19 Nov
A reading by our beloved co-editor and savant Zach Savich!
Where: Maple Street Book Shop, 7523 Maple St., New Orleans, LA
When: Tonight! Thursday, 11/19, at 6 pm.
We’ll have wine and cheese, copies of the newly printed THERMOS 3, and Zach’s book, Full Catastrophe Living.
And you, if you live here! We hope. Let’s meet.
9 Nov
Heather dressed for a Georgia snowstorm
Heather Christle, THERMOS’s blog poet for early November, grew up in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. She is the author of The Difficult Farm, a poetry collection published by Octopus Books. A portfolio of her poems and other documents recently appeared in Slope, and you can find more poems in recent or upcoming issues of Columbia Poetry Review, Fence, and Octopus. She lives in Atlanta and is a Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University. More information is at heatherchristle.blogspot.com.
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It Is Like Surgery But It Is Not Surgery
When you split infinity you just get more
infinity It’s different with crackers with bells
with an eagle When an eagle flies into
a bell the bell rings the eagle collapses
There is a finite distance from the bell
to the ground It is harder to say when
the bell completes ringing For a man
with tinnitus the sound does not end For
infinity childhood was rough At the zoo
infinity could not pet the eagle was
not allowed but kept spreading everywhere
It was embarrassing An eagle in a cage
is in some ways a symbol You can
split her up from her real parts
27 Oct
How do you assemble a magazine? Big tent, buzzing scene, modest assay, thumbed crumbs? THERMOS co-editor Zach Savich writes:
In the Spring 2009 issue of The Iowa Review, long-time editor David Hamilton reflects on his years with the magazine. His essay, “At the Fair II,” articulates an editorial philosophy—“everything else is peripheral to our saying ‘Yes’ to writers we do not know, writers who don’t emerge from our own circle, who may have sent their work from anywhere and who have found favor so far only where they were assented to by friends”—then examines the personal and literary procedures that support his “Zen of Reception.”
Like other pieces by Hamilton (such as his review linking Creeley to Hardy and Herrick in the Fall 2008 Iowa Review), the essay gains depth by extension, rather than hunkering. Hamilton does not hide out in one narrow, critical haunt but walks his reader around a hospitable expanse.
This approach seems right for anyone who wishes to live in the world, not just look at poems lodged in hard-to-reach places. It matches the receptive spirit of Hamilton’s editing.
I saw this spirit in action when I served as an assistant editor and volunteer reader with the review from 2004-2007. It calmed and broadened me during graduate school. Like the Human Rights Index that begins each issue, editorial work at the The Iowa Review reminded me that poetry can be distinct from an MFA community’s exhilirating fashions and chatter.
I spent a lot of time in those years trying to make myself proficiently grotesque in modes that seemed on the cutting edge of poetic evolution. Continue reading
22 Oct
THERMOS wishes we had Dora Malech's photographer
Dora Malech, Thermos’s blog poet for mid-October, is the author of two collections of poems: Shore Ordered Ocean (Waywiser Press, 2009) and Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, forthcoming in 2010). The poems here on Thermos are from Say So. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Best New Poets, American Letters & Commentary, Poetry London, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa; Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, New Zealand; Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa. For more information on Dora Malech, please visit www.doramalech.com. We hope you enjoy her poems!
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THEM’S FIGHTING WORDS
You left the party and I checked the deck, found I was missing
my suicide king—full blown and come to blows and left
full well enough alone, rose from the playing dead
to heads or cocktails, full-contact chatterboxing, standing
water and standing bets. Cry uncle, tweaked nipple and whistle
or you lose it, mechanical bullfight running on empty threats.
Now solve for x where mph is speed and oomph is impact
and the tip of the tongue sticks to tip of the iceberg
and now the slow part where the whole plot’s read out loud—
and in the next panel, the big gun says pkow pkow pkow.
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BREAK, MAKE OR
Unseemly to dream in green each night sleep
through the entire moon lids on or else an eye
boils over. Rattle the sabers through void
of course and claim a brighter phase. Teetering
on a flimsy peduncle all petal and heavy head
and nothing afield that the mower would stop for.
Aspire to symbolic shovelful forever mourn
the severance of the lesser hissing heads.
Binoculars backwards closest call to distance
as in redwing flipped to a fleck on a lens.
5 Oct
A view of the poet...
...and a view of the shop.
Each month, THERMOS interviews a past contributor; late-September-early-October’s star is Maggie Ginestra. She answered our questions and sent along an excerpt from a long poem, “The Lifeguard Wakes Up.” (Here are her poems from our second issue). Enjoy!
THERMOS: You’ve recently opened a chapbook store. Could you tell us about that experience and how it has changed your thinking about poetry?
MAGGIE GINESTRA: Yes!
I’m Internet-phobic, so I didn’t know the first thing about chapbooks when I started—I just suspicioned I was lonely for them, and when everyone at the presses was so nice and started sending things to me in the mail, I suddenly had my own library. Thinking about presses’ bodies of work feels truer than thinking about writers’ because presses have a responsibility to believe while writers have a responsibility to doubt.
The big shift, though, is selling these chapbooks to other people—that moment of curiosity and then conviction they experience—how private it is! My personal aesthetics take a backseat to seeing that happen, and it feels great.
TH: What’s your typical day like this month?
MG: This month, two big things changed for me at once: I started social work school and fell in love with someone in another city. So it’s doing homework in buses and bars, writing letters to friends during class, eating tomatoes like they’re apples, being confused by all the good weather—you know, multitasking. Life doesn’t feel like it’s about poetry right now, but that probably means it’s more so than ever. Right? I don’t know.
TH: What’s something you noticed about the poems—or a particular poemby other contributors in the issue of Thermos you were in? Things that intrigue you? Techniques you’d like to try or have tried? Ways you see your work as distinct from or related to other poems in the issue?
MG: There are several poems in Issue #2 I want to be when I grow up. Sold boat, Italian song. *
Michael Comstock’s line-breaks in “Home Movies” win the prize for most tender ever. It’s like a big hug in the face every time.
(* line from Jen Denrow’s “California”)
TH: How does what you’re writing now differ from the poems we published?
MG: It’s become much more important to me for my poems to have a voice. I think I was trying to work against that in the poems you published—I wanted a landscape alone to hold a story. I tried to take voice out. Now I’m obsessed with voices. How much can we believe one person believes?
But all of my current creative plans are collaborative, and a few leave out language entirely. Life doesn’t feel like it’s about poetry right now, but that probably means it’s more so than ever. Right? I don’t know.
TH: If you had to give a brief lecture on some aspect of poetry right now, what would you enchant us with?
MG: Embarrassment as a divining rod for the good stuff.
TH: What do you dream of but feel in some way limited from achieving? Does that affect your poetry in any way?
MG: It’s more that actually achieving the dream would affect my poetry. If I really get to help other people write and/or perform all day, will I still need to make, or will I have made?
* * *
from The Lifeguard Wakes Up
The problem of each other’s penises.
Can’t not acknowledge beauty.
The problem of plants. They know
I’m strange and deaf to them.
more generous with their men than their god
I kissed five boys in one day that time.
and that was her soul
*
Maybe a belly,
then always your belly, your blue suit,
my neon float takes the light,
you take my float,
and I’m you.
Something beside us unbraiding,
I’m beside you.
*
A black teenager surrounded
by a bunch of white girl-children
makes a wildflower I love.
So does the dark
of his throat
inside the bloom
of his teeth.
*
Sex as a metaphor for the present, the now
and now and now and
everyone so past and future.
I don’t even have I don’t have anyone
Coming wise.
Leaving dumb.
Mean is secret sad.
4 Sep
Aaron Belz is choosing a necktie to match his shirt
Aaron Belz, Thermos’s blog poet for early September, lives in Upland, California. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Fence, Painted Bride Quarterly, Black Clock, and other places; his first full-length book, The Bird Hoverer, was published by BlazeVOX in 2007. His second, Lovely, Raspberry, will be published by Persea Books next April. We hope you enjoy his poem!
MESQUITE BAR CODE SQUIGGLIES
I made the mistake of reading Indian Barn
as a racist reference. Of course it wasn’t,
and Aunt Coronary corrected me politely.
It was an artifact of antique Iowa & common
as a disembodied duck bill, or a flugel horn.
Perhaps this teaches us not to read
Indian Barn; just let it set there in the breeze.
(Aunt Coronary neglected to refresh these teas.)
Of the seven things exposed to breeze
in this psuedoaquatic environment, only one
begins with X and also ends with X,
and it’s obviously not Indian Barn, but it’s
important. I made the mistake of not learning
to spell, long ago, as a wee spry yearling.
Aunt Coronary’s fireplace is flanked
with shelves bedecked with geodes and
barnacle, snapshots of haybailers, statuettes.
The exposed thing could be a mattress;
it could be a tilting stack of flag stones.
But what it actually is is an X-large box
emptied of its contents: you fill it.
I pulled it out of yonder fuselage aflame.
Printed on it stylochronometrically: “Indian Barn.”
I repaired it with homemade appleskin glue.
(Printed on me: a variety of tattoos.)
12 Aug
Daniel dressed for fall
Hi all! Daniel Khalastchi, who published poems in Thermos’s very first issue, is going to have his first book published. Daniel won Tupelo Press’s 10th annual First Book Award with his manuscript The Maturation of Man. Congratulations Daniel!
11 Aug
Janine on her porch
Each month, THERMOS interviews a past contributor; August’s star is Janine Oshiro. She answered our questions and sent along a new poem (you can also check out her five poems from our second issue). Enjoy!
THERMOS: How does what you’re writing now differ from the poems we published?
JANINE OSHIRO: The poems in Thermos and most of the poems written during that time and the years before belong together. They are a thematically complete group of poems that I am not interested in adding to, so I feel as if I have been starting over in some sense, not sure of what I’m really doing. I’m fine with that. I learned something from making those poems and now I am ready to do something else, something that is nothing like those poems, if possible. I am not interested in having a particular project that I write poems into. I’d rather work on individual poems and figure out how and if they work together after a few more years. Writing for the past two years has been difficult and sporadic. The handful of poems I have been working on lately have little sense of cohesion, though they seem to be exploring worst case scenarios and states of emergency. Kitchen tables exploding. Children directing traffic. Supermold with the power to eat up a house. Some feel very loose and conversational and others feel like tightly wound metrical objects. Lately I’m more interested in the ones that are tightly wound. I’ve been fooling around with a mostly 2 beat line, with the line slicing an uncomfortable angle. I want to achieve more compression, rigorous music, uneasiness.
TH: What are some of the first poems/poets you loved? How do they seem to you now? How do they relate to your own work?
JO: The first poem I loved was “Stepping Backward” by Adrienne Rich. I was comforted to read: “We are a small and lonely human race / Showing no sign of mastering solitude / Out on this stony planet that we farm.” And later: “But all we can confess of what we are / Has in it the defeat of isolation– / If not our own, then someone’s, anyway.” Reading this poem made me want to write poems. It made me feel less lonely. I haven’t read Rich for many years now, but I needed this poem 15 years ago. Looking back at her again, I prefer the early poems.
I have had one constant and dear friend from my first poetry class until today: The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop. I turn to that book more than any other. I remember first reading “The Armadillo”—the moment when the “short-eared” rabbit jumps out: “So soft!—a handful of intangible ash / with fixed, ignited eyes.” That moment is still astonishing to me, the body transforming to ash the moment you touch it. Her poems first seemed so conservative and kind of well-behaved, but the more I read her the more her poems become unexpectedly risky and strange. I may get obsessed with a new book or poet for a period of time, but I always return to Bishop.
Caryl noted that her list of first poets lacked girls—not me. I first read and loved women poets: Anne Sexton, Mary Oliver, though I came late to Sylvia Plath. Doesn’t every girl have a Mary Oliver phase? Oddly, or perhaps not, the poets I’m most interested in right now are Ammons, Hopkins, and Whitman. A few years ago I sold my Whitman, vowing never to read him again, but this summer I am in love with him—it’s true, he stopped somewhere waiting for me.
TH: What’s something you noticed about the poems—or a particular poem—by the contributors in the issue of Thermos you were in?
There were many striking poems in that issue, but there were a few poems I kept going back to. I kept lingering at Mia’s “First Hector, Then Achilles, Then Troy.” How can this poem encompass detainees and pimple cream and clowns and still feel reverent and quiet and rather intimate? It’s a powerful poem. I love Chas’s poem “New Face,” especially the “hand shaped like an ampersand.” I’m interested in how that fruit bowl is funny but kind of terrifying, and the poem as a whole is pretty violent but also really hopeful. Hopeful! I’m intrigued by Helen Parson’s drawings, particularly the one on the page with my name (not just because of my name). I’d like to see a whole book of these strange and wonderful creatures.
TH: What’s your typical day like this month?
JO: This month I’ve been obsessing over my extreme love/hate relationship with Whitman and looking up every single reference made in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer, which my American Lit class is currently reading. (Why can no one agree on the origin of scalping?) I’ve also been watching Civil War documentaries like mad, baking sweet cream biscuits, and trying to find something to do with plantains. I try to do at least one fun non-work related thing everyday, and this month I’ve mostly managed it! Today my fun thing is beet salad. Beets are fun!
TH: What do you dream of but feel in some way limited from achieving? Does that affect your poetry in some way?
I’m intrigued by this question, though I don’t really want to answer it specifically. I believe in limitations. Maybe I should say that I believe in a lively, generative grappling with limitations in both life and a poem. I don’t think that anything can happen in a poem. I know that all my dreams in life can’t come true. I can’t achieve everything that I want. And yet that does not stop me from dreaming and longing for the impossible. I am, in the deepest part of me, happy. Longing for what I know I can’t achieve doesn’t make me delusional, nor does it fill me with despair I can’t handle. Stubborn persistence in the face of the impossible has everything to do with my experience of writing poems.
A new poem from Janine:
Hear Ye, Hear Me
Sister Worst a
scramble up
Hill’s Hill
What’s coming is
to end and what
is known
(The Scene
ensues, the script
insists)
The Other
One, the other
other is
scrambled up,
a smothered
mouth, a froth
“Even her funny
bone a broken
thing”
a batter batter
cord cut up a
ravel
“Sing[ular] Valor”
I don’t think
so
Sister Sister
who made up
The Worst
She throws her
kisses
kisses
to the Acoustic
Shadows
Janine Oshiro lives in Hawaii, where she teaches at Windward Community
College and coordinates a poetry program for 3rd-12th grade students.
She is glad to be among such fine company in Thermos.
29 Jul
Andrew Grace, Thermos’s blog poet for late July, is the author of two collections of poems, A Belonging Field and Shadeland. His third collection, Sancta, from which these poems are taken, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press. Enjoy.
[From Sancta]
The moon snitches on a clutch of skunks. Another rack of cloud scrolls over. At times, the eye seems charnel house of the known, and can only be slaked by novelty: that lavish other. It wants to turn down a corner of paradise. But tonight the eye seems instrument only, stunned as a lighthouse’s strobe. The marred moon hectors itself clear as if witness is all I am good for.
Better than reading a tree’s rings to learn its history is to see its torn roots after it has fallen in wetlands, its pale foundation laid bare by untenable mud. A Medusa’s head: blind roots caught mid-grope, as if trying to nurse the dry air. It is a wreath of struggle. Now lichen and bracket mushrooms set up their frail kingdom. I almost believe God cannot be unkind to us.
I stoke the stove livid. I want to treat dry heat like a mirror: in that low belly of blue efficiency, form is undone more honestly than ever. Better than earth, which feigns to embrace what enters it. Better than the willful tantrums of air. Better even than water, which removes but preserves forms in the museum of no eye. Let my attention feed like fire, from the inside out.
Out walking, stirred a sorority of sparrows. I am not sick or well; I am luke-sick and free. This is the Chapter where wood and water stand quite still and I make nothing of it. I could say, Do penance and disappear. Or When I die you will find swamp oak written on my heart. But I’ll not even kneel. My mouth is seamed as a scar, debarred and redeemed.
There are shoeprints in front of the cabin—some hunter bent on silence in the glassy fields, some stranger who could eye me from afar and see me as their own ghost, take my hesitations along the slick path as their regrets, my switchbacks as repentance, my leaving as their choice to return to the lush sleeve of their bodies. Blessed are the risen. May the risen-from also be blessed.
17 Jul
Hi readers! Today Verse Daily has reprinted a third poem from Thermos No. 2 (our fourth total– grand slam!): the first section of Jen Denrow’s fabulous, disarming, wish-it-would-never-end long poem, “California.” Read the excerpt on Verse Daily’s site here, or read the whole poem on our main site. Congratulations, Jen!
This seems a good time to mention that we’ll happily sell you issue no. 2 for $7 plus postage. Send us a note at thermosmag@gmail.com if you’re interested!
