The Common Ground Review Blog

How did you decide that What Haunts Me would be your next book? Did the concept for the book come to you first and you focused your poems on it, or did the concept naturally develop from what you were already writing?

I would say the concept naturally developed from what I was already writing, though some of the poems in What Haunts Me date back more than 20 or 25 years. This was actually supposed to be my first book. As I was writing the poems, they started coming together as thematically linked by the thread of understanding that we are each influenced throughout our lives by our memories and our ancestry. I started submitting the manuscript to contests and open reading periods back in 2003 and had some early successes with it being a finalist or semi-finalist. But then I started writing new poems that came together rather quickly as The Scabbard of Her Throat, so the first manuscript got put on a shelf for a while.

How does What Haunts Me compare to your first publication?

The Scabbard of Her Throat really fluctuates between a variety of voices and personas, in addition to a wide variety of poetic styles. There are many poems on the topic of motherhood, as well as ones that incorporate aspects of fairy tales. That book really emerged from all the experiences I was having as a new mother seeing the world in a very different way and experiencing a wealth of new emotions. What Haunts Me, however, stays closer to my own voice and is much more unified in that respect. The collection as a whole is more personal as it sinks its teeth into the questions of how we become who we are because of − or even despite − the influences of family and society.

How long does it typically take for you to get your poems to a satisfactory state? — How much do you revise, reread, or wait to look at them again?

Most of the time, I will write a draft in a journal and dogear the page if it’s something I think I might want to come back to and explore further. Then I usually forget about the draft for weeks – if not months. So I end up “batch editing” several poems at a time. I’ll scan through my journals looking for the dogeared pages, then I’ll type these drafts up and print them out. At that point, I start playing around with them on a regular basis. I don’t think I’ve ever been the kind of writer that has adhered to the “first thought, best thought” concept. It usually takes a while for me to even figure out what my thought is, and even longer to really explore that thought and bring a poem to the point where I believe it has achieved its purpose.

What was your most effective method for gaining inspiration for these pieces? Did the poems come to you in solitude after reflecting on familial ties and the history of places you visited, or as you were in the moment?

I definitely need time and mental distance from any triggering event before I can look back and write about something that inspires me. Many of these poems were inspired by photographs that I’ve had in albums for decades. Solitude is very important to my writing. But I don’t have to hole myself up at home, shut away in my office space. I can definitely achieve solitude in a crowd – be it on a train during my morning commute or sitting in a hotel bar or cafe. The important thing for me is that I need to know that no one will bother me and I am not expected to engage in conversation with anyone. I need uninterrupted mental space to just stare and think. This helps memories surface and swirl together, which is usually when the words start coming to me and I get to channel them onto paper.

Does the book have a single poetic voice or are there tonal shifts? How does the voice in this collection compare to your everyday language?

I believe this collection to have a strong single voice that carries through it. As I mentioned, it’s a very personal collection and there is a lot of “me” in here, but it’s not my everyday language, and it’s not the voice I use when talking with my friends or family members. It’s the voice I hear inside my head when I am thinking or having a conversation with myself. It’s a voice that’s full of doubt and wonder and searching. It’s the part of me that doesn’t show through on a regular basis. Not because I “keep it hidden,” but because my poems are the landscape in which this voice really lives and where I have the opportunity to let it run free.

Which piece do you connect to the most? Please share as much as you would like.

It would have to be the poem “Ksiazek,” whose title is my maiden surname, which is of Polish origin. The poem was inspired by my first visit to Warsaw and my wonder at seeing variations of this word everywhere. It was my first exposure to the land of my father’s father’s ancestors. I had been in a Polish dancing group when I was younger and had grown up in a small Pennsylvania town that was divided almost entirely into Polish and Italian descendants. There were two churches – one for each nationality – and at the church my family attended, we often sang Polish religious hymns during the holidays.

To visit Poland was an incredible experience, and I took tons of photographs. I was actually there for work, so I had a local guide to show me around and offer insights into the history of the parts of the city we visited. It was only years later that I thought back to the experience and began to write about it. The poem has eight sections, and here are a few of them.

v.

City of thin beet soup, vodka,

and everything in aspic. City

of beauty pageant contestants

with my same exaggerated teeth.

City whose name was born

from the love of a fisherman

for a mermaid. City that would later

become a sea of rubble.

City rising up. Phoenix city.

vi.

Unaware of meaning, I photographed

anything with a word resembling my name.

Bookstores, streets, even a memorial

I would later discover was placed to honor

the Księgarzom Polskim, “Polish booksellers,”

and others who, during the Nazi occupation,

rescued books in order to defend

and maintain their national culture.

viii.

I look through my Warsaw photos,

grateful for the guide who included me

in so many of them: posed at sunset

on the Old Town wall, smiling

from a seat on the city tram,

solemn in a Ghetto doorway.

