Flood: 3 Missing

The birds have all traded places.
The seagulls, bent kites
veering toward the hills,
are strangers. The sea is closer.
Robins sway wet
in mockingbird trees.
No one touches ground,
no one in the barefoot garden,
the riddled mirror dreaming
a forest of sunflowers.
In the dawn,
I hear the creek
boiling brown water.




Posted for Dverse Poets
Open Link Night #34

Sunnyvale

He came home to two martinis
and Art Buchwald out loud
in his black bucket chair,
steam creeping out the kitchen door.
By dinner he’d rolled his sleeves,
Indian-brown arms
like snakes under skin,
and we knew to pass the plates
without a sound.
If he was happy, he’d tell us
about the railroad—
emptied the toilets
right onto the tracks—
or the slaughterhouse
or the aircraft carrier nose-up
and falling fast.
Fish sticks hung in mid-air
and crashed the conning towers
of our tater tots. Milk bled out
the mouths of glasses.
Later, he’d change
and walk to the garage,
wrestle metal for hours
and shoot the bright rivets
through round, clean holes.



Posted for DVerse Poets
OpenLinkNight, Week 33


(Originally appeared in Alehouse)

The Incredible Growing Poem: Tim Green on the Rattle Poetry Prize

Earlier this month, just after I’d chided the editors of Rattle a bit for choosing so many long, narrative poems as finalists for their $5,000 Poetry Prize, I got an e-mail from Rattle’s editor, Tim Green. Tim had read my blog (reminder to bloggers out there—people do read these things), and he wanted to set the record straight.

My complaint had been that, while most of the 15 finalists were good poems, they seemed to show a Rattle bias toward long, stream-of-consciousness poems with complete sentences and proselike structure. Where, I asked, were the tight little sonnets, the scattershot experimental works, and the short, pared-down poems?

Tim, gracious as always, told me exactly where those short poems and concise sonnets were: They were somewhere out there in the world, but not in Rattle’s mailbox. A strange phenomenon’s been happening, he said, ever since Rattle made their prize a hefty $5,000: Fewer and fewer poets have been sending him short poems, even though he’s a big fan of brevity. He also likes unobtrusive formal verse and rhyme—and he hardly ever gets poems like that, either. There’s a misconception out there, he said, that only a long poem has a chance at winning that $5,000 prize. And then the phenomenon feeds on itself: Because Rattle receives so many long, narrative poems these days, the editors tend to pick long ones as finalists for the prize—because that’s what they’ve got to pick from. And then readers see the finalists, notice that they’re long and narrative, and then those readers send their long, narrative poems. The result, Tim said, has been a gigantic snowball effect: “I can probably count on my fingers and toes the number of poems—out of 6,000—that featured regular meter and rhyme. Short lyrics were the same.… People assume that I don’t like anything that isn’t narrative free verse. Not true at all!” Next year, he said, he’d like to see more variety in the competition, and he wants to get the word out. So, dear poets, there’s your cue: If you like to play the prize ponies, send him your best—and don’t worry if your poems don’t look like the winners of the past.

This exchange reminded me of a conversation I had a few years ago with the editor of another journal that sponsored a poetry prize. One year, this editor told me, it came down to two poems: one long-ish elegy and a short, cynical little poem. He was pulling for the short poem, but the rest of the editorial board voted him down and went with the longer one, deeming it—and I quote him here—“more contestlike.” That phrase has stuck in my head ever since, and for years I thought of it every time I entered a contest. But honestly, sending long poems to constests was no better a system than betting on football teams based on the color of their uniforms; it worked once in a while, but most of the time, not so much.

Still, it’s not unusual to see a long poem win a prize—as far as I can see, it happens a lot. And if you can work in death, childrearing and/or Alzheimer’s, your chances are even better. I’m being a little facetious, but sometimes it just feels that way. Still, Tim’s e-mail reminded me of something I often lose track of in this dog-eat-poem world: We poets should ignore the trends and stick to writing what we think is good, and we should send out what we think is best. Trying to match the perceived trends of the day is usually a losing proposition, and our poetry suffers for it. Your work is your own hothouse flower, growing exotic and unique in your own particular corner of the world. Nobody can write what you write, and that uniqueness is what makes it yours, what makes it valuable. That’s what the world needs, not just another echo of Mary Oliver or Billy Collins or Matthew Dickman, much as we love them and are influenced by them. Here’s to breaking the mold, again and again.

