David Meischen's Blog, page 3

The Poem Embodied

In 2020, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, a year from the end of its three-decade run, chose Octavio Quintanilla as the Featured Poet for issue 52. I have not forgotten the surprise I felt discovering Quintanilla’s poetry—nor the pleasure I take these days, re-reading poems from his new collection, The Book of Wounded Sparrows, issued earlier this year by Texas Review Press.

Over and over when I read Quintanilla, it is the image that arrests me, the image that surprises, the image my eye goes back to when one of his poems arrives at the last word. “Nostalgia,” for example, a poem in five brief glimpses, spaced apart and buffered by asterisks.

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Here’s the second section:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  I follow the plow’s pull, slitting  the earth in two.  A voice with two sparrows  for a throat  calls me.  I think it’s my father’s.

The plow here is a metaphor for nostalgia, drawing narrator and reader, unable to resist. And then—“a voice with two sparrows for a throat”—I feel the ache in my adam’s apple, stronger with the pull of memory, with the thought that the voice is “my father’s.”

This poem’s closing glimpse is one simple line:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Tonight, nostalgia is a lit candle in my chest.

Here again, Quintanilla locates the poem’s central emotion: in the physicality of the self. Nostalgia surprises when it enters, splitting the recipient open like a plow, vibrating in the throat like sparrow song, illuminating from within like candle fire.

Another of the poems in The Book of Wounded Sparrows moves smoothly from couplet to couplet, opening simply:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  You take a picture of your father  with your new cell phone

No surprise here—except in the poem’s unrippled forward movement. To a moment when son faces father, hoping for “anything that doesn’t require // words, a doorknob perhaps / that opens the sky before you.”

From the ordinary moment of taking a cell phone photo to the simple physicality of opening a door . . . to the surprise that awaits when the poem takes a reader’s breath away.

Notes:

2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas, Octavio Quintanilla is a prolific poet, artist, poet-artist. His frontextos are striking works of art—stunningly colorful paintings that incorporate text. The word frontexto is Quintanilla’s coinage, combining frontera and texto—border/text.

Check out his website ⇒

The Book of Wounded Sparrows was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award. It is abailable here ⇒

PSA: Please purchase your books from bookstores or independent presses or from online entities such as bookshop.org. Avoid the Big-A, which is in the business of putting bookstores and small presses out of business.

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Sidelong Glance

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published“You ever notice no one gets diarrhea on the Hallmark Channel?” Boner said into the awkward silence of the bus.

Crudeness notwithstanding, this little paragraph is the perfect opening to “Once Upon a Time in New Haven,” a masterful short story by Paul Juhasz. For starters, the boy’s name, an indication—paired with the speaker’s excrement fixation—that we are entering the realm of the adolescent male, where a nickname can brand someone as both a dick and a bonehead. Boner is both. In one of the story’s wryly humorous moments, we learn that his given name is Bonaparte.

He and two peers are taking advantage of a day off from school by heading into downtown New Haven, first stop Libby’s, a sweets shop rife with Italian goodies. Here they encounter an infamous mafioso—pomaded black hair, sinister carriage, handgun bulging beneath his suit jacket. Boner’s friends understand the threat inherent in the man’s name; Boner does not, his cluelessness on stark display later in the story, when he identifies the mafioso to a policeman investigating a murder.

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By now, we know these boys. Boner is a goofball, a hanger-on, serving as punching bag for Jaxson, angry son of an alcoholic father and a mother who split. Gill is middle class, with an intact family. He’s shrewder than both his companions, but he won’t be able to guide them through the dangers that await. Painful disappointments will clearly shape all three as they negotiate adolescence. This jewel of a story could easily close with Boner’s fateful—possibly fatal—mistake of naming the dangerous man.

But Juhasz knows these boys better than we do. He knows New Haven, knows their day has only begun. Shortly thereafter, the boys pass Wooster Park:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published. . . man-creatures slept under benches, enfolded within layers of discarded jackets and frayed blankets, their soiled coats the corpses of the free market, the promise of capitalism lined inside lint-frayed pockets, cardboard beds slowing the seepage of wet earth and insect horde. They will arise in the dark, scouring through the leavings, fostered by detritus, scrap-nourished, but for now, they sleep . . .

