Stephen Page has a poem published on New Plains Review

Stephen Page has a poem on New Plains Review

Here is the poem:

Punch Clock

Tattler, Tattler, quit telling
your tale; I arrive and find you
in your lounging pants, your horse
unsaddled. Quit looking bleary eyed
at me and saying you arrived just
five minutes ago. Quit. Quit.

The Bug-Sprayers inject their venom
into the air, multi streams of DDM
needle outward like an inside-out
Iron Maiden; the entrapped: cows,
birds, butterflies; the punished:
you and I; the ruined: global atmosphere,
water supplies; the victims: the unfed
of the earth with lies of quick
profit, with promise of a new grain belt.

You who weigh the wheat honestly,
step off the scale “to see my father
in the hospital,” and park your pickup
in front of the couple-hotel while
your wife measures fish portions
for the children at home: I should
believe your numbered cards?

The ants are carnivorous here
where I wait for the wheat to be cut:
From the furrows of your lies
they attack my legs; the three day dead
cow is bones picked clean; red welts
painfully lifting my skin organ, the ribs
a cage of death stink; why did
I park here? Is this really the cow you claim?

Another sixteen-hour workshift, another
no-life dinner alone. Three days
is but a little, even for the vultures
perched on the fenceline, their sclerae red.

New Plains Review Spring 2013 Available on Amazon

Three Stephen Page Poems on South Florida Arts Journal

Stephen Page has 3 Poems published on South Florida Arts Journal.

 

Here are the poems:

The Complexity of Managing Ranch Employees
have you found that simple arithmetic
seems like physics,
or does that not bother you anymore,
only bore you, tire you.
have you finally learned to say,
“this is not my fault.”
have you finally learned
that learning is to save yourself.

On a Winter Walk
Garner some violets,
Teresa said to me,
They are perceptually constant,
Under the trees.

This Morning
This morning
the eucalypti and sycamores
are shrouded in a smoky fog.
Trunks and branches are the horizon,
leaves are ashen sky.
This is good sign,
for fog means moisture,
and it has not rained on Santa Ana
for two months.
The parrots are silent.
Jonathan misses their jazzy symphony.
He hears neither the flute
of the mockingbird
nor the screech
of the baker bird.
He does not see the spread wings
of chimangos overhead,
though one is on the yellow pond
of winter lawn
worming beside a wood dove.
He hears waves crashing
on a shore,
Though that is impossible,
as the sea is 200 kilometers away.
He hears the river lapping
with its salty tongue;
he sees stalks of flamingo legs,
the pink clouds of their bodies
(but the river is thirteen
kilometers away).
He tastes the rain
on his outstretched tongue.
He feels cool drops mist his body.
He stands shirtless outside his office,
engulfed in drought
and cold fog,
knowing that the cows are calving
and that they and the horses
are beginning to show their ribs.

Bio:
Stephen Page is the author of The Timbre of Sand and Still Dandelions. He holds two AAís from Palomar College, a BA from Columbia University, and an MFA from Bennington College. He is the recipient of The Jess Cloud Memorial Prize for Poetry. He loves to teach, ranch, and spend time with his family.

The Future is Happy

by Sarah Sarai
BlazeVox Books
reviewed by Stephen Page

A saxophone in Count Basie’s band. An Ode by Keats. George Harrison’s guitar. Cain. St. Sarai carrying infant Jesus. A Jewish Emily Dickinson hiding in an attic. Moses breaking tablets. Baden-Baden, Germany. Miss Piggy. Tijuana. Jodie Foster. Billy Bob Thornton. Denzel Washington. Ingmar Bergman. Laurence Fishburne. The Rosetta Stone. Superman’s mother. Clark Kent. Orpheus. The Oregon Highway. An angel. The goddess Venus. Jim Thorpe. New York. Rilke. Skin cancer. The Married with Children television series. Jack Kerouac. My Favorite Martian. A Woolworth’s store. James Joyce. Ulysses. Ithaca. Penelope. Helios. Socrates. Kilimanjaro. Jason of the Argonauts. California. Conan Doyle. Jenifer Lopez. The Ritz-Carlton. Strawberries. Woody Allen. A labyrinth. Walt Whitman. Sméagol with his ring in his pocket. Holden Caulfield. Humbert Humbert. Jane Eyre. Mecca. The Zig Zag Man. Such are the many allusions, images, and sounds used in Sarah Sarai’s eclectic collection of poetry, The Future is Happy.

Sarai brings to the reading public a collection of poems that invokes existentialism. There is no future, no past, only the present. Everything is connected. We are only in the now, yet, we are the sum of what we have experienced and what we will be. Happiness is the ideal state of being, but it is a state difficult to achieve. Sarai’s poetry is syllabic, but music is there, the innate beating of language sounds that come from the primitive core of the brain, the rhythms, assonance, and alliteration of language that makes all languages poetic when used well. Sarai often switches view point and narrator voice. One reason is to show the same story from a different point of view; the other is to show the connectedness of all of us here in this dimension on earth. Tonal shifts only show another facet to the whole. The ample collection, sixty-two poems, has no set form, but that is Sarai’s allowance to let each poem be as it is. How do we find happiness? Sarah Sarai leaves that up to the reader by bringing out the emotions that make all of us feel alive.

A Stephen Page poem on Madswirl

Here is the poem:

featured poems on Mad Swirl

Guias

The green guias are paid for.
The seven thin cows
and seven spine-warped bulls
are about to vanish
from our virid pastures.

The Accomplice skipped work today.
He did no show his olive face.
I guess he became weary
of shoveling hen-house shit.
We set his horse free.

My truck wheel fell off:
after driving sixty kilometers
at one hundred thirty kilometers per hour
I turned off the highway upon a dirt road
and felt the thump.

The two calf-killing stallions
were boxed in crates.
and although the Calloused-Hand Crator
displayed coins in his palm
I did not offer the star-marked colts.

The Malingerer extended his sick-leave:
I loom patiently outside his locked window
with a hammer in my hand;
I remove rusty animal traps
from the moonlit afternoon.

I town I errand tools and supplies
and take a coffee-break at El Café Local,
The gossip at the table behind me
is that the Rustler was seen at the stationer—
that his pen had run out of ink.

- Stephen Page

Birth Of Insanity (above) by Johnny Olson, one of over 20 featured artists currently coloring the virtual walls in Mad Swirl’s eclectic electronic collective Mad Gallery. We know you’ll wanna see mo’ fo’ sho’ so move that mad mouse of yours right over here and a-way you’ll GO

Winter News by John Haines (as published on Fox Chase Review)

Winter News by John Haines

Review by: Stephen Page

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Haines Duality

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White men are invading the last of the american wilderness.  They pan for gold, fish, trap, hunt, and cut down timbre to build homes.  During the 1940’s, while Haines is living in Alaska, he sees this happening, and feels it is morally wrong.   In “Winter News,” Haines, with all his good intentions and moral judgment, has a duality about him that maybe even he did not realize.

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‘The House of the Injured’ reveals a part of Haines attitude:

.

I found a house in the forest,

small, windowless, and dark.

.

From the doorway came the close,

suffocating odor of blood

and fur mixed with dung.

.

I looked inside and saw an injured

bird that filled the room,

fluttering against the walls.

.

With a stifled croaking

it  lunged toward the door

as if held back

by an invisible chain:

.

the beak was half eaten away,

and its heart beat wildly

under rumpled feathers.

.

I sank to my knees—

A man shown the face of God.

.

Here Haines shows his reverence for nature and his personal philosophy.  A bird is a part of the larger scheme of things, a religious symbol, a thing that represents God.  The animal has been trapped inside a house.  This house is obviously built by a white person, for since it has windows and doors, it is not typical of the homes built by the then indigenous people of Alaska. The house is a symbolic cage, a deathtrap.  Thus white man is killing a representation of God.

.

In ‘Horns’ we get deeper into the psych of Haines:

.

I went to the edge of the wood

in the color of evening,

and rubbed with a piece of horn

against a tree,

believing the great, dark moose

would come, his eyes

on fire with the moon.

.

I fell asleep in an old white tent.

The October moon rose,

and down a wide, frozen stream

the moose came roaring,

hoarse with rage and desire.

.

I awoke and stood in the cold

as  he slowly circled the camp.

His horns exploded in the brush

with dry trees cracking

and falling; his nostrils flared

as, swollen-necked, smelling

of challenge, he stalked by me.

.

I called him back, and he came

and stood in the shadow

not far away, and gently rubbed

his horns against the icy willows.

I heard him breathing softly.

Then with a faint sigh of warning

Soundlessly he walked away.

.

I stood there in the moonlight,

and the darkness and silence

surged back, flowing around me,

full of wild enchantment,

as though a god had spoken.

.

The narrator of the poem sees a moose and is awed by it.  He believes the sigh of the animal is the voice of a deity.

.

Throughout the collection, there are scenes of white men panning for gold, fishing the seas, hunting, trapping and building houses of timber in a land that was once occupied my animals and indigenous people who lived in sync with the rest of nature.  The indigenous people are almost wiped out, the majority of them lying in graveyards, and their way of life is thus becoming extinct.  Haines believes nature represents God and that humans need to live in sync with it to understand God.  He hates what white men are doing to one of the last places on earth unexploited by greed.  The irony of the whole book is that Haines, or better worded, his narrator, is a white man in the alaskan wilderness who is surviving by hunting, trapping, and living in a house built from cut timber.

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All this taken into consideration, it does not detract from the quality of the poetry in “Winter News.”  These are vivid poems from the Alaskan frontier that put the reader in a metaphysical state with nature.  I sense a deep imagist influence, and find a few romantic and formalist phrasings, yet the poems are unique, the product of a well-read poet working on his own finding his own voice.  Some of the images and phrasings are by now clichéd, but that is only because so many other poets have been influenced by Haines.

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You can buy Winter News here:  

Winter News – Poems

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Stephen wrote this while living over a rickety abandoned supply store amongst the Rocky Mountains of Montana with only a smoke-leaking wood stove for heat and dried beef jerky for sustenance. He brewed coffee and drank water from snowmelt.

This Review first published on Fox Chase Review