Better Than Starbucks January 2018

By Better Than Starbucks

Interview. Poets/writers this edition: Free Verse: Cyndi MacMillan, T J Barnum, John David Muth, Brett Stout, kwame Nti Kwame (knk), John Reinhart, Kendall A. Bell, Edward Lee. Haiku: Kenneth Salzmannn, George Brookings, Ken Lott, James Godfrey, Jen Smith, Vera Ignatowitsch, Honorah Murphy, Angie and Joseph Davidson. Formal & Rhyming Poetry: Karen Kelsay, John Beaton, Richard Wakefield, Robin Helweg-Larsen, Michael Burch, DE Navarro, James Scannell McCormick, Phil Huffy. Poetry Translations: Eric Pretz, Kendall Lappin, Murray Alfredson, Achille Fang. African Poetry: Athol Williams, Macpherson C. O. Okpara, Uchi Ogbuji, poem and commentary by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka. Asian Poetry: Uma Venkatraman, Muzammil Ahad Dar, Kazi Nabeel, and poetry by Razeema Nasim. Experimental Poetry: DE Navarro, Diane Hamilton, Penny Senanarong. Sentimental Poetry: Al Black, Alan Balter, Candy Marie. Fiction: EXPECTED ENCOUNTER by Sameer Belgaumi, INFLAMED by Marisa Crane. Experimental fiction: I’m putting down words by Chuck Taylor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387537433

Book preview

Better Than Starbucks January 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 978-1-387-53743-3

Managing Editor Vera Ignatowitsch

Publisher & Editor-In-Chief Anthony Watkins

Florida, New Jersey, Canada, Pakistan, Zimbabwe

https://www.betterthanstarbucks.org

Featured Poem of the Month

Formal & Rhyming Poetry

Daybreak, Tofino

The sand is of doeskin, the mizzle is bright

for the sun is a lamp above sleepwalking mist,

and the land intermingles with dimness—the night

still lingers, asleep on the rainforest’s chest,

but is slipping away

in a luminous gray

from the hills and the headlands that hammock the bay

as its forehead is kissed

by the light.

Each wave is an indigo ripple on slate

which advances, glissando, a wraith from a wall

of nothingness, makes the expanse undulate

like the wandering remnant of some perfect squall,

then swells to a ledge

which is stropped to an edge

by the whet of the wind, and collapses to sledge

up the foreshore with all

of its freight.

In frothing white crescents they scallop the strand

with dazzling magnesium fire in the haar

and flare through the sea fog until they have fanned

themselves out, then they ebb away leaving no scar

as the veils of gray clear

and the capes reappear

and, a ghost in the background, the form of a deer

manifests on the far

doeskin sand.

John Beaton writes metrical poetry and his work has been widely published. His poetry has won numerous awards, including the 2015 String Poet Prize and the 2012 Able Muse Write Prize for Poetry. He was raised in the Scottish Highlands and lives in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.

The Interview January 2018

Anthony Uplandpoet Watkins by Kevin McLaughlin

I conducted my interview with long-time friend and Better Than Starbucks publisher Anthony Watkins in the Osceola Street Café in downtown Stuart, Florida, about midway between the statue of Lady Abundance and the historic Lyric Theatre where for years we conducted our Night Heron Open Mic sessions.  We are comfortable in each other’s presence.  This was to be a free-wheeling interview, but I did mean to ask some very difficult questions. -Kevin McLaughlin

Kevin: You have spent a good portion of your life dedicated to writing, publishing, and promoting poetry.  What initially drew you to this art form?

ALW: Well, I was five, so my memories have been tossed about a bit since then but, I think I was amazed that I could order words in a way of my own choosing, that it was impossible for me to do it wrong. Of course, at the time, a poem had to be a couple of verses four lines each and about 5-7 words per line and they had to rhyme. I know at some point, I began to use poetry to war against the conformity, not of poetry, but of the English language. This picked up steam about a decade ago, when my then 2-3 year old began to use my laptop and destroyed my shift key. So I began to leave out capitalization and any punctuation that required a shift.

I can’t say what drew me to it. I have been writing poetry for exactly as long as I have been able to write. There were a couple of times in my life where I went a year or two without writing, but they were both extreme circumstances. If what I write is poetry, which I still consider a big if, I think and write in poetry, almost exclusively.

I enjoy bringing poets and readers together. I especially enjoy being the agent of the spark. You know, where a reader thinks they are big on haiku or free verse or formal or whatever form, and they stumble over ten little words on your page that blow them away, or an image in translation or an Asian or African voice hits them between the stomach and the heart.

Kevin: You have spent many years publishing arts newspapers, poetry anthologies, and poetry magazines.   Few would take on this burden.  What are some of publishing's rewards?  And there must be many of these: what difficulties and aggravations ensue when you undertake to publish works of literature.

ALW: Our mutual friend, and now your brother-in-law, Jerry Warmuskerken was part of a publishing a tiny hand printed local literary monthly journal in 1994, called Erosion. I think the distribution must have been a hundred or two copies. He published a couple of my poems and about two issues later his partners moved out of state and it ceased publication. I LOVED that paper! I still have every copy I ever got.

My second wife and I were still married, and her uncle published a free Spanish language paper. I spoke to Jerry a few times, and he was excited for us to try it, but didn’t want to be part of the next round. We met with her uncle, we met with the uncle’s printer, a daily newspaper in Winter Haven.

I thought I would sell ads and she would lay out the paper. Except, as soon as we had published the first issue, she left me and the paper. As anyone who ever read the next several issues can attest, I was not only overloaded, working a full time job, selling the adds, getting the stories, and then writing the stories, and editing and laying out the paper, but I was woefully underprepared to be a copy editor. It was a nightmare. But I loved being THE editor! And eventually I got a little better and then some folks, including two girl friends (one at a time), the latter becoming my wife, and our current free verse editor, came along and made it a better paper.  I added columns, like your old Poetry column, so I wrote less and focused more on vision.

I wrote a poem about the rewards. The reward was never money, and it still isn’t, but after working all week, I would work doing the final layout from about 5 pm until 5 am Thursday night and drive to Winter Haven and wait a few hours while the paper was printed, then drive back delivering a few hundred copies to select locations on my way home. After a few hours sleep, I would spend the rest of the weekend delivering the paper to 100+ venues where it was