Can’t stop now! By John Yamrus

John Yamrus has been featured previously here at Poet Hound and his latest collection of poems, can’t stop now!, published by Epic Rites Press is an excellent collection. From every-day humor to every-day tragedy it is all here. I flagged so many poems to share that it will be difficult to choose just a small sample to entice readers into purchasing a copy for themselves. There are poems that made me laugh out loud, poems that made me say out loud “Isn’t that right?” In any case, John Yamrus’ writing is straightforward and to the point and I am happy to share just a few poems below:

right around the ninety minute mark
the poetry reading
got nuts.

it was one of those
blog-talk radio
things

and there were
four of us,

all on the phone
from wherever
we were,

and,
(like i said)
right around the
ninety minute
mark

the wine and beer
kicked in,

and Plath,
(still on the phone)
ran out of
smokes,

so,
he went
to a mini-market,

and,
in the lot
he sees this girl
who was kinda cute
and he starts talking to her…

“hey,
you like poetry?
i’m on the radio right now.

you wanna
hear some poems?”

and he
puts her
on the phone,

and
Carstens
starts reading,

and you can hear Plath
in the background
trying to talk her
boyfriend

out of decking him.

and
when she
hands the phone back,

Plath
says to us:

“i’m gonna grab another.”

and
he finds this
old juice-head
sitting in the lot,
and Hardung reads him
one about his junkie days,

and the old guy’s almost in tears,
when he hands back the phone,
saying:

“god bless ya,
man.

god bless
ya.”

that’s just the way
it goes.

sometimes
you’re lucky
and find the poem.

and, sometimes
it finds
you.

This poem makes me grin ear to ear. I can just picture this poet on the radio walking outside and finding random people to connect with on the air to poetry. The “juice-head” is moved to tears, blesses the poets, and the poets are indeed, blessed. To have your poem move someone, anyone, is always the ultimate goal and the scene depicted in this poem makes it fun to imagine and hope for.



he says to me

“i can’t believe
you actually
throw some poems out.”

“sure i do.
lots.”

“why
would you ever
throw a poem out?”

i looked at him and said:
“if they don’t work,
there’s no sense
in keeping them.

so,
i throw them out.”

“that’s nuts
(he says)
my words are
like gold.

i’ve slaved
every word i ever wrote.

i’d never
throw them out.

they’re covered in my
blood,

drenched in my
sweat.”

i didn’t know
how to answer that.

i couldn’t tell him
that i can’t
stand
the sight of blood,

and a long time ago
i made a promise
to myself

i’d never
ever

let them
see me
sweat.

This poem reminds me of the countless times writers volley back and forth with each other about whether to keep or toss works they are not proud of. There is also the battle within ourselves. This poem hits me personally, I tend to keep even the lousy work but I live in fear that some poor soul will stumble upon my “treasure trove” of work after I die and try to “put it out there” for the world to see and that gives me nightmares. This poem hits home.



every year

someone
sends me
an entry form
for the local
Poet Laureate competition.

unable
to throw the thing out,
but unwilling to co-operate,
i take ten minutes
and fill out the form,

sending in
the required
number of entries,

all the while
making sure
that each and every poem
is about hemorrhoids,
a hair on the tip of my nose,
bad breath
or my dog
taking a dump in the yard.

i know the poems
won’t be what they want,
but they
just might be

precisely
what they
need.

This poem makes me laugh out loud. I like the rebellious attitude of Mr. Yamrus. I am just dying to know what the people who appoint the Poet Laureate think when they see his application and his poems!

Mr. Yamrus has been publishing poems since 1970 and his work has been translated into many languages including Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and so on. He has also published two novels in addition to eighteen volumes of poetry. If you enjoyed this short sample, you may purchase a copy of can’t stop now! by John Yamrus at Epic Rites Press for $22.00 at:

http://www.epicrites.org/bookstore.html

Thanks always for reading, please drop in again soon…

Death Becomes Her

Well, folks, my laptop has finally given up the ghost. At nearly ten years old it decided to stop accessing my Word Files and the internet on exactly the same day that my husband's power cord to his laptop fell apart. We weren't able to resolve either issue until yesterday.

At the moment, my prized posts from last week are being pried free of my old laptop and onto an external hard drive compliments of the Geek Squad team at Best Buy. My husband has replaced his power cord and we now share his computer.

