Online Poetry: January 2004 Archives

I didn't intend to post the last entry on can we have our ball back without at least a couple of poems from it. I, of course, hit the wrong key and posted anyway. At any rate, here are two poems which I absolutely adore. The first is a sestina, which I like so much because it's, well, a sestina without all the philosophical noise that typically accompanies sestinas written post-Renaissance . . .

Non-stop
by Jo Ann Wasserman (from Issue #9)

um, the pictures, the ones she is wearing make-up and stilettos
something bigger than the city or choosing fresh cut lamb chops?a rootcanal
the kind performed over and over, a building from the inside, a real-life
morality play, no one gets out free, not the smokers or the wintergreen
gum chewers, not much forgiven, raincoats all deeply resembling the newest
color and winter shapes, shaped like a few winter?s ago, only gray

if I saw cosmetic or the small cosmetics bag she often had, but too small, it was gray
shoes, gray and silver waffle-iron steps, the moving faster her in stilettos
it isn?t easy to say how far we had walked, she was silent, mourning the newest
way of losing it, it was booming all around and he had been booming, ?it is only rootcanal?
not the Holocaust? which of course nothing really was, chewing Wrigley?s wintergreen
gum I was aware that nothing in my life would be the Holocaust but what was that? in real-life?

the Holocaust? we wouldn?t have been able to tell you, riding that train was real-life
her hand (right) offering the green papered bit, emerging from a bullet of leather-gray
glove was not as soft anymore or she could have said, with wintergreen
gum disappearing and reappearing, ?my hands are not so soft? tapping stilettos
against the grim-gray slide train, "don?t let this happen to you, this awful rootcanal"
which was said not to be the Holocaust but reaching into her life, pulling and newest

pulling out of the station and pulling off her heavy coat, I am pulling off my newest
best coat, a coat I hate and have tried to lose on buses and skating trips taking it out of real-life
to make it someone else?s life, I left it at Mrs. Gage?s house, but it was a singular, ugly rootcanal
of an overcoat but like Sunday, rootcanal, fists and yelling?no Holocaust, just real-life
she read a magazine folding the square of silver paper, flaking away the shine until it was gray
she was the prettiest almost ever in her gray sweater and clicking a slice of wintergreen

gum, ?you can?t say a word about this,? (she is laughing) ?about this wintergreen
candy to your sister, she is too young and could choke easily? choking becoming the newest
non-Holocaust event but still bad and I promise and she crosses her legs, the stilettos
point forward dangerous, a pain is through me, is thinking these shoes are more about real-life
than anything , her hands feel soft, her sweater is soft but wiry and mossy gray
I look at her too long, she says, I sense I have learned something on the way to rootcanal

If I was looking to learn something on the way to the rootcanal
I knew I had learned to chew gum and not swallow, put it back into the Wrigley?s wintergreen
paper but we were not looking to learn something and the final station floor was sad and gray
it snowed and I had hot cheese sandwich later, in Union square, in my newest,
best, coat, with a ripe pickle spear and my mother only smoked after all it was real life
and ate a frosty, dish of yellow vanilla ice cream she said, I have to get out of these stilettos

she removed the stilettos, on the train home from the rootcanal
sitting with me just like real-life and eating lifesavers?wintergreen
She fingered my newest and best coat, laughing, ?this is terrible, even if it?s gray?

. . . It's something of a love poem, in the Troubador tradition, and so not only technically a sestina. But it's more than that. It's an ambitious experiment with six words. If you've not tried out the form yet, you must. Find yourself six good words and have at it. Alternatively, write a six-line poem, then keep going, using those six words again. And again. If writing poems is discovery, the sestina is a great form for discovering where the poem will take you.

Here's another poem I like . . .

