Rattle
Making Rattle Rattle
— Timothy Green
Quick Note about this issue: This Editor’s Issue of The Café Review is different from our normal published reviews. We have asked 14 editors of poetry journals from across the United States two complex question: Why do some poems stand out from others? And what is he state of poetry in America today? Their answers will surprise you. We hope this issue will give poets a better sense of what editors look for in poems. You will get the inside scoop about why different journals accept different types of poems. For teachers, this issue will answer questions students have about the dos and don’ts in submitting poems as well as the perennial question of why poetry matter.
Before the written word, there was poetry. The earliest known proto–writing appeared as ideograms carved into tortoise shells along the Yellow River some 8,600 years ago, yet the oral tradition stretches much farther back into the historical abyss. For ages immemorial — literally — priests and elders have set their stories into verse, having not yet learned how to set them in stone. Meter and rhyme were bridges to the past, the only tools they had to keep their records pure.
Civilization has come a long way since, but in many respects poetry hasn’t changed. With all of our books and computers, we don’t need to keep a formal oral tradition but the heart of poetic experience is still memory. You might argue that all art is concerned with truth and beauty — but what’s more memorable than a beautiful vision or the brilliant spark of epiphany?
So when people ask what Rattle looks for in a poem, the answer is easy: something we won’t forget.
Unfortunately, the execution is much more difficult. We read approximately 150 submissions, typically containing five poems each, every week of the year. That means whittling 39,000 poems down to the 200 or fewer that we have room to print. That’s about one–half of 1 percent. In the wake of this endless tidal wave of language, chances are slim that we’ll remember a poem the next day.
It’s impossible to make a list of what not to do, all the obvious pitfalls — the mixed metaphor, the failed line, the lazy cliché. The truth is, most of the poems we don’t publish aren’t bad — they’re just bland, forgettable. All that readers want is poetry that resonates so much that it rattles around inside of them, banging into their heart and knocking the air out of their lungs until their skull is vibrating like a bell that echoes into eternity. Is that so much to ask?
So how does a poem become memorable? A while ago I came up with three features that seem like the fundamental elements of great poetry. Not every memorable poem works on each of these levels, but they seem to always work on at least two of the three, to varying degrees. Try as I might, I haven’t been able to improve upon this list:
Lyrical: Is the poem fun to read out loud? Does it sing? While the overall impression is subjective and intangible, all the usual lyrical criteria apply — alliteration, end rhyme, internal rhyme, meter (regular or irregular), pacing, etc. For example, these lines from Alan Fox’s Silk Woman:
am I the moth inside
her mouth where words
form, silk cocoon dark skin
The “moth inside / her mouth” dances on the tongue like . . . well, like a moth inside your mouth. There’s an innate pleasure to the simple textures of language, and as any fan of E.E. Cummings or John Ashbery knows, sometimes pure lyricism can make even a line you don’t understand very moving.
Intellectual: Does the poem present an original idea? Interesting facts? Can you learn something just by reading? A great example of this is Alan Greenspan by Tony Trigilio. What could be less memorable than a poem about the chairman of the Federal Reserve, right? Wrong. Did you know that he was a saxophone player? Intimately involved with Ayn Rand? Just reading this poem changes the way you look at the world, the way you see this man we keep seeing on 7 televisions all at once.
But like any good intellectual poem, it’s not just about those interesting facts — there’s also a wonderful cognitive leap in the final line that transforms it into an important statement about the absurdity of this moment in history: Things are like they are now, like never before.
Emotional: Does the poem evoke a visceral response? It’s not easy to write a few lines that make others burst out laughing or feel like they were just punched in the gut. Even more difficult to parse out how those lines achieve their effect. Often emotional poems deal with subjects of gravity. One of my favorite examples is Cheryl Gatling’s poem of longing and loss, Even the Nails in the Sheet Rock Missed Her, in which a personified house misses the missed loved one. The curtains hang, keening, the bed prods him (the one left behind) in his sleep, until finally:
And when he sat up, his hand on his chest,
how could he breathe,
when all the air had gone out into the street
calling her name?
The poem isn’t particularly lyrical, and doesn’t present anything new, yet the conclusion, as it unfolds, can make us weep.
Interestingly, each of these three elements of poetry corresponds with a different form of memory. Lyricism is the physical memory — it’s stored in the muscles of your mouth as they shape the words, in the feel of the breath your throat, in the rhythms of your pulse as you read. The emotional element is the nonverbal memory of the id, the tide of neurotransmitters, the joys and fears of the heart. And the intellectual element is, of course, the rational, verbal, conceptual memory of the ego — the expressible facts and concepts. It’s no wonder that a poem operating on all three levels is likely to stay with us the longest.
