Peter Lattu

Halloween 2

jackalopes
along the wall
trophy heads
hung high
a basket full of skulls
and a chest full of masks
black spiders
creeping in the ivy
crows flapping around
pumpkin heads
here and there
and a skeleton
flying up
front and center
all in the Virginia Florist window

{Poem by Peter Lattu}

Keith Wesley Combs

his story.

crying
he takes
another drink
and begins
to tell me
a story
of love lost.
a love
that he sacrificed
with liquor
and hatred.
a love
forgotten
in her mind
but one
that tortures him
still.

{Poem by Keith Wesley Combs}

Kaci Mason

Echoes

Conflict
Resolved without tears
Without feeling
Without remorse

Followed
By shock
And then unnatural
Laughter

It builds
And shrieks
Across the world
But we are deaf

The laughter
Is obscene
Harsh
And true

It echoes
And we are deaf

{Poem by Kaci Mason}

Jovan Burgess

Understanding

In any relationship whether with someone of a different
race or the same the name of the game is understanding.
What is expected of me is also expected of you,
so we can make this a dream come true.
There is a two way street in order to meet
each others expectations, hopes, and aspirations.
It's me for you and you for me,
in order for the understanding to be

{Jovan Burgess}

Scott Alexander Jones

from “elsewhere”

That finger on your temple is the barrel / of my raygun— / / That wretched dull resonance / / breaching walls where windows once were, here / at the end of all things / / tells us nothing / / we haven/t already been told / / regarding nightjars— / / That eyelid slit of light / beneath the bathroom door at the end of the hallway / / yellow & yellowish & yellowing / as deciduous leaves / / come winter / / says one of us remains / awake at this androgynous hour / / lighting candles meant to conjure azaleas. / Call it evening despite / / our blue proximity to morning— / / Blue as your tattered peacoat I always mistook for black— / Choose any definition / / of blackout: / / A scarlet pulsing of stoplights / or the scar in my abdomen from the failed / / appendectomy of a cyclone / / fence— / / And if I am sleeping thru the lullabies of a summer / storm, you are screaming / / an arsenal of auburn / / cellos into hiding— / / Your lipstick desperately flamingo. / Soundlessly agape as Civil War daguerreotypes. / / We have arrived / / at the scene of the film where the first bullets hail down— / All sound cuts out— / / Your larynx / / banished brailleward / / by explosions in the sky. / Toward the more taciturn outskirts of: / / anywhere but here— / / The nowheres / / we/ll no longer witness together— / Scouring burnt lexicons in search of the perfect word for: / / murmurs of wind / / caught in a vacant stairwell—

{Excerpt by Scott Alexander Jones}

Maxwell Mednick

Double Dragon

My aunt calls me
from Las Vegas to say

my grandmother’s
estate is cleared for sale
but don’t hold your breath

she owed money all over town
there won’t be anything
left for us—

After a short pause
I read her my new poem.

She says she doesn’t get
one word of it.

I tell her it’s about a nutsack
with wings wearing green
night vision goggles and eating pizza.

She says still doesn’t get it—
That I just repeat the same things over
and over, only in slightly

different ways.

{Poem by Maxwell Mednick}

Dale B. Craven

Salvaged by Poetry

Salvaged by poetry
Living for the moment of inspiration
That comes after a bout with divine intoxication
What we seem born to do
And I know the feeling comes to you
That by writing our words,we change
A little piece of our world
And we are left feeling purged
And are able to understand the abstract
The meaning of the odd things we do
It is the ruin of the losing streak in my mind
That I was only playing to win

{Poem by Dale B.Craven}

Frank S. LeRose

The Abandoned Ethereal

With great spears
and enchantments
from the Eighth Sphere,
the Firmament;
soon to be known

as angels came-

having given in,
temptation was brought
into them;
by the glowing hair
and bright halos
of woman thus,
a greater descent began.


Nth Lament

Sadly caused
to lose,
to be,
unforgivingly trod upon
to the last
bent and bowed,
flowerbed
is this-
torn
and sickly mother:
Earth.

