From the original PBS broadcast with discussion of Jane Hoogestraat’s book Bordern Lands.

Liz Blood is a writer, editor, and itinerant. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Numero Cinq, Hunter Mountain, Delta Sky magazine, the Oklahoma Gazette, Art Focus magazine, and Oklahoma Today. In 2014, her personal essay, “Sway,” was awarded first place in the magazine column writing category by the Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists. Her essay “Bloodsport,” was recently published in Hunger Mountain. She lives in San Marcos, Texas with her boyfriend Will and his dog, Mini, where they chase cats and hike and jump in the river together.

Sign up for River Pretty.

Richard Farrell graduated from the United States Naval Academy and served on active duty until 1993. For a number of years, he was a high school teacher in San Diego before deciding to pursue writing fulltime. He completed his M.F.A. through Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2010. He is currently a Senior Contributing Editor at Numro Cinq Magazine and the Non-Fiction Editor at upstreet. Rich teaches at Words Alive, PEN in the Classroom, San Diego Writers, Ink and at the River Pretty Writers Workshop in Missouri. His work, both fiction and non-fiction, has appeared or is forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, Numro Cinq, A Year In Ink Descant, New Plains Review and upstreet. He is currently at work completing a collection of short stories and a memoir on flying. He lives with his family in San Diego, CA. Click here to read an interview with Rich.

In this episode Tatiana and I get together and begin to determine the conversation going forward, the audience we can reach, the kind of small space we want to cultivate, and then Tatiana sits down with A.W. “Andrew” Marshall who recently published his first collection of stories, Simple Pleasures. They discuss reading for fun, allowing the process to ferment,  what she said, a passage of life in a series of stories, the good and the bad days, the objects tucked away and the imagination they influence. So whittle a figurine, squirrel away your attachments, and find the small spaces of your obsession.

Buy a copy of Simple Pleasures here.

Here’s what some brilliant people are saying about the book:

Simple Pleasures marks the debut of Andrew Marshall’s curiously addicting fiction.  In Marshall’s stories hearts can literally be touched, actually–grasped, and a rolling Head can terrorize a town. Here the power of sex both attracts and repels: lovers fall off a dizzy perch among branches, a plunge that alters the lives of others for decades; the accidental glancing touch of two strangers binds them to an increasingly disorderly life of physical pleasure; and the confluence of a cache of pornographic drawings and mistaken identity allow a man to escape his dreary life.  Surprises appear at nearly every turn in these intriguing, original stories, and Marshall orchestrates them beautifully.

—Philip Graham, author of How to Read an Unwritten Language and The Art of the Knock

Amidst the known and predictable elements of this world, A.W. Marshall’s fictions open up uncanny new spaces, ruled by the unexpected, the inexplicable. Thanks to mysterious encounters and turns of event, the very human characters in Simple Pleasures come to experience life as “weirder and full of more possibility” than before. I feel that way too after reading these stories, which startled and moved me with their mix of marvelous strangeness and genuine heartache. After a boy proves his claim that he can touch a girl’s heart—literally reach in and touch it—he muses, “‘Imagine if I can do this now, what I can do later.’” It’s hard not to wonder the same about Marshall himself, given the dark powers and brilliant promise he shows in this scary-good first collection.

—Ellen Lesser, author of The Shoplifter’s Apprentice and The Blue Streak

Simple Pleasures is a mysterium tremendum of stories like little boxes with secret drawers and hidden latches the reader opens with glee, trepidation, and increasing recognition that the great mysteries of existence are best mined in the small moments between humans.

—Mary Rickert, author of The Memory Garden and Map of Dreams

A.W. Marshall has lived in Oklahoma for the last eight years, but grew up on the beaches of Southern California. His work is published or forthcoming in Red Wheelbarrow, TheNewerYork, Fiction Attic, Austin Review, and Vestal Review.  In 2005, he wrote and directed the professional theater production of his play, Pan, with Long Beach Shakespeare Company.  In 2003, his play, Emptier, was produced at the Hudson Theater in Hollywood and directed by Kristin Hanggi.  He received his MFA in playwriting from University of Southern California and a MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.  He is co-editor of Piece Meal, an online magazine that exclusively reviews poems and short stories from literary magazines.  For the last four years, he has been writing a novel about a half man, half rabbit in 1850’s California called Hendo.

On this episode we begin with a call to friend of the show, Poet Emilia Phillips, where fills us in on some unfortunate events that have taken place with University of Akron Press and the University’s President Scott Scarborough. Then in the regular show we turn the podcast over to newly appointed and devastatingly brilliant, coconspirator, co-pilot across the sonic inter webs of space, time and words, co host extraordinaire Tatiana Ryckman! Tatiana sits down with writers John Proctor and Kate Senecal at the Young’s Residency and discuss finding space to write, the grand movements of the mind, 80s movies, the allowance of bad writing and creating the space of possibility for the written word. Several links follow also for where you can sign the petition and also let President Scarborough know what you think of his recent decision. So simmer down, keep it up, relax, let your voice be heard and give us a listen.

Mary Ruefle was born in Pennsylvania in 1952.  She is the author of many books.  Her website has been designed to allow readers to experience her erasure books, which can otherwise not be seen as they are old, friable, one-of-kind things.  It is also a way for prospective collectors and buyers to preview the books without handling.  The books will be changed eventually. Mary is a writer, or to use the parlance of our times, an artist.

Lawrence Sutin was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on October 12, 1951. His parents, Jack and Rochelle Sutin, were Holocaust survivors who fought as Jewish partisans in Poland during World War Two. He graduated from St. Louis Park High School in Minnesota and then earned an undergraduate degree in psychology and English from the University of Michigan and a law degree from Harvard University. Since 1984 he has been a full-time writer and teacher, publishing books in multiple genres including biography, memoir, history and the novel. He is also currently working in the field of text-and-collage erasure books. He currently is a professor in the Creative Writing and Liberal Studies Programs of Hamline University and teaches in the low-residency program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has been married to Mab Nulty, a psychologist, since 1990. He has three children, Ceallaigh Anderson (stepdaughter), Brennan Vance (stepson), and Sarah Sutin (daughter). He also has a part-beagle part-German shepherd dog, Murphy. He tries to lead a quiet life devoted to writing, family, friends, reading and listening to music. It doesn’t always work out quietly but he does the best he can.

Cole Closser holds an MFA in Sequential Art from the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. His first graphic novel, Little Tommy Lost (Koyama Press), was named one of the ten best graphic novels of 2013 by A.V. Club (the Onion), and nominated for the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award in the category of Best Publication Design at the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con. Cole is an Assistant Professor of Art & Design at Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri—and is a regular guest faculty member at the River Pretty Writers Retreat in Tecumseh, Missouri, where he leads a workshop in sequential art/graphic narrative. Cole’s work has been featured in such publications as Regular Show from Boom Studios, Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream from Locust Moon Press, and The Dreadfuls from Rotland Press. Cole’s forthcoming graphic novel Black Rat will debut this September at the Small Press Expo, from Koyama Press. Cole is generally a nice guy, but don’t jive talk him. He enjoys reading books with funny pictures, watching old cartoons, and wrestling alligators. Cole likes cats.

