Vallum Poem of the Week: “Six Durusti Translations” by Simon Brown and Emmi Lebuffe

 

 

Six Durusti Translations

1.

Up to here, every time is a variant. We pass ourselves, for the
ending dirt operates on denial. Of not knowing, unaware and
bereaved tumuli agree on a defined point.

From here all iterations are the same iteration, passing for finite
mud and operating on exclusion. Knowingly or unknowingly,
small mounds meet at this sad point.

2.

Shapes are surviving but encounter not once the tranquility of
agitation. At selfsame horizons, cushions wake and hollow out.
Our needful burrow of confinement is no stumbling for this
mammal. A clear affirmation of fog.

Conditions are present but never met, quiet and disquiet
equidistant. Pillows awaken and shovels dig small but necessary
tunnels: fear of confinement is no obstacle. For mammals and
what is, a message is mixed or unmixed.

3.

Peppery sauce constrains slurring itself. This is language. Indistinct
twitching or clean hands. Hope-for-efforts glower, partially full.
Obviating, a draw traces elsewhere.

Rust prevents rust, and mumbling is language too, Faint spasms
and hand-washing make for an honest effort, in part or in whole.
Evidential markers mark away.

4.

The subject is what is, a bad idea. Weight is gloomy and like
vocabulary. A box of broad ones and the twigs take form. He’ll
lose to take it back. Featured parts disband and find unpublished
wholes among. Marching beside and toward another horizon.

Subject to what is, a bad idea and weight are morose and equal: a
dictionary, can of beans or large bundle of twigs. We take form,
lose it, and take it up again. Constituent parts scatter to find new
wholes. We walk among them, or by them, and walk away.

5.

More the sweater ages, the falls are a recent version. In this way, a
heavy light. We remember it sadly with a given snare. The
substance is what misses us to become dirty. Dilation that doesn’t,
really. Our weight is of others.

The older the pulling, the newer the fall. With a heavy or light
thud, we remember this: a sad and substantial trap, one of many.
Missing elements contaminate a growth that doesn’t grow. it is
surely someone else’s burden.

6.

Using the value of smells is familiar. Mouthing huts, obscures the
refraction of confirmed sauces. There is little assemblage. Tracing
isn’t not in the dark without our hestitation. A place where some
eyes are porous.

Use-value wafts and familiar mispronunciation happily obfuscates.
Our prism is smeared with old mayonnaise, socks are unpairable
and outlines untraced. In the dark, reluctance is out of place: our
eyes remain open.

 

Mimi Lebuffe (aka Emmi Ramos Lebuffe) is an experimental poet and artist from the East Coast of Canada. She has published in Vallum, nationalpoetrymonth.ca, Pahkakuhtak, and in various zines and artist books.

Simon Brown is an interdisciplinary poet from New Brunswick currently based in rural Québec. His French and English texts have been presented in performances, poetry collections and artist books, and via platforms such as Lemon Hound, Estuaire, Vallum, Poetry Is Dead, Watts, and The Blasted Tree.

 

To view other poems published in this issue, 14:2, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

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Vallum Poem of the Week: “Carbon Copy” by Andy Lee

Photo: Dominic Ali (@domali3)

 

Carbon Copy

Your third life starts the split second you die
from a vaccination gone awry. Consolation:
consciousness restored from a lifetime of metadata
hoarded on Google servers. Virtual no more,
a superhuman subroutine emerges from
primordial digital soup, an avatar so flawless
your lover and mother barely notice
the quiet fleck of death gleaming somewhere
just beyond pale blue eyes.

 

 

Andy Lee (@realandylee) is a Toronto-based poet, lyricist, musician and member of the Writers Guild of Canada. An award-winning writer, his poetry has appeared in Vallum Magazine and was shortlisted for their 2017 Chapbook Award. Andy is the author of Chrys and Coco, an e-picture book about friendship and diversity, available on Amazon.

 

To view other poems published in this issue, 14:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Syllabic Acrostic: Hoodoos (Bryce Canyon)” by Carolyne Wright

credit: Duane Kirby Jensen

Syllabic Acrostic:  Hoodoos (Bryce Canyon)

“A tall, thin spire of rock that protrudes from the bottom of an arid
drainage basin or badland.”
—National Park Service

Bristlecone Pines’ storm-scoured
roots twist into limestone slopes
yielding to ice that widens
cliff-face caverns and grottoes,
erosion’s slow slide gliding

counterclockwise underneath
afternoon’s unbroken blue.
Numinous lithic fingers
yoke cycles of frost and thaw,
overarch our path down to
nodes fissured in sandstone shade.