Poem: Waking to Snow

It gathered in your sleep,
quietly packed your dreams
for the long glare of day.
It arrived alone,
stamping small feet on the brick stairs,
pulling down the rhododendron.

You did not need to call it
or think ahead
or clean a small room for its stay.
It will settle on the roof,
on your shoulder,
on the soft back of the doe
who will not move when you step out
onto the street’s new-made bed
as birches rake the wind
with long, patient hands.

This morning is your everywhere,
your everything at once. It took
nothing at all to get here—you
came in sleeping, remember?
Even your brightest dream
could not have seen it so new, so cold.





Posted for DVerse
Open Link Night #32
Thank you, DVerse!

RIP, Nick Barkley

I was sad to read that one of my childhood icons, Peter Breck, died earlier this week at the age of 82. He was best known as the actor who played Nick Barkley, the mercurial middle brother on The Big Valley.

I got hooked on The Big Valley when my sister Bev and I used to stay up to watch it in the late 1960s. She was seven years older than me, and up until then, we hadn’t liked each other—she was the haughty teenager who knew everything, and I was the geeky little sister who’d replaced her as the baby of the family. But, slightly bleary-eyed and watching TV after the rest of the house had gone to bed, for some reason we bonded over shows like The Big Valley and Marcus Welby, M.D. At first, we just sat in silence together. But eventually we started making fun of those shows—laughing at bad dialog and implausible plot twists*. We’ve been laughing ever since.

The Big Valley gets kind of a bad rap these days. Of course, Gunsmoke lasted longer, Maverick was cooler, and Have Gun, Will Travel had that great theme song**. But for me, The Big Valley trumped them all. This was largely due to my raging crush on Lee Majors, who managed to get through four years of playing the sullen brother, Heath, without cracking a smile more than twice. There were other things to love, too: We had Richard Long as the sensible brother, Jarrod, who always followed his moral compass while the rest of the family started bar fights, fell in love with swindlers, and generally made bad decisions. Then there was (Miss) Barbara Stanwyck as the steely matriarch, Victoria, and Linda Evans playing the slightly dim daughter, Audra***. And then of course there was Peter Breck as the brawling Nick, iconic in his neckerchief and black gloves.

For the first couple of seasons, the show placed all its bets on the hunky Majors, who seemed to have been recruited mostly for his tanned torso. Poor Peter Breck was often lost at the wayside as the impulsive, less photogenic Nick, a man who had a five o’clock shadow even at breakfast and rarely took off those gloves. (Now nearing 50, I can’t help wondering: psoriasis?) But without Nick, that show would have been a brooding mess—Jarrod and Heath would have pondered everything to death, and Audra would have been murdered by about eight different psychos. So, while Heath was out chopping wood with his shirt off, Nick was doing the dirty work—smacking the bad guys (and the occasional bystander) and shouting what needed to be said. Nick was the great air-clearer, the icebreaker, the jester who jumps in and stirs everyone up. In a way, he was the true hero of the show, the one who really ran the ranch and broke heads to get it done.

Maybe every family needs a loudmouth like Nick. Or maybe, as I discovered, sitting in the living room with my sister all those late nights, maybe it doesn’t matter who’s the shouter and who’s the thinker. What matters is that they’re family. You rode in with them, and at the end of the day—if you’re lucky—maybe they’ll be there to help you bring the cattle in.




*You just can’t bring up this sort of thing without mentioning Mystery Science Theater 3000. People tend to fall into two camps about MST3K; I’m in the Joel Hodgson camp. I like Mike Nelson too, but Joel would never have let so many sexist jokes into the scripts.


**A couple of years ago, during a Big Valley binge, I came up with words for its theme song:
The…Big…Valley!
The…Big…Valley!
Nick and Heath…and Jarrod are boys…and Audra’s a girl…
and they all…are…still living with their mom…
Barbara Stanwyck!
Bar…bara…Stanwyck!


***I never identified with Audra; most of her subplots involved her falling for one unscrupulous man or another, and she had a weird, clingy relationship with her mother. I have this vision of her, after all these years, still unmarried and living in that big house. She still puts on a satin dress every morning, and Silas, who’s about 105 now, still offers her pots of tea and tells her when there’s somebody at the door. Her mom is long gone, shot dead one day by bounty hunters when they mistook her for a lady outlaw in her bandolero hat and peg-legged riding pants. Victoria cracked one of those guys good with a bullwhip before she went down, but there was no arguing with that clean bullet hole in the back of her black leather vest.

