Better Than Starbucks May 2018

By Better Than Starbucks

Interview: Rhina P. Espaillat & 5 poems.
Poets: Diane Elayne Dees, Laura Hampton, Dan O’Connell, Donald Gasperson, Kaileen Campbell, Joe O'Neill, Meg Smith, Edilson A. Ferreira, Richard Leach, Ray Spitzenberger, John Rowland, Bob Whitmire, Angela Davidson, Joseph Davidson, Angelee Deodhar, Winston Plowes, Vera Ignatowitsch, Devon Richey, Christine Taylor, Denny E. Marshall, Richard Wakefield, Kathryn Jacobs, John Beaton, Peter C. Venable, Michael R. Burch, JB Mulligan, Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas, C.B. Anderson, Jerome Betts, Soodabeh Saeidnia, Walter Savage Landor, Rabindranath Tagore, Gloria Sofia, Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Domingos Cupa, Abigail George, Ogunkoya Samuel, Martin Porter, JayJay Conrad, Mike Yunxuan Li, Debasis Mukhopadhyay, Cyndi MacMillan, Ann Christine Tabaka, Michael Fraley, David Hayes, Kate Bernadette Benedict, & Paweł Markiewicz. Early Poetry of the British Isles.
Fiction: Charles Rafferty & Thomas R. Healy. CNF: Brian Michael Barbeito. Poetry Book Review: The Book of Totality Yun Wang

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387772100

Book preview

Better Than Starbucks May 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 978-1-387-77210-0

Managing Editor Vera Ignatowitsch

Publisher & Editor-In-Chief Anthony Watkins

Florida, New Jersey, Canada, Pakistan, Zimbabwe

https://www.betterthanstarbucks.org

Cover Image: © Bob Whitmire

https://www.betterthanstarbucks.org

Featured Poem of the Month

Swimming Toward the Light

by Diane Elayne Dees

Fish in caves are born blind,

they haven’t any need for sight.

Darkness is all they will ever know,

yet they easily navigate the waters.

They haven’t any need for eyes,

and—having no sense of what they’ve missed—

they skillfully navigate the waters,

just like all the sighted swimmers.

They have no sense of what they’ve missed,

unlike those who once knew light,

yet—just like all the sighted swimmers—

they move toward life with every breath.

Unlike those who once knew light,

blind fish are satisfied each moment

they swim toward life. With every breath,

they thrive in fluid, tranquil pools.

Blind fish are satisfied. Each moment

for those who remember the sun—

those who once thrived in fluid, tranquil pools—

can drown the soul with cold regret.

Many who still remember the sun

now swim in frigid, hostile waters,

their souls drowned in cold regret.

They move in circles, never at peace.

They swim in frigid, hostile waters,

and darkness is all they will ever know

while—moving in circles of quiet peace—

fish in caves are born blind.

Diane Elayne Dees's poetry has been published in many journals and anthologies. Diane, who lives in Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that covers women's professional tennis throughout the world.

Featured Poem (publisher's choice)

Swimming Toward the Light

Featured Poem (editor’s choice)

My Mother’s Back

by Laura Hampton

General Poetry/Free Verse

Laura Hampton lives in Houston, Texas, and has published poetry, short stories and non-fiction in a variety of online and print publications.

The Interview April 2018

Rhina P. Esapillat

by Vera Ignatowitsch

Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic, has lived in the U.S. since 1939, and writes in both English and Spanish, but primarily in English. She has published eleven poetry collections, including Where Horizons Go, winner of the 1998 T.S. Eliot Prize; Rehearsing Absence (New Odyssey Press, 1998), University of Evansville Press, 2001), recipient of the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; Playing at Stillness (2005); and a bilingual chapbook titled Mundo y Palabra/The World and the Word (Oyster River Press, 2001). She has also translated the poetry of Robert Frost and Richard Wilbur into Spanish.

Vera: How old were you when you wrote your first poem? Do you still have it?

Rhina: I began making up poems at 4, but didn’t know how to write: my grandmother—who was a poet and hooked me on poetry—wrote them down for me when I asked her to. No, I don’t have all those early things: they were left behind in the Dominican Republic. They were all in Spanish, of course. The earliest poem of mine that I have is in English, written when I was 10, in PS 94, in NYC.

Vera: May we read it?

Rhina: Yes, here it is.

The First Snowfall

Fell on the first snowfall

Flowers from the skies

Burying under heaps of snow

The place where summer lies.

And in that same tomb lies my heart,

Dead with summer’s gladness,

Harried by the Autumn winds,

Prey to winter’s sadness.

Vera: Thank you!

You’ve been a daughter, wife, mother, and more through your life. Have you always been a poet at the same time? Did that ever result in conflict?

Rhina: Yes, I’ve always written, but sometimes a lot and sometimes very little, when I was bringing up small children and later teaching English in HS in NYC, and even later when I was taking care of aging parents during the little free time I had. But the writing has been with me all my life: mostly poetry, but also essays and stories.

Vera: You’ve written about your father’s strictness regarding language, and about chafing against it as you grew up in a changing bilingual environment. Did these things inform your poems? If so, then how?

Rhina: Papa’s devotion to our native language and culture affected my attitude toward identity and how enriching it is to be multiple. I love translating, largely because it connects me to the rest of the world. I think it also influenced my poetry, because bilingualism teaches you that language is only an attempt at conveying reality, which can’t really be captured in any way, only approached tangentially with fairly unreliable tools. But they’re all we have, so it’s important to use them as well and as imaginatively as we can.

Vera: Where, do you think, does poetry come from? What purpose does it serve?

Rhina: It feels as if it comes from an outside voice, but of course that’s our own submerged mind, saying things that are more complex than the conscious thoughts we act on and live by. That’s why poetry can do things that reasonable, logical language can’t always handle, such as say and unsay at the same time. A good example of that is Catullus’s I hate you and I love you.. Perfectly possible in the real world of feeling, but impossible in the logical world of thought. I think its purpose—if it has one—is to tell us what we really mean under what we think we mean. And to communicate, of course, with the living and the dead, the absent, the imaginary, the not-human…

Vera: Where does your muse reside?

Rhina: Wherever I happen to be at the moment. I hear a lot of poems arriving when I’m cooking or cleaning or sewing. I wait until I hear the whole poem in my head before writing it down though, as, if I try to write the first draft before I’ve heard the whole thing, I