The Fool’s Name for Fate [Kathleen Ossip]
What is your relationship with literary journals? Mine can be one of guilt, as in “I have a pile of them on the living room table, adding to clutter that doesn’t need adding to, and I haven’t read them with any attention and they’ve been there so long that the new issue of one of them has just arrived in the mail.” Well, maybe better guilt than complete neglect.
Inevitably, the experience of reading a poetry journal, composed of relatively short pieces, is peaks and valleys. As an editor involved in a couple of journals, I know the long hours of midnight oil burnt in trying to turn out a good product. This summer I read the Spring 2008 issue of Columbia Poetry Review. I’d always found this student-edited journal to be enjoyable, but this issue is miraculously chock-full of good things, not a dud in the bunch. One of the highlights is a portfolio of 20 early poems by Tim Dlugos, put together by David Trinidad.
I wonder what accounts for this convergence of excellences. As far as I know, the procedure and the players haven’t changed—someone from CPR should correct me if I’m wrong. Sheer chance, maybe, but as they say in The Gay Divorcee, “Chance is the fool’s name for fate.”
Here’s one poem I especially appreciated, by Clay Matthews, and I’ll include another in the next post. There should be a name for this form, the supple interlocking couplets (Matthewsian couplets?).
One Bright Morning
The hum of gravel
tires biting rock biting back
and friends
I have been bitten.
Mosquito, mosquito.
It was an itch
and then an itch
to go. He gone.
The foot’s outside
the door. They hung
a man on the pecan tree
then they hung a man
on the oak.
Then they hung
a man already hanged
again, and I hung
my arm out the window
and waved. So long,
so long. Fare thee well
when the flowers wilt.
And the leaves brown.
And the snow falls.
And the seasons
with their seasonings,
the salt in the pan
the pepper on the chicken
the bird never even
given the chance to fly.