How We Are Human by Luke Armstrong

Luke M. Armstrong has appeared on Poet Hound before on an interview: http://poethound.blogspot.com/search?q=armstrong

Now Mr. Armstrong is back with a heartfelt collection of poems about humanity in all its shapes, forms, phases, and tragedies in How We Are Human published by Create Space Independent Publishing Platform. The poems inside describe hungry children, pop culture, joyful celebrations, philosophical questions, death and more. If you have read his first collection, iPoems for the Dolphins to click Home About, you will enjoy this collection even more so. He also includes an equally hilarious introduction which makes the collection worth purchasing all by itself. Humor before tragedy, it’s the way to go. The poems in his collection are longer so I will only include a couple of them below:

WHEN THERE WILL BE LAUGHTER

One day our greatest grandchildren will
Remember the day everyone burst
Into a simultaneous song of laughter:
The priests and the pastors
Atheists and agnostics
Hippies and homosexuals all stopped
Mid-sentence and took a deep sigh before
Finishing each others’ sentences with a gong-grinding
Bout of gushing laughter.
The babies, who did not understand, put
Down their rattles and stopped dirtying their diapers to
Join the hilarity because they
Comprehended in a wild and unarticulated way.
Priests, politicians and pragmatists poeticized and promised
To stop finishing long dead people’s journeys and
Instead laugh and laugh to laugh and laugh.
Everyone felt like it was the first day of school
And despite reservations had been
Accepted wholly and cherished plainly by
New classmates who grabbed the palms of
Their humid hands and ran towards the tire swing
Where the world’s orbit shrank to the size
Of everyone’s ability to laugh and love it.

I love the idea of everyone coming together through humor. Isn’t that what most comedians aim for? To unite a potentially diverse audience? Perhaps someday a laugh will ignite unity and wouldn’t that be a beautiful day?


BODY LANGUAGE

When we were hungry we'd
wave our arms in the air
mimicking the mating dance
of a rare South American swallow
only ever sighted in tribal
legends of the Amazon.
We communicated in a complicated
dialect of body language.
Once she broke her shoulder
trying to tell me to pass the
I Can't Believe It's Not Butter,
since this was communicated by
doing a backflip off the side of the garage.
To pantomime an ape was to invite
me to the movies. To mime a heart attack
was to remind me to do the dishes. To gesture a
giraffe was into invite me into her arms.
We're still both fluent. But out of practice,
spending our time learning new languages.
But sometimes, without thinking, I'll do a cartwheel
followed by a somersault and fold my hands into a pistol
when all I needed to do was ask for the time
and wonder how it got away from our conveying hands.

This poem resonates with me—so much of how we communicate is by physical and facial expression. The words we say mean less than how we say it. If you have ever been in a foreign country where you do not know the language, pantomiming and mimicry become your main method of communication and I love the elaborate physical communication described in the poem above. It makes me smile and reminds me of growing up on the Texas/Mexican border making friends with children who spoke Spanish and how we got along just fine “aping” our intentions, opinions, and ideas.


There is so much more than I can possibly share with you, the book consists of 114 pages and is worth exploring. If you enjoyed this sample, you may purchase a copy of Luke Maguire Armstrong’s How We Are Human for $9.99 here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1480055867

Thanks always for reading, please drop by again tomorrow…

Help Luke Armstrong Help Others Start A Better Life

Thank you to all who have read the review of Luke Armstrong's latest work, How We Are Human, posted earlier this week.
Luke and I have been e-mailing back and forth about a project he has been working on: Helping Guatemalans start a savings account in addition to teaching them basic money skills. I, for one, am passionate about personal finance. I've been reading books like The Millionaire Next Door since I was 12 years old. The Rich Dad Poor Dad series is excellent, too. It really was a toss-up years ago whether to do a blog about poetry or a blog about helping others gain knowledge in personal finance. I now have the very rare opportunity to combine the two.

So I am asking all of you out there that are looking for charitable giving opportunities to check out the link below and learn how you can help others help themselves:

http://www.integralheartfoundation.org/Third.World.Savings.htm


If ever there was a way to really pay it forward, it would be helping others learn to help themselves. If you have more questions and want to contact Luke Armstrong, please e-mail me or message me on Facebook. Luke is hoping to raise an additional $150.00 by December 17th so please take a look and thanks always for clicking in!

An Interview With Luke Armstrong

Luke Maguire Armstrong resides in Antigua, Guatemala where he is the director of the educational development organization Nuestros Ahijados. He has published a collection of poems through Potent Possibilities Publishing titled iPoems for the Dolphins to Click Home About which is also the title to one of the poems in the collection. The introduction alone is worth picking up a copy for yourself as I laughed so hard my husband begged me to read it aloud. The cover is tongue-in-cheek as well, and once you read the intro you then focus on the poems which range from funny to serious to worldly. I was intrigued by the entire package and just had to dig into the mind of Mr. Armstrong, who willingly obliged:


1. Your cover features dolphins against the waves, the title is large and easy to read, and then there’s this white circle towards the bottom and in the circle it says “if this book were to win an award, we’d put it here.” Seeing the circle and its text made me laugh aloud before I even bothered to open to the first page. Why did you decided to throw that on the cover?

Because I thought it was funny. It was just a matter of, once I had the idea to put something like that on the cover, there was no way I was not going to do it. It stays with the theme of the book of making poetry fun without compromising the artistic integrity.



2. As if the cover wasn’t enough, you have a table of contents that has absolutely nothing to do with the titles of your poems but are quite funny to read such as: “Hiring Your Girlfriend: Mistake or Best Decision You Ever Made?” and “Bathing Kitties: A Reluctant Memoir,” and “Bathing Old People For Money: A Reluctant Memoir.” When I eagerly flipped through the pages to those poems they were nowhere to be found but the poems were wonderful enough to make up for it. Then you find a creatively done map that serves as a more accurate table of contents but doesn’t exactly give away the exact titles. What prompted you to do an incongruous table of contents and then a map of an almost-table-of-contents for your readers?

When I was putting this book together, funny titles for poems that did not exist would just sorta pop into my head, and I’d write them on napkins or whatever I had to write on. I knew I had to include them somehow in the book, and creating a fake table of contents seemed like a winning idea.

At some point in our lives, we all ask ourselves the deep question, “Are treasure maps the coolest thing ever?” I think there is something universally awesome about treasure maps. I know I spent a large part of my youth making “pirate treasure maps”. In writing a poetry book, a pirate treasure map seemed a good direction to take. Credit goes to my friend Andrea C. Johnson, who took the idea and used her talents as an artist to create the map.


3. Mr. Armstrong, your Foreword is so funny that I would love to reproduce it in its entirety but I don’t have the energy to retype that much text and the readers of this interview really ought to get a copy for themselves, anyway, to thoroughly enjoy it. I would like to quote a couple of excerpts and ask you to expound on how you came to write this Foreword:

“If you have ever listened to poets talking about poetry (when we consume alcohol we tend to rant), you’ll discover that we feel a little left out. We see the Jonas Brothers rocking out and filling up stadiums of screaming teenage girls, while us poets sit on coffee shop stools and look out at an embarrassing acreage of five pale faces who have come to our poetry reading (usually all five in attendance are our mom.)”
Mr. Armstrong, this had me rolling on the floor as you really seem to understand poets’ plights, please expound on why you would share this sentiment with readers of your collection?

You never hear someone say, “You’re only a poet for the fame and fortune and free Ferris wheel rides!” Poetry is an interesting endeavor. Tons of work goes into it, but there are very few financial or other rewards to it. And this is okay. It just means that people write poetry for the right reasons. In my experience, there is no such thing as being a sell out and a poet.



Here’s another excerpt that really hits the nail on the head for me at least, please tell me more about why you thought to share this sentiment with your readers:
“We are all English majors who aspired to be Shakespeares, and when that failed, we aspired to be Hemmingways, and when that failed, most of us decided between having drug problems or becoming English teachers. That’s why your high school English teacher was so cranky. She not only was not Shakespeare, she chose teaching you not to end your sentences with a preposition instead of hitting a bong with your tied-dyed friends with names like Star, Cheebuz and Bob Marley.”
Please expound on why you would share this sentiment with potential readers?