What does this mean for everyone? It means that posts will be rather sporadic for the next couple of weeks as I search for a new user-friendly laptop. Thanks for your patience, I have some excellent books that I can't wait to feature here on the blog and at least this interruption allows more time for reading these books more thoroughly.

In the meantime, please enjoy the sprinkling of posts over the next couple of weeks and thanks always for reading...

Exquisite Corpse Site

This site is an on-line journal worth exploring for articles, poetry, art, and so on. I urge you to check them out at:

http://corpse.org/index.php

Thanks for dropping in, please stop in tomorrow for another featured poet…

The Perfectly Imperfect Home How to Decorate & Live Well by Deborah Needleman illustrated by Virginia Johnson

For those of you who don’t know, I am obsesses with home decorating books even though I really don’t have the money to do much more than rearrange what I already have and throw in some inexpensive shelves and side tables. I lamented the day that Domino, the decorating-within-reach magazine, shut down, as I looked forward to Deborah Needleman and her crew’s expertise. In this book, The Perfectly Imperfect Home, Needleman breaks down how to turn your home into its best version of itself room by room, nook by nook.

The illustrations by Virginia Johnson are beautiful, charming, and inspired by the homes of various designers and artists and add to the eye candy of the book. The book homes in on the idea that personal touches and comfort is what makes a worthy home, not the show-house version so often portrayed in magazines where everything is perfect and there are no signs of the aftermath of small children or pets or messy spouses.

For me, it’s knowing how to arrange all my little items that tend to gather onto flat surfaces that I enjoyed learning about in the book. How to make inexpensive trays take the everyday items we enjoy and showcase them in a way that looks nicer than just having them spread out on the nightstand or coffee table. How to organize your entryway is another valuable lesson for me. How we enter our home is not only a first impression for guests but for ourselves and having places to put coats, keys, umbrellas, shoes, and mail is vital to keeping clutter at bay.

I also liked that there are allowances for “ugly” and “glam” items in the same spaces. There will always be that hideous chair or object beloved by someone else that you must create space for but it’s okay. You can also introduce something fancier, or shinier, into the same space and this book shows and tell you how.

One of my other pet peeves is how to entertain and what kind of dining room table works best in an apartment. I’m stuck with what I have for now but there is a section that explains the ideal shape for your lifestyle and space which shed much needed light on the subject for me and future dinner parties. There are also notes on the fact that you can entertain without a dining table which is just as important to me as having no dining table at all.

All the bits and pieces that make up living comfortably in your home are presented here with common sense, fun, and positive attitude. None of us are expected to go out on a shopping spree, we can simply rearrange our furniture or table top objects to better accommodate traffic flow and guests.

I have read this book beginning to end and end to beginning several times, I enjoy it so much. If you love the idea of making every day life more comfortable at home, I highly recommend this book which can be found at your local book-store, perhaps at your local library, or you may order it for $30.00 (not including s/h) on-line at:

http://www.randomhouse.com/book/205724/the-perfectly-imperfect-home-by-deborah-needleman

Thanks always for reading, please drop in again next week…

Issue #181 Lilliput Review

In this issue editor Don Wentworth gathers up rainy days, droning insects, and lonely souls into a beautiful and cathartic collection to be enjoyed on a day when you just aren’t “feeling up to it.” Below I am happy to share a short sample:


static in my head
crickets rub hind legs
in Buddha rhythm

By: A. D. Winans of San Franciso, CA

This poem reminds me of those dog days of summer where you drown out your thoughts and clear your mind while sitting on an old blanket in the grass and listen to the crickets, I miss those days.



cook, i.e.
where your thoughts meet your brainstem
where your brainstem meets the map of
forever on your back
where your forever map meets mortality

that is where i want to sleep
burrow into hide inside of hibernate within
with a box of pomegranate seeds and a bear cub
and a cherry pie with crust right out of hansel’s oven

by: Kennedy Cane

This poem makes me want to cocoon myself into blankets with the love of my life. I love the idea of sleeping where your loved one’s thoughts meet mortality/immortality, then the poet brings in the comfort food of cherry pie from the innocent hansel’s oven from the fairy tale. It is a whimsical poem that gets you thinking about what the poet is or is not truly saying.



full
moon

filling
my

cracked (old)
tea-cup

by: Ed Baker of Takoma Park, MD

I picture the poet sitting by the kitchen window at midnight as he sips hot tea, trying to ease his troubled mind. A lovely snapshot poem.


If you enjoyed this review you may purchase this little journal, Lilliput Review, for a mere $1.00 by going to Lilliput Review’s blog, Issa’s Untidy Hut at:

http://lilliputreview.blogspot.com/

Thanks always for reading, please drop in Friday for another featured Good Read…

Book Shelf Porn

Visually stunning, this is a site devoted to how people display their books either creatively or on shelves. While you may think this is unusual I urge you to take a peak because it is absolutely inspiring. I even saw a Christmas tree made entirely out of books stacked up to form the tree itself, why didn’t I think of that?
Check it out at:

http://bookshelfporn.com/

Thanks for clicking in, please stop by tomorrow for another featured poetry review…

As Always, Julia edited by Joan Reardon

As Always, Julia The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto is a collection of letters edited by Joan Reardon who took extraordinary care to present these two amazing women’s correspondence as accurately as possible in regards to timeline and clarifying names and subject mentioned throughout the correspondence. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, this collection is fascinating and endearing.

Julia Child’s initial letter to Mr. DeVoto is answered by his wife, Avis, and the two women continue back and forth on all manner of subjects from knives to recipes to politics in the McCarthy era. Avis DeVoto is able to utilize her editorial skills and connections to the publishing world to assist Julia Child as she and her colleagues create the now famous cook book: Mastering The Art of French Cooking. Julia is able to teach Avis how to create particular dishes she misses from her own travels to France and the two women trade ideas about education, social classes and more throughout the years.

For those who enjoy good food or have a fondness for Julia Child this book will not disappoint. Charming to the end, it is a wonderful read and highly recommended to anyone who loves good food and/or old fashioned letter correspondence. I love both and so I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

If you enjoyed this review you may pick up a copy at your local library, visit your local book-store or follow this link below to order a copy on-line of As Always, Julia edited by Joan Reardon at:

http://www.amazon.com/As-Always-Julia-Letters-DeVoto/dp/0547417713/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325437899&sr=1-1

Thanks always for reading, please stop in again next week…

Zygote In My Coffee Open Submissions

You may send 3-8 poems (no simultaneous submissions please) with a brief biography as well as a bio picture via e-mail. Be sure to include a subject heading of some kind similar to “Last name/Poetry Submission” and have your contact information along with your poems in the body of the e-mail and send it to:

submissionsATzygoteinmycoffeeDOTcom

To learn more about the press, go to:

http://www.zygoteinmycoffee.com/

For exact details on submission guidelines, go to:

http://www.zygoteinmycoffee.com/submissions.html


Good luck to all who submit, please stop in tomorrow for another featured good book…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://sites.google.com/site/larrydthomasfar/3
“#3” by Larry Thomas

https://sites.google.com/site/47rhpissue/howie-2
“Visiting Hours” by Howie Good

Thanks for clicking in, please stop in tomorrow for more Open Submissions…

doing cartwheels on doomsday afternoon by John Yamrus

doing cartwheels on doomsday afternoon by John Yamrus is published by Epic Rites Press and is a dead-pan collection of poems focusing on every day life epiphanies and circumstances. Mr. Yamrus pulls no punches, his work is straightforward and to the point. Below I am happy to share a sample with you:

i just now

agreed to an interview.

this one’s
for monday.

it’ll be
the same old questions,

like:

“how’d you get
started?”

“who
do you read?”

and
“who are you influenced by?”

all the same questions
and never once
do i get asked
the right one.

in my
opinion,
the only one.

the one that
says:

“you write a lot about
dogs…

why is that?”

if they’d only
ask me
that

i’d go away
happy.

i’d sit them down
and tell them

exactly

what the dogs
do for me…

they teach me
joy,

perseverance

and
acceptance.

they teach me
total concentration
on a single task.

and
most of all
they teach me
the secret…

the answer to
the one question
i’m asked the most.

the one question
that i’ll never
answer.

they wouldn’t
believe me
even if i
did.

they’d think
i’m lying.

but, you won’t,
will you?

the truth
is

the great secret
these dogs
teach me

is
there isn’t
any.

I like this poem because I am usually the one interviewing someone else and hoping I can go beyond the typically asked question and know the writer has a question they’re dying for someone to ask them. This poem illustrates it perfectly along with adding the wisdom of canines—that there are no secrets in life, just life itself.



giving

them
what they
want

can
be hard

on
a man’s

soul.

This poem speaks the plain and simple truth, no further words needed.



