Charles Entrekin

Rhymes and Ruminations

Poems from the Threshold

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Dear Reader,

I never thought that I would live past my forties.  I don’t know why I got that figure in my head, unless it was due to a book I read in high school: Martin Eden by Jack London. By the time I finished the book, I had strongly identified with the character and his disillusionment, the ultimate choice he made to stop living.  It felt so real. I was young and had never considered whether life might not be worth living if you couldn’t live up to your expectations. It was the story of a man who rose from poverty and the school of hard knocks for the love a woman, through education, into a successful man of ideas and philosophical foundation so that he could challenge the best thinkers of his day and so become capable of challenging the current postures of the gilded upper class. But he had learned too much to be satisfied with the status quo.

That book changed me; it shook me awake to possibilities I had never considered: that one could succeed in the world and yet fail to live up to his own inner expectations.  The Self one creates is only an illusion, but it’s an important illusion.  I continue to invent my Self one poem at a time.

This birthday I turned 82.  I have multiple major conditions: cancer, Parkinson’s disease, glaucoma, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, spinal stenosis, and interstitial lung disease.  My life expectancy is short.  I am considering taking ownership of my own death and ending my life with the California Aid in Dying Act.  But for now, I am learning to embrace what remains.

Charles

California Death with Dignity

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Some of my advocacy collaboration with Compassion & Choices, “an organization dedicated to improving care, expanding options and empowering everyone to chart their end-of-life journey,” was recently published in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Cancer, blindness and Parkinson’s changed how I think about death. It’s a door I want to open when ready.

When my time comes, I want to experience my death as yet another dimension of human life. Current state law gives me that option
Over the past 15 years, cancer, blindness and Parkinson’s have changed how I interact with the world and how I think about my own inevitable death. In 2007, I was busy promoting my first novel and serving as chairman of the board of the third computer software company I’d founded, about to be sold. Then I went to see a doctor about swollen lymph nodes, was diagnosed with a chronic form of leukemia, and all of my previous life disappeared.Following cancer surgery and intense chemotherapy for the cancer, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2011. Around that same time, I realized that I was starting to lose my vision due to glaucoma. Today I’m completely blind.

I’ve since come to understand my environment more comprehensively, listening more intently to bird songs, the sounds of traffic and the tenor of people’s voices as they speak. I’ve continued to write, even as the process of translating what’s going on inside my head into the written word looks different now.

I’ve also realized that at the end of my life, I want to be able to face my death head-on. I don’t want to be out of my mind on pain medication, being kept artificially “alive” in a hospital. If one of my illnesses becomes terminal, I want to be able to call on my wife, my children and other loved ones and say, “Come join me for a goodbye session.” I want to be as present for that final moment as I am for every other day of my life.

If I need it, California’s medical-aid-in-dying law, the End of Life Option Act, would allow me to obtain prescription medication that I could take to peacefully end my suffering, if it becomes unbearable, in my sleep, at home, in my bed, surrounded by my loved ones. Knowing that this option exists where I live gives me great comfort and peace.

But it may soon no longer be available to me or any Californian.

In April, a coalition of disability groups filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the recently updated act makes it more likely for people with disabilities and communities of color to use life-ending drugs than the rest of the population because they are less likely to receive proper medical and mental health care. The plaintiffs also argue that these vulnerable populations could be coerced into taking their own lives by family members or caregivers.

The data doesn’t support them.

According to a July 2022 report from the California Department of Public Health, only about 13% of the terminally ill individuals who have utilized California’s End of Life Option Act since it took effect in 2016 were from communities of color. Moreover, a 2022 study examining “the most common arguments against legalizing assisted dying” concluded, “There is no evidence that assisted dying laws have bad effects on other aspects of healthcare for people with disabilities. In fact, there is evidence that legalization goes hand in hand with increased support for palliative care.” And as Assembly Member Jim Wood (D-Ukiah) noted in September 2021, “There have been no reported cases or instances of abuse or coercion.”

According to an attorney for the plaintiffs, they were looking for a way to challenge the law and settled on the recent update because it removed some safeguards in the original law. The revisions reduce the minimum waiting period between the two oral requests patients must make for medication from 15 days to 48 hours and they eliminate the requirement for patients to make a written attestation within 48 hours before taking life-ending medication.

Why did lawmakers make those changes? Because those stipulations have been significant barriers for terminally ill patients seeking aid in dying. A 2017 study of the first year the law took effect found that 21% of people died or became too ill to complete the 15-day waiting period. And contrary to what the plaintiffs of this lawsuit would have you believe, numerous safeguards still remain in the law.

Let’s be clear: This lawsuit isn’t about protecting the rights of vulnerable populations. It’s an attempt to eliminate a health care option that the plaintiffs would not personally choose.

As someone with a disability and a serious illness that could become terminal, I find it insulting that disability groups claim to speak on my behalf and describe people like me as being unable to make independent decisions about end-of-life care. I have thought carefully through my decisions for what I want for end-of-life care and my decisions should be my own. I’m not alone in this belief. A November 2021 poll showed 68% of likely voters nationwide support medical aid in dying as an end-of-life care option. The opinion holds among people with disabilities as well — a February 2023 national poll shows 79% of likely voters with a disability support medical aid in dying.

I like to think of death as just another door I haven’t opened yet. When my time comes, I want to step through that door and experience my death as yet another dimension of human life. The California medical-aid-in-dying law as it stands now gives me that option, so I pray it remains intact when I reach death’s door, as we all will one day.

Charles Entrekin lives with his wife, Gail, in Orinda.

in the SF Chronicle.

A Poetry of Mood, Place, and Time

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1987 interview excerpt of Charles Entrekin by a University of California, Berkeley, PhD candidate from Czech Republic as part of his dissertation. Read by Eugene Berson.

The poet in his yard with Molly Bloom and blooming dogwood.

 

Why I Write

Charles: When my mother died I didn’t want to go to the funeral really, but there were people who wanted to see me and wanted to make me feel all right about my mother dying.  So I went to the funeral and I bid everybody goodbye and then I came home and went to work and it was as if nothing had happened, as if I didn’t really have that experience.  I went through it, but I didn’t have it. Until I wrote that [April in Alabama] poem about my mother and then, then, it started coming back to life for me.  Then I knew what I had been doing.

It’s like enough emotional experiences get accumulated and finally I can find the space to deal with them.  Maybe the culture is so fast now, there is so much happening, that we don’t have time to process our experiences.  Times used to be slower, we used to have more time.  Poetry is a way of stopping time.  It’s a way of coming back to an experience.

April in Alabama

        for Ruth, my mother, who died after a 15-year battle with Parkinson’s disease

My father once shouted that she loved me best.
Now, again he stares without seeing, and yes,
I know he thinks I have her feel on me still.
Always she was so quiet, insisting without speaking,
always seeming to know she gave context, shape,
thickness to things.

And now her relations have arrived, her grandchildren,
dressed up, stage-whispery voices, this
quiet sobbing punctuating the sunny morning,
with a pack of Marlboros left on an end table,
coffee, truck roars from a nearby freeway,
and me, just in from California, like an unholy
ear, listening.

In chapel we sit with silent faces, dark
mahogany walls closing in. A hoarse cough
of a relative with a cold, echoes.

And now my cousin Rodney, no longer a boy
but a Mississippi preacher taking hold, speaks
and the background rush of our lives floats away
as the sound of his voice spreads over us,
honeyed and slow, “I remember times we’d come to comfort her,
worried and concerned, but she’d say, year after year
Go your way, there’s nothing you can do here,
go your way...”

Outside, a casket winds past the new chapel,
the gravesides and in the distance, kudzu
clings to the new leaves. Spring. Still Alabama
forests remain a muddy, monochromatic brown.
What stirs is the new busy noisiness in the humid air,
wasps and dirt daubers at their nests.

With everyone gone, like wind
I feel her out there, like fish and mosquitoes,
lakes, blowing grass, dead leaves, dung beetles,
bees. Yet there is an emptiness in the landscape
as when the dogwoods are in full bloom and no one notices,
a sadness like oil cans and abandoned shacks, empty stores
beside the highway, spirits that no one knows.

For me a good poem is one that, when I come back to it again and again, every time I get the same emotional hit, the same mood and experience again.  So it’s like a little time capsule of mood, of emotional experiences.  And a poem fails when it doesn’t do that, when it won’t take you back to that place anymore.  There’s something wrong about it [then] so that you can’t re-experience it, it’s not a movie anymore of that emotional state.

When it stops touching you, usually the reason is that there’s something wrong about it, it’s not lyrical enough, the images are not unified enough, and so it doesn’t hold up to re-exposure.   The really best poems don’t fall down under exposure.  The more you are exposed to them, the better you like them.  And when I was putting together In This Hour, I felt that all of those poems still worked in that way, and now I feel that about a third of them do.  Over time I’ve come to see that some of the poems don’t hold up, but others still do.  And they are old now; a couple of them are nearly 10 years old.  And they still hold up, they still do the same thing for me that they did when I wrote them.

So in a sense I write poems for that reason.  So that I can have that for myself.  So that I can have my life back.

 

How I Write

I don’t know what I’m going to write about when I begin.  I never plan for it.  I never even think about what it’s going to be about; it’s going to be about whatever comes into my head.  If I premeditate, if I really try to think ahead of time what I’m going to write about, I often muck it up.  Because my intellectual gear, which is pretty strong inside of me, like a censor, gets into gear and it starts censoring too soon and won’t allow me to do things that I need to do in order to get a good poem out of it.

