What To Say To Death

by Ron Androla

"From the not so lofty perch of middle age, Androla sees in all the blue smoke of days gone by, the gray & golden now, the certain shadow of the future's ass end. He knows the reaper's on the road & closing steady, still a little light remains & not all the fruit has soured. There's time left for small victories & he wins with this the strained cadence of a life lived hard, words as natural as spit & poems built of flesh, breath & bone." -Bart Solarczyk

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 2, 2008

About the author

at 13 i fell in love with a 15 year old girl, who sooned turned 16, & able to drive. i wrote long-hand love poems to her in notebooks, the most forceful act i cld do when not talking to her on the phone for many solid hours. i don't remeber how we ended, but at my first year of college in 1972 she was in an accident, her vett slipped under the back of a semi truck, decapitating her. poetry became energy. my highschool sweetheart kathy must have had hundreds of sappy loves poems written for her, & ultimately there's tragedy there too. i felt my being bend to forms of poetry, felt most comfortable with the likes of ez pound & charles olson & robert creeley & william carlos williams, but read various outshoots from w.s. merwin to ms. plath, to the beats, kerouac, to henry miller, buwoski, intrigued by language poets i.e., larry eigner, & the PROCESS, which i knew in my early 20's wld be a life-long process. a poet must live by his wit's, i remember creeley explaining in an interview, & my wits had me working in various factories for 35 years. still, thru all the decades, i wrote. i cldn't NOT write. it was NECESSARY. i had no control. wild years of drunken readings. & most of the details i cannot recall. these days, married to ann, who is also a writer, who fell in love with in the mountains of new hampshire 25 years from suddenly hearing her voice in my soon-be-lost house thru a long marriage into divorce & the rage of that, hell, but ann, my love, soul-mate moved up against lake erie & we married & aging without mercy, thanks the stars for the strike at the last factory, i'm out of that, into something different:
weighed against 350 degree presses & fiberglass dust, all metals yell, & i sit in a partial cubicle now, headset on, keyboard under my finger & the computer screen. it isn't a job without stress, & it doesn't pay factory wages, & the hours change weekly; whatever, at age 54 i'm a poet. i've worked relentlessly. i never want to stop.

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

What To Say To Death by Ron Androla – GOSS 183/CASA MENENDEZ - ISBN 978-1440414916

Ron Androla is a poet’s poet. Not the Laureate style poet, but the street poet kind. Road rash, septic back up, alleyway drunk, syringe littered, street light out reality. Poetry is a life force for him. His main addiction. Through his life he has quit cigarettes and liquor, but never poetry. As poetic friend Gabriela Stroschen once said, Ron “Lives the poem.” And there is nothing of his life excluded. One could write a biography on Androla from his poems alone, no interview needed. Prolific & diverse, his poetry plays with language like a druggie would with chemicals.. There’s always another new way to get a fix.. And for Androla, that’s laying his lines out for us to snort up. So, snort away. There are 95 pages w/white lines awaiting.
In his mojo bag of verse, Androla explains that “Language distinguishes/Concentration via movements” and that’s what it is. His poems move across the page. They bump & grind, they slither & quake, they ooze and recede. They are.

Poetic Friendship
To assert a proposition
Other than I am a metaphor
5 scrambled eggs in a blue bowl
A spiral galaxy of milk in the center
Doesn’t cut cake to piece exactly now
Now & the morning light of nicotine
Now & the flowers of bourbon in pores of skin
Now & creating smoke horse-head nebula
Now & regrets & their results whispers crack
Me, a fawn before the butcher
Me, with fingernails of granite & no teeth

The zombies have vanished

Wrens, weak with meek seed, sob on metal
Fence tops

Everyone I know wants to smile


Poems that deal with the death of his father, his own medical woes, his wife, cigarettes & booze, dentures, “6 vikes & grape jelly toast,” a dog & cats, rain & snow, eyes, chocolate pop tarts, “dingfuckingbats,” New York City, truck drivers, “Folger’s black silk coffee/Is delicious with the aftertaste//Of Hawaiian beans”, and friends of the verse.
Androla is one of the most under-appreciated masters of our generation. But then, as in his own words;

We are
Holiest
Unread

Feel free to worship at your earliest convenience.

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Androla's poetry dares death to talk back. He writes cynically of getting older, with lines about getting high and drinking cross-referenced with lines about dentures and taking medicine.

His writing is spare, yet rich with imagery. My favorite poem in the collections is "What To Do On One Day Off Work". Androla captures precisely the experience of being of an age when a day off work is not spent having fun.