Check out this review of To Love the River on The Mark Review! I’m especially happy that the reviewer, who is one of many who are not so enamored of poetry generally, really enjoyed the collection. Please check it out, then check out this page for buying it as well as other information, such as interesting details about the cover artist.
Filed under Uncategorized
The formal poetry website The Chained Muse has published my ghazal “The Triumph of Roses” (reprint) on Christmas Day, a gift and also an auspicious shot of luck for 2019. This link will bring you the Roses Ghazal and also give you my ghazal “In Egypt” with a wonderful and appropriate photo, published there last October. This is an up-and-coming venue for formal poetry. Please check it out!!
Filed under Formal Poetry, Poetry, Publications, Siham Karami poems, Siham Karami poetry
The hyperactive (publishing up a storm) and wonderful site Rhythm & Bones’ zine dedicated to the dark side, Dark Marrow, has published two of my poems: “Metamorphosis” and “Frost My Heart.” These are definitely dark poems, formal ones (a sonnet with variations and a rondeau), which fit the site’s description: “featuring your twisted visions and nightmares, your traumas you can’t shake, the ghosts that haunt your daydreams…” If this is what you need at this moment, there is much more to fit that mood here.
Filed under Formal Poetry, Poetry, Publications, Siham Karami poems, Siham Karami poetry
The marvelous literary zine Off the Coast’s Winter issue is now live with my poem “Out of Many, One.”!! And the title of the issue, “Percussive Wake”, is taken from my poem!
Please check it out. The entire magazine is well worth your time.
Filed under Poetry, Publications, Siham Karami poetry
November has started out as a busy month for my poetry publications, with three fabulous journals publishing multiple poems each, all now live online for November.
Otoliths, “a magazine of many e-things,” publishes experimental poetry of many varieties with an impressively large volume of work, making it an unusual venue for me, but a good home for these particular 3 poems, one of which is entitled “Ode to Ancient Astronaut Theorists.”
Mojave He(art) is a desert themed journal which, although relatively new, already shows promise with fine poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and photography that is a cut above. So I am happy to have three poems in its November issue, which explore the desert theme with the Apollo moon landing, a ghazal about longing and time, and a prose poem in a Middle East setting. (Scroll down to my name to find separate links for each poem.)
And last but definitely not least is the vital and unique online zine Anti-Heroin Chic, where two of my poems have been published, each about very different kinds of love.
Please check out all three places, where you’re likely to find much to enjoy!
Filed under Poetry, Publications, Siham Karami, Siham Karami poems, Siham Karami poetry
My first full-length poetry collection, To Love the River, is now on sale at the publisher Kelsay Books’ website! This is much sooner than I had imagined, months earlier than its projected publishing date, so this is a huge and happy surprise. The book is the culmination of many years’ work, the subject matter spanning a river’s worth of emotions and experience condensed into the craft of both formal and free verse poetry.
The cover art is by the Swedish artist — a pioneer of abstract art pre-Kandinsky! — and mystic Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) whose séance-inspired (and later simply inspired) paintings are finally getting recognition in her first solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. Like her work, my poetry also reflects a subtly spiritual perspective on life.
Here is one sample poem from the book, which echoes the “dawn” theme woven through some of these poems, “The Word for Dawn,” first published in Sukoon journal.
The Word for Dawn
Fajr: the j a mere mirage, light on the tongue,
just melting into r, no vowel between,
bluing into nothing but a turning of the lips.
I hear it like a distant motorcycle,
its street lost in a cricket’s heartbeat,
and I find it leaking tiny drumbeats from
my son’s earbuds fallen from his ear,
buzzing in his sleep. Newborn wasps,
tinny, revving j’s straight through the r’s
that rise and thread their little lights
where teeth touch lips and feel the furry f’s
a darkness, void, a space of hairy night.
A single hair-edge turning from the deep.
The Hobo Camp Review Autumn Issue is now live online with my poem, “Hovland, Minnesota.” This is about the actual town in the far north of Minnesota (close to the Canadian border) which is the closest named place on a map to the cabin where my family used to spend summers when I was a child.
The Hobo Camp Review, with its hobo theme, is a place I like to go to often for writing that validates my vagabond spirit, where campfires are home in a temporary world and often the makeshift feels the most permanent. Please check it out!
Filed under Poetry, Publications, Siham Karami poems
My Ghazal “The Triumph of Roses” is up at Better than Starbucks, in the Rhyming and Formal Poetry section, wherein you will find some fabulous poetry. This issue is also available in print. Please spend a little time there, maybe with whatever beverage you consider better than Starbucks.
Filed under Formal Poetry, Poetry, Siham Karami, Siham Karami poetry
This is a discovery I should have made long ago: Edward Harkness, a poet of place, and so much more, recording solemn and moving histories and keeping an uncommon, quiet faith with the reverence that understands what not to say. I found myself deeply moved by poem after poem. His tone is conversational, elements of the casual somehow imbued with a sense of the sacred. And so one finds truths and openings one otherwise might have missed. He is a teacher, award-winning poet and author of two poetry collections and a number of chapbooks, but most of all a man somehow in touch with his surroundings and aware of both his place and his displacement in them. Let the poetry speak for itself.
Union Creek in Winter
There’s no word for it so far, the word
for what it means to be in love with you
in our sinking world, what it means to hike
through new snow, to hear beneath
the glass of creek ice the flow of winter
percolating its way through the ravine
not quite soundlessly toward lower ground
to join the wild roar of the American River.
The word that means we’ve loved
through the avalanches of our time,
loved while the wars raged, paid for
with our taxes, loved while our loved ones
voted for hatred, for I want the false past I want
what’s coming to me, protected as they’ve been
by their skin white as this very snow draped
on hemlocks in the ravine’s wavering light.
The word that means we’re not alone,
we share that same nature wonder,
for the flicker tapping on a far-off tree,
the delicate calligraphy of a mouse’s
prints along our path, as if Tu Fu
has been here too, who knew, even then,
even in the Tang Dynasty, beauty
leaves behind its faint notations.
The word that means we will go on,
we will follow an earlier trekker’s snowshoe
trail, slog on bundled to keep the chill
from overtaking us, descend again steeply,
then climb again switchbacks above the creek
away from its cold murmurings, to our car
and the long drive back to the war zone
of now. Armed with our little courage,
we must drive straight to the front,
strap on flak jackets and begin the slow
search for survivors, slow search
for the words that might revive them.
Even now we’re feverish to make contact,
to know what to listen for, to learn to hear
those muffled cries from deep in the rubble.
If we knew the words we might save
those most weakened, most in danger of giving up.
If we knew the words we might keep the world,
its rivers, its ice, its bitterroot, its winter wrens,
its hemlocks, its moonlight, its children,
its Shakespeare, its Szymborska, its rosehips,
its green and orange lichens, its Dylan,
its kora players, its humming birds, you,
me, and our Muslim neighbor, Maya, alive.
And this, the title poem of one of his collections:
Saying the Necessary
I read of a Montana man
whose pickup
stalled in the mountains.
Cross-country skiers
found him next spring,
their skis rasping
on the top of his cab
just showing through the snow.
His engine dead, no map,
he’d apparently decided
to wait for help.
His diary calmly records
his life of being lost.
He describes the passing days,
how he rationed his crackers,
an Almond Joy,
built a few small fires at night,
ate his emergency candles,
ice from a pond,
a pine’s green lace of moss.
He hoarded every spark
from his battery.
There’s evidence he wandered
up a nearby ridge.
He might have noticed a marmot,
gold and relaxed on a rock,
or spotted mountain goats
wedged high in grey basalt.
From a pinnacle of broken
lichen-colored scree
he watched the world bend away blue,
rivered with trees.
He might have heard
the whine of a plane
in the next valley,
looking, looking.
Then the cold came.
Frostbite settled the matter
of hiking out.
He wrote detailed accounts
of the weather,
noting the clear, icy air,
little flares of stars
drawing no one’s attention.
Not so frigid this evening.
A later entry read:
Ribbed cirrus clouds moving in.
Then tender goodbyes
to his wife and daughter—
my lilac, my rose.
When the blizzard buried him,
he wrote by his interior lights,
and when the battery failed
he scratched in the dark
a strange calligraphy,
covering the same pages,
the words telegraphic,
saying only the necessary
as he starved.
In the end,
his script grew hallucinatory—
…toy train… …oatmeal…
…farmhouse lights just ahead…—
illegible, finally,
like lines on a heart monitor.
Several pages he tore out and ate.
He must have known
even words wouldn’t save him.
Still, he wrote.
He watched the windshield
go white like a screen,
his hands on the wheel,
no feeling.
He listened to his heart
repeat its constant SOS,
not loudly now,
but steadily—
a stutterer who’s come to love
the sound of his one syllable,
at peace with his inability
to get anything across.
He must have pictured himself
wading through the drifts,
traversing the heartbreaking distance
between voice and any ear,
searching for tracks,
a connector road that leads
down to everyday life.
By glow of moonlight filtered
through snow-jammed windows,
his last act was to place his book,
opened to a page marked Day One,
on the passenger seat beside him.
Timothy Murphy, formalist poet of the heart, will be long remembered for his inimitable style and formal mastery, the sheer volume and energy of his creative output, his contributions to the poetry community, his love of hunting and of the land, his open attitude about being both gay and conservative, and his strongly-felt re-conversion to Catholicism in his later years. One can’t easily sum up a life really, but this thoughtful review of his most recent poetry collection, Devotions (North Dakota University Press), helps. As does this obituary. And maybe the best of all is this interview, where Murphy talks about the moment, quite a miraculous one at that, when everything changed. Inspiring, no matter what your point of view on faith or politics. Beyond that, let his poetry speak:
Agape
The night you died, I dreamed you came to camp
to hear confession from an Eagle Scout
tortured by forty years of sin and doubt.
You whispered vespers by a hissing lamp.
Handlers, allowing you to hike with me,
followed us to the Bad Axe waterfront
down a firebreak this camper used to hunt.
Through all I said you suffered silently.
I blamed the authors of my unbelief:
St. Paul, who would have deemed my love obscene,
the Jesuit who raped me as a teen,
the altar boy when I was six, the grief
of a child chucked from Eden, left for dead
by Peter’s Church and all the choirs above.
In a thick Polish accent choked with love,
Te Dominus amat was all you said.
**************
(Notes:
Pope John Paul II died on April 2, 2005, and that night he visited me in a dream. This dream recurred three times. The last time was April 15, 2007—the night Pope Benedict XVI accosted American bishops over the matter of clerical sexual abuse—when this poem came to me in its entirety. I rose and immediately typed it. In every instance the dream was identical, and John Paul’s words were the same. Te Dominus amat is Latin for “God loves you.”— TM)
*******************
”Mizar” and “Alcor” in Winter
Cirrus dispersed. As a black night grew colder,
clearer, I spied the binary in the handle
of the Big Dipper dangling above my shoulder,
a pinprick twinkling by a blinding candle.
Absent the moon, its boreal corona,
I watched the stars rise east of Ellendale,
Guelph and Ludden, then wheel above Verona
and sleeping friends who farm near Englevale.
A thousand miles of road: I’d shunned the pavement
which bears the burdens I no longer ferry,
the cargo of material enslavement.
Six eagles hunted small game on the prairie.
An Arab prince’s fortunes once were measured
by blooded foals, by sons his wives could dandle,
by tributary quatrains to be treasured
and his eyesight: a pinprick by a candle.
Filed under Formal Poetry, Formal poets, Poetry, Poets, Remembering Poets
