Happy Halloween! From issues past...

We thought you'd appreciate a little Halloween themed prose! This piece was featured in HFR issue #40. Enjoy!

Loom

-B.J. Best

The 1983 Halloween, I was the red Pac-Man ghost. My mom made the costume, dyed it a color named Wine and stitched the squiggles of its agitated face like railroad tracks all akimbo.

In 1986, she stood ironing in our brown living room. The TV was on. The Challenger had exploded. They kept showing it again and again, a perennial flowering of fire.

I took pictures of swans on her camera during the spring of 1992. It was as if they had risen from ice, bobbed for a while, then flew away.

In 1972, she and my dad smoked dope they called Wauwatosa Wacko.

Tonight, she invited Erin and me to dinner. Erin was going to aerobics. I was going to drink and write with my friends. We had already eaten dinner. Erin is at aerobics. I am writing and drinking with my friends.

In 1997, I told her the quarter moon cut me like a scythe. It was the one thing she wished she had told me sooner.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Here in Arizona, the leaves aren't really changing colors in time for Thanksgiving weekend, so we're relying on a little bit of fiction to round out our pre-feasting experience. This story excerpt comes from Issue #33, back in 2004.

"The Leaves, They Pirouette"

by Kevin Grauke

When ladies at the church ask you what you do - what you are - you say, "I'm a leaf blower," and you're happy saying this. You're happy being a leaf blower.

[...]

When you're out working, you like to listen to a tape that your mother made for you for Christmas. You have to turn it up loud to hear it over your Echo. The songs don't have words, but you know what they're about because your mother told you their names. One is called "Autumn Leaves." One is called "Autumn in New York." One is called "Autumn Serenade." One is called "Falling Leaves." Your favorite, though. is just called "Autumn." It's just a piano. It sounds exactly like leaves would sound if they made music when they fell. Plink. Plink, plink.

You know that Autumn and Fall mean the same thing, but you like Autumn better than Fall. It makes leaves sound prettier. You wait all year for Autumn. Autumn is like Christmas except there's no Santa for Autumn. Dead leaves tumble and float with every gust of wind. The ground crunches beneath your feet, and the air smells like smoke. Autumn is better than Christmas.

*

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Meteor Shower Coming, A Poem!

In honor of the annual Perseid meteor shower approaching (best viewed in the wee hours of the morning, if you can stay up or drag yourself out of bed!), we are posting a poem. This one appeared in our issue #34. Enjoy: poetry and meteors!

Finding God in the Stars, Not Finding God in the Stars
by Mike Dockins

Cygnus points east, swoons backwards.
Did our ancestors in Ireland and Greece
hear it wail at that place where the sun

drops into its little dark pail? Meteors
streak the Northern Cross. Asteroid dust
is falling on us, but you're busy looking

for God, something nebulous at the end
of a telescope. Neutrinos swim through us
constantly, nearly massless. Billions of suns

burst and contract, a spray of atoms we'll
never see. "I can't get over God," you say.
Sprawled on wet grass, we look not up,

but out. I wish I could be amazed all the time.
We stand - into streetlamps, parked cars,
metal fences, silent beehives, the familiar

shelf of horizon, all the jarrings of the world
I know. I'm bent now away from the stars.
I don't know how it happens for you.

A Poem in Honor of Bastille Day

God Over Paris
by Jesse Lee Kercheval

In the toilette at the top
of the Eiffel Tower, a cabinet--
a stall--in the men’s room
costs 50 cents, but the urinals
are free, so my son, four,
stands next to his father
& for the first time in his life,
pees standing up.

The line of men waiting to piss
is longer than for the elevator
or the bronze telescopes--
which charge three euros
to see Paris up close,
something, it seems to me,
we just paid to escape.

How to explain this sudden desire
to urinate, to hold
your penis in your hand
at the very top of a tower,
which, while too pointed to be a penis,
is--in its own iron way--
spectacularly endowed?

So like men, I think, to take joy
in the near impossible--
in flushing a urinal with water
that traveled 300 meters
straight up for the sole purpose
of carrying their urine,
triumphant, to the ground.

My son, leaving the warmth
of the men for the view,
looks at me with pity
knowing I lack the necessary equipment
to do what he has done.

Though this just morning, he saw
a gypsy woman peeing standing up

in the Bois de Bologne,
her feet spread, skirt hiked to her knees.
Her daughter called
to my son by name--
Had she heard me call him?
Had she read it in the stars?
Max, she said, I’m thirsty.
Give me a drink.

And though she spoke to him
in French, he understood
her need & gave her his warm Coca-cola--
bottle shaped like a tower--
& she drank it
without stopping, like a diver
desperate for air.

Now at the top of the Tour Eiffel,
it is raining, fat drops
fall from the bruise-colored sky--
Max points to a cloud.
Is that God’s butt? he asks.
Does He ever sit down?

Review of The Spider Sermons by Robert Krut

Review of The Spider Sermons by Robert Krut, BlazeVOX Books, 2009.

By Elizabyth Hiscox

This collection is some easy sermonizing. It’s zesty, utterly earnest at points, but worldwise and worthwhile. As Laurie Kutchins blurbs: “Robert Krut delivers a precipice city, a galactic (but not preachy) spider, a narrator who sometimes wears a sandwich board.” These poems spin a rock and roll lullaby for heavens that are under serious contemplation.

The universe Krut creates in The Spider Sermons is situated in the philosophical kitsch of a modern life. A close look at spiritualism, but with “Sympathy for the Devil on the jukebox to great effect.” The book opens with a Dylan [Bob] quote, there is Hendrix, quite a few radios tuned in and turned up, and a bit of the bad-boy gone reflective throughout. The literary type too: Johnson and Burkhard warrant notice and these homage poems don’t compromise Krut’s own slant:

Social Graces
-after Burkhard

I do not know what not
to do—
little yellow notebook of rules,
tip-toe topics,
gone missing, if I ever had it at all.
[…]
There is a secret I’m bound to
let slip, write on a sugar packet,
pass across the table.

The light bulb eye sockets of the waitress
shine white light in my glass,
saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry—
there’s a mosquito frozen
into one of ice cubes—
I’m really sorry.

The closing poem, “Hood Ornament Radio Signal,” serves as a kind of au revoir: a parting phrase that invites a return of sorts to the impulses of the collection:

I’m going to melt
a cross, a statue of the Buddha, and the arms of Vishnu
into a hood ornament of a naked woman with wings of fire,
set it on my car and follow it like a compass. […]

This sense of serious play– a smug wonder at the hard, amusing truths of humanity and eternity – is this collection’s greatest gift. The guidance systems we’ve been given are off and our collective naïveté is at once tragic, and a gut-buster.

Formal elements and the fingerprints of careful craft are shot straight through. The collection’s third poem is the heady sestina “A Thousand Pieces, Dancing” with sugar and neon to the sixth power. “Another Spider Song” slant rhymes its way: “There’s a sheet of burning ice/ and it’s moving up the coast./ Leaving ghosts in sight/ looking just like tainted frost.” And Krut pulls it off. These poetic footholds are valuable; the legacy they infuse in the collection. But, ultimately, the most affecting are those poems in this book that slip to the side. Fool one as freeform. Become the improvisation around the loose spine of language, as with “What Beckian Said” or “Tenth and Northside Arrival”: “[…]I don’t know—/ but my answer is this, and it is final: / I head to the jukebox, slip in a quarter,/”

There’s also a charm to the pieces that cast a sweetly outdated vision of the future as their laughably endearing touchstones. Why don’t more poets have the common sense to write poems like “Gravitypants Rocketboy” or “The Clumsy Love Robot”?

“I’ve been feeding my robot human hearts
in an effort to have him
understand the formula that posits
love is cumulative, not chronological.”

Digest the collection this way too. Read it out of order, sinking your teeth in, letting the poems build up and accumulate on your chin, in your belly, in your arteries, and in your muscle memory as you read aloud. Broken into four sections there’s symmetry and a resonance in the structure of the book and the deploying of the poems, but the chronological approach doesn’t do them justice. Abandoning the cover-to-cover on this one let Krut’s particular style rise to the surface: the quirky mixed with the questing.

And it is that aforementioned “cumulative” effect that is the real hook of this book. The flipside to the grit beneath the verse’s fingernails –the talk of tailpipes and objects of the everyday – is the caress of real affection and attention. A woman is in these pages, a deity too, and moments of daring that strike one as quiet truths: “It seems the less I believe in God, / the more biblical life around me becomes.//”

Robert Krut is the author of The Spider Sermons (BlazeVOX, 2009). His poetry has appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Blackbird, The Mid-American Review, Barrow Street, and more. His poem, "The Relativity Tree" appeared in HFR #32. In addition, his chapbook, Theory of the Walking Big Bang was released in 2007 by H-ngm-n Books. He teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and lives in Los Angeles.

Review of DO-OVER! by Robin Hemley

Review of DO-OVER! by Robin Hemley, Little, Brown & Company, 2009.

By Jessica DeVoe Riley

“You’re going to know a lot about your life when you finish this.”

Imagine being given the chance to do over something from your past. How about two things? How about ten? Think you would learn something new about your life? Robin Hemley did.

At age forty-eight, Robin Hemley finds himself divorced and remarried, the father of three girls with one more child on the way, and the owner of one too many unresolved childhood memories. He decides that if he intends to be the kind of father he wants to be, then he must come to terms with those cringe-worthy memories. His approach is to shout “Do over!” with the bravado of his inner child. The end result is his book DO-OVER!, "In Which a forty-eight-year-old father of three returns to kindergarten, summer camp, the prom, and other embarrassments.” Hemley brings readers on an amusing tour of his life: reflections on the awkwardness of youth and his journey to confront those ghosts of his past.

While the book admittedly sounds a bit like the plot to Billy Madison, it is much more than repeating a few grades in school – Hemley returns to summer camp, joins a fraternity, and spends the night in his childhood home. Each chapter is dedicated to a single do-over, in which Hemley tells the memory of why this is a moment in time he would like to repeat, how the do-over experience goes, and what he learns from it to apply to his present life as a father and husband. It’s hard not to cheer along for Hemley. He writes with such endearing humor as he addresses the survival strategy that everyone knows but has trouble applying to their own lives: learn and move on from your mistakes. “Our whole lives we struggle with our personal sense of failure,” he writes. “To the outside world, our failures are strangers, but to us, they’re our closest intimates, closer than friends, children, spouses, parents; nourished from an early age, they may become so strong that they overcome us.”

In addition to a balanced blend of comedy, sarcasm, and sensitivity while delivering painful memories of flubbing lines, lacking confidence, or getting homesick while studying abroad, Hemley draws the reader in with descriptions of the supporters he encounters along the way. Hemley repeatedly references how most people he tells about his project are not only excited for him but often offer the moments they would like to do over. Even the sixth grade art teacher who introduced herself to Hemley saying, “I’m going to have a hard time taking this seriously,” winds up confiding in Hemley about her own past experiences with teachers, a conversation that leaves him “feeling as though I’ve made her a convert, though I’m not exactly sure to what.”

From his dream high school prom date talking of the current batch of high-schoolers (“Sometimes I forget that I’m not as young as they are because I feel their age still”) to toasting with friends in Japan (“To who we are!"), Hemley makes his strongest connection to readers by bringing everyone in on the agreement that the inner child still exists, and that everyone benefits by letting him out once in a while. With that imagination and exuberance for life, though, comes the childhood feelings of confusion or lack of confidence or fear. As adults we’ve (hopefully) become more capable of handling those feelings: “Sometimes I’m an observer. Sometimes I’m a participant. Sometimes I’m an oddity. But most of the time, I seem to fit in somehow, and these are the moments I relish, even when I’m playing the fool or basking in the imaginative worlds of childhood.”

Robin Hemley is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on DO-OVER!. He has published seven books, and his stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and many literary magazines and anthologies, including Hayden's Ferry Review (his story, "Mercy" appeared in issue #34). Robin received his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop; he currently directs the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City, IA.

Happy July 4th!

Going through the HFR archive, I had some trouble finding an appropriate Independence Day poem. Our contributors don't like to talk about independence, or freedom or - even - apple pie. I suppose fireworks are kind of heavy handed for a poem? Fine. And I guess "Declaration of Independence" doesn't rhyme with a lot of stuff. So here's what we've got: a poster celebrating Summer from Silver Buckle Press, which appeared in issue #25. And a poem from issue #31 which strikes me as very American, contains an explosion, and is called "Consitution," though is not about the document. Enjoy! And have a wonderful holiday.

Constitution
By Caki Wilkinson

I have an Uncle Hugh
who shot his car.

It had something to do
with the carburetor,
and the seventh or eighth time
it steamed and smoked
instead of purred and sped,
he pulled his rifle
from the coat closet
and popped the gas tank
into a balloon of fire.

I asked my mother
did he feel bad
and she said
when a man's got a temper
he never feels bad, and
Uncle Hugh's like Daddy--
he'd shoot down
the big dipper
if he thought it sprung a leak.

I worry about that.

Some days
when the garage door
sticks
and the dog
pees on the newspaper
instead of retrieving it,
I watch a single, blue vein
rise
and throb
across my father's forehead
and I think of Uncle Hugh,
the way he stood there
with his mess of fire,
the way his family filed out
to the front porch,
squinting through all that
orange light,
and the way Uncle Hugh
never made a sound,
wiped his sweaty cheek,
picked his back tooth.

Gunning For the Prize

The Publishing Triangle, an association of gay men and lesbian women in publishing, has announced its finalists for the 21rst annual Triangle awards, and Hayden’s Ferry Review has two past contributors in the running for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, which honors the British poet Thom Gunn (1929–2004), who lived in San Francisco for much of his life. Gunn was the author of The Man with Night Sweats (1992) and many other acclaimed volumes. In its first four years, this award was known as the Triangle Award for Gay Poetry, and Mr. Gunn himself won the very first such award, in 2001, for his Boss Cupid.

Finalists for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
Jericho Brown, Please, (New Issues)
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire (Harper)
Ely Shipley, Boy with Flowers (Barrow Street Press)

Jericho Brown was featured in Issue #41 with the poem “Track 3: Back Down Memory Lane.” Ely Shipley's poems, "Six" and "Roll of Dimes" from this book appeared in Issue #36. (Ely's book is also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award!) Congratulations, to both Ely and Jericho! The award winners will be announced on May 7, 2009. To see the finalists in the other categories, check out the Publishing Triangle website here.

If you have been a contributor to HFR and you've got news about your work, we want to hear about it! Email us at hfr@asu.edu so we can spread the good word.

Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe!

On January 19th, Poe turns 200. And gets a stamp. To show that his memory lives on at HFR and not just through the U.S. Postal Service, a poem by Brian Hayter from issue #34...

Thoughts on Tamerlane: Poe's Former Neighbor Speaks with a Biographer

Misery was a name for him,
a name that was given
as a prefix to every individual item:
miserylamp, miserymirror, miserybottle.

For him it was a game
that took the place of life,
knowing he would develop an ulcer
at twenty-three.

He used to say,
"Steel robots will rule this world."
No one knew what a robot was,
but it was Poe
and we all just agreed.

He used to call his fingers metacarpals
and refer to his other body parts
using technical names:

His sternum shifting upwards as he breathed,
his retinas scanning miserypages
in a miserybook.

One morning while I was raking leaves in the yard
he wandered into the street, drunker than sin,
and said,
"I have a headache, hold my trachea--"
snatched my arm
and with a cool look
in his eye
said,
"Like daggers in my fucking skull."

Best American Essays 2008

Congratulations to Bethany Tyler Lee, whose essay "Sex and the Single Eight-Year-Old" was listed as one of the "Notable Essays of 2007" in the new volume of the Best American Essays, released last week from Houghton Mifflin. Bethany's essay was published in HFR #39, as part of our Works of Witness special section. Read Bethany's whole essay here.

The new anthology has essays culled from countless publications including lit journals Swink and The Pinch. In his introduction to this year’s edition, Adam Gopnik finds that great essays have “text and inner text, personal story and larger point, the thing you’re supposed to be paying attention to and some other thing you’re really interested in.”

Palestinian Poet, Mahmoud Darwish, Dead at Age 67

Mahmoud Darwish, one of the world's greatest contemporary Arab poets, died Saturday night in Houston after complications from heart surgery. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, declared three days of mourning on Sunday, saying that Mr. Darwish was “the pioneer of the modern Palestinian cultural project,” adding, “Words cannot describe the depth of sadness in our hearts.” Read the full article at the NYT.

In HFR issue #39 - the Works of Witness issue - two of Darwish's poems appeared in the Arabic along with translations and an introduction by Fady Joudah. Joudah's introduction and Darwish's poem, "The Cypress Broke" are below. To read more from issue 39, see our website.

In 2001, when the Israeli forces began a siege of the Palestinian territories to quell another uprising against the occupation, Mahmoud Darwish was in his residence in Ramallah. He had been working on more colloquial, conversational pieces, which he had to postpone, and he turned toward writing a long memoir poem, “A State of Siege.” Comprised of lyric journal-like entries, it was a testimony not only to human suffering but also to art under duress: Darwish says, “Our losses: from two martyrs to eight / and fifty olive trees, / in addition to the structural defect / that will afflict the poem and the play and the incomplete painting.” The poem’s title also brings to my mind the same expression al-Niffari, the tenth-century Iraqi Sufi poet, used to articulate the stage or the station in which the creative mind must pass through to arrive at a new aesthetic. This was such a poem for Darwish, and in it his address to poetry is simple: “Besiege your siege.”

From that point forward, Darwish found himself “In the Lust of Cadence,” a long sequence poem of forty-seven short lyrics grouped into twos and threes or more. They begin by reintroducing the self, weaving through place and time, constantly forming new interiors, as in the pentad that deals with death and life, of which “The Cypress Broke” is a part. Forgetfulness follows the death/life sequence in a triplet that ends in “As for Me, I Say to My Name.” Then it is a dream sequence, followed by progressive, playful, and occasionally absurd lyrics that culminate in the poet’s hovering over the body of his exile, in the final pentad sequence of his latest book: Don’t Apologize For What You’ve Done (2003).

Darwish is a formal poet who abides by the taf eelah, the element of prosody in Arabic. However, as he explained it to me, he sees his recent poetry as “circular,” wherein the line is insignificant, as if the poem is made up of one long line of prosody in prose interrupted into shorter fragments because of the limitations of the printed page. He encouraged me to “break up” or “re-form” the poems as I saw fit, but I persisted in providing the English reader with as much of the original “view” to which the Arabic reader has access. Even his peculiar use of the virgule and frequent pacing of the orality of the poem through ellipses enhance this vision. In the two poems translated here, the enjambments are more obvious. One can read the poems as if they were prosody in prose or imagine the curvature of the phrase in the Darwish poem.

The Cypress Broke
The cypress broke like a minaret, and slept on
the road upon its chapped shadow, dark, green,
as it has always been. No one got hurt. The vehicles
sped over its branches. The dust blew
into the windshields . . . / The cypress broke, but
the pigeon in a neighboring house didn’t change
its public nest. And two migrant birds hovered above
the hem of the place, and exchanged some symbols.
And a woman said to her neighbor: Say, did you see a storm?
She said: No, and no bulldozer either . . . / And the cypress
broke. And those passing by the wreckage said:
Maybe it got bored with being neglected, or it grew old
with the days, it is long like a giraffe, and little
in meaning like a dust broom, and couldn’t shade two lovers.
And a boy said: I used to draw it perfectly,
its figure was easy to draw. And a girl said: The sky today
is incomplete because the cypress broke.
And a young man said: But the sky today is complete
because the cypress broke. And I said
to myself: Neither mystery nor clarity,
the cypress broke, and that is all
there is to it: the cypress broke!

The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2

The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 2 is being released today from W. W. Norton. It features the essay "Instead of the Rat Pack" by Gwendolyn Knapp, which was originally published in HFR's 20th Anniversary Issue.

Gwendolyn's essay is hilarious, moving and completely original. We're thrilled Lee Gutkind and company chose it for the anthology. See the complete table of contents for the new volume here.