Sometimes a name is all you have

to prove you once existed.

Sometimes a photo, the only record.

Here, right here. Let me show you.

I feel like this poem also brings together all the themes I explore in this collection, which contains several of these multi-sectioned meditations on various related topics.

What does it mean to you when you leave something behind or take it with you?

In 2013, my husband and I moved with our daughter from the U.S. to Berlin, Germany. We sold our house and nearly all the contents of it before we moved. We actually brought relatively few of our possessions with us, which was necessary because we were transitioning from a four-bedroom suburban house with multiple living spaces, closets, basement, and garage to a four-room city apartment with a small storage unit in the basement. As you might imagine, it was quite a Herculean task to go through all of our possessions deciding what to leave behind and what to take.

That process taught me that most of the things we own are just things. I’ve learned to not become too attached to objects. Of course, some things have their own meanings attached, which makes it easier to decide to keep those things – unless they are negative meanings. But there are many things we carry with us internally − thoughts, feelings, memories. We can’t always leave the negative ones behind, just as we can’t always guarantee that the positive ones will stay with us our entire lives.

These are really the ideas that I tried to explore in the poems in this book. There are things we do to try to keep from forgetting – like taking pictures, or writing in journals, or passing our stories along to others. For me, writing these poems has been my way of keeping these memories with me.

Bernadette Geyer’s poem “The Long Man” was published in Common Ground Review’s last print issue, Spring/Summer 2020, but you can find that poem in What Haunts Me.

We'd like to thank everyone who entered the contest.

We are thrilled to announce the winning poems, chosen by Abby E. Murray, with her comments.

First Place, $500, “Running in the Dark”--Kathleen Holliday

The poet’s handling of this simple but stark imagery shows restraint in a way that lets one lingering encounter with death absorb all the light our eyes can give to it by reading. How does a poem manage to feel so ghostly while rooted in the experience of living? In my notes, I wrote, I love this.

Second Place, $200, "It's only ugly when you use it"--Norma DaCrema

This is a beautiful, dancing glimpse at a single word’s role in the poet’s heart. The way words are used—and by whom—matters. Every word has infinite histories, knowings, possibilities, births, and deaths within it, and it does us good to explore those experiences. This poet accomplishes that exploration while creating a poem that, in the end, instructs us on how to appreciate a word.

Third Place, $100, "Blessing"--Olivia Kingery

A poem that is true to its title: one moment, equal parts prayer and blessing, shared between writer and reader. Exquisite in its simplicity and truthfulness.

Common Ground Review would like to thank everyone who entered the contest this year. We are thrilled to announce the winners of our 2021 Annual Poetry Contest, chosen by our judge, Simeon Berry:

First Prize, $500

Connor Drexler, “Alone Another Vacation”

Simeon Berry writes: “Alone Another Vacation” is an anti-pastoral that lights up the countryside in an apocalyptic negative while the speaker wrestles necromantically with entropy and exegesis. Acknowledging both the gyre of Robinson Jeffers’ savage inhumanism and the bleak susurrus of cosmic indifference, Connor Drexler searches unflinchingly for the antidote inside the traumatic cloud of unknowing that is masculinity. This is a poem that is both surgical and gracefully suggestive as the capillary action of ink in a charcoal wash.

Second Prize, $200

Scott Ruescher, “Plumbing”

“Plumbing” is skillfully held aloft with elegant syncopation on the zephyr of a single sentence, borrowing from the harmony of a sonnet’s interlaced lines without importing any of its claustrophobia. Ruescher manages the difficult trick of stirring up the dark sediment of Blake’s Satanic mills and the depredations of catastrophic economies while maintaining the placid surface of his rhetorical argument, demonstrating all the contradictory ways that privilege is encoded in our circumstances and our art.

Third Place, $100

Charles Gillispie, “As Close as Anyone Gets”

“As Close as Anyone Gets” is a slant memento mori, a snapshot of a wilderness of grief superimposed on the crystalline cordial of a dinner party. In just three deceptively-simple stanzas, Gillispie advances his aural argument using the hinge of punctuation—first ellipses, then dash, then question mark—to maintain the tension between comfort and anxiety. This deft doubling reminds us that grief makes the world both uncertain and simultaneous, a confusion of chronology and essence that keeps us painfully alert, even when we would prefer the consolation of the anesthetic.

Honorable Mentions:

Zebulon Huset, “The Mathematics Are Indisputable”

Sandra Fees, “Self-Portrait as Flame”

Michael Buebe, “JigSaw 32”

Congratulations to all the winners! Their poems will appear shortly in our first on-line issue. We would like to accept a few of the other poems for our second on-line issue, and will be contacting everyone soon with more information on that.

