Better Than Starbucks April 2018

By Better Than Starbucks

Featured Poem by Domenic Scopa.
The Interview with Chad Norman & 3 poems.
Free Verse, Haiku, Formal & Rhyming, Translation, Experimental, & Sentimental poetry.
Fiction & Non-Fiction.
Poets: Chuck Taylor, Diane Webster, Scott C. Kaestner, Simon Perchik, Soodabeh Saeidnia, Sarah A. Etlinger, Pawel Markiewicz, Robin Helweg-Larsen, DE Navarro, John Hawkhead, Vera Ignatowitsch, Vinnie Mongelli, Angela Davidson, Honorah Murphy, Richard Wakefield, John Beaton, Susan McLean, Kathryn Jacobs, Peter C. Venable, Michael R. Burch, Antonia Clark, John Perrault, Carol Lynn Grellas, Phil Huffy, Jane Blanchard, Chinese translation by 柏舟, Tembi Charles, Wafula p'Khisa, Delia Watterson, Fethi Sassi, Veerangana, Maziar Karim, and Rohini Sunderam, and Kris Anderdian, Steve Denehan, Trish Shields, Mauricio Rosales, & Carol Smallwood.
Fiction by Sharon Frame Gay.
More Fiction by David W. Friedman.
Better Than Fiction by Larry D. Giles.
From The Mind of Anthony Watkins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387707942

Book preview

Better Than Starbucks April 2018

Copyright © by Better Than Starbucks. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing ISBN 978-1-387-70794-2

Managing Editor Vera Ignatowitsch

Publisher & Editor-In-Chief Anthony Watkins

Florida, New Jersey, Canada, Pakistan, Zimbabwe

https://www.betterthanstarbucks.org

Cover Image: © James Pritchett

https://betterthanstarbucks.org

Featured Poem of the Month

Found

Two snowflakes can be the same, my student argued

in her English Composition essay.

It snows so much where I am from

I had to stop searching.

As when a father, after decades, gives up on a kidnapped daughter,

because suddenly he understands—He needs her to be dead.

There’s always something lost in the laughter

of a single blackbird, its talons tight around a branch.

Everything is missing. House keys, money,

smiles, minutes, patience. I remember

how my shrink would shake his head,

stare straight at me, and sigh.

Domenic Scopa is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the 2014 recipient of the Robert K. Johnson Poetry Prize and Garvin Tate Merit Scholarship. His poetry and translations

have been featured in many publications.

The Interview April 2018

Chad Norman

by Anthony Watkins

Chad Norman is a touring poet, an ambassador for, and a supporter of poetry in his home region of Nova Scotia, Canada. He is currently on tour as a cultural representative of Canadian Poetry in Scotland.

BTS: I noted somewhere you mentioned that as a teenager you sold your guitar because you decided to focus on lyric writing. That brings two questions to mind:

Do you find a very close connection between poetry and lyrics? or conversely, what do you see as the difference? and secondly, did you ever wonder if you should have stuck with the guitar? I mean, there are a million kids who take up the guitar, but hundreds of them end up making a decent career of it, while only about a dozen people make a living with poetry.

CN: No, I don’t find a very close connection between poetry and lyrics, mainly because at this point after so many years of writing poetry I know the music or melody or rhythms seem to be in the words, phrases, sentences already, by that I mean I don’t require any outer music, like a band or instrument, to inspire or bring about the words. I believe, for me, that is the difference between poetry and lyric writing. When I was a teenager that was what I hung around, band members or players who were mastering a single or several instruments, however once I started attempts at lyrics I began to hear just the musicality in the vowels and consonants, and how beautiful that sounded. So I sold both my guitars, stopped hanging with the band members, and began what has become 18 titles of poetry, 35 years of touring the books and publishing individual poems in all kinds of publications around the world. Even today I still hear them begin inside me, far away from any page. In fact, just the other night while working at the plant, a poem I felt inside me for months finally came together, and I had to stop and give it life on the page. As for making a living with poetry, hasn’t happened, but poetry has certainly made a wealthy life for me.

BTS: On to maybe more serious questions. A Room in Pisa, 1820, is this a poem about a painting that exists, or exists only in your mind? Or is it a painting from the Shelley household?

CN: The poem, A Room In Pisa, 1820, is from my manuscript, Squall: Poems In The Voice Of Mary Shelley, a work which delves into poems being memories, in which Mary remembers her short life with Percy, while on the beach where his body was cremated. I took her there because it still isn’t absolutely proven she ever attended that grim happening. But I felt it was important for her to go there and begin to remember. All of the poems open with a two-line description of her at different spots on the beach or in the nearby bay, including with the black box which has been said to have contained Percy’s ashes. So, the poem is not about a painting, it is about an actual room Mary stayed in during a time in Pisa, 1820. As the poem reveals, it wasn’t a pleasant stay. I lived, ate, slept, and read everything I could on and by her, but most of all carried her within me for many years while writing those poems — call it obsession or, perhaps, possession, she still inhabits me today. The manuscript will be published Spring 2020 by Guernica Editions, here in Canada.

BTS: I see you have won, among other awards, the Gwendolyn MacEwen Memorial. What do you know of her writing? Would you say there is a connection between you and her besides both being considered good writers from Canada? Did you know her? I confess I had not previously heard of her, due to my sadly Ameri-centric exposure to modern poetry..

CN: Dear Gwen. I am happy you mention her and the award. I won it a long time ago, 1994. At the time it was an annual award but fairly new, I believe I was the second one to win it. However the funding source for the cash prize vanished, as did the award up until a few years ago when it became available again. Her writing is unique as it is mythical in ways, and very visceral too. The themes she tackled were and remain educational, by this I mean to read her poems one always comes out taught in some way, at least it is so for me. She began writing and publishing very young, and knew some fame, if one wants to call winning awards and making her way in a very male dominated scene fame, in a brief lifetime. As for any connection between us I would say it would have to be we follow our muses willingly, and attempt to help other poets whenever possible. No, I didn’t know her, but when