Vocal
Class
Southern Poetry Review, 45:1
Armstrong Atlantic State University
Southern Poetry Review is rather grand in its way, up North the poet
tends his garden speaking out of ripe italics, here he does farming. Nance
Van Winckel peeks “out from the flap / of a dog-eared page. // An old
clock’s laid open on a dish / and I finger the tiny tools I’ve seen
/ all my life but have // no idea how to use.”
These are poets exercised by the presses,
William M. Ramsey takes a similar guarded view of a trucker,
relieved
to have for the next few hours
an
empty rig, darkness, and Corinthians or Galatians
spoken
aloud from his portable tape deck, the high hum
of
tires rolling on and on, to some vanishing point ahead.
Philip Dacey’s “New York
Postcard Sonnets” take the mickey out of the Public Library:
Brass
lamps spread hominess in Bly’s “favorite
room
in the world.” (From Robert, rare good sense.)
and Juilliard:
From
a public vocal class: “Break their hearts
with
pianissimo... Your best friends are vowels.”
The
students here obviously work so hard
they
remind me to. Thank you, Juilliard.
Matthew J. Spireng has in mind the grateful
reader, “Remember, before we met / I always dreamed I was you.”
Tim Skeen goes to school in “Hokoku-an
Zen Center” with a string of sayings and the student’s apt reply.
Louis Phillips imagines a jailbreak and pursuit (“It Escapes Me”):
There
must be an island somewhere
That
humankind has overlooked.
We
were, as you can well imagine,
No
wiser than before.