Profiles – Page 15 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 85: Andrea Jurjević

About Andrea Jurjević

Andrea Jurjević grew up in Rijeka, Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia, before immigrating to the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Small Crimes, won the 2015 Philip Levine Poetry Prize, and her book-length translations from Croatian include Mamasafari (Diálogos Press, 2018) and Dead Letter Office (The Word Works, 2020). Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Believer, TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, Gulf Coast and The Southeast Review, among others. She was the recipient of a Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Hambidge Fellowship, and the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. Andrea lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and teaches at Georgia State University.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Nastic Movements”, “Department of Dream Justice” and “Nevada Augury”

“Department of Dream Justice” is haunted by the idea of home and the question of reconstructing oneself after the loss of one’s home, or country, particularly as a parent, and especially as an immigrant parent. I’m often drawn to writing about displacement, and the sense of alienation, but this piece in particular attempts to reconcile the need for intimacy and security with realities of life. I reference a line from the song “La Pistola y El Corazón” by Los Lobos, a beautiful song that claims that there’s no cure for emotional pain.

I started writing “Nevada Augury” during a cross-country road trip with the man I was newly engaged to. At the time I was working on poems that explored the idea of abandon—both the sense of abandon and leaving something behind. The poem finished itself a couple years later, after the sudden death of that relationship. It now seemed the desert had forecasted, or forewarned this ending, and that the abandonment I wrote about might’ve been a premonition. I love Pieter Brueghel and his depiction of how foolish human nature is.

As for “Nastic Movements,” one night during a walk, I noticed a patch of dandelions, all closed up. Dandelions react to darkness, like tulips and poppies and many other flowers. These dandelions, though, looked like they have lost their ‘heads,’ and they made me think of different ways people lose their heads . . . to war, death, trauma, stupidity, love, deception. I wrote the ending lines of the poem first, including the image of a letter falling apart in rain, which I stole from Will Christopher Baer’s novel Kiss Me, Judas.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

I used to be a big fan of Robert Smith and The Cure. I bought Disintegration at 13 from the local Jugoton, the chain record store in former Yugoslavia (Jugoton had a very limited selection of imported music), and every other of their albums from friends who travelled abroad. I wrote to The Cure fanclub in London and would in turn receive fat parcels filled with their newsletter and fan stories and black & white photocopies of the band. I also loved Siouxsie Sioux, Jesus and Mary Chain, Sisters of Mercy, The Smiths, Bauhaus (lots of alternative 70s and early 80s) and heaps of Yugo bands that are unknown to the American audience. Punk rock in particular meant a lot in Yugoslavia. It was a way to mock and attack the establishment… that kind of expression was very uncharacteristic of a communist country. It tricked us into thinking that having music as an outlet was freedom. My hometown, Rijeka, has always had a rich and distinctive music scene, and I grew up surrounded with phenomenal musicians. And I believe music made me the writer I am. I listen to music daily. Recently I’ve been listening to the Verve, Low, Nothing, the Black Ryder, Girls, the Mexican duo Lorelle Meets the Obsolete. I love their moodiness, their dark, sultry atmospherics. But I also love lots of Beck, Brian Eno, Tricky, David Sylvian, John Cale, Sparks, the Kinks, etc.

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Issue 85: Michael Hettich

About Michael Hettich

Michael Hettich was born in Brooklyn, NY, and grew up in New York City and its suburbs. He has lived in upstate New York, Colorado, Northern Florida, Vermont, Miami, and Black Mountain, North Carolina, where he now lives with his family. His books of poetry include To Start an Orchard (Press 53, 2019), Bluer and More Vast (Hysterical Press, 2018), The Frozen Harbor (Red Dragonfly Press, 2017), Systems of Vanishing (University of Tampa, 2014), The Animals Beyond Us (New Rivers, 2011) and Like Happiness (Anhinga, 2010). His work has appeared widely in such journals as Ploughshares, Orion, The Literary Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, Witness, and Poetry East. His awards include three Florida Individual Artists Fellowships, a Florida Book Award, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, and the David Martinson–Meadow Hawk Prize. He has served on the board of several organizations, including AIRIE (Artists in Residence in the Everglades) and WAIL (Word and Image Lab). Hettich holds a Ph.D. in literature and taught at the college level for many years. He often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and fellow writers. His website is michaelhettich.com