And the best poems stay forever. Sophia Rivkin won the first annual Rattle Poetry Prize with Conspiracy. As you read, pay attention to each of the three elements — the insistent, soldier–like marching cadence, the novelty of her “conspiracy,” and the emotional power behind that realization. And see if you can forget that “white–faced crowd” of which we’re all a part:
The husband calls from two hundred miles away
to say he cannot stand it, his wife is dying
in a rented hospital bed in their living room
and he must put her away, somewhere, anywhere,
in a nursing home and she is crying looking up at him
through the bars like a caged animal —
she is an animal with foul green breath
and buttocks burnt raw with urine —
he cannot lift her, he cannot change her often enough,
and she is crying for the children’s pictures on the mantle,
she cannot leave the silver candlesticks,
the high school graduation pictures.
And I say, yes, it is time to put her away,
I am the friend and I say it,
the living conspiring with the living,
death standing like a Nazi general or a stormtrooper
with a huge cardboard chest covered with metals,
and he leans over her and pins a gold star
through her skin and it pricks us,
pricks us through the brain,
through our skin
but we do not bleed
when death is pushing her
out of her bed, marching her away,
while everyone stands white–faced
among the white–faced crowd,
blending in, blending in.
Oak Bend Review
Oak Bend Review: A Plainspoken Little Journal
— Sandee Lyles
They may forget what you said, but they will never forget
how you made them feel.
— Carl W. Buechner
Quick Note about this issue: This Editor’s Issue of The Café Review is different from our normal published reviews. We have asked 14 editors of poetry journals from across the United States two complex question: Why do some poems stand out from others? And what is he state of poetry in America today? Their answers will surprise you. We hope this issue will give poets a better sense of what editors look for in poems. You will get the inside scoop about why different journals accept different types of poems. For teachers, this issue will answer questions students have about the dos and don’ts in submitting poems as well as the perennial question of why poetry matter.
At Oak Bend Review, we are much more interested in how a poet makes us feel than the fact that the poet used precise, textbook technique. Having said that, we do insist on proper grammar and correct spelling, as well as poetry that flows well and makes good use of line breaks, etc. We just are much more impressed with a plainspoken poem that anyone can read and get something out of than a poem that would only impress a literary
scholar. Our mission is to produce “an innovative literary journal which seeks to merge the academic and underground writing communities.”
In particular, there are several things Oak Bend looks for in poems submitted for consideration. Are any metaphors that are used fresh? Do they support the goal of the poet in getting his or her point across? Does the poem make the reader feel an experience, even if he or she may not have had relatable circumstances?
A perfect example can be found in our March/April 2009 issue. A Pennsylvania poet, Charley Springer, writes of a personal experience that many can relate to, but even those who cannot will find something appealing in his poem, Dementia:
Doc says she has the onset
and I ask him how he knows and he says
how she talks and carries herself.
After hearing specifics, I say
she’s been like that as long as I remember.
It’s nothing new.
When I tell him she’s a fairy godmother,
he says, ah, that
explains it and I ask what?
Her cooking for ten when only the two of us
sit down? Her passion for weed blossoms
over exotics? Her concluding that jets
unzip sky and dump rain?
Tell me, Doc, where did you get your
degree? And what funneled you
into this windowless exam room?
When you look in a face, Doc,
you don’t see wonder?
Hers is a world where wishes are gospel.
Hers is a world where fingers are wands
and eyes, big picture windows.
Through Springer’s words, the reader finds the beauty in something usually perceived as awful and ugly. The endearing loss of a loved one’s senses is a fresh way of looking at dementia. The metaphors are magical and support the idea of dementia being something that will ultimately need to be accepted, regardless of a diagnosis.
Oak Bend Review delights in publishing poets who want to challenge, engage, and enlighten plain folks who might be reading contemporary poetry for the first time. We want the hopeful, the heartbreaking, the retrospective, the unfinished, and the ongoing story. I found some of those qualities in the poem Necklace of Moss by Jack Myers, the 2003–2004 Texas Poet Laureate, printed in our November/December 2008 issue, in which the speaker’s older self talks to his younger self:
Remember the old blue dory a storm coughed up,
how you packed its seams with tar–soaked caulking
and painted it blue so you couldn’t be seen very easily —
blue on blue under blue — how that’s what you wanted?
