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Online School of Poetry
New venture seeks to bridge the worlds of literary academia and slam poetry. Instructors include former California poet laureate Quincy Troupe, performance poets Patricia Smith and Regie Gibson, prizewinning author Tom Daley.
OnlineConversion.com
Conversion calculators for currency, clothing, cooking, computers, and weights and measures of all kinds. A gigabyte, for example, is 1,024 megabytes. The year MCMLXXXXIX is 1999. And in the kitchen, six drops make a pinch.
Only Poems
Launched in 2023 by award-winning poets Shannan Mann and Karan Kapoor, Only Poems seeks to publish longer suites of poems by each contributor in order to showcase their style and range. Authors receive $55 for each feature. They are open year-round to submissions of up to 10 pages/10 poems. Unpublished work only. Follow specific formatting guidelines on website. Editors say, "We love prose poems, traditional forms (ghazals, villanelles, sestinas), love poems, sex poems, speculative poems, and experimental questionnaires, but we are not married to a style or genre."
Onym
Onym's reference site collects resources to help you generate catchy and appropriate names for fictional characters, places, or products. In addition to the usual dictionaries, thesaurus, and baby name lists, Onym includes profession-specific glossaries (e.g. legal, nautical, and mathematical terms), historic slang, world mythology, and random word generators. (However, political sensitivity and avoiding cultural appropriation are up to you.)
Open Culture
Educational media website Open Culture provides this archive of over 500 literary classics available as free e-book downloads for your computer or mobile device. Genres include poetry, literary novels, science fiction, philosophy, and children's stories. There are also links to other free e-book libraries.
Open Minds Quarterly
Open Minds Quarterly is a publication of The Writer's Circle, a project of NISA/Northern Initiative for Social Action. Open Minds Quarterly is dedicated to writers worldwide who have survived depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. The journal publishes fiction, book reviews, poems, and first-person narrative accounts, and sponsors the annual BrainStorm Poetry Contest for mental health consumers and survivors.
Open Road Integrated Media
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its e-books through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media. Their mission is to give publishing's "vibrant backlist" fresh exposure in the digital marketplace. Open Road has published e-books from legendary authors including William Styron, Pat Conroy, Jack Higgins, and Virginia Hamilton, and has launched new e-stars like Mary Glickman. Their current projects include reviving out-of-print LGBT classics for e-book readers.
Operation Memory
Second collection by well-regarded poet and critic is intellectual without being pretentious, full of witty surprises and self-mocking cultural observations. "Many are called and sleep through the ringing."
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
This darkly comical autobiographical novel is narrated with deadpan wit but also a certain tenderness toward her own and her family's eccentricities. Raised by a fervent Pentecostal mother in a provincial British town, the protagonist finds her world shaken to its core when she discovers her attraction to other girls.
Origami Poems Project
The Origami Poems Project features instructions for creating your own mini-collection of poetry that can fit on a single sheet of paper, to be folded origami-style into book form. Participants' books, with folding instructions, are available for free download from the website. The project was founded by Rhode Island poets Lynnie Gobeille, Jan Keough, and Barbara Schweitzer, who also distribute the featured books as free gifts at local libraries, coffee shops, art centers, and bookstores.
Orison Books
Orison Books publishes spiritually-engaged poetry, fiction, and nonfiction of exceptional literary merit. Editors say, "In our view, spiritual writing has little to do with subject matter. Rather, the kind of work we seek to publish has a transcendent aesthetic effect on the reader, and reading it can itself be a spiritual experience. We seek to be broad, inclusive, and open to perspectives spanning the spectrums of spiritual and religious thought, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation." Anthology proposals and fiction and nonfiction manuscripts are accepted year-round. There is an open reading period for poetry manuscripts in the spring and a contest in the winter with a large cash prize and prestigious judges. See website for online submission guidelines.
Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry
This selection of autobiographical and critical essays by an award-winning poet eloquently explores how the poetic imagination fruitfully problematizes the self, potentially liberating us from fixed identities based on race, class, sexual orientation and personal history.
