Super-sized Series

 Poetry Readings and Poets

 

 

Paul Hostovsky

 

 

The Only Question by Paul Hostovsky

 

She was very beautiful.
Exceptionally beautiful.
But beautiful in the way of
certain sudden realizations,
like: My god, is it raining?
or: Look how huge the moon!

She was at the poetry reading.
My poetry reading. Just one among
many pretty undergraduates
until the Q&A. That was when
she raised her hand in the third row
and asked me: "What inspires you?"

What I should have said was:
"Beauty. Beauty inspires me."
And left it at that. And let
the awkward silence speak
for itself while I stared at her
from up at the podium for perhaps

a whole minute, ignoring
the chair of the English Department
clearing his throat, the few diffuse
titters filling the room, the enormous
moon filling the big picture
window as my drenched gaze

fell on her, steadily, like a fine
summer rain falling on the second seat
in the third row. But what I said instead,
a little dryly, was: "Literature. Great
literature inspires me." And she looked
away. And hers was the only question.
 

 

THE NOVELIST GOES
TO A POETRY READING by Shoshauna Shy

 

to torture himself.
Secretly, he wishes he were a poet
so that he didn’t have an agent
on his back egging him to pay homage
to her bottom line.
And he would be quite happy to rely
on white space to emphasize
his insightful declarations.
The novelist is tired of having to write
pages and pages of prose in order to say
what a poet can say with a few choice words.
To have every syllable matter seems exalting
 
especially when he is at a stalemate
with his characters who are acting
like they don’t care if he finishes the book
without them.
That’s when he slinks into Café Montmartre
with its orange lamps and rattan couches
for the deliciously patient hush as
a poet settles at the podium to deliver
her utterances.
The novelist listens to each perfectly
positioned preposition, each adverb
as it pulses in the air, the reverence
that cushions them–and then those sweet
little throat-clucks the audience makes
when they resonate with the final line.

 

Official Licensed Poet by Joe Cottonwood

I go to the hiring hall for poets
but a bouncer at the door demands to see my license.
“What license?” I ask.
Don’t play dumb, he says. No license, no entry.
“But I’m a poet,” I say.
Lemme ask, he says. You got poems in the New Yorker?
“No,” I say.
You got the MFA?
“No.”
You got awards? Prizes?
“Just a bowling trophy,” I say. “How do I get a license?”
You got to take classes, conferences, workshops taught
by Official Poetry Teachers. Then, the license.
So: no hire, I’m illegit.
Oh well. The pay was shit.

I keep the day job. Go around the city. Open mics.
Reciting poems to small groups.
Out loud. For free.
The audiences, they never ask to see a license.
After the reading a few men, always men,
come up to me and say
I don’t really like poetry but I like your stuff.
Always, they call it stuff.
Women say they like it, too, but without
the disclaimer and they don’t call it stuff.
Face it, guys are uncomfortable with poetry.
Me, too.

I find a wise woman. She’s got the MFA,
the publications, the awards.
An Official Licensed Poet if ever there be.
She says, I met that same bouncer.
Everybody meets the bouncer.
She walks with me to the Hiring Hall.
The bouncer blocks the door.
With a quick move, martial art,
she flips the bouncer to the floor.
She says, A poet is a verb, not a noun.
A person writing a poem is a poet.
A person not writing a poem is something else.
You’ll find her poems in anthologies of Great Lit.
She says, By the way, the pay is still shit.

So listen, bouncer: I write stuff, therefore I am.
My license. Now scram.

From Random Saints

 

 

The Reading by Jayne Jaudon Ferrer 

Like Munsch’s man,
my screams are silent;
no one hears.
Indeed, there are those who would smirk
and roll their eyes at my outrage.
But, no, not outrage; outrage is
for cigarette butts flipped
nonchalantly into flowers,
for environmental activists
who drive to protests in SUVs,
for teachers forced to squelch
interest in a newfound fact
so fifty more can be covered
for the standardized test next week.
No, my scream is born of frustration,
of disappointment and despair
for, once again,
a poet proffered a key
and no one showed up
to accept it.