You with your adolescent thoughts of killing yourself
hooked so deep, pickerel boy, you never believed
you’d grow old. Can you see me now? I am the ocean
you rowed across. The sun tanning you golden is me.
My life is yours.
Let’s scare ourselves today and go really far out
just to see what we’re made of. We’ll beach the boat
and scrape off the moss that’s been slowing it down.
We’ll do it in honor of having gone so far out that
we became possible, something we thought we could never be.
Myers’ poem is incredibly easy to read and to relate to. The simplicity of the language draws the reader in and allows him or her to become part of the poem, which addresses the common subject of how one changes and evolves throughout life. The metaphor of the boat further perpetuates a relaxed, conversational tone. Myers’ message is simple: circumstances do become clearer to a person if he or she can “hang in there” long enough. The poem is hopeful without being sentimental and that is what draws us in and makes it believable.
By the quality of submissions Oak Bend Review receives, it is clear there is much talent out there. The challenge is in getting the poems read. Our print editions are sold on our website, www.oakbendreview.com, for $12 an issue, however we offer an online, complete edition for free to anyone with access to a computer. We want our poets read, period, regardless of the effect on print sales. (Oak Bend also publishes some fiction, essays, and reviews, as well as art and photography.) I believe the active promotion of poetry is essential to its survival through word of mouth, poetry readings, inviting friends to poetry events, etc. The current Texas Poet Laureate, Larry D. Thomas, is very active in making poetry part of Texans’ daily lives by promoting it in the public school system. He visits schools regularly and was quoted in an interview in Oak Bend Review’s November/December 2008 issue, telling us how anyone can be a catalyst in the effort:
“We can take advantage of every opportunity we have to share — both in writing and in oral presentation — our poetry with others of all ages; tell them why we write and how writing has changed and enriched our lives; talk to them about the process of our writing; and encourage them to write a poem themselves even if no one else ever reads it or to try another avenue of creative expression, regardless of the form it takes, and just see what happens.”
Thomas is a man of his word. Recently, he made an appearance at a dormitory lounge filled with big, overstuffed furniture at the University of North Texas at the request of a resident. I also attended and was surprised that Thomas would come all the way from Houston to Denton, about 279 miles, for a handful of students to whom he gave his undivided attention. He spoke individually with the students and kept them very engaged, reading from his works and even asking them to relate their own experiences. It was as if, in that small amount of time, there was nothing more important to Thomas than those students. I’m sure they will talk about meeting Thomas for years to come.
Perhaps what we can all take from that experience is that every chance we get to talk about poetry is a potential opportunity to bring it to the forefront. The state of American poetry is not immutable but rather malleable, something that those of us who care about it, ultimately, can create.
Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry
The Measure of Poetry
— Rob Griffith
Quick Note about this issue: This Editor’s Issue of The Café Review is different from our normal published reviews. We have asked 14 editors of poetry journals from across the United States two complex question: Why do some poems stand out from others? And what is he state of poetry in America today? Their answers will surprise you. We hope this issue will give poets a better sense of what editors look for in poems. You will get the inside scoop about why different journals accept different types of poems. For teachers, this issue will answer questions students have about the dos and don’ts in submitting poems as well as the perennial question of why poetry matter.
In the wake of the Modernist Movement, formal poetry (or, more precisely perhaps, we should say poetry interested in meter, traditional forms, and/or prosodic devices such as rhyme) suffered a decline so severe that, by the ‘60s, ‘70s, and early ‘80s, it became a professional liability for one to even admit that he or she liked to write the occasional sonnet.
Practitioners wore a kind of scarlet letter that told all who approached that they were hopelessly mired in the past, that they spent their free hours at Renaissance fairs or Flat Earth Society meetings. After all, the argument went, meter and rhyme are cages which limit the vocabulary and, thus, what one can express in a line of poetry. And some would have even gone so far as to characterize formal verse as merely a vehicle for conservative thought and free verse as the only way to express a liberal or progressive point of view, the only way to remain avant–garde (whatever that means after a century of mainstream free verse).
These ideas are, quite obviously, ridiculous in the extreme, and formal poetry never really went away. Between the end of World War II and today, poets such as Richard Wilbur, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Justice, and Seamus Heaney (among innumerable others) have kept the art alive and vibrant. That said, the teaching of traditional prosodic elements certainly did languish during that period, at least in this country, and it wasn’t until the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that a kind of renaissance occurred wherein new journals such as The Formalist appeared, journals dedicated to giving space to poems written in meter and traditional forms. Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry attempts to fill that niche as well and, happily, we receive hundreds of submissions a week.