{Poetry by Frank S. LeRose}

Peter Lattu

Harlem Stomp!
A Review

Among histories of the period, Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance by Laban Carrick Hill is one of the best. Hill sets the background to the Renaissance: the Great Migration, World War I, and the rise of black consciousness. There are short, incisive, vignettes of literary life, music and dance, theater including musicals, and visual arts. A chapter traces the history of Harlem itself as an urban mecca drawing African-Americans from around the United States. It was an exciting time to be there.

Hill excels in putting the Harlem Renaissance into its social context. Because so many talented African-Americans were right there in Harlem in the 1920’s, Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity, could throw a party with the whole literary world there, black and white, to introduce “the New Negro”. The Civic Club Dinner brought the publishers and editors of New York City together with the new African- American writers. Out of this dinner came a special issue of Survey Graphic featuring many of these new writers. From the Survey Graphic feature came the anthology The New Negro edited by Alain Locke. All of this was made possible by the proximity of people in New York City and Harlem.

This knack for putting things into context shows up in other ways. Other surveys of the period state that Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” was a landmark work signaling the rise of black consciousness and the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. None of the other surveys, however, explain why it was a landmark. Hill places that poem in the midst of the bloody race riots of 1919, called “the Red Summer” by James Weldon Johnson. McKay’s poem struck a note of defiance in difficult times and was published widely in the African-American press across the country. Here Hill has made clear what other surveys only hint at.

Harlem Stomp! abounds in apt anecdotes. With the Depression killing his literary career, the poet Countee Cullen returned to teaching French in high school in Manhattan. One of his students was James Baldwin, who interviewed Cullen for the school newspaper. Thus the torch was passed to another generation of black writers.

Such deft touches fill Harlem Stomp!. It includes a rich literary survey through select quotes. The stunning and inviting graphic design enhances the period artwork, illustrations and photographs. The Harlem Renaissance closed with the stock market crash of 1929 and the end of Prohibition. Willie “the Lion” Smith quipped: “It was legal liquor that did to Harlem what scarcer tips and shuttered warehouses had failed to do.” Harlem became an urban ghetto with nearly fifty percent unemployment. If they could, the artists left for teaching jobs elsewhere. Otherwise, they foundered in poverty. The Renaissance was over.

{Written by Peter Lattu}

Christopher Honey

Pontiac Sunbird, 1994

my old car was inhabited
by insects
small cockroaches
I liked to call my friends
but they weren’t really
we didn’t even talk
they stayed in the back seat
and I lived in the front seat
by the radio
and the speedometer
while they whispered in the back
and ran from bright lights
screaming in small voices

{Poem by Christopher Honey}

Arthur Winfield Knight

Happy Hour

We’d go into the bar every afternoon at four when Happy Hour began. The bartender would put on CNN when he saw us come in, then he’d pour half a carafe of Chardonnay, bring us two glasses and another one filled with ice because Kit liked her wine to be cold. The oak-handled beer spigots and the wine bottles chilled on ice made a kind of poem in the blue lights strung above the bar.

The bartender always wore a black Stetson because he was bald, although Ned was only in his thirties. He also wore a black vest over a white shirt and black Justin Roper boots because that was what the real cowboys wore. He’d ridden bulls for a living before he got the job as a bartender.

Sometimes, when it was very cold out, Kit and I would take our glasses into the lounge and sit before the stone fireplace that went from the floor to the ceiling. It was very warm in there and the TVs weren’t as loud as the ones in the bar, unless there was a game on.

Sometimes older ladies with blue hair were in the lounge, sitting around the tables, playing cards. The ladies were all very serious about it so they almost never talked to each other, but you could hear the cards sliding across the tables when they were dealt and the logs burning in the fireplace.

There were times when a quiet bar late in the afternoon was nearly perfect.

