Susan Shaw Sailer

 Is there, can there be, anything worse than failure to protect those we have the responsibility to protect?  Perhaps what’s worse is making money from that  neglect and treating the death of human beings as “collateral damage.”  This is the message of Susan Shaw Sailer’s chapbook Coal, soon to be released by Finishing Line Press.

Still thinking about BP executives making excuses for their horrendous oil spill, viewed again recently on CNN 60 Minutes, and still receiving daily messages about Occupy Wall Street, I opened the first page of Sailer’s manuscript and  saw the names of the twelve miners killed in the Sago Mine disaster on January 2, 2006.  

 Today is January 2.

Now let me tell you a little about Susan Shaw Sailer.  After retiring from the Department of English at West Virginia University, where she taught 20th  Century Irish and British literature, she went back to graduate school herself and completed an MFA in Poetry at New England College in 2007.  I’m proud to say that she was my classmate there.

Sailer’s poems, reviews and articles about poetry have appeared in many journals, including Poetry International, 5 A.M., Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, Alehouse and others. 

Below are three poems from Coal.

                                                                  Irene Willis                    
                                                                  Poetry Editor

 Not One Damn Thing Went Right

Foam blocks supposed to keep escape ways safe
blew out like feathers from a busted pillow.
Trapped, the miners nailed that curtain to keep
the bad air out. What fool bought the kind that let
it in? Air packs to keep men breathing till help
comes—there weren’t enough for every man.

Packs didn’t work at all or made men breathe so 
hard they thought they’d die. Guys that had them 
ripped them off. That lightning strike they say made
the mine explode—thunder like grenades, lightning
so bright it lit the sky like August noon though night
was black. I just laid down, finished my shift at the mine.

I woke right up, drove back to Sago, twenty-five miles
away. Lightning never hits in January here. Old folks
say no storm ever was that bad. What’s worst, the guys
on rescue teams away for New Year’s Day—it took two
days to make two teams, get in the mine, clear the cave-
in. Twelve men dead long before they got there.

Too Small to Be a Dot on Maps

Rusted exhaust pipes, buildings pastel blue
against gunmetal sky—old Sago Mine.  

The bridge across Buckhannon River leads
to new Sago Mine, closed since the explosion

January 2nd 2006. On the twelve-foot, padlocked
fence: Authorized Persons Only Beyond These

Gates. Safety Protects. Inside, cars and trucks:
two teams investigating causes—safety experts,

ventilation engineers. The coal tipple, small
cone of coal, two-story-high earth movers,

giant lumber piles—extras on the scene, waiting
to be called. Week five, and the twelve, dead.
 
Coal Mine Museum Guide

Says he ran the twin-head roof bolter.
Explains to visitors the bolter drilled
deep holes in the roof, shot in a mix
of resin and glue, twisted bolts to hold
the plates that stop roof cave-ins. Says

it’s in his blood to mine. He went down
at seventeen, recruited out of high school.
“No need for no diploma. You’re strong,
smart,” the mine recruiter told him. First
he worked the shuttle car, moved coal

chunks from where the miner spewed them 
out to the feeder, proud how many tons he’d 
move each shift. “We was the best,” he tells
us, “got more coal out than any other team.
A mile down that noisy dark all you’ve got’s

your wits, your buddies. You don’t want no
cowboys. You go in together, out together. If
there’s an accident you fight to live together—”
points to his right arm hanging, crushed in
a roof cave-in. Both his kids went to college.

 First, the memorial.  One of our finest, belatedly but still insufficiently recognized American poets, Ruth Stone, died on November 19 at the age of 96.  Not only as a poet but as a person, she was a marvel.  A fan of hers for years, since discovering  her book Cheap: New Poems and Ballads in 1972, I finally had the privilege of hearing her read and chatting with her just a few years ago inVermont.  The reading – actually more of a recitation, because she was blind by that time and reciting her poems largely from memory, with her daughter at her side as rare prompter, was one of the best I have ever heard by anyone, anywhere. Reading with her that evening was Toi Dericotte, who also turned in, as she always does, a stellar performance, but I had heard Toi before on a number of occasions, and this was my first exposure to Ruth Stone off the page.  What a delight!   Petite, with long red hair, a jaunty cap and little boots, she was an animated and animating presence.  Everyone became more in her company.  Our timeline has been too short to acquire permission to quote her at length here, but these few words, the last stanza of her poem “Bargain,” will give you the flavor of her work:

           “Sweet cream and curds …
            Who will have me,
            Who will have me?”
            And close upon my words,
           “I will,” said poverty.