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “I Wake” and “The Hive”

Although neither “I Wake” nor “The Hive” is drawn literally from life experiences, both poems feel true to me in ways I always strive for but only occasionally achieve. Though at first they feel like very different kinds of poem to me, as I look at them more carefully, I realize they are actually quite similar in tone and even content, and that their apparent dissimilarity is due mainly to the different cadences that drive them. Both were written in the past year or so, after my wife and I moved from Miami to Western North Carolina; both feel haunted by spirits hovering in our new landscape, feelings and figures we might even stop noticing once we’ve become fully acclimated here. Perhaps that’s one reason I trust them.

Both “I Wake” and “The Hive” draw from random moments of experience, fragments unrelated to each other except in the landscape of the poem. These consist mostly of snippets of observation and overheard conversations that might have vanished entirely had I not remembered them as I wrote. In both cases the act of writing remembered these things for me. I do wake in the middle of the night to listen for night-creatures, and I have noticed that at a certain age, some people look suddenly old. I also know I have had that experience of driving through the dark while someone I love is suffering next to me, right beside me but miles beyond my touch. I’ve also recently had the experience—it felt like a moment of grace—of a bee buzzing wildly under my shirt—and not stinging me. And my wife and I often walk to the meadow a mile or so from our house, to watch the horses grazing there.

I’ve heard that those horses were rescued from abusive owners, nurtured back to health and granted new life in that meadow. Maybe the grace of that beautiful gift somehow sings in my little poem, too.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

Like most writers, music is central to my life and art. I grew up living inside late-sixties rock and folk, as well as bebop and post-bop jazz and even the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. I still love all of that music and know a great deal of it in my bloodstream.

Lately, though, with so much chatter in the air, I often yearn just to listen to the songs and squawks of the actual world. I certainly want a music that engages rather than distracts.

The music that has touched me most deeply for many years, the work that connects with that part of me that aches to write, is neither rock, nor folk, nor jazz, but a more-difficult-to-classify music often called—perhaps pretentiously—“new music.” Among the composers I’m referring to here, I would include John Cage, Meredith Monk, Robert Ashley, Pauline Olivieros, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon. I’d include some of Brian Eno’s work here as well.

Of all contemporary composers, Terry Riley speaks most profoundly to me, from his earliest work, “In C,” which heralded a new kind of music and listening, to his most recent compositions.

And over the past few months, I’ve been marveling almost daily at John Luther Adams’s beautiful symphonies Become Ocean and Become Desert. All of Adams’s work feels “true” in fresh ways to me; it grows more interesting the more deeply I listen.

In other moods, I find myself turning to David Torn’s haunting Only Sky, and to Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet’s Landfall; as far as live music goes, living here in Western NC, we are graced with the likes of Al Petaway and Robin Bullock, two of the greatest acoustic guitarists alive.

By far the best live music I heard in the past year, though, was the Meredith Monk ensemble’s performance of selections from Cellular Songs at the 2019 Big Ears Festival in Knoxville. The work was (and is) literally beyond words

“The Hive”and “I Wake”by Michael Hettich

The Hive Someone else’s loss, buzzing through the garden like the bee that got under your shirt and landed in your chest hair but didn’t sting; someone’s grief right … Read more

About Roy Burgess

Jackson Burgess is the author of Atrophy (Write Bloody Publishing, 2018) and the chapbook Pocket Full of Glass (Tebot Bach, 2017). He is a graduate of the University of Southern California and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. His poetry and fiction are published or forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, The Cimarron Review, Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, PANK, Colorado Review, The Boiler Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is at work on a novel and his second full-length collection of poems. (jacksonburgess.com)

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Medicine”

A couple Thanksgivings ago, I sat down and wrote a chapbook-length series of poems like “Medicine,” trying to work through some life circumstances that felt a bit out of my control. Since then I’ve been gradually editing them and sending them out to magazines. I liked the idea of a prose poem responding to itself through an erasure “echo,” whittling itself down until it became a self-reflexive call-and-response. I thought, “If you’re gonna feel sad and solipsistic, you should probably lean into it formally, right?” Now I’ve been thinking about the process of revising old work, trying to re-enter the emotional or mental space you were in when you wrote the initial draft, respecting that original feeling while still incorporating what you have learned or become since.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

