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After Petrarch
In 2007 the Tupelo Press “Poetry Project” was established to provide poets and creative writing teachers with engaging, challenging prompts or provocations for writing new poems. Between September 1 and October 15, 2009, poets were invited to send in poems for the theme “After Petrach.” Writers were urged to use any style they chose, including traditional forms or wide-open experimental modes (or some combination).
Each poem submitted for this round of the Poetry Project was expected to use as its title or first line one of the following phrases from Francesco Petrarca (1304—1374), known in English as Petrarch, whose sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyric poetry:
And I saw weeping those two lovely lights that have a thousand times provoked the sun to envy. (Petrarch 156)
I swim a sea that has no shore or bottom. (Petrarch 212)
Once I accused myself, now I excuse, in fact I rate myself quite highly now. (Petrarch 296)
This is the final day of years of sweetness. (Petrarch 314)
If you got free by any strange behavior . . . (Petrarch 64)
Quoted phrases are from David Young’s translation, The Poetry of Petrarch (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2004).
The editor for this round of Poetry Project prompts has been Nancy Naomi Carlson, whose poetry chapbook Complications of the Heart won the 2002 Robert Phillips Prize from Texas Review Press, and whose book of poems Kings Highway won the 1997 Writer’s Publishing House competition. Nancy teaches at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and she is the editor and translator (from the original French) of Stone Lyre: Poems of René Char, which will be released by Tupelo Press in early winter 2010.
The poets selected for this round of the Poetry Project are:
And I saw weeping those two lovely lights that have a thousand times provoked the sun to envy I swim a sea that has no shore or bottom If you got free by any strange behavior This is the final day of years of sweetness- Boyd W. Benson
- Trina Burke
- Michelle Gillett
- Maya Smith Janson
- Charlotte Mandel
- Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
- Rita Mae Reese
- Amy Schrader
The winning poems can be read below.
And I saw weeping
Those two lovely lights
That have a thousand times
Provoked the sun to envy
The tender admiration
Bestowed upon them
By mariners and voyagers
Even as the ship fought in protest
Of the lifeboats bruising her hull
The lights drew me over the sea
That shone in the constant
Gaze of the northern light
That pointed in the blinking
Of the southern eye
Even as the rain fell
Onto the face of the captain
Who prayed on his knees
Gripped the splintered bulwark
While sailors slipped
With their broadaxes
Tangled in the ropes
The rigging trilled
Like a chorale of mourners
And those two lights before me
Veiled and unveiled
By the wet pulse of sorrow
Summoned a remembrance
Of an even greater passion
Ren Powell is a writer and teacher living and working in Norway. She is the author of three collections of poetry and eleven books of translations. She has received grants as a poet and playwright, and her work has been purchased by the Norwegian Arts Council. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Lancaster University in England.
I have long thought the universe alive, all forms equal:
cup, cloud, bird, tree, a child’s ball rolling down a hillside
in Kentucky or Japan, the stars in mimic motion;
here now at heart-center, center heart, dream machine
of mundi spirit, spiritus mundi, call and break of passing
fading, crashing, plash on purpled sand and broken stone
and back again; witness how the silence comes alive,
what never was was only silence in a blind dumb deathlike
absence, abiding in the earth’s deep pit of bone and blood
of beast that beats in steadfast rhythm; change me, change me,
cruel crustacean rock and weed, pretend to know and render
what my soul does to the sea, as if the earth itself were bathed
in fine sheer gleaming sheen of animated matter making
whitefoam whiter in the spitting out of open pockets under
undercurrent urge and urge of ceaseless silent song.
* Previously published as “Montauk Journal” in Pat Falk’s poetry collection Crazy Jane, published by Plain View Press, 2007. Used with permission.
Pat Falk is a Professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York where she teaches writing, literature, and women’s studies. She is the author of two collections of poetry: In the Shape of a Woman and Crazy Jane, as well as the literary memoir It Happens As We Speak. She is also the editor of the anthology Sightings: Poems on Discovery. Pat has received several awards and her poetry, essays, reviews, and memoir have appeared in regional and international publications including The New York Times Book Review, Thirteenth Moon, The Mickle Street Review, and Women Artists News. Visit Pat’s website at www.patfalk.net
I swim a sea that has no shore or bottom.