Pinnacles sculpted by wind
almost translucent against
rosy dusk’s backlighting. What
keeps us on these scumbled slopes?

Under what spell do hoodoos
tease, tempt, voodoo us into
acquiescence to the stone?
How evening’s mauve shadows move

up the windowed rock, help us,
spires, to reflect you, as clay
arcs toward the sky cradle’s light.

 

 

Carolyne Wright’s latest book is This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and was included in The Best American Poetry 2009.  Her co-edited anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse, 2015), received ten Pushcart Prize nominations and was a finalist in the Foreword Review’s Book of the Year Awards. A Seattle native who studied with Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Hugo, and William Stafford, she is author of nine previous books and chapbooks of poetry, a book of essays, and five volumes of poetry in translation from Spanish and Bengali—the latest of which is Map Traces, Blood Traces / Trazas de mapa, trazas de sangre (Mayapple Press, 2017), a bilingual sequence of poems by Seattle-based Chilean poet, Eugenia Toledo (Finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Poetry 2018). Wright teaches for Richard Hugo House and for national and international literary conferences and festivals. A Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes and a Senior Editor for Lost Horse Press, she has received grants from the Fulbright Association (Chile and Brazil: Fulbright Study Grant; Bangladesh: Senior Research Fellowship), the National Endowment for the Arts, 4Culture, and Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture, among others. Wright returned to Brazil in mid-2018 on an Instituto Sacatar residency fellowship in Bahia.

 

To view other poems published in this issue, 14:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Mid-April Afternoon: Listening to Beethoven’s Für Elise” by Bibhu Padhi

 

Mid-April Afternoon: Listening to Beethoven’s Für Elise

What song that an hour ago put me
to my drunken sleep,
nearly took away my life?
What fragile, unheard sound now
that almost seems to stop midway
through its own composition?
What questions asked that I couldn’t
answer, what translucent persuasion
that diffuses toward an unremembered space?
What repetition of doubts, what
modest meditation that unfurls
the vastly superior actions of our minds?

Yes, you seem to say, and now,
and now, the sounds seem to echo
more and more from life, from death,
when the long pre-summer evening
is so supremely awake, stretches far away.

Love: I seem to need more
and as I ask my eighteen-year-old child
to repeat the chant that ends
every time without notice,
I wonder what else there might be
to the end than our meaningless claims
to supremacy, our ever-listless minds,
our dark, peripheral lives.
Isn’t it true that somewhere , at some
unknown time and place,
they all come to a close,
and end as quietly as they began?

 

Bibhu Padhi has published eleven books of poems. His next book, Meditations on Being, will be published by HarperCollins later this year.

 

To view other poems published in this issue, 14:2, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

 

Featured Review: Voodoo Hypothesis by Canisia Lubrin (reviewed by Julie Mannell)

Today Is a Good Day to Dream: Canisia Lubrin’s VOODOO HYPOTHESIS 

(Hamilton, ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2017, $18.00, 96 pages)

Review by Julie Mannell

Canisia Lubrin’s seminal book of poetry Voodoo Hypothesis is one of the most artful and influential works to emerge in Canada in 2017. It raises the bar for what can be expected of debut collections. Voodoo Hypothesis reconstructs history as visceral, bodily, and endured as perpetual, intergenerational psychic injury. The poems are a map of historical displacement depicted by Lubrin as mental and physical manifestations that are both purposeful and lyrical.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will acknowledge that I have been good friends with Canisia Lubrin for a year and a half. However, this friendship formed from my involvement in the Canadian writing community: a particularly small community where it is difficult to not have personal encounters with other authors.

Voodoo Hypothesis is referentially thick. It recollects modernism through frequent allusion both to history, canonical texts, and authors/public figures (Dionne Brand, Jesse Williams, Priscila Uppal to name a few). One could venture to call this book an academic’s wet dream because of the depth of research a single poem requires of its reader in order to fully realize the multiplicity of layers and how these layers poetically conspire to render a single multifaceted and rich collage. For the speaker, the body is not ever a blank slate but is born of and into history. “I am a simple child, then, a tilled site of history.” Before their first breath, a person is already a palimpsest of linguistic signifiers that only becomes further compounded by the experiential. Writing (or becoming) oneself is always a process of writing over what has already been written, experience in conglomeration with that which has already been experienced.

Consider Lubrin’s poem “The Mongrel,” which heavily leans against allusions to Haiti: the Creole language and the Nèg maron (creole for maroon or “wild negro” in the pejorative and can also refer to a statue commemorating the Haitian slave revolt against France in 1804), as well as the Shakespearean island “monster” Caliban (The Tempest was set on an unnamed Mediterranean island but has been often set in Haiti in modern adaptations), to name a few. The word “mongrel” itself is a charged word that refers to a dog with no definable breed and has been unfortunately adopted as a slur for someone of mixed descent. The poem interestingly opens with a quote from Nobel Prize winning poet and diplomat Saint-John Perse, who was heavily influenced by Robinson Crusoe (an author who notoriously treated Caribbean characters with a British Colonial agenda), and was the son of plantation owners in Guadeloupe—fleeing to France on the occasion of the election of the first Guadeloupian President. Yet the quote Lubrin has chosen is one of longing and displacement: “There was no name for us in our mother’s oratory.” What follows renders the quote ironic, if one meditates on its context. However, it is not strictly accusatory. It takes the sentiment of displacement and namelessness and reconstructs it as experienced by “the Mongrel”—those whom Shakespeare, Crusoe, and Perse simultaneously benefit from and blame. Here I point to Lubrin’s striking line, “What else reveals us, a species of amnesiacs, cut off from the trembling that tore—our continents apart? And with so much unknowing.” The longing is as enchanting as it is elevated—it is enchanting because the strength of imagery evoked by “a species of amnesiacs” and elevated by its originality. Yet, the speaker is direct in their inquiry and treatment of historical tropes and colonial agendas that have been adopted and taught: “our knowledge of the Mongrel is only fragmentary.” Throughout the poem, not only are the thoughts and the ideas that accompany the Mongrel elevated, but the “Mongrel” itself as a posited identity is elevated through repeated capitalization:

brutality loves us this side of the name, while
only misted, our ears stretch to still the Mongreled
air landing, broken, invented again as history
in the rusted coils of coffee shops, inked
Mongrel skins, whose only escape is one cosmic
blue carbuncle.

While the breadth of information is intimidating, the universality of the many small observational phrases ground the poems in relatable sentiments that render the work immediately accessible. A dangerously thin line that Lubrin navigates well is that of the wise voice and the casual observer. Lubrin draws upon a wide array of research that for many might point towards someone who has aged into stark seriousness—but she is young, and her material is interlaced with quotable, twitter-esque observations. From her poem “Frankenstein Universe” is a favourite of these lines: “today is a good day to dream, it doesn’t matter if it rains.” Another, this one from “Up in the Lighthouse” goes: “You must know, black isn’t always the void” And here is one last one from “Epistle to the Ghost Gathering”: “Today I insist on the tenderness I may soon forget and remind you.” She successfully marries both the prudent voice of a judicious academic with the passive vulnerability of late-girlhood and the final product is pretty cool:

Nowadays I like to say cool
cool cool thrashing my tongue like an iguana

Tonally, poems often shift from reflective to angry and take you on an emotional odyssey in a fashion akin to an album of music: this is partially due to Lubrin’s expert lyricism and perhaps also due to the careful consideration allotted to the ordering of the poems—no doubt influenced by the editorial team at Wolsak and Wynn’s Buckrider Books. This shift is exemplified in the final line of “Fire of Roseau,” which seamlessly moves from indignant to elegiac: “I rebel, I like any nigger with a demand: tell me my thoughts are jagged but never why they bruise.” Little attention is often paid this kind of tonal movement, both between poems, within a poem, and as Lubrin does frequently, within a line. Something that can be witnessed in too many collections of late, is the focus on a central premise—and there is much to be said for how the Canadian grant system encourages this approach—which often ends up treating poetry collections as if they are an essay. The final product of such endeavours is often a grouping of poems of a singular tone around a central metaphor. It is obvious, for example, that an essay could be written on the Caribbean-Canadian experience in Lubrin’s work, the role of allusion in this collection, integrating pop culture within explorations of colonialism, the aesthetic of the emotive in the reflective speaker. Yet none of these is the central concern of the book as a whole, nor do all of the poems employ the same tools or muses. When a poet permits themselves this sort of freedom, the final product has some variance within it and allots the reader room to breathe. This is an integral element in the enterprise of world creation, even if that world is largely internal and confined to thought. No world is any one specific thing (trauma, ecstasy, disappointment, or accomplishment) all of the time, always, forever.

