Gene Twaronite's Blog, page 3

Dethroned

It has no effect on them, the zookeeper replied,
when asked about the rhino’s missing horn.
Better dehorned than dead.
Saw it off now before they come in the night
to murder and dethrone your crowning glory
to be ground into magical cure-all powder
or carved into obscene jeweled daggers
to adorn a prince’s empty existence.
Just remove the profit motive.
How easy it sounds, when we pretend
to know all possible effects,
what pain is to another.
Who knows the wild heart of a rhino?
Does he still see a rhino in the pool’s reflection?
Can you save the animal
without losing the soul?

Just one of the poems from my new collection Death at the Mall, just published by Kelsay Books (kelsaybooks.com) and available wherever books are sold.

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What Survives

My poem “What Survives” was just published by Panoply, a Literary Zine. A cento is a poetic form composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets. It comes from the Latin word for patchwork.

What Survives: A Cento* – by Gene Twaronite

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What Do Trees Talk About?

Now that we know how they signal each other
through root hairs and fungal threads of meaning,
will we ever learn to read these signals
and know what it is they talk about
in the dark loamy layers below?

Surely there must be more
to their talk than survival
as when insects or fires threaten,
just as we sapiens came to learn
grunts and guttural sounds could signify
so much more than danger
when wolves or tigers were near
but …

what I want to know is
do they ever sweet talk each other
sending love notes to nearby birches
as they bend in the breeze
and sing praises to Mother Tree
who watches over all?

Do they speak in hushed tones
of what it must be like to walk
on feet or touch each other
the way those wise apes do
and wonder if trees will
ever learn to read their signals
when words are too shallow and coarse
for root hairs to hear
and smoke signals fill the valleys
with the scent of disaster?

First published together with “The Price of Poetry” in Tipton Poetry Journal Issue #61 (See pages 36-37)

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Death at the Mall: New and Selected Poems

Dear Friends,

I am excited to announce that my new poetry collection, Death at the Mall,  has just been published by Kelsay Books. For me, it represents a milestone in my poetic journey. It features 54 all new poems as well as 16 poems selected from my four previous books. Not only is this my fifth published collection, but it marks over 200 poems published since that day, thirty years ago, when I first began writing poetry. Read what one advance reviewer has to say:

“In Gene Twaronite’s Death at the Mall, a wry and earnest take on the human predicament is everywhere apparent —our desires and follies, our great possibilities and perpetual undoing are all on display.  But here too is an underlying sweetness in the poems that perseveres: an orientation of wonder and astonishment, often brought on by the world itself, in all its unknowable splendor, or brought on by the fecklessness of our actions in the face of the grander forces that shape our days.  Twaronite’s formal interest and dexterity are on full display in these selected works—whether sestinas spooling out, or the sonic energy of an interior rhyme, or riffs on Marianne Moore or Gertrude Stein.  In his poem “Distress,” Twaronite recounts the occasion of coming upon a beached sea lion in distress, “an inscrutable moment / between me and one sea lion / sharing the common anxiety / of where the next blow will fall, / trying to make sense of it all.”  In the crucible of Twaronite’s poems, we see the things we are made of with rigorous attention, made new by a capacious imagination.” 

— Tyler Meier, Executive Director, University of Arizona Poetry Center

Available here:  

https://kelsaybooks.com/products/death-at-the-mall

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Imaginary Garden

My poem “Imaginary Garden” has just been published in New Myths Magazine Issue #67  https://sites.google.com/newmyths.com/newmythscomissue67b/issue-67-stories/imaginary-garden

It has also been nominated for a Readers Choice Award. If you go to the home page (https://sites.google.com/newmyths.com/newmyths-com-home/home-page) you can read and rank the nominated poems and stories.

