No, no, you’ll have to work your way up to that and then to a finer fabric. A feedsack for now will do. So as Sis stepped into the handiwork her mother had helped her guide straight between the feed dogs and the throat plate she pretended the material wasn’t scratchy osnaburg. It was a pretty dress, anyway, with blue-shaded morning glories and lilacs for a pattern. There would be other girls at the fair whose dresses originally arrived at their parents’ farms bagging a hundred pounds of chicken meal or fertilizer. If anybody asked, Sis would claim hers was from a sugar sack. Because I’m so sweet, she’d say. From outside she heard the rumble of Horace’s twenty-year-old Ford coupe as he backed it from the barn. She grabbed her shoes and a hairbrush and raced through the house to the porch where her grandma waited. “You forgot your socks,” the old woman sighed. “That chicken won’t have nothing on you, will he? There’s a pair in the laundry basket. You ain’t forgot your money, too, have you?” She had, so when she ran back to the bedroom Sis made sure to take a breath and think if there was anything else she might not remember. Once in the black coupe she slipped her quarter into her right sock so she wouldn’t lose it. Getting the Mary Janes over her heels wasn’t easy. She was squeezed between her grandma

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and the man who wasn’t her grandpa, and whenever Horace shifted gears, his elbow inadvertently popped her right above the breadbasket. He didn’t seem to notice that; he was more concerned with how wide Sis had to spread her knees for the gearstick to make it to fourth. Ethel finally tucked the girl’s legs onto her own lap, sitting Sis sidesaddle. Even then, Horace’s bent arm whirled wildly at her. Ethel had to cup her free palm around the bend in Horace’s shirtsleeve to protect her grand-daughter. “Don’t get too disappointed if this Mike business turns out to be a fraud,” Horace said as they puttered along Blue Ridge Road. “There’s a reason you can’t yank the beard on a bearded lady at these sideshows. They’ve yet to make the glue that’ll hold a phony one in place.” Ethel answered for Sis: “I would think headlessness’d be far harder to rig up than a fake beard.” “Oh, I’ve done my checking up on this,” he insisted. “Charlie Hearns who’s on the fair board was in the other day for a trim. He didn’t want to spill any beans, but something about another man rasping clippers across your skull makes a fellow real chatty. According to Charlie, this can’t even be the original Mike the Headless Chicken, because that one would have to be thirteen years old, and it’s a rare chicken that’s gonna live a decade, much less a decade and Heavenly Shades Of Night Are Falling

some with no noggin.” “That doesn’t mean this Mike’s hiding his head,” Sis sniffed. “Just because he’s not the first one, that don’t mean he’s done with mirrors or nothin’.” Horace gave the impression of preferring to listen to himself instead of her. “You know how this whole monkey business started? Charlie told me all about it. One day a farmer in Colorado goes out to butcher a Wyandott rooster for dinner. He gives the critter an odd chop with the hatchet that takes off most of its bean. I say ‘most of’ because the chop misses the jugular and the brain stem, which is what controls a chicken’s reflexes. So this Mike is able to strut around with his own head under his wing, not even knowing his head is under his wing. As freeing as it might seem not to be plagued by selfconsciousness—which is the fall of man, if you ask me—it was a one in a million stroke what spared Mike from knowing his peculiar condition. I’m sure for however many dollars he made that Colorado farmer there’s been plenty of men decapitating their flocks in hopes of recreating that miracle lop. Like I said, it’s a one in a million stroke that not even the best surgeon in France could’ve given Louis the Sixteenth. It’ll take another million years for it to happen again.” Sis didn’t understand a word of this, but that wasn’t unusual when her notgrandpa gabbled.

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“Horace,” Ethel finally interrupted. Her voice was low and humming, not unlike the rhythm of the tires. “What you know about a chicken could fit on a feather. And it’d be about as weighty, too.” Nobody spoke the last few miles to the fairground. Sis watched the cornfields peel by, the green and gold blurring until stalks and ears seemed to lose shape and become more liquid than solid, hovering above the brown earth like dots of water hurled from the new Zimmatic irrigators the wealthier farmers let prowl their land. When they arrived at the dirt lot a man with dark circles under his shirt arms motioned them into a parking spot. Horace shut off the engine but made no effort to open the coupe’s door. “You planning to talk to her, or you want me to?” he asked the grandmother. “I don’t have nothing particular to say. Not one way, not the other.” Horace sighed. “Well, I would ask you to step outside, Ethel, so this girl and me might talk in confidence, but as much as your children hate my guts the last thing I need is her telling Clinton we were in the car alone together.” He put his arm on the back of the seat and twisted to face Sis, a pain in his face. “You need to know that some of the folks preening this midway like cocks of the walk may speak less than flatteringly of your grandma and me. If they do, just Heavenly Shades Of Night Are Falling

ignore them. They’re just yakking to give their jaws the workout. You’re here to have a good time, and I’m here to ensure you do.” He reached into his pocket and jangled a handful of loose coins as if he were throwing dice. “I’m giving you every bit of spare change I got today. You find the Hokey-Pokey Man, and you get you some gum drops and some—” He said the funny name he always used for candy corn. It was a two-word name, only the second of which Sis understood: teats. She knew what those were because each morning she helped her father attach the teatcups to the cows’ udders in the milk barn. “C’mon now. Take them. I know you’re not too snooty for some jinglejangle. As ragged as Clinton runs his operation, I ought to donate my spare dimes to him. I’ve no doubt your ma would appreciate my charity, but I’d rather you be the beneficiary. You at least act Christian toward me.” Her hesitation had nothing to do with the fact that Horace was the man she wasn’t supposed to ever call Grandpa. It was hard enough to walk on one quarter; to lug a piggy-bank in her socks seemed a monumental task. Nevertheless, she tucked the coins evenly at the sides of her ankles and hoped they didn’t slide under her heel. It took several strides along the lines of parked cars before the change didn’t pinch. But then the three of them reached the first tents that marked the

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midway’s entry, and when Sis spotted some girls she knew, the discomfort gave way to excitement. She raced to join her friends without asking permission. Only vaguely was she aware of her grandmother calling out the evening’s ground rules. “Back right here, eight-thirty! Don’t waste all that money on candy! And keep them Mary Janes white as they are now!” The girls were her classmates. In a month and a half they would start second grade together. Sis noticed that, like hers, their dresses were adorned with bold floral patterns and electric colors, sure signs that the fabric came from a feedsack, not a bolt. Nobody was quizzing anybody on what their clothes originally bagged, though. There were more important concerns to debate. “Mine says he’s gotta be a robot,” Margo Ropp was saying. “Anybody goin’ to the trouble of making a robot,” Phyllis Metcalf answered, “iddn’t gonna make a robot chicken. They’re gonna make a robot person.” “I bet he’s not even living,” Bobbie Kissling chimed in. “I bet he’s stiff as a board from the taxidermist.” Everybody had an opinion to share. “I heard he keeps his head in a pickle jar. Only it ain’t his head ’cause his got ate by a cat.” “My dad says a headless chicken can still lay eggs.” “Mike’s a rooster. If he’s laying an egg he’d be famous for that, not Heavenly Shades Of Night Are Falling

for having no head.” Sis didn’t speak. She was listening to music, tinny and distant, but familiar. It took her a while to find the source. Several yards down the midway a photographer was selling teenage boys the opportunity to have their pictures taken with a movie star. Exactly who the movie star was wasn’t clear; all Sis could see on the signboard above the booth were the words MOVIE STAR. The woman was brunette and pretty in the way that Sis assumed all movie stars were, though she didn’t know for sure—Clinton and Dorothea had yet to take her to the Strand Theater. They kept promising that, someday, when she was old enough, they would. Sis wondered if she’d have to wait to turn twelve before that happened. She wondered which she would see first: a movie or a chicken on the chopping block. But it was the music that interested her most. “My ma has this record,” she told her friends. “I was with her when she bought it at Murphy’s. We have a record player in our house. I saw her and Pa dance to it when they thought I was sleeping on the davenport.” The other girls stopped talking long enough to listen. The whirl of orchestral strings made Sis think of the Ferris wheel. When she craned to see the steel web above the tent tops, she imagined it rotated in tempo to the music.

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Deep in the dark your kiss will thrill me, like days of old Lighting the spark of love that fills me, with dreams untold Each day I pray for evening just to be with you Together at last at twilight time “Ick,” Gaye Caffee grimaced. “I like syrup on my pancakes, not in my ears. Gimme Elvis Presley or gimme death.” “This is colored music,” added Margo. “My preacher says not to listen to it. He says Elvis is bad, too. Because the devil likes him. The devil likes the coloreds’ music, too.” Before anyone could plug their ears to save themselves from Lucifer’s tune, a boy from their class rushed up. “Little Pruitt just threw up by the Tilt-aWhirl! Come see!” He was so eager he didn’t wait to see if the girls followed, but they did. The whole time he ran the boy twirled his hands at his wrists. He always did it when he got excited—once in first grade it was so distracting the teacher made him sit on his fingers. The boy’s name was Walter, but nobody called him that. Thanks to his spinning hands, he was known as Helicopter. The Tilt-a-Whirl was all the way down toward the other end of the midway, where the line of tents broke open to accommodate the rides. The girls were huffing for breath by the time they cut and darted around the clog of adults, none of whom seemed to Heavenly Shades Of Night Are Falling

move with any more urgency than a glue dab. Somewhere among the promenade of ring tosses and target shooting, Sis was aware of passing the movie star’s booth. She heard a barker with a voice as sharp as a switch call out: “Star of The Magnificent Ambersons, by Indiana’s own Booth Tarkington! Academy Award winner for The Razor’s Edge! Most recently seen in glorious VistaVision as the fetching Nefertari in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments!” Only when the barker’s voice was too distant for his words to be understood did Sis realize what she hadn’t heard: the song she’d once spied her parents dancing from the davenport where she played possum. Helicopter’s hands were still whirling as he stood next to the railing that kept the line of children from rushing the ride. A few yards away Little Pruitt sat elbows to knees on a folding chair, his face white and pasty. Even from a distance you could see his Adam’s apple going up and down, like a shuttle on a sideways loom, as he furiously swallowed. “Where is it?” Phyllis asked Helicopter. “Should be along here somewhere. He didn’t no more n’ hop off the platform than it jumped straight out his mouth. It was like lava!” Along with her classmates, Sis lifted herself onto the railing and scoured the path of grass that lay between it and the rickety ride.

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“You’re too late,” somebody said. It was Little Pruitt’s brother, Eddie, waltzing a cup of water to his queasy sibling. Eddie pointed to a man on the far side of the rail. Looking about as thin as a quivering cattail, the man stood over a small mound swinging a coffee can in one hand while lighting a cigarette with the other. “We didn’t beat the sawdust,” Sis said, disappointed. As they watched, the man dug his hand into the can and sprinkled another fistful of shavings over the pile. “Hey, maybe Little Pruitt’s not done!” Before anyone could check a vibration shot through the rail. It felt like an electrical shock. “Get off there!” a voice growled, and another jolt burned through the metal. Only when Sis hopped down did she realize where the pulse came from: the carnival worker running the Tilt-a-Whirl’s controls was hitting the rail with a thick metal pipe. “The line’s over here,”the worker snapped. He was a fat-faced man who reminded Sis of a storybook illustration she’d seen of the Three Little Pigs. He pointed to the children waiting their turn with one of his black hooffingers. “If you’re not riding, keep walking.” “Don’t have a heart attack, Jack,” Eddie shot back. He could do that—he was a teenager already, and thanks to his D. A. he looked a little like Elvis. Other than a hairstyle, Sis didn’t know what a D. A. was—she’d just heard Horace mention it on occasion. Heavenly Shades Of Night Are Falling

He liked to say that if any greaseball with a D. A. sock-hopped into his barber shop, the young man could be sure he’d quadrille out with a crew cut. Sis walked over to where Little Pruitt sat. He was actually a year older than her but everybody called him Little anyway because he was so much younger than his brother. “You have some left in you?” she asked. Little pressed his stomach with his fingertips and cleared his throat. “Empty as a gas tank,” he groaned. “I just got dizzy is all.” Eddie was still staring down the pig-faced worker with the pipe. “I’ll meet you back here in an hour,” he finally told Little Pruitt. “I gotta go see a girl about a gash in her coon-skin cap.” “Can’t she just sew it up?” Phyllis Metcalf asked. Eddie smiled at Sis and her friends. “Sure,” he smirked. “That’s why she needs my help. I’m a master seamster. I’ve helped a lotta girls with their coon-skin caps. Just don’t go blabbing I said ‘gash,’ you hear?” He turned back to Little: “Eight o’clock, on the dot, Chief. I don’t need dear old dad boxing my ears because you were the first munchkin ever to get lost at the fair.” Little Pruitt finished the water. “I ain’t sitting here for an hour,” he told nobody in particular. “I still got fifty cents to my name.” “Let’s get you a corn fritter and another ride,” Helicopter suggested.

