i don’t think it important

to say you murdered malcolm

or that you didn’t murder malcolm

i find you vital and powerful

i am aware that you use me

but doesn’t everyone

i am comfortable in your house

i am comfortable in your language

i know your mind   i have an interest

in your security, your civilization

compares favorably with any known

your power is incomparable

i understand why you would destroy

the world rather than pass it to lesser

people. i agree completely.

aristotle tells us in the physics

that power and existence are one

all i want is to sit quietly

and read books and earn

my right to exist. come—

i’ve made you a fantastic dish.

you must try it, if not now

very soon.

Welton Smith, who was born in Houston, Texas, is the author of Penetration (1972), a collection of poems, and The Roach Riders, a play. His poem sequence “Malcolm,” which was included in the historic 1968 Black Arts collection Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited by Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka, is one of a number of elegies written after Malcolm X was killed in 1965. Its tonal shifts help make it one of the most memorable and one of the more inventive poems to come out of the Black Arts movement.

Jesse Goodman has been producing benefit concerts for the Henry Miller Memorial Library since he brought Patti Smith there in 2004. The past few years he has been bringing poets in as the opening acts of these shows, which as you can imagine, pleases us here in the Republik of poets to no end. This year he is bringing in legendary San Francisco poet, David Meltzer to open for Pink Martini in this year’s benefit on December 8th at the Golden State Theatre in Monterey, California. Get your tickets baby, they’re going fast . . . So, to honor Jesse’s mad genius we are featuring his story as well as poems by David Meltzer and his wife, the poet Julie Rogers. Scroll down for his story, but first: the poets. Enjoy. Read More >

This month’s featured poet, Joanna Fuhrman asks, among other questions “the meaning of the space/between the prongs of the unplugged iron?” What shouldn’t we allow in? In this age of surveillance and sophistry, what remains sacred? What profane? Does one bleed into another? Is all the world a stage? and if so, then must we let everyone watch? Where do we locate the real? Post a poem, video or story that reveals that every elusive commodity: truth. Yeah, I know you’re thinking about John Keats right now, we know what he has to say about truth, but what do YOU, tiny human giant, have to say? Read More >

Brian Henry is a poet who likes to play. In the following piece, you will note lines of precisely 5 syllables in length. He once told me he wrote a sonnet a day for a year for fun, I think. Or maybe it was a story Hayden Carruth told about Ezra Pound who once wrote a sonnet a day for a year and then threw them all away. Carruth told the workshop he was guest-teaching, “and if you can’t do that, then you’re not a poet.” Either way, as the wondrous Tomaž Šalamun would say, it’s good mythology. In this vein, I am asking my poetry students to write their own small offerings, inspired by Mr. Henry’s piece (Brian might say here, Mr. Henry is my father), of 5 syllables per line, and at least 5 lines in length. You can play along too…

Thanksgiving

Revenge is no dish

and should not be served

at all, much less cold.

But as a guiding

principle, revenge

can cast quite a light.

Although it begins

in darkness, it breaks,

so timely, toward

any little shine:

may your object of

revenge be standing

or, better, kneeling

in front of you when

that light breaks to sun.

Poet, translator, and editor Brian Henry earned his BA at the College of William & Mary and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His collections of poetry include Astronaut (2000), American Incident (2002), Graft (2003), Quarantine (2006), In the Unlikely Event of a Water (2007), The Stripping Point (2007), Wings Without Birds (2010), Lessness (2011), and Doppelgänger (2011). An advocate for Slovenian poets and poetry, he has translated Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices (2008) and Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things (2010). Henry’s translation of Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers received a 2011 Howard Foundation fellowship.

Henry edited the collection of essays On James Tate (2004). He is the cofounder and coeditor, with Andrew Zawacki, of Verse Magazine. Henry and Zawacki also coedited The Verse Book of Interviews: 27 Poets on Language, Craft & Culture (2005).

Henry’s poems, essays, and translations have been published widely in journals such as Jacket, the Georgia Review, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Program, the Slovenian Ministry of Culture, and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His honors and awards include a Distinguished Educator Award, a Cecil B. Hemley Memorial Award, an Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and a George Bogin Memorial Award. He teaches at the University of Richmond.

The intersection of nature and technology is a place inhabited by poets. Whitman created links in his poetry between ancient religions and modern technology, Yeats questioned the worth of technological advances famously in “The Second Coming,”  and now we have Brenda Coultas and her tree. In order to see technology from a vastly different perspective think about how you would describe the world if you were a bird? a rabbit? a pampered dog? a cockroach? or whatever. Or just enjoy the beauty of this lovely poem:

My Tree

I found a pearl and wore it in my ear
Deep ocean echos sing like a seashell

A girl promised a purse filled with jewels, if I would be her friend Purses open secrets as priceless as pills in a jeweled box

Loose pearls, enough to imagine what a great loss that necklace was or was not Read More >

Presto Manifesto

I

Exegesis

reach

space bend

time

II

Greater forces

We guess

two dots

three spirals

all paisley Read More >

Laurie Anderson’s Yodel

In the early 80’s I heard Laurie Anderson sing “yodel-a-he-hoo, Big Science . . .” and have been possessed by the refrain every since. I had no idea at the time she would become the multimedia goddess she is today. I didn’t know she’d take me with her into the endless universe of her art, with the admonition, “don’t forget your mittens.”