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Memory Care

I have long been fascinated by science fiction and often write poetry in this genre. Here is my latest offering, which suddenly decided it wished to become a shape poem. It was just published in issue #66 of NewMyths.com, a quarterly online magazine of science fiction and fantasy. You can read it here: https://sites.google.com/newmyths.com/newmyths-com-issue-66/issue-66-stories/memory-care

America, We Call Your Name

Those who would pigeonhole poetry, assigning it to a more restrictive category according to what they think it should be, ignore poetry’s dynamic flux and the range of things a poem can do for us. Some think poems should always be lyrical, dealing with personal feelings and emotions, with nary a trace of narrative. Some insist that poems must always rhyme or be written in meter. Others will never accept prose poems or found poems as legitimate forms of poetry. And heaven forbid a poem should ever be about politics!

As David Orr writes in The Politics of Poetry, poetry and politics are both means of persuasion, connecting through expression and feeling. While politics connects to current events, political poetry seeks to connect to people’s feelings – that “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” so aptly described by Wordsworth. I like to think of all poetry, in whatever form it takes, as simply compressed emotion on the page.

I just finished reading (and rereading, in some cases) the poems in the anthology, America, We Call Your Name. Poems of Resistance and Resilience. Featuring the work of poets living and dead, it was selected and published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2018, in response “to the cultural, moral, and political rifts that now divide our country.” Talk about powerful feelings! I like how the publisher added the word resilience to the subtitle. Whatever your feelings about the 2016 presidential election and the state of our country right now, I think we can all agree that we must never lose the resilience of hope.

Here are three of my favorite poems to give you a brief taste.

Violaceae

By Jose A. Alcantara

If we must have violence, then let it be
the violence of violets, how they burst
into spring, before most anything else—
vanguard of the voluptuous—
unravelling their petals, their leaves
to attract whatever will love them.
If we must rant and rave, then let us
do so as they do, inconspicuously,
close to the ground, in all the wet places
until something with a stinger comes
and mounts us, turning us inward
where we learn what it is to sweeten.

Let Them Not Say

By Jane Hirshfield

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something:

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

No. 1096

By Emily Dickinson

These Strangers, in a foreign World,
Protection asked of me—
Befriend them, lest Yourself in Heaven
Be found a Refugee—

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After Hearing the Young Black Poet

It is very unusual for a literary journal to publish a previously published poem, especially one that has appeared in another journal. I am honored to appear here in Tipton Poetry Journal (see page 20). https://issuu.com/tiptonpoetryjournal/docs/tpj59

This poem, by the way, is from my second poetry collection, The Museum of Unwearable Shoes.

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A Young Man’s Journey Through Hell

While the world does seem like it’s going to hell, here’s a fun video I made when I published my young adult novel, My Vacation in Hell. It’s a sequel to The Family That Wasn’t, in which John, a sexual abuse victim and frequent flyer of his imagination, must find a way out of the hell inside him.

My book is available at the following outlets:

https://books2read.com/u/mKXkoy

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Death at the Mall

We walk there to escape the heat
or the pall of our
coffined lives.

We are a rag-tag lot,
from the lithe, pony-tailed woman
who waves as she whizzes past me,

to seniors with walkers and trekking poles,
stepping cautiously toward
whatever future awaits,

big families sprawled across the aisles,
briefly trying to hold it all together
against the forces spinning them apart,

couples strolling hand in hand
dreaming new lives
in reflected windows.

We regulars go with the flow, religiously
following the outlines of each corner,
as if our lives depended on it,

some moving slower each year,
then picking up the pace upon recalling
how fast we used to walk,

up and down the one set of stairs,
sometimes three or four times,
recording steps to what end,

or saving our strength on the escalator,
gazing up at blue sky
beyond the skylights.

There’s only one elevator,
though I’ve never seen it go
any other way but down.

With electric eye, the Tyrannosaurus sees all
and roars as we go by, reminding us that
we too will be eaten by time.

We pretend not to notice
the fountain’s gone dry
or the vacant spaces,

and believe the empty promises
of new stores coming
just for you.

And we imagine it will
all still be here
tomorrow.

First published in Sky Island Journal Issue 27 https://www.skyislandjournal.com/issues#/issue-27-winter-2024/

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