Surprise

A new poem is always a surprise, but in fact that's the title of my latest. It may still get a bit of fine-tuning, but it's mostly done:

Surprise

All that day the wind
blew me along but
gently and the gray
clouds came and went
but left no rain
and in the intervals
the sunlight glittered
in the puddles I
slogged through
the day before.

The latest issue of The Scrambler with two of my poems is now online. In addition to the poems, you can listen to sound files of me reading them. It's one of the best online journals I've seen—and I thought that before the editor accepted my work. It's worth bookmarking and I've added a link to the sidebar.

Breaking news, 5/13: I've had another poem accepted for publication by a journal in Sacramento, CA, called Rattlesnake Review. It's due out in mid-June. This one's a print 'zine, but you can follow the link and probably get a copy.

Lightning & Water

NaPoMo and NaPoWriMo may be over, but I'm still writing of course. here's a new poem, accompanied by the usual thanks to Naomi for her usual insightful and incisive comments:

Lightning in a Bottle, Water in a Net

I.
Dozens of interlaced
nerves branch out
like ant pathways
in all directions
crackling like a hundred
tiny electrical fires if
I could find the switch
I could sleep.

II.
I grasp for words
that slip like tiny
fish through fingers
the thoughts behind
the words trickle into
tiny streams and sink
below ground if
I could collect them
you would stay.

The Great Figure

We'll close National Poetry Month with William Carlos Williams, one of America's greatest and most important poets. He influenced many poets across a wide and diverse range, from Robert Lowell, to Robert Creeley to Allen Ginsberg. My own work owes a great debt to his.

The Great Figure

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

April may be over, but keep poetry part of your life every day!

Don't Love Your Life Too Much

Continuing our National Poetry Monthly selections, an excerpt from Mary Oliver, one of our finest poets and one of the few who can actually sell out a reading:

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then

the butterfly
rose, weightless in the wind.
"Don't love your life
too much," it said,

and vanished
into the world.
from "One or Two Things"

And something new from me:

Lightning in a Bottle

Dozens of interlaced
nerves branch out
like ant pathways
in all directions
crackling like a hundred
tiny electrical fires if
I could find the switch
I could sleep.

Check These Out

To hold my readers until I can post another poem (Mary Oliver is up next), here's a link to a very entertaining article about the value of poetry up against, e.g., mathematics. Also, I am not alone in thinking
George Oppen deserves a wider audience.

Out of a Cloud

Continuing our Poetry Month postings, here's another first-rate poet who happens to have been a woman (I'm not falling into that "woman poet" locution ever again...no one calls T.S. Eliot or Whitman "America's greatest man poet"!):

Several Voices Out of a Cloud

Come, drunks and drug-takers; come, perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit, to whom
and wherever deserved.

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless
And it isn't for you.
—Louise Bogan

Off Balance

We pause in our regularly scheduled poetry postings for a trenchant observation. If this was true in 1932, how much more so today....

The number of people on the borderline of insanity in a big country is simply appalling, and these seem especially addicted to believing themselves saviors and prophets. It takes only a slight stimulus to throw them completely off their balance.—Clarence Darrow