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Dear Poets, Welcome to the March 2005 issue of Poetry Life & Times (For those of you reading this on a mirror site and not poetrylifeandtimes.com, click here). This month's interview features Paula Brown, poet, publisher and Editor of thepeoplespoet.com. Featured Poets include: Jean Hull Herman, Deborah P Kolodji, Helga Ross and Jim Dunlap. Resident Poets feature Robin Ouzman Hislop, Richard Vallance, Jan Sand and Sara L. Russell. See below Featured Poets for the link to this page.

In the Vallance Review for March 2005, Richard's Review No. 43 features Edna Saint Vincent Millay's most famous sonnet collection: Fatal Interview. A fantasy interview with Edna is also included. Fans of The Perils of Norris cartoon: You can buy Norris merchandise for home and office, including apparel and stationery... Click here to visit the store at CafePress.com. More goodies will be added as soon! My own poetry can be found on AuthorsDen, these days. The links in the left-hand column of my pages include books and articles as well as poetry. Some of the articles give advice on making chapbooks, or finding publishers - and there is even an item on ghosts. My latest e-book: Worlds Inside The Head, is now available, featuring animated poetry pages, short stories, video & audio recitals, plus pages in PDF format. Click here to scroll down to the animated ad at the bottom of the page, and click the link to find out more. NEW - Poetry Life & Times Mobile Phone Pages + Free Ringtones & Wallpapers! We now have new mini-sized Poetry Life & Times supplement pages for mobile phones, which include information on the main site, occasional interviews, short poems + free ringtones and wallpapers. If you have a WAP-enabled mobile phone with a colour screen, point your mobile's browser at these pages (on your mobile you can usually omit http//:): www.poetrylifeandtimes.com/pltmobile/index.htm www.poetrylifeandtimes.com/pltmobile/ringtones.htm www.poetrylifeandtimes.com/pltmobile/wallpapers.htm Ringtones are both classical and new original music (my own). Wallpapers are mostly from The Perils of Norris cartoon. Any comments on this issue or back issues can be emailed to me on the link at the bottom of the page. Announcements are always welcome (brief if possible), you can also promote poetry books here. Poetry submissions should be in plain text in the body of an email, with a small jpeg author picture attached, also a bio, with the URLs of any ezines mentioned, so that they can be shown as links. This increases the chance of inclusion, especially for late submissions. Pictures are best at a maximum of 520 pixels across, otherwise they take ages to arrive by email, especially in bitmap or TIFF format. I recommend that poets click the submissions link on our main page, for full guidelines, and please, always use a spellchecker. Poets can submit previously-published work here. If another editor likes it, there's a chance we'll like it too. Best Regards,

JEAN HULL HERMAN Jean Hull Herman's first book, Starving For The Marvelous, is again available - the first printing had sold out. See her web site www.jeanhullherman.com for order sheet. She has chosen to be an instructor at Delaware Technical and Community College, tutor at Educational Services in Wilmington, and is at work on her second book, Jerry Springer as Bulfinch. Jeans' new career is a resumption of an old one: performing her work and giving speeches on poetry, for the Delaware Humanities Forum and for others as asked. Talking money here! She is on sabbatical from Delaware Technical and Community College, and determined to finish Jerry Springer As Bulfinch.

SESTINA: JERRY SPRINGER AS BULLFINCH © Jean Hull Herman Some say it’s the worst show on television, the talk show hosted by Jerry Springer. Before television we had books, and the announcer might have said, “Here's Thomas Bulfinch!” And comes on stage the author-lecturer, a respected American nineteenth-century learned man Who catalogued the myths and legends of several civilizations. Of gods and women, Heroes and nymphs, sprites, changelings and jokers, bad boys and good boys, Bulfinch can tell; He'd gather explanations of creation, good and evil, great nobility and virtue, and of great pain. Tolstoy put it a bit differently when he said all humans, beset by family or not, suffer pain. But how to deal with it? Most try to hide. Others call TV shows: “I'm gonna call Jerry Springer!” Eager for the nanoseconds of fame, and this may be the highlight of their life, they'll tell Any and every thing, changing only a few words. Leave the gentleness to Bulfinch – They are carrying their grudges to the vast wasteland, (no other recourse for these women) Demanding solutions, even if by combat on stage, shoving matches, “man-to-man.” Gender, once neatly cleaved into two, has new rules: no rules – anything, any kind of man, “Pre-op,” “post-op,” no-operation wanted or needed, “thank you, no physical pain.” Women who want to be men parade their feelings, as do men who want to be women. There's enough confessions for three segments every hour, five days a week, on Springer. And you might think there'd be nothing here suitable for the modern Bulfinch, But there is. Jerry just frames the Same Old Stories in a different format. He'll tell, As Bulfinch would, the general circumstances of the story; then the guests will tell Their version, give the details, because there are more than seven sins. Ah! Modern man, And nothing new: delusional, deluded, changeable and fickle, stories right out of Bulfinch. Men who quarreled, loved, quarreled, settled scores, quarreled, who raged in unsettled pain Until fatigued… too tired to be uplifting. It’s hard to be noble looking at Jerry Springer. And that was just the men. It’s no different for the women – Our list of inspirations: Hippolyta, Ariadne, Psyche and Baucis, too, noble women; Well, Medea and Scylla, too. In America it’s of Adam, Eve, Lilith, and snakes we first tell. We are their children, gnashing our pitiful stories to a leering audience and Jerry Springer, Who listens politely, wanting us to get to the point – he is inherently a nice man. Those on stage scream, kick, claw, try to shove past the burly bodyguards, claw their pain Into the eyes of the audience (these scenes never imagined by the level-headed Bulfinch). A set of stories came down via stones, cave paintings, tablets, scrolls and statues, to Bulfinch. He is kind, this dreamer: he attributes every virtue, including sense and beauty, to his women. He would spare them and us embarrassment, intimacies; Jerry would have them exhibit their pain. “It’s the circus, with stage and lights, a mob of friends; you're here now, so sit down and tell Your story. Tell us everything allowable,” he cajoles the reluctant, very uneasy man Who tears up, stammers out his predicament – the crowd is screaming – to kindly Mr. Springer. Thomas Bulfinch, recorder of legends, has morphed into television's chief host, Jerry Springer. Now we have a daily page-turner, but instead of god and goddess, we have women, or a man. Pain makes great television, doesn't it? Tom and Jerry know, and it’s their job to tell. INTRODUCTORY QUOTES FOR JERRY SPRINGER AS BULFINCH Sometimes we must remember that the people we are dating are just that, people, not Gods.” From a 6/18/04 broadcast, spoken by Jerry Springer in his ‘Final Comment.’ Take care of yourself, and each other. Jerry spring, ‘Final Comment,’ every show. “It was a pleasing trait in the old Paganism that it loved to trace in every operation of nature the agency of deity. The imaginations of the Greeks peopled all the regions of the earth and sea with divinities….” Bulfinch’s Mythology, p. 167. I'M GONNA BE FAMOUS! © Jean Hull Herman Blonde woman in full bridal regalia Says “I’m gonna to be famous for this: I'm going to marry a dwarf on The Jerry Springer Show!” Worse yet, there's another woman A brunette, also in full bridal regalia, Who says, “I'm gonna to marry the dwarf on this show, If there's any marrying to dwarves to be done!” Neither woman has met said dwarf/prospective husband. Neither marriage nor dwarf is motive Of either lovely. Neither specifies what kind of fame she wants, either. They just want the fifteen minutes, or the five, And the videotape to prove they were on Jerry Springer! Dwarf, tricked out in formal regalia, Trots on out for his time onstage. Damn! The tape ran out! THE JARRAH WOOD BOWL'S SILENCE (Winterthur Arts and Crafts Fair, 2000) © Jean Hull Herman Don't you walk past this booth! Who cares whether it’s sunshine or rain out there – I'm right here, waiting, anticipation on its pedestal. Hear me whisper, “Come here. Come here. I'm the only one for you.” I like you. Pick me up. Yeah, that's right. Hold me with both hands so you can be soothed by my pleasing rotundity, appreciate the exquisite narrowing of my tiny throat, the lacework that the lathe left for a collar. Close your eyes – yeah, that's right – while you smooth your way about my whorls and knots, caress the clever traceries of ecstatic Nature. Ah, you thrill to red? – I am jarrah wood. I am a creature of Australia. Can you feel the ocher threads of patterns, my webs, the cracks, the rise and fall of my breathing, the patina of Mars? My lightness is pleasing, too. I'm rounded, hollowed, made to please. What of the opening in my side, that strange black emptiness somewhat like the butterfly's two joined wings, the imperfection that sets off smoothed bark? Is that what interests your gentle senses: that I am not perfect? Perhaps the joy of imperfection has caught your curious kindness. Why do you slip your fingers into my side? Do you try to touch the hand that made me, touch my turners happiness? See, you can't put me down, not even while you get your money out. So you do believe in love at first sight. Dear lady, let's go home. I want to make myself comfortable on my new pedestal.

© Deborah P Kolodji Deborah P Kolodji works in information technology to fund her poetry obsessions and to pay for her children’s college tuition. She is the editor and co-founder of Amaze: The Cinquain Journal (www.amaze-cinquain.com) and the owner and moderator of a yahoogroups e-mail discussion list for cinquain poetry called CinquainPoets. Her cinquains have appeared in Eclectica, Scrivener’s Pen, Wilmington Blues, St. Anthony Messenger Magazine, Autumn Pond, Short Stuff, Brevities, Hummingbird, and many other places. Three of her poems appear in the international poetry anthology by India's Cyberwit, New Pegasus.

Morning at Shaver Lake © Deborah P Kolodji Sunlight strikes my tent flaps, I rise to walk the shore. A fishing lure plops loudly in the stillness. Arizona State Poetry Society Annual Contest - 2003 2nd Honorable Mention in the Adelaide Crapsey Cinquain division. * * * * * * Early Morning Walk © Deborah P Kolodji the squeeze into blue jeans much easier these days - the row of crows on the fence as I stretch * * * * * * In the Pink © Deborah P Kolodji She jogs in the morning before scanning the ads; lost her exercise excuses - pink slip. * * * * * * Lost on an Afternoon Hike © Deborah P Kolodji Lips chap, overexposed in unrelenting sun. We strain to follow faint markers of trails nature's weed erasers have hidden under brush- reclaiming what man has tamed from the wild. Hunger rumbles inside our bellies; we dream roasts seasoned with sage, oregano and thyme. Feral screams of cougars stalk us as the heat cooks silence in those last steps before dinner. First published in Eclectica, July/August 2004 * * * * * * In Burbank (at NBC Studios) © Deborah P Kolodji long lines for the stand-byes we waited after work - those Johnny Carson moments of our past (for Barbara Heidemann)

HELGA ROSS Helga loves the well-written word and loves to write her own; derives great pleasure from great literature, art and life, and the great outdoors. Her current environs, Newmarket, north of Toronto, produced and provided backdrop for the novels of a celebrated Canadian author of earlier generation, Mazo de la Roche. Helga expresses herself through an eclectic writing repertoire of material, style and form. This last year, however, has been her literary turning point: She's 'discovered' poetry in a big way. Now, poetry is her passion and focus. Thanks to the example and encouragement of fellow Canadian, Poet/Sonneteer, Richard Vallance, she's keen to work with the Sonnet format. For Helga, the theme is 'Passion' in the broadest sense. She believes and illustrates in her writing: "The creative mind plays with the objects it loves". - Carl Jung Her poetic voice is playful, provocative, uplifting. Her serious pieces conclude on a positive note; reflect her approach to life. Recent Accomplishments: Prix Poesie's laissez-faire Faire Award, April 2004. Poetry selections published in Sonnetto Poesia Vol.3 no.2 Spring 2004

A Wild Coexistence © Helga Ross, 2004 A Canadian poet enjoys her “hot, hazy, humid” lazy summer days on Southern Ontario’s suburban fringes. In the winter, wistfully … A hammock, a hot day, a leaf adrift, I list, loving this warp-weft resistance, these wafts which buffet a butterfly’s lift, the subtle tokens we tack our existence; enveloped, vaulted sky and grassy sea; suspended, forest core to urban fringe. A heron lands on quay, his bended tree, nearby boggy pond, waterfowl still binge. Echoes persist of habitat’s pardon. I hear the hum of traffic over hill, phantom footfalls native to this garden, caring to keep these legacies we kill; content we cohabit woodlands and lawn, wildness as vital as our next day's dawn. How Does My Garden Grow? © Helga Ross, 2004 A sonnet on poetic form … This poem is seeded in the opening line with the grains gathered of wind-scattered thought. Write and plot what? Word garden intertwine leads where I walk, arrives not where I sought! Scratch. Restate. Punctuate with Tudor knots tidy row hedges of formal design: Rhyme. Perhaps, promenade lawns, plants in pots, pool and pergola and sculptures assign? Craft a cottage garden of uncurbed charms? Climbs and wanders drift the color, texture, merging lines; the drawn wild drama disarms – yet descries absent focal point fixture. Back where I started. Will words have their way? Blueprint Petrarchan, a Shakespeare display! Love Letters © Helga Ross, 2004 Romancing poetry ... A, B, C’s of a poet’s prayer: (abecedarian/acrostic) All that I am, all I would be, Bring forth from the deepest part of me. Caught in your spell command my effort. Draw fervor, language of passion Everlasting in translation, trigger tongue’s rapport. Form portraits sculpted from wordless feelings, Give eloquence exquisite frame and meaning. Help me hold you to heart, show you without, Image you, dearest love’s face. Joyous in celebration, compel your coming out. Know that I care, work hard to prepare, Love what I do, as only dare you compare. Mark my commitment to this, our passage, Now aligned purpose in tandem, Oblivious in isolation, script heart’s message. Present stories sketched from limitless emotions, Quest essence luminous of memory and notions, Record worth of life’s lessons in discovering you. Sentence me, I promise fulfillment! Tender in contemplation, trace pilgrimage true. Underscore who I am, what We mean, Verbal garden adventures depict ardor’s scene. Words weave their spells, fingers find keys, ‘X’-cite me! Interpretations I’ll fashion, Yearn in anticipations, render soul’s release. Zenith of dreams, height of imagination... Scaredy-Cat Sonnet © Helga Ross 2003, 2005 That’s Chloe with a long “e” Pretty Chloe, such charms she shows and shies; much fuss in one pulchritudinous puss of angora swath with panda-wide eyes to wit to watch, suspecting signs of ruse. Should mere motion mean commotion she streaks, treads carpet, leaves shreds, lading her beauty beyond hope of reach; sees my friends, she freaks; my suitors, she flees, owners-be-booty! Too bad. Love's no relief neuroses-wise. Did nosiness unnerve my fearless fluff? Scared-to-death by some nemesis surprise? Litter’s last little one’s rescue, enough? What's that some say? Pets reflect their owner! How could I help it, so few have known her? Post Script: Blessed with 14 wonderful years of love and companionship,my precious Chloe sadly passed away, September 25, 2004.