The more literary term for a “turn” in a poem is a “volta,” and these are classically featured in sonnets which often have a dramatic curve in tone. Lubrin has multiple per poem and they never tire, they are strategic so as to keep the reader alert and engaged, evoking suspense:

If proof is what you seek: these doors, clear with fright
and conscience burst at the hinges and turn out all ill this life deposits,

however cosmic the unease, into the black sweater
of nighttime. I can’t tell you what marks the hills that wait

like hexagrams of frost. But behold the sweet, holy reprieve
of a hoodie pulled over the eyes in wanton praise

of the pre-bang dark when the world is too much.
Instead the sun comes up announcing it has touched the parts of us that hurt

In this passage, the speaker employs metaphysical conceit to move from grand existential observations to the specific of a black sweater. The voice switches from philosophically instructional to pragmatic and personal. Then what follows is a transition into something simultaneously reflective and collective, implicating the speaker as part of a larger experience: one who perceives the sunlight as illuminating the historical and individual pains of the past synchronously. All the while maintaining its musicality through creative word choice and graceful imagery.

There is far too much quality material for a single review to adequately cover Voodoo Hypothesis.  I will, however, state that I think this collection is absolutely perfect and wholly anticipate its presence on the awards shortlists in the coming months.

 

Julie Mannell is an author of poetry, prose, and essays. She is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at University of Guelph. Mannell is the recipient of the Constance Rooke/HarperCollins Scholarship, the Mona Adilman Poetry Prize, and the Lionel Shapiro Award for Excellency in Creative Writing. She splits her time between Montreal and Toronto.

 

To view other poems published in this issue, 15:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

 

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Day 1: Uxmal” by Anita Pinatti

Day 1: Uxmal

No sooner got here,
sweating, squinting,
itchy to leave.

Concealment lingers—
scruffy moss and lichen
reclaim a roof.

A sudden downpour
douses the temple fires
extinguished thrice before.

Darkened chambers shelter
darker ones holding secrets,
silent as bats.

Scorching sun, lashing rain,
self-sacrifice, hocus-pocus,
spiritual necessities.

An iguana, still as stone,
blinks one eyes and turns
the gaze of chance on me.

So we are visitors here,
passing through, blinking
in this morning light.

 

Combining poetry and photography is an enjoyable challenge for Anita Pinatti, but she did not have a camera when she visited the Yucatan many years ago.  Her poem about Uxmal is based on snapshots stored inside her head.  She received a Jurors’ Choice award in 2016 for a Flash Ekphrastic poetry event at the Hartford Art School/University of Hartford.

 

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

 

Featured Review: “Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie” by Jay Ritchie (reviewed by Bill Neumire)

Jay Ritchie’s CHEER UP, JAY RITCHIE

(Toronto, ON: Coach House Books, 2017, $19.95, 88 pages)

Review by Bill Neumire

 

The title of Jay Ritchie’s debut poetry collection is teasingly straightforward, and it begs the question, to begin, why does Jay Ritchie need to be cheered? The book is full of disappointment, especially the disappointment and depression created by deep intellectual engagement and study—this is not the bliss of ignorance, but rather the dissatisfaction of “O I make so much sense all the time.” The war between feeling/play and thought/education is apparent in “Vanishing from Yourself,” where the speaker wants “[j]ust to not / know for a minute.” He remarks, “I drank red wine and coped like an adult” and “I made pasta because / I wanted to avoid the actual / conditions of my life.” As the title suggests, there’s a real effort, though difficult, toward a practiced optimism, a sort of fake-it-till-you-make-it striving to see the positive, which culminates in “Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie,” where he tells himself:

how giving is easy,
how gratitude is free,
how I believe in everything,
how there are omens if I want them

Ritchie’s voice is concise, funny, epiphanic, self-deprecating and simultaneously self-aggrandizing, splintered, and erudite. It’s full of allusions to writers like Richard Brautigan, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Rainer Marie Rilke, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. It’s a mind whirring like one of those simulated cyclone booths that we can momentarily step inside. His erudition often leaves us intruding on small glimpses of others’ stories, and then, through non sequitur and associative leaping, we’re ricocheted off into a new scene, forced to use the journey of juxtapositions to form our own tale. His voice is sarcastic but it’s also appreciative and affectionate—indeed, the word “love” comes up in many of these poems. The tone is flat as he pokes fun at capitalism, education, and lit crit. His speaker notes, “‘Here I am’ // using non sequiturs and air quotes” and later, “I try to look impressed, but / it comes off stoic and sarcastic.” As he mentions, he also makes skilled use of quoted material, dialogue, and a staccato, post-modern meta-take, curating little ironies like “[p]eaceful streets / named after violent men” and “The easiest way out is to look for an entrance.”
In This Is Water, David Foster Wallace presents a fish who doesn’t know what water is because it lives in water; similarly, the speaker in Ritchie’s collection is so immersed in a stream of commercial plastic capitalism that he fractures himself trying to escape, to define his condition and to find value outside the stream, as the speaker in “Town of Mount Royal” asserts, “Going outside is the only way // to have anything interesting to say / about interior design.” The speaker—and increasingly books of contemporary poetry are their speaker—is vanishing and reappearing, even “mistaken for fireflies.” He often expresses the self as otherness, as here in “Water Tower”:

When I listened to my voicemail,
I conceived of my body
and moved to St. Henri
as a tower of water

His identity is intimately tied to economy, to money, as he observes, “The stores had changed / and so had I. / We were difference together.” Some reference to money overtly appears in most of these poems, a motif that quickly becomes existential and troubling in passages like this one from “Multi-level Marketing”:

There Is No Such Thing
As Ethical Consumption
Under Capitalism.

I read that on Tumblr
while working at the self-storage,
dizzy with love and disappointment
like my past self in Paris

Desire, advertisement, and debt all play crucial roles in this book, perhaps most trenchantly when the speaker confesses, “I buy plastic to feel / normal.” As a result, one of the strongest subtextual motifs is that of value—if the plastic junk of ads is a false, superficial value, then what is real? How can one possibly not become depressed, inadequate, broken? Indeed, this is ironically highlighted in the Camus-esque “Multi-level Marketing”:

In a Society That Profits from Your Self-Doubt,
Liking Yourself Is a
Rebellious Act.

I read that on Tumblr

The quest for real value begins itself in the negative, specifically, in the absence of money, as the speaker quotes the truism, “A Truly Rich Man Is One Whose Children / Run into His Arms Even When His / Hands Are Empty.” The world of money and salesmanship is absorbed into the building of the self, and the speaker takes this to an extreme as he writes, “Every Brand Has a Story— / Here’s Mine.” This construction is front and center as here, where Ritchie again employs dialogue, a strategy he often comes back to:

The rehabbed
juvenile delinquent said,
Building a house
is just a
series of small
tasks that amount
to something big

This struggle to become whole, to become oneself, is often articulate in lament, as in “I only wish I were myself.” In Mark Strand’s famous “Keeping Things Whole,” the speaker pictures himself as an absence, and Ritchie here also envisions himself in the negative:

Inserted
into a narrative I do not recognize—
I am not that, I am
only what can be articulated
in negatives, a lost item
that is definitely not there

The process of reflection is at its most optimistic in this moment from “Upcycle”: “BE / YOU // TIFUL,” a playful moment that makes, from the fracturing of a word, a larger meaning only possible in language. Language’s effect on identity is truly under the microscope, evident in this moment from “Vanishing from Yourself”:

You’ve made an arrangement
with existence to be
mostly language, and here
are the results: an impossible
demand for expressivity,
cognitive dissonance

It’s a collection that, despite its seemingly inward self-absorption—as amusingly intimated in the book’s title—is so full of brilliant voice that it makes me want to speak with it; a collection whose speaker reminds us that “Oil and Coca-Cola linger / on the poisoned lip of the twenty-first century,” and in this reverberating proclamation makes clear that this is not the depression of a singular speaker, but rather a crisis more universal, a conversation more inclusive and necessary.

 

Bill Neumire‘s first book, Estrus, was a semi-finalist for the 412 Miles Press Award, and recent poems have appeared in The Harvard Review Online and Beloit Poetry Journal. He reviews contemporary poetry for Scout, Vallum, and Verdad, where he serves as a poetry editor.

 

To view other poems published in this issue, 15:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “There’s a Certain Slant of Light” by Charles Wyatt

 

There’s a Certain Slant of Light

Imagine the chandeliers, the candles
at moonlight cant, hedge twist—

portrait of a pale cry,
animal rondo, puffed and pouted—

The orchestra files from the pit,
first the flutes, then an oboe,

cleaned with an owl’s feather,
then several owls, struggling

with a guitar, a wheel of cheese,
the tiny bones and skulls—

They always leave because
they can see, they can sing in the

dark—

 

Charles Wyatt is the author of two collections of short fiction, (Listening to Mozart, University of Iowa Press, Swan of Tuonela, Hanging Loose Press), a novella (Falling Stones; the Spirit Autobiography of S.M. Jones, Texas Review Press), and three poetry chapbooks (A Girl Sleeping, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Series, Myomancy, Finishing Line Press, Angelicus ex Machina, Finishing Line Press).  He is the recipient of the Beloit Poetry Journal’s 2010 Chad Walsh Prize and the Writers at Work 2013 Fellowship in Poetry.