 And so it did.  Ruth Stone was poor all her life, the National Book Award and other honors notwithstanding.

 Second, the déja vu.  Sadness is too mild a word to describe what many of us experienced when we read of the dark turn of events on the campus of U. C. Berkeley last month.  Images of students protesting, police violently over- reacting bring back the nausea and horror the the sixties’ culture clashes.  It made us think of Kent State.  But this was 2011, and the Occupy Movement people – not only students but faculty and others – had pitched their tents near Sproul Hall, the very home of the Free Speech Movement, not far from the campus café where Mario Savio’s words appear, without the irony we feel on reading them today:

          There is a time … when the operation of the machine
          becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart,
          that you can’t take part.  You can’t even passively take part.

On learning from a colleague that the Occupy tents were being taken down by police and that  students were being beaten viciously, former U.S. Poet Laureate  Robert Hass and his wife, the poet Brenda Hillman, went down to do what they could to protect the students.   Instead, they became victims themselves.  Brenda Hillman was talking quietly to the deputies when one of them, Hass tells us, reached out, shoved her in the chest and knocked her down.  Hass,  trying to help her, saw the deputies assault the line of young men and women with clubs, beating them on their chests, stomachs, ribs and spines.  Hass himself was beaten on the ribs and forearm.  Another colleague, the poet Geoffrey O’Brien, got a broken rib.  Most shocking of all, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar who presented herself for arrest, was dragged across the grass by her hair.

Granted, I was not there to witness this and hate to think of what might have happened if I had been.  Like the New York Times editors, however, who thought enough of Robert Hass’ first person account to feature it on their November 20 Opinion page, I believe what he said.  There have, of course, been other appalling responses to the largely valid Occcupy movement, such as the pepper-spraying of an 84-year-old woman in Seattle, but for those of us who love poetry, the U.C. Berkeley episode will go down in infamy.

 Finally, a brief, end-of-the-year review.  The editors of Penguin Classics had the good sense to ask another former Poet Laureate, Rita Dove, to edit an Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry, which has just been released, and will be treasured.  Dove’s choices, although they show some surprising omissions, as do all anthologies, are superb.  Here you will find more of Ruth Stone,  Robert Hass, Rita Dove herself, our beloved former Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress Maxine Kumin (an early contributor to Poetry Monday), Gerald Stern and many others, including some I had never heard of but that Dove brings forward and introduces to fine effect.  The book itself is a handsome volume, with  a sturdy binding, high-quality paper and comfortable print.  Do go to a bookstore –an independent bookstore, hopefully – and l0ok at it.  Hold it in your hands and turn some of the delicious pages.  It might be enough to lure you away from your Kindle.

Warmest greetings for the holidays  and the year  ahead,                                                        

                                                                  Irene Willis                     
                                                                  Poetry Editor

Irina Mashinski

I’m pleased to introduce our November poet, a bilingual poet and translator who emigrated from the former Soviet Unionin 1991.  Irina Mashinski has authored seven books of poetry in Russian.  Her most recent collections are Volk (Wolf) (Moscow: NLO, 2009) and Raznochinets pervyi sneg I drugie stikhotvoreniia (Raznochinets First Snow and Other Poems) (New York: Stosvet Press, 2009).  Her work has also appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including Poetry International, Fulcrum, Zeek, The London Magazine, and An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005).  She is the co-editor, (with Robert Chandler), of the forthcoming Anthology of Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky (Penguin, 2014), as well as co-founder, ( with her late husband, Oleg Woolf), and co-editor, ( with Robert Chandler and Oleg Woolf), of Cardinal Points, a literary journal published in theU.S. in English and Russian.  The winner of several literary awards, including the Russian  America (2001)  and Maximilian Voloshin (2003), her poetry has been translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish and Serbian.  Her book, Poems (2001) was nominated for the Appolon Grigoriev Award, one of the biggest in Russia. 

 Here are three new, as yet unpublished poems by Irina Mashinski.   

                                                                    Irene Willis  
                                                                    Poetry Editor

The Room

 The room started at sunset
endless sadness
bright sunlight on the walls
white empty smell of warm paint
the diamonds the circles of glare

She entered through the tunnel of swirling sun-dust
stared
then she left and returned with a freshly sanded wooden board
and it became the table
she left and then  came back with a sheet of table cloth color of snow caps
the  curtains which became visible when breeze sent them sail
folding cot
woolen Latvian plaid

she left and returned carrying cautiously
alcohol lamp on the shaky stand
left the room and didn’t come back for a while

then appeared
with a straw basket with someone ‘s apple  in it
left and immediately returned with some pears
old German camera

napkin with someone’s debts summed and crossed over
and she sat down and looked at
the wicker hamper with towels wet from the morning swim
blue vase daisies with crumbling centers and  smelling already like chamomile tea
white plaster stove with a diamond of low sun, the copper wash-basin with a dent
a jug
a striped summer dress
thrown over the bent back
and a  straw hat   “Death inVenice”
piece of ryeNormandybread
simple white plate
and she saw
the universe was complete
it was good -
ready
for an
explosion
 

Before Dawn

a bird of glass,
a bird with a scratched throat,
a bird that tries to tell it all at once,
a bird that turns its head when called,
a bird that’s pinned with hopes,
a bird O Woe,
a bird that must be turned up louder,
a tip-toed bird,
a bird that types,
a bird that strikes a match.

Sheets

Our shoulder blades have become
            oars of fire, rowing back.

Unwrinkled linen sheets are floes of ice
            my hips slip down.                  

Brown is the twilight of  my room,
             owls stare from their dark pouches –

as if my parents were here with me,
        sleeping across the room at arms’ length.
     
 A boat is hidden behind the curtain
                        and  I am biting on the strings of my childhood night gown  –

gnaw at the wet satin knot,
                        before you know it

boat will come untied.

Click Here to Read: Swedish Poet Wins Nobel Prize for Literature By Julie Bosman in the New York Times on October 6, 2011.

Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer at his home in Stockholm on Thursday after receiving the news that he won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.

 Chris Fogg

This month brings us our first poet from the U.K., Chris Fogg, whose book of poems and stories, Special Relationships, was published this year by Mudlark Press.  Born in Manchester, he now lives in West Dorset with his wife, Amanda, a dance practitioner working with older people and those with Parkinson’s.  It was through Amanda, when she was in the U.S. on a Winston Churchill Fellowship, that I met Chris and learned about his work in arts project development and management, as well as in theater, and first read some of his poems.

Chris’work has taken him to many exotic, far-flung places, and he uses these  experiences to full advantage in his writing.  The poems in his book recall his own northern working-class childhood, growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, and also look at more recent events from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as from “lost empires” in India and Africa.  The “special relationships” of which he writes are both personal and political.  “What ultimately emerges,” his editor says, “is a kind of hard-won innocence measured out across the years.”

What I said myself in a brief review of his book was this:

          Chris Fogg takes us on a magical, whirlwind tale of his world
         which means the world as a whole, through time and space.
          We are in Mali, in India, on the streets of New York City – on foot
          or roller-blade, plane, train or boat – and always with eyes and
         ears open and heart at full throttle. 

It was difficult to choose from among so many strong narrative poems, but ultimately it was those with unforgettable images that made the final cut.  I hope you will find them interesting.

                                                                                         Irene Willis
                                                                                         Poetry Editor 

Chance Encounter

It is some moments before I see her,
picking my way through the rubbish
that runs through this country like a sore.
She covers her face as if to wish
either she or I might disappear.
For a second our eyes meet, fused
in a silent shriek of pain,
then the pupils cloud: they cast
me out as surely as she has been.

Reeling I stumble on and almost
miss them: four dead babies, each a clone
of the other, packed in a row
beneath her filth-stained sari,
their brown bodies now grey
in the stuffed street-sewer grime –
dead, discarded, untouchable.

A beggar tugs my clothes, I become
engulfed once more in the wall
of heat and noise that is Bombay –
“I change money?”  “You want boy?  Girl?” –
and as I turn char my way
across the teeming, grid-locked road
(taxis, rickshaws, bullock-carts;
the guttural cries from burning throats)
high above, a circling kite
selects, with the keen, sharp eye
of a predator, or God,
the stopped pulse, the shrivelled heart,
and swoops…

   In the rubbish, privately,
the woman squats and coughs up blood.
It trickles through the dirt and mud
to where her four dead babies lie…

Fires are burning in doorways,
the acrid smell of  charcoal,
incense, traffic fumes and
human ordure that drifts across
this city’s maggot sprawl.
She is a hariyan. The hand
of God is printed on her brow,
scheduled to gather the night-soil,
which tonight will be her pillow. 

Family Trees

this is a story my granddad told me
it’s about his great granddad
who lived with his family on the Moss

every evening after work he’d go
to the family cow lie on its back
his head between its horns

and teach himself to read
my granddad’s father told this story
often like reciting catechism

it was what inspired him he’d say…
I don’t know whether that’s true or not
but there’s a plaque in the Wesleyan

chapel in his honour and a street
named after him – Albert Street –
(truly, not after Victoria’s

husband, but him, my great-great-granddad)
behind the printing works my granddad’s
mother set up when she was a widow

(before that she’d been a lacemaker)
all are there still – testimonials
to their endurance (except the cow

and the book) what book was it I wonder
framed by the huge sky of Cadishead Moss
that so made him want to read?

