SEVEN NEW POEMS from Lauren Haldeman

TEAM KEEP SLEEP

                                                                                                           

This is my first draft and I join team ‘Keep Sleep.’ 

My number is behind me on my uniform.

On occasion I feel the iron-on plastic’s curve

and it feels like a eight. I might be an eight.

Our jerseys are off-white; our symbol is a pile

of fingernail clippings, slightly turned

to the right. A lawsuit requires this.

If shown from above, the pile too closely

resembles the symbol for ‘breath.’

Our colors are tooth-white & brain-

white and diamond. Our cheer goes

like gin down our followers throats.

Tomorrow, we play the team ‘Recall of Elephants.’

They supposedly compete with their eyes fully closed.

On their uniforms they’ve scribbled

the text of team movements in layers of grey pencil

on light parchment gear.  It is said

they remember. It is said if shucked open

their brains are not ‘whiteness’ but instead

slung with ink. For practice, we ambush

some trainers that scamper

in an elephant costume all over the field.

I do not understand this. I forget where I am. If

my tackle is blank, I fill it in with a blur.

This is my first draft. It is game day, and now past

the populace a comment on my athletics

is flashed. I’m so dominant an extreme

in my complex of living that each day begins

backwards from each hit I divvy.

So I join up team Keep Sleep. My back has a digit.

In a minute, I’ll witness the wipe of my tackle. 

11/23

             

I’m your mom. I step up. I attach a papier-mâché wolf head to my head, 

I tie fur to my back; I am your mom now,

a pine tree carved into a bantam,
a strong wind holding up an animal. I am your mom.

You don’t have to test your hold --
you can use the vines, you can pull yourself up by my teeth. I am your mom,

a heliotrope & plasma pile, steady, weather passing me;
this is my job, I’m your mom, I am

astronaut, helmeted raven; I am neutrons, plum-pits, core-mantle metallurgy. Baby,
you can pull yourself up by my teeth. 

LES QUARTRE CENT FLYING BUTTRESS

First, an icy tundra where

our parents build a chandelier. A gallery
portrait: one has bubble eyes.
Mom says, see the trees
through the crystal: it is
like a festival. We are watching

multiple headlocks and the myriad forms
of evening, immersing
slowly in our heirlooms. Here
at the most perfect location
for a pyramid --
my wrist. You can peek through the

upper spatial window: inside it,
the spider and inside it: a hive.
Know that the spider is mathematics
alive. & Out from
each of us runs a star-proof. In our flesh-shape,
a wake of multiple rabbits

spiral through the tubular field. This is nice:
a Zippo lights up
in the ginkgo. A box of breeze unravels
the window. Bubbles
of voice and data bluster by
in this ice cave where we’re made

as small as we like. For instance,
a curve could pass us in
two directions. From our ambient manifold
we gather ourselves. This cavernous air
filled with geodesic loops.
And those -- The friendly tubes!

CROATOAN

  

When the hypnotism lifted,

I was unusually alone. Hungry.

Knelling. Taciturn. Strange

smelling. Your plank boat on the bank

was replaced with dark leaves

in the shape of a boat. Heavy fog,

hickory. There was always some

consternation among the birds.

There was always a letter, blood-

streaked, in a bottle.

But this time, it seems, it is very

real. I’ve called for the monitors,

but hear only hissing. A new

word is written all over the trees.

 I’ve considered the thicket,

but only the dogs will go in it,

and they always come out

acting strange. Even Manteo. Very

slow. Leaning, as though

to tell a secret. But nothing. He seems to

know nothing at all. And nothing

erases the way your face blanked

when they came up speaking

with flags. Nothing fogs

how you smiled and nodded as they

slowly coddled you down. When

the hypnotism lifted, I lay prostrate

among catamounts, charcoal

and fluttering shapes

on the stage of a new century. Kudzu

luggage filled the lark’s fort. Half of

us wandered the courtyard,

whispering.

FUNERAL INVITATION

Watch as my funeral becomes very calm.

It happens beneath the third lamp on the street.

I was a lamp once,

inside this big life --

An epistolary record

that scattered the leaves.

Now a shadow and a mailman pass the procession,

both of them mixing up each other’s lines.

I pet the purring

gnat on my chest.

I bite the light-bulb

inside the gnat’s mind.

As always a motor sings in the distance.

Somewhere, a bike makes continual leaps.

Under the sky,

flanked by cats on all sides,

I notice my skull --

it devours the breeze.

This gravel is gorgeous. It’s so wild and contained.

There are enormous projections of friendship today.

I put on this coat of

unavoidable feelings.

I walk to the fire-pit

and take off my head.

THE POSTBELLUM OFFICE

Six huskies will be hitched along by dawn;

Embroidered on my coat, the village heads.

In perfect composition, one by one,

The townsmen knot their wishes to my sled.

They have no right to place their trust in me

For I have been ignored until, now sick,

They come to me as to them came disease --

So in that waft, my un-picked hand they pick.

I’ll say of course that I am coming back

To harvest boon with any skull that’s left;

But as I tie the Wolf’s Bane to my neck,

I take both traitor-breath, then hero-breath.

Departing past their patron eyes, I think:

“I’m running through these woods, choosing these things…”

12/30

While the smaller human sleeps, 

observe its forehead: 

a glowing cord reaches to connect

to the mom-skull. This is how the pair

will integrate sleep patterns.

You can tell by the bright-green dashes flowing through

that a dream about mares

in liquid-dark has been shared.

The infant world is, in fact, liquid-dark.

Infant arms push

electric outer-space water. Watch it through

these goggles of emerald night-vision: the child bends,

syncing, toward the loading mom-skull.

People here call this

the 'neon whisper.'

Lauren Haldeman’s first poetry collection, Team Photograph, is forthcoming from Rescue Press in Fall 2014. Also: she’s a mom and makes paintings.

Three Poems by Cindy Carlson

If Emerald Could Be a Color a Sky Could Be

She peeled the wax back,

            from the museum statue

made string, hung bird whistles

            a single bed,

lay down boxes

            in a row of silver and traced

bears: polar and grizzly,

            realizing the sentimentality of

the color blue she

            called it Sunday, called it also

December, handed

            herself a cake made also

from something else.

            Cheer up she said, you

are Sunday, you

            are still—the sky also

turned something else

            not what she always wanted

not what she knew

            but erased and made

a scribbled red, just

            enough to say her place

and held there.

What to do with thousands of dead blackbirds; or that talk we had last Sunday

I’ve been sheen feather

sky, waiting to fly me

when starting they fall—

not float or all softly

two pounds of black: hard

on December. Blink eye and gather,

I pull bird to make body, in

wishness I teeter all edges then

over. Half light and hollow

like words I swing air, I swish

and toe tip, I flap and I fall—

fully for moments then

land all cemently, gaining

what always, they’ve known

all along.

Museum poem

           

Glass blocks attached only

by light to look through, changing

shapes, eyes to arms, I see you

like this: taking in color quiet

the walls gone/ escaped through

transparent then incandescent

we’re left in filaments, infinity,

held together with a knot

this room of strands and walls

(there again) holding what

has always been just breath

between words where our hands  

stutter and brush, a vibration

—the cubes are blue

and after hours they say

there will be a wedding—

       

the way the lake and wings are

fills my lungs with heat.

Cindy Carlson's poems have appeared in The Madison Review, Sentence Magazine, Shampoo, and other places.  She lives and teaches in Madison, WI where she also enjoys thinking about apple trees.

Three Poems by Sam Reed

Cave Stream


What you see isn’t there,
If the crimson, ever-bruising
Effervescent light-starved
Musings of the eye teem
Fathoms deep in what
Only its touch can tell you,
Palm equally outstretched
To find and fend it, is
Clearest rock. Climbing you
In the chill, very rush
Chiseling this density
Grit by unthinkable
Less-than-grit open to
Unseal what heart nor brain
Have right to beat in
Is only water. Like you
It must keep moving, but not
With you, crowd panicking
The other way. How long
Since you were anything,
Threshold to seeming depth-
Lessness once waded, but
Engulfed? Can time, great reacher,
Ocean-shadower, pass
Through crevices so tight
A single human such-
As-it-is knowingspan’s
Straitjacketed, cinched
Both fore- and hindsight in this
Impenetrable instant’s
Night-knot? Deeper, and dis-
Belief be your guide, rose
Impervious in the vise,
Your daredevil angel (turn back
If you know how) beckoning
To the last, hand, heart as eyes
Straining for some trace of
That fool’s phosphorescence
Not wholly dissolved in a
Blink, but to be left grappling
With that impossibility:
Grasses, a tree, the sky.

              South Island, NZ



Field Guide Marginalia


             Coyote

Snow-tracked it to
the creek and that
was that


             Rattlesnake

Each cool scale
as it slides
over me


             Raven

One-lettered
in sand, but
in wind



Solstice, South of Tucson


You’d call this humid, if they made
Humidity out of fire, not water.
If fire could hide in air, like kerosene
Lit and covered up with sand,
You’d call this air.

I was just trying to breathe
When you looked at me like
You were covered in kerosene.

Whatever has a shadow
Won’t for long. A little overhead, the saguaro
Fruit is splitting, showing
Its red of crushed strawberries,
Its lushness.

You looked at me that way
One time before, only that time
As if I was pouring it.

Sweat leaks down my neck.
The shadows shorten in.
Please,

Don’t stop.
You’re scaring me.




Sam Reed graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Orion, Thermos, and other journals. He currently lives in Seattle.

A Great Poem: Norman Dubie’s “Ibis”

Zach Savich's first book, Full Catastrophe Living, won the 2008 Iowa Poetry Prize and received a New American Poet honor from the Poetry Society of America. His poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in many journals, including Boston Review, Kenyon Review, A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, and Pleiades. A recipient of a BA from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Savich has lived and taught in Italy, France, New Zealand, and around the US. He currently teaches and studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he helps organize the jubilat/Jones Reading Series.

Zach's piece is the second of ITIWNH's new series of writings called "Expositions," which are, in essence, short essays about "great" contemporary and/or non-canonical poems. The idea behind this series is to allow for critical interaction with either individual poems or small clusters of poems, since such writing is hard to come by in mainstream publications. My guidelines, as such, are both nominal and (therefore) flexible, so authors are free to investigate poems they find fascinating in whatever way they see fit. Even after just two installments of "Expositions," the nature of the project surprises me--and, to a degree, escapes me. Peter Ramos's inaugural essay on Joy Katz's "A Desk." is rigorously focused on exploring the poem at hand; Zach's work, by contrast, tapers toward its observations about Norman Dubie's "Ibis" only after considering some of the constituent elements of poetic "greatness": great lines, great poems, great books. It spirals, beautifully, toward insight. Perhaps Peter's work will establish the precedent for future Expositors; perhaps Zach's will. I don't know. But I do enjoy the fact that I don't know what to expect. It's all so wonderfully out of my hands.

***

Is “Meditation at Lagunitas” greater than Robert Hass? Is any Robert Duncan poem greater than his use of “ensouling?” Is his “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” great or does it just have great first and last lines? What about Alice Notley’s “The Prophet”—I’ve often quoted lines from it (“The purpose of awakening is black coffee”; “You are not great you are life”) but have never been moved to memorize or copy-out the whole piece. This is typical of my favorite poems: with effort, you can memorize any poem, but the best lines seem to stick with me whether I want them to or not; I often forgive dull books that have three great lines. And often, I mentally anthologize poets not by poem but by line—Ezra Pound, for example, wrote more beautiful lines than anyone since Chaucer, one might claim in an undergraduate paper, but may have never written a great poem. And then, of course, there are the poets I love who do not write poems but books of poetry, sometimes in contrast not just to the idea of great poems but to the idea of great lines. There are passages by Rosmarie Waldrop that have composed my days (“Much work still to be done. And the smell of ripe peaches. And Long-Jin tea. And lungs full of words. And being an opaque body that intercepts the rays of the sun.”), but I would tell students to read an entire book by her, not any anthology’s selection.

