MORE POETS AT CLOUDBURST: Judith Kerman, ryki zuckerman,Helen Ruggieri, Phil Good

 JUDITH KERMAN

For me, poetry is at least partly a visual and musical art form. Or at least, it comes out of those parts of my mind. Making art is more important to me than poetry in particular, but poetry is my first and oldest art, and my central identity. (I'm also a musician, photographer, plastic artist, and computer artist). I'm intrigued by the pieces that "come easily" out of a weird part of my head, but more in love with the things I have to work hard for. Several years, I composed several songscapes for performance with my poems.

I founded Earth’s Daughters magazine in Buffalo in 1971, and have run Mayapple Press since 1978. Our catalog of over 100 titles includes books by Allison Joseph, William Heyen, Eleanor Lerman, Conrad Hilberry, Gerry LaFemina, Geof Hewitt and Helen Ruggieri. Last May, I retired after 20 years teaching and administration at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, and moved to Woodstock, NY.

My eight books or chapbooks of poetry include, most recently, Galvanic Response (March Street Press, 2005) and the bilingual collection, Plane Surfaces/Plano de Incidencia ( Santo Domingo: CCLEH, 2002). I have also published two books of translations of Spanish poetry, A Woman in Her Garden: Selected Poems of Dulce María Loynaz (Cuban; Cervantes Prize laureate, 1992; published byWhite Pine Press in 2002) and Praises and Offenses: Three Women Poets from the Dominican Republic (BOA Editions, 2009). As a Fulbright Senior Scholar to the Dominican Republic in 2002, my main project was translating the poetry and fiction of contemporary Dominican women; I made a video about Dominican Carnaval during a second visit in 2004.

Aleph, broken

slides from his

warm soup into bitter air,

breathes but does not cry,

the start

of a life without promises,

the dirty floor where language

will creep but no one hears it.

He is the first son.

Describe poverty.

Describe the ache to say.

Ellipsis, not the egg

but disconnection.

When he is old enough

to read, the letters crack

and fall apart, flakes of burnt paper.

He is a window with a missing pane.

Wind blows through on winter nights.

His father’s hat and beard

hunch over the kitchen table,

a shawl over his shoulders,

his hand trembling with chill

as he traces the lines of text.

Saffron

the shirt I always imagine wearing –

            not coral, not gold

            but I can never quite

            focus on the difference

fragrant rice smell

like that cinnamon and

turmeric stew (almost that

color)

            Buddhist monks’ robes

            “hot” sunset

            tangerine

            a glow, not salmon

like the light of October maples

reflecting off low clouds –

flames of the end of summer

            Hot hot hot

            the fragrance of cinnamon, cumin

            and onion

cream of tomato soup – too pastel

my frustrated efforts at color-mixing

wanting saturation, brilliance

            Why not choose an easier color?

            (I need an old

            National Geographic,

            an article on Burma)

no words for it –

not sweet, not hot

the glow persists

paella in a Spanish café near the ocean

Sibling Rivalry

My brother is standing under the ceiling fan

in my parents’ Florida apartment,

turning a screwdriver with his left hand.

He holds the fan housing still

with his right.

For years I have been fascinated

by my brother’s hands,

strong and muscular, but graceful.

I have hands

like my father’s, with a square palm.

My brother’s hands

are more beautiful than mine,

with longer fingers.

The postcard he once sent

is on my father’s desk:

the temples of Bangkok

rising above the city streets

like glistening rooster-combs.

Taxi horns cry

Cock-a-doodle-do!

I ask my brother,

did you know that Thomas Merton died

in Bangkok when he stepped

out of the shower

and turned on an electric fan?

My brother says, I’d never

be stupid enough

to work on wiring with wet hands.