This vividly detailed scene widens the context—for Boner and his companions, for us. But Juhasz has a surprise in store:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published. . . amongst them walks a man, bone thin and pale, his eyes hidden under the brim on an anachronistic top hat, feeding on this atmosphere of despair. He has been to Libby’s already; has whispered . . . in an ear beneath pomaded hair the black of the universe. . . . In due time, he will be elsewhere. In due time, he will be everywhere. He whistles. . . . And he is once again, as always, prowling, interminable.

Each time I read this story, I pause here, realizing that the grim reaper has strolled into an actual park in an actual American city. “Once Upon a Time in New Haven” is not about men without homes who spend their days in Wooster Park, but these dispossessed are part of the urban fabric experienced by Boner, Jaxson, and Gill during their day out of school. And already, they have brushed elbows with the grim reaper.

Twice more, Juhasz enriches the story with sidelong glances, once to include a destitute blind man who functions as a seer for the boys. And again, to include a prostitute tasked with her client to lure one of the boys into his grasp. You’ll want to know what happens. Get this collection into your hands: As If Place Matters. Let Juhasz’s stories shake you up.

Note:

As If Place Matters is available here ⇒

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Conversational Surprise

Benjamin Myers draws me into a poem with ordinary words of ordinary people . . . leading to moments of quiet insight that keep me turning pages forward. And turning pages back to re-read favorites. “Grown-Ass Man,” from The Family Book of Martyrs, is one of those.

For starters: the title. I hear this title—the voice, the inflection, the vernacular irony. Can’t help myself, I grin. I want to read a poem that calls itself “Grown-Ass Man.”

Myers opens with the image of a tractor mower on “the empty lot across the street at 5:30 / on a summer Monday morning.” In five effortless stanzas of four lines each, he listens to the mower, “the pings of rock // bouncing up against the metal deck.” He remembers the derelict house that once occupied the lot, recalling that “for three months an abandoned baby / doll with one missing eye sat / on the roof outside the attic window.” This singular detail lands me on the porch with Myers.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedNow, stirred from tall grass by the mower,a white dog noses an empty can of energydrink by the curb, lifts its leg and lowersit again without pissing. I am 39 this week.

I love the surprise here—I am 39 this week—love that nowhere in the nineteen preceding lines does the poem suggest awareness of or anxiety about aging. But sudden awareness is just that: sudden. Sometimes it arrives without embellishment. The number alone suffices here. 39. We need not be told that’s one year shy of 40.

Myers turns then, from details of these minutes on his porch to facts about himself on the cusp of 39. He is “learning to walk slowly beside / my small son . . . learning to walk / slowly beside my mother into the cancer clinic.”

Then, in a perfect bit of serendipity, Myers overhears a gruff neighbor arguing with his wife, insisting, I am a grown-ass man. The man repeats his claim. And Myers closes out: “I repeat it too, quietly, /  liking the sound of it.”

Page after page, in The Family Book of Martyrs, Benjamin Myers surprises—with subtle moments, gentle epiphanies such as this one. I keep my copy near at hand. These days more than ever, we need this kind of poetry.

Notes:

Thanks to the poet, I can share this poem here. See below.

A former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma, Benjamin Myers is the author of four poetry collections. He is a professor of literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he directs the Great Books Honors Program.

The Family Book of Martyrs is available here ⇒

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedGrown-Ass ManA man backs a tractor slowly down metal rampsbehind a flatbed truck and begins to mowthe empty lot across the street at 5:30on a summer Monday morning.I am standing on the front porch drinking coffeebefore I drive my mother to chemo. I watchthe tractor drag its large, flat moweraround the lot, listen to the pings of rockbouncing up against the metal deck.Last fall, they tore down the housethat used to be there, its peeling roof patchedonly by leaves fallen from one large oak.There were stacks of car batteries by the front door,and for three months an abandoned babydoll with one missing eye saton the roof outside the attic window.Now, stirred from tall grass by the mower,a white dog noses an empty can of energydrink by the curb, lifts its leg and lowersit again without pissing. I am 39 this week.I am learning to walk slowly besidemy small son when we go to the librarydown the street. I am learning to walkslowly beside my mother into the cancer clinic.As the mower powers down, I hearmy neighbor’s voice suddenly loudin argument with his wife. I ama grown-ass man, he is yelling.I am a grown-ass man, he repeats,and I repeat it too, quietly,liking the sound of it.Benjamin MyersThe Family Book of Martyrs (Lamar University Literary Press, 2022)

Fault Line

It’s a lovely Irwin Shaw Sunday morning in New York City. “Michael held Frances’ arm. . . . They walked lightly, almost smiling, because they had slept late and had a good breakfast.” Michael almost falls as they walk. His wife’s response lets us know why this story is titled “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published    “She’s not so pretty anyway,” Frances said. “Anyway, not pretty enough     to take a chance breaking your neck looking at her.”

