Category: Uncategorized

Poet Interview #15 -Troy Cabida

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? At what age did you start writing? Have you always written poetry? Who/what first inspired you to start writing? Who are your favorite poets?

I started writing poetry when I was fifteen years old and was going through what might be the first time I’ve ever felt heartbroken. My entire life was going through such a transitional phase that I needed to find something to help vent in a way that’s harmless and progressive for the healing process. I ended up writing a lot of sad and emotional poetry that I’m glad I didn’t send out to magazines. And as I grew older and saw and learnt more about the world my poetry became more positive, more balanced and something that’s become a huge part of my identity.

Music has actually become more of an inspiration to me than poetry when I started. I wanted to find stories that I could relate to and learn from styles that attracted me, and I found them through pop and underground Filipino music from musicians like June Marieezy, Karylle, Curtismith and Bamboo. Only a couple of years later I found poets that I could connect with.

My favourite poems come from Anthony Anaxagorou, Juan Miguel Severo and Marilyn Monroe. There’s a wonderful poet out there named Robert Eric Shoemaker whose debut collection I had the honour of editing and his style is very, very fluid and colourful. I’m a huge fan of poets that write in a more conversational style and can manipulate wordplay.

How do you first start writing a poem? Does it come to you out of the blue, or do you have a set time where you meet with your Muse each day and let the words just … come? Has your idea of what poetry is changed since you began writing poetry?

I wish I had a writing schedule to follow because a lot of articles online say that it’s really important for writers and it, at least in my opinion, gives you a better chance of getting more work done, but writing a poem is quite a random process for me.

Either I think of a line or think of an interesting wordplay and then I keep that on my phone for a while or I sit down, open a blank screen and just write whatever it is I’m feeling. When a song or a show hits a nerve in me that I never knew I had, I end up writing something about that or when I want to preserve a personal memory, I work around it and it ends up a poem that I get to keep forever.

Poetry used to be difficult for me to understand and I thought you need to have a degree to sink into it properly but while growing up I realised that it’s just as rough and dirty and rewarding as any other craft out there. You can get really brutal and honest with it and usually that’s where the best ones come out. Now there’s so much diversity in poetry today as well that makes me want to become a part of it even more.

I realised that in order to write a stable of varied poems that people will also connect with I need to live life and to always be in the moment because essentially you’re capturing life through words, something that I thank the craft for every single day.

Are you on Facebook or Twitter or any other social media? Does that fit into your writing life, and if so, how?

I have Twitter and a profile page on Facebook just to keep my personal stuff and my writing separate. Being on social media also helps me find journals and websites that have current calls for submissions and some looking for writers and editors so I think social media’s really helpful in that way.

Do you have a writing group or community of writers you share your work with? Who are they? What are you reading right now?

I’m currently going through a lot of writer groups or classes available around my area because I’d really like to have some feedback from fellow writers. I used to be in a writer’s group when I was back in sixth form but it was short-lived and since then I’ve always wanted to be a part of a community like that.

I’m currently reading Mia Alvar’s In The Country, a collection of short stories about Filipino Overseas Workers all around the world and how being abroad has changed their lives and relationships with people both with them and back in their motherland.

What words of encouragement can you offer other poets who are trying to get their work noticed?

It’s always an enriching experience to volunteer editing for a magazine or something like that because you get to look at a poem from a different angle and you end up learning more about your own and how you can improve by reading many different kinds of poems.

When submitting work, always find the literary magazine that is a match for your poem; don’t do it the other way around. Follow lots of journals and websites on their social media platforms and subscribe to their mailing list to always be updated with what’s going on with them and if there’s anything that you might be interested in.

And lastly, write about what you feel needs to come out from your system and write what YOU want to write and not what you feel the world wants out there. Remember to not be afraid of getting honest and brutal when you find bits of yourself between the lines; usually your best work lies in poems that you weren’t comfortable writing.

