Fixed and Free: poetry anthology 2011 is a collection of seventy-nine poems with conscience and heart. Edited by Billy Brown, Gregory L. Candela, Elaine Schwartz and Stewart S. Warren, it contains poem by forty-seven women and thirty-two men from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Arranged alphabetically by author, the collection holds together in meandering themes. More free than fixed form poems, the latter include ghazals, sonnets, regular stanza verses and prose poems. Many poems reflect aspects of Albuquerque and New Mexico at large, from its environmental qualities to its Catholic Hispanic culture and ties to Mexico. Others take the reader to different states or continents entirely. Themes include nature, daily life, racial and economic inequities, terrorism/ war related concerns and gender issues. The book is a finalist in the anthology category of the New Mexico Book Awards to be announced on November 16th. In this entry, I will quickly introduce the reader to a few poets before devoting a few pagers to a more in depth discussion of the writing of several other poets.
Billy Brown’s poem, “Roberta,” is a tender nineteen line thanks to a young violinist who reminded him of his dead daughter who was also a violinist.
to see you again
after three weeks
is like seeing a daughter
gone fourteen years
her tan skin
her long brown hair
her dark brown eyes
her long delicate fingers
dancing on violin strings
her small nose
her smiling lips
gently pressed together in effort
are all yours now
in blessed reincarnation
her flesh, her moisture,
her ashes, her steam,
her grace, her beauty
miraculously reassembled
a divine gift
Early in 2012, Hakim Bellamy was named Albuquerque’s first Poet Laureate. His long poem, “The Origin of the Hand Sake,” is a narrative commentary on illiteracy, class issues and violence, especially against children, in our culture. Its style and rhythm reflects his work with young poets as well as his Poetry Slam and song writing affiliations. In the poem, the hand shake that is “thought to imply that one holds no weapons” morphs into hands raised for the police, hands empty of food, a “raised right hand/ [that] holds five fingers until there is a fist inside it.” Playing on the phrase “hand shake,” the poem ends:
Since they are only fifty percent proficient at reading, reciting, essay
writing and multiplying our lies
Knowing our history and their present
An open hand
Means nothing
To a child
Who is much more concerned with whether that hand is held or
shaking
Cause when she’s only four
And this hand shake—is what’s left from her “night before”
There are lots of answers
But only one question…
Why?
Sandi Blanton’s “Watching Little Daryl,” is a lighthearted, yet profound, meditation on the ordinary as a doorway to the eternal. The vehicle for this journey is “a tiny black and white kitten/sleeping on his back/…in its furry tuxedo/ pulsing with the peace/that passes understanding.” From there the speaker journeys through the “amazing miracle” of “every molecule/lined up perfectly” to create a cat with all the right parts—inner and outer—in good working order. Contemplating and then entering this mystery, the speaker notes:
He is dreaming,
riding on the breath,
miraculous prana
lifting and falling
like gentle ocean waves
carrying him deeper and
deeper into nirvana.
I breathe with him
lifting, falling
pulsing, throbbing
in, out
up, down
searching
for my own heaven.
Kenneth Guerney is an Albuquerque poet and editor of the New Mexico poetry anthology Adobe Walls. His satirical poem, “Becoming Impossible,” offers a different twist on the miraculous. Is it coincidence that the human speaker, suspicious of eternity, limits his poem to 7 quatrains—a number just shy of 8, which, on its side, is the symbol for infinity? Numerology suggests that the number 7, uneven and therefore unbalanced, resolves itself into the even and complete number 8. Not only does the poem’s content impede such a resolution, the structure of the seventh stanza, with its break away last line, impedes it as well.
The speaker begins by noting his attempted “walk on water trick” which he “thought a good compromise start/ for my real goal of walking on air.” His gymnastics meander through “bend[ing] light around my body,” which he says is “as easy as learning/ the mariner’s manual of knots.” In the next two stanza, the speaker references popular science to elucidate his failed attempt to fly, which, “gave me the idea/ of walking on air.” The poem goes on:
It has something to do with my Roadrunner mentality
and the successful assertion of ignorance
in the meaningful accomplishment of what might,
otherwise, be considered impossible.
