MSR Fall 2006
10th Anniversary SpecialThis is a special oversized issue to celebrate 10 years of publishing. In it we feature many long time contributors as well as many of our Chapbook Contest winners and Poetry Book Award winners.
Feature:
Irene Blair Honeycutt—
Founder of the CPCC Spring Literary FestivalInterviewed by Suzanne Baldwin Leitner
Essays
Ten Years After by Shawn Pavey
What Can We Do to Make Your Stay in Power More Comfortable? by Norman BallFarewell to the Barons and Lords by Tim Keppel
Country Porch Lights by Richard Peabody
Wild Kingdom by Steve TaylorReviews by Richard Allen Taylor, Phebe Davidson, John Birkbeck, Anne Barnhill, S. Craig Renfroe, Jr., Heather Jane Collings.
of the following work:
Carp Head Replica by Mark Hartenback, Delirium: Selected Poems by Lloyd Van Brunt, Keep and Give Away by Susan Meyers, In Mirrors by Lyn Lifshin, Re-Entry by Michael White, Thru The Heart of This Animal Life, A Measure of Impossible Humor by Chris Cunningham, Playback by Raymond Chandler, Ted Benoit, and Francois Ayroles, A Quiet Divide by Roger Colombik.
Poetry by Irene Blair Honeycutt, Anthony S. Abbott, Joan E. Bauer, Pam Bernard, Ann Campanella, David Chorlton, Robert Cooperman, Silvia Curbelo, Mary Christine Delea, donnarkevic, Cathryn Essinger, Rod Farmer, Jim Ferris, Janice Moore Fuller, Nathan Graziano, Maureen Ryan Griffin, Susan Lefler, Jay Griswold, Carol Hamilton, Jonathan Hayes, Fred Kirchner, Lyn Lifshin, Jennifer MacPherson, Don Mager, Louis McKee, Ron Moran, Matt Morris, Michael Murray, Bruce G. Nims, Robert Parham, Richard Peabody, Gail J. Peck, Diana Pinckney, S. Craig Renfroe, Jr., Pat Riviere-Seel, Jonathan Rice, Mike Schneider, Dana Sonnenschein, Caren Stuart, Jennifer K. Sweeney, Gilda Morina Syverson, Wendy Vardaman, Richard Vargas, Charles Harper Webb, Dede Wilson.
Cover Art: A collage of MSR covers by Doug South.
Images by Vincent Calabrese, Gerald Wheeler.
TEN YEARS AFTER
by Shawn Pavey, Kansas City, MO
The part of me that denies the fact that I age with each passing day, the voice whispering in my ear on those frequent nights when I lie awake as my brain spins its familiar, tangential spin, and tells me, yes, I still am that long-haired punk who strolled the streets of Chapel Hill in a black London Fog trench coat, also tells me that it can’t be more than a decade since Scott Douglass called me with his crazy idea. It just can’t be.
Only it has been more than a decade, as unbelievable as I find that. Back then, I lived in one shithole of an apartment or another somewhere in Charlotte where the rent was cheap and the amenities nonexistent. I’d really arrived when I finally had a place with a dishwasher. So, I had no money. I worked in a series of dead-end jobs—hotel night auditor, résumé writer, rental car clerk—the list goes on. But I wrote. I had poems dripping from my pen back then. I worked them, pouring over the same lines for hours, changing a word here, altering the punctuation there, whittling them down to their tightest, cleanest, most powerful selves. Always an insomniac, this is what I did instead of twisting the sheets in frustration and staring at the red numbers on the digital alarm clock as it counted down to my official waking hour.
Armed with these poems, I would enter the balmy Charlotte air, searching for places to speak them aloud. It was in one of these places where I found Scott and Jill, in an art gallery on 7th Street where Barbara Lawing held her monthly Poetry Sharing. If you’ve been a supporter and reader of MSR for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve read the story of how Scott put this magazine together, so there’s no need to bore you with too many details. But the crux of it was this: as Scott and I looked around, there weren’t places locally where our poems could see print. We weren’t Southerners in the strictest sense (he by way of steel country, me by way of the Rockies). We didn’t write Southern poems. I heard someone once describe himself as a “Baptist in the South, not a Southern Baptist.” Scott and I were poets in the South.So it was hard for the editors of The Southern Poetry Review and other regional publications to print our work because we didn’t write poems that fit their format. Scott and I both had wandered the country in our time, developed different kinds of voices. We were angry, direct, and, in no small way, frustrated and impatient. We felt, strongly, that there was room for us, too. And we weren’t alone.
