Richard Silberg and Joyce Jenkins
Richard Silberg’s new book of poems is The Horses: New & Selected Poems (Red Hen Press). Tony Barnstone says, “Richard Silberg is a scat cat razzing and jazzing and boom-shika-booming down the page-stage.…These poems are timeriffs and deathrants and they are written with a profound humanity, and with a “crying so deep/ it was like coming/ bitter crying/ a crying sweet like milk.” He has published five previous collections of his poems, most recently Deconstruction of the Blues (Red Hen Press), winner of a PEN Oakland- Josephine Miles Literary Award. He is Associate Editor of Poetry Flash/poetryflash.org literary review and calendar. He also co-translated, with Clare You, The Three Way Tavern, by poet Ko Un (University of California Press, 2006), which won the 2007 Northern California Book Award in Translation, and co-translated, with Clare You, Flowers Long For Stars, poems by Oh Sae-Young (Tamal Vista Publications, 2005), This Side of Time, by Ko Un (White Pine, 2012), and the forthcoming I Must Be the Wind, by Moon Chung-Hee (White Pine Press). Among his other books are Reading the Sphere: A Geography of Contemporary American Poetry (Berkeley Hills Books, 2001), essays published in Poetry Flash, and a previous book of social philosophy. His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, VOLT, Catamaran Literary Reader, Parthenon West Review, New American Writing, and in The Addison Street Anthology, Berkeley’s Poetry Walk.
Five Questions for the Postmodern Poet
If poetry is a love feast are the poets meat puppets?
If my father is dead if when I was six years old
I leapt out of sleep in the pouring sun
what then?
Begin with your intensely lived experience
Mask it mask it
Will it play in aporia?
She took off her clothes Paler places
She was 5’8″ tall and round as a tower
“Baby, baby, baby,” she said
“take me down I’m so blue”
Who am I?
What’s that girl to you?
Crying
I cried for my father
for his slim muscled legs
because he was too timid and shy
for death
I cried for my childhood
my bedroom mouse
our long hall apemen
and dinosaurs marching in the darkness
for Bach’s climbing violins
ache of their beauty
too tangled in this world
to ever get out
for women
faces in sunlight
the places they were
songs that played
all those filaments of soul
itching under time’s rock
The crying so deep
it was like coming
bitter crying
crying sweet like milk
Joyce Jenkins is the author of Joy Road, a limited edition chapbook, and Portal, with an introduction by Carolyn Kizer. Her poems have appeared in Parthenon West Review, Ambush Review, ZYZZYVA, Addison Street Anthology: Berkeley’s Poetry Walk, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Watershed, and elsewhere. She is editor of Poetry Flash, Literary Review & Calendar for the West (Poetryflash.org) and executive director of Poetry Flash, presenter of the Poetry Flash reading series in Berkeley and Oakland, Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival, and Northern California Book Awards. She is chair of Northern California Book Reviewers. Her accolades include the American Book Award 1994, National Poetry Association’s Distinguished Service to Poets & Poetry Award 1995, and PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Lifetime Achievement Award 2006. A day was proclaimed for her by the City of Berkeley as part of the Berkeley Poetry Festival’s lifetime achievement award 2009. Poetry Flash received Litquake’s Barbary Coast Award in 2012.
Piano Man
Friday night. Beautiful jazz piano at Picante’s. Two people in
the room. Three grubby skateboarders and several ticket
holders waiting for their food in the next. The music, simple,
yet impossibly lovely, impossibly complicated, pours out of
the shiny black spinet. The piano player notices me listening.
He can hear me listening. He turns his head slightly to look.
I look away to avoid eye contact because the music is
impossibly intimate. How can I tell him that it’s okay that no
one but me hears? That I will walk out and down Sixth Street
and he will be alone but that he must not stop playing? That
he is not alone as long as he sounds? That he means as long as
he sounds? That he cannot stop playing. He must not.
Portal, by Joyce Jenkins,
Pennywhistle Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1993