Now, what are some popular associations with “Roadrunner?” Well, if you live in New Mexico as Guerney and this reviewer does, you will on occasion see one of the long, tall, Roadrunner birds race along the sand or tarmac from point A to point B. I am thrilled each time I encounter one of these unlikely creatures and am never quite sure if it is running away from or toward something. Although the Roadrunner can fly to a perch or over an obstacle, it is predominantly ground- dwelling, like the poem’s speaker.
Perhaps you also recall the Looney Tunes cartoons and the eternal struggle between Roadrunner—that speedy bird—and Wile E. Coyote who inevitably suffered what should have been fatal encounters with Roadrunner. Yet, Coyote repeatedly comes back to life only to be outsmarted time after time. Roadrunner often has something to do with Coyote’s would be demise. Coyote was the trickster predator, but Roadrunner, with his carefree enthusiasm, always did him one better. The speaker in this poem shares a devil-may-care defiance with this Roadrunner.
More recently, there is the Roadrunner high speed internet cable company that services parts of the US but they do not service New Mexico so it is not likely to be an association in this poem. Still, the image is apt for an internet company since users do manage to “fly” in the infinite ethers while never actually leaving the ground.
In the last quatrain, the speaker reveals that what he is after is assurance that he will not be tricked out of an abundance here by false promises about an abundant afterlife.
My true goal is to visit heaven before death
and make sure there is plenty to go around
of the promised riches of the afterlife
before I join any one religion over another.
How does one “visit heaven before death?” Perhaps by seeing the universe through the wave-particle relativity of quantum mechanics referenced in the poem’s fifth stanza. Perhaps through a Roadrunner mentality, that looks for heaven on earth and refuses to take promises of the hereafter more seriously than the abundant fun of now.
Mortality and the march of the generations is the subject of Don McIver’s poem, “The Awning.” Well published, McIver is also a slam poet who has organized and performed at poetry events across the country. The poem’s first stanza recounts the speaker’s childhood experience of his father, “a being capable of anything.” By stanza two, the boy has become a man, as strong and competent as the remembered father. Indeed, the son is now stronger than the aging father who, by the third stanza was “tired/wanted to call it quits…/but I insisted.” The son drives the father as he once felt driven by the father to perform, achieve. Father and son reach a kind of accommodation:
He plugged away, though watched me work more often than in the
early morning hours.
And we did as much as we could with the materials at hand.
In a small town, 60 miles from the next bigger town,
we were stuck.
This suited him fine,
In the next lines, the speaker implies his frustration with these limitations as he
…looked at the mass of wood, crossbeams, canopy pieces, bolts,
hoists, nails
and knew I was strong.”
The son has displaced the father and the speaker seems to feel some satisfaction about this. However, the last couplet reveals the speaker’s deeper ambivalence about two things: the price of being a “strong” man and the sadness about the once omnipotent father’s aging—and, by implication, the speaker’s inevitable aging.
I was the body that my brain could still abuse.
And my father, once capable of anything, was old.
One is left with the impression that an inevitable part of being a man is to dominate and drive one’s body—even to the point of abuse—in the service of a will to achieve. Just as inevitable is the diminishment of this ability to challenge limitations as one ages. In its own way, each is just as sad as the other. While this poignant poem stands strong on the father/son story, the twist in the last couplet introduces a stunning depth.
Carol Moscrip is a published poet and teacher of creative writing in high school and college. Her poem, “Shadows,” takes the reader back to the speaker’s childhood experience of her father’s return from World War II. This poem is of particular interest to me as a former Army Nurse and spouse, mother of a soldier, and leader of writing groups for active duty military service members, veterans and family members. In this free verse poem, Moscrip beautifully captures how the realities of war affect families as well as military personnel.
