Body My House

Today I read Body My House, by Bethany Reid (Goldfish Press, 2018), for the #SealeyChallenge, Day 14. "Body my house" comes from the poet May Swenson, and Swenson snippets open each section of Reid's book, which is a celebration of the body, down to its aches and pains, and of the soul and heart, too! In "The Body Stands Waiting," "The body / like a housewife opens its blinds / to let in the light."

Lots of animals and their bodies in here, too: horses, goats, sheep, dogs, cats, a pretty scary parrot, other birds, even the green of an iguana. I was delighted to discover that some of the proceeds from this book go to a goat sanctuary, and that such a thing even exists!

I love "Her Desk," that unfolds for us the poet's connection to her desk's previous owner: "maybe, she, too, was hard to love, / craved quiet more // than husband and children." I connect, too, always craving quiet, though not, these days, more than husband and children...

Part 2, Take Heart, is one long, sectioned poem, riffing on the heart, as in "her heart / is a room full of old books." Again, I connect! Or, "Her heart unfolds, a blue heron..." in a section that continues until:

                                  Take wing,
          she whispers, a peculiar
                    incantation of the verb---

          as if she had said, Take heart.

Part 3 is Living in Books. Again, yep! I connect. I laughed out loud at the epigraph to the poem "When Poems Sit Vacant," which is:

          When poems sit vacant for a long time,
          they can attract squatters.
                                                    --real-estate story misheard on KUOW      

I know from just reading If It Bleeds, particularly the last novella, Rat, that Stephen King would connect with the poem titled "If Plot Is What Happens" and continues "then what about those long, still moments / when nothing happens?" Good question!

There's another good question in "Her Heart, Her Soul," the last poem, that starts by giving a list of things of this world (colors, animals, a "bright feather") and then asks, "What if the soul 

          is no more than these? Less--
          the colors of sunset

          reflected in water, foam
          on a horse's lip after a gallop.
          Vestigial, intransigent.

Well, I leave it to you.

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American Gun

American Gun arrived in the mail today, so of course I sat down in the back yard and read it straight through, acknowledgements, writer bios, and all, for the Sealey Challenge, Day 13, while feeding nuts to a squirrel and listening to the breeze in the windchimes. It is a beautiful book on a horrific subject--gun violence--and truly a collaborative effort. American Gun is A Poem by 100 Chicagoans, edited by Chris Green (Big Shoulders Books, 2020). Big Shoulders Books is a publishing unit at DePaul University.

This book is free, and you can get it here, at Big Shoulders Books, in a variety of ways. "The editors ask that by taking a copy, you agree to support groups working on anti-violence efforts in Chicago." There's a list of organizations in the back, or you can choose your own. I belong to a local chapter of Moms Demand Action, part of a national organization working to reduce gun violence by raising awareness, teaching gun safety, and promoting sensible gun legislation. Chicago is having a hellish summer of gun violence, and I'll also use the book's list to target some extra help there. (Aauugh, "target.")

The group poem is a pantoum, a form with repeating lines that "mirror the semi-automatic firing of a weapon and also the seemingly endless cycle of shootings in Chicago," says editor Chris Green. "However," he goes on, 'the main title of this poem, American Gun, points to the gun epidemic as not simply a Chicago problem, but an American one." Indeed.

The poets writing together here, each composing two new lines while incorporating two lines given by another poet (as required by the pantoum form), include many I crossed paths with when I lived in Chicago: Tara Betts, cin salach, Jan Bottiglieri, Richard Jones, Valerie Wallace, Nina Corwin, Mike Puican, Mary Hawley, Barry Silesky, Virginia Bell, Patricia McMillen, Edward Hirsch, and I bet I missed some, as the poets' names are vertical beside the horizontal stanzas. Oh, and sometimes you must turn the book sideways to read the stanzas with long lines, a marvelous part of the book's design.

Here's a gorgeous stretch of heartbeat, heartbreaks, and horror that reveals the pantoum form, verses 46-49, written by these 4 poets in order, Marty McConnell, Joshua Carey, Edward Hirsch, and Christina Pugh.

     Each heart-beat timed, a ricochet,
     a holy echo. It's hard to remember our names,
     hard to breathe, take cover, bolt away
     from what's said of us through unfamiliar lips.

     A holy echo. It's hard to remember our names
     drowned by lead's loud whispering
     from what's said of us through unfamiliar lips.
     Run, hide, fight the false equivalents

     drowned by lead's loud whispering
     whispering a holy echo wholly unholy.
     Run, hide, fight the false equivalents
     to God, unholy god, who has withdrawn

     Whispering a holy echo wholly unholy,
     the device reverberates from human cochlea
     to God, unholy god, who has withdrawn
     his sinuous heavens far from America.

The book is printed on black and white pages, mostly black print on white pages, but also some white print on black pages, with red dot accents like drops of blood. Some words and phrases become images, echoes like gun reports or reverberations on facing pages. This, like the sideways pages, is the work of the book designer, Natalie Bontumasi, whose "creativity and expertise transformed American Gun into a visual poem," as praised by editor Chris Green.

Some of the wonderful poets in this book weren't even born when I left Chicago 20 years ago! They are the 16- and 17-year-old student poets whose words and experience are essential to American Gun. I loved reading everyone's bios as well as their stanzas. And this is definitely a contemporary pantoum, which admits variation from exact repetition (though most of the repetition is exact), allowing the poem to move forward (or sideways!) as needed.

Even if a single line sometimes stands out--"we could be alive to something better," written by Cecelia Pinto in her stanza and repeated by Larry Janowski in his (and I noticed those lines were often mirrored on the facing page by the designer!)--this is a beautiful sharing, truly a group effort. Sensible gun legislation is a group effort, too, and so is ending gun violence. Let's do it, together!

Ecstatic Destinations

What a lovely book, a chapbook by Keith Taylor, Ecstatic Destinations (Alice Greene & Co., 2018), with cover art and illustrations by Mary Shea. The title phrase ends up in the last words of the last poem, foretold by the epigraph (spoken by a bus driver!). The book is dedicated to his neighbors, and the poems recount his daily journeys through his own neighborhood, a triangle of three streets.

As I know Keith Taylor is fond of birds, I hoped to do a little bird watching in these pages. I found vultures (more than once), chickadees, jays, starlings, and even skateboarders on gossamer wings! Other wildlife included white-tailed deer and a monarch butterfly. Trees: spruce, maple, hickory, redbud, mulberry, box elder, wild cherry, ash, elm (dying), sumac. And grapevines.

Alongside the nature, townspeople, town things. And paintings. Here's a poem that gives you the sweetness and summarizes the adventure:

     To the Muse

     On my daily walk
     around this triangle
     of crowded streets

     occasionally someone
     passes by carrying
     grocery bags filled
     with peaches and milk.

Makes me want peaches cut up in milk. And I am glad to say a goldfinch came to own my back yard today, to feast on the seedhead of a purple coneflower.

Falling Off the Empire State Building

Today's #SealeyChallenge book is Falling Off the Empire State Building, by Jimmy Pappas, the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner. Pappas's book grabbed me today for its somehow darkly comic yet patriotic title, the day Biden has announced his running mate, Kamala Harris. The title captures how I've been feeling lately, with America having reached great heights only to fall off its own pedestal. Yet here I can celebrate something.

And I am certainly enjoying reading a poetry book or chapbook a day on the advice of poet Nicole Sealey, a good literary citizen. I wanted to tell you yesterday about that moment in the "Document/ed" chapter of Brian Sonia-Wallace's book, The Poetry of Strangers, but I am telling you today: "A mentor had been talking to me about 'literary citizenship' as the obligation that writers have to support each other's work and work to elevate each other's voices." Brian was thinking about it in the context of citizenship itself, "in an age of immigration terror and child detention." Paying attention to poetry was something he could do. And it's something I can do, as a poet and a reader of poetry.

So let's visit the Empire State Building together! Pappas's book starts with an "Invitation" to homemade organic pancakes sprinkled with blackberries picked in the rain. I'm in! The second poem, "Creation," creates the [poet's] world and the theme of falling via "the man across the street / who fell off a ladder / to the cement sidewalk." (This reminded me of the guy who fell off our roof and broke both wrists, repairing our home after a house fire, a fact we learned much later from the neighbors, as we were living elsewhere during the repair. I hope compassion after the fact still counts!) 

Here are Jimmy Pappas's "four Noble Truths:"

     Life is suffering. People fall
     off ladders. Love ends.
     Nothing has any meaning.

The title poem is a father poem, and also repeats an urban legend. There are unsentimental and deeply human tributes to stepmother and mother, noting "the massive indifference of the universe" and a plethora of shoes. A father poem of love and guilt, deathbed poems of pure love for various people, a lovely poem where his sister, ready to die, signs, "Sleep."

     She took the open palm of her right hand
     and dragged it down her face. Sleep. Sleep. 

I, too, would have let her sleep. And then, in "Mourning," taking the poet Sappho's advice, Jimmy Pappas keeps

     jotting down
     notes

     for my next
     poem.

A poet's gotta do what a poet's gotta do. And that takes me back to The Poetry of Strangers again, something Brian Sonia-Wallace says in one of his own unsentimental poems, how he's

     always rooting for the monsters
       who are at least honest
         to themselves, at least
     not pretending altruism.

Jimmy Pappas, who has a poem about putting his screaming father in a nursing home against his will, might agree. And "rooting for the monsters" takes me all the way back to My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris, and now you've come along with me on a Random Coinciday in the blog.

The Poetry of Strangers + Delicate Thefts

Brian Sonia-Wallace was a writer-in-residence for Amtrak and the Mall of America and has his own small business called RENT Poet, and, you guessed it, he writes poetry for strangers on a typewriter! His book, The Poetry of Strangers: What I Learned Traveling America With a Typewriter (Harper Perennial, 2020) was, I have to say it, a great ride. It's got lots of poems in it, including translations, so I was going to count it toward the #SealeyChallenge, but I also read another Debra Kaufman book, Delicate Thefts (Jacar Press, 2015), and there are tiny stolen things in both books, both concrete and abstract.

Like me, Brian is an actor, too. Unlike me, he approaches his poetry writing, as well as his reading aloud, as performance. Like me, he connects poetry with attention and listening.* He actually composes poems after listening to his customers' stories, writing the poems they need. Vending his poems across the country, he has worked with all kinds of interesting performers, including clowns and witches, and has appeared at big corporate events, malls, music festival, and, interestingly, a detention center to document (in poems) the undocumented.

*Debra Kaufman dedicates Delicate Thefts "to listeners everywhere." I sense she's done her share of the kind of listening that results in poems, too. In "The Receiver" she's listening at a bar: "When I...look straight / into a stranger's eyes, / always he will tell me his story."

Brian Sonia-Wallace experiences that intimacy, too, in talking to strangers. They will tell the deepest things. Back to Kaufman's poem: "Two drinks in I have taken / the gift of his loneliness." Here, the loneliness was a gift, not a theft, but the stolen things in Kaufman's book include a locket, a wallet, stolen innocence, pride, self-image. All, yes, with a delicate touch.

Stolen lives. In "At Duke Gardens, After Another School Shooting," there is nothing to do but seek solace, remembrance, and "peonies you can wash your face in." In "Trying to Find a Way," sometimes the heart is too full, with "no room for another's story." 

And sometimes it's "A Perfect Day to Hang Out Laundry" and let a memory waft in as a comfort:

     His first day at kindergarten
     Danny said, My shirt smells like wind.