During our most recent interview, Penelope Schott and I discussed her writing of the following poem, “Heart Failure,” including its intrinsic connection to her relationship with her mother. The poem appears in Schott’s most recent collection, SIX LIPS (© 2009, Mayapple Press), and appears here with the writer’s permission.

1.

This is the year I would like to find pity. I would like
to hurt for my mother the way I ache for my children
whenever anything major goes wrong in their lives.
I want to feel vicariously glamorous when she models
the umber cashmere sweater she bought half-price
in the overpriced boutique by her favorite sushi shop.
I would like to gasp for breath whenever she grabs
for her oxygen tube and jiggles the prongs into sore
nostrils. I want to tremble and feel confused
when she can’t retrieve e-mail messages and starts
to panic. When her skeletal legs burn under sheets,
I wish my own hard-muscled calves would throb.

I want to be sad that she’s eighty-seven and fading.
I want to invent memories of how she encouraged me
when I was a child, how she helped me when I
was a young mother, how understanding she was
when I got divorced, or else I want to stop caring.
Meanwhile, my mother masters forgetting: which
museum she means to visit, the name of the play
she saw yesterday, what day is today.

This is the year I intend to excavate my terror,
melt down my resentment, blow it into molten
orange glass, shape it into a shining sculpture
of one enormous woman and cool it and smash it.

My mother has become tiny and pathetic and brave.
Recently she has learned thank you or even please.
She lives in her elegant house like a black pearl
from a broken oyster drifting under reefs in a bay.
She lives in her house like a startled rabbit unable
to finish crossing the road. If I had enough pity,
I would dare to squeeze her fragile neck and kiss
her forehead as I press down on her windpipe and keep
on pressing with my strong and generous thumbs.

2.

These days my mother surprises me, slowed,
gentled, taking trees into account.

It’s not what I’m used to, this appreciation,
watching the squirrels scamper up black bark
like acrobats of joy, while the long afternoon
withdraws into twilight, her mechanical tide
of oxygen yawing through waves and troughs
of breathlessness.

This drowning old lady is not my mother. Not
abrupt. As I stroke her knuckles, grace glints
in our salt hands.

–
Read more of Schott’s work here.

Scot Siegel is an urban planner and poet from Oregon. He serves on the board of trustees of the Friends of William Stafford. His books include Some Weather (Plain View Press, 2008), Untitled Country (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and SKELETON SAYS (Finishing Line Press, 2010). Salmon Poetry has accepted his second full-length collection, which will be out in early 2012. Siegel edits the online poetry journal Untitled Country Review. The following four poems appear here with his permission.

WHEN THE BARN DANCE BEGAN

                    Under aluminum lamp-swing
                    the beginning and the end of
                    the early suffering began . . .

                     – inscribed on the back of an abandoned barn

Nearly evening. No friend
arranged a meeting. No rumor
No letter passed hand-to-hand––

Behind the grandstand, sweet
riffs off the San Joaquin Valley––
Oat grass, reeds and a young

Latina dances in a wind skirt
on the moon-swept pond…

                    *

Alone again with my thoughts
I lean against the split-rail fence
of my childhood in California––

Night air rippling off the Sierras,
wagon ruts meandering somewhere––
and Lyra’s constellation reemerges…

                    *

A sacred code was broken that night
I cannot explain. But she brought forth
everything I’d ever wanted

and that one thing, free
yet inescapable, still a part of me,
I would always need

[First published in The Enigmatist, and appears in SKELETON SAYS.]
–

INSPECTING GRANDPA’S GUN

I retrieve it from a dry, dark place
Pull it from a sleeve, some felt-like leather
With our name inscribed on a flimsy tag
I examine it for any trace of him –

This was a gift to my father from his true father
The one with spaniels and a hunting lodge
Not the one we could not speak of –
I take up the heft of it, and get the sense

I am looking down the long barrel of some
unknown history . . . He always told me:
Safety-on, until you’re absolutely ready
Watch your stance; hold steady.

I scan the room: No window. No door.
Just the gun like an iron dove in my hand. With love
I turn it over, brush my fingers over the stock
Find his initials in smooth silver ridges –

I turn it over again. And drink from a spring called
The pooling of history – A chalice of blood,
The Ukrainian forest at dusk; – I have his chin
When I lift & pump the muzzle; his shoulder

When I place it in the crook; his eyes
Pressing cold metal to my face; – then his voice
When something faint & terrible, in the shape of
my real name, burns through the cheek piece –

[Appears in Some Weather]
–


VISITING THE MASONS’ GRAND LODGE IN FOREST GROVE

The glass is half-empty. The night fills it with sighs
We came for a good time, my wife and I––
Kids at summer camp––Even after twenty years,
Some things we still do on a whim…

It’s late. Packing now. Didn’t even stay the night.
The lodge and its rooms are dingy & warn
With the pall of those who lived and died here.
(A siren wails from the highway below)

Ten years ago the last resident left in protest;
The Grand is boutique hotel now. Micro beers and
A movie house. Tourists and young executives
Drink without a designated driver. Play truth or dare.
Watch foreign films, or screw, for a change…

Our room is hot and it smells like the old, my wife says
Though I think hospital… Poor Farm… Asylum…
I wonder how many died right here in this room
Where the walls feel dank. The sash window sticks

And the radiator sits silent as a minister
No hiss. No spit… Idle as a visitor slouched
in the corner, when I turn and close the door
behind us

[Appears in Untitled Country]
–

WHEN YOU BRING MY MEDS

I am strung out at the end of Ward 3 in the midst
of a dream, flying over Havens Elementary

I am no longer old. My bones so light the sun
lifts me from the balcony of my decrepit body

And releases me into the atmosphere of your white frock
And I am grateful. For I have died

Five times already, since my wife’s elongated
stop––her slow surrender to Alzheimer’s––

And my daughters’ inevitable leaving, when they shed
my name like snakes shed skin in early morning sun

For men who take one look at me and see only an old
man: No inheritance. No plan. Only the slow drip,

Drip, drip… to keep him company. The piped-in oxygen,
cigarette grip on the channel changer––

This day is a gift, really. When you come, the round gears
of the sun and trees outmuscle the blinds, and release me

The sky and swifts make love again. And my disease
subsides, docile as a sweet little lapdog––

I am so lucky to have you here with me, listening; holding
my hand as if it were a living thing. Saying nothing

And everything I ever needed. Your eyes guiding me safely
over the tarmac of what my healers call

my advanced dementia

[First published in The Centrifugal Eye, November, 2009: “Battling Stereotypes” and appears in SKELETON SAYS.]

Watch Siegel reading this poem.

William Stafford referred to Carlos Reyes as a “connoisseur” of the “many strange, tangy things that happen in the Northwest.” His writing career stretches back more than 40 years; most recently, Reyes has been honored with the Heinrich Boll Fellowship (2007), which gave him two weeks to write on Achill Island, Ireland, as well as poet-in-residence at Lost Horse Ranger Station in the Joshua Tree National Park (2009). An avid traveler and translator, his knowledge of labor, the land, and the daily struggles of everyday existence inform his work. I was honored to sit down with him a few months ago in a very loud and crowded Portland coffeehouse to talk about his recently released collection of new and selected poems, The Book of Shadows (© 2009, Lost Horse Press). During our conversation, Reyes spoke candidly about his life as a poet, and how his ability to describe what he does for a living has shifted with time.

DJ: You’ve been at it for a long time. I read an interview you just did with BT Shaw, where she asked you about choosing the poems for this collection. Was that difficult?

CR: My editor really wanted to lean on some stuff that had already been in books. I was more interested in poems that hadn’t come out in book form. I’ve worked with the editor before. We’ve always had something of a tugging match. Our negotiations usually revolve around a couple of drinks of whisky . . . on his part at least — I don’t drink. So we had some pretty healthy discussions about certain selections.

DJ: Why is it important for a poet to have a person who gives another perspective when putting together a collection?

CR: In this particular instance, it’s rather unusual. When I first started publishing, I would usually just take a box of poems to an editor and say, “OK, do what you will.” As I got more mature, I realized I didn’t want all of that responsibility in someone else’s hands. I wanted a part in the selection. I had to declare my independence, say things like, “Look, I understand what you’re saying, but this particular poem has a certain meaning to me.”

Editors see a lot of stuff. They get something of an edge or bias, especially people who are used to working with writers of a certain caliber. Then they come upon someone such as myself who’s past a certain point and is willing to hunker down and say, “I know what you think, but that’s not what I’m doing here, and I don’t want to lose what I’m trying to do.”

I was very insecure for a while. I don’t have the usual background of a poet, or of someone who writes for a living. Maybe this is kind of dangerous to say, but I don’t have the formal background, the MFA . . . I didn’t go to Iowa, didn’t study writing. The only writing classes I ever took were in short fiction at the University of Oregon years and years ago.

DJ: Was there a point in your life as a poet where this sensibility of not having a certain degree stood in your way?

CR: If you write, and I think this is especially true for poets, you’re always on the edge between being sure and unsure. “What the hell am I doing? Why am I spending all this time doing something that may or may not ever amount to anything?” I used to get a little bit of that laid on me, but not so much anymore. Not necessarily from my close colleagues, but from other people.

A long time ago, I was the faculty advisor for the poetry committee at Portland State. Certain people would say things like, “You’re not even in the English department, what the hell are you doing here?”

Unfortunately, there’s a question of legitimacy about being someone who simply has written but doesn’t have a certain degree. I’ve been writing for 40 years. Maybe there’s something there that may or may not equal an MFA. Who knows? Sometime around 1976 or ’77, I thought maybe I’d go to the University of Montana and get an MFA. I talked with some people I knew, and they said, “We’d love to have you, but why?” After you’ve created a body of work, it’s kind of silly, unless you want to become a teacher. I already tried to teach. So I never got the MFA. Maybe it took me a bit longer to get where I am because I didn’t come from that world of workshops. I just tried to figure it out on my own.

DJ: Did you seek out mentors?

CR: I sort of picked them along the way, but not in the traditional sense. I’d become interested in their work.

I was interested in Robert Creeley. He was one of my models, if you will. When I really got into writing, guys like Creeley and Gary Snyder came off as really impressive. To a certain extent I’m still following Creeley’s footsteps. Looking at his later poems, he uses these really short lines, as opposed to what you see from a lot of contemporary poets using really long, Ashbery-style lines.

Other people have come and gone without me really thinking about it at the time, but looking back I can see their influence. In the ’50s, the first poetry I ever really read was W.D. Snodgrass, who’d just won the Pulitzer Prize. It turns out, Snodgrass and I . . . and I never talked to him face-to-face . . . we actually corresponded for a long while. He was a mentor, not because my writing was anything like his — he’s definitely more traditional with regards to rhyme and meter — but he impressed upon the possibilities of being a poet, the idea that you could lead your life as a poet, which is as good a way to lead your life as anything else.

A number of my influences have been rather oblique or subtle. Impressions have come from a person’s work as much as what their work was about. Here I was trying to figure out life as a poet, and I’d take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. And that’s still the case, to a degree.

DJ: It sounds like you came to an awareness around something Snodgrass said, that you could lead your life as a poet. At what point did you accept that as a truth?

CR: For the last 10 or 15 years, I’ve come to consider the fact that the focus of my life is on writing poetry. It took me a long time to get there.

I come from a family where if you literally weren’t working with your hands then it wasn’t legitimate work. For 40 or so years of being a poet, and being a lot of other things as well, when somebody would ask me what I did for a living, I’d say things like, “Well, I’m a poet but I’m also a land surveyor.” And they’d say, “OK, land surveying . . . let’s talk about that.” About 10 or 15 years ago, I started saying, “I’m a poet,” If that was as far as the conversation went, then so be it. I wasn’t going to try and prop myself up with things like, “Yeah, but I’m also a medical translator.”

DJ: And you’ve taught in residencies?

CR: Yes, but I don’t do it as much these days.

DJ: What have you seen in the last 20-25 years with regards to how students take to poetry?

CR: I used to not feel this way, but I think a lot of it nowadays has to do with the electronic age and the visuals that pop up on screens. There’s been some kind of change. Of course, my grandson is nutty about games, but he’s also a great writer and a prodigious reader. But I don’t think this is the case for most kids, and even adults, who are really tied to their screens.

