J. I. Kleinberg, THE WORD FOR STANDING ALONE IN A FIELD

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THE WORD FOR STANDING ALONE IN A FIELD, J. I. Kleinberg. Bottlecap Press, 2023, 32 pages, $10, https://bottlecap.press.

I have been a follower of J. I. (Judy) Kleinberg, Bellingham poet, artist, and blogger for a number of years. If you have not already subscribed to her near-daily blog The Poetry Department, you must do so immediately. You’ll find there all sorts of poetry-centric announcements—for readings both local and world-wide, for book and journal recommendations, for great quotes, and more.

Kleinberg posts her own artfully collaged, found poems at her personal blog, Chocolate Is a Verb, and this, too, I recommend.

What a delight to have not one but three collections of poetry by Kleinberg released to the wild in 2023. (I am breathlessly awaiting a full-length collection.)

In The Word for Standing Alone in a Field every poem brings to life a scarecrow—part Dorothy’s Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz; partly an actual scarecrow, hung in a corn field, immobile, abandoned; partly dark witness to the world. I want to write to “the world on fire.” We meet him, and get to know him through the voice of a girl, who seems to me beyond lonely. But, once she has her scarecrow, she becomes his friend and amanuensis, and through her we learn the scarecrow’s secrets, and through him we glimpse her secrets.

I don’t want to tell you too much. She holds the scarecrow when he weeps. She observes how his “shadow / stretches across the tasseled corn, / a long scarf pulled in hour by hour / until it’s hidden beneath the circle / of his hat” (“Shadow”), and how she finds him, and the crows, and more, as “We all kneel together // in the church of corn.” (“Alike”).

Any of these 28 poems would be a good choice to share. Some are imagist, some paint a larger picture: “Oh scarecrow, faded effigy, straw man, / what can you tell us…” (“Effigy”). Every one of them shot right through me.

Stranger

Indoors and in doorways,
the scarecrow is a stranger.

His roof is blue or gray or black,
fastened by stars. His carpet

the color of seasons—green,
gold, brown, green again—

but his feet in his boots
never touch down, suspended

in a wilted crucifixion,
arms flung, eyes turned

to the girl in the doorway.

—J. I. Kleinberg

Kleinberg is an award-winning poet and has published widely. To learn more about her, find her at Poets & Writers: https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/ji_kleinberg.

Or read the lovely overiew at her author page at Bottlecap Press: https://bottlecap.press/products/field?keyword=standing%20alone.

Such a treat!

Joseph Powell: THE SLOW SUBTRACTION: A.L.S.

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THE SLOW SUBTRACTION: A.L.S., Joseph Powell. MoonPath Press, P.O. Box 445, Tillamook, OR 27142, 2019, 80 pages, $16, paper, http://MoonPathPress.com.

The Slow Subtraction is a collection of love poems. Difficult content, yes, addressing the diminishment visited upon a beloved with a chronic illness, but love poems, no less.

We never think of coughing
as a blessing
until we can’t cough. (“Ironies”)

Practical realities, the minutiae of care-giving, but also the gift of close attention: “A studious winter light magnifies the afternoon” (“Yakima Canyon in Winter”). Or consider these lines:

the carnelian arrowhead found in the garden,
the painted floral plate she bought in Greece,
the cinnabar snuffbottle (“Ringing”)

According to his biographical note, Joseph Powell now lives on a small farm outside Ellensburg, gardening, fly-fishing, and scrounging, “hunting mushrooms and agates, picking berries,” after thirty years teaching in the English department at Central Washington University. Lucky students, to have had the grace of such attention to the trajectory of details, beauty and danger, in every life.

I wanted to give you “At Adrianne’s House on Patmos” (“The lemon trees curl inward / and the warmth is a soft net over us”), but I think it has to be this one:

Faith

She has passed through the heavy doors of grace.
Its spareness a kind of amplitude.
Small things wash away like bathwater.
Even the choking for air after a bad swallow
has lost its wild-eyed reflex
as if she’s stroking the leopard beside her
until breath comes back.

Her faith is in the rightness of demise,
in the mind’s transformative evolution,
the feel of the enlarged pulse
in the sway of events, the way pettiness
is candleflicker against the passing night,
the divinity of sleep on cool afternoons.

She has taken the sacrament of faith
like a host into her failing body.
It enlightens the spiral of fragments
in memory’s house—dust in small sunlit rooms.
Love is the old dog asleep at the door.

—Joseph Powell, The Slow Substractions: A.L.S.

I read (or reread) this book while sitting in the ER beside my husband’s bed (he is fine now). I was going to begin this post with something like “I don’t recommend…,” but it was actually the perfect setting.

Life is always going on all around us. The ten thousand things. When we are caught up in the drama of it, stopping to notice those details is a great help.

Joseph Powell has published 6 books of poetry. You can read more about him, and his poem “The Snake,” also from this book, at https://moonpathpress.com/JosephPowell.htm. See his poem (and hear him read) “Upside Down and Flying” at https://www.terrain.org/2019/poetry/joseph-powell/.

Event Cancelled

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Just a quick note to let you know my reading at Maplewood Presbyterian in Edmonds tomorrow (1.21.24) has been cancelled. Both my husband and I have the flu.

I’ll let you know when it is rescheduled.

Ann Spiers, RAIN VIOLENT

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RAIN VIOLENT, Ann Spiers (poet), Bolinas Frank (artist & calligrapher). Empty Bowl, 14172 Madrona Drive, Anacortes WA 98223, 2021, 78 pages, $16, paper, www.emptybowl.org.

“In Rain Violent, Ann Spiers unfurls the ravages of climate change,” so Deborah Bacharach begins her Compulsive Reader review of this arresting book. Along the way, Spiers unfurls her own life: a child’s knees, dead bees, Dakota, chickens, China.

In his Raven Chronicle review / interview / potpourri of and about this book, Jim Bodeen describes the 61 short poems in Rain Violent as “compulsive” and interpretive of not only weather but of our lives. “We’re in this weather together, reader.” He talks with both Spiers and Bolinas Frank, whose hand-painted weather symbols illustrate and accentuate each title (please skip over there and take a look at all he has to say).

Do take note of the cover designed by Tonya Namura.

My own weather today (Rain Continuous: three black dots arranged in a loose triangle):

Rain Continuous

I wear rain gear always.
Some of us go naked, cycling
through the market. Everyone wears
shower caps, crinkling over coiled hair.

—Ann Spiers

The poems are 4-lines each, not much room to play in, you would think—though every line bears Spiers’ signature sound-play, “Electronic hearts skitter. / Data, like confused fighter jets, scramble” (“Wind Out of the North”); “Snake skins, shunting in the wind like riffs / from a broken guitar” (“Thunder Heard”).

The prose introducing and following the poems also drew me in. I love Spier’s biographical note, a Vashon Island, Washington, poet I have reviewed before, but should know better. And we get this from the bio note on artist and calligrapher Bolinas Frank, suggesting the depth and range of the symbols, not to mention the themes packed into this slim book:

Bolinas sees the painting surface as a skin, and his creation emerges on the intelligent edge where art and life interface. Through his painting’s stacked messages, he asks what is underneath things, what is on the hidden side, what secrets lie underneath, and what information asserts itself….His work speaks about migration, domesticity, atrophy, exposing underlying flaws and defects that are carried, delivered, and exposed. (p. 77)

Rain Violent is a fast read, only 244 lines of poetry, after all. But the format and the content work together to slow you down. I found myself pondering each page. Despite the one-poem per page, and the artful titles and international weather symbols as rendered (beautifully, starkly) by Frank, there’s also a sense of the book as one long poem. When I finished I went back and read it again.

I often feel an urge to leave you with something gorgeous. Instead, this:

Clouds Dissolving

Faucets dry. Streams silent. Pools
fill with brush. I spit on my finger tips
to wash black oil from my child’s knees.
From the air drop dead birds.

—Ann Spiers

You can read more about both Spiers and Frank by following these links to their websites:

http://bofrank.com/

http://annspiers.com