A Jury of Your Peers: The Rattle “Readers’ Choice” Poetry Prize

I’ll admit, I cringed when I heard that the poetry journal Rattle was letting their readers vote on the winner of this year’s Rattle Poetry Prize—at $5,000, one of the largest in the country. For years, I’ve been duking it out with thousands of other poets for this one, trying to find the right combination of tone, premise, length, and—well, hell, I don’t know what, and that’s part of the fun—that makes a poem worthy of such a large cash prize.

The news came a few months ago in an e-mail from Tim Green, Rattle’s superhumanly kind editor, a man who keeps in touch with his readers and writes a damned fine blog. Tim told us the plan: His editorial board would choose 15 finalists out of a staggering 6,000+ entries, publish them in an issue, and let Rattle’s subscribers vote on the prizewinner. It was a radical idea—Joe Q. Poets like me would get to decide who would take home the $5,000. And, since everyone who enters the contest gets a subscription to Rattle, a lot of us Joe Q. Poets already knew we were this year’s prizelosers, and now we would get to vote on the poems that had beaten us out, the grapes of wrath still fresh in our mouths.

I had my doubts. It all seemed fraught with emotional landmines. And it smacked of some sort of People’s Choice Awards, that lowest and most laughable of the awards shows. But Tim Green clearly had the same misgivings: In his instructions to us voters, he stressed that the contest was for the best poem, not for our favorite poet. This had crossed my mind, since Tony Barnstone*, one of my very favorite poets, was one of the finalists. Beyond that, Tim’s instructions were simple: “Use whatever criteria you’d like…. We can’t tell you how to fall in love with a poem.” It all felt weird—unfamiliar territory—but it seemed like my civic duty, as a longtime Rattle subscriber, to pitch in and see if this crazy thing worked.

So when the issue arrived, I sat down with the 15 poems and got to work. My first surprise was that I wasn’t at all bitter that these poems had been chosen as finalists over mine. It was just another contest—I’ve judged a few, and my brain goes into a hyper-slow, generous mode as soon as I have to write a number on a Post-It and stick it to a poem. I felt the usual mix of impulses: disgust over the absurd fact that I was judging one piece of art over another, and a sense of stewardship, of keen responsibility, when I found a poem that I loved.

I also was reminded that “judging” poems—pitting them against each other, whether for real or for fun—is a great exercise for poets. It forces you to think about each poem on its own terms: Is it doing what it set out to do? And because you’re considering a so-called finished poem, rather than one in progress as you might see in a workshop, it’s easier to take a step back and think about it as a whole product like a cake or a painting, without having to suggest changes. Does it satisfy me the way it is? Will I remember it later? Does it, in a word, work?

Another unexpected benefit was that I got to study what the Rattle editorial board picked as finalists. I can tell you that they favor long poems—only 5 of the finalists fit on one page, and there were several three-pagers. They also seem to like stream-of-conscious poems, ones that take the reader down unexpected alleys in long, convoluted, sometimes poem-length sentences. Narrative storytelling and complete sentences are the order of the day; few if any poems featured sentence fragments. Only one poem played inventively with white space; all the others were one long stanza, a few long stanzas, or consistent couplets, tercets, or quatrains.

In the end, I picked a poem that I felt was the clear winner, with a nod to a very good runner-up**. The others, for the most part, didn’t do it for me. This was perhaps a major flaw in the plan: I was constantly aware that I was choosing from among poems that someone else had already pre-picked, someone with a different aesthetic than mine. I’m a fan of paring down, of compactness, and I didn’t see a lot of that. And as I read those 15 poems, I couldn’t help wondering which of the 6,000 originals I would have picked, or which ones you, dear reader, would have picked. Such is the nature of contests: You’re at somebody’s mercy, and no two judges are alike. It’s just the way it is, and all the more reason to celebrate when you find one that fits.

So overall, it was a good exercise, and I liked the sense of community that Tim Green has established at Rattle. And while I’m glad not all journals let the readers run the show (cue the American Idol poetry nightmares), I’ll be curious to see how this experiment turns out.

