Sometimes we, as a literary
community, do not know the treasures that surround us.
Take for example the
February 3, 2014, Café Muse readings by poet mathematician JoAnne Growney and poet interactive hypermedia "physicist" Stephanie Strickland. They
both brought to the lit table a wider reach of our world.
And not only did they offer
up a different complexity shaped by the writer’s primary tool—words, but also
they framed an energy that brought out some exciting participants to the Café
Muse open mic, like Mary-Sherman Willis who recently presented in our forum
from her new cross-genre book Graffiti Calculus.
Here is a poem from JoAnne
Growney that is done in a syllabic square. About this form JoAnne says, “One of
the poem-forms I use frequently is the square, a form going back at
least to 1597, the date for a square poem by Henry Lok, honoring Elizabeth 1. The
square form (a single-stanza in which the number of lines is the same as the
number of syllables per line) seems to help to shape a pithy statement.”
This square by JoAnne has
six syllables per line and is six-line
poem:
More than the rapist, fear
the district attorney,
smiling for the camera,
saying that thirty-six
sex crimes per year is a
manageable number.
Copyright © 2013 by JoAnne
Growney
Reading from her latest book
Dragon Logic, Stephanie Strickland, serves as prophetic voice against the void
created by the virtual reality of the Internet that detaches its users from
each other. She shows how the past is not so different from the future and that
we have always lived with human consuming dragons.
there is a zombie at the wheel
who finds acceptable all risk
( his flesh looks like mine )
a crinkle monkey in the swamp
mind tricky and brisk
( his moves feel like mine )
headless mannequin draped
white print snakeskin dress
( pale fakery filling me with dread )
a boneless man used up
by apparatchik juggernaut
( scrivener like me )
the one who hoped to poach
cockroach strategy adrift
( like me time-amnesic overreaching )
cord-cut all beyond the call
to heal or heel fold molt
( wormhole crush crash course )
Copyright © 2013 by Stephanie Strickland
