Featured poets this month are Liam Guilar, Ward Kelley, The Quill, Val Magnuson, Fred Wolven, Jim Dunlap, Donna Hill, Charlotte Mair, Mary Angela Nangini, Connie Marcum Wong, Dale M. Houstman, Andrew Belsey, Ian Thorpe and Jan Sand.

Liam Guilar LIAM GUILAR Liam started writing poetry with a blunt pencil when he discovered that cat and mat rhymed. Somehow this is far more memorable than much else that happened at primary school. Thirty years later his first book of poetry, "The Poet's Confession" was published in Canberra by Ginninderrra press. He never bothered trying to get the poems published before that. He just assumed no one wanted to read them. Since then his poems have appeared in various places, though he is proudest of its selection for a book of world music, edited by Allan Allexander. (Apart from his excessive love of books my other main interest is acoustic music.) Inspired by a childhood reading of Rider Haggard's She, he's traveled to places too obscure to make the Lonely Planet Travel Guides. (Coventry, Halesowen…) He is the only lute playing, kayaking medievalist known to have been "smuggled" across the Kazak border in an apple truck and "arrested and deported" from Samarkand. The story is on the Idaho State University Website: http://www.isu.edu/outdoor/dwbstart.htm Born in Coventry, England, Liam studied Medieval Literature and History at Birmingham University, and moved to Australia in 1986. He has a Masters Degree in Medieval Literature from the University of Queensland, and currently lives on the Gold Coast, where a version of himself is Head of English at a private girls school, a fact he often finds incomprehensible.