Often, for me, when I’m writing a poem I have to write a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense initially.  I can’t see the connections, I can’t see the sense to it, and sometimes it’s really sentimental and sloppy and, if I get my intellectual gear into operation, I won’t allow myself to do it at all.  And so nothing comes out, or what does is dry, dead, more like an essay, diatribe, an investigation into abstract principles, and they don’t live at all.  They have no aura.  They don’t evoke anything.  They are either right or wrong.  They are understood or not understood, but what you understand of them is not worth reading.  Throw them away.

If the intellectual gear gets too much into the spirit of it, it dies.  I try not to; I try to leave myself as much room as I can to not.  Real unorganized and it might just be phrases.  I have a notebook that I write down phrases in, things that catch my attention, that sound right, and sometimes I go through that and let a phrase guide me.

…I have a whole notebook, several notebooks, that are filled with these kinds of things, odd thoughts, random images, just things that occur to me.  I used to do it a lot more than I do now just because lately I’ve been caught up in making money again.  But when I’m really in stride with writing poems and really in tune with it, I keep one of those books with me all the time and I write things down in it.  And there will be a line or two, or a word or two, that I’ll later use.

 

What a Poem is About and What the Poet Thinks it’s About

I have discovered something else too, this was something of a surprise actually.  I had arranged it once so that I had a job that I could work three days a week and have four days off that I could work pretty much on my poems.  And so I did, and I was writing a lot of poems.  And what I noticed was that over a period of time all the poems I was writing would be about the same thing.  They were all coming at it from different angles, but after I had written enough to look at them and see them, I could see that they were all trying to capture the same thing.

I was trying to think of a particular period.  It wouldn’t be something so specific that you could state it in an abstract way, or state as a principle, but it would have to do with a mood, a way of feeling about, for example, my mother’s dying.  And that mood was holding sway over everything that I was working on.  I was under the influence of that mood and so every time I came to write a poem, that mood would have its effect.  And so if I looked at all the poems together, I could see that that event, that mood was working its way out, and it was working its way out in my poems.

Earlier on, if I went back and looked at my poems, I could see that my relationship with my wife was going to hell, and that all of my poems were being affected by it.  I could see that every poem that I wrote was about, had an angle to it that was about, the relationship breaking down.  It was showing up in poem after poem.  As a matter of fact, it used to amaze me that my wife never noticed that.  She never did.  I didn’t notice myself for a while, and then I began picking up on it.  Then I saw what I was doing, and it was like there was this other person, that I was being let in on a secret, that I had been working it out, I was working out breaking up with my wife through poems.

I have one poem where it’s said outright, “The Dream of Leaving You”:

This dream about leaving you
begins with your clothes on the floor
and flowers falling from your hair;
then there’s an icy drink
at my elbow and the air
of a conversation that will not end,
The way time sits in your mouth
like cold sunshine and doors
wink open around you.

That was written near the end.  A number of the poems in my book are about that and catch it in its purest expression.  Here is a similar kind of thing, [in the poem, Objet D’Art, also from my book, Casting for the Cutthroat & Other Poems (1980)].  You wouldn’t think it had anything in common with the last poem unless you see them all together.  They are about different things, but it turns out I was writing toward the same thing.

In the beginning
there was the feeling of being found,
discovered,
the way he fit so neatly inside her
world view of things,
his appearance as it were,
and the armature of his being
becoming by necessity the base
which best displayed her beauty
so alarmingly.

Both of those poems are about a relationship going bad, in a way.  The second poem is about how he provides the base for her to be an art object, how he’s allowing himself to be used for that purpose.  And when I wrote it, I didn’t think it was necessarily about me.  And later on I could see, well, that it is about me.

I could sure find out what I’m up to by writing a poem.  And so I can sort of see why I start feeling a little bit lost and upset and fearful of things when I can’t write poems.  Because it has become a way of self-knowledge.

Interviewer: Yeah, I suppose that’s what attracts most people to go into it.

 

How Moving West Affected My Poetry

Yeah, yeah, it does.  In this book I talk to you about how I felt about coming to California, about Nature. This is a poem about being affected by the landscape that I lived in.  Have you ever been to Pt. Reyes?  It’s near you actually, if you go on farther north.  It’s got some of the most beautiful beaches in the world.  They’re really wild and rugged and everything.  This is called “Point Reyes Station.”

I stand at land’s edge,
fat buds barely
Breaking into green and
suddenly
there’s no sun,
no Alabama breeze,
only the Pacific cold mists
and this rising and falling
inside me. This longing
for roots, for no fear
of the forever false spring
that surrounds me.

That’s clearly a poem that was evoked by a real sense of lack of seasons.  As if this constancy of California was fearful, or was cloying, as if I wanted the purgation of winter, wanted thing[s] to have an end, a rebirth, a re-beginning, and the fact that it was always spring was really getting to me.  [On a practical level,] when I went to Montana, I had the feeling that I had really made a mistake because I had quit my job here, had taken my family and gone to this university to study and get my Master’s degree. We were living on 200 dollars a month.  Everybody had colds.  I thought we were really going to go under financially.  We were on welfare and things looked really pretty bleak.  And then after about six months of it, there came this wonderful springtime in Montana.  Missoula Spring.  Missoula is [a] town in Montana, but it means literally “by the chilling waters.”

Missoula Spring

        I have become
one of my own poems.
This morning
the covered streets
opened black
in melting snow.
I was wrong.
Winter gone, a flower
opens in me, a song, words
crawl in my veins,
a carnation of the brain,
a dogwood.

So, yeah, Nature definitely has a way of being part of it, but it’s the context again.  Things don’t make sense without their context and nature, the world we are living in.  That’s the most all-embracing context of all.  Lately I’ve been writing poems about nature, about how I seem to be an entity outside of nature, [but] affected [by], impacted by nature.  I think as the stages of my life move on, Nature means something different to me.

Interviewer: So where are you going to head with all of this, once you get it all collected?

 

What I Focus On

In the craft of the poem, crafting the poem, I spend a lot of time trying to evoke mood.  I think I want the mood more than anything else in the poem, the atmosphere of what’s happened, more than what has actually happened.  For that reason, I tend to pay more attention to a kind of painterly aspect of a poem, and the musical aspect of a poem, than the content of the poem.

In those last couple of poem[s] I read, I’m paying a lot of attention to how things look, what’s in the background, what’s in the foreground, what the experience is like, not for an interpretation of the experience but for the experience itself.  To capture it.  And the way I get at that is to try to get at the mood, what was the mood of that moment.  And the mood is often caught up in the environment, in nature, what’s going on in the physical world at that point in time.

 

The Role of Nature

Nature has a lot to do with it.  That’s why that poem about Point Reyes was so scary to me.  Suddenly I felt guarded because I wasn’t going to get the purgation of winter, I wasn’t going to get to go through this sort of emptying and dying out, so that things could be reborn.  I was going to get this continual sense of things growing up.  I think within me I used to worry that living here in California, no further development could come about.  It was almost like things couldn’t ever grow up because they couldn’t get strong enough, because they were in this constant kind of new birthing process, which never gave anything a chance to age.  Everything just got displaced by the next new thing, and when that went away, the next new thing.  It was like a kind of caldron of birthing going on here.

It was the way it felt coming from places like the East Coast, New York City, or down South.  I spent a lot of time in Alabama, where experiences are codified, extrapolated, spread out, developed.  You don’t let go of something until it’s finished.  You carry it all the way through and new things, new ideas, are few and far between.  They are very mistrusted, particularly in the South.  Anything that’s new is automatically suspect.

 

Hectored by the New

Whereas out here if it’s not brand new, it’s just not the latest thing, it’s not any good.  It’s sort of a reverse process.  It bothered me a lot because I felt emotionally unstable, destabilized, is how I felt.  How am I going to develop as a person, as a human being?  How am I going to get to the places I want to achieve for myself if I don’t give myself room to explore my experiences, if I’m going to constantly be caught up with the new, the new thing, the latest fad?  If I constantly have to deal with that?  But I’ve found that that hasn’t been the case.  It was just a difference in volume between the East Coast and California.  There is just a lot of variety of things going on here.  The cultural variety is just enormous. I don’t think anything at all now about going to a café and listening to two Iranians carry on a conversation in one corner and a Frenchman talking to an Australian in the other corner, and a couple of computer nerds sitting there rattling off about their computer programs.  That’s ordinary.  At first it was overwhelming, but it’s become ordinary for me now.

 

Poetry and the Inner Emotional Life

I’m writing poetry more focused on my own emotional trials, my own struggles.  What’s going on outside in the world is interesting and fascinating, but I’m not generally drawn to write poems about it.  It doesn’t pull me in.  I have to be emotionally affected by it.  It has to have some emotional punch for it to creep into my poetry.  Intellectually stimulating, and I don’t write poems about it.  These events are just not, for some reason, grist for me.  I think other people do, but it’s just not for me.

I identify myself with a tradition of poets that goes back to Theodore Roethke and Richard Hugo, people who were influenced by Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, etc.  It’s a kind of poetry that deals with an interior landscape of emotions unlike another whole brand of poets that seem to be, that feel like they have a moral to preach or an idea to convey.  There is that whole side of poetry, but that doesn’t interest me very much.  I don’t spend much time on it.  And I’m not that excited by those kinds of poets.

