Tuesday poem #37 : Dennis Cooley : a few meagre words

a few meagre words

of love or thanks

sub stance of things unseen

sound of thoughts unsaid

letters i have filched

from Paul’s garden

i toss feigning

nonchalance into the pot

savour to the beans and carrots

cut and chopped and diced

hoping with a gourmand’s need

            they will add

thickness to the stock

so we give this day

our daily dread

weak with want

& bent spoon

the small lumps

that are my thoughts

these my pilferings

the dumplings i am

hoping for

stirring the firmament

sniffing the pot

Dennis Cooley has edited two anthologies of prairie poetry, written two critical titles and over a dozen books of poetry. A new book of poetry, the stones, was released in September, 2013, and another, abecedarian, in the spring of 2014. He is working on a collection of essays on Robert Kroetsch's poetry.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #36 : Peter Jaeger : Excerpt from 540493390

4

You learned of comrades, whom you loved, clouded, null and void with joints and bones disclosing zero. And of volume, disclosing soundless bones and holes. For your love spent hours and hours on soundless hymns, drones and clouds—

9

those long morning clouds, portions of clouds and whole clouds, clouds of soundless yellow and unknowing. Your commune offered clouds to the void. Bowed down they softly dropped below your bones. Mouth soft, clouds of nothing softening your tongue. Would that you followed bodies onto soil, onto a song abandoned by yellow or by clouds of love—communal love—broadening onto an unfathomable yawning yellow, not a shallow no, not a word or a wound, nor a bottomless no now frozen, now zero. You learned how the solid implodes those wounds, sometimes, imploding those untold yellows and clouds, those hymns of snow—and how powder dropped through a hole, around the border of a hole, towards crows who looped round the pond, looping over an unknown love unseen by none but crows.

0

2

You learned how hymns possessed your wounds with drones and you looked onto icons of crows, your unknown body longing for a hole.

1

Those holes, annulled in your songs and your learning, your rooms of nothing.

3

You studied in those rooms how to humanize broken sounds and how to sort a song from numbers, and though you found the contour of your acoustics somewhat boring, you crossed their roughened country, moving under hopeless clouds towards your new-found position.

Peter Jaeger is a Canadian poet, literary critic and text-based artist now living in the UK. His published work includes the poetry books Power Lawn (Coach House Books 1999), Prop (Salt 2007), Rapid Eye Movement (Reality Street Editions 2009), and The Persons (information as material 2011). His book John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics is coming out from Continuum Press this Autumn. Jaeger teaches poetry and literary theory at Roehampton University in London.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #35 : Maxine Chernoff : Camera

You exit camera’s gaze,
through the aperture,
politics unknown,
motives shrouded in leaves,
certain as any tomb.
Without limit or attitude
luster is mechanical,
grows reasons
melting in summer’s heat.
Hope is a vessel of
longitude’s practice,
lengthening space
as glasses toast
skin’s translucence
in a photo you took
when the story found
its way home to
   the mind
of its choosing.
A dreamed equation
suffices for essence,
being stretched over
a candle’s swift burning.
Grief is a body of water
spreading like fire
  in the branches
of a landscape painted
  and patiently framed.

Maxine Chernoff is the author of 14 books of poems.  Her latest, Here, will be published by Counterpath in early 2014.  She chairs the Dept of Creative Writing at SFSU and has co-edited New American Writing since 1986.  She is a 2013 NEA Fellow in Poetry and the 2009 winner with Paul Hoover of the PEN USA Translation Award for her work on the Selected Poems of Friedrich Hoelderlin  (Omnidawn, 2008).  In January of 2013, she was Visiting International Scholar at Exeter.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #34 : Joe Blades : where is tomorrow’s wine?

annapolis valley vines hang

                        heavy

with grapes waiting

            to freeze

before they can be

harvested

all this nor’easter rain

melts chocolates in pockets

turkey and plum pudding

picking crews hang

            christmas with family

wish to be in outside lane

moving slow with fresh

                        ice wine

but weather is not

            cooperating

bottles empty

too warm

            not truly winter

so living is unsettled

with an eye to outside

and anticipated arrival

            of a cold snap

            for their picking

gainful employment

24-hours max

            start to finish

wine pressed onsite

            estate bottled

before next month’s

            pruning begins

Joe Blades lives in Fredericton, NB, Canada. He is a visual artist–writer, educator, producer–host of the award-winning, long-playing Ashes, Paper, & Beans community radio program at CHSR 97.9 FM, founding publisher of Broken Jaw Press Inc., and a Past President of the League of Canadian Poets. The editor of ten collections, and the author of seven poetry books, including Prison Songs and Storefront Poetry (Ekstasis Editions, 2010), Casemate Poems (Collected) (Chaudiere Books, 2011), and three books in translation, his newest book, Iz knjige koja se ne zatvara, is translated by Tatjana Bijelić into Serbian, co-published by Art Print in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Broken Jaw Press, in Fredericton, NB.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #33 : Sarah Mangold : How to Electrify Human Hands

To redeem dreams betrayed by the machine—The devout
mechanist— Mesmerized subjects—Magnetized waters—Priest
and patient—Her reader will understand this compression

Displacements of agency reconstituted through technology—
Each new version of the phrase a small victory in an expected line
of succession—At the same time she advocated—The marks
of desire are various—The spirit body abounds with scenery—
Spiritual nitrogen—Spiritual calcium—Exhale

One way of attaining to be—Boundless and unknowable desire
is a generative grammar—Trinket—Lincoln—The number
“379”—And the image of a small house

A sensitive girl—Her sensitive fingers—Motifs of sea
and separation—We have received hand written instructions—
Breathless wonder and utopian potential—The implied reader
is a qualified reader—An ideal specification should not waiver
from this purpose

Sarah Mangold lives near Seattle, Washington and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts 2013 Poetry Fellowship. She is the author of the forthcoming Electrical Theories of Femininity (Pavement Saw) and Household Mechanics (New Issues), selected for the New Issue Poetry Prize. Recent chapbooks include Parlor (above/ground press), Cupcake Royale (above/ground press), I Meant To Be Transparent (LRL e/editions), An Antennae Called the Body (Little Red Leaves Textile Editions). www.sarahmangold.com

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #32 : Colin Smith : A Small Poem to Help with Something

  (for Sandy Boyko)

“If I put in my hearing aids

all I will be able to catch

is the bugs of $$$ chewing on my doorframe”

“I can hear my dog

’s sbsnc whimpering just fine”

Colin Smith’s latest is a chapbook, Carbonated Bippies!, out in 2012 from Nomados. He lives in Winnipeg.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan