Deborah DeNicola’s analysis of Paul Hoover’s Poem “Windows (Speech-Lit Islands)”
won the Packingtown Review’s Critical Essay Award March 2009. Both the poem and review are available online at http://www.packingtownreview.com/issues/1
Deborah DeNicola’s poem “I Am, I Will” was the winner of the contest
and Deborah will be attending the Santa Barbara Poetry Conference Aug 1-3rd.
I AM, I WILL 
No pastries for breakfast, just a pear in my pocket and a long walk
on the beach at 6 a.m., wearing my bullet-proof bra and grey
duster as in an old film noir. Now the sun
lifts quickly from its bed of waves, like the pink
rubber handball from junior high school, compact
disc ejected from the horizon. The sea is muted,
understated in steady breakers. I Am, I Will,
says the sun and Let it be. And I do
not think of you as I watch gulls cross the sun
in formation like planes at the air show. And I think of how it took guts
to play handball with the guys when I was twelve. I think Top Gun—
and how these birds are perfectly aligned. Then when the lead
flaps his wings, his side-kick pulses till they’re all in synch
and cease their flutter at the same time to dive
through the reddened edges of sun which begin to yellow
as if another sun lay behind them. The few clouds are doused
in raiment. And the disc burns, unconsumed, like Moses’ bush
while some god turns and awakens from sleep,
so the light deepens. I stare, then stare at after-images
everywhere, the unconscious issue of the sun assualting
both sand and sky, how it abides as whole civilizations are lost
and gone. I think of Shelley’s Ozymandias,
how even things meant for endurance
crumble and die. And I think of the Buddha
and his one revelation, everything changes.
I do not think of us as a lone surfer jogs by, his board
so much lighter than a cross beneath his buffed arm,
his wetsuit zipped up snug
so within his rubber skin, the bone-chilling water
will warm and will keep him
warm.
Deborah’s poem “The Bacchanalia of Trash” was chosen by Dorianne Laux for the “Best of the Net 2008” anthology.
“The Bacchanalia of Trash”
after A.R. Ammons
(Garbage)…is spiritual
Let’s worship the evolving cycles, the sweet and sour sediment scraped
from microwaveable take-out containers and tied into synch-sacs
with the morbid humors of our secret habits as well as inorganic
returnables, tuna-tins sharp enough to slit a vein, with an after-life
of their own via the ravaged curbside bin— Let’s praise organic husks,
the hides of grapefruit to whom we entrust the waking enzymes of our bodies
every morning. Grapefruit breaks down something, works out wherever
it goes and beats the beejesus out of fat. I break down the Sunday classifieds
into dispensable paragraphs for the recyclable brown bag, the Arts Section
I won’t give up to the trucks for a week or two after each new movie opens
and oh the scam of paper, the deadly sin of our worst addiction. At night
we hear junk mail grieving in the trees of our dreams.
This detritus all afternoon, this American frenzy for cleaning
as the sun shifts direction through burnished motes dancing
and the air wafts new odors, more expendable for being burnt
on manufactured woodchips, combustible faux-realite
as if our fantasies weren’t hot enough now that the season of barbecue
closes– We live in the city. We have no compost pile to turn and toss
with a fork like a nice salad of vermiculite and dirt. At least we no longer
heave our ashtrays out the fire-escapes at the moon. We’ve quit smoking;
We’re utterly clean and yet we dream that garbage shoves back up
through the kitchen sink, the pipes collapse and the Age of Aquarius
is without drinking water. Lord, must we fall to our knees and pray
to the Alchemists of Garbage for a new infra-structure to renew ourselves
this late in the century? Kleenex, Tampax, hairspray, the whitened stems
of asparagus, used dental floss, pulp and pitted masses, we need some
homeopathic jacketto clothe the mercurial state of the soul, some crushed
dandelion oil, funereal bouquet made to remedy the fresh droppings in the park;
the world of the dump where the Lapis Lazuli is stuffed between mayo
and crumpled foil at the bottom of the Oatios box, or stale salami
slid into a baggy like a commercial for safe sex . . . Freud himself felt
civilization reduced (or perhaps elevated) to Sex and Death and the ancients
grew the Goddess of Love from an abusive Father’s genitalia, polluting
a whole ocean—it all comes out in the wash—so why not Garbage
as the ultimate cure of itself, a huge festival every Spring,
The Bacchanalia of Trash, with mites and maggots and mating toadstools,
thread-bare shoes, violins and broomsticks, one big black Mass
for the crack-smoked gasses loose in the universe, a sacrifice for landfill
and the world made pure, made poetry, made pre-lapsarian enfin!
-Deborah DeNicola (Apple Valley Review)