His first collection of poetry, Goldberg-Variations, was the winner of the 2014 Carolina Wren Poetry Series Contest, and was published in 2015.  His second collection of poetry, Rembrandt’s Nose, was the winner of the Second Annual Ex Ophidia Press competition and was published in 2018.

A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music (BM), The Philadelphia Musical Academy (MM), and Warren Wilson College (MFA), he has served as visiting writer at Binghamton University, Denison University, The University of Central Oklahoma, Purdue University, and Oberlin College.  He currently teaches in the Low Residency Program of the University of Nebraska and the Writing Program of UCLA Extension.

Before this, he was principal flutist of the Nashville Symphony for 25 years.

www.charleswyatt.com

 

 

To view other poems published in this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “The Good in Us” by Chad Norman

The Good in Us
for James Walsh, singer in StarSailor

When my passing through is over,
when a woman smiles as she cries,
when my country stops being involved,
when that involvement isn’t about wars,
when my country is really a peace-keeper,
I will know the good in us.

As my living becomes a dying,
as a man cries as he smiles,
as my life no longer includes greed,
as that greed wakes up with guilt,
as my wish takes over all doubts,
I can know the good in us.

Our tears are caused by a voice,
our voices can never be just noise,
our routines own everything we own,
our homes do not need large yards,
our properties belong to unhappy strangers,
I should know the good in us.

To fall over the top of a piano,
to punch a clock in order to be abused,
to sit on one side of a dirty window,
to sip a blend of fine coffee and rum,
to cry when a branch sways slowly,
I claim the good in us.

The good in us.
The good in us.
I see into the troubled now,
and hear a song so loud
I wonder if anyone else
can hear it, no, I wonder
why it plays so loudly for me,
I wonder if all of you
also feel and believe in
the good in us, knowing
it is there if we want it?

 

Chad Norman‘s poems have appeared for the past 35 years in literary publications across Canada, as well as a number of other countries around the world.
He hosts and organizes RiverWords: Poetry & Music Festival each year in Truro, NS., held at Riverfront Park, the 2^nd Saturday of each July.
In October 2016 he was invited by the Nordic Assn. for Canadian Studies to give talks on Canadian Poetry and read from his books at Borupgaard Gym in Copenhagen, and Risskov Gym in Aarhus, as well as other readings in both cities and Malmo, Sweden. Because of that tour Norman has started the manuscript, Counting Coins In Denmark And Sweden.
His most recent books are Selected & New Poems, from Mosaic Press, and Waking Up On The Wrong Side of The Sky, from Grant Block Press, and a new book, Squall: Poems In The Voice Of Mary Shelley, is due out Spring 2020, from Guernica Editions. Recently, he completed the manuscript, The Black Rum Poems, and presently works on a new manuscript, A Small Matter of Inclusion.
In October of 2017 he read at various Eastern Canada venues in Kingston, Ottawa, and Montreal. And in the Fall of 2018 Norman will undertake a speaking/reading tour of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, as a celebration of literacy and Canadian Poetry.
His love of walks is endless.

 

To view other poems published in this issue, 6:2, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Prism Index” by Shazia Hafiz Ramji

 

Prism Index

He turns and it is 11 o’clock, face pulled
into light’s straight tail boastful of time
the slaves it illumines. Of us, smiles; beacons
somewhere in a forest, a satellite swings
its arms cupped and wide, hugging you
a path made for you, the prisms that index
spines. I thumb through your white light.
Can you feel this? Bent needs, knotted might
might not come to see these losses.

 

Shazia Hafiz Ramji lives on unceded Coast Salish land where she wrote her first book, Port of Being, which received the 2017 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, judged by Wayde Compton, and is forthcoming from Invisible Publishing in fall 2018. She is the author of the chapbook, Prosopopoeia (Anstruther Press, 2017), and her poetry is forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2018. Shazia’s fiction and criticism have recently appeared in The Humber Literary Review, Quill & Quire, and The Hamilton Review of Books. She is an editor for Metatron Press and the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive.

 

To view other poems published in this issue, 14:2, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.