Background notes for an autobiography © Liam Guilar 1) Setting. (Walking home from Bagginton:1970s) Rain on the wind and the smell of wet grass. Thick soil smeared by the tractor's tyres. Old oak and pub near the motorway to London. Turn left, you'd take a greener, bending road to the castle ruins at Kenilworth, where once we stumbled over models changing for their fashion shoot. A Roman fort, fields full of shining cars, Three brown spires against sky blue, a dull wind blowing through their ruined windows; time fluting through the bones of history. Beneath the ring road's noise, daubed MUFC rulz, the scarred remains of city walls once encircled plague infested streets and squares where heretics were burned. Gutted ruins of the old cathedral where choirboys learnt their songs now louder music drowns the words Langland flirted with though mating rituals persist and Godiva, stark naked in the rain, provides a lesson in anatomy for boys before full frontal nudity was common on TV. Down narrow dirty streets, the double decker buses shoulder one another past dim crowded stores, where migrants squeezed the clock and calendar to make more time for work. This in the days when there was work, the factories producing cars. The line of cherry blossoms by the road will bloom again near plastic swings and raucous kids, besides a stone that says: here Bolingbroke did not fight a duel. And summer will icumen in and riot in the street, in bare arms, and clothes that show the body has a shape. Past the primary school and muddy fields, where dirty past belief, we'd stagger home to warmth and light and welcome then past the pub, where on a Friday night, the tired drunks freed from assembly lines sang goodnight to Irene, who probably was glad to see them go and down the road, to home, beside the park. Or further still, to Coombe, where Malory broke laws and heads. There's a dull wind blowing through the abbey's ruined windows. If you stood beside this oak, in the cold damp wind of a Midland's spring, you can feel the force of centuries pushing through the words you use, echoing in the song the wind sings in the crumbling bones of history. 2) fragments I was born in the shadows of the Second World War. My father flew in bombers over Germany. Hunched in the frigid, droning cold, below him burning cities mimicked childhood dreams of hell. In his ears, the sound of shell burst, the morse's rapid stutter, distant voices calling out to God. He left his bombers, with twenty thousand cigarettes as cash, to wander across Europe in the aftermath of war to serve, on HSLs, a sailor in the airforce. My mother served in Egypt in the WRAAF. The little pictures in the shoe box show A "fresh young English face", behind large glasses staring knowingly towards the brownie's lens. She too left London and the blitz, school yards smashed by doodlebugs bomb-sheltered evenings, nights in the underground, ration books and egg-less recipes for the warmth of an African sun and an unofficial Irish voice that could talk the world still And there'd be laughter once again. I was born in a city growing from the rubble. A new cathedral full of light and air beside the gutted, blackened nightmare of the old. We staggered out of bed on winter's mornings, pinched by the bitter cold, and stumbled down the stairs to dress before the glowing coals, aching fingers fumbling with buttons ears stinging on the walk to school. The headmaster flew spitfires in the war, A gentle man, folded behind his desk using words instead of canes. Before PCs, or videos, before T.V infiltrated the classroom (or our house) we listened to the radio, learnt songs, before pocket calculators, learning nine times nine, dreaming of the day we'd get a slide rule. When the snow fell so thickly the water heaters broke, everyone went home but me, so the teacher read me Russian fairy tales. While Russia lurked behind the iron curtain, a muddled metaphor from a collective nightmare And death was just a button's push away. When sex was free, and everyone (but me) was getting laid on Sundays when everything was shut when even buses hardly ran we queued for films so Errol Flyn would save us all again. The echo of the bombers' drone was fading, veterans, sipping cups of tea hid horror in tall stories only vaguely understood. "Dave Smith ran up the beach at Anzio," "A twenty-five in either hand?" "Firing as he ran!" "And get this, Louie fell without a parachute, hit the phone wires, bounced and landed in a hay-rick breaking every bone" "But living in a fashion." Before the supermarkets came, we loitered at the corner stores, where the owner knew his customers by preference and name. Clenching sixpence in the sweet shop, perusing jars and jars of things we couldn't name. We didn't even have a phone, before Neil Armstrong walked upon the moon and left a trail of footsteps leading back to where he started. Men in cloth caps, meeting in the street, touched their brims. Playing in the park, before vandals killed the flowerbeds or graffiti expanded my vocabulary, before England won the world cup before high rise buildings, before unemployment, before the four day week and power strikes. Huddled in the winter dark around a candle, playing cards. When kids could dream that by the year two thousand We'd all be living on the moon, and drifting off to touch the stars. No more disease or poverty or want, Didn't Hamburg, Auschwitz, Hiroshima the death of children in the playgrounds of each blitzed and battered city mean we didn't need to do it all again? Of course they lied. The memories of death and loss will fade before the rhetoric. Righteous indignation will dry tears, heal wounds and sons can march off to another "International incident". Before Churchill died, before the Beatles sang, Before aids or ethnic cleansing I was born in the shadow of the Second World War. Going Down (Hylo*) © Liam Guilar Your roses flower between the words. I’d like to leave the fool I am behind, a winter suit now summer’s here, dive into colour, as the petals bloom. Their languid welcome clasps me tightly as I plunge, down, through the spectrum to the point where light and silence meet and scream one blinding moment of unthinking awe. Before finding I’ve been exiled once again and forced to stand outside the gates of Eden. So press your face against the bars. Inside you see a landscaped garden. Silly fountains play and roses rustle in the cliché of the breeze. Beneath the trees the shadows call: Come sit and drink your wine: Come read your verses. Rest. Ignoring guards with guns and keep out signs the horror stories heard at second hand, ignoring barbed wire, minefields and surveillance cams, you enter through an open gate that clashes shut. Light quickly fades, the wind begins to tear the fabric of the painting you admired. The thunder hammers on the frame. Wind shreds the roses, tumbles fountains uproots trees. You chase the petals, strewn like bloodstains on the breeze, stepping through the canvas to an older landscape. Things half seen, half heard, unnamed, snuffle at the corners of your sight. You follow petals down the forest path, and find a narrow fissure in the rock: gaping, fringed with dripping weeds. You slide inside the narrow cave where red walls glow below red pulsing roof and you go down the falling tunnel floor still chasing petals down, until you find, appalled depth only leads to depth and nothing but the ever deepening red of roses blooming in the space between the words. *Hylo is a set of images of Roses digitally manipulated by Alana Hampton. CLICK HERE to view [email protected]

WARD KELLEY A Pushcart Prize nominee, Ward Kelley has seen more than 1000 of his poems appear in journals world wide since he began publishing in 1996. Kelley's publication credits include such journals as: ACM Another Chicago Magazine, Rattle, Ginger Hill, Sunstone, Spillway, Porcupine Literary Magazine, Pif, 2River View, Melic Review, Thunder Sandwich, The Animist, Poetry Life & Times, Offcourse, Potpourri and Skylark. He has been honored as featured poet for Seeker Magazine, Physik Garden, Poetry Life & Times, and Pyrowords. Recently he was the recipient of the Nassau Review Poetry Award for 2001. Quote from Ward: "As for me, I'm a 50 year old business executive with 3,600 people in the division reporting to me. I only mention this because in a sense the daimon that propels my occupation also propels my poetry. For instance, Gertrude Stein once said, "If Mr. Robert Frost is at all good as a poet, it is because he is a farmer -- really in his mind a farmer, I mean." So in my mind am I a businessman who writes poetry, or a very minor poet successful at business? Who knows? Yet I tread carefully with this balance for fear my daimon will leave me, or my greed will taunt me for decades. Formerly I managed distribution centers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, California, Arizona and Illinois. My wife and I now live outside of Indianapolis and are currently toiling with much determination on our second crop of children, having adopted four wonderful girls and fostered several others." Of the 1008 published pieces, some have found their way into: POETRY COLLECTIONS & NOVEL "comedy incarnate" on CD ROM by Kedco Studios (Las Vegas, NV) "histories of souls" an ebook & POD by Word Wrangler Publishing, Inc. (Montana) "comedy incarnate" on AUDIO CD by Artvilla (Tennessee) "the naming of parts" an ebbok by Shyflower Press (Minnesota) NEW: "Divine Murder" a novel, paperback by Word Wrangler Publishing, Inc. (Montana)* *Editor's Note: I have read "Divine Murder" and thoroughly recommend this compelling story concerning the divine, the diabolical and the struggles of two mortals to discover their momentous destiny. Of the 1008 published pieces, some have found their way into: PRINT MAGAZINES: ACM, Another Chicago Magazine Ginger Hill The GSU Review Limestone The Listening Eye The Lucid Stone Mad Poets Review Nassau Review The Old Red Kimono Porcupine Literary Magazine Potpourri Rattle River King Skylark Spillway Sulphur River Review Sunstone INTERNET: Adirondack Review The Animist Ariga Big Bridge Lynx: poetry from Bath Melic Review Oblique Offcourse The Paumanok Review Pif Poetry Life & Times Poetry Magazine.Com Pulse Pyrowords Renaissance The Rose & Thorn San Francisco Salvo Sonata Thunder Sandwich 2River View Unlikely Stories

Peering Out At the Elements © Ward Kelley How silly we are all going to look to our descendents five thousand years from now, those happy folks who will have discovered the exact, physical evidence of the soul, found in some future age whose scientists have invented microscopes or telescopes powerful enough to discern the soul's location, and then mapped the circular journeys of the soul as it frolics through its repetitive lives. No doubt they will look back at us -- the Neanderthals of spirits -- and wonder what it must have been like to live without the wheel, to exist without concrete knowledge of the soul's existence. They will think, 'How difficult it must have been for them to steer through life without such certain knowledge.' True. I would like to shout forward to them, "You're lucky sons of bitches!" But even if they could hear me, it would only cause them to smile and shake their heads a little the way we do when we consider our poor ancestors who lived in caves, peering out at the elements. Artist's note: Part of the text from the cardinal inquisitors who on June 23, 1633 convicted Galileo of 'heinous crimes' reads, "We say, pronounce, sentence, and declare that you, Galileo, by reason of the matters which have been detailed in the trial and which you have confessed already, have rendered yourself in judgment of this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy, namely of having held and believed the doctrine which is false and contrary to the Sacred and Divine Scriptures, that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world; and that one may hold and defend an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture." The Cemetery of Heaven © Ward Kelley True, true, we were all angels at one time, all divine in our love, all inspired in our empathy for our fellow beings . . . how this state of grace came to change, I confess I do not know, even though I witnessed the deterioration of all such saintly love, witnessed the decline of us all into fallible beasts who did not care to be known as angelic beings . . . for we all had the choice, I later came to see and regret, we all had the ability to reverse this slide, yet none of us thought to do so. Later we conjectured these bodies we were forced to assume caused most of our misfortune but, I must admit the bodies came later, much later. This Yellow Skin © Ward Kelley My skin is yellow, a flawed garment which marks me as a spiritual corpse. People look at me and immediately conclude I am not a proper recipient for their discourse since my yellow skin calls out to them: I want to talk of sinning and what it means to endurance of the sin itself. I had a lover once but she died, and now bothers to prod me from time to time, "Oh, man of clay, why do you persist in your trials when it is so much easier to simply change the color of your skin?" Clever of her, for she knows no one can argue with a corpse; besides this yellow skin is necessary for the chore of poetry: I will keep them both, this skin and this woman, for both appear ordained. Artist's note: Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) during a lecture on the Buddha once said, "The corpses in India, when they're about to be burned, are clothed in yellow garments. Monks wear the yellow garment, meaning, 'I am a corpse; I am cut off from the world'."

THE QUILL (ROGER C. WORLEY) Published - Stand A Alone, Scroll Artist Magazine .. E_Zine - Twice winner at PoetryDownUnder - Two winner at Point of life - Two winner at Poetic Links - Published around the world on the net. From Alaska to Belgium. The Quill runs these websites for poets: The Poets' Porch Poets Yellow Pages Alpha Poets Inclusion on these sites is mostly by invitation, but published poets can ask for an email submission form by emailing The Quill using the email link at the end of his featured poems. Poet's note - "I am a poet who writes whatever happens to come into the gray matter... I believe in making the reader smile. There is to much pain and suffering in the world. I have been given a Nick name 'The Master Quill guru of the twisted tales.' Once you read my writings you shall know why..." NOTE: Due to a large amount of Virus HOAXES, The Poet's Porch now list in Poet Resource center three locations to check the facts. SO, in doubt..check Poet Resource center. List your site ..at Poets Yellow pages.com

THE DUEL © The Quill 2001 High noon, March 2,1882, Tucson, Arizona: The weather worn, wooded, fan windmill was working overtime in the brisk wind. A dust devil oscillated from one side of main street to the other, collecting sand and rubbish while two gun-slingers stood poised, twenty feet apart, finger tips almost touching the handles of their 45's, awaiting the last ticking of the town's clock, signaling noon. Twitching fingers, brows dripping sweat, hands shaking and eyes focused, they waited. Onlookers nervously watched from behind closed windows as the clock's second hand sang: "Tong-tong, Tong- tong..." Hands moved, pistols fired. Six distinctive clinks on target: Morrison turned to Jennings, saying: "You missed the fans of the windmill completely." Jennings replied: " Of course, I was aiming at the spaces." EIPOPLICTIC TREES © The Quill 2001 Somewhere back when I was young, when trips to Grandma's were undertaken, I had this thing about knowing just how close to Grandma's we were. I could tell by the trees that bordered the freeway on either side A few miles from Grandma's house. As I recall, there was always someone who wished to hear me howl grandma's is near, for they would always see the trees And ask whose house is near? I could not pronounce Eucalyptus at the age of five, so I would look out the window of the car and see the trees, then howl... five minutes to Grandma's. " Eipolictic trees" San Joaquin Hill. © The Quill 2001 To Tampa they were sent to await orders to fight. Locals treated them like dirt. Discrimination ran high ... living conditions were worse. Sent on a boat to Cuba to fight, they were forced to sleep and live like cattle, in the bottom of the boat ... a deep insult to say the lest. But they kept the faith. Upon arrival in Santiago, it was rainy and hot, a difficult environment for a military force; but, true to their legend, they started to fight. Like demons from hell, they attacked from the bottom of Kettle Hill. Bodies lay dead every few feet, but those remaining soon raised their arms in total conquest. Then another order came rumbling in: "Go take San Joaquin Hill." Bullets flew like fireflies. Bodies dropped one by one. Yet, these brave men continued until they stood atop San Joaquin Hill. As they raised the red, white, and blue, a huffing and puffing young officer named Theodore Roosevelt arrived with fresh troops and ordered the fighting 24th back to the boat. Now history speaks of Teddy's Rough Riders and how they charged up San Joaquin Hill. Operative word please ... charged ... as they arrived after the fact, while the all black 24th sailed away home PROMISED LAND © The Quill 2001 For thirty years I wandered in the desert sands, sweat pouring from my brow, working with my hands, Doing everything just so ... in every way possible. to reach the biblical promised land. Then one day in the burning sun I realized and understood. what the Wise men of old knew long ago. the operative word is not land.... [email protected]