Congenial husband and wife banter spills from the page as they walk on, no hint of tension. Until Frances breaks off mid-sentence:

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published     “Say, are you listening to me?”     “Sure,” he said. He took his eyes off the hatless girl with the dark hair,     cut dancer-style, like a helmet, who was walking past him with the self-    conscious strength and grace dancers have. She was walking without a     coat and she looked very solid and her belly was flat, like a boy’s, under     her skirt, and her hips swung boldly because she was a dancer and also     because she knew Michael was looking at her. . . . Michael noticed all these     things before he looked back at his wife.

And clearly Frances has been noticing her husband noticing.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published    “You always look at other women,” Frances said. “At every damn woman     in the City of New York.”

As the conversation continues, the words border on bickering. Michael tries to defend himself:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published    “I look at women,” he said. “Correct. I don’t say it’s wrong or right, I     look at them. . . .”    “You look at them as through you want them . . . Every one of them.”

Minutes later, after rhapsodizing about all the attractive women in the city, Michael admits, “I can’t help but look at them. I can’t help but want them.” And shortly after: “Sometimes I feel I would like to be free.”

What has been said here reveals not necessarily the end of Michael and Frances—but a fault line that threatens their marriage. In the space of a few minutes, a woman surprises her husband by saying what she has noticed. A husband surprises his wife by verifying what she fears. Readers are surprised by seeing—perhaps for the umpteenth time—the disrupting power words can have in what begins as a congenial conversation between two people who take their relationship for granted.

I’ve written about this kind of story, this kind of moment before, when an ordinary conversation trips over a word, an admission, that can’t be taken back. I call these Hurstwood moments, after the character in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie who is on the verge of returning $10,000 in cash that is not his to the safe where it belongs . . . when the safe door clicks shut.

Frances might have dropped the subject, but she didn’t. Michael might have safely returned the currency of his marriage to a safe place, but he didn’t. Shaw might have penned a definitive verdict on this relationship, but a good story—like a previously okay marriage—doesn’t work that way.

Note:

“The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” is available in Short Stories: Five Decades (University of Chicago Press, 2000). I found it online at Classic Short Stories.

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Dumbass Decisions

“The next afternoon, near the outskirts of El Paso, he was downing his last beer.” Our man here is a serially irresponsible truck driver named Donnie, one of several characters defined by thoughtless choices and worse luck in It Falls Gently All Around, linked short stories by Ramona Reeves.

Donnie has been locked out of his apartment for failing to pay the rent. His father has died. His wife has left him, and he’s fallen for the delusion that he can change, that surely he’ll win her back. Still, driving a load from Mobile, Alabama, to the West Coast could be the first step toward at least minimal financial solvency, and the drive might go smoothly, despite Donnie’s decision “to drink on markers divisible by fifty.” But then this:

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“A billboard advertised Psychic Readings by Sylvia and boasted Get Answers Now. He’d driven past the billboard hundreds of times, but the double weight of losing his father and his wife had him feeling like the heavy end of a pickax. Sylvia’s answers couldn’t be worse than his own.” Even a somewhat clueless reader will chuckle here, knowing that a freeway psychic along the outskirts of any American city is not likely to offer actual rescue.

But Ramona Reeves knows this character. She lets him make the foolish move, the predictable but surprising move—the mistake that keeps on giving. Donnie leaves the freeway, his exit a fork for driver and story. His life unravels as the story comes into its own, engaging us in a sad but comic misadventure to a dead end for Donnie.

“The GPS led him onto a tar-and-chip road littered with rocks and potholes” to a derelict house that looks abandoned, where he draws the death card from a tarot deck, then drinks from a bottle of beer after watching as the psychic “emptied a capsule into the bottle.” I love this moment in the story. It’s a hinge moment, when a character does something both appallingly foolish and—given what deft storytelling has revealed about him so far—absolutely credible.