THE EMPTY THEATER
after photographs by Gordon Parks
by Arielle Greenberg (Issue #2)

Chapter 1. We are big as the china and alone.
Chapter 2. We are bristles and the scum.
Chapter 3. But smiling. An electrical problem --- cord xzzz cut ---
what that truck --- is xxzz two braid zz the --- back up
to --- xzz black now si --- silv wave face xzz silver --- gone
Chapter 4. Flags of weary, stripes and stars.
Chapter 5. Do we live among the blind?
Chapter 6. We are the career of the empty theater.
Chapter 7. Circus peanuts. Baptism. Pool hall. Junk truck.
Chapter 8. Whitewash, swing low, church-go, thumb suck.
Chapter 9. Now the wheels are still and our souls taken.
Chapter 10. All souls. Boxers. Fluff-headed girls.
Chapter 11. Arise, old fedoras! Arise, light-skinned girls!
Chapter 12. Arise, new Moslems bent forward as women!
Chapter 13. A call to arms, and the newest hands.
Chapter 14. The blind house of snow.

What's to say? I am struck--no, make that fully charmed--by the line "we are the career of the empty theater."

Clark's comments about canwehaveourballback led me back to the zine to take another look at some of the authors there. As Clark says, you'll find poems by famous writers. For example, this one by Charles Bukowski, reprinted with permission from Black Sparrow Press. Another example of a reprint, without permission as far as I can tell, is a poem by Wallace Stevens in issue 5.

I don't mean to swat canwehaveourballback, but online zines that reprint poems do more harm than good for online publications. The reprints give the impression that the zine is unable to collect new work to fill its online space. (I'm not sure why canwehaveourballback would add Bukowski to its long list of mostly unknown writers, unless he's there to impress readers.)

A zine could print an anthology issue, where it's obvious that the poems are reprints, but to mix reprints with original poems, especially when the permission, if there is one, is buried in a link, seems like a sleight of hand. A reader could possibly think the author has submitted to the zine. But a dead author, like Stevens? The impression still exits that the poem is new, published online for the first time.

Every online journal covets established, well know poets. Some get them. But as I have said elsewhere, the majority of poets publishing online are those who are just now knocking at the door of reputation. There's really no need, to mix my metaphor, to pretend to be the pool when the diving board is good enough.

Being the springboard to another destination is a good thing to be. Though being a legitimate pool would be nice.

What a zine is can we have our ball back? It's not so much a pub as a project, and a secretive one at that. The home page is plain to bland, the editors clearly favoring the poetry over the presentation: a line of issue numbers linking you to a page of names linking you to poems . . . and absolutely nothing else. No masthead, no contact address, no editors page, no submission guidelines, no invitation to submit. Oh, and no design. That is, no icons, no graphics. Each issue is set up with a different color background (most are psychedelic reds, pinks, dark-room blacks, tie-dyed-LSD-tripped-out color swaths). No nothing but the poems.

Now, whose idea was this? No mention. Who maintains it? No mention. What are the editors' perferences, biases, standards? No mention. You have to figure these things out from the poems. One clue is the (ultra) inclusive list of contributors, living and dead, avant guardist and standard, Established and unknown, serious and quirky, technical and sentimental, celebrated and ridiculed. Among the better known: Anselm Hollo, David Lehman, Naomi Shibab Nye, John Tranter, Amiri Baraka, Rod McKuen, Ira Sadoff, Claude McKay, Andrei Codrescu, Robert Pinksy, William Corbett, Kathleen Ossip, Charles Bernstein, James Tate, Dara Weir. Among the weird: Mickey Z, JFK (a poet, and apparently not one of the dead Kennedys), mIEKALaND (a license plate?), Jumper Bloom, Christopher Shit.

There are names that pop up in more than one issue: Buck Downs, Andrea Baker, Murray Moulding, Anselm Berrigan(?), Joseph Torra, Chad Parenteau, from just a quick scan. Suggesting what? Pals? Is that what this is? An anti-pub made by pals in some New York pub project? Through three years and 17 issues (counting the .1 release)? And then there are the "guest edited" issues simply labled "Tuscon," "Montana," "Western Massachusetts."

I admit it. I am thoroughly left behind. One of the most eclectic and inclusive online pubs on the web with absolutely no invitation to join in!

can we have our ball back?, apparently, launched in 2000. Its most recent issue, #17 (which is indistinguishable from #16), was posted in March 2003. Just about the time the U.S. invaded Iraq. Hmmm. There is an issue "X" and an issue "8.1." In this way, the pub is like an online poetry version of Adbusters Magazine, determined to call forth and then violate every publishing convention.

So you've really got only one purpose to go poking around can we have our ball back? The poems.

Speaking of which, here's a sample or two: