An excerpt from “Boys with swords” by Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (poetry, ’05), published at Guesthouse:
in the forest. One is wood,
flames painted
to the hilt. Dry October,
sparks
of the papery eucalyptus.
One of them swings,
one of them ducks.
Wood on wood,
fracture in the line of fire.
It feels good
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An excerpt from “ONE DAY ONE FLOWER” by Patrick Donnelly (poetry, ’13), published at Guesthouse:
Glimpsed through an open door,
a simple summon,
hard to describe what was seen.
Then we lost the bar for a week, searched
many nights on the block where
it ought to have been. Kyoto, years ago.
When it appeared again, we said this is it.
Is it? Yes,
here
we are.
Chalkboard drawing of a goblet saying,
“Why not have some wine?”
Like Brigadoon turning up
only when it wishes to, or Frost’s Grail,
“Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it.”
The master nodding as we entered.
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An excerpt from an interview with Tommye Blount (poetry, ’13), published at Four Way Review:
FWR: How do you protect your time and foster your writing?
TB: Like many poets now, and throughout history, I work a demanding weekday job, so writing can sometimes feel nearly impossible for me. With that said, I do dedicate early Saturday and Sunday mornings (or any off days) as “writing” time. Writing is in quotes, because in these sessions, I make no promises to myself that I have to write anything at all—and, to be frank, sometimes I don’t write. There may be times where I do nothing but read essays or books by other poets or fiction writers. (Oh! One of my obsessions as of late are essays on fashion—have you read The Battle of Versailles by Robin Givhan?) If you were to pop in on me, you might even see me looking at YouTube videos of other artists—either performing or talking about their disciplines. Where I am getting at is this: the act of writing for me encompasses a lot more than the physical act of writing.
Right now, I am in New York for a theater run—something I do often. Yes, I am gaga over musicals and plays, and get gooseflesh anytime someone starts talking about Audra McDonald, but all of this too is a part of my process. Watching other artistic disciplines feeds me. Not so much the subject matter of their work—although that is fair game for me as well—but I am more interested in their materials. For the past couple of years, I have been going to Stratford, Ontario, home of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. Here, the plays and musicals are performed in repertory—so many shows are going on at once. You will see one actor playing two, or three, different roles in different shows. I love this, because to me, and my poet brain, it always leads me to rhyme and the shapes of rhyme. When I am watching occurrences like this happening, something seemingly minor to most of the audience, I am thinking how can I translate this into a poem. Of course, I can’t ever pull it off when I mean to pull it off—I’m too slow for that. Ha! It takes a while for the idea to sink into my body and, it always seems, out of nowhere I pull it off without thinking about it—or maybe I am thinking about it? I don’t know.
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An excerpt from “CASTRATO” by Annie Kim (poetry, ’09), published at Four Way Review:
I want to be a boy, you tell the man
who analyzes you. Free of desire.
He nods, light flashing
off his thin gold spectacles.
No one called the singing boys
castrati to their face. So evirato,
meaning one unmanned,
musico: one making music.
Boys aren’t free
of desire, of course—
Though not by ordinary means—
fingers pressing keyboard, lips
against a cold silver mouthpiece.
No, the singer’s body turned
to supple balsam, stretched
over the years until it forms
that frame beloved by engineers—
strength, endurance, range—
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An excerpt from “Little Brown Bat” by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10), published at American Literary Review:
Little Brown Bat
1.
That you must fall to fly. That you can live two decades or more.
That you have young like we do, one per year.
That you make a rich milk to feed your pup and to keep it warm
fold it between your wings.
That you eat every day half your weight in mosquitoes, found
by echolocation one winged speck at a time.
That you hibernate in utter torpor, absorbing the fat you’ve stored,
a very precise amount.
That you were, on that July night, a shy, soft thing, a vibration
just brushing my left eyebrow.
That you once were once unnumbered as Dante’s leaves in the fall.
That you die from eating the insects
we poison. That you are cut down by wind turbines, not the blades
but the drop in air pressure popping you
like kernels of corn. That you swoop and careen arcs traced
by the streetlights of my childhood summers.
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An excerpt from “Heartwood” by Rose Skelton (fiction, ’17), published at Four Way Review:
On the day after Hazel died – it was a Tuesday afternoon in early March – George stood at his woodworking bench, whittling a bowl. He pressed the piece of yew down, and used a bowl gouge to scoop a smooth sliver of the pinkish-white wood so that it curled upwards and away, falling to the bench. He did this repeatedly – he tried not to think of anything else, not Hazel, not the empty house – and then, tired of that singular motion, he reached for sandpaper and ran it over the burrs and birds-eyes until the wood was warm and smooth to the touch.
George looked through the window, out on to the loch, where the water was as flat and as grey as slate. On the loch’s far shore, lying low across the hills Beinn Bheàrnach, Beinn a’ Bhainne, and Beinn Taladh, was a bank of cloud that made the hills seem like stubs that ended only a few hundred feet up. These were the hills that George and Hazel had looked at every day of the 43 years that they had been married. Peat and granite and died-back bracken were George and Hazel’s winter-time palate; these were the hues that stayed with them through the darkest months of the year, until April when the first of the dog violets reared their purple nodding heads.
Hazel hadn’t been well, but despite the pains that tore at her bones, and then the operation just before Christmas, she had been out in her garden every day. A few weeks after the operation, even, she had pulled on her wellies, got her gardening gloves down from the hall shelf and wrapped her purple rain jacket about her. Concerned, George had watched her through the long window at the back of the house climb carefully up the steps, clutching at the wooden rail, and enter her labyrinthine vegetable garden. He had watched as she had become smaller and smaller, eventually disappearing behind the poly-tunnel, just a purple speck on the hillside, a trowel in her hand.
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An excerpt from the book, The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy by Anna Clark (fiction, ’07), published by Metropolitan Books. The excerpt appears in Lapham’s Quarterly, with an additional piece published at The Guardian:
Looking through the photo archives of Flint’s parks and recreation department, I was struck by how water had such a rich place in the city’s history. Flint, the birthplace of General Motors, is famous as an industrial hub. But it is also a river town, only seventy miles away from both Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron. It’s part of the Great Lakes ecosystem, one of the most abundant sources of freshwater on the face of the earth.
In one photograph after another, I saw the people of Flint gathering along riversides, pools, and reservoirs. The waterways built community—sort of. The photos were also revealing in what they didn’t show. Flint was the most segregated city in the North, and the third most segregated city nationwide. I found a 1929 photo of an integrated children’s baseball team—the league champs, according to the handwriting on the back. But in later years, when the African American population in Flint exploded, they vanished from many community spaces and from, it seemed, the photographic record. At Berston Field House, white children played in the pool while African American children were set up with sprinklers. Black children could swim in the Berston pool once a week, and afterward the pool was drained and cleaned before white children returned.
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An excerpt from the essay “Aesthetics and Politics: A Reaction to ‘War Poem’ as Film” by Nomi Stone (poetry, ’17), published at Motion Poems:
“When I’ll pray the sun won’t devour/ your northbound steps” –Javier Zamora
Last week, in over 700 cities and towns across America, protesters marched against the Trump administration’s brutal immigration and refugee policies, calling for the reunification of the over 3,000 children separated from their parents and an end to indefinite detentions. Amidst the photographs of children in concrete-floored cages with foil blankets, there were decades of suns devouring steps. It is in this same searing month that Motionpoems releases the film Tyler Richardson made of my poem, “War Poem,” a poem also about refugees.
Tyler Richardson turned my poem “War Poem” (The New Republic, 2017) into a film in Season 8 of Motionpoems. To start: let me trace where the poem came from. I am an anthropologist and research war and American Empire; my poems are often inspired by what I’ve seen and stories I’ve heard. My second collection of poems (Tupelo 2019) is about the two years of fieldwork I spent in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America for trainings. I’ve also done fieldwork about the refugee crisis in the Middle East. “War Poem” is inspired from several stories told to me by a migration aid worker—about moments that occurred in the Middle East and Africa. I wrote the poem while I was an MFA student at Warren Wilson, and my brilliant mentor Monica Youn read many drafts, as I worked to get it right: how much urban and how much pastoral; how to justly locate the voice of the poem and the witness within it?
When Tyler and I first spoke about translating the poem into a film, he told me he was thinking of shooting on the country roads of Upstate New York—and transposing the poem into a Westernized version of the refugee crisis. When he sent me the final cut some months later, he explained: “We decided to lean into the idea that this film is subtly referring to an Americanized version of the images that so often come from overseas––unrest, separation, refugees.” As Tyler wrote on “Director’s Notes,” he wanted to offer “a slice of just one journey shared between siblings and rooted in what is personal and relatable [to him].” He explained that he wanted to make a distant crisis more imaginable to a Western audience. I was immediately both anxious (at the thought of an “Americanized” version of the poem) and intrigued: what would a Western or American translation of my poem look like? I hoped for a portrayal of Empire at home.
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An excerpt from “It Has a Wish,” one of two poems by Peter Schireson (poetry, ’17) published at Connotation Press:
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An excerpt from “A Hiker’s Guide to Damascus” by Serene Taleb-Agha (fiction, ’12) published at Ploughshares:
Syria is the country where I first began to hike. I had moved there from the US with my husband in the early 2000s to the approving nods of the elders of my family. Before then, I’d only gone on visits, to see relatives and learn the language. My move was supposed to be a homecoming. A graft cut from a tree only thrives in its native soil, my relatives told me. Syria is the only country where you will be unconditionally embraced. In the ambivalent years following 9/11, when I began to be noticed as something more than an oddly dressed woman whose parents came from a country no one had ever heard of, it sounded like an easy route to acceptance.
It turned out the acceptance was not so unconditional—more on that later—but it also turned out there was much more to embrace than the people. To this day, when I think of Damascus, I think of the land that cradles it: the pockmarked hills with sharp spines down their ridges like the bones of a stegosaurus, where the rains have etched away at the limestone; the dry valleys, where the road is rough, the water scarce, and you wouldn’t venture without a friend. In other words: hiking country.
I had trouble making friends the first couple of years. Then my husband read an article in an online paper about a hiking club and, knowing that I had a love for nature, forwarded it to me. That was how I found myself at a bus depot in downtown Damascus very early one weekend, prepared to take a bus ride off into the countryside with a few dozen complete strangers.
They called themselves the Nature Explorers, and unlike the independent, go-it-alone streak of the American hikers I’ve hiked with since, they considered themselves a family. Everyone paid a small fee, which went to the purchase of common meals, and before we embarked on the bus, we divided the packets of olives and cheese for breakfast, beans or pasta for lunch, into our packs. The bus was barely big enough to fit half of us, and most of the young men stood in the aisle. Leaving the city, the driver would play the mellow strains of Fairouz, the Lebanese diva. On the way home, our feet sore from ten to fifteen miles of all-day traveling, those still left with energy cranked up the dance music and clapped and shook their hips in the aisles.
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