These are among the moments that make fiction worth the bother for this reader, when I witness a character make absolutely the wrong mistake, the foolish mistake, the patently avoidable mistake—the mistake that reveals him to me.

It Falls Gently All Around has an ensemble cast that deserves an award of some kind—characters who stumble over their own worst impulses, then get up and try again. Their missteps surprise as their stories engage. I’ll be reading this collection again.

Note:

Ramona Reeves won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for It Falls Gently All Around (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022).

Available at University of Pittsburgh Press ⇒

Check out Ramona’s website ⇒

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At Home in This World

flesh to bone, ire’ne lara silva’s 2013 story collection, opens with “hunger/hambre/mayantli”—the title word in English, Spanish, and Nahuatl.The story proceeds in short sections, each focusing on one of four characters—brother and sister Luis and Luisa, their mother Bertha, and a ghost-boy named Adrian who wanders a cemetery near his unmarked grave. ire’ne lara silva navigates a fictional territory known as magical realism, but she and her characters are so much at home in this world that readers enter—and stay—without needing a label for where they are.

We meet Luisa in the story’s short second section—three paragraphs that immerse us in this girl’s relationship with words. What surprises—and enchants me here—is that nothing happens. Except enchantment. Enter it with me:

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“sollozo sollozar llorar olvidar recordar recuerdo iluminar luminiscencia luminosidad reflección espejo cara  retrato pintura luz. She embroidered her day with words, words like rays of light, words like flowers and butterflies and bird wings. She didn’t need music, just words. Words pulled from the sky, the light, the walls, the people she saw in the street or at school. Words lived under and on and in everything. She caught them, hiding them in her mouth. She tasted them, testing their shape with her tongue, her teeth, the roof of her mouth. Sometimes she held them in her hands. She liked to hollow them out, pressing with her thumbs, scratching with her nails. The faintest scratch and entire sounds would fall away. She liked the unknown shapes in words. Liked to open them to the eye. Liked words that sparked with one meaning when they were held up to the light and another meaning when she took them to the shadows. A tree that was a cloud that was a silver fin that was a drop of water that was the aching curve of the moon.”

My Spanish is less than rudimentary, but speak the first five words with me: sollozo sollozar llorar olvidar recordar. Hear the music in the weaving of repeated sounds—the sibilance of s, the yummy feeling of double l, the rounded mouth of o, the widemouth wonder of ar. Notice that the first verb in silva’s actual narrative is embroidered. We observe Luisa as she engages with words, but the embroidery here, the tactility, the harmonies—these are the author’s. The word words—plural—enters the stitchery eight times. The varied rhythms are mesmeric. “words like flowers and butterflies and bird wings. . . . Words pulled from the sky, the light, the walls.” Notice the iambic pulse of the sky, the light, the walls. Years ago, I heard iambic pentameter defined as “the rhythm of the human heartbeat.” Yes! My heart beats with Luisa here.

To an observer other than the author, this girl might easily appear to be static, immobile—doing nothing, going nowhere. But the verbs say otherwise: pulled, lived, caught, hiding, tasted, testing, held, hollow, pressing, scratching, fall, sparked, held, took. These verbs are weaving a story, transforming Luisa into someone profoundly engaged with her private world. That’s the gift of writers such as ire’ne lara silva. They take us deep into a world of surprise.

My Question for You, Dear Reader/Writer:

Name a story, a novel, a collection of poems with language that casts a spell, that mesmerizes you, that wants to be read aloud. Extra challenge: identify a single paragraph / stanza with this kind of language. I’ll go first: the opening paragraph of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

Notes:

ire’ne lara silva, 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is a force of nature. She’s the author of five poetry collections, two chapbooks, a comic book, and flesh to bone, a short story collection, winner of the Premio Aztlán. I’ve had a bit of a preview of irene’s second story collection—can’t wait: the light of your body (Arte Publico, Spring 2025).

Visit the author’s website.

flesh to bone is available here.

At Amazon as well. But to the extent possible, purchase your books from independent bookstores, small presses, university presses, and authors themselves. Keep this publishing territory alive.

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Impossible Masquerade

When you sit down to write a poem, you don’t have to be you. When you dive into a new collection of poems—say Sandra Yannone’s The Glass Studio—the excitement of a masquerade awaits, the poet inhabiting various masks, various aspects of herself as you move from poem to poem. Behind the mask, glimmers of something vital that each page has to offer.

