Manifestations: The D'arts Literary Anthology

By Gary Corseri

Heres a pinata of insights and delectations: an anthology of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, drama, translation, criticism, photography and mixed genre by some of the best artists working today. Based on seven years of work compiled and edited by dArts Literary Editor Gary Corseri, this attractive book contains selections from the following nifty fifty:

Annabel Alderman, Sandra Fenichel Asher, Charles Baudelaire, Stephen Bluestone, Emery Campbell, Jimmy Carter, Chibi, Stephen Corey, Sam Cornish, Daniel Corrie, Gary Corseri, Bill Costley, Elsa Cross, Robert Dana, Rosemary Daniell, Patricia Dubrava, Tu Fu, Anthony Grooms, Kijima Jajime , Kodac Harrison, Lola Haskins, Holly Hatch, Paul Hemphill, Lawrence Hetrick, Cooper Holmes, Flournoy Holmes, Gray Jacobik, Ha Jin, Yoko Kagawa, Yoshinori Kagawa, John Lane, Michael Lehman, Thomas Lux, Leslie Lytle Sylvia Melville, Jean Monahan, Donald Morrill, John Ottley, Jr., Collie Owens, Barbara Ras, Larry Rubin, A. E. Stallings, Stephen Toskar, Mark Twain, Michael Walls, Christopher T. Wilkerson, Stephen Wing, Cecilia Woloch, Karen Wurl , Lane Young.

The editor has reached for inclusivity, eclecticism and excellence to present a perdurable portrait of this pivotal age between millennia: our at once exciting, tumultuous, nerve-wracking, sensuous and tender Zeitgeist. About half of the book features Atlantan, Georgian and Southern writers with unique voices whose excellence is measured against writers from around the world and back in time.

White and Black, Asian, male and female, young and old, scholars and peace activists engage each other and the reader creatively and critically. Heres a book for the student as well as the practitioner. A good student, a good teacher, will use it as a handy textbook, building upon its variety of style, content and technique. For the practitioner, its a talisman, a good-luck charm with which to measure his/her best against the best herein.

No one travels deeper than the artist, and no one manifests more. With a handsome cover design by Flournoy Holmes, memorable photos and a stunning array of literary selections, this book is a keeper and a treasure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 2, 2004
• ISBN: 9781469105437

Book preview

Copyright © 2004 by Gary Corseri.

Library of Congress Control Number:          2003095046

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

To order books contact:

The DeKalb Council for the Arts ph: 404-371-8826

POB 875 fax: [phone]

Decatur, Georgia 30031 Email: [e-mail]

(Discounts for multiple and special orders.)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Contributors

Jimmy Carter

Some Things I Love

Lola Haskins

To Play Pianissimo

Robert Dana

You

Kijima Hajime

The Undecipherable Book

Jean Monahan

Eating a Peach After Kissing You

My eye can’t accept such intact enticement, my tongue such sensuality.

Gray Jacobik

A Serious Sweetness

Stephen Toskar

The Taste of Prayer

Ha Jin

If You Had Not Thrown Me Away

Annabel Alderman

All Night Long

Kodac Harrison

Static on the Radio

John Lane

The Muse Is Looking For

Jean Monahan

Lonely in Eden

Patricia Dubrava

Nothing To Show

Sam Cornish

A Promising Child of Color

Ha Jin

The Past

Lawrence Hetrick

Little River Towns

Larry Rubin

Tourists from Florida Reach New Mexico

Stephen Corey

The Famous Waving Girl

Stephen Bluestone

Speaking of Cousins

A. E. Stallings

The Poet’s Sister

Ha Jin

To My Grandmother Who Died

in Manchuria Fourteen Years Ago

Sam Cornish

The Streets Are Flowing Rivers

Patricia Dubrava

Holding the Light

Ceclia Woloch

The Pick

John Lane

Someday My Mother’s Death

Gray Jacobik

Economies

Haiku

August: Deadsville

Gray Jacobik

Flamingos

Jean Monahan

Rough Beast

Stephen Wing

Visiting the Deer

John Ottley, Jr.

Necessary Servants

Lola Haskins

A Periodic Event

Daniel Corrie

World’s Time

Collie Owens

John Calvin Redivivus

Barbara Ras

Letting Go of Land

Perspective

Holly Hatch

Fall Along the Delaware

John Lane

The Peripheral Poets: A Manifesto

Bill Costley

Linwood Place in Snow

Robert Dana

Selling the Earth and Everything on It

The Mark

Kijima Hajime

The Enormous Axe

Ascent

Raison d’Etre of Red

Charles Baudelaire & Emery Campbell

The Cracked Bell

Donald Morrill

Might

Tu Fu, Yoko and Yoshinori Kagawa

Spring Arrival

Elsa Cross & Patricia Dubrava

Dancing Shiva

Sam Cornish

Elegy

Daniel Corrie

Voice of Glass

Sam Cornish

Ohio After the Shooting at Kent State

(June 1970)

Paul Hemphill

from Nobody’s Hero

Sandra Fenichel Asher

from A Woman Called Truth

Tony Grooms

Hollow and Far Away

Jimmy Carter

A Committee of Scholars Describe

the Future Without Me

Barbara Ras

Bad Hair

Thomas Lux

Rhadamanthine

Michael Lehman

How I Learned Grammar

Rosemary Daniell

Bridal Luncheon

Lane Young

Madonna with Child

Sam Cornish

Folks Like Me

Stephen Corey

The Uselessness of American Counties

Karen Wurl

Davaye Poznakomimsya, Rassiya!

(Let’s get acquainted, Russia)

Michael Lehman

After a Few Drinks,

the Moon Begins To Brag …

Robert Dana

Dancing

Gray Jacobik

Skirts

Kodac Harrison

Her Pipa Sings

Sam Cornish

Ma

Michael Walls

The Blues Singer

Stephen Corey

Old Musician, Tuscaloosa, 1859

Patricia Dubrava

On Attending a Lecture on the Poetry of

Su Tung-po

Thomas Lux

Mr. John Keats Five Feet Tall Sails Away

Gray Jacobik

The Double Task

John Lane

Connemara

Bill Costley

April Snow Raga

Lola Haskins

Love

Jean Monahan

What We Talk About

When We Talk About Love

Gray Jacobik

The Last of Our Embraces

Transformed from the First

Larry Rubin

Lines for the Parents of a Marginal Child

Christopher T. Wilkerson

April, Come She Will

Stephen Toskar

Eclipse

Lawrence Hetrick

Brickyard Landing in the Rain

Patricia Dubrava

Cataract, also a waterfall

Mark Twain

from Life on the Mississippi

Review

Poet Inhabits the

Heart of Jimmy Carter

Review

Review

Imbrications of Perceptions

Review

Ripeness to the Core

Sylvia Melville

Gypsy in My Soul

Afterword

for Jimmy Carter and Kijima Hajime—

bridge-builders

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments are due to the editors and publishers of the following for permission to reprint material herein:

Speaking of Cousins. From The Laughing Monkeys of Gravity by Stephen Bluestone, copyright (c) 1995 by Mercer University Press.

A Committee of Scholars Describe the Future Without Me and Some Things I Love. From ALWAYS A RECKONING AND OTHER POEMS by Jimmy Carter, (c) 1995 by Jimmy Carter. Illustrations Copyright (c) by Sarah Elizabeth Chuldenko. Used by permission of Times Books, a division of Random House.

Bad Hair, Letting Go of Land and Perspective are reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from Bite Every Sorrow: Poems by Barbara Ras, copyright (c) 1998.

The Undecipherable Book, Ascent, The Enormous Axe and "Raison d’Etre of Red." From Responses Magnetic by Kijima Hajime, copyright (c) 1996 by Katydid Books.

(Note: all work herein is protected by copyright and, except for review excerpts, may not be re-printed or reproduced without the express permission of the authors and/or their publishers. Other specific publications are noted throughout. For inquiries contact the DeKalb Council for the Arts, as below.)

