The object poem: Simple enough that we can teach grade school children to write them, complex enough that great poets write them. We think 3rd Wednesday’s poem of the week is a fine example of how much a good object poem can accomplish with a few lines – just look at that final question!
Paperback: 58 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (August 5, 2019)
Available from Kelsay Books
Amazon.com
Barnes and Noble
Paul Bernstein is a self-taught poet who began writing seriously after a varied career as a library worker/weekend hippie, anti-war activist, radical journalist, medical editor, and managing editor. His work now appears regularly in journals and anthologies. He is also a prizewinning amateur country music lyricist and a published photographer. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Front Porch Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, New Plains Review, Third Wednesday, and U.S. 1 Worksheets. Paul currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He suffers from an addiction to Michigan sports contracted as an undergraduate but is otherwise functional.
Click to see and hear Paul Bernstein reading from What the Owls Know on our YouTube channel.
3rd Wednesday’s poem of the week from the summer issue.
Spindrift suggests stuff blown onto beaches, beaches of discovery in one’s mind. When these poems show a squirrel, a fish, birds, a beggar, an Irish pub, or a dish we see these as metaphors which conjure up ideas or feelings from our own familiarity with them. A poem that begins as an abstraction, like an enemy or peace or patience, becomes objectified. Spindrift is comprised of whatever little gems might be found along the shore, examined closely to become part of the reader’s experience. These jottings of spindrift take off from that experience like going to an airport when you want to be someplace else – or like poems which say one thing when they mean another.
Published by Atmosphere Press, 2021. 124 Pages, ISBN 163649532X
or purchase from Barnes and Noble or Amazon.
Laurence W. Thomas is the founding editor of Third Wednesday Magazine. He has been around long enough to know the sting of rejection and the salve of acceptance. His shelves are lined with his own publications as well as the works of many other poets. He Chancelor Emertus of the Poetry Society of Michigan.
Now you can see and hear Laurence read poems from this book on 3rd Wednesday’s Youtube Channel!
Coming soon to a computer near you:Ordinarily a poet should avoid abstractions but, when handled with great skill, an abstraction can produce something as wonderful as this short poem. Great title, great ending, perfect word choices throughout, Fruition apprears in the summer issue of 3rd Wednesday. Thank you, Carolyn Russell, for showing us how it’s done.
Stream on consciousness can make for interesting (and fun) poetry if it is handled well, as it is in our Poem of the Week by Kelly White. This is from the summer issue of 3rd Wednesday. The free e-edition is up now on our website and print edition is on sale at Amazon – just $8.
Home and Away by Ruth Holzer is a collection of short prose poems combined with haiku in the Japanese form of haibun, originated by Basho in the 17th century, and now becoming more widely written in the English-speaking world. These poems, reflecting a range of emotions, trace a personal journey and hopefully will also resonate with a reader’s experiences.
The 36 page chapbook is available for $7.00 from dancing girl press at:
https://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/collections/dancing-girl-press/products/home-and-away-ruth-holzer
or directly from holzerruth@yahoo.com
Bio: Ruth Holzer is the author of five previous chapbooks, most recently, A Face in the Crowd (Kelsay Books, 2019) and Why We’re Here (Press Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Poet Lore, Faultline, Connecticut River Review, Southern Poetry Review, Journal of New Jersey Poets, The South Carolina Review, Blue Unicorn and other journals and anthologies. She has served as a co-editor of Haibun Today and as an associate editor of tinywords. A multiple Pushcart nominee, among her awards are the Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of Virginia and the Tanka Splendor Award.
Room by room and roof by roof, the poems of Lynn Pattison’s Matryoshka Houses open up those dwellings in which the speaker has lived, and lost, and loved, where the soup contains everything from hard knocks and thorns to the divorce decree, and rooms are “flooded pink with sun through the crabapple.” These are poems that have emerged from a life not only fully lived, but fully seen. The world, here, comes in through the eyes and is sifted through the imagination: “Wide white wings / bloom from either side” of a plow blade, she writes, “as if some/commanding angel sweeps across / the prairie in moonlight delirium.” Pattison’s is a worthy voice to guide us through these disorderly, “illogical days,” this “understory world,” where still the houses of memory sing, in “Calls that reached to the pasture / if they had to”—Here I am.
—Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
Lynn Pattison writes, “Here,” the house sings, “Here I am.” In Matryoshka Houses, she deftly explores how her homes have served not only as vessels for loved ones and the tangle of objects a family accumulates—like records playing on a Victrola and jewelry boxes decorated with dancers—but are also containers for deep emotions and memories. In these graceful poems, she blends her many houses together seamlessly, until, distilled, they become the essence of home, which stands, “steadfast / no matter the weather,” and to which she returns, again and again.
—Kathleen McGookey, author of Instructions for My Impster
Time collapses in this wistful and shimmering collection by Lynn Pattison, in which all the rooms and houses her speaker has lived in become layered like double exposures, a palimpsest, nested Matryoshka dolls. Whether lived in for days, like a hotel room in Cancun that becomes home to a seasick tourist; or decades, like the family homestead where “my father / remembers his father setting logs at dawn,” these lost homes and their furnishings take on mythic significance, resonating with the reader’s own memories. Easily read in one sitting, this chapbook is an ideal introduction to Pattison’s fine work.
—Julie Kane, former Louisiana Poet Laureate and author of Mothers of Ireland
Lynn Pattison’s work appeared, most recently, at Ruminate and Moon City Review. It has also appeared in Smartish Pace, Pinyon, The Notre Dame Review, Mom Egg Review and elsewhere. Previous collections include : tesla’s daughter (March St. Press); Walking Back the Cat (Bright Hill Press) and Light That Sounds Like Breaking (Mayapple Press).
Lynn Pattison’s chapbook, Matryoshka Houses, debuted June, 2020 from Kelsay Press. It can be ordered from the Press or purchased from Amazon or Kelsay Books.
3rd Wednesday’s poem of the week is the 50/50 contest winner from the summer issue of the magazine. David Prather won half the voluntary entry fees and a one year subscription to the print magazine for his poem, Casual Gospel. The summer issue is available free in PDF format at our website or in print at a nominal price from Amazon.