Tom Waits and bottom-shelf whiskey feel pretty mandatory for me post-breakup—at the moment I’m revisiting The Black Rider, Waits’ and William S. Burroughs’ collaborative take on an old German Faustian tale. Love Phoebe Bridgers’ cover of “Georgia Lee” on the new Women Sing Waits album, too.
I just finished an advance copy of Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl and can’t get it out of my head. Pub date is June 9—do yourself a favor and pre-order a copy. Frazier’s the fucking truth.
I’m closely following Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, listening to old speeches from him and his surrogates (AOC, Dr. Cornel West, Killer Mike, etc.).
I spend an ungodly amount of time on YouTube. These days I think Conner O’Malley has the most unhinged and underappreciated channel on the platform. I’m also a big ASMR junkie. Anxiety’s a motherfucker, but ASMR seems to cut right through it.

“Medicine” by Jackson Burgess

Found in Willow Springs 85 Back to Author Profile You could spend half a lifetime trying to learn what another body needs, and believe me, I have, making eyes at the … Read more

About Roy Bentley

Roy Bentley was a finalist for the Miller Williams prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City, is the author of eight books; including American Loneliness from Lost Horse Press, who is bringing out a new & selected in 2021. He is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the Ohio Arts Council. Poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner among others. Hillbilly Guilt, his latest, won the 2019 Hidden River Arts / Willow Run Poetry Book Award.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “A Human Heart, Left Aboard, Sends Airplane Back to Where it Started” and “Fallout, or the Mother Tongue of Pinocchio Was the Wind Through the Trees”

“A Human Heart, Left Aboard, Sends Airplane Back to Where It Started” was a headline in The New York Times that struck me. Over the years, I’ve flown more than a few times, many times experiencing delays. Which is where I elected to start: with the pilot’s uber-authoritative voice blossoming into an explanation for turning the plane around. The heart that’s “in with the luggage” is the turn of the poem—where the poem coalesced. After I finished, it occurred to me that I was giddy-glad that an airline would behave in this way, regardless of inconvenience.

“Fallout, or The Mother Tongue of Pinocchio Was the Wind through the Trees” wrestles with the events I lived through as a small boy around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis—I’d have been 8 years old that October. I’ve tried to recreate what we had to contend with, and to recreate discovering what it is to be a boy at the moment the narrator’s life is threatened by the events of those days, aided by the odd detail of the bomb shelter model—which actually opened business and took orders that autumn. Gepetto has always fascinated me. Inspired me—I mean, all he wanted was a child. I love that, whatever else, he represents the creative impulse in males.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

I have a tiger-descending tattoo the size of a big man’s hand above (and on) my left breast. Why did I get a tattoo? I wanted a tattoo somewhere on the body that many tattoo artists tend to avoid because of the pain. (I’d left a relationship that ended badly; I was numb and hoped the tattooing would jolt my consciousness into something approaching awareness—it took about 4 hours to get it done. And it worked.) The experience changed how I viewed my body. Twenty years later, the tiger has held up well enough that it often occurs to me that one backfoot is just wrong!

I recently finished a Michael Connelly novel. Haven’t jumped into anything else, as I’ve been readying copy for the catalogue promotion of a new & selected called My Mother’s Red Ford, which Lost Horse Press is bringing out next year. (Trying to stay sane in these insane times.)

“A Human Heart, Left Aboard, Sends Airplane Back to Where It Started” and “Fallout, or the Mother Tongue of Pinocchio Was the Wind Through the Trees” by Roy Bentley

Found in Willow Springs 85 Back to Author Profile “A Human Heart, Left Aboard, Sends Airplane Back to Where it Started” THIS WAS A PILOT coming on the intercom: Good … Read more

About Andrew Farkas

Andrew Farkas is the author of an essay collection: The Great Indoorsman (University of Nebraska Press 2022), a novel: The Big Red Herring (KERNPUNKT Press 2019), and two collections of short fiction: Self-Titled Debut (Subito Press 2009) and Sunsphere (BlazeVOX [books] 2019). His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (with one Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXV), Best of the Net, and Best American Essays (with a Notable Essay in 2013). His novel was named one of the Best Fiction Books of 2019 by Entropy Magazine, and it was a finalist for the 2019 Big Other Fiction Award and the 2019 Foreword INDIES humor award. He is a fiction editor for The Rupture and an Assistant Professor of English at Washburn University. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "When Hamburger Station is Busy"

One of the things I wanted to do in my essay collection, The Great Indoorsman, was focus on indoors spaces I like even though most people wouldn’t think of them as beautiful. Now, I’ve been going to Hamburger Station since I was a kid, and seeing as how my dad and I have a wacky routine about the lack of people there no matter what time we go, I figured I had to write a Hamburger Station essay. Thinking about the routine that’s described at the beginning of the essay, I realized it sounded like a thought problem, maybe Schrödinger’s cat. I then decided each section would be a proposed solution to the thought problem posed by my dad. The essay, then, is a purposeful collision of Hamburger Station memories/fantasies and philosophical/scientific thought, bringing together two different sides of my personality: the regular Joe (who chows down on burgers and fries) and the cerebral writer (who prefers mind-blowing works, rather than pieces that remain locked on everyday experience). At one point, I did have a little trouble with some of the science I use later in the essay; luckily my friend, Phil Jensen, helped me out there, since he showed me how I could balance the two sides, when it felt like the more difficult ideas had started to dominate the piece. I was then briefly stuck because I didn’t know how to end the essay. Then I remembered hearing Max Tegmark on a podcast (The End of the World with Josh Clark) and thought he’d be able to help me because I was dealing with the same sort of material Professor Tegmark does. Fortunately, I was right. The last section, especially the last paragraph comes from me pondering Tegmark’s comments on time and my hope for the perseverance of Hamburger Station.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

While writing my novel, The Big Red Herring, I got interested in tiki drinks, since the Singapore Sling plays a big role in Part Two of the book. Although I have a small, two-seater tiki bar and a room decorated with tiki paraphernalia, I never really used it, mostly because I tend to go out for booze. During the pandemic, though, I opened what I called either the Isolation Tiki Bar or the Alienation Tiki Bar (since I was the bartender, the bouncer, the person hogging the jukebox, the nursing major, the dude who needs cut off, the dude drinking alone, etc.) and started making cocktails, my favorites (in no particular order) being the Jet Pilot, Black Pearl, Painkiller, Singapore Sling, Jungle Bird, Lorikeet, Dark and Stormy, and the Zombie. The weirdest one I made, though, had to be the Cradle of Life, since it requires you to hollow out a lime, fill it with Chartreuse, set the liquor-lime boat afloat in the drink, and then set it on fire. The fact that I didn’t burn down the Isolation Tiki Bar is pretty amazing.

“When Hamburger Station is Busy” by Andrew Farkas

When Hamburger Station is Busy Whenever I go to Hamburger Station for lunch with my dad and I point out there’s nobody there, he says, “It’s busier at dinnertime.” … Read more

About Kathleen McGookey

Kathleen McGookey has published four books of prose poems and three chapbooks, most recently Instructions for My Imposter (Press 53) and Nineteen Letters (BatCat Press). She has also published We’ll See, a book of translations of French poet Georges Godeau’s prose poems. Her work has appeared in many journals including Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, December, Field, Glassworks, Miramar, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Quiddity, and The Southern Review. She has received grants from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Her work was just featured on American Life in Poetry, and can also be found online at The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, New Flash Fiction Review, and MacQueen’s Quinterly. On the Seawall published three of her prose poems along with her interview by David Nilsen.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "Even in June"

Two summers ago, for a week in June, my family members were scattered across the country, from Oregon to Colorado and I was by myself at home in Michigan, having my own little writer’s retreat writing poems every day, which was unusual for me. While I loved having the time alone, I really didn’t like the feeling of us being so far apart. It just felt like too much space and distance between us. I’d look at the “Find my iPhone” feature on my phone and see us spread across the country and feel so strange. And then one morning, some of my family woke up to a snowstorm in Colorado, which I didn’t know could happen in the summer. And that felt surreal.

So I guess this is a poem of longing. And a wish to compress distance. My usual challenge in writing a poem is finding a title, which was true for this poem. In the end, I just made the first few words into the title. And then I worried that the poem was too small to amount to anything, which is my usual worry.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

During the pandemic, I’ve been making and eating a lot of sweets. Chocolate chip cookies, brownies, cinnamon rolls and fresh strawberry pie, especially. During strawberry season, which is early June in Michigan, I’ll sometimes just make a couple of strawberry pies for dinner for my family. All these sweets might add up but I also walk six miles a day. I’ve just picked sixty pounds of peaches and in a couple of days I’ll make a lot of peach cobblers and pies. I have one recipe for peach pie that you can freeze to enjoy later, which my family loves in the winter. Actually, they like most things I make.

Beyond eating a lot of sweets this year, we adopted a one-year-old golden retriever named George on Christmas Day. While he has a seemingly endless supply of energy and has chewed up many socks, shoes, hats, a book of poems, a yellow paint pen and a chromebook charger, he has brought such silliness and delight to our house that of course we love him. He sleeps on my daughter’s bed and there are not many cozier sights than a little golden dog curled up in the blankets.

“Even in June” by Kathleen McGookey

Snow fell on the mountains and the towns that faced them, on the interstate and the creek running beside. Snow swirled against the gray sky and gray cement, dizzy with … Read more

About Sandra McPherson

My 21st collection, Speech Crush, is scheduled for publication by Salmon Poetry Press in Ireland this year. Among my previous books are Expectation Days (Illinois), The Spaces Between Birds: Mother/Daughter Poems 1967-1995 (Wesleyan), and Streamers (Ecco). I taught 23 years at the University of California at Davis, 4 years at U of Iowa Writers Workshop, and several years in Portland in informal workshops. I collected improvisational African-American quilts and donated 67 of them to UCDavis. I founded and edited Swan Scythe Press. I'm adopted, & in my birth family is Plymouth feminist author Abby Morton Diaz, my great-grand-aunt or something. As a grad student at the UW, I met Henry Carlile in Elizabeth Bishop's class and we were married for many years. Willow Springs has published him too.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on“Simple Science” and “Portraits in My Room”

The poems you’re publishing came from a deep silence, or too much talking, the opposite. Finally they became what you found and accepted, & that made me fully happy. I lost most of my possessions a few years ago, including a vast library of field guides. “Simple Science” sprouted from what I could reconstruct of wandering trails and marshes with the man who would become my second husband. We become elements of the natural history. We exist forever now in the poem, although he died young 19 years ago.

“Portraits in My Room” is an indoor poem. I was an art collector, but, again, lost most of my paintings ten years ago. Interestingly, the Dolly Sloan portrait, by Agnes Richmond, was purchased by Clarence and Pamela Major, so it is still in the family of poets. I would very much like to buy it back from them, but can’t afford it. Dolly looked pretty and painful. There is a silence in these portraits–they can’t talk if they’re resting their chin on their fist.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

In this eighth decade of my life my days are filled with three things: obsession with pots, potters, and clay; music 24/7, classical, jazz, and blues; and a social commitment to my friends on Facebook to make daily discoveries of the lives and minds of remarkable artists, comics, thinkers, makers. Sometimes I use the quotations that turn up as themes for mostly sonnets. My friends depend on me to come up with one or more discoveries per day. It’s nourishing. There’s more peculiarity to be found than we’re used to living with normally.

For 19 years my dearest cat was Dr. Jesus.

I do not work with clay, but I have enormous admiration for ceramicists–Japanese, American, Danish, British, and artists of other regions. You can find their aesthetic statements provided by galleries along with their work for sale; I’m more touched by what they say than I am of the poetry-talk I’m more used to.

Two Poems by Sandra McPherson

Simple Science Our first time, I was not taking field notes. The gift was too great to jot down. Then together for years we bothered wild terrain to botanize … Read more

About Gary Young

Gary Young’s most recent books are That’s What I Thought, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books, and Precious Mirror, translations from the Japanese. His books include Even So: New and Selected Poems; Pleasure; No Other Life, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Braver Deeds, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; The Dream of a Moral Life which won the James D. Phelan Award; and Hands. A new book of translations, Taken to Heart: 70 poems from the Chinese, is forthcoming from White Pine Press. He has received grants from the NEH, NEA, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America among others. He teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz.

Visit his website: gary-young.net

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Last night I fell asleep” and “Each moment blossoms”

Both of my poems are from a work-in-progress, American Analects, and revolve around my dear friend and mentor, Gene Holtan. In the Analects of Confucius, the author devotes considerable attention to right action, and takes pains to describe and praise certain friends and disciples who exhibit exemplary character. I had intended to write primarily about Gene, but I am at an age when the number of dead friends exceeds those still living, and there are many poems in the manuscript that address those who have died but continue to exert a presence in my life.

“Each moment blossoms” tackles the impermanence of the present moment, which can never be held or even apprehended, and the accumulation of moments into discrete aggregates that make up memories and the indelible proof of our having lived. I list several of these moments before describing the central action of the poem: holding Gene’s hand while he was dying. We can’t really know what someone else is thinking, but we can get close. Because Gene was such an intimate friend, and someone I loved dearly, I can believe that I knew what he was thinking. And though the sea at sunset only looked as if it was burning, it felt as if the whole world was on fire.

“Last night I fell asleep” depicts a situation that most poets have experienced: you wake up with an idea in the middle of the night, write it down, and in the morning you have at least the germ of a poem—or you don’t, as is the case here. Gene did not trust consciousness, and he taught me to be wary of the anything that I “thought”. Gene was always waiting for the real, “the authentic self” to appear. This poem offers a glimpse.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

When the pandemic struck, our two grown sons moved back home with my wife and me—a blessing for us, perhaps less so for them. We live in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and we’d settled into a comfortable routine when the CZU Lightning Complex Fire struck last August. We evacuated our home, and for two weeks had no idea if our house had survived. In the end, we discovered that the fire had burned all around us, but our house had been spared, a small miracle considering that over two dozen friends were among the 900 families on the mountain whose homes had been lost in the blaze.

All the buildings on the property suffered damage, and we camped in a friend’s condominium for four months while repairs were made and moved back into our home just two days after Christmas. Our oldest son, Jake, in addition to being a marvelous poet and critic, is also a sommelier and a superb chef. To ease his pain, and ours, Jake dedicated himself to cooking the best meals possible. For the past year, the four of us have dined on world cuisine—Japanese yakitori, Thai soups, miso noodles, homemade gravlax, marinated pork with a Peruvian aji sauce, Panzanella salad with watermelon and feta. This list could go on for pages. We also drank our way through boxes of wine kept under the house, assuming that if we were saving a particular vintage for a special occasion, that occasion had arrived.

Both our boys are moving on again, and though I will be unable to duplicate our culinary adventures, I hope that I will not slip back into the habit watching my diet or saving that special wine for another time. The lesson of the pandemic is clear—open the bottle now.

Two Poems by Gary Young

“Last night I fell asleep” Last night I fell asleep, and in a dream, I wrote a poem. I worked every line into place, and when I’d finished, I … Read more

About Frank Gallimore

Frank Gallimore is the associate director of marketing for Gallaudet University. He also holds an MFA in poetry from Johns Hopkins University and paints in his spare time. A sampling of his art and poetry can be found at frankgallimore.com. For more recent works in progress, you can follow him on Instagram at @frank_gallimore. His poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and websites, including Slate, Harvard Review Online, Unsplendid, Cold Mountain Review, and was featured a couple of times on Verse Daily.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Edsel” and “Appaloosa”

“Appaloosa” reflects experiences I’ve had growing up in rural areas of Oregon and Nebraska, living close to livestock and plenty of other domesticated animals. Growing up this way allowed me to witness the complicated relationships we have with them, the bonds we make and sometimes sever. The lives of these animals have in many ways supplied the vocabulary for the languageof my childhood. I know it’s easy to run the risk of anthropomorphizing but there’s a reason for that. I believe animals bear more humanity than we are oftentimes willing to admit. Or, to put it differently, I find we are not so unlike animals as we would like to believe.

I can’t speak to what brought the Edsel into this poem. I believe the poem wanted to be about intertidal zones, their changeability, all that life and death, and life in death. Somehow, in that way that poems have, and because it looks like a fish, someone drove this memory of an old, ruined Edsel into my poem and left it there until the poem became the Edsel.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

What a funny question! Music-wise, I listen to everything but usually not with profound attachment. FKJ and Elise Trouw have interested me lately, as well as anything mellow with a hip-hop edge. By contrast, I also happen to be an occasional bluegrass fan. I sing old tunes out loud to myself a lot, sometimes without realizing it. I know much about me tends to be contradictory. Intersectional, perhaps. Food-wise, I have a weakness for enchiladas and lasagnas, anything with an excessive amount of cheese. I like a good scotch although I rarely drink. Most of the time I’m good with a diet coke or just water. I have a tattoo on my arm that I got when I was eighteen. In Japanese, it says “Opposite Twins”. We have a zoo, consisting of two dogs, a rabbit, a bearded dragon, and two African clawed frogs.

Two Poems by Frank Gallimore

Edsel I can feel myself winnowing to some rudimentary figment, as when the distinction no longer quite holds between that Edsel and a beached hunk of carrion, its vertical grille … Read more

About David Kirby

David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. His collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for both the National Book Award and Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize. He is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense” and was named one of Booklist’s Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010. His latest books are a poetry collection, Help Me, Information, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "Galileo,” “The Return of Martin Guerre” and “Immortal Beloved”

A lot of poets’ descriptions of their books these days announce a subject matter: politics, history, relationships, climate change, what have you. Good for them, if the poems are good. But I can’t imagine writing that way. It sounds like journalism to me. I like to stumble around in language, to think less and work more. Some of my Elvii, like singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen and playwright Tom Stoppard, say they don’t think at all, yet theirs is some of the most beautiful, intelligent, moving work we can watch or listen to.

That said, my poems do share common elements. One of these is humor. That’s a good thing—everybody likes to laugh—but it can work against you. I’ve had people tell me, “I didn’t know poetry could be funny.” That’s understandable, because most of it isn’t. Most poets aren’t funny. Look at their head shots: if you’re not scowling like the lead singer of Mudhoney or the Screaming Trees, nobody’s going to take you seriously. I’m often identified as a funny poet, as though I’m only a funny poet. Even my own press says so: if you go to the LSU Press page and tap the icon for Help Me, Information, which is my latest book, you’ll see the tags they use to tell booksellers what the book is about begins with “Humor” and only lists “Poetry” second.

But don’t you like to use every tool in the toolbox? I do. Take a look at my three poems in this issue. They’re about heartbreak, suicide, hanging. Ha, ha! Yet there are a couple of chuckles in each. A poem should be like a letter to a friend or a good conversation. A poem should have everything in it.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

You know that Andy Warhol movie of a man sleeping for five hours? At first Andy thought about casting me, but I blew the audition. I was too boring.

Actually, Warhol is also one of my Elvii. When a reporter asked him who his favorite contemporary artists were, he said, “Oh, I like ‘em all.” That’s me. I eat everything, from chili dogs to foie gras. I like to shake up a craft cocktail, but I like milkshakes, too. I don’t have a pet, but a pet has me: Patsy the cat decided her needs weren’t being met at the neighbor’s house, so she moved in with us (the fact that I’m allergic to her has not altered her plans in the least). I think tattoos are awesome, but I don’t have any. A few years ago a student was over at our house, and I saw she had a tattoo that said, “Poetry is not reflection; it is refraction.” I thought that was pretty good, so I asked, “Who said that?” and my student said, “You did.”

Flaubert said, “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” That’s me. I want my poems to be as action-packed as those Westerns I used to watch when I was a farm kid in Baton Rouge and rode my bike into town and plunked down my quarter at the Ogden or the Hart or the Paramount. It doesn’t matter who the artist is. The art? That’s what’s important.

Three Poems by David Kirby

The Return of Martin Guerre Ever see The Return of Martin Guerre? It’s the best movie. Actually, it’s the worst movie, but I’ll get to that in a minute. … Read more