Your weekly serving of verse for National Poetry Month, by Peter Ludwin

 — Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times arts writer

In celebration of National Poetry Month, we're sharing a regional poet's work with readers each week in April. Kent poet Peter Ludwin evokes a mood of desperate isolation in "Notes from a Sodbuster's Wife, Kansas, 1868."

Verbal rhythms, line spacings and sharp imagery dovetail perfectly in Peter Ludwin's compact slice-of-history in verse. His ear for colloquial speech and his eye for detail ("accusation leaking from rudderless eyes" in an old photograph) add up to a powerful distillation of the downside of the frontier experience. Ludwin splits his time between Kent and West Texas.

Poetry Month continues through April. Look for more poems by Northwest writers on this page every Thursday until May.

— Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times arts writer

Notes from a Sodbuster's Wife, Kansas, 1868

What really got us in the end—
we women who didn’t make it,
who withered and blew away in the open—
was the wind.  Space, yes, and distance,
too, from neighbors, a piano back in Boston.

But above all, the wind.

In our letters it shrieks hysteria from sod huts,
vomits women prematurely undone by loneliness,
boils up off the horizon to suck dry
their desire as it flattened the stubborn grasses.
Not convinced?  Scan the photographs,
grainy and sepia-toned, like old leather.
Study our bony forms in plain black dresses,
our mouths drawn tight as a saddle cinch,
accusation leaking from rudderless eyes, betrayed.

I tried.  Lord knows I tried.
Survived the locusts and even snakes
that fell from the ceiling at night,
slithering between us in bed.
I dreamed of water, chiffon, the smell
of dead leaves banked against a rotting log.
I heard opera, carriage wheels on cobblestone.
Cried and beat my fists raw into those earthen walls.

The wind.  Even as it scoured
the skin it flayed the soul,
that raked, pitted shell.
And how like the Cheyenne,
appearing, disappearing,
no fixed location,

not even a purpose one could name.

— Peter Ludwin, from "A Guest in All Your Houses" (Word Walker Press, $13.95)
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/2011607774_poetry15.html

~ By DR. REBECCA EPSTEIN ~

The poet in Lois Jones is worried about our overly medicated society. She sees the modern world as a place dangerously close to becoming drone-filled, with people going through their lives numb to their own humanity. “Our culture [is] fulfilling the prophecies of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,” she says.

Poetry may not seem like the obvious medium to explore the prescriptive pacifying of a generation, but Jones says it was the only method she knew. On Monday, her desire to explore this subject through verse will be fulfilled when several of the poets featured in the recently released anthology A Chaos of Angels (Word Walker Press, 2006) read selected poems for “Moonday in the Village.” The event will be held at Village Books in Pacific Palisades.[complete story]

Prescription for Poetry: Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, teachers and housewives, among many who contribute to A Chaos of Angels by Word Walker Press

Glendale, CA – September 19, 2006 – Word Walker Press opened its publishing doors with the release of its controversial poetry anthology, A Chaos of Angels. This diverse collection of works disputes the notion that biochemistry compels our every action.

Co-editor Lois P. Jones comments, “In a culture where biochemistry has become its own religion, spirituality is being trumped by serotonin manipulation and ‘mood enhancers.’” Referring to Aldous Huxley’s disquieting portrayal of a utopian society gone wrong (Brave New World, 1932), she continues, “We are acquainted with the author’s prophetic predictions of a world addicted to chemically driven happiness, and it is quietly coming to pass.”

The idea for A Chaos of Angels was conceived nearly two years ago when the editors observed the disturbing rate at which family and friends were being prescribed psychotropic drugs. Under the initial title, Pill Blues, editor Jones and co-editor Alice Pero placed a simple ad in Poets & Writers magazine asking poets to send in their works on the subject.

The response was enthusiastic, culminating in a collection of poems from over 60 poets (with contributors from as far as England and Czechoslovakia). Chaos hosts a broad perspective: housewives, doctors, ex-patients, psychoanalysts, professors, mothers—even a contribution from a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist.

It was standing room only at Chaos’ debut reading on September 11th at Village Books in Pacific Palisades. Contributing poet Jane Alynn was one of several writers who flew long distances just to read her works at the book’s premiere. An excerpt from her poem, “Rx,” makes its subtle point:

“So a nurse named Dot who wants no trouble
heeds the hypocritical oath, and in double time,
fills the script with a pharmaceutical treat-
ment to kill, types the white label that reads
Serene as needed with food at bedtime
and pushes it through the moon-eyed window.”

Not to be drummed down by the beat of protest, there are other tones integrated into the mix, transcendental prose aimed at carrying the reader beyond the physical realms, as in R.G. Cantaloupo’s “Igloo”:

“No day now. No night. The vast turquoise sky not changing
to a black mask pricked with eyes. Out of the flames
gods come, spirits, ghosts bearing visions and old
battles. Out of the white nothing, we create the living
light, the universe of blood, a new world.”

The back of the book contains a healthy list of references where readers can learn more about the many alternative solutions to drug therapy.

from PRWEB