Mapping - Gillian Nevers

NB: In order to promote Architrave poems and poets, this blog will release both poet bios and my comments on their poems into the wild. Enjoy~

Read the full text of the poem by clicking the image or purchase it here.


The Poem:
This is a short poem with a big punch. The speaker is relaxed, enjoying the company of old friends on a lazy summer evening. But don't let the tone fool you - Nevers lays out the loose tangle of this group's history both to beguile and to prime her reader for the end's intimate touch. That touch is the knot at the center of a complex history, but it's also a kind of 'you are here' on the map of their shared lives. The "incision that travels,/ like a narrow road over/ the flat plain of your chest" will continue to connect these two women, just as their past includes the same man. This is something poetry does especially well: teasing out what's True (in this case friendship) from the tangle of the everyday.


The Poet:
Gillian Nevers started writing poetry in 2002 after retiring from a career working with victims of crime. Her poems have appeared in Silk Road, Miller's Pond,Wisconsin People and Ideas,Pearl, Pirenes Fountain, Verse Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Poets' Calendar, and several other print and online literary magazines. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2011 and won second prize in the 2008 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters statewide poetry contest. Gillian is the current membership chair for the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets (WFOP) and writes the "Markets" column for the WFOP's online, and print, Museletter. She has a degree in Art Education from the University of Wisconsin, Madison,with a concentration in printmaking and painting, which may explain why many of her poems are influenced by works of art. Gillian has two grown sons and lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband.

As We Celebrate

There are so many different celebrations this time of year, all of them glorious. My own preference is for the winter solstice - the longest night, yes, but punctured by light (both electrical and sun). It gives me peace to see the darkness filled with and ultimately answered by light, and that peace leads me to gratitude: for family and friends, for poets brave enough to share their poems, for readers everywhere, and for the abundance that makes Architrave possible.

In that same spirit, I offer you this short poem by Lucille Clifton. It's a blessing suitable for any occasion or season and it never fails to calm me. I hope you find it similarly useful.


I'll be taking a brief blog break; the next post will appear Thursday, December 29.
photo: M. Dellas

On the Application of Poetry - Guest Post by Don Raymond, Jr.

Sarah Lindsay’s What All It Takes

from Primate Behavior (Knopf, 1997)

November, 2007: the last phone call of the last hour of the day before leaving for Thanksgiving was my doctor telling me I had been diagnosed with diabetes. 

            Over the following weeks of measuring-cup starvation, I looked for ways to assign meaning to what had happened. I didn’t need an answer to the existential “why.”  I knew “why” – sugar was not one of the four food groups, no matter how much I wanted it to be.  Ditto for coffee, cholesterol, and cigarettes. What I needed was a way to give this meaning, to help me feel this was more than simply a struggle for continued existence.

            I found myself reciting Sarah Linday’s “What All It Takes,” over and over again. Sometimes in the morning, to brace myself for another day of measured almonds and banana snacks; sometimes in the midst of a panic attack brought on by too much exercise. And far too often, murmured under my breath in anger at the world.

            As the glucose meter read too high one moment, too low the next, I would mutter: “Up and down its red and blue chutes / my defective blood bumps / Oreos and gumballs one hour, / famished soap bubbles the next.” Describing red blood cells as “Oreos and gumballs” made the sickness tolerable.  If she could laugh at it, could sum it up in such words, the least I could do was survive. The least I could do was marvel at the mounds of pharmaceutical junk I was producing - the twice-daily blood sugar readings, the lancets for drawing blood, special strips for reading sugar levels, a mountain of biologically hazardous garbage, all to prop up my continued existence. I had become a medical cottage industry. All this stuff … “Christmas survived, / I find with the special sugarless candy’s / mild laxative effect time to wonder / at what all it takes to keep me up.”

I had been hurt, in ways that would not heal. I had reached the time of my life where ready access to hospitals was a major lifestyle decision. Though I’d always lived within walking distance of a liquor store, the pipe dream of rugged self-sufficiency was gone for good. “… in an Ice Age cave I’d be dead. / In a Roman villa with household gods and servants / I’d be dead. In a Gothic wheatfield town, / even before the plague came I’d be dead.”

            I made it through, and in no large part because someone else had before me. Someone had faced the same thing, and won, and Sarah Lindsay told me about it in language so vital, so heartbreakingly true, that it had to be true for me, as well.


For more on Sarah Lindsey, check out her page at the Poetry Foundation.

For more about Don Raymond, Jr., visit his work for Architrave.

Painting - Eric Primm

NB: In order to promote Architrave poems and poets, this blog will release both poet bios and my comments on their poems into the wild. Enjoy~

Read the full text of the poem by clicking the image or purchase it here.


The Poem:
The restrained longing expressed in this poem is well suited to the Villanelle, its pattern of repeated lines and end rhymes creating an obsessive focus on the woman being painted. She's naked enough for the speaker to see the scar across her ribs, but she remains distant, even as she intoxicates him. It's all so seamless in Primm's hands, how the brush is both on the woman's body and the canvas, how she is both present and absent, but it's actually quite difficult to do. Most Villanelles fail because the writer contorts the language to fit the form, making something so obviously artificial it fails to satisfy. Not here. The phrases slide through the repetition just as someone would say them today. It ends, as required, with the repeated lines, sealing this couple into a kind of permanent non-embrace. It's form beautifully following function.


The Poet:
Eric Primm is an engineer for the Boeing Company and a fiction writer in the University of Missouri - St. Louis MFA program. Architrave is his first publication.

Turning, Returning - Alex Fabrizio

NB: In order to promote Architrave poems and poets, this blog will release both poet bios and my comments on their poems into the wild. Enjoy~

Read the full text of the poem by clicking the image or purchase it here.



The Poem:
Every family has its stories, the narratives that define its members and how they relate to each other and to the world. They can change depending on who tells them and why. And then, because people are never simple, there is conflicting evidence. Fortunately, the poet has given us an honest speaker with the benefit of hindsight. Della doesn't scruple to shield the reader from the effects of her parents' dysfunction, from the humiliation of wetting the bed, but she also shows us her father's fearless joy at her birth. Only then do the photos surface to fill in the affection missing from her mother's story. In a less nuanced poem, they could have functioned as a simplistic affirmation, but here they expand our understanding of the speaker's hurt and hunger to be loved.


The Poet:
Alex Fabrizio is a University Fellow and MFA candidate in Poetry at The Ohio State University. She is a University of Florida alumna and is originally from Orlando.

If Basho Were Alive Now, As A Woman...

Jane Hirshfield's Come, Thief

(Knopf, 2011)

“What in this unpleated world isn't someone's seduction?”

There it is, right on page one, the poet stating her intent: this will be a seduction. But because it's orchestrated by Jane Hirshfield, it will revel in imperfection and impermanence. Readers familiar with Hirshfield's work will recognize her strong Eastern lean here. There is an aphoristic quality that suggests the haiku master Basho. Living in Seventeenth Century Japan, he wrote “Even in Kyoto—/ Hearing the cuckoo’s cry—/ I long for Kyoto.”* Had he been a Twenty-First Century American woman, he might have written “Stay, leaf./ It reddened,/ embarrassed for me and itself.” (22) That same poem (The Promise) ends with “Stay, I said to my loves./ Each answered,/ Always.” Hirshfield and Basho are kindred spirits, understanding all too well the ephermeral nature of our existence and the exquisite heartbreak of being born to die. Both masters write the kind of poems mimicked by less experienced poets because they appear simple. But while the images and metaphors are straightforward, they haven't been simplified.

Take the title piece. It uses familiar images of a window, a path leading to a door, and a fire. The poet compares the window to a lax guard; she makes the path an accomplice of the titular thief (i.e. time); she links the fire to birth and love; it’s all very predictable and plain. In less accomplished hands this poem would be a lament that nothing lasts, but Hirshfield warmly courts the thief, saying, "Dear one, enter." It's a difficult stance for an American poet; not only do we like to think that love conquers all, we cling to it as if its absence were a form of death. The speaker of this poem knows better and says so. All things subject to time must end, therefore an ephemeral being must embrace both love and the absence of love. We must welcome the thief, knowing he will take everything. It feels like a much larger piece of writing that has been carefully honed down to its essential 8 lines, instead of writing that was born small and never grew beyond its initial idea.

Very few of the poems in Come,Thief are longer than a page and many are much shorter. It makes for a satisfying afternoon—poems that can be grasped on an initial reading that also inspire (and reward) multiple readings. In the time it takes to finish, the light will have changed from the bright glare of day to the softer, more forgiving tones of early evening. And the poems will stay with you. Late at night you might think of them again, how their embrace of impermanence is full of joy, like master Basho: “It would melt/ in my hand—/ the autumn frost.”*

*Translations of Basho by Robert Haas

Seizure - Corey Mesler

NB: In order to promote Architrave poems and poets, this blog will release both poet bios and my comments on their poems into the wild. Enjoy~

Read the full text of the poem by clicking the image or purchase it here.



The Poem:
How do you describe the failure of language using language? It's a challenge well suited to the compressed space of poetry. We're never told who Chloe is, but it's easy to tell she's loved - loved so much, in fact, that her seizure incapacitates the speaker as well. So much is left unsaid. The reader is allowed to fill in those enormous blank spaces with emotion, with whatever associations the poem's images provoke. "Now it's years ago," and this is the first time s/he has been able to speak of it. Language has failed in the way that language always fails in the face of fear. But language also returns to give us the poem, the outline of the unspeakable.


The Poet:
Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published four novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010) and Following Richard Brautigan (2010), two full length poetry collections, Some Identity Problems (2008) and Before the Great Troubling (2011), and two books of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009) and Notes toward the Story and Other Stories (2011). He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. He also claims to have written, "Coronet Blue." With his wife, he runs Burke's Book Store in Memphis TN, one of the country's oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.

Lazarus of Bethany Speaks from the Tomb - Emily Grise

NB: In order to promote Architrave poems and poets, this blog will release both poet bios and my comments on their poems into the wild. Enjoy~

Read the full text of the poem by clicking the image or purchase it here. 

About the Poem:
The Bible is full of poetry and the Gospel according to John is among its most lyrical books. But it is also an official history, a status quo, which is something artists and poets have long challenged. Why is the story so clear that Jesus stayed away? Why wasn't Lazarus upset with his friend? This poem reminds us that Lazarus was human before he was a saint. What could be more human than refusing to cooperate? Even Jesus, according to Christian teaching, is simultaneously human and divine. Does he stay away to make sure his miracle has enough drama? That would be a very human thing to do, too. Or maybe their actions are a guide for how to transcend our baser instincts. However you read it, this poem will help you better know your own mind.


About the Poet:
Emily Grise - a poet and native of Lexington, KY - is working toward her MFA at the University of Missouri - St. Louis. She teaches composition at UMSL's Pierre Laclede Honors College and reads for WomenArts Quarterly, a St.Louis-based journal featuring work by women writers and artists. "Lazarus Speaks from the Tomb" was composed in a notebook whose cover features a cigarette-smoking monkey in a three-piece suit - a phenomenon which Emily enjoys but doesn't altogether condone.

Cherokee Print League Holiday Sale is Dec 3!

The Cherokee Print League Holiday Sale is right around the corner. Architrave poems get born on Cherokee Street, so of course I'll be there to represent. Joining me will be scores of other artists from St. Louis and the region, each of us with a table tucked inside the already fabulous (and warm) brick & mortar establishments. Pick up a map and a hot beverage from Foam, then get a leg up on your holiday shopping while supporting local artists and merchants.

And lest you think this event is limited to posters and book arts, think again - if it involves ink, it's here. Come see just how broad that definition can be. 

Once I know which sale venue will host the Architrave table I'll be sure to post it here as a comment as well as to Facebook and Twitter.

Clearing Materials of Exile - Kelli Allen

NB: In order to promote Architrave poems and poets, this blog will release both poet bios and my comments on their poems into the wild. Enjoy~

Read the full text of the poem by clicking the image or purchase it here. 

About the Poem:
This poem is restless in the most literal sense: constant movement framed by the idea of exile, itself the absence of a place to rest. But that's not something you'll understand from the 'facts' of this poem - instead it's in the feelings the images evoke. Allen is asking her reader to step outside the customary use of language into a world made entirely of metaphor. She's asking us to set aside our literal expectations, to join the poem's collective voice as "we" alternately pursue (hunter and hermit) or are pursued (by the horse) across border after border. It's not necessary to decode every statement. What is necessary are repeated readings over time to allow the implications of, say, eggs that are also "dark stones" to slowly reveal themselves. It's a poem to savor.


About the Poet:
Kelli Allen is an award-winning poet and scholar. Her work has appeared in The Blue Sofa Review, WomenArts Quarterly, The Caper Review, It Has Come to This: Poets of the Great Mother Conference,Foliate Oak, Greatest Lakes Review, Lugh Review (where she was the featured author), Blackmail Press, Puerto del Sol, The Chaffy Review,Euphony and elsewhere. She is the author of two chapbooks (Applied Cryptography; Picturing What Breaks) and has served as the Managing Editor of Natural Bridge. Allen also serves as Director of Development for The Missouri Warrior Writers Project, which serves United States Veterans as they attempt to tell their stories through poetry and creative non-fiction. She is also the founder and director of the Graduate Writers Reading Series for the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Allen gives readings and teaches workshops throughout the US.

Submission Guidelines for Spring Residency - Karen Lee Lewis

NB: In order to promote Architrave poems and poets, this blog will release both poet bios and my comments on their poems into the wild. Enjoy~

Read the full text of the poem by clicking the image or purchase it here. 

About the poem:
Writers and artists will smile at how this poem inserts the lexicon of bird habitat conservation into the standard call for residency applications. That kind of cross-pollination is something that poetry does well, as is the list format. But the poem's appeal is much more broad; anyone who has ever searched for an apartment or a job will empathize with the task ahead of the Kirtland Warbler - there is always so much to consider, so many hoops to jump through! Lewis is obviously enjoying poking fun at overly prescriptive submission guidelines, what with her threat of "evil Shakespearean citations" and request for translations of bird song. But the poet is also quite serious, placing at the end, where it will be what's best remembered, a reminder that the consequence of failure is death. Not just of the individual, but of the entire species. It's strong medicine disguised in a huge, humorous spoonful of sugar. 


About the Poet:
Karen Lee Lewis is an independent Teaching Artist, and a Teacher Consultant for the Western New York Writing Project. She teaches creative writing for non-profit organizations and art galleries throughout Western New York. Her "Picturing Poetry Project" with Amy Luraschi, was the subject of a documentary film by Jon Hand, and was aired on PBS. Karen is a fellow of Canada's Banff Centre's Wired Writing Studio. Her poetry, short fiction, features, and photography have been widely published, recently in Red River Review, Nomad, Stormy Weather, the Nature Conservancy's newsletter Nature, Buffalo Spree and Teachers & Writers magazine. Karen won Honorable Mention in the 2010 Aurora Artisan's Wordsworth poetry contest. Her poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Slipstream Press. Editorial work for Traffic East magazine is archived at www.trafficeast.com. Her full-length poetry collection, What I Would Not Unravel (Writers Den Books), is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Overdue Thank You's

First, a big thank you to the good people at the Poetry Foundation for their recent post about Architrave. When I started this project I had grave doubts about whether my fellow poets would embrace a press that sought a general reader. After all, "accessible" is a dirty word in many poetry circles. We all (and I include myself in this) want to be seen as progressive writers. But as an ever increasing number of fictioneers, essayists and other creatives confided to me that they "just didn't get" my art form, I knew it was a leap of faith I had to take. I'm glad I did. So far it's been wonderfully rewarding and it turns out there are plenty of poets willing to share their work in a venue such as this. Getting noticed by one of America's premiere poetry organizations is sweet, sweet icing on an already tasty cake.

Second, thanks to Burke's Books in Memphis and Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee for stocking Architrave poems. There's a fair bit of paperwork to tracking consignment sales, so I'm appreciative whenever a merchant likes the product enough to want to invest their time in it. Please check out their stores this holiday season.

And third, thanks to Barbara Harbach for organizing the Women in the Arts Conference at UMSL. I really enjoyed presenting and hearing the other great presentations. I hope the conference becomes an annual or biannual event!

Women in the Arts @ UMSL

The concept for Architrave didn't just occur to me one day – it was a long process that involved many phases of thinking, asking questions, investigating leads and re-evaluation. I’ll talk about that process and what I learned from it at the Women in the Arts Conference on Thursday, November 10 at 2pm.

The conference is three days (Nov. 10-12) of performances and talks by and about women creators and I’m really looking forward to it. There will be poets, fiction writers, musicians (both solo and ensemble), filmmakers, plus scholars of all these disciplines. The scheduled presentations look to be an even mix of process discussion and appreciation of the final product. Registration is only $25 per day or $70 for all three days and FREE for UMSL students and faculty.  I hope to see you there!

Jennifer

Another new retail outlet...

I'm happy to report that Left Bank Books will carry Architrave poems. It will take a few days for the stock to appear on shelves, but appear it will.

What would we do without local book stores?

Be sure to support yours, and to look for Architrave alongside the other printed ephemera while you're there.

Thanks!

Thanks to everyone who came out to our release party at the Tavern of Fine Arts, and for bearing with us while the blog and shop are under construction.