Moscrip’s poem has the dream like quality of early childhood memories—memories of the speaker’s four year old self during World War II. Indeed, the speaker’s first reference is to a dream.
It must have been
an anonymous tip
in a dream
that woke me
Capitalization is reserved for the first word of each line, the first person “I”, “Mother”, “Father”, home description (“Victorian”), and place, (“San Francisco”). Punctuation is sparing and there is no period at the end of the poem’s sixty-six lines. “Shadows” mirrors the experience of families who currently have family members in the military just as accurately as it represents the speaker’s experience so many years ago—the worry for the one in danger, the effort to connect through imagination when distance makes touch impossible, the tensions and challenges of reunion, the desperate, private whispers in the dark and the “everything is OK” daylight face shown to family members and the public alike.
The second stanza begins, “[a] whisper of light/drew me down,” the “whisper of light” echoing the whispers that the speaker was not supposed to hear, and soon wished she had not heard. The next two lines describe the “generous…Victorian house/where we lived…during the war.” Then the speaker breaks into a description of her fears during the war—of blackouts, of the “whistles of bombs,” even “the sudden flashes of star! star! star!/in the utter night as though pitched/ into the sky by my fear of dark.” As a four year old, all the speaker knew of her father was what her Mother had told her—that he “could see the same stars, too, /wherever he might be—. “
Then the fateful night of the “anonymous tip” and the “whisper of light” that compelled the speaker, “despite the dark” to tiptoe
…past Mother’s pale floral
chair and Father’s overstuffed one—
which meant his presence
and his absence through those years—[.]
The “single shaft of light [cast] its spot…/Mother sat bolt upright/ with an electrified stare.” The light has gone from a whisper to a glaring, electrifying spotlight illuminating the paradox—to wife and child—of a returning hero/husband/father who “held his head and wept,/ just come home from war to find/ the savings all spent.” It is not clear how much his tears are over his combat experiences or his fractured dream of returning home to peace and prosperity. It is striking how common the problem of management of finances remains for military couples. It may be that the military person unrealistically imagines the accumulation of bank balances, forgetting the financial realities of civilian life. Or it may be that the home-side spouse has indeed mismanaged funds the military spouse earned by risking his/her life. Of course, during World War II, almost all of the stateside spouses were wives. Now, it could just as easily be a husband as a wife.
Whatever the case, the home a combatant returns to is not the home s/he left. Nor is the combatant who returns the same person who left so many months before. It certainly is not the home s/he daydreamed about returning to, even if the physical structure is solid and intact. Even when the home spouse has managed things responsibly, there are home side “bombs” that drop on most reuniting families. This poem contains no sentimental stars to wish upon with a naïve faith that one’s wish will come true. This poem is full of “the sudden flashes of star! star! star!”—three stars for the three star characters of the poem.”
It is all too much for the young child who, like a startled little animal, ran “[s]currying in panic back upstairs,/ [and] ducked under my blanket/lest he know I saw his tears.” Even at her young age, the speaker knew seeing the tears was as dangerous as the fact that they were shed. Perhaps the parents also received and “anonymous tip” because, at least in the poem, the Father quickly looms in the bedroom door,
the huge shadow of his anguish
stood there for a moment looking in
as I, curled up in my bed
like a shrimp on a platter,
pretended to be asleep…,
bit down hard on my fear
of this big person in my house
crying like a child[.]
The language in these lines is compelling. Father is not a man but a “shadow of…anguish.” The child, “a shrimp” as a child is often called, has become not only a small person, but a morsel to be served on a platter as so many children are served up to help solve problems in their parents’ relationship, or served up to carry emotional burdens their parents cannot carry “well enough.” There’s no blame here, just a stunning description of how frail children can feel devoured by the sufferings of their frail parents.
