Better Than Starbucks November 2018

By Better Than Starbucks

The Interview: Rae Armantrout & Four Poems. Featured Poems: Anton Yakovlev, A.S. Coomer, & Sunil Sharma. Free Verse: Katherine Wu, Timothy Robbins, Simon Perchik, John L. Stanizzi, R.J. Zeman, Pamela Sumners, Judith Skillman, & more. Haiku: David McClintock, Hanoch Guy, Cynthia Sharp, David Bankson, Ray Spitzengerger, Nancy Botta, Bob Whitmire, Harold Whisman, Christy Burbidge, Linda Scott, Gerard Sarnat, Joan Fingon, Joyce Kopp, Faiz Ahmad, & more. Formal Poetry: Richard Wakefield, Susan McLean, David Berman, Martin Elster, John Beaton, Anton Yakovlev, Robin Helweg-Larsen, Gayle Compton, & more. Poetry Translations: Norman R. Shapiro, David B. Gosselin, & Adi Wolfson. International Poetry: Ram Krishna Singh, Hira Naz Sulehri, Pragya Vishnoi, & more. Experimental & Prose & Form Poetry: Jonathan Giles, Dominique Williams, & more. Sentimental Poetry: Arlene Antoinette, Martin Porter, Gayle Compton, & Lisa Barnett, & more. Fiction: Ursula Abdala & Tyler Clark. Better Than Fiction!: Tobi Alfier.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9780359189847

Book preview

IX

Copyright

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.

Contributing authors retain copyright to their works.

First Printing: ISBN 978-0-359-18984-7

Editor-In-Chief: Vera Ignatowitsch

Founder & Publisher: Anthony Watkins

Cover Image: Red House, Petrograd

Abraham Manievich (1883-1942)

Table of Contents

Better Than Starbucks November 2018

Copyright

Three Featured Poems

Even As We Seize the Day

Hollow Rings

Freedom

The Interview November 2018

Four Poems by Rae Armantrout

Free Verse Poetry

Haiku

Formal Poetry

Poetry Translations

International Poetry

African Poetry

Sentimental Poetry

Experimental & Form & Prose Poetry

Fiction

More Fiction

Better Than Fiction!

From The Mind

Contributors to this issue

Three Featured Poems

Publisher’s Choice Formal Poetry:

Even As We Seize the Day by Anton Yakovlev

Editor’s Choice Free Verse Poetry:

Hollow Rings by A.S. Coomer

Editor’s Choice International Poetry:

Freedom by Sunil Sharma

Even As We Seize the Day

A broken clock is

a photo of the moment

its hands stopped moving.

We light our cob pipes

on the recliners, our lips

shriveled like mummies.

Behind steady smoke,

faces look like clock faces.

We try not to breathe.

But the smoke dissolves.

Somewhere, a parking meter

dings. Anubis stirs.

Ravens flap their wings

awkwardly to float in place,

but the wind just laughs.

An afternoon chill

pierces our fleece-lined loafers.

We die a little.

Anton Yakovlev’s latest poetry collection is Ordinary Impalers (Kelsay Books, 2017). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Hopkins Review, Amarillo Bay, Prelude, Measure, and elsewhere.

Hollow Rings

The sky bruises slowly

Blues slipping into violets, slashes of red

purpling on to a stain of pink

Before the sun,

at first a pretty little light trick

involving a folded penny

then a thumbnail

chewed off to drift on,

slinks off

finally just another rain dog’s hidden tail scamper

leaving me, the flea, squinting & lost,

in its ritual dusk bleed.

No. I don’t pay ‘em any mind

(when they say it’s always darkest right before the dawn)

Let me be

the darksome judge

the stygian evaluator

These eyes, despite the red rims,

kaleidoscopic spiderwebs of busted veins

& hollow rings,

can still see,

even

through the tears.

A.S. Coomer is a writer and musician. His novels include Rush’s Deal, The Fetishists, Shining the Light, and The Devil’s Gospel. He runs Lost, Long Gone, Forgotten Records, a record label for poetry. He coedits Cocklebur Press. He likes tacos. A lot.

Freedom

Against a dark-hued

Threatening sky’s

Shrieking winds

Flies a stormy petrel,

Flapping her tiny wings

Dominated by the elements

Yet,

Soaring

Over the

Sea,

A striking

Kinetic image

Of pure

Aerial

Freedom.

Sunil Sharma is a Mumbai-based senior academic, critic, literary editor, and author with nineteen published books: six collections of poetry; two of short fiction; one novel; a critical study of the novel; eight joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism; plus one joint poetry collection.

The Interview November 2018

The Interview with Rae Armantrout

by Suzanne Robinson and Anthony Watkins

Rae Armantrout’s most recent books, Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, Itself, Partly: New and Selected Poems, Entanglements, (a chapbook selection of poems in conversation with physics), and Wobble were published by Wesleyan University Press. Wobble is a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. In 2010 her book Versed won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetry, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, Bomb, The Paris Review, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology, The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, etc. Her books have appeared in Spanish, French, Italian, and German editions.  She is recently retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics. She currently lives in the Seattle area.

SR: How do you decide when to write? Do you set aside time every day or is it more spontaneous?

RA: I allow myself time almost every morning to jot in my notebook or to work on poems that are already underway, but I don’t force it if nothing comes. I will make notes during the day too, wherever I happen to be. I start writing whenever something nags at me, puzzles me. I write towards discovering what that feeling is and where it comes from.

SR: Do you outline your poems?

RA: Not at all. I feel like if I already knew where a poem was going, I wouldn’t bother to write it. I really see writing as a way of thinking in real time. Parts of poems come to me at different times in different circumstances. My process involves deciding what goes with what — but I can’t do that until I have the pieces, the what.

SR: Do you tinker with poems after the first draft or do they spring fully formed from your head?

RA: I usually rewrite quite a bit. As I said, I start without knowing where I’m going or what I’m doing. As the poem becomes clearer to me, I often need to make changes. That said, there have been a few times when I’ve written something right out fully formed. That’s a great feeling and it’s happened with some of what I consider my best poems: Grace from my first book, Extremities, Scumble from Versed, and Soft Money from Money Shot.

SR: I’ve read a great deal about the Language poets. What does that phrase mean to you?

RA: Well, I don’t really like the moniker. We didn’t choose it for ourselves; it was applied to us. We were two groups of young friends in the Bay Area and New York who were trying to figure