for J.W. and her family

If I say, Go gently, go loudly, go as gently or loudly
as you wish. Do not do as I say.

If I say, Go to the light, stay as long as you like.
Do not ask what this light is, or that I point it out to you.

The sky is ink today, a white neither cloud or ooze.
Fog would like to catch us snoozing before trees go full bloom,

waiting for the slip between winter and spring, as if we can see
seasons on their way in and out.

I’ll pour you a shot of booze in your favorite glass tonight.
Come in as you wish and drink.

If you forget how to sip, funnel your lips. Fall back
in a bend against the floor.

After your swallow, choose any cobweb you like as yours.
Or float through a mirror at first chance.

I’ll keep busy watching shadows rise and fall,
catching glimpses of something glinting in the yard.

–

. . . a review of A Walk Through the Memory Palace by Pamela Johnson Parker

What strikes me most about Parker’s brief collection, winner of the 2009 Qarrtsiluni Chapbook Contest (judged by Dinty Moore) is just how easily the book lulls the reader into the plane of memory. Parker does a wonderful job connecting us with moments that belong to others, which in turn brings us back to ourselves. Suddenly we are at the window gazing at “stands of green bamboo,” and our own version of “Old Mrs. Sonnenkratz.”

A Walk Through is more about the observed than the observer. The poems unfold in a way that feels akin to sitting with an old friend who answers the question, “How are you?” by describing what she’s seen.

Most of the poems are situational, starting with the lead piece, “78 RPM,” (a first kiss moment between two young lovers, away from the watchful eye of a doting aunt). In each unique setting, Parker gives us enough room to make our own emotional connections — nervousness, anxiety, excitement, lust. Rather than tell us how any of this feels, we’re allowed to remember. As we squint at the images that churn up, we fall deeper into our own memories and pasts.

Time and again, image leads us into these scenes. In delivering her poems to us, Parker paints just enough fuzz over her pictures so that when we focus in, we have no choice but to latch on to whatever emotion swims by. This see-saw between the lives of others and of our own comes to a head in “Taking a Walk with You,” the sixth poem in the collection of ten.

The poem starts with an epigraph from Kenneth Koch, “Walk forwards and backwards with me.” Koch was part of the New York School of poetry, renown for their reliance on objectivity and image. It’s no wonder then that Parker creates a connection here with Koch, as the poem, even as it touches mortality, has more to do with the walk than the walkers.

This brief pass through the woods is as sad and real as anything I’ve read in a while.

-
“Gazing into Wet
    Creek’s tapestry, through
      the warp and weft of

minnows weaving
    in shafts of sunlight, echoed
      in the shadows of

the sawgrass swaying,
    in the small stream’s undulance
      toward the river

torquing to the Ohio
    that somehow will spill
      into the Atlantic,

all salt spray hissing
    against rocks: the sound of
      repeatable longing.”

-

Later, when the poem shifts inward, Parker keeps us tied to the physical, focusing on the composition of the human anatomy rather than the stories we tell ourselves.

-
“Dear, the stents in
    your heart wend the same;

the plate and screws in my knees
    tell me before the skies do
      how they’ll be rain,”
-

Parker wants us to feel these things in our bones, then let the body convey the emotions attached. Before the poem ends, she offers one brief glimpse into our own unspoken longing, but again does so in a tactful, subtle manner.

-
“Now as we thread
    our way through cattails
      in gauzy light, there’s this

pause, an inrush of breath, holding
    it, holding your hand
      watching the water, the way

it flows, feeling my body moving
    toward yours, as the water reflects us
      as we were then, in its

mottled plane, mirror,
    mirror, our younger
      faces gazing back

at us from their side
    of this day,”
-

Another poet could have sent the narrator into the water, leaving any disconnected readers alone on the banks. Parker, instead, keeps us walking:

-
      “through cattails, through

muscadine, weaving through scything
    sawgrass, sumac, taking the path
      of least resistance.”
-

Whether her life as a medical editor lends itself to such objectivity or not, Parker certainly understands that the path of least resistance is the surest way through the void. With her calm language and quiet melancholy, she lets us build our own memories and name the emotions that come with them, reminding us of all the lovely things that make our time on earth so fleeting.

–

Read more reviews of A Walk Through the Memory Palace as part of Read Write Poem’s virtual book tour.

The following entry is in response to a New Year’s Day Facebook post by friend and fellow writer Lisa Nichols. She wrote the following: “Can you tell me, how do you maintain your independence while in a loving relationship?” I started to leave a comment but decided to post it here. Happy New Year.

