Here, in a web-exclusive poem–cousin of sorts to the pieces appearing in the print issue–the search for intelligent life comes to an end.

–

The fortune teller

cannot tell me if Americans will come to believe
in evolution. “You will get a sliver
of cedar in your hand,” she says, kissing my palm
where Christ would have had a scab, whose father
made everything, including Band-Aids,
according to polls. And what about the oceans?
Will senators admit we’re breaking them?
Her eyes roll to white, a wave of capitalism
snaps her flesh to and fro in her chair, “I see a woman
telling you not to worry, it happens
to all men,” and falls back, arms flung out,
panting as if she has just won gold
in the hundred meter fly. Can you at least see
if we’ll stop beating up nerds
in movies? She takes her wig off, her mole,
her hooked nose is a prosthetic, her crap teeth
are fake, layer by layer she un-uglies herself
until I’m looking at a beautiful woman
lighting a cigarette and saying, “no one likes
the smartest person in the room.”
She’s so wise I want to marry her
brain and protect it at parties
from the lesser intellects of the rum drinkers.
“It would never work,” she says, sensing the future
redecorating I’m planning, a granite backsplash
with glass tile inserts. “You’re a gradualist,
I believe in punctuated equilibrium, our children
wouldn’t know where to turn.” We sit awhile,
the carnival perfecting its screams and odors
of rut and dung around us, until she tells me,
“you’re about to stand, picture me naked and wonder
if life is worth it.” I stand, picture her in nothing
but a lab coat and head straight for the caramel corn,
sure intelligence has never been sexier and buy
the biggest bag they have of life being worth it.

–
Bob Hicok‘s recent books include Words for Empty and Words for Full (Pitt, 2010) and This Clumsy Living, winner of the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.  His new book, Elegy Owed, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2013.

In anticipation of her visit, we share the article “Science & Stanzas” that she wrote for The Scientist, about her work as both poet and molecular biologist, and the interesting things they have in common. We also call attention to her recent appearance on the NewsHour, where she talks about her research and writing, and reads several poems in dramatic natural settings, like they did in ancient Greece. Above all, we invite you to join us at the FREE events next week.

cover art by Amanda Knowles

As languages approaching the mysteries of existence and advancing the limits of human understanding, poetry and science have more in common than you may think. The Spring & Summer 2012 issue is devoted to the theme of the sciences as poets encounter them, and vice versa. Featuring: Linda Bierds, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Timothy Donnelly, Amy Greacen, Bob Hicok, Richard Kenney, Katherine Larson, Sarah Lindsay, and many more.

Subscribe now, and we’ll start you off with the best in left brain/right brain thinking. Meanwhile, catch contributors Linda Bierds and Bob Hicok at The Skagit Valley Poetry Festival, Friday & Saturday, May 18 & 19. We’ll be there too. Stop by our table and say hi!

EARLIER:
Poetry Northwest’s annual spring symposium explores the intersection of poetry and science, through panels, talks, exhibits and readings. It takes place in two locations — Seattle (Wednesday, May 9) and Everett (Thursday, May 10). See full schedule below.

The spring symposium features prize-winning poets and scintillating scientists—or both in the same skin. Presenters include Katherine Larson, Amy Greacen, Richard Kenney, Mott Greene, and Fayla Schwartz

Thanks to the sponsorship of the Everett Cultural Arts Commission and The Everett Community College Foundation, all events are FREE and open to the public. The Science Issue was produced with the support from The Kinsman Foundation and the Greater Everett Community Foundation’s Robyn Johnson Poetry Fund. We thank our sponsors for their generous support.

Wednesday, May 9, 8 pm – 10 pm:

The Big Bang

featuring the Yale Younger Poets:
Katherine Larson & Richard Kenney
plus the Vis-à-Vis Society
Liberty Bar - 517 15th Ave. E., Seattle, WA

Thursday, May 10, 2012, 1:00 pm  – 4:30 pm:

Poetry & Science: A Symposium

ORCA/Port of Everett Waterfront Center
Blue Heron Room
1205 Craftsman Way, Everett, WA

Schedule:

1 pm: WELCOME: Kevin Craft, Editor Poetry Northwest

1 pm – 3:30 pm: Science Fair with the students of ORCA

1 pm – 2:00 pm: READING/PRESENTATION: A Northwest Botany of Desire
Amy Greacen and Fayla Schwartz

2:15 – 3:15 pm: PANEL: Model Realities: Science in Poetry & Poetry in Science
Kevin Craft, Amy Greacen, Mott Greene, Richard Kenney, Katherine Larson

3:30 – 4:30: READING [Sci-Po]: Katherine Larson and Richard Kenney

for presenter bios and more information visit www.everettcc.edu/possessionsound

Photo by Elisabeth Flenniken

Editor’s note: Kathleen Flenniken is the 2012-2014 Washington State Poet Laureate.  (Congratulations!)  On Sunday, March 18, 2012 at 3pm, she will read from her new book of poems, Plume, at Open Books in Seattle.  Details here.

The accompanying photographs are not part of the original text of the poem, and are publicly available at The Hanford Declassification Project archives. The images, including those of Herbert Parker, appear unaltered  from the archives.

–

Herbert Parker (1910-1984) started the Health Physics program at the Hanford Works in 1944, charged with designing and implementing radiation monitoring systems for both workers (who must remain within “permissible” exposure limits that he, in part, established) and the downstream and downwind environment.  Parker created standards and methods in an industry that had never before existed. His team brought back proof of new and unforeseen contamination every day; monitoring must have been—I think, looking back—a terrifying adventure.  Parker embraced and advanced secrecy, and worried in now-declassified memos that an action like closing the Columbia River to fishing (in the 1950s, sediments, fish, and water samples tested well above the radiation exposure limits he helped set) or evacuating public lands (a particularly alarming stack problem at Redox Plant in 1954 resulted in widespread airborne radioruthenium contamination large enough to see with the naked eye) would do irreparable “public relations” damage.  Armed with his own calculations that scuttled “overly conservative” safety factors, Parker invariably erred toward maintaining morale.

The italicized sections of “Augean Suite” are in Herbert Parker’s own voice.  I am fascinated by his tendency to repeat language (a kind of double speak evident in Part V) and his taste for grand—mythic—verbal gestures.  (Kathleen Flenniken)

–

Augean Suite

I. The Fifth Labor of Hercules

Augeus’s vast herds of cattle were divine
but their shit was earthly,
and divinely abundant.

The stench hung over the valley,
palpable. Nobody
waded into the fouled stable

without drowning.
This gave Hercules his idea
to divert two rivers,

the Alpheus and the Peneus,
and sluice the filth away,
which he finished in a single day.

Then he slew King Augeus
to remind us the world belongs
to gods and kings,

that exacting justice is worthier
than atoning for sins.
No more mention

of the two gangrenous rivers,
the women downstream washing clothes
or their children bathing.

II. Augean Gray, 1954

Flakes emitted from the process stack
could be discerned by the eye
the way one might hear the taps
of countless leather soles
treading a busy bus lot
and yet not attend them—

not notice their drift and fall.
Say the click of my mother’s heels
as she pushed one baby in a carriage
and pulled another by the hand
through the nearby village in August—
as it snowed radioruthenium.
She wouldn’t know to listen.

If only she’d thought to ask
why snow fell that summer.
If only the villagers had asked
why 17,000 signs were erected
all over the desert to
Keep Off the Grass.

III. Internal Report, Herbert M. Parker, 1954

IV. Augean Gray

Women,
+++ take off your
++++++++++++++dresses
+++++++++++++++++++++++++and undergarments.
+++++++You babies,
+++++++++++++++++++crawl naked
+++++++in the grass.
+++++++++++++Lie down all of you

+++under the August sky,

+++++++++++++++++++++++++and nobody ask.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Questions alarm

and weaken
+++++++++++++our nation.

It is snowing.

+++Your men are at work+++++++making snow.

+++++++++++++I will go first

+++++++++++++++++++++++++and close my eyes,

+++++++cross the distance

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++between here

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++and winter.

+++Lie down, patriot.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Don’t ask.

