Jack Ridl is a multiple-award-winning poet from western Michigan whose latest book is Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (Wayne State U. Press, 2013). HisLosing Season—about an entire small town suffering through the dismal performance of its high school basketball team—was named 2009’s best book about sports. Poet laureate Billy Collins chose his Against Elegies for a chapbook award. Editor of many poetry anthologies, Jack is retired from Hope College. He is one of Michigan’s most important working poets.
Hands by Jack Ridl (at Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac)
David James has published 4 chapbooks and 2 books of poems. His most recent collection, She Dances Like Mussolini, won the 2010 Next Generation Indie book award. His poems have appeared in Iowa Review, Literary Review, and Rattle. Six of his one-act plays have been produced off-off-Broadway in New York and a score more in Massachusetts, Michigan, and California. He teaches writing at Oakland Community College.
INTERVIEW WITH SHAKESPEARE
The plays, I’m sorry, I wrote for the money—
bills to pay, food on the table, drinks to buy.
They kept me busy, a good busy. I could whip one out
in a month or so, though I had days of drought
when my blank verse became too blank and my
plot points made me sound like a one-trick pony.
My favorites were always the sonnets, fourteen lines
of heart poured into words. The plays were pretend,
enjoyable for the most part, a façade I found amusing.
The poems, however, came from someplace deep, confusing
and surprising me. I would look down at my pen
and wonder, is this some god’s doing or mine?
ONCE UPON A TIME
“all I can hear is light”
— John Glenday
And it comes out of your voice, tiny beams
bright enough for me to make out the walls, the bed,
to barely see the door, half open.
I often wonder if you can see the dreams
moving across my forehead, traveling into my eyes
as I sleep. Once I tasted something like bread
on your skin, but I never told you, or anyone.
And there are nights when our bodies fall together
and break apart, losing, for a moment, the thread
that keeps us tied to earth, safe below the skies.
Sue Budin has published poems in Poetica, Third Wednesday, and The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. Her new book of poems, After the Burn, expresses empathy with others and explores connections between visual art and language. While on staff at Ann Arbor District Library, she led writing workshops for youth and arranged poetry readings there. She’s won awards in Current magazine’s writing contest.
Orange Cat – Florence
Along one side of the Pitti Palace
he paws at the base of a sculpted range
of orange trees, a surprise in early April.
From this tableau he moves
in and out
of a shiny green curtain
embellished with these
rounded jewels
that hang like wingless cherubs.
The cat, oblivious to art, is a study,
irreligious yet sacred in this city of
framed annunciations, first and last judgments.
Some oranges have fallen but this is no sin.
The earth welcomes its fruit.
The cat weaves its way through the orange trees,
a canvas that refreshes, bears gifts like the Magi
who carried balms through the desert as a blessing.
Aaron McCollough is the Assistant Director and Editorial Director of Michigan Publishing, which includes the University of Michigan Press. His PhD in English literature is from the U. of Michigan and MFA in creative writing from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His 5 books include Double Venus, No Grave Can Hold My Body Down, and Underlight—a lyrical engagement with sadness as part of self-formation and the paradoxes of suffering and joy in codependence.
Featured reader is followed by Open Mic reading at 8 p.m. All writers welcome. Read your own or other favorite poetry. Sign up begins 6:45 p.m.
Poetry Series readings every fourth Wednesday hosted by Joe Kelty and Ed Morin
Phillip Sterling has 4 published poetry collections: Abeyance (winner of the Frank Cat Press Chapbook Award, 2007), Quatrains (Pudding House 2006),Significant Others (Main Street Rag 2005), and Mutual Shores (New Issues 2000). His fiction, In Which Brief Stories Are Told,was published by Wayne State U. Press (2011). He edited Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange (Mammoth 2003) and founded the Literature In Person Reading Series at Ferris State University.
Forecast
The air wears a hint of water
the water a hint of lake
and the lake
in its desire to be more than lake
begins to wear the look
of a person who cannot swim.
Enter a horse
and a saddle of unpretentious
leatherwork
clasp and buckle and cowhide
and the dirt caked on its flank
will turn to mud.