The child’s experience of the father as intruder magnifies as she wonders, “where would he sleep, not here in my too small bed.” These lines caught my breath the first time I read this poem. Were we going on to memories of sexual abuse? Thankfully, this was not the case for, “after a silent moment he moved on/…[to take] refuge in my mother’s room.” Interspersed with the child’s recollection of events, are lines that must surely grow out of the years of the speaker’s internal replaying and reflection upon this pivotal experience, for though the child may have had a visceral apprehension of the situation, a child could not formulate the astute observations about the father that follow.
…like any other child
distraught at night
he took refuge in my mother’s room
where she would know how
to quiet his sobs, …
The vulnerability of this warrior Father has exposed his despair and child-like need for solace. The child imagines him being comforted by Mother, much the same as Mother has comforted the child, and perhaps in his fragile state, that was the comfort offered. However, an adult reflecting on this observation likely imagines the comfort and maturing influence of long unavailable sexual congress between this long separated couple. Even as a child, and certainly as the reflecting adult, the speaker “knew/ that I could not comfort him.” Only now does the speaker tell us that this is “my first memory of him ever.” Clearly, it is a memory burned into the speakers psyche and one that shaped her psyche as she matured.
It is fitting that the child’s awareness of the father is as a shadow for the father who returned from war was a mere shadow of his former self and the child’s imagined hero. After three dreamlike stanzas describing war related trauma,
[t]he light of day did come
but could not bleach out that shadow
of the night before,
now permanent at my bedroom door
this solitude he brought home from war[.]
This solitude, so powerfully imaged as a dark shadow in a doorway that cannot be lightened, moves the father from fragile to intruding to remote. What a meal for a “shrimp on a platter” to digest!
Then, as now, adults often act as if these surreal events—the war, the tearful homecoming, the financial crisis—never happened. Friends gather. Father talks of a swing and a dog for his little girl and likely never again talked of his crisis with such vulnerability. What is the dream here—the crisis of the night or the illusion in the daylight.
But bodies, especially young ones, are exquisitely attuned to discrepancies between verbal and non-verbal messages, between what is said and what is viscerally communicated. And so, the child “stood transfixed as if posed/for a photo, anxiously curious” about which reality held the greater truth—“the sunlit room” that put a bright face on everything or the Father’s “shadow seated at the same place.” A shadow relegated to the shadows, it is “now small upon the wall” even though it held his immense pain, which the child had witnessed the night before.
Moscrip’s poem depicts how people can attempt—and fail—to bury agony in ordinary life. At the risk of charges of political incorrectness, Aaron Trumm’s persona poem, “Walking Dead” brings a woman’s agony, in a militant Muslim culture, into the light. At the anthology‘s celebration event last March, Trumm’s delivery of the poem from memory was riveting. Trumm is another published, slam poet who has competed nationally. At one time, he was ranked 10th in America. He is also a musician and owns an Albuquerque recording studio ( www.nquit.com ). “Walking Dead” is an eighty-two line free style poem with irregular rhyme patterns, lines and stanzas. Punctuation, consisting of a few commas, is sparse. A couplet begins the poem. The two lines, together and individually, stitch the poem together.
I am walking dead today
mother of six three taken away
This poem, also plays on the image of hands—mother’ hands that “the cradle of civilization cannot warm.” Hands that are
… cold from the touch of death
and long to cradle sons’ foreheads
they are withered from three souls gone far from my body
they float
as if they loved still…
I am walking dead today
all my hands can do is pray [.]
Hands that
…are looking for something to touch
but they don’t want daughters
they don’t want fathers
they don’t need a blanket or a pen or a phone
they need SONS[.]
This same mother who “sometimes …wonder[s] if Allah will not listen to daughters” is “like stone and rain.” She is a “cold mother shunning her daughters.” In a culture that values only sons even a mother forgets that she was once a devalued daughter and inflicts the same abuse upon her daughters. Women perpetuate misogyny as surely as men do. This mother’s only plea (to whom?) is,
don’t take my SONS
I am walking dead today
my sons are my SOUL
but Islam’s sons are lined up like grains of sand
they blow away before the night comes…
they drop wind and word and nothing for nothing
and sons,
they send no word of aliveness or grief
they say no prayer to their mother
they send nothing home unless ashes
and letters with news
not of heroism, heat and death
only villains
and victims
they only send letters here, if your sons are dead [.]
