Literal Latte: A Journal of Prose, Poetry and Art

     The poetry journal that I chose to read from is Literal Latte (http://www.literal-latte.com/). Literal Latte debuted in 1994 in New York to bring "mind-stimulating stories, essays and poems" to the people of the city. Literal Latte states that their mission is finding and nurturing new writers and helping their careers flourish in a world where it's become increasingly harder for new writers to get a leg up in the traditional publishing world.
     Literal Latte has various contests for its writers, one of the more recent ones being their Food Verse Contest. One of the winning poems was Toothache by Jack Miller. His poem talks about driving in the winter and the sugary, candy-like imagery in the landscape:
"By daylight the car was glazed, dipped in molten sugar and set back down to harden."
"I passed so many cars that had spun out, wedged in dirty snowbanks like glacé cherries in nougat."
"The night you arrive, we share the king bed, the sheets smooth like wedding buttercream bleached unnaturally bleached"
     At the end of each poem, Literal Latte puts in a summary about the author and summarizes their other accomplishments and works. They also link to their profile page on the Literal Latte website and other sites, allowing for more publicity to the author, helping unknown authors widen their audience in a way that otherwise would be nearly impossible.
      Another poet, Susan Cohen, talks about Felix Baumgartner's 23 mile free fall to earth in her poem Freefall. She doesn't state this outright, but from the title and many lines the reader is able to pick up that this is a prominent free fall:
"He plans to plummet from the edge of space".
"...first man, Adam of the stratosphere, Icarus come back to report from the sun's proximity."
     She has many beautiful, highly visual lines, one of my favorites being, "To think: God must see me now that I'm a cinder in his eye." This line by itself discusses the dilemma of humans wanting to be noticed by God, to be acknowledged, like a child acting out to get it's parents' attention.
     Another part of this poem that really struck me was the final few lines, personifying the earth: "New Mexico rushes up to ask him why he didn't find the ordinary plunge from birth to death terrifying enough." This "kerchunk" moment makes the reader reflect on what it means to take risks in life and how this adds to the already inherently terrifying nature of life and death.
     A third poem I enjoyed was The Last Sister by Tracy DeBrincat, talking about memories and the past. The first line immediately draws in the reader: "This is the trouble with visiting the past: you're not invited." DeBrincat personifies the past, writing, "The past prefers to be left alone, knitting sweaters from cobwebs." She goes on to describe a room filled with memories that have been "knitted" and "sewn" by the past. She sums up the poem reminding the reader to look forward and press on into the unknown, despite the desire to remain dwelling on the past.
     Literal Latte helps both its writers and its readers. It exposes readers to poems, poets, essay writers and artists that they otherwise may have never encountered on their own. Similarly, it gives publicity and attention to its writers that otherwise would struggle to get published in the modern publishing industry. It also goes against the grain of more political or scientific journals and emphasizes the importance of fiction and artistic writing. In addition, but being completely published online, it opens up a whole new world of writing to not just New Yorkers, but the whole world.

ICU

On Sunday I woke up at 7:30 AM, took a shower,
ate some cereal, and then drove to the hospital, where I
then got in the elevator and descended quietly to the ICU.
Outside the big wooden doors stood my 6'6'' uncle with his peppered
hair and glasses with lenses like the bottoms of old Coke bottles.
He looked up from his phone, gave me a hug and a kiss, before
we all walked past a sign that alerted us that we were entering a
CLEAN HANDS ZONE and under another that Welcomed us
To Intensive Care Unit 3200. We walked around and around
this deathly silent rotunda, like a sickly merry-go-round,
past the nurses buried in their charts,staring into the rooms where
frail bodies that lay amongst cords and tubes and stiff sheets,
lying still like papier mâché left to dry. From every room the
rhythmic chirping of cardiac monitors could be heard over the
gentle sighing and sleepy breathing of the medical ventilators.
We crept silently into room 3634 where grandma lay in bed,
and her face was pale and her hair looked whiter than normal
and 34 BPM flashed in red on the screen behind her. I bowed
down and she reached up to hug me. Half an hour later they
let the electrodes slither through her veins and the electrical port
nuzzle and nest in her ribs. She slept and dreamed of running again.

