"A Study in Weights and Measures" by After Shocks poet Shaindel Beers

She punches ruthlessly—like the women at the gym
who’ve taken kickboxing,
but there’s something different, so I ask who she’s hitting,
and she says “Cancer,” and I wish I knew how to fight
because when I first heard the word in relation to myself,
I thought God, at last a rest, and pictured a few months of time alone
to think and read and sleep in,
perhaps so long that I would feel ready to again take on the burden
of this world that has become so heavy in so short a time
that I don’t know why people fight back to carry it even longer—

except there’s still a lot I want, things that may seem silly.
Climb Mt. Brown (elevation 7487 ft) though it’s just a hill
to people who’ve climbed Everest or Kangto or Antofalla, because I’m
    ashamed
I made it only halfway, a testament to my lack of discipline—just like
my meager writings which I held next to my Complete Works of
    Keats,
who died only one year older than I when my diagnosis came from
   the doctor.
This all seems panicked, looking back a year later,
but now, all tests negative, there’s the bleeding
again, appointment three days away, and my head feels as light
as the balloon I let go in Mrs. Chamberlain’s kindergarten class
with my name and address tied to the string
so that someone would write back to tell me how far it went—
maybe to Ohio or Kentucky, depending on the speed
and direction of the wind.

                     And though the test seems so close, there’s so much
blood I wonder if, like that balloon, I’ll lose my grounding,
float away like that red speck—smaller, smaller, gone.

Reprinted from After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events by permission of Shaindel Beers. Also appeared in Ms. Beers’ collection A Brief History of Time. Copyright 2009 by Shaindel Beers

Interview with Shaindel Beers

How did you come to write this poem?

This is one of those poems that had a pretty straightforward genesis. I really did work as a fitness instructor at the time of writing this poem, and a woman at the gym I worked at, during the cardio portion of her circuit training, was just wailing punches, and when I asked who she was punching, she said, “Cancer.” From there, it’s pretty much stream of consciousness.

How did writing this poem affect your recovery?

I think it really helped me accept that different people have different attitudes. Some people are fighters. I guess, in a strange way, I was sort of relieved to have something wrong with me because I thought I would get to rest. I was teaching adjunct at two colleges, working as a fitness instructor at two gyms, and tutoring at one of the colleges when I was diagnosed with pre-cervical cancer and uterine fibroids. I didn’t really get to rest. I scheduled my medical procedures after finals so I could finish my grading, and I was able to return to work as a fitness instructor (although with a little discomfort) after three days.

It did put into perspective things that I had left undone – time spent in nature and more writing that I wanted to do.

A lot of time has passed since writing this poem. At least ten years. I’ve done a lot more writing since then – my first book, A Brief History of Time, which came out in 2009 and then my second poetry collection, The Children’s War and Other Poems, will be out in February. And my life has changed completely. I’m with a different partner; I have a child, etc. It’s probably good I didn’t “just die” at twenty-five.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this poem come to life?

At the time I wrote this, I was studying with Richard Jackson and was very interested in associative poetry – stream of consciousness, leaping from image to image. I still love poetry that works that way. I went from the woman at the gym and her experience with cancer to my experience with cancer and the things I still wanted to do. Then, I went from blood and always seeing blood to the red balloon I released in kindergarten at our balloon launch. (I also thought of the 1956 film The Red Balloon, which we would watch in the gym at school for one of our big parties when I was a young elementary school student.)

The condition I had included lots of bleeding and being light-headed, so I did feel like my head was a helium balloon, and I felt “floaty” a lot of the time. And always “light” – like I might just disappear.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

Richard Jackson was a huge influence on my work as far as poets I personally worked with as a student. I consider Anne Sexton and Eavan Boland my feminist forbearers, in a sense. There are so many great poets out there now, and I find a lot of them by being an editor and publishing them. Poets I’ve published fairly recently whose work I want to find more of and encourage others to find more of are Temple Cone, Anne Barngrover, Ronda Broatch, Hannah Stephenson, Karina Borowicz, Amy Groshek, and Rebecca Lehmann.

