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The Other Pages

The Other Pages

By Steve Spanoudis

Brief, insightful commentaries on poetry, travel, writing, photography, and other topics. Home to The Republic of Dreams. Scroll down for a list of episodes and icons linking to additional podcast platforms where this content is available.

Full text of all episodes is available at The Other Pages on Facebook and Tumblr.

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2021 NPM 17 Keorapetse William Kgositsile

The Other PagesApr 17, 2021

00:00
07:10
2021 NPM 30 Jane Hirshfield

2021 NPM 30 Jane Hirshfield

This will be our last article for National Poetry Month. I hope you have enjoyed the series.  I would like to extend my warmest thanks to Kashiana Singh and Nelson Howard Miller, who each contributed three thoughtful, varied articles, and also thank Kashiana for her three podcasts. Nelson helped out despite contracting Covid and being hospitalized, followed by surgery. Kashiana, despite being in the process of a cross-country move.

Today’s poem is a deceptively simple piece by American poet Jane Hirshfield, a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and author of nine books of poetry and two more of essays. Her writing is clear and conversational, even when, like today, the subject is a difficult one for us to put into words. The title of the poem seems simple and descriptive,

(https://poets.org/poem/three-foxes-edge-field-twilight) Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight, but as we have hopefully learned, something observed in the world around us can often reflect something else. It starts out with:

One ran,

her nose to the ground,

a rusty shadow

neither hunting nor playing.

One stood; sat; lay down; stood again.

One never moved,

except to turn her head a little as we walked.

In this case, the narrator feels that the foxes’ behavior mirrors something about her own self. Perhaps her own fear, indecision, and wariness. Published when Hirshfield was forty-three, it suggests a changing viewpoint, or a turning inward - a personal transition:

There is more and more I tell no one,

strangers nor loves.

This slips into the heart

without hurry, as if it had never been.

Just as her metaphor, the foxes, disappear into the woods without a trace. The important part of what the poem is telling us is not that there has been a change, but that she, the narrator (the poet) has recognized that change. She ends with,

And yet, among the trees, something has changed.

Something looks back from the trees,

and knows me for who I am.

So I guess you could call this a poem of self-knowledge, of recognition that identity changes, and that we change, sometimes without knowing why.


(You can read the rest of the article text at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr)

May 04, 202103:54
2021 NPM 29 Yonatan Berg

2021 NPM 29 Yonatan Berg

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I have been curating the series with help and contributions this year from Kashiana Singh and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Technically, National Poetry Month is over, but we didn’t quite get to thirty, so I thought I would squeeze a few more in.

Today’s poem is by Yonatan Berg, an Israeli poet I was not familiar with until I ran across an article in Lunch Ticket (https://lunchticket.org/two-poems/ - the second poem on the page) with two of his poems translated from Hebrew to English by Joanna Chen. If you go to the page, I ask you to read the translator’s notes at the bottom. They are brief, and very good. I included this poem purposely after yesterday’s, You Are Your Own State Department, by Naomi Shihab Nye, and while their families hail from different sides of the tracks, so to speak, in the Israeli / Palestinian situation, their views have very much in common.

This is an important thing for Americans in particular to understand, in an era when opportunists are still pitting one half of the country against the other, creating and inflaming tensions, instead of pushing for Unity, which is the title of today’s poem. Nye, with the perspective of a longer life, talks of incremental change - small acts of kindness for those who suffer. Berg is not as concrete, in fact he is entirely mystical. Unlike Nye, he does not offer up any way to change the reality we are in physically. Instead he describes us as common souls, sharing a journey through darkness. And the recognition of that shared experience is his call for unity.

I think that Joanna Chen’s translation is excellent. As a separate point, I would like to say that yesterday’s poem reminds me of my good friend Hani Silwani, originally from Jerusalem. Today’s reminds me of another good friend, one who has lived through many dark journeys, Yair Alon from Holon, Israel, whose ambulance-driving was, in part, inspiration for one of my own stories, Tethered to the Sky.

Berg begins with:

We travel the silk road of evening,

tobacco and desire flickering

between our hands. We are warm travelers,

our eyes unfurled, traveling in psalms,

in Rumi, in the sayings of the man from the Galilee.

I would like you to note the phrase “our eyes unfurled,” suggesting they open, uncovered and uncloaked, to see and experience everything. There are religious and cultural references of all types, open and agnostic, following the metaphor of the open eyes. Later in the poem:

(The full text of the article is available at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.)

May 03, 202104:49
2021 NPM 28 Naomi Shihab Nye

2021 NPM 28 Naomi Shihab Nye

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year with help and contributions from Kashiana Singh and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Technically, National Poetry Month is over, but we didn’t quite get to thirty, so I thought I would squeeze a few more in.

Today’s poem, You Are Your Own State Department, was written by Naomi Shihab Nye, a woman who is, in many respects, much like her poem.

A common process in poetry is to describe something by talking about its pieces to give you a better picture of the whole. This poem is a first-person viewpoint, commentaries from her wanderings in life, and why she tries always (as we all should) to improve the things that we see wrong in the world. Even if it is only little things. That mirrors the idea of a thing being made of its smaller parts. And this too is a common process - that the form of a poem is chosen sometimes to mirror the thought process or the subject.

First, just a few comments about the poet. Born in 1952 in Saint Louis, Missouri, to Palestinian and Swiss/German parents, she has written poetry, novels, essays, and songs, authoring or contributing to thirty books, and editing several collections. She recently served as the Young People’s Poet Laureate for the Poetry Foundation. She is known for finding novel but clear perspectives on people, things, places, and circumstances. You will hear those things very clearly in today’s poem. It starts out:

Each day I miss Japanese precision. Trying to arrange things

the way they would. I miss the call to prayer

at Sharjah, the large collective pause. Or

the shy strawberry vendor with rickety wooden cart,

single small lightbulb pointed at a mound of berries.

In one of China’s great cities, before dawn.

Nye has commented that her poetry comes from a combination of: “local life, random characters met on the streets, [and] our own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.” The poem continues,

Forever I miss my Arab father’s way with mint leaves

floating in a cup of sugared tea—his delicate hands

arranging rinsed figs on a plate. What have we here?

said the wolf in the children’s story

stumbling upon people doing kind, small things.

Is this small monster one of us?

And she talks about those people - sometimes people who are displaced or themselves living under fear or hatred of one kind or another, and those small things they contribute:

(You can find the full text of this article at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr)

May 02, 202106:26
20201 NPM 27 - JoJo Rabbit and Rainer Maria Rilke

20201 NPM 27 - JoJo Rabbit and Rainer Maria Rilke

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Kashiana Singh, (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today’s article is by Poet and Contributing Editor Kashiana Singh, and unfortunately, as she is slightly under the weather today, it’s me you’ll be listening to on the podcast, instead of her soothingly thoughtful voice. My apologies. To quote Theo Metro, “It can’t be helped.”

There is a reason Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) is considered one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets.

Born in Prague, he published his first book of poems, Leben und Lieber, at age 19. In 1897 he met Lou Andreas-Salomé, the talented and spirited daughter of a Russian army officer, who influenced him deeply. Rainer is best known for such collections as Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) and Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), but also the semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge). Then, there’s also Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter), published after his passing.

His words are touchstones that other artists, from authors to poets to sculptors to filmmakers - often reference - words that are still relevant today. And could there be a message more relevant than love enabling humanity and love also being about setting free. Jojo Rabbit (https://youtu.be/tL4McUzXfFI), was a movie that was also a poem that touched souls with its poignancy. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

The central character of the movie is a fatherless 10-year-old boy coming of age in WWII. I do think the central character of the movie is also the poem itself  “Going to the limits of your longing” (https://onbeing.org/poetry/go-to-the-limits-of-your-longing/)

Go to the limits of your longing

Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

(text space limited)

You can find the fill text of Kashiana Singh's article on The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.


Apr 30, 202106:35
2021 NPM 26 - Rita Dove

2021 NPM 26 - Rita Dove

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

I mentioned a few days ago that we have not spent enough time focusing on Poet Laureates. The current U.S. Poet Laureate is Joy Harjo. Article # 16 focused on Ted Kooser. Today we’re going to focus on Rita Dove, who was U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995. By the way. Prior to 1986, we just referred to them as Consultants in Poetry. Why? I don’t know. SInce you’ve probably all heard of Amanda Gorman by now, unless you are living in a cave in the desert, you’re also probably aware that we now have a position called National Youth Poet Laureate. Amanda Gorman was the first of those, chosen in 2017.

While Poet Laureate sounds like an impressive title, it only comes with a stipend of $35,000, which only works out to a little over $16 an hour before taxes. That means that even the Poet Laureate better have a day job.

Rita Dove was born in 1952 in Akron, Ohio. Her father was a chemist. She was a brilliant student, and studied in Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship. She was only forty years old when she was named Poet Laureate - the youngest in American history. In addition to authoring eleven books of poetry, she is an essayist, editor, activist, novelist, and playwright, and, paired with her husband, an avid ballroom dancer. Her awards are too many to list. There are extensive collections of her poems online at the Poetry Foundation (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rita-dove) and at poets.org (https://poets.org/poet/rita-dove#poet__works)

I will say that, in general, Dove’s poetry is very readable, in Ted Kooser’s phrasing, very accessible. More than any other Poet Laureate before her,  she saw it as her mission to expand the role, as a teacher and essentially an evangelist of the art. She made an effort to be very accessible.

Today’s poem, Dusting (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35004/dusting), has a simple premise, and an elegantly simple, well-matched metaphor. It starts out:

Every day a wilderness—no

shade in sight. Beulah

patient among knicknacks,

the solarium a rage

of light, a grainstorm

as her gray cloth brings

dark wood to life.

The speaker is watching Beaulah dusting around all of the things, and polishing the wooden furniture in a sunroom, a “solarium.” It may be bright and sunny, a “rage of light” but her gray cloth (like a gray rain cloud) produces a “grainstorm” bringing the hidden details in the dark wood to light.

(You can find the full text of the article at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr)


Apr 27, 202105:30
2021 NPM 25 Khaled Mattawa

2021 NPM 25 Khaled Mattawa

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

I’m going to talk about two things today, Imagery and enumeration. Both are very common in poetry, as a vehicle for conveying ideas, emotions, memories, and metaphors. As a way to give emphasis, and to define, in example bits and pieces, those things that are often difficult to describe in their entirety.

And let's add a third topic - repetition. Poets, like songwriters, often return to the same words or phrasing repeatedly for emphasis. Sometimes they do this with rhyme or rhythm, and sometimes by repeating the same or similar words again and again.

As the basis for this discussion, I’ve chosen the poem Bedtime Reading for the Unborn Child by Libyan-American poet and translator Khaled Mattawa. He was Born in Benghazi and came to the U.S. as a teen in 1979. He studied and taught at several universities, receiving his PhD from Duke, and currently teaches at the University of Michigan.

The text of the poem is online at the Poetry Foundation (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54258/bedtime-reading-for-the-unborn-child) and Mattawa does all of these things I mentioned above, and does them beautifully. He begins by setting the scene, and the mood, and then introducing us to the title character, or maybe to his dreams for her:

Long after the sun falls into the sea

and twilight slips off the horizon like a velvet sheet

and the air gets soaked in blackness;

long after clouds hover above like boulders

and stars crawl up and stud the sky;

long after bodies tangle, dance, and falter

and fatigue blows in and bends them

and sleep unloads its dreams and kneads them

and sleepers dive into the rivers inside them,

a girl unlatches a window,

walks shoeless into a forest,

her dark hair a flag rippling in darkness.

So of course your first reaction should be an appreciative Wow at the use of language, at the velvet sheet of the horizon and clouds like boulders and crawling stars and dark hair like a rippling flag. Like I said, Wow.

(The full text of this article is available at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.)

Apr 26, 202109:13
2021 NPM 24 Michael Torres

2021 NPM 24 Michael Torres

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today I want to focus on two poems by American poet Michael Torres (https://www.michaeltorreswriter.com/). He is a current professor in the Minnesota State University system, and a former graffiti artist, originally from Pomona California. His first collection, titled An Incomplete List of Names, was published in 2020. I’m going to read from two pieces, the first is titled “Because My Brother Knows Why They Call Them “County Blues,” but Won’t Tell Me Why,” and the second one is “My Brother Is Asking for Stamps.” The complete text for both poems is available online at the Poetry Foundation.

Yesterday, I commented on Fred Marchant’s poem that bad things happen. In today’s two poems, a sibling is dealing with a brother’s incarceration in sort of a “. . . and then what happens . . . “ progression.”

In the first poem the speaker feels left behind, Sadness. Loss. Struggling to understand. He tries to come up with some kind of metaphor to help him understand. He says,

When my brother left, I painted our room

blue to make a more manageable sky. But

the room couldn’t mean anything besides

an offering of endless daylight for the parade

of shadows and the solitude shadows purchase

by virtue of their existence.

And then, he turns from color to noise, he continues, later in the poem:

Ultimatums were set,

sides chosen; each faction manufactured bigger

and bigger speakers. Volume knobs turned to 10.

Then, walls of roar. I don’t care who won. Really.

Finally, he admits,

I’m not a good liar. I’ve been looking for the perfect

metaphor for sadness. All along. I apologize

for nothing. I sit with my sadness, desperate

to relieve its weight. It’s not as easy as everyone

makes it seem.

It isn’t easy, obviously, for anyone, but adults often hide the emotions that a child or adolescent cannot.


(You can read the full article text at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.


Apr 26, 202109:09
2021 NPM 23 Fred Marchant

2021 NPM 23 Fred Marchant

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Bad things happen. They happen everywhere. Sometimes you try to disconnect from the world, but when you reconnect, they are there again, facing us, challenging us to figure out how we are going to respond. We’ve all had that experience, at one point, or at many points. You can become paranoid, or you can grow numb. Perhaps that is what Fred Marchant  (https://fredmarchant.com/) is giving us a picture of, that numbness, in his poem Here Is What the Mind Does (https://poets.org/poem/here-what-mind-does).  I had the good fortune to be able to watch and listen (thanks to Zoom) to Fred Marchant as he read several pieces as part of Amherst College’s annual Emily Dickinson reading series. He is the author of four poetry collections, and is a professor emeritus at Suffolk University.  The poem begins with:

when my laptop opens to a small red car

a tight street in Jenin gray-yellow dust

an electric window half-open and five

lean-to cards where on each a number

denotes a round spent or the place where

it began to travel at the speed of its idea

You’ve all seen this scene, on the news, in police procedural dramas on television, in movies. This one happens to be in Jenin, a West Bank city. Note that the person narrating this is not talking about the how or the why or the who - questions that perhaps no one can answer. It is absorbed in the small details - the yellow dust, the half-open car window, the ubiquitous  numbered tent-cards. Why? Because, Marchant is telling us, that “is what the mind does” when faced with violence on such a persistent basis.


(You can read the full article text at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.)