Last year in one of the schools, I was passing out paper with poems on them when a young guy said, “You should just put this up on screen.” Part of it is my own bias, I suppose. I work on a laptop, but I still print things out to read. Computers are useful, obviously, but the screens get distracting.

DJ: Don’t you think there’s something to the art of scratching and editing on paper? A sort of tactile connection between the words themselves and the process?

CR: I do, but I’m not the best example. I was dragged kicking and screaming into the electronic age, and swore I’d never have a computer. Now I’m not sure what I’d do without one.

I do like that scratching around. I’ll still go out in the backyard and write by hand. I recently bought a manual typewriter, but I don’t even know if I could actually get away with the act of typing. It’s a lot of work. Eventually you wear yourself out, especially if you’re putting together a manuscript. It would take forever. I can’t figure out how people wrote fiction before computers? Or maybe computers make the whole act too easy, which can have a critical effect on quality.

DJ: Maybe Hemingway’s first draft was like a fifth draft when you factor in his level of attention? As if he had greater intention regarding what he put down.

CR: I think in the old days, people wrote more carefully. And I mean the physical act of writing on paper as much as more focus on what they were writing. Professors would write everything out then have someone typed it up, which presupposes that the typist could actually read it.

In a way, technology has made us lazy. We’re less careful. All we need to do is hit a few buttons and change everything at once.

DJ: Going back to The Book of Shadows, when you had the chance to review your old work and your new work, how do you feel about your recent writing compared with pieces from 30 years ago?

CR: In some senses, I’m still writing the same way, but I look at things a bit more carefully.

When this book came up, I realized that many of the older poems wouldn’t stand a whole lot of change. Also, I believe there’s something not quite genuine about looking at something 30 years after the fact and saying, “Oh, well, I’ll just rewrite this.” I think certain things need to stand, no matter how frail or awkward, as a kind of example of a period.

A few people tried to talk me into correcting some of the older poems. I just felt there was a kind of grittiness or rawness, an awkwardness that had some value I wanted to keep, rather than going back and rewriting things to “make them better.”

No one’s ever convinced me to do this. My wife’s an editor. She likes to mention things about punctuation. Well, I have no clue about punctuation. So of course I can go back and punctuate a poem . . . maybe it would make it make more sense. But when I was writing this or that poem to begin with, punctuation wasn’t part of the process. Of course there are a few places where I went back and added punctuation, tried to make things a little nicer, but for the most part I’m not that interested. The spark that was there when I wrote a particular poem is different now. To go back and rework it just isn’t that interesting to me.

DJ: Was there a certain period in your career you enjoyed more than others?

CR: At any moment I’ve enjoyed it as much as any other moment, because there’s nothing like the individual spark behind a particular poem. I think I’m enjoying my current writing more than anything, which isn’t to say that my work has earned any more or less critical acclaim, whatever that is.

DJ: Acclaim’s elusive.

CR: People do review my books, but not that much. A very good friend of mine said this about The Book of Shadows: “This is a really good book, and you can be sure it’s not going to get the attention it deserves.” I’ve come to accept that.

I never thought the book would be reviewed in the New York Times Review of Books, for instance. They’ve got all the books they can handle, and how you get a book reviewed in there is beyond me. Frankly I don’t think it’s that important to the kind of writing I do.

One thing I’ve learned after so many years is to be happy with what I’m doing, and to realize that, for me, this is important work, whether anyone else thinks so or not. The writing itself has value, and that’s what’s important, whether or not it receives critical acclaim.

DJ: Was there a point when acclaim was more important?

CR: Absolutely. Anyone who’s ever written feels that way. You want to be noticed. You want somebody to say, “This is good,” or to give you some sense that what you’re doing is valuable in some way.

There was a time, before publishing got so big, where you’d send poems off and an editor would actually write back and say, “Hey, this isn’t so bad, but it’s not exactly what we want.” Some people still believe that if you send work to a publication that you’re going to get some sort of response back. It’s become so overloaded with so much stuff coming and going, that you might get a piece of paper that says, “This isn’t right,” and maybe someone might sign it.