I have to say, I had great English teachers in high school who went into teaching for all the right reasons. To my knowledge, none of them are drug addicts…
I have lots of friends from college who sort of gave up on their dream of writing when they had some setbacks early on and had to take jobs as teachers. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. People need to make their ends meet, and teaching is one of the most beautiful ways to do that. But this is no reason to stop writing creatively. At the heart of it all, writing in-and-of-itself is a worthwhile enough enterprise to do for its own sake.




4. After the Foreword you present your Marketing Plan and how you hope word of mouth is important and that profits from this book will go to charity and say “Who says that poetry can’t save the world?” Please let us know which charity the profits are being sent to and what does the charity mean to you?

There’s no marketing budget for this book, or even much of a marketing plan for that matter. Publishing the book was never my intention when I was writing these poems. Writing poetry is just something I do for myself. But after accumulating a lot of material, it felt right to be putting some of them into a book. The whole thing is a result of a big mindset shift. I never used to share my poetry much with others. Then a writer friend, Alex Ferrar, invited me to read at a reading he was organizing. The feedback was positive enough that I started sharing it with friends and submitting it more for publication—all of which eventually led to the book.

It also feels right that if sales of this book somehow take off, which could only happen through word of mouth, that I put some of that where it can do some good. So a portion of any profits will go to the charity I work for (www.godschild.org). This is a wonderful organization that is changing thousands of lives worldwide. I’m lucky, in that when I go to work, I get to see those lives changed and even help make it happen.



5. Now that we’ve gotten this far with you, we can now focus on your poetry which is a wide range of subjects with an even larger variety of emotional responses which could be provoked depending on how your readers view the particular poem at hand. I would say your poems range from trying to awaken the world to the plights of the less fortunate to ones that make readers laugh at your childhood antics and perhaps drunken college days. How did you decide to select such a broad range and put them together into one collection?

I’m laughing at you describing them as “drunken college days.” As I said in the earlier response, I never set out to write a book of poetry. I’ve been writing poetry since I was a kid, and before that I was expressing myself through journaling. What made it to the book are poems mostly written over the last three years. I put in what I considered to be my best work. I also left some out that I felt were negative and without the silver lining of hope to them. We all have good days and bad days, and as writers both are reflected in the writing we produce during those times. I’m a believer that there really is no reason to share with the world work that has an intrinsically negative nature. We all have lots of faces, but should strive to show the smiling ones to the world.



6. I would like to share a few of your poems with readers and ask you about them. Since I’m running with the theme of “funny” I’ll start with your own rendition of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” which you’ve turned into as “The Drink Not Taken.” How did this poem come about and how did you decide to model it after Robert Frost’s poem?

This poem was written when I was in college, for a literary journal that was looking for “bad poetry”. They rejected this poem telling me that it was “too good” for what they wanted. That was some irony, since most of my poetry at the time was not being accepted into literary journals because it was “not good enough.”


The Drink Not Taken
Two drinks settled on a yellow table,
And sorry I was able to drink only one
And be but one drinker long I gazed
And looked intently at both the labels,
For a closer inspection, both to the light I raised.

The first was light and smelled of juice
And having within it nothing to impair,
While the other was of a higher proof.
Though deep down I knew I should care,
Recklessly, I took the second and drank it bare.

And that next morning in bed I lay
With pounding head and eyes shut tight,
I realized shortly I’d slept through the day.
I should have realized that through the night,
Drink leads to drink and then to drunken plight.

I shall be telling this with a sigh,
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two drinks settled on a table and I,
Drank the one with alcohol content high
And that has made all the difference.



7. This next poem is called “Lunch Box Filled With Cat,” in which two young boys smuggle a cat into their room and it is discovered by the parents who return it to the rightful owners next door. I love that the main boy desperately wants a pet and fulfills his desire by simply picking up the cat and smuggling it into his room. Is this something that really happened or did you come up with this poem another way? What inspired you to write a poem about childhood adventures like this one?

This particular poem is inspired by reality. When I was eight, I really did kidnap a neighbor’s cat. I got in a lot of trouble for that. As the poem truthfully recalls, I was no longer allowed to have my own room when my parents found out. If only that cat had been a little quieter…

A Lunchbox Filled With Cat

Having only eight years frees you
Like birds soaring because they can.
Your own room is limitless space that lets you paint
The world even a peacock color—it turns
All things into possibilities—even pet cats.