Since that time electronic music has found its way into the mainstream and, as often happens, has often been watered down to a barely palatable mush. Laurie has kept pushing the limits of her art by simultaneously interacting with and reinterpreting popular culture through her shows. Each performance is a singular experience because she is attuned to her audience. She reminds us of the limitless capacity for creation we each have as individuals while awakening our collective mindfulness.

You cannot help but be present at one of Laurie’s shows. I often look out at the sea of faces filled with silent “O’s”: it is not so much awe or worship, it is the recognition of the boundless possibilities inherent in each of us.

Universe: E=mc2

Art: Laurie Anderson = (strangeness + beauty)music

Maria Garcia Teutsch

President, Henry Miller Memorial Library

Editor-in-chief, Ping-Pong Publications

(Original program note for Laurie Anderson’s concert at the Henry Miller Memorial Library July 26, 2005, signed for my son).

“It was sublime to play in the mist under the gigantic trees.
One of the most beautiful and spiritual places in the world.”
– Laurie Anderson about the Henry Miller Memorial Library.

Happy Spring! This month offers us daffodils, cherry blossoms and best of all, my birthday, I mean, National Poetry Month! I have chosen yet another stellar poet, Lauren Gordon who asks us in the following poem, what prayer feels right in your mouth?

Quality of Life

The baby wants a parable for a good life, one of top milk
and caramel, a garden with pumpkins to kneel by and confess

a daily admission of weakness, where a squash tendril traffics
the trellis under an orange patina of sunshine. I will tell her

how winter saturates so deeply that every new breath escapes
without feet, how half of every mother’s heart is a chrome shadow.

Dirt pilled with pink egg shells, star clustered loam and her hands
balling into the deep black of it, this earth like a dilating pupil.

Pain insists on being tended to, I will say in our garden of silence.
A skinny sorrow stays us in the sad sands until we detach our heads

in surrender and this is what we grow, how we lie, how we will
spend our lives finding a prayer that feels right in our mouths.

Lauren Gordon is the author of four chapbooks, “Meaningful Fingers” (Finishing Line Press, 2014), “Keen” (Horse Less Press, 2014), “Fiddle Is Flood” (Blood Pudding Press, 2015), and “Generalizations about Spines” (Yellow Flag Press, 2015). She has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net awards and her work has appeared in such journals as Sugar House Review, burntdistrict, MiPOesias, The Andirondack Review, The Collagist, and Coldfront Magazine. She is a Contributing Editor to Radius Lit and lives with her family outside of Milwaukee.

March is Women’s History month. As a tribute, I would like to share one of my favorite poets of all time, Alice Notley. She may resist categorization, but she has done more for women’s poetics than possibly any other poet alive. If you don’t believe me, please read, The Descent of Alette. Who is a woman who has inspired you?

THAT I MAY LIVE

I step across and can no longer make myself understood.
Listen to Torna a Sorrento concentratedly
I don’t understand Italian I understand the song.

I’m here. You can’t return because
a former life is not available; they read dis-
sertations there now. The clean glass of sparkling
water is for my mother.

                                     Who will I write
for, alive? Into the air of you. This sadness,
rather than gotten rid of, is become another;
a quality both thicker and lighter

You still don’t understand that you too must
change; you value phantoms: I’m talking
to you — but my phantoms are real. You all
value material comfort over knowing a thing–

who is speaking?
I have none; the counterclock stops; though
it’s late where you are.

Alice Notley is the author of over twenty-five books of poetry, including 165 Meeting House Lane (1971), Phoebe Light (1973), Incidentals in the Day World (1973), For Frank O’Hara’s Birthday (1976), Alice Ordered Me to Be Made: Poems 1975 (1976), Dr. Williams’ Heiresses (1980), How Spring Comes (1981), which received the San Francisco Poetry Award, Waltzing Matilda (1981), Margaret & Dusty (1985), From a Work in Progress (1988), Homer’s Art (1990), To Say You (1993), Selected Poems of Alice Notley (1993), The Descent of Alette (1996), among many others. Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and her collection Disobedience (2001) was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Notley’s recent work includes From the Beginning (2004), Alma, or the Dead Women (2006), Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, In the Pines (2007), Culture of One (2011), and Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011).

originally published in Ping-Pong 2014.