Louis Jenkins

     I really enjoyed reading some of Louis Jenkins's work. I haven't ever read much prose before, but I find that I like the style a lot. I especially like the way the tone and format make it sound like a snippet of a paragraph out of a short story. It has lots of descriptive, poetic lines in it, but it reads like someone telling a story. I think Jenkins's uses this aspects of prose very well. For example, in the poem from "Nice Fish", it starts with the premise of two men sitting down to ice fish. One of the men starts talking, and if you didn't know it was poetry that he was reciting, you'd think that it was just a guy rambling to his buddy while they got ready to fish. In one section of that poem, Jenkins writes, "She talked about the problems of coffee growers from Central America. I listened, but I also thought about kissing her on her neck, just behind her ear where her blonde hair curled." Nothing is particularly profound or deep about this line; the way this character talks about this girl absentmindedly while his friend struggles to set up the tent is almost comical. And yet, the simplicity in the way this line and the way it is recited makes it so heartfelt and easy to relate to. I also really liked the poem Change. I really liked the line, "Dinosaurs did not disappear from the earth but evolved into birds and crock pots became bread makers." There is a playful, humorous aspect to this line and to the overall poem, but the last line is a very "kerchunk" moment: "But essentially you are the same as ever, constant in your instability.
     Reading Jenkins's work has opened me up to the potential of prose. It was very poetic lines and phrases and focuses very much on the meaning of each sentence, which allows the poet to drift more from the structure of lines and focus on the meaning and sound of phrases, which I really like. It reminds me of Garrison Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion and his tales from Lake Woebegone. The gentle carrying on of his voice as he tells a story is reflected in Jenkins's poetry. I feel like prose is the art of story telling but only with snapshots, mixing story telling with the "language condensed" aspect of poetry.

Listen

I press my face against the wrinkled flesh of the earth,
Listening to the washing-machine hum of its core.
Every muscle tenses, my bones splinter, my brain crackles
Like firewood, I feel a heat that supernovas from my middle
And stretches outward to every limb.
             I grasp the wild roses that unfurl between my fingers,
             Parting the rain dampened soil to dry their faces
             In the sun. I inhale their delicate breath and sleep.
                         I awake in the dark to the gentle kisses
                         Of rain that falls in thick, bulbous drops.
                         They run in tiny streams through my hair,
                         Like a mother's gentle fingers.
                                           I lie there and listen as the
                                           World and the universe
                                           Tries endlessly, desperately
                                            To understand itself.

Spoken Word POD

I'll write more on this later, but for now:

Poem of the Day

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.




I'll be honest-- the first time I heard of Pablo Neruda was on How I Met Your Mother (he's Ted's favorite poet), but I figured it was a good place to start looking for poems. I came upon Neruda's "A Dog Has Died" after scrolling through a basic introductory collection of his work on PoemHunter.com and loved it. I could totally connect with what he was trying to say; it's hard to quite describe the relationship an owner has with their dog. What I get from this poem is how dogs are so patient with us. They have a tolerance for our nonsense and our acting out and even when we get angry or sad they know just what is required. They don't say anything, which, in a way, I'm sure they wouldn't do even if they had the capability. I especially love the line, "gazing at me with a look that reserved for me alone all his sweet and shaggy life, always near me, never troubling me, and asking nothing." To me, this line really encapsulates how dogs will lie there next to you, gazing into your eyes, and even if you're being a boring person doing boring person things, they'll still sit there and keep you company.

Z. macroura

In the soft afterglow filter of a day in June,

The trees apply the sun’s soft blush to the clouds

That hover in the pale indigo streaks of the sky.

The birds in the trees sing the day to sleep

From their rooftop gardens in the oaks and maples--

Except the mourning dove.

This feathered piece of drift wood sits

Alone on a telephone wire, shoulders sloped

In his blissful solitude.

He sighs soft and low, like an old man

Who has the familiarity of how hard one day can be.

His neck puffs outward and again he coos his lament--

He can’t find the words to say how he feels.

The sun sits like a fiery thumbprint on the horizon

And begins to sink, its rays waving

Like the arms of a drowning man.

The mourning dove throws himself from his perch,

Leaving nothing behind but the whistle of fluttering wings

In the rapidly cooling air.

 

Creta

In August we went to the drug store
And walked through the illuminated linoleum aisles
For something I can't recall.
Mama stopped in her tracks and gasped and cooed
At the shelves stocked with Crayola crayons
In their yellow cardboard boxes with the green corners,
Glossy and new, the flaps smooth and intact,
Something that would be lost to sticky, prying fingers.

Mama plucked a box from the shelf,
Gently tugging back the top tab
With a perfectly rounded finger nail.
Inside packed snugly sat sixteen crayons,
Their coned tops still smooth and perfect,
Their polished finishes gleaming. They were still
Cloaked in their paper jackets,
With their clean edges, not yet peeled away,
Cast aside, leaving their owners
Nameless.

Mama raised the box to her nose and took a deep breath.
"Smell," she said, passing the box to me.
I inhaled the musty, waxy smell of elementary school,
Of coming home after an 8 year old's day,
Sitting down at the coffee table
Alone, and drawing in silence.
The olfactory memories blurred and drowned my brain
In melted wax.
I sat there sniffing hungrily, like it was some bizarre new form
Of huffing paint or sniffing glue,
This intoxicative inhalant that got me high off
Psychedelic memories of my own childhood.

"That smell never changes," Mama says.