Enter a woman’s hand
ungloved
and the world will fill
with air that hints of water
and the massive head
that turns to her
with soft, curious nostrils.
[Poet Lore 2013]
The Etymology of March
I leave the page
to get closer
to the page
I’m leaving behind
like a word tucked
inside another
and misled by it
Or a piece
of chewing gum
cornered in a poet’s mouth
as he reads aloud
Or these
bright birds
panning for spring
in my neighbor’s eaves
where ice
hangs like a TV crew
over rumors of news
—one thing or another,
particulates,
notes of forage
and refuge. Here’s
pretext: masticated
and tasteless
as the lie in belief,
its small cove a brief
unmapped stay
all the way through recovery
[The Cape Rock 2013]
Cycling
You get out the bike your son
left behind. Something you
haven’t done in years. Wipe
off the dust. Pump air into
the tires, which feel chalky
but still seem pliable. You’re
hopeful. So you wheel it
to the bike path the township
has paved, the path your taxes
pay for, and you think: One
never forgets how to ride
a bike (or some other nonsense
meant to buoy your aging
confidence). But now you can’t
recall the last time you rode
a bike, or even the first time,
for that matter, and as you
consider the idea further, and
with a certain gravity, you
begin to question if you’d ever
ridden a bike at all, for if
you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have
forgotten how. And yet,
the vocabulary is familiar:
wobble, teeter, swerve, veer …
Don’t your eyes recall a flash
of asphalt? Can’t your ears
summon a whistle of air? You
look at the bike beside you, gray
as an elephant, and the color
brings to mind the ballsy
Hannibal, his elephants and Alps
and great assault, and how
when he’d grown tired of it
and could no longer mount
a ride, he took his life. Ready?
[Baltimore Review 2012]
A Day Like This
A snake could get lost
n a day like this:
coral and ebony,
ringed with white,
morning light sloughed
from clouds of indeterminacy.
As if my breath taken
from your breathing
or landscape leveled
by uncanny wings
and deft vocalizations.
Everything I know
coils beneath the false rock
of everything I’ve known.
Ed Haworth Hoeppner is the author of three books of poetry, Rain through High Windows, Ancestral Radio, and Blood Prism, the last of which won The Journal/Ohio State U Press award and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Memorial Prize. He has also written Echoes and Moving Fields about the work of W.S. Merwin and John Ashbery. He teaches at Oakland University and directs the creative writing program there.
Against Emptiness
After little sleep, the day got by sun.
The spoons shimmer into rain, each drop full.
The smell of bread and coffee.
The untrained mind, with its beetles clicking,
tries to drive me now toward emptiness.
I will not go, this morning. I will hover.
Let mourners keep watch on the over-pass,
through the chain link to cortege.
Let others conjure now this only world as loss.
Ice*
No anger and transparent, its tips at the windows,
throat-wise, it dams
and threatens to collapse the shallow-peaked garage.
The string of those who wait
and those who don’t arrive, slide into abutments,
lengthens. Glistening.
Almost to fly, to skate and, skating, curve backward,
my childhood friends shrinking
as I watched them, animal-glad, and to sail the great
oblique, return to the pack.
Once it was my greatest pleasure. The high lip of snow
around the rink, the clouds
of voice, the small blots of bright color, blue mittens
and red, swinging, hand-in hand.
The early dark, then. And the cold, sharp and shared.
OMEGA*
Monster like the drunks who stand outside
the dark church, waiting in a thick snow fall:
show of want.
And something else hovers
in the deepening cold, almost visible, a bruise.
One has other clothes to wear and one has not.
Later I have said my piece and later yet
I see the tiny sparks inside my hands,
taking off my sweater in the black bedroom.
The chirping in my worse ear that never goes
away, the little waterfall I populate with frogs
singing in an April night so I can get to sleep
even now, in January.
I took my name off
the do not call list, but I keep getting voices
asking for the veterans without arms or legs,
minds shot up, the children with a wish
to see Disneyland before they die. Time
and want. I’m trying not to think of anything,
but what good is that? The thought of trying?
And why, after all, puppet through another night
of wishing everything would just go away?
Crazy Wisdom Poetry Circle 