A Precarious Tilt

Smoke & Mirrors
by Rehan Qayoom

 

            So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

            So long lives this, and this gives life to thee,

 

                                William Shakespeare.  Shakespeare’s Sonnets. (Thomas Thorpe, 1609).

 

Sans toi, les émotions d’aujourd’hui ne seraient que la peau morte des émotions d’auterfois.

 

Hipolito.

 

Can we only love

Something created in our own imagination?

Are we all in fact unloving and unlovable?

Then one is alone, and if one is alone

Then lover and beloved are equally unreal

And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.

 

T. S. Eliot.  The Cocktail Party.  (1949).

 

I

 

Tonight the moon reminds me so much of you

It is as lonely as the night is making me

Penetrating the mind with its black fantasia

Learning me how Mir was moonstruck for Mah

So there are no words but the memory surviving yet as in a chrysalis:

You dancing widdershins naked in the snow, prancing

Jigging on a wibbly wobbly bridge

Swinging and unafraid to risk a fall

 

They laugh at me that sometime did me seek,

But once at a party I overheard 2 fictionary beaux mondes

“Ought you to wear a skirt with legs like that?”

I laughed like there’s no tomorrow

And in short, I was afraid.

 

Woman creates so that she may destroy

Beauty’s arch-rival: time – Subdued into a diorama of death

The drowned belle de la Seine humming

(Unknown who saw or met her, saw her weep)

To have but not to keep

 

The mouth in the mouth

Under the mouth

Is the round tuffet that becomes us

Because it doesn’t have to, because

It can because it is

The unreal and the real

 

So these are the roots that grasp at the fly in aspic

Clutch at the crystalline moon in a spray of sea-mist

 

II

 

So you were your own Church

Your religion was Love.

Its sacrificial murder –

That killing in heaven –

Was flow of passion here on earth

Where your kiss, your real lips,

And your words

Were the blessing.

 

Ted Hughes.  ‘Religion’.  Collected Poems. Edited by Paul Keegan. (Faber & Faber, 2003).

 

… Tu se’ ombra vedi.

… Puoi, la quantitate

Comprenderde l’amor chi temi scalda,

Quando dismento nostra vanitate

Trattando l’ombre come cosa salda

 

[… “For shade thou art and look’st upon a shade”

“… Now thou’lt know

How large and warm my love about thee clings

When I forget our nothingness, and go

Treating these shadows like material things.”]

 

                                Dante Alighieri. Divina Commedia: Purgatorio.  Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers.  Dante – The Divine Comedy ii: Purgatory. (Penguin                         Classics, 1955).

 

Love answers all the ogress’ grave questions

Offering even as counter-question (a salve), itself in a frisson

Saying “Silence and I speak the same language, share one quiddity

I, knowing my incapability

Interlock fingers on Imagination Road

But if holiness is a mystery

Corruption is a mystery

Sin is a mystery

You and I are history”
Love does not question

Love does not reason

It survives

The headaches, the worries, the vague, the vogue

It is all there is or ever was or will be

It is everything I know

It is what remains of us

It is God

Behind a caboose

It is death, haunted by hostile shadows

(And death is not the enemy

Time is the enemy)

Lives, the Life-in-Death, an antevasin

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

The fire and the rose are in symbiosis as one

 

Sometimes love is unable to share

Is delicate and vulnerable

Cannot show wishes, tell desires, touch

Nor share a joy to the senses

Far greater than makeshift individual pleasure to the spirit

Though living with oneself does not make one less human

 

So you are a gazelle of light all by itself

Your own muse

Your most beautiful poem

Yesterday’s dream

Was love

Too much love

In every sacred place

Of your ‘Jour-Nuit’

 

I am not going anywhere

Because I am already there.

 

            Love is you

            You and me

 

Love is what we cannot be

‘I am you,

you are me.

I am a tree.

