By Tony Hoagland

Featured Image: Deer from Momoyogusa-Flowers of a Hundred Generations (1909) by Kamisaka Sekka

Set in the large public hallway and various spaces of a courtroom building. Drinking fountain, a pay phone on the wall, various benches where people eat their lunch or sit, and a few nooks and crannies where they stand and speak. The play is a sequence of monologues from alternate sides of the stage. All the speakers are connected to the trial, but nothing of the trial itself is ever shown.

PROLOGUE

(professional woman wearing glasses, reading from a clipboard, her voice bu- reaucratic and oracular)

Unicom officials denied knowledge of the events of June ’95. Somehow an entire forest had disappeared.

2nd PROLOGUE

Those erasures were committed, they said, by an irresponsible subsidiary

who didn’t know the right way to make a jungle disappear.

By Tarfia Faizullah

Featured Image: “Tête-á-Tête” by Edvard Munch

I admit that when the falling hour
begins to husk the sky free of its
saffroning light, I reach for anyone

willing to wrap his good arm tight
around me for as long as the ribboned
darkness allows. Who wants, after all

to be seen too clearly? Still, the heart
trusts, climbs back down the old
mango tree outside the bar to marvel

at the gymnast tornadoing forward,
electrifying the air with her soaring
body on the TV, even as the friend

beside me asked, But how could you
sleep in the same room as your dead
sister’s things? Once, a man I loved

told me I was stunning. It terrified
me, the way grief still can, rising
above us in the bar, seeking its own

body. I told her the body, exhausted,
does what it must, as it does now,
suturing itself to his, saying, I’ll be

yours forever, with all its secretive
creases turning to steam in this heat
flustered city, wet fever of the nape

of my neck chiffoning beneath his
lips galaxying across it. I could have
told her about the shelves of porcelain-

cheeked dolls tarnished lavender by
falling light, the ebony abundance
of my mother’s hair varnished blue

as she slid my sister’s child clothes off
the old wooden hangers then back on—
but what else is mine, if not all this

strange beauty? Look, I say to him,
running my own hands down my own
body: night-rinsed anaglyph of muscle

and bone holding against everything
yet to plunder this or any twilight’s
nameless and numinous unfurling.

By Richard Schiffman

Featured Image: “Houses of Parliament, London” by Claude Monet

“It is not known why they were not finished,”
the curator noted of two hundred later canvases.
Turner’s work becoming increasingly unhinged—
cyclonic sunbursts, hills skipping like rams, crepuscular
curtains, reeling cliffs and brimstoned cities.

“I did not paint it to be understood.”
Was he mad, as some critics alleged?
Were these “mere freaks of chromomania,”
posters of a private apocalypse, flotsam
and jetsam from the shipwreck of a soul?

“I only wish I had any color to make them blacker.”
A glutton for whirlwinds and monster blizzards,
snow funnels and conflagrations. The lakes abysmal,
the seascapes either black or blinding—
a roller coaster few Victorians could ride.

“Indistinctness is my forte.”
Prophet for a world unravelling at the speed of light.
With hands as “fast as lightning,” when he sketched,
organs of creation, and equally destruction,
all churned together in the cement mixer of his palette.

“It is not known why they were not finished.”
Yet surely he knew that finishing would be a lie
in a world where the waxing / waning moon
is unfinished, the river ends, but does not finish,
nor the bronking sea, nor the calving sea-ice,
nor life itself, which only knows—
again and again and again—how
to begin.

By Amos Jasper Wright IV

Featured Image: “The Repast of the Lion” by Henri Rousseau

Forty days passed without landing a sale. For a while, I felt sorry for myself, and then self-pity shifted gears and boiled into a rage that curdled everything   I touched. The BP spill down in the Gulf had put a damper on auto sales. The economy in general was in shambles, but this town hadn’t prospered much since the Red Mountain cut. Meanwhile, we’re dumping good, hard-earned USD into foreign countries and our Harvard-educated Kenyan president was doing all  of jackshit about it. Instead of buying new cars, people just drive them longer. Used to I could sell forty cars in a month. You don’t need a Harvard degree to do that.

When DOT took a slice out of Red Mountain, most of downtown Birmingham reverted to a giant used-car lot, a smooth asphalted prairie where trash and news blew before the winds. I managed a downtown lot on 20th Street. My office was in a portable trailer stacked on cinder blocks. Long strands of razor wire outlined the perimeter of the lot like a concentration camp. The warehouse next door had probably been abandoned since I got my driver’s license. Sale banners flapped and whipped in the hot winds and the flat air in that metal can was tight as my collar. We parked cars on the sidewalk. On Saturdays, when the urban prairieland was empty and dead, looking more and more like a southern Detroit, instead of getting hung up on by irate voices, I played lonely games of golf, as blue and red klaxons dopplered by.

By Nathan Anderson

Featured Image: “Tingletangle” by Edvard Munch

I’m not like those crazy people.
The people that watch me
are real. I can see them.

Never mind the mailman. That blue coat
nearly swallows him. You never know
what’s under there—and he’s, well,
rather strange looking,

like a boy with a bald spot
bent over thick black shoes
and that bag he cradles

like a smooth gray animal
he does not recognize
is dead. Sometimes I believe

he really is a little boy
and I have to stop myself
from running after him.