Other People’s Flowers
Launched in 2018, Other People's Flowers is a weekly podcast that showcases submissions of poetry, fiction, and essays. Previously published work is accepted if you own the rights, but the podcast acquires the audio rights to your entry if they read it aloud on the show. Last new episode is from June 2019, but the archive is accessible here.
oTranscribe
oTranscribe is a free web app that makes it easy to transcribe recorded interviews, readings, and lectures. The finished product, with interactive timestamps, can be exported to Google Docs, plain text, or word-processing markdown format.
Our Lady of Acid Rain
By Mark D. Hart
With the lime of her body
sweetening the forest floor
in ecstatic effacement,
this plaster Virgin melts earthward,
the body of a woman imagined
free from corruption, safe in heaven,
her virtue like a stored cask.
Mold now greens the bulk of her,
taking her back, once all-white,
church-pure, immaculate.
Blurred, eroded by the sour tears
of an exhausted sky, her face
like ours someday.
A half-teepee of stone slabs shelters her
on a spur off the main trail.
Clearly others have found her,
depositing evidence of devotion—
various seashells, a candle
that spattered the rock with wax,
a rosary, a perfect red maple leaf,
pine cones, coins.
Originally published in the McNeese Review, nominated for a Pushcart Prize
Our Mothers Would Not Let Us Watch
By Linda Neal Reising
Our mothers would not let us watch
from any closer than the backyard.
There were no sirens
or flashing lights,
only a row of rusty pickups
and one sheriff's car.
The men were fishing the mine pits,
those gaping mouths that never swallowed,
except during July and August
when the sun glinted off the water,
sending a secret code to summer-bleached boys.
There was a fence,
but its sagging wires called sneakered feet to climb,
"Come learn the truth the parents try to hide."
They shed their clothes
and left them, shells on a chatpile beach.
The men plucked three bodies out
and gently laid them on the tailgates.
When my father returned,
I wanted to ask him what they looked like up close.
Were their eyes open?
Had the water leached the tan from their arms?
Instead, he grabbed my shoulders and shook me hard.
And his eyes were pools
that had no bottoms.
Out of Malibu: An American Exodus
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Malibu commemorates the young son's
birth. The sculpted balsa family spends
Christmases here in a lean-to
on a bluff. A star leads others to them,
then and now.
In that time of times—no light
guided law abiding
citizens on their trek, only warm
sandy days, bitter desert nights.
No intention of becoming myth
or graven image but here they are.
A likely place to settle. Like Sinai,
familiar palms, near a sea, hard winds
weather them, still as stones,
hearts hardened to wood,
feet statue still. Exiles altered
from folk to revered. Their design
never to be worshipped, they ask
this night for compassion
and so it was.
Their feet quickened
from carvings to flesh. The choice
to stay or leave now theirs,
they travel interstate byroads
at night when they will not frighten
other sojourners, they—homeless,
shoeless, unfamiliar robes, faces
still immobile from decades
practicing the art of crèche. This new
adventure across rocky peaks, great
plains. An arch marks a river, mighty
as any they had seen, this monster land,
roads like veins, Mapquest's
blue design. As Chaucer's pilgrims sought
redemption they trudge East, leave
behind those who thought they loved
them but imposed burdens beyond
imagination, less urgency than before,
their son born, free of civic bondage.
New-turned pine aches not like ancient
flesh. In weather they had not known
earlier they walk and rest, idols
unnoticed in the snow, part of December's
pageant.
This time they follow no light
but their own, come upon an open swath,
Washington's obelisk, rotunda like Rome's,
somehow their kin, erected for the ages.
Beneath their feet the Post, sodden, headline
bawls War. Fine drizzle diffused
by starlight they stand before another,
newer wailing wall, a granite gash.
This, this! Their destination.