We …’

Love you love me

Love is lonely

Love me and give me

Life – Its poison – Love me or kill me

 

Only love

Can justify the art in verse

The just and the unjust

The intended and the intent

Jackknife at the diabolical form

Of the devil’s opus in Pandemonium

I know what it is

Did nobody tell you?

This is what it’s all about, what were you expecting?

It is the only way to go, you know

Echoic: the music playing

The screen flickering

And our first meeting.
Awaits (from profundity) with baited breath

Its turbulent exertion welcome

To the garden

In the garden

Under the rose-garden

As the Earth’s axis tilts towards the sun, tilts away

 

—————–

 

Rehan Qayoom is a poet of English and Urdu, editor, translator and archivist, educated at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has featured in numerous literary publications and performed his work internationally. He has published 2 books of poetry and several works of prose. www.rehanqayoom.weebly.com

Poet Interview #14 – Rehan Qayoom

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? At what age did you start writing? Have you always written poetry? Who/what first inspired you to start writing? Who are your favorite poets?

I write poetry in English and Urdu.  I started writing at the age of 10 and haven’t stopped since – allowing for prolonged bouts of writer’s block – I am primarily a poet but also write prose and book reviews, adaptations of Urdu poetry and I edit and archive things.  My inspiration has always come out of my life, my surroundings and my people.  The list of my favourite poets is colossal so I shall spare you!

How do you first start writing a poem? Does it come to you out of the blue, or do you have a set time where you meet with your Muse each day and let the words just … come? Has your idea of what poetry is changed since you began writing poetry?

Lana Del Rey said ‘My muse is very fickle.  She only comes to me sometimes, which is annoying.’[1]  I would say that the Muse always come out of the blue in the unlikeliest of places at the least appropriate times.  I find that I can work best from dawn onwards, as the day gets on the motivation decreases.  Though I do get the odd days/nights when I work non-stop to get something accomplished (while the inspiration lasts) that is nearly ready but which I have been putting off for too long but sadly, those times are few and far between! These days my poems usually begin their genesis as words or phrases in the notepad on my smartphone or as they have always done on scraps of paper which are usually lost and which I sometimes have to waste time trying to recover.  I write on anything that is nearest because the longer I leave it the more there is a danger of it being forgotten.  There seems to be a secret law of nature for distractions and diversions set to occur at such times: for the phone to buzz (never otherwise as I don’t communicate by phone) or someone (from Porlock) would be knocking at the door (I’m a recluse and can go easily unvisited for months on end).  I do have some neglected notebooks but they rarely get written in.  A poem would sometimes come to me whole but that is a rare occurrence.  Usually there are around a dozen drafts (more for the longer poems I have been writing lately such as ‘Smoke & Mirrors’ the final draft of which was completed in a laborious 18-hour non-stop jaunt).  My method of writing prose is very different: I read everything there is to read about what I am writing and write down the relevant information and references, then I start writing whilst making notes in the margins as I go along which is all copied onto neat drafts that become untidy very quickly and so on.  There are usually several drafts of these too.  This haphazard method of writing can be very frustrating and I have tried to be more organised and lineal but it just doesn’t cut it for me.

I don’t think my idea of poetry has changed radically over the years except that the internet has given me access to a wider range of poets.

Are you on Facebook or Twitter or any other social media? Does that fit into your writing life, and if so, how?

I am on Facebook and Twitter et al but I have a love-hate relationship with social media that is conflictive: literature offers a one-to-one relationship with people one does not have to meet in real life, the internet gives people a false sense of intimacy with those they do not know.  I have a website and an email, I attend literary events and give readings and meet other writers and audiences but I feel we live in a changing world where the social networks demand more and more of our time and I am weary of and bored by people who need to publicise every minute detail of their lives, what they are wearing or eating or what their pets are doing every minute of the day.  It might work for some but as a writer I find it is too much distraction and too intrusive to one’s privacy to be constantly available every moment of the day.  If I were to do that then when would I find the time to do the writing?

Do you have a writing group or community of writers you share your work with? Who are they? What are you reading right now?