HELEN RUGGIERI

Helen has been writing and publishing her work since the 1970’s.  A writer of both prose and poetry Helen lives in Olean, NY and taught at the University of Pittsburg, Bradford, PA. She spent a semester teaching in Japan at Yokohama College and has a FootHills published book The Character for Woman of short prose pieces (haibun) from that period. She teaches workshops on Japanese verse forms (haibun, haiku, senryn) Her own Japanese verse forms have appeared in publications in Turkey, Japan, Belgium, England, Russia and Slovakia. She has been published in Rootdrinker, Normanskill: Open Fields and in Benevolent Bird Broadside. She has studied with Bill Stafford and tries to pass on Stafford’s process, witnessing for poetry.  Ruggieri is a master gardener and has a black sash in Tai Chi.  She will be reading from a new book Butterflies Under a Japanese Moon from Kitsune Press. 

http://www.helenruggieri.com/poems/poems  

and her video:  Abutsu's "Journal of the Waning Moon"

 http://www.helenruggieri.com/video/video

The Power of Water  poem by Helen Ruggieri first appeared in the Winter 2009 (Vol. 83 No. 4) issue of Prairie Schooner

                         THE POWER OF WATER

                           In the evening grandfather came,

an empty spirit from a far place.

In this old country, he was under

the earth, held down with a stone.

Grandmother cried as she worked

milking the cows, turning them into

the meadow, carrying the pails

of milk on an oxbow over her neck.

On hot afternoons I swam in the pond

supported by water which held me

when I wanted to be held and I knew

even then it would let me sink

when it was time to sink.

The church commanded us.

We obeyed.  It was stone

and wood and not the soft

lap of water where we were

forbidden to go.  On summer

evenings the air was thick

with singing insects and

water held the last of the sun,

a mirror of silver broken by

the leap of a fish into twilight

falling back into itself

I wanted then not to be

the muddy creature grandfather became

or the milky stooped grandmother

caught between two galvanized pails.

I wanted then to leap,

to rise up out of what was,

to leap into twilight,

to fall back into my true self.

                                      Helen Ruggieri

ryki zuckerman

Poet ryki zuckerman is author of the chapbook body of the work (Textile Bridge Press). Her poems have appeared in Black Mountain College II Review,  Slipstream, SwiftKick, Monthly.Planet, Lips, Escarpments, Paunch, and Pure Light, as well as the Buffalo News and Artvoice.  Zuckerman has had poems published as broadsides by Seredipity Press, Textile Bridge Press, and the Tea Leaves Collection. She is anthologized in the new Brigid's Fire. She was "poet of the week" at  "poetrysuperhighway" and also has work online at Moondance.  She has been a co-editor for decades of Earth's Daughters magazine, the longest continuously published feminist literary periodical in the U.S., now in its 41st year.              She has been a featured reader  at Daemen College (Readings at the RIC), UB Poetry Collection Reading (at the Butler Mansion), Buffalo State's Rooftop Poetry Series, NCCC English Dept. Raiders of Niagara Series at Talking Leaves Bookstore, Allen Street Hardware Cafe Spoken Arts Series, Nietzsche's, Big Night (Just Buffalo), St. John Fisher College (Rochester), Passaic Community College (New Jersey), Olean Public Library, Tru-Teas Series, Burchfield-Penney Art Center Rendezvous Series, the Screening Room, Center for Inquiry Literary Series, Dog Ears Bookstore Fourth Friday Series, Empire State College Appletree Series, BuffaloEast, Buffalo Society of Artists' Annual Poetry Reading at Artpark,  and other venues, as well as on spoken arts programs on WNED-TV, WBFO-FM, WHLD-AM (AudibleInk Radio) and thinktwiceradio.         She created and curates The Gray Hair Series, which is now in its sixth season,   co-sponsored by Earth's Daughters, Just Buffalo, and Hallwalls.  She also created (and curates) the Wordflight Series at the behest of the Crane Branch Library, co-sponsored by the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library and Just Buffalo.  She is an Adjunct Art Professor at Erie Community College, City Campus.

epsilon eridani for my late father, lover of sci-fi astronomers sing of  its radiant moons, a little like our earth. future generations might build their dream house there. anywhere a mist might rise, there grow amoebae. anywhere a tear might fall, dew lifting off leaves, settling on the surface of primordial slime. a lunar place circling a planet twinkling among the distant stars so many set out for, spun stories & chanted in tongues about - you might be there now: still shaking your head that the clothes you read about in '30's  sci fi novels - the spacesuits of rigid plastic, the futuristic styles for intergalactic lolling around - had actually arrived, but fooled you, as you pointed to your polyester pants, your nylon scarf, your acrylic sweater, the soft side of plastic for life on earth.

