Masks, Mirrors, and Poetry from In Posse Review

You may not know this, but your humble editor is also a writer. Your humble editor writes poetry. This is not to say that your humble editor gets any of his poetry published. Some of your humble editor's poetry got rejected just yesterday, in fact, and by a very fine journal, too.
But I keep drinking from the well of poetry, because the water tastes so damn fine. And here's a fresh draught for you: The all-poetry "Mask & Mirror" issue of Web del Sol's In Posse Review has just hit the cyber-stands. The poems in this issue range in style and content from the mundane to the fantastic to the imagistic, written by veteran poets with decades of experience and by new authors receiving their first publication.
Shawn Pittard's "Fall Stream" starts with an image both concrete and fanciful, and continues in the same vein:

There’s a door in the bottom of the freestone stream
at the bend below the railroad grade.
On my birthday, I dared to open it, figuring
I’d lost most of what I had to lose by fifty.
Under the door, the water was drinkable,
like it was when I was a boy scout.
Crayfish still crawled everywhere.
A speckled trout swam by
with my lost hook in its mouth.
My front tooth sparkled in the gravel bed
near the piece of my right knee the orthopedist removed.

The simple, declarative sentences are complicated by deliberate line breaks and strong verbs. The combination of clear description and fantastic imagery makes us feel as if we're reading a fairy tale in the form of a particuarly well-written poem.
In "Tomasii and the Wise Serpent, Ourdyss," Jeff Miles recounts the experience of falling asleep while a grandfather tells a bedtime story about seven men who get chased into a cave:

In my dream, the seven found footholds
cut into the hidden cave’s near-vertical shaft.
Tomasii led them downward. The darkness
was complete. Then came the serpent’s voice:
I am Ourdyss. Who disturbs my sleep? Sleep,
said my grandfather’s voice. The seven men
groped along the cold black road, arms
stretched out before them. Ourdyss, said the voice
out of the darkness. My grandfather
said nothing, dead these forty years. He visits
my dreams, drinks from a red goblet, never speaks,
though sometimes I ask him questions. I know
he would not tell me what happens next. As always,
he would start over again from the beginning.

I love the palpable sense of adventure in this poem, but that youthful fun plays out in counterpoint against a sad adult wisdom that knows about loss and death. As I read this poem, I found myself as interested in the plight of Tomasii and his followers as in the relationship between the narrator and the grandfather; and by the end, the two threads are woven inextricably together. Poems like this make life itself seem like an adventure, a real one, whose final chapter is still unwritten.
After examining two poems with a strong narrative thread, I now want to look at a poem made of enigmatic images and metaphors. The title of Luisa Igloria's poem is also its first line:

At night, the sky's a parasol studded with points--
Its steel ribs retract, taking the woman's earrings,
her filigreed comb, the agate necklace
which she hung from a cloud's lowest branches.

Her arms grow heavy, so heavy, oh.

This is not a poem about life, or Life, or Death, or aging or sex or any of the other things poems are so often "about." Instead it uses arresting images to convey a feeling and a mood and a savor. But these are not static, unchanging moods; those steel ribs do retract, taking the stars away in the form of earrings and comb and necklace; yet the conflation of stars with jewelry does not leave the sky behind, as our attention is then directed to "a cloud's lowest branches." So the images move us from one side of a metaphor to the other and back again, and we still feel that we've never left the world drawn for us in that first line. This is a fine, fine poem.
There's a lot more where that came from, so click on over to In Posse Review, put on your mask, look in the mirror, and enjoy.

Big Quality in Small Packages: La Petite Zine Delivers Concentrated Literary Goodness

I know you're all dying to learn more about me--Who is that mysterious man with the attractive, uh, typing?--so here's a breakdown of my typical week:

• Edit article about the link between snack foods and death, while eating an apple.
• Write this blog, dazzle literary world.
• Edit book about blind, slimy cave organisms that have only been seen by a few nearsighted, clammy grad students.
  
• Write my personal blog, dazzle no one.
• Write screenplay that is vying to break world record for Taking Longest to Finish (record currently held by the novel Tristram Shandy, unfinished since the 18th century).
• Exercise (this one gets skipped now and then).
• Have fulfilling relationship with spouse (this one never gets skipped on purpose, but you know how it is).
• Have friendships with people whose weeks are at least as full as mine.
  

You know what's missing from this picture? Reading! Who has time to read for pleasure anymore? If it's not a menu or a court summons, I may not have the time to read it. And that, my friends, is why La Petite Zine is such a wonderful thing. Imagine a good literary journal that only publishes poetry and prose pieces of 1,000 words or fewer. Doesn't that make your stress monkey relax? And the reader in you, that underfed starveling, begins to salivate in anticipation of the nuggets of literature headed its way.

The latest issue of La Petite Zine has some real good little gobbets for you. "In Search of Mariachis," a prose piece by erstwhile poet David Shumate, begins with a grabber of a sentence:

When our lives grow unbearably dull, we load up the car and go in search of mariachis. Sometimes we drive a thousand miles before we come across a group dressed in those fancy black and silver suits strumming their guitars out in some parking lot or beneath a wedding tent. We listen to their ballads and laments and are restored.

Heather Christle's "Parallelograph" is poetry, but this is not your father's iambic pentameter or blank verse. No line breaks, no punctuation, no capitalization; just phrases separated by white space. Poems like this are too often experimental to the point of unreadability, but this one, while challenging, rewards the effort (slashes represent white space):

that is not a bird / that is a large dark area / it is the same thing / as your head / when I do your head in silhouette / there could be a nation / that outlawed the profile / or only thought of outlines / from the front / it is the same as your imaginary life / you have just given your concession speech / bravely to a small crowd of supporters / they could be thinking anything and aren't / you can’t tell a large dark area to give up

Jason Koo gives us a refreshing draught of the life-saving elixir called Humor in his poem "What We Talk About When We Talk About." The conversational tone rubs against precise word choices and skillful line breaks, creating a thread of tension that runs through the whole poem:

I thought I should write this down, since your ear
is a vagina and you might not hear it if I said it out loud,
she wrote, and I couldn't tell if she was being sweet
or funny or was just angry with me, mostly I was confused
by the vagina metaphor and thought it was a little extreme,
I mean, was a vagina the first thing that came to mind
when she thought of my ear? Which ear was she talking about?
By then I was fingering my right ear thinking it wasn't
all that different from a vagina, I guess I wouldn't be so shocked
if I took off her pants and saw an ear where her vagina
should be and took off her hat and saw two vaginas
where her ears should be, ears and vaginas were closer
in family than, say, vaginas and toes, and she often caressed
my ear with her tongue the way one might caress
a vagina, I'm not saying I climaxed but the possibility
was there.

There were more pieces I wanted to write about, but I'm edging close to my own thousand-word limit here. And besides, you're busy! Got places to go! Things to do! Short pieces of literature to read! Go to La Petite Zine! Hurry!