What are you working on now?

My second collection, The Children's War and Other Poems, will be released February 15th from Salt Publishing. It is a collection that opens with ekphrastic poetry based on the artwork of child survivors of war. These poems act as a survival guide, showing that hope exists even in the darkest of places and that perhaps poetry is the key to our healing. The second half of the collection explores war at home and the war within ourselves. I am running a promotion between now and February 15th, that for every 50 "Likes" on my Facebook author page, I will give away a signed copy. All you have to do to be entered in the drawing is "Like" this page: Shaindel’s Facebook page .

Shaindel Beers lives in Pendleton, Oregon, with her partner Jared and their son Liam. The Children’s War and Other Poems, her second poetry collection, is forthcoming from Salt Publishing in February 2013. Her first poetry collection, A Brief History of Time, was published in 2009. She serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary Magazine Contrary Magazine. Find her online at Shaindel’s web page.

Haiku Poet Deborah P. Kolodji Reading Feb. 3

Deborah P. Kolodji, whose poetry appeared in the anthology After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, will be reading Feb. 3 in the literary journal RATTLE’s reading series. The reading will be held at 3 PM at the Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse, 1010 Foothill Blvd., La Cañada-Flintridge, CA 91011.

Ms. Kolodji is a haiku poet. She also writes speculative poetry. Her poem from After Shocks reprinted here with her permission:

lingerie drawer
after the divorce
skimpier

After Shocks is an anthology of poetry of recovery comprising 152 poems by 115 poets from 15 nations in these topics: recovery from grief, war, exile, divorce, abuse, bigotry, illness, injury, and addiction. Follow the After Shocks blog postings at Poetry of Recovery.

Two other examples of Ms. Kolodji’s haiku, reprinted with her permission:


cottonwood rattle
the wordlessness
of his final days


we promise each other
nothing will change
slack tide


Reprinted from The Temple Bell Stops, Contemporary Poems of Grief, Loss, and Change," an anthology of haiku and tanka, edited by Robert Epstein.

Interview with Deborah P. Kolodji

How did you come to write this poem?

After my marriage broke up, I wrote a lot of poems about divorce. Some of them were longer and more metaphorical than this one. For example, I wrote about a dozen poems about earthquakes and every single one of them was about the divorce!

Being primarily a haiku poet, many of my haiku and senryu evolve out of simple personal observations about my environment – my yard, the street I live on, my house, the people I encounter. They are word snapshots of a moment in my life.

After the divorce, my lingerie budget became much less important to me and I was consumed with putting food on the table for my children and seeing to their educational needs. One day I happened to notice that my lingerie drawer seemed a bit “skimpy” and the poem just came to me, pun and all. It made me smile so I wrote it down.

How did writing this poem affect your recovery?

Finding humor in my situation helped me cope with the break-up of my marriage. If I can laugh about something, I can get past it. Writing poetry was therapeutic and really helped me get through those first difficult years.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this poem come to life?

I have a small notebook that I carry around with me and jot down little things that catch my eye. These observations become seeds that sometimes turn into haiku or longer poems. I live a hectic life, at times, with work and family obligations. It has calmed down in some ways, now that my children are grown, but I also have an aging mother and a job that sometimes involves travel. Writing short poetry helps me take little pauses in my day, to observe the things I might miss otherwise – the egret that flies across the street on the way to the nearest body of water, the wildflower growing out of a crack in the sidewalk and other moments of beauty, moments of humor, moments of sadness.

So, regardless of what I am doing, there is this part of my mind that notices little things and says, “hey, Deb, look at that.” And, I’ll pause, and turn my head slightly and suddenly see a moment that I want to capture, whether a moment of truth like “I don’t need sexy lingerie since I no longer have a significant other” or a sudden glimpse of beauty like the reflection of sunrise in my car’s side mirror.