I fly to the gritty rings
of Saturn — at three million miles per minute —
and arrive in the drivetime
from Boston to New York, or to the edge
of the universe in fifty-five billion years.
I’m looking for an end to loneliness.
On my childhood farm, a looming
Cecil B. DeMille pulled out all the stops,
and pricks of light floated as if a slow hydraulic
lift stationed them above the earth — a screen
of stop-time midges blinking horizon
to horizon. Human scale.
In city streets the Milky Way has long since
dissolved, and stars once called eterne
are, from my window, three or four.
After midnight the world is a painted set
and the city hum is still. But out there,
above the Pru Tower and the Citgo sign
and beyond the docks and bay,
a voracious vacuity always waits.
Jacquelyn Malone's work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Sou’wester, Cimarron Review, and Poetry Northwest, as well as on the website Poetry Daily. She has been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant in poetry. Jacquelyn holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.
Her consciousness emerged to green streaming through water, illuminating swimming sand. The light was beautiful. She raised her eyes from the brown to the green, to the path of light shining from above. She could look only at the light from below to above. Pressure from all around increased especially from within. Suddenly she was rushed, raised through the lane, spitting, coughing. Then running to the beach to the others who did not notice she had something left to say.
Su Smallen is the author of Weight of Light (Laurel Poetry Collective, 2004), which was nominated for the Pushcart Press Editor’s Book Award. Her many honors include the Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, judged by Elizabeth Alexander, as well as grants from the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council. Her poems and essays have appeared in Bellingham Review, Bloom, Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies, Midway Journal, The Normal School, Packingtown Review, Saint Paul Almanac, Smartish Pace, three candles, Water~Stone Review, and several anthologies.
Like straddling a long-dead maple,
belly encased in moss matted beetle rot
supple crumblings, surrender to the forest.
Like asking this tree whether I was dying too?
It took half a sun¹s arc for it to answer‹
plenty of time for balance beam,
spine-to-spine realignment,
nap, pick and flick bark chips with impatience.
Like putting my ear to the trunk and
hearing the wind composing the de-composing,
the wind play the hollow like a wet reeded clarinet,
hear the crack of gravity as my body on its body
pressed into an opening earth.
Like certainty in hearing from the tree:
telling me, of course you are dying,
but not so quickly my dear.
Dying takes a very long time.
Trees die from the center;
a hollow tree is very much alive.
You are hollowing out.
And hollow is awfully close to holy.
Markie Babbott is a psychologist who lives with her partner and two children in Massachusetts. Her chapbook,Sus Scrofa, won the 2008 Poets Corner Press competition. Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Perigee: Publication for the Arts, Literary Mama, Women.Period (Spinsters Ink, 2008), and Poets Against the War (Selected for “Poem of the Day, 5/03”). With Julie Akeret, she produced a “bra-cumentary” entitled My First Bra, which is available through Filmmakers Library.
If you got free by any strange behavior,
stranger than what they put you in there for,
lurk arch and cunning under maple trees
when cones of searchlights penetrate the groves.
When they have passed upwind of you, take care
to cross and recross as you take the stream’s
easy meander through the valley’s floor.
They will have circled back by now, however,
so when you hear the baying of the dogs
(you will think baying, will imagine hounds),
don’t lag, because they’ve found your trail again,
but also know that distances are tricky,
and topographical extremities
of mind will render sound much closer than
it is, and if you think that you’re made strange
by any free behavior, let them come.
Paul Bone has published poems in The Evansville Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Cimarron Review, The Cream City Review, Raintown Review, Black Dirt, and Quarterly West. His manuscript Momentary Vision of the Assistant Meteorologist won the 2004 Uccelli Chapbook Contest. He is the founding co-editor of Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry and he teaches writing at the University of Evansville in Evansville, Indiana.
The Amalfi Coast, 1971
but you’re a perfect bride, mother, nodding, understanding
none of the warning signs—pericolo, caduta massi—the flimsy
FIAT gunning through mist and potholes and platitudes.
My not-yet father’s hand chokeholds the clutch, and an empty
bottle of Blue Nun taps against your bare feet, the toenails tinted
honeymoon-peach, sweet as the ten-barrel contract of kisses
his nonna and zia pelted your cheeks with in the village
where men binged at the table and women stood on-call,
like butlers in British films. The table where a six-year-old
boy whimpered when the Don boxed his ears for swiping
an olive, shook like the brown rabbit before its neck was snapped
the morning of the wedding. And you cried, remembering
the kitsch chip & dip set, still wrapped in marigold tissue paper,
on the floor of the Boston apartment, where you were expecting
an empress’s Triumph, something with doves and chariots,
not the fleur-de-lis stitch of the tablecloth his mother handed
you in the clammy room before the vows, that slack second
of levitation—staring out monastic window at the sun-stung
path in the piazza, the one meant for girls who weren’t virgins.
Daughter of an ex-POW, daughter of scuffed saddle shoes
and step dancing, so many regrettable things—the first time you
saw The Three Faces of Eve, you knew you could be anyone’s wife.
It’s 3:15 when you board the ferry for Capri. Napoli,
like a sewer, glows lovelier as it disappears. On deck, he drinks
a gimlet and you’re too shy to say grazie when the bartender
hands you a limóncello. The slow scorch stays with you all the way
to the beach where your husband snores under an umbrellone
and you swim way out, down into the Ionian blue. Through
your mask, the underside of a dingy appears hairy green,
barnacles blossoming along the mooring, the hull shadowing
everything an orphic dark. You return to the surface with gifts—
sea glass gleaming like the lost lures of an Emperor’s palace.
So common here, he’ll say later. For now, you clutch it like treasure
and fall asleep on the black-sand beach to dream of urns
emptying into the sea, all those ancient bones dissolving
while you work on your tan. You dream of his mother holding
court in her housedress in some buried Pompeii brothel,
the walls decked with 200 versions of the missionary position—
his mother shaking the white face of a Polaroid, archivist
of all her son’s women. You watch your own face emerge;
a warehouse of condemned carousel horses smiles back.
Mia cara mama, if only you’d gotten free by any strange behavior;
but, his mother named him Antony because she wanted to turn
the other women’s taunts into blessings; she wanted him to be
the fire and ice that laced her bones that first year in Boston.
Mia cara mama, you could’ve been anyone’s wife.
Kara Candito is the author of Taste of Cherry (University of Nebraska Press), winner of the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her poems and reviews have appeared or will appear in such journals as Blackbird, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Nimrod, Diode, and Best New Poets 2007. She has received awards for her poetry, including an Academy of American Poets Prize and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
This Is the Final Day of Years of Sweetness
Now you can rest. Breathe with the birds light
between the maples. The sharp edge of the sun.
You know something terrible is here.
This is how years emerge: like clouds, now red, —
now yawning gray, all this sweetness
above the eastern hills
where cows lift their deep moans.
Morning, I think the mailman has clouds in mind.
Maybe a rooster on the weathervane to catch rust
points to the past
we imagine for him. Years appear like this.
Sweetness like the terrible clouds.
Now close your eyes. Make birds be
the sound of their wings. The only sound.
Boyd W. Benson lives in Clarkston, Washington, where he cooks in a small restaurant. He also teaches writing at Washington State University. He has published poems in The Iowa Review, Ascent, Free Lunch, and other publications. In 2007, his twenty-poem manuscript The Owl’s Ears was included in Volume One of the Lost Horse Press New Poets Series, New Poets | Short Books, edited by Marvin Bell. Co-poetry editor of A River & Sound Review, Benson is a recipient of a 2009 Lohmann Poetry Prize. His poem “Owl” recently appeared in the Anhinga Press anthology The Poets Guide to the Birds.
Yesterday,
I saw a mule deer buck and doe here.
I could have touched.
And as I passed a bicyclist
our eyes met and said “I know!”
I must pay no attention to all this.
What holds me to the sidewalk,
stained with leaf pigment
is only a step.
Pattern of motion woven and suspended
from trees and eaves.
And now for coffee. I shrug
further into my coat, shuffle my feet
to kick up a rustle—
gravel, river rocks, sand hard-packed and wet, cobble, these leaves.
I have other things to think.
Low-flying jet, Doppler climax and decrescendo
charge: Consider your own undanceable tempo.
No further.
Our worries, those that you and I share, are over for now.
The time of year for candle-dipping
come and gone.
Gourds deflate on the vine
and we return home lanternless.
Our fingers test boundaries,
eyes adjust to another way of objects’ edges,
and, expecting to pass through are stubbed,
barred from entry. You have permission to stumble,
but you remain in place.
Build me a wagon wheel, whittle me a switch to guide it.
We are both of us clumsy with limbs.
Plant me and I will reach.
The chill is located in your neck, isn’t it?
No amount of scarf
or warm hand for it.
Seek the pillow. Lay your head
to a precedent of thread count.
In the morning, dove, you will wake
and say what there is to say.
Trina Burke's poetry has appeared recently in Double Room, Fawlt, Drunken Boat, and Word for / Word and is forthcoming in Quarterly West and Iron Horse Literary Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and currently lives and works in Seattle.
Wormwood. Eyesore. The orchard trees no longer cared for.
Still we pick up windfalls, pull spotted fruit from branches,
take them home to boil down, counting on the flavor--sweetest
at season’s end like the changes we’ve out-lived.
One death after another. Our parents keep
their distance now— ashes tended by stone.
We slipped the rings from their fingers, bands of stones—
a diamond, two sapphires-- and begin to take for
granted, days without bad news. This is the first we have lived
in abundance. This is what absence bestows. Sun rakes the hills, branches
fill with sky. It’s almost too much. The earth’s sweet
insistence steadies us when we walk the path that keeps
us fixed to the world like a finger on the book keeping
the page when we look away-- we are only a stone’s
throw from losing our place now that the stories are told. Sweeter
yet, apples cooking, time stopping over the house. Before
long, deer will come out of the woods, shift under branches
to eat windfalls we left. Nothing we said can be taken back. We live
unencumbered by guilt. Her skin turned livid,
his eyes wouldn’t close. We don’t mind that they keep
to themselves. Soon the rest of the leaves will fall from branches;
later today, rain changing to snow. The stone
sundial in the garden keeps time by shadows. By four
o’clock, it’s nearly dark. My sister stirs the pot. “Is it sweet
enough?” she wants to know. We like it tart, just a little sweet.
She passes me the spoon. We’ve had our taste of final days, life-
less hands against our lips, one last kiss before
the cold takes hold. Memory stores them for us— death’s keep-
sakes like November’s final offerings: stones
on the path—mica flecked, dry husks, spiked rosettes, the twisted branches’
lichen. There is always more to gather, branching
past season’s end. I learned the dead are not sweet-
tempered. Refusing to answer, to look at our faces-- stony-
hearted, they ignore our voices. When they were alive
they said they loved us. Now we keep
to ourselves a happiness we did not know before
they left—broken like branches, distinct from their bodies, living
our lives without them. Grief can be forfeited. Nothing’s worth keeping
as much as this sweetness where each day is the next to the last one.
Michelle Gillett won the Backwaters Press Poetry Prize for Blinding the Goldfinches, selected by Hayden Carruth and published in 2005. She teaches writing workshops and is a freelance writer, editor, and op-ed newspaper columnist. Michelle’s work was recently published in Agenda, Salamander, Poet Lore, The Comstock Review, Calyx, and Orion. She lives in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Think of straw. Fields of it. Then recall Edward
Elderkin’s hair. His temper.
Think of the last time you heard from him:
A phone call from a fishing boat in Skagway, Alaska.
He was everything you wanted then he wasn’t.
The kind of love that could cause you to lie down
In a field during a thunderstorm praying to be struck.
Matches in your pocket with the warning:
Close before striking. Bad love being
Better than no love at all.
The color of his hair, the final day in a year of sweetness.
It was pride of lions yellow, the animals sunning
And licking each other as a sign of filial devotion.
On the savannah in long grass. The savannah being
Long on grass but short on shade.
What trees there were were like an afterthought,
The lord saying oh yeah, let there be shade.
You can put all your trust in the lord your god
And still wake up in a field of straw too late
In the season to be harvested.
The field flooded after torrential rain.
The boy long gone.
Maya Smith Janson's poems have appeared in Jubilat, Green Mountains Review, Rattle, Harvard Review, Best American Poetry, and other magazines. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and lives in Western Massachusetts.
This is the final day of years of sweetness
of color-quick ways of knowing.
Whose are the faces I no longer
understand at a glance? Voice
offers child/woman/man but
if stranger/friend chooses silence?
My reaching hands slice nothingness
body careens through an opened door
lands scrabbling on a stoop
hearing derision.
Am I bleeding? This is
our kitchen where the ceiling
recognizes percussive footsteps
of upstairs neighbors.
Warm stir in the air I lay
ear to your heartbeat
Let my tongue bless
the tips of your fingers
try gentle bristles of your chin
to your mouth. Oh,
from this day you must
flavor your pity with honey
that I may see yesterday’s light
with my lips.
Charlotte Mandel's seventh book of poetry, entitled Rock Vein Sky (Midmarch Arts Press), was listed as a Best Poetry Book Read for Fall 2009 by Monserrat Review. Previous titles include two poem-novellas of feminist biblical revision, The Life of Mary and The Marriages of Jacob. She recently retired from teaching poetry writing at the Barnard College Center for Research on Women. Her website is: www.charlottemandel.com
This is the final day of years of sweetness.
(Petrarch, 314)
when we planted the oak
it was September
Spring in Brazil
Winter
under our feet
nineteen days after the making
of the planet
no time that I know
took roots
in her grave sleeping
face down
not to see not to be touched
a sigh came out of
the ground
shoveling worms
dirt
the tapering light
winds split us —
this blood on our hands
branches
and leaves —
in numerous parts
this September sun
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, Ph.D. in French Language & Literature, is the author of several collections of poetry published in the United States, Romania, and France, including Last Call (2005), Diving With the Whales (2008), and Insomnia in Flowers (2008). She is the winner of two International Poetry Prizes, awarded for her two books published in France, Terre Interrompue (2007) and Un cri dans la neige (Editions du Cygne, Paris, 2009). Her poems have been published in Seneca Review, Pleiades, Karamu, Louisville Review, Rhino, Laurel Review, California Quarterly, and Visions, as well as in a variety of literary magazines in France, Belgium, Quebec, and Romania.
The poet’s skull is long gone
from this pink marble tomb,
replaced with my head.
His unrequited bones
keep me awake, chattering
for his beloved Laura.
The right hand is missing,
stolen by a drunken friar
ages ago but that tibia won’t
let it rest. Alive, my right hand
cupped eggs still warm from the hen,
a newborn’s head without
ever saying this is what waits.
I used every part of me,
every bone pushed against the world
and the world pushed back.
And now the heavy lid is lifted.
It’s the pressure I’ll miss
and remember—the tip of his spine
firm as a finger held to my lips.
Rita Mae Reese has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Stegner fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation award. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies, including Imaginative Writing, From Where You Dream, Blackbird, New England Review, The Southern Review, and The Nation.
I swim a sea that has no shore or bottom.
Strange, this middle distance. Call it phantom
horizon. Call it lonely girl, lonely buoy.
Opening scene of our favorite movie:
the pretty night-swimmer, naked & struck
by shark. A shame, you say, worst kind of luck.
So, quick! Hang a horseshoe, toss some salt,
or at the very least change the channel. So what
if the goldfish has high ambitions?
His frantic splashes aren’t by any definition
teeth. Lucky us, but still our socks get wet
when we walk past the tank. Threat-
en: tartar sauce, threaten: filet. We’re going
under 1, and 2, and 3. We’re waving.
Amy Scrader holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She was a recipient of a 2008 Artist Trust Grants for Artist Projects (GAP) award, and her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Bateau, Fairy Tale Review, DIAGRAM, and Filter. She lives in Seattle.