I used to attend poetry workshops early in my career but I’m pretty much a one-man job which can be troublesome at the best of times.  I was recently invited to join the lovely Poets and Dreamers.

What words of encouragement can you offer other poets who are trying to get their work noticed?

Keep trying.

[1]  Lana Del Rey, (22nd October 2013). http://www.nylon.com/articles/lana-del-rey-november-cover

Nostrovia! Poetry’s 2015 Chapbook Contest: Submissions Have Opened!

Nostrovia! Poetry is preparing for its third round at the NYC Poetry Festival by hosting a free Chapbook Contest. Three winners will be chosen, each with a chapbook debuting at the NYC Poetry Festival + the option to hit the stage to represent Nostrovia! & themselves. Submissions are being accepted 3/23/15 + 3/24/15 only. This is a two day flash submission call. Poetry + prose + hybrids & experimental are accepted. All entries are free. Contributors receive 25 physical copies. More info below:

Nostrovia! Tavern

Hi Everyone! Jeremiah and I are thrilled to announce that the floodgates have opened for Nostrovia! Poetry’s 2015 Chapbook Contest!  It is free to submit your manuscripts for print publication + debut at the 2015 NYC Poetry Festival, where you will have the option to represent yourself & Nostrovia! on stage / our vendor table.

Full details here (main site sub guidelines) and here (Advanced Submission Call write up).

Deadline: You will have until the end of Tuesday, March the 24th (at midnight, PST) to submit your chapbook!

Send your excellent work to [email protected]

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Nil By Mouth (4 Poets)

Smoking Your Mother’s Effigy

The other day I almost popped a pervert 100 percent if I had a gun
I would have done it.
I always ride w my hood up.
I always ride down the alleys.
I always take the long way.
That gives my ex-boyfriend enough
Reason to blame me
If I get raped
100 percent I would have popped that ***** too.
F w me. F w me. Im begging you to try to
F w me.
I’m smoking ur mothers effigy.
I’m chillin in the back of ur AA meetings
Pick up a white chip bitxh court mandated u aint good for shit.
I don’t think I believe in god anymore
I don’t think I wanna
talk anymore
Today my plans are to not
Get scared when they call my
phone.
Today my plans are to not
smoke crack at my grandmas house.
Miami you suck I wanna die.

______________

ether

I used to huff a lot of ether
and walk around my house
with the soaked sleeve of my
misfits hoodie up to my
Nose.
The house was usually empty,
my parents were never there.
so I was pretty unnoticeable,
Until the my face got
irritated or until
I’d pass out unattended
on the kitchen floor
I won $40,000 in horse races
gone out of my mind in another
Dimension. I know how to
gamble now, and when the odds
Aren’t in ur favor and u get it
You win big.
but you can really only press ur luck so much.

Kailey Borrego “Daddy says I could maybe be the voice of my generation if I just stop smoking pot. Miami, Fla.”
_____________

