Poets

The City of Knossos. Haiga. Richard Vallance.

February 11, 2019December 3, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

Press to Enlarge:

Linear B, the very earliest Greek script, was used by the Mycenaeans and Minoans from ca. 1450 – 120 BCE for administrative, financial and accounting purposes only, at least so far as we know. No literature as such has survived on the some 6,800 Linear B tablets and fragments. So Richard’s haiku is in effect the very first poem (or literature for that matter) written in Linear B in 3,500 years.

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BIO:

Richard Vallance, meta-linguist, ancient Greek & Mycenaean Linear B, home page: Linear B, Knossos & Mycenae, http://linearbknossosmycenae.wordpress.com/

PINTEREST Boards: Mycenaean Linear B: Progressive Grammar & Vocabulary, http://pinterest.com/vallance22/mycenaean-linear-b-progressive-grammar-and-vocabul/ and, Knossos & Mycenae, sister civilizations, http://pinterest.com/vallance22/knossos-mycenae-sister-civilizations/ Also poetry publisher, The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Press, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © August 2013. 35 illustrations in B&W. Author & Title Indexes. 257 pp. 315 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian. http://vallance22.hpage.com/

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The Words. Poem. Sage Sweetwater.

November 29, 2013November 26, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop


the words
opened a
wound

those nights 
we wrote
yours 
coming out like fine
hairs of a sable brush 
and mine
with the toughness 
of an orange peel well I want 
you to know
I rubbed your words off 
nightly into erotic soft powder screaming

in shades of pastel mixing it up for a day 
when we would have
a likely work to be juried 
by critics too close to ownership but
so far from
the truth

the
words
opened a wound

those
nights
the tension was
so heavy with denial
I could feel it
in the air
what wasn't being said I heard 
so loud until the
silence gave it
away

the words
opened a
wound

***



***

Sage Sweetwater is an American Celebrity firebrand lesbian novelist, poet, storyteller, screenwriter, and business artist who hails from Colorado, USA. Her novels and screenplays are being made into Hollywood High-Budget films. Her complete list of works and bio can be found at http://www.authorsden.com/sagesweetwater

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Could I But Show You.Poem.Sonnet.Corey Harvard

November 29, 2013November 22, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop


***

Could I but show you how a word can grow

into a thorn that lodges deep within 

the softest places of the hardest men,

you wouldn't be so quick to let one go.

In silences, defenseless and alone,

security and self-esteem descend;

ambitions cease and aspirations bend

in victims of a fatal verbal blow.

If I could show you how a word can rise —

bring laughter, bring excitement, bring rapport,

bring nations out of poverty and war —

perhaps your speech would seek a different guise.

What problems of this world could be deterred

if we revered the value of a word?

***

Corey Harvard from Mobile, Alabama, (B.A. English & Philosophy, University of South Alabama, 2012), is a young American musician, pianist, vocalist and poet. He began writing verse at age 10 and music at age 12 when his parents bought him a keyboard. He went on to win his 8th grade talent show by performing an original song. Since then, he has published poetry and prose in journals including Tales of the Talisman, Pirene’s Fountain and Sense Magazine, and he has also been featured in Alabama’s prestigious Literary Mobile, an anthology of established (historical and contemporary) southern writers. He has served as associate editor of Sonnetto Poesia and Editor-in-Chief of Oracle Fine Arts Review. In 2009, he was a Pushcart Prize nominee.

***

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Let the Sun set on me.Poem. Bhuwan Thapaliya.

June 13, 2014November 20, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

Virgin dry is my throat
and anaemic the veins

that supply my semen
to your embryo.

I cannot ejaculate
a lover’s warmth in your womb

nor can I grab your breast
as they grasp the deity’s forehead.

The lips of the overhead sky bulb
are seeping the blood out of me,

and my tongue
is parched and lonely.

Let the sun
set on me.

Let its crimson sweat of ferocity
spill all over me.

My heart is ready
for the chill of the darkness.

I put my best shirt on
and wait for a bride of the light.

Let the darkness
rise from me,

the darkness that conceals
the bruises of the light.