Awake

every
night I pray for
rain so that I might fall
asleep easier than the night
before

Maryann Corbett and Anna George Meek at Common Good Books

Over the weekend, I went to a poetry reading by Anna George Meek and Maryann Corbett, two local Minnesota poets who are good friends and wanted to present some of the work from their new books.

The first to read was Maryann Corbett. A big focus in her poetry was about Minnesota and especially winter and the change in seasons. She said that a big part of winter for Minnesotans is that we want it to end, but we have to embrace it since it's around for so long. Her voice was very soft which reflected the nature of her poems. She sounded like a combination of my rabbi, Garrison Keillor and a newscaster on MPR, so it was very relaxing to listen to her. The people in the audience audibly reacted so some of her lines, especially the older audience members who a lot of her poems seemed to be directed at. She gave background on a lot of her poems, one of them being a poem connecting the death of her sister to the death of Tinkerbell in a Peter Pan play that was broadcast on TV in her childhood. Another poem which I particularly loved was "Dutch Elm", about seeing the trees that had been victims of Dutch Elm disease and had red rings around them marking that they were doomed to be cut down and how there was a "quiet sadness" about it.

The second poet was Anna George Meeks who read from her book "Engraved". All of the poems in the book were based off the engravings in Webster's dictionary and were dedicated to the engravings artists who had long been forgotten but had done such incredible work. She said it was inspiring looking at the drawings that they had done for adjectives, such as the word "fibrous" which was depicted as a dead-looking shrub for some reason. Meeks had a lot of really interesting lines in her poems:
"The objects are grotesque, or perhaps we are."
"Will you know me by my teeth?"
"The universe blushes black"
There were a lot of kerchunks in her poems and almost every poem resonated with me. She also discussed the death of her father in her poems which had been a very traumatic event for her. After he died from Alzheimer's, she said she thought she would never write poetry again. One of my favorite poems by her was "Cephalata", about the engraving of the octopus under "cephalopod". She connected it to the word "cephalitis" and tied it in to her father's death.

I really liked this poetry reading. It was a small group of people, but both poets were enlightening. It was nice to see that they were just regular everyday people who had a passion for writing poetry. Meeks brought her elementary age daughter along and it was very sweet to see her switch between poet mode and mother mode. I would definitely recommend both of these poets, especially Meeks and her new book which plays on a really interesting idea for poetry.

Chris Martin

Although it originally threw me for a loop, after a few poems I grew to appreciate Chris Martin's style. It's sort and simple and not narrative, which is something I'm definitely not used to, but I found that his poems are best read aloud. I feel the main purpose in his poems is the sound of the words and the meaning within every little section. The whole poem itself doesn't seem to have any meaning, but if you break it down into little sections, each section has it's own meaning. Occasionally that meaning will be tied together with the meaning of the next section with words or phrases. For example in The True Meaning of Pictures, he writes "...it's abominable the way we let/ Our feelings instruct us and yet it's the only thing/ To be done, right? Right?" Although he's saying that it's abominable that we let our feelings dictate what we do, the break in the line separates it so it seems more like just a statement, that our feelings instruct us and that's just how it is. I also noticed that at the end of every poem there was a very intense ker-chunk moment. Some of my favorites were:

"Have you offered your seat on a crowded downtown subway car/ To a man in perfect physical health because he had tears in his eyes? Neither have I, not yet, but at least/ I considered it in writing." (Jokes for Strangers)

"Every person in every passenger/ Seat in every car in every town in every country is selling some goddamn/ Thought to themselves, but you see Grandpa was a salesman, both of them, that's why I have my foot in this/ Door and my knuckles are red and I'm smiling." (Grandpa Was a Salesman)

The final lines all really resonated with me and I feel that they were some of the most important parts of the poem. Overall, I liked Martin's style and it gave me a new perspective on how to write poems in varying different styles. It made me focus on the sound of the words rather than the meaning which is definitely something I'll take into account when playing around with different styles in future poems.

Synonymous

There is no synonym for you.
There is no synonym for the delicate contour of your smile,
Nor for the pleasant hiccup of your laugh.
There is no earthly equivalent for the gleam in your eye,
Like moonlight reflected of water,
Or the soft warmth of your cheek,
Like a mushroom cap warmed by the sun.
There is no adjective to describe
The earthy brown of your eyes
Or the shy, carnation pink of your lips,
Or the gentle statuesque curvatures of your face.

There is no synonym for you.
There is no simile of being next to you,
Like my ribcage is being cracked open wide
By a pressure pushing outward from the inside.
There is no metaphor for my tree love,
With deep roots that grip the ground with gnarled fingers.
I could not hyperbolize your unequivocal perfection,
Although perhaps you are distorted
Somewhat by my emotional cataracts.
There is no imagery to describe your perfect symmetry,
The natural hum of your voice, the calming scent of your hair,
Or the comforting envelopment of your hugs.

There is no synonym for you,
And I hope there isn't one for me either.