 

How People Different from Myself, in Different Circumstances, Inform My Poetry

This poem isn’t in this book but in a different book.  It’s a similar one, where the experience of picking cotton, being thrown in with a group of people that I had really not had any experience rubbing shoulders with, people who did this for their livelihood, and feeling like I could just barely keep up with them, particularly this old man I was picking cotton with.  I felt really sad for him because I knew what I was going through, what it was doing to me to pick that one day, and he had been doing it for a long period of time.  And so I was moved later on, it was really odd, 20 or 30 years later.  Somehow that experience popped back into my head and I wrote this poem about it.

A Day’s Work

For so little pay, to move all day that weight
slung backwards, and watch the dust
cover my hands like a new skin,
to stagger behind a black man who pulls
forward like a horse in harness,
so much power in his arms and back,
to lift that white substance from the plant,
that feeling of the seed stuck in the center,
to stuff cotton balls in one smooth motion
without breaking stride,
‘til it’s sundown beside the oak,
beneath a red-varnished sky,
and an old man plopped down beside me,
wiping his eyes, face dust brown as mine,
saying, Damn wind done made me cry.

That’s sort of an external experience, but it affected me emotionally.  I got caught up in it.  I was moved by it.  Like I say, I spend a lot of time trying to capture the mood, and I spend a lot of time trying to use images that will capture the mood.  Like I purposely used “forward like a horse in harness, so much power in his arms and back, to lift that white substance from the plant,” juxtaposing white and black also because it’s the South and it’s a period of integration, but the meter, the rhythm of that is supposed to suggest a power and a kind of rhythm of picking cotton, “stepping, step-ping.”  It wasn’t really like that; it was more like “step-bend.”  It was a horrible experience; that people could do that for a living just amazed me.

There were these camp movies a while back, I don’t know whether you saw any of them; they are not animated but are almost cartoons anyway: Hulk and Conan the Barbarian movies.  When Conan’s woman gets killed, his compatriot is standing there by the stone, the wind is blowing the fire up around the bier as the woman’s body is burning, and an old man asks the compatriot, “Well, that’s not your woman.  Why are you crying?”  And he says, “Conan is a barbarian; he can’t cry.  Somebody has to; I cry for Conan.”

I don’t know consciously that I’m taking all these things into consideration when I go to write a poem.  I  don’t really.  I think it must be because I have a sense of the rightness of it when I get to the writing, trying to evoke it.  It’s like trying to write music, a sense of the musical expression that would hold the mood for some people.

 

Literal Time and How a Poem Gestates Meaning

Later on I was able to experience it.  Things stay with me for a long time.  It’s interesting because I must have carried that experience with me for years and years, never thought anything about it.  It was like I never processed it, never developed it.  It was like raw information that was unassembled.  But that’s the reason for my sense of pulling something out.  The pull makes sense.  Even though I went through the experience with that man and I watched it all happen, I didn’t have the feeling for that man until I wrote the poem.   It was like I was just there.  I was seeing it, I was witnessing it, I was going through it, but I was also tired, my bones were aching, I was covered with dirt, I felt like shit.  I had all these other things that were going on too, that were part of the current, the physical, the moment that it was happening to me.  And it was only later, much, much later in this case, 30 years later, that the experience came back to me and I began to make sense out of it so that it took on another whole life of importance for me that it wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t written that poem about it.  It just would have been like so much random experience.

It’s a shaping.  In talking about it right now again it sounds like taking an experience and shaping it, giving it form.  Also giving it punch, giving it significance, giving it weight, giving it meaning.  And an experience without that has none of those things, except what the culture gives you, the tools with which to interpret it.  You’re supposed to feel this way about this thing, and you breathe in these cultural expectations the way you breathe in the air, and so you experience what the culture teaches you to experience, you see what you’re allowed to see, you feel what you’re expected to feel.

 

How Meaning Gleaned From Writing Can Inform Your Family Relationships

I used to worry about my children being raised in Berkeley for that very reason.  I used to think, and I still do to some extent, that all the opinions, all the understandings that I worked so hard to develop for myself before I came here, are now available to my children like the air they breathe in.  They are going to get all these sophisticated ideas, sophisticated cultural understandings at no cost to them, no work, they put in no effort to get them.  Which makes me wonder, can they really understand them then, if they have the “correct opinions” without the underpinnings.

My son, my 15-year-old son, is arrogant with his liberal understanding of the rights and wrongs of the world, which he feels with great passion.  And most of his opinions I agree with because I thought my way through to them.  But I don’t feel the same arrogance about them because of all the steps, all the cultural understanding I had to reject, to get to them.  And he has not had to figure out his way through to these understandings; he has just breathed them in.

A little afield of our discussion.

Interviewer: Maybe this is what you’re leading up to: It may well be that since they haven’t had  to spend all their time to get to these kinds of opinions, maybe they can go forward from where they come in.  Maybe they have a base to stand on and don’t have to deal with a lot of shit that they don’t have to deal with.

Charles: But I don’t think so.  I really think that the process of figuring out things is in some ways the most important thing.  Learning the process, learning the ways to figure things out is more important than what is actually figured out.

It makes you look at it.  Were you there when I read the Rilke poem about the raising of Lazarus?  It was the very first poem that I read at that reading, but that to me is an example of it, that somebody could write a poem about an old Biblical story about the raising of Lazarus and get you excited about it is incredible.  I mean, he makes you sort of re-experience at least a possible perception of what it would have been like to be Jesus Christ trying to raise Lazarus from the dead for the reasons that he had to have for doing it.  You see Jesus saying to himself, “I don’t want to do this.  There’s no reason to go make this man come back to life, but I’ve got to do it.”

Jesus was able to look at the people, all following their own sense of things that they had taken from the culture, and see the larger picture, see something so huge that they had no idea.  The forces that are at work on you are at work on you, and you can’t see them.

What’s neat, I think, is Rilke showing us how Jesus could see the story from the context of the people’s lives, what they needed and what they were capable of receiving.  They’ve had a mother, they’ve had a father, they’ve had a place that they grew up in.  And they became the things that they have become because of the forces that were at work on them.

I don’t know, [but] what I was leading up to was I was thinking about Pablo Neruda from Chile, who was not much liked by the intellectuals but was greatly loved by poor people, and he is also a big hit in this country.  He’s very often likened to Walt Whitman in this country as a poet of the people, a man who is transforming poetry, particularly South American poetry, into a humanistic poetry like Walt Whitman did with poetry in the U.S.  And what he did, and the reason they loved him so much, was that he took their stories and found metaphors, truths in them, and he made their stories into poems so that they could see the whole.  He sort of reached down and pulled out of a pool a shape of something that made their stories, their struggles, visible to them.

This concludes this section of the interview.

 

The Raising of Lazarus

by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated from the German by Franz Wright

Evidently, this was needed. Because people need
to be screamed at with proof.
But he knew his friends. Before they were
he knew them; and they knew
that he would never leave them
desolate here. So he let his exhausted eyes close
at first glimpse of the village.
And immediately he seemed to be standing in their
                     midst.
Here was Martha, the dead boy’s sister.
He knew he would always find her
at his right hand, and beside her
Mary. The one a whole world of whores
still called a whore. They were all here.
Yet opening his eyes it was not so.
He was standing apart,
even the two women
slowly backing away,
as if from concern for their good name.
Then he began to hear voices
muttering under their breath
quite distinctly;
or thinking, Lord, if you had been here
our friend might not have died. (At that,
he seemed to reach out
to touch someone’s face
with infinite gentleness,
and silently wept.) He asked them the way
to the grave. And he followed
behind them, preparing
to do what is not done
to that green silent place
where life and death are one. By then
all sorts of others had gathered
from sheer curiosity: leering across
at each other and keeping their own
shadowy distance, they followed behind
like a pack of starving dogs.
Merely to walk down this road
had started to feel like a test,
or a poorly prepared-for performance
with actors unsure of their lines,
or which play they were supposed to be in;
and gagging on self-contempt
the stench of desecration
he himself seemed to emit,
a feverish outrage rising inside him
at the glib ease with which words like “living”
and “being dead” rolled off their tongues.
And loathing flooded his body
when he hoarsely cried,
“Move the stone!”
“By now he must stink,”
somebody helpfully shouted.
(And it was true, the body
had been lying in the tomb
four days.) But he was far away,
too far away inside himself
to hear it, beginning
to fill with that gesture
which rose through him:
no hand this heavy
had ever been raised, no human hand
had ever reached this height
shining an instant in air, then
all at once clenching into itself
at the thought all the dead might return
from that tomb where the enormous
                     cocoon
of the corpse was beginning to stir.
In the end, though, nobody stood
there at its entrance
but the young man
who had freed his right arm
and was picking at his face,
at small strips of grave wrappings.
Peter looked across at Jesus
with an expression that seemed to say
You did it, or What have you done? And all
saw how their vague and inaccurate
life made room for him once more.

 

Raising of Lazarus (Rembrandt)

 

This poem, unpublished in the poet’s lifetime, appears in a notebook that the Austro-German Rilke (1875–1926) kept while in Ronda, Spain, in 1913. The translation was begun by Franz Wright decades ago (“I have been working on it, in a hundred versions, since I was in college,” he says). Wright’s most recent collection of poems is F (2013). His Walking to Martha’s Vineyard earned the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He and his father James Wright are the only parent/child pair to have won the Pulitzer Prize in the same category.

Meditations on Coronavirus

by

This collection started with the impact of COVID-19 and the sense of being surrounded by a force that couldn’t be opposed or reconciled, but yet had to be addressed. I started off with the inspiration of W.B. Yeats. To take away the fear and depression of old age, I needed to learn how to sing. What I would sing about became a series of six meditations on how to live in the world with the coronavirus.

 

A New Song (March 2020)

“An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing…”
                      Sailing to Byzantium, William Butler Yeats

Mock orange blossoms
scent the air.
A Stellar’s jay fights
with a squirrel
over the sunflower seeds
in the bird feeder.
I follow the
caw-caw-caw
of the busy crows
up the nine stone steps
to the sky garden
holding tightly to the rail,
and listening to their chittering,
like a ratchet turning fast,
click-click-click-click.

Still, normal life seems
suddenly elusive.

It is early days,
infectious disease authorities say,
It’s not a question of if, but when.
Nine new deaths in the Northwest
and my immunity compromised
by targeted therapy.

I wonder what’s left,
what remains.

When I want to sing
the notes come out wrong,
the tune lost.
Even so, I try to learn
a new song
like the crows’ rattle-call,
the words
that I choose
to explore
are vulnerability
attachments
surrender
joy and
tranquility
in the midst
of a gathering
inevitability.
 

 

Vulnerability

Stop. Just stop. /It is no longer a request. It is a mandate. /We will help you. / We will bring the supersonic, high-speed merry-go-round to a halt. /We will stop…the frenetic, hurried rush of illusions and “obligations” that keep you from hearing our single and shared beating heart.
                               — Letter from the Coronavirus, Kristin Flynts

I

COVID-19 is not a poison.
It is droplets in the air that one can walk into,
like a spider’s web.
It exists, just as we exist,

to be seen for what it is.
It needs to be respected,
understood, but not feared.
How do you understand a virus —
a one-dimensional, conscious-less verb
that replicates because it can?
As Rilke says, the world is not against us.
If it has terrors, they are our terrors;
If it has abysses, these abysses belong to us;
If there are dangers, we must try to love them.

It keeps coming back,
the sense of threat.

We transmit it to each other.
When we most need comfort,
our safety means distance.
To replicate
the virus preys on our need
to congregate.
Delicate, clever, elegant.
The virus has used our greatest strength
and made it our greatest weakness.

II

We are strongest together,
arm-in-arm,
leaning on each other,
collaborating,
innovating.
We build to suit our desires:
skyscrapers, airplanes, computers.
We have separated ourselves above,
but the virus has outstripped our usefulness.

This virus will ride inside us,
with droplets to share.
It is becoming a part of us now.
We will always have it with us.

And what is left behind?
Stadiums empty,
highways bereft,
the testaments
to human-centered design
idle,
quiet.
Now we can hear the hum of the planet.

And God said,
Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea
And the fowl of the air
And over the cattle
And over all the earth
And over every creeping thing
That creepeth upon the earth

God is wrong.
We are part of the earth,
not the stewards of it.

This virus is in the atmosphere.
It has a message for us.
It is telling us it’s time to stop.
Listen.
Find a world-centered vision.
Adjust.

We are all ill.
We are not well.
We have overgrazed the land,
overfished the sea.
We are tangled in a spiderweb
of deceit and delusion.
We think our story
is the only story.
But we are wrong.

We’re not from this planet.
We are of this planet.

 

Attachments

            If we are quiet and still in the moment,
             we can witness change and accept it as inevitable. – Ram Dass

A crow and a squirrel are having a face-off
on Sunday morning, when Molly Bloom launches
herself out the door barking ferociously, asserting
her claim on her territory.

We live in the world of our egos,
dressed up and defended.   It’s how we are,
trying to figure things out about this COVID-19,
a novel virus.  The world is full of clues, says Gene,
but they’re all mixed up
with meaningless things.
And here I am in the at-risk category in the path of the virus,
Zoom talking with other poets.

I come in from the warm sun,
drift into a sleepy wakefulness in my chair, hallucinate
a dream, a prior time, my wife as a younger woman.
I speak to her. She’s not there.  I say to myself,
This is your vision playing tricks on you.
But there is a sadness to it, a letting go
of what was for what is.

Dying is ongoing.
we let go these dreams of who we thought we were,
no longer asserting our territory
or claiming victories.

                          We’re all just walking each other home.

 

Surrendering

            You need to find a place to stand in relation to change
             where you are not frightened by it. – Ram Dass

Upon getting out of bed, I stand up,
start forward toward the night light,
when I realize I am not in control of my body.
One moment I am dizzy,
the next I am on the floor.
Parkinson’s will have its way,
but it makes me a wiser man.
I need to make a place for it,
accommodate changes.

We manipulate our lives so we can see
what we want to see.
By embracing change
I can see what is happening,
what has happened.
I am left with recovering, healing.

Surrendering does not always imply giving up.
It can also mean letting go,
accepting what is.

Growing up I learned to surrender
into the summer swelter of Alabama,
allowing the heat in,
accepting the humid weather,
becoming one with the environment,
no longer fighting the heat
but sinking in
and finding pleasure in it.

 

Joy

Now that I am old
and live in the moment,
I take pleasure in the joy of others:

my wife singing
as she sews a scene
into the fabric of her quilted creations,
unencumbered
by self-consciousness.

Like my barely-walking son Nathan
speeding awkwardly toward
birds eating birdseed in the park.
An explosion of wings, startling,
then stopping, spinning around,
The surprised look on his face,
the sheer wonder of it.

Or my son Caleb at three
running into the bedroom
leaping up on the bed and shouting,
Oh, I can’t wait ‘til I’m four!

Learning how to take joy in
is like learning how to sing
to participate in a rhythm
outside myself.

 

Tranquility

Afterwards
we lie back
in the heat
of our bodies’
exertions, floating
still coupled
drifting
downward
for landing
on Tranquility Bay.

Audible Version of Red Mountain, Birmingham, Alabama, 1965 (and Kindle Study Guide)

by

Hip Pocket Press is pleased to announce the release of the Audible version of Managing Editor Charles Entrekin’s novel, Red Mountain, Birmingham, Alabama, 1965 and Paul Dolinsky’s accompanying Kindle Study Guide.   Remember to shop at AmazonSmile and dedicate your purchases to Berkeley Poets Workshop & Press. Each time you shop, Amazon will dedicate a percentage of any of your purchases to support the literary non-profit umbrella responsible for the publication of Sisyphus and Canary Literary Magazines.

“As narrator/author/philosopher/poet, Charles Entrekin revels in giving the reader, wonderful details—of landscapes, of homes of the time, and details about the various characters, which help to make the setting and period come alive for us.”—Paul Dolinsky, philosopher

“It’s an emotionally powerful indictment against the futility of being paralyzed by fear of life’s impermanence.”–Gene Berson, poet

“A[n] honest, gripping, poetic account of growing up in the South in the late 50’s/early 60’s” —Shaun, Amazon verified reader

 

We announce the release of Issue 6.3 Morality. The authors on these pages explored Morality — personal, societal, and environmental. This issue features poetry, essays, humor, memoir, philosophy, flash fiction, and art. There are pieces to open discussions about cultural divisiveness, technology’s effect on societal interaction, the climate crisis, grief and healing.

We appreciate your comments and readership and encourage you to hit the button at the top of Sisyphuslitmag.org to subscribe. As always, it’s free, we never share your information, and a subscriber can begin a discussion with an author who sparks your interest.

Thanks to all our readers, authors, and contributors. Sisyphus is now read in 122 countries and counting!

Submissions are open at Submittable for the next issue: “Design”.

 

Three Poems Appearing in The Louisville Review

by

The Louisville Review (Fleur-de-Lis Press) have released their Fall 2019 issue and it is really stellar. I commend editor and friend Sena Jeter Naslund, Managing Editor Ellyn Lichvar (who was also guest poetry editor for the issue) and all the guest editors and staff, including guest fiction editor Flora Schildknecht who’s short story “Bad Signs” appears in Sisyphus Literary Magazine. I am happy to be in the company of poets like Jeff Worley (I was particularly fond of “Christmas in Abilene, 1957”) and authors like Aimee Lehman, whose short story “The Things We Leave Behind” won the 2019 Writer’s Block Prize in Fiction, but was as finely detailed as a memoir.

The hyperlink to purchase the issue is embedded in the beautiful cover image (“Cloud Shadows Falling on Plains” by T. Cowles) above.

I want to thank the editors for including my work in this issue. The impetus for being included was sharing and reminiscing with my college compatriot, Sena, the feelings I have and the understanding of who I have become after these last seven decades or so.  My poems are below, but I encourage you to check out the whole issue.

 

On Going Blind

Alone, in a world of sensation,
sneakers on asphalt,
whisper of traffic on wet pavement,
birdsong,
a goldfinch trilling,
mist and sun on my face,
cold breeze under a soft March sky,
trees dripping, Spring
drizzle on my hands.

Oh, the ease of it, the comfort
of all this weather washing over me.
Travelling through weather while blind
is like navigating by the stars.