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“Maybe you can get sick again.” “What we better get is to the show tent,” Bobbie Kissling cut in. “I don’t want to miss Headless Mike. I want a seat on an up-close bleacher so I can see down his neck with mine own eyes.” “I heard they feed him with an eyedropper,” Helicopter offered, instantly forgetting his previous suggestion. “C’mon on, let’s go.” The group started walking off. Sis waited for Little Pruitt to get up. She wasn’t sure he could. He still seemed dizzy. But once upright he found his feet. They started to follow their friends when they heard a “Hey!” It wasn’t the pig-faced man. This time it was the cattail-quiverer, the one with the can of sawdust. He was squatting at the rung on the rail where Sis had stood. “You dropped something, chickadee.” Pinched between the same two fingers as his lit cigarette was a sparkling dime. Sis could still feel the coins in her socks, so she wasn’t sure this one was hers. She wasn’t taking any chances, though. “You lose this,” the cattail man said, flipping the dime into his palm, “you’re out one whole ride, ain’t you?” His features were so sharp his face looked like it’d been whittled from a woodblock. The man grinned as Sis returned to the rail to claim her money. Only when she went to take the dime, he clapped his fist shut, barely missing catching her fingers. The lit cigarette barely missed her, too. Heavenly Shades Of Night Are Falling

“Aw,” he snorted, reopening his hand. “I’m just playing with you. Go on, take it. Spend it with all the benevolence Mr. Tipton would. All us carnies got families to feed.” Sis didn’t take the dime, though. She was distracted by a blue design on the man’s forearm. At first she thought it was a messy scribble of veins, but then the form resolved into a familiar shape. It was a naked woman. Sis knew what those looked like because she’d been in her parents’ bedroom before when Dorothea dressed. The man’s grin broke when he realized Sis was looking at his tattoo, not the dime. He quickly yanked his shirt cuff over the image. “You didn’t see that, okay? Bossman done repped me twice already for letting it out to air. One more and I’ll be scraping a griddle somewhere. Now I could’a kept your money, but I didn’t, so you owe me.” When Sis still didn’t take the dime, the cattail man took her by the wrist and himself pressed the money into the center of her palm. Again, the lit cigarette barely missed her. “Don’t lose it again,” he told her. “Not everybody in this operation’s as honest a man as yours sincerely.” Sis pushed the dime deep in her sock. When she turned around, she discovered the other girls had kept on walking. Only Little Pruitt had waited to make sure she was safe from cattail man.

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“You ever seen a chicken butchered?” she asked as they made their way between the rides to the show tent. “Sure. T’aint nothing. I done it myself. Plenty.” Sis was doubtful. “How’d you do it?” Little Pruitt shrugged. “I just wrestle them down and go to work sawing.” She was about to tell him he was a liar, but then she saw a familiar figure stationed by the haunted house, and her mind went elsewhere. “There’s the Hokey-Pokey man!” she said. “Let’s get some—” She used Horace’s word for candy corn, the one she didn’t understand. Little Pruitt stopped in his tracks. “You can’t say that to him. He’s likely to pop you.” Sis didn’t understand what he meant, but the truth was the HokeyPokey man scared her a bit, so as they approached, she didn’t say anything. She just looked over the tray that hung from his neck by a V-shaped strap. In the tray were little cups of gum drops, licorice bites, and fudge. She caught Little Pruitt staring at her, waiting for her to order. “You do it,” she said under her breath. “It’s all good,” the Hokey-Pokey man insisted, shooing a fly from one of the cups. “But it ain’t gonna gain any flavor just from you two staring at it. Nothing in life ought to be so difficult to choose.” Heavenly Shades Of Night Are Falling

Little Pruitt pulled three cups from the tray. Sis propped a hand to his shoulder for balance to dig money from her sock. She started to hand the man the coins, but he shook his head and pointed instead to a little platter of nickels and dimes among the candies. “You’ll get me in trouble passing it over straightaway,” he told her, shaking a long black finger. “The Hokey-Pokey man got enough problems, little miss.” Under his supervision, Sis laid two dimes on the platter. “Fifteen cents out of twenty means you get a nickel back,” he said. His voice was louder than before, and he kept looking at the fair-goers walking past them, not Sis and Little Pruitt. “Here’s you a nickel.” He pushed one from a pile of them to the edge of his platter. “Remember the Hokey-Pokey man always makes fair change,” he told her. Now his voice was back to normal. As they left the concessionaire, Little Pruitt was trying to figure out how to dig candy corn from one cup while carrying another of coconut haystacks. “I can tell you ain’t been around many coloreds,” he said as he ate. “A bunch of them live not but a block from here. We got a couple who come out to milk for us.” “We do our own milking,” she answered quickly and defensively. “I help my pa. I do a lot of the milking myself.” Then she thought of the song that had played at the movie star’s booth, and what Margo Ropp said

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about it. “My ma listens to colored music. My pa lets her. He even likes some of it.” Little Pruitt’s cheeks plumped as he chewed his second coconut haystack. “So does Eddie. Only he says it’s not always colored music just because coloreds sing it. He’s always teaching me about his music. He got in trouble for driving all the way to Chicago to buy his records.” “My ma just buys them at Murphy’s.” “Then she don’t really listen to colored music. Because Eddie says Murphy’s don’t stock none.” What Sis had wanted was candy corn, but Little Pruitt had kept that cup for himself. Instead, she’d been relegated to jelly-beans, which weren’t sweet enough for her. She’d only eaten three by the time they reached the show tent, and one of those, a green one, not by choice—it had melted into the side of a red one. Helicopter and the girls were all in line waiting for the show tent to open. Phyllis Metcalf waved Sis and Little Pruitt forward, despite grumblings from the folks they cut in front of. “We’ve been holding their places,” Phyllis told one woman in a cherry red dress dotted with the white silhouettes of tulips. Sis let herself believe that dress had originally sacked potatoes. Ladies and gentlemen! a barker in a candy-stripe coat declared through a megaphone as he flipped open the tent flap. You’re about to Heavenly Shades Of Night Are Falling

witness what will rightly go down in history as the eighth wonder of the world! And I will tell you here and now I personally think tonight’s spectacle should rank higher than either the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Taj Mahal on any such list! Because no man ever made a night’s dinner out of those marvels! But after the soul of tonight’s special guest passes into the azure coop of sky, you can bet his mortal remains will fill a belly or two—hopefully mine! All that overripe oratory was followed by decidedly less grandiose directions about keeping the line civilized, having correct change, and not stomping other folks’ hands while propping feet on the bleacher backs. As the barker prattled on, Sis threw a hand to Bobbie Kissling’s shoulder and dug into her sock for her quarter. She’d just about retrieved it when Bobbie was suddenly jerked out from under her, leaving Sis to nearly topple onto the ground. “You’re Ethel Brandywine’s granddaughter, ain’t you?” A man in brown trousers had Bobbie by the wrist. When Sis said, “Yes, sir,” he nodded his head. “I thought I recognized you. C’mon, Bobbie. Your ma’s pork sandwich ain’t sitting well. We need to go home.” “But Mike’s about to happen—” “I said your ma’s not feeling well. Apparently, a lot of things I say to you don’t sink in.” The man jerked Bobbie so hard

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Sis thought she might fly out of her shoes. She and her friends watched the man drag his daughter off. As she stumbled to keep up with his pace, Bobbie stared back bitterly at the line. “I saw her ma eating a hamburger,” Sis overheard Margo whisper to Phyllis. “Not pork.” Sis thought of what Horace had said in the coupe. This wasn’t the first time it’d happened and it probably wouldn’t be the last. She rubbed a wrinkle from her dress and stood straight. She liked it that even though Little Pruitt was older than her, she was taller. The barker took her quarter with a smile and patted her head, just as he did the head of every child who entered the tent. He obviously hadn’t heard of Ethel Brandywine. “Little Pruitt, it’s been so long since I called you anything but Little I can’t even remember your Christian name.” “Peter,” he told her indifferently. They sat together one row behind their friends. Sis chose the seats because she didn’t want any other friends dragged away simply for sitting in her proximity. It took a long time for the crowd to file in. So long that Little Pruitt not only finished the last of his coconut haystacks but the candy corn and Sis’s jellybeans, too. He dropped each cup under the footwells of the bleachers and then stuck his head down among the row of shoes to see exactly where and how they might’ve Heavenly Shades Of Night Are Falling

landed. “My stomach hurts,” he groaned after a while. The lights went out, crudely snapping off instead of dimming. A squeal went through the crowd. Sis pushed her elbows into her knees, leaning forward. Every one else did, too. The tent swelled with such eagerness that the excitement was almost claustrophobic. “Just so you know,” she heard Little Pete whisper, “I ain’t scared of no chicken.” “Me neither.” But a second later when a spotlight erupted at the front of the tent, she was spooked. A fat man in a plain suit hoisted a cage covered by an apron onto a table. Before he could unveil his marvel, Sis felt a second startle. Something brushed her right hand. Fancy got the better of her and she wondered what kinds of deformities crawled under bleachers in the dark of a carnival. Then she realized what had really given her the scare. Little Pruitt was curling his fingers among hers. Whether he held her hand to soothe his own anticipation or to comfort hers didn’t really matter. Sis just felt good knowing that, no matter what happened next, hers wasn’t the only imagination whirling with wonder at the possibilities of what a chicken running around without its head might mean. (To Be Continued)

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The Fragile Thread Between Dream and Reality: Encountering the World Of José Parra Review By GRADY HARP

The Queen’s Caravan

José Parra is a young artist with an old soul. Ever a dreamer, he has managed to bridge that chasm between the old and the new in a language that is ecstatically of his own creation. His subject ideas about power versus fear, tradition versus novelty, royalty versus common, and reality as interpreted or transfigured by the glorious excesses of Baroque all contribute to his grand and complex paintings that mark the world as a stage waiting to be illuminated by grand

costumes and props, yet peopled by those actors who surround him in real life. Early influences, outside of introspection and dreams as a child, include working in his father’s Tlaquepaque, Mexico gallery surrounded by paintings and statuary deeply influenced by Spanish baroque decoration and reproductions. His fertile, inquisitive mind embraced that precursor school of Mannerism (1520 – 1580) that responded to the harmonious

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The Last Great Voyage

The Royal Fleet

ideals and restrained naturalism associated with artists such as da Vinci, Raphael and early Michelangelo. It is this journey from the intellectual sophistication of Mannerism to the subsequent artificial excesses of the following Baroque period that brought Parra to his mature style. The young José Parra combines his technical facility with drawing, brush, pigment and canvas with an infectious hunger for philosophy and the circles that at times fail to define a beginning and an end – the tangent between real and spiritual, seen and imagined, beginning and future or past. His paintings are rich in detail as though he painted them from life despite the very obvious fantasy of his floating ships, signature harlequins, and melting worlds. Yet the vivid colorful costumes and

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creative fantasy. And this is his goal: his paintings are not complete until we, the fortunate viewers, participate and at least temporarily fulfill those seemingly thwarted expectations. Here is a young and gifted artist to watch, an artist whose talent goes beyond the expected surface and invites us to dream.

The Queen Of Harlequin Monkeys The False Clothing Of Cleonte

accoutrements of his tableaux don’t completely disguise the tinge of sadness or disappointment of unfulfilled expectations. He is at his strongest in his panoramic paintings such as The Queen’s Caravan, The Last Great Voyage, and The Royal Fleet, yet he is also able to paint dramas of touching intimacy as in The False Clothing of Cleonte and the Frida Kahloesque The Queen of Harlequin Monkeys. One of the aspects of José Parra’s paintings that makes his work so poignant in our contemporary world is his ability to take the viewer into another space, a place where we, the players in a mundane and chaotic world, can find at least momentary solace in transporting ourselves into his spaces of

Christopher

Arigo Christopher Arigo’s first poetry collection Lit interim won the 2001-2002 Transcontinental Poetry Prize (selected by David Bromige) and was published by Pavement Saw Press (2003). His second collection In the archives (2007) was published by Omnidawn Publishing. Additionally, he co-edits the literary magazine Interim with poet Claudia Keelan and is currently working on a booklength hybrid scholarly/ creative nonfiction project on the intersections of ecopoetics, ethnopoetics, hunter-gatherer culture, language extinction, and anticivilization theory. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Washington State University.