When you’re younger, you’d like to be in magazines like Field or Atlantic Monthly. When you get a little older you realize it’s more complicated than that. If someone is offering $500 for a poem, they’re looking for someone who will give their publication a little more credit.

DJ: Do you remember the point where you got over that and finally decided that it’s just about the writing?

CR: Probably in the last 10 or 15 years. That’s all part of coming to the conclusion that no matter what I do, any kind of fame or money that comes along in the process is no longer important.

A fellow writer used to ask me when he’d see me, “Carlos, why are you doing this? And don’t give me any of this bull about honor or nobility.” It used to frustrate me.

DJ: How would you answer that question now?

CR: I’m doing it because I think it’s important. And I like it. It’s a perfectly legitimate way to conduct your life, whether or not you earn a dollar.

I used to be very defensive, always trying to explain what it was I did. Some people would get it, but most people wouldn’t. Most other writers would get it, but still there were some that didn’t.

People don’t know what being a poet is all about, especially if you’re just trying to be a poet and not an entertainer, which is a whole different art form and way of thinking. I’ve forever tried to explain what it is that I do, and quite often I’ve just copped out. “Oh, you know, I drive a bus . . .” People could relate to that. Now I just tell them I’m a poet because that’s what I am.

–

Oregon poet, Mark Thalman, helps us springboard into new guest writer features with four poems from Catching the Limit (© 2009, Bedbug Press – Fairweather Books), part of the Northwest Poetry Series. Thalman received his MFA from the University of Oregon, and has been teaching English in the public schools for 28 years. He’s also been a board member of the Portland Poetry Festival, a Poet-in-the-Schools for the Oregon Arts Foundation, and an Assistant Editor for the Northwest Review. His work has appeared in Carolina Quarterly, CutBank, Many Mountains Moving, Pedestal Magazine, and Verse Daily, among others. The following poems appear with his permission.

EASTERN OREGON

Out here is miles from anywhere.
Coyotes, cattle, and sun become your companions.

Hills roll and fold, a sea of giant swells,
then flatten out, lay calm, in bleaching summer heat.

When evening unveils its stars,
life shrinks under the universe.

For centuries, Nez Perce came to trade for Columbia salmon,
then Pioneers snaked wagons down the Blue Mountains.

Even today, dust devils coil up,
and rivers cut deep gorges.

Sage grows low so wind can go where it wants–
whistling through wire fences.

[Previously published in Writers' Dojo]

AT THE CABIN: ODELL LAKE

Not having talked to anyone in a week,
I keep my voice in shape
by standing on the swing,
knees pumping, arms flexing ropes–
making the board go
back and forth,
higher and higher,
until I´ve got enough momentum
and become the metronome.

If I am off key or forget a lyric,
there is no one to hear it.
On a slight breeze, I sing to my favorite trees,
chipmunks scampering the wood pile,
the shy rabbit by the lake. I sing
through soft filtered light–
a couple of Elvis, a bunch of Beatles,
followed by some soul,
and a medley of rock n´ roll.

Firs, having stood for hundreds of years,
absorb my voice. When I stop
not much has changed.
The world is a little older, the planet
a little further through space.

[Previously published in Pedestal Magazine]

HIGHWAY TO THE COAST

Thick and green, the hills rise
on each other’s shoulders.
High ridges disappear in fog
make me wish I was born of water.

At the divide, I taste the cool ocean air,
the way a deer finds a salt lick,

and roller coaster down a narrow road
that does not believe in a straight line.

Blackberry vines
crawl through barbed wire fences.

Small towns occur like a whim.
As if in a coma, they merely survive.

I tune in the only station
and listen to country western.

Static gradually drowns the singer out.
Rounding a corner, he pops to the surface

for another breath,
simply to sink back still singing.

Fir shadows lace the road.
Bracken cascades embankments.

At the next curve, a farmhouse is half finished–
boards weathered raw. Chickens roost in a gutted Chevy.

Scattered among these hills, families
rely on small private lumber mills,

the disability or unemployment check,
the killing of an out of season elk.

[First appeared in Caffeine Destiny]

NORTH UMPQUA, SUMMER RUN

Wading thigh-deep,
I cast a fly
which I tied last winter,
and let it drift
below the riffle.

There, a steelhead lies,
weighing the current,
balancing in one place,
the mouth slowly working
open and closed.

While eyes that have never known sleep
signal the body to rise,
slide steadily forward,
shadow flickering
over mossy stones.

In a smooth flash of motion,
deft as a blade, the fish strikes
and the surface explodes.

Trembling violently in air,
amid spray and foam,
the steelhead blazes like a mirror catching sun,
falls back, extinguishing the fire,
only to lift again,
a flame out of water.

In a long meteoric arc,
cutting a vee across the surface,
the fish unable to dislodge the hook,
dashes instinctively down stream.

Zigzagging back and forth,
fight the current and line,
it is only a matter of time,
until this miracle of energy
rests on its side,
gills flaring.

She’s fat with roe,
so I work the barb out
and let her go
on her journey
from which
there is no escape.

[Previously published by Gin Bender Poetry Review; later appeared in Deer Drink the Moon: Poems of Oregon, Ooligan Press, Portland State University)

–

Thalman will be part of a panel discussion on Oregon poetry during the upcoming Summer Solstice Poetry Weekend, coordinated by Eleanor Berry. The discussion takes place on Saturday, June 26th, from 1:30 – 3:30 in the Stayton Public Library meeting room in Stayton, Oregon. On Sunday the 27th, from 3-5 p.m., Thalman will be among the events featured readers at the Stayton Friends of the Library Used Bookstore.

Read another of Thalman’s poems here.

–

Shaindel Beers’ poetry feels like the Midwest itself – open, rolling, as if a dust storm could blow through any moment. Her first full-length collection, A Brief History of Time, captures the sadness and longing of a never-ending landscape in rich language that evokes loss, flight, grace and humility. We spoke a few weeks ago, and discussed the concept of “mental crafting” (Beers holds onto ideas for months and even years before writing them), teaching (she is a professor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, OR), rural life (she grew up in Argos, Indiana), online publishing (she’s been poetry editor at Contrary Magazine since its founding in 2003), “short-shorts” night (as referenced in the poem A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR), and how memory and reflection lead her into verse.

DJ: You definitely have a lot going on, between your own work, your work with Contrary, what you’re doing at “the school” and your radio program (blog talk radio). Is there one area where you get greater pleasure or satisfaction?

SB: I guess everything feeds into more material to write about. It would be nice to have more free time to write. Still, I learn a lot from my students and from my other part-time jobs. They give me more time to think about writing.

DJ: A lot of your work reads in a way as if it arrived on paper exactly how it happened, almost in a “channeled” sense. I don’t mean “channeling” in a new age way, but more so like the poem came out of you in one long gush. I’m trying to get a picture of you working when suddenly you’re hit with this wave…

SB: I work a lot in my head, more than I ever write down. I wish I were one of those writers that carries a notebook and pen everywhere. I go through phases where I try to make myself do that. Sometimes something will stay in my head for months or even years before I write it down.

DJ: What finally gets you to write it down? Why does it stay so long, and what gets you to say, “I have to get this thing out?”

SB: Sometimes because it doesn’t feel finished. I’m not saying it’s a finished product in my head and then makes its way to paper. It’s like a seed. It has to germinate for a certain amount of time. Sometimes I write it down because it feels like it’s almost done, and sometimes I write it down because I’m afraid of forgetting either a part of it or the whole thing.

DJ: Would you say you’re mentally crafting pieces?

SB: I always feel like there’s a frame around things. When it feels like I have enough to build on it, that’s when it goes on paper.

DJ: So you’re never too worried that you’ll actually forget something?

SB: There are things I think I’ve forgotten.

DJ: Looking at the poem, ELEGY FOR A PAST LIFE, you mention in the second stanza:

“Back then at sixteen
I thought we’d make it out together,
and become writers.”

How long has this been going on for you, getting these lines coming to you, and at what point did writing enter your life?

