Tag: poetry

I came across this magazine from 2006, which has an older poem of mine. You can find it on page 51. It was part of a longer series of pseudo-sonnets, all called Sonnet of the Everyday.

Send me an e-mail.

A close friend died early this morning. This is for him and for those of us who loved him:

ELEGY: FOR WAYNE KRUGER, 1962-2011

Bombs fell in Baghdad that night, and all eyes were on the small screen
above the bar in a tavern that was demolished by mistake years later,
and what should have been a giddy chance to say goodbye and good luck
as you ventured west to the Rockies and a new start
became a solemn ceremony laced with uncertainty.
That war lasted just weeks, but never really ended, flaring
back up a dozen years later and still smoldering as the bombs
began to fall on Tripoli, hours before Bill called to tell us you were gone,
around the time that you left us. These things happen in threes is what they say, as if the dead
demand company in their travels, so when Annie heard about her Aunt Rae,
who died at ninety-seven a day before you were to go, it seemed to confirm
what we’ve known since Bill called with the news of your tumors:
It was when and not if, not maybe, and even the smallest bits of good news
provided in e-mail by your wife to the world were no match for the inevitable.
It all happened too quickly – a cliché, I know, but it did and I don’t give a damn
about the cliché right now because it all went down too quickly for any of us to comprehend.
And yes, too far away too to understand or say goodbye,
though distance is just physical and a piece of me feels
as if you’re still around the corner, as if we could meet at the Hub
and drink pitchers before driving to New Brunswick to throw
rice at the movie screen as Brad and Janet get married and drive off
into the sordid world of Dr. Frank-N-Furter.
One night, we stopped for drinks in the bar next door, the Stagecoach,,
Where the band played twisted, fevered jazz, the four of us the only white kids in the place
aside from a vibes player leading the musical assault.
We drank and left and laughed then shouted “asshole” at Brad on the screen
as sweet transvestites danced on the Arts Cinema stage.
On another night, you climbed the hill to the rail tracks
above the parking lot behind the theater –
I don’t remember who climbed with you but I do remember
the train whistle and someone yelling your name and the terror
that gripped my gut until you emerged from the darkness with a drunken laugh.
We were young, of course, and stupid and never thought of the consequences,
and I guess we were lucky to have gotten through all of that and, yes, to make a life,
which is all that we can ask of ourselves, to make a life and live it and be happy.
And I think of the tracer fire on the television that night
and the bomber planes over Libya tonight and question whether
anything has changed, whether it can, and know that so much has,
that you have left us, like Tommy and Glenn did before, too soon way too soon,
and that none of these words can do justice to your memory,
or the place you held in all of our hearts and souls.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

In today’s edition of “Blowing my own horn,” I offer a review of Shot Glass Journal from August — a review I only found last night.

In the review posted to Sabatage, my poem “Jazz” is mentioned as a highlight.

Here is the review:

Sometimes you’re not in the mood for a three-course meal, sometimes you just want a shot of something invigorating, if so, Shot Glass Journal might just hit the spot. Shot Glass Journal is a new online literary magazine specializing in short poetry (16 lines or less). Edited by Mary-Jane Grandinetti, the idea for the journal came from the many short poetry workshops she has led.

I often think of first issues as similar to TV show pilots: not always indicative of the quality of the following episodes but at their best emitting a promising flavour. Shot Glass Journal is no different with a mixture of hard-hitting and more disappointing poems.

Shot Glass Journal features several excellent poems that make over-used poetry genres seem fresh. There is Austin Alexis’ ‘Merce Cunningham Event’ who manages the feat of avoiding the usual dance clichés (if I read one more mention of ‘pirouettes’ and ‘jetés’…) and to capture what I’ve always found to be a particularly difficult experience to relate. Likewise Hank Kalet’s poem ‘Jazz’ manages an original take on the well-worn genre of love poetry:

‘Love is the lasting
resonating note
the high E picked and
held and
bent higher and
higher still’

On the other hand,  Steadman Kondor’s ‘For she is Paris’ fails to dwell further than the postcard picture of Paris:

‘She might toss you a Niçoise salad or seduce you with pâté de foie gras.’

Several poems in Shot Glass Journal delight in exploring the darker side of human nature. Gil Fagiani in ‘Dopefiend Hustle # 132: Playing The Christers’ reminds us that poetry doesn’t always have to be about the good guys with this amusing tale of exploited credulity.  Ruth Holzer‘s ‘Elderly Couple On Park Bench, N.Y.C’ (based on a Diane Arbus photograph) recreates the spiteful interior monologue of a clashing elderly couple. Meanwhile Rachel Green plays with death in ‘The Musician at the End of the Cemetery’, a deliciously macabre sensory experience:

‘she tunes the dead:
cadaver skin stretched taut
in chromatic scales of putrefaction’

Shot Glass Journal features an abundant array of forms including a triolet, a sonnet, a rondolet and some tankas, but my favourite of these form-players is Sir John Lambremont’s ‘Locked Lavatory’. Lambremont’s doesn’t adhere to a strict form but he masters rhymes (both internal and external) dexterously and unleashes them to accentuate the distress of being locked in a lavatory.

Shot Glass Journal is easy to circulate through but would benefit, in my opinion, from having a different table of content format than an alphabetical list that privileges the authors closer to the top of the list (or those well-known). A different format would be more democratic.

Overall, this is a journal that shows potential and is worth keeping an eye on as it develops in the coming years.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

This interview with Martin Espada is worth reading for a lot of reasons — for its exploration of political commitment, discussion of Latino America and its politics and the need for grassroots mobilization — but this quotation from the poet would have been enough on its own:

I believe there has to be an aesthetic; that we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard. I believe that political poetry should be grounded in the image, in the five senses, in the concrete, and that serves as a barricade against the rhetorical, because political rhetoric is often too abstract.

It is something all of us who try to merge the political with our poetry.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.