INDEPENDENCE

I go into my office and close the door. Sometimes I wedge a chair in front of the door to keep people from opening. Once I’ve blocked out the world, the next thing I must do is escape from myself. I open the window, sit at my writing desk, unzip the back of my neck and float outside, leaving my body at the desk.

I strip from whatever clothes my soul might be wearing, leave them folded against my house and walk the neighborhood.

I sit and have dinner with whole families of strangers who can’t see me. The babies can see me, the toddlers especially. They don’t care that I’m naked. They laugh at my face and play with it, because my soul’s face, like my body’s, is funny and interesting to look at and touch, all full of jagged angles and slopes.

After dinner I leave through their windows, never the walls, because windows are made of water while walls are made of fudge, and therefore harder to pass through.

I walk until I find a street I’ve never walked down, usually near a church or bingo hall, some place where seniors gather. Some of the seniors can see me. When one does, it becomes a joke among the other seniors. Everyone’s mood lightens. My mood lightens.

I like to sit in the church and listen to people recite prayers. I get lost in the monotone nature of their praying, how their voices form a steady droll that becomes one great, many layered voice.

I wait until the last hymn then float through the top of the building and watch as the moon reaches the center point of the sky. Then I start the long walk back. I cut through as many windows I can, watch television in bed with couples, stand in corners until the family dog barks at me. I put my clothes on when I reach my house, float through the window and land inside my body, which has been slumped for hours pretending to get something done.

–

Oregon poet Shaindel Beers will be making her way into Portland this weekend (from Pendleton, where she teaches at Blue Mountain Community College) for a one-day workshop at Writers’ Dojo.

During the three-hour workshop, writers will explore the voice that begs to cry out in their work, discuss ways to access and drive a strong, personal style throughout their writing, explore personal history as springboards and much more.

THE FACTS

DATE: Saturday, November 7th

TIME: 2-5 p.m.

PLACE: Writers’ Dojo, 7518 N. Chicago Ave., Portland, OR, 97203

COST: $59

MORE
This workshop is part of the Dojo’s upcoming November workshop series. Register and find out more about this and other upcoming workshops at the Dojo’s events page, or by calling 503-706-0509.

MORE ABOUT SHAINDEL BEERS

Shaindel Beers’ writing, including poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. In January of 2009, Salt Publishing released her first full-length poetry collection, “A Brief History of Time”, which is steeped in personal narrative, internal musings, and the personal longings of a girl reared in a flat country. Beers is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, and serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary.

You can learn more about Beers and her work by visiting her newly launched website.

The following review of Ed Skoog’s first full-length collection, MISTER SKYLIGHT (© 2009, Copper Canyon Press ), is part of Read Write Poem’s ongoing virtual book tour series. Keep an eye on all upcoming reviews here.

I’d been in a funk when MISTER SKYLIGHT showed up. A writing funk, sure, but also a reading funk. They feel the same when you boil them down. Nothing inspires, nothing motivates, nothing comes. Every book in the house felt like television fuzz. Not you, MISTER SKYLIGHT. I could tell you were different as soon as I pried you from your Copper Canyon envelope, you with your sepia cover image that spoke of walls and distance, your rusted font and your shot of Ed Skoog on the back cover standing in front of what appeared to be a trailer.

You had poems entitled “During the War”, “Party at the Dump”, and “Memory Loss” right there in the first 14 pages. You had weird sounding stuff later on – “Early Kansas Impressionists,” “Punks Not Dead”, “Pier Life.” MISTER SKYLIGHT, I hadn’t even read a poem yet and I knew you were after my soul.

Then I jumped in.

The truth of this collection is the same truth you’ll find in the nearest skylight. Go stand under the glow. Tell me of the sun, the weather, the clouds. Now tell me of the mites trapped in the screen, the bird shit, the exoskeletons of life. Skoog’s first full-length collection captures and presents the truth of the truth: our under-analyzed, overlooked, often fragile existences on earth.

PLACES, REAL OR OTHERWISE

The collection succeeds, in large part, because of its all-too-real intensity, even as the poet makes no bones about the fact that many of the bones within, while borne of truth, take shape in the imagination. As Skoog mentioned during a recent conversation, “Giving yourself over to the imagination — and I’m not the first person to say this — allows you to express deeper truths than what are factual.

“You begin to approach poems with more liberty with regards to what the ‘I’ is, and what the subject is or isn’t.” Going forward, it allows a writer — Skoog or otherwise — to go deeper, even if a poem, on its surface, may not be about anything.

Many of the poems owe their strength to Skoog’s clever return and reliance on place, right down to times, dates, neighborhoods, streets and rooms. No matter how imaginative and inventive the language becomes, the reader is never lost. Still, Skoog’s places — his Topeka, for instance — are the imagined places of dreams. And not the idle daydreams that help pacify our minds during business meetings or dinner with in-laws. The dreams of MISTER SKYLIGHT are weird midnight visions that flicker along our internal movie screens, the ones that replay your childhood bedroom at an 80% reduction. The furniture is familiar but something is off. Reality becomes temporal, the present is fleeting, and our memories are forever liquid and ever-changing.

“Even when the names of places are accurate, the poetry takes place in the imagination,” Skoog says. “If I say, ‘Topeka’, it’s different than ‘Topeka’ in an essay, and different than taking a picture and saying, ‘This is Topeka.’

“There are a lot of places in the book,” Skoog continues. “Some are places where I’ve lived or visited. Some, like the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, are places I’ve never seen. They’re all imaginary places as far as the poems go. Each place means something different to me, and each has associations that, when you put them into poems, become art associations. They become the aestheticized Topeka, the aestheticized New Orleans.”

UNIVERSAL TIMING

Skoog wrote these poems over the course of a decade and a half, the earliest dating back to around the time he was finishing his M.F.A. at the University of Montana. The bulk of these poems, however, come from an intensely creative period between 2001 and 2006. During this time, Skoog was immersed in the richly creative community of New Orleans, a city the poet credits with having, in his mind, the greatest literary heritage in the country, and our most thriving contemporary literary scene.

“New Orleans was a place to mature, and to do so in an interesting way,” Skoog says. After growing up in Topeka, and living in places like Montana, Southern California and Seattle, Skoog relished the city’s life, art, and color.

“It was different than being off in the suburbs teaching as an adjunct in the middle of nowhere. Aside from growing up and becoming more understanding of the world, New Orleans affected my relationship with poetry in a number of ways.” Skoog found himself as part of a community of “magnificent writers”, each with their very high standards with respect to meaning, music and form.

“They had a lot of different interests, not all of them being of American traditions.”

During this period, Skoog was on the faculty of an arts high school was founded in the ’70s by Ellis Marsalis and other New Orleans musicians. His colleagues helped expand Skoog’s view of poetry and the meaning and role of verse.

“They demanded that you take poetry seriously, which was different from other poetry friends I’d had. For five years I taught with this great group of three other writers. All we did was read, write and talk about poetry, both among ourselves and with some very talented New Orleans kids.”

BOTH SIDES OF THE MASK

Beyond the conversations, study and crafting Skoog experienced in New Orleans, the city itself affected his work in a profound, deliberate sense. As Skoog mentions,

“The nature of the city as being very public and carnivalesque was unbelievably exciting to me,” he says. “But also, the other side of New Orleans, more of the Latin side, is very private and reserved. I found it to be dignified and reflective in ways I’d never encountered. Those two sides of the mask became very important to me, my view of life, and my understanding of how poetry should be written.”

It is from this understanding that the poems in MISTER SKYLIGHT truly begin to open up. For every midnight tramp — the poem “West Coast,” featured in Narrative Magazine, is a fantastic example — Skoog consistently brings us back to a place of reflection. The narrator’s long, drunken night with an old friend concludes with a walk through the present moment as well as past haunts. The poem distills down to the following:

“Our high-minded speculation fades
as we try to find the car, remembering
only that it faced the ship locks,
and when we find it we eat the fries
cold, and let the paper bag be taken
by the wind along the water, and settle
onto its currents, among the rustling gulls.”

While Skoog understands and adheres to the belief that the aim of poetry is serious, he is mindful not to take himself or his role as a poet too seriously. In Recent Changes at Canter’s Deli, a poem in which the narrator, like an earlier version of Skoog, finds himself teaching poetry to affluent teens in Southern California, we read,

“Poetry’s just the form
of unimportance I teach teenagers above L.A.
under slanted windows that kill, by surprise,
the birds we then write about, gathering bonfire
around the small corpses, because it’s cold here.”

This idea of unimportance, similar to giving yourself up to the imagination, proves liberating.

“It’s making a claim for unimportance,” Skoog says. “How wonderful to be unimportant. What liberty and freedom there is to being unimportant in a world where so many things are deemed important.”

Throughout MISTER SKYLIGHT, Skoog does an excellent job guiding readers through the subterranean landscapes he creates. Even when our footing seems unsure, his mastery of narrative and linguistic manipulation — seemingly stretching meter, meaning and rhyme at will — ushers us along. While he is more trickster than sherpa — he may very well duck away and hide on you for a few seconds, and don’t expect him to carry your bags — he keeps us in a close proximity, reminds us that we are all underwater together.

–

Visit the Guest Writer page to read five poems from MISTER SKYLIGHT. Read part 1 of our interview here.

–

Because she’ll ask. She’ll want to know
if the team won. Not that she knows
the difference, but she knows
you want her to ask, and even if
you don’t want her to ask,
you expect she’ll ask because you expect
she expects you to expect her to ask.

So she asks. Did they win. Maybe she knows
by the look in your eyes, but if you’re home alone
listening, not watching, but listening
the way no one listens anymore, and if
you’ve been crying because baseball
sometimes makes you cry – if you’ve been crying
then she might have no idea
whether they’ve won or lost, because crying
goes both ways with baseball – if she sees
you’ve been crying she’ll certainly ask,
after she asks “What’s wrong?”, because
her first thought will be something’s wrong,
he’s on the couch crying, the radio is off,
the dog is snoring and he’s crying in the corner
of the couch, his drink is empty, just the bottom
of bourbon-yellow ice, and his eyes are red.

So she asks, “What’s wrong,” and you say,
“The game, that’s all.” You shake your head
and she shakes hers. “I’m sorry.” But you say,
“Oh no, it’s OK, they won.” “They did?” “Yes.”

“How?” She’ll ask how and you’ll tell her
as she buzzes through the living room
into her closet to strip from her pants and top,
a quick dance into house clothes, the pre-sleep wardrobe
of fleece on top of fleece for the Northwest’s fall.

“Well,” you say – you chink the ice around
in your glass and suck what’s left.

“They were down, you see, down by two,
then by one. They hung around. And in the ninth,
the big closer out for a save, he walks a guy,
hits another, the next guy pops out – there are
two outs now, see, and the leadoff guy…well,
that’s not important. A little guy – later, after the hit
it’ll be all set up for David and Goliath stuff.
But for the time, the little guy, before he turned
into David, took an oh-one pitch to the gap
in right. Both runners dashed home. That’s what
I imagine, at least, a dash – there are no dashes
on radio. Just swings and pops and the announcer
going crazy. All the dirt and dust gets swallowed
in the soft static. And you’re left with the win,
which is enough to make you cry, not because
you missed a thing, but because you sat and listened,
you never saw it coming and you knew all along.”


–

The following piece is in response to Read Write Poem’s prompt #90 – an image of a street performer balancing a flaming star. Rather than accessing the scene, making my way down that street or even turning into the performer, I waited for the picture to lead me to a title, via the first words it prompted. Those words were “laser light show”.

LASER LIGHT


Smith decided we should drive to DC for the weekend light show.
It had been ten-years since he, Patrick and I
were there together. A reunion of sorts.

Patrick lived in Arlington. We called on the way.
He told us to leave him alone. He had Reserves next weekend.
He wanted to take it easy. By the time
we showed at his door he couldn’t do anything
but offer up his couch and spare cot.

Smith brought acid. He didn’t tell us about the acid until
we were already half-drunk from a few hours
at a Tiki bar along the Potomac drinking Mexican beer.

None of us needed acid at this point in our lives. Patrick
had done two tours in Iraq. Smith spent three-years
in prison. I was an absent father of two children
with different last names.

But we were all feeling good with limes in our beer, fireworks
going off for some nondenominational reason,
together in the nation’s capital remembering the world of 1999

when ours lives went by in a fury of jokes about the president
and thoughts about the end of the world.

Now we were three old lumps surrounded by a table of empties.
Patrick with his razorblade haircut, Smith who smoked
like he was trying to burn himself inside out, me
with the spare tire around my waste that wore like a retread.

We decided to walk through the Capital on our way to the show.
Smith wanted to go see Lincoln. Patrick said we couldn’t.
Jefferson then, the Washington Monument. Patrick said
none of that mattered now, it wasn’t on the way.
We passed all the lights and strange glows in the periphery,
statues kept awake under security and patriotic flares.

Two-hours with the acid in our system, Smith said lasers
were already teeming in his head. Patrick crouched behind things,
regretted the whole night, regretted whole other nights
that didn’t include us. Whole mornings and days too. A whole year
and one whole long episode that was so classified
the hallucinations had a hard time reaching it.

