| Starpoet Newsletter Vol. IX, No. XX |
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| Written by Lisa Jain Thompson | |
| Saturday, 17 May 2008 | |
 The Starpoet Newsletter
Volume IX, No. XX Night falling spring unravels
Twisting summer from the sun and leaves Water vapor hangs thick
The heat rises My gown clings to me
In the small spots Where the sweat pools Causing me to pull my hair back To ease my breathe Before you touch me Lisa Jain Thompson c. 2008 C. E.
  Midpoint May well drenched by spring
Between hayfever and death
Orbiting Antares
Seconds like hours,
My body drifts, Unhinged from time, My mind files the moment For future reference. I watch the light
Shift east to west Above the clouds And the gray cold rain. My thoughts move
Through slow molasses glass, Grasping for anchors To hold me fast to reality. Deconamine, Benadryl,
Rizatiptan benzoate, Free of pain, I struggle to release myself From the pit. Like some ancient sun
Turned red with age, I cannot re-ignite My former glory, The best I can do Is this. Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008 discontinuities
Clockworks Drifts
6 A. M., three
Time disconnects, re … The flow is disrupted,
Corrupted, Senses barrenly overloaded, Grasping at slivers, Eddies of reality Teasing my consciousness. The poet struggles
To provide structure To the formless. Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008 To me love is one of a thousand elements in fiction. Love in a novel is like salt, and I use it like salt to heighten plot and character in uncountable ways. In fiction, as in real life, love is tangled with anger, with compassion as in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter (which obtuse critics mistook for pity), spirituality, adornment, fashion, parent-child relationships, shifting concepts of physical beauty, sacrifice, seduction, bodily sensation, fantasies, dreams and plottings, metaphor, lies and fumbling truths, poetry, virginity, possession, semen, philosophy, loss, fading color, tristesse, pregnancy, heredity, clan power. It runs the gamut of meanings from mad obsession to basic biological lust to a fondness for delicacies as Ignatius J Reilly's love for the soft drink Dr Nut in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. - Annie Proulx
the waken poet
Watching Ink Drying
The pen, dry of ink,
Finds itself gathered With the crumpled, Discarded Kleenex And the come-ons from The common mail catalogs That connect us, spam to spam. The poet, her muse vanished,
Disappears without a word, Without even recycling
Her greatest hits Late night on cable Between the CSI reruns. Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008 too much sneezing
After
When the limousine comes
to move my ashes And scatter me on a westerly breeze, I shall no longer care or give a damn, Having, at last, reached perfection, With all my best work well dead behind me, No longer worried whether my mascara has run. Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008 On the dark side sexual love has multitudinous negative facets that enrich many novels and stories: illness and disease; forbidden loves, including pedophilia, consanguineous unions (Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure), same-gender relationships as "Brokeback Mountain," and the whims of controlling parents or guardians, as Romeo and Juliet. It spawns jealousy (Robbe-Grillet's Jalousie), disappointment, infidelities (Flaubert's Madame Bovary), physical abuse and sometimes murder and suicide. Its commercial aspects-the lives of prostitutes as in Maria Flook's My Sister Life, the politics of madams and pimps-find their way into noir fiction. Thwarted love inspires ambition or vengeance. Strong stuff, this love.
- Annie Proulx
into the great unknown that swallows us
Beeswax and Incense
I have seen a ghost,
Or perhaps it was an angel, Or maybe just the wind Rustling silently off focus. The anticipation was breathtaking. Tomorrow, as we know tomorrow,
May not exist In a form we will recognize, A great swirl rotates counterclockwise To and back, Spewing stars and calendars Gaily from its twisting arms. Choosing the moment is everything. Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008 my very first
The House Down The Block
The first person die I ever saw
Was a middle aged woman in Whose foot slipped from brake to throttle And crashed her Buick into a concrete wall A quarter block ahead of where I stood On the sidewalk with my mother across the street. We were shopping. It was spring. I was ten, Perhaps less than, but I remember. Still. My mother wouldn’t let me look but I saw the crash. The first person who died I ever knew,
Was the husband of an older woman -- Gilbert was the name – Whose house down the block I would stop in on the way back from school. They were my neighborhood grandparents, I was their neighborhood grandchild. We would talk, they’d ask me questions, I’d answer and ask them and talk some more. One day, while I was at All Hallows, he died. A heart attack I’m told. The first person ever To vanish suddenly from my life. I was seven, Or perhaps five or six, but I remember And remember crying in bed that he was gone. Later I would stop by his house, talk to his wife, A widow still mourning and the neighbor’s kid, I knew it would never be the same. It never is. Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008 Despite the ubiquity of love in literature I cannot see it as the contemporary novel's mainframe. The strength of the novel, until recent years, has been its flexibility of form/shape and its structure as a malleable container for a multitude of ideas and themes, of which love is but one, and that usually dominated by heavier or more topical material. If we go beyond the realistic psychological novel of the 19th century, to experimental works of the early and mid-20th century as Robbe-Grillet and Irish-born Joyce, Beckett, Aidan Higgins, to the recent emergence of the ex-colonial novels of Panos Karnezis and Junot Diaz (to name only two of dozens), we see that these stories are telling us of other things than love. The woof and warp of societies and cultures and the characters' places within are the important elements.
-- Annie Proulx
poets
To Lie in the Sky
Sappho-Shakespeare-Whitman-Thompson,
A line running through us, ego to ego, Working writers all, in constant motion, Child to poet to epilog and old age, Where death awaits us all Until the next one takes us further. Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008  Caesar 46 B.C.E.
a dash of starpoet
Locus
Starlight above the cloudbank,
Unseen below the rain, Imagining Orion rising, A temporal spatial exercise. I prefer to send golden ships
In search of worlds unknown Than sulk inside life’s rude unfairness, Curled up, withdrawn, undone. Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008 The American narrative painter, John Hull, once remarked that when a painting wasn't working out well he would take crime writer Raymond Chandler's advice. "He said whenever you have a problem in a story with character or plot development have a man come in the room with a gun-and if it's a big problem make it a big gun."
For me, love, in most fiction, is a big gun.
-- Annie Proulx
the past and future meet
The Transverberation of LJ
When the Lord was flesh inside my body
And I but seven and dressed all in white, Every face around me was gay or recollected, Floating three feet above the altar rail In ecstatic contentment: each of us, For the moment, the beloved of our savior. Children of the sorely wounded Christ,
We were well taught in our belief, Experiencing God’s presence within our young souls, if not in our raptured vision, our hearts afire With the unsurpassing sweetness of His love While our parents and the nuns watched over us. Stick on stick, coal on coal, I waited for my ignition,
But the revelation only grew more tenuous As I escaped the white and black power of the nuns; I grew until I was no longer seven, and each communion Was but one more added to the list, one more silent retreat Without the Lord moving my world or adolescent body. But when I was seven, He was within me,
Or so I thought with little else to compare Him too; Now I find His existence quite suspect, Thomas’s proofs A true believer’s rationalizations that carry no weight; My first communion was a moment to be cherished, When, in my innocence, I was one with my God. I even have the photo’s somewhere in a cardboard box
In a trunk in the basement along side my family bible. Lisa Jain Thompson
May 2008   Copyright © Lisa Jain Thompson 1995-2008. Further distribution of this newsletter in its entirety is authorized. Email your letters and postcards or visit her contact page at the Starpoet website |
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