Rain turns to doilies (as this small
tribe turned from human tissue
to wood and back again), decorates
their cloaks, caps, hoods, slides
down the polished façade
before them. Wet-white punctuation
attach themselves to incised
names on this family's
own reflected images. They
reach to touch them
to quench the flow.
Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples
This compendium of brief, lively biographical sketches of 19th and 20th century American innovators showcases the unsung contributions of their same-sex partners. In addition to well-known duos like Stein and Toklas, the book gives "the rest of the story" for luminaries such as the president of Bryn Mawr and the founder of the field of interior design. Some of the profiles could have benefited from more discussion of how the unconventional relationship passed muster in an era when homosexuality was not only stigmatized but illegal. Overall, the anthology is an entertaining and upbeat read that whets the appetite for reading longer biographies of these notable figures.
Outspoken: Oral History from LGBTQ Pioneers
Outspoken is an online archive of Steven F. Dansky's video interviews with leaders and elders in the queer community. Its goal is to preserve the grassroots history of LGBTQ life and the battle for equal rights following the Stonewall uprising of 1969. Writers will find this useful for historical fiction and nonfiction research.
OWL’s Starting Points for Internet Research
Purdue's Online Writing Lab has plucked out some of the more interesting links to research sites on the web. The English and Journalism categories will be of special interest to writers. The Voice of the Shuttle is particularly well regarded for humanities research.
OwnMade AudioBooks
Create your own audiobook from your published or unpublished book. Reasonable fees.
Oyez Review
Well-known contributors have inclued Barry Ballard, Ace Boggess, Gaylord Brewer, Moira Egan, and John Surowiecki. Authors of narrative free verse, prose-poems, and magical realism may find this journal a particularly good fit. Reading period August 1-October 1; no simultaneous submissions.
Pageantry
By Cindy Kelly Benabderrahman
In second grade,
my mother and her best friend
Rebecca took the shortcut
home from grade school,
fashioned a beauty pageant
from ribbons and flowers
they found in the trash out back
of Sweeney-Dodd's funeral home.
"In Memoriam" and "Dear Husband"
sashayed home with lily-scented hair,
their pageant sashes sparkling with glitter.
Paper Cat Press
Paper Cat Press is a curated online collection of opportunities for animators, illustrators, comic creators, and writers. They publish a Weekly Roundup e-newsletter (also available to read on the website) that includes upcoming literary contests and submission calls.
Paper Lanterns
Based in Ireland, Paper Lanterns publishes poetry and short fiction aimed at teens and young adults, as well as book reviews and feature articles about young adult literature. Authors aged 13+ are welcome to submit. See website for submission periods and formatting guidelines. This is a paying market.
Parks & Points
Handsomely illustrated with nature photography, Parks & Points is an online journal of personal essays and poetry about national parks and other public lands. See website for annual writing contests.
Parody Poetry Journal
Launched in 2012, PPJ features authors such as David Alpaugh, Bruce Boston, Tracy Koretsky, and Hal Sirowitz.
Passeridae
By Julie Novak-McSweeney
We open our hands and bid the past farewell.
A dead leaf falls. Another leaf grows green
in the oaks where sparrow-weavers dwell.
Now is rooted then—but we can dwell
in other rooms, can play out greening scenes
and open our hands to bid the past farewell.
Trailing dead addresses, moving well
and often, in flight from numb routine,
far from where sparrow-weavers dwell.
What is home, we wondered, hardened shells
Of children that we were, quarantined
From pasts to which we finally bid farewell
And thrive despite, and sing our citadel
of roots into brave being. Unforeseen,
this blessing of a leafy place to dwell.
We broke the chain of violence, passed from hell
on earth to healing. Now the slate is clean.
We open our hands to bid the past farewell
and look to where the sparrow-weavers dwell.
This poem won 2nd Prize for Rhyming Poetry in the 18th Annual Writer's Digest Poetry Awards.
Pastoralia
Enter the deranged theme park of this unique writer's imagination, in surreal tales that exaggerate the insincere cheer of mass-media corporate culture to show the ruthlessness beneath. Beneath Saunders' manic wit lies a fierce compassion for misfits waging a losing battle for authenticity in a world of manufactured messages.
Patricia Smith
Ms. Smith has won four National Poetry Slam individual championship titles, as well as a National Poetry Series prize for her book Teahouse of the Almighty.
Pavement Saw
Pavement Saw Press also publishes innovative poetry books and chapbooks that get good reviews. See website for their contests.
PD Info: Royalty Free Music
This archive of sound clips in various genres, from the website of the Public Domain Information Project, can help you enhance podcasts or other audiovisual recordings of your creative writing. Pricing starts at $7.95 per song.
PDF Online
Convert your word-processed documents into PDF or HTML format with this free online service. Works for both Windows and Mac documents. Writers can use this service to create e-books or HTML newsletters featuring their work.
Peacock Journal
Launched in 2016 by poet W.F. Lantry and musician Kathleen Fitzpatrick, this online literary journal seeks to publish beautiful creative work, taking advantage of the graphic possibilities of modern web technology. They also put out an annual print anthology of poetry and flash fiction. Send previously unpublished poetry, fiction, personal essays, artwork, or short audio files. See website for lengths and formats. Michael Linnard, the editor of the literary press Little Red Tree, is the journal's publication liaison.
peculiar: a queer literary journal
peculiar is a bi-annual queer literary journal publishing poetry, fiction, essays, art, and photography. Co-editor Jack Garcia says, "Based in Provo, Utah, the title is a nod to the Mormon claim of being a 'peculiar people' because, let's face it, being queer is far more peculiar!" Read an interview with him at Trish Hopkinson's writing resources blog.
Peek Inside a Successful Book Proposal
Nieman Storyboard, a publication of Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, showcases exceptional narrative nonfiction and offers resources for writing and marketing your work. In this article, Kim Cross shares the lengthy proposal that secured a contract for In Light of All Darkness, her book about the Polly Klaas kidnapping. She annotates the key elements that made this pitch more successful than her earlier efforts. Click on the "Story Annotations" header for other craft articles by journalists explaining how they researched and structured a feature story.
Peepal Tree Press
Based in Leeds, England, Peepal Tree Press publishes Caribbean and Black British fiction, poetry, literary criticism, memoirs and historical studies. In addition to their catalogue of contemporary authors, their Caribbean Modern Classics Series restores to print essential classic books from the 1950s and '60s.
PEN America’s Prison Writing Program
For over 40 years, PEN America, a prominent arts and advocacy organization, has sponsored a Prison Writing Program that pairs incarcerated writers with mentors on the outside. Their annual free Prison Writing Contest accepts poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic works.
Pencilhouse
Pencilhouse is a writers' resource site that aims to help writers at all levels improve their craft. You can submit two poems or one short prose piece per month for a free critique (enter early because submissions are capped at 35 per month). Pencilhouse also publishes Zero Readers, a process-oriented literary journal that provides extensive feedback to accepted authors and guides them through the revision process.
Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts
Founded in 2020, Pensive is a literary journal sponsored by the Center for Spirituality, Dialogue, and Service at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. They are currently open to submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, cross-genre, photography, visual art, and translations, from writers of all spiritual and philosophical perspectives. Editors say, "Pensive publishes work that deepens the inward life; expresses a range of religious/spiritual/humanist experiences and perspectives; envisions a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world; advances dialogue across difference; and challenges structural oppression in all its forms."
PenTales
Online writers' forum PenTales strives to empower people to share and discover stories through live events, collaborative books, and a curated online platform. They publish narrative poetry, flash fiction, and artwork. See website for currently open themes.
Pentimento Magazine
Pentimento publishes poetry, short fiction, essays, and artwork by writers with disabilities (including children), and authentic, well-written essays and poetry with a disability-related theme. Submissions may be by a individual with a disability or an individual who is part of the community such as a family member, educator, therapist, etc. Please indicate in your submission which category you are in. "Pentimento" is the term for an underlying image that shows through the top layer of a painting. The journal's name reflects their mission of "seeing beyond the surface". Currently a print magazine, with an online edition in the works.
Peonies: For Jill
By Joan Gelfand
She won't sell the country house. Not yet!
And not because of Locust Lake, sailboats in summer.
Alders in snow. Not because of the long view of the Poconos,
Those graduating waves of forest green fading
To watery sage tiered like a chiffon dress.
Lost in those folds, the dizzy roller coaster
Of marriage, sickness, the push pull of desire.
Paul planted peonies. She, a lover of Japanese.
Woodblock prints, bamboo, and toro nagashi:
Lit lanterns set free on a river,
Golden rice paper houses inscribed with ancestor's
Names reflecting orange glow on black water.
Vertigo. Her tears water the earth where peonies proliferate.
In life, he betrayed, but in death transmogrified,
Missed. At night, she denied him the touch
The skin he craved. You can't have it both ways,
She reminded. Just now, she wants it exactly
Both ways. Perfect in life. Perfect in death.
The condo and the country house. The peonies and the lake.
While her resentment foments like the mulch he piled on the roots.
Now that he's gone, her loneliness blooms. Tissue thin,
She is married to the million petalled profusion of pink.
The peonies are her private toro nagashi, his soul reunited
With hers. She needs, him, and his perfect peonies.
"Besides," she cries, "It's such a short season."
People Like Me
We are held air in iron-banded lungs
we sear in our own fires,
inside flesh falls off like fat off a roast
we are oven we burn or
burst like weeds, swell like a malignant lump
in some breast, becoming bloated
bogs in our own shadows inside
where people like me can forget
what sunlight feels out of glass.
We die before we die
consumed by our fusion reactions
swallowed by our inside shadows
until we are nothing more than
eggshells, with the white and yolk
blown free
Our garden is rock.
Shale and granite and limestone
road rock is our garden
and any blossom, any green, any growth,
is pulled burned and poisoned
as a weed.
People like me haunt doorways
never completely in, never completely out,
never to be here or there, we are nowhere,
doorways and cracks and in between spaces, lost places
lost people like lost keys lost in between
and we can be found on the bottom of dry riverbeds,
see us walking there, people like me,
we who walk through the silt and dust
of desert canals, we
don't live long, people like me.
How long can a person live
with gasoline for blood
we are raped by our intensity
wasted, wraithed by it, we don't
live long, we weren't meant to.
Copyright 2006 by J. Malcolm Browne
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, J. Malcolm Browne's "People Like Me", takes us inside the psyche of someone who is battered and shipwrecked by his own emotional storms. Wisely, the author does not "diagnose" the condition in clinical terms that would permit us to label and distance ourselves from the speaker. We are left to speculate about the reasons why he might experience life as alienation and nightmare: hallucinatory drugs, mental illness, the aftermath of a tragedy, or the morbid romantic temperament of the artistic genius. By speaking not only for himself but for a shadowy cohort of "people like me", the narrator makes an almost political demand for empathy and recognition. (I was reminded of the line "Attention must be paid" from Death of a Salesman, whose theme of invisible desperation finds its echo in Browne's poem.) The poem makes us feel these sufferings as our own, thereby revealing our common humanity with the self-destructive or delusional characters we might otherwise stereotype.
What impressed me about this poem's technique was how the author provides just the right amount and type of information to avoid being either too prosaic or too maudlin and gothic. Both of these pitfalls are common when writing about depression and emotional disorders, and both stem from an excess of self-consciousness. The prosaic poem uses the vocabulary of the medical or journalistic observer to define the condition from outside, never allowing us to see the sufferer as more than a statistic. At the other extreme, the poet is too aware of talking about his own feelings, and over-adorns the poem with blood and devils, like a bad action-movie director throwing in more and more explosions to add punch to a dull plot.
By contrast, Browne takes us directly inside the surreal realm that his characters inhabit, reporting their experiences through images of ordinary objects (an oven, an egg, a garden) gone terribly wrong. In this, the poem resembles Anne Sexton's masterful, disturbing "Angels of the Love Affair" series from The Book of Folly. Some of the most affecting images for me were "inside flesh falls off like fat off a roast" (you can just see that, however much you don't want to); "eggshells, with the white and yolk/blown free"; and "gasoline for blood".
The jagged rhythm and headlong rush of Browne's run-on phrases ("we are oven we burn"; "lost people like lost keys lost in between") convey that the speaker is being driven wild by his own emotions, his agitation mounting as he strives to make others hear his plea for understanding. The abrupt, broken-up lines of the ending are just right, a final failure of breath. I loved the disjointed repetition of "people like me" in the penultimate stanza, breaking up the grammar of his sentences like a madman's interior monologue that is bleeding through into his conversation.
Browne's incantatory use of repetition is another thing that gives the diction of "People Like Me" its poetic quality. "Free" verse is something of a misnomer, because good poetry always requires structure, only here it is the hidden musical structure of language rather than an obvious pattern. I personally feel that poetic speech needs to sound different from ordinary dialogue and description: more intense, compressed, almost prophetic. Paradoxically, sometimes this means using more words than are necessary simply to convey the plot. Lines like "consumed by our fusion reactions/swallowed by our inside shadows" and "any blossom, any green, any growth" reveal the same thought from multiple angles, in the tradition of the two-line verses of Psalms and Proverbs. Such repetition, if not done to excess, can add emotional intensity and increase the musicality of the poem. Preachers and politicians know that catchy rhymes, alliteration and grammatical parallelism help the message stick in the minds of the audience. Good free verse takes advantage of this fact in a more subtle way.
In the spirit of self-examination that I urged on readers at the beginning of this critique, Browne's poem got me thinking about the darkness of modern poetry. Why does it seem that the majority of good poems are depressing, or at least contain significant suffering and gravity? The connection between creativity and bipolar disorder continues to be debated, but if that were the whole story, one might expect to see more happy poems from the manic phase. Perhaps happiness makes us more completely absorbed in the moment, to the point that we would break the spell if we stepped outside to describe it, while in sadness we look for an imaginary world in which to rewrite or escape the present. Are we more likely to reach out for companionship from our readers when we feel insufficiently loved and understood in our personal lives?
For myself, the impetus to write has often been a problem that I needed to work out, struggling to reconcile my duties and desires, or what lesson to draw from a mistake I made. Happiness seldom needs to be "solved" in this way. There's a reason theologians talk about the "problem of evil" and not the "problem of good". Maybe we poets really are optimists, or at least idealists, believing that suffering, however widespread, is an aberration whose causes we need to discover so that Browne's "people like me" can live a little longer.
I invite our readers to send me their thoughts on this topic, in poetry or prose. For extra credit, tell me about a well-written classic or contemporary poem (think Wordsworth's "daffodils" poem, not greeting-card verse) that you consider uplifting, joyful or optimistic. The poem should not only have a positive intention, but succeed in making you, the reader, experience that mood. We may publish some of your responses in our July newsletter.
Where could a poem like "People Like Me" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Boulevard Emerging Poets Contest
Postmark Deadline: May 15
Prestigious journal Boulevard offers $1,000 for poems by authors with no published books
Five Fingers Review Awards
Postmark Deadline: June 1
$500 each for poetry and fiction from journal with a preference for experimental work; 2006 theme is "foreign lands and alternate universes"
Bridport Prize
Entries must be received by June 30
High-profile award offers 5,000 pounds each for unpublished poems up to 42 lines and fiction up to 5,000 words
Bellevue Literary Review Prizes
Postmark Deadline: August 1
$1,000 apiece for poetry, fiction and essays about themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the April 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Periodically Speaking
Presented at the New York Public Library and co-sponsored by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, this reading series showcases poets and prose writers from influential literary magazines, introduced by their editors. Videos of past readings can be viewed on the NYPL website.
Persistent Armageddon
(dedicated to Joseph Campbell)
I deserve to die in Potter's Field
Fall on my face in the dust.
A place for those who have no name
Because they have no reason.
I have crucified all I have and all I am
And still left empty.
This is Your struggle, not mine, not ours.
You let Lucifer dabble.
Alienated at Babel.
Heels are bleeding
Crushing the constant snake.
Why am I talking to You so?
I told You. You are deception.
Created the Kings of the North and
Sovereigns of the South
Only to amuse Yourself
Watching them raze.
This is Your struggle, not mine, not ours.
Horsemen driven
By your monotony.
A One incapable of monogamy
Desires one, seven, seventy.
They battle in the valleys, you dry their bones.
And raise them up to brawl again.
Your many illicit sons—doctrines without foundation,
Tenet against tenet fighting over You.
Offerings approved, rejected—brothers killed.
Inheritances taken by trickery You instilled.
I told You. You are deception.
Did you spin the clay
Only to bury it here
In this sand with weapon in hand?
Truly the Potter's option?
That's their opinion, your bastard canon
Persist to create a printed desolation.
Abomination? In the True Creator's eyes—
Latent, covert, dormant. It seems so.
I will not die in Potter's Field.
A truth revealed, a heart healed.
This is not Your struggle, nor mine. Not ours.
Only Confusion re-written,
Mythology-smitten
That placed me in this furrow
Chained-metal in hand.
Paradise intended, perilous game and
It ended.
With every event has transpired.
Benevolence warranted, you determined it,
I will expect it to stand.
I will shore up for the race, I will arise to your face.
I will see through the glass before long...
Copyright 2006 by Charlet C. Estes
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Persistent Armageddon" by Charlet C. Estes, stands in a tradition of spiritual protest literature as old as the Biblical book of Job. Some see doubt and anger as incompatible with faith, but one could also consider them signs of a mature faith, like the shadows that show an object to be solid and three-dimensional. (For a classic example of this tradition, see Gerard Manley Hopkins' "dark sonnets".)
The more deeply we commit to our spiritual path, the more we may become pained by the gap between our ideals and reality. Hence doubt arises: do these beliefs really fit human experience? do they cause more suffering than they cure? and can they be implemented in this imperfect world? And anger: at human beings who pervert spiritual teachings, at the Creator who made us this way. As we see in Estes' poem, faith and doubt go hand in hand because we may need to see through false dogmas in order to reach a faith that fits the truths of the heart.
"Persistent Armageddon" is an example of a poem based on literary allusions (in this case, to the Bible), yet one that can also be understood and appreciated by readers who are less familiar with the source tradition. One of the pleasures of studying literature is finding these keys that unlock multiple levels of meaning in a poem, so that one suddenly finds one's self sharing an experience not only with the individual writer, but with an entire community of writers who have pondered the same issues.
On the other hand, a poem heavily reliant on allusions will be frustrating to the uninitiated, unless there is something evident from a first reading that directly touches the emotions. Without this personal connection to the poem, the reader may not be motivated to puzzle out the additional meanings. Though the argument of "Persistent Armageddon" may be hard to follow absent some familiarity with the Bible, one instantly recognizes its heartfelt anguish at the problem of evil, expressed in traditional apocalyptic imagery.
Estes' poem dares to call God to account for the "persistent armageddon" of human warfare, especially religious war. With the reference to the Potter's Field, the speaker boldly identifies with Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus who was buried there. One can imagine a remorseful Judas, as he tosses away his thirty pieces of silver, saying that he has "crucified all I have and all I am/And still left empty." A potter's field, whose soil was not good enough for growing crops, was traditionally used for burying unknown or indigent people. The speaker of the poem here groups herself with those outcasts. She is opting out of the system that took everything from her and gave nothing in return. This rebellion is not without guilt ("I deserve to die") but it is the only honest course she can take.
The next stanza tells us why: "You let Lucifer dabble./Alienated at Babel." Was it not God, she asks, who allowed evil into the world? Having divided the human race into mutually uncomprehending tribes, can God really be surprised that we have descended into warfare? "Heels are bleeding/Crushing the constant snake" is a reference to Genesis 3:15, where God curses the snake after it tempts Adam and Eve: "And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel."
In frustration, the speaker concludes that God must not care about His creation. He created us and watches us suffer "Only to amuse Yourself". God, not the devil, is the great deceiver. Therefore, we should refuse to keep playing His game of fighting over "doctrines without foundation": "This is Your struggle, not mine, not ours." Her argument reverses all the traditional attributes of God—not truth but deception, not creating but devouring, not faithful but "incapable of monogamy". The sonorous stanza "Horsemen driven..." inspires a chill of horror at this merciless, insatiable deity.
Subsequent lines continue to indict God for our fratricidal ways. "Offerings approved, rejected—brothers killed./Inheritances taken by trickery You instilled." These references to Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, also describe a universal pattern of human misbehavior.
Now the poem truly takes an interesting turn, as the speaker realizes she has other intuitive knowledge of God that cannot be reconciled with this cruel theology: "Did you spin the clay/Only to bury it here/In this sand with weapon in hand?" Surely life cannot be that pointless.
Perhaps the God that the warring factions invoke is not the "True Creator" but an erroneous image of Him. "That's their opinion, your bastard canon/Persist to create a printed desolation." It was false mythology, not the will of God, that put the swords in our hands. The somber refrain is given a new twist: "This is not Your struggle, nor mine. Not ours." The dedication to Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of world mythology, suggests that critical analysis of religious traditions need not be an obstacle to faith, but instead may help us gain perspective on destructive misconceptions that we accepted as dogma.
"Heart healed" by this new discovery, the speaker readies herself for a more constructive struggle, namely the effort to see God more clearly and to bring that peacemaking knowledge to the world. "I will shore up for the race, I will arise to your face.//I will see through the glass before long..." (an echo of St. Paul's words in 1 Cor 13:12, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known").
I found the first five lines of the final stanza somewhat confusing. Though I grasped the general idea—God's intentions for His creation are good and faithful after all—the manner of expression seemed unnecessarily convoluted. "Paradise intended, perilous game and/It ended" has a satisfying cadence. Does it mean that God intended paradise for us, but we chose to put it at risk? Or does the speaker still feel that God was playing games?
The lines "Benevolence warranted..." suggest that she has rejected the latter idea. Still, I wasn't wholly comfortable with the use of "warranted" in this context. Is the poem saying that we "warranted" benevolence, in the sense of "deserved" it? Or that God made a promise ("warranted" in the legal sense, i.e. "swore") and we can "expect it to stand"? The multiple meanings are intriguing, but the insertion of "you determined it" adds confusion with the unclear reference to "it". I might prefer simply "Benevolence warranted, I will expect it to stand" (with or without a stanza break in there). "With every event has transpired" did not make grammatical sense, nor was it clear to what it referred.
When analyzing this poem, I was impressed by Estes' ability to compress so many ideas into a small space. She was able to rephrase or economically hint at many familiar Bible passages, while for the most part steering clear of cliche. Like a military drumbeat, the strong rhythm of these lines propelled the poem forward and created an ominous tension, gladly dispelled by the hopeful last lines.
Where could a poem like "Persistent Armageddon" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: April 1
Top prize of $250 plus smaller prizes including a $25 award for best religious poem; sponsored by the Midwest Writing Center, this contest is now in its 33rd year
This poem and critique appeared in the March 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Peter Elbow, Teacher of Writing Teachers
Dr. Elbow, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts, has come to enjoy substantial influence over the teaching of writing. "Over the years," he tells Critique Magazine, "I've finally concluded that safety in writing is my highest priority.... I must make a classroom where safety happens, but due to the lack of safety in some classrooms, student writers don't take risks; they don't feel safe when they write." Read Dr. Elbow's complete interview.
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PhotoBloom
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