Recently, I had the privilege of experiencing Sandra Yannone’s poetry in person, of listening rapt as she read from The Glass Studio, including a poem that turned my understanding of poetic masks upside down: “David Cassidy Writes Me a Fan Letter from the Great Painted Bus Beyond.” I know about letter poems. I know that often these poems take liberties—that a letter poem can address Kahlil Gibran, Josef Stalin, Anna Karenina, Joan of Arc—the possibilities are endless. But I’d not encountered a poem that achieves a double impossibility—a famous person no longer breathing writes to the author of the poem—until Sandy imagined David Cassidy writing to her teenage self.

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This remarkable poem surprises in two ways. David Cassidy and Sandy’s much younger self come to life on the page. Here’s a lovely moment in Cassidy’s voice:

I was hoping to be a firefly that feasted
on night flowers, leaving my scent behind
with my original songs, the ones no one heard
over the din of those pop hits that ABC’s money
moguls shoveled into my mouth.

And Cassidy’s insight into Sandy’s teen self:

       I know you gave
a private concert to Tara Hardy
in your living room, that you have two microphones
at the ready . . . when you feel inspired
by songs you wore down the needles
. . . to hear over and over.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
       You know you are happier
when you are unlocked, unleashed . . .

Cassidy—the David he wants to be—as a firefly dipping to night flowers! Sandy, letting Cassidy reveal something about herself that shines brighter in his voice.

I’ve been so taken with “David Cassidy Writes Me a Fan Letter from the Great Painted Bus Beyond” that I’ve tried the double masquerade myself. Here’s the opening of my first attempt:

“Dr. Kildare Writes to a Texas Farmboy”

I pulled your chart so many times. Nights
after a shift, after the klieg lights went dark,

I made notes toward a diagnosis: reflexive
grinning syndrome. hyperactivity in the glands

that regulate optimism. You were watching me
in black and white—the TV screen, my doctor show

reflected back at you, who couldn’t know
that I was looking through a one-way mirror.

As an avid reader—and writer—of poetry, nothing makes me happier than a poem that takes me elsewhere. Thanks, Sandra Yannone!

My Question for You, Dear Reader/Writer:

Which character from bygone television (or movies) is writing to a younger version of you? What unique insights does this character offer into your former self?

Note:

I recommend two collections by Sandra Yannone:

The Glass Studio (Salmon Poetry, 2024).

Boats for Women (Salmon Poetry, 2019)

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The Hurstwood Moment

“They were doing the dishes, his wife washing while he dried.”

Thus open’s “Say Yes,” a very short story by Tobias Wolff. The situation here is the epitome of ordinary—humdrum marriage, humdrum evening chore. Reading the short opening paragraph, one might be forgiven for expecting a flat story. What could possibly lift this narrative out of its domestic rut?

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Our answer comes in the second paragraph, though subtly, when the couple happens upon the subject of interracial marriage, and the husband “said that all things considered, he thought it was a bad idea.” Notice the qualifier here—all things considered. Notice, too, that the husband doesn’t plant a flag. He merely thought the idea was bad. This feels like potentially “safe” domestic territory. But twice in three short paragraphs, the wife asks why. Her facial expression—pinched brows, bitten lower lip—tells the husband “he should keep his mouth shut, but he never did.”

The wife continues with her questions; the husband becomes increasingly defensive. The wife reaches abruptly into the dishwater and cuts her hand on something beneath the surface. The husband springs into action, helps her with a bandage, and that might have been the end of it, the discussion shelved. But then the wife makes the story’s one bear-trap statement­: “So, you wouldn’t have married me if I’d been black.” A page of back-and-forth dialogue ensues, during which the husband tries to avoid the trap he has helped to set for himself. Until the wife insists: “No more considering. Yes or no.” And despite the author’s plea in the story’s title, the husband says, “Jesus, Ann. All right. No.”

In the space of three pages, a marriage has been shaken to its very foundation.

“Say Yes” continues for a little more than a page. The husband promises the wife he’ll make it up to her, and she asks, “How?” At this point, she’s in bed already; the house is dark. Wolff, masterful throughout, leaves us with a wonderfully ambiguous closing moment.

