Poetica Magazine

Over dinner one night two years ago, a friend revealed to me that the great love she had left her husband for was no more than a roommate now. For the last year, they had been pretending in front of family and friends to be a couple, but really they slept in separate bedrooms and rarely spoke. Now here I stood, on the downtown subway platform awaiting the number six train to take me to the man whose love I had been resisting for months. On the train, filled with fear and anticipation, nausea and love, I began my first sonnet.

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As a playwright, I have always favored formal poetry over free verse because the boundaries and rigidity of formal poetry mirror the structural limitations of plays. The word sonnet means “little song.” Here is my first little song about love, in the Elizabethan mode:

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Sonnet for a Heartsick Friend

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We met in P.J. Clarkes, a famous New York haunt,

And we slurped down oysters and drinks with rum,

You leaned forward, silencing the restaurant--

Not really—but I sensed bad news to come.

You told me the love you had was over,

You’d been living a lie, a sham, an act,

And oh, who the hell wants to be sober

When you’re talking of a heartbreak like that?

--Waiter here! bring a round, and make it strong—

You said, “Never again will I love or trust,

And I’ve cried myself empty way too long.

I’m done, I’m finished, and it’s been a bust.”

              But me, I vow to play loose with my heart.

              Here comes the hammer to smash it apart.

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Two years later, the love I was so worried about, has lasted. For two years, I have been deeply in love. Yet love has not made me happy. It has tormented me and bent my mind so that I live in fear of losing the beloved. I want to lock my heart, guard the precious. I decided to consult an expert on love - William Shakespeare. What could a man who’s been dead four hundred years know about love? A lot. After all, he wrote 154 love sonnets, not to mention some pretty great plays on the subject.

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I began to explore Shakespeare’s sonnets, to unlock their wisdom and find relief from my worry. Some of the sonnets have brought me great comfort; others have not. Even Shakespeare doesn’t know everything about love. Still, there was a lot of great beauty, if not enduring wisdom, in the poems. I decided, in an act of monumental foolishness, to write my own responses to each of the 154 sonnets.

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Shakespeare’s last two sonnets, 153 and 154, both deal with Greek myth. In these two linked sonnets, Cupid falls asleep in the woods, and a chaste nymph of the goddess Diana steals his torch and douses it in a cold fountain. The fountain is thereafter supposed to cure lovesickness when a lover bathes in it. But in Sonnet 154, the final sonnet in Shakespeare’s collection, the speaker finds that after bathing in the water, he is not cured of his passion, and he leaves us with this couplet:

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Came there for cure, and this by that I prove:

Love’s fire heats water; water cools not love.

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In other words, there is no hope for the hopelessly in love. Here is my response to Sonnets 153 and 154:

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So, Aphrodite, my lovely dear friend,

You need to shield me now from my own fears,

Because the beautiful man you did send

Penetrated my fortress with his…spear.

And the bitter rushes in with the sweet.

All of the hurts and the ghosts of the past

Are trying to deal me a bruising defeat,

Kicking me, yelling that love doesn’t last.

I want to be untouchable, hard, aloof,

Protected from heartbreak, so please make me

Solid, indestructible, bulletproof.

Too late—Cupid has already shot me.

              Faithful Hera will say love's never sure

              But often a flower grows from manure.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Robyn Burland, Guest Blogger

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Robyn Burland is a playwright and drama teacher living in New York. Her plays have been produced in New York and regional theatres around the country. She is chair of the drama department at Bronx Performance Conservatory, and artistic director of Skipping Stones, a theatre company for city teens that deals with contemporary issues. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

It's next to impossible to rid my mind of haunting Holocaust imagery. The fact that these images opened the gate to creative writing is a mixed blessing. There is this compulsion to pull from the library shelves anything that has to do with that tragic time in history. I have gone on to write poetry with more light-hearted themes, but in order to depart from that painful topic I found I needed a coda - an ending, a final note.

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After serving several years as a volunteer at the Red Cross Holocaust Tracing Center in Baltimore, I found my emotional in-box full to bursting. Either I had to give up my efforts or find an outlet for the horrific imagery indelibly imprinted on me from those soul-rending cases. And so I took pen in hand. Actually, it is the computer that has fostered any artistic expression I may have, since this wonderful enabler allows my creative voice, such as it is, to be heard. Without the computer to unscramble my thoughts and decipher my scribble, I would have remained mute.

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The result was several Holocaust themed poems circulated among my colleagues at the Center. “You should send them to Elie Wiesel,” they said. In the innocence of a first time writer who has yet to fear baring his soul in public, I did so. He wrote back telling me, "I was touched to read your words - I am not a poet, but I think your words are moving and will do much to make sure that those who were lost will not be forgotten..." Can you imagine, Elie Wiesel infers I am a poet?

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I wrote the following poem in an effort to find an answer to an unanswerable question.

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I BELIEVE

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Where was He when evil swept

Through villages where innocents slept,

Faithful to commandments kept,

Did David's shield protect them?

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Gott mit uns in another tongue

Damn them all, the old, the young

It's from the Jews our ills have sprung

Death for them is in ordnung.

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Useless were their tears to quench

The fire, as was their blood to drench

The Almighty's sacrificial bench.

The search for His existence in vain.

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If we are made in His image,

If mercy triumphs over rage,

If all is written on one's own page,

Was infinite wisdom forsaken?

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The millions marched to certain death,

Shouting His name with final breath,

Their ashes greening mother earth...

Where was G-d? Why omit the "o"?

                  Ani ma'amin,

                              And yet I omit the "o."

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The oft repeated remark, "anyone is a poet who thinks he's a poet," still gives me pause, as does finding my name among the others listed as poets in an anthology. I'd like to think I deserve the appellation as well, but I am still startled when a jumble of thoughts rattle around my brain in the early hours of the morning, then appears as if by magic on the clean white page later in the day in some semblance of order and meaning.

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Thank you for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Jerome Shapiro, Guest Blogger

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Jerome Shapiro writes from Naples, Florida and Baltimore. Another of his Holocaust-themed poems appears in the current issue of Poetica Magazine's Mizmor L'David Anthology,The Shoah - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor.

“The poet disappears behind his own voice, a voice which is his because it is the voice of language, the voice of no one and of all. Whatever name we give this voice - inspiration, the unconscious, chance, accident, revelation - it is always the voice of otherness.” Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire.

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I don't understand inspiration, but I know it is real. A consequence of relinquishing my understanding of this process is that it removed every ounce of arrogance. How can I be proud of something I had nothing to do with except to be available? This knowledge helps me to walk humbly and to review the end result as a miracle that I have had the privilege to participate in.

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After this, of course, the real work begins, but the muse is ever present.

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Inspiration is like being struck by lightning. Lightning cannot be controlled, and when it strikes, it strikes without warning, making the sensitive writer into an oblivious lightning rod walking in the rain during a roaring thunderstorm. When lightning strikes he knows it, where it came from he doesn't. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time and was willing to take a chance that his preternatural gift would manifest itself and that he would be given an opportunity to harness, to a degree, the power inherent in the creative pistons firing in his brain, similar to the movement of the muscles in his body. I don’t understand lightning or the lightning of inspiration.

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I have been writing since 1969, and I have often considered and questioned the origin of inspiration as it relates to creativity; in my case, how it relates particularly to writing poetry and other fiction. I can, to a degree, agree with Edison who said genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration because I believe most good writers are driven and they hone their craft with significant rewrites and revisions sometimes toiling endlessly to get it “just right.” I think this is a given, and I can attest to laboring to secure the right word, phrase or sentence.

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However, just as I do not believe there are “born losers,” I don't believe there are “born writers” or born “anything” other than human beings with unlimited potential.

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Writing is hard work and requires persistence, diligence, and a host of other positive attributes and, these attributes are part of the creative process. Yet I find myself more intrigued by inspiration, and where it comes from.

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Where do creative thoughts about a particular subject come from, those creative stimulants that can not necessarily be specifically identified, stimulants to our senses that later may become a work of art, or, in my case, a poem? I realize that a writer might see be so powerfully impacted by a particular event that he writes a poem about his experience, but when he puts his pen to paper he cannot necessarily identify the end of the thing, and just as the end of a thing may produce the beginning of a thing such as a poem, the whole, which has become the sum of its parts, remains largely an unknown.

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“A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry,” said Shelly. “The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness...and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.” - Percy Bysshe Shelley, Defence of Poetry

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Richard Ilnicki, Guest Blogger

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Richard Ilnicki is the author of six books of poetry, his latest of which, The Hatchetman, is currently in the library of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Library in Washington, D.C. He has written two unpublished novels as well, Mr. Monstriparity and The Bibliophile. An avid supporter, defender, lover and contributor to the state of Israel, the book deals almost exclusively with the Holocaust experience. Mr. Ilnicki lives and works in Tarpon Springs, Florida.

The English seminar I designed for the boarding school in which I teach, Strange Literature, has been attracting a steady flow of seniors. A “strange” title? Well, the syllabus offers no Sci-Fi, let alone Fantasy with its frequent adjunct Horror. What I intended was to teach selected books with a unique slant toward life and which had a unique writing style.

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I open the course with a pair of short story opposites. Raymond Carver offers a Minimalist style and a somber survivalist look at life. “In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the bedroom.” (Why Don’t You Dance?) On the other hand, John Updike is one of our most ornate fiction writers in the 21st century. “The woods at their distance across the frosted lawn were a Chinese screen in which an immense alphabet of twigs lay hushed; a black robe crusted with white braid standing of its own stiffness.” (Crow in the Woods) Both men are able to look deeply into character and motivation. If their plots seem truncated, their intent is to show life is like that, often unfinished and unexplained.

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One of my non-fiction choices is an autobiography by Stephen Kuusisto. The premise of this book, as Kuusisto states late in the plot development, is that he was a blind man for the first thirty-six years of his life who pretended to see so he could be accepted into “normal” society. His encounters are hair-raising. “One of the fellows lifts me to my feet, spins me around. He’s talking spitfire cartoon gibberish. ‘What the. . .how the. . .didn’t you. . .waddya BLIND?’ I have concrete in my hair and beard. It hangs from my shirt like pelts strung around a fur trapper. ‘Yessir.’ “ (Planet of the Blind).

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Again using short fiction, I conclude the course with a duet of foreign writers. Poland’s Isaac Singer mystifies while making the students guffaw. “I don’t think myself a fool. On the contrary. But that’s what folks call me. They gave me the name while I was still in school. I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny, and fool. The last name stuck.” (Gimpel the Fool) His shtetl characters are full of life, and the plot is often rambunctiously outlandish. Luis Borges brings the world of South America alive. Since he is the forerunner of Magic Realism, I try to choose stories that feature a more concrete rather than abstract premise. “With a gesture, he asked them to wait and turned his face to the wall, as if to resume his sleep. Did he do it to arouse the pity of those who killed him, or because it is less difficult to endure a frightful happening than to imagine it and endlessly await it.” (The Waiting)

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Some of my students have been greatly moved by these books. One student wrote a very emotional essay inspired by Planet of the Blind, because he could see parallels to his brother with muscular dystrophy. Another boy could relate to the brutality in the neighborhood that Carver writes about. Someone finally spoke for him. Still another student was made more environmentally aware by reading Lopez’s Desert Notes, then on his own River Notes. If I could put my finger on the specific area in which I was influenced by this unique literature, I would note that I write more freely and more associatively now, as in this poem:

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WAITING FOR THE WORD

Through the filth, degradation,

pain, an inmate of Auschwitz

waits for the right word;

surrounded by light and wine

and camaraderie

the poets speak of

jazz, existentialism,

humor late into the night.

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The victim waits and nods

waits and nods until

almost offhandedly

he hears the word Hope

and his ancient soul sleeps;

the poets not knowing

what they have contributed

to the world beyond.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Ray Greenblatt, Guest Blogger

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Ray Greenblatt’s poetry has appeared in America, International Poetry Review, Midwest Quarterly. His reviews have been published in Drexel Online Journal, English Journal, Joseph Conrad Today. His latest book Leavings of the Evening was published by Foothills Press.

Most of us have heard the phrases "time is of the essence", "timing is everything" and "patience is a virtue." As a writer, often dealing with deadlines and guidelines, I have heard these quite often. They sometimes sound contradictory, both telling me to wait and telling me to move. I have actually found that the concepts do, in fact, go together, it's simply in the way in which we choose to understand them.

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Time is a constant factor that we cannot stop, disturb or disrupt. However, I do believe we can operate out of "right" timing. There is something to be said for waiting - in fact in Isaiah we're told that if we do so, our strength will be renewed. I believe that learning to wait is a valuable lesson in developing humility. When we're humble-minded about our approach to life, things will come full view and become much clearer to us. I have found that in the circle of poets and artists I deal with, that being humble and waiting are great tools for creation. Some of my favorite and most meaningful written pieces have come from moments of waiting. I view my poems as life being born; therefore, it's safe to say the finished products are often labors of love.

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It's when I decided to put my poetry process into that perspective that it all made sense to me - wait but patiently. Many times I may feel frustrated that I can't write or compose something on the spot as my counterparts do. Or I may try and actually put something together on paper but when I read it back with my soul's eye it's clear something is missing. Since I’m influenced by many variables in my environment, my surrounding space is key to how productive my pen is. I prefer to soak up an environment, whether it's hearing another poet/artist, reading someone's work or simply observing the room. It's there that, through patience, I’m able to take in all that I need to feed the place within me that will eventually release the poetry.

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I am often motivated to write from this contact with other artists and connection to this nurturing world in which the voices not only rise up but also raise up. They uplift their psyches to new levels of inspiration, dreams, goals, peace, love and intelligence.

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Many of the poems I write serve to remind me why waiting is very important when seeking to express a story. Now keeping in mind that time waits for no one, we do however have to learn to patiently wait on our time. When I process this, the term "due time" comes to mind. This phrase has sort of an irony to it. On one hand we understand that time is not promised to us, yet when we're owed something that implies that something rightfully ours is on its way. So I close by saying this - continue to wait on what ever dreamed was promised in your heart. This does not mean we should stop moving forward, but it does mean to press forth with confident endurance in the face of times when you're dream doesn’t seem clear. It takes patience to move with trusted assurance. ~K'~

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, The Poetica Magazine Blog

Kiki Johnson, Guest Blogger

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Kiki Johnson is a poet originally from New York who now resides in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. She recites poetry at local open mics, works with aspiring young artists, and facilitates programs and workshops with the YMCA of South Hampton Roads, the City of Norfolk and the City of Suffolk. Her work has been submitted to Essence Magazine, to HBO, and to other local publications, and she anticipates publication of her first collection of poetry by year’s end. Her pen name is K'larity, chosen to reflect her purpose as a spoken word artist. For further info on how to contact her she can be found on MySpace at www.myspace.com/Klarity_517 and by email at sj2c517@gmail.com  - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Several years ago, I attended a creative writing class in my neighborhood. For years, I’d been writing poetry but except for some advice from dear friends, I’d never had a serious critique of my poems. Attending the creative writing class was a successful endeavor. The critiques my poems received from the teacher and my fellow students/writers made my writing riper, stronger, and significantly more succinct. However, over time, I noticed that our time in class was spent primarily on analyzing prose pieces.

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We read and write poetry because we have an intrinsic passion for words and their broad spectrum of meanings. Poetry writing is a creative process usually carried out in solitude, yet I believe that most poets yearn for some feedback, preferably in the form of constructive criticism. A childhood friend told me once that he stopped writing poetry because he didn't have an audience any longer.  Reading poetry to an audience could be in itself a powerful motivation to keep writing. This being said, how do you find an audience for your poetry and how do you maintain these readings on a regular basis? Perhaps by founding a poetry group, which I did when I established the Vaughan Poets’ Circle.

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Here is a plan you can adopt to establish your own local group:

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· Find a rent-free venue in which to conduct regular meetings - I live next to a public library. I emailed the Head Librarian of my city, introduced myself, and related my plan to found a poetry-writing group. I asked for a free room on a Saturday (I knew that most of the library programs are offered during weekdays. Therefore, the likelihood of getting a free room on the weekend was higher.) The Head Librarian was delighted to give me the opportunity to organize the program pro bono. The library was even willing to supply complimentary refreshments (and still does).

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· Name the group. Since my city’s public library sponsored the program, the group’s name had to include the city’s name.

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· Create a core group. Once your rent-free venue is set-up, call a few friends or acquaintances, tell them about the new group, and invite them to attend the first meeting. In my case, four of my fellow students from the creative writing class were thrilled to join the new group and have since been attending and participating in the monthly meetings.

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· Publicize the event/meeting in free outlets. In today’s cyber-culture, your local poets may belong to many web groups. Hence, advertising the meetings in national and international websites and forums could bring local poets to your meetings. Announce the meetings, at least in the beginning as the group is forming, on Craig’s List, poetry @ about.com, MeetUp.com, Outsider Writers and allpoetry.com. Winning Writers, a well-organized web resource for poets, offers an extensive list of poetry forums. Alternatively, send announcements to your local newspapers. They usually publish community events for free. Our library printed bookmarks and posters to advertise the new program which the members then brought to other libraries, community centers, coffee shops, and local bookstores.

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· Create an agenda for the meetings. Here is where your imagination can go free. Create guidelines for submissions – start with one to two poems for each member and change the guidelines according to attendance. Structure your time allotment so that the group starts and finishes on time. The Vaughan Poets’ Circle began meeting monthly for two hours. In the beginning, the time span seemed a bit lengthy. As a result, I contacted local published poets and invited them to read from their collections and conduct question & answer periods. As compensation, they were able to sell their books to the members. The readings became quite inspiring to the budding poets in the group. The atmosphere is relaxed, non-competitive, and supportive. Members share their doubts and successes. So far, the group has published a collective chapbook Waging Change: Vaughan Poets Engage in Politics (2007) and a bound anthology Earth to Moon (2009). Both were successfully launched in the community.

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The Vaughan Poets’ Circle has been holding its meetings regularly for the last five years. Its members have since published chapbooks and book-length collections, as well as contributed to national and international publications.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Dina Ripsman Eylon, Guest Blogger

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Author and publisher, Dina Ripsman Eylon has a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. For the past thirteen years, she has served as the publisher and editor-in-chief of Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal, a gender-related publication, which has engaged and promoted new feminist scholarship in Jewish Studies. Her book, Reincarnation in Jewish Mysticism and Gnosticism, was published by Edwin Mellen Press (2003). Eylon founded the Vaughan Poets’ Circle and serves as the Thornhill branch manager of the Ontario Poetry Society. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

I started out as a Hip Hop head listening to Biggie and KRS-One and Rakim and Group Home. I fell in love with the New York state of things and lyrics. It was something I could relate and respond to. Coincidently, a friend of my mother's lived in New York and she taught me about the Harlem Renaissance and Brooklyn and the Nuyorican Poet Movement. 

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In high school, I was one of the cool kids, but quiet. Most thought I was shy, but I was just reserved. I had a lot going on in my life and I was doing even more just because of the stigmas in my environment. Writing was my escape from that. I printed out my first novel and sold fifty copies. It was a romance novel based on the stories of my brothers and I. At the time writing was like I was having movies play out in my mind what I wanted to write.

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Poetry was an afterthought for me. I started off thinking that everything had to rhyme, but then I adapted to the words. It was amazing to write the hardest things and it would shed a tear. I could write about something horrible to go through and make it soft and running with emotions that it possessed and provoked at the same time.

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Poetry is an elemental blend of so many different things. I write from every angle because there are so many sides to life that we mistake and neglect. I write on different subjects and combine them in topics that might not fit because sometimes it doesn’t hurt to try something different, like sweet and sour or hot and cold. I write things because I know we feel different things and it is worth doing.

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Ready

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these wings,

princed in artistry,

may fall and rise

more now,

these webbed tentacles

will grab air

as if it is solid

and somehow solidify

the fact that dreams

do not fly away

like this,

these annexations

will tilt in a hemisphere

on an atmosphere so stratospheric,

it will be the impeachment

from the reality of normalcy

that the exacerbation and exasperation

will pool off the wing tips

and dovingly,

this body will become

the angel it prey as,

and these wings will go

to a different rhapsody

to be deceitfully docile

within the fruitation

of idle inspiration

being falsified by the sweet glamour

the sun makes the new pond look or love,

still, these wings

will fly outstretched

to eternity

because this is the feeling,

this is ready

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I write now from a place of understanding and curiosity. Losing my mother made me want to know what else I may be missing not only from the world, but myself. I write to challenge others and myself. I write to keep the bar interesting. It’s hard to identify where and why people write nowadays because it’s the same thing over and over. I write to exploit and change that.

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I love prospective writing and I use that in not only my poetry but in my novels and articles as well. We’ve lost our reality in fantasies. That is all we’re interested in now, things we are not used to and things we want because we don’t have. I write reality novels because I love the simple things in life. Something simple can also be the most complex thing in life. It’s exhilarating at times and very special. I write to tap into those moments because it’s relatable.

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So, although I have my mother to thank for my writing, for giving me the tools to be who I wanted to be, from books to the encyclopedias people sold door to door, I know that from the first, writing was familiar to me. No moment is ever dull. I would love to call it my job or passion or hobby, but it’s so much more than that. Writing is who I am and I write because of that. It’s my life.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, The Poetica Magazine Blog

Balik Whack, Guest Blogger

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Balik Whack is the creator of "The Vulgarity Report" and is focusing on a company called "The Starworks Company" to help develop writing programs for underprivileged children. He is a columnist for UNIverse.com and working on reprinting his first book of poetry, “Likage” as well as two more books of poetry, “Deconomics” and “Star Conversations.” He resides in Norfolk, Virginia where he is active in poetry open mics, and is a member of Java Poetry Club, Hampton Roads Writers and Virginia Beach Writers. He can be found on Facebook or can be emailed at decskills@gmail.com  - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

The dream came to me in the early morning hours while I was sleeping beside my husband in a beachfront condo in Florida. Our teenaged daughter was asleep down the hall. Our view faced east, across the causeway, where we could see the sun rising over the water. At first, on waking, the dream held me in such a spell that I started from the pillow and stared up at the shining white curtains that were drawn across the sliding glass door to the balcony, illuminated from behind by morning sunlight, and I wasn’t sure where I was. I gazed down at my arm, tan against the white sheet, then at the sleeping face of my husband, and peered around the room, at the wall, the dresser, the picture of a heron, until reality came flooding back.

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I jotted down some words to remind me of the dream, and I went out on the beach to experience the lively morning, raucous with the cries of birds, the murmuring tide, and rustling breezes. The light was brilliant, the air heavy with moisture, the sparkling sands strewn with treasures of shells and sea mysteries. In the beauty of the morning, I forgot about my dream. It was a kernel, a seed, in the back of my mind. It wasn’t until later, when my husband and daughter left to join other relatives, and I remained alone in the quiet condo, with the door behind me shut and the door to the balcony open, so I could hear the sounds of people on the beach below me, that I began to think about my dream and ponder its meaning. It seemed to me that I had been a visitor in the night garden of my muse. My poem, Blessing XIX (“In my dream I was standing...”) is about inspiration, that elusive subject so beloved of artists.

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BLESSING XIX

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In my dream I was standing

in the courtyard of a villa

built on a hillside

in a tropical country.

The soil was the color of ochre.

From it grew variety

upon variety of trees and bushes

whose branches and leaves

seemed carved of metal,

gray trunks amid dark,

glittering greens and golds.

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And here and there a red flower or white.

I could apprehend only the details,

not the mysterious whole.

I breathed in the scents of earth

and flowers, water and decay,

listening to the parrots in the trees,

the shrill insects.

The equatorial night fell suddenly,

and in the fragrant darkness

a woman seemed to float toward me

from across the courtyard.

I couldn’t see her clearly,

only shadowed features,

round face, upturned nose,

small, sturdy, delicate.

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She extended her hands to me

they shone so white

I took them both in mine.

Their touch impossibly soft

filled me with rapture

I wanted never to let go.

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I wasn’t sure who she was,

a woman from the present or past.

Her features were vaguely familiar.

Had I dreamed myself a visitor

into her life?

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I was confused and afraid.

Had I sought this attachment?

I didn’t know what it meant

but when I tried to deny it,

I felt I was killing something.

Opposed by my doubt, she vanished.

I woke empty-handed,

with a vision and memory

that wasn’t really a memory,

longing for such a touch

to caress my mind and free my thought,

bringing into expression

the frail idea in danger of perishing,

the flight of the mind

that moves without movement

to the stillness that is not death,

from life to the fullness of life.

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Art begins in desire. The sculptor desires to make the sculpture; the composer, the music; the poet, the poem. Without the will to create, there will be no creation. From where does creativity come? Perhaps it is a shadow possibility that is always present, though mostly unseen, because it goes unnoticed, and, unnoticed, it is not used. In order to recognize creativity, to develop it and make it into some thing, one must allow the space for it to come into being and to grow. The space begins from within, a kind of inward attention, almost as if one were fine-tuning one’s mental listening to hear what speaks back, in order to be able to select the raw materials that will allow one to realize one’s vision. For a writer, these are ideas and metaphors, themes and images, characters and story, the music of language.

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And who was the mysterious woman who appeared as my muse? I have my suspicions.

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Anne Whitehouse’s books include the poetry collections, BLESSINGS AND

CURSES and THE SURVEYOR’S HAND. Her chapbook BEAR IN MIND is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2010. She is the author of the novel FALL LOVE, now available as a free e-book from Amazon Kindle as well as Feedbooks and Smashwords. She is featured in the Editions Bibliotekos blog writing in connection with her anthology PAIN and MEMORY and her April 22, 2010 reading at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Please visit her website at http://annewhitehouse.com. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

In the decades since the Holocaust, a “children of survivors” literature has grown up. The phenomenon is worldwide. From my days as a book reviewer, the following titles come immediately to mind: See Under: Love by David Grossman (Israel), Maus I and Maus II by Art Spiegelman (United States), What God Wants by Lily Brett (Australia), and Nightfather by Carl Friedman (Holland). Different as these books all are from one another—and each is wonderful in its own way—what they have in common is the child’s struggle to come to grips with the parent’s unspeakable legacy.

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Inevitably, the iniquities visited upon the parents return to haunt the children. The ways in which this happens are as varied as the individuals themselves. Even when the children know very little of their parents’ ordeals, they cannot but be affected.

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My poem Curse VII (“Now in her eighties...”) is about one such mother-daughter dynamic. In this case the mother’s life was saved by her inclusion in the Kindertransport. The poem was inspired by a Yom Ha-Shoah program at my synagogue. Erika, the survivor, told her story to a group of assembled Hebrew school parents and children that included her own grandchildren as well as her daughter. Erika’s personal journey to share her story took nearly 70 years—a Biblical lifetime. Until she began to speak out publicly, her own daughter was ignorant of much of her mother’s history.

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For me, the cement that holds the poem together is the tension between what parents know and what they choose to tell their children—in this case, what Erika’s parents knew or suspected and did not tell her, and what Erika knew and did not tell her own children.

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When someone like Erika, who has suffered so greatly, chooses to break her silence, it is important to pay attention. I tried to pay attention, and the poem seemed to write itself. I sent the poem to Erika. “I’m glad to know that at least one person was listening to me,” she said.

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Curse VII

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Now in her eighties,

Erika sits in a chair in a circle of chairs

to tell us her story for Yom HaShoah.

“During the Second World War,

the British took in ten thousand children

from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.

I was one of them, sixteen years old in 1938.

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“I was scared, lonely, unhappy.

When the blitzkrieg started,

the bombs fell indiscriminately all over London.

Then I felt better;

I had wanted to be like everyone else,

and now I was.

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“I never dreamed my parents were murdered.

I didn’t learn until after the war.

I was completely unprepared.

The way I felt – it’s more than anger,

it’s the deepest despair.

I lost my faith in God.

I’d made a bargain—

I’ll get through all this,

and You’ll reunite my family.

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“The bargain was one-sided.

When I found out,

it was Yom Kippur, 1945.

I went to a non-kosher restaurant.

The meal I ate stuck in my throat,

but I wanted to make my point.

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“After Chamberlain and Munich,

I remember my father saying,

‘It’s a good thing there’s no war.

If there’s a war, they’ll kill the Jews.’

My parents might have known

they were saying goodbye for good

at the dock in Hamburg in 1938.

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“I was the youngest

and they considered me useless.

All my efforts were for them.

I wanted to show them what I’d accomplished.

In some ways I’ve never gotten over it.

I think of what they did for me.”

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Erika’s daughter Kim says,

“My mother was P.T.A. President

and led the Girl Scout troop.

She never talked about herself,

but I knew she was different.

When a friend said,

‘Your mom has an accent,’

I replied, ‘She does?’

my voice rising in a question,

knowing and not knowing.”

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Anne Whitehouse, Guest Blogger

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Anne Whitehouse’s books include the poetry collections, BLESSINGS AND

CURSES and THE SURVEYOR’S HAND. Her chapbook BEAR IN MIND is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2010. She is the author of the novel FALL LOVE, now available as a free e-book from Amazon Kindle as well as Feedbooks and Smashwords. Please visit her website at http://annewhitehouse.com  - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

When we left America for Israel 38 years ago, my three sons were far from thrilled with the move, to put it mildly.

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Try to look at it as an adventure," was my standard reply during that first year when the complaints were constant, "and besides, think of what an interesting autobiography you can write some day," I'd add dismissively.

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Almost four decades later, my kids have yet to write, while I, on the other hand, find that the displacement from a familiar culture and the adjustment to a strange new one propel much of my writing. I see America through the eyes of an Israeli, and Israel through the eyes of an American. On a good day, I call it perspective. On a bad day, alienation. No matter how I look at it, I will always be between two worlds.

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In my latest poetry collection, Laissez-Passer, there is a section entitled, "Back to the USA". The opening poem reflects my ambivalence:

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Oh America I loved you,

Love you still but I can't stay.

Gone too long and seen too much

To fit into the USA.

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Other poems in the section echo the commercial chatter that assaults my (foreign) ears: Small medium or large morning? Extra milk or sugar morning? (from Morning USA) or Toys 'R Us ,'Tis of Thee Just Do It! Land of Liberty (from America the Beautiful).

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Would I have been as sensitive to this commercial bombardment had I remained in America? I doubt it. Do I think Israel rises above this banal banter? Of course not. But from my perspective, with a foot in both worlds, I am intensely aware of the creeping Americanization of Israel and of what we in Israel are losing in the bargain.

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As an occasional visitor to the USA it's not only the commercialization of the language that catches my attention. It's the language itself. Are Americans jolted by the pervasiveness of 'awesome' or the disappearance of ' whom', I wonder? In the English I spoke when I left America in 1972, for example, we didn't 'grow' companies, we developed them. When I read TIME magazine or other foreign papers, I regularly find words or expression that I don't understand. What does that mean for my writing? Will I lose touch with my American audience?

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But absence and distance also benefit my writing. As I 'zoom out' from the American comfort zone and look at US society from my Israeli vantage point, I see clearly the optimism and the naïveté of Americans; the "yes we can" which is a new phrase for the prevailing American attitude that the world can be changed for the better, that problems always have solutions. (Although, admittedly this bright optimism has been tarnished of late) .

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I am no longer convinced. After four decades of living in a war zone, fed on promises of peace and swallowing endless disappointments, I have become a skeptic; sometimes determined, sometimes in despair, always in turmoil, and my writing shows it.

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Walls

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‘We’ll build a wall’

they say.

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‘They’ being those who know.

The generals

who first declared

we’d have to live together

side by side,

and trust the others

to behave like us.

Or like we’d like to be, that is.

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And now ‘They’ say

it’s better to build walls

that separate

and keep us out of range

of rage unbridled

and the lust for blood

set free.

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But no one listens now

because we’ve learned

that walls cannot contain

the fury

any more than words can

realize

the dream.*

..     .

Had I stayed in America, would I have written these lines? No way.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Ricky Rapoport Friesem, Guest Blogger

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Ricky Rapoport Friesem is a poet and documentary filmmaker. She has  written two cook books: Fruits of the Earth (Adama Books, 1985) and Joy of Israel (Steimatzky, 1976). In 2007, her first poetry collection, Parentheses, was awarded First Prize in Writer's Digest 2007 International Self-Published Book Awards . Her 2nd collection, Laissez-Passer was published in October, 2009. Visit her website. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

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     * First published in Moment, April 2003, subsequently included in Parentheses,

       Kipod Press 2006