So, this particular poem came to life because I opened a drawer and it suddenly looked “skimpy” to me.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

Most of my favorite poets are contemporary haiku poets like Roberta Beary, Margaret Chula, Michael McClintock, Christopher Herald, Ann K. Schwader, and Penny Harter. My favorite classical haiku poet is Chiyo-Ni. I also enjoy W.S. Merwin, Gary Snyder, Robert Haas, Jeannine Hall Gailey, and many other poets. (I am sure I am forgetting to mention at least a dozen poets!)

As for my favorite poems, I am very partial to “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes and “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound, as well as a haiku by Tom Tico about a black umbrella breaking down at a funeral graveside service. (The Tico haiku was published in Modern Haiku about two years ago and I still love it today as much as I did when I first read it.)

What are you working on now?

I’m always writing haiku – right now I am trying to write at least one haiku a day. I am also working on a book-length haibun.

Deborah P Kolodji is the moderator of the Southern California Haiku Study Group and the former president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Her poems have appeared in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Acorn, bottle rockets, and many other journals. In addition to After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, her poems have been anthologized in various Red Moon Anthologies including the 2011 Red Moon Anthology, Carving Darkness, several Haiku Society of America anthologies including the recent anthology Haiku 21: An Anthology of Contemporary English-language Haiku, edited by Lee Gurga & Scott Metz and published by Modern Haiku Press.

Haiku by Deborah P. Kolodji

lingerie drawer
after the divorce
skimpier


Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Interview with Deborah P. Kolodji

How did you come to write this poem?

After my marriage broke up, I wrote a lot of poems about divorce. Some of them were longer and more metaphorical than this one. For example, I wrote about a dozen poems about earthquakes and every single one of them was about the divorce!

Being primarily a haiku poet, many of my haiku and senryu evolve out of simple personal observations about my environment – my yard, the street I live on, my house, the people I encounter. They are word snapshots of a moment in my life.

After the divorce, my lingerie budget became much less important to me and I was consumed with putting food on the table for my children and seeing to their educational needs. One day I happened to notice that my lingerie drawer seemed a bit “skimpy” and the poem just came to me, pun and all. It made me smile so I wrote it down.

How did writing this poem affect your recovery?

Finding humor in my situation helped me cope with the break-up of my marriage. If I can laugh about something, I can get past it. Writing poetry was therapeutic and really helped me get through those first difficult years.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this poem come to life?

I have a small notebook that I carry around with me and jot down little things that catch my eye. These observations become seeds that sometimes turn into haiku or longer poems. I live a hectic life, at times, with work and family obligations. It has calmed down in some ways, now that my children are grown, but I also have an aging mother and a job that sometimes involves travel. Writing short poetry helps me take little pauses in my day, to observe the things I might miss otherwise – the egret that flies across the street on the way to the nearest body of water, the wildflower growing out of a crack in the sidewalk and other moments of beauty, moments of humor, moments of sadness.

So, regardless of what I am doing, there is this part of my mind that notices little things and says, “hey, Deb, look at that.” And, I’ll pause, and turn my head slightly and suddenly see a moment that I want to capture, whether a moment of truth like “I don’t need sexy lingerie since I no longer have a significant other” or a sudden glimpse of beauty like the reflection of sunrise in my car’s side mirror.

So, this particular poem came to life because I opened a drawer and it suddenly looked “skimpy” to me.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

Most of my favorite poets are contemporary haiku poets like Roberta Beary, Margaret Chula, Michael McClintock, Christopher Herald, Ann K. Schwader, and Penny Harter. My favorite classical haiku poet is Chiyo-Ni. I also enjoy W.S. Merwin, Gary Snyder, Robert Haas, Jeannine Hall Gailey, and many other poets. (I am sure I am forgetting to mention at least a dozen poets!)

