Letters to the World
— Bruce Guernsey

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me —
— Emily Dickinson

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.

I wish the answer to what makes a poem memorable were as easy as the graph that Robin Williams’ character mockingly uses in The Dead Poets’ Society — one coordinate for importance of subject and the other, mastery of form. Editing would then be a matter of statistics and charting, and not the intuitive cloudiness that it really is.

The Spoon River Poetry Review receives about 3,000 poems a month during our reading period, September 15 through April 15. We also run a very successful contest called “The Editor’s Prize,” which attracts more than 1,400 poems (winnowed to 50 or so finalists). That’s a lot of poetry, and I am blessed to have a very fine staff of first readers who are all excellent poets themselves. But, as editor, I have to make the final decision on the hundreds of poems submitted to the magazine, plus I screen all the work that comes in for the prize. So, what do I look for and what tips the scales one way or another?

Here’s a poem that answers these questions. It’s by Hope Coulter, an Arkansas poet:                              

     The Last Joke

     My last trip home before my brother
     fell, spiraling down,
     out of his green prime
     (the orchards in full leaf
     the cows wading through thick grass
     straining to hear over the sound of their cud
     the gears of his truck
     the clang of the gate
     an oath or two borne their way
     on the summer breeze) —

     my last trip home before his lungs seized up
     with a rare and deadly condition
     first identified in veterans of tropical wars,
     before his blue amazed eyes flicked toward us
     over a hospital gown, his bulky forearms
     brown and hard as split wood
     resting so strange on a bedsheet —

     before the time when his dirt–caked boots
     leached by long days of their shine
     sat empty beside his guitar,
     his cases of worn books,
     on the tables his caps, the day’s mail —
     before all that, home for a visit,
     I got in my car to find
     hooked to the fabric over the driver’s seat
     a cicada shell, split down the back,
     pale, nearly transparent, light brown,
     raising its little barbed feet in attempted menace.

     Or prayer. Its bulbous dry eye–skins glared
     as I plucked it off the upholstery,
     and I shook my head, startled into a laugh,
     thinking: a brother’s way of saying hello,
     trying to get a rise out of me,
     even now. Forty–nine, and this is the towel–snap,
     the affectionate pop of the rubber band
     sailing across the room.
                                              I didn’t know

     it would be a last message
     before he split his own skin
     and vanished
     into whatever sort of rise
     might be granted, not to be seen again
     but only heard, heard in the roaring absence
     that towers over our heads, like a chorus
     unseen, stacked in the trees day and night, that twangs
     like a giant rubber–band choir, a choir of curses
     borne on the breeze.
                                           He didn’t know
     when he stuck it beside the visor (cracked carapace,
     buggy salute) where he was going,
     what he was finding out soon.

“The Editor’s Prize” is stiff competition, and not only in those staggering numbers but in quality. So, what led me to include Coulter’s as one of the finalists I sent on to the 2007 judge, Ohio poet Philip Brady?

Here’s a hint: Instead of scanning her poem onto the page just now, or duplicating it in some other technological way, I typed it. Indeed, had it been acceptable, I would have written the poem out by hand because The Last Joke has that kind of feel for me — that it was handwritten. It’s precisely that kind of poem I look for: one that is really “a letter to the world.”

So much of what I read as an editor seems hurried, computer–driven, written for the purpose of publication and the enhancement the poet’s “career” — the poem as exercise, based on some obscure quotation or reference to an esoteric source, perhaps a painting or musical composition. Certainly, great poetry has come from such sources, but when I read dozens and dozens of poems with the same kind of allusive genesis, I suspect that I’m really reading assignments from a master of fine arts class.

There is none of that in Coulter’s poem. Instead, there’s an urgency at its source that has led the poet from silence into sound. And I’m not talking about “sincerity” here — some of the worst poems ever written were the most sincere. A cry or a wail is sincere, but neither of these is poetry. What lifts The Last Joke from mere moan into powerful verse is its wonderful ordering of sound and sense which are both in service to what Robert Frost called “the lump in the throat” that generated the poem to begin with.

I also look at how a poem appears on the page. When I see no white space, I confess to being cautious because silence is as much a part of a poem as is sound. The poem that floods the page with verbiage suggests to me that the poet has not paid much attention to shaping. And I listen as I look, wanting to hear lines, not sentences disguised as such. Is there a rhythmic pattern at work here, or are the line breaks determined primarily by dependent clauses or prepositional phrases — that is, by syntactical units instead of sound?

When you go back to Coulter’s poem, you will hear a powerful pattern based on anaphora as the poem proceeds at the same time with necessary exposition and exacting imagery. Her metaphoric use of the cicada is both brilliant and heartbreaking, but metaphor is something I find sadly lacking in so much of the poetry I read. A poem is burdened by adjectives not enhanced by them, and all too often I find the literal description trying to do what a figure of speech can do far more succinctly and, thus, more memorably.

We seldom get personal letters anymore, ones with actual handwriting, both inside and on the envelope. When we do, those kind of “letters to the world” stand out in the mailbox — and on the page.