{Written by Arthur Winfield Knight}

Steve Garrett

Ancient Portal

Pay attention! From the womb, I formed you,
Black hair, red skin, blue eyes.
Ancient portal, full of grace, speak.
O my people, full of fear,
You hide in the earth.
Tend to your fires.
Do not let your hearts grow cold.
The rocks will not crush you.
GOD is real.

{Poem by Steve Garrett}

Peter Lattu

Name Dropping with Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia’s book Break Blow Burn about forty-three of the greatest poems in the English language certainly elicits questions about her choice. I am not going to dip into the long past history of poetry from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. Even there, one wonders about her omissions and balance. I am going to look exclusively at the moderns.

Modern poetry starts with Walt Whitman and Paglia includes Whitman. That’s a good choice. The great-grandfather of contemporary poetry should be in a collection of the greatest.

Paglia, a Dickinson scholar, has chosen three of Emily Dickinson’s poems to round out the nineteenth century. Three Dickinsons seem to be too many. She could have chosen something by Alfred Lord Tennyson, A.E. Housman, or Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Then we turn to the early twentieth century. She picked two poems each by Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and William Butler Yeats and three poems by Theodore Roethke. Why so much by so few? Certainly one could choose a Robert Frost or two: “Mending Wall”; “The Road Not Taken”; or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. Perhaps one could include Sandberg’s “Fog” or Masefield’s “Sea Fever”. Why no T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound? Maybe choose a poem by Robinson Jeffers, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, or Langston Hughes. Surely there was better verse written in the early twentieth century than some of her choices.

Paglia’s selections among contemporary poets raise question. There is nothing by Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Grace Paley, Robert Haas… Maryland poet Linda Pastan merits inclusion. Among poems by African-American writers, Nikki Giovanni’s “Knoxville, Tennessee” and Rita Dove’s “Ripont” would be far better choices than the strident “Wanda Why Aren’t You Dead” by Wanda Coleman.

She also picks one song as a poem, “Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell. That opens a door to the wide range of outstanding songwriters. One could just as easily choose songs by Jim Morrison, Carole King, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Brian Wilson, The Beatles, or Paul Simon, among many possibilities.

Paglia is bold to try to select the best poems in English. Her choices in modern poetry are suspect, but then wouldn’t any choices be second-guessed? We are all Monday morning quarterbacks. Her book promotes thought and discussion. That is good.

{Written by Peter Lattu}

Jon Mathewson

Natural Cycles

So, I’m sitting on sagging lumber, hoping to not
get stuck by the random rusty nail, thinking about
all those great poets who received inspiration from ruins -
Wordsworth & Tintern Abbey, Frost & the forty cellar holes,

The never abandoned lines, look upon me and
Despair, from ashes comes renewal, and find myself
Totally unmoved by those sentiments.
What to do after making the best
Of what is still around? Rage to what purpose?

Slow decline numbs some, confuses others.
I sit on a shore land grabbers actively seek, where
Boats once stayed in the winter. I think of the hard
Labor needed to bring the materials here, and then construct
This large boathouse, and the shame of the waste through disuse.

There is no more need for this boathouse, just as there
Is no more need for the pained expressions of loss when
Nature retrieves. Moose forage nearby, I hear the call of
The loon. The land grabbers and their
bulldozers blast and bumble over the hill.

{Jon Mathewson}

Kim Johnson

Pulse of Pain

Is like a bad headache
period cramps
realizing that which you love
doesn’t love you back
is something which creeps
up on you very slowly
but can hit at the most
inopportune time.


Love

Love
Hate
Indifference

Unrequited love?
what is the opposite of that?

{Poetry by Kim Johnson}

Roger G. Singer

Abandoned Shadows

A weaving of willow branches brushed
evening into song. The sun pressed the
last of color through scattered thin
clouds.
From her chair on the porch she lifted
A crescent smile at me, cold like
autumn moon light, pressing back
my august warm hands, stopping my
steps.
She laughed. Her cheeks lifted at
my weakness, mocking my wants
and needs into abandoned shadows,
buried deep under her name.

{Poem by Roger G. Singer}