Apr 24, 202104:23
2021 NPM 22 Kashiana Sharma (fictional)

2021 NPM 22 Kashiana Sharma (fictional)

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today is celebrated as Earth Day, a day to be introspective and consider the state of the world we live in, and the world we leave to our children, and our children’s children. At the risk of being a little self-serving I’m going to  take a detour into The Republic of Dreams and talk about a character from Final Orbit, my seventh novel, and one which focuses heavily on environmental themes. That character is named Kashiana, in deference to one of my co-hosts, and she is a future astronaut and poet, looking down from an orbiting space station at the earth below, and commenting, in her own voice, on what she is seeing.

Only the first stanza appears in the book. The rest I added for the current theme of Wednesday Night Poetry (https://www.facebook.com/WednesdayNightPoetry) , Kai Coggin’s long-running invited guest and open mic series. If you have not had a chance to listen in, I recommend it highly.

The View from Above

I see tendrils of time creeping into reality,

Tongues of flame erasing the living things from the landscape

As a rampant red pen with searing strokes of deletion,

Or cruel fluid fingers drowning homes and habitats,

Removing a patina of life from the estuaries of the world,

As if our mother planet no longer desired her emerald adornments.

The brilliant snow capped mountains, and floating icefields

Have melted away to nothing, leaving lonely patterns

Of naked gray rock, and turbid gray waters,

Where no life lingers. Where nothing grows.

I am returning soon, to the great grayness below.

And as we humans cope as best we can,

With a world where wasteland replaces watershed,

Where wonders disappear daily,

We can only wonder why they did nothing for all those years,

Letting waste and greed rule their lives,

Letting opportunity slide through their fingers

Like the sands of the worlds beaches, now buried

Beneath the unstoppable onslaught

Of the gray waters that obey no laws,

Recognize no borders, and bow to no authority.


This is from Final Orbit, Not All Ghosts are Human, The Autobiography of Mario Ng

Available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08R2FW42K).

Thank you for Listening. If you’re enjoying these commentaries, and the poem selections, please share them - either the text versions or the podcasts - on social media. You can find more at theotherpages.org, The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr, or at The Republic of Dreams (https://www.facebook.com/therepublicofdreams/)

Apr 22, 202102:57
2021 NPM 21 Vona Groarke

2021 NPM 21 Vona Groarke

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today’s selection once again focuses on a poet I should have known about, but did not. Irish poet Voana Groarke was born in Mostrim (population 2,072) in the middle of the country. She received her degrees from Irish universities including Trinity College, Dublin, before coming to the U.S. to teach at Villanova and Wake Forest. She currently teaches at the University of Manchester in the UK. She has published six volumes of poetry, won several prizes and awards for her writing, and is also currently editor of the Poetry Ireland Review.

Today’s poem is simple, and yet not so simple. It’s a character study, perhaps in the vein of Longfellow’s famous blacksmith, about an Italian stone carver, who works on headstones for the local cemetery. It is a more thoughtful portrait however, far from one-dimensional, with an interplay of thought between the perfect figures he carves, intricate but lifeless, frozen in time, and life’s simple, but transient realities.

She begins with,

The day is hot. So far this morning

his hand has held true, not a stipple,

not a glitch unwarranted. Some days

his right hand contradicts what his left

(his holding, placid, steadfast left) requires.

He works in shade. A man of means has died

and the dying must be marked in marble

carved to trap not grief but its dramatized affect:

a mantilla so fine it weeps its lace; a boot so certain,

it folds the fact of death in every crease.

As he carves exactingly detailed portraits of others in stone, he thinks about his own family, and his own life. The observed details of life are simple, but very sensory in nature: The curl of his wife’s hair, the tilt of his daughter’s chin when singing, rabbit and peaches for dinner. His mind goes back and forth, methodically, between the two worlds he inhabits:

(The full article text is available at theotherpages.org, or at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.

Apr 21, 202108:26
2021 NPM 20 Nora Marks Dauenhauer

2021 NPM 20 Nora Marks Dauenhauer

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Occasional poetry consists mainly of poems written to remember or commemorate special events. Battles, coronations, state funerals, the dedication of a building. But poets write many occasional poems at a more personal level - on the birth of a child, for example. I always thought one of the masters of simple, domestic occasional pieces of light verse was Christopher Morley. There is a large collection of his works at theotherpages.org.

Today’s poem, however, is very specific. The viewpoint, I think, is a grandmother, relishing the amazing skills of her granddaughter. You might simply consider it a descriptive poem, but from the Grandmother’s viewpoint, as the title words suggest, it was a memorable occasion.

That title is  Amelia’s First Ski Run, and yes we’re out of season, but the sense of pride, the use of sounds, and the elegant simplicity of the short poem caught my eye and ear.

First the poet: Nora Marks Dauenhauer (1927-2017) grew up as a member of the Tlinget tribe in Alaska. Her father was a fisherman, and the family lived in seasonal camps, and sometimes aboard a fishing boat. Imagine how much change she saw in those ninety years. She earned a degree in Anthropology, and became a poet, author, and scholar of her native Tlinget language. She went on to become the Alaska State Writer Laureate.

By the way, current U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo is also a Nora Dauenhauer fan. You can listen to her reading How to Make Good Baked Salmon from the River on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bX2x2Rf7tI). If you listen, besides Harjo’s joy at reading the description, what comes across is Dauenhauer’s own joy in remembering traditional ways and relishing traditional foods, and her honest acknowledgement that, inevitably, living in a city apartment may require a few compromises on traditional recipes and cooking techniques.

But for today, I chose a shorter poem, one that gets across that first idea, that joy and pride, without compromise. Dauenhauer was born near Juneau, and the poem’s heading indicates it was written at Eaglecrest, a nearby public ski run. Sourdough is one of the highest runs on the mountain.

She starts out:

Amelia, space-age girl

at top of Sourdough

makes her run with Eagle Grandpa Dick,

Raven girl, balancing on space,

gliding on air

in Tlingit colors:

And later:

Once in a while

I could even see space

between her legs and skis.


(You can read the full article text at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr)

Apr 20, 202105:07
2021 NPM 19 The gleaming work of Kazim Ali - The Voice of Sheila Chandra.

2021 NPM 19 The gleaming work of Kazim Ali - The Voice of Sheila Chandra.

Is a book in which the poems feel like succulents. Lonely and speaking of survival.

By Kashiana Singh

Poet and writer Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian descent.  Ali lives in Oberlin, Ohio and cofounded Nightboat Books in 2003. He teaches, writes poetry, and reads. Ali’s latest poetry collection is The Voice of Sheila Chandra (Alice James Books, 2020). He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Besides other books, he also has a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light.

Sheila Chandra is a singer who had to retire from performing due to being afflicted with burning mouth syndrome, which she has had since 2010. She was known for the richness and fluidity of

her voice. She is effectively mute, and communicates in person largely through handwritten notes and very basic sign language. Sheila’s “Speaking in Tongues” series stood as Top 10 on the Billboard World Music and stayed ahead on the label in the US for several weeks.

Sheila’s work "Ever So Lonely" by Monsoon is at the center of this collection, The Voice of Sheila Chandra. This particular album concentrates on the purity and emotional intensity of Chandra’s extraordinary voice and is a representation of what Sheila believes is her universal form of inspiration. She says in an interview

“It’s as if an outside influence has entered me, sound is channel led through my body like a flute and there’s no sensation in my throat.”

So where does Kazim Ali come in? He comes in with a brave, unique, titular work dedicated to Sheila Chandra. And much more.

Kazim Ali chants – he sings – he howls

“Dark earth come Sheila

Dame ocean dome this poem

Roam to tome tomb foam

It is an incantation; it is a chant”

Kazim’s work picks up many underlying threads and moves in and out through the work of Sheila Chandra as it gropes with the everlasting, never answered, universal questions about existence.

(The full text of the podcast is available at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr, or through theotherpages.org)

Apr 19, 202109:41
2021 NPM 18 Melissa Balmain

2021 NPM 18 Melissa Balmain

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Did I mention that we haven't talked about love poems much in this series? We still aren’t there, but at least we have the title this time.  Love Poem by Melissa Balmain is light verse-ish. What is light verse? Great question. There is no real definition. In general, it's an ironic, sometimes humorous treatment of a subject or a person, written more to entertain than to probe deeply into a concept. It’s often observational, and as with today’s poem, slightly skewed logic and comparisons are common. In some cases, it might be thought of as what a meme might have sounded like before the internet.

First, a quick comment about the poet. Melissa Balmain is a poet, journalist, humorist and teacher. She’s the editor of a journal of light verse, titled, logically enough, Light (https://lightpoetrymagazine.com/) and teaches at the University of Rochester.

Getting back to the poem, what struck me was not the poetic techniques, or novel vocabulary, or unusual insight, but the fact that light verse, and the ironic or sardonic or sarcastic tone it often takes, is a wonderful vehicle for stating the obvious. Or at least, what should be obvious.

I am an Engineer by day (novelist and editor by night) so my normal inclination when anything isn't working, is to fix it. My wife gets annoyed with me sometimes, for taking something the neighbors threw out, lugging it home, and making it look like new again, or making it into something completely different, but useful. I was always a fan of Charles Dutton as garbage collector Roc Emerson, turning castaway items into a well-equipped, if miss-matched home.

Melissa Balmain looks into this idea, with the view that, if we can make something look so good, why give it up?

Her Love Poem starts out:

The afternoon we left our first apartment,

we scrubbed it down from ceiling to parquet.

Who knew the place could smell like lemon muffins?

It suddenly seemed nuts to move away.

She takes that idea, and revisits the logic through several examples - a common technique in light verse - including fixing up a car, and tuning a piano, and then focuses her attention on human relationships:


(The full article text is available on Facebook or Tumblr)

Once again this is Steve Spanoudis for theotherpages.org.

Thank you for Listening. If you’re enjoying these commentaries, and the poem selections, please share them - either the text versions or the podcasts - on social media.

You can find more at theotherpages.org, or at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.


Apr 19, 202104:30
2021 NPM 17 Keorapetse William Kgositsile

2021 NPM 17 Keorapetse William Kgositsile

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh,and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

I have emphasized that poetry, because it has the ability to fix things in memory, to make them understood and memorable and give them emotional weight, is highly effective at saying the important things that need to be said in this world. Along with the things that amuse and entertain, that describe and narrate, that create wonder and introspection, we need poems that say the important things.

Earlier in this series we had poems from Ladan Osman and Maria Nazos that were in that category. Today’s poem by South African Poet Laureate Keorapetse William Kgositsile is very much in this vein, and if you remember nothing else from this year’s articles, I would like you to remember this one.

First, a few comments about the poet. Keorapetse William Kgositsile (1938-2018) was born and grew up in an impoverished South African Township, witness to many of the ills not only of Apartheid, but to the long-lived consequences of European colonialism on the african continent.

He became active in the African National Congress, as journalist and as an outspoken voice, but was urged,  for his own safety, to leave the country in 1961. He spent most of his twenty years of exile in the United States, where, after earning his Masters at Columbia, he became a visible presence as a spoken word performer in NewYork. He taught at multiple universities and published ten collections of poetry and two more books on writing poetry.

Today’s poem, Anguish Longer than Sorrow, is about the accident of birth, or, as he describes it simply, referring to the children of families fleeing violence and starvation:

Empty their young eyes

deprived of a vision of any future

they should have been entitled to

since they did not choose to be born

where and when they were

So yes, if you have not figured it out yet, today’s discussion is about borders. In the U.S., discussions of the southern border have been an incendiary topic, fanned by political interests to polarize the population and garner money through fear. But the topic is global. This problem is everywhere.

Listen to the poet's own reading here: (https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/anguish-longer-sorrow-5908)

(You can read the full article text at theotherpages.org, or at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.


Apr 17, 202107:10
2021 NPM 16 - Ted Kooser

2021 NPM 16 - Ted Kooser

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh,and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

It’s hard, in the course of one month, for us to give you, the listener, or the reader, a full spectrum overview of all that is poetry. As the curator of the series, all I can say is that I try my best to look for shortcomings, and fill them.  One is that we have probably not featured enough poems by poet laureates. Today we’ll chip away at that deficit with a poem by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. (https://www.tedkooser.net/)

Today’s poem is titled In the Basement of the Goodwill Store, and the full text is online at the Poetry Foundation website (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42631/in-the-basement-of-the-goodwill-store).

I’m going to try and squeeze in two concepts and an anecdote. First is the idea, the conceit in this case, that things can take on a life of their own without us. A second life perhaps. For those elsewhere, or from the more monied side of the spectrum, let me explain that the Goodwill is a store that makes its money by selling people’s discards to other people for a profit. Yes, they are making money off the poor, but things can be cheaply had by those who need them, in places where more affluent stores would never consider going.

Kooser, as poets commonly do, gets across this idea, and its atmospherics, by talking through the small details:

In musty light, in the thin brown air

of damp carpet, doll heads and rust,

beneath long rows of sharp footfalls

like nails in a lid, an old man stands

trying on glasses, lifting each pair

from the box like a glittering fish

and holding it up to the light

of a dirty bulb.

I want to comment on how artfully Kooser chooses his descriptive words: the “thin brown air”, “damp carpet” - can you smell the mustiness? And especially the sharp footfalls - the implication, from the way it is worded, is that they might just as well be the sound of nails in his coffin lid.

You can read the full article text at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.


Apr 16, 202105:25
2021 NPM 15 Michael Hamburger

2021 NPM 15 Michael Hamburger

National Poetry Month Number 15 - Michael Hamburger - The Grape and Nut Letter

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh,and (Nelson) Howard Miller.I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today's article is the third of three by Nelson Howard Miller, one of the major contributors to Poets’ Corner at https://theotherpages.org. Anything with the initials NM next to it, is thanks to him. He’s also a poet and a retired English professor.

Michael Hamburger (1924 - 2007) was a German-born writer whose family moved to Britain in 1933 where he grew up and was educated.  He was a poet, critic, teacher, and translator of many German-language poets.  Between 1966 and 1978, he held positions at a number of U. S. universities, but returned to England permanently in 1978.

He published over 20 volumes of poetry, employing both meter and rhyme as well as free verse; his subjects include themes of loss and the natural world, particularly man's relation to nature.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=33448

His poem "Grape and Nut Letter" is a thank-you letter to friends for allowing the speaker to pick "the last grapes / from your fallen vines" at the very end of the growing season; the grapes are just passing the point where they would be useful to humans and thus are "yours no longer"  but are still of value to

"insect, bird,

Rodent closer to soil

Than the makers of wine . . . ."

Similarly, the last of fruiting nuts are developing thicker shells which only the teeth of animals can penetrate, "no teeth but a squirrel's can crack," and which still contain "only a hint of savour."

The meaning here, the speaker says, is "Cryptic," but the significance, he implies, lies in the fact that nature does not exist just for man’s benefit alone; that dying vines "Still forbear to put out thorns" indicates that they exist for the benefit of other creatures as well, a theme that appears in several of his poems.

The full text of Michael Hamburger’s poem is online at The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=33448

Thankyou for Listening. If you’re enjoying these commentaries, and the poem selections, please share them - either the text versions or the podcasts - on social media.

You can find more at theotherpages.org, or at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.

Apr 15, 202103:32
2021 NPM 14 - Richard Blanco

2021 NPM 14 - Richard Blanco

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh,and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

As a novelist, and one who subjects his characters to perils that sometimes go off the charts, I recognize they need resilience, but also they need anchors. Some thought or person or place that provides them a concept of stability when nothing else can, and their world is in utter chaos.

Think about your own life. Do you know what your anchors are?

Continuing this train of thought, poets often do the same thing, or at least something similar. You realize it sometimes in how they describe a person, or place, or thing, or event, and how it connected with them in their past, and how they look for something with relatable resonance in the present to hold on to.

Today’s poem, El Florida Room (https://poets.org/poem/el-florida-room), by Richard Blanco, is about a very specific place, as the anchor to a life.  I’m not going to go deep into his biography - there is plenty on the Poetry Foundation website (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/richard-blanco), or you can go to his own website at https://richard-blanco.com/ . I’m just to comment on two things: one is that he is an Inaugural poet - meaning he was chosen to read at a presidential inauguration - there are only a very few of those.  Amanda Gorman is in very select company - she makes number five.  The other thing is that he is an Engineer / Writer / Poet, something I aspire to be, and yes, probably something else there aren’t a lot of.

Defining terms, a Florida room, generally, is a room at the back of a house with windows that look out onto garden flowers. Ideally the windows are big and also let in lots of sun. Ideally there are flowers to be looked at, and ideally the windows are louvered, to let in fresh air.

In Richard Blanco’s case,

Not a study or a den, but El Florida

as my mother called it, a pretty name

for the room with the prettiest view

of the lipstick-red hibiscus puckered up

against the windows, the tepid breeze

laden with the brown-sugar scent

of loquats drifting in from the yard.


You can read the full text of the article  at theotherpages.org, or at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.

Apr 14, 202105:58
2021 NPM 13 - Tina Cane / Anna Akhmatova

2021 NPM 13 - Tina Cane / Anna Akhmatova

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh,and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Earlier in this series I commented on Irish poet Eavan Borland’s poem referencing American poet Anne Bradstreet. Today we’re going to shift timelines and talk about Tina Cane’s poem Some Kinds of Fire.

Cane is an American poet and currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island. She grew up in New York City, and many of her poems speak to life there. Her poem Sirens - a character study / memoriam  is a good example. I was listening to her read several pieces earlier this month during the Camperdown poetry series season finale.

This particular poem caught my attention for several reasons. One is that it references iconic Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. In her poem, Cane visualizes a fire scene - one of many things that happened at New York’s Chelsea Hotel - home, over the years, to an absurd number of poets, and artists, actors and dreamers of all sorts, - in which a fire creates an ambiance like a war zone:

iron balconies were dropping like lace

windows were popping like sobs...

Despite the drama and descriptive poetic language here in the middle of the poem, what caught my eye an ear was the opening:

Anna Akhmatova burned

her poems

A line that is a story all in itself. Akhmatova is a woman who struggled to say what she wanted - not because she had any difficulty in putting words on the page, but because, through war, and revolution, and war, and pogroms and gulags and threats, and a thousand shattered hopes and dreams, she was kept from writing what she wanted. Her books were banished, she was heavily censored at the best of times, and much of what she did manage to get published was destroyed.

You can read the full text at:

The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.

And you can learn more about Tina Cane at https://www.tinacane.ink/about.html


Apr 13, 202104:06
2021 NPM 12 Leila Chatti

2021 NPM 12 Leila Chatti

Writing of womanhood - Deluge, a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.

Kashiana Singh

In her debut collection of poems - Deluge, released April 2020 by Copper Canyon Press, Leila Chatti explores what the body can do and how the female experience with the body

is often canonized. She writes with inner most persuasion and focus towards the woman. Her style is gentle, her words trip over each other into the pathways of menstruation, aches and arrivals and stirred stories of possibilities.

Reading Leila Chatti is like being on a pilgrimage to an ancient monument or temple, a hush settles as one reads out loud poems like Conversation whispered between lovers – lovers as in the body and it’s being, the mind and it’s awakening to womanhood, the soul in an embrace of itself. Deluge stems from a deep personal space, the lived experience. The truth of her writing is palpable and actually is elevated through the poem.

Like a goddess song, she sings through her words in language that singes into our spaces. Burning not in a destructive way but in a healing way. Like an untethered placenta she often talks about, this fire is the fire of the woman’s blood, her willingness to be “give up the inconceivable heaven for a warmth, I can sense”. In her poem Nulligravida Nocturne Leila Chatti talks about the endless well – of darkness, of blood, of doubt, of shadows.

I like Mary a little better when I imagine her like this, crouched and cursing

a boy-God pushing on

her cervix (I like remembering

she had a cervix, her body ordinary

and so, like mine)

I am both awestruck and awakened by her approach to Mary in the book and specifically in her poem, Confession. She demystifies Mary by bringing her to life in the moment that should matter the most – birth of Jesus. Yet is not a moment described in any text. Instead of shying away from it, Leila addresses the moment of delivering a child “like a secret she never wanted to hear”

Confession is reticent in such a powerful, controlled way that one can feel one’s physical self-pulled into each poem. In reading these poems, one is moved as one is moved when a deep spiritual experience takes you into the core of a hymn or a chant.

She brings an invocation to Mary in her poem, “Questions directed toward the idea of Mary” in which she asks in a subtle whisper – “Do you wish for me the freedom of a vast barren plain?”

Her poetry is full of empathy – in the choice of words she is empathizing with every woman who has faced a deluge in life – of emotions, of physical responses, of others wanting to judge, of contradictions. . . 

(You can read the full text at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.)

Apr 11, 202110:47
2021 NPM 11 Yolanda Wisher

2021 NPM 11 Yolanda Wisher

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair i, Kashiana Singh and (Nelson) Howard Miller.

In retrospect, love poems, as such, are not a form we have covered much in this series. Today’s poem is an unusual one. Like the earlier example from Ladan Osman, this is also a prose poem, though on a lighter subject. It might be more accurately classified as an infatuation poem. Maybe a serious infatuation poem. Not a serious poem, a seriously infatuated poem.

As a slight tangent, I would comment that over the past year of pandemic, where so many have been isolated in their homes, nesting tendencies have been magnified: people have obsessed over pets, plants, and all aspects of their homes and immediate surroundings. Including food, of course, but foodie culture has been on the upswing for most of the last two decades. Cable TV has popularized what was, in the past, either a highly specialized, or highly pretentious vocabulary. And speaking of tangents, yes, today’s poet takes that vocabulary, that lexicon, in a whole new direction.

One of the things I like best about doing this series, is it gives me the opportunity to learn about new poets. Or at least, new to me. I often realize, as in the case of today’s poet Yolanda Wisher, that I should have known about them already.  Born in 1976, she is a poet, educator, spoken word performer, and lead singer for the band Yolanda Wisher and the Big Fixx. She is currently the Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, and you can learn more about her, hear her singing, and listen to her performing some of her poems on her website, http://yolandawisher.com

I’m not going to read today’s poem out loud for reasons that will be obvious when you hear her. It’s far better coming from her as a performance piece. I’ll just comment for the movie aficionados out there, that if  Georgia Byrd in the remake of Last Holiday could have said what she was thinking about Sean Matthews out loud, this would be the script.

It’s called sonnet w / cooking lexicon, and while it has a few sonnet structural elements, but is essentially a prose poem in 14 lines.

So I’m going to send you to Yolanda Wisher’s website. Go to the Gallery page and hear her sing, and then tab to the right a few times in the gallery until you see her standing on a darkened stage at BIF2018. It is well worth your time to listen. There is also a link directly to her reading in the text.

http://www.yolandawisher.com/gallery/2018/10/2/yolanda-wisher-a-poet-of-people-and-place

As a treat tomorrow, if all goes well, instead of me you’ll be hearing the first of this year’s pieces from Kashiana Singh. Always a voice worth listening to. I hope you’re enjoying the series. If you are, please share the link on social media.