We are thrilled to announce the results of our 2020 Poetry Contest, chosen by Lori Desrosiers. Here’s her statement and the list of winners:

LORI DESROSIERS: First, I want to say that I had a terrible time deciding on which of the three top poems to rank for which prize. To me all three poems were extremely strong, and all deserved a first place win. Congratulations to everyone and thank you for entrusting Common Ground and me with your work!

1^st Prize ($500) “Table of Contents”: Cassandra Rockwood-Rice

“Table of Contents” is a poem about survival and bearing witness. It is also about what it means to write about abuse and struggle. The voice in the poem speaks to the rebuilding of a life through writing about trauma, and also about how in the life of a survivor there are frequent replays of that trauma through micro-aggressions perpetrated by those who have not had the same experience. It raises some great questions through the use of anaphora/ the repetition of words down the lines, in this case “how.” The lines are crafted to cascade down the page and bring the reader both a visceral and metacognitive experience, coming back around in a circle to the table: the table of childhood, the table of memory. The table of contents questions itself, how to make this book make sense, and brings the reader back around through rejection to the final table of reckoning in “the light of day.”

2^nd Prize ($200) “When I Say I Have Known Black Boys”: Darius Simpson

Darius Simpson’s “When I Say I Have Known Black Boys Like You” is a poem from a powerful voice that needs to be heeded today, especially in the light of the last how many years of struggle to stop white people in authority from dehumanizing Black youth. It is also superbly crafted, using slashes to take the place of white space and this is both effective and symbolic. The use of space in the line “then he got / / and came back a whole letter grade shorter” is surprising and deeply important. The word that came to my mind was “disappeared” although it could mean “suspended” in the sense of taken out of life and time. This is a visual poem, where the reader sees the friendships of the young men and the violence surrounding them, as well as the concern expressed by the voice in the poem, who is older now and looking back, and the last stanza seems to be speaking to a young man of today, trying to show him the danger he is in. Finally, I want to thank Darius for this poem and end with another line from it that stays with me… “boy loud / cuz he need a hug / or a meal / or an open hand / on his shoulder / not a muzzle / not another brick / layered dismissal”

3^rd Prize ($100) “Wedding Dress”: Adrienne Christian

“Wedding Dress” is an extraordinary poem about a dysfunctional family, yet despite recounting the terrible behavior of these people (including the narrator!), the poet maintains a sense of humor throughout. This kindles in the reader a sense of pathos along with perhaps a bit of a morbid fascination. The language is surprising and very believable. It sustained the story, and held this reader to the page in anticipation of what might come next.

HONORABLE MENTIONS (in no particular order)

“Stay” : Arien Reed

“Yardsale” : Karen Mandell

“the easier way to deconstruct a monroe (by waveform? or otherwise?)”:

Tobi-Hope Jieun Park

“Working the Child At Risk Hotline” : Pamela Gemme

“Octavia” : Michael Baldwin

“Mi Casa Es Tu Casa” : Alfredo Antonio Arevalo

Thank you to all who entered our contest. We loved reading your work, and we wish you the best of luck!

First Prize, $500: Roy Bentley

“Luis Sarria, Muhammed Ali’s Longtime Cut Man, Prepares the Boxer’s Face for a Workout in Deer Lake in 1978”

This poem, ekphrastic from a photo, exceeds the mere description typical of ekphrastic poems by seeing the photo from the inside out. The poet uses a capacious Whitmanesque line to focus tightly on an intimate relationship of healer and warrior. These men do not speak, but the cut-man’s fingers feel their way into the hard history of Ali and all black Americans. This tight shot then brings the two out on the road into a country fighting for and against civil rights. The poet has researched the physical things in the photo and through concrete specificity has used them precisely to meld history and human particularity. I was moved by the poem, and thought of Ali with warmth. I was in Vietnam the year Ali refused to serve, and saw the effect of this on the black marines I was deployed with. By a few images the poet has not only sharply depicted the two men, but opened up the world around them and its history.

Second Prize, $200: Richard Cummins, “Carpe Diem”

I like very much this father’s observation of his daughter as the family trio drives through a landscape. The father’s language of memory and time are counterpoint to the child’s joyful naming of things. The father knows the snow is coming; the daughter’s acquisition of language is immediate. The child’s grasping for language recapitulates the poet’s incessant choosing of the best words. The poet says, “Love tells me that we three close our eyes/and create the world each time we open them again, that there is nothing but now, nowhere but here.” This line is a demonstration of Coleridge’s argument that the poet creates the world as if for the first time.

Third Prize, $100: Terry Bodine, “Hitting the Bottle”

This poem is in one sense a struggle with alcohol but in another, just getting through life with its “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” The bruises are not only the broken blood vessels beneath the skin but life’s heartaches. Childhood is woven with the present. “We’re as likely to remember a story we’re told/as we are the story we lived.” Memory revises, innocence is bruised with experience. There is a need for a mother to wipe away tears but there is also a sense the speaker will survive and recover