Bhuwan Thapaliya works as an economist, and is the author of four poetry collections. Thapaliya’s books include the recently released Safa Tempo: Poems New and Selected (Nirala Publication, New Delhi), and Our Nepal, Our Pride (Cyberwit.net). Poetry by Thapaliya has been included in The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry and Tonight: An Anthology of World Love Poetry, as well as in literary journals such as Urhalpool, MahMag, Kritya, FOLLY, The Vallance Review, Nuvein Magazine, Foundling Review, Poetry Life and Times, Poets Against the War, Voices in Wartime, Taj Mahal Review, and more.

***

Author
Our Nepal, Our Pride
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Nepal-Pride-Bhuwan-Thapaliya/dp/8182531152

***

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A Hard Rain. Poem. Candice James

June 20, 2014November 19, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

A hard rain pelts down
Graying the sky to charcoal
The Quay is deserted,
And somehow out of key.

I stand at the guard rail,
Collar pulled tight,
Staring at the cold river.
The wind whirls and swirls
Inviting the river into its frenzy.
The river resists, then slowly submits.
Small ripples at first
Cresting to waves;
Synchronicity somehow present
In this simple chaos.

A young girl
In a pink fleece Parka
And well worn Mukluks
Passes by;
Her eyes as vague
As fading winter sparks

The day dissolves

Night chews on the last remnants
Of a non-descript twilight.
Appetite sated,
She licks her lips
And the thunder rolls
In the bruised atmosphere
Of a hard, hard rain

2 Poets Laureate — New Westminster Poet Laureate Candice James and Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah at Royal City Literary Arts Society Setp 22, 2013 membership drive

***

Poet Laureate, New Westminster, BC

President, Royal City Literary Arts

Honorary Professor International Arts Acadamy, Greece

Board Advisor, Interantional Muse, India

Board Advisor, Federation of British Columbia Writers

Candice James is Poet Laureate of New Westminster, B.C. and President of Royal City Literary Arts Society. She is a poet, musician, songwriter and author of six poetry books A Split In The Water (Fiddlehead 1979);Inner Heart―A Journey; (2010), Bridges and Clouds (2011); Midnight Embers–A Book of Sonnets (2012); Shorelines-A Book of Villanelles (2013); and Ekphrasticism (2014). Websites: http://saddlestone.shawwebspace.ca and www.candicejames.com

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Downtown Waco. Midnight. Heidegger Looks at the Moon. Poem. Sonnet. R.W.Haynes

November 13, 2013November 13, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

The Bush Library really should be here,

For each dead city needs a laugh or two,

A little something so the skeletons can jeer

On nights like this when there’s little to do

And nothing to haunt but the haunting lack of hope

Where words are born to sputter anxiously

Toward brief life in some half-bungled trope

Irrecoverable etymologically.

Is there another cyclone on its way

To re-mix this desperation here?

To make words and deeds mutually obey

A dim correspondence–never more clear

Than the misshapen moon cruising so high

Over the Brazos in the hopeless Waco sky?

***

R. W. Haynes has taught literature at Texas A&M International University since 1992. His recent interests include the early British sonnet, and he is completing a second book on the Texas playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote (1916-2009). In his poetry, Haynes seeks to celebrate life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without sounding any more dissonant notes than he has to. In fiction, he works toward grasping that part of the past which made its mark on his generation. He enjoys teaching drama, especially the Greeks, Ibsen, and Shakespeare, and he devoutly hopes for a stunning literary Renaissance in South Texas.

***

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Settling City. Poem. John Horvath Jr

March 27, 2015November 12, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

(i.)

A world made from the refuse of a higher world of culture,

a domain of trash, immature myths, inadmissible passions…

City is stench of alewife millions inextricably dead on pebbled

beaches after icebreaks on Lake Michigan. Fisheyes reflecting

beached debris and the latest arrivals arriving amid girder and

concrete Sullivans and Wrights. They as did them who built the

buildings join the city to become steel or slag, oiled machine,

part of the stench

Empty belongings from cars: Packard backseat divans, fruitcrate

end tables, curtains of plastic, crazy quilts, heirlooms, family

icons. On once cobbled streets, children are tribal on the curb–

at the edge of the world–displaying their valorous conquests

of enemies left behind, ancient or old, forgotten–no, in the city

never forgotten.

