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)