The Flea Byteth a Second Time

The Second Flea has hatch'd, and, pamper'd, swells — with verse by Peter Bloxsom, Catherine Chandler, David Davis, Ann Drysdale, Rhina P. Espaillat, Bill Greenwell, Clive James, Jalina Mhyana, Timothy Murphy, Alfred Nicol, Marly Youmans and Thomas Zimmerman. Go, read, be bytten!

http://www.the-flea.com/

Recent news from our published authors

A new interview with Joseph S. Salemi, along with some of his published work, appears at the following website address: http://alongstoryshort.net/ThePoetsCorner-June09.html

Salemi writes a monthly column for The Pennsylvania Review , and his comic poem ‘Rear-Meat Rhoda’ is up at The Formalist Portal.

Bench Press: Poetry that exerts pressure at every point, and so achieves a momentary rest.

Bench Press, an independent publisher of poetry, will be launched on July 4, 2009. On that day its website will go ‘live’ and unveil its logo. 

The press is pleased to announce its first title: Jee Leong Koh’s Equal to the Earth. Of Koh’s book, Vijay Seshadri writes: ‘Jee Leong Koh is a vigorous, physical poet very much captured by the expressive power of rhythm, rhetoric, and the lexicon. He is also, paradoxically, a poet in pursuit of the most elusive and delicate of human emotions. The contradiction is wonderful and compelling, and so are his poems.’

You can read a poem from the book on the press website, and purchase a copy of the book.

Margaret Menamin, Poet

We are all saddened to hear of Margaret Menamin's death. She was a poet's poet and beloved by many, not only for her fine work but her gracious and thoughtful critique. This poem of hers from The Chimaera III speaks beautifully about acceptance, remembrance and treasured relationships …how those who loved her will come to remember her season on season, summer after spring.

Baucis and Philemon

I believe I know how it will be
with you and me:
Coming silent one day through the wood
where last you stood,
I will stop, remembering, and see
a newsprung tree.

It will be as if it had been planned:
Where then you stand
I will stop, remembering, and see
a wild young tree
tall and straight among the others, and
put forth my hand.

As I touch your greenness, some strange thing
will leap and sing
within the hardening fibers of my hand.
So we will stand,
season on season, summer after spring,
remembering.

Chimaeric Editor Quizzed

Paul Stevens interviewed by Nic Sebastian:

http://verylikeawhale.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/ten-questions-for-poetry-editors-paul-stevens/

Book Launch for Ray Pospisil's The Bell

Ray Pospisil, a Brooklyn based poet and journalist, was born in Bogota, Colombia, and early in his life moved with his parents to Union, New Jersey. He spent most of his life in New York City. Ray was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Rutgers University. He worked as an energy and environment journalist working for Fairchild Publications sand then McGraw-Hill and later became a freelance journalist working mostly for McGraw-Hill publications. Ray had a passion for poetry and often read in the East Village and in Manhattan. His work has been published by Lyric, Iambs & Trochees, The Newport Review, Rogue Scholars and others. In 2006, his chapbook of poems, Some Time Before the Bell, was published by Modern Metrics.

Ray died tragically on January 28, 2008, aged 54. The Bell is a book of remarkable precision, feeling, and sense of beauty among the squalor of urban life in the early twenty-first century. A mixture of anger, humor, compassion, and a deep, hard-earned love for life in spite of its many disappointments make this a painful yet transcendently beautiful collection.

Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Nightingale Lounge
213 Second Ave (Corner of 13th Street)
Manhattan, New York

Featured readers:

Quincy Lehr
R. Nemo Hill, Jane Ormerod, Oran Ryan,
Thomas Fucaloro, Michelle Slater, Su Polo,
David Elsasser, Terese Coe, and Wendy Sloan.

If You Love English Poetry...

SCR's Poetry Editor, Angela France, has a book out! It's called  Occupation, and it's a ripper! Occupation is full of the sort of poetry that  The Chimaera loves: articulate, honest, incisive, imaginative, true.

And English: if you love English poetry—not just poetry in English, but English poetry — you will love this book. And if you're going to buy a book of poems to read and then come back to, this is the one.

Occupation is available for pre-publication order from Ragged Raven Press, and will be launched with a reading at Ledbury Poetry Festival on July 10th.

Ragged Raven Press is here: http://raggedraven.co.uk/collections.htm#Occupation

Angela France’s robust poems move through a range of themes, but the passage of time and the struggle against it, in physical effort, in mind and in dream, recur. There is also a very welcome intellectual clarity that produces a beauty of its own, in short poems, like Unpoem and Beeing, but also in more gritty works of realism like Urban. The poems are always vigorous and rhythmically controlled. Occupation establishes a clear, firm, valuable voice in contemporary poetry.

—George Szirtes

Here's a poem  from Occupation to whet your appetite:


Secrets

The scrubbed block had scars and nicks
from the graded blades hanging on the rack;
I could see blood lingering
in deep cuts. His slabbed hands
were always wet and red, fingers
plump as the sausages forced
from the maw of his machine.

He smiled at customers as he slapped steak
on white paper, chatted as his cleaver
slammed through flesh and joint.
He knew all the wives by name,
knew who would want the cheap cuts,
the marrow bones for soup. He’d wink
an extra slice of ham into the wrapper
for Mrs Green and tease newlyweds
about what they’d give their man for supper.

I’d keep my eyes down, only offer
words from the shopping list,
scurry away with ideas about his steel door
and what it hid, sure of his kinship
to the plaster pig in the window
with a striped apron and a perverse smile
as its varnished trotter pointed
to rows of glistening chops.

I coloured him red,
heard draining arteries in his voice,
the thud of cleavers in his laugh.
I watched him checking a delivery, afraid
of what might burst from the straining seams.
He caught me looking
at the pigs hanging in the lorry,
pink feet pointing in a row.
Look like ballet dancers, don’t they?

The Flea Reviewed

Christine Klocek-Lim reviews The Flea here:

http://novemberskypoetry.blogspot.com/2009/05/review-of-flea.html

" ...At least I know that there is still poetry in the world that speaks to the mind and heart without navigating through the navel first and miring us all in the lint so often found therein."