  *

my uncle Stanley never learnt to read
never needed to, he said, he was what
we used to call a little simple
I remember him as a jolly man

with a red face and a high squeaky voice
a bit like Mr Punch he made me laugh
he used words like Jimmy Riddle and
he taught me how to play gin rummy

he never went to school he’d slip off
to the fields and bring home injured rabbits
dead voles live adders which my gran (his
sister) had to get rid of before their dad

(a miner) brought his temper home from work
but mostly what my uncle Stanley
studied were birds – he had a way with them
he ringed them nursed them later bred them

finches love-birds canaries – he became
something of an expert in them people
wrote to him from all over the world
to seek his advice my auntie Ruby

(Stan’s wife) would read the letters to him
he answered them all he was the first
person to breed a white budgerigar
after that he let his birds go free

I remember him at family funerals
sitting in the kitchen with the women
he’d take me on his knee and produce
pennies from behind my ear

  *

all families have their characters
their stories – these are just a few of mine

I tell them to Tim I pass them on
in the hope that he will in his turn

pass them on to his own children
my stories make him laugh for they’re no more

real to him than the imaginary friends
he talks to when he’s climbing trees

which he does in the garden, making complex
routes among the branches which he tries

to follow but something always distracts
him he has to start again he makes up

new rules every time whistling as he
swings casually from the highest branch

the past does not concern him
I too follow complicated routes

of my own making I think I know
the way I want to go but always

something checks me nudging me towards
a path I meant to shun – a pair of horns

prodding me in the back a white
bird flying across the sun…

Potting On

There is a photograph I have
of Amanda in the garden;
so easy in her body she
kneels by the flowers, her busy
fingers thinning out weeds.  She is
unaware I am watching her:
there is deep contentment in
the way she works.  After a time
she notices me – there is mud
on her nose which she wrinkles as
she smiles.  Come and look, she says, then
shows me what she’s done: poppies and
cornflowers nod in the breeze while
mallow and marigold wink back.
These have set themselves, she says, her
delight transparent as a child’s.
Sometimes seeds lie dormant for years,
becoming little more than a
memory of how the summers
used to be: a child’s picture book.
I flick the pages and I find
further reminders: Amanda
in her Sunday best for Whit Walks,
Amanda with an Easter egg,
Amanda with a doll’s house and,
last but not least, there’s Amanda
dancing – the same soulful, oval
face, the serious-sad eyes that
catch at pleasure like moths at night
who beat their wings against the glass.
I flick the pages further and
the years go rushing by me.  It’s
a dizzy roller-coaster ride:
memories blur like old photographs,
colour fading to black and white,
reducing the image to a
simple basic composition –
a single face in focus, a
blue star of flax in the meadow
peeping from the darkness after
years of neglect lying buried…
I take the dust sheet off all these
memories and shake them in the sun.
One by one I examine them –
they all come down to this one face.
It’s the one photograph I’d keep,
yes, Amanda in the garden –
only now she’s in the greenhouse
sitting at a makeshift table
full of trays and seed-packets and
the remnants of last year’s cuttings.
She is singing as I watch her,
the past tumbling from her fingers
in tiny molecules of soil.
I hold my breath… she is potting
on the future… her hands open…

Today is Independence Day in the U.S.A. It’s a day of parades and celebration — with fireworks, picnics, and days off from work. Apropos of that, please note that Poetry Monday will be on vacation until September. Have a wonderful summer, and be sure to look for us
then.

Irene Willis
Poetry Editor

Click Here to Read: Paper by Douglas Kirsner: Saving Psychoanalysts: Ernest Jones and the Isakowers.

This paper originally appeard as Kirsner, D. (2007). Saving Psychoanalysts: Ernest Jones and the Isakowers. Psychoanalytic. Histsory  9:83-91 and zappears here with all requisite rights and permission.

Click Here to Read: Review of Charles B. Strozier’s Book: Heinz Kohut, The Making of a Psychoanalyst, Reviewed by Douglas Kirsner on this website.

Douglas Kirsner

Arlene Kramer Richards

Our poet today is someone many of you already know as a colleague. A practicing psychoanalyst in Manhattan, she is a Training and Supervising Analyst, New York Freudian Society; Fellow, Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research; member APsaA and IPA; co-editor of Fantasy, Myth and Reality: Essays in Honor of Jacob Arlow (IUP, 1988), and author of numerous papers on female sexuality, perversion and gambling.

