Fieralingue Poets Corner

3 Poets from Fieralingue Poets Corner

It’s long list, some 360 poets in all, and each is introduced with a brief biography and illustrated by an extended sample of their work, usually several poems but occasionally selections from a long piece.

The work I liked most of the poems presented (which are not always the author’s best) are by Charles Alexander, Bill Allegrezza, Ivy Alvarez, Jim Bennet, Millicent Borges Accardi, Ruth Fainlight, Kathy Figueroa, Annie Finch, Jessica Fiorini, R.S. Gwynn, Bill Lavender, Hoshang Merchant, Joyce Nower, Jane Kerrigan O’Keefe and Patricia Valdata.

I’ve chosen three poems to review here. The first is ‘Pushing Water 47 (for Chris Bruch)’. Charles Alexander has published three books of poems, teaches at Naropa University, the University of Arizona, Chax Press, and Pima Community College. ‘Pushing Water 47’ is a discursive poem about the irrevocable decisions we make, what Alexander terms ‘singularity’. Here the word is being used in a technical sense: not simply oddness or unpredictability but points in space- time where the quantities that are used to measure the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on the coordinate system.

If each point is a singularity
we were right or left
on unspeakable plains
I will be there right
away
and you will be
left out
on the noncollinear path

That path is further developed (non-collinear points are points not occupying the same plane) through memories: of Olanthe Kansas, an attack of stage-fright, of a love renewed or not renewed. The arrow of time is invoked:

and all the works that are good are
=> amusing
if the arrows point the
right way
arrows are arrows are arrows
if I remember a swing in
a park late at night

And there are more memories, possibly of a family:

where are you going
my blue eyed son
green eyed daughter
brown eyed child
spot on my shoulder

And a death:

each second
and my friend imagines the place
to scatter her ashes

Until the singularity ‘disperses’ and firmer memories are blocked in with rhyming couplets:

all my life I have heard about many
lines
lines mark a sonnet’s walk around a block
in Toronto daughter and father write a walk
in ink that dries and falters falls and sighs
when the wind blows water and grass and cries

Though these too crumble away.

the thirst of many
faces many days cry out cry loss cry hasty sleep
upon the plain of dust we dream tonight
when the fire dies and the shooting star stays
against confusion stays our hand our leap
toward the wall that crumbles into light
light crumbles too
says the echo to the water

In short, it’s simple poem that echoes the fragility and unpredictability of life with disconnected lines whose scraps of scientific terminology help give them a more general dimension.

The second poem is ‘Only More So’ by Millicent Borges Accardi,. Millicent Borges Accardi has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the arts (NEA), the California Arts Council, the Barbara Deming Foundation, Jentel, and the Corporation of Yaddo. The poem comes from Woman on a 'Shaky Bridge' (2010), and relates a wartime incident, of a woman and her husband abused by soldiers billeted on them. What actually happens is not spelt out, but remains stronger for only being hinted at.

You see it was very much like this.

The scene is set:

In the flatland dregs, the fat-coated
soldiers knocked at the door, so a woman
was forced, with a gritty smile,
to invite them in,

The husband resents the intrusion but can do nothing:

In the corner her husband rubbed
a wooden rifle, tapped wooden boots against
a wooden floor, thinking, thinking
visitors are cold as bad luck.

And so the familiar scene is repeated:

The soldiers, making circles in the dust
on the hearth, asked the woman to remember
the unremembered: the jewelry sold for food,
Where are the rings?
the crudely made benches evaporated into firewood.

Until the inevitable happens:

while their stares mocked the broken
windows, and pain, itself, counted the woman’s
buttons as they easily slipped through the stitching
of her clothes.

The woman survives (though possibly not the husband) by accepting the flat banality of rape:

That now she must survive by owning air,
holding back the red, the full, the bare,
the proud canvases of flat language paper
that once told her everything she needed to know.

From which she will distance herself by suppressing the particulars:

It was like this, only more so.

The third poem is ‘The Crescent by Ruth Fainwright’, who has published thirteen collections of poems, two volumes of short stories, and translations from French, Portuguese and Spanish. The poem comes from 'The Knot' ( Hutchinson, 1990) and starts with a commonplace observation:

My stick of lipsalve is worn away
into the same curved crescent

Which recalls memories of her mother:

that was the first thing I noticed
about my mother’s lipstick.

And her ingress into the adult world:

It marked the pressure of her existence
upon the world of matter.

Which the daughter remembers in detail as it was:

It was part of the mystery of
brassieres and compacts and handbags
that meant being grown-up.
And also alarming:

I thought my own heels would have to grow
a sort of spur to squeeze right down
the narrow hollow inside high-heels.

Now the author is older, and the crescent shape reminds her of a candle and the moon:

or a memorial candle,
wax congealed down one side,
as though it stood in the wind
that blows from the past, flame
reflected like a crescent
moon against a cloud

When the lipstick becomes a talisman:

in a small plastic tube
in my handbag, a holy relic
melted by believers`
kisses,

And reminder of her mother:

and every time
I smooth my lips with the unguent
I feel them pout and widen
in the eternal smile
of her survival through me,
feel her mouth on mine.

In all three poems, and most particularly in the third, the language is exact, scrupulously kept to the emotionally relevant, and stripped of unnecessary ornament.

First posted by Colin Holcombe 30/09/2013 on TextEtc.com blog.