stopping by On Jan. 29, 1963, poet Robert Frost died in Boston.                      ("On This Day" in history, NY Times online) the wind blew his hair across his face, as he squinted, snowblind, in the brilliant cold of early january and tried to tame the pages and his eyes, the world waiting for his new words, his inaugural poem for j.f.k., our fair-haired boy, who we would lose later the same year frost left us; the wind blew sparks of hope into all eyes, that day in 1961, when, with the television cameras focused on him, frost, unable to see in the snow glare, recited, instead, from memory "the gift outright": "the land was ours before we were the land's..." the wind blows the old dream across the face of despair, the dream that was ours before we were the dream's, some hollow melody skips across the road we took that led us to this precipice, where we are still at the edge of the woods looking up at the falling snow.    trying to channel lucille  (for lucille clifton) the man had no voice. when they cut out the cancer, the talk went out of him, the flesh that should have formed a vowel lay bloody in a kidney-shaped steel bowl the police had no cause, but adrenaline-pumped from running through the yard, the house, chasing the nephew who had danced with drugs and the law before, they sent seven bullets, steel-cut holes,  into the man who had no voice, as he walked up the steps to the porch of his own house they had invaded. the town of homer, lousiana,  will have no justice. the jury sent down no indictment. the killer quit the force. and the woman who might have pierced way down into the center of the death-scene chaos and stinky-to-high aftermath, whose verse could cut through a tangle of confusion and fancy side-stepping,  is herself mute, gone from us her colon cut from her, bloody in a kidney-shaped steel bowl, her flesh not saved, her soul risen to high heaven, waving to us from the far shore wishing she could still write it right. previously published: epsilon eridani,  Buffalo News; stopping by, Artvoice; trying to channel lucille, Earth's Daughters)

Steve Tills: So, HA!, that’s another “Pure,” and they both exist, of course, HA!

Alan Casline:
I wanted to meet on Sunday April 15th. I was indifferent to where we met. Although e-mail works fine, I find more can be accomplished face-to-face ( large percentage of total communication being unspoken and the word play which cannot be duplicated otherways) John Roche told me about this Phelps Poetry Reading: {Sunday April 15, 2012 at 2 PM: Poetry Afternoon at Phelps Arts Center, 15 Church Street, Phelps, featuring Steve Tills, Sally Bittner Bonn, Lori Nolasco, and Patricia Roth Schwartz, free, refreshments.] It looked good and as it turned out was perfect as lead-in to the meeting of myself, John, Stephen Lewandowski and Ken Warren held after the reading to discuss all things Cloudburst.  In a scene I expect to repeat a few times on the way to the Naples gathering I got to meet Pat Schwartz for the first time and thus we could both say how we had heard so much about each other. I had met Steve Tills a few times but it was a great expansion to hear his poems read and Patrica Roth Schwartz also had poetic subject matter beyond the guessed at. The part about it being a great lead-in was because both Pat and Steven are coming to Cloudburst and are co-founders of a a venture, Literary Guild of the Finger Lakes, which is using the Phelps Arts Center as one of their nestings spots and sponsored the reading. 

                                   

                                            Steve Tills    April 15, 2012  at Phelps Art Center

                                    Patricia Roth Schwartz    April 15,2012  at Phelps Arts Center


Steve hung with us after the reading but had to leave after a while. We started a conversation about poetry on the page and poetry read to others, The conversation continued the next day via e-mail, Seems to be relevant and as everyone gave me permission ( and with a little editing) here is a recounting...

Steve Tills:   e-mail 4/16/2012 
Thank you so much, you guys, coming to the reading yesterday ( Alan Casline, John Roche, Ken Warren). It was a great pleasure to get that kind of opportunity to have you three “hear” what those “objects on a Page” “sound like” from “this person,” in this case “the writer of them,” as opposed to “the Pure experience” of “taking them in SOLELY ‘from the Page,’” where I always believe they are SUPPOSED TO BE, FIRST, FOREMOST, and perhaps even, ideally, SOLELY – and yet, there’s the alternative “Pure,” which is that it’s good to hear how the pomer, himself (in this case, me), means for that page experience to be read, needs “live Readings” to give a bit more cue as to how the rhythms and inflections and such “should go.”  So, HA!, that’s another “Pure,” and they both exist, of course, HA!

 All part of my ongoing obsession with “addressing” and rock solid belief that a given poetry should neither need its author’s VOICE, GOOD LOOKS (who would a listener most trust, fellow in blue jeans and old t-shirt, slick looking corporate guy with three-piece suit, professorial fellow with tweed jacket and rumpled clothes, suggesting he stays up late at night and composed his poetry from old-fashioned library-study with on old-fashioned typewriter; gorgeous female in string bikini, frumpy old woman in frumpy old clothes, spiked haired Goth girl with multiple face spikes/piercings, right-wing woman in church clothes?), BODY GESTURES, REPUTATION, or ANYTHING ELSE, nor WANT those kinds of things in fact “interfering” with “a pure interaction” with the page by a private reader in solitary surrounds.  AND, of course, there are all kinds of contradictions to these Concerns, and we’ll be discussing the pros and cons of these issues (some of which are NOT even NECESSARILY contradictions at all) for years…  (Personally, and perhaps obviously, I am always of the persuasion that “a given poming” should never require “extra-textural” accompaniment, hence “resides” on the page, blah blah blah, ad infinitum…)

John Roche     e-mail 4/16/2012
You're most welcome, Steve. Really enjoyed your stuff. Of course, we disagree on the "SOLELY 'from the page" thing--too New Critical for my taste. Everything's inextricably wrapped up with the voice and gesture and what Walt called "Personalism" of the poet, even when it gives the fish 'n' chips a bit of the smell of yesterday's news that stays news. But the nose knows, hopefully, what's fit to eat, and your homefried pomings are delish!

John

PS Diner was closed so we ended up at old hotel in center of Phelps. Walked out cause the menu was a bit dear, but maitre 'd ran out to tell us of 2 for 10 specials (what Alan calls the "locals' menu"). Pretty decent food, and a touch of class for planning our classless society.

Steve Tills    e-mail 4/16/2012

You’re right.  It DOES smack very much of “New Critical” and it’s part of long, ongoing “debate,” too, I suspect/suppose or just plain kind of know.

I think that we’ll be discussing it the rest of our lives.  In ways, I think it’s probably ALSO a false dichotomy, but then even as “that” endlessly useful, since, where it (or anything else that) leads one to write things is really the bottom line.  What gets on to the page, by whatever means.

But some of these things are so very BASIC, too: What is written should not ever NEED a person there to substitute extra-textural “emotion” or “decoration” or various other outside distractions to sell its MEANING.  If the words and/or other machinery of items, including page space and scoring of same on the page do NOT deliver EVERYTHING that is necessary and self-sufficient, then the object there, and THERE TO BE REGARDED, is another kind of object altogether, and to varying degree, maybe even “fails,” for it depends on all kinds of things that apparently “the poems” do not or cannot equal or constitute.  Nothing wrong with that, it’s just a different kind of writing, a writing that is a part of something else.

But also the more obvious problems: If we get the Stones and the Beatles as back up band, the “what’s on the page” has VERY LITTLE it actually needs to DO, as the back up band will imbue it with all the appeal and meaning and it (“lacks” on its own?) to “transfer energy,” to actualize the object’s being. (I know that that sounds strange and high-falutin, but it’s not meant to be – it’s just, again, my way of arguing FOR a kind of “actualization of (meaning?) poetic object that, in this case, desires FULL separation from ALL extra-textual sub-particles, including (in Purest form, and here’s where I get really onto the edge of what I may someday find is complete nothingness, something that doesn’t even exist) unconscious, as well as deliberate “allusion” to other texts, poets, poming, etc.

There’s WAY TOO MUCH on this subject to talk about here, though, AND, frankly, I am fully aware that these are long-existing OBSESSIONS  of my own that may not have anything to do with ANYBODY’s stuff, HA, just blah blah and all…

You’ll probably have to listen to me obsess about it all for many years, anyhow, though.  And then in between, we’ll all just “do poems” and all-inclusive “actualizations” of “poetry” anyways, fool ourselves about WHAT has value and meaning and worth and grooviness, forever, anyways…

Alan Casline   e-mail  4/16/2012

 This subject has been well debated at the Poets' Corner although the conversation often comes around to then the debate about audience and who validates your work. I am in the middle in that I think both presentations (oral and on the page) are important. I never get miffed at those who claim the printed poem is primary and I do get irritated at the other view when taken to the extreme as in 'Only the Spoken Word is Poetry" I think a lot of my poetry is better when you can see it on the page but I have also taken advise and tried to improve my reading of poetry to an audience.. For any of my poems done in projected verse when reading I try to use the spaces in the field as cues as to pausing, speeding-up and otherwise spacing out my vocalization  I consider all my poems to be one breath to one line, which I consider almost a standard way of going from the written line to spoken.  I hear the poem in my head and do not at all understand those poets who say, "I have to read the poem out loud to judge the poem's success" and also "If I stumble in reading then that shows a place where the poem should be rewritten." When I am reading another poet's poem I will ask, "Is it one breath to one line?" if they say "no", then I ask "Does the poem follow the punctuation like stop at a period, etc."  The vast majority of the time the answer to that is also "no". Which leaves the poem just there to be read any which-way. What I then will do is read their poem more-or-less as the ideas appeal to me. Other times I try and read the whole poem in one long breath. Which is fun and sometimes I will even forgo my own line breaks and do the same with one of my poems. The problem I have with one breath to one line is I can easily read a longer line than the page allows. To be true to this and not be constrained by page width I should be writing with the page turned so one line can be 11 inches long not just 8.5 inches. It would look just too odd and be hard to publish and so I have never made that switch.

Steve Tills     e-mail   4/19/2012

And especially, as ANY KIND of “prescription” like “one line for one breath” COMPLETELY LIMITS what can be accessed/actualized that would then be any given writer’s actualization of the given poetic object(s).  I mean, heck, it’s as preposterous as believing that only iambic pentameter can be employed.  At least, for me, I see it as such an obvious limit.  And I will never believe an abstraction like “only what originates from the breath” gets to, or comes from, “the heart,” “the soul,” “the body,” the full body/mind” or anything of the sort. 

Hey, Olson and others may indeed have succeeded in “freeing” “the poem” from the New Critical EXTREME that had, say, robbed poetry of its vitality and such, but surely they then “also” “may” have locked it in to other EXTREMES.  Or not…  It’s all up to endless debate and discussion, of course. And there are endless “contradictions” and “splits” and dichotomies (some “false” and some “real” and ALL merely, as well as magically, just “words” and other items that the singular “Human” “Unconscious” infinitely provides and endlessly creates) that anybody and her four sisters can “take off from” to endlessly explore the human condition and “what is Meaningful” in any given moment, era, split second, wink-of-an-eye, period, century, or geologic epoch.  IMO…  Blah blah, ad infinitum…

Personally, I am usually (but not always) inclined to use the page, and especially “line-breaking,” to “torque” meaning(s) and possibilities as they occur in the “process” of “theenking” (or otherwise “play it by ear”), and, at the same time, I know THAT, too, can and will “naturally” become “a limit” (and in fact I ALSO make stuff that “actively resists and declines ALL torquing and the use of line-breaking, sometimes, as well) if it gives over to some idea that it is THE ONLY THING that I might like to do, in writing.  (I.e., there can be “too much” “torquing,” when such a compulsion may become a fetish and get in the way of writing “something” that doesn’t/wouldn’t “happen” because I might be WAY TOO INVESTED in “following THAT muse’s ‘habituated’ compulsions” (or that “bitch’s confused indulgences” or *******s), but, let’s face it, there won’t be time enough in life to DO EVERYTHING, so best, I guess, CHOOSE a few things that one likes to do, that one does well, and that one gets some fulfillment from, and, really, we’ll all just do the best we can, regardless that Shakespeare, Olson, Homer, Gomer, Emily, Gertrude, Ezra, Wallace, Frank, Hilda, Milton, Sappho, and the rest of the old pros may chew us out for when we get up or down there to Pomer Heaven (if, of course, they aren’t too busy chewing each other out from their respective neighborhoods in the Collective Unconscious that they’ve so bravely staked out for themselves and us before we get there).

Alan Casline   email  4/19/2012

And one can have a love of limitation as per this poem from my 64 Changes & heart and hand are in there too

LIMITATION

It is necessary to set limits

even upon limitation.

Discriminations are the backbone of reality.

What good is the plowed earth

without the hand to set out seed?

What good is the house

without the heart to establish rest?

Tending life requires care

and measured energy.

                                   5/14/1980

John Roche     email  4/19/2012

Yes, agree with Steve-Tills-His-Garden: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!

But do I have to weed between every damn one?