Thanks for Listening

You can find more at theotherpages.org, or at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.

Apr 11, 202102:57
2021 NPM 10 Tishani Doshi

2021 NPM 10 Tishani Doshi

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Poems can be about many things, sometimes physical things, or events or people, or as in Thursday’s poem by Hayden Carruth, things and the relationships of things.  One thing poetry does well, I think, is give us a medium for describing abstract things by anchoring them with a comparison of some kind, or giving a descriptive example.

Today’s poem by Indian poet Tishani Doshi is an almost imagist take on strength and stability. On holding the world together. It makes me think of another line from A.E. Houseman’s Epitaph on an army of Mercenaries:

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;

They stood, and the earth's foundations stay;

First a few comments on the poet. Tishani Doshi was born in 1975 in Madras, India, and received a Masters’ in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S.. She has published ten books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and has won numerous awards for her writing. She is an unusually multifaceted individual, with a significant presence as a poet, author, journalist, dancer, public speaker, biographer, blogger, and cricket commentator. She advocates on environmental issues and on the violence against women, persistent issues in India, and elsewhere. For those into mindfulness, she has an interesting take on time in one TEDx talk “The Luxury of Slowness,” and a poetry reading at another. Both combine her thoughts on dance, and on words.

Today’s poem, The Day We Went to the Sea is available online in several places, including her website, http://www.tishanidoshi.com/.  It happens to be an unnaturally windy day:

The day we went to the sea

mothers in Madras were mining

the Marina for missing children.

Thatch flew in the sky, prisoners

ran free, houses danced like danger

in the wind.

The consonance is very strong (note all the wave-like m’s and w’s), and how things are paired - mining the Marina, danced with danger, gives added emphasis.

Amid the chaos and the uncertainty, the narrator observes one point of stability:

I saw a woman hold

the tattered edge of the world

in her hand, look past the temple

which was still standing, as she was -

miraculously whole in the debris of gaudy

South Indian sun.


The full text of the article is available at theotherpages.org, or at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.



Apr 10, 202104:38
2021 NPM 09 Eavan Borland

2021 NPM 09 Eavan Borland

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida.

It is not uncommon for poets to write poems about the art of writing poems, or about other poets, especially those they admire. In the category of light verse, where humor and sarcasm predominate, poems about people they despise are often common.

But today’s piece by Irish poet Eavan Borland is definitely a case of strong admiration, for a poet I have also always admired. First we’ll talk about Anne Bradstreet, the woman who is the subject of the poem.

Bradstreet, who lived from 1612 until 1672 CE, was the first person residing in the Americas to become recognized and published as a poet. This was at a time when just getting to the Colonies was perilous, and life there was harsh, at best. Being sent to the Colonies as a punishment was considered by some to be the equivalent of a death sentence.

We have several of her works online at theotherpages.org (https://theotherpages.org/poems/poem-ab.html#bradstreet) (we should definitely have more; I’ll work on that over the summer).

That she lived to age sixty was quite uncommon for her time and place. That she became a poet, and managed to get her works published in England, makes her unique for the times. Particularly unique, when you realize that, in the Puritanical culture of Colonial Massachusetts, writing was considered a highly improper activity for a woman. The headwinds against her were considerable.

Eavan Borland (who was born in 1944 in Dublin, and died there in 2020), was a professor-in-residence at Stanford University from 1996 onward, and split her time between California and Ireland. She wrote many poems, essays, and pieces of literary criticism. Much of her writing focused on the everyday lives of women, and the hurdles they faced in a male-dominated society, something that Anne Bradstreet herself would have no-doubt appreciated, although she also took on painful topics including domestic violence, in common with Wednesday’s piece by Maria Nazos.

Today’s short poem, Becoming Anne Bradstreet,  is a meditation by Borland on what it must have been like to be Anne Bradstreet, and the kinship she feels towards her, and understanding of what she must have gone through in life. Each time she reads Bradstreet’s poems, according to her own poem, she feels hope and optimism, and a connectedness:

Mare Hibernicum leads to Anne Bradstreet's coast.

A blackbird leaves her pine trees

And lands in my spruce trees.

I open my door on a Dublin street.

Her child/her words are staring up at me

Boats sailing the Irish Sea (that’s Mare Hibernicum in Latin) visible from Dublin, can be sailed all the way to American shores.

(To read the full text of the article, go to  The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.)


Apr 09, 202104:05
2021 NPM 08 Hayden Carruth

2021 NPM 08 Hayden Carruth

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today’s piece was contributed by (Nelson) Howard Miller, who has been one of the major contributors to Poets’ Corner (you can find the full collection at https://theotherpages.org/poems/). Anything with the initials NM next to it, is something he selected, transcribed and edited.

Hayden Carruth (1921 - 2008) lived much of his life in Vermont where he earned his living through a combination of farmwork, editing various literary magazines, and teaching at a number of colleges and universities.

He wrote thirty volumes of poetry, and much of it draws upon his experiences with nature and farming, and with the people of rural New England. He is also considered a significantly philosophical poet. He often writes formal poems -  using meter, rhyme, and set forms, especially the sonnet, but also writes highly rhythmic free verse influenced by jazz and the blues.

He also has a number of longer poems; I particularly like the early pieces "Journey to a Known Place" and "North Winter" as well as the later "Vermont."

Today’s poem The Ravine (https://www.poetryexplorer.net/poem.php?id=10005076) is a nature poem which is also a philosophical meditation on identity, relationship, and meaning.

The poem opens with a detailed description of the ravine in summer -- grass, weeds, one dead and two live animals.  The speaker then contrasts what he sees with the appearances of the ravine in both spring (flooded) and winter (snow-filled), in both cases hidden from view.

Over "geologic time," the ravine will change, either vanishing altogether or becoming deeper; recognizing these possibilities brings "sorrow," because the speaker sees not individual things but "relationships," how things are connected rather than the beauty of what is individual and unique; there is a sense that, for him, something is lost as a consequence.

Finally, he questions what these relationships themselves may mean, but he cannot arrive at an understanding and ends the poem by twice repeating his own puzzlement:

"I wonder what they mean.  Every day,

day after day, I wonder what they mean."

Thanks for Listening

You can find more at theotherpages.org, or at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.

Apr 08, 202103:46
2021 NPM 07 Maria Nazos

2021 NPM 07 Maria Nazos

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

It’s generally easier to write free verse or blank verse than it is to write highly structured, rhymed poems, but forms with structure and repeating patterns can often be far more memorable and impactful. Sometimes, as in today’s piece by American poet Maria Nazos, the same structure can reinforce the message and resonate on many levels. Today’s poem was originally published 2019, in the Winter/Spring issue of TriQuarterly.

The title, Waitress in a Small Town Seaside Tavern, may suggest you are in for a rustic character sketch. Nope. That idea is thrown out after the first stanza. Maybe even after the first line. It starts out:

Maybe a surfboard hit her, you say.

Though folks whisper, her man beats her,

and there are no waves today.

Her eye is black and sealed like a shutter.

Clearly domestic abuse is the thing we’re going to talk about. Just from these four lines you understand that the locals are aware of the violence, but do nothing. You (the perhaps narrator) Try to think of a plausible excuse (the surfboard?) but your own conscience refutes that (“there are no waves today”) and the black, swollen eye is physical evidence that is hard to ignore.

Everything here in the first stanza sets up patterns that run throughout the piece. Those patterns of rhyme and repetition echo and reinforce all of these issues - the recurring cycle of violence, attempts to hide or dismiss or excuse the issue, despite all evidence to the contrary, and the painful fact that the victim is trapped in this cycle, just as her own eye is “sealed like a shutter.”

She continues:

We've all heard, her man, he beats her.

Still, we look at her and then look away,

her eye is sealed like a shutter.

(There are no waves this week; the sea is calm today.)

The second stanza both reshuffles and reinforces the first. You might “look at her and then look away,” but the repetition implies that neither the problem, nor this message, are going away. And things may appear calm (in parentheses) you already know that isn’t true. This structure is called a pantoum, and like a villanelle or a sestina, it uses a specific pattern of introduction and repetition to reinforce ideas. 

(to read the full article text, visit The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.)

(Waitress in a Small Town Seaside Tavern is © 2019 and © 2020 by Maria Nazos, all rights reserved worldwide, reproduced here by permission of the author.  Maria’s 2011 collection, A Hymn that Meanders is available from Amazon, and her 2016 chapbook, Still Life, is available from Dancing Girl Press.

You can learn more about her, and follow her blog on her website (https://www.marianazos.com/)

Apr 07, 202108:17
2021 NPM 06 Pat Mora

2021 NPM 06 Pat Mora

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today we’re going to take a look at a short, tightly-written, and beautifully interwoven poem by American Poet Pat Mora, who was born in El Paso, Texas, and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, both places in which the desert is never far away. The desert is an important presence in today’s poem, Curandera (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57665/curandera). In fact, you might consider it as much a character as the Curandera herself.

The title is a Spanish word whose equivalent in English would be Medicine Woman. The opening stanza gives us identity:

They think she lives alone

on the edge of town in a two-room house

where she moved when her husband died

at thirty-five of a gunshot wound

in the bed of another woman. The curandera

and house have aged together to the rhythm

of the desert.

The husband’s killer is not identified. The first line also adds ambiguity. But the important line is the last one, that cements the structure of this tight porm - that the Curandera and her home are one with the desert. That rhythm concept runs throughout. Perhaps, to be a Curandera, she must be married to the desert, and to no one else. Note that Mora emphasizes the idea of rhythm in her word choices and word order - repeated vowel sounds (assonance) and consonants (consonance).

She wakes early, lights candles before

her sacred statues, brews tea of yerbabuena.

She moves down her porch steps, rubs

cool morning sand into her hands, into her arms.

Like a large black bird, she feeds on

the desert, gathering herbs for her basket.

The second stanza reinforces the idea that she is immersed in the desert - she rubs its sands into her skin, she drinks tea made from desert mint, she “feeds on the desert”, “like a large black bird” - Large black birds in the desert are often vultures, scavenging the remains of the dead, adding to her mystical nature and reinforcing the metaphor.

The third stanza continues describing the rhythm of the Curandera’s life, made up of small details, but returns, yet again, to the desert, “always, to the desert.”

By sunset she is tired. The wind

strokes the strands of long gray hair,

the smell of drying plants drifts

into her blood, the sun seeps

into her bones. She dozes

on her back porch. Rocking, rocking.

And now the desert wind, like a spouse or a lover, is stroking her hair, and seeping into her blood and her bones. The consonance here is very strong: sun / set / she / strokes / strands / smell / plants / drifts / bones / she / dozes.  “S” sounds are everywhere, yet the word choices match well. The s-s-s- reinforces the sound of the wind, her sleeping, and perhaps the seeping process, as the medicine woman seems now to have become a part of the desert herself. The “Rocking, Rocking,” of her chair again echoes and reinforces the rhythms throughout the poem.

Apr 06, 202103:59
2021 NPM 05 Ladan Osman

2021 NPM 05 Ladan Osman

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida.

One “new” poetic form that has become increasingly popular in recent decades is the prose poem. Perhaps I should mention that poetry is such an ancient art that anything in the last century still qualifies as, well, relatively new. Denise Levertov, whom I discussed earlier, wrote many. It’s one of the few forms we have not delved into previously in this series.

What is a prose poem? Basically it is something written with poetically descriptive language and maybe some other features of sound and rhythm and thought structure, in a largely unstructured physical form (think paragraphs). If you’ve read enough, you can probably think of some story writers who write this way. Sandra Cisneros is a good example.

Today’s poem is by Somali-American poet Ladan Osman, whom I had the pleasure of listening to as she was reading her poem Water during a book launch for Saddiq Dzukogi, who we may feature later in the series. Her poem The Key is written in prose style and comes from her Book, The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony, published in 2015.

The voice in the poem is reminiscent of Esperanza from Cisneros’ House on Mango Street in terms of a child's observational language. It encapsulates three narrative pieces - overhearing her parents discussing a problem, trying to understand the problem at a child’s level, and going off on a personal quest to try and find a solution - though whether that search was real, or imagined, is something even the unnamed narrator cannot tell for certain.

On a very different level, it is clearly an allegory for the disparity in opportunity between white and black in America, on perhaps the same level of symbolism the movie Parasite used to show economic class disparities in Korean society, but Osman does it very effectively in the space of a single paragraph.

The metaphorical key in question is whatever will open the door of opportunity for her father, and her family. She assumes it is a real key and takes the fanciest key she can find from among her family’s collection and tries all of the doors around town, hoping to find one that opens. When she does finally succeed, she becomes entrapped in a place that is alien and terrifying, full of hard white surfaces. She finds no answers, she just feels frightened and alone, until “a surprised guy, white, wearing white” releases her, from her nightmare.

The child’s viewpoint makes us think through the images she describes, from her view of her parents toes from under the table, to the dark cloud that hovers over her house, the “darkest” in the neighborhood, to the letters written in spit on her dusty leg, the dresser with the crooked mouth, and the metal keys that smell like a missing tooth.

Osman’s allegory is emblematic of our current times, when half of our society seems to be beginning to understand the disparities that exist, and the other half is doggedly keeping their eyes wide shut. By using a child’s viewpoint, she gives us a vision of both how cruel and how damaging hatred is, for a child, and for us all.

If you ever get the opportunity to hear Ladan Osman read, please take advantage of it. The full text of The Key is available at poets.org.

For access to more poetry and other resources, visit https://theotherpages.org or follow The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr

Apr 05, 202105:46
2021 NPM 03 Vassar Miller

2021 NPM 03 Vassar Miller

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades. After yesterday’s light-humored contemplation of Karma, we turn to more serious stuff, as today is Easter Sunday, as recognized by the non-Orthodox Christian faiths. Orthodox faiths follow the Julian rather than the Gregorian calendar, which recognizes May 2nd this year. Faiths of all kinds are a common subject, as well as a persistent metaphor in poetry.

Today’s piece was contributed by (Nelson) Howard Miller, who has been one of the major contributors to Poets’ Corner (https://theotherpages.org/poems/). Anything with the initials NM next to it, is something he transcribed and edited.

Vassar Miller (who lived from 1924 to 1998) was born in Houston, Texas and lived there all her life. She was named Texas poet laureate two times.

She was born with cerebral palsy and learned to write at an early age with the help of a typewriter. Despite her disability, she produced 10 volumes of poetry between 1956 and 1981.  Much of her work is rigorously formal, with carefully crafted form, meter, and rhyme. That is especially true of her sonnets.

Her two main subjects are the effects of disability - especially the isolation which is often one of its consequences, and her deep religious faith.

Her poem "Without Ceremony" is a Shakespearian sonnet. It is the first poem of her second book [I]Wage War on Silence[/I], published in 1960 and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The book's title comes from this poem (lines 9 - 10).