This is the beginning of a special series of episodes with readings and talks recorded at the River Pretty Writers Retreat. The first of these was recorded last spring during River Pretty 6, and then recently when I was able to attend during River Pretty 7. They are unruly, they are bucolic, they are full of passion and rivers and mountains and verve. I have told you before, you need to get your self to River Pretty Writers Retreat. Whether you’re a novice, an old hand, a passerby or dyed in the wool, LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE and then go check out Riverpretty.org sign up for the retreat, donate some money, be kind. For now check out these readings from Chaz Miller, Steve Rucker and D Gilson.

Chaz Miller has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Moon City Review, Ozarks Watch, Bayou Magazine, and The Southern Review.

Steve Rucker received his M.F.A in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and his M.A. in Writing from Missouri State University, where he taught creative writing. He has published his work in Numro Cinq, Elder Mountain, and Upstreet (“A Terminal Chord” was listed as a notable essay in The Best American Essays of 2013 anthology), and his essay regarding the life and work of Raymond Carver appears in Research Guide to American Literature: Contemporary Literature 1970 Present. Steve writes from a well-lit front room in Springfield, Missouri.

D Gilson is an Ozark boy whose poetry, essays, and scholarship explore the relationship between popular culture, sex, and literature. In the past year he’s published Crush, a collection of poems and essays with Will Stockton. His first chapbook Catch & Release, won the Robin Becker Prize from Seven Kitchens, and his second, Brit Lit, is now available from Sibling Rivalry. A graduate of the MFA program at Chatam University, he is currently a PhD student in American Literature & Culture at the George Washington University.

Caitlyn Paley is the founder and editor-in-chief of 491 Magazine. Her work has appeared in The Austin Review, Metazen, Moria Poetry Journal, Shampoo, andOtoliths, among others. Caitlyn received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Also check out the work of Lee Busby, order now, 5th Generation Immigrant.

Sarah Certa was born in Germany in 1987. She is the author of RED PAPER HEART, a limited-edition chapbook from Zoo Cake Press (2013, free e-version now available). Her poems have been published in Narrative Magazine, B O D Y, Connotation Press, smoking glue gun, PANK, and many other journals. Her second chapbook JULIET (I) is forthcoming from H_NGM_N this fall. She lives in Minnesota. You can find her online at sarahcerta.tumblr.com.

Check out the pdf of Red Paper Heart Here.

Also check out Vent, http://noapologies-vent.com

Rimas Blekaitis is adrift in the wide, shallow sea of his “crappy novel” project, constantly on the lookout for pieces of debris on which he can stay afloat, the better to see the migrations of efflorescent sea-horses and gauge his progress in the currents. He thus also gains insight into the movements of certain characters’ minds. As he also has aspirations as a contemplative, he’s mindful of the fact that the drifting itself can be quite addictive. He is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has produced seven reviews for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Be sure to get copy of Ian Bodkin’s Book, Every Word Was Once Drunk, here.

And also while you’re at it how about Hot Teen Slut by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz.

And Check out one of Tatiana Ryckman’s day jobs over at the Austin Review.

Emilia Phillips is a poet. She is the author of Signaletics (University of Akron Press, 2013) and two chapbooks including Bestiary of Gall (Sundress Publications, 2013). Her poetry appears in Agni, Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of the 2012 Poetry Prize from The Journal, 2nd Place in Narrative’s 2012 30 Below Contest, and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, U.S. Poets in Mexico, and Vermont Studio Center. She is the 2013–2014 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, the prose editor for 32 Poems, and a staff member at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author Fire Road (Dream Horse Press, 2013).  She is a co-translator with Ana Jelnikar of Look Back, Look Ahead, Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel  (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). Her poetry has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, New Ohio Review, Agni, Asheville Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Porch and Cutthroat, where she was a Discovery Poet in 2010. She is the author of a chapbook Between this Quivering (Coreopsis Press). Her translations and essays have appeared in Artful Dodge, Mid-American Review, Nimrod, Hunger Mountain, The Literary Review, International Poetry Review and Metamorphosis.  Other translations are in Ljubljana Tales (New Europe Writers, 2012) and Apokalipsa (Ljubljana, 2013). A portfolio of translations is forthcoming in Verse.  Carlson grew up in Cranford, NJ and graduated from University of Rhode Island and Vermont College MFA Program. She has given readings and led poetry and translation workshops in the US and Europe as well as participated in the Golden Boat International Poetry Translation workshops in Slovenia. She lives in Carver, MA.

“After 1am” is available in the most recent issue of scissors & scpackle, which you can find here.

Steve Rucker
Steve received his M.F.A in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts where he worked alongside writers such as Sue William Silverman, Robert Vivian, Abby Frucht, and Larry Sutin. He has also received his M.A. in Writing from Missouri State University, where he taught creative writing for two years. He has published his work in Numéro Cinq, Elder Mountain, and Upstreet, and his essay regarding the life and work of Raymond Carver appears in Research Guide to American Literature: Contemporary Literature 1970 – Present. He is currently developing a collection of essays about his experience in the Air Force, entitled Fraud, Waste, and Abuse.

Go sign up for River Pretty Writer’s Retreat!

Check out “Goat Caitlyn” by Caitlyn Paley here.

Also, get a copy of Every Word Was Once Drunk, here.

Pamela L. Taylor is a data guru by day and a poet by night. She has a doctorate in Social Psychology from UCLA, an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Backbone Press, Blackberry Literary Magazine, Construction Literary Magazine, Pedestal Magazine, Sou’wester Literary Journal and When Women Waken. For the past five years, she has been a co-organizer of Living Poetry, a group that organizes and promotes poetry events throughout the Triangle area of North Carolina. When Pamela is not working or writing, she’s dancing Argentinean tango. Her blog, www.poetsdoublelife.com, is geared toward poets with non-literary careers.

You can check out  “Disguising Weapons, Everyday Objects” by Erica Wright here.

“Are we Dead Yet?”

I’ve been thinking about the state of the art this past week. The state of poetry to be precise, but also the state of words and writing. Maybe it’s the new year, for me a new decade, maybe I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and just now I got this itch to put it into words. I don’t know, but it does make me think of a quote from the great prose writer F Scott Fitzgerald, “Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.”

Now at first, the whole statement dares the reader. The artist will not commit the act unless the reader is willing to take a similar risk. But the words that get me have always been edge and precipice. They are the boundary, extremity, fringe, margin, side; lip, rim, brim, brink, verge; perimeter, circumference, periphery, limits, and bounds. I know them both from the chair of the audience and writing with a gall to welcome strangers into my words.

And of course, then there’s a poem:

For Guillaume Apollinaire

Come to the edge.

We might fall.

Come to the edge.

It’s too high!

COME TO THE EDGE!

And they came,

and he pushed,

and they flew.

-Christopher Logue

It is here, dear friends, I begin. It is a difficult task, only because I too am afraid to fall. These words feel tarnished. So many willing to play, so few willing to clean. Over the course of our humanity we’ve perfected the scalpel once stone, once bronze; we’ve even gone and gilded us the handle; tried silver a generation or two after that. But then what precious metal do we apply to the task? Platinum? No, that’s too rare and too flashy. Titanium? At first no, as there are the stories of wedding bands that can only be released if the finger is severed. Then again, there’s that word—synthetic—beyond the polyester, nylon and high-fructose, it ain’t all that bad. And yet, if it’s purity we’re looking for it ain’t found, no, it’s touched by a raised hand stained in earth.

