Jan's comments (member since Oct 15, 2008)

Jan's comments from the ¡ POETRY ! group.

Nina wrote: "MSJ has accepted 2 poems for their next issue, which will be released Monday November 23. This is a new journal, only the second issue, put out by the University of Delaware."

Hey hey, whoo hoo, you!

Dayna, "Nursling" is beautiful.

Thanks, Barry!

Tom’s Quality of Light

Devolve again into the same mandala.
Sketch to focus. It’s your meditation.
The nurse brings your evening medication.
I see it’s hard to swallow.

Draw repetitive abstract flowers.
Cedric, the black nurse whom you say
is from pine country is with you today.
He charts minutes, swallows, urine, hours.

Think only of the years, months, weeks
you may or may not purchase like indulgences
with chemo. Make known your preferences
to go back home, among the other luminous antiques.

You and Debbie made a boho life:
thirty years of squalid joy and still inspired.
No judge or minister required
to make your one great love your wife.

Your ancient kitty, missing her Tom
now yowls in anguish to the empty studio.
She thinks your absence rude. You know
that emptiness and silence are not calm.

Instead, they swell to gales overnight
that swallow reason. Everywhere you turn
sail coffins like oaken ships. Eyes burn.
Worry chemo will obliterate your sight.

Can one calculate from fear and pain a quotient
quantifying life gained over quality thereof?
She wants, (your one and only love),
for you to die a person, not a patient.

That’s progress, I suppose, from refraining
even from the thought that you may one day die.
I want you both to look Death in the eye
so you can see your light as it is waning.

Wow, that's wonderful, Ruth. I really like and respect Nimrod. Great journal. Congrats.

The Queen of Green

“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all."
~ John Keats

On Halloween, when all the world’s
in black, white or lantern orange,
I’ll don a rich green velvet gown.
My hair I’ll spray both green and gold.
My face I’ll streak with greasepaint
the color of Oakland hills in March
after the rains. I’ll pull grass-green
silk hose onto my legs, slide my feet
into mossy gold-buckled slippers.
A wreath of California live oak
will be my crown. At my feet,
gummi worms will burrow,
aerating mud for candy corn to sprout.
After that, if poems don’t come
as naturally to me as leaves to a tree,
then Keats can kiss my verdant tuchas.

Love your work, Matt, and definitely up for a trade if you want to read fiction (my chapbook MIXING TRACKS). See private message....

Love your intro, Matt. I'm an Oakland, California poet, writer and former pediatrician who's been in this group for a number of months. I have two books out: my poetry chapbook THE UNDERWATER HOSPITAL (Zeitgeist Press, 2006), and my fiction chapbook MIXING TRACKS (Gertrude Press, 2009), winner of the 2008 Gertrude Press Fiction Chapbook award for LGBT writers (I'm the "B").

Wow! You are in GREAT company, Ruth. Congratulations.

"A la pileta" was great, Wendy.

Chella Courington, that was something special. I enjoyed reading all the finalist poems, but yours moved me the most.

Well, Ruth and Nina, as at least one of you already knows, I was rejected by Bellevue Review a number of times before they finally accepted one of my poems. So don't give up!

Gail, I think the biggest-time literary journal in which I've been published so far is BELLEVUE LITERARY REVIEW.

Places I aspire to: CALYX, the top women's literary journal, is very well-respected. POETRY is perhaps the most prestigious literary journal. I've never even dared to submit to POETRY. If I ever get published in CALYX, PLOUGHSHARES or POETRY, I'll know I've really made it.

What do other people consider the big time?

Hey, congrats, Ruth!

Wow! I came back from a week out of town to find a lot of discussion of my poem "Funeral Speech." Thank you all for reading it and for paying it so much attention.

Dana and Erica explained the poem pretty well in their messages on 9/20/09 labelled #34 and #35. The man was a relative of mine by marriage, and we were very fond of each other. I saw him at Jewish holidays, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, birthday parties, weddings, and funerals. I also visited his home a few times a year to read poetry aloud (he preferred rhyme, too!) and play word games with him.

Even so, I never learned what he did before retirement until the funeral, when his daughter mentioned it in her speech. It was sort of a running joke in the extended family, because his answers about it were always vague, and nobody really knew. His daughter said at the funeral that he had "worked for the Departments of Defense and of Intelligence as a quality control statistician." I don't know if that means the CIA or not. As for the line about us knowing he was really an assassin, most readers seem to understand that it was a joke. The bit about the stiletto in the Scrabble rack usually tips people off.

I wrote this poem very soon after the man's funeral, mostly to express my impressions of it and my sadness at losing him (through the image of his youngest grandson mourning him). I also felt that while the funeral speeches helped me, words could not penetrate the deeper grief of his grandchild. There was nothing I could say to that boy at that moment that would have meant anything to him. Words were just words.

Colma is a huge complex of cemeteries on the Peninsula below San Francisco. It's similar to L.A.'s Forest Lawn, which was so famously satirized by Evelyn Waugh in his novel The Loved One.

The two men sitting with me refused yarmulkes from the assistant rabbi because they didn't believe in God. They felt that putting one on (to cover one's head out of respect for God) would be hypocritical.

While I don't aim for obscurantism, I think it's okay for some parts of a poem to be mildly cryptic or open to interpretation by the reader. Part of the marvel of art is that it can mean something different to each person who appreciates it.

I am Jewish. I am not antisemitic, nor is the poem. Gregory's opinion that the poem is antisemitic arises, I believe, out of an idiosyncratic misunderstanding of it. Are you Jewish, Gregory?

Thanks again to everyone for all the attention.

I loved your poems on the qarrtsiluni site, too, Pamela. Wow! They were dense, allusive, beautiful, well-crafted and original. Brava.

Funeral Speech


The assistant rabbi offered husbands
skullcaps they politely rejected,
refusing to bear false witness.
You lay affably in your box.

You were vague about your work.
We had joked you were in the CIA.
In the temple your kids finally came clean:
you had worked for Intelligence

as a quality control statistician.
Sure. We knew you were
the most unassuming of assassins,
hiding a stiletto inside your Scrabble rack.

We wound through the necropolis.
Topiary spelled out “Cypress Lawn.”
Welcome to Colma, Land of the Dead.
Evelyn Waugh had nothing on this.

Peninsular sun shifted to mist
when we sank you in the ground.
Loud the first shovelful on the coffin,
you cricket-dry inside.

The youngest grandson sat on a wall,
face in his hands. Nearly ninety years,
but you’d miss his Bar Mitzvah.
Words were just words.

Stephen wrote: "i sent six poems to poetry SZ. They took the batch. Oranges & Sardines (poets & writers) accepted a poem of mine. & I'm waiting to hear from Mudlark. If Mudlark gives me the thumbs up, I'll be 100%..."

Congrats, Stephen!

Tara wrote: "Jan wrote: "Take your fifteen or so best poems. Put the best one first and the second-best one last. Now take the strongest six. Put three in positions two, three and four, and put three in positio..."

Hi Tara,
Everything I know about ordering poems I learned from my mentor and editor Julia Vinograd and my publisher Bruce Isaacson, owner of Zeitgeist Press. They're really wonderful.

I've just put Susan Grimm's Ordering the Storm on my wish list, Ruth and Nina. If you both like it, I'll leave it there and hope to get it for Christmas/Chanukah!