New York just

wasn’t
the same.

i remember
as a kid

everything was
gray and brown

like
the old movies,

and my uncle
had this
2nd floor
walk-up,

with a
single bulb
hanging from a wire
at the top of the stairs.

i remember the night
someone
dropped
a bag of bottles
down the steps,
and the neighbors
yelled,

and my uncle
yelled
back

and the soft
grays

and warm browns

felt safe,

and
we lounged around
in the alleys of the universe.

no, New York’s not
the same.

nothing is.

except for maybe
that old girl,
sorrow.

This poem casts a warm glow on an unusual memory of bottles crashing down the stairs amidst the brown and gray tones of city life. I can’t help but wonder what the poet saw the next time he was in New York that brought about this particular memory and lament.

Mr. Yamrus has published 17 volumes of poetry and 2 novels, his work has been translated into several languages and has been taught in high school and college curriculums. Some of his titles include: New and Selected Poems, Blue Collar, Shoot The Moon, Someone Else’s Dream (a novel), and many more. If you enjoyed this review of doing cartwheels on doomsday afternoon by John Yamrus you may purchase a copy for $20.00 from Epic Rites Press by going to:

http://www.epicrites.org/bookstore.html

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

How A Poem Happens Blog

Brian Brodeur’s blog states “Contemporary Poets Discuss the Making of Poems” and delivers! Interviews with poets about their work and about poetry take place here, read on for inspiration at:

http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/


Thanks for clicking in, please stop in tomorrow for another featured poet…

Two Shot: War Medal and Fat Chance by Hosho McCreesh

Hosho McCreesh strikes again with stories that crawl inside your head and stay there.
In the first of two short stories available at http://www.smashwords.com , War Medal, a young boy named Henry spends his day with Buck, a man that was best friends with his father in the armed forces. Buck gets around by using a wheel-chair and Henry gladly spends time pushing him around town on his birthday which happens to be the 4th of July. Buck is out-spoken and bitter, cracking unseemly jokes and causing “scenes” wherever they go. Buck is a vet with a drinking problem, Henry is a boy of 12 trying to understand the jokes Buck spouts and the emotional reactions Buck has to the world around him. Buck spouts off about losing his legs, about a bottle of booze breaking on the sidewalk, and to Henry’s delight, reminisces about Henry’s Dad. For those who know someone like Buck, this story will make your skin crawl. For those who don’t, your skin may crawl anyway as we read about a grown man dealing with the loss of his legs, his best friend, and his attempts to befriend the son of his dead best friend. Told from Henry’s perspective you get a sense of Henry’s innocence, his desire to hear all he can about his Dad, and his longing to make sense of someone like Buck. The ending to this story is disturbing, it has the makings for tragedy of the worst kind and then leaves us hanging. So many lives never tie up neatly and the ending leaves us believing the same thing for both Henry and Buck—how their lives will continue on with loose ends dangling.

The second story, Fat Chance, is about Patrick, a working class man in a working class neighborhood who gets a call from a woman he knows and she asks if she can crash at his place and catch some sleep while he goes to work. He says it’s fine and spends his day thinking about her, forgetting about the hardships of his working shift, dreaming of the things they’ll do together after work, such as heading to the bar Fat Chance. Patrick is the underdog, a man who endears himself to you as you champion his dreams for the night. Does he get the girl or not? To find out how it ends, you’ll have to read it for yourself.

Hosho McCreesh’s stories are always dead-pan and startling, taking the hard-working and turning life on its ear. I highly recommend reading these two stories,War Medal and Fat Chance, are available as a “double shot” for a mere .99 cents at:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/106823


To learn more about Hosho McCreesh and see what other poetry and stories he has published, visit his web-site at:

www.hoshomccreesh.com
Thanks always for reading, please drop in January 2nd when I have returned from spending time with family and friends for the holidays. I wish you and yours Happy Holidays and Happy New Year…

Nerve Cowboy Open Submissions

If you are a poet looking to break in, this is a great place to do so, they were my first acceptance and I am proud to be part of their journal. They also publish great work by seasoned veterans along with artwork and short stories, it’s a well-rounded journal that’s been around for a long time—they like attitude and you need to visit their web-site and/or order a journal to see what I mean.

