After Marlon’s Interview, poem by Barbara Eknoian (Celebrity Free Verse Poetry Series)

AFTER MARLON’S INTERVIEW
by Barbara Eknoian

This was not my last sight of him
that evening.
But at 2 in the morning
cabarets are shuttered;
only cats remained to keep me company
and drunks and red-light ladies.
I had trudged more than a mile
to the main street district
of stores and cinemas.
Then I saw Brando
sixty feet tall.
There he was, in comic paper colors,
on a sign above a theatre
that advertised “The Teahouse
of the August Moon.”
Rather Buddhalike, too,
his pose depicted in a squatting position,
a serene smile on a face
that glistened in the rain
and the light of a street lamp.
A deity, but, more than that,
a young man sitting
on a pile of candy.

SOURCE: “The Duke in His Domain” by Truman Capote, The New Yorker (November 9, 1957).

PHOTO: Marlon Brando by Philippe Halsman (1950), ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Barbara Eknoian‘s work has appeared in Pearl, Chiron Review, RE)VERB, and Silver Birch Press’s Silver, Green, and Summer anthologies, and Cadence Collective on line. She has received two Pushcart Prize nominations and is a member of Donna Hilbert’s poetry workshop in Long Beach, California. Her first young adult novel Chances Are: A Jersey Girl Comes of Age, and her poetry book Why I Miss New Jersey are available at Amazon. She is currently working on a generational novel.

Smack in the Middle, poem by E. Kristin Anderson (Celebrity Free Verse Poetry Series)

Smack in the Middle
by E. Kristin Anderson

Irreverent, your star has
this year found out.

Pitch perfect, as ever, you sleep,
so many panicked things,
not supposed to be rocking rules.

I know you think there’s a girl –
everyone’s the smallest one.

SOURCE: “That Girl” (interview with Anna Kendrick) by Laura Ferrara, Glamour (August 2014, pages 168-173). Photos from the interview at models.com.

PHOTO: Anna Kendrick by Dan Martensen, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: E. Kristin Anderson‘s first nonfiction anthology, Dear Teen Me, based on the popular website of the same name, was published in October of 2012 by Zest Books (distributed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). She’s worked at The New Yorker magazine, has a B.A. in Classics from Connecticut College, and is currently an online editor for the YA & Children’s section of VCFA’s literary journal Hunger Mountain and a contributing editor at Found Poetry Review. She’s published poetry in many magazines worldwide, including Post Road, the Cimarron Review, [PANK], Asimov’s Science Fiction and forthcoming work in Cicada. She also has poems forthcoming in the Silver Birch Press Great Gatsby Anthology. Her first chapbook, A Guide for the Practical Abductee, was just released by Red Bird Chapbooks, and her next chapbook, A Jab of Deep Urgency, is forthcoming in October from Finishing Line Press. Her work also appears in Futuredaze, an anthology of YA fiction and poetry, and in Coin Opera 2, an anthology of poetry about video games. She blogs at EKristinAnderson.com.

Cornered the niche, poem by Claire Trévien (Celebrity Free Verse Poetry Series)

Cornered the niche
by Claire Trévien 

Do you have to be the witch
          or the queen tomorrow?

Mrs Lovett, Bellatrix, Miss Havisham.
          Different textures, different temperatures,

you always start from the inside out:
          reinvent a corseted
                                        wow.

You want to have fun with
          self-definition; your houses
a reluctant vampire that
          never really wanted to grow up.

They think they have
          got you sussed,
                    but you’ve got plenty of room
                    for stubbornness, darling.

SOURCE: Helena Bonham Carter interview by Daniel Radcliffe , Interview magazine (May 2012).

PHOTO: Helena Bonham Carter by Peter Lindbergh, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I adore Helena Bonham Carter and the confidence and flair she brings to every part, as well as her gloriously and defiantly dishevelled appearances on red carpets. She is everything I want to be when I (fail to) grow up.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Claire Trévien is the Anglo-Breton author of Low-Tide Lottery (Salt, 2011) and The Shipwrecked House (Penned in the Margins, 2013), which was longlisted in the Guardian First Book Awards. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Best British Poetry 2012, The Forward Book of Poetry 2014, Magma, and The Guardian.  She edits Sabotage Reviews and the forthcoming anthology Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History.

Had a Window, poem by A. Garnett Weiss (Celebrity Free Verse Poetry Series)

HAD A WINDOW
by A. Garnett Weiss

There’s always a certain awareness,
a limited amount of changes you can make.
Can’t get away from your actual identity
as that cross-eyed Canadian.

Too easily consumed by the wave,
I’d seen all the pitfalls.
All those sandtraps of entitlement
you think you suddenly deserve
in this funny business.

Overeager,
still searching for
that kind of roadside attraction,
crushing
so much for the role
I just left.

Young enough, dumb enough, feel
like this kid sitting on the bench
in the life-threatening cold:
It was real when the camera rolled.

SOURCE: Richard  Ouzounian’s “The Big Interview: Ryan Reynolds” (Toronto Star,  August 23, 2014).

IMAGE: Ryan Reynolds 

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I read the source material, extract phrases or words of interest, then live with them until a sequence emerges and until the poem clicks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Poems by JC Sulzenko, now writing poetry as A. Garnett Weiss, have been featured on local and national radio and television, on-line and in anthologies and chapbooks. Her centos have won a number of recent awards. Various newspapers have carried her creative non-fiction. “In the third person” was featured in Silver Birch Press’s self-portrait poetry series. She has appeared often on behalf of The Ottawa International Writers Festival, which hosted the premiere of her play about Alzheimer’s disease, What My Grandma Means to Say, and launched her sixth book for children adapted from the play. In 2012, she served as poet-mentor for The Gryphon Trio’s Listen Up! Ottawa music and poetry project. She also received the Ottawa Public Library’s Order of Friendship for her “outstanding volunteer” service. Visit her at www.jcsulzenko.com

May is “Get Caught Reading” Month, Starring Johnny Depp

Johnny Depp (in a photo from a few years ago, it appears) gets caught reading on a train — and looks none too thrilled. Go back to your book, Johnny. Looks like it will take many train rides to finish this one — whatever it is. If you’re reading this Monsieur Depp, let us know. Bon voyage!

UPDATE: Duh! I realize this is a scene from the film THE TOURIST (2010) — a not-that-great movie but worth seeing for the locations.

UPDATE 2: The novel that Johnny Depp reads on the train in THE TOURIST is The Berlin Vendetta by Charles Torbett — a book that exists only in the movie.

Henry Miller & Brenda Venus

During the final four years of his life, Henry Miller wrote more than 1,500 love letters (over 4,000 pages!) to his muse, a beautiful Native American actress named Brenda Venus. Originally published by Morrow in 1986 — six years after Miller’s death — the voluminous correspondence was edited into an approximately 200-page book, with commentary by Venus. When it came out, the book received rave reviews, including a sensitive, insightful analysis by Noel Young in the L.A. Times (2/2/1986). Here is an excerpt:

Henry Miller’s death in 1980 brought an end to one of the most extraordinary romances ever conceived, coming as it did from the impassioned mind of a man nearly 90, admittedly a physical ruin, and the good graces of a young actress, aptly named Brenda Venus, in the prime of her life. For Miller, it was love at first sight, kindling an ardor that kept him alive for four more years. He did what he did best — he wrote; and he laid it all on the line in more than 1,000 letters from which this volume is drawn.

An ordinary man, blind in one eye and partially paralyzed, might have taken to bed and wasted away, but not Henry Miller. Instead, he fell hopelessly, shamelessly in love and spilled it out in letters to his dear Brenda, wallowing in a euphoria that lasted to his end. He worked himself into a lather, at least on paper, and lived for those Thursday nights when she appeared at his door, took him by his arm and drove him to dinner at his favorite Japanese restaurant in the Hollywood Hills. One stormy night, to spare him hobbling through the puddles in the parking lot, she simply picked him up and carried him upstairs to the entrance. He accepted this with aplomb and a jaunty smile.”

Dear, Dear Brenda by Henry Miller (with text by Brenda Venus, edited by Gerald S. Sindell with an introduction by Lawrence Durell) is available at Amazon.com here.

Find out more about the fascinating Brenda Venus at her website, brendavenus.com.