SB: I probably wrote before I could physically write. When I was little, I would tell my mom stories, make her write them down then read them back to me. I was sort of a writer before I knew letters or the alphabet.

I think it was either high school or undergrad when I made that leap between wanting to be a reader and being a writer. I don’t know if I felt confident about my own work until I started having things published, first in the undergrad literary journal, then later in places right out of college.

DJ: It’s interesting that you showed up in the world as an oral storyteller, because there’s a wonderful diversity in the language of your poetry. Did you make your way to poetry from other places, or has poetry always been a place where you found a home and a voice?

SB: Some of it might be that poetry requires a shorter attention span. When I was an early teen, I remember reading my mom’s old poetry books and feeling like I could read a lot in one sitting, because mostly they were just stripes down the middles of pages. So I could read much more poetry in a short amount of time than I could, say, fiction. I feel this way about writing it also.

I’m trying to get better about spending more time at poems and fiction. I think poetry is my natural progression as a writer, then eventually I’ll move onto fiction. A lot of writers move in the same way.

DJ: So you’re actively writing things other than poetry?

SB: I have about half of a short story collection done. I need three to six more stories to be long enough to send out.

DJ: When you mention that poetry requires something of a shorter attention span, how do you say this is a benefit when it comes to online publishing? Especially when you consider the fact that there are well-regarded online literary sites and opportunities popping up all the time.

SB: I’ll sit down and read a 500-page novel in hard copy but I’d never do that on screen. I don’t know if it’s a physical issue, where staring at a screen that long isn’t good for your eyes, or if it’s a psychological issue, where we feel that things online should be short. There’s definitely something to the fact that people will only spend so long reading something online. You expect it to be no more than three screens if you’re scrolling, as if there’s an intuitive link between how long something is and how much we’re willing to read. Which is a good thing for poetry.

In general, I think people are in the mode of reading shorter fiction when they’re online. They’re more likely to read a 2,000 word story online than a 10,000 story.

DJ: Is that sort of shift completely positive?

SB: I don’t think it’s positive. It might just be one of the necessary evils that happen. I don’t want to think that we’ll be like Japan, where our literature turns into text message novels, or whatever the craze is. I hope it doesn’t go that far, but I think we have to be realistic that, if we’re sending things to an online venue, people are only going to read a poem that’s one screen, or a story of about 2,000 words.

DJ: As you’ve edited and been a reader for print and online places, could you speak to whether or not you see a different caliber of writing coming in?

SB: With Contrary, at least right now, I’m the final poetry editor. Of the 1,000 or so submissions a month, I only see the top 20 – which makes it really hard to choose. I’ve gotten things sent to me directly where I’ve felt people didn’t even look at the literary journal, but I haven’t seen any differences in quality from when I was a first reader for print to now.

DJ: Do you have any sense of shifts going on as it relates to the financial viability of small press publishers vs. online journals?

SB: I just know it’s expensive going to print. Just look at the big newspapers that are shutting down or selling right now. Print no longer seems to be where people are getting either their news or reading material, and I think we’re moving more to the online end of the spectrum.

In one issue of Contrary, we had nearly 100,000 page views – there’s no way we could afford to print 100,000 issues, or even 20,000 issues for that matter. I think a lot of it is the economy, but some of it is environmentalism – we’ve all seen journals give thousands of back issues away for free. It’s sad because there is something to the hardcopy print world and the tactile feeling of a book, magazine or journal. Unfortunately it’s expensive to do these days.

DJ: A hundred-thousand views is huge. When you think about a journal like Contrary, if it was exclusively in print as opposed to online, it would probably be a regional-type press.

SB: Definitely. And if anyone weren’t from the University of Chicago, or around the South Side, it would just be word-of-mouth subscriptions. People would read their classmates who were published in there, and that’s how it would spread cross country.

(more…)

Shaindel Beers’ poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, in Eastern Oregon’s high desert and serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary Magazine. She hosts the talk radio poetry show Translated By, which can be found at blogtalkradio.com/onword. The following poems from Beers’ first full-length collection, A Brief History of Time (Salt Publishing Ltd) appear here with her permission.