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from Desert revised 5. this is a further story a furthering of impulse of water pulsing through maiden-hair ferns into an undrying spring: a dog swims in the water you say the dog—a shepherd (—this is no pastoral)— is happy the cool drip is the sound of undying the air drifts in thermals and there are no jets only the sound of your own blood traveling unpanicked the occasional imagined sound from vultures drifting on thermals you confuse with breeze or the stirring of rabbitbrush or single-leaf ash a desert marigold’s almost blinding wave its leaves drawing fine traceries around its base you say there is plenty written about panic and not enough about origins

Christopher Arigo

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from Desert revised 9. the light is minor everyday you erode a bit everyday you get to know the light better and better until you predict when the shadow from your eaves falls across the yard between two boulders of granite shipped from who knows where all that remains and remains you gone your remains sufficient to replace you what erases you is not wind-blown sand or freezing and thawing and cracking you are ecstatic in the desert your insistent grip on my arm there is an ecotone between us—-the dust between you and the desert

Christopher Arigo

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from Desert revised 10. mountains take rain and leave virga trailing off above the land you live in the rainshadow rain has afterthoughts called smell of sage—several different species whose names you can never remember: which is silver which is dusty green which has purple flowers which is which is reduced which is tridentata called cooled off from the intense heat that preceded it rain calls with steam what is home and why vapors trail also across the near-blue air—algorhythmic lines bisecting ad infinitum the jets have not traveled overhead near enough for you to erase

Christopher Arigo

Jeff

Danley “ I have always been interested in the language of the body – what is being expressed by posture and movement, as well as the marks of time on the body itself. In response to my own physical malformation, I am acutely aware of such ideals as beauty, perfection and symmetry in relation to the human figure. Through intense observation of the model, I slowly build up many layers of paint to create a material form, giving the inert pigment the illusion of a flesh and blood presence.” [email protected]

Jeff Danley grew up in Georgia, Florida and California. He now lives in Nashville where he has worked as a drummer and as art director for television commercials and music videos. A self taught artist, he has been painting full-time since 1991. He has been in numerous juried, invitational, and gallery shows across the country, and his work has been featured in many regional and national publications including New American Paintings and The Oxford American.

Which artist/photographer do you admire or has had the biggest influence on your work? I’ve been influenced by artists from Rembrandt to Rothko and beyond. The influence can be more than any obvious style or subject matter. I try to search out anyone painting the human figure, but I’ve also found much in works of non-figurative painters, as well as artists working in other mediums. There have been just as many “unknowns”as there have been well-recognized ones that have had an influence on me. If I had to pick one, it would be Caravaggio. Several years ago I spent several weeks in Italy for an independent study. Once I saw the Caravaggios in Rome, I would start every day by going to the S. Luigi dei Francesi to look at his St. Matthew triad—and many times I would also end the day there. I could not get enough of those paintings. Seeing them in person solidified my desire to be a figurative painter.

paint, paint, paint, and paint some more. In my opinion, that’s the most valuable type of training available. How do you bring emotion across to a flat surface? I think just by having the human figure as my primary subject brings emotion to my work. I almost never paint faces. Most of my models are posed or cropped so that you never see the face, because I don’t want the work to be about a specific identity. We usually think of emotion as coming from the face, but I think a lot of expression can come from the pose, the gesture, the body language of the model. I try to use all of the components, including color, lighting, space, and even the size and proportions of the canvas to assist in conveying emotion. The psychology of a piece can change dramatically just by the amount of space surrounding the figure, by what fills that space, by how it’s lit.

How do you feel about formal training? I have no formal training as a painter, and have regretted this at times. But I’ve found that formal training is no guarantee of success. With or without training, you have to do your work. The most important thing as a painter is to pick up your brush and paint. You might make a lot of messes—you have to just

Have any of your mistakes become a success? When I first started painting seriously, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I only knew that I wanted to take a non-objective approach to painting. But as I would work, things would emerge, like a shoulder, a back, or maybe a thigh. I would scrape them away, try to paint them out. And they would come back, try as I

Q&A

did to get rid of them. It was like seeing a shape in the clouds, once you see it, it’s there. After much frustration, I realized— “PAINT THE FIGURE.” When I finally let it happen, people immediately started connecting to my work in a way that had never happened before. And surprisingly to me, so did I. The “mistake” was in trying to control my work into what I thought it should be as opposed to letting it develop into what it was meant to be.

Must there be a statement with each creation? I think there is too much emphasis placed on every work having a statement, so much so that there is much more concern with writing about the work instead of making the work itself. In what I do, the focus is on a body of work, with each piece contributing to an affirmation of the whole. Sometimes there are paintings that become more important to me personally because something may develop in them to push me to another level in thought or technique. I hope that the viewer experiences something different each time they encounter the work, that their experience grows and continues to engage them in some way. That to me is the greatest statement that someone could give about my painting.

Medusa oil on canvas 57 1/2 x 37 1/2

Jeff Danley

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ORANGES & SARDINES

Gabriel Jeff Danley

oil on canvas

42” x 42”

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ORANGES & SARDINES

Leda Jeff Danley

oil on canvas

31 1/4” x 48”

Submerged No.1 oil on canvas 13” x 9”

Happy Day Jeff Danley

oil on canvas 32” x 38”

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ORANGES & SARDINES

SHWA 20: Juliet Cook’s Horrific Confection BY DAVID CADDY

I would like to say a few words about Juliet Cook’s Horrific Confection originally published as an e book and now published in hard copy by BlazeVox Books (www.blazevox.org) of New York. Juliet Cook’s Horrific Confection combines elements of magical realism and dark horror in a poetic exploration of the domestic, especially food, and the artificial. It is set deeply within the meaning of confection as a noun ‘the making or preparation by mixture of ingredients’ (OED 1), ‘a preparation made by mixing; a composition, mixture, compound’ (OED 5) and as a verb ‘to make into a confection; to mix, make up as a seasoned delicacy’ (OED 1). More than that, Cook reaches back to older meanings of confection such as ‘a medicinal preparation compounded of various drugs’ (OED 5b) and ‘a prepared poison, a deadly potion’ (OED 5c). The book is divided into four sections, ‘heat me up’, ‘cool me down’, ‘consume me’ and ‘choke on me’, which provide both a narrative and analytical structure. The opening poem, ‘Morning Fragment’, introduces two recurring motifs, the egg and the knife, within a breakfast image of bloodshot eggs, glistening marmalade, glowing hot wire ribs and crumb cake crawling out of the narrator’s throat. The egg registers as nutrition, embryo, ovulation, fertility and eyes and the knife as implement and weapon, showing the domestic to be both constructive and destructive. The first section, ‘heat me up’, inhabits a domestic world that is both sensuously tactile and swerves between the kitchen as a site of sanitised violence and food as nourishment and poison. The raw seems to permeate and resist the cooked. Here the narrator attempts to resist the artificial and sinister world of her mother’s domestic regime: A black line blurs into bristling trellis. Throbbing. Little sister ensanguined, straining twisted limbs. Furry bodies wriggle in sockets. Honey bees burst out her eyes. Leave behind tiny stingers pumping venom into trespassed flesh. (page 15)

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Note how the stressed ‘b’ produces a savage intensity. ‘She Warns Me’ continues: Mother’s burgeoning tongue. Cyanosis-blue and serrated abduction. I can’t hide. I surrender to the toxic spill, the swarm. Excruciating swell and thrall Words sprawl disembodied. A husky hum from the filthy darkness underneath a rusty engine. Tendons slashed. Ripped open dress. Knivey licks and public restroom reek of chloroform. (page 15) Cook’s feminism is indirect and subtle. Domestic violence lurks and hovers in all manner of unexpected places and weapons, from the mother figure, to Barbie dolls, to confectionery and the male gaze. The artificial is seen most graphically in the poem, ‘Dollophile’, which concerns male fascination with blow-up and other dolls, and occasions some blistering and comic language: He wants to smooth pancake makeup onto already poreless ‘flesh’ He wants her preprogrammed ‘voicebox’ to ‘acquiesce’, ‘deliquesce’, ‘luminesce’, and release a steaming shitload of dirty words. He wants made-to-order, interchangeable crotch panels, blinking lights, a bottomless spit valve. He wants a barely legal doll who can fit a small octopus inside like some kind of mutant nesting doll rape. (page 17) In the second ‘cool me down’ section, the poem ‘Grotesque Intimacy’ features a narrator that yearns for the artificial and transgressive desire. Here the self and her partner seek invasion: ‘We’re being drained, smeared, / dragged into the lush desire for even darker disguises.’ The language is suitably double-edged and shifting into a multilayered universe of possibility. ‘Beady-eyed sweetie. Zombie lips. / Feel the baby earwigs tickle your spine. / They know how you want to be a book.’

David Caddy

SHWA 20: Juliet Cook’s Horrific Confection

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The textual solidity of the poems forces through to a world that is less make believe and more credible horror through its constant reminder of the self as consumer and its proximity to the raw. ‘Swathes of mucus always ooze / from slugs nestled inside her pastel cupcake papers.’ and later from the same poem, ‘Horrific Confection’, ‘A shiny knife winks at her. It wants her -- / a frosted slice. Gaping and glazed with coagulum.’ The third section begins with ‘Self Portrait as Gingerbread Girl’ and takes the reader into the heart of this culinary dystopia. Here the narrator longs ‘for a dress that flaps open’ and to ‘escape this edible mess / of shams.’ in order to avoid decapitation and gives voice to the Gingerbread Girl that ‘didn’t ask to be cut in the shape of a girl.’ This is an attack on the artificial as she would prefer to be ‘abstract’, ‘unable to be construed’ and ‘spicy misdeeds’. It is a wonderfully idiosyncratic elegy. The section as a whole gives voice to confections that insinuate and fester against the matronly domestic goddess and her opposite the domestic witch. These poems show the ways in which the artificial penetrate other parts of a woman’s life and culminate in ‘Costume Party Afterbirth’ where: You’re more like a pinstriped service provider, holding down the tongue depressor gag. You experiment with cup sizes, but have nothing real to fill them. Sample 1. Fake Secretary Sample 2. Fake Pig Suspended in Silicon Sample 3. Besmirched Cryptozoology. You have anthropomorphized yourself, you have felt yourself up for suspicious lumps. You have frisked your hollow panda bear head until at least one piece of candy fell out your eye socket. Your gaping piebald maw. (page 42) The final, choke on me, section gives voice to more mutant confections, fake cakes, horror cakes and gaping holes oozing slime leading to ‘Self Portrait as Semi-Amorphous Entity’ where ‘she’s beating / her own head against a doll house / door’ and the narrator’s head ends up in the cake pan. Choke on me shows the impact of the artificial on the young girl that veers away from the domestic goddess to the domestic witch in a blistering series of dramatic and satirical poems. Poems such as ‘Oh Those Mercurial Wrists’, ‘Spilled Milk’, ‘little death scenes’, ‘Pink Bird’ and ‘The Angel of Death’ bring this energised collection to a climax full of invective and humour. Here’s the beginning of

David Caddy

SHWA 20: Juliet Cook’s Horrific Confection

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‘Oh Those Mercurial Wrists’: The way she froths at the mouth then explodes into sexy blasphemy. The way her lips sizzle then ignite – Bananas Flambé. Painted flames drizzle down to scintillating nipple ring gleams. This leads to The way she makes up her own eyes with a languorous, over-the-top glamour she calls ‘Tarred & Feathered’. The way today’s look is called ‘Little Bo Peep the Whore’ as she wields a tiny riding crop, exclaiming, ‘Faster Lambchop! We must escape the damned rapscallions!’ (page 54) This, however, is a mere warm-up for the full violence of ‘The Angel of Death’ that links its sustained attack on the artificial to a Catholic upbringing and explodes in visceral anger. My womb is a real muckraker and half the congregation’s dirty fingers are stuck inside. Some of them are trying to get me off; some of them are trying to turn me off, but my motorized blades are still whirring furiously. You see, in MY visceral guide to uterine occupation, the vagina dententa myth is true. I’ve cued the seizure-inducing lights and the spew of slashed babymakers. Bang your head to the strains of this heretic cunt. (page 63)

David Caddy

SHWA 20: Juliet Cook’s Horrific Confection

“My interest, as a Chinese artist, is to create art that reflects the changing times while maintaining the conventional tools and influences of my culture. I expressed the sentimental human sense with a powerful visual effect through the huge, detailed faces, as well as abstract figures that involve motion and minimal atmosphere.”

