Even though I am mostly working on “Let’s Deconstruct a Story” these days, every now and then I still like to feature a stellar poet! Today’s post includes a reading by Michigan poet, Ken Meisel, from his new book, Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance published in January by Kelsay Books.
Poems in the recording include “Fatherhood,” “Two Portraits of Hunger, South Carolina” and “The Angel of the Wonderful “ all published in the San Pedro River Review. “Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance” was first published in Third Wednesday.
Please enjoy the recording on Anchor here:
Or you can access it on Spotify:
Apple, or wherever you enjoy your podcasts.
Ken’s new book is dedicated to another legend in the Michigan poetry world, Joy Gaines-Friedler! They will be reading together on April 19th at 7pm on zoom through the Royal Oak Library. Register here.
Happy weekend, everyone!
Kelly
Bio: Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent books are: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020) and Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018). His new book, Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance, was published in 2022 by Kelsay Books. He has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, San Pedro River Review, The Wayfarer, and Rabid Oak.
This is an interesting question because it is not only hard to choose, I am still working on looking at my work as “good enough.” Perhaps an odd thing to admit out loud, but as an artist – I am also a photographer as well and write in other genres – I find my work to be perfectly imperfect in different states and stages of finish. Some things are more finished or “complete” than others. While some things I have decided to let them stay as they are while constantly seeing what could have been better.
I feel like that is just the overall cycle of life. If I am to pick which one of my poems I feel the most drawn to at this moment, it would have to be, “Syna-ghetto-sthesia: An Exhibition.” I wrote this a bit ago and it was the first time that I actually started engaging with the place where I grew up without shame but as an artifact within the process of creating and making art. When people ask me where I am from, I often say Connecticut clear and without a mumble. But if there is a further question of where, or if I am just volunteering saying, “I grew up in Hartford,” there are edges and notes of shame underneath my voice. I think for the construction of this book, before I ever knew it was a book, I decided to engage the urbanscape as a place of possibility within my poetry. It was something, previous to this, that was easier to do in prose. The urbandscape didn’t have to just be in places like New York, but other places where the urban offered a lot of flavors of the surreal, fantastic, the ridiculous, alongside all of the other things about the place that still cause my face to twist in disdain.
Creating the past and the place that I have so many complex feelings about into an exhibition space on the page allowed me to enter it a different way. Again, it was not expected in terms how how this came to be and when it did, it was almost as if the place itself – the apartment building that did burn down in late 2019 while my parents were still living there – was instructing and inviting me to see it, in habit it in a different way.
***
Shanta Lee Gander
BIO
Shanta Lee Gander is a writer, photographer, journalist whose work has been featured in The Massachusetts Review, PRISM, ITERANT Literary Magazine, Palette Poetry, BLAVITY, DAME Magazine, The Crisis Magazine, Rebelle Society, on the Ms. Magazine Blog, and on a former radio segment Ponder This. Shanta Lee’s photojournalism has been featured on Vermont Public Radio (VPR.org) and her investigative reporting has been in The Commons weekly newspaper covering Windham County, VT. Shanta Lee is the 2020 recipient of the Arthur Williams Award for Meritorious Service to the Arts and 2020 and named as Diode Editions full-length book contest winner for her debut poetry compilation, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues. Her contributing work on an investigative journalism piece for The Commons received several New England Newspaper & Press Association (NENPA) awards for her journalism work. Shanta Lee gives lectures on the life of Lucy Terry Prince (c. 1730-1821) — considered the first known African-American poet in English literature — as a member of the Vermont and New Hampshire Humanities Council Speakers Bureaus. She is the 2020 gubernatorial appointee to the Vermont Humanities Council’s board of directors and has a solo photography show, Dark Goddess, being featured in the Manchester, VT gallery, Southern Vermont Arts Center in August 2021.
Shanta Lee is an MFA candidate in Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has an MBA from the University of Hartford and an undergraduate degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality from Trinity College. To see more of Shanta Lee’s work, visit Shantaleegander.com.
At this moment in time which of your own poems is your personal favorite, and why?
***
The Leopard Lady Speaks
This leopard-skin come onto me
when I lost love,
(this is not for the marks to know)
when my man’s absence
set a hot kindle of distrust
that blowed back on me
as lack of faith
in what is more worthy
than some handful of spit and dust.
No wonder I lost
my natural color, trying to be
all things to him, and him not wanting
what I ever was or become or any between—
turning away like a spoiled child,
turning away like the sun eat up
by the moon, and not my doing
or undoing.
I scourged my soul,
turning myself inside out
to make him a better tent
against the weather of the world,
stretching myself across his failings
like a worn-through quilt
on a wide cold bed.
They weren’t enough left of me
to fill a thimble, then,
but I gathered myself back up
and stood, feet reasonable
to the earth, liver’n lights settling back
like I’d been dropped
from a high place,
and I was about satisfied,
but the letting-go of that man—
him of me then me of him—
left me streaked, specked, and spotted
like the flocks of Jacob,
and I opened my mouth to say
the true things that underprop the world.
***
I chose this poem because it first chose me. I was sitting with pen in hand, wait for lightning to strike, and it did — this voice arrived and kept visiting with me for many years until the entire story of Dinah (the Leopard Lady), the Professor, and their lives on the road with a mid-century carnival sideshow came into being. I didn’t so much write as excavate, make a space for her being.
***
BIO:
Valerie Nieman’s third poetry collection, Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse, includes work that first appeared in The Missouri Review, Chautauqua, and The Southern Poetry Review. “Steeped in sideshow tradition, and addressing issues of race, gender, self-concept, and creative expression, your book is beautifully written,” writes Lisa Schaefer, curator of The Coney Island Museum. Her fourth novel, To the Bones, a mystery/horror tale that takes on the coal industry and its effects on Appalachia, was published in 2019. Her poetry has appeared widely, from The Georgia Review to Crannog, and has been published in numerous anthologies, including Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She has held state and NEA creative writing fellowships. A graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte and a former journalist, she teaches creative writing at North Carolina A&T State University.
***
Available for purchase at Press 53 here or Indiebound here or Amazon here.
I wrote this poem on the sixth floor of a university library about a year ago, flipping through the actual Modern Encyclopedia For Basketball — a thick brick of pages wrapped in a blue cover, published in 1969 by Zander Hollander. At the time, I was working on a longer suite of nonfiction essays about basketball, Asian identity, and desire. I encountered the actual Modern Encyclopedia For Basketball during my research process. Around the time of this writing, I was also interested in who gets culturally portrayed as fluent or foreign in the context of speech, and in the context of sport. I was interested in the concept of the encyclopedia — what gets contained? What gets attributed (or misattributed)? Who arrives to the encyclopedia — and in pursuit of what? I’ve always been fascinated by language, and the clinical language of an encyclopedia for basketball intrigued me, particularly because we think of an encyclopedia as a source-text; we are beholden to its fact and its science. At times, however, privileging the encyclopedia can mean we privilege a certain type of knowledge and overlook the knowledge of personal narrative, of storytelling, of emotional root. In flipping through this particular encyclopedic volume, I witnessed pages of terminology, black and white photographs of (primarily white) men. I thought about the ways that my own encyclopedic knowledge of basketball — while very limited in scope — is still knowledge. My knowledge of basketball contains a sense of intimacy, a sense of care and duty, a sense of lineage. In my poem, I wanted to reclaim the love I have for basketball and for good fathers. I wanted to write in — and perhaps expand — the image of Chinese fathers, who so often are portrayed in popular culture or literature as stoic, unfeeling, strict. I wanted, instead, to write a Chinese father into an encyclopedia of motion, to “tender-ize” (and here, I mean to make soft, tender, critical) and begin again. To question what we think we know, or are capable of knowing.
The father in my poem is joyous, he’s bold, he’s singing, he’s alive. The speaker celebrates him. She loves him. There is motion and there is speed and there is a hoop and there is, always, a life that is made possible by care, by trust, by nodding to the ones who have come before, sang to us, lifted a ball, shot it in.
***
CARLINA DUAN is a sister, a poet, a friend, a fan of basketballs and sugar. She hails from Michigan, and has taught writing in classrooms across across the state, as well as Malaysia, California, and Tennessee. Carlina is the author of I WORE MY BLACKEST HAIR (Little A, 2017), and the chapbook Here I Go, Torching (National Federation Poetry Societies, 2015). Carlina is the winner of multiple Hopwood awards, a Fulbright grant, the Edna Meudt Poetry Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and the 1st Place Winner of Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below Contest. Her poems can be found in Black Warrior Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Margins, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Poetry from Vanderbilt University, where she served as the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Nashville Review.
I believe that a good poem needs to surprise its writer and also to risk something aesthetically or emotionally, preferably both. “Shadowbox” is a poem with origins in a writing prompt that my friend, the poet Elizabeth Austen, introduced me to one Friday morning. Once a month we meet, drink coffee, share what we’re reading and then write together. When life becomes overwhelming our meetings ensure that we will still have some poetry drafts started. Now as we begin our fourth year of meeting together, we have seen several of our Friday morning poems grow-up to be revised, polished, and eventually published. For this poem, I began with a random set of words that would become the end-words for each line of the poem (horses, something, decisions, coming, dark, aftermath…).
Why is this my favorite? Because it doesn’t sound like anything I have written before. Because I surprised myself with the varied swerves that the poem takes and at the same time, the poem recalls an event I experienced, many years ago. In the Top Ten list of the worst nights of my life, this river walk easily ranks in the top three. And yet here is the evening examined from the distance of decades. I survived. And of course, the poem is not a photograph or a news article of what “really” happened but a piece of art. I admire this poem for the energy that emerges as each line ends with a random word not of my choosing. It is this “structured randomness” that pushed me to say things about life that I would not have otherwise articulated.
How surprised I was when the Academy of American Poets chose this poem as a Halloween poem — a reading of the poem I had not considered. Of course “horror film” and “vampires” are there in clear sight.
Finally, I like the multiple meaning and references to the title, “Shadowbox” including to spar with an imaginary opponent (often the self) and a glass-faced wooden box used for displaying small objects (as in the artwork of Joseph Cornell). My takeaway from this is that it’s useful to allow prompts to push you into emotionally dangerous territory; it’s useful to write in a way that makes you uncomfortable; it’s useful to use the surreal to examine the real.
***
Bio:
Susan Rich is an award-winning poet, editor and essayist. She’s the author of four poetry collections including, most recently, Cloud Pharmacy, and The Alchemist’s Kitchen (White Pine Press). Susan is co-editor of the anthology, The Strangest of Theatres, published by the Poetry Foundation and McSweeney’s. Rich has received awards from Artists Trust, Peace Corps Writers, the Fulbright Foundation, The Times Literary Supplement (London) and the Seattle Mayors Office of Arts and Culture. Her work has appeared this year in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Pleiades, Southern Review and the Wallace Stevens Journal. She is currently completing her fifth book of poems, BLUE ATLAS. You can follow her on Twitter @susanrichpoet or on her blog at www.thealchemistskitchen.blogspot.com
At this moment in time, which of your own poems is your personal favorite and why?
***
ARS POETICA WHILE READING THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT LAKES
Port Austin, MI September 2017
Rising levels in Saginaw Bay this summer have ruined the wooden stairs leading from the break wall to the beach; a tongue of rust rises to a high water mark not seen here in decades, an inscrutable ecological signpost. A beetle scampers out of mud-dried kelp. A shelf of stones thirty yards out veils a precipitous drop into green depths. The stench of life is everywhere.
My mother-in-law tells a story of coming here as a girl and having to shovel mounds of alewives from the beachhead before swimming.This book describes the lakebed as a field cobbled with invasive mussel shells and refers to those zebras and quaggas flushed from the ballast tanks of freighters as “biological filtering machines” that trick us into thinking the lakes are well.
A middle-aged woman rafts out beyond the sandbar, and her husband swims to deliver her a drink, some sugary rum concoction in a plastic water bottle, his ratty ponytail flat against his sweaty, water-kissed skin. Off to the southwest, lapidary strokes of windmills mimic bathers soaking up sun and water in their plastic rafts. Seagulls bark at each other in the foam, plucking gobies from breakwater, wounding them before dropping them in sand.
Bouts of animal behavior, this propensity for pure fun, different than joy or love, deleterious as mussels straining algae from fresh water. Boats cruise the clear-as-glass surface. Poetry, despite what has been written in the shadow of murky etymologies and unkempt epochs during the dull regenerative paces that compose our human time, is little more than a series of absurd acts of love we could never plan out in the morning or the day before at dusk—a chin cupped in a palm, a kiss, a cocktail waded through the combers.
Right now my favorite poem of mine is called, “Ars Poetica While Reading ‘The Death and Life of The Great Lakes.'” I like it in large part because it’s set on my favorite stretch of beach on The Saginaw Bay in Port Austin, MI. Also, I’m a sentimentalist at heart, and I feel like in this poem I manage to say something about love, cloaking the sentiment in ecology and poetics so that no one’s busted me for being maudlin, yet.
Bio:
Cal Freeman has had work appear in many journals, including The Journal, Drunken Boat, Pank, Passages North, New Ohio Review, and Hippocampus. He is the author of Brother of Leaving (Marick Press) and a chapbook, Heard Among the Windbreak (Eyewear Publishing). His second book, Fight Songs, has just been released by Eyewear Publishing.
At this moment in time, which of your own poems is your personal favorite and why?
Amber Shockley has published poetry in a variety of print and online publications, including Rattle and Gargoyle Magazine. Her first chapbook, A Brief Catalog of Common People, was published this year by Main Street Rag. She serves as assistant poetry editor for Atticus Review and enjoys creating book trailers for other writers of all genres.
At this moment in time, which of your own poems is your personal favorite and why?
***
Family Movies
No one has learned to hold the camera still
so there is an earthquake
in the white blur of these frames.
New babies are displayed on blankets
and sometimes couples wander
across mountainsides or beaches
without their heads. It is often Christmas
or someone’s anniversary or a retirement
party where men are smoking cigars
and your grandmother walks through
the last years of her life in Florida,
beyond a hotel pool and a flock of flamingos,
to a sudden winter where snowmobiles
move in circles, carrying children
in orange suits. A tree glows in the window,
wrapped in tinsel, and the men are dressed up,
squinting into a kingdom of gifts.
An uncle falls in love with fall foliage
and a full hour passes,
in some lost Vermont October,
smoke seeping from chimneys;
then, you step into the light, a hand
over your eyes, as if you can see us
out here, watching, in the uneaten cake
of the future.
Hi Kelly:
I like this poem because it speaks in images, and captures the sensation of watching a family movie, which is often a disjointed, sputtering thing that illuminates strange, formal fragments of our lives; family movies are usually badly filmed, and utterly boring to strangers, yet they offer glimpses into rooms of the past, allow us to see people who have died, and events before we were born; in this way, the movies are both terrible and powerful. I like working from photographs or, in this case, film because I begin with images, which are naturally infused with meaning.
Faith Shearin
Bio:
Faith Shearin’s books of poetry include The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press), Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), and Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press). Her short stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Frigg, Atticus Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Sixfold, and Meridian. Shearin’s work has been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from the NEA, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Hi Everyone,
