Spartan Press

Journeyman’s Suitcase by Mike James
journey
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By Lynette G. Esposito
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In Journeyman’s Suitcase by Mike James, published by Luchador Press, clear questions and observations open a literary window of perspective and viewpoint. The fifty-two pages of this short tome are mostly one-stanza experiences that read like someone’s notebook as the writer interprets representative images into logical conclusions.
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For example, in the poem False Confessions on page three, James presents things that never happened in a one-stanza truncated sentence form.
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                   The time you panhandled for tattoos. The monthly
                   payments for transcendence.  All the famous people waived at or
                   had orgies with.  The time you found the burnt wreckage
                   of flaming shoes.  Childhood spent tossing pennies behind the
                   Red Dirt Cabaret.  The mother who worked as both a nun and a
                   stripper. The medical journal contribution about aspirin as a
                   cure for love sick penguins.  How you were the first o capitalize
                   and conjugate KAPOW.  That ability to translate any fairy
                   language into Yiddish.  The parakeets who sang duets while
                   you scrambled and re-scrambled the eggs from the plain white
                   chickens you raised. The prize-winning rooster from Borneo.
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The choices of the false confessions suggest bravado and humor as well as serving a good dose of how our memory works and what we are willing to confess to even if there is little truth in it.
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James uses this same tone and technique in the poem, She Could Have been a Seller of Indulgences on page twenty-one This poem shows a perception of time as it controls and/or influences one’s choices.  The poem is presented in a two–stanza format.
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                        It was never easy for her especially on Tuesdays, as we know
                        how Tuesdays are with their leftover promises from the start
                        from the start of the week and the day before.  It’s probably not enough
                        that every third day she wore a sun dress to keep the sun
                        interested and nearby.
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The reader is introduced to the she of the poem by what she wears and on what day. she wears it.  There is a certain tonal sorrow for this SHE as the unnamed person who seems to be holding on by the thread of a perhaps unneeded sun dress on a specific day of the week. The answer the narrator gives is to keep the sun near and interested. This is almost like a Don Quixote scene without windmills.  In its place is the sun.
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The second stanza gives details of her life and the dry chardonnay she shares at her dining room court with her nail technicians and everyone else.  It is like a short story without unnecessary details.
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In part two of this volume, the journey continues as James explores the everyday symbols that define everyday life. The image of a map is used in Too Far on page thirty-nine.
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                               A map keeps you from too far.
                               That’s a map’s job.
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                               The best map would reflect stars.
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This poem like so many of the poems in this book, suggest in a direct way the meaning, both literal and figurative, of everyday objects that guide us.
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James demonstrates his prowess in observing and analyzing poetically how the world works.  The book is a pleasure to read and quick paced.
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Lynette G. Esposito has been an Adjunct Professor at Rowan University, Burlington County and Camden County Colleges. She has taught creative writing and conducted workshops in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  Mrs. Esposito holds a BA in English from the University of Illinois and an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Rutgers University.
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Everyone Just Wants to Drum by Kevin Rabas
drum
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By Charles Rammelkamp
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In the title piece of his new collection, in a brief section called “Prose Pieces,” Kevin Rabas, chair of the English Department at Emporia State University and poet laureate of Kansas from 2017-2019, tells the story of library night in Mulvane, KS, where he has been invited to participate. He stands by a sandwich board with an arrow pointing to Clowns & Activities and another arrow pointing to Poet Laureate. He stands by the appropriate sign with a table of books and his drums beside him. “I do a jazz poetry bit,” he tells us parenthetically.

Of course, nobody is particularly interested in poetry but makes straight for the face-painting and food trucks. But when Rabas begins with a measured, Brazilian beat” on the drums, a little kid with his mom gets interested, and soon enough Rabas is mobbed by kids wanting a chance at the cymbals, the snare, the tom-tom, “about 50 kids make their way through in an hour,” but of course  nobody sticks around for the poetry, he observes with good humor. “Everyone just wants to drum.”
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But Rabas makes the point that the music is a form of poetic expression itself, and this theme holds up throughout the collection. Indeed, one whole section (the book is divided into nine sections), “Song Cycle: Poems at the Piano,” a suite of eight poems, was written in collaboration with the pianist Martin Cuellar. Each poem corresponds to a movement in a Tao Lin composition. One especially evocative poem is “Floating Clouds”:
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Above us, clouds
sag with rain, as if they
carry heavy sacks. They move now
with weight. Then, rain,
and those clouds run,
sleek and thin
on to another pasture, another
town, water
rising and following.
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Another section of ten poems is entitled “Music,” with titles like “Jazz Standards,” “Know the Notes,” “How composed music hopes” and “Quartet.” The poem “Crazy” is after the Patsy Cline song:
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I know everyone,
every girl sings
Patsy’s Crazy
at karaoke, but
in this little rusted-
out bar my drink
burns with your voice.
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Most of the poems in Everyone Just Wants to Drum are short, focused like haiku, more about image and reflection than narrative. Indeed, many have the impact of “Observations,” the title of the final, twelve-poem section. “Hail,” for instance, succinctly shows us a hailstorm:
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How the hail, pea-sized,
  froghops on the lawn,
bright white, rock-like, misshapen,
  and sounds like bags
of marbles being dropped
  on top the roof
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The sections entitled “Time Off,” “Words, Language,” and “At the Gym, the Gas Station, the Coffee Shop” are likewise little epiphanies of examination, celebrations of the everyday. What could be more ordinary than a gym, a gas station or a coffee shop, after all? “On the Road,” from “Time Off,” reads:
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Rain coming, the black cows
lie down in the green and wait
for droplets, for a summer
shower like a lover’s
touch, all hazy
and indigo, late June
in east central Kansas
along the turnpike, driving
the grey ribbon
that never ends.
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Simple but vivid, Rabas shows you the passing scene in all its modest, quotidian beauty, like something from a Japanese haiku indeed, as you drive along the mind-numbing freeway going from point A to point B. The cows settle in, the soothing, life-giving rain about to begin, the drab hypnotic pavement unspooling ahead.
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Rabas teaches playwriting at Emporia State as well, and thus another of his short “observations” from the “Words, Language” section paints another powerful, dramatic picture:
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That white noise murmur
of the house with the lights up
before the show, what
heaven might be like
at first, before we know
the words.
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A short, five-poem section called “Disquiet” seems to address a time of mental anxiety. But the drum is back in “Mom Brings My Drum to Menninger’s,” an apparent reference to the psychiatric clinic in Houston.
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How that
garage sale conga
held what I knew
and needed,
when I thumped
my story
across its skin.
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And the orderlies
said, That’s ok, sonny.
You can play that,
play that again.
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And thus we come full circle to music and expression and to poetry and the mental and emotional impulses that move and are moved by the words and the music. There’s a quiet wisdom in Kevin Rabas’ work, even a subtle “therapy” at work, as well, as if these are the very things you really need to stay sane in our turbulent world – the poetry, the music. Because face it, everyone just wants to drum.
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Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. Another poetry chapbook, Me and Sal Paradise, was recently published by FutureCycle Press. An e-chapbook has also recently been published online Time Is on My Side (yes it is) –http://poetscoop.org/manuscrip/Time%20Is%20on%20My%20Side%20FREE.pdf
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