Contrary to what we might expect from someone to whom words were so important, she contends that we have no words with which to pray meaningfully to God;  the only prayer which matters is the self, humbled before God:  “We fall not on

our knees, but on our hearts," where God is the only word which matters:

"Oh Word, in whom our wordiness dissolves,

When we have not a prayer except ourselves."

https://www.reddit.com/r/ReligiousPoetry/comments/8897k5/poet_of_the_month_vassar_miller/

Nelson comments that he also admires her Italian sonnet titled “Holy Week,” a sentiment echoed by fellow Texan and author Larry McMurtry, who considered her the best poet in Texas. She is also, according to Nelson, the only poet he is aware of has who used the word "artichoke" as a rhyme word in a serious sonnet. (yes, it is in "Holy Week.")

Thanks for Listening

You can find more at theotherpages.org, or at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.

Apr 04, 202103:32
2021 NPM 03 Terence Degnan

2021 NPM 03 Terence Degnan

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

In today’s short poem, the yes no, American poet Terence Degnan explores the idea of karma, in a slightly sideways sense. While I’m not one of those people who believe that for every good thing that happens to you, something bad will happen to even things out, some of the more pessimistic among us do.

Poets like the idea of balance, from a structural standpoint, and from the standpoint that much of poetry is about making comparisons - contrasts, similarities, elaborations, metaphors, analogies, etc. to add layers of meaning. Think of it this way: In the simplest sense, if you are reading or listening to a rhymed poem, you’re always waiting to hear what the rhyme is, and how it repeats. English is a difficult language to rhyme - at least compared to romance languages which have more uniform word endings.

So what is the conceit (that's the clever idea or elaborated metaphor) behind this particular poem?

Toledo has a sister city

in Spain

sister people,

sister pains

It is that, in these sister cities, things mirror each other. Not necessarily in an exact fashion, more like compensating karma. A long-distance version of the Butterfly Effect (taken in a wickedly literal sense, in this poem), or maybe a Murphy’s Law of Distant Unintended Consequences.

Terence’s writing style is well-matched to his well-humored sense of storytelling and observational irony. He has published two full-length books of poetry and is a co-director at the Brooklyn, NT-based Camperdown Organization which was created to increase access to publication and education as well as promote agency for underrepresented writers. Camperdown hosts regular online poetry slams and workshops.

Terence is also the founder of the monthly storytelling series, How to Build a Fire, which is now in its seventh season. HTBAF is hosted at Open Source Gallery, also in Brooklyn.

Terence’s published collections include The Small Plot Beside the Ventriloquist’s Grave, and Still Something Rattles, from which today’s poem is taken.

(The Yes No is © 2016 Terence Degnan, all rights reserved worldwide, reproduced here by permission of the author. You can follow him on Facebook https://m.facebook.com/TerenceLDegnan/)

Thanks for Listening

You can find more at theotherpages.org, or at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.

Apr 03, 202104:32
2021 NPM 02 - Molly Peacock

2021 NPM 02 - Molly Peacock

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. This marks the fifth year of this event, where we try to explore at least one poem a day throughout the month of April. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series, with help and contributions this year from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Oops is not generally a word we associate with poetry. Most poets review what they have written many times to make sure it says what they want it to say, in the way that they want it to be heard, and that the layers of meaning, the sounds, the rhythm, or other aspects of the poem reinforce or resonate, wherever possible. Of course there are also many things informally written, and these may not necessarily be as exacting.

Poetry in translation is something that takes extra effort to ensure the original intent comes across. That can be a painful process - especially painful when the languages are structurally very different.

Creating any form of art is, in a way, a translation. A vision of real/unreal things, brought into being as interpreted by the artist, based on the characteristics of materials, methods, and tools. American poet Molly Peacock’s poem, The Flaw, is about rug-making. About weaving coarse threads on a hand loom - a difficult, tedious, repetitive process, but one which requires skill, concentration, and attention to detail.

First, a few comments on the poet. Molly Peacock (1947- ) was born in Buffalo, New York, and is a dual American-Canadian Citizen, Residing in Toronto and sometimes New York. She has been prolific and varied in her output, writing seven books of poetry, short stories, biographies, essays, and editing three anthologies. She is a past president of the Poetry Society of America, and has taught at numerous universities.

As an interesting aside - if you have ever seen poetry on a bus or subway instead of an advert in a major U.S. city - thank Molly Peacock for starting Poetry in Motion.

Our focus today is a beautifully simple poem, putting forth the idea that it is the irregularities, the rare but inevitable flaws in the pattern, that give it life. Or at least, they tweak your imagination, and your mind provides the animation. It begins with the simple premise:

               The best thing about a hand-made pattern is the flaw.

There are a few lines in this short poem that may remind you of Emily Dickinson, especially toward the end. The closing thought, maybe metaphor, maybe truth, is that the flaw is the hand’s way of saying “I’m alive,” I’m not a machine, hoping that someone deciphers the coded message.

The Poetry Foundation website has a more in-depth biography and sixteen of her poems online.

More of the series, and the full text of this episode are available through https://theotherpages.org and The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.

Thanks for listening,

--Steve

Apr 02, 202103:57
2021 NPM 01 - Denise Levertov

2021 NPM 01 - Denise Levertov

National Poetry Month at The Other Pages - Number 01 - Denise Leveretov - The Room

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. This marks the fifth year of this event, where we try to explore at least one poem a day throughout the month of April. This is a good opportunity to discover new poems and poets, or maybe to gain an insight on something familiar.

My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series, with help and contributions this year from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Florida, from Coral Springs, on the eastern edge of the Everglades. Good luck to Robin Berard, who will not be joining us this year, as she valiantly tries to teach creative writing to 240 students.

So, where to start? Something new? Something old? Something that speaks to broad themes? Something more intimate? How about something that speaks to the most common shared experience in the world over the past year:  the idea of isolation, and how our imagination can help us reach outward from that isolation, toward the things we feel we have lost, and the people and places and aspects of life that we are missing.

This is not a new problem, but pandemic has renewed it and spread it globally along with the disease. Today’s poem, likewise, is not new. It was published in Poetry Magazine in October of 1958, and it is titled simply, The Room. It was not written in a time of plague, but during the Cold War. The Americans and Russians were building atomic bombs and starting to launch satellites overhead. Then, as now, as always, there were things to worry about. And likewise, then, as now, as always, there were plenty of fears and worries, things rational and irrational, that drove people to isolate themselves. 

The Room is not about the cause of isolation, but about the existence itself, and how to make it more expansive. If not to participate in, at least to observe the daily rituals of sunrise and sunset, the arc of the moon and stars, and maybe too, all of the daily human rituals and interactions that so many of us have missed so badly. The speaker’s solution, in this poem, is a literal house of mirrors, but she realizes its risks. At least some of them. 

First, let’s talk about the poet. (Priscilla) Denise Levertov was born in England in 1923, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1948 at age 25, three years after the Second World War. The Poetry Foundation has a good biography (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/denise-levertov) and many of her poems online, so I won’t try to compress her story here, other than to comment that, interestingly, she was home schooled by her mother  - largely by reading aloud.

Over the course of her prolific writing career she produced twenty-four books of poetry, five more of poetry translations, and many essays. Her writing has received praise and criticism over the course of her career for her activist stance and themes, and her sometimes prose-like narratives. While she wrote only a few war poems initially on WWII, as time went by she became a strong advocate against the Vietnam war, and wrote about environmental concerns, AIDS, and other contentious topics. These themes were clearly visible (or sometimes the explicit subject) in her works. She died of cancer in 1997, and writing up to the very end. She is recognized for the clarity of her voice, and I think that comes through in today’s short poem.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=93&issue=1&page=13

You can find more at theotherpages.org, or at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.




Mar 28, 202105:40