© 2009 Shaindel Beers

CICADAS

Where will we be the next time
they emerge, in 17 years,
when brood X nymphs first wriggle their way
out of exit holes, climb the trunks of oaks and maples,
sun themselves on viburnum,
pale and helpless, before their wings dry
and darken
so they can fly safely to trees to mate, lay eggs,
and die?
I’m not sure I have a concept of 17 years.
I remember Ronald Reagan was President,
I was jealous of my friend Lindsey because
she had a Debbie Gibson hat.
The Princess Bride came out, and is still
my favorite movie.
Seventeen years in the future seems daunting.
The boys at the little league field behind my house
will be men, the neighbors’ dog will be dead
and the tree in my backyard
will no longer be mine.
I could be living anywhere—
not one to put down roots, I can’t even guess.
Just yesterday, I realized, looking out your window,
that in less than two months
new trees will greet me from another window.
No longer the canopy of hardwoods,
but lush, tropical greens year-round
1,300 miles away from you.
And though we’ve talked about this,
I wonder what you’re thinking,
what you would like to be doing
with the seventeen years that this year’s
nymphs will spend underground,
burrowing, living on the roots of all those trees.

ELEGY FOR A PAST LIFE

I miss the honest life we used to lead
scraping up odd jobs so we could see
a movie the next town over,
and stare for a few hours at people
on the drive-in screen who weren’t
like us — who didn’t wear too big hand-me-down
flannels and mud-caked boots —
and even if they were playing farm people,
had never known that pinching pain
in the sacral spine that paralyzes
as you heft the bale by the twine
and let it avalanche down to the ground.

For days, after seeing a show, we’d sit in the loft,
legs dangling over the bleating sheep below
and dream about the life we’d live
when we’d escaped. Back then at sixteen
I thought we’d make it out together,
and become writers, the only job we could imagine
where we wouldn’t smell like shit or hay or cows

but too many months passed when I didn’t bleed
and when we were safe, the test negative
and burned in the rubbish heap behind the barn,
you left, too afraid of being trapped
in a cornfield town
to wait for me.

A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR

He was tall, well-built, blue-eyed,
a guy most girls would want to take to bed.
Then he reached for the beer with his left hand,
revealing the stump of his right.

We could tell the second he knew that we knew.
We’d smile, but the smile wouldn’t travel
all the way to our eyes. He’d turn back to the bar,
fold his arm closer so that we could
no longer see

as we rushed off to sling beers for guys
not as good-looking but more whole,
the ones who leered lecherously,
on “Short-Shorts Night”
and left ten dollar tips for two dollar beers

always expecting more, always bitter when we didn’t deliver.
The quiet one, we wounded week after week, a guy
any of us would have considered “out of our league,”
“a long shot,” if he had been unbroken,

the sad, blond man we were afraid to love.

SUNDAY WORSHIP

They used to chuckle at him softly
the way the small-minded do at the simpleminded
when he would snore or fart in church–
And sometimes let him carry the collection plate
while they dropped in a sweat-earned buck or two
from callused, earth-caked hands. But it was her I watched–
Imagining how hard it must have been to have
a Mongoloid son and a husband so cruel he called
the boy “It” and left her out of shame. And yet–
she sat every Sunday of my childhood
beside a forty-something son she still dressed every day
and felt blessed enough with her life
to make me ashamed to pray for more.

REWIND

Fridays Mrs. Wampler would give in
and leave the projector light on
as the film wound from one real to the other.

At six, the world moving backward amazed us
more than the world moving forward,
though that amazed us, too.

Full blooms squeezed back into buds;
seedlings hid themselves underground,
but our favorite was our claymation version

of Beauty and the Beast. We would cheer as each
petal affixed itself to the thorny stem
and the beast grew stronger, clap as Beauty

no longer wept at his deathbed. And soon,
he was a prince again, too polite to ever
insult a crone. This taught us that beginnings

are always best, despite all they say about
Happily Ever After. If we could invent
the automatic rewind, bodies would expel

bullets that would rest eternally in chambers,
130,000 people would materialize
as the Enola Gay swallowed the bomb,

landmines would give legs and fingers
back to broken children.
Right now, teeming cancer cells

would be rebuilding blood and bone.