Work is rock: hard underfoot raucous dance of souls like morning

mists that settle, rise, vanish in the same low empty spaces–like

dunes that wander from waste to waste over farmlands abandoned.

The village known by its brokenness–That friend in the mist

boiled in oils from broken pipelines; The neighbor there in the mist

butchered by ingots thrown from rollers; There in the mist a father

crushed in the presses. Around the dancehall wallflower daughters

painted for paychecks recognize brothers and sons who in the mists

begin to belong to the city.

City is forge: rhythm out of the afternoon cacophone language of traffic-trapped

cousins cursing the ongoing babble of sledges and hammers that encircle their

metallic-tint enclaves of gas dreams. Afraid to unignite engines and escape, leap

the icefloes of autos jammed forever up and down stream–Ford, Dodge, Chevrolet,

Dodge, pimpwagon, Volkswagen, Dodge, druglord Mercedes, turn-about, run.

Who walks here passes into stone unfinished.

There faces are the sculptures of workdays beaten into their souls

over time that begins with the end of their villages, farms, families.

City is history. From Hoosier Dunes to Chicago Loop, then circle

back again, down Dan Ryan to East-West 90 Interstate, round

from Kankakee and Little Calumet to the temple of the rich,

archaeology dreamlit with comers refusing to melt into mist

later and earlier, 1846, late 80, 1926, 46, 56, today or after,

maybe another time altogether and around every corner a new

homeland where it’s always the Springtime and waves roll

onto the lakeshore leaving new stenches of alewives with

dead eyes rushing toward Bedlam out of old whoring Babylons

across dead seas, across rolling vast flatlands.

Come like belligerent hordes to the mills

where summer heat sparks from dried loins,

muscular shapes–like salted meats–boil

onto asphalt murdering of thought, never

take home the punishment, trouble, dirt,

or the danger of workplace. Consumption

and power in sweet sweaty hands gripping

hot steering wheels along potted streets

narrowly leading toward quiet exhaustion

proud of private slow death for girders,

rails, and–for the wealthier–appliances

(sons and daughters desiring such honors

follow footsteps of foolhardy martyr fathers.

They dream they will conquer the dragons

that spat the flames that marked fathers

who worked in the mills for a living but

only inherited scars like the slavebrands

their daddies had carried as birthright).

father, I love you.

A man hears himself saying what his father had said his son would

say when he looks into his rearview mirror mirroring traffic come

to a halt like Lot’s wife; He hears himself cursing his father’s

curse when he curses that self like himself stalling all forward

movement. In a language of the dead, sinner and saint correspond.

father, I love you.

When passion has gone after the work must end

alone in the heat of coffin-like cars dead in

the end of shift traffic, ghosts come to say,

you, you are the father who brought you here.

father I love you.

you are the mistaken idea of rescue beyond the village walls

escape into purgatory of factory days from the hell of knowing

every valley dweller by name and the dates of their first loves.

This is the city: when you look back on what it was to you when

you were mocked neutered and cowered, primmed for display in it,

bled by it, when you have fled from it, left someone behind in it,

when you are gone from it, when you are gone… the city is yours.

father, I love you.

This city is yours.

It is the village

It is the valley

The dried farm

you sought to escape.

The city is history. Rebuild its monuments. Make way for boulevards;

Leave the façades, the mirroring windows, the pointed roofs, the false

faces of what you’ve made and the chimneys

whose rich dark smoke recall death’s communards.

This city is yours. It is where your child blew her first kiss away,

It is where your sons blooded their first enemies, where all

the passions denied you long ago from some false sense of dignity,

honesty, integrity, the church that held like glue together family,

this city is yours now that all that is past.

It is your country to where the street signs end,

to where garbage is taken and the dead are buried.

***

(ii.)

