An excerpt from “On Poetry and the Necessity of Aimless Wandering,” an interview with Alan Shapiro by Amanda Newell (Poetry ’17), published by Plume.

AN: “In his recent essay for Plume on the prose poem and other hybrid forms, Chard deNiord observes that “[i]n the irrepressible, ever-evolving, experimental process of ‘making new’ many poets today are finding the traditional line inadequate for expressing and/or accommodating their urge for adopting liminal and hybrid forms that obviate the line. Which raises the question: how can a poet write poetry without lines?”

I have noticed that much of your recent work, including several selections for this feature, are prose poems—or at least what I would categorize as prose poems. And yet, you are someone who pays fastidious attention to the traditional poetic line as well, which we can see in “Ghost Story.”

Can you talk to me about your approach to the poetic line, and take a stab at answering that question—that is, how can a poet write poetry without lines?”

AS: I don’t know if I have an “approach” to the line. The line is only “a line” in relation to a sentence or a phrase it either reinforces or interrupts. And the line itself will vary to the degree it either reinforces or interrupts that phrase or sentence. And the effect of those various interruptions and/or reinforcements will depend on the lines before and after them, on the larger patterns of relation they either depart from or approach. For me it all comes down to pattern and variation, variation that depends on pattern for its significance.

Same holds true of a prose poem. Even without the line, you still have to establish some kind of pattern that suggests its own completion, some expectation of recurrence you can upend, modify or adhere to in varying degrees at every point in order to vocalize or enact a felt change of consciousness. Every sentence is a form or pattern in and of itself—that arouses grammatical expectations, that promise certain directions and outcomes which are either realized or disappointed.

The long sentence makes the short sentence that succeeds it more conspicuous, a loose sentence which begins with a main clause and then tacks on list-like a series of dependent clauses in apposition creates an open-ended expectation that it could go on forever. Depending on context, it could enact a feeling of indeterminacy, or a feeling of excited or oppressive abundance, ecstatic noticing or crushing boredom; whereas the antithesis of a loose sentence, a periodic sentence whose dependent clauses come at the beginning, its main clause at the end, seems more conducive to increasing degrees of anticipation, to the build-up of tension, since the longer you defer or suspend a main clause the more we’ll long for it and the greater sense of fulfilment we’ll experience when it finally comes. Likewise, complete sentences potentially intensify the effect of sentence fragments; just as a passage comprised of fragments will make whatever full sentence that follows them that much more surprising or emphatic.

There are, what, six kinds of sentences one can write: loose, periodic, compound, complex, compound-complex, and simple (seven if you count the fragment). You can’t set up an effect without setting it off from something else. In a prose poem the sentence is the principal expressive resource for enacting or embodying. A prose poem (like all poetry, like all art I would argue) depends for its life blood on pattern and variation. In a prose poem that expressive tension arises primarily (not exclusively) from the interplay of sentences whereas in lineated poetry it arises primarily (not exclusively) from an interplay of sentences and lines…”

Continue reading the interview here: https://plumepoetry.com/on-poetry-and-the-necessity-of-aimless-wandering-an-interview-with-alan-shapiro-by-amanda-newell/

“Coyotes” by Terri Leker (fiction 17) won the 2019 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest, selected by Claire Vaye Watkins. It was published in New Ohio Review Issue 26.

The coyotes moved into the woods behind my house just after I learned I was pregnant. On a quiet June morning, while my husband slept, I pulled on my running shoes and grabbed a leash from a hook at the back door. Jute danced around my feet on her pipe-cleaner legs, whining with impatience. It would have taken more than this to wake Matt, but I hushed her complaints with a raised finger and we slipped outside. A light breeze blew the native grasses into brown and golden waves as we wandered, camouflaging Jute’s compact frame. She sniffed the dirt, ears telescoping as though she were asking a question. When we reached a shady thicket of red madrones and live oaks, I unclipped the leash and wound it around my wrist.

It was over with Richard, had been since I’d found out about the baby. Anyway, I had come to believe that adultery sounded more illicit than it actually was. Between managing my schedule with Matt and making time to rendezvous with Richard, an affair often seemed more about time management than sexual gratification. I was meticulous with the calendar, but I would have known that the baby was Matt’s regardless, because Richard’s sperm could not locomote. He had told me so early on, while showing me the master bedroom of his faithfully restored North Oakland Victorian. His unexpected disclosure had interrupted my admiration of the exposed brick walls, so unusual for the earthquake-conscious Bay Area. Matt was having dinner just then with friends, thinking I was helping my mother set up her new television (she would be dead within a few months, but we all pretended to be optimists then), so he was eating eggplant parmesan at the Saturn Café as I lay with Richard on his king-sized bed, hearing words like motility and capacitation. Richard’s sober tone had suggested that I might comfort him in his sterility, which I did, if the definition of comfort was a passionate encounter that lasted as long as one might spend unboxing a 48-inch HDTV and connecting it to both Netflix and Hulu. But Matt and I had tried to have a baby for three years, so I took the pregnancy as a sign to recommit myself to my husband, who, predictably, jumped up and down on our unmade bed when I shared the news, attempting, in his white-socked excitement, to pull me up with him, not realizing that doing so might judder the bundle of cells loose, delivering me back to Richard and a childless but aesthetically pleasing life.

Read the rest of the story here: https://newohioreview.org/2019/12/13/coyotes/#more-2578

Alyson Mosquera Dutemple’s story “Prix Fixe” was nominated for a Pushcart and appears in the latest issue of FLOCK.

It was May, but the trees outside the restaurant didn’t seem to know it.  Their blighted leaves shuddered and fell, lending an autumnal feel to the air even before Mary took me out to dinner and announced that she wanted to leave me.

“Stephen, I’ve thought long and hard about this, and… Stephen?  I need you to listen,” she said.

A waiter had walked by. “I’m worried about you, Stephen,” Mary began, and though I tried to focus, there was something about this waiter, this kid, that caught my eye.  The way he bounced up a little on his toes as he walked.  That nervous jump at the end of each step.   The same skipping motion, the same funny little stride.  It reminded me of our boy, Everett.

“Stephen? Are you listening to me?” Mary’s voice rose.  “Now see?  This. This is exactly what I’m talking about.”  She rattled the ice in her glass.  “I can’t stand it.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the waiter, the one with Everett’s walk, standing just a little way off from our table, patting down his pockets.  “You tune me out,” Mary continued. “Whenever I bring up—” Her words rumbled indistinctly around me, a storm on the horizon, the wing-beat hum of locusts.  “It’s like you’re trying to be distracted all the time.”  I watched as the waiter brought a tiny notebook from his pocket, the kind used to write down orders in a restaurant.  I wondered if there was a name for such a book.  I wondered why I hadn’t asked Everett if there was a name for such a book the summer he worked on the pier washing dishes. Back when he was saving up for college or for whatever else he thought, we all thought, might have come next.

Read the rest of the story here: https://flocklit.com/fiction-dutemple-prix-fixe/

An excerpt from “Interior with Young Woman” by Susan Okie (poetry ’14), published by Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Interior with Young Woman

A borrowed house awaited,
empty but warm with intention—
soft white rugs for bare feet,
orange cushions posed on sofas.

A woman by Picasso kept one eye
on us. The other watched the lights
down in the valley. He played me
music from his country, asked

to dance. Awkward, I shuffled
to the beat. When he held me,
my body recoiled. I was a crane,
he a rooster, glossy, compact.

[…continue reading “Interior with Young Woman”at Valparaiso Poetry Review.]

An excerpt from “Tin Boy” by Sumita Mukherji (fiction ’15), published by Failbetter.

Tin Boy

My mother called herself a modern-day witch. With all of her poultices and potions, I thought of her more as a mad scientist. But I should have thought of her as a magician, because one day she disappeared.

That day started like many others. It was one of those California valley summers that extends into the fall, the kind that leaves you thirsting for your mother’s limeade all day and dreaming of ice castles all night. On our walk home from sixth grade, the sun, having scorched the ridge where my nose had once broken, burned the back of my stringy neck and parched my friend Jenny’s delicate throat. At the end of my cul-de-sac we paused and tapped at our injured skin, making mock sad faces at each other.

My sweaty San Francisco 49ers t-shirt fell to the middle of my thighs, over my loose gray shorts. At age eleven I was double-jointed, and as Jenny and I climbed the porch steps, I bent my arms forward and backward, aiming to impress my mother, who used to adore my awkwardness and loved watching me journey home from her bedroom window. “My sweet, tottering son,” she would say as a greeting at the front door. She adored it until a few months ago, when my father was legally allowed to stop sending alimony payments, and she quit her job at a marketing firm so that she could devote her days to herbalism and witchcraft.

[…continue reading “Tin Boy” at Failbetter.]