Having said all of that, they are open to snail-mail submissions year round: Send up to five pages of poems with your contact information on each page along with a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope to:

Joseph Shields and Jerry Hagins, Editors
Nerve Cowboy
P.O. Box 4973
Austin, TX 78765

For more details, go to:

http://www.jwhagins.com/submission.html

and

http://www.jwhagins.com/nervecowboy.html

Good luck to all who submit, please stop in tomorrow for a review of two short stories…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://juked.com/2011/12/breakfastinslidell.asp
“Stopping for Breakfast in Slidell” by Ann Barngrover

http://www.sundresspublications.com/wickedalice/young.htm
“Little Red Riding Hood” by Jessica Young


Thanks for clicking in, please drop by tomorrow for more open submissions…

The Accidental Navigator by Henry Denander

Henry Denander’s latest collection of poems and one short story, The Accidental Navigator, is published by Lummox Press and has a conversational, close-friend tone that is familiar and comforting. The poems themselves describe Mr. Denander’s amazing life (amazing compared to mine, anyway) of his time working for a record company and meeting such famous people as Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis, Chet Baker and Keith Jarrett. In addition, living on an island in Greece affords him wonderful tales to tell in poetic form as well. From poetry to music to every day life, Mr. Denander covers it all in a natural way that has you reading page to page before realizing the stories are coming to an end. I look forward to more poems and more stories from Mr. Denander and I’m happy to share a few of them with you:


Beauty Sleep

I am sleeping with a CPAP,
it’s a device that blows
air into my nose.

For years I’ve been snoring heavily and
suffered from sleep apnea.

With this tube attached to my nose
I no longer snore and I have a
good sleep.

But when I strap the mask on at night
my wife realizes I no longer look like
the handsome young man
she married

but more like Hannibal Lecter.

But I think she prefers
the Silence of the Lambs
to the Thunder in the Night.

This poem made me laugh. If you don’t know or remember who Hannibal Lecter is he is a character in the movie Silence of the Lambs and is known as a murdering psychopath. I love that this poem is conversational in tone, as though the poet is leaning into you and telling you this story.



The revenge of the couch potato

Zapping through the TV-channels
I stopped at Jeopardy, when I
Recognized a familiar face from
35 years ago.

It was an old teacher I remembered
for his beard and his clogs.

He was a besserwisser and here he
Was on prime time and I was sitting
on my couch watching him miss
almost every question.

At last he got what was coming to
him, Mr. Know-It-All.

I wish I could’ve been there in the
studio to tell him to do his lessons
better next time.

Mr. Denander’s story of sweet-sweet revenge watching a teacher who harassed him as a kid failing at Jeopardy is another one that makes me laugh aloud. We all know this type of person and we all feel grateful when they are put in their place, another great poem.



Accept your name

Henry Chesney Baker
and Henry Charles Bukowski;

if I had known about these guys when
I was young perhaps I would have liked
my own name better.

My name is OK now but I was never very
pleased with it when I was a kid.

At that time no one here in
Sweden knew about Chet or Buk
but now it’s god to be able to
tell people that both of them were
named Henry.

And no one needs to know that
Buk never liked Henry
but used Charles instead.

This poem is one I can relate to, I hated my name as a kid. My grandmother still doesn’t like her own name. This poem’s title is simple and true, accept your name, and then discover other people you admire with the same. A lovely poem that gets you thinking.



The SASE

On eBay I bought a self-addressed and
stamped envelope that the poet Charles Bukowski
sent to Chiron Review in the 80’s.

This is the system, you send poems to a
magazine or a publisher and if they like them
they will use the SASE to reply to you.

More likely they will not use your poems and
return them in the SASE with a brief standard note
telling so.

Many poets have written about how they received
their first rejection letter or how they have their
drawers full of rejection slips.

Even Bukowski got rejection slips. In the early days.

I have framed the Bukowski envelope and
it looks nice on my wall.

It’s a nice conversation piece; when someone asks
about it I tell them the story of how it works and also,
sort of by the way,
I tell them that the Chiron Review is
actually the magazine where I had my
first poem published.

And I don’t mention any of my
rejection letters.

This poem is a tribute to all writers, in my opinion. All of us pine for a personal piece of a writer we admire, we all have those rejection letters saved (some of us shred them or delete them from our e-mails but we always have one or two saved). This poem is a guilty pleasure of mine to share with you all, simple as that.


If you enjoyed this review I urge you to Lummox Press for a copy of your very own. There are so many poems I would like to share but feel it better for you to indulge yourselves by finding a copy for yourself. To purchase a copy of The Accidental Navigator by Henry Denander for $15.00 (not including S/H), visit Lummox Press at:

http://www.lummoxpress.com/

To learn more about Henry Denander go to:

www.henrydenander.com



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