A neighbor’s cat—lounging lazily on her porch—
A reminder of things you do not possess—
Things you do not possess—
A reminder of still possible things—
Still possible thing—
The need for a plan.

The plan:
1) Coax the cat with cheese.
2) Stuff cat in large, red lunch box.

Destination:
Your room’s closet.
Your own room’s closet.

Your own room’s closet—
Soon to be cat cage.

And so with a faithful younger brother in tow
The world is suddenly remade—even a pet cat is now possible—
Is smuggled into your closet via a lunch box.
Our precious pet—which we fed with fish sticks—
That we gave a pillow for a litter box
And a sleeping bag for a bed—
That clever cat
Who used the pillow for a bed and
The sleeping bag as a litter box.

And for three days the cat and world were ours.
And were it not for too loud a meow, our father would
Not have been brought to anger—I would not have been
Brought to apologize to worried neighbors—I would not
have been punished—
forced to again share a room with my younger sibling—
I would not have been brought back to the stinking
Society of a younger brother still in diapers.

And this world has not changed.
Today there are no less kidnap-able cats,
No less lunch boxes.

The world has not changed—but something has.

Today I have my own room, but not my own world.
And every day I pass by cat-filled porches and
Wonder where the desire to coax them with cheese has gone.
The world has not changed, it has just been found finite.





8. This is a poem you mention in your introduction as one your mother would not be happy with but it is a poem which most people can relate to, especially the college crowd. Why did you decide to write this poem and if your mother did read it, what did she have to say about it?

My very religious mother, who is also a writer and proofread the manuscript of the book for me, certainly would have liked that I leave that poem out, but I think she understood why I kept it in. I kept the poem because it is not a poem about one-night-stands. It is not exploring a racy issue just for shock value. For me, it’s about the underlying human essence that causes people to want to have a one-night-stand. The poem is a realization of that.

I added the last two lines, “And this is hopeful. / And hope is love.” months after I had written the poem. I don’t think I would have included the poem in the book were it not for the addition of these two lines. They somehow changed the poem; it made the subject of one-night-stands somehow seem acceptable—when framed in the right context. Poetry is so much about how we frame things. By reading someone’s poetry, you have clues to how they see the world. Sometimes I’ll look at a poem I’ve written and wonder, “Is this poem true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?” When I say truth, I’m not thinking did it happen, but of Truth with a capital T. Meaning, does the poem invoke some essence of humanity? When I say kind, I mean, is the poem a positive take on reality? This is so important. Just by being part of the world, we are all charged with the responsibility of shaping it.

Whether we like it or not, we are all changing the world. The only question is to what degree and was it for the better or worse. Writers of poetry are not excluded from this. You can explore sad and taboo issues. This has always been the playing field of poets, but I think it is intellectual laziness to just stop there without offering readers road out of any darkness a poem or story leads them to.


To The Fathers Of The Daughters Who End Up In My Bedroom

Man to man, you know how it is,
Let us discuss some few things:

Everything will be dark, so we
Need not concern ourselves
About whether there is, or there
Is not, a decaying apple core in the corner.

Words are merely words and lies
Also words. Things happen
And there is sometimes a pot
Of gold at the bottom bottled beer.

I won’t call the false number
She gave me, so don’t stress it,
We will not meet over an
Awkward table, so never
Concern yourself about
Who will foot the bill.

If she needs a taxi tomorrow, I
Will offer to pay and she will
Refuse, choosing instead to use
Her daddy’s money.

You have raised her well, though
I admit my standards have
Slipped lately. Were you in my shoes,
You sir, would not have shoes on at all.

And after it all, in the dark light
Of the familiar edge of my bed,
As we both rummage through our
Value systems, searching for
Fleeting silver linings, we will
Sit listening, to the intimate voice
Of mutually vanishing
Exclusive revelations.

And one day, to my despair,
The tentative daughter,
That I hope your daughter is not
Carrying, will likely do the
Same human thing.
And this is hopeful.
And hope is love.