17

i remember 17 as a good age and i don’t know why
i just know it was dotted all over with you
the way those hills were dotted all over with us
and not much else, fleeting classroom bells on
mountain bikes, retiring from our futures,
falling down the same knolls convicts climb to freedom
like the knees we knew we’d break,
i remember you wresting the flask from me,
sucking it like an orange inches from my lips
eyes pinning me to the cows skirting the trees
divining cow sleep,
i remember the shape
they made the moment you edged the flask away to tell me
“i think we’re gonna be losers all the rest of our lives”
and how it felt so much better back then
the shape of the kisses they formed,
framing lips to cremate and bury a thousand times in my neck,
and you finally broke your knee a week later
when you’d lose one of your crutches and i’d carry you to your car to
go off and graduate
i remember the way you winced when it pressed
like a murderer’s spade into mine when i fucked you
in the guest room on your eighteenth birthday
and i stopped to whisper you as many sorry’s as i could
and you pressed it harder and yanked out tufts of my hair
like i was something taking some kind of flight and
for months after we didn’t wonder what it’d be like
to be on acid we just brushed legs brushed edges
let ourselves get jagged
i remember your hands in my hair then
as i remember your hands in my hair
as i vomited out a twenty minute handle of burnette’s
the night my grandmother passed away
when you found me minutes before the cops would have
half naked and swearing in the middle of jefferson
i remember your face being shredded by the violence
of the light i kept dim in alliance with my eyes,
i remember the punch i poured the morning of the first day
of your spring break, hanging up banners
and setting out speakers, tieing ribbon on a goldfish bowl,
doing math over and over and over,
checking my phone over and over and over.
i remember when you said you couldn’t make it home,
like i remember hearing his laugh in the background,
like the classroom bells we learned to dart from instinctually,
remember thinking that this ain’t no fucking
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Fucking Mind
and I’m never gonna get to sleep again,
like i remember asking you why on the phone
……….
why on the facebook chat i’d touched 37 times since you last did
(a name turns gray)
why by the fountain outside the coffee shop
where our parents used to drop us off on weekends
with money for drinks and cheesecake
where we’d make up stories about the eels beneath the ripples
that we swore longed to be our anklets
“i’ve outgrown you”

i don’t know why 17 is enveloped, postage stamped with the
fucking essence of nostalgia inside every version i fashion of this head
especially on the days when i replay that 18 scene
and “i’ve outgrown you”
starts to sound like “i don’t wanna be a loser anymore”
but i’m still falling off my bike, circling round those hills
where you lost your mind and i lost my soul on my way home from work
stirring cows and escaping bells that are never going to ring again
and escaping bills and escaping plans to do something better and
escaping the badge from your job at the old folks place that you left
and which i have yet to fucking throw away and escaping stirring old me’s and escaping writing lovesick shit about what i don’t love anymore but can’t make go away and stirring cows and
escaping bells that are never going to ring again
or at least i think i am

Adam Sharpe had a daydream about his third grade teacher contracting some improbable form of cancer and discovering she had six days left to live when he was eight years old. He documented the experience in a shorthand form that a decade and a half later his peers would start referring to as poetry. After spending the summer of 2014 stranded seven states away from home, living in a car with a blown head gasket, he’s taken up a nomadic sortof lifestyle which he’s currently working on transcribing the experience of in his prose.

_____________

A Cute Little Fort

A cute little fort on the couch
A beautiful day outside
Which I watch from inside
Naked
And scared
For my love won’t let us out to play
Until we play his games first
Switched now
My friend waiting her turn
While he makes me look down
“Do you see” he asks
For we are connected
His small size
Is still large for my
Child body
Dark and Humid
Why is it hot?
Feelings of pleasure and sickness
I want to cry and scream
For so many different reasons
For I loved him, didn’t I?
He said it was so
I was an adult now
And these were the games
The adults had to play
New sensations
Awful and good
Sickening and wonderful
Oh what strange new feelings
Switched again
I watch my friend blow him
Demands me to watch
So I could learn how
‘What does it taste like?’
Was the only question on my mind
As I sat and waited for him to be done
And now it’s my turn
He gives his demands
“Just taste it he says’
But the slim pale tube of flesh
Has no appeal
I shake my head
He insists
I try my best
But it seemed so stupid
To put that in my mouth
And he lets it go
How ‘kind’ of him
And this goes on
Switching and waiting
And I as I wait
Feeling the filth of my body
How gross my insides have become
I sit and wonder
In my childlike stupidity
How much I loved him

Jennifer Joann Miller is twenty years old and graduated from CIVA Charter High School in 2012. She currently live with her parents, helping care for the animals and doing art projects. She spends time writing, illustrating a kids book, and trying to learn Japanese.

