Poetry
I write often, but I hold onto most of it. When I get that sense that something is done, I am ok with letting it go. It takes me a certain amount of time before I feel that way because I like to put some distance between myself and a poem. I let it go mellow somewhere. Then I take it out again, maybe even ten years later.
I have had some pieces (poetry, fiction, reviews, etc.) in: Red Fez, Blue Print Review, Big Bridge, Graffiti Kolkata, Asemic, Slova, Citizens For Decent Literature, Blink Ink, Zygote In My Coffee, “World Of Change” Anthology, “First Time”, Crow Reviews, MUST, MiCrow… I will add them as I remember.
I had a collection of poems that I put together years ago called “The Urgent Traverse”, followed by “The Terminal Vista”. Both were loosely based on themes of geography, traffic, human patterns of movement, implications of planning. The poems were out there, weird, disjointed, and I couldn’t shake the belief that elements of cohesion and connection were missing. They were examples of poems that made sense to me, but required too many footnotes. In other words, they were not ready to share.
I had two chapbooks with limited print runs: “Flesh Made Widow” and “Prologue To Mariamne”. These will be reissued in 2020.
I also have a collection of poems on the language of shame, and that was produced by Naked Bulb Press in Oakland, California, called “The Shouldspeak Disease”. The cover features a great painting that I have in my office, by artist Moly Tov.
“Somewhere a mother
with invisible stitches
sits up.
“Something was taken from me.”
“You should rest,” they say.
“Try not to speak.”
Filament, Whose Time Inside The Glass Has Passed
This disease leaves you alive
Until you aren’t.
Who you are gets thinner from within
Until you aren’t.
It is figment.
Until it isn’t.
The mind becomes a forgotten wire, naked
in the ceiling. A dead filament.
It was born into a bulb, to hum.
Filament,
Whose time inside the glass
Has passed.
(“The Shouldspeak Disease”, E.Lynn Alexander, Naked Bulb Press)
There is a review at Big Bridge here.
Prologue to Mariamne
Lynn Alexander
Review by Paul Corman-Roberts
Lynn Alexander’s poetry has a brutal way of assessing the world from the outside in. In her most recent collection, Prologue for Mariamne (Citizens for Decent Literature, 2012) her stripped down narrative functions as a weary, battered spaceship recording every detail of an equally damaged planet as it plunges through a biosphere rotten with overstimulation and politically driven spectacle. A tour through her poem titles in this collection reveals the following sequence: “The Atmosphere is Skewed”; “The Hemisphere, Descending”; “We Are As Algae”; “The Age of Drowning”; “To The Singularity, Wane” and “All, Owing to the Shiva Fold.”
These aren’t all the poems in the collection, but the order follows a descent into humanness, for all its travails, and finds the desolation in that state to be a universal constant. This is not to say the collection is a “bummer”; though it is no ray of sunshine either, as the opening salvo sets the table for what is to come:
Tonight we are with the fire.
Finite. The Atmosphere is skewed.
Here we flicker to extinguish
We are shifting
We are rendered
as the Shadows
– From “The Atmosphere Is Skewed”
The cyclical spectacle that plays out in this chap chronologically begins where our narrative spaceship meets “civilization” smack dab in Herod’s Judea (as many Western dialectics do.) Herod’s second wife Mariamne is caught between the political intrigues required to save her own life while watching her family slaughtered by her husband’s maneuverings over the years. Mariamne (the root name of today’s “Merriam” and “Marianne”)* is trapped by her circumstances, as a pawn in various power plays from Herod’s court and family and of course by Herod himself. By openly speaking truth to power, she is able to leverage her position in the king’s court by mocking those pretenders to power, who inevitably turn out to be her betrayers. She surrenders her privilege, and eventually her life, for this act of dignity. It is said she died in calm silence, while her rivals, including her own mother, excoriated her on her way to execution. *
The middle section of the Prologue to Mariamne explores this intrigue in the title poem and its following pieces, “The Age of Drowning” and “Things Like Rage.” What Alexander does that is so profound is to tie the meanings of those poems to what is surely the centerpiece of the collection, the near epic and heartbreaking “Fingers Growing Furious” which unflinchingly depicts a woman being burned alive. While the poem’s movement is absolutely literal, it also serves to symbolize the fate, but also the revenge, of every mother, privileged or otherwise, who ever dared to speak out against the injustice done to their families by the machinations of corruption that rule through fear:
“Silent in the dampers they sat back
and watched her fingers
growing furious
If she squatted now
only black would smack the floor
Met in that last transcendent mastery,
the true last tension of the muscle clinging to bone
layers
their compressing acts
the black
to vanishing
Soon her dust was in their rugs”
– Fingers Growing Furious
This poem, in effect, links Queen Mariamne to our modernist sensibilities about using truth as a weapon. Mariamne is very much in the dialectic of Joan of Arc, the so called “witches” of Salem, Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, or even say Sandra Fluke who dared to speak out against hypocrisy and political agenda, only to be then cast as a hypocrite and manipulator despite her good intentions by the few who whip up the frenzy of a cowed and ignorant populace.
The message isn’t comforting, echoing so many others in this apocalyptic age, particularly those of the “things-have-to-get-worse-before-they-get-better” stripe. And yet Alexander doesn’t leave us hopeless:
“You are in the smallest speck that isn’t zero
The bang in a box
The black to vanishing
You are invisible, in the dark matter drown
of elements stripped
All
Owing to The Shiva fold
Still you live
Furious.”
– from “All. Owing to the Shiva Fold”
The promise of rebirth from the void is not denied, nor is the hope that lessons of the current incarnation of human civilization are not lost in those rebirths.
* Jewish Encyclopedia