9. I would like to take a turn here to note you do have more serious poems, one in which I am curious as to whether it really is about you or from the perspective of someone close to you. The poem title is “The Certainty: Either We Must Become Orphans Or Parents Who Lose Who They Most Love.” The poem speaks of brother and sister driving with the knowledge that their parents have passed away. Please let us know how this poem came about and why you wanted to share the quiet, contemplative drive with your readers?

I know it is going to be a good poem when it just writes itself. This poem did that. I’m blessed in that both my parents are still alive. Art has such a strange dimension to it. When I read this poem, I can feel that it is vividly true. Even though I have not personally lost my parents, I can picture the car and the two siblings and I can hear the sound of the tires on the road and feel the frost on the window. I can even taste the coffee. This is what makes art so strangely wonderful, that it can be True, without really being true.

The sentiment I was really trying to express was about eventually finding love. I realized, somewhat sadly, that falling in love in the future means only knowing that person from the present onwards. I’ve calmed down a lot over the last few years. And that’s a good thing. But it is somewhat bittersweet knowing that whomever I meet from this day onwards will only see the destination and not the journey. This is why there is nothing as wonderful as an old friend, someone who knows both the journey and destination. So this was the point of the poem, and somehow it came out framed as a brother and sister driving down a dark highway, alone after their parent’s funeral.

The Certainty: Either We Must Become Orphans Or Parents Lose Who They Most Love

My sister sits silently steering as we
Speed back to returning to normal lives—
Lives built years ago by him and her
Now both not resting, not sleeping, not rising—
gone.

Cars hum by. I’m trivially troubled by the
Modifier in “good as gone.” Cars hum by.

Slowly I feel and taste a connection between
The humming highway and the warmth of my Starbucks.

Time’s frozen. Neither words nor glances pass between us.
We understand. Cars hum by.

Highway. Icy. Progress.

Lately I’ve become too old to still be young.
When my parents were my age they were married
With two kids and a promise that lasted till the end.
Cars, still, hum by.

Back then love was something that happened early.
And I’m not too worried it won’t, but it will be long
After I’m worth knowing.

We won’t experience the youthful best of each other,
But taking turns listening, we will settle for being
Ambassadors to our own pasts:

Rugged youthful stories: Black out binging, altered
Everything, new consciousness, have-beard-will-hitch-
hike, first and last times, recklessness that led to wrecks, the
future, as we uninhibitedly dreamt it should be.

The past won’t repeat itself in the future. We’ll repeat it.
Good as gone. As gone as cars humming by.

As the light fades, my sister turns on the headlights that
Illuminate the next few moments of highway.
Every minute twin lights moving faster than our ability
To survive an impact speed inches by the left.

It’s intimate inside the heated car. But to everyone outside
We are just a pair of anonymous lights speeding through the
Strange darkness, wondering when we’ll cross paths with
someone, hoping to one day leave loves orphaned to the
forgiving future.



Mr. Armstrong, thank you for sharing your work with me and allowing me to interview you. You have many more wonderful poems and I hope readers of this interview will seek out a copy for themselves. Please keep in touch and I wish you continued success in your writing.

If you enjoyed this interview and the poems shared you may purchase a copy for yourself for $9.95 at Amazon.com (shipping and handling not included) by following the link below:
http://www.amazon.com/iPoems-Dolphins-Click-Home-About/dp/1451555865

Thanks for reading, please drop by tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…

Tom Healy's What The Right Hand Knows

Four Way Books has introduced me to two wonderful collections of poetry and today I will feature Tom Healy’s What The Right Hand Knows, published by Four Way Books. Tom Healy lives in New York and Miami and has appeared in The Tin House, BOMB, and other journals. This collection of poems is edgy, full of wit, surprise, tragedy and was a thoroughly enjoyable read. I have countless poems I’d love to share with you but I will narrow it down to a few and hope that you will look for this book in stores or use the link below to capture a copy for yourself:


Oh, Hi Dad

I thought I had killed him.
But here he is,

come to life so quickly,
despite the scarce crop

of talk, how long
words went hungry,

the distance I’d driven
to dump his memory.

But here he is,
the fruit of famine,

an alphabet emptied
of ice or apology.

Look where it comes!
Here he is.

Taste and eat.
Smile and wave.