However, perhaps as a result of a generation of poets growing up having to re–learn the craft of formal poetry (often from first principles instead of mentors steeped in the nuts and bolts of the tradition), much of what we receive is flat, boring, didactic, and completely forgettable. Our submissions are full of poems that are simply essays in plodding, unvarying iambs; poems that excoriate the practitioners of free verse; poems that mimic the style, content, and diction of their authors’ favorite 17th century poets; and didactic poems that simply gift–wrap a hackneyed sentiment flood our mailbox.
Fortunately for us and our readers, there are also plenty of poets who send in exactly the kind of work we’re looking for: poetry that speaks in a human, contemporary voice; poetry that uses form and meter in innovative ways to move the reader rather than simply set a metronome ticking away; poetry that uses its prosody in an attempt to capture a mind in motion and not to simply deliver a prefabricated “message.”
As an example of what I would consider a successful formal poem, I offer Vermont poet Deborah Warren’s wonderful Orion of the Barnyard:
The kitchen’s loud with guitars, and the party
throbs from the house and follows me away
past shed and barn:
The shrieks and music fade,
but the light from the windows interferes with the darkness.
Further then, to the first field and the hay
heavy with night.
Nobody sees me wade
ankles — knees — in the wet alfalfa, eyes
overhead, in the silences above
where thickets and forests of constellations move,
copses of stars in the black sky’s open glades.
These are the bright woods where I recognize
Orion; dressed in stars, Orion’s clearer,
hunting his dim and shimmering distant grove,
than the farm that drops behind me, out of sight
and only yards away — Orion’s nearer,
treading the east horizon and the barnyard’s
roofs: There’s such a thing as too much light.
In this poem, as in all of the best metrical poetry, Warren uses meter to establish a mood, modulate her music, and explore her ideas. And it is far more than mere window–dressing. Think of Robert Frost’s Design or William Butler Yeats’ Leda and the Swan. In these poems, the meter is tightly bound up with the ideas the poems explore. In both, as the poems approach the idea of chaos and dissolution, the meter itself dissolves, leaving their readers feeling — viscerally feeling — unsettled and discomforted. Warren, too, knows the power that such metrical control can wield, and when her final line swings into a highly regular rhythm after having strayed just slightly enough for the reader to hear it, we feel the certainty of her pronouncement.
As an example of how some contemporary poets use form in novel ways, examine Minnesota poet William Breen’s Cookie Monster Blue. Though this sonnet could be dismissively called “light verse” (and it certainly is funny), I would argue that its final turn is really quite poignant, and Breen uses the form to expertly mimic the voice of its sad protagonist.
Me sad. Me who love cookie cannot taste
with tongue of felt to cardboard pasted flat.
Me cram and stuff, but puppet throat sewn shut.
Delicious cookie just crumble. Me waste!
Me not feel cookie, not see. Strange hand
creep too far up skirt of phony blue fur,
rattle plastic eyeballs round. Cookie blur.
Me hate what move inside, not understand.
So if little children me supposed to love
(me teach them take away — leave plate of crumbs!),
why slowest boy so quick to think me dumb?
Why sweetest girl not what me dreaming of?
Someday in rocket ship me fly away,
eat all of moon, wash down with Milky Way.
In Orion and Cookie Monster, as in all of the poems we accept, every formal element of the poem is in service to (or in league with) the content. No mere envelope or garnish, form enhances the meaning and effect of every good metrical poem, and the best contemporary poets use this fact to their advantage. In the end, like every editor, we want poems that speak with a recognizably human voice, that sear themselves into our memories, and that move our hearts and challenge our intellects.
And it is, honestly, that final point that gives me hope about the state of American poetry when people ask, “Does poetry matter? Can it change the world?” W.H. Auden said, perhaps facetiously, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” In the sense that poetry rarely speaks directly and effectively to the world in such a way as to change public affairs, he’s probably right. However, if the best poetry is personal, and if the best poetry nudges its readers’ hearts just slightly out of their normal orbits, how can it fail to change the world, one person at a time?