Though “crazy, desperate birds from the other side of hell /come steady now every night” when the mother cannot sleep she prays,
let me hear nothing,
if silence be the word of triumph
let me see no man again for all my days
as long as no corpse be given to me in the evening
fresh with the smell of blood and lead[.]
But the mother cannot escape the fact that even though she hears nothing,
I am walking dead today
no everything is NOT ok
I am like all mothers with bullets in their bellies
sons waiting in Allah’s place
begging to be birthed
only to “walk this fair firm Earth…in their fathers ‘ footsteps” that have become
…foxholes
slobber
dripping
gushing
bleeding
everything naked
everything in the skin
standing in their dirty dripping holes
waiting for the rain
why?
From beginning to end, the imagery graphically as it progresses from hands, to cold stone and rain, to sand and ashes, to letters, to nothing, to bullets and blood, climaxing in a mother’s despair.
I am bloodier than the dust
walking dead brained in the wind
waiting for the dry-eyed sky to cry my sons to me
mother of six three taken away
it only rains here, when you’re dead [.]
This is not a poem that talks of redemption. This is a poem which, by virtue of the stark integrity of its speaking, is redemptive for those with the courage to listen. The repetition, the rhyming, the rhythm and the imagery propel the reader/listener forward through the heaviness of the topic. The fact that a son wrote this poem also invites the redemption of other sons and mothers who undervalue their own daughters and womanly suffering. One can only hope that someday men and women in such oppressive cultures will have the desire, courage and ability to stand for woman’s value and truths. And while we’re at it, let’s hope that humans will find a way to turn from war as a solution for differences.
The last poem we will explore is “Gulf Ghazal” by Yasmeen Najmi. Najmi is an environmental planner and a widely published poet. Her poetry reflects her deep feelings for ecosystems. The poem is set in the Louisiana gulf. It concerns the physical and spiritual nature of the place and how human’s and the space they occupy impact each other. In particular, it is a tribute to the life in the Louisiana bayous that mourn the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill.
The ghazal is a traditional Persian form which owes its popularity in English to Pakistani and Indian poets who wanted to reclaim the ancient form. Strictly speaking, a ghazal consists of unenjambed couplets which share an end refrain (rhadif). The word preceding the refrain is the word that rhymes through the poem. The refrain is set in the last phrase of the two opening lines and repeats at the end of each couplet. Each couplet must be able to stand alone, in structure and content. The cohesiveness of the form is in its structure and pattern. Another distinctive feature is that the poet refers to him/herself by name in the last line of the poem. It is a challenging form, particularly in English.
The “Gulf Ghazal” layout on the page consists of three, rather than two, line stanzas. It is difficult to know if this was a printing necessity or the poet’s intention. I would judge the former since, when one examines each stanza, the content and rhythms break nicely into couplets. Otherwise, Najmi has met most of the technical requirements of the form: the refrain, “thin places” is repeated verbatim. The words preceding the refrain rhyme well: “grow/toes/closed/those/through/below/roux/our.” There are two minor variations from the formula: the insertion of the article, “the” between the rhymed “closed” and the refrain in the second stanza, and the context and placement of the poets name in the last couplet. Though it would be nice to have a visual couplet layout for the reader who counts on such things, the variations do not disrupt the texture or flow of the poem when spoken, which is how a ghazal is traditionally delivered.
The refrain, “thin places” is defined in the author’s note as “a physical place on the landscape where the veil between this world and the next is thin—a place you understand intuitively.” The poet heard this definition on public radio. The sixth and next to the last stanza indicate the event that likely got the radio people and the poet thinking about thin places—i.e., the gulf oil spill of 2010.