AJ Jilani, a newcomer to Charlotte by way of Pakistan, also felt the time was ripe for a new magazine that would publish the poets who weren’t being read and heard, so he launched The Charlotte Poetry Review. If you were lucky enough to have read it during it’s all too short life, it was the breath of fresh air that we’d all wanted so desperately. And like many a labor of love, almost ruined poor AJ. Scott watched him and learned from him. Me, well, I was just happy to see my name in print.One night in 1995, I got a call from Scott with a crazy idea. Right now, you’re holding the result of his vision in your hands.
For the next three years or so, I served off and on as Associate Editor of The Main Street Rag, pouring through pages and pages of submissions that could pass the Scott and Shawn test. The poems had to be strong, they had to be tough; “gritty” is a word that Scott liked to throw around. And we had to love them. The Rag grew from a black and white Docuteched booklet with black and white card stock covers distributed to local booksellers and coffee houses to more of what you see now: this glossy, full-colored, perfect-bound quarterly with international distribution. We published our own chapbooks along the way. Just recently, in a fit of internet vanity, I searched for myself only to find that Brown University has a copy of my pitiful little chap in their library. I rock the Kasbah.I’m sure Scott will have an editorial detailing his journey over the last decade. Suffice it to say that this man who never gives up, who wakes with the sun and pours everything he has into this endeavor, is the reason The Rag is still going strong. He’s turned into a prolific publisher, and gifts each of us with the result of his work once each season. I couldn’t be prouder of him, and I hope he knows that.
I took a different path. Shortly after launching The Rag, I changed careers, again, to enter the field of technical recruiting. My years as a résumé writer taught me how to market people to the jobs they wanted, so I decided to take that skill and turn it into a living.
I know what some of you might be thinking. Why does a poet embrace corporate culture and the most ruthless form of capitalism? I’ll tell you. I got sick and tired of abject poverty. There’s no nobility in knowing that the piece of junk Buick I drove, held together with chewing gum and bailing wire, could die at any second and the $500 or $600 required to fix it, again, simply did not exist. That kind of stress tears at a man, at anyone, and there was money to be made in filling jobs for companies too busy to do it themselves. Of course, this led to longer days and working on weekends. I still managed to help out at the magazine, but my time became much less free. I found that the struggle to earn a living got in the way of actually living. But I was young and had energy.
Want the rest of the story (and more)?
The conclusion can be read in the Fall 2006 issue which is available direct from MSR for $7 at
The Main Street Rag Bookstore.BACK TO TOP
FAREWELL TO THE BARONS AND LORDS
by Tim Keppel, Cali, Colombia, South America
The kingpins are gone.
That or they’ve turned invisible. You don’t see them anymore. Not like a few years ago, when they were cruising around in armored SUVs. The Magic Men. They could snap their fingers and have anything they wished.
One built a hacienda with its own private zoo—a huge collection of wild animals—two of each, like Noah’s Ark. Over the entrance was a car purported to be Capone’s. Gutsy but unwise of the guy who sold them the fake.
Another, denied membership to a prestigious country club, built his own club just for himself. An exact replica of the original, only larger.
One bought the Miss Colombia crown for his girlfriend. Another, a soccer championship. Another bought the presidency. They could have anything, do anything. They could appear and disappear at will.And now they’re gone.
Or so it seems.
The sala is stacked with boxes—boxes from Carmen’s place and boxes from mine. We’ll worry about unpacking tomorrow. Right now we’re just hanging out on the patio, celebrating our first day of living together. “Organizing ourselves,” as the Colombians say.
The high-walled patio is rimmed with tropical plants—the huge biaho leaves, big as elephant ears, the red beaks of the birds of paradise, and the knuckled leaves of the hand of God. The air is scented with jasmine.
We pop a cork and clink our glasses. “To this new place,” I say.
We’ve known each other only three months.
But what’s not risky in Colombia?
Gone are the Chess Player and the Mexican, Popeye and Little Bear, the Earring and the Cartwrights—like on Bonanza, a father and three sons, the youngest, like “Little Joe,” cute as a choirboy. And Big Daddy, country squire and equestrian, all three hundred pounds of him, his restaurant featuring a riding ring where he himself would sometimes mount and ride—poor horse!
Gone. Their grandiose buildings sit uncompleted, the cranes idle, the beams scabbed with rust. What happened? The gringos. Their czar no match for the lords, they decided to apply the heat. They would cut off aid unless Bogotá cracked heads.
So heads were cracked. With U.S. “logistical support,” they got Pablo on a rooftop, his shirtless potbelly pocked with holes, ugly a corpse as you’d ever want to see. And Popeye they caught in flagrante delicto with a minor, his pants down around his ankles, his mother in the next room crying, Please, he’s a good boy.
Now they’re all in prison or underground—in either sense of the word.
Want the rest of the story (and more)?
The conclusion can be read in the Fall 2006 issue which is available direct from MSR for $7 at
The Main Street Rag Bookstore.BACK TO TOP
David Chorlton, Phoenix, AZ
AMERICAN JOURNEY
One day you wake up, go outside,
and fail to recognize your street
which somebody has begun
to excavate
in search of the future.
So you take a walk
downtown, where some streets are blocked
while others face rezoning
for business use. You get on a bus
to ride across town
in the hope of seeing again
the places you visited last year, last month,
last week, but the casual café
has been stamped with a corporate logo
and the second-hand clothes store
hung out its final bargains
as flags of surrender.
Renting a car, you decide on a ride
through the desert
that used to be fifteen minutes away
and it’s dusk before you see
the first saguaro. Discouraged,
you keep driving through the night,
cross the state line
and fill the tank at a gas station
where the numbers on the pump
spin like the ones in a casino
until the price is more than you can afford.
Where now? you ask yourself,
staring into the dark
with the car radio playing
one of those talk shows
people call to complain
about foreigners
when nobody else is left to blame
for their troubles. Your only option
is to drive on empty
until the road moves beneath you
and all you have to do is hold on
to the steering wheel
enjoying the illusion
of control.
Mary Christine Delea, Richmond, KY
THE THINGS YOU WANT,
THE THINGS YOU CAN'T GET
Depressed about decisions you made in the past,
you can drive around aimlessly with no cash,
no ATM card, through hazelnut orchards,
through coastal mountains, humming chordsout of tune with the radio, but no one will care.
The rest of us just want to get to our chores
then rock our tired bodies to sleep every night,
happy if one thing during the day went right,enchanted, bewitched by mergers and deals.
Drive yourself south if you like, you seem
distraught, like a country song man, so lonesome
because your sweet lover is gone, gone, gone.What it is you want, you probably won’t get.
These words will be meaningless, as words meant
in the best way often are, spun through the air
from all the misery the rest of the world sharesright back to you, in the present, and that is
the point. You can change the radio station, the fizz
of words, but the past is steady, constant, unmoved.
Get out your checkbook and drive.
Cathryn Essinger, Troy, OH
WHY ELLA NEVER MARRIEDYou can love a man like that,
but you can’t marry him.
Gregory Ellis wasn’t odd, he was just rare,
why, he’s the boy who planted marihuana
in the window boxes outside the police station.
He drove by every evening to watch
the officers water those plants.And who can forget the summer
he built a catapult so large that a water balloon
launched into the fairgrounds dented the side
of a carnival trailer? He was aiming for
the grandstand and knew when to be
grateful for a near miss.He even convinced Ella
and her mother that he had a wooden leg.
Listen, he said, as he limped across
the kitchen floor, Don’t you hear the difference?
and they both swore that yes, they could hear
the lifeless thump of his left foot,
which sounded nothing like his other,
his real flesh and blood.Still, she might have married him,
but that was before he took that picture of her
one summer evening while she was sleeping
on the veranda—a close-up of her left nipple,
which he enlarged, and hung at the county fair
where it took second place in the landscape division.
He told everyone it was a picture of the moon.
Jay Griswold, N. Fort Myers, FL
STATE OF THE UNION
A dense fog hovers over the nation;
It fills all the crevices,
And makes each object appear ten feet tall.
Through it the sound of church bells can still be heard
But the Bible has gone underground.
Only the minister who has lost his flock
Can feel the heat of its secret fire
Rising from the pulpit, into the palms of his hands.And the lovers who have had their fill of each other
Separate at last; they sink down into the depths,
And end among the skeletons of salmon
Washed up against a gravel shore.
The President rises, and walks from the room.
He has said nothing. He has the bewildered look
Of a deer trapped in headlights.
The Bible has taken refuge in the subway tunnels
Under Manhatten. A flow of Leftist blood
Runs through its words. It knows
Who will try to sell you the cross, and the nails!
Somnambulists are crowded together on the platform.
Each of them is wearing a mask.
All of the masks have the same face.
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