So, ok. In this the Titanium Age? Or Titanic? We’ve given up our household gods, I mean the ones that look like you and me. We’ve even made an alloy that’s exiled us, scorched and flooded our lands only to come down here as flesh so we could cut it, stab it, hang it to watch the blood trickle, and then believe that it couldn’t die. All points bulletin as went the Town-Crier, “He will come again, he will come again…” Now some milleniae later, we still don’t know. But there is always Metallica:

And I was going to pepper my statement here with clips from the song “No Leaf Clover,” but given the band’s penchant for people using their songs without permission, I rerain; I don’t need my podcast to be that popular.

I digress. I mean to say that all of us have that moment whether infantile or even pragmatic where we know that this word, this line, this sentence, these cells will stand alone. They will emerge from the medium. Out in the light of day or wandering home in twilight, the art will take on a theater of the mad all its own.

And yet, the problem, as with all parents, is guidance. We want it to be all these dreams, wishes, and hopes. Unfortunately, our deepest desires often amount to nothing more than a memory of adolescent provocations.

In terms of modern poetry, yes, there was the time of Yeats and Elliot. Not so much Whitman and Dickinson, but yes, cummings again and again, all over the place for years. What I mean to say is yes, each art has there moment in the sun, when the world bends an ear, or tunes in “to use the parlance of our times” (Lebowski).

But too many lament, too many hope for the grave and lay their flowers prematurely. Every once in a while and I imagine in almost every form, though it seems to occur most often when discussing words and letters and such, there is the question, are we dying? Has the written word lived out its usefulness?  No.

And Speaking of metals, yes, we live in the golden age of television, like the seventies were for film or was it the forties that will always “be! Nothing else! Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!”? Regardless, every form loses sight of the world.

A page has become far less interesting to the eye or so we might think. Again, our approach to this opinion has more than one walk. There is the audience ready for the shiny object in the room and in the blue light of the television what page or shelf can offer a better distraction? So we grow frightened and look out upon the audience with fear that if lights are turned down, then we might see the empty chairs, and feel forced to ask, “Am I dead?”

Again, no. In many ways we are the most alive as artists when the world has turned its back to us. Many and dare I say all of us begin out of a need to express something that we cannot achieve in our everyday discourse. And due to technology, everyday discourse is more complicated and nuanced than it has ever been, and to the point of distraction.

When the zeitgeist is not staring us down, monitoring our likes and dislikes, trying to define the a community of artists under one umbrella, like what age this is, we are free to go about our work without the added distraction of populist belief. Think how much work our politicians might get done if we did not have a twenty-four hour news cycle.

Now is the time when we can experiment. Dylan should have waited till now to go electric. We are a fringe community. Last year over 110,000 books were published. Thousands of poetry books, and out of those thousands, the majority probably only sold 100-200 copies each. My point is this, we write in a time when we need not worry about the size of our audience. None of us are popular, and especially in poetry, the age of the rock-star poet is gone, for now. Sure there are a few names out there, but honestly, how many will stand the test of time? Regardless, we do not need to worry about the audience, because somewhere there’s a few hundred people waiting to read our work, we just have to find them.

We are all on the edge, and the best thing we can do is come closer to fall and fly away.

John Proctor lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, two daughters, and Chihuahua. An active reader on the New York City open mike scene, he’s written memoir, fiction, poetry, criticism, and just about everything in the space between them. His work has been published in DIAGRAM, Superstition Review, Underwater New York, Defunct, New Madrid, Numero Cinq, McSweeney’s, Trouser Press, New York Cool, and the Gotham Gazette, and is forthcoming in The Normal Schooland Austin Review. He serves as Online Editor for Hunger Mountain Journal of the Arts and Resident Dad columnist for the blog A Child Grows in Brooklyn. He completed his MFA in nonfiction writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and teaches academic writing, media studies, and communication theory at Manhattanville College. You can find him online (including links to his work) at NotThatJohnProctor.com/.

Check out Kurt Caswell’s piece: “At the Phillips 66” up at The Common.

Preparing the Space:

Committing Suicide for Tum Tum

Of Suicide

Reflexions on suicide, & on my father, possess me.

I drink too much. My wife threatens separation.

She won’t ‘nurse’ me. She feels ‘inadequate.’

We don’t mix together.

It’s an hour later in the East.

I could call up Mother in Washington, D.C.

But could she help me?

And all this postal adulation & reproach?

A basis rock-like of love & friendship

for all this world-wide madness seems to be needed.

Epicetus is in some ways my favourite philosopher.

Happy men have died earlier.

I still plan to go to Mexico this summer.

The Olmec images! Chichèn Itzài!

D. H. Lawrence has a wild dream of it.

Malcolm Lowry’s book when it came out I taught to my precept at Princeton.

I don’t entirely resign. I may teach the Third Gospel

this afternoon. I haven’t made up my mind.

It seems to me sometimes that others have easier jobs

& do them worse.

Well, we must labour & dream. Gogol was impotent,

somebody in Pittsburgh told me.

I said: At what age? They couldn’t answer.

That is a damned serious matter.

Rembrandt was sober. There we differ. Sober.

Terrors came on him. To us too they come.

Of suicide I continually think.

Apparently he didn’t. I’ll teach Luke.

–John Berryman

When I was young my thoughts were Epicedian—no, I mean to say this is not a dirge—I could understand the work of Epicetus before I read him. There has always been the image and the subterfuge of the word. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” To commit the act is to lie.

In a field tonight or next year—the storm—lightning has struck and in time we may stumble across the split boughs or singed field. The leftovers of the event. And we will know, this is not the event. It is the aftermath. Perhaps this is where we get on our knees with Magritte and write, “this is not the strike.”

But how do we commit to an act of art and in that very process acknowledge that this is all an act? What becomes of the matter we affect in our hands when set out for all these denizens who lately pass by ever so late?

It is the creation or destruction we leave on the page, on the stand, in the gutter, beneath the fingers, passed the eye, in the ear, or by the nose where we wish to be the object. Being that the remnant will remind the audience of the act. The mark becomes totem and testament to the event. And those of us in the stands often nod as though this is the fact into an accusative end of motion; the matter.

Over time & language we continue to create a series or group of words—an established communication—of meaning that cannot be deduced by the words together or alone; idioms pepper every interaction.

Some two thousand years ago upon the rostra to utter “Novis Rebus” would be today’s red ticker on the bottom of the screen with “Breaking News” in some strobe-lit-pixel-effect. The most accurate translation of this idiom is “revolution.” Our phrase for re—again, and volvo, volvere, volui, volitum—to roll or turn over.

To the Romans new ideas were revolutions, to us etymologically we look for the past turned over again. Each year Berryman said he committed suicide. In his art he was Henry, so each year meant a phoenix, he could kill Henry & write him again. In his poetry, he exercised ; what fools went and named confession.

What I say next…This is hard. I have slit my wrists, thrown a belt over my closet door & slammed it shut without masturbating; I’ve sawed my radius. I’ve jumped from steps, stairs & balconies. I’ve thrown the front wheel of my bicycle down a dirt road, jumped off the mountain & careened into the valley. I’ve broken my tibia through the fibula with a cracked femur; my humerus went left as the body went right; I broke my radius and the ulna on both arms at the same time; in a home improvement store I tagged my sister six years older than me for the first time & turned around to split my skull in two on the corner of a basket of bolts. I jumped out of or ran across the road to kneel before a series of swerving motor vehicles. Even when I was first married, my wife hid the kitchen knives.