Click here for September 2001 Featured Poets page 2 -->

---

Over the next month
The Poet's Porch will take on a new look.
This is to celebrate its birthday.

Born August 22.1999 -

---

The 14th St. Y of the Educational Alliance
The Center for Cultural and Performing Arts
Wendy Sabin-Lasker, Director WhY Women Poetry Series,
Veronica Golos, Artistic Coordinator for Literary Programs

Presents:

NEW FOR FALL: WRITING CLASSES
From Fact to Fiction - Carol Dixon
All In One Poetry Workshop - Kate Light
Free the Artist Within - Jelayne Miles
Writing a Life: Discovery of Soul and Surface - Patricia Smith
News From Poems - Angelo Verga
(Classes start mid October.
For information please call 212-780-0800x255 and
leave your name and address {s l o w l y} for further information).

Some of the WhY Women Poetry Events in the Fall:
Oct. 4 - OPENING DOORS with DH Melhem, Rashida Isameli, Veronica Golos and music.
Nov. 8 - THE FEELING OF FLESH with Cortney Davis and Sondra Zeidenstein +music
Dec. 6 - CEREMONIES OF LIGHT with Enid Dam & TBA
Dec. 20 - SOMETHING UNDERSTOOD with Phillis Levin and others TBA, introducing her new anthology, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, with music by Sarafina Martino.

For more information about events in the fall, or to join the mailing list, write to:
Victoria Golos [email protected]

344 East 14th St.
New York, NY 10003, USA

Phone:
212-780-0800 x255

---

NEW FROM

Poet Of The Week

Click the Comrades logo and browse the site for details and submission guidelines. A recent winner was Dale Houstman, whose work features in this month's issue of Poetry Life & Times.

---

NEW POETRY SITE:

POESIE'S LAISSEZ-FAIRE FAIRE FOIRE

Poetry submissions welcome in both English and French.

http://www.homestead.com/poesieslaissezfaire/index1.html

---

ELISHA PORAT: NEW POETRY E-BOOK

GROWING OLD

See this link for more details:
http://www.shyflowersgarden.com/Press/Books_GrowingOld.htm

now available as a POD - print book.

Also available - Scar Of Pride, new and selected short stories, at
Word Wrangler Publishing Inc.
http://www.wordwrangler.com/elishaporat.html

---

NEW ANTHOLOGY - SUBMISSIONS WANTED
For Kedco Artist Profile Press

We pay in free copies of anthology + prizes for the best.
Short story trophies + solid silver medallions to be won!

Submissions of short stories and/or up to 10 poems wanted for new MILLENNIUM DAWN anthology, to be published both as a CD rom and a bound book.

Email submissions to Elaine Davis at [email protected] before September 2001.

---

THE PERILS OF NORRIS cartoon, #6 of new story. David Jackson of Artvilla won the Spot Reginald The Rat contest last month (prize coming soon, David). Reggie is away on vacation to the Seychelles this month.

The Perils of Norris started in August 2000. To catch up on past episodes, click the links below and click your browser's Back button to return.

#1  #2  #3  #4  #5  #6  #7  #8  #9 #10 #11 #12 #13

---

---

Click here for BACK ISSUES page

Mail me on: [email protected] with any poems, letters or poetry news.
Please get Featured Poets submissions in as early as possible each month.

---

Click here to return to main index

Created using: Lightning HTML Editor Version 2.10.1997