_____________

un/finished…

….but the rumor is you may be a heartbreaker. You’re your own worst enemy incarcerated inside your mind. A supercell terror of hallucinated happenings. There you are sitting pixie pretend happy, but you carry the keys and they click softly…sadly…none fit properly into your dreaming schemes. You want to believe in make believe. ‘Sex is religion and love is a series of bombs dropping.’ Life sweeps you away into a town only you know. And you wonder, how do I escape now……

Like you aren’t me, said the vixen to the maven, describing every man. The human condition is overrated. We should gather together and slit our wrists. hal·le·lu·jah. All of our letters link together and the message includes, fuck you. This is the secret code. Amongst the other thoughts streaming in hi-definition this is the lurking demon. We are the std, the spreading disease. There must be a clue leading to somewhere so we think. Self Actuality. Here we are procreating our way into planned pregnancies, oops babies, and ones that never existed. A goal is to overcome the alone. Our prayer is please let me age gracefully or die glorified. The steps include self induced negativity. My revelation is that blasphemy is our ambrosia and we should all be reading the Devil’s Dictionary and completing the five steps in the grieving process faithfully. Whether it is for the shock value or we just lie there military prone, the union is our addiction to painful pleasure. The many things those could possibly be. We ache for the belladonna, the cake of two flavors. Please sir deliver me up the accidental right into the solar plexus. Just.to.feel.alive. I’ll suck up my problems into bloated exclamation points and exchange formality for sin. Sell. Sing the pain. Just to write the reason and paint the confusion, I want to feel. I want to look at pictures of myself before during and after and know that when captured in picture…….i think we all remember as we glance at frozen time…that the expression on a face is worth it for being a part of the human damn condition. Call me a liar, let’s trade keys. One of yours just might fit.

_____________

Debut

i have an affinity for
the
shy way
sly way
trouble finds me everyday
in the form of mouths
that misinterpret their own stories
while blowing me kisses in the wind

i am a confessional for all the truths
given
to me

I like to think I land on my two feet
but flat on my back I am
gazing at stars
star gazing
wish
wish
wishing on stars
but I find myself
counting on sheep instead.
baa baa-ing overtures
of latin lullabys
like la la la
implying forever
as if forever could work
me down to bare skin
the sound is akin to the drone of bad cable television
like the wah wah wah
bleed out
of
silence
pregnant with words
left
said

my last dalliance
was with the devil himself
it was as if death was trying to catch
me
run a finger down a shivering spine
to tell me
never trust
me
telling me
not to slow up
catch me
enchant me
seduce and move me
mentally capture and forever change me
maybe
with this ghb
i got ahold of
that was the venom of his kiss.
shy way
sly way
of passing it to me
the question then
did I willingly give in?

because
I have an affinity for
I have taken a liking to
my battles
with
weaponry
making me a competent adversary

Debuting
brand new
my sharpest blade for you

Dancing under the glow of streetlights, the soft noises breathed latin into my every inhale. Exhaled the bliss, the toxic parts of …….. time fast forwarding and rewinding. In this daze of me,

a fairy’s imagination in the sky

my own personal delight

naked upon the tree of life

crucifying the concrete

on my knees

smooth skin on rough terrain

I was

a masochist

my mantra

yes please

I was

Permanent in dusky cemeteries

Mental tombs, married to the graves

poets mind

shadow play

mood swings & blindly writing

Running

Tripping

over the same rough terrain

about Rachael Delamar “The formula for giving in: blood.splatters & heart.matters. I have always been obsessed with the he and she. Which has led me down many light vs dark alleys of discovery…… Some things have a way of not letting you divert your gaze, convincing you to investigate, though you know you should pull out. The carnal connotation is a studded collar and leash, a master of enslavement. The safe word is forgotten or it was screamed then blurred by the air moistened with resonating moans. Immorality exudes and wrong becomes right. Sanity melts into dementia. This fatal voice murmurs and echoes deep, in a lullaby, whispering eyes to fall hypnotized. This is a diversion, the ultimate Con, I have won before the equal sign claims the battle has only begun. an assaulting FETISH, the engagement of you vs me. My creation of poetry.”