This poem is the way I imagine it to be when you cut ties with someone close to you and that person then returns to your life unexpectedly and inexplicably. It is obvious that the poet didn’t actually kill his father but perhaps all memory had been carefully blocked out of mind only to have to confront the father face to face. The ending is what intrigues me most. Despite “killing him” the ending portrays trying to put on a happy face with the ending line of “Smile and wave”, trying to bury the negative thoughts when confronted with the very person he had tried to bury away in his mind and instead showing off a smile. Isn’t that just the way of human nature? Torn between putting on the “happy face” or the “angry scowl” when confronted with someone you had long since abandoned on purpose?



What The Right Hand Knows

I am not in stereo.
Deaf in one ear,

I am unable
with any accuracy

to pinpoint clamor
and quiet.

Argument reaches me
only on my left or

marching down
the center of the street

cleared
of other traffic.

I lose the background,
the sotto voce.

I lose scratch,
whisper, rain,

white noise, color
if it’s muted,

the good gossip
unless I turn to it.

Stories must
circle west

toward twilight.
I have no east.

I learned this
on an ordinary afternoon,

my parents fighting,
torching one another,

and the only place
to run for cover

was standing there,
covering my ears.

But my right hand slipped—
to nothing.

Nothing?
I rolled up the gates,

brought my fingers
flat again, lifted

one, then the other.
Both hands. Neither.

I don’t know why I didn’t
cry or

tell anyone
the sound wasn’t working.

Suddenly strange,
hearing and not—

I kept the sugar taste
of that secrecy

well-hidden
until eventually

Armstrong
landed on the moon

and our family’s first
color console

broadcast the Earth
reflected in the bubble

over the astronaut’s face—
itself another

television
attached to the body

of the best father
of all possible worlds.

Did you know,
I said to my mother,

that the moon’s dark side
has no sound?


I love the eeriness of this poem, the rude awakening of discovering you have no hearing in one ear and then not speaking a word of it. There are wonderful lines that bring to life the absence of sound, how “Stories must/circle west/toward twilight./I have no east.” The parents, distracted: “torching one another” do not notice their son testing out his ears by placing one hand alternately over and then away from his ear and never do notice as time goes by with the poem. I love the ending, a child’s imagination of the “moon’s dark side” having no sound and pairing it with the idea of his own hearing loss. I think this is a beautiful poem that brings out the innocence of a child’s perspective in such a discovery.



An Act of Forbearance

i.

You’re the type
who’d murder.
I’m the one
who eyes
his own wrists.
Should we shed
and spend life
thwarting
one another?

ii.

Compare apples
and oranges.

Compare fiction
and breathing.

One peeled,
one bitten.

Which, my spider,
is which?

We swing
in the threads

of this web
waiting

for sting,
for struggle.

iii.

Consider this.
Consider clay
where there
was once a field.

Consider
what it would
have been for us
to flower—

or stealing
the work
of another verb,
to weed.

iv.

I have my doubts
about the alphabet
bending to our will
like spoons.

We’re the ones
always following
like dogs
and their tongues,

fetching for letters,
playing dead
across sentences,
working sad eyes.

Pity me
in the pound.

This poem, although not necessarily joyful, introduces some playfulness in comparing the writer to his companion. One being the type who’d murder vs. one who would murder him/herself, the idea that the other version is a spider and they are both tangled in the same web makes me wonder what the relationship is? The last section makes me wonder if they are both writers as the poet introduces the idea of “the alphabet/bending to our will/like spoons” (an imaginative visual) and the idea of “fetching for letters/playing dead/across sentences.” The ending lines are an interesting metaphor, referring to being the dog mentioned earlier, and I am dying to know what form this particular “pound” takes? Is it the writing desk? The poet’s home? What do you think? Either way it brings out the idea that the poet and his companion are opposites, one being perhaps stronger than the other.

As I said before, there are countless poems I’d love to share with you but narrowed it down to just a few. All of them are interesting and this collection held my interest through the entire 88 pages. You may be able to find Tom Healy’s book, What The Right Hand Knows, in your local book-store or to purchase a copy for yourself for $15.95, not including shipping, use the link below:

http://www.fourwaybooks.com/books/healy/index.php?PHPSESSID=1f484dd61c16c0dd2a69d43f6f13dab0

Thanks always for reading, please click in tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound…