Arts
A collection of 250 articles.
Porschegasbord
In Search Of Dreams
At the Cardiologist’s
Mystifying Answers to Magic 8 Ball Questions Regarding Recent Political Events
Bad Angel's Home
Solaria
An Alternate Ending
Gilgandra, 1963
Words Unheard
Summer in the Mountains
Haberdasher
Mother-in-Law
Stealing Baby Jesus
The headline in today’s Inquirer shocked me to my very soul: “Baby Jesus Stolen from the Shrine of St. John Neumann,” Northern Liberties neighborhood, Fifth Street & Girard. In broad daylight, too. Okay, it was only a plaster figurine, not expensive, though very much beloved— according to the shrine’
Ice Skating on Lake Estancia
Shahuhude (Foolish)
The Teacher Retires
A Manifesto Against Manifestos
Johnny Payne questions the idea of manifestos in poetry, preferring his own mantra: “Write poetry first with the ear, second with the eye, third with the mind.”
The Sound of Silence
Like a Rock
Cheers
"God could be shaking a cocktail for me and I’d still/have a complaint."
The Endless Vitality of "Ode to the West Wind"
Merion West arts editor Johnny Payne reflects on why Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” endures over the centuries as one of the finest works written in English.
At Woodlawn
Three Haiku
The curved universe reflected in this puddle Let us break our stride
The Discarded
Villanelle for Stronghold Table and Daydream
“Prairie dogs call through the murmuring grass,/mimicking history—its rhythmic drum beats—/and resurrecting Wodziwob’s sacred chants.”
Indigo Goodbyes
“in a vale of blue orchid gowns/sewn with bachelor buttons/in lavender blue fields”
Fieldnotes: Annie Christain’s “The Vanguards of Holography” and Caroline Harper New’s “A History of Half-Birds”
“There is a sense of preparation through formal and informal erudition, meant to complicate what it means to write adequately about natural and human worlds, with fewer donnéees and more of a sense of a non-human cosmos, one of manatees and marsupials, in which each creature’s essence is not given t
The Ficus Frost
“to the garage bound welders masked/in metal, tampering the eternal flame”
Melodic Dream of Attic
“Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.”
A Chapel
“Yet these walls sound with echoes of the past,/With whispered prayers which linger in the air/And animate this space – still holding fast:/A shelter from the passing world’s despair.”
Strawberry Fields Forever: Amie Whittemore’s “Nest of Matches”
“Lilies/finch/flinches/nest/basil/hair/hat. I would swear before a jury that those are all legitimate off-rhymes, even if I were convicted of perjury for it. I wish that Shelley or Keats or Lorca or Miguel Hernández were alive so that I could pass this poem along to them.”
The Incorporated Town and Cold War Clocks
“The train cars are trying to sleep/in the postal town. Purple tracks/forsake concrete footer and loading/dock pad. The pale moon/asks homes to hold the bones.”
Public Education
“No one assigns homework./No one expects anyone to do anything./Disappoint, like ill-fitting pants,/can chafe you to death.”
Daisy Chain
“Astrology is not a science because women conceived it/and it’s not a religion because the stars, even/with the pictures they pattern,/could never take the place of a god”
Cosmic Comic Kvetching in Anthony Immergluck’s “The Worried Well”
“The grand Guignol exaggeration provides an excellent comic read, as we fail to take completely seriously his worrywart grandstanding. Chances are, we have known someone exactly like him, who upon greeting us, got straight to describing their various medical conditions, real and imagined in excrucia
Overpass to Memphis
“This insufficient code of the soil—/aphasia’s shorthand where/language lathers in mud, masquerades its atoms”
The Bells, on Evening Paths
“The tower tall strikes bells. The day slinks out/Leaving behind skies watercolor clear/And gives the evening air the taste of song”
Perfect Paradox
“the idiosyncrasies, stamps of my proprietorship”
The Worst of Our Fathers
“we struck/each other so often, too often,/like astronauts/scraping for the last flight/back to earth”
My Best Friend’s Sugar Daddy
“waxen winter plants, an oil portrait of a stillborn son,/sensory deprivation tank”
Midwestern Mice in Silk Kimonos: Yuki Tanaka’s “Chronicle of Drifting”
“[Yuki] Tanaka’s singular view, somewhat detached yet not lacking in compassion, soberly reckoning while allowing for flights of optimism, is, again, the product of the angle of vision of the flaneur, the stranger in town, the person who has seen it all but decides not to linger on individual premis
Miscalculated
“For this, we built a star-searcher/and launched it/into the galaxies:/Mirror upon giant mirror/sifting through time”
Observance, 2022
“Someone recently fell/into an industrial mixer at the latter’s factory./The company sent bread/from the same facility to her funeral.”
Saints
“What kind of light flames on them? What’s on fire—/A church? A shop? But also inward: desire”
Language for Throat and Tongue: Elise Paschen’s “Blood Wolf Moon”
“[Elise] Paschen’s writing give new meaning to the term ‘ethnopoetics,’ taking it outside the boundaries of ‘traditional societies,’ ‘the informant,’ and the outsider who goes in to record ‘pre-literate narratives.’”
Night Stalkers
I Thought I’d Live ‘til Ninety-five
“I envisioned myself old on a mountain hike/a soft breeze lifting my long white hair/I thought I’d live ‘til ninety-five”
Asterisk*
“Sinister pinwheel/stuck to a breezeless sentence/as sly ornament—”
The Wake
“I swore I heard willows cry/through the zig zagged fields,/traveling through my universe/as quickly as the moon touches our light”
Haunted by the Sonnet: Erica Reid’s “Ghost Man on Second”
“In [Erica] Reid’s Ghost Man on Second, the real ghost man floating through the pages is the sonnet.”
Moth
“The city never sleeps: the isle of faces illuminated by cell phones/is proof its waking isn’t rising, only beeping, only static,/only the cashier in the convenience store, only flickering.”
Nostalgia
the gilded tree that glitters in dusklight/like an upside-down chandelier
Witness. Target = Rubble
“We thought there couldn’t be anything more./But hurricanes can collide with tornados, can join floods./Beautiful and horrific are the moment’s songs.”
Bruises Bloom Roses
“Bruises bloom roses; the blind bird has fled./Ocean quiet bedroom night light turned dim,/the sting of his fist purple on her skin.”
The Speech of Herbs: Melissa Kwasny’s “The Cloud Path”
“Yet what might in lesser hands become mere effusions is tempered with a wise, sometimes steely, sometimes self-abnegating, sometimes mournful contemplative voice that speaks of philosophical and personal concerns combined…”
A Woodpecker Pecks
“the specific iteration of woodpecker pecking at yet/another juicy place, but I forgot to pack the guidebook”
Villa 351
“The news we got at first was dire,/the damage bad though not entire”
Hands Together Ghazal
“Seek mercy for eggs we scrambled in a youth/spent banging pots and pans together./For the telling of clumsy lies, our voices/cracking like pecans together.”
The Treachery of Poetry
“How/it both is, and is not/a type of existence.”
Still in the Holler
“If a stranger comes around, if he’s wise, he will keep to the road and announce his business soon, clearly and loudly, then you’ll see what’s what. You’re not against him, but you’re not automatically for him.”
The Buster’s Hand: Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s “Rodeo”
“In her exquisitely physical Rodeo, Sunni Brown Wilkinson takes her place among those superb modernists, early and late and post, who recognize the combination of mutability and continuity across poetic epochs that is a key to lyric’s continuing strength and relevance…”
Bruegel, Columbidae, and Walking Home
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559) I imagine them in mud, steaming people, bony hands joined to the land, farming with fingers clawing furrows in the earth, dreaming of rain. Someone begat someone who begat someone, who begat someone else (etc) then you and I
Moon Bloom and Lithopedion
“Night flower,/short-lived lover/of darkness,/offspring of cactus,/desert jewel/lulled awake/by moonbeams”
God’s in the Weeds: Daneen Bergland’s “The Goodbye Kit”
“Eve about to be cast out of the Garden kills as the mistress of straight-faced understatement. There is no fury, no rebuke, or if there is, it has not set in yet. Instead, we get rationalizing, looking on the bright side, and philosophical self-doubt.”
Down at the Ecoplex
“Doom is there staring, everywhere/I go, like a brazen coyote/dead center of the road/half-starved so it doesn’t care anymore.”
The Hand
“The hand drops a fresh globe/into the scoured skull, secures breath upon/the hemispheric nostrils and stands back,/appraising…”
Sand, Ash, or Mud: Valerie Witte’s “A Rupture in the Interiors”
“As for most poets, [Valerie] Witte’s writing is intensely personal, whatever form it may take. No ‘experimental’ poet could be more candid and direct about her intention of ‘examining in a new way’ matters close to her heart.”
Mannequin Exposé
“Among a murder of mannequins/the guilty can’t be picked out of a lineup.”
Skwentna, AK
“The woods sigh. And then, a thousand miles away,/I’m in your arms again. Your breathing is an ocean./I’m drifting away. You whisper.”
For Your Penance
“There is a fervor that I do not surge with,/A saintliness with which I do not sing.”
Little Engines of Self: Joy Manesiotis’ “Revoke”
“It is a remarkable feat of poetics to create epic sense out of the most micro of human materials.”
Butter Weed
“Having just emerged from her tv and ac,/she was too sun-shocked and asphyxiating/to hear ‘it’s a lovely shoot’/as my spade severed the root.”
Fire Island
“I scatter the sandpipers who/run from me/but not/the tides.”
