Mark Kraushaar, “Twenty-something”

I sold my flute,
I sold my watch and my chair and my bed
and gave away my books and my TV and I took
the Greyhound bus to a town in Kentucky.
I thought I’d start over.
I thought if I could see things just as they are
(this street, this curb, sky, bottle cap, ballpoint)
I’d find out the real and the right now.
I’d locate the temperate,
gentle center of my life.
And so I walked a lot.
I’d think, Here I am, and, This is it.
I’d think, These trees, this park, this life.
This is it. This is it.
But what are you doing? my sister asked.
First she called and then she drove down from Wisconsin.
We were standing outside Kramer’s Department Store.
Maybe I wasn’t so sure anymore.
I guessed I didn’t know.
I said, I’m living.
A city bus passed and somebody waved.
Then a dog walked by.
This, I said.
And then I said it again.

Falling Brick Calls Local Man is the 15th book to win the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison English department. The collection also includes “We Regret to Inform” (from The Gettysburg Review) , “Dear Mr. Whitman” (available in a PDF of an issue of Beloit Poetry Journal which includes several other Kraushaar poems).

8 April 2009 | poetry |

Jennifer Firestone, from Holiday

The cloud’s outline
defines itself

A kiss is a ghost
is a branch
is raking

Eyes closed
out come more stories

The idea is to love wholly
a punctured tube bleeds
red, yellow, green
[smear]

Ancient intellectualizing

Abstracts
depend on my life

Ink scrawls a message
Let love be animals, weeds

Holiday is Firestone’s fourth collection; Shearman Books has prepared a PDF sampler of the opening poems. Other Firestone poems online include “Sun Stream” (from The Cortland Review), Purposeful” (from Moria), and an excerpt from from Flashes (from Alice Blue).

Firestone is also the co-editor of Letters to Poets which, as she explained to HOW2, was inspired by Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:

“[Dana Teen Lomax and I] were curious about this book’s easy appeal and particularly the omission from the book of the letters of the young writer, Franz Xaver Kappus. We hadn’t heard people speak about this omission and it was difficult for us not to see it as part of the problems embedded within a “mentoring” relationship. Perhaps Kappus’ letters weren’t all that compelling. Perhaps he didn’t want to see them in print. Whatever the case may be, we wondered what Kappus actually asked Rilke and how much Rilke’s responses about writing and his two cents about love, among other things, spoke to Kappus’ queries.”

Firestone exchanged letters with Eileen Myles, while Lomax corresponded with Claire Braz-Valentine; the book contains a dozen other epistolary pairings.

7 April 2009 | poetry |