Of course, this may be a problem not only of contemporary poetics—that today’s best poets often work more by sequence and line than by lit mag page units—but of contemporary perspective, as Keats’ contemporaries neglected his odes and Auden’s best early verses (including the hits we all know) first appeared untitled. One day, we will come to see the singular in what now seems continuous, and the major anthologies will no longer get limp after O’Hara. Perhaps, we will come to see that a truly great poem is one that has no great lines—those painted scarecrows—but exists as a unit, each piece equally required. Carl Phillips’ “Custom” is one of my favorite great poems that may have no great lines (except for, perhaps, the displaced augur’s thesis of “I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere / to be found” and the line linking that sensibility to poetic effort, claiming that “art can become, eventually, all we have / of what was true”—but I see these lines as structurally integrated into the poem, necessary machinery, not vivacious fauna flashing in the rough). It is a poem I never tire of reading or sharing with others. Like other poems I have memorized and recited to myself and motley assemblies over the years (Yeats’ “Adam’s Curse,” in particular, comes to mind) it deepens with each saying, like things should in the old idea of greatness. On the same hand: what about a poem like Dean Young’s “Sunflower,” with its “ketchupy light” and “crowness?” Some memorable phrases, riveting turns, general plunging descent and the invention of running by moving your legs very fast—but I remember most the rush and the voice of it, its vibrational contagions infecting my oatmeal when its way of seeing comes to mind, not a particular bon mot that’s reducible from it.

Other concerns: recent poets who do not focus on producing polished poems at all, but on recording their producing of poems, a process set down; or those whose process is not product but project, apart from the projection of greatness; or those who intentionally uglify a poem’s proceedings so its experience is more empirical than transcendentally great, based in a friction that can be created only through the exchange within its particular presentation. (An upcoming smart, sharp, and somewhat sociological review of American Hybrid by Michael Theune and Jay Thompson in Pleiades gets into thoughts about how anthologies variously represent poets, poems, and ideas of poetics.)

And I think of the conventional “beauty is truth” great line ending of a great poem, in which the line is great at all because of the particular path of greatness that has preceded it, long ice luge that makes the cheap vodka worth getting on your tie…And how that gets changed in a book like, e.g., Joshua Harmon’s Scape, where I often feel the BMX boost ramp of Keats’ ending in grounding, voice-rooted phrases that frame and stitch more burbling and diverse lyricism mid-poem…

All that said, this weekend I have been reading Norman Dubie’s The Mercy Seat (Copper Canyon), which compiles poems from 1967 and 2001, most of which appeared in earlier volumes, and such thinky thoughts have been far from my mind: I’ve been thrilling at the poems, jealous of what Dubie can do, pleased that his work exists. I first read his poems in 2002 at the suggestion of my teacher at the University of Washington, Linda Bierds, whose own careful and passionate work shows the influence of Dubie’s historical dramaturgy and personae. At the time, I got that, but missed the strange depths and hard-bright rhetoric that drive the speeches and scenes of Dubie’s poems. His poems may resemble work you, reader of adventurous poetry, distrust—imported scenes and personages; tremors of Zen; naturalistic landscapes depicted as though language can, by naming, portray and give voice—but they are more startling and solid than the often-made, dull performances of those traits. The sense of the actual in them recalls Yeats’ materially constructed images (“a tattered coat upon a stick”); the presentation of consciousness is as expressive as Faulkner’s or shifty-stanced Keats’. The mix of reserve and rollick, characterization and its dissolution, detail and the minds that frame them—

There’s a poem called “Ibis,” first published in 1975, that I particularly recommend. It begins:

There is the long dream in the afternoon

That turns a large, white page

Like, once, the slow movement

Of slaves at daybreak

Through the clouds of a stone laundry.

The blossoms

On a black vegetable and

The olive wood burning in the plate

Are the simple events

That I’ll wake to this evening.

At dark, we’ll walk out along

The shore having finished

Another day of exile in a wet place.

As a boy I burned

Leaves in the many gardens

Of a cemetery in Rome.

I wrote in my diary:

A blue vessel

Is filling out in the rain. All day,

Here, the water falls and is not broken,

But it punishes me like the girls

With their clubs and bowl

Flattening the new maize,

Millet, and the narrow tubers

Of yam

That are white like hill snow.

You do not yet realize that the speaker of poem is Ovid, in exile, attended by a servant he envies, admires, and hates, who, a page and a half later, is told he must “fuel the terra-cotta lamp / And gather the cress and hidden eggs / Of the Ibis” when Ovid is dead, but of course the poem isn’t really about Ovid: it’s about a situation, a dailyness that surpasses the weary dailyness of most dailyness-based poems. Are these lines great? Well, the sense of line is great. The sense of real things somehow more real than the things around me, given with range that is held so it is tight but still vibrating, a heavy kite by which you deduce these must be very heavy winds, and somehow my thin wrists are up to it—it makes my poems feel smaller than they should, as though I do not take on the real good variety of utterance and world. I would like to. To see poem and line, book and poem, intelligence and artfulness as more wildly aligned. As they are in the great poems of Norman Dubie. 
 


