This is the new release of POESY #19!!! The best poetry, interviews, reviews and an editorial on the controversy on Poet Laureate of New Jersey, Amari Baraka!
This issue features an interview with Todd Moore on capturing your reader in the poem!! Doug Holder interviews Gary Duehr on his new book out on Ibbetson Street Press and the artistic vibe of Somerville, Mass.!
Poetry this issue by: rick smith, rebecca lehmann, todd moore, charles p. ries, kelley jean white m.d., nathan graziano, b.z. niditch, robert k. johnson, lyn lifshin, nicole henares garland, brian morrisey, daniel crocker, urquiza vicente, daniel green, bill morrison, louis mckee, hugh fox, deborah m. priestly, christopher thomas, a.d. winans, michele battiste, simon perchik, james scofield, christopher robin, dave church...
We are blessed with the stunning photography of t. kilgore splake, marilynn dammann, a.d. winans, john bower, brian morrisey, herschel silverman, stephen pataki
Four introspective book reviews... "New England Security Service" poems by rocking chair frank, "Silent Thunder" poems by mike catalano, "lucintite tm" poems by charles potts, "Roadkill" a long poem by rd armstrong.
Excerpt
EXCERPT FROM THE INTERVIEW WITH TODD MOORE:
brian: When RD Armstrong of Lummox Press gave me your Dillinger CD as a gift, I heard a voice that could take a poem and twist and turn it until all its liquid passion was squeezed out of each image. Your images are short, punch hard and quick, leaving your reader dumfounded and wanting to read the poem again. How important is it to catch your reader off guard with shock value? Does it ever get stale, even though it strays away from all academic theories which romance the reader with witty, and often corny metaphors, but rather you prefer to grab your reader by throat and tell it like it is?
todd: Funny thing about shock value. When I started writing poetry back in the early 70's, I had no idea I was using shock value. At the time, I was just trying to write an honest poem. Nobody was doing what I was doing and I liked that. What I wanted to do was to get a kind of cinematic look and feel into a poem. I wanted The Treasure of Sierra Madre in there and I wanted The Maltese Falcon in there and I wanted Double Indemnity in there and I wanted The Big Sleep in there. The really strange thing, something I can't exactly explain, is that a lot of poets love detective novels and some even write them. Look at the Brits. Roy Fuller wrote poetry and mystery novels. Dylan Thomas was hooked on mystery novels.
And, the Yanks. Poe wrote both mystery stories — among the first — and wrote poetry. And, even Richard Hugo, a mainstream poet of the 70's and 80's, wrote one detective novel. All I wanted to do was combine the very best of both the poem and the noir or thriller into one thing. It kept going thru my mind — get Raymond Chandler's talk into a poem.
Shock value? We live in a state of ongoing shock. Turn your tv on to CNN, you can see it in the news. I want a poem to be as simple and quick and visually instantaneous as the news. Some guy gets blown up in Israel — the camera pans to his arm and some blood which looks black. I want the arm, the blood, and the black all in the poem. Anything less than that is a lie and a pure b.s. lie to boot. You want to write poetry, you can't look away. I don't want to talk about the blah blah theory of the blah blah violence of the blah blah poem. I want to hand the reader the arm with the blood dripping off and if that's un-pc, then life is un-pc.
I look around at a lot of the what passes for poetry in the mainstream journals. I can't read past the first few lines. These kinds of poems look like incredibly bloated corpses. Corpses of language. If poetry is going to be anything these days, it should be the sleekest, most lethal weapon any of us possess. I'd like to think the poems I write will go into the reader the way a Peckinpah movie entered the people who went to his movies. And, stayed there like little psychic bombs, waiting to go off. Dillinger is in there somewhere. Dillinger is always in there.
A further collection of poems, many from years in the Middle East, but also the California San Francisco and Central Coast areas (Santa Cruz, Carmel, Big Sur, Berkeley, etc.).
Under Amber Skies, written by author and poet Jill Eisnaugle, is a wonderful collection of rhyming poetry guaranteed to please every reader. In this, her second book, she writes of new friendships kindled, as well as old friendships solidified. She g