What brings me back to “Say Yes” is that moment in the conversation—as in so many moments in our lives—when a word is spoken that changes everything. And that word cannot be taken back.

I like to think of it as a Hurstwood moment, after the character in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie who is on the verge of returning $10,000 in cash that is not his to the safe where it belongs . . . when the safe door clicks shut. There is no going back from such a moment. Great literature, great stories, return to them. Over and over.

As Lady Macbeth says, when all is lost: “What’s done cannot be undone.”

Notes:

“Say Yes” is available in Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories (Gibbs Smith, Publisher; 10th ptg. edition, July 30, 2013). Highly recommended. If you’re an avid reader, I think you’ll want to keep it near at hand—for re-reading. If you’re a writer, my challenge is this: Write a very short story that hinges on a Hurstwood moment. I’ll share one of mine in the coming weeks. (I found a PDF of “Say Yes” online—not sure if the entity that posted it had permission.)

I read Sister Carrie as an undergraduate, again as a first-year teacher, and a third time in the eighties—long enough ago that I don’t want to vouch for my taste at the time. Numerous critics have observed that Dreiser’s writing is clunky, but for me, Sister Carrie was an engrossing character study.

Until next week,

David Meischen
Nopalito, Texas: Stories
Caliche Road Poems
Anyone’s Son: Poems
meischenink.com

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Desert Surprise: Abandoned Hide-a-Bed

On a spring morning in 2015, I stepped between the strands of a fence along Albuquerque’s West Mesa and descended a curving, rubbled path available only to trail bikes and pedestrians. Though ranching vehicles of some kind had clearly worn the double tread where I walked, the wild was reclaiming this part of the desert. But then something neither flora nor fauna flagged my peripheral vision. I stepped around brittle scrub blocking my view and gaped at the apparition of a weather-worn, rusted-out hide-a-bed splayed open in the sand.

This part of the mesa along the city’s western edge bears many such dispiriting discards—mattresses, washing machines, ancient television sets. But the derelict sofa had been there so long it looked almost at home among the chamisa. I took photographs. I mused over how the sofa got there, how long it had been moldering. One day it was gone—extracted, I assume, by a four-wheeler crew from the city department that maintains our open spaces.

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As a writer, I’ve spent much of the past quarter-century musing over the notion of surprise. I’m a born story-teller; narrative is my default mode. But stories need surprise to jolt them out of whatever narrative rut we writers are apt to follow.

As I was working on poems for my first poetry collection, my desk succumbed to clutter. And clutter can have its uses, as I discovered one afternoon when the official report from a high-contrast heart scan surfaced. Thanks to the poet Kevin Prufer’s achievements in “braided narrative,” my brain juxtaposed two images—ragged arteries, ragged sofa. And I was off. Here are the opening lines of “Tomography, with Quantitative Evaluation of Coronary Calcium” (yes, I stole the title—from my heart scan report):

­­­­­­­­­­­--------------------------------------------------

I pause beside a sofa bed splayed

over rock-strewn sand along the mesa trail.

   A coyote trots through the brush beyond, heedless of me,

     my distractions, my specialist’s report.

   Calcified plaque (large) noted in the proximal portion of the vessel

                      resulting in mild stenosis.

The fabric is in tatters, foam dingy with rainfall and sun,

batting still fluffy along the edges

               like a lamb ripped open

               on a summer morning years ago.

           Predator shall lie down with prey—

­­­­­­­­­­­--------------------------------------------------

So: the narrative moves from sofa bed to coyote to heart scan, then back to the sofa bed, then flashes to a quick memory of farm life, followed by a biblical reference. To the extent this poem succeeds, I credit surprise.

These are my opening thoughts for Narrative Surprise, a blog that will focus on poetry, fiction, and memoir. How do writers employ narrative to lure us in? How do they unsettle narrative so as to show us something fresh, unusual, surprising?

Notes:

·         I discovered Kevin Prufer’s approach in “Braided Narrative,” his contribution to Wingbeats II: Exercises and Practice in Poetry. I had the honor of serving as co-editor.

·         Highly recommended: Kevin Prufer’s The Fears (Copper Canyon, 2023). The braiding on display in these poems is masterful.

·         My poem with sofa bed appears in full in Anyone’s Son, from 3:A Taos Press. I highly recommend browsing there.

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