Falling in Love with Words by Margaret Coombs

We all admired Pablo—read his poems
to one another in sunny Sunday bedrooms,
or on benches overlooking foggy lakes.
We cheered his name at concerts
where Chileans in wool ponchos
played indigenous musical instruments.
We didn’t know about his abandoned daughter,
the rape regretfully admitted in his memoir.
 
In a choice between poem or poet,
we loved the poet, took lovers like him,
who bit our lips and dumped us at dawn.
Oh, poetry! How patiently you waited
until we learned that the fire aglow in us
burned hotter from words
than from worshipping heroes.
--
First published in Shot Glass Journal.  

Letter to Donald Hall by Lori Levy

All evening I curled up with your poems,
letters to a dead wife:  “Without.”
You showed me Jane—
her daffodils and her leukemia;
how she died bald and incontinent
in your black and gold painted bed
in the old farmhouse,
Wilmot, New Hampshire;
how Gus, the dog, still brings you
her white slipper.
I went to sleep with your words,
dreamt of terrorists, guns, Jerusalem:
the old nightmare, the cold-sweat chase
in the darkness—where I almost died. 

The Poet at Ninety by Sharon Waller Knutson

Blind now,
she still creates
stories
of life with
Ma and Pa
and the love
of her life,
all gone now,
in her home
in Wisconsin
she shares
with a daughter.

Dictates poems
to her I-Pad,
memorizes
and reads
her poetry
on zoom,
and still
publishes books,
something she
never dreamed
of doing

as a 12-year-old
girl in Wisconsin
during World War II,
as an English
teacher
or even when
she penned
her first poem
at seventy-two
and published
her first poem
at seventy-seven.

After publishing
her fifth book
of poetry
she tells
The Spectator
Ted Kooser
is her inspiration.
I write simple,
no beating
around the bush. 

 

 

Poets Don’t Retire by Alarie Tennille  

In Memory of Robert C. Jones 

so he pushes against time
and gravity, lifts from his chair.
Rattles his papers before him—
a shaman casting a spell.

Each step a period at which we hold
our breath and will him forward.
At the stage, he clutches the podium
like a walker.

Then, gathering himself up, he lets

his words go without a tremor-

straight to their mark.

 

 

Forgetting by Alan Walowitz

 

The poet who died the other month,
or perhaps a different year?
I heard him beat a drum and chant,
or make some other holy noise;
the same place Lincoln spoke, quite nice, downtown,
though I can’t remember where.
I was convinced I liked him well enough
as I waited for the meet-and-greet,
to buy a book, hoped to get it signed—long hall
of women I thought I’d like to know.

I went back home, alone, stopped for a bite,
greasy takeout in a paper bag.
Then thought, he had a voice like God—
you know, the guy who played Mandela once?
Or, who’s the queen got her head cut off
at Henry 8th’s behest?
They say he sounded like a naked hiss.
I forget and this just a recent list
of what’s so hard to recall.

Suddenly, I remember, and don’t quite know why:
Cooper-Union, Morgan Freeman, Anne Boleyn, Robert Bly—
Everything will come to you, my fortune-cookie promised,
fetched from the bottom of the bag.
I’d hoped for more by now—a book of poems, to be rich,
a name on everyone’s tongue.
But it’s getting late to wait for will,
which seems to never come.

First appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily 

 

 

 Riding with the Haiku Poet by Laurie Kuntz

 

On a muddy road, a haiku poet
driving a car that looks like an old stone pond,
offered a ride.
 
Haiku today, he bemoaned,
is written by those who have never seen a frog jump,
or heard the cricket’s dusky lament.
 
I, then, recalled, one last lingering fall day,
the window, left ajar, just enough for a cricket
to fly in and land in the middle of my classroom,
 
and the teenage boy, amidst the curious yelps of students,
stood up and squashed it with the 5-7-5
beat of his heel.
 
But this poem does not pretend
to be about dead crickets, vicious boys,
or open windows on autumn days,
 
it’s just about a ride with a haiku poet
in a car that looks like
an old stone pond.