CALUMET

a kulfoldi magyarjaihoz

for Hungarian emigres

Cartwrights and sailors and farmers

leaving families, histories, icons,

you came to this blast-furnace city

as if God’s own breath blew through

its chimneys a forgiveness of greed

but you were not the first to come:

Endlessly East moves West,

West moves endlessly East,

toward Calumet drab smoke,

into cauldrons and furnace,

into the moments of common

machine and common labors,

into this moment of common language.

Strangers forged into a new race.

Nothing–

not a slightest movement–

could have been differently.

Southside Chicagoan and second-wave immigrant John Horváth Jr. now lives in Mississippi; he has published his poetry nationally and internationally since the 1970s. “Doc” Horváth has taught creative writing, literary criticism, and theory. Having been an online mentor to new and emerging poets, in November 1997 he published and now edits poetryrepairs.com [www.poetryrepairs.com], a zine dedicated to promoting contemporary international poetry.

“Veteran of two wars, retired Professor of English in Mississippi, the poet with a unique and brilliant and cutting perspective of southern culture and religion teams up with talented musicians to produce something quite unique. The language of the Veteran and the south and poetic style with good music.”…..David Michael Jackson, www.artvilla.com

See also: Excerpt from Blues Man Joe from the Album Reverend Terrebone Walker John Horvath Jr. Label The buy link at… http://fb.me/2T11LMNlh

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Forsaken, the Carthaginian Quartet. Poem. Joseph Armstead

March 27, 2015November 10, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

…the warm waters of the Punic ports stir fitfully…

City of Bones, languid and arid, it sleeps,
skeletal ruination of Phoenician dominion,
Hellenistic citadel, on the eastern shores
of Lake Tunis, once a sandy jewel
in the crown of Elissa,
birthplace to Hannibal,
and legends of endless war…

the squawking of gulls threatens the silence

1.) Confessio Nunquam

— my voice will hide —
the membranous gates
to my secret heart
are stitched shut, sown
of coarse thread, spun of denial,
I let nothing bathe
in the revealing light of day,
hiding nakedness
behind a fragile,
cracked, mirror-mask,
a spiders’ web map,
faultlines of the psyche…

— Sssshhhhh—!

2.) A Strange Blindness

History obscured
behind a wall of lucid dreaming,
soft-focus P.O.V.
through the vaseline
smeared over a camera lens,
I clutch the Past to my chest,
cautionary, restrictive,
custodial, prenominal,
let no picture escape, no image
be seen, no tableau unfold,
sub-rosa, clandestine,
none can know the Truth…

— cryptic, let sleeping dragons lie —

3.) Sigmund Benedicta

…shamed, I camouflage my ferocity…

I am struck mute.

searing magma of flaming tears
behind eyes swimming
in the memory of damnation,
while shameful denial forms the lyrics
to a song stuck in my throat,
words set to the music of heartbreak
waiting to play
before an audience
eager to judge…

chaotic, quixotic, impracticable and dreamy
my anarchy seeks its voice

— hush, I will not speak —

4.) The Justinian Variation

the dam breaks, the levees are overrun,
the hot stones of the rocky shoreline hiss
as the waters cascade inward from the harbor

the necropolis coughs its myths
into the air, fable and folklore
dancing with skeletal ghosts
through the haze of antiquity,

and the waters rise yet higher
and the sun-baked ruins grow cool

The sound of my voice astonishes me:
bygone phonems, repressed grammar
and disremembered syntax mix
with nostalgia
creating a lullaby
for ravens.

Unrestrained, I sing
powerfully
in the City of Bones,
the squawking gulls
my choir…

BIO

Joseph Armstead is a suspense-thriller and horror author living in the United States’ San Francisco Bay Area. Author of a dozen short stories and ten novels, his poetry has been published in a wide range of online journals, webzines and print magazines. A mathematician, Futurist and computer technologist, Mr. Armstead’s poetry often defies easy description, but frequently includes neo-classical imagery, surrealist viewpoints and post-modern themes.

http://redroom.com/member/joseph-armstead

http://www.amazon.com/Condemned-Of-Heaven-Joseph-Armstead/dp/0578013665

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