Poets and Poems: Dave Malone and "Bypass"

I’m reading a poetry collection, and an image forms in my mind, a memory I hadn’t recalled in years. I’m 11, and my mother arranged for me to spend a week with my widowed aunt who lived in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.  She was the family historian, and I was the family reader, so I suppose my mother thought we’d be a match. We were. 

She was a force to be reckoned with. In her lifetime, she crossed swords with reluctant neighbors, homeowner associations, historical commissions, the New Orleans City Council, and just about anyone whom she saw standing in the way of historical preservation and urban beautification. She also buried every deceased pet in her deep back yard, well behind her pre-Civil War house.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Friday Readings

 

Found in Translation: Love’s Fire and Ice – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“Hendecasyllabics,” poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Formalist, Farmer, and Faithful – Marie Burdett at New Verse Review.

Poets and Poems: Dave Malone and “Tornado Drill”

I live in a suburb of St. Louis. If asked what they know, most people might think of the Gateway Arch on the riverfront, or the St. Louis Cardinals. Before I moved here more than 40 years ago, that was all I knew. Living here, I’ve found my most surprising experience to be living in a hilly city. St. Louis is in the foothills of the Missouri Ozarks. Drive southwest, toward Springfield, and the hills become increasingly more serious. 

I think of the Missouri Ozarks as Dave Malone country. His poetry springs from the Ozark landscape, and it’s not all about hills. And it springs from the people of the Ozarks, his own family, the people he grew up with, and the people he knows. This is not the Winter’s Bone or Ozark of Hollywood’s imagination, but the real landscape of where one grows up, and where one’s family and friends still live. 

 

As the poems of Malone’s newest collection, Tornado Drill, demonstrate, that landscape is not so different from the ones the rest of us grew up in, and live in. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Reading the 1913 Edition of “Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare”

It was an intriguing invitation. Read all the works of William Shakespeare in a year?  

Poet Dave Malone posed the challenge. Writer Callie Feyen accepted. I wavered, trying to balance time commitments, and then I leaped. But before I told Malone yes, I checked to make sure my memory was correct, and I indeed had a one-volume edition of all of Shakespeare’s plays. I did. I also had several copies of several individual plays, small, hardbound editions published between 1890 and 1930.

 

Also pushing my decision was having read The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro, the movies Shakespeare in Love and Much Ado About Nothing, which I truly enjoyed, and having seen Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones playing the leads in Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic Theatre in London in 2013. 

 

My copy of the 1913 edition of Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare has been occupying space on my bookshelves for more than 30 years. Judging by the bookplate, I purchased the book sometime in the late 1980s from Dappled Gray Antiques, a shop in my St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood that had been across the street from the Kirkwood train station. The antiques are long gone, the owner having retired and moved away. The train station is still there, an Amtrak station operating in a building built in 1893.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph: The actor Robert Mantell in the stage production of Richard III, from Cassell's Illustrated Shakespeare.

Listening to the Poets in the Sounds of Silence

If a single word could be used to describe the 2400-acre Shaw Nature Reserve 40 miles southwest of downtown St. Louis in Franklin County, it would be silence. When a soul craves contemplation or calm, it’s the silence that attracts. It’s not serenity I’m looking for, though, but rather a cure for restlessness.

I’ve been here before, and late November is a good time to visit. The temperatures are cool without being chilling; slithering creatures have crawled into their dens for the approaching winter; and the gray brownness of the trees and terrain guarantee few visitors, especially on a Monday.

The reserve opens around Pinetum Lake, and the scene, especially in autumn, could pass for a landscaped design in 18^thcentury England, like at Blenheim Palace. All that’s missing is the Greek temple.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Pinetum Lake, Shaw Nature Reserve.

Poets and Poems: Dave Malone and “You Know the Ones”

That kid in seventh grade who went overnight from scrawny and skinny to muscled jock claiming he had to shave twice a day. The girl in the pink sweater who moved through the crowded halls of eighth grade like she was parting the Red Sea. The furtive glance at the skinny girl in glasses rewarded with an equally furtive return glance. The physics teacher who was barely this side of crazy. The best friend in high school whom you planned the rest of your life with. And don’t forget the music – the best music ever, with nothing to match it before or since.

Dave Malone

This is the stuff that puts the form in our formative years. And this is the stuff of Dave Malone’s newest collection of poetry, You Know the Ones.

Malone doesn’t confine himself to those middle school and high school years. He knows what shapes us is also the landscape we’re born and raised in, and the people who are never more than a few feet away – the grandparents, the mothers, the fathers, the brothers and sisters, the extended family of aunts and uncles and cousins and the distant relatives whom we’re not sure are really relatives or not but it doesn’t matter because they’ve been part of the landscape forever.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Twitter Party: Slivers of Plum at Midnight

It’s been a while since we last hosted a poetry party on Twitter, but it finally happened. Nine Twitter poets participated, responding to prompts by @tspoetry taken from Dave Malone’s (that’s @dzmalone in the vernacular of Twitter) most recent poetry collection, O: Love Songs from the Ozarks. Our review of the collection was posted here at Tweetspeak Poetry back in February.

Tweetspeak Poetry was born as a result of series of poetry parties on Twitter. For a while we posted the resulting poems on my personal blog, but finally created a site just for that purpose. Over time, the site grew, additional additional features like Poetry at Work Day and Bring Your Poet to Work Day, literary tours, poetry reviews, poetry prompts and more.

Like every previous poetry party, the lines for poems developed on a number of different levels, some people following the prompt and others responding to each other; while some kept closely to the timing of prompt as others were more considered in their responses. It’s great fun, but it takes some detective work on the part of the editor (me) to identify which lines belong with which poem. But I think you’ll like the resulting poems.

To continue reading (and to see the poems), please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Illustration by jks Lola via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: Dave Malone and “O”

My first experience with the Ozark Mountains was virtual – a novel called The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks by the late Donald Harington. It was published in 1975; I read it about 1980 and thought it hilarious. A few years later, we spent a long weekend in Branson, before it was discovered by all the big name entertainers and when Silver Dollar City at the duck boats were the bog attractions.

It was then that I learned about The Shepherd of the Hills and the Bald Knobbers, a group of vigilantes who were still fighting the Civil War for the North in the 1880s, their enemy being the Anti-Bald Knobbers, who sided with the south. I also discovered that St. Louis is considered to be in the foothills of the Ozarks, surprising, since the Ozarks about 100 miles away. And we’ve spent several long weekends at Lake of the Ozarks, created way-back-when by a dam and today a heavy tourist draw Missouri.

So my knowledge of the Ozarks was essentially limited to what any observant tourist might know. And I didn’t consider the movie Winter’s Bone to present an accurate portrayal of life in the Ozarks, either.

I’ve had a different picture of life in the Ozarks, and it’s thanks to Dave Malone’s poetry: View from the North Ten; Under the Sycamore; Seasons of Love; and Poems to Love, and the Body. His latest collection, O: Love Poems from the Ozarks, includes some of the most vivid love poetry I think I’ve read.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Candy Simonson via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads: Poetry Five

I’ve read several good works of poetry recently. Three were in e-book form and two in paperback.

Making Adjustments for Life Expectancy: Collected Poems

M.J. Duggan is a British poet who lives in Bristol, and he’s published several works, including  a series of 11 poems entitled Avalon, which focus on industrialization (I reviewed it in 2012). Making Adjustments for Life Expectancy is a volume of Duggan’s collected poems (paperback), and it’s constructed in a very specific way: four chapters of poems reflecting two related themes in each chapter. The themes are love and mortality, youth and politics, nature and modernization, and culture, war, and travel (which might count as three themes).  A personal favorite is “Remembering the British Boozer,” a poem about the British pub and the conversation that happens there.

Poems to Love and the Body, and Seasons of Love

This week, I reviewed Dave Malone’s latest poetry collection, View from the North Ten, over at Tweetspeak Poetry. He’s published two previous collections, and I read both as preparation for reading his latest work.

Poems to Love, and the Body (e-book) is about love and relationships, but the poems also search the depths of relationships, and how much love can often border on obsession.

Seasons of Love (e-book) is also a collection about love and relationships, but the volume is structured by the four seasons, and it’s fascinating how Malone uses the physical seasons to explain the relationships and interactions of lovers.

Of Cars, Dragons and Whimsy: Poems

This is a poetry collection that had another name when I first received it – Techtorals and Other Poems That Rhyme. The author, a lawyer named J. Aloysius, changed the title to Of Cars, Dragons and Whimsy (e-book), and I like the new title better (a “techtoral,” a term invented by the author, is a poem about technology).

Aloysious has included 14 poems in the volume, and then annotated each of them to explain where they came from, what inspired them, and in one case, his puzzlement about the poem’s origin (I have moments like that, too). He says in his introduction that the poems are meant to be read and reread alone and in groups, and I think they work best when read aloud.

Agalliao, Volume 2

Aaron Cornett manages a Facebook page called Agalliao, designed for poets to post and discuss what you might call the “poetry of faith.” For the second time, Aaron has selected poems and published them as Agalliao. The second volume has now been published and is available at Amazon. Aaron was kind enough to include three of my poems in the volume. A total of 65 poems by various poets are included in the volume.

Photograph by Randy Klugiewicz via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: Dave Malone’s “View from the North Ten”

The Missouri Ozarks is a distinct region within the state of Missouri, yet geographically indistinguishable from the Arkansas Ozarks. It presents distinctly different faces, depending upon what one is looking for: the entertainment complex of Branson (and upscale resort at Big Cedar); the natural beauty of the hills, small mountains, rivers and streams; St. Louisans’ favorite weekend resorts at Lake of the Ozarks; the rural, backwoods movie setting of “Winter Bone;” the Ozarks of the Baldknobbers legend and Harold Bell Wright’s “Shepherd of the Hills.”

Behind the legends, entertainment extravaganzas, resorts is the region that tens of thousands call home, where they live, work, get married, raise families and die, much like any other part of the United States. This is the territory of farms and small towns (Springfield, Mo., population of 162,000, would likely be the unofficial capital). Away from the glitz of the Branson Strip, it’s an area of rugged, stark beauty; I even have two photographs from the region on the walls of my office at work.

This Missouri Ozarks is the home of poet Dave Malone.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poet Dave Malone Reviews “Poetry at Work”

Dave Malone, a self-described “Ozarker,” is the author of several books of poetry: Poems to Love and the Body, Seasons in Love, View from the North Ten: Poems After Mark Rothko’s No. 15, and Under the Sycamore (I reviewed Under the Sycamore for Tweetspeak Poetry in January 2012).

Dave was kind enough to read Poetry at Work when it was still in galley form (or as close to a galley as a pdf document can get) and had some very encouraging words. He’s now posted a review on Amazon, and he’s captured exactly what I was trying to do with Poetry at Work. You can read it here.

You can read more about Dave’s poetry at his web site.

Dave Malone's "Under the Sycamore"

I thought love poetry was pretty much a thing of the past – you see occasional love poems today but love poetry as a genre seems to have been wrapped in acid-free paper and placed (lovingly) in a box in the attic.  If I wanted to read it, I’d have to go dust off Elizabeth Barrett Browning or some of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

And then I read Dave Malone’s Under the Sycamore.

To see my review, please visit TweetSpeak Poetry.