Isn’t the mind amazing?
I’d like to know
what he’s doing when he’s not
walking through front lawns

or talking to the man
across the street. I’d like to know
what he’s delivering,
if it will require a deep breath

and more wine
than I’m willing to drink. If it’s even worth

the paper cut I’ll get
opening the envelope. And what about
that man across the street?

By Ron Padgett

Featured Image: “Antique Illustration from The Grammar of Ornament” by Owen Jones

I don’t remember who suggested the idea of an evening of spontaneous poetry collaborations by Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Koch, but I think it came up during a taxi ride the three of us took, six or so months before the event, in which Allen and Kenneth started joking about and even parodying each other’s work. This playful conversation culminated in their public performance of Wednesday evening, May 9, 1979, at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.

As the date approached, both Allen and Kenneth—who had never taken part in such an event—started to express some misgivings, as did I. A month before the event, I wrote to them, “I’ve been wondering about some details of your May 9 extravaganza here, and I thought I would ask you about the format of the evening. Do you want to set any rules? Or would it be better to set none and just let fly?” Both poets thought it best to have some structure to work with, but they left it up to me. So I drew up a list of poetry “assignments” to surprise them with.

By Denise Duhamel and Amy Lemmon

Featured Image: “The Seasons” by Alphonse Maria Mucha

As we wrote “Class Action,” our first poem together (alternating one line at a time, on email), Amy noticed we were writing in abba rhyme, which gave her the idea of writing tangentially about ABBA, the pop group. This lucky association led us to begin a series of poems with two constraints: the stanzas had to be written in abba rhyme, with a mandatory mention of ABBA, the singing group, in each. As we built up our confidence, we sometimes added a third constraint. In one poem, each line had to end in a long “o” sound; and in another, each line had to contain a palindrome, as ABBA is a palindrome. Although we stuck with the rhyme scheme (with allowances for occasional, or more-than-occasional, slant rhymes), we liberated ourselves from metrical restrictions. While Denise is comfortable in the prose poem and free verse, Amy tends to write almost unconsciously in a loose iambic pentameter or tetrameter. But we didn’t insist on uniformity of rhythm. This gave us the leeway to go with the flow, quoting lyrics or song titles, creating dialogue between characters, and injecting other bits of pop culture into the poems.

By Ron Horning and David Lehman

Featured Image: “Four Crowned Cockatoos” by Samuel Jessurun de Masquita

We met late in 1972, when we lived two blocks from each other on Riverside Drive. Though Ron’s room in his apartment was easily quieter than David’s room in “The Barracks,” thus named because of the decibel levels achieved by the inhabitants (David’s roommates were a jazz disc jockey and poet, a veteran of the Marine Corps just back from Vietnam, and a TV-watching, football-twirling specialist in East Asian studies) and their many guests, Ron’s room was also less private, more subject to interruption, and did not have its own bathroom. The first poem we wrote together was written at the Barracks, and so were most of the others in 1973 and 1974. From almost the beginning, the idea was to write a book of poems, but the book never really gelled, either because there were too many other things to think about or because we didn’t know what, if anything, the poems and lines we were typing and writing added up to. We had a working title, or at least we toyed with some candidates. (A Phone of One’s Own captured David’s fancy for a time.) Many poems we started were left unfinished, and even the attempt to write poetry together stopped abruptly in 1975, when we both married for the first time, David in January, Ron in July.

By Patty Mitchell

Featured Image: “Little Penguin” by Elizabeth Gould

Located in Athens, Ohio, Passion Works Studio supports collaborations between artists with and without developmental disabilities. The studio began as an experiment in 1996: what would happen if I set up a collaborative art studio within a sheltered workshop, a supported work place for people with developmental disabilities? A grant from the Ohio Arts Council allowed us to put the idea in motion, and through additional grants and sales a second professional artist was added to the staff, Wendy Minor. Wendy and I brought to the table our understanding of materials and our art process; the participating individuals brought with them their unique way of experiencing the world and a natural ability of fearlessly jumping into art-making. For fifteen years now, Passion Works has offered a relaxed and informative environment for people to collaborate and investigate ideas. The synergy of excitement and discovery is conveyed in the resulting artwork: playful, vibrant, unpredictable.

By Lawrence Raab

Featured Image: “Path Through the Fields from Momoyogusa-Flowers of a Hundred Generations” by Kamisaka Sekka

Many years ago—and I really don’t want to remember exactly how young we were—Stephen Dunn, a friend but not yet a collaborator, was traveling from New Jersey to Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. He stopped for the night at our house. During the course of the evening I recall bemoaning the fact that I hadn’t written a poem—maybe not even tried to write one—in over a year. I had writer’s block, I announced, as if it were an identifiable disease. I had not yet learned the wisdom of William Stafford’s famous—or infamous—remark that there is no such thing as writer’s block; all you have to do is lower your standards.

Of course Stafford didn’t mean you ultimately aim for less. You just have to give yourself a break to get started, and accept whatever occurs to you because “something always occurs” to us, as Stafford says in his essay, “A Way of Writing.” Let the act of writing carry you beyond your first inevitably dull words, to better words, better sentences that may give you access to something waiting in your mind “ready for sustained attention.” This is the writer’s daily work—putting some words down, then rearranging them, adding, then subtracting, looking for a shape, a focus, “the poem’s informing principle,” as Stephen Dunn puts it in his wonderful essay, “The Good, the Not So Good.” If that’s inspiration— and I like to think so—it’s earned by the work of writing, not given as a gift of the gods, like an autumn leaf fluttering down significantly on the poet’s head.