Rob Woodard Commentary

"Port of Long Beach" came out of my day-to-day life. When I find that I've been sitting too long at the computer, or that I just can't stand teaching anthropology and biology for one second longer, I get on my bike and head for the wilds of Long Beach, which usually means a jaunt along the coast. The stupid stinking gray-veined harbor looms like a polluting Goliath over this town. Any Long Beach poet who doesn't incorporate it at least occasionally into his or her work, as the saying goes, is probably a liar or a fool or both.

On "Orange Crush:" Southern California has been founded on lies: invasive plant and animal species, Hollywood films, and the belief that all the water we've stolen from the Owens Valley, Arizona, and Northern California is native to this place and therefore we deserve its bounty. The citrus trees of this region lie at the heart of this scam. This is partially their story, but mostly a fantasy: one lie triumphing over the others, mainly because it's more attractive than its competition. Oh yeah, I sent this poem to Gary Snyder and he said he liked it. This vindicates me as a poet and a man.


Rob Woodard was born in Anaheim, California, back when giants walked the earth and was raised mostly in the nearby Long Beach area, where he still lives today. He is the author of the novel Heaping Stones (2005 Burning Shore Press). His novels What Love Is and Backwaters of Beauty and his poetry book King of Long Beach are trapped in different stages of the endless publication process. His poems and other scribblings can be found all over the web. In a recent interview, Rob said he'd rather be his generation's Brian Wilson than its Charles Bukowski. Though no one really understood what he meant by this, soon after, Bukowski fans burned down his house and raped his girlfriend, just to be on the safe side.

Troy Urquhart Commentary

In 2007, I took part in a panel investigating the issue of tolerance. I was writing about the prisoners held by the United States at Guántanamo Bay, Cuba, and after the panel had ended, I found myself reading Jacques Derrida's Of Hospitality.

About the threshold, Derrida writes: "Desire measures time since its abolition in the stranger's entering movement: the stranger, here the awaited guest, is not only someone to whom you say 'come,' but 'enter,' enter without waiting, make a pause in our home without waiting, hurry up and come in, 'come inside,' 'come within me,' not only toward me, but within me: occupy me, take place in me, which means, by the same token, also take my place, don't content yourself with coming to me or 'into my home.' Crossing the threshold is entering and not only approaching or coming."

Beside the desk in my study, there is a door, framed in wood but mostly glass. Some nights, I leave it open.


Troy Urquhart lives in central Florida and works at Montverde Academy, an independent boarding school where he teaches writing and American literature, mostly to students who aren't American. His work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in places like Tulip, Hobble Creek Review, The Corduroy Mtn., and Willows Wept Review. His chapbook Springtime Sea Bathing is scheduled to appear later this year from Carl Annarummo's small press, The Greying Ghost. He sometimes keeps a blog at http://notesfromthewonderground.blogspot.com/.

Meg Pokrass Commentary

For me poetry is best written in dreams, finding that language. Or when I'm just waking up or exhausted at night - and less aware of making sense or being logical.


Meg Pokrass 's story "Leaving Hope Ranch" in 971 Menu was chosen for Wigleaf 's Top 50, 2009. "Lost and Found," in elimae, was chosen in May 2009 by Storyglossia for Short Story Month showcase. Her many stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gigantic, 3AM, The Pedestal, Toronto Quarterly, Mud Luscious, Juked, and many others. Meg serves as a staff editor for SmokeLong Quarterly, and is currently mentoring with Dzanc's Creative Writing Sessions. Her blog, with prompts and writing exercises can be found here.

Luca Penne Commentary

I took a one-day workshop with a poet named Jeff Friedman, and he assigned us all to write a poem based on a color. Since it was spring, green naturally came to mind. I wrote a first draft very quickly and then in my next drafts green began to take on other meanings. I'm out of work again. I earn a living as a carpenter on projects like building barns. The great money rip off by the banks and Wall Street has made it impossible for me to earn a decent living. I can no longer afford to pay rent on my one-bedroom apartment so I've had to move in with a friend of my mother's. I guess that's why the cold hard cash image comes in at the end. I discovered that ending in the final draft. As the poem progressed, the color just kind of opened up for me. In successive drafts, I was able to find the rhythm, the music of the color. That’s important because I want my prose poems to be poems, not just stories.


Luca Penne runs a ski lift and builds barns in the summer, when there are barns to be built.

Sean Lovelace Commentary

I would say #27 came from the tension between family life and artistic life. Usually I drink when I feel this presence. This time I wrote a poem. I also think Sexton had great hair. I wish I had been her neighbor.

# 22. Well, I hesitate to discuss this one. Advice implies you know something. I know nothing. But this poem summarizes the best of the nothing I know. Feel free to ignore.


Rose Metal Press will release Sean Lovelace's flash fiction chapbook, How Some People Like Their Eggs, in summer 2009. He blogs at seanlovelace.com

Sean Patrick Hill Commentary

The ekphrastic poem "Self-Portrait as George Gisze, Merchant" comes from the 1532 oil-on-wood portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger. What was stunning about the portrait was simply the fact that the subject looks more or less like me. Or, exactly like me, depending on who you ask - and if you ask my wife, who first showed me the painting, she'll side with absolute likeness.

What also struck me was the Latin motto seen printed on the piece of paper hung on the wall, which I used as the epigraph, and is translated as "No pleasure without sorrow." This is a classic motif of the time, the worldly success presented with a reminder that it is ultimately temporary, fragile.

Several oddities are present, too; note the strange dip in the fabric to the lower right, almost an optical illusion, a kind of black hole into which all of his "tools of the trade" are slipping. Also, that glass vase really is "precariously placed," as if a single movement would send it to the floor, wrecked. And then, of course, there is the look of melancholy, almost. It is very subtle, but present.

All this was how I felt as I was attending my MA program at Portland State University (and this poem was part of my thesis). I felt like what I was doing was ultimately futile, that though I'd had some success it felt largely empty. That, and at 35 all I could think of was the debt I'd accumulated from tuition.

Craft-wise, I have to say I really like the line "There is wear along my collar." Why? Because it's just so simple, but to me it speaks the proverbial volumes. James Wright was quoted as saying -and I paraphrase - that the only way he could write was flatly. Yet, this is what I learned from Wright - the flat statement is far more poetic than your typical flighty line. Thus, I tried to make the poem (aside from a few embellishments) as flat-toned and sharp as I could.

The poem really is a "Self-Portrait" projected onto Gisze. I like the idea of that kind of substantial art, a long-lasting work that preserves a long-lasting human feeling of futility. Not that I necessarily feel that way now, but I can be sure it haunts me at times.


Sean Patrick Hill lives in Portland, Oregon, for now, and is a soon-to-be father. New poems will be appearing in New York Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, Diode, and Copper Nickel.

Molly Gaudry Commentary

These poems are excerpted from my forthcoming novella-in-verse, we take me apart (Mud Luscious Press 2009). Now in its sixth- and final - draft stages, this manuscript has undergone substantial revisions and bears no resemblance (but for its title) to the original. Drafts one through five, however, got me here - gave me this speaker’s voice (which was initially inspired by the narrator of Lydia Millet’s novel, My Happy Life), and brought me to this particular way of structuring the text: if this were more traditional prose, then where there should be commas, periods, or question marks are where I instead insert line breaks. The comma breaks, I feel, lend the “prose” a breathless, rushed quality, while also retaining space for pause; and the period and question mark breaks, I think, are here to jar the reader from the breathlessness so as to invite her or him to stop every so often, to return, re-read, and reflect. Overall, I like the speed with which the prose can be read; and an added benefit (in terms of character development), as a result of forgoing traditional exposition, is that although this speaker exists to tell her story within a certain time frame (yes, there is a narrative arc here), there is no way of knowing for sure how much time passes from this novella’s beginning to its end - a minute, perhaps, or less, or, on the other hand, maybe decades.

I am both nervous about admitting what I have to say next, and excited by it: this draft operates entirely as a word-association project. (Early drafts’ narratives felt too forced, and I wanted to free myself of “having” to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end. I wanted the writing -the actual sitting down to write every day - to determine the narrative. I had the speaker’s voice, I had the emotional core of why she was telling her story, and I had the structure: all I needed was a constraint that, oddly enough, could free. So I turned to Gertrude Stein and Tender Buttons. I had thirty-six chapters, so I made a list with one through thirty-six on the left-hand side. I opened Tender Buttons, and I started writing the nouns and adjectives, in order and as they appeared, vertically on my list. The first word on the number-one line was “carafe,” the first word on the number-two line was “blind,” and the first word on the number-three line was “glass,” and so on. The idea was to use all the words in Tender Buttons, but by the time I got through “Food,” I had over fifty words on each line. I stopped with “less,” the final noun in “Food.” (Perhaps one day I will write a sequel inspired by “Rooms.”) In any case, I will share with you here the words from Tender Buttons that inspired these four poems (which are all on my list’s fifth line): in the poem “gratitude,” the words are cousin, squeezing, and cut; in “mission,” the words are piano, actual, direction, and purse; in “courage,” the words are cool, gracious, leaning, steady, remarkable, sewing, and lace; and in the poem “bouquet,” no words were used; “bouquet” emerged, like so many other poems in this project, as a response to the others.

My final note: these four sections do not appear consecutively in we take me apart, and I like to think that a reader could take any random sampling of the sections and put them together to create a cohesive, self-contained storyline. The multi-textuality of this final draft is exactly the type of organic byproduct that I hoped would occur when I, in desperation, asked Tender Buttons to rescue and guide me away from what I had when I knew it was not working.


Molly Gaudry publishes other writers' books at Willows Wept Press, edits Willows Wept Review, co-edits Twelve Stories, and is an associate editor for Keyhole Magazine. Find her online at http://mollygaudry.blogspot.com/.