..for Measure

My villanelle “Under Glass” is in the current issue of Measure, which is now a biannual journal of formal verse. I’m flattered, because most villanelles suck and these guys know it.

New Chapbook!

Aquinas Flinched, a book of 15 of my poems, has been published by Modern Metrics, an independent press specializing in “formal” verse. Find out more about the chapbook and the press and how you can get a copy right here.

Here’s a poem from the chapbook:

Manasquan
(for Steven Phillips)

WE crab the ruin rocks at Manasquan,
The Island of the Squaws, we Forfeit Boys,
Embraced by our paternal Grandmas on
A beach of Kodachrome and rubber toys

Where, as we tumble, adamantly tanned,
They come up bleached and ghostly in reel two:
Our fathers talking, standing in the sand,
Their pallid chests, long pants and business shoes.

A moment. Then they crack and fade to light.
We’re back to waving matriarchs against
the bank of blue and yellow clouds that shade
the field of skeletal remains, condensed
8 millimeter tidelines to a night
that pulls us to the lights of the arcade.

_____

I have my copy, and I can vouch for the physical quality of the book! Modern Metrics produces very fine books, indeed. The cover, by the way, was designed by R. Nemo Hill, incorporating a photo I took of the Tick Tock Diner on Route 3 in Nutley on the way home from a Bruce Springsteen concert. As for the quality of the poetry, well…it is published by Modern Metrics. But…you be the judge!

Thanks for checking it out.

Across the Grid of Streets

Quincy Lehr, a son of Oklahoma finding himself in Galway, Ireland, via New York City, has published his first full volume of poetry with Seven Towers, Dublin. It is called Across the Grid of Streets, and it’s available in hard and soft cover. There is also a companion chapbook.

Quincy is well known in the world of formal verse, though he is fluent in free verse as well. I have read much of his poetry and it comes highly recommended.

WHY THERE IS NO SOCIALISM
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

At 4:15 AM, the city bus
Had pulled up to the curb, its silhouette
Marked dimly by the light that crept through grates,
Fencing in empty stores. I paid my fare
And squeezed beside a sleepy Barnard girl.
She moved a centimetre to her left—
Away from me—and twitched a pinkish nose
Below grey, narrowed eyes, accusing me
Of something, so I leaned against the glass
And stared at greasy, distant streaks of light.
Each one of us was tired, pissed-off, and bored,
Angry at the hour and with those pricks—
That fat-assed bitch, who muttered at a cell phone,
That rat-faced airline worker at the front,
That punk-ass hoodlum, glaring at his feet,
That stuck-up twat, that sad-eyed brown-haired schmuck
Gawking at New York’s predawn, backlit blackness.
And if we were united, our disdain
For every dumb-shit creep—in short, ourselves—
Had fused our isolations into one.

~Quincy R. Lehr ©

The Holiday Season

–Westmoreland Bar, Westmoreland Street, Dublin, September 12th 2006

2-14

All around the world,
every boy and every girl,
need the loving.
The humble and the great,
even those we think we hate,
need the loving.
Soldiers of the Queen,
all the hard men that we’ve seen,
need the loving.
Babies at the breast,
those in power and those suppressed,
need the loving.

Andy Partridge (XTC)_____
Image: Patricia Wallace Jones ©

You’re Da-a-a-a-mn Right!

14 by 14, a new bimonthly online journal that publishes 14 sonnets per issue, took The Theme from Shaft (Part I: Geometry) for issue one. Others in include Margaret Menamin, Chris Hanson (also taking up a pop music theme), M.L. Price, Janet Kenny, and Maryann Corbet. The issue’s overall theme is “Flights of Fancy.” Beware of falling cows.

The Barefoot Muse

Winter 2007 includes Summer Lightning by your ol’ pal. Also, check out Tourista by Mike Alexander and Sleeping Hermaphrodite by James Wilk, for which those guys each picked up one of these. And here’s a trip–all three of us read our poems on the site. Mike and James will tell you that The Barefoot Muse is one of the best journals, on- or off-line, for the metrically obsessed. But I’m not sure they are the most objective sources on the subject.

Thanks, Barefoot Muse!

And then there’s Maryann Corbett and Quincy Lehr.

Pushcart Nomination!

My poem Shrine to Satan is among the six nominated by Shit Creek Review for a coveted Pushcart Prize! I’m honored to be named along with Mike Alexander, Rose Kelleher, and Dave McClure, and I will Google® Pushcart Prize very soon!

Thank you, Shit Creek Review!

Knuckles

My poem, The Dutchman, is included in issue No. 2 of Contemporary Sonnet, new online. Check out James Wilk, David Landrum and others, including our old pal Margaret Menamin in No 1.

The Horror

The Shit Creek Review blows topical for Ocotober.

(photo)

Good News for Modern Man

Creator, Author of the Fool’s Canard appears in issue 4 of Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression.

Creator, Author of the Fool’s Canard

Creator, author of the fool’s canard
of crossing to creation, captured where
economies of scale engage–regard
the brutal neighbors, God, your sullen heirs!

Executors of your divinity
declared an endless war. But could they find
the stone we perched upon your tomb, or see
the logic of your wrathful, errant mind?

Erase this math where two and two come four,
unwind our hearts so we might disengage
from their domain and disinherit war.
Exempt us from this Messianic age.

For, God, their vision and its spawn are one–
the neighbor’s kid, his Hummer, and the gun.