Chances Are, Novel by Barbara Eknoian

Congratulations to Barbara Eknoian — author of poetry that appeared in the Silver Birch Press SILVER ANTHOLOGY and the Silver Birch Press GREEN ANTHOLOGY – on the May 2013 release of her novel CHANCES ARE.

BOOK DESCRIPTION: It’s the l950′s. Thirteen-year-old Susie Di Pietro lives near the projects in New Jersey. Bookies stand on the corner by the candy store and sound like characters from Guys and Dolls. Everyone plays the numbers, even young Susie. Throughout her high school years, she’s painfully aware that her pal, Ginger, and she are wallflowers. Susie shares her romantic tribulations, her trials with her teachers, and funny incidents that happen to her while she is growing up. Chances Are is a charming coming-of-age novel that will take you on a nostalgic trip: dancing to Johnny Mathis, Elvis, and The Platters. It will trigger fond memories for some readers of their teen years, and give younger readers a picture of that special era, “The Fifties.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Barbara Eknoian lives in La Mirada, California, with her extended family. Originally from New Jersey, she was forever homesick until she joined Donna Hilbert’s poetry workshop in Long Beach. Barbara was the first recipient of the Jane Buel Bradley Chapbook Award for her collection Jerkumstances (Pearl Editions). A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry, her story “Crazy Mom” was featured in the 2009 6th Annual Emerging Voices Group Show produced by Sally Shore‘s New Short Fiction Series.

CHANCES ARE is available in paperback and Kindle editions at Amazon.com

Of This Moment, Poem by Larry D. Thomas

OF THIS MOMENT
by Larry D. Thomas

primaveral,
when the trees
are tuning forks

struck into the tones
of birdsong,
the squirrels

descend the trunks
like beads
of hot wax,

each onto the floor
of his own
little room

sans walls or roof,
lit by a thousand
candles

in the dazzling
yellow house
of morning.

(“Of This Moment” was first published in The Christian Science Monitor and is featured in Larry D. Thomas‘s collection Where Skulls Speak Wind, Texas Review Press, 2004 — winner of the 2004 Texas Review Poetry Award.)

Illustration: “Silently Watching,” watercolor by Cathy Wilson, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Loveliest of Trees, Poem by A.E. Housman

LOVELIEST OF TREES
by A.E. Housman (1859-1936)

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Illustration: “Cherry Blossoms,” watercolor by Hailey E. Herrera Art Journey, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Leafy Moments (A Baker’s Dozen), poem by Daniel McGinn

 LEAFY MOMENTS (A BAKER’S DOZEN)
by Daniel McGinn

I
I bought a tree online.
It arrived the next morning
fully equipped with leaves.
 
II
One week later
I received an e-mail
from one of the leaves
asking for more water.
 
III
This leaf
became a spokesleaf
for the others.
 
IV
The sun shines
through the window.
 
The leaf is green.
Light is warmth.
Alive is good.
 
V
The leaf is on the tree.
The tree is on the table.
Kermit is on the TV
strumming on the old banjo.
 
VI
My parakeet
cocks its head
and ponders the leaf.
The leaf
is shaped
like a feather.
               
VII
Take the tree outside.
Here comes the wind.
The leaf gets all excited
and starts wagging its tail.
 
VIII
Soil and roots are one.
Tree and leaf are one.
Sun and milk are one.
Breakfast for everybody!
 
IX
Evening shadows fall on the leaf.
 
X
A blackbird sleeps
on the windowsill;
in the blink of an eye
it opens its wings.
 
XI
The green leaf stands up
like an arrowhead.
All of its fountains
have turned into gold.
 
XII
Frost and window are one.
Stem and branch were one.
Leaf and air are one.
 
XIII
The leaf has leapt.
The room is full of circles.

 Photo: “Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides)” courtesy of arborday.org.

For Purity, poem by Larry D. Thomas

FOR PURITY
   in memory of Georgia O’Keeffe
by Larry D. Thomas

she dons jet-black
and takes her stance
before the canvas,
 
draping her heart
with the shadow
of a black cross.
 
She scours her mind
with cloudless
desert sky
 
and she waits
for the moon-like rising
of the flower,
 
the pelvis,
the cleansed,
sun-bleached skull.

“For Purity” appears in the collection Amazing Grace by Larry D. Thomas, Texas Review Press, 2001

PHOTO: Georgia O’Keeffe with painting, 1930, by Alfred Stieglitz, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, Read by Michael Caine

“The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.”

RAYMOND CHANDLER, Farewell My Lovely

May is “Get Caught Reading” month, and during the past few weeks we’ve posted a range of familiar faces reading a variety of books. In the photo above, Michael Caine – in the role of Jack Carter in the 1971 movie Get Carter — reads Raymond Chandler‘s 1940 novel Farewell My Lovely. And, as the excerpt at the top of his post proves, Chandler was a master of the original metaphor.

These Blooms, poem by Larry D. Thomas

THESE BLOOMS
by Larry D. Thomas

in late
afternoon
so red

they hurt.
These blooms
of the hibiscus.

These wide-
open mouths
of sopranos

bleeding
from singing
the brilliant,

unbroken
high C’s
of these full

yet day-
long
lives.

“These Blooms” appears in Larry D. Thomas‘s collection Amazing Grace, Texas Review Press, 2001

Illustration: “Hibiscus,” watercolor by Carol Carter, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Larry D. Thomas, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, was privileged to serve as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate.  He has published twenty collections of poems, the most recent of which is Uncle Ernest (Virtual Artists Collective, Chicago, 2013).  His Larry D. Thomas: New and Selected Poems (TCU Press, 2008) was long-listed for the National Book Award.

Our First Post: June 24, 2012

Since we’re honoring THE GREAT GATSBY these days, let’s revisit the post that started it all — our first post from June 24, 2012…

To me, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the quintessential summer book. It chronicles the hot months of 1922, when the Great War was over and the Great Depression was yet to come. The 1920s were a blissful time when possibilities seemed limitless — and everyone seemed to be having fun (despite, or perhaps because of, Prohibition). These were the years when the cocktail was borne (to make the booze go farther), when women bobbed their hair and danced with abandon. It was The Jazz Age, as Fitzgerald called it — a name that stuck.

Every time I pick up The Great Gatsby -- and I’ve read the book perhaps a dozen times — I am drawn in and enraptured by the book’s poetry and romance. To quote the song Kiplinger plays: In the morning, In the evening, ain’t we got fun. Yes, Gatsby is great fun — even with its sad ending. The story seems fresh and real, even though it took place 90 years ago…

We all have a Gatsby in us — a hopeless romantic, an impossible dreamer who tries to hang onto the inner spark that makes life worth living. So pour yourself a lemonade (or something stronger), plop yourself in a lawn chaise, and dive into the greatest novel of all time. Happy Summer!

IL GRANDE GATSBY, Italian translation by Fernanda Pivano

IL GRANDE GATSBY
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Italian Translation 
by Fernanda Pivano

Opening lines in Italian:
Negli anni più vulnerabili della giovinezza, mio padre mi diede un consiglio che no mi

è mai più uscito di mente.

– Quando ti vien la voglia di criticare qualcuno — mi disse — ricordati che non tutti a questo mondo hanno avuto i vantaggi che hai avuto tu. 

In Inglese: 
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” 

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR, from Wikipedia: 

Fernanda Pivano (1917- 2009) was an Italian writer, journalist, translator and critic. Born in Genoa, as a teenager she moved with her family to Turin where she attended the Massimo D’Azeglio Lyceum. In 1941 she received a bachelor’s degree with a thesis on Herman Melville‘s Moby-Dick, which earned her a prize from the Center for American Studies in Rome. Her first translation, part of the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, was published in 1943, the same year she received a degree in philosophy.

In 1948, Pivano met Ernest Hemingway, resulting in an intense relationship of professional collaboration and friendship. The following year, Mondadori published her translation of A Farewell to Arms.

Throughout her professional life, Pivano contributed to the publication in Italy of significant American writers, from the icons of the Roaring Twenties, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and William Faulkner, through the writers of the 1960s (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti), to young writers of recent decades, including Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace, Chuck Palahniuk and Jonathan Safran Foer. Pivano was also interested in African-American culture and published many Italian versions of Richard Wright‘s books. In 1980 and again in 1984, Pivano interviewed Charles Bukowski at his home in San Pedro, California. These interviews became the basis for her book, Charles Bukowski, Laughing with the Gods first published in the USA by Sun Dog Press in 2000.

Photo: Ernest Hemingway and Fernanda Pivano, 1949.

Gatsby Erasure Poem by james (w) moore

THE GREAT GATSBY
CHAPTER 5 ERASURE POEM
by james (w) moore

I was
a house on fire
the peninsula blazing with
thin glints Turning
it was lit
it was wild
all the sound
blew the wires and made the lights go
he winked
toward me
like the World’s Fair,
eyes absent.
to some,
too late.
we take a plunge
all
 
All
 
I said
“I don’t want to put you to
any trouble.”
“I don’t want
to put you to any trouble, you see.”
the day     to-morrow         a moment
with reluctance:
 
We both looked
ragged ended and darker

Copyright james (w) moore, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Visit james (w) moore, the self-described writer/director/actor/designer guy at his blog (jameswmoore.wordpress.com). His note on the above erasure poem reads, “if Baz Luhrmann can remix The Great Gatsby, then so can we.”

james (w) moore was one of 85 official remixers in Pulitzer Remix, a 2013 National Poetry Month initiative to create found poetry from the 85 Pulitzer Prize-winning works of fiction. Each poet posted one poem per day on the Pulitzer Remix website during the month of April, resulting in the creation of more than 2,500 poems by the project’s conclusion.

According to the Pulitzer Remix website:
Pulitzer Remix is sponsored by the Found Poetry Review, a literary journal dedicated exclusively to publishing found poetry. Found poems are the literary equivalents of collages, where words, phrases and lines from existing texts are refashioned into new poems. The genre includes centos*, erasure poetry, cut-up poetry, and other textual combinations.

Pulitzer Remix poets are challenged to create new works of poetry that vary in topic and theme from the original text, rather than merely regurgitating the novels in poetic form.

*Cento: A work of poetry  composed of verses or passages taken from other authors, placed  in a new form or order.