The Active Voice
— Daniel Kerwick

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 aftermath of what we, in New Orleans, refer to as “The Thing” (Hurricane Katrina) the notion of “being there” took on a new focus. Surreal to be sure, an altered landscape emerged that we saw with cautious eyes, an etched clarity, and perhaps somewhat optimistically simply because we had survived. But, too, it haunted us with a lingering fear that the intangible uniqueness of our city might be lost forever.

One of the positive things to come out of the disaster was that local artists, especially poets, stepped up to the plate to put these fears to rest. It was out of the many poetry readings during that time that Simpatico Poets Press was formed. Born out of necessity — not to go crazy in our fragile, altered world — Simpatico evolved from raw pamphlets and chapbooks passed among friends to now, three years later, what is known in the trade as “book art” publications that were even recently displayed in a gallery show of such work.

To date, Simpatico Press has published more than 20 titles by New Orleans poets who are active on the local scene. The books are all handmade and hand stitched at Simpatico Studio, with press runs of 50 or 100 copies. We enlist local artists to contribute images and interns from local schools have even helped out. The books are sold at readings, book fairs, and a couple of local bookstores. When I travel, I always bring along a few copies of my own work to trade with other poets.

The poets that we’ve published have produced true documents of the time and voice of our region. Listen to the range of their voices:

     To begin a tale that decides its own meander…
     — Megan Burns

     We pick the ripest harbingers of light . . .
     — Gina Ferrara

     One should have gentle addictions
                        a sense of the maladjusted . . .
     — Thaddeus Conti

These were opening lines that made me want to hear more, dive deeper into the poems, swim in their language. The absence of the declarative “I” dotting the poems like billboards of self allow the reader to use his or her imagination, to participate in its movement. Meander where? What harbingers of light? Why a sense of the maladjusted?

A friend of mine, when using “I” in a poem, has a rule that it can’t appear until the eighth line. But, of course, rules are made to be broken. As an editor, I usually pass on “poems as diary,” poems that lack persona or an inherent love for the musicality of language. “Opinion poems,” as I call them, are better off buried in essays or bar chatter. I can tell you why the New Orleans Saints lost last Sunday or how our government dropped the ball after Katrina. But in a poem?  Didactic political statements usually kill a poem that, in itself, is political.

An example of avoiding this is seen in New Orleans poet Megan Burns’ poem At 30. Burns is able to move from abstractions like the vagaries of memory and desire into the use of allegory in order to illustrate her concerns:

                                        . . . a slumbering city
     slips beneath the water but still no metaphor
                       that I could hand you
                       that would help me
                                tell you
                                   how
                                   that
                                   feels . . .

In her poem, fact and imagery fit into a dream landscape as context without a linear narrative other than “the poem,” which ends with an island of ferocious outcomes. 

After hearing Burns read, I wanted to see more of her work and experience it on the page. What I look for in poems is a cadence that moves and surprises me, a return to the form of the poem that once again departs, pulls me into a landscape that is as unfamiliar as it is familiar. I look for the sense that the poet’s work is part of a whole without being redundant, that, if one shed the poems’ titles, we’d have a decent, serial work.

Like New Orleans musicians, who wear many hats and play music of numerous genres and styles, a poet who is not afraid to take risks, play with different forms all in the same piece, will sometimes find far more interesting results than adhering to shopworn formulas.

Born out of local readings, Simpatico Poets Press seeks to capture raw energy on the page. But the design of a proposed book can inform the choices an editor makes about a particular poem. The rejection of a poem does not always mean that the poem is not successful, or that there is not something valuable in the effort. In most cases, it is apparent that a writer is a skilled poet, who is not only busy sharing his or her work with others but is interested in hearing other voices. Poems are rejected for many reasons, some of which are based on craft, others based on how they fit into a particular book.

A question I like to ask young poets is, “Who are you reading lately?” Some stammer and say something like, “I only like Bukowski.” Nothing against Charles Bukowski, but my red flag goes up if they read only one poet, and that’s when I suggest they take a trip to a bookstore or library.

A journal or book can be a good chronicle of the times and all the voices embraced that precede it. Besides the meditative benefits, and the need to say something, one of the great benefits of poetry is people simply gathering and sharing. Poems are meant to be read aloud; books facilitate that act and are a great talisman to take home, to pull out now and again to howl with.

Here, I like to share a poem by New Orleans poet Thaddeus Conti:

     The Sexual Prowess of a Meteorologist as Held over
     from the Age of Aquarius

     one should have gentle addictions
     a sense of the maladjusted

     so as when those around them step out of the norm
     they can reign them in as well as earn a sense of shame

                                       sometimes it is so easy
                                       to be under the scalpel

     in a world of sores      

     if I were a musician    I would suspend theory

     and call on
     the absence     of

     a certain knowledge

     to write         our song

When reading this off the page, I can hear Conti’s voice and am pulled into a mysteriously shared space where all of us are under the scalpel. With his use of humor and pathos, there is movement in this poem away from the facts and anguish over the predicament, here, in New Orleans that reveals Conti’s quirky, singular voice honed at gatherings where the business of poetry is in its rightful place.

 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: 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.