Marc Beaudin

The Last Autumn

Posted on October 27, 2009 by marcbeaudin

Lying on the couch with a fever raging through me, I watch leaves dropping from the cottonwood outside my window. I have one hand on a speaker so I can feel this violin sonata of Mozart. Sometimes hearing just isn’t enough. In my fever, with the gently-refracted light through the streaked glass, I can’t be sure if it’s leaves or little birds that are falling; pine siskins perhaps, or mountain bluebirds.

Suddenly, it’s the last autumn. The final fall. All the birds fall silently from the trees like yellowed leaves. The bears prepare for a hibernation without end. The last of the green bleeds from the earth like the color from our faces when we hear the news. Our skin grows numb and we lose control of our hands. No amount of Mozart can save us now.

The grey of the sky is an iron door continually slamming shut. The mountainsides are crimson with dead trees: the warming brought the beetles and the pines can’t climb any higher to escape. I don’t remember voting for this. I don’t remember choosing profits for oil companies in favor of life. Wasn’t there a moment, some time in the recent past, that we could have said, “No”?

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Submit your Poetry to Poets’ Basement on CounterPunch

Posted on October 5, 2009 by marcbeaudin

CounterPunch is the internationally renowned political newsletter edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. Its weekly poetry installment, Poets’ Basement, has published work by Robert Creeley, Harold Pinter, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Patti Smith, and William Heyen, as well as many talented new and upcoming writers. We generally publish three poems per week: Fridays at CounterPunch.org.Editorial Statement:
For Poets’ Basement, we seek work from the leading edge of the poetic dialogue. Have something to say, and say it with precision, music and electricity. In the words of Miscellaneous Jones, “If you’re going to kill a tree just to write something on it, you’d better have something damn good to say.” … Show us creation, not imitation. Passion, not romance. Blood, not tears. Give us thorns without the crown. … Make us think. … Make us stop thinking. … Amaze us.

Submission Guidelines:
We are open to all genres and styles, although the painfully sentimental and dogmatically religious would have more luck elsewhere. Although CounterPunch is a political journal, poems for Poets’ Basement need not be restricted to political work. In fact, if your work is merely a political screed masquerading as a poem, it will almost surely be rejected. Simultaneous submissions and previously published work are accepted (provided that you retain the rights to any published pieces). Translations are accepted provided the original work is included along with documentation of granted reprint/translation rights. Works published on Poet’s Basement remain the property of the author. At this time, no monetary payment is possible.

To submit to Poets’ Basement, send an e-mail to CounterPunch’s poetry editor, Marc Beaudin at counterpunchpoetry@gmail.com with your name, the titles being submitted, and your website url or e-mail address (if you’d like this to appear with your work). Also indicate whether or not your poems have been previously published and where. @font-face { font-family: “Times New Roman”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } For translations, include poem in original language and documentation of granted reprint/translation rights. Attach up to 5 poems and a short bio, written in 3rd person, as a single Word Document (.doc or .rtf attachments only; no .docx). Expect a response within one month (sometimes longer due to heavy submission periods).

Poems accepted for online publication will be considered for possible inclusion of an upcoming print anthology (details forthcoming).

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Prestidigitatious Verse: Enjoying the Trip of David Blaine’s ANTISOCIAL

Posted on September 12, 2009 by marcbeaudin

(Published by OW Press, 2009. www.OutsiderWriters.org)

The author’s bio at the end of this book notes that this is not the magician of the same name. Yet, David Blaine, the poet, plays with words the way I imagine the other David Blaine plays with cards or silk scarves. His agile manipulations nearly defy physics and the results are surprising, mystifying, and sometimes downright magical.

Blaine revels in the double entendre: In “Guns and Butter” he describes a love affair with oil, the “hydrocarbon medusa,” as a “crude relationship.” In “Child” he says, “the remainder of you perhaps buried / as dust motes drift into a dune / across the top of some deserted windowsill” and we might not even notice the sleight of hand that connects “dune” with the desert of the “deserted windowsill.”

Extended references lurk around the corners of lines like rabbits made to disappear, yet you know they’re still there, somewhere. In “Allen and Jack,” Blaine has Kerouac reincarnated as Willie Nelson (“On the Road … Again”), then later sneaks in a line from “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

But these pages are not merely games and verbal dexterity. You can feel the depth of thought and passion flowing below the surface of most every poem. Blaine takes on issues from the social, political, religious and environmental front-lines. Never beating you over the head, his attack is more subtle and fun to watch – like a blade eased gently through the slot in the brightly-painted box he’s put you. In “The Usual Suspects,” we hear of hands that “sign the orders,” “pull the trigger,” “deal in currency,” “swing the hammer,” “place the nails,” and perform a host of other heinous crimes. We then are given the revelation that all of these hands are ours. And with that, we are successfully sawn in half.

There’s much in the poems of Antisocial that describe an entire world sawn in half. Dead soldiers, starving children, drunks, prostitutes, saints who’ve lost their goodness, Judas’ pointing finger, Dick Cheney’s lies and vitriol, and “a thin man [who] cries so people won’t notice it’s raining.” However true all of this is, we can take comfort in the stoically existentialist wisdom of Blaine’s “Terminal”:

I have this suspicious feeling
that in the end,
at the pearly gates,
it’s all going to turn out
to be fake, worn
and shabby.
But still,
I’m trying to enjoy the trip.

And what a trip it is.

– Marc Beaudin, September 2009