Calder at the Top of the Stairs by John Timpane

Calder at the Top of the Stairs  

If this is modernism

         Why are you smiling?

                   Is it the light hanging

In nothing, ruby

           Triangle turning, leaf

                       Or teardrop train or

Dreamshape you

             Have never seen

                         Before turning

Answerably round the

            Ruby triangle? Is

                        It the invisible

Unavoidable, as in they 

             Will turn, at a speed 

                         Consulting nothing but the 

Declarations of independence 

               Of air and gravity? Is

                          It their delicate

Armatures, wires of

               Relation, family

                            Of place and force,

Cantilevers hiding

              Tensions, weights,

                          Poise and counterpoise,

Sleights

            And designs

                        Inviting the sacrilege

Of touch to test how

              What hangs is hanging,

                          Feel, as Eden’s

Finger felt for

           Heaven’s, patterns-made-solid

                       Hauling against and with

(Which gets you kicked

             Out of the museum)?

                        Still smiling. Do you

            Remember that

You, too, hang

             Athwart and among

               Circlers, wanderers, brilliants,

             All the ellipses and rings –

Planets, blood

             Cells jostling down

                          Vascular sluiceways, wacky-

              Eyed fish, sycamore

Rookbursts, shockwaves

             Flowering, comic

                        Domino of cause into

              Effect, conga

Lines, timeframes,

            Interorbits of planned

And unplanned – and

            You, too, are

                       At play? Do

                                     You smile because

A man started this but

           His art lay in

                        Turning it loose, letting

                                     Go self into everything,

                                                   A universe of sightless

                                        Angels of influence at

                               Work, bulky, spinning

                  Pear of a planet, cross-

Pulling vector

             Fields, writhing

                         Magma, currents that

Never stop, never? As if

Watch what happens now 

           Were his only theme? Turn:

                       This blue orb gestures to

                                That black rhomboid. Turn

                                             Again: brand-new

Fingerposts in all

             Dimensions? Do you

                          Smile to recognize

                                      The marvel in this

                                                  Nameless moving? Isn’t

That predicament

Great? To live where

             Known and

Unknowable, these

            Shrapnels of

                        Joy, reshape the shape

We’re In? Drive

             To the child at the

                        Center? You’re still

Smiling. Do you assent? Did

You ever think you would?

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John Timpane is former Commentary Page Editor (1997-2008) and Books Editor (2014-2020) for The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philly.com. His work has appeared in Sequoia, The Fox Chase Review, Apiary, Cleaver, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Rathalla Review, Per Contra, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Vocabula Review, Wild River Review, and elsewhere. Among his books is a chapbook, Burning Bush (Judith Fitzgerald/Cranberry Tree, 2010). He is the spouse of Maria-Christina Keller. They live in New Jersey.

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2nd Wednesdays Poetry at Northeast Regional Library- Philadelphia- February 8th

February 8^th

6pm to 7:30pm

Northeast Philadelphia Regional Library

2228 Cottman Avenue, Philadelphia, Pa. 19149

 Charles Carr

Followed by an Open Reading

Charles Carr is a native Philadelphian. Charles was educated at LaSalle and Bryn Mawr College, where he earned a Masters in American History.   Charles has two published books of poems “paradise pennsylvania, (Cradle Press, St Louis,2009)), and “Haitian Mudpies And Other Poems” (Moonstone Arts 2012).  Charles’ poems have been published in various print and on-line local and national poetry journals. Charles is host of Philly Loves Poetry, a collaborative live broadcast on the first Tuesday of the month. For five years hosted a Moonstone Poetry series at Fergie’s Pub on the second Wednesday of each month.    On September 26^th, 2013, Charles read poems in honor of the international 100,000 Poets For Peace at The Garden of Remembrance in Dublin, Ireland.

Our Full Winter/Spring Schedule Here: https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2023/01/02/2nd-wednesdays-poetry-northeast-regional-library/

On street parking and parking in Giant/ TD Bank  parking lot available. SEPTA Bus Service available

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2nd Wednesday’s Poetry @ Northeast Regional Library

Spring 2023

2^nd Wednesday’s Poetry @ Northeast Regional Library

Featured Poets + Open Mic

Curated By North of Oxford Literary Journal

6pm to 7:30pm

2228 Cottman Avenue, Philadelphia, Pa. 19149

February 8^th

Charles Carr

Charles Carr is a native Philadelphian. Charles was educated at LaSalle and Bryn Mawr College, where he earned a Masters in American History.   Charles has two published books of poems “paradise pennsylvania, (Cradle Press, St Louis,2009)), and “Haitian Mudpies And Other Poems” (Moonstone Arts 2012).  Charles’ poems have been published in various print and on-line local and national poetry journals. Charles is host of Philly Loves Poetry, a collaborative live broadcast on the first Tuesday of the month. For five years hosted a Moonstone Poetry series at Fergie’s Pub on the second Wednesday of each month.    On September 26^th, 2013, Charles read poems in honor of the international 100,000 Poets For Peace at The Garden of Remembrance in Dublin, Ireland.

March 8^th 

Naila Francis and  Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon 

Naila Francis is a writer/poet, grief doula and wedding officiant based in Philadelphia. She is also a founding member of Salt Trails, an interdisciplinary collective honoring grief through community rituals. Her poetry has previously been published in “North of Oxford,” “Scribbler,” “Voicemail Poems” and the Healing Verse Phone Line. www.NailaFrancis.com

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Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, PhD (Cultural Anthropology), M.A. (Anthropology), MFA (Theater), Graduate Certificate) Women’s Studies, B.A. (Journalism); is an Associate Professor of Urban Theater and Community Engagement in the Theater Department in the School of Theater, Film and Media Arts in the Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts and is currently serving as President of the Faculty Senate at Temple University. Williams-Witherspoon is the author of Through Smiles and Tears: The History of African American Theater (From Kemet to the Americas) (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011); The Secret Messages in African American Theater: Hidden Meaning Embedded in Public Discourse” (Edwin Mellen Publishing, 2006)

April 12^th

Host: Dave Worrell

Diane Sahms and g emil reutter 

Diane Sahms a native Philadelphian, is the author of  six poetry collections: Images of Being (Stone Garden Publishing, 2011), Lights Battered Edge (Anaphora Literary Press, 2015), and Night Sweat (Red Dashboard Press, 2016), Handheld Mirror of the Mind, (Kelsay Books, 2018); Covid 19 2020 – A Poetic Journal (Moonstone Press, 2021); and most recently City of Shadow & Light (Philadelphia) – Alien Buddha Press. Her poems have appeared in a number of online and print publications.   Diane is the Poetry Editor at North of Oxford and works as a purchasing agent. You can visit her at http://dianesahmsguarnieri.wordpress.com/   and http://www.dianesahms-guarnieri.com/

g emil reutter lives and writes in Philadelphia. Seventeen collections of his poetry and fiction have been published, most recently Thunder, Lightning and Urban Cowboys a poetry collection and Selected Stories 1990-2022 both from Alien Buddha Press.  He is the book review editor and site manager for North of Oxford.  His work has been published widely in the small and electronic press. You can visit him at   http://gereutter.wordpress.com/

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May 10^th

TS Hawkins and Emari DiGiorgio 

TS HAWKINS is an international author, performance poet, art activist, playwright, and member of the Dramatists Guild. Plays, short works, and books include Seeking Silence, sweet bread peaches (formerly, Cartons of Ultrasounds), Too Late to Apologize, In Their Silence (formerly, They’ll Neglect to Tell You), #RM2B, The Secret Life of Wonder: a prologue in G, AGAIN, #SuiteReality, “don’t wanna dance with ghosts…”, Sugar Lumps & Black Eye Blues, Confectionately Yours, Mahogany Nectar, Lil Blaek Book: all the long stories short, and The Hotel Haikus. Ongoing projects: TrailOff and Community Capital: an Afrofuturism South Philly Walking Experience. TS HAWKINS

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Emari DiGiorgio is the author of Girl Torpedo, winner of the Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and The Things a Body Might Become. Her poetry has received numerous awards, including the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, RHINO’s Founder’s Prize and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. At Stockton, Emari teaches first-year writing and poetry, is Faculty Director of Murphy Writing, and serves as President of the Stockton Federation of Teachers.

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Videos For Your Enjoyment

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2 Poems by John Timpane

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Photograph courtesy of Library of Congress

Elizabeth and the Tramps

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The dandelions always grew, even in 1930;

They ran the fields to the fence where all the boards had fallen,

And if, arrayed in clothes and dirt, they cut across the grass lot

The tramps could beat the watchful men who lay for them with rifles.

If they could make her back door, they could beg for dimes and nickels,

A chicken wing, or three square yards on Grandma’s floor for sleeping.

Her yeses earned her word among the sons of the Depression

Who traipsed to her in random flocks and seldom lost her mercy,

Found succor for their freight car mouths, bandages for the broken,

A shoe that almost fit a foot, and small talk if they wanted.

Night, train time, called the tramps away. A couple stayed on longer

Then struck out aimless through the dandelions that grew always.

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Bach’s Great Theme

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is God arising from trouble. Beginnings welcome

you; a folk song you know

or wish you knew gives way

to hurdles, threats, twinges, changes wrung

out of memory (watery light box);

you climb walls of thorns to

reach the wasteland, sun in your

eyes; valleys fill with mist, milk,

carillons; lighthouses necklace the coast; the

drunken river of song urges backward;

bass and melody leapfrog; branches whip

across your face; mainspring time relaxes.

Does the Orchestral Suite No. 3

in D Major, second movement, move, or

do you? Moving to be living,

to know, to hear, bear this

chord, those scraps of theme around

corners like spies of the spirit?

Haunts, rehaunts. New fields render alien

the childhood path. Have you been

led? Or is being here, the end, wrung,reset

remapped, equal to hearing what you already

hear?

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John Timpane is the Books and Fine Arts Editor/Writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philly.com. His work has appeared in Sequoia, The Fox Chase Review, Apiary, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Philadelphia Review of Books, The Rathalla Review, Per Contra, Vocabula Review, and elsewhere. Among his books is a chapbook, Burning Bush (Judith Fitzgerald/Cranberry Tree, 2010).

 

 

 

Coming On September 15th

Our September 15^th edition will feature poetry from Dongho Cho, John Timpane, Jeremy Freedman, and Julia Wakefield.

Submissions of book reviews, commentary, essays and poetry are open at North of Oxford. Our guidelines are here: https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/about/ 

Night Sweat by Diane Sahms-Guarnieri

A poetry collection by Contributing Editor Diane Sahms-Guarnieri

Now available at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Night-Sweat-Diane-Sahms-Guarnieri/dp/1519197888/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451867499&sr=1-1

What others say about Night Sweat:

Wherever Diane Sahms-Guarnieri takes you, she takes you all the way there, soul and senses rendered high-definition cameras, taking in history, loss, family, humor, and eros in a world brought alive. Night Sweat, her new book, moves among her beloved Philadelphia and environs, Old City, Christ Church, where “the present belongs and does not belong,” even the drug dealers at Frankford Terminal — then we’re in a bed of fire and fondly remembered love, then “friendship, the hinge of a calm shell,” then a flower field, with “seductive” tulips and “slightly badass” dandelions, then ancestors, relationship, descent from Lenape settlers and from the stars alike (“Stars connect us: they are lineage”). This poet is a singer, of car accident, graffiti artist, or the marriage (told in a hilarious poem) of William Carlos Williams and Flossie. After reading Night Sweat, you will live in a different world — or, rather, thanks to Diane Sahms-Guarnieri, the world you always lived in, all aching beauties laid bare.

John Timpane- Assistant Books Editor/Media Editor Writer – Philadelphia Inquirer                                                                       

Diane Sahms-Guarnieri’s Night Sweat is a moving collection of poems. In Sahms-Guarnieri’s poem “Sunset” she writes: “Everything has its own way of entering into night.” Many of her most memorable poems are intimate and unprecious portraits of people and urban landscapes and the psychic interplay of each in the other. Here people and places live inside each other and vice versa. In the poem “Delaware River” she describes the river as “a snake/ who has swallowed a mouse/ it carries it through night/ like a dark and dirty secret.” There is also much flora and fauna in the book, but Sahms-Guarnieri’s edge remains. She writes “I have come to mistrust the wisdom of trees/ their disguises.” Sahms-Guarnieri is a tough and tender poet. Her poems bridge time and memory in ways that unexpectedly reveal our present.

Thomas Devaney, poet and author of The Picture that Remains and A Series of Small Boxes.

In Night Sweat, Diane Sahms-Guarnieri explores the physical and emotional landscapes of the places and people she loves. She knows these places. She knows these people. And she writes with both the authority and humility of a poet fully engaged with these worlds.

Jim Daniels- Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English- Carnegie Mellon University

In a city that looks back, reflective as the moon, Diane Sahms-Guarnieri hangs life on the line from clothespin to clothespin to clothespin, billowing in the night breeze, a breeze that chills but does not cool.  The light Night Sweat sheds on the city is not the glare of sun but the haunting vision of moonlight that touches at once the subliminal and the sublime.  In a striking array of poetic images, reflecting together Ash Can Art and Georgia O’Keefe, haunting and dazzling at once, as moonlight illuminations provide tantalizing glimpses in a landscape revealed only to the exquisite extent that moonlight allows.

Mike Cohen
Host of Poetry Aloud and Alive
Contributing Editor, Schuylkill Valley Journal