Notes on Kitsch: Janice Harrington’s “Yard Show”
“As witness of this exaltation of the gaudy, the poet reclaims kitsch as a redemptive force, a vital stream of art, when it is mindfully connected to a set of local traditions, the heritage of a group that had to strive hard to find its native expression using the materials at hand.”
Shadow
“her body, between the buildings/behind her and the parked cars/in front, throwing a coal-black shadow/on the ground the color/of tarnished silver…”
Ben Jonson’s Prison Conversion
“You had time to contemplate its masonry/and recall that other jail, the temple/of muscle and flesh built by your trade/of bricklayer, now turning wan and idle.”
How to Read Poetry
“If I have become something of an expert reader of poems, it is in part because long ago, I learned to linger on the surface of things, rather than push past their specifics in order to arrive quickly at instant profundity.”
Following Bishop, This Excess Our Sentience, and Amnesia Palace
“The far shore wore a gauzy veil of rain./Dark thunderheads rose over Evian/and shook the silver surface of the lake,/ruffling like shot silk.”
The Dead Are Difficult: Jenny George’s “After Image”
“The tone of After Image is simultaneously calm and feverish, as the bereaved one moves along a spectrum from numb to utterly passionate, up and down, yet never hysterical, never heaping ashes on her head.”
The Disappearing Sonnet
“Cicadas, dirty oil, dogs, Venus, gloves/clouds, manholes, fled storms, black notes, harmonies/float indiscriminate as my head throbs/then disappear on the next wisp of breeze”
The Lecher’s Lament
My Red Schwinn and Bird Shot
“While others cycled to dusty fields,/sported bats and mitts, shouted to claim/their favorite positions, I was alone,/my red Schwinn and me—no/deception of ritual, no useless chatter,/no bad calls, no vicarious parents.”
Hair Clip
A poem by Nancy Byrne Ianucci.
Wrackable as Arguments: Anne-Marie Turza’s “Fugue with Bedbug”
“[Anne-Marie] Turza shows dramatic flair for summoning our attention, that of a town crier or carnival barker who was handed a surprise announcement at the last possible minute, and now must sell its premise before a skeptical gathered audience with all the bravado she can muster.”
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine Reschedules Christmas and Judges 9:45
“After supper,/God burps through his heartburn, eyes Gabriel/and—as expected—punishes: Two thousand years/hard labor for your antics, errand boy.”
Hair Clip and Dread Talk
“and I send her sunflowers on a sunny day./and I think of her children./and I sing with the Wailers.”
“No One Is Ever Really Just One Thing”: Laurel Nakanishi’s “Ashore”
“What stands out in Nakanishi is that she possesses an acute awareness of the root poetic traditions of her native islands and brings them forward with respect while also being influenced, as she herself professes, by poets such as Californian Gary Snyder—whose verse, like hers, is thoroughly immers
Gods and Angels and Other Poems
“The Sistine Chapel hived billions/of microbes, moss piglets/throbbing on God’s finger, frescoes flooded/with bacteria, angels fruiting cocci.”
Étude: Perspective Photo Lyric
Beyond a life of seeing, saying, being, by sparest nudge or shimmer, I shall cease. I ask what for, the dying, what the living. I start recording. I collect and keep.
Scribe in Disguise: Amy Beeder’s “And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey”
“[Amy] Beeder’s nimble adaptiveness and ability to key her lexicon to a wily set of speakers and dramatic personae in And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey are what make this rare book command attention.”
Old Men Coughing
“Coughing, ululating, barking, whooping./Can he cough out the memory of a lonely/girl waiting, wanting, watching, waiting?”
Quan Yin
“Wife of himself/she taught him how to be in this world/as all women teach. The woman in you/will teach you, man king,/how to be.”
Fierce Lyric in Karla Kelsey’s “Blood Feather”
“Blood Feather stages scenes of both unexpected victory and chronic defeat in the three featured lives, while allowing us to imagine an alternative history for these women, had they been listened to and given latitude to exercise their rightful prerogatives in the culture at large, rather than retre
Shifting Patterns and The Rose
“Ever human-centric/We self-aggrandized/Anthropomorphized/And now agonize.”
Ekphrasis and Eugene Datta’s “Water and Wave”
“Once the speaker’s psyche and voice are introduced via questions, the photo in a sense begins to dissolve, becoming secondary, important, vital in its own right, but not ultimately defining. Thus the fecund faithlessness of poetry.”
Paying For Pleasure
“The old man had paid dearly/he could still get lost in dreams”
Homelands
“The bright green of summer wheat/with the brown of the ducks that stalk the fair/dykes where the raft spiders search for things to eat.”
Villanelle on a Theme from Rimbaud and Other Poems
“He feels himself watched/as he counts accents./He knows the painter’s/watching for the precise moment/when his blue ink freezes.”
How To Write Lyric Poetry
“This lyre-derived heritage survives robustly in the lyrics of pop songs, guitars now taking the place of the lyre and the orality of the human voice singing taking precedence over all.”