I thought I could die.

The night before my fifteenth birthday I remember being really high; smoking one last bowl before bed; the stars were beautiful. That night in my dreams, what I would later name my shadow over my Id, told me that I had lived half of my life; I had fifteen years to be the fruit of the fuck of it.

Even in my twenties, a year after meeting my tribe, I staggered out into the alley with a chef’s knife and fell to fillet my wrist beneath the city lights; amber and blood.

Four days ago, Berryman jumped off a bridge in 1972.

Coke annoys me. Pot sets all the doors I have known some 20,000 leagues away, and leaves me anxious. A pint of vodka is a circus I can dance under. Whiskey steals the keys and has an inkling to drive the car off the bridge. And while nicotine soothes me, it clogs my arteries; swallows me in smoke. I reach across the table and my hands tremble.

Kate Donahue, Berryman’s third wife said that poetry kept him alive and when he was done with his Dream Songs there was nothing left in his way.

Again, Berryman said that each year he committed suicide; he killed the self to begin again; he wrote more.

I spent almost thirty years fascinated by Achilles and death. Horus and Rimbaud and Joan of Arc and Hendrix and Shelley and Joplin and Cobain and Morrison and good old Jesus. The god made flesh that had to die.

But now I’m thirty and days running. I’m tired of trying to die, let alone the return of Saturn. I’m ready to live.

Berryman attempted the reinvent himself every year; he changed his name from Smith; he left Oklahoma for New England; he went off to Cambridge and grew an accent; in The Dispossessed he chose to become Yeats; he married Eileen and then found Chris and later Kate; he met Henry Bones; his life became that gyre in “Second Coming,” his center could not hold. Berryman could never leave that stoop where his father fired a bolt through the temple.

I understand being obsessed with my childhood, the breaks, bruises & cuts. And maybe this is just the manic upswing where I deem the world beautiful. But with all do respect, I don’t think Mr. Berryman found any new matters, I think of his suicides and rebirths as merely the matter turning over. I say this as someone who reads Berryman almost daily.

I find it interesting that he mentions Gogol, for me it’s like mentioning Paul Valery. Both are writers that survived the long haul. They did not burn brightly only to be snuffed out by their obsessions. They survived. Valery going as far as giving up poetry for decades, only to come back swinging. Gogol only realizing that writing might be his salvation toward the end. Both with a lasting effect on the literature of their countrymen, which means that each is integral to the last century of Western Writing.

Berryman is also a poet that in time will not be dismissed as a Pound or Elliot; simply a point without legacy. His writings may have merely turned over, but a lifetime of reading Dream Songs, I think would be well read. Add some Whitman, Cummings, Emily Dickinson & William Carlos Williams, then you got yourself a library.

So what am I saying? After six days of being thirty, I can finally say that I am not going to kill myself; sooner or later. I’m turning over; my revolution is one of new matters. I wish to be a dance of fire like my buddy Nataraja burning the world so that it can be born again.

Yesterday, I found out that in about 12 to 14 weeks I’ll have a boy coming into this world. Aiden Bodkin. One day if you’re listening, son, know that in the womb I saw you dancing & at the moment I was ready to begin again. You were the little fire that made me write this. I will write my tragedies, errors, obsessions, and what your mother will think are my ill attempts at humor. But I will be here as long as my body allows Tum Tum.

My students think you’re going to burst from the womb with a full beard—no pressure—I’ll teach you the art. And unlike me, your mother’s father has a full head of hair, so you can expect a fine quaff well into your golden years. After Uncle Joel, Aunt Meghan, Uncle Rafael and Aunt Victoria, just wait until you meet the tribe—Charlie, Caitlyn, Andrew, Tatiana, Lee, Liz, Summar, Steve, this next fellow John, and David and Judy Savage, they’re sure to keep you wild; which is exactly what your mother and I want.  All I ask is that you read Berryman on your own because I’ll probably mention him and Batman from time to time. You are the event, even if I etch “this is Aiden” into your crib.

Andrew Marshall is a writer in Tulsa, Oklahoma and a 2012 graduate of the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he studied fiction.  He has been published in Red Wheelbarrow, Mysterical, Headlinemuse and the Austin Review. He also received his MFA in playwriting from USC in 2000.  In 2005, he wrote and directed the professional theater production of his play, Pan, with Long Beach Shakespeare Company.  In 2003, his play, Emptier, was produced at the Hudson Theater in Hollywood and directed by Kristin Hanggi.  His play Personal Stigmata received a staged reading at Theater of Note in Hollywood in 2004.  Currently, he is writing a novel about a half man, half rabbit in 1850’s California called Hendo.

Read the rest of Ben Segal’s piece “Yes Hog” up at the Collagist.

Richard Hartshorn lives in upstate New York.  He is the recipient of the 2011 Richard Bausch Short Story Prize, and his fiction has been published in Drunken Boat, Our Stories, Crack the Spine, The Dirty Napkin, and other publications.

Preparing the Space:

cummings² and the Poetics of Being

set to “First Breath After Coma” by Explosions in the Sky

Both a thought and an idea, this is in between two quotes. A mere line. Both quotes are from the work of e.e. cummings. Both quotes came via email earlier this week from my mother. Both my parents taught me of poets. Both read their favorite passages almost nightly to my sister and myself when we were young.

My mother would sit at my bedside with ee cummings or Emily Dickinson to read me a poem before I drifted off into sleep. My father would set his chainsaw down and as we gathered firewood, he would recite passages from wild-eyed Frenchmen I knew from the pictures above his desk. But this is both, not about my father nor my mother, and yet is. This is about poets & poetry.

Quote 1:

“Such was a poet and shall be and is—who’ll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam’s architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain’s heartbeat in his hand.”

― E.E. Cummings

As I write these notes down, I am listening to Explosions in the Sky, a band well known for creating albums that are wholly instrumental. At this moment I am not afraid of hearing words nor silence. But I am trying to focus here on the words of Mr. cummings, and yet I need an undercurrent of sound. Still, as with every note whether from the contortions of a larynx or the strike of a pick across the string, there is the idea, an expression, that beckons words even if they have yet to be formed by the mouth or through the microphone.

Explosions in the Sky is an instrumental rock band creating soundscapes like the many guitarists before them of early mornings with the first rays of the “New Rising Sun” to raucous evenings or somber blues of “Things that [we] used to do.” There is anthem. There is reflection. There is triumph. There is a world after the bombs have fallen. There is a light and there is a storm.

Here I could go on to discuss the writings of Mr. cummings; how little the denotations meant; how paramount the inner connected universe of connotation and the words being pronounced as they are written is in his work.

But that would be like asking a poet to choose, as modern day poet Norman Dubie was once asked in an interview, “If you could choose an American Poet that you could do without, would it be Whitman or cummings?” to which Dubie replied somewhere along the lines of Whitman because you can’t get to cummings without Whitman having existed. Whitman is inherent to American verse.

Now here, I will say in this day or age or epoch, so to is cummings. His notion of a poet is romantic, the last of the great warriors in a world where we only know of soldiers; an epic hero. The poet is Horus. The poet is Sidhartha. The poet is Demeter. The poet is Achilles. The poet is Aeneas in a single work full of piety and rage. And in keeping with the themes of this show, the poet is Batman and Batwoman.

She will walk through the depths of horror with nothing but a utility belt. In the cities I’ve visited with my mother, she must stop and take a picture of each fountain we pass. At home, her bedroom windows are adorned with pieces of stained glass because she likes the way the light comes through.

The poet is not here to judge but take note. When I was young and I asked my father about poets, he always gave me the same response, “Everyone can be a poet, they just have a different set of tools.”

This is the part of the song that repeats across a major scale.

Quote 2:

“A poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being”

― E.E. Cummings

We lived on a mountain and driving into town for a gallon of milk or a box of nails was an excursion. If we were lucky and going to dinner at a restaurant, it was an event.

Gertrude Stein once said that we live in a period of late-language. Meaning. When we look at the moon, we see the moon as it is, what the New American Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the natural satellite of the earth, visible (chiefly at night) by reflected light from the sun.” It is not made of cheese, there is no man, there are no moon people, or what I always thought looked like a woman kneeling as if in prayer her hair flowing off into space behind her. She is a figment while the distant rock remains.

The melody is one of memory.

From the end of the dirt road where I grew up there is a two lane highway, that merges five miles down the road into four lanes known as route 250 or Richmond Road, it stretches through Richmond, VA, where I live now all the way through Charlottesville, VA, a town known for Thomas Jefferson and UVA, and a half hour to forty minutes from my childhood.

I think we were on our way to a Chinese place. My mother, my father, my sister and me in our two-door gray Nissan and I know I was young. I sat behind my father because my sister was taller than me then. I was learning how to read among other things because I remember pointing at different street signs like “Stop. Yield. One Way. Etc.” Reading them aloud, and then asking why? Why is that red, why does it have an arrow, why is it always that shape, why is green go, and etc.?

Amongst the rhetoric of my father I remember a few phrases above all others. One was “Keep your eyes peeled,” which always made me think of bananas sprouting from my eye sockets with the peels pulled back like twin stars across my face. The second, he probably had many second thoughts about: “Always ask ‘why?’” In a period before the Internet with computers in their infancy, there was no Google nor Wikipedia pages, there was no one to text or even call. There were only the people in the car. No answer every ended in “because” or “just is,” most questions ended in the third but perhaps most repeated phrase, “I don’t know, we’ll have to look it up.”

I don’t know if it’s right to listen to music while composing a series of words. I don’t know if that music should contain lyrics. I don’t know what makes a poem and what doesn’t, but I know what I like. I don’t want to ask a question and find the definitive answer. I don’t want to know that in 1923 the Mississippi Valley Association of State Highway Departments decided that the stop sign would be octagonal, while the circle, which has an infinite number of sides, screamed danger and was recommended for railroad crossings, where as the octagon, with its eight sides, was used to denote the second-highest level of threat. I don’t want a precision that stops me in my thoughts. I want someone to attempt an answer that is fantastic, mythical and in some way forms a period of thoughts that cause me to read and Google and pick up a dictionary and text and remember and read and write. I want a string of notes or a series of words with music or with silence, allowing me to ask why again and again.  I want to know, again in the words of the New Oxford American Dictionary, “a form of energy resulting from the existence of charged particles…either statically as an accumulation of charge or dynamically as a current.”

I don’t know if the quotes of Mr. cummings should be treated as scripture, but when I approach the page, both of them will be there line by line.

 What’s on My Desk:

The Haptic Cold by Lily Brown from Ugly Duckling Presse

Figurative Love

The Tent’s a sheet with a man under it.

An open-faced lover, vision’s trick.

The haptic cold.

Go sick into it.

What’s the story?

Solids pushing me hard,

or imagined hands

pushing hard on solids?

Whichever sea we can set,

an iced up crate of spray

saved for later, skins

shading away.

I run these thoughts down

like a list each night

and in the morning, they’re still here.

The Simple Hill

Black path, skinny statues. Each step up,

you throw a rock out with your voice,

a pebble, a jagged fragment of slate.

With each, you use your body

to admit what’s wrong.

You describe the problem

as milestones, and your milestones breathe.

So you go north; you make air different.

And in that split you glimpse

the simple hill, its retinal gleam.

You think to bounce your voice

off the simple hill to see if the simple

hill is a mirror or a box of breath.

Aside from a curious half-decade in Georgia, Charlie Geoghegan-Clements has spent his life in New England. He has most recently been published in theNewerYork, Marco Polo Quarterly, Tin House, Prick of the Spindle, and Scissors and Spackle. He frequently bumps into things and his truest love is for candy corn.

Here’s the link to the Mary Ruefle essay discussed at the top of the show: Recollections of My Christmas Tree

Tatiana Ryckman was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and writes from Austin, Texas. She is the editor of The Austin Review, was an artist in residence at Yaddo, and her work has been published with Keyhole Press, Tin House, theNewerYork, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Unshod Quills, and Marco Polo Arts Mag.

Chad Coffman was born in Broadway, Virginia, in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley. Ever since his very early childhood, he has committed himself to some type of art. At age six he was covering his grandmother’s living room with drawings of fantastical creatures inspired by anything from Jim Henson to science fiction, horror, and antiquity. At age eight he remembered getting his first block of polymer clay and instantly being addicted. Fast forward through to college, and his love for the medium never ceased. He received his BFA in Crafts & Material Studies with an emphasis in glass and ceramics from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2004. During his education, he was selected for the Allan Eastman Award of Achievement for creative excellence in his ceramic work. He now has returned to the Shenandoah Valley were he continues to imagine and create the work of his life’s calling. Check out Chad Coffman’s website here.

From Boris By The Sea, available from Octopus Books:

So Boris stopped what he was doing and began to live alone. He kicked
everyone out. And he said, This is worse for me, but better for everyone.
And he was scorned.

Boris was not always this way. Before he was like everybody else, and
he could say:

–             —What should I do.

–                                                              and

–             —Should I do.

–                                                             and also

–              —I do.

These things got him into trouble with Woman.
But not only that. Other things too.

Liz Blood is a writer who lives in Oklahoma City. She is a graduate of the MFA in writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she studied creative nonfiction. Currently she freelances for a few local Oklahoma publications and businesses and is working on a documentary project. She has been published by Hunger Mountain, Numero Cinq, Oklahoma Today, and Delta Sky Magazine. With the approaching new year, Liz resolves to write more.

The Rilke poem discussed translated by Edward Snow:

Solitude

Solitude is like a rain.

It rises from the sea toward evening;

from plains, which are distant and remote,

it goes to the sky, which always has it.

And only then it falls from the sky on the city.

It rains down the in-between hours,

when all the crooked streets turn toward morning,

and when the bodies, which found nothing,

leave each other feeling sad and disappointed;

and when the people, who hate each other,

have to sleep together in one bed:

then solitude flows with the rivers…

Our guest, Adam Love, is an emerging writer from Salt Lake City. His work has appeared or is upcoming in Revolver, Atticus Review, Sugar House Review, Main Street Rag, Metazen, and others. He’s the author of Another Small Fire, a chapbook of poetry. He was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize. He holds and MFA from Vermont College.

Here is the Robert Capa photo discussed at the beginning of the episode:

Robert Capa

Also here’s the book Photography: a concise history by Ian Jeffrey.

Also be sure to get a copy of Letters Wendy’s by Joe Wenderoth:

July 29, 1996

I sort of recognize your employees, but not as much as

you’d think. I believe they recognize me. When I think

about it, the faces that really stay etched in my mind are the

faces of porn stars. Only in porn, it seems, does a face

acquire a peculiar glow of its ownmost rhythmic

ambiguity. It’s sad to everyday come to Wendy’s and see

faces that will never be given to me in their full porn depth.

August 18, 1996

We’ve become a throw-away society! they gasp. Well, could

this be because we’ve discovered, finally, that we’re a throw-

away organism… living in a throw-away land? I think it’s

just the discovery that’s prompted so much righteous

organization against “waste.” I’m happy to every day get a

brand new ornate yellow cup, drink half my Coke, then

abandon the thing altogether and forever.

If you’re in the Richmond area be sure to check out Elizabeth Evans’s showing at Cafe Rustica.

Elizabeth Evans attended VCU for painting and printmaking. She made her first bra in 1989 to wear to a party in NYC where women had to wear breastplates and men codpieces. About a year later she made a few for friends. She started getting serious about them in ’92 and had her first show at Zues gallery cafe in ’95. She has since had her work hanging in local businesses around the Richmond area. In 2005 she met a woman named Amalia Pissario, who liked her bras, but thought Elizabeth needed to make them more of a piece of artwork. That is when Elizabeth added the backgrounds. She enjoys all the different mediums she uses and figuring out how to make her ideas work, either aesthetically or just logistically. Her work has also shown at The Gallery and the Main Library for first Fridays along with many restaurants and bookstores.

Elizabeth Evans in her own words: “While bras are the one constant, the themes and the work on which they are attached vary. I experiment with different materials such as wood, cardboard, plexiglass, collage, paint and screen. On “Stare” I layered screen to portray a woman waiting upstairs for her lover. In “Mother’s Milk” collage represents the Madonna breast feeding the baby Jesus-the same bond all mothers feel with their infant. We come back round to cupcakes, fortune cookies and 50′s kitsch housewives. Its all about the fun.”

Stare:

Oooh Lala:

Jane Mansfield:

and then there was the Batman:

Rule Number One

Robert Vivian is the author of two award-winning books of meditative essays, Cold Snap As Yearning and The Least Cricket Of Evening. He is also the author of The Tall Grass Trilogy–The Mover Of Bones, Lamb Bright Saviors, and Another Burning Kingdom. His most recent published novel is Water And Abandon. He’s also written many plays that have been produced in NYC, many of whose monologues have been published in The Best American Monologues for both men and women. He wrote an adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts in 2006 that premiered at Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo. His essays have been mentioned numerous times in The Best American Essay Series, and his stories, poems, and essays have appeared in magazines and journals like Harper’s, Georgia Review, Creative Nonfiction, and scores of others. In 2008 he was the first American ever to teach at Ondokuz Mayis University in Samsun, Turkey; he currently teaches as associate professor at Alma College in Michigan. He’s just completed two new novels, The Town That Burns Eternity Into Your Soul and Return To Hush Moon Lake.

A Prayer to God My God in a Time of Desolation

I guess you know about it all,
my woman trouble. That’s what I call it,

though in a way I should say the trouble
has been with you. It’s pretty bad,

but tell me when was it pretty good?
I ain’t complainin’. You like that ain’t,

an uncouth ain’t in a prayer to you?
He thinks he’s tough now, don’t he? No,

I’m gentle. If there’s a rough old cob
round here, it’s you, and I like you for it,

you sneaky old hidden son of a nothing.
Hey, do you remember what’s her name?

She was such a little thing. She chirped
so perfectly I told her we

should live in a tree like a couple of birds.
It sure was fun to feel her flutter.

Is it okay to call it fun?
Because I like it, though what I wanted

was what i thought the flutter should
have meant–a little time with you.

That was a stretch. Those were the days
when I believed you wanted me

to find a woman who wanted to live
in a tree, two birds of a feather,

all love-covey. Well, it turns out
not many women want to live

in a tree, because not many women
think of themselves as birds. They’re women,

people, and i don’t get along
so well with people, thanks to you,

who bent my heart from the beginning
to creatures with four legs, or wings.

Have I told you you’re a weirdo? You
should have made me a horse and been done with it;

I could have drawn a plow and scratched
my hide against a tree or cribbed

a fence in a pasture. Or better yet,
I could have been an owl and combed

the hair of night before she lays
her head to sleep. How’s that for gentle?

I used to think it was you and me,
but now I think it’s only you.

You’re on your own, so be it. If that’s
the way you want it, alone, amen.

—Maurice Manning

Frank Stanford Turning 30

final echo of heartbeat as he raises
the pistol to his chest and sheds his skin
he will never feel his hands again
tapestries of wild orchids paint the moon
on the battlefield where only it can say
I love you poor Frank he wants to know
why but already knows the answer
tears in his napkin sobbing only brings
out the best in me he thinks goddamn these
bullets their conversations were vacant
the scent of snow in his nostrils
the cool evening waiting
a cooing dove its wing trapped under the tread
of his front tire where its shadow will be
the only light the dead see while the moon
pulls blood from its many lovers
flowers burning in a jar
two women set out a dish of milk
to tell his story to the living

—Adam Love, from Another Small Fire, Tired Heart Press, Originally published in Conte.

Here be the people all River Pretty. Enjoy an Epic Reading from the following:

Ed Henegar

The passages of discussion have been formatted in bold.

Horace Ode 1.37

Now’s the time for drinking deep, and now’s the time
to beat the earth with unfettered feet, the time
to set out the gods’ sacred couches,
my friends, and prepare a Salian feast.

It would have been wrong, before today, to broach
the Caecuban wines from out the ancient bins,
while a maddened queen was still plotting
the Capitol’s and the empire’s ruin,

with her crowd of deeply-corrupted creatures
sick with turpitude, she, violent with hope
of all kinds, and intoxicated
by Fortune’s favour. But it calmed her frenzy

that scarcely a single ship escaped the flames,
and Caesar reduced the distracted thoughts, bred
by Mareotic wine, to true fear,
pursuing her close as she fled from Rome,

out to capture that deadly monster, bind her,
as the sparrow-hawk follows the gentle dove
or the swift hunter chases the hare,
over the snowy plains of Thessaly.

But she, intending to perish more nobly,
showed no sign of womanish fear at the sword,
nor did she even attempt to win
with her speedy ships to some hidden shore.

And she dared to gaze at her fallen kingdom
with a calm face, and touch the poisonous asps
with courage, so that she might drink down
their dark venom, to the depths of her heart,
growing fiercer still, and resolving to die:
scorning to be taken by hostile galleys,
and, no ordinary woman, yet queen
no longer, be led along in proud triumph.

“Objects In This Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear”

Because the dawn empties its pockets of our nightmares.

Because the wings of birds are dusty with fear.

Because another war has eaten its way

into the granary of stars. What can console us?

Is there so little left to love? Is belief just the poacher’s

searchlight that always blinds us, and memory just

the tracer rounds of desire? Last night,

under the broken rudder of the moon, soldiers

cut a girl’s finger off for the ring, then shot her and the boy

who tried to hide under a cloak of woods beyond their Kosovo

town. Listen to me, – we have become words

without meanings, rituals learned from dried

river beds and the cellars of fire-bombed houses.

Excuses flutter their wings. Another mortar round is

arriving from the hills. How long would you say

it takes despair to file down a heart?

When, this morning, you woke beside me, you were mumbling

how yesterday our words seemed to brush over the marsh

            grass the way those herons planed over

            a morning of ground birds panicking in their nests.

When my father left me his GI compass, telling me

it was to keep me from losing myself, I never thought

            where it had led him, or would lead me. Today,

            beside you, I remembered simply the way you eat

a persimmon, and thought it would be impossible for each

drop of rain not to want to touch you. Maybe the names

            of these simple objects, returning this morning

            like falcons, will console us. Maybe we can love

not just within the darkness, but because of it. Ours is

the dream of the snail hoping to leave its track on the moon.

           we are sending signals to worlds more distant

           than what the radio astronomers can listen for, and yet-

And yet, what? Maybe your seeds of daylight will take root.

Maybe it is for you the sea lifts its shoulders to the moon,

for you the smoke of some battle takes the shape of a tree.

On your balconies of desire, in your alleyways of touch,

each object is a door opening like the luminous face of

a pocket watch. Maybe because of you the stars, too,

desire one another across their infinite,

impossible distances forever, so that it is not

unthinkable that some bird skims the narrow sky where

the sentry fires have dampened, where the soldier, stacking

guns in Death’s courtyard, might look up, and remember

touching some story he carries in his pockets, a morning

like this blazing through the keyholes of history, seeing not

his enemy but those lovers, reaching for each other, reaching

towards any of us, their words splintering on the sky,

the gloves of their hearts looking for anyone’s hands.

~Richard Jackson

The work of the Thirii Myint “Green Lake”: http://www.thebicyclereview.net/poem-of-the-week.html

http://www.thebicyclereview.net/poem-of-the-week.html

So a little more secret sauce mid-week. Again we offer you another Special Episode from River Pretty with readings from Jen Murvin, Lee Busby, Danielle Frandina, and the Richard Jackson. Break out the wine, pour some more vodka, or if you’re not in to the whole imbibing thing, have some tea, get some coffee going ’cause this is a sit back and just take it all in kind of listen. Always and forever enjoy!

We come to you live from the River Pretty Writers Retreat with a wonderful panel discussion joined by Robert Vivian, Richard Jackson, Danielle Frandina, Steve Rucker, and Jen Murvin. Many things are covered. Enjoy!

http://riverpretty.com

Richard Jackson teaches creative writing and poetry, humanities in UTC’s interdisciplinary honors program, and is a frequent guest lecturer at the MFA writing seminars at Vermont College, University of Iowa Summer Writers’ Festival, and the Prague Summer Program.

He is the author of ten books of poems including Resonance ( 2010) (Eric Hocher Award), Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems (2004) and Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems (2003). He has also published two books of translations, Last Voyage: The Poems of Giovanni Pascoli from Italian (2010) and Alexandar Persolja’s Journey of the Sun from Slovene (2008).

He is also the author of two crucial books, Acts of Mind: Conversations with American Poets (Choice Award) and Dismantling Time in Contemporary Poetry (Agee Award Winner), and has edited two anthologies of Slovene poetry, as well as the journal Poetry Miscellany.

His work has been translated into fifteen languages and has appeared in The Best American Poems, among other collections. He has been awarded the Order of Freedom Medal by the President of Slovenia for literary and humanitarian work in the Balkans, and has been named a Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, Witter-Bynner Fellow, NEA fellow, NEH Fellow, and has lectured and given readings at dozens of universities and conferences in the U.S. and abroad.

In 2009 he won the AWP George Garret National Award for Teaching and Arts Advocacy. He leads a group of writing students to Europe each May.

Danielle Frandina has been a teacher of literature and writing for fourteen years. In 2011, she received her MFA in writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts.  She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is working on a short story collection. Her work can be found in Conceptions Southwest, Número Cinq and Avalon Magazine.

Steve Rucker received his M.F.A in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts where he worked alongside writers such as Sue William Silverman, Robert Vivian, Abby Frucht, and Larry Sutin. He has also received his M.A. in Writing from Missouri State University, where he taught creative writing for two years. He has published his work in Numéro Cinq, Elder Mountain, and Upstreet, and his essay regarding the life and work of Raymond Carver appears in Research Guide to American Literature: Contemporary Literature 1970 – Present. He is currently developing a collection of essays about his experience in the Air Force, entitled Fraud, Waste, and Abuse.

Jen Murvin‘s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Cincinnati Review, Belingham Review, Midwestern Gothic, Baltimore Review, Huisache, and the MacGuffin. She teaches friction writing and the graphic novel in the Missouri State University creative writing program and is and MFA candidate at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.

Rich Farrell: (fiction) Rich is a recent graduate from the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has published at Hunger Mountain and at Numero Cinq, where he is also a contributing editor. For the past year, he has been the Creative Non-Fiction Editor at Upstreet. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he has worked as a high school teacher, a defense contractor and as a Navy pilot. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories. Click here to read an interview with Rich.

Robert Vivian: Robert Vivian is the author of two award-winning books of meditative essays, Cold Snap As Yearning and The Least Cricket Of Evening. He is also the author of The Tall Grass Trilogy–The Mover Of Bones, Lamb Bright Saviors, and Another Burning Kingdom. His most recent published novel is Water And Abandon. He’s also written many plays that have been produced in NYC, many of whose monologues have been published in The Best American Monologues for both men and women. He wrote an adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts in 2006 that premiered at Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo. His essays have been mentioned numerous times in The Best American Essay Series, and his stories, poems, and essays have appeared in magazines and journals like Harper’s, Georgia Review, Creative Nonfiction, and scores of others. In 2008 he was the first American ever to teach at Ondokuz Mayis University in Samsun, Turkey; he currently teaches as associate professor at Alma College in Michigan. He’s just completed two new novels, The Town That Burns Eternity Into Your Soul and Return To Hush Moon Lake.

Ian Bodkin: What? Ian is the one writing this. He likes you. You’re alright. Ian hosts a podcast. This is the selfie in a hall of mirrors, but painted in words. Ian has a creepy smile as of now.

River Pretty: http://riverpretty.com

Paddle Shots: http://riverpretty.com/paddle-shots-a-river-pretty-anthology-vo

Get a copy of Wild Strawberries here.

And Check out River Pretty

And if you like podcasts and the HULK go listen to PADSMASH.

Below you can find the Richard Zenith translations of the Pessoa poems discussed in this week’s episode.

Alberto Caiero

THE KEEPER OF SHEEP XXXIX

The mystery of things – where is it?

Why doesn’t it come out

To show us at least that it’s mystery?

What do the river and the tree know about it?

And what do I, who am no more than they, know about it?

Whenever I look at things and think about what people think of them,

I laugh like a brook cleanly plashing against a rock.

For the only hidden meaning of things

Is that they have no hidden meaning.

It’s the strangest thing of all,

Stranger than all poets’ dreams

And all philosophers’ thoughts,

That things are really what they seem to be

And there’s nothing to understand.

Yes, this is what my senses learned on their own:

Things have no meaning: they exist.

Things are the only hidden meaning of things.

Ricardo Reis

Since we do nothing in this confused world

That lasts or that, lasting, is of any worth,

And even what’s useful for us we lose

So soon, with our own lives,

Let us prefer the pleasure of the moment

To an absurd concern with the future,

Whose only certainty is the harm we suffer now

To pay for its prosperity.

Tomorrow doesn’t exist. This moment

Alone is mine, and I am only who

Exists in this instant, which might be the last

Of the self I pretend to be.

Alvaro De Campos

From The Tobacco Shop

I’m nothing.

I’ll always be nothing.

I can’t want to be something.

But I have in me all the dreams of the world.

Windows of my room,

The room of one of the world’s millions nobody knows

(And if they knew me, what would they know?),

You open onto the mystery of a street continually crossed by people,

A street inaccessible to any and every thought,

Real, impossibly real, certain, unknowingly certain,

With the mystery of things beneath the stones and beings,

With death making the walls damp and the hair of men white,

With Destiny driving the wagon of everything down the road of nothing.

Today I’m defeated, as if I’d learned the truth.

Today I’m lucid, as if I were about to die

And had no greater kinship with things

Than to say farewell, this building and this side of the street becoming

A row of train cars, with the whistle for departure

Blowing in my head

And my nerves jolting and bones creaking as we pull out.

Today I’m bewildered, like a man who wondered and discovered and forgot.

Today I’m torn between the loyalty I owe

To the outward reality of the Tobacco Shop across the street

And to the inward reality of my feeling that everything’s a dream.

I failed in everything.

Since I had no ambition, perhaps I failed in nothing.

I left the education I was given,

Climbing down from the window at the back of the house.

I went to the country with big plans.

But all I found was grass and trees,

And when there were people they were just like the others.

I step back from the window and sit in a chair. What should I think about?

How should I know what I’ll be, I who don’t know what I am?

Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!

And there are so many who think of being the same thing that we can’t all be it!

Genius? At this moment

A hundred thousand brains are dreaming they’re geniuses like me,

And it may be that history won’t remember even one,

All of their imagined conquests amounting to so much dung.

No, I don’t believe in me.

Insane asylums are full of lunatics with certainties!

Am I, who have no certainties, more right or less right?

No, not even me . . .

In how many garrets and non-garrets of the world

Are self-convinced geniuses at this moment dreaming?

How many lofty and noble and lucid aspirations

–Yes, truly lofty and noble and lucid

And perhaps even attainable–

Will never see the light of day or find a sympathetic ear?

The world is for those born to conquer it,

Not for those who dream they can conquer it, even if they’re right.

I’ve done more in dreams than Napoleon.

I’ve held more humanities against my hypothetical breast than Christ.

I’ve secretly invented philosophies such as Kant never wrote.

But I am, and perhaps will always be, the man in the garret,

Even though I don’t live in one.

I’ll always be the one who wasn’t born for that;

I’ll always be merely the one who had qualities;

I’ll always be the one who waited for a door to open in a wall without doors

And sang the song of the Infinite in a chicken coop

And heard the voice of God in a covered well.

Believe in me? No, not in anything.

Let Nature pour over my seething head

Its sun, its rain, and the wind that finds my hair,

And let the rest come if it will or must, or let it not come.

Cardiac slaves of the stars,

We conquered the whole world before getting out of bed,

But we woke up and it’s hazy,

We got up and it’s alien,

We went outside and it’s the entire earth

Plus the solar system and the Milky Way and the Indefinite.

(Eat your chocolates, little girl,

Eat your chocolates!

Believe me, there’s no metaphysics on earth like chocolates,

And all religions put together teach no more than the candy shop.

Eat, dirty little girl, eat!

If only I could eat chocolates with the same truth as you!

But I think and, removing the silver paper that’s tinfoil,

I throw it on the ground, as I’ve thrown out life.)

But at least, from my bitterness over what I’ll never be,

There remains the hasty writing of these verses,

A broken gateway to the Impossible.

But at least I confer on myself a contempt without tears,

Noble at least in the sweeping gesture by which I fling

The dirty laundry that’s me–with no list–into the stream of things,

And I stay at home, shirtless.

Fernando Pessoa

Oblique Rain

VI

The maestro waves his baton,

And the sad, languid music begins…

It spends me of my childhood, of a day

I spent playing in my backyard, throwing a ball

Against the wall… On one side of the ball

Sailed a green dog, on the other side

A yellow jockey was riding a blue horse…

The music continues, and on the white wall of my childhood

That’s suddenly between me and the maestro

The ball bounces back and forth, now a green dog,

Now a blue horse with a yellow jockey…

My backyard takes up the whole theater, my childhood

Is everywhere, and the ball starts to play music,

A sad hazy music that runs around my back yard

Dressed as a green dog that turn into a yellow jockey…

(So quickly spins the ball between me and the musicians…

I throw it at my childhood, and it

Passes with a yellow jockey and a green dog

And a blue horse that pops out over the wall

Of my backyard…and the music throws balls

At my childhood…and the wall is made of baton

Movements and wildly whirling green dogs,

Blue horses and yellow jockeys…

The whole theater is a white wall of music

Where a green dog runs after my nostalgia

For my childhood, a blue horse with a yellow jockey…

And from one side to the other, from right to left,

From the trees where orchestras okay music in the upper branches

To the rows of balls in the shop where I bought my ball

And the shopkeeper smiles among the memories of my childhood…

And the music stops like a wall that collapses,

The ball rolls over the cliff of my interrupted dreams,

And on top of a blue horse the maestro, a yellow jockey turning black,

Gives thanks while laying down his baton on a fleeing wall,

And he takes a bow, smiling, with a white ball on top of his head,

A white ball that rolls down his back out of sight…

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Reginald Thomas Davis, known to all as Duke, who passed away this week, October 2nd, 2013. Duke was known for his kind smile and gentle heart to his friends, family, and all who had the pleasure to share his company even if only for a moment or two.

Check out Joanna S Lee’s website for her work and Poetry happenings in the Richmond area: http://the-tenth-muse.com

Also the upcoming River City Secrets

Below are the two Berryman poems discussed in the second half.

John Berryman’s Dream Songs

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,

we ourselves flash and yearn,

and moreover my mother told me as a boy

(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored

means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no

inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

Peoples bore me,

literature bores me, especially great literature,

Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes

as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.

And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag

and somehow a dog

has taken itself & its tail considerably away

into mountains or sea or sky, leaving

behind: me, wag.

Dream Song 76

Nothin very bad happen to me lately.

How you explain that? —I explain that, Mr Bones,

terms o’ your bafflin odd sobriety.

Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones,

what could happen bad to Mr Bones?

—If life is a handkerchief sandwich,

in a modesty of death I join my father

who dared so long agone leave me.

A bullet on a concrete stoop

close by a smothering southern sea

spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.

—You is from hunger, Mr Bones,

I offers you this handkerchief, now set

your left foot by my right foot,

shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,

arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,

hum a little, Mr Bones.

—I saw nobody coming, so I went instead.

Cheryl Pallant:

http://cherylpallant.com

Continental Drifts: http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/Poetry/continental-drifts-by-cheryl-pallant-286/

Contact Improvisation: http://www.amazon.com/Contact-Improvisation-Introduction-Vitalizing-Dance/dp/0786426470/ref=la_B001JRX4Z6_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380318634&sr=1-1

What we’re reading this week:

“Pie” by Tatiana Ryckman: http://theneweryork.com/pie/

“How I Will Miss My Grandmother” by Charlie Geoghegan-Clements: http://theneweryork.com/how-i-will-miss-my-grandmother-charlie-geoghegan-clements/

Joshua Edwards Imperial Nostalgias: http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=230

Sasha Seensen The Method: http://www.fenceportal.org/?page_id=279