We open our 3rd Session with BJ Ward’s aptly titled “The Return.” It’s a poem of loss on its face. That’s fitting for a journal that courts the blues. It’s fitting territory for a poem. But there’s also something else brewing, the kind of blessing that only derives from loss. It’s something earned, permanently worn. I think I hear that in Reed Turchi’s music and it comes up again in the session in other work. If we’re going to be real, maybe this is the only way it goes on in life when we get on with the living. If we meet BJ Ward after a crash, Darla Himeles drops us in the middle of one in “Panic on the 10, Near 7th Street”. The subtle double-play between stalled engine and person that in the hands of such a fine poet can also fire as crescendo. Speaking of song, Kate Sanchez delivers an ode to her mother-in-law. Consider the good spill in these opening lines: I feared I put too much garlic in the beans. And too much pepper into her son, and tell me you’re not dying to divine the rest.
The session generates a lot of interesting connections. Lynne McEniry sings of whales and Paul Illecko’s post-Moby Dick names their killer. Matthew Thornburn’s “Monastery in Koyasan” plays with the divine and the mundane in what feels like a travelogue while Blossom Hibbert gives us her bent postcard with styled abbreviation in the title “Domu, Bangor High Strt 1997” where she buries the I statement we expect to find. In that final paragragh/stanza when she declares As I board a steam train, the peacock ambles proudly past in the licorice night. Indeed, that peacock pulling their own Bogart. While Kristin W. Davis proves in “Farewell at Varanasi” what I’ve always felt, the best travel prose seconds as an elegy.
I find something so tender and charming in the personal voice of Koss’s prose short. And in a persona piece or character study, Robert Perchan’s “Lifeguard” provides so much personality with a single word, nada. While Andrea Thompson creates this opening lift with the juxtaposing fragment, Coyotes in the city. At first blush, Jung Hae Chae’s Stereoscopic feels heady and meta before it shape-shifts to something so lyrically powerful, I’m still shook by it. Packing narrative or creating movement in short prose/poem work never ceases to light the fire for me and Justin Hamm’s breathless single sentence poem is a magnificent example. Robert Vaughan’s prose work here and Claudia Cortese’s poem mine similar terrain. I’m gutted and inspired by their style of reveal and resolve in work I deem vital.
I want to pause the music and introduce the house band. Thank you to editors T. Nicole Cirone, Ayesha F. Hamid, Vismai Rao, Jon Riccio, Angelique Zobitz, Connie Millard, Cathlin Noonan and Cheryl Vargas. Sheila Wellehan sat out this session but she’s a big part of us and was with us in spirit. There’s no group of people I’d rather trade notes about poems and prose with and so much of this session is their doing. Speaking of music, Reed Turchi lends his “Special Rider” from his new album Playing From the Spirit. It’s such a good album and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s also been a privilege to talk music and poetry with Reed. I walk taller for the experience.
We close the session with the elegant prose work of MC Catanese in her book review of J. C. Todd’s stellar Beyond Repair. I’m damn proud of this work and its company of players. We sequence the set, there’s a current running through it that I’ve barely and perhaps poorly touched. I opened by touting BJ Ward’s opening poem. But I undersold it. There’s a turn towards the end that he earns when he speaks of a kind of benediction. I don’t want to steal the line here more than I have. I don’t say this to be dramatic but too often I feel bereft of hope. I don’t think I’m alone though it plays with me and I feel awfully alone. I’ve lived with this work half a year but it’s the damnedest bit. It’s just a crazy dream till you take it live and share it.
EIC, Rogan Kelly
Ran Off With the Star Bassoon 