Lilliput Review
Resonance & Revelation
— Don Wentworth
Quick Note about this issue: This Editor’s Issue of The Café Review is different from our normal published reviews. We have asked 14 editors of poetry journals from across the United States two complex question: Why do some poems stand out from others? And what is he state of poetry in America today? Their answers will surprise you. We hope this issue will give poets a better sense of what editors look for in poems. You will get the inside scoop about why different journals accept different types of poems. For teachers, this issue will answer questions students have about the dos and don’ts in submitting poems as well as the perennial question of why poetry matter.
Poetry, in its creation as well as its appreciation, is first and foremost visceral. It is almost precognitive: the moment of seeing, close–up and in the wild, a peregrine falcon; or a pair of mating garter snakes; or a painting before intellectualization begins.
It is revelation.
Even though this is the single most important part of the process, involving something beyond words, what follows is almost as important: taking in the falcon, the snakes, the Klimt; processing the images, the intent, and the resonance. For these reasons, rarely do I accept or reject any poem on first reading. Every poem is carefully considered two, three, four times, and ones that spark a lyrical quandary are often read many, many more.
Above my desk there is a note I had written: Clarity and resonance, not necessarily in that order, and when I am queried about what I look for in a poem, I pass that statement on. (It has been part of Lilliput Review’s entry in the Poet’s Market for most of “Lillie’s” 20–year run). If you equate my note to the process described above, I’d have to admit that it would be missing that single most important element: revelation.
In my mind, without revelation there is no poetry. Clarity is specific to execution but it also applies to vision, and so we are back to the visceral and how it might best be described. And really it is beyond description. Perhaps there can be an approximation. There is, however, no definitive answer or this selection of essays solicited by The Café Review would be unnecessary. One would have sufficed.
All great poetry mirrors life, in its entirety or in some aspect. There is no definitive answer concerning life because, if there were, all the different religions, like these essays, would be unnecessary. Good poetry rarely posits an answer: it is a restating of the question. Good poems are a constant rephrasing of the one unanswerable question. Ah, theory, theory! But how is it done, how are poems selected, what makes a poem worth including in Lilliput Review?
Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry provides a glimmer of an answer. “If I read a book of poetry and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
This certainly is what I have in mind when I speak of revelation and, frankly, this is no theory.
Lillie is a magazine of the short poem. It is diminutive in size by design, for a number reasons, but suffice it to say that form reflects content. Guidelines ask for three poems, with a maximum of 10 lines each. These are the only rules. If somebody has a 10–line sonnet, I’m ready. I receive nearly a thousand batches of poems and publish, on average, eight issues a year, generally 16 pages in length. On average, there are two poems per page, occasionally one or three. I use artwork so that reduces the page number to 13. That’s 26 poems per issue, approximately 200 poems per year out of a pot of 3,000.
Now comes the tricky part; Lillie is a one–person operation and has been for 20 years. So, really, how are the poems chosen? Well, aside from what is noted above (and if my colleagues are honest, they know the following to be true), work is chosen that I personally like. In fact, I can look back over the full run and see something of a mirror, reflecting a body of selected work. It isn’t a poet’s complete poems, but it is something like that. It is something like a personal journal, a written artifact of a life’s journey. In all its honesty, foolishness, pettiness, courage — the full gambit of humanness. Folks often comment on how issues seem themed but nothing is preplanned, though sometimes an issue taps into something like a collective unconsciousness. Putting together an issue is actually a creative act; this is where it all comes together and this almost singly makes the endless hours of detail work worth every single second.
So, er, what do you like, Don?
Well, I have a dedication to the short poem. In tone and flavor, I’d say I have an Eastern predilection. I like clarity, plain speaking; I also like something that resonates, something that suggests the many realms of possibility. I love Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Sharon Olds, Kobayashi Issa, Mary Oliver, William Shakespeare, Yosano Akiko, Franz Wright and James Wright, Anne Sexton — I could go on, but you get the idea. An example of the perfect Lilliput poem might be The Jewel by James Wright. It does everything I’ve described above and much more. Here’s a poem by California poet William Hart from a very early issue of Lillie that is emblematic of the kind of work I look for:
in a fold of
Balzac’s coat
spider eggs
This poem, comprised of eight, simple words in three truncated lines, says it all. What really is going on? Is it a Balzac statue or an imagined episode in his life? It seems to contain all the stories Balzac ever wrote and writer’s block wasn’t an issue. There is something ominous, possibly. Or it’s simply a naturalistic expression of an imagined or seen event. And it resonates like hell.
And that is precisely the point. It is all those things, drawing the reader in and forcing him or her to participate in the creation. It is the perfect melding of Eastern sensibility and Western mind.
And, oh, did I mention — it’s under 10 lines?