I walk past the Safeway grocery
feeling for obstacles,
cracks in the sidewalk,
with my red-tipped cane.
My blind stick finds steps,
three steps up into Starbucks.

A stranger I can almost see
opens the door to let me in
and warm air rushes against my face,
and there is laughter
and tangled conversations,
a confusion of voices rising and falling,
and faint piano music though speakers,
and two giggling children scamper
around my knees,
and I try not to lose my balance
as I step gingerly to the counter
and order a Grandé Latté:
one honey, no foam.

I hold up my iPhone, tell the barista
I can’t find the scanner
and she takes my hand,
guiding me to it.
Her soft electric touch
against my skin
is almost overwhelming,
shocking in its immediacy,
its tenderness.
A sudden intake of breath,
I want to cry,
I am so grateful.

 

April 1, 2019, Gratitude Poem

I find myself grateful
for the vision I have left,
small as it is;
to walk Camino Sobrante
transiting from Geppettos to Starbucks.

Grateful to see color again
while showering:
a washcloth
suddenly appearing before me
in fulgent yellow.

Grateful to taste the food
that sparkles on the tongue,
dancing highlights
of unfamiliar odors and spices,
like turmeric or cumin,
that translate into saliva,
and I can swallow it down
without coughing.

Grateful for the words
crawling about in my veins,
as I sit with a poem in my mind
and turn it over and over
until the words fit
like they are supposed to
and do not lose
their music or magic.

Grateful to visit with friends
and delight in conversations
in which the present disappears
and the exchange becomes
a whole world of ideas
that manage to march
across the palimpsest of our minds
into some kind of alignment
that leads to understanding.

Grateful to sit with family
one-on-one
amidst the orange trees
in the Sky Garden,
around the fire pit,
when the noise
of the distracting world
is not intruding on our sharing
with each other.

Grateful to lie beside my wife
lifted out over the horizon
of our pillows and sheets
and feel her body tremble
with anticipation,
with touching.

Grateful to discover
in a new-found friend,
a love of sharing the difference
between what is real and what is not,
surfing waves,
navigating tides
of the world wide web,
grasping beauty
in a comforting office
under the blessing
and watchful gaze
of a fragmented mask of Buddha,
and a Devonian fossil
from the age of fishes.

When all we have
is this fragile appreciation
of a willingness
to love and be loved,
when whatever we have
we hold between us,
as easy as walking down a street
in the untrammeled sunshine.

 

Acknowledging Parkinson’s

…[T]he limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.–Ludwig Wittgenstein

I used to ignore it,
a blinking red light I drove past
without stopping.

The tremor
was like a squirrel crossing the road,
indecisive,
running left, then right,

an ant
that had lost the scent,
no way to get back to the nest,
wandering aimlessly
across the unmapped countertop.

A rebellion was going on,
a soldier gone AWOL,
breaking ranks,
risking the whole,

a computer virus,
a threat to my identity
stealing my passwords,
making decisions
without me.

I try to delete it
but it comes back on its own.

In my lucid dreams,
I am unsure
who is in control.

A woman wearing bright red lipstick
offers a taste of something
dripping from her outstretched fingers.
I see her coming forward,
inviting,
but suddenly know
she is not real.
She stops,
fragmenting, shimmering,
disorganizing.

I stare but do not see her,
lost in the unrelenting
flow of sensations,
in the trembling
of the universe around her.

First Publication 2019 The Louisville Review

 

The Making of a Poet

by

Missoula Spring

                I have become
one of my own poems.
This morning the covered streets
opened black in melting snow.
                I was wrong.
Winter gone, a flower
opens in me, a song, words
crawl in my veins,           
a carnation of the brain,
a dogwood.

University of Montana, Missoula

 

Recently I received an email from someone preparing a book on the writing program at the University of Montana, Missoula. As an MFA graduate (1974), thinking about Missoula and my time there started me down a joyful path of reminiscence about my mentors and fellow writers – a coterie of flamboyance that is indicative of the time: a buffalo-robed musical poet, a rodeo poet, an heir-apparent poet. It was the time of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Gonzo journalism. Everything in that era was larger than life, none more than my mentor Richard Hugo. To know Hugo was to be invited into the storm that was his life.

I was a little older (32) than most of the graduate students because I had done a fair bit of living before I got there. I was already widowed and remarried with two small sons: Demian (9) and Caleb (3).

I had graduated from Birmingham Southern College (1964) with the full intention of going to graduate school for a doctorate in philosophy and becoming a college professor, but life got in the way. My academic career was sidelined by the suicide of my first wife. I started at NYU but dropped out after her first attempt. At Vanderbilt she succeeded. I moved home and took to my bed for weeks.

After emerging from my cocoon, I taught at institutions from Head Start to Stillman College, earning the ire of my Dixiecrat father. After a series of flings and fights at home, I had to get out of Birmingham. Go West, young man, my Philosophy professor told me. Finally I applied and was accepted for a Teaching Assistantship at UC-Berkeley. By the time I had made the cross-country journey in my red Corvair (unsafe at any speed) with my friends Lee Fesperman, Michael Hughes, Bob Valacovich and his girlfriend Pam, and my young son Demian, then-Governor Reagan had cut the budget and my post no longer existed. I secured employment in the burgeoning computer industry, and it was at Demian’s daycare that I met my second wife Maggie. Things were good for awhile. We had enough to get by. Along with others, I started a poetry magazine, the Berkeley Poets Cooperative.

During that time, Caleb was born. Bringing another son into the world was a big change in my life. I was working as a contractor, but I changed jobs when I lost my California State Employees contract. They decided that going with an individual was too risky. They said, “What if you get hit by a truck, what would we do?” I ended up working for a company called Programming Methods Incorporated. They made me the lead programmer for a NASA contract. This project was to track funding by Congress for NASA. That was an interesting project for lots of reasons. It was such a big project. We had to become extremely inventive because it required doing some things that IBM software wasn’t designed to do, like having Job Control Language (JCL) pass codes from one job to the next to indicate which jobs should next execute.  It was really big fun and very creative. At the same time, it was a long commute. I had to leave Berkeley at 6 am in order to get to Mountain View at 8 o’clock, and then I couldn’t leave until 6 pm, arriving home around 8:00.

Maggie was under stress, parenting both Caleb (toddler) and Demian (grade school). I was under stress and life was beginning to be difficult even though we had plenty of money. Something had to change. I had no more time. And when I did have time it wasn’t good time. It was stolen time. I was coming home, fighting with Maggie, helping her put the kids to bed, walking the dogs, then going down to my study and writing into the wee hours of the morning. I would get up in the morning and start over again.

I had things to work out about my past, and poetry seemed the best medium to work with. I wasn’t able to give it the attention it needed. I was becoming depressed and needed to take a break from the daily grind of painful memories, work, kids, commute – I knew a way out. I would become a graduate student and study how to be a poet who could invest my psychic energies in meaningful expression that would give me relief.

I had enough money put away in savings. I wanted to get a Teaching Assistantship and study poetry with Richard Hugo. I was interested in the Missoula Creative Writing program because I had read and admired work by Hugo in American Poetry Review. What attracted me most was the transparent honesty and passion and concerns to investigate his own motives and realities for living, his inner self and his emotional life and well-being.  He was the perfect poet for me to study under. His distinctions between the “public” poet and the “private” (Triggering Towns, 1979) make perfect sense to me, in retrospect, although I wouldn’t know that until later.

I wrote off to University of Montana to be a TA and they accepted me. I told Maggie, “We are going to Montana. I’m going to quit my job and become a graduate student again.”

Maggie cried all the way to Montana. She didn’t want to go, but I was feeling suicidal. I had to change directions. I asked one of the members of the Coop, Pat Dientsfrey, if she would take over the running of the Coop for me until I could come back to Berkeley. I loaded up the car with Demian, Caleb and Maggie, and drove to Montana for a one-year hiatus—graduate school.

During our year in Montana, Demian turned 10, Caleb turned 4, and I turned 33. It was a challenging year because I had to convince the administration to let me take five academic courses each semester. I only had enough money for one year. We got on food stamps, I got a TA salary, and I had my savings. We rented a place right off the Clarks Fork River, and I settled in as a Creative Writing grad student.

Clarks Fork River

That was a great year and, in retrospect, I wouldn’t change a thing about it. Richard Hugo was everything I’d hoped he’d be, and I met some other fabulous teachers there: Madeline DeFrees and Ed McClanahan. What I admired most about Richard Hugo was his willingness to become emotionally transparent in his poetry. He was willing to put into an art form a kind of nakedness. He was the most honest character I had ever run into. He did not shield himself from the world. I think he suffered a lot because of that, but it was an amazing thing to watch. There is a term I once heard about, I believe in a Psychology class, called “involucrum”– that envelope of space against which one resists intrusion. Hugo seemed not to have one. He seemed emotionally available. You could walk right in. He would invite you to his own storm of feelings.

If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions. — Richard Hugo 

 

I took poetry workshops and independent studies and studied poets like Rainier Maria Rilke with Hugo. He was a great big glorious open man. You couldn’t be in his presence without being affected by it. He cared – a lot – about language and poetry and place. He was intense and his workshops were intense. He poured himself into his students, as well as into every poem and every workshop lesson and every discussion. He invested himself — his time, energy, and attention  — in the way the poem worked or didn’t work. His attention to detail and intensity about whether a poem was working or not created tension in the room. Each poem was treated as either a magnificent success or an abject failure.  Anxiety in the room was palpable. Fellow classmate Clay Morgan recently reminded me about a time during a class on Rilke: “… when Dick was reading a Rilke poem and I [Clay] had my ‘seizure’ and Quinton Duval got on top of me and tried to stuff his wallet in my mouth to stop me from swallowing my tongue.  Oh, how we fought. Hugo said, ‘That’s the finest reaction to a poem I’ve ever seen.’”

Hugo On Campus

for Richard Hugo, in Montana

His forehead wrinkled in thought
like a massive scar, he seemed
a monument, and his civilization
asleep, working hard at discovering
what one wanted to work hard at,
and finding it hard work, and
                in a stage whisper, he hisses,
“Isn’t she a beauty?” about the coed
he had in bed one night
and couldn’t get it up, and
wouldn’t you just know it, still
impotent then. . .
                that self-mockery he used to dis-
guise himself from himself, and
making me blush, want to turn away, sane,
not hear the inner workings of his soul,
delicate as maidenhair, like a silky green fern
ripping at your skin, the sudden surprise and pain,
the rush of contact.

He could be intimidating to colleagues because he was so passionate, and he was deeply immersed in the writing of Triggering Town during my time at Missoula. He was casual, a product of the Northwest. Honesty and transparency were of vital importance, as were relationships and people and places. He was fascinated by names of places, the historical nature of a place, how Indian names stuck, the richness of the place-names that were reflected in language. He frequently disagreed with his New York editors, believing their academic perspective clouded the essence of what a poet should be working on: the honest evaluation of the poet’s real inner self as reflected by events and people and their language. He would get absolutely furious, freaking people out (students and instructors alike), going on rampages. His forehead blazoned when he got upset—angry or frustrated—a “v” like a heat flash, that would grow in intensity. It was a real sight to see. He was so sensitive, so passionate, so open, and he was unafraid to take you into his heart and share his innermost feelings – whether ecstatic or furious.  Madeline DeFrees once tried to calm him down and ended up leaving for the day. I didn’t really have any classes with Madeline DeFrees, but I do remember her mentioning, in discussion, that part of her morning ritual included daily recitations of poetry over breakfast with her partner. From memory.

In one class Hugo taught Rilke’s Duino Elegies. I remember particularly a class about angels (I don’t remember which elegy). He came into class, said he couldn’t make head nor tail of the poem. Class dismissed. He looked like he was having a nervous breakdown, talking to himself about how only academics from New York could understand the angels—too abstract. He was unlike anyone I had ever met, that sense of a man who has no defense against the world around him. This quality had a powerful effect on me.

Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong. — Richard Hugo

 

Hugo invited me into a full immersion in poems, a full commitment to what a poem was about and the craft that was required to give it its full raison d’etre.

“You should never give up on a poem,” Hugo said. “You should just keep working on it.  Even if it means working on the same poem over and over. The poem has its right to exist and you shouldn’t let your ego get in the way. Let the poem assert itself. It doesn’t matter if the reader knows what the poet is talking about, it only matters that the reader trusts that the poet knows what he is talking about. You should fully engage your imagination and invent what the poem needs to succeed.”

It was a wild time and everybody partied a lot, but I was in married student housing with a wife and two kids, taking a full course load of five classes, teaching a class, and immersing myself in the poetry workshops. Nonetheless, once in a while we would visit Eddie’s Club on the drinking side of Missoula. The walls were decorated with pictures of miners and cowboys and ranchers and patrons. The people who had already died had a star on their portraits.  There was often a fight –who knows what about – lovers and angry husbands. Poets James Crumley, William Kittredge, and Jim Welch held court. I was there the year Ken Kesey showed up and battled with Marge Piercy over macho vs. feminist issues (what fun that was!) During the same conference, I got to visit with Wendell Berry (who was close friends with Ed McClanahan) and participate in discussions on the nature of evil.

Photos on the walls of Eddie’s Club (now Charlie B’s)

 

By transferring my academic coursework from my graduate work in Philosophy, I was able to complete my degree in one year. My study and writing space in Montana was a room in the basement next to the furnace. It was a cemented-in crawl space with just enough room for a desk, light bulb, and my books. I would go down to my crawl space at night and work on my studies and my poetry. Montana gets pretty cold, and all the pipes were wrapped to avoid freezing. My writing space, near all the hot water pipes, was warm and completely isolated, which is what I needed for writing. I managed to get all of my academic work done and still have time left to work on my stories and poems. I was able to finish my MFA and publish my thesis. It became my first book, All Pieces of a Legacy, dedicated to Richard Hugo.

 

Masters

                I pick you out, a man to become,
yes and no together; you lead me
into the desert.  Your single words
are too thick for meaning.  I
can’t make them out.  The cactus
plants are all I understand.  And
the heat.
                In the moment I look around
you fall behind:  whose death
do I feel?  This is all a dream.
I wake, think of writing it down.
A man walks in thru my window
from Montana.  “Thirty white geese
are saved from extinction,” he says,
helps himself to my liquor.
We ignore the snow.
                I was just in Mexico. “I said,
did you feel something die?” He rages out
in the midst of a blizzard, with my liquor.
This is another dream.  The white petals
all sink to the ground in a row.

 

Fellow Graduate Students:

Clay Morgan grew up a free-range child in Idaho, where summers had one rule: Be home by dark. After college, he became a Forest Service smokejumper, parachuting to fight wildfires in the western US and Alaska. He married his college sweetheart, astronaut Barbara Radding. Their sons, Adam and Ryan, helped Morgan write his  young adult novel, The Boy Who Spoke Dog. He has also published several adult novels, including Aura and Santiago and the Drinking Party. Morgan has been awarded the NASA Public Service Medal, Idaho Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and was an Idaho Write- in-Residence. He teaches creative writing at Boise State University.

Milo Miles is Fresh Air’s (NPR) world-music and American-roots music critic. He is a former music editor of The Boston Phoenix. Miles is a contributing writer for Rolling Stone magazine, and he also writes about music for The Village Voice and The New York Times. Incidentally, he was the buffalo-robe wearing poet.

Quinton Duval was a revered professor of English at Solano Community College for 29 years, where he specialized in creative writing. On his retirement, the Humanities Division created the Quinton Duval Prize for Creative Writing, awarded annually to an SCC student writer. Quinton published three books of poems. He was also editor and publisher of Red Wing Press and active in the local poetry community. A man of elegance, great charm and wit, Quinton could make a song out of anything. He will be missed by all who knew him.

“Remember the music, the food, the dope, the cheap gas and junk cars, friendship, love, moonlight, firelight, cold water, geese, wine, poetry, liberty, happiness, when we were still too far from the end to see it turn to history.” Quinton Duval

“Thank you for the sea, for what the river discovers at its end, what waits for all of us to come calling.” Quinton Duval

Steve Flick, M.F.A., LCSW, was born in Kansas but raised in California. He attended San Francisco State University, San Jose S.U., Stanford, University of Montana, Humboldt State University, and Boise State University, where he received his Master’s in social work and then became a licensed clinical social worker. He has worked with sexually abused children, clients with psychiatric disorders, couples, families in crisis, adolescents, and the aged. He has written several books along the way: The Feeling Process: A Workbook for Men, Teller’s Last Brand (a novel); Speed Writing: A Workbook for College Composition; The C.O. (a novel); and Creative Writing for Counselors and Their Clients. He has won fellowships from the federal government, IV-E Grand for at risk kids, and the Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University. He has been a counselor for fifteen years in Boise, Idaho, most recently with All Seasons Mental Health, and lives there with his wife Loretta who is a silversmith.

 

Goodbye, is
                for Andy Grossbardt, 1979

a word that always finds
its own place in the language,

like friend, a dark seal aswim
in the same ocean, or
she, a ship, or, he,
who went down with it,

and isn’t it always this way,
random as sand by your seaside,

or filled with useless explanations,
like Friday morning traffic in Manhattan

after he leaped from the window
last Thursday.

 

Ed Harkness is the author of two full-length collections of poems, Saying the Necessary, 2000, and Beautiful Passing Lives, 2010, both from Pleasure Boat Studio press. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, where he studied with some of the best in poetry: Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees. His poems have appeared in print and online journals, including Fine Madness, Great River Review, The Humanist, The Louisville Review, Midwest Quarterly, Mudlark, Switched-On Gutenberg, and The Salt River Review. He lives with his wife, Linda, in Shoreline, Washington. More about Ed can be found online at Pleasure Boat Studio.

David Lambert (Editorial Director, Author) is the author of eleven published books. He has received numerous awards for magazine articles and short stories published in such places as Virtue, Moody, Story, Christian Parenting Today, Sweet Sixteen, Decision, Montana Magazine, Campus Life, Outreach, and many other periodicals. David has an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Montana. He has held a variety of positions in publishing, spending eighteen years as an acquiring editor at Zondervan, most of that time as executive editor for fiction, and more recently, three years as senior fiction editor at Howard Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. David and his wife Cindy work through their own company, Lambert Editorial. lambertedits@aol.com

Gary Thompson’s fifth book of poetry, One Thing After Another, a collection of six lyric sequences, was published by Turning Point in 2013, and recent poems have appeared in Arroyo Literary Review, December and Hubbub. He earned an MFA from the University of Montana, where he was a founding editor of CutBank, and taught in the creative writing program at CSU, Chico for nearly thirty years. In 2010, he edited Quinton Duval’s posthumous collection of poems, Like Hay, for Bear Star Press. He and his wife, Linda, live on San Juan Island, home port for their old trawler named Keats.

Paul Zarzyski is a cowboy poet who grew up in Hurley, Wisconsin. The recipient of the 2005 Montana Governor’s Arts Award for Literature, Paul Zarzyski received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in creative writing in the mid-1970s at the University of Montana, where he studied with Richard Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and John Haines, and where he later taught Hugo’s classes after his passing. In the same breath in which he first pursued his poetry passion, he discovered a second unexpected calling—bareback bronc riding—and competed on the amateur, ProRodeo, and Senior circuits into his early forties. Zarzyski has performed at the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV for the past 30 years, has toured Canada, Australia, Wales, England, and Russia, has recited at the National Book, Folk, and Storytelling Festivals, at The Kennedy Center Millennium Stage and the Library of Congress, and has appeared with the Reno Philharmonic Orchestra and the Spokane Symphony. He was also featured on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, aired from The Mother Lode Theater in BUTTE! The author of twelve books and chapbooks, Paul’s most recent collections were published by Bozeman’s Bangtail Press: Steering With My Knees: Zarzyski Lite in 2014 and, in 2011, his “triptych,” 51: 30 Poems, 20 Lyrics, 1 Self-Interview, the latter offering 120 pages of question-answer prose that traces his otherworldly journey from his 1950’s and ’60’s, rural, Polish-Italian, blue-collar childhood in Hurley, Wisconsin, to the poetic pages and stages of the American West.

 

Notable Neighbors

Dave Thomas, the Walking Poet of Missoula

Maggie Crumley (James), audited the class

 

The Art of Poetry

                Once more, buddy, your last ride
has left you behind and nothing can be done.
You want someone to come, a silver angel,
to seize your hair and lift you from the earth.
                But the weight of your two feet
presses against the ground.  No one comes
to save you.  It’s too cold to stand still
and too dark to run.
                Once more, buddy, you write
to save yourself.  Here’s the barn.
Here the horses are warm.  Here, on a dark
night, between towns, between meals,
simply the heat of other animals is enough.

 

All poems are copyright Charles Entrekin. “Art of Poetry,” “Hugo on Campus,” and “Masters” are dedicated to Richard Hugo.

New Years Day, 1983

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This poem just appeared in San Diego Poetry Annual 2018-2019 (out March 1, 2019). 

It has a really extensive list of poets. Here is the information from the publisher:

Both volumes of the 2018-19 San Diego Poetry Annual will be officially published simultaneously on March 1st.

The cover art, a view of the Oceanside Pier, comes from Michael James Slattery (luminous-views.com).  Choose Cover Photo from the menu to see the cover.

The volume of poems in English, containing 353 poems by 328 poets, runs 441 pages, and will sell for the retail price of $22.50 at Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Powells.com, and through bookstores.

A link to the SDPA PDF is here.

 

I think this pic is circa 1983…

 

My sister on the phone from Birmingham
with my mother who can no longer talk
but who listens and tries to be well,
and my dad who announces his retirement
like success,

and suddenly
I remember him from before,
before he and I stopped speaking for four years,
before my mother began her long descent into Parkinson’s,

before Birmingham Sunday tore me loose from my roots,
and all the deaths, and the dying,

my father, on my bicycle, on his way back
from his first day at work after the war,

this unworded man, his new laughter,
wishing me a happy new year.
And somehow it is,
and, in this moment,
we are everything
we set out to be.

Thanksgiving Thoughts 2018

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When I think of things to be grateful for, I think of immediate family—my amazing wife and kids and friends—engaging in life in the fullest. These elements are as essential to me as life itself. But sometimes we get distracted. The ancient Chinese curse is upon us, “May you live in interesting times.” These are interesting times.

California has again been plagued with drought-induced wildfires this year. Climate change and its unpredictable alteration of wind currents make the fires calamitous— thousands of people have lost their homes and potentially hundreds have lost their lives, maybe as many as a thousand. This has been a year of chasing President of the United States’ Donald J. Trump’s shiny new objects of deceit and glittering falsifications. This is the year that you can’t get away from the news because it is an ongoing onslaught of embarrassing events: the dismantling of the EPA and democratic institutions like the Justice Department, the firing of James Comey, the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, the election of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the appointment of Matt Whitaker, the dismantling of agreements and fundamental understandings of civilized values. What are “civilized values”? They begin with the expectation that people tell the truth (or at least feel guilty about lying), because there is a general goodwill agreement between human beings that is the basis of all our dealings with each other. There is a way to come together, to find common ground and to not kill each other over stupid misunderstandings. To paraphrase a Star Trek exchange, Spock muses that the human race is so violent, predatory, and murderous, that he can’t understand how the species survives. To which Kirk replies, “One day, we just decided—today I will not kill anyone. We take it one day at a time.”

What is there to be grateful for? Poetry, beautiful paintings, music, morning sunshine, rain, a basic willingness to let go and participate in what it means to be alive. Take a shower, let the water flow over your face and down your body, take a moment to appreciate and participate in the amazing feelings and immediacy that are available to you in this simple act. And then there is the fact that, in America, we have running water, we have sewer systems, we have electricity in our beautiful homes, we have the ability to take a meal together that we call Thanksgiving. And we have friends and family gathering together, sharing our bounty and our love.

Sierra Poetry Festival, April 27-28, 2018

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What an amazing weekend! I have to offer a big thank you to the Nevada County Arts Council for the organization of such a successful event. Coordinators Eliza Tudor and Julie Valin created stunning visuals and worked tirelessly marketing the literary gathering. On the days of the Festival, they seemed to be everywhere at once, creating an atmosphere of beauty and excitement and intimacy. Eliza held court and her lovely British accent and omnipotent calm presence made everyone feel at ease and welcome. Nevada City poet laureate Molly Fisk and author Judy Crowe supported the camaraderie and worked hard to make every aspect a success. There was a a wide, diverse range of readers and writers and storytellers, including NCAC Artists-in-Residence Ruth Chase, Michael Llewellyn, John Deaderick, and Nancy Schaeffer. A big thank you, also, to emcee Sands Hall, who moderated the event with grace and aplomb. And, as always, thank you to the community of Nevada County for tirelessly supporting the arts, poetry, and beauty.  It was a great pleasure to be one of the presenters.

Thanks also to the Sierra Poetry Festival Committee: JoAnn Marie, Brett Hall Jones, Sands Hall, Rachel Howard, Kim Culbertson, Julie Valin, Chris Olander, Karen Terrey, Judy Crowe, Kirsten Casey, Hannah Casey.

I would like to share a backstage anecdote:  Featured Festival reader, Los Angeles Poet Laureate Robin Coste Lewis, was amazing–eloquent and powerful. She also has a lifelong connection with local author Judy Crowe. Crowe’s daughter, Jean Marie, was Coste Lewis’s midwife about 15 years ago when the two were welcoming Coste Lewis’s child to the world. The planet gets smaller and smaller.

Gail and I shared the stage with and Molly and mother-and-daughter team Straight Out Scribes on Saturday and then conducted a well-attended workshop. We enjoyed working with everyone tremendously. Following is the information from the workshop handouts (as requested by the folks who couldn’t get their hands on one), a few poems, and a workshop review by fellow poet and good friend Gene Berson:

“I felt relief as you opened the workshop with Richard Hugo’s counsel not to give up on a poem, to stay with it until it revealed its personal transformative motive. I sensed the same relief in others throughout the room. You were returning poetry to us. After the spectacular and somewhat grand historical landscape explored by Robin Lewis, with all its linguistic virtuosity, although deeply felt and tenderly delivered, all the social and historical awareness she distilled and wove into her work,  your words restored poetry to us, people sitting in a room.

It became available to us again. The wonderful thing about poetry is that no matter how difficult it is, it is easily available, technically. Pick up a pen. You don’t need a special camera, funding, permission. I recall my great uncle who was a painter, who went to art school in Paris and lived to ninety-one, saying to me, ‘You’re lucky. All you need is a pencil and paper. I’ve got all these paints, canvases, frames, and easels to lug around. And all I’m after is light! Which doesn’t weigh anything!’ We were both amused by his oversimplification. But we both realized there was something to it: all you need is to see. That’s the hard part. Your workshop addressed that—and then how to make what we see visible.

When you spoke of the difficulty of poetry, you also conveyed a sense that it was possible. The difficulty of seeing things with the double vision required to write a poem about one thing but really about another, is it enforces a practice of seeing beyond appearance, literality. I suppose this is why Jesus always spoke in parables, avoiding the literal answers, returning the questions to the questioners.

The workshop didn’t ignore the personal psychological confrontations necessary to realize a poem, the honest courage it requires to clarify what a poem is about. It was a call to our strongest selves. And the workshop encouraged those in the room, as if to say, this struggle to see and say is worth it. Stay with it. See. Describe. Struggle to find what’s at stake— wonderfully restorative advice. The real work, as Gary Snyder said.

Another thing I liked was the reminder that being a poet is hard because it goes against the grain of our filters, as your handouts point out. They are defensive, they are learned and they are blinding and they are wrong. To see beyond the maya of the world threatens political and social order, threatens personal habits of going along, all of which struggle to deny change. This must be what D.H. Lawrence meant when he said that there is always an element of danger in any new utterance.

In the mid-fifties, when Ginsberg asked rhetorically in his poem ‘America’  What price bananas? the devastating consequences on Central American cultures by United Fruit exploitation was out in the open—in an almost comic tone. It is the wise tone of the awake fool. It takes a fool to do anything against the cynicism your handout insists must be blocked in order to create a poem.

There is a kind of purity required to write a poem, a baptism or absolution of sorts, that washes away habits of seeing. Then the poem confronts you with how cowardly you have been, how you have lied, how you have fitted in. The poem now exists, with its new perceptions. Old excuses won’t hold up in the face of it. But it comes with new possibilities of acting.

These are some of the things I carried away from the workshop. I talked later with a few people about it and they also took away similar incisive encouragement. I want to say, also, both of your poems were mentioned and appreciated by people in conversations I had. Gail’s ‘whatchamacallit’ poem [to read the poem, “Wind,” follow the hyperlink to the latest issue of Sisyphus] was a knockout hit and the ‘haystacking’ poem stood out.”

 

Some Thoughts on Poets and Poetry

Galway Kinnell held that it was the job of poets to bear witness. “To me,” he said, “poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”

Poetry comes from the Greek word, poiesis, and means a “making” or “creating.”  The poet is considered a maker or a creator: a creator of emotional realities.

What is a poet? A poet is a seeker, a seer, a witness. In a way, we poets are our own audience. From Birmingham to Berkeley to Burma we discover one another, a common ground established between the pages of our books or online presence, a sharing that goes beyond the language of understanding of one another. For me, poetry is closer to the sense of smell than it is to the art of discourse. It is more a way of feeling with someone than talking to someone; a way of reclaiming a shared inner sense of the world.

It works like this: poetry is a kind of thinking that gets where it wants to go only by heading off at a slant to avoid being literal.   The reason there is nothing as useless as yesterday’s news is that it has successfully fulfilled its function. The news, once told, is no longer news. For me, even as I am the poet writing my own poem, if I understand it too soon, I ruin it for myself. Poetry succeeds by putting on a mask in order to see itself, by glancing sidelong, by sneaking up on the subject matter, by surprise, by music, by sleight of hand, by illusion, by verbal magic!

For the writer as well as the reader, poetry operates through:

  • A state of blocked cynicism.
  • An unsystematic derangement of the senses.
  • A willingness to see parts as wholes.
  • An investment in pieces of things, or places, or people, raising that investment to the level of vision

 

The Art of Poetry
by Charles Entrekin

Once more, buddy, your last ride
has left you behind and nothing can be done.
You want someone to come, a silver angel,
to seize your hair and lift you from the earth.
But the weight of your two feet
presses against the ground.  No one comes
to save you.  It’s too cold to stand still
and too dark to run.
Once more, buddy, you write
to save yourself.  Here’s the barn.
Here the horses are warm.  Here, on a dark
night, between towns, between meals,
simply the heat of other animals is enough.

 

What’s at Stake in a Poem?

In every successful lyrical poem, there is something at stake that in some way is resolved by the end of the poem.  (Lyrical poetry has come to be a general term for poetry that is susceptible to being sung, or chanted, or read aloud.  In earliest times all poetry was, in essence, lyrical, i.e., accompanied by a lyre.)

What do I mean by “something at stake”?  I mean that the poet should maintain an honest narrative thread that is resolved somewhere in the poem.  There should occur a feeling of something completed by the end of the poem, of closure.

Not too long ago I read an article in an old issue of  the New Yorker (10/09/2006) by Milan Kundera, “What Is a Novelist?” in which, as he compares the novelist to the poet, he says that, according to the philosopher Hegel, the content of the lyric poem is the poet herself.  The poet gives voice to her inner world so that the reader can share the feelings, the states of mind, of the poet.  That seems right to me.

Poems are nothing if not a sharing of an internal reality, an inner world, and a possible new way of seeing it.  And this sharing is achieved through the skillful use of a learned craft that has been evolving for thousands of years, the craft of poetry: sound (lyric), rhyme, meter, symbol, simile, metaphor (dreams, as Robert Charles Wilson put it,  are metaphors gone feral), dramatic tension, line breaks, perhaps storyline.

For me, there is also something about this act of sharing that is, in part, a process of self- discovery.  It is a locating of  a “self that sees,”a witness. In my own poems there is an inner “self,” a muse, that rises up from the pool of my subconscious mind, from my leaf mold memory, that allows me to find the exact right sound or word I need to make the poem work.  And this discovery of a “self that sees” is a joy that fills and sustains me and remains one of the major reasons I write poetry.  It’s also one of the ways I am able to discover my inner self, my guiding self, my historical self.   I lose track of who I am when I get too far away from poetry.

I think Wallace Stevens was making a similar point in “The Idea of Order at Key West”:

She was the single artificer of the world
in which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
whatever self it had, became the self
that was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
as we beheld her striding there alone,knew that there never was a world for her
except the one she sang and, singing, made.

What is at stake in a poem? It’s the poet’s penetrating presentation of something being discovered, something being uncovered from the poet’s own emotional pool of intelligence: an emotional reality which, if the poem does its work, can be understood, shared, and felt.   What’s at stake in a poem?  A revelation rising out of the poet’s discovery of a reality uncovered by his “seeing self.”

 

Spring and Fall:
To a Young Child 
Gerard Manley Hopkins


Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

 

Missoula Spring
Charles Entrekin

I have become
one of my own poems.
This morning, the covered streets
opened black in melting snow.
I was wrong.
Winter gone, a flower
opens in me, a song, words
crawl in my veins,
a carnation of the brain,
a dogwood.

 

Blue Whales
Gail Entrekin

Blue whales are out there somewhere,
six thousand of the hundreds of thousands
that once roamed the planet’s seas.
Now separated from each other
by thousands of miles, they moan their loneliness
four octaves below middle C, so low, so slow,
we humans cannot even hear.  But on our ocean liners
and in our lighthouse kitchens, the cutlery jangles on the table,
the glass pane vibrates in its frame, and we know
something nearby is crying out in need.
Two thousand miles away, they can be heard
and answered, the loudest sound made by a living thing,
and we don’t know what it says, but only that,
speeded up ten times, what we hear is a long, blue,
unearthly note, a gurgle so deep
we slip down into our own lostness,
grateful that they are carrying for us
something bigger than we could hold.

 

Hay Stacker
Charles Entrekin

Too small to lift a pitch fork full from
below, I would climb up top and catch each throw,
mid-air, then guide and drop the load in one motion,
until the wagon would hold no more.
Then coming out of the dust from the back four acres
I’d be atop the hay, barely able to breathe in the heat,
yet lying back in the wet of my own sweat, almost complete.
And when we passed beneath the big pear tree
there in the middle of my grandfather’s pasture,
I knew how it would be:
I would stick out my hand and
take the pear straight out of the air,
without effort; it would come to me
because it belonged to me.
I hadn’t yet guessed how things could go wrong,
or how it might be to be left alone, or that one
could lose badly and go down at the end
like my mother, shaking and defeated.
I was, in that moment, simply there
watching my cousins and uncles in the distance, shimmering
in the hot air like mirages in black rubber boots,
with pitch forks in hand,
and when I took my first dusty bite,
it was like my first
sinking deep into a woman’s body,
almost overwhelming, and I could feel
the pear’s juice sinking into me
as I lay there in the hay-scented air, adrift
and becoming everything around me,
until suddenly I laughed out loud
without knowing
what the laughter was about
as it poured out of me
at the top of the tree-high stack
while the future waited,
and I was carried on the harvest to the barn.

 

Some Craft Concerns to be Applied after the Fact of the Poem

  1. Avoid linear sentence syntax. Shift frame of reference whenever possible. Try to create the illusion of seeing things from many angles at once, in a compressed time and space.
  2. Use alliteration for the music of the line, especially in short or flat lines.
  3. Run sentences or phrases over into next lines for surprise and to indicate speed and immediacy.
  4. Work images into the poem as though they were part of an apparently flat statement. Make the image work as a surprise:

the way time sits in your mouth
like cold sunshine and doors
wink open around you.

  1. Use concealed rhymes, rhyming end words in the middle of the next line, asynchronous rhymes. Use the anticipated and unexpected rhyme. Make it accountable to the ear, not a rhyme scheme.
  2. Never worry about what’s being said until after it’s been said. As Richard Hugo once said, “Those who worry about morality probably ought to.”

 

Sisyphus 5.1 The Change Issue

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Today we announce the release of Issue 5.1: Change: What is Normal and What is Not. The authors on these pages explored change—personal, societal, and environmental. This issue features poetry, essays, humor, memoir, philosophy, flash fiction, short story, and photography. There are pieces to open discussions about the March for Our Lives, patriotism and environmentalism, wilderness preservation, ecology, Stoic philosophy, and nihilism.

We appreciate your comments and readership and encourage you to hit the button at the top of Sisyphuslitmag.org to subscribe. As always, it’s free, we never share your information, and a subscriber can begin a discussion with an author who sparks your interest.

Thanks to all our readers, authors, and contributors. Sisyphus is now read in 87 countries and counting!

If you have an essay, poem, prose, or visual art, submissions are open at Submittable for Issue 5.2 Communication.