*Here’s the first Tony Barnstone poem I ever read. He had me at “an amazing spread of food and drugs.”

** I will not say which ones I picked, unless drinks are involved.

The Lost Decade

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Judy and I went to see the new Charlize Theron movie, Young Adult. Early in the film, there’s a scene where Charlize pops a cassette into the car stereo and starts singing along to a plaintive indie-rock song. I’d never heard the tune before, and I figured the filmmakers had saved some money by finding an obscure song and sticking it on the soundtrack. Later, I noticed another song that I wasn’t familiar with. Then another, and another. No big deal; I didn’t think about it much. But when Judy and I were leaving the theater, she turned to me and said, “Wasn’t that great music? It was like a soundtrack to the ’90s. I hadn’t heard those songs in years!” Then it dawned on me: Those weren’t obscure songs; they were just ones that I’d never heard before—not a single one of them*. And then I realized why: They were from my Lost Decade.

It wasn’t that I fell into a coma in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It was just that, for about ten years, I didn’t listen to FM radio or watch TV. My media blackout was partly intentional, and partly by accident. I had just moved into a tiny cottage after parting ways with a roommate who'd watched TV every waking moment. She’d been a good roommate, but I was tired of the constant barrage of laugh tracks and ads. So I decided to not bring a TV into my new house. And after my beloved ’67 Cougar caught on fire one too many times, my dad persuaded me to trade it in for a (safer) Pontiac that had only an AM radio—no FM and no cassette player. At the time, I had no idea that I was about to miss out on an entire decade of pop culture. And if I’d known, I wouldn’t have minded, and not just because I’d be spared having to listen to Guns N’ Roses. No, it wouldn’t have bothered me because I was about to discover two things that filled the cultural void: radio shows and big-band music. Unknowingly, I’d transported myself back to the 1940s.

Not having a television turned out to be a rocky adjustment. I spent the first few weeks of my TV-free life in a restless, disoriented funk, constantly glancing at the clock—I hadn’t realized how much my evenings had been tethered to the TV schedule. Eventually I decided it was okay to have some noise in the house a couple of evenings a week, so I turned on the radio. At first, I couldn’t fathom A Prairie Home Companion—why in the world was this corny, catatonic show so popular? But I warmed up to it eventually—maybe my brain cells just had to tune themselves to its quiet humor—and PHC became a Saturday-night staple in my little house. Then one night I found a station that played radio shows from the 1940s, like Jack Benny and The Life of Riley and Lights Out (“It…is…later…than…you…think”). Before long, I was hooked, and Mortimer Snerd from Charlie McCarthy was my hero (“When they was handin’ out ignorance, I musta got two scoops!”). Radio shows were enjoying a little renaissance right then, and even NPR got in the act with reruns of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and a refurbished Doc Savage (“with Johnny Littlejohn, the fighting archaeologist, and Renny Renwick, the two-fisted engineer!”).

Meanwhile, without much to listen to in the car, I kept running across a local blue-hair station called Magic 61 that played music from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s—basically, anything pre-rock, from Benny Goodman to Brenda Lee. At first, this seemed corny, too—I laughed at Perry Como gliding his way through “Papa Loves Mambo” and “Round and Round.” But there was a lot that I admired, like Hoagy Carmichael doing “Ole Buttermilk Sky” and anything by Glenn Miller, Dinah Washington, or the Mills Brothers. Magic 61 kept drawing me back, like a strange food that left a good aftertaste. And before long, I was addicted to that too, and found I was learning a storehouse of great songs like “Stardust” and “Mountain Greenery” and “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” full of more poetry and puns than any of the rock music I grew up with. I was even starting to like Perry Como**.

I loved all the old radio stuff so much that I wasn’t even aware of what songs were popular at the time—I completely missed grunge, and George Michael, and Janet Jackson. So if I had to make a playlist of songs from the ’90s now, I’d be up a creek. But if you need to know the lyrics to “Up a Lazy River,” I’m your gal. I can even put a little Mills Brothers swing on it. So far, it’s been a pretty good trade.

* The song she sang to in the car: “The Concept,” by Teenage Fanclub. Never heard of it, or the band. I had to look it up.

**  “Round and Round” is now one of my favorite hiking songs: “Find a ring…and put it round, round, round / and with ties…so…strong that two hearts are bound...”