As for my favorite poems, I am very partial to “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes and “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound, as well as a haiku by Tom Tico about a black umbrella breaking down at a funeral graveside service. (The Tico haiku was published in Modern Haiku about two years ago and I still love it today as much as I did when I first read it.)

What are you working on now?

I’m always writing haiku – right now I am trying to write at least one haiku a day. I am also working on a book-length haibun.

Deborah P Kolodji is the moderator of the Southern California Haiku Study Group and the former president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Her poems have appeared in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Acorn, bottle rockets, and many other journals. In addition to After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, her poems have been anthologized in various Red Moon Anthologies including the 2011 Red Moon Anthology, Carving Darkness, several Haiku Society of America anthologies including the recent anthology Haiku 21: An Anthology of Contemporary English-language Haiku, edited by Lee Gurga & Scott Metz and published by Modern Haiku Press.

[Blogger note: If you’re a haiku fan, the Poetry of Recovery blog will post more of Ms. Kolodji’s work soon, along with an announcement of her upcoming readings in California.]

2 Poems by Nazand Begikhani: A memorial to 3 Kurdish women assassinated in Paris, Jan. 10, 2013

In response to the murder last week of 3 Kurdish activists—Sakine Cansiz, Fidan Dogan, and Leyla Soylemez—in Paris, After Shocks poet Nazand Begikhani emailed two poems to the Poetry of Recovery blog with these words: “Could you please publish the attached poems in memory of the three women assassinated in Paris on 10 Jan 2013. They were great women and strong advocates of peace and dialogue.”

Mass Grave

The earth has stood up yet again
it stood up as a desert
with its face covered in red
holding a skull in its hands

The earth stood up
to speak of a child smiling
while shot to death

The earth stood up
to speak of the screams of a girl
about to be raped

The earth stood up
to speak of the prayers of an old man
being scorched

The earth stood up
to speak the words of a poet
while his tongue being cut

The earth stood up once again
It stood up to break the silence
around the burning body of Kurdistan

Nazand Begikhani
Spring 2006
From Bells of Speech (Ambit Books 2006)

Two Tongues in Fight
After Sujata Bhatt

I grew up with two tongues
in perpetual fight
My mother tongue was a butterfly
in turquoise flight
over a valley of light
singing a melody for life
I still remember the song:

و ه ره بۆ لام بفڕه به باڵ
(Wara bo lam bfra ba bal)
من و تۆ ده بینه هه ڤاڵ
(Mn u to dabina haval)¹

My alien tongue was a snake
invading me
slithering into my body
and roaring:

امه عربیه واحده
(Umma Arabiyah wahidah)
دات رساله خالد ه
(Dhatu risala khalida)²

My mother tongue was too high to fall
too vibrant to be silenced
My alien tongue
moved into my days
my school books
It devoured my alphabets
and occupied the white space of my childhood
A chilly wind started to blow

My mother tongue was uppermost
too vibrant to be silenced
it flew to the Zagroz³ mountains
gathered an army of butterflies
and besieged the snaky tongue

The tongues went into perpetual battle
A battle that became
the history of a nation
striving for a voice

Nazand Begikhani
London, February 2006

¹ From a Kurdish children song: “Come and fly towards me, You and I will become friends.”
² A pan-Arab slogan of the Ba’sth patry that ruled Iraq from 1963 up to 2003: “There is one Arab nation, it has an eternal message”
³ A chain of high mountains across Kurdistan.

Both poems reprinted by permission of the poet.

A note from Nazand Begikhani:

“I have known Sakine and Fidan as two advocates for human rights. Fidan had grown up in France and was involved in organisational work. Sakine was the figure of resistance who endured years in Turkish prisons. She was admired by all those who had known her, even by her jailers, for her courage and her soft but powerful character. It is unfair and absurd to categorise her as a "terrorist"; she was a peaceful activist, stood up against state violence, defending millions of Kurds whose basic rights have been denied by the Turkish state. She believed in dialogue and a peaceful solution for the Kurdish question, this is why she was targeted at this crucial time when negotiation between the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] and the Turkish government had just started. If Sakine were not Kurdish, she would have been elevated to the grade of a world hero meriting the Noble Peace Prize. She will live in us and will be remembered in history.”

Blogger's note:

The three women, who were all shot multiple times in the head, according to news reports, were Sakine Cansiz, Fidan Dogan, and Leyla Soylemez. Cansiz, a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the first senior female member of the organization, was a political refugee in France since 1989 after being detained and tortured in Turkey for great part of the 1980s. The second victim, Fidan Dogan was a representative in France of the Brussels-based Kurdish National Congress. The third woman, Leyla Soylemez, was a guest in the office at the time of the murders. The French police are still investigating the crime.

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party has sought to create an independent nation state of Kurdistan, consisting of some or all of the areas with Kurdish majority, Recently, it entered into negotiation with the Turkish government for a peaceful solution of the Kurdish question. Other Kurdish nationalist groups campaign for greater Kurdish autonomy within the existing national boundaries or autonomous Kurdish regions where Kurdish people currently make up a majority: Eastern Turkey, Northern Iraq, Northwestern Iran, and Northern Syria.

Nazand Begikhani was born in Kurdistan, Iraq, into an educated and militant family in the cultural city of Koysinjaq, Iraq. She has been living in exile (Denmark, France, and the U.K.) since 1987. She took her first degree in English language and literature at the University of Mosul. Then completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Sorbonne, Paris. She published her first poetry collection Yesterday of Tomorrow in Paris in 1995. Her other collections were published in Kurdistan by Arras and Ranj publishing houses. They include: Celebrations (2004), Colour of Sand (2005), Bells of Speech (2007), and Love: An Inspired Absence (2008). Bells of Speech (Ambit Books 2007) was her first collection written in English. Her collection Colour of Sand was translated and published in France (L'Harmattan, Paris 2011), and her second collection in French, Le Lendemain d’hier, will come out this year (Maison de l’Amandier, June 2013). In March 2012, Ms. Nazand received the Simone Landry Poetry Prize for 2012 in France.

Ms. Begkhani is a polyglot who translates her own poetry into French and English, and her poems have also been translated into Arabic, Persian, and German. She has also translated Baudelaire and T.S. Eliot into Kurdish. Ms. Begikhani is a founding member of Kurdish Women Action Against Honor Killing, which later became Kurdish Women's Rights Watch. She is currently a senior research fellow at the University of Bristol. She created the first pioneering Gender and Violence Studies Centre at the University of Sulaimaniya, a project funded by the British Council. She has represented Kurdish women at the United Nations, and she presented Kurdish women’s demands to the U.N. authorities in 2000. Her work has had considerable influence on action and strategy to address honor-based violence in Kurdistan. She has published academic work in Kurdish, English and French. She received the UK-based Emma Humphrey’s Prize in 1999 for her advocacy and action against honor crimes. Since 2009, she has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Kurdish language edition of Le Monde Diplomatique.

Three of Ms. Begikhani’s poems from Bells of Speech appeared in the anthology After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events. Those poems will appear in this blog at a later date.

Poem from Jim McGarrah's new collection, "Breakfast at Denny's"

Meditations on the Jungle Ambush
By Jim McGarrah

There were nights, strands of time tied together with a thin wire of     fear
when you could hear the full moon keening as it rose to wait for     death.

Its only job was to end someone's loneliness forever by lighting
the path of a sniper's bullet or casting a dim shadow across a trip     wire.

You wanted to believe it hung there to run the tides at China Beach,
guide the course of love you hoped to feel one day, the leap and swirl

of Basa fish or the unlocking of a Cac Dang flower, echo a tiger's     growl
or a Black Kite's song, record explosions of dew across the rice     paddies.

Everything, even the hard click of brass as a round got chambered,
seemed more romantic and buoyant in the oblique and ductile glow.

In the end, all it did was burnish, and then not even from its own fire,
the monstrous clouds roiling above the banyan canopy overhead.

All it ever did was tempt you with its silent dusting of sugared light
to forget that each night ambush held the origin of your oblivion.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

From Ink Brush Press. January, 2013. Temple and Dallas, Texas. Editor – Jerry Craven. Ink Brush Press
Price $15.00, 114 pages.
An excellent Houston independent bookstore that carries many Ink Brush Press Books is Brazos Bookstore. A great Louisville, Kentucky, independent bookstore that carries all of Jim McGarrah’s books is The Reader’s Corner on Frankfort Avenue.

Mark your calendars: Jim McGarrah has two readings scheduled for February. He'll be in Zionsville, IN (a suburb of Indianapolis) on February 7 doing a reading and signing for Poetry on Brick Street at Eagle Creek Coffee Co., 10 South Main, Zionsville at 6:30 P.M.

On February 19, he'll be in Owensboro, KY doing a reading and signing for the Brescia University's writing group - Third Tuesday Writers at Gambrinus Libation Emporium, 102 W. 2nd Street, Owensboro. The program is from 6pm - 9pm.

Words of praise for Breakfast at Denny’s:

In Jim McGarrah’s third poetry collection, the present is often eclipsed by the ghosted past of Vietnam. These vital poems dwell in the inevitable privacy of being human, and it is in these starkly singular spaces--walking the dog, truckstopping for breakfast, closing the bar at 2 A.M., visiting Vietnamese children suffering the effects of Agent Orange—that McGarrah wrestles truth with music, grit and wry humor. As the poet sways between sobriety and stupor, bearing witness to the horror of being alive and the horror of going on, he too leads us through that slim midnight portal into rugged grace, where a worn ball cap becomes a whiskey-washed Eucharist and the cast of the missing creates the genius of absence. When transcendence comes, it is no lavish exaltation, but something far more real and astonishing.
Jennifer K. Sweeney, author of How to Live on Bread and Music, winner of the James Laughlin Prize

Jim McGarrah knows the back roads of the American Psyche and the kind of solar flares the brain releases when you pull off the electro-throb highway and smell the real people. Like Wim Wenders’ angels, he listens to the inner plaints and pleas beneath the noise of everyday life. He hears the old woman, Marge, who says that we are all “Collateral damage in God’s plan” and Jesus, the carpenter with blistered hands, who downs a cold one at the bar. Reading this book is like coming home.
Doug Anderson, author of The Moon Reflected Fire and winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize

Jim McGarrah's poems and essays have appeared most recently or are forthcoming in Bayou Magazine, Cincinnati Review, Connecticut Review, Elixir Magazine, GreenBriar Review, and North American Review. He is the author of three books of poetry, Running the Voodoo Down, which won a book award from Elixir Press in 2003 and When the Stars Go Dark, which became part of Main Street Rag’s Select Poetry Series in 2009. McGarrah’s newest book of poems, Breakfast at Denny’s, was released on January 1, 2013, by Ink Brush Press. He has also written a memoir of the Vietnam War entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace (Indiana Historical Society Press, 2007) that won the Eric Hoffer Award for Legacy Nonfiction and The End of an Era, a nonfiction account of life in the American counter-culture during the 1960’s and 1970’s, published in 2011 by Ink Brush Press. McGarrah has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a finalist twice in the James Hearst Poetry Contest. He is editor, along with Tom Watson, of Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana. An interview with him appears in the blog posting just below.

"March Is the Cruelest Month" by Jim McGarrah

Two robins and two jays trill
in counterpoint harmony as if Davis,
Coltrane, Parker, and Kirk flitted limb to limb
and spoke of various drugs and women
through the language of wind.

One leaf appears on a tree. You see it
through the bedroom window
and, like a caretaker in a cemetery,
sell yourself the illusion of rebirth
so you don’t go crazy counting graves.

A woman is here and so are the stars,
full of cold fire lighting your mind
with memory and possibility.
The hooker on Tu Do Street
forty years ago with her silk ao dai

open to expose a thigh
the color of Tupelo honey reflected
these same stars from a different world.
You wonder briefly if that might be big
in some Jungian way, this woman lying so near

to your beating heart, a muscle you would
gladly tear from your chest and offer
as a mere token of what you feel,
like an emerald in a velvet box, this woman
reminding you of how the past never

escapes the present, instead of vice versa.
It’s always the subtle things, sandalwood
incense, the hiss of the teakettle on the stove,
the flicker of shadows along the candle-lit walls,
that flash the rocket round through your mind.

Then the room on Tu Do becomes the rubble
of your life. The dust and the cordite take away
your breath and the woman who no longer is
bleeds into the one you lay beside and love.
Then, you bury your face in her hair,
smell lavender and fear.

Reprinted from After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, by permission of the poet.

Interview with Jim McGarrah

How did you come to write this poem?

Actually, that’s an interesting way of putting it. I don’t really come to poems, they come to me. I’m very disciplined about revising and editing once I get some content on the page, but initially a word, an image, sometimes even a phrase will pop into my head. What I come to is life. If you put yourself into circumstances, if you take some emotional risks, if you allow yourself to experience life, then poems come to you. The poem “March Is the Cruelest Month” came to me because of the demons I had created during my time in the Viet Nam War.

How did writing this poem affect your recovery?

There is a cathartic effect in writing, but because my writing is so often autobiographical in nature I sometimes go through the trauma of the experience itself all over again in my mind before that sense of liberation from the memory arrives. When I first started writing about my experiences in war, I wasn’t aware of this phenomenon and it caused me some emotional difficulties. Over the years, I’ve learned what to expect when dealing with this particular subject matter and I keep myself in check better.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this poem come to life?

Years ago, I wrote constantly in journals, whatever came to mind whenever it came there. I explored sensory input, memory, associative logic until I had stacks of journals. It’s become a habit when I start a new project to go back and read those journal entries and I often retrieve ideas, phrases, images, and themes from them. In the case of “March is the Cruelest Month” I discovered an old line from a T.S. Eliot poem that I had written on a page of a journal that was about ten years old. It read – "April is the cruelest month" – and beside that quote, the scribbled words "not for me."

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

I’ve always liked Robert Lowell a lot and a generation removed from him, poets my age, there are some really good ones like Lynn Emanuel, Richard Jackson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Stephen Dobyns, and Jack Myers, among others that I like reading. Of this newest generation, I have mixed feelings. Much of the poetry seems to rely on pop culture, blank spaces, and obscure references without much emotional substance. I do think Matt Guenette is a young poet of exceptional talent, as are Sandra Beasely, Elizabeth Bradford, and Shaindel Beers.

What are you working on now?

MY new collection of poetry has just been released, Breakfast at Denny’s by Ink Bush Press (Dallas, edited by Jerry Craven).

Jim McGarrah's poems and essays have appeared most recently or are forthcoming in Bayou Magazine, Cincinnati Review, Connecticut Review, Elixir Magazine, Green Briar Review, and North American Review. He is the author of three books of poetry, Running the Voodoo Down, which won a book award from Elixir Press in 2003 and When the Stars Go Dark, which became part of Main Street Rag’s Select Poetry Series in 2009. McGarrah’s newest book of poems, Breakfast at Denny’s, was released on January 1, 2013, by Ink Brush Press. He has also written a memoir of the Vietnam War entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace (Indiana Historical Society Press, 2007) that won the Eric Hoffer Award for Legacy Nonfiction and The End of an Era, a nonfiction account of life in the American counter-culture during the 1960’s and 1970’s, published in 2011 by Ink Brush Press. McGarrah has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a finalist twice in the James Hearst Poetry Contest. He is editor, along with Tom Watson, of Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana.