a poem by alicia rebecca myers

Alas, his fears are well founded.
There is thunder and lightning in the sky.
-Vivaldi, The Four Seasons


At St. Bartholomew's After a Breast Biopsy


The longest day -- Summer Solstice -- daylight
bides. I learn that dusk will wane
sometime during the Second Movement.
Adagio in Fall, then darkness.
I am twenty-nine.

In the mural above the nave
Christ lifts his arms to an invisible
practitioner. He's suspended
in a weatherless sky. And that grey dove,
is she coming or going?

I think of the story of you
painting a comedian's apartment high
on cocaine, how you confused colors,
reversed walls and ceiling.
I didn't know you then.
I only know the sober god who kisses
my nipples each morning before walking dogs
for a living: a change, a benediction.



Originally published in Greener


Alicia Rebecca Myers's chapbook of poems, Greener, was released from Finishing Line Press in 2009. She has four poems in the current issue of Cream City Review, and a poem forthcoming in the Southern Poetry Anthology: Georgia. She is the Co-Editor of the online literary journal Clementine, and blogs about being a travel consultant and a poet at www.beccamyers.com.

the real social network

Interesting how so many of them resemble each other.

Not surprisingly, the film debuted at #1 at the box office. Maybe one of the best movies to do so in a while?

No, the internet doesn't kill all professions. Becca hashes out the differences between a travel agent and a travel consultant.

James Franco is so hot. Watch him and The Hours scribe Michael Cunningham discuss writing and other things. I'm reading Cunningham's new novel By Nightfall and enjoying it.

pretty in pink

Rachel Bilson at Christian Dior in Paris. Love her style.

The recent sad wave of gay youth suicides on Towleroad and on Out.com.

Loving Bagpoor's fall issue. Featuring my preview of the film Black Swan.

Becca's blog is back!

Amanda loves Halloween.

A nice defense of the very gifted poet Elizabeth Alexander on The Rumpus.

Matthew Hittinger remembers John Stahle.

outside of the circle

I feel that it is necessary to respond to Anis Shivani's article, The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary Writers on the Huffington Post. Huffington Post is a powerful political entity which recently added a section for Books: a fledging form of entertainment in our country. Some agree with Shivani's choices. Some, as indicated in the comments below the post, hadn't heard of or read many of these authors (which makes me question whether they should be deemed "overrated" at all). Literary Facebook friends have responded with equal amounts of solidarity and disdain.

As a writer and admirer of many of those skewered here, I was interested to see his arguments. Instead I found myself flinching at his brash insensitivity. I could defend some of the good in everyone of these writers, something that Shivani eschews--to which I call "bad criticism." There's a muddled pettiness and laziness to his attacking.

He writes of The Hours: "Another devotee of the antihumanist message, which comes packaged as resignation to reality--in other times, such an attitude was called fatalism." So according to Shivani, to be a "good writer" one shouldn't explore fatalism? Based on his assessments, not only do I think Shivani misread The Hours, but he doesn't take in account Cunningham's other works (A Home at the End of the World is a fantastic read; Specimen Days, less so, though full of interesting ideas).

Of Jhumpa Lahiri, a tremendously gifted and subtle storyteller, Shivani dictates what he thinks she should not write about: "Utterly unwilling (though probably fully capable, since she's the only readable writer on this list) to write about anything other than privileged Bengali immigrants with PhDs living in Cambridge's Central and Inman Squares, and making easy adjustments to the top of the American meritocratic pyramid." I would disagree that the adjustments her characters make are "easy." Did he read and fully comprehend the exile and heartbreak in "Mrs. Sen's" or The Namesake?

He writes of Ashberry as a mixer of "low and high levels of language, low and high culture, every available postmodern artifact and text, from media jargon to comic books, to recreate a reality ordered only by language itself." Ashberry isn't a poet I always connect with necessarily but I don't see what's wrong with the criticisms Shivani lays out here.

And the critiques on Sharon Olds are quite ludicrous and reek of an innate discomfort with writing by women: "Her poetry defines feminism turned upon itself, chewing up its own hot and bothered cadaver, exposed since the 1970s. Female poets in workshops around the country idolize her, collaborate in the masochism, because they say she freed them to talk about taboo subjects, she "empowered" them."

I disagree with his characteristics of "bad writing": "obfuscation, showboating, narcissism, lack of a moral core, and style over substance." As a writer, I should have a better "moral core"--a firmer grasp on the good and the bad. Such a laxness has left me on the on the outside of circles or snarky workshops discerning why something sucks. There is just so much out there, recognized or unrecognized (Shivani claims he will put out an underrated list: a much more worthy, but less-attention-seeking endeavor) to engage with, to explore and to take away from.

The lack of openness on Shivani's part is toxic. There is a personal, interior texture to writing that separates it from any other art form. This pursuit, I believe, should be encouraged more than derided, especially by fellow writers and contemporaries.


-Jeffery Berg



My friend Becca wrote a measured, articulate post in defense of Sharon Olds that I hope everyone reads.

See also Anna North's response on Jezebel

And Charles Jensen, who is so smart.

shoutouts

I love the Brooklyn Museum. Their American High Style exhibition was great to see. I'm still thinking about the 1910 dress above designed by Paul Poiret.

I am so happy that the talented Rebecca Myers and her blog is a finalist to appear in the next issue of Creative Nonfiction. I suggested her entry "Christmas Past" to the editors and alas, out of over 800 submissions, it was one of 19 finalists.

Dan Rosenberg, whose poems were recently featured here, has a new chapbook: A Thread of Hands. Only $8!

A well-written review of George A. Romero's 1977 cult vampire classic Martin from Behind the Couch.

Love these John Woo Star Wars inspired drawings for various menswear lines on Le Chic Batik.

203 east 4th

A poem from my friend Becca. I love this one. Go seek her chapbook Greener (or order greenerchapbook@gmail.com). We co-edit Clementine together and are hoping for a new issue soon.


203 East 4th

I write you from a dense island.
Ships skirt the pratfall shore then grow
distant -- I grow inventive, pray radio
sleeps in the coconut's core. Can
waves refuse what they carry, manage
without baggage? I've lost how to row.
Flat palms vise the hot air, sostenuto.
The same sun that drowns rises, dripping.
Shells protrude like tusks or oars;
I string colors together, rope starlet
necklaces of auger, cuttlebone. Sweat
salts my eyes to tears -- that, and the hours
spent alone. You might forget
me completely. I write you from regret.


-Alicia Rebecca Myers

oh my darling

My friend Rebecca Myers and I co-edit an online journal named Clementine.

Our third issue went live yesterday and we are excited about it. With every issue, it's a pleasure to compile great poetry and photography by up and coming and established artists. One of my favorite poets, David Trinidad, is in the latest issue with two beautiful poems on death. It also features Chris Roberts, Lisa Newhouse, MRB Chelko, Sharanya Manivannan, Rachel Marie Patterson, Kaethe Schwehn, and Andy Stallings.

The gorgeous photography included is by Rick Herron (who took the picture here) and David Wright.

Compiling all of the unique perspectives has been fun and it's exciting to see Clementine blossom. It's also fun to work with Rebecca who is a very talented poet.

Our mission with Clementine are to give a space to poems that tackle or adopt ideas about the persona. Here's one of my favorite poems that Becca wrote from her chapbook Greener. The poem is in the voice of Maria von Trapp.

Maria Von Trapp, on the 25th Anniversary

Re-release of The Sound of Music on Video

They sugared and screened my life, made me

Julie Andrews, finder of comfort in brown

copper kettles, climber of mountains, settler

in unfamiliar territory. I went from hills to curtained

kids, yodeling all the way. Oh there's the whirling

dervish now, the how-do-you-find-a-

word-that-means-the-how-do-you-solve-a-

problem-like-Maria. Say it loud and it's almost

like praying. Maria. Sweet singer, second

mother, former nun turned able-bodied Edelweisser.

Christopher Plummer tired to make surrender

film worthwhile, but how, chin scar

like an either/or? Pick your poison,

your puppeteer. Will it be God or Captain,

abbey bells or seven children screaming?

Favorite things do nothing for fear. I hear

my well-kept songs wanting out, personal

refrains not fit for any festival chorus but voiced

Leisel-like at night, gazebo hidden. I sneak away

for secret ballads, strum chords crisp as abandoned hills,

wonder if when I wandered long,

afternoons by the high stream, through audience-

less and still a nun, I sang better.

I rewind the final scene, watch again and again

as my Julie Andrews legs trudge towards an unseen

inn in Vermont. A family fleeing war,

hands so full of Gretel, who can carry

a guitar?

-Alicia Rebecca Myers

I do hope you enjoy our latest issue!

maine events

Becca talks about being a summer nanny in Maine for a family of geniuses in an insightful post.