This book would not have been possible without the vision and encouragement of Jack Sartain, and the support of the DeKalb Council for the Arts

To order books contact:

The DeKalb Council for the Arts ph: 404-371-8826

POB 875 fax: [phone]

Decatur, Georgia 30031 Email: [e-mail]

(Discounts for multiple and special orders.)

Foreword

This anthology began over forty years ago, with a boy of fourteen spinning an iron book carousel in a five and dime in Queens, New York. Amidst the 25-cent cowboy, war and mystery paperbacks that might have diverted me, I found a paperback tome selling for a hefty fifty cents. Perhaps it was the bright, gold binding that attracted me to Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, as revised by Oscar Williams. Opening the crackling new book, I found in the middle, eight pages of postage-sized pictures of great poets of the past and present. Except for Byron, Whitman and Millay, few of them looked as I imagined a poet should look. Then I read.

The poem I chose, by luck, was Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. I did not understand as much as I wanted. But by the time I came to the lines, Who are these coming to the sacrifice? / To what green altar, O mysterious priest, / Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies… the metropolis swirled around me, and I was in the poem—transported to a world of ancient heroes—marble men and maidens overwrought—eager to impress on me one of life’s great mysteries and injunctions: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The injunction, of course, is to know it fully in the fibers of one’s nerves, the grain of memory; to proclaim it and live it. To manifest it.

I bought that anthology, and many more were to follow. I was especially fond of Louis Untermeyer’s Great Poets, which integrated biographical sketches with the poets’ work. Scores of subsequent anthologies helped me travel the literature of this world, seeking answers, and finding a few. I learned this: when you know a people by their poetry, you cannot hate them. You may hate the stupidities and venalities of individuals, but you cannot hate the people who craft the art—the song-making soul of our species—from the fire-lit caves of Lascaux to Lady Murasaki’s observations on the Heian court; to the mean streets of Scorsese, et. al. The artist strives to proclaim his truth. She speaks to herself in a way that others want to overhear. The artist’s mouth, Kierkegaard tells us, is shaped in such a way, that when he opens it to cry, it makes a beautiful sound, and others can’t help listening.

For six years, I volunteered my editorial services to d’Arts, a quarterly, tabloid-sized newsletter of a dozen pages, serving DeKalb County and metro Atlanta. The Literary Corner varied from half a page to a page. This anthology is based on the work I was lucky to gather during my tenure. I have reached for inclusivity, eclecticism and excellence—a difficult, democratic mix—to make a pleinair portrait of our times. The discerning will find symmetries—converging themes and countervailing styles. If I’ve achieved what Denis de Rougemont termed (in another context) equilibrium resulting from innumerable tensions, I’ll rest easy. If I’ve suggested Arthur Koestler’s continuity in change upon which artists build, so much the better. Necessarily, about half of this book features the work of Atlantan, Georgian and Southern writers; but those writers take their measure from other writers around the world and back in time.

I hope I’ve made a book for the student as well as the practitioner. (Encourage those students to make their own anthologies—and to back up their choices!) May it be a book that remains: one taken down over the years to renew an acquaintance; and one for discovering unexpected resonance; symmetry and asymmetry; consonance and dissonance.

The artist’s task is two-fold. He hoists the double-edged sword above his head, hoping he has captured the Zeitgeist, while shooting arrows of light into the future. Failing either task is failing for good.

The anthologist’s task is likewise double-edged; the work is twice-distilled: by the original editor; then by the anthologist. The process may yield a greater clarity; yet, an anthology is, necessarily, a montage. Film master Sergei Eisenstein described five types of montage: metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal, and intellectual. Obviously, one may take various approaches to a book of this kind.

Eclecticism is one of the hallmarks of modernity. In the late 18th Century, George, the Prince of Wales, decorated his palaces in London and Brighton with paintings by Gainsborough and Van Dyck, Pieter de Hooch and Francois Boucher. While a strict neoclassicism prevailed in the rest of Europe, industrial England melded Neo-Gothic and Byzantine; Japanese vases and Chinese silks; itaglios and ottomans; Indian and Mogul architecture. Four score years later, the