V. The Graying of Herbert Parker, 1956

There will be through the course of the years
a very slow build-up, he said.
One knows the final answer only some 10,
20, or 30 years from now. He said, Perhaps
by the time the deposit becomes a hazard
the true permissible levels will be known,
and the word permissible was downy
as fine snow. It is rather easy to show, he said,
an undesirable tendency to concentrate where
least desired. As though Jack Frost had touched
his mind. The obvious hazard is not always—
the flakes started falling in earnest—one might
almost dare to say not usually—the real hazard.
While snow drifted behind his eyes.

VI. Herbert Parker’s Statement to Congress, 1962

–

Kathleen Flenniken’s second poetry collection, Plume, about the Hanford nuclear site, was selected by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series and is available now from University of Washington Press. Her honors include fellowships from the NEA and Artist Trust, an ALA Notable Book Award (for her first collection, Famous), and a 2012 Pushcart Prize.

–

“Augean Suite” appeared originally in Poetry Northwest v6.n2 (Fall & Winter 2012).

On Thursday, February 9, 2012, Albert Goldbarth will read as part of the Seattle Arts & Lectures Poetry Series. Details here.

–

1971—forty-one years ago! I was twenty-three when “Village Wizard” and “The Death of the Printed Page” appeared in Poetry Northwest, probably twenty-two when they were written. The cells of my body have completely replaced themselves six times since then. Whoever that “Albert Goldbarth” was, he isn’t me.

And yet I remember so clearly the day that acceptance letter arrived. These weren’t technically my first published poems (I believe we’d need to go back to 1969 for that) but they were the first to be taken for a journal that I recognized as nationally available (in Chicago, in those days, DeBoer distributed it to a prominent downtown bookstore) and that I’d been reading with a novitiate’s deep passions from before my attempts to submit. There were names in its tables of contents I recognized, and the poems of editor David Wagoner were already favorites of mine (and remain so today: I’ll be teaching him in a graduate poetry workshop this week). I remember dancing, whooping, around the living room table after I read that acceptance letter (Tom Cruise later copied my moves for a famous scene in Risky Business). I can’t imagine what could cue such a physically jubilant response today. I’d never met or corresponded with David Wagoner, I’d never at the time set foot in the Northwest; and that early moment of small validation, among others, cemented my working sensibility from then on: no networking, no multiple submissions, just faith in the poems themselves and in the honesty of the editorial process.

And although it was a many-cells removed Albert Goldbarth who wrote those poems, I can recognize in them the first seeds of subjects and strategies that would continue to grow in other, later pieces: the fairy tale and fantasy tropes of “Village Wizard,” the pleasure in word play and chewy vocabulary of “The Death of the Printed Page,” the use in both poems of listing as a viable substructure…and the trust that these gestures could accrue the gravitas of a knowing look at the human condition. (What I might not have known then was, sadly, how prescient “The Death of the Printed Page” would turn out to be: I suspect I saw it then as an exercise of the imagination more than an actual elegy for a way of life and its physical structures.)

This remains true for all of the poems Xeroxed from the Poetry Northwest archives and mailed my way: someone else wrote them; but he was clearly a progenitor, a proto-me. The self-referentiality in “Things I’ve Put Into This Poem,” and its willingness to use its own vertical layering of lines as an indication of passing time, have kinship with gestures in more current work. Ditto the celebratory long-windedness and overspilling population of “The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States”; and, in a very different poem and different voice, the tendency toward maxim in “Against the Odor” (“Every six seconds the blink lies / to the fovea”), as well as its willingness to morph scientific and historical facts into imaginative metaphors.

Can I find fault with these poems? If I wanted to. But I confess I feel a fondness for the sheer love of the art I sense radiating from that twenty-two-year-old’s efforts—his unstoppable energy, his belief in the magic of language and in its ability to inform us about ourselves. Some of these poems later appeared in books. Some didn’t; there are hundreds of my poems—hundreds of these little blocks of radiation—that have appeared in literary journals but have never been collected in book form. (“The Death of the Printed Page” is one of these: it never will be on a printed page again.)

Later collected in a published volume, or long-gone on the winds of chance, these poems are the first of what must have been a few dozen to appear in the magazine over the years, and David Wagoner’s generosity provided me with an important testing ground, showcase, and early self-identity as a poet working in, and for, a like-minded community. I felt that wonderful mixture of humble and proud, at being invited to join. It happens that the pure serendipity of the Xeroxing process also brings me Poetry Northwest poems and part-poems—printed right before or right after my own work—by Tom Wayman and Dave Etter, and part of a contents page with names like Michael Harper, Eve Triem, Robert Hershon, Greg Kuzma…names that filled the pages of the literary journals of the 1970′s…all of them, “my people,” all of them poets worth knowing still.

–

Village Wizard

Begged by a novice-wizard to display the secret
of his craft, Waziri demonstratively
kept silent.
Asked to perform at the Merchants Bazaar
a feat never seen before, Waziri came
with a dozen coins in his purse and left
with a dozen coins in his purse.
Requested by the husbandless maid to conjure,
Waziri concocted three gifts: a flask of lotion
scented with spice; a beaker of potion
made with grapes; and a potent amulet
wrought with pearl to wear on a necklace
between her breasts when she bared her breasts
to the waxing moon. Even her husband
called it magic.
Paid to recite a spell for sleep, Waziri
began his life story.
Told to foresee the Emperor’s future,
Waziri closed his eyes.
Ordered to exorcise evil influence
from the royal heir at his birth,
Waziri cut the umbilical cord.
Commanded on pain of death to provide the impossible
virgin speculum for the Queen, that fabled mage’s mirror
so pure, it would have imaged nothing—not its maker,
not the air, and not the darkness—before her face
reflected there: Waziri stared at her despairingly
and wept a tear.

The Death of the Printed Page

1.

I awoke to an inaudible stutter: the consonants
already floating into the moonlight or grime, keening
their singular claps of wisdom: once more, once
only, the sharp crack of k’s and j’s like a firing squad
and the rotund air of b’s rising skyward, ghosts released
with the last breath. The shadows of w’s in flight
fading across my skin. It is cold, a time for migration.

2.

Fruit of knowledge? Last to go, the p’s burst
from their drying pods. This is a pun and a metaphor.
That was a pun and a metaphor.
Caskets: lower
cast t’s scattered the floor, then even those grave
markers disappeared. The grand thesaurus of silence.

3.

The books? Shaking in their jackets,
curling their spines. Some going easily, willingly
perhaps: my extensive collection of porno
steaming into vapor above the bed: the real thing
at last! But it was the last, and the reticent paper
backs lined up against the wall without reprieve:
well, what could I say? Or how could the words in my throat
live honorably without birth certificates? Only the vowels
now, a wail: of ooo’s and aaa’s in a wordless dirge.
When I looked again, the silent e
vanished, at the end of life.

4.

We can only comfort their final hours.
This repayment, however small: to hold the last anthology
of English and American Literature. This is the finish.
Turn to the start. Whisper the hymns of Anonymous.
And now when we talk across the oceans, no speech
reflects in water. We cannot talk to mirrors.
And now no living page is left with living contents, or ever read.
Of course this is silly.

Things I’ve Put Into This Poem

1. 1972

The top line is sea-level. Here, a girl dances the black flag
her hair makes in wind, over green leas fleecy with primrose.
She is out to dig for potsherds, shells in shale, pebbles veined
pied and peacock enough for rings and pendants, something
spaded up from history to shine between her breasts.
And splitting one hillock, her hands undress red earth
from around a skeleton: yellowed, at peace, a bullet
packed in red dirt where the heart was.

2.

Long weeds of lantern-light seem to sprout
from the night soil; looking closer, through those bright cracks
splitting a farmsteader’s shack in the dark of the 1870′s:
one man, pallid and spread on the checkered quilt, twitches
under the flame-cleaned knife and forceps
the country doctor poises an inch above his chest.
The goal: to pry an arrow out of flesh. The advice: here,
bite on this. And the gray veins at the temple bulge
into a world without anaesthesia, from the wild try
of a dying man to chew a lead bullet in half.
+++++ *
(The outcome: he doesn’t die. Barb out, the farmer lives,
breeds, and whistles whacky orisons in the bull manure,
thinking: when I do die, let them lower me in my grave
wearing this memento, this tooth-marked pellet of birdshot
that is all the suffering in the world.) The scene:
+++++ *
skin split, forceps pinching in muscle, doctor’s breath
a cloud above his face, the farmer clamps his jaw
til its bone hinge warps. And in that moment
before his troubles tumble out of him into the shadowy sack
of fainting: he feels the fever go into the sweat, and leave.
The pain goes into the bullet.

3.

So I’ve put some special things in this poem.
The girl whose hair is a small night sky star-specked
against the ordinariness of my daytimes
I put in so this poem will make me think of Syl.
She is Syl. She brings a primrose home to me.
The grass and flowers are here to remember
greenery by, in the forthcoming days of its disappearance.
Let those lines symbolize chlorophyll.
The jewelry I put in to be those circles of beauty
human hands shape for human hands,
to glint against the twilight.
And the quilt, and the shells, and the lantern.
And the bullet I’ve put in to make this prayer real:
+++++ All our pain, go into the bullet.
+++++ All our pain, go into the bullet.
+++++ And bullet stay buried in the bottom line.

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

The old Jew down the road near the gristmill
died, call a minyan. Call ten men to howl
prayers into amber bottles, and with wood
mallets tap mourning-songs
from their transparent necks. And call the frogs:
the flies have been jewelling the wayside jackal
droppings, they glitter and make a sound of wire
plucked by the sun’s touch; call blackwater frogs
and venus-flytraps carted over flagstone.
Also, call the caucus; and everyone playing faro
is welcome, even the croupier, tell her here
she could slither out of her glitter and run
on all fours with the rams and uproot cabbage.
Call the cows home. Call the reserves.
Dwarf-stars and snails are in alliance.
Tell the spelling bee its napkins are folded
in hyacinth-shape on the plum-patterned plates.
Let them congregate; let them daisy-chain so dense
word travels from thighbone to thighbone
like code rapped through the length
of a blue metal banister; let the space
between them be sweat; call the midgets;
ask the fife platoon; call the wranglers and glaziers;
if their brains are packed so flat together
one torched tongue arsons a flash-fire
under the scalp of the whole generation, yes,
though the word be “revolution,” even if their souls’
metaphorical hands are twisting teeth from the gums
to hurl like stones through the corneal blind-spot:
call the cubs to the sows’ teats, engrave what gulls
you may find along the abandoned pier
with my wedding invitation.
Let the sky go argyle with magpies.
Let the waters plump paisley with shrimp.
It begins.
Let the triplets be an ellipsis.

Against the Odor

Every six seconds the blink lies
to the fovea. The sunspot burns
a hole in the long, looped radio wave.
A dozen roses is eleven
flowers and one mauve chameleon
straining to stamen its tongue. These
be the natural hypocrisies.
In the land of the lie you’re shown this
photo: a man standing spreadlegged
“in two states at once!” castrated
by their common edge; the ten inner intervening
tips of a husband’s gloves insulate his caress;
and one Jew, thrown to the showers, lifts
the soap t his nose against the odor
of gas, and smells his niece’s breast.
The white lie is the nephew
to euthanasia. This is the lie: the worm
in the history text; the alligator purse;
the Catholic virgin saving space in her womb
for eschatology. This is the difficult
rectification: the purse snapped open,
its pink mouse saved from drowning
in the digestive fluids. Keep him whole.
In the land of the lie the one-eyed man
blinks every three seconds. This is the myth
of the land of the lie: that the lamb led
by its tear ducts sees the blade
as just the Utah border. This is the queen
of the land of the lie: whose tongue crawls
into the vegetable bins and ballot boxes
to spread its wet; whose belly is ectopic;
whose menstruation, trompe l’oeil.

–

Albert Goldbarth is the author of over twenty books of poetry, and has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.  He is also the author of five collections of essays, including Many Circles (Graywolf), winner of the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, and a novel, Pieces of Payne (Graywolf).  His newest book of poems, Everyday People (Graywolf), is out now.

“Village Wizard” and “The Death of the Printed Page” originally appeared in Poetry Northwest Volume XII Number 3 (Autumn 1971).

“Things I’ve Put Into This Poem,” “The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States,” and “Against the Odor” originally appeared in Poetry Northwest Volume XIII Number 2 (Summer 1972).

“The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States” and “Against the Odor” are published in Jan. 31 (Doubleday) © 1974 by Albert Goldbarth.

“Village Wizard” and “Things I’ve Put Into This Poem” are published in The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems 1972-2007 (Graywolf) © 2007 by Albert Goldbarth.

All other materials © 2012 by Albert Goldbarth.

–

Watering the Garden (Till It Bursts into Flame)

Planting impatiens, Charlotte portions out
Her plot’s next spots to plants that complement
Impatiens (also known as touch-me-nots).

Me? Neighbor rung to hear her wring harangues
Equally from her best friend’s wedded bliss
And weeds that blaze in lazy pyrotechnics

Across the lawn. I listen while I loosen
The hose’s brazen nozzle; Charlotte knows
I’ll tend to what she’s planted, Mr. Handy

Man misting fistfuls of the fitful flowers
She forages and forgets until they wither.
I diamond-dust the lot of them with water

And contemplate the weight of waiting, wanting,
This winter-into-spring song sprung to mind
While minding morning glories, mums, and blooms

Rumored the kissing cousins of jewelweed
Because I hope she finds her passion’s match in
(My fair chère, share my fire: let every chore

Be tinder tendered to the flames for ages:
Charm me, sweet charlatan: please: char me, Char)
This sexiest of secret potions, patience.

–

Stephen Kampa has poems published or forthcoming in The Southwest Review, The Hopkins Review, Tampa Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, First Things, Christianity and Literature, and River Styx. His first book of poems, Cracks in the Invisible, won the 2010 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and is available from Ohio University Press. He currently teaches and works as a musician in Daytona Beach, FL.

Seattle area readers: don’t miss Molly Tenenbaum reading at Open Books on Tuesday, January 24 @ 7:30 pm!

–

Afternoon Off

Some out riding, some on skates, some promenading
with strollers—“Take me for a ride in your car, car”
bumps to the offbeat, wheel gimpy.
The waves, blue and twinkling, scallop in mildly,
foam kitchy-cooing, music of milk kisses puckering, popping.

A day so bread-and-jam fine, so red-shovel fine
the kids dig holes and watch water fill them, dig holes
and watch water fill them. So golden-glow fine,
here at the end of the world, on a Friday,
playcalls dispersing, moms walking
elephant-style, blankets under one arm,
tote bags with sleeves dangling out the top
banging knees from the other.

Over there, a drift-stick upright in the sand.
Over there, a fat butt in blue dots.
Over there, farther, the silver-white ferries
putter like dreaming. Heads and cars, shiny as pins,
gleam to their green homes on the island.

I’m here on a bench, bike leaned at my knee,
my bag with its sunscreen and notebook,
small bottle, from home, of fresh water.

–

Molly Tenenbaum is the author of Now (Bear Star Press, 2007) and By a Thread (Van West & Co, 2000). A recipient of a 2009 Artist Trust Fellowship, she also plays Appalachian music and has two CDs: Instead of a Pony, and Goose and Gander. She teaches English at North Seattle Community College.

photo by Anita Boyle

Waves Again

What has not been said
about ocean waves?
That they resemble white
chicken feathers in the wind?
Or cream cheese icing on a carrot cake
after you’ve dragged greedy fingers
through it?

Waves have a sense of timing, which they
often violate. Waves are not always comforting
for new lovers, and can represent grave
disharmony to the old.

Ocean waves are like poets
whose tidal changes always make noise.

Waves can be a soporific
for those who would rather be awake.

Waves are predictable, despite the wobble
and thrash of their arrival. They are always
coming in, even when the water’s
going out. Or am I wrong
again?

–

James Bertolino is the author of ten volumes and fifteen chapbooks of poetry.  His work has appeared in hundreds of magazines, including Ploughshares, Poetry, Indiana Review, Florida Quarterly, Paris Review, and Crab Creek Review.  His most recent book is Finding Water, Holding Stone (2009, Cherry Grove Collections).

–

Notes Regarding Happiness

Sorry, I didn’t mean to post that message
nineteen times on your Facebook page.
What I meant to do was wish you
a happy birthday.  Instead, here are thirty
random characters followed by fifteen more
followed by an exclamation point!
These messages must look like a language from the future,
classified codes that will take years to decipher.
They aren’t.  The only thing those signals say
is that I’m bad at computers
the way continents are bad at crossing oceans
to touch the other continents, or the way planets
are bad at breaking their orbits and setting off
on their own.  Even light
has limitations as, eon after eon, it barrels forward,
unstoppable.  Yes, light is bad at changing
its mind, so it continues to tumble
in the same direction, the way I continue to pummel
the same enter key, amazed each time
at all the nothing that happens.
So technology also can be accused:
let no wire go without blame,
no microchip be absolved.
Remember when that plane left Brazil
and was gobbled up by the Atlantic?
No one could figure out what happened
until, one day, the leading minds of the industry
said it was “a computer error.”
Nineteen times today, my computer screen
has said, “Sorry, there has been an error.”
What I’m saying is, if Dell made a passenger jet
instead of this laptop,
we’d have crashed nineteen times by now.
Nineteen times, we’d be dead.
Nineteen times, trapped underwater, the weight
of the ocean pressing down like a billion barbells.
And if we weren’t dead yet, we’d still be trapped
underwater which is even worse if one considers
the sharks. Let’s consider the sharks!
I’m from Michigan where sharks are only considered
in late-night horror-movie marathons.
Sharks get a bad rap in those deals.
A shark will put you in its mouth
because you are delicious.
But a man will do much worse because
you stole his parking space.  You didn’t steal
anything but at your funeral, your aunt
will try to comfort the grieving by saying,
“Well, you know, the Lord works in mysterious ways.”
Your nephew will consider these mysterious ways
and if they involve shark attacks,
he’ll grow up an atheist.  Religion?
Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with my internet.
On the day my wireless connection
betrayed me, the was an article online
about the Westboro Baptist Church.
To get from Topeka, Kansas, up to Michigan,
their little convoy of hate traveled
a network of American highways—like poison
travelling the roads of the body—to protest
a high school play.  It was my old high school.
The play was “The Laramie Project,”
a drama about the death of Matthew Shepard.
Here come the church folk. Here come
the picket signs that say “God hates you”
and “God Will Kill You.” And honestly,
when I thought of your birthday,
I did not intend to write about
the Westboro Baptist Church, a subject
guaranteed to make birthday letters fail
the way computers fail,
the way the engines of airplanes fail,
the way Gods fail
to convince their followers to treat
each other with any level kindness.
Let’s call this one big-ass mountain of failure.
Let’s grab some ladders and grappling hooks.
Let’s try to climb over the mess we’ve made of this place.
I am trying to do that. I am sitting in front
of a blue screen, hitting a button over and over,
trying to send you the following message:

Hello. I am your friend.
I am wishing you happiness.  

–

Matthew Olzmann’s first book of poems, Mezzanines, was selected for the 2011 Kundiman Poetry Prize and will be published by Alice James Books in 2013.  His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, Failbetter and elsewhere.

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Additional work by Matthew Olzmann appears in the Fall & Winter 2011-2012 print edition of Poetry Northwest (v6.n2).

Severance Songs

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Put anything in fourteen lines, and someone will call it a sonnet; although each poem in Joshua Corey’s third full-length collection, Severance Songs, shares that number of lines (often with visual variations that slide the tree line of the volta up and down the poems’ slopes), his poems are sonnet-like less for their containers than for the bright shapes they contain. The sense of a sonnet, these poems suggest, isn’t in formal configuration but in a manner of speaking, of talking to oneself, of talking things through. In Severance Songs, this manner reels through landscape to render the “pool of newsworthy airs” that “surrounds my perception.”

For Corey, such perception typically comes from pastoral inspiration that he is both suspicious of (“Building sorrows / on a plan of pastoral affection”) and beholden to (“I do not reject terrain”). Early in the collection, a poem begins with a walk; throughout Severance Songs, one sees the record of a mind sent outside by some fever, and what it sees, “ground by the sun’s pestle,” but not what sparked its turn toward the world:

Givens of my walk round: five goslings and two geese
under architecture.

++++++++++A sapling spines out of rainwater
with a marsh bird in its beak.

The deft sonic—and thematic—echo between “geese” and “beak” embeds a sonnet-like rhyme into lines that, like the work in Shane McCrae’s gorgeous recent book, Mule, visually disrupt the form. But it’s the second image that signals sonnet to me; in my favorite moments in Severance Songs, Corey does with images what Shakespeare does with rhetoric, making complex figures snap precisely to, but through a thickness that preserves their complexity. After the hic-cup of “spines”—one blinks, then hears it as a verb, kept awake for the coming image—one wrongly sees the beak as belonging to the bird, and then, no, the beak is a metaphor for the tree, which has acquired a beak it holds its marsh bird in.

Sound like hard work to decipher? Well, it happens as fast as sight, easy as a tree you notice because it looks like it could take flight. Consider this brilliantly quick depiction of lightning: “Now the dog’s skeleton of an electrical storm / splays itself on our town.” Or this lovely moment, in which the final three words open up the simple image: “A woman thrusts her hands through her window to be clean.” As in Stevens’ line “The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down,” Corey’s images often take much longer to say than they do to see; this lets the sight one arrives at seem both exact and rich with the fizz of perception, with the process of coming into focus that makes the images meaningful.

Elsewhere in Severance Songs, perceptions stream more than they snap, resembling an impressionistic “tension of flight, face forward, borne aloft:”

+++++++++++++++Skin

windswept, snow of you underhand, muscular
texture melting like the grass over a grave
time-lapsed and filmed in radical reverse

Or, images can begin in precision and then dissolve, as one staring hard at something can fall into thought or lose interest: “saw the starkness // of two roads tunneling into / similar distinctions”; “rinsed chapped hands / cupped skinned water / ice splashing / absence.”

These modes of depiction meet in the poems’ subjects, what the poems use a sonnet’s mindset to think about. There are riffs on war (“This poem does not spill a drop of the fluids that are yours”) and torture (“Like green corn / the nude is hooded, its genitals recognized / by experts”); on classical figures (“The music man wears a high hat”; “The emperor plows the fields”; “Then Corydon put down his flute”); and on our relationship to the natural world (“The bloom is off again, / on again the oil wells”; “Artifacts lodge under / any old soil”). These subjects crop up obliquely, as they might during the course of a walk, and often don’t conclude but veer into  closing observations: “The rivers break, the rag ladder has started / up toward a twilight”; “Two crows glanced and fell in imitation of these leaves.” In fact, Corey’s poems can seem all veering, as one walking boldly on ice, in any direction he must. Try to keep speaking as your next step slides another way. Try to have your voice hold us still. Try to see how that voice is yet again, yet differently, making a variation on the proportions of a sonnet.

The language of this veering is churningly stylized, teeming, burling ahead with veiny syntax and wordplay that can both expand and obstruct simple sense; Corey nods to the “deliberate errancy” of this density. This language makes speech as empirical as the many landscapes Corey speaks through, and because it’s default mode is so loud, giving figures like the “asphalt shimmer of august solitudes,” quieter moments become startling. Late in the collection, for example, Corey announces, with affecting simplicity, that “sunlight falls / into my chest, bit of heart that carries me.” And here is a high-voltage passage that charges into a nuanced assertion that, in its performance of revision, of a turning thought, shows the mix of certainty and ambivalence that sonnets have often given:

Hellish complacencies seamed by lightning
cut through the blinds across these blind bodies

knotted to one another’s possibilities. I’m
mining the hour for what’s mine, what’s ours.

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Zach Savich is the author of three collections of poetry, including The Firestorm (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), and a book of ardent prose, Events Film Cannot Withstand (Rescue+Press, 2011). He serves as Book Review Editor with the Kenyon Review. His writing has recently appeared in journals including GulfCoast, A Public Space, and Oh No.