dan raphael
dan raphael's most recent books are In the Wordshed, from Last Word Press, and Maps Menus Emanations, from cyberwit. More recent poems appear in Impspired, Mad Swirl, Lothlorien, Otoliths and A Too Powerful Word. Most Wednesdays dan writes & records a currents event poem for The KBOO Evening News in Portland, Oregon.
The language is pyrotechnic, mind-expanding. With 64 poems it might be the new I-Ching, treating the dictionary like a bundle of yarrow stalks—pull carefully, you have nothing to lose but your illusion of limits.
The deception of labels can be used self-consciously, provocatively. When you hold one mirror against another there can be many different results, from infinite repetition to out of focus darkness.
When reading a poem, or a book of poems, based on other material, does the reader need to be familiar with that material? Is this why ekphrastic poems are often published with a picture of the work of art that inspired the poem?
The poems in Other Sacred give us many colorful pieces with a wide range of observations and wonderings. There’s a whole section on jazz and its makers. And throughout the book are the shadows and results of man’s interactions with nature.
Along with being very funny, Cheches is very inventive and also writes with great economy. He has the skill of a magician, surprising and amusing the reader with his verbal sleight-of-hand and crisp wit.
But the full, necessarily subjective, effect of each piece—the elements and their arrangement—takes the work to another mind-space, a different perceptual dimension, at times ineffable but always communicating.
Apophallation Sketches: A Theater of Affective Extremes (j/j hastain, MadHat Press, 2016). [“Then suddenly one slug gnaws off its partner’s or its own penis, . . .That act is apophallation: take a gulp of ephemeral air, then chomp down, amputate your lover’s (or your own) dick.”]
you can tear down a house
but its crumbled soul will infest what’s built upon
cross-bred into apartments and inconsistent utilities
the rain curious about where it’s never been
About four years ago, I did five readings in Louisiana and Alabama with Wendy Taylor Carlisle and Jeff Weddle, arranged by publisher Jonathan Penton. Poems I can hear or read a few times and still enjoy and find nuance in are hard to come by, and Wendy and Jeff were bringing those in the tour.
rest your bones by the fire, hang your flesh by the door
wind hasn’t the strength to come in, muscles would unfurl
and spread from wall to wall but bones want to be legible
through the cloud ceilings, when angelic satellites
come to identify us and hollow our bones so we can fly
cause resilience is fertile, imbued to bursting
without braking, so much a skin can hold on its surface
waiting for the next waft or rivulet, where air and water
co-fervesce, no need to separate the crystals from the solution,
curdling is just one way: engage marry ferment and proliferate
One T leads to another
the few hills left will collapse soon i’ll
keep gong 'til i’m asked who i am
the atm spat my card back at me
the bird that’s been following since reno isn’t a bird
Grabill samples widely across the here and now, the American landscape, the landscape of human consciousness, a scaping that moves through time, species and possibilities.
The sky’s been paved and i have no traction, standing or credit
transparent doesn’t mean empty as opaque doesn’t guarantee content,
light that’s never received, so many phone calls passing through me
must be a couple ideas, how to increase signal strength
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