What you may not know is that she is also a poet. Full disclosure: Arlene and I became friends through poetry back in the 1970’s, in a workshop at the 92nd St. Y in New York City. The workshop was led, brilliantly, I might add, by Erica Jong, who, as younger readers may not realize, was a well-known, prize-winning poet well before the launch of Fear of Flying. Later, because of our shared interest in psychology and education, Arlene and I decided to collaborate on a book for young adults, which became How to Get It Together When Your Parents Are Coming Apart, first published in 1976 by David McKay Co., then by Bantam, by Scholastic, in Japanese by Shobun-Sha Publishers, and re-published in 1986 by Willard Press. It’s still in print, still in use and, I’m happy to say, will have a new life before long. By invitation of another publisher, we went on to write three more young adult books together, one of which, Under Eighteen and Pregnant, was voted a “Best Book for the Teenage” by the American Library Association. It also, some years later, had the honor of appearing on another list: those banned, (along with Catcher in the Rye), by the Racine, Wisconsin public school system.

Although she has continued writing poetry since those early workshop days, Arlene, for a variety of reasons, has not submitted p oems for publication. Now, however, IP Books has brought out a first chapbook of her work, The Laundry-man’s Granddaughter, which I’m pleased to introduce with the three poems below.

Irene Willis
Poetry Editor

Brighton Laundry

Sheets 9 o’clock, pillowcases 12,
shirts 3, tablecloth 6,
all the flatwork round the clock
builds a timescape on a raw floor.

Mrs. Goldberg has a mountain of flat this week.
Grandfather Laundryman and I sort her mountain
into four orderly hills. You and I.

My playground is here in your laundry
You let me do the 7:30 napkins myself.
I plane wetwash, clock center,
into a black-green sliced off mesa
with my toes. I skate
on socks, shorts, undershirts
in the middle of time’s kingdom.
Banished to the corner, dry stands of towels,
Eyelet-edged teddies and pale buckets of handkerchiefs
wait for sorting.

Twenty years later, the son stands on my pale wool carpeting,
asking to come into my sorting room.
I measure him out a comfortable chair.
He sits in the gold corduroy chair.
He, magician, pulls stacks of linen
from his sleeves. I wonder at the colors.
He starts to make a mountain.
I help sort out. Some belong to table, some to bed.

He calls himself shocked at the smells,
eyes me to see if I gag, smiles back at my chin.
I sit simple here.
He pulls out sheets stained with piss.
Damp wash, I say. Damp goes to the middle.
We dance on the piles under the moon.
Whirling on shrouds, we pout on the soap.
Bubbles splash, tickling our nipples, the milk comes.
Around, the long minute hand sweeps past,
closes a circle,
leaving others. We’ll go around again.
Giddly with dancing, flushed peach with moving,
we bow, shake hands and part,
We’ll collect again next week.
We pick up Monday.

Halloween

Your ghost ate chocolates and refused to ski.
Mine drank music and wore boots.
Yours loved to shop, to throw furious pots.
Mine finally removed his red toupee.

Our ghosts dance on the shaggy green rug,
between us.
We’ll fold their sheets, top and bottom,
to make our bed

The Husband

A long woman green as pale trees
Stands in my doorway
Going in or coming out
She waits there as if
For a signal
To push her
One way or
The other.

Poised between she sways
And I wonder
Can she stop
Over a threshold.
She goes
I come
Apart.

He saw the light in images in dreams
When words had fled and left the wandering night
Without a sign to guide it. The past it seems
And present in cahoots took great delight
Creating maps that led nowhere, Escher
Stairs that climbed to upsidedowns beyond
All reason where a principle of pleasure
Ruled with blind mis-rule and black was blonde.
He saw the light in such confusion, saw
The face in condensation where all faces
Were spit and image of another, where law
And order lived in chaos. Of all places!
The dream then whispered in his ear and said:
“It was I who put the nightlight in your head.”

Eugene Mahon Rapallo May 2011

Holocaust Memorial Day

At dawn
The dead arose again,
Millions of specters
Brighter than the sun.
By noon
The stench of memory
Was unbearable,
As if all graves
Re-opened,
The dead breathing
Their last again.
By night
The stench of the living
Was unbearable
As if all clothes
Were banished,
And naked crime
Hadn’t a stitch
To wear,
And even shame
Went barefoot.
And then the silence.
And then the screams again.
And then the dreams
That would not stop.

(used by permission of Eugen Mahon)