Chin-Cheng

Hung

www.chinchenghung.com

Q&A

Which artist/photographer do you admire or has had the biggest influence on your work? I admire photographer George Platt Lynes (19071955) deeply like a lot of photographers although I am a painter. I like the way he portraits his models and demonstrates such poetic and romantic disposition with an artistic and classical atmosphere. His innovative style and mastery of lighting has had a great deal of influence on my work. How do you feel about formal training? As a classically trained painter and art educator, I firmly believe that formal training is important for every artist. A good art education can prepare an artist with not only good skills, but also a more thoughtful process of creativity. One can reform the rules easily when they have learned them.

Chin-Cheng Hung is a professor of foundation studies at Savannah College of Art and Design - Atlanta. He is a member of several prestigious organizations including the Pastel Society of America, the Southeastern Pastel Society, and served as a member and former President of the Chinese-American Academic and Professional Association in Southeastern United States. Hung has received numerous awards from different juried competitions and has been featured in International Artist, New American Paintings, and most recently the cover of The Pastel Journal magazine in June 2008. His biography was selected to be listed in the newest editions of Marqus Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Art, and Who’s Who among American Teachers and Educators. His works hang in many private and corporate collections in Taiwan and the United States.

If you knew your time was up what would be the last image you would leave us with? I would definitely leave my self-portrait with the world as my last image if I knew my time was up. To me, a self-portrait is a true representation of an artist; or rather, a reflection/mirror of an artist. Whose work would you acquire if you were a collector? If I were a collector and if it is possible, I would collect paintings of Jacques-Louis David (17481825), Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704-1788), and Odd Nerdrum (1944~). Besides, I would collect any good figurative work. Must there be a statement with each creation? A good artist must be a good thinker. I personally admire arts that have intense narrative content and can speak by themselves. An artwork with no rich visual content and clear message won’t be able to impress viewers to keep coming back to visit it again and again. A powerful and meaningful artwork can last forever.

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Besiege

pastel

28” x 72”

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Animosity Chin-Cheng Hung

pastel

36” x 63”

Infatuation pastel 52” x 24”

Chin-Cheng Hung

Michelle

McEwen Michelle McEwen – a writer living in Bloomfield, Connecticut – always has her head bent down in some book. When she isn’t reading, she’s scribbling or doing something poetry related on http://theblacktelephone.blogspot.com/

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Sucker   Gwendolyn Lee was the first Coffeyville girl to pay daddy any real attention. Any weekend you could find them on some corner downtown— holding hands. The Thomasville boys, his bunch, made fun of him for this. Real Coffeyville girls didn’t hold hands—they started at the good stuff. No one ever really intended to make a Coffeyville girl their main girl—except maybe Coffeyville boys who were no match for the boys of Thomasville. Even on the football field, the Thomasville boys outshined them and their girls took notice— would do anything to be able to jump down from the bleachers, lean against the fence and holler out the name of a Thomasville athlete, but they’d never be a main girl— they’d get taken to the prom, they’d get shoved in the river and not complain, but they’d never be able to say they made it out of Coffeyville on account of a Thomasville boy. Daddy says he was one of the first in Thomasville to fall hard for a Coffeyville girl. Sucker, they called him, but he didn’t mind because to him Gwendolyn Lee was just the sort you hung on to— maybe married. What did he want, he said, with a girl whose mind was always on crossed legs & Sundays? Those were Thomasville girls for you and Thomasville girls did not impress him— they were made to impress mothers and fathers and aunts. Gwendolyn Lee, he said, didn’t care how she looked eating a peach.

Michelle McEwen

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Jelly My cousin Darren is determined to tell me about who my mother really is— who she was before the twins took over her belly, rushed her into marriage. The wedding: Sunday clothes, court house & a witness. Darren thinks my mother should have been a Soul Train dancer— bets the camera would’ve zoomed in the most on her. Even the lightskinned, long-haired women would have been jealous, he says. He has a video tape, which I have yet to see, of my mother in little yellow shorts and white boots knee-high— claims at one point my mother drops to the ground, then hops right back up as if her body was jelly. I wish I could have known her like this— loose as jelly and not all-the-time-worrying Michelle McEwen

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about whether James will like the meatloaf she put in his lunchbox for work. Uncle James got the tame Sarah, my cousin says and he means it— knows and holds on to what he saw that afternoon when a sweet-talking-old-flame came bursting through the door— high or drunk or both. Darren will never forget, he says, the butcher knife my mother pressed up against that man’s throat.

Michelle McEwen

Jelly

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July The baby came home in July— right in the middle of summertime; just in time for kitchen flies & butterflies & wild blueberries for the pies that never get made because it is too hot to bake, too hot to be messing around with some oven. Look how everything’s ripening, how everything’s melting— just like the butter left out all day on the counter. Da says we can’t afford to let butter melt. Ma says it’s just butter— and the falling out begins, will last all summer. Da always loses his cool in July; gets hotblooded when he can’t sleep off the heat. Makes like he’s smoking no more; says

Michelle McEwen

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it’s a breeze being cigarette-less and a father now of four girls. But there is never a breeze, it seems like, in July— and there is never ever enough shade. Ma could use a maid, but we don’t have it made, so she keeps a tight hold on the four of us because the boys on our street can’t wait for us to get older.

Michelle McEwen

July

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Even on Sunday The Thomasville girls, on Monday, were already planning what they’d wear  on Sunday. The Coffeyville girls, even on Sunday, just threw on any old  thing. They leaped into creeks and waterholes with the boys— didn’t mind it when their hair drew up from the water. Gloria-Jean was one of these girls out of Coffeyville, father says, who’d let you. For change for a soda, you could un-tuck, unbutton, unzip, feel up on all the Coffeyville girls and for that, on prom night, the Thomasville gym would be filled with them. Thomasville folks joked, said who needed city women when you had Coffeyville— where the girls didn’t think twice before climbing up trees and into backseats. Those girls were something else: part-boy the way they slung rocks and ducked just in time, but all girl when it counted— when it mattered most who’s boy  and who’s girl.

Michelle McEwen

O& S P O R T F O L I O

LANE TIMOTHY

Lane

Timothy www.lanetimothy.com www.lanetimothyprints.com

Lane Timothy grew up in Missoula, MT, and is a self taught artist. At the age of 11 he sold his first painting and at the age of 21 he had his first sold out show. Lane’s nostalgic work is acquired by many well known collectors, and he finds one of his biggest challenges is keeping up with demand. His work has been featured in numerous magazines, and his paintings have graced the covers of American Traveler, Skywest Airlines and American Art Collector Magazine among others. Lane Timothy’s art is represented by Waterhouse Gallery in Santa Barbara, CA, Bonner David Galleries in Scottsdale, AZ and Peterson Cody Gallery in Santa Fe, NM.

“I spend most of my time researching and daydreaming of stories I can tell through my work. My vintage figures are reminiscent of an earlier more innocent time, while my composition and color pallettes are very modern and contemporary. I love the challenge of trying to marry both styles.”

American Dreamer

oil on canvas

48” x 60”

Cadillac Blues oil on canvas 60” x 40”

The Bare Necessities oil on canvas 60” x 48”

Departure oil on canvas 60” x 48”

Eye Of The Beholder oil on canvas 48” x 36”

Solitude oil on canvas 48” x 36”

Boys And Their Toys

oil on canvas

48” x 60”

Learning The Links

oil on canvas

48” x 60”

Eye Catching

oil on canvas

36” x 48”

My Girl

oil on canvas

30” x 40”

Patiently Waiting oil on canvas 36” x 24”

Will She Say Yes oil on canvas 48” x 36”

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STRANGE TRADES by Kristy Odelius REVIEW BY STEVE HALLE

Shearsman Books, 2008, 92 pages, ISBN-10: 1905700849, ISBN-13: 978-1905700844

Recently viewing David Lynch’s film “Blue Velvet,” I found myself caught up in thinking about the famous scene Roger Ebert took offense to, in which Isabella Rossellini’s character Dorothy Vallens is dumped naked on Detective Williams’s lawn. Even though Ebert objects to Lynch’s alleged mishandling of Rossellini, his female lead, this scene is crucial to the film because it brings together the disparate worlds the main character, Jeffrey Beaumont, straddles—the normal world of suburban Lumberton and the seedy underworld of gangsters, kidnappings, and sadomasochism. In a way, Kristy Odelius’s first full-length collection of poems, Strange Trades, finds itself examining its terrain by straddling two worlds a la Lynch’s Beaumont in “Blue Velvet,” and this Tiresian situation/situating fuels many of the resonant poems in Odelius’s collection. Looking firstly at the poem from which the collection draws its title “We Make Strange Trades,” from the book’s second of three sections, readers discover the title’s “we” is a stand-in for poets or makers, as we find out who might trade “Stomach for knuckle” or “‘L’ for ‘P’”. Later in the poem, the collective “we” is traded for the first-person “I,” and readers get a taste of what the poet-speaker has given up and received in return: I trade my fear of death for fear of breath and puzzled, I end up with both— some morning in a classroom whisper, we’ll find out what we got. Having fear of both death and breath situates the poet-speaker between life and death, an irremediable betweenness. Only another’s

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“classroom whisper” knows the trade’s outcome. In the first part of the book, “It’s curtains, ars poetica,” the speaker has set us up for the fulcrum poem “We Make Strange Trades” by showing us a courting of death: “Is this why I stand at my oeil-de-boeuf, / blowing sugar bubbles at that guy / in the snazzy black hood?” Again, death and life are straddled, mixing bubble blowing (breath) with the black-hooded man (death). The title’s curtain, too, separates or prevents the bubbles’ attempt to connect life and death via the oval window or eye. The “oeil-de-boeuf” of an apartment above a cityscape precedes “window winks [of] a seadrowned cabin” later in the poem. The final stanza, then, brings readers a sea of allusion: “On the dock, faded gray paint / suggests “submerged rock”. // Underwater, you there, you hear?” Odelius offers a connection to Wallace Stevens, who she incessantly echoes and reinterprets, by reinventing the end of “Crude Foyer” (“At last, there, when it turns out to be here”), setting speaker on the dock to connect with aforementioned location of speaker at window. The “faded gray paint” failing to prevent the ship, with its cabin window, from sinking, leaving the speaker to call after the separated self or selves, simultaneously there submerged and “here” on the dock. “It’s curtains, ars poetica” also echoes the situation of Robert Frost’s “Neither Out Far Nor in Deep”and Lucille Clifton’s use of the homophonic “hear” and “here” at the conclusion of her poem “at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989,” both allusions further complicating what’s being done in this poem. The “faded gray paint” from “It’s curtains” also presents an important connection to betweenness running throughout Strange Trades. The color gray reappears in “The Virgins of Chicago (3),” a five-poem series all sharing that title, which presents the mythical virgins as tradespeople who “work nights at ‘Federal Screw / Products.’ They like welding, / sweating and wearing / gray aprons.”Again the speaker is not exactly of the virgins, rising above them in an elevator only to later fly in a helicopter “an octave / below the shareholders.” This situation again puts the speaker between, only this time its between Chicago’s wealthy, the shareholders and businessmen (its STRANGE TRADES BY KRISTY ODELIUS

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mercantile traders), and its Sandburg-echoing, big-shouldered, blue-collar workers. Color finally gets the reader somewhere, or does it? In the final poem of the book “Ineffable Green Thing, Loved by All” the reader gets more Stevens (see “The Man on the Dump,” see “Dutch Graves in Bucks County”) as the imagination and truth, or singularly “What we see we think we see” get characterized in this poem and “wakes up and climbs the dunes” and “cloud-gazing” then “become[s] entranced by glare and a proper saint sighting.” The past, which Stevens denies being part of the present, affects Odelius’s poem differently as “The past pages the horizon, a world of real weather.” Odelius infuses Strange Trades with the color red (her virgins are redheads, for example), only to arrive at an idea of green, “the nostalgic green toy in the window,” among the “dunes,” the “Mojave landfill.” Yet the weather is real, not red as in Stevens’s “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” and the suggestion is that we be “very predictable, very translatable, / meaner, past due.” And the imagination and truth, the “real” and “inevitable,” get eschewed for the struggle of betweenness, the thought that any or all of us can be “meaner, past due” to stave off inevitability. Odelius presents us with an eminently readable collection of poems. Strange Trades both surprises and pleases with its melopoeia, wordplay, odd juxtapositions, and prettiness, in the best sense of that word, upon first reading. Influenced heavily by Stevens, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Robert Desnos, Odelius entrenches herself in the lineage of poets that mingle attention to image and language with philosophy, which offers resonant possibility through multiple readings. In Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” the mystery of the opposing worlds is rectified, and Jeffrey Beaumont, intimate with both, finds a resolution in the normal, real world. In Strange Trades, however, Kristy Odelius does not provide readers an easy resolution, and her poems preserve mystery rather than offer ready-made answers, giving readers a both instead of an either/or. Trades can be made, sure, but outcomes remain unsettled, unresolved.

STRANGE TRADES BY KRISTY ODELIUS

Alex

Rodriguez www.itsajackal.com

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Alex Rodriguez is a pizza slinger with delusions of grandeur. He’s a freelance artist, doing portraits of friends and clients. Born in

Which artist/photographer do you admire or has had the biggest influence on your work? There are 2 famous artists that influence my art every time I draw. Andrew Wyeth, “the helga pictures” is my bible, and patrick nagel, he’s the foundation of my portraits. it’s all about the lines. it’s amazing how nagel can convae shadows with lines. the thing i love about wyeth is how a body of work can be centered on one subject. artists have “muses” but i have yet to see an artist that has done such an intimate portrait of a single subject like “the helga pictures”.

Cuba and raised in Miami, Alex currently resides in Seattle with his faithful flying squirrel Zoe. Like Zoe, he’s constantly flying from one place to another.

How do you feel about formal training? I think formal training is great. I wish I had it. I’d be alot better. I honestly feel like such a joke without it. I’m always jealous when I look at one of my best friends’ work,a’cause I think “if i actually stayed and worked hard in college, i’d be doing work as good as him,” and if another best friend went to art school he’d be off the charts. I’m hoping to go back to school in the near future. Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when creating art? My biggest ritual is going to a

Q&A

coffee shop, sit down with my iPod, quad mocca and sketch book and draw. I can’t draw at home, too many distractions. I don’t have a tv, but the computer is a vortex of time. Warcraft is my art’s biggest enemy. Which three other artists would you consider to be your contemporaries? Tony roman, brian christopher, and mike marsh. Three guys I went to high school with. Two of them are best friends. I’d be full of it if I said anyone famous. although i think those three guys do some stuff that can go toe to toe with some of the poeple out there.

How does your environment influence your work? Well, I moved from Miamia’cause I was drawing less and less, and it was driving me insane. When I moved to Seattle it was like a flood gate. My art also became more organic. Then when I lived in California, for a bit, i started thinking more abstract, but I think that was more to do with the friend I was living with. But not that i’ve gone away from Miami, when I go back it’s become more of a place I get some of my ideas, but that again is due to another friend.

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ORANGES & SARDINES

apnea pencil, watercolor, photoshop 9” x 12”

Alex Rodriguez

kayden pencil, watercolor, photoshop 9” x 12”

Alex Rodriguez

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Alex Rodriguez

ORANGES & SARDINES

kelly

mechanical pencil, photoshop

6” x 7”

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Alex Rodriguez

ORANGES & SARDINES

jaz sneakerpimps

pencil, watercolor, photoshop

14” x 14”

Eileen R.

Tabios

Eileen R. Tabios’ publications includes 16 poetry collections, an art essay collection, a poetry essay/ interview anthology, and a short story book. Nota Bene Eiswein (Ahadada, 2009), her most recent poetry collection, extends a unique body of work for melding ekphrasis with transcolonialism. Recipient of the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry, Ms. Tabios also edited or co-edited five books of poetry, fiction and essays released in the United States. She writes the poetics blog, “The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys” at http://chatelainepoet.blogspot.com, edits the popular poetry review journal “Galatea Resurrects” at http:// galatearesurrects. blogspot.com and steers Meritage Press (http:// meritagepress.com) from St. Helena, CA.

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Roman Synopsis #5 I could be happy in Alphabet City, buildings crumbling around my notepad. [Auden said you can’t write a poem about dropping a bomb.] She shows him the run on her stocking, and fails to see how his eyes linger. [In the rose bush, a yellow bud opens.] The fat dog is shedding hair on the sidewalk and observers are buffeted by the choice between focusing on its fur or its distended stomach. [He wears a hat emblazoned with a yellow happy face, the symbol for Local Government Official aka Tour Guide In Search Of Tips.] Now I understand why some barkers call Oliver Stone un-American. [When you reach the edge of the Black Forest the glade moves away and, once more, behind every leaf a stinger lurks.] With an impassive face, I reply before walking towards an open window framing a nude moon with an absolutely stunning belly, That’s why Billy serves hors d’ouevres. [I ripped a page in a beloved book of poetry and wondered whether the act was truly inadvertent.] When I stepped on pine cones, the soles on my feet recoiled but my smile never slipped. [They long had wished to arrive in the same bed, but it was unexpected when it occurred.] I heard the beat of wings during a migration. [He said he tore up a skyscraper.] Dangling from his chest, the baby plays with his beard. [It will be a familiar gesture, judging by the scuffs.] Once, she summoned sufficient energy to fix him a martini as they stood in a stranger’s penthouse, an entire city blazing its lights through tall, wide windows. [The kids have painted their noses yellow to mirror, they say, “kittens with flue.”] I confess to being unable to empathize with Shakespeare’s appreciation of Titus Maccius Plautus: perhaps “greatest comic” is like “giant shrimp”?

Eileen R. Tabios

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Roman Synopsis #7 I could be happy with your hand on my waist as you try to identify the scent hollowing my throat. [The tears huddle around a bonfire.] Her lapis lazuli blouse evokes a Mediterranean summer and I think, How nice. [A poet finally looks up, another birth concluded.] He looks at me as if I had spoken my question. [The bicyclists steal because they have transportation, a Mr. Something nearby adds as he gropes himself for additional emphasis.] Someone is insisting, “But, that’s a far cry, Mother Jones, from calling Oliver Stone ‘commercial’.” [On every path a branch waits for your step.] Billy is deaf but insists on serving hors d’ouevres. [Have you noticed how stuffed animals often look wise?] Roy, my twin, ignored me—to this day his indifference leaves me breathless, stunned. [He has never placed his lips on my forehead, even most momentarily.] It transcends the feminine gesture. [Consolation defined as the bat never reappeared]. She totters on ice despite thick ankles. [By his face, one can tell he’s about to deliver the boot.] He has a gaze like a mirror. [There is nothing like an infant tugging on a daddy’s white whiskers.] “Sulpicia, a Roman woman writer, wrote elegies in Latin that had been attributed to Tibullus.” [Whatever. True love is never chaste.]

Eileen R. Tabios

Karen

Hollingsworth karenhollingsworth.com

“I love to create paintings that evoke a sense of the familiar. To blend the common objects of everyday life, placed within the interior of a room, with a glimpse of the ocean or mountains, through an open window. My ‘windowscapes’ are intended to provide the viewer with a sense of solitude, and well being. A comfortable world bathed in sunlight and cool breezes from the sea. For me, a painting is successful if I wish I were there.”

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Karen Hollingsworth knew from a young age that she wanted to be an artist. But it wasn’t till her mid thirties that she could devote herself fully to studying art. For many years she focused on portraiture and has several portrait awards to her credit. Later, while concentrating on painting still life’s, she suddenly decided to add a chair into the composition and from that day on, she has been intrigued with painting room interiors and windowscapes. The combination of painting rooms, including the view of oceans and mountains from the windows, has allowed her to combine her love of painting interiors, still life’s, landscapes and sometime’s even birds into one painting. That way every painting stays interesting and exciting. Her work can now be found in galleries across the US .

Q&A

How do you feel about formal training? When I graduated highschool in 1973 and wanted to study art, it was a difficult time for artists interested in pursuing realism. Most formal art programs discouraged realism in favor of other more contemporary styles. I was disappointed with the focus of the art schools I had access to, and decided to change my field of study completely. I ended up in science, and then to be practical, a degree in Nursing. I didn’t go back to art school till I was in my thirties, and realism had started to make a comeback. I always loved to draw faces, and decided to focus on studying Portraiture, which I did. With a well known Atlanta Portrait artist, Nancy Honea, and that training made a huge impact on my portrait work, as well as overall composition and technique. But at some point, I had to turn my back on any training and let my heart choose what and how to paint. I say, learn how to handle the medium of your choice, with any instruction you can find, then quick as you can, follow your own style and passion. How do you bring emotion across to a flat surface? I think most of the power from a painting happens in the composition. For me that is a combination of the story, or narrative, played out in beautiful lines and colors.

If you knew your time was up what would be the last image you would leave us with? Probably, a portrait of my husband and my cats. Selfishly, so the last image I had in my head were all the details of their beautiful faces. How does your environment influence your work? The biggest environmental influence on me is sunlight. When I walk through my house, and I see how the sunlight lands here and there, and transforms ordinary things into the most beautiful things, my toaster, a pair of jeans on the floor. And of course chairs and tables. I’m mostly a homebody, and really have to force myself to travel, but as you can tell the ocean affects me greatly, as do all animals, the sky and land. So I have to travel to the ocean at least twice a year. I have a beautiful park near my home, and I try to walk there every day weather permitting. I get inspired watching the clouds, or the way the treetops flow in the breeze. I also try to spend some time each day meditating. I find the most incredible inspirations can happen during meditation. Must there be a statement with each creation? Maybe, not necessarily a statement that you can put in words. But a strong image can impact your whole being, and make you change the way you see the world in just a moment.

Karen Hollingsworth

Deep Breathing oil on canvas

36” x 48”

Karen Hollingsworth

Overcast

oil on canvas

40” x 40”

Karen Hollingsworth

Symmetrical

oil on canvas

40” x 40”

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Karen Hollingsworth

Annie’s Place

oil on canvas

36” x 60”

Sean Patrick

Hill

Sean Patrick Hill is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon, where he earned his MA in Writing from Portland State University. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Exquisite Corpse, diode, In Posse Review, Willow Springs, RealPoetik, New York Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Taiga, Weave, Juked, and Quarter After Eight. He is a regular blogger for Fringe Magazine.

theimaginedfield.blogspot.com.

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When This Rose Parade Burns maybe then you’ll stumble on an undying understanding of why the Panhandle hung on to its cherry trees. To its mortgaged plows. To rusted floats. To sock puppets stuffed with dirt. To horses blind as Homer. To hymns written on sandpaper. One afternoon is enough to know why black widows prefer outhouses. Break a widow’s web, it tinkles like glass. The bombers had sights with crosshairs strung with such vicious gossamer. Ask the pilots and they’ll tell you, We had no idea

that kid was in the barn, carrying so much spoiled milk.

Sean Patrick Hilll

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When This Drift Fence Burns no need to hold the weather to its lines. Snow allowed to scatter allows everyone to sleep in the barn at night, the doors unhinged. Without roads or open range. What is significant enough to tie the map in place. To desire to map at all. What drove cartographers to the rotten bottle. Spindle and lathe, fulcrum and task. Survey markers nailed to crucifixes. You are right, I’m sure— the self tires of itself, the way a drift fence can only view the world askance.

Sean Patrick Hilll

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A Different Vantage: Wade Reynolds and The Figure As Landscape Review By GRADY HARP ‘Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another’s universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.’ Marcel Proust (1871 – 1922) Wade Reynolds has been painting from life for over a half century, and while other elder artists have settled to concentrate on successful subject matter as their careers advance, Reynolds seems determined to visually inspect the world until even the most microscopic elements of what his eyes encounter are described in light and color, meticulously recreated with his deft sense of structure, composition and the effects that light absorbed or reflected define. Long respected for his portraiture of famous and ordinary people, his dramatic figurative art as well as his subtly glowing still lifes and his images from intimate gardens to vistas of water in nature, Wade Reynolds elected to devote a period of time during this century to wed his experiences of observation in a series of ten paintings collectively called The Figure as Landscape. Henri Matisse said ‘What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the almost religious feeling I have towards life.’ For Reynolds, his familiarity with the human figure, so rich in specific details, and his view of the natural world offered the opportunity to redefine how we look at the nude figure. Selecting ten models, both male and female, he succeeded in subtracting those elements of

Figure as Landscape 1

the figure that invite the viewer into the personality of the model –eyes, faces, expressions, interaction with props - and instead discovered a manner of plinth or support for the figure that suspends the need for focusing on any surface except the molded configuration of the body as a receptor and reflector or absorber of light. In Figure as Landscape 1 the male model is viewed from behind, the upper portion of the flank and the buttocks resemble those glimpses of mountaintops as the sun rises. Similarly in No. 2 only half the female form reflects the light source while the remainder of the ‘body’becomes the

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incidental features of the surrounding landscape. In No. 3 Reynolds has included glimpses of the personal aspects of the male model but only in the sheer curtain of shadow as a passing cloud might obscure. Similar uses of body form in Nos. 4 and 5 allow Reynolds to spread light and shadow as on a range of hills, while in Nos. 6 and 7 he pulls our attention to the ground surface, finding perspective and incidental configurations of more complexity – still defined solely by light and shade. We do not see these models as individuals: we see them as ‘bodyscapes’ or landscapes. The final three paintings in this luminous series, Nos. 8, 9, and 10, seem to be pulling Reynolds’ attention back to the figure as a figure, or more acutely involving the viewer’s eye as a return to the reality of the model while still projecting the quality of incorporating the nude figure as being at one with the landscape: we begin to see folds in the covering of the plinths as well as back reflections onto corporal details such as the breast, the ear, the axilla –now

doorways returning to the figure as figure. The body is becoming a mirror of the landscape as the light and shadows define it. Though Wade Reynolds is not the first artist to repeatedly paint a subject until the possibilities of variation seem exhausted (think Monet’s water lilies, Thiebaud’s San Francisco streets), but there are few artists who at the peak of their careers celebrate the simple basics of their craft – light and dark and the spatial relations they create –with the skill and sense of discovery as we see in this series The Figure as Landscape. ‘Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.’ Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924)

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Jane

Varley Jane Varley has published poems and reviews in literary magazines, and she is the author of a memoir, Flood Stage and Rising, published by the University of Nebraska Press. She has a Ph.D. in poetry and creative writing from the University of North Dakota, and she is an associate professor and coordinator of creative writing at Muskingum College in Ohio. Her travels to Iceland have inspired her to write poetry again after a few years’ hiatus. “I find that northern climates give me clear thinking and acute perceptions of what it feels like to be alive on this earth.”

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International Travel In the night before, fear comes, that old bed visitor. You sweat through insomnia—you can feel movement of blood inside your body, and your parts feel out of place. Is that your heart beating in your throat? There is the suitcase you worked on. Clothes that can be layered, imagined in weather and culture. You have the essential pair of carefully selected shoes. The shoes. Pressure point of body against earth, sturdy, long-range. Black is the color, black volcanic rocks, black as the imagined place you go when you think you can disappear.

Jane Varley

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The Ice Fishermen I love the fish houses, plywood and particle board, tarp-draped and hammered, bobhouses wheeled across the lake. Some are expensive, made from good wood or metal, like that one that fell through, a palace of the deep. You hinge your doors on wooden floors and auger holes into the ice-ceiling. Fix your hooks with smelt and minnow, and feed the lines into darkness with no fear of what happens in the underworld. Silvery shapes flash at the bottom like the sharp sudden lightning of a dream. Oh Fishermen, invite me in! At twenty below I see you snow tracking over the frosty road to a private city of shanties. I can picture the interior. I’d like to try this business of dropping hope into the shiny waters to see what comes back through the perfect circle. Jane Varley

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Beautiful Arrangements One misty afternoon in November in a basement office on campus, I recited Stevens to no dramatic effect, all the poetry lost in my rote repetition, no poetry in my voice but a wishful thought for the poetry of sitting alone, in front of the window at home where I cried for beauty and the freezing wind cut through the aged window pane. Line by line I pronounced “The Idea of Order at Key West,” words I had filed like exact and obedient soldiers of fortune. That winter I chewed sunflower seeds and worked a jigsaw puzzle of a landscape scene, all those dusky pieces that seemed alike. I searched for the ones with the gold and white, the easy ones, to make the dogwood tree and mustardcolored weeds. Winter deepened and we hung plastic over the windows to keep the outside out and inside in, thick plastic with a bit of luster, stretched and blurring, making abstract and interesting the looks of the world.

Jane Varley

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Greed I want to play basketball and golf, ride my bike in the mountains, hard on the uphill, fast going down. I want to cut grass and weed the garden. Sweat. Walk the dog. Be with the dog in the bright field by the river. Be the dog. Eat grass and lie in the sun. Run to my companion. Frolic. Paw the tiled floor. Stretch and strip to my bare human flesh and become unmuscled, lax. Do you know, lover, partner of my body, all that I crave? My greed. To find evidence of love in us, bone to bone and flesh, flesh and bone, I live inside this body, with you.

Jane Varley

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The Bells of Akureyri No one will find me here, standing still with a whole world of young mountains, the sea not broken into shape or song, arctic terns angling the sky. As the bells of Akureyri close down the afternoon, we drive on, even further, crossing the shallow fjord to the village where a furnace takes in damp rectangles of peat. Why do the gods in our hearts do this? Bring us out and turn us free? Rattling around, mismatching our lives. I can hear them inside laughing, urging me on. The river. I will go and sit by the river, inspect the gray-white layering of water, mountain, snow, and sky. It is a daguerreotype of the mind.

Jane Varley

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A Collection Of Favorites, 2008 Reviews By MICHAEL PARKER

MATCHING SKIN by Shirlette Ammons (Carolina Wren Press, 2008)

Matching Skin, one of this year’s most fascinating book titles, is also Shirlette Ammons sophomore book of poems. I had never heard of Ammons until receiving it from Carolina Wren Press. I immediately realized what a pity it all was -- that I missed out on the vibrant voice and the intriguing stories surely present in that debut. Matching Skin is an absorbing collection patched together in four parts. Introducing Matching Skin is the gloriously written preface “The High Un-Lonesome of Shirlette Ammons,”written by the poet Nikky Finney. And it is this preface that acts like a grand soliloquy – it sets the stage for us to know her past, her qualities as a human being, and her skill as a poet. More significantly, it establishes a measurement for what we can expect when Finney closes her remarks, exits, and the stage is given up to Ammons to carry us through to the end. What is the “high un-lonesome,” you ask? Well, Finney first describes the “high lonesome,” which is a back-country “twanging guttural octave” type song. Specifically, it is a “sorrow song that sizzles out of the tops of long leaf and yellow pine; a sound that celebrates hard times; goodbad love, and the razor-sharp edge between the old ways of living and the new....[it is] sad, depressed, maudlin, reclusive, sequestered, estranged, forsaken, forlorn, [etc.]” Ammons is not the “high lonesome,” Finney unabashedly explains. Rather, Ammons’ poetry is the “high un-lonesome,” which consists of impressions such as secure, emotionally-trenched, and tethered.” And perhaps at its core, Finney seems to explain, exist the still fresh footprints of history – “you hear the smooth slide of African feet, walking, dancing, and sometimes running for their lives, without shoe the first. You hear harmonica solos and the irregular meter of holiness praise houses.” Finney is accurate. We are entreated with narrative and song, spoken and sung, with the vibrancy of today and the echoes of her heritage. In the section “Ain’t No Shame,” Ammons speaks to themes familiar to her back-country upbringing –the community, the family. She takes on the wealthy and

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the bourgeois. Her language is the type you might hear in the streets, homes, churches, and back-country fields and forests of the middle-class, the poor, and the simple country folk, singing in the melody of reality and veins of hope needed to make it to the end of hard times. I wrote earlier about Finney setting the stage for us, especially in regards to describing characteristics. Adjectives that came to mind as I experienced Ammons’ poetry: self-assured, spunky, speak-it-how-it-is, don’t-ya-pity me, street-smarts, wise, prophetess, rap-star, bra-burning feminist, witty, clever, powerhouse, and commanding. In fact, I felt an empowerment in her narrative voice as powerful as a hurricane and a self-assuredness the width of the Bible Belt States. Also within Matching Skin are poems penned to many of the greats we sense have been mentors to Ammons: Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Grace Palley, and even an astoundingly witty “Do the Funny”for Dave Chappelle. Matching Skin ends with the section “John Anonymous.” It’s a title rich with meaning and could be the theme of an extraordinary, fully fleshed-out, article. It also is the title to the accompanying CD included with the book; and the concluding song on that CD. Long before I placed the CD “John Anonymous” in the CD player, I read the poetry section of the same title with the greatest passion. Reading the poems “Ain’t it (A Shame),” “Juju Man,” “Looking Glass,” “Tattooed Smile,” and “John Anonymous,” were joyful experiences. They are full of various rhythms with beats and soaring melodies. But for someone like me, who has never yet had the opportunity to see or listen to Shirlette Ammons perform her work, I joyed in her vocal abilities, singing and rapping with such soul poured into the music enraptured me. The male bass vocalist for “Ain’t it (A Shame)” transforms Ammons poem into a classic black spiritual. It’s the heart of the entire CD. In all, the messages woven throughout this John Anonymous (both on page on in music) resonate with me profoundly. I cannot stop listening. I cannot stop hearing them and aching for them when that need to touch that innersoul strikes. There is yet another accolade paid by Finney to Shirlette Ammons that I not only echo but I magnify it to the level of celebration: “[Ammons is] a young poet intent on rolling hard on the back roads until the road ends or something new begins or the hurricane hits.” In other words, Ammons is going to be a driving force in the weave of American poetry, interpreting the stories and visions she experiences on the “back roads” and “hurricanes”of life until there are no roads or hurricanes left to interpret. It’s a pleasure to introduce my favorite list of 2008 with Matching Skin

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HESITANT COMMITMENTS by Pris Campbell (Lummox Press, 2008)

INTERCHANGEABLE GODDESSES, by Pris Campbell and Tammy F. Tremble (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006)

In his poem “Beyond Pleasure,” from his National Book Critics Circle Awardwinning collection of poetry, Refusing Heaven, Jack Gilbert describes the worth of good poetry: “Poetry fishes us to find a world part by part.../to give us time to see each thing separate and enough./ The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward/to know its merit with attention.” Undoubtedly, when I read Jack Gilbert’s poetry and his thoughts here on the raw intentions of poetry, I always turn to the poetry of Pris Campbell. In Campbell’s poetry exist narratives that embody these raw intentions. What is it to “see each thing separate and enough”? Simple. To have within one’s skill the thoughtful, gentle awareness of the minute “parts” of the vast whole. Campbell has an amazing insight when it comes to seeing the “whole” of the human experience – the aptitude she has for interpreting the human, whether it be physically reading their movements, their expressions (intentionally displayed or not intentionally), or their simple (sexual) and complicated (conjoining of hearts) relationships. In Hesitant Commitments, Campbell courageously turns inward to interpret for us the images of the lost lovers and meaningful affairs of yesteryear (and the affairs not so meaningful but needed in order to soothe the ache of loneliness, or, as Campbell describes them, “black holes”). Campbell takes us on journey’s to the romantic Greek Isles, where her loves are Odysseus and she is Cleopatra; Rome; Paris; the European continent; London; and New Zealand. And in all of these moments of significant connection, Campbell reveals her heart – that she was always searching for “paradise,” “redemption”, being at the “last blink of innocence”, the sadness to be drawn out of the shadows, and to “see the face/ of her true love reflected in the one panting/ above. Hesitant Commitments is a significant work. Some might considerthis brave. Because Campbell suffers from the debilitating disorder CFIDS, Campbell’s poetry

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could easily wallow in the more maudlin, romantic notions of aging with grace. But Campbell gives us amazing stories and images seemingly right out of the mind of Mrs. Robinson, a soul whose passion, longing, and sex-drive is at its peak and not willing to let the reins of time pull or control her. Because she is the one in control! And neither does Hesitant Commitments feel like an elegy or funeral pyre. Campbell writes these in the tone of celebration. The joint chapbook “Interchangeable Goddesses”by Pris Cambell and Tammy Trendle also became a beloved collection after listening to The Jane Crow Show interview in June (2008). In this collection, both poets poignantly address themes of womanhood, love, marriage, motherhood, and life. But if I might focus on Campbell again, I stress how adept her skill at depicting the human condition so keenly and thoughtfully. Her work really shines and warms. Whether she is writing about her visit with Eleanor Roosevelt, the ghosts of her dead soldier brother, the memories of lovers of year’s past, the ravaging effect of CFIDS, or the old woman across the street dancing alone in the night, Campbell’s insights hint toward a wise and humane soul who’s forever opening doors for us to walk through. Again, Campbell is engrossing – how she masterfully develops a fully-breathing depiction of a person, dynamic enough to enrapture me, capture my attention, and also my heartstrings. For Campbell, this skill comes easy because she knows the intricacies of life and the important lasting impressions of connecting. Echoing Gilbert again, Campbell has the gift of sentience and the understanding of human behavior that equates with knowing the “endless flowing forward” of life. We are very fortunate to have her beautiful narrative voice and poetics becoming recognized.

TIME & MATERIALS by Robert Hass (HarperCollins, 2007)

Robert Hass is a noted translator and teacher at the University of California at Berkeley. He served as poet laureate for two years in the mid-’90s. His latest work, Time & Materials is winner of the National Book Award of 2007 and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 2008. It is not an uncommon trait for editors and publishers to seek out poetry and voices that challenge them, structurally, thematically, or otherwise – work that has the feeling of now written all over it. With this in mind, I introduce to you Time & Materials, the first collection from the

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esteemed Robert Hass in nearly a decade. Hass’ narrative poetics can appear at first glance so nondescript and unchallenging that the unseasoned or impatient reader may not venture in. After all, some of Hass’objects for his poems are of the I-see-them-daily variety: the dawn, a tree, a field mouse, the interior of a house, the eating of cucumbers, birds, and the color red. Hardly enchanting, you are thinking. In “The Problem of Describing Trees,” Hass hints about enchantment in poetry: “It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.” What does he mean by this? Is he speaking of subject matter or structure? And what about the art of “enchanting” or being challenging? Does poetry have to enchant us to be relevant? It is not my intent to answer these questions in this review, though I’ve been thinking about them for weeks. But I will say that the need to be enchanted seems to come from the mind of an amateur. I say this holding as evidence Hass’ collection, where, it is true, the desire to enchant is his furthest intent. For this astutely, masterful Time & Materials, his penchant to take the seemingly mundane conversation, event, or scene and treat it with such poetic skill is, undoubtedly, nothing more than enchanting to experience. It’s like sitting in tutelage of a master at work at his most brilliant. But let me expound, if you would allow me, on Hass’ masterful skill at writing about anything, even a tree. Because possibly it sheds light on the nature of the poet. Consider Hass’interview with PBS.org after receiving the Pulitzer Prize, in which Hass defended the importance of writing about “anything”: JEFFREY BROWN: By implication, there are limits to say anything. ROBERT HASS: Yes. I mean, there are two ways of saying this -- or there are a million ways of saying this. One way is to say what Wittgenstein said, language philosophy in the early 20th century, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” which I don’t think is quite true. And the other is to say what Ed Wilson, the environmentalist and entomologist, biogeographer said, which is that every species lives in its own sensory world and, at some point, it dawns on you that you just -we don’t have a language for what would be the experience of a tree or, for that matter, a fox or a robin. So... JEFFREY BROWN: So much of your work is about trying to examine or

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describe things like that. And I think I can understand the problem of finding the right words or any words. But what I am not sure I understand -- and maybe this is what distinguishes poets from the rest of us -- is, why the need to describe trees? What is the burden on you that you must come up with a way to describe the world? ROBERT HASS: My mind goes straight to my dear friend and mentor, Czeslaw Milosz, who... JEFFREY BROWN: Great poet. ROBERT HASS: ... great poet, and he was born in Lithuania in 1911. And he lived through much of the worst violence of the 20th century in Europe. He lost so much that I know -- I came to understand about him. One of his poems begins, “Reality, what is it in words?” I came to understand about him that he’d lost so much that he felt like everything he didn’t get down -- if he didn’t get it down, nothingness won, you know? JEFFREY BROWN: If he didn’t get it down into a poem... ROBERT HASS: Yes, nothingness won. He had this sense that, if art doesn’t somehow preserve our memory of the gift of life on Earth we’ve lost, so something like that. So there you have the purpose of writing about the mundane and unenchanting – “to preserve our memory of the gift of life.” If anyone dare look upon Hass’ work and call it droll narrative or “nothingness,” well that is their prerogative. But I can attest that within Time & Materials are ruminations on various images and themes that are fleshed out concisely, expressively and with language that is a treasure. Specifically, Hass introduces us to expansive landscapes or solitary landmarks or object (familiar and unfamiliar) in locations as far away as Berlin, the border of North & South Korea, Mexico, and Thailand, and as close as the forests of the High Sierras and the California coast line. And in these locations, he raises themes that analyze art, war, man’s inhumanity, nature, life, and

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relationships. As a final note, the sleeve to this timeless collection adds an exemplary quote from the New York Times Book Review that evokes my exact sentiments: “It has always been Mr. Hass’aim to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and everything else, into his poetry.” This mission statement hardly could be considered by a poet not in full understanding of his craft and the importance of the art. * PBS interview can be read in its entirety at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june08/ poetry_04-30.html

PLEASE by Jericho Brown (Western Michigan University, 2008)

The word “please” is employed to enhance or soften the sincerest of requests. “Please”, when spoken, is called forth with a cold-cocked and drawn out desperation for assistance, for consideration, or for understanding; heart and reputation is seen weighing down its back. In truth, “please,” is an expression offered with emotional gravity –that the hearer will understand the offering, consider it, and in some regard, reply with allowance or acceptance. It’s upon these thoughts that I introduce Jericho Brown’s stunning and passionate collection “Please,”a work of poetry that at its core are pieces of Brown’s life narrative that he offers to the reader on the outreached palms of his hands. To Brown, life has been a long song full of dichotomy: abuse, empowerment, love, violence, longing, fulfillment, lust, relationship, confusion, clarity and selfacceptance. It’s the song of a not-so-easy family life and the realization of his sexual orientation. In the sections Repeat and Pause, there are images of abuses and the innerbattle for self-acceptance: “father’s leather belt;” “the braided belt;” the grandmother rubbing his sister’s neck so hard with a washcloth that she draws blood; the narrator feeling as vulnerable as an “open field;” to name a few. From the poem “Pause,” we get a sense of Brown, as the narrator, trying to escape: If they ever heard of slavery, the work song – the best music

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is made of substraction, the singer seeks an exit from the scarred body and opens his mouth trying to get out. His desire to transcend this past is most apparent in “Prayer of the Backhanded.” Not the palm, not the pear tree Switch, not the broomstick, Nor the closest extension Cord, not his braided belt, but God, Bless the back of my daddy’s hand Which, holding nothing tightly Against me and not wrapped In leather, eliminated the air Between itself and my cheek. Make full this dimpled cheek Unworthy of its unfisted print And forgive my forgetting The love of a hand Hungry for reflex, a hand that took No thought of its target Like hail from a blind sky, Involuntary, fast, but brutal In its bruising. Father, I bear the bridge Of what might have been A broken nose. I lift to you What was a busted lip. Bless The boy who believes His best beatings lack Intention, the mark of the beast. Bring back to life the son Who glories in the sin Of immediacy, calling it love. God, save the man whose arm Like an angel’s invisible wing

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May fly backward in fury Whether or not his son stands near. Help me hold in place my blazing jaw As I think to say excuse me. In the last section of the book, Power, Brown’s poetry is written with songs, vocalists, and musicals of yesteryear making up oxygen of their atmosphere. Experiences are enhanced with the sounds of Minnie Ripperton, Diana Ross, the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz, Janis Joplin, Luther Vandross, Natalie Cole, and Danny Hathaway. But these are not so much tributes as they are realizations that Brown and his lovers are the representations of these singers as they grope and spread and climb and join and “give in to [the] mouth/tongue and not bite.” It’s in these poems in which Brown’s poems are most powerful and passionate. In closing, two last points: 1) Brown’s poetics throughout “Please”are as finetuned as a professional. And 2) I appreciate poetry that crosses the border of surface emotions and gives us poetry that exhibits emotional depth, integrity, and sincerity, despite the effects. “Please”is a very courageous work, probably one of the most courageous in my memory.

KEY BRIDGE by Ken Rumble (Carolina Wren Press, 2007)

Susan Sontag, in “The Art of Fiction” interview published in The Paris Review (Issue 137, 1995), explained that the writer is “someone who pays attention to the world.” Sontag’s remark comes to mind when I consider my review of Ken Rumble’s Key Bridge. Rumble uses the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Washington, D.C. as the backdrop and symbol around a collection of date-titled poems that address themes of race, street-life, sex, drugs, death, family-life, and growing up in Washington, D.C., the city of contrasts: houses the federal government, welcomes millions of tourists, and yet has continually through the years struggled with high poverty rates. Key Bridge captures, with the eye of an insider, all of beauty and ugliness of his experience with the city. But not only do I love Key Bridge for its poetics, but for Rumble’s unique repetition of phrases and his syntax, which helps accentuate the narrator’s internal conflict with the subject matter at hand.

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HITLER’S MUSTACHE by Peter Davis When I first saw Peter Davis’ book Hitler’s Mustache, two disparate thoughts came to mind: the audacity and how ingenious. And I determined that Davis’ work would have to meet two criteria: 1) the content within these poems could not in any manner deflect, ridicule, or lesson the severe gravity of the horrors, brutality, inhumanity, atrocities, and genocide of Jews during the dominance of Nazi Germany. Nor 2) could the collection, in any manner, be an apologist of Hitler’s nature and actions. Upon opening the book, I quickly noticed Davis’ callout to Elie Wiesel’s quote: “But when later we evoke the 20th century, among the first names that will surge to mind will be that of a fanatic with a mustache.” And I immediately gloried that Davis chose a quote in which the name Hitler wasn’t even used, as if it were an intentional choice to never mention the name again. And Hitler’s Mustache never failed the criteria I set forth. In fact, the contrary was the case. Davis’work is every much a hilarious fixation on the square mustache in general as it is social commentary on the utter absurdity of everything Hitler/Nazi and everyone Nazi/Hitler. And Davis clearly spotlights this in the very opening poem: “Hitler’s Mustache: The List of Facts.” “Hitler’s mustache is a cancer.... Hitler’s mustache does not believe in peace, has contempt for the law, does not respect university professors, ....turns up its nose.” Any student of this historical period would catch the correlation of these characteristics with the early days of the Nazi Party in pre-holocaust Germany. Davis continues: “Hitler’s mustache begins something, loses track of it, starts something else but forgets what, moves on to something else. All the while, killing Jews.... Hitler’s mustache pulls strings for certain elevators, levers for certain pulleys, , cables for certain women, triggers for certain bullets, ripcords for certain threads, latches for certain trapdoors, zippers for certain ovens.” In all, there are 76+ poems that all begin with the phrase “Hitler’s Mustache:”. A sampling of titles looks like this: Hitler’s Mustache: The Mustache is a riddle, except it can’t be answered

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Hitler’s Mustache: The Punk Band Hitler’s Mustache:Of All the Possible Face Fur Hitler’s Mustache: The Short Story Hitler’s Mustache: The Basic Situation of the Clandestine Mustache And to prove my point that Davis ingeniously uses this form of satire to scrutinize Hitler, I”m leaving you with these sections of poems. 1 “You are aware of the fur trade and the killing of animals. You know things you wouldn’t tell the police.” (From “Hitler’s Mustache: The Basic Situation of the Clandestine Mustache”) 2 In the Mustache Museum of untrue truth, I think of dead soldiers tying neckties with pinky fingers, and the shriveled faces in mass graves that are not discovered, and the fecal-impacted colons of German mystics, all dreaming of super-humans. All the clawed Fascists are ashamed to seek medical attention. Their wounds swell with infection, pussing to be healed. Therefore, in the middle years of the twentieth century, one dome of flesh grows, and one upper lip tussles wildly with the fur latch on this small, black trapdoor. (From “Hitler’s Mustache: Mustache Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Mustachio”) 3 .... [A] mustache says to the bartender, “I’m bored, can I have a drink made of something other than boredom?” The bartender gives him a drink made of mustache. The...mustache says “What’s this? I’m not a cannibal!” And the bartender says, “Well, you look like a mustache to me.”

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.... What’s the difference between a mustache and a black hole? A black hole isn’t attached to your face and growing from your face pores. .... (From “Hitler’s Mustache: The Jokes”) Davis employs a wide range of poetic structures to build this truly incredible narrative about the most controversial mustache in the history of the world. The poet Nin Andrews called Hitler’s Mustache “refreshing,” “surprising,” and “innovative.” I might add: “undeniably memorable,” “poignant,” “amazing,” “historically relevant,” and “furiously good fun.”

UNRAVELING THE BED by Mia Leonin (Ahinga Press, 2008) Reviewed by Michael Parker in the Cuban-American issue of MiPoesias, March 2008.

In the poems, stories, and even the spoken word of Unraveling the Bed, the first collection from the Cuban-American poet, Mia Leonin tackles the highly arduous task of interpreting love. Under the auspices of love, Leonin specifically highlights desire, longing, and the sexual connection. She also stunningly analyzes sub-themes such as love as service; love as the religious experience; and love as the brilliant chameleon set against the fierce play of love – the joy and peace; the hunger and longing; the sacred act and the shared meal; and the magic and the miracle. Poetry can read like a great river. This collection, on the other hand, is more intimate and vital: it is like a heartbeat. Here is a joyous collection! And here is an impressive poet whose star just may be rising into a more prominent space of sky.

FEAR, SOME by Douglas Kearney (Red Hen Press, 2006) Reviewed by Michael Parket in the first issue of Oranges & Sardines, July 2008.

Douglas Kearney’s writing is an explosively energetic and hypnotic style that mixes moments of self-examination and societal analysis in a flight of words, screams,

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and apparent songs. Yes, linger awhile in these poems and you sense you aren’t reading Kearney as much as sensing he’s performing a full-cast play somewhere behind the text. Kearney’s poetry depicts a society always at diverging tides, in flux, not ever comfortable with who it is or what it wants to be. His references to and reflection of the past, idea of the now, and vision of the future never crosses emotional or sentimental lines. It’s straight-forward – this is how it was and what it is, and how it will be –based off of a predictable causal framework. Yet, his voice doesn’t preach. Discovering Kearney at this time seemed fate, as many of his themes, especially those speaking to race-related issues - the strokes of the heart beating behind his words - are the same themes beating in Senator Barak Obama’s magnificent speech on race relations in America in February 2008. One can never divorce themself from their personal, familial, societal, or heritage past. Like Peter Pan’s shadow being stitched to the sole of his foot, our past is stitched into our soul. Kearney walks with his past as if he’s walking with a wise mentor, gleaning what needs to be gleaned, then interpreting it for us, for our time. Near the middle of Kearney’s extraordinary poem “The Poet Writes the poem that will certainly make him famous,” a extraneous work that addresses his muses, the slave trade, the multifarious abuses on the black man, and the sheer idiocy of how the black performer was treated, Kearney interrupts his work with a seeming plea to break down the walls of hatred and racism. It’s part call-down-heaven’s-power Sunday sermon and part shake-the-foundations-of-the-earth gospel hymn. Fear, Some is a collection of vibrant verse that is as much performance art (a one-man play) as it is a work of immense historical significance on the past and upon the time we breathe in. At its backbone are the dreams of the courageous, the dreamers, and the activists that are ever prescient, timeless, and that reverberate in any human with a heart. Kearney’s work is a storm of reckoning and awakening. In this, we see the brutal ugliness of our treatment of others. But underlying this are the echoes of the dreams of the greats of past and present. And they resonate in me – knocking wildly around the rafters of this heart!

GOD’S SILENCE by Franz Wright (Knopf, 2008)

The last Franz Wright collection, Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, won him the

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Pulitzer Prize. That was in 2003. God’s Silence is his first publication since that award. One of the primary conflicts in literature and poetry is loneliness, a singular sense that we are absolutely alone - no man knows my story, my sorrow. So we write for understanding. We search for and write about the strings that connect us - that universal connection that means that no matter my experience and no matter your experience, I understand you. You’ve reached me. You’ve captured me. God’s Silence is a collection that tackles this very internal conflict of having connection, but analyzes it on the spiritual plane of the human soul connecting with God. And this conflict of believing arises in part to the estrangement that we feel from God, because of the silence. This is the core of Franz Wright’s work and it breathes with mystical manifestations of faith and adoration at one moment, being selfdeprecating another moment, and then being courageous to even express his own struggle with doubt, despair, and addiction at other moments. Rising from the pages of God’s Silence are the refrains of a haunted soul trying to come to terms with all of the contradictions of his faith, personal trials, and more poignantly, the seemingly loud silence from the God he seems so intent on hearing. This theme is most evident in the jarring reality behind his own revelation: “I have heard God’s silence like the sun.” Though Wright wrestles with the demons of doubt and physical trials, he counteracts this with poems and insights full of hope. In all, the themes, the continual search for meaning, faith, and even redemption – structured under Wright’s compassionate perspective – transcends the tide of genre-like religious poetry. To me, Franz Wright steps onto the same plane as R.M. Rilke and shows he is the voice that can circle around the concept of God and do it convincingly, sincerely, and realistically, as proved in the line: “Proved faithless, still I wait.” I adore poetry that resonates in me long after I shut the book and walk away; that haunts me while falling into dreams. This is effect many of the works on this list had on me, but Wright’s poetry followed me into my dreams and rattled around in the back of my head in my days. I have selected God’s Silence by Franz Wright as my favorite poetry work of the year. * If you released a collection/chapbook last year and your publisher didn’t send me a copy, get in contact with me either through O&S or personally.

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Rachel

Constantine www.rachelconstantine.com

“I seek qualities of repose, balance and visual harmony in my compositions. These delicate and elusive traits could never be achieved without a dedication to depicting each situation’s unique and distinctive quality of light.”

Rachel Constantine was born in Philadelphia in 1973. She discovered her passion for portraiture early on, and the desire for academic figurative training would lead her on an adventure that would culminate in 2003 with a certificate in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she graduated with honors. Since then, she has participated in 20 exhibitions, won three awards from the Woodmere Art Museum in Pennsylvania and another from Allied Artists of America in New York City. In 2006, Rachel was invited to exhibit in Artworks Gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as the local compliment to the Museum’s blockbuster exhibition: ‘Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic’. Her work can be found in The Vivian O. and Meyer P. Potamkin Collection in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and is featured in the new hard-cover illustrated book Alla Prima: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Direct Painting, written by Al Gury, the chairman of the Pennsyvania Academy’s painting department. Photography by Denise Guerin

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Which artist/photographer do you admire or has had the biggest influence on your work? The painters whose works have inspired me most are undeniably John Singer Sargent and Cecilia Beaux. Books of their paintings are always strewn about my studio, ready for me to pick up and study whenever I get stumped in a piece. I’ve also always been a great admirer of the early French Impressionists and their influences on late 19th century American art. I’m fascinated by their economy of brushstroke, the attempt to say more with less. How do you feel about formal training? I happen to be of the mind that there are some fundamental “rules” in painting, and that a foundation in anatomy, color theory, perspective, art history, etc., is very important. This might not be entirely the case for artists who are either inherent genuises or who paint more abstractly. But as a classical representational painter, I’ve found formal training to be pretty inescapable. I’ve seen many young painters who eskew formal training and whose foundational mistakes—some easily correctable early on—become deeply entrenched. But there’s always a balance. I’m also not one to endorse endless training. At some point one has to jump in and pick up a paintbrush. Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when creating art? Like most artists, my projects are typically sparked by a particular quality I observe in someone (and less often, but occassionally, in some thing or some place) that I feel compelled to try to capture and translate visually. I almost always paint people I know—even if it’s just casually—because I prefer to have that emotional connection going in. At the same time, my paintings don’t necessarily aim to be “about” the person I’m working with; it’s the characteristic of the individual that I try to use as a vehicle to express larger concepts. Typically, I’ll bring a subject into my studio, try my best to get them to relax and not “model,”and then photograph them in an attempt to achieve a specific pose that speaks to me. I try to have as few preconceptions as possible at this point, because my whole goal is to capture a “found moment.”Once the pose is set, I bring the model back for sittings, as needed. How do you bring emotion across to a flat surface? For me, classical painting is all about light; I find in my Rachel Constantine

Q&A

own work that a piece’s success often rises and falls according to the accuracy of it’s depiction. An instructor of mine once said that in learning to paint light, one learns to capture emotion, and I think that’s true. So it’s through the subtleties of the way light falls that essential things like tone and mood are conveyed. And, on a more pratical level, I’d mention that this is why I rarely use artificial light sources; there’s a limitlessness about the color and range of natural light that artificial light just can’t reproduce. As a painter who doesn’t subscribe so wholeheartedly to the concepts espoused by modernism and postmodernism—or at least, I should say, isn’t particularly affected by them—I’d also argue that the foundation of any solid painting is solid drawing. To my thinking, color in and of itself does not make art. There’s form, function and foundation there. It’s one thing to say something’s beautiful—because there’s beauty in almost everything, if you take the time to stop and really look hard enough—but it’s another to call it a work of art. So I tend to admire painters who are strong draftsmen first. How does your environment influence your work? To me, this is among the more interesting questions to think about. Environment, of course, can be physical—as in locale, the place where you’re physically working—or emotional, that is the place you’re painting from internally. The latter, as you might expect, permeates every aspect of my art. As I look back over my body of work, among the emotions that seem to stand out most is longing. And by that I don’t mean to imply depressiveness per se. It’s more so the human instinct to connect— connection between the subject and the artist, the subject and the viewer, but also between the subject and something larger, something metaphysical, I suppose. In terms of physical environment, I’m frequently torn between my own instinct to flee for newness and what I’ve come to appreciate as an advantage to “soaking in” one’s surroundings over a longer term. Having lived—and painted—in Philadelphia for the better part of my life, I’m always surprised by the constant possibility for new subjects. And I’m humbled by the legacy of a painter like Andrew Wyeth, who spent all of his 91 years in nearby Chester County, and whose paintings betray a profound sense of physical and emotional place.

Rachel Constantine

Dove

oil on canvas

40” x 36”

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Michaela

charcoal and graphitie

22” x 30”

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Pause

oil on canvas

30” x 30”

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The Sculptor

oil on canvas

30” x 30”

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MOM’S CANOE by Rebecca Foust REVIEW BY MELISSA MCEWEN

Texas Review Press, 2008. 30 pages.

Go ahead…aspire to transcend your...roots.../escape the small-minded tyranny of your small-minded Midwestern coalmining town./But when you’ve left it behind you may find it still there, in your dreams your syntax, the smell of your hair... — from “Altoona to Anywhere”               And in your poems!   In Rebecca Foust’s Mom’s Canoe, from the first poem to the last, the reader is “back  home” in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania as if he were born there, too, and  going back home for a visit — that is how vivid Foust’s poems are in this chapbook. Rebecca Foust was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania and grew up in a small town made up of coal mines and farmland; she now lives in Northern California, but it is as though she never left western Pennsylvania. Sometimes one has to leave to appreciate “back home” and understand that “back home” shapes you and makes you who you are and if you are a poet, it will find its way into your poems, eventually, even if you “aspired to transcend...[and] escape...[it].” In Mom’s Canoe, Foust falls back comfortably into her native town, even though, sometimes, times were hard. And she does not explain things that may be unique to her town, as if you are an outsider, stopping over to pay her a visit, instead she expects you to know; she is reliving with you, as if you were an inhabitant. And after reading Mom’s Canoe, you will feel as if you were. You will know of:   [the]...thick smoke from the papermill all day and night... — from “Things Burn Down”

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  ...the men…[and how]/their coats exhale wet wool and wood smoke,/their feet beat a work boot tattoo; laid off,/laid off, laid off... — from “Allegheny Mountain Bowl” [the]...beer/served on an unfolded Altoona Mirror. Not damask... — from “Things Burn  Down”                         [the]...cottage down in the Cove —mildew and wild roses, thick vines choking/everything... — from “Once was a River”   “And if you understand, you won’t have to ask” about Mom’s canoe; you’ll listen as if you’ve heard the story before, but not how Foust tells it, and you’ll nod in remembrance:   Do you remember your old canoe? Wooden wide-bellied, tapered ends made to slip through tight river bends swiftly, like shadow…/Remember how it glowed like honey in summer...      — from “Mom’s Canoe”   You’d go back to him... your swaggering.../second husband.../How could you after he blackened/your eye, dumb-bitched you and wrecked your canoe? — from “Backwoods”               Overall, Rebecca Foust’s chapbook, from page one to page thirty, is a strong compilation. The poems in here can hold their own in any literary journal or anthology. Mom’s Canoe, to me, is the epitome of what a chapbook should be.       

MOM’S CANOE BY REBECCA FOUST

poetsandartists.com

Front & Back Cover Art by Lane Timotny

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