I hadn’t planned on being the smart one, rarely was,
but got us to the field and our seats. We blended in
like we were anyone else, just normal people who’d never
killed anyone or beaten someone to near death
with a bar of soap, had never knocked up
an old friend’s girlfriend then another, never
had to decide which one to send checks to.

Just normal guys riding out a strong trip waiting for the lights
to take our minds off the fact our minds were gone.
People nodded at us like they knew. Tapped their noses
because they saw our eyes and identified.

They couldn’t understand. Our ghosts were our own.
It didn’t matter if one of theirs chased them up a tree.
We were stuck with ours, so far from our skulls
that the only words any of us could mouth
where things like never again and can’t come down.

But there’s that point, like when the Space Shuttle goes up,
where you’re not sure if it’ll break earth’s glass face
and get out toward the moon. Right as the boosters
jump off and the ship’s all alone, just its crew
with rations and the one bathroom they share,
the bird edges a straight line against the sky
and is gone –

That’s where we were when the music fired on. All the world
except for cigarette tips got dark. Then lights zoomed to life
in a panoramic grid, made water out of thin air.
Behind the sudden brightness and noise,
the faintest cry of crickets set the universe soft.

–

My good friend Ryan Mayers sent me a scorecard that I kept when he, Donnie Sabs and I took in a Cubs game a couple of seasons ago. My scorecards are usually a mess, and this was no different – a mix of hieroglyphs, scribbles and meaningless notes that only I could understand. Reading one from two-years ago was a particularly entertaining exercise, and it gave life to the following poem.

SCORECARD


The psychic in the bleachers calls a leadoff homerun
because of the wind and the hitter’s hot streak.
She twinkles her nose like a cartoon witch
and spooks her friends. In the second, a man
with a red foam finger misses the mustard on his chin.
Clouds look like dolphins in the third. A kid points this out
to his father walking back from the john. In the fourth,
fans wave the runner home on a two-out hit.
He’s out by a foot. It’s our fault when the manager gets tossed.
A foul pop in the fifth becomes a struggle for turf.
Flying popcorn. An elbow to the eye. In the sixth,
we anticipate the ritual of the mound trot,
the pitching change. When last call
and the seventh-inning stretch collide, my friend recalls
what Ken Burns said – that Jesus died in the on deck circle.
The sun ducks away long enough in the eighth to lose ourselves
in the slow loft of the wrong team’s deep fly. That’s when
dolphin clouds turn into whales, the sky opens with a quick
sad rain. The last rally fades in the ninth.
The ladies one row ahead cheer for their boys
like Little League moms. All claps and first names.

This poem’s been vexing me since May 13, 2002, when I pulled an article out of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with the same title. I can’t find the article now – it’s in a journal somewhere. And my attempts to find the story online yielded the this.

This latest approach is fairly simple: a dead couple having an argument.


COUPLE EMBRACE IN TRAIN’S PATH


There we are. See, a hand, a lip, one thousand bones
scattered the moment we squeezed shut our eyes.

You’d like to head back? Fine. Go ahead. Seep
into your sister’s dream while she sleeps in your bed.
Visit my father’s mourning couch, the remote like a crest
in his lap.

I won’t be at the funeral. They can bury us however they want.
I’d rather not float close to the ground, buzz someone’s leg,
have them think I’m there.

The moral? There is none, just the tracks that led us here.
Kids-gone-bad type PSAs playing in a loop
against dim afternoon health class light. A film

in the Say No to Drugs series, still-shots from prom,
my hand around the mark in your arm you wanted to hide.

We were never good kids. Like anyone else
in that shit town we finally left. There was never enough
to keep us from the junk under Jones Bridge.

You’re the one who talked about hopping a train, riding
one long ride west. You said you didn’t care
where we got. Just that we got. I simply said

there was no use getting anywhere. We’d still be stuck
in these frames. And you agreed.

Let’s break the speed of light tonight. See what it’s like
drifting into stars. Find a planet with an opposite pull.
I told you I’d give you all of this. Why so afraid?

The following comes from Read Write Poem’s prompt #87, working with vowel sounds. I decided to work with “A”.

Avenue A was the first place I’d look for Tina
when she disappeared. It wasn’t anything psychic.
I knew her haunts by the way
she’d crawl around the parquet floor scrawling loops
with bisecting pens, muttering Sweet Jesus
what will our Christian soldiers do now that the war
has wound to a halt?

Starting at the back of Alphabet City
she’d head north where St. Al’s parish was a shadow
behind canopies, its towers
pointing like missalettes at God.
There, the patron saint of Gaston Isles would hang
her wine drunk hair from the tallest perch
until all the birds came back.