More Pepper Than Salt: a response to Joy Katz's "A Desk."

Peter Ramos’ poems appear in Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, The Chattahoochee Review, and Poet Lore. He is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008), and two chapbooks: Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems (handwritten press 2004), and Short Waves (White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2003).

Peter Ramos' essay, as noted in the title, responds to Joy Katz's poem "A Desk." quoted in its entirety below.


A Desk.


Solicitous of its own business. Not chewable, and never mordant.
How to say a desk as I would say a hand? I look out
from the brows: wooden, unaltering.
Perhaps a desk is more important.
Perhaps I cannot have a sentence without a desk,
more pepper than salt, more violà. Perhaps in life
one does not discover a desk enough—its cruelty and trousers—
simple as a line of dancers, full of bone.

Is a desk modestly a field?
No: a turnstile, an airplane wing.

You can count on railroad bridges, on cut celery.
You can count on the flatness of bateau,
on all that is not the flesh, such as a deck of cards.

The boxes fit one inside the next, the cutlery is put away,
sturdy to push on as bike pedals. All this belongs to the desk,
and a berm awash with tide—all things at rest,
not panicked or insane.
As if the heavy telephones were back.

--Joy Katz, from The Garden Room


Peter's essay is the first in a series of "Expositions," in which poets present brief essays on either a single poem or a small group of poems...

***

It’s almost not a poem. At least it doesn’t fit the model I usually hold up: most poems begin with a scene that is then destabilized and then, finally, resolved—in some fashion, either by the passage of time or the arrival of some epiphany—as in, say, Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in which the sun sets by the poem’s end, and the speaker has gone from addressing the historical moment in which he is situated to confronting those readers of future generations taking in the poem long after the speaker has passed away; or in Dickinson’s “465” (“I Heard a Fly Buzz when I died”), in which the speaker’s death-bed expectations for the coming of Christ—or wisdom or final illumination—are horribly undercut by her/his ultimate and final sensation: the carnal, decadent, insistent, small and defiantly non-transcendental noise of a fly.

Katz’s poem, by contrast, doesn’t really begin in one place and end up somewhere else. Nor does the poem seem to resolve anything like a conflict or tension. In this, and other ways, it resembles Gertrude Stein’s most compelling work (for me, anyway), the shorter prose poems of Tender Buttons. In fact, Katz’s use of the period in the title/phrase makes the allusion seem intentional. And, like Stein, Katz takes up the otherwise drab, commonplace items usually associated with the domestic sphere—food, linen closets, coffee, desks—and transforms them, makes them appear strange, magical, out of context. It’s tempting to read this as a critique of the domestic sphere—of the place socially constructed and designated to accommodate a patriarchy. But that’s too simple a reading. This poem is about establishing a ground, a solid surface on which a self or subject can establish itself as a self, from which that self can then greet and make the world. Yet the poem contains both aspects: a launching pad and flight, the latter inconceivable without the former. But flight can only be imagined or anticipated here—what the “turnstile” or “airplane wing” will precipitate. The ground must be receptive and innocuous—neither imposing nor critical—and also trustworthy—“sturdy” and “full of bone.” That something so simple—a wooden desk—can be so valuable, so essential also reminds us of the times in which we live: where a place for silence and meditation is threatened by the speed and distractions of living in this era—with our apparent dependence on email and cell phones, on various pressing and immediate obligations. The desk is “not panicked or insane./ As if the heavy telephones were back.”

In terms of meter, the poem maintains a wonderful conversational quality that keeps the bouncy anapests and dactyls almost hidden: “MORE PEPPer than SALT...Is a DESK MODestly.” The rhymes, too, move just beneath the surface, internal and aslant, innocuous, insistent, and essential as the desk itself: “solicitous/ business”; “brows/ trousers/dancers”; “flatness/ bateau/ back”; “desk/rest.” It’s as if, somehow, especially in this age of spectral distractions, there is still a need for something simple, solid, and dependable, on which and from which to cast the nets of our imagination.