The play on the phrase, “thin places,” evolves through the poem. The first stanza describes the “dry stripes between the feral bayous and rivers” where people built. These were “thin places,” in both structure and atmosphere. The second stanza describes trees “slumped like old women” and “antebellum lace of moss that filled dikes of sunlight.” One gets a visual image of the veil between worlds in the definition of “thin places.”
The third stanza eases us into imagery related to the oil spill. It follows life forms that “settled in all those thin places” of sky, earth and water as “earth’s blood crept to shore, staining, straining….” “Earth’s blood” is, of course, the oil pumped from her heart, deeper than the sea. The fourth stanza magnifies images of wild life, confused by the eruption of oil that that darkened the ocean.
Thinking it was night again, eels left their watery nests among the
breathing roots that held the world together, darting, twisting in the
flow through thin places.
Again, there is the multi-valance definition of “thin places” here when we imaging thin eels literally passing between and among tangled tree roots and the “slimy” feeling most people get just thinking about eels.
The poem has three human presences: the settlers who worked with nature in the first stanza, the implied actors who caused the oil and so confounded nature in the third and fourth stanza, and the local fishermen and a particular cook who populate the last three stanzas. The fishermen are the “anointed soldiers of Goddess Yemanja”, an Afro-American goddess of the ocean, motherhood and protection, whose name shares sound sense with the poet’s name. The fishermen “pried the”
paralyzed from gluey graves, wound new levees like chastity belts
around shores, dark clouds and truth spun below thin places.
I find this imagery compelling. The once fertile and “ferel” bayous have become oily, “gluey graves” for wildlife. The “chastity belt” of levees implies a barrier against the toxic oil which brings death rather than fertility. Just as the oil spill and the “spin” of oil officials are “dark clouds,” so also the oil spreads into “dark clouds” along the “thin places” of coast and waterways. In Jungian psychology, transition places such as coastlines are referred to as liminal spaces—a place where realities meet and vie for dominance, where truth is nebulous and awareness is cloudy. Najmi describes not only the physical state of the oil infested waters and shores, but also the psychic state of the perpetrators, victims and observers of the disaster.
The last two stanzas ground the generalities of the previous stanzas in the person of one man in one place, “Old Joe at Boutte’s Bayou.” Old Joe can fix only a “poorboy sandwich.” While “poorboy” fare is a southern tradition, the reference also underscores that the oil spill has made poor boys of all inhabitants of the ecosystem.
When the poet’s name is spoken in the last stanza, she seems to be more a listener than a speaker, which is a transgression against the traditional ghazal formula. It reads as if she is being told the story, rather than telling it herself to the reader/listener. I had to read this a number of times before I realized that, by now, the poet is herself in a “thin place” which, if not a new experience, she now experiences it in a new way. By letting Old Joe be the speaker in the last as well as the penultimate stanza, the poet, Yasmeen, is bowing to a man, a people who have inhabited the “thin space” of the bayous for years, even generations. “‘In these prowling bayous’ “they know the most about their “thin places.” It is a break from the ghazal formula but it is a break that creatively serves the poem and leaves a devotee of the form in her own “thin place” as she wrestles with what the poet did here and why.
I selected the seven poems presented here because they deeply touched me. They also hang together thematically around questions of life, death and eternity even though their style and content differs greatly. Their quality is representative of the other poems in Fixed and Free, which I encourage the reader to discover.
____________________
Caroline LeBlanc turned her energies toward making art and writing after thirty-seven years as a Nurse Psychotherapist. In September she relocated from Northern New York to Albuquerque, New Mexico where she enjoys the regular sunshine and the rich cultural community. Her chapbook, Smoky Ink and a Touch of Honeysuckle was published in 2010. Recent work can be found in War, Literature & the Arts and The Louisville Review. A former Army Nurse, she continues to lead writing groups for active duty military, veterans and their family members and looks forward to having more time for her own writing and studio work once her home is set up and Lola, her rescue puppy settles down.
