Nik Beat’s collection of poetry, The Tyranny of Love (Seraphim Editions), is the first of a stash I’ll be sampling over the next few weeks. As mentioned in my previous post, I found this book at The Book Band booth at the Mill Race Folk Festival.
Tag: Poetry
Story: A Coney Island of the Heart
After they peeled the tape from the door frame and pulled her head from the oven, the cop came at me, hat in hand, with the obvious question.
Poem: Toxic Tree Juice
Unshaven unshoweredhoodie soul-patch leash-tautdog-dragging morning stumblepast the local school. SUV retinuegas-chugging polished momsleery of child-snatching fiends,scary looking men like me. Veering off the sidewalkinto the cool tree-shade parkdoggy does as doggy-doobaggy swallow the shit. Drawn up short, I see itabandoned near the swing set:purple plastic tricyclebroken handle cracked wheel. Toxic tree juice in disguiseburied a…
Serrated Poem
Tongue the jagged edge.Take a sliver from unbuffed wood,a splinter in the eye. Blister the ragged thumbthrough a frayed asbestos oven mitt,a searing Pyrex dish. Barter with the man,a local artisan of handicraftsand rustic klatsch. Pause at the eulogy,the rough-hewn words of a nervousnephew’s ramblings. Hoe a chip-edged furrowthat follows a taut stringed template,a back…
Poem: Smoking Lounge
We first meet in the smoking lounge. Ward 3C. Psychiatric. The only place in the hospital where you’ll find a smoking lounge.
David Barker Writes Sappy Poetry
I confess it: I sometimes vanity google. My name is sufficiently common that enhancing my google rankings has become an exercise in frustration. However, it passes beyond frustration when I discover that I’m outranked by a dead poet no one has ever heard of.
Poem: Mournful Trees
Why has this calm stolen over mewhen I lost countless years, not to rage alone, nor to joy, but to both,jittering between the two like the lines on an EEG,the REM patterns of a cold-sweat nightmare”s sleep? Why have I found a stillness in this hourwhen waters crash on eastern shores bearing bodies out to…
The Mirror, The Lamp & The iPad
When I was feeling my way into the art of blogging, one of my first posts was a short piece on The Mirror and the Lamp, M.H. Abrams’ critical masterpiece on modern poetics. Although poetics may seem like an arcane subject, what gives Abrams’ book enduring relevance is that he’s really writing about something bigger. He’s writing about how we communicate or, even before that, how we think.
The Patient Frame, by Steven Heighton
Of all the things Heighton stares and stares at, the thing he fixes most intensely is the matter of justice. He wants to know why bad people sometimes thrive while the just are routinely crucified.
Poem: All of Us
I’ve noticed that as people age, they have more fun reminiscing with their peers than with their children and grandchildren. When my parents get together with their friends and start talking about people they knew in school or things that happened before I was born, it’s feels like I’m standing outside in the cold and staring through the window at the warmth inside.
Charlie Sheen Poetry Reading
When you break a silent vow, does it count? I silently vowed I would never mention Charlie Sheen on my blog. It just seems too crass, too exploitative, too easy. But then I discovered that Sheen had self-published a book of poetry in the 90’s and all my integrity went out the window.
Present Tense, by Anna Rabinowitz
To the extent that we think about themes in contemporary writing (assuming themes even exist outside high school English classes) one of the most familiar themes to trouble the contemporary reader’s brain is alienation.
A Poem For Christmas
I journeyed to the temple,a pilgrim borne on the wingsof a promise that I live better.I did, I did, oh I did.Face pressed almost to the floor,I rooted out every last coin,snuffling into the corner, kneesworn, but blessed with my reward:a two-for-one on tube socksheaped like fishes in a discount binfor the credulous multitudes. John…
Poem: The Dead Zone
My thing is not your thing;your thing is not my thing.Particulate things enclosed in force fields,bouncing off each other and brick walls,marbles flung from a sling shot. Talking through string between tincans, graduating to Morsecode on flashes of light betweenbedroom windows, semaphores,made-up codes, rudimentaryencryption. Now everyone’s talk is coded.The keys have gone missing: an aphasic blare,…
Particularity in Jeff Latosik’s Tiny, Frantic, Stronger
I have volumes of poetry that once belonged to my grandfather and which had belonged to his aunt before him. Some are more than 100 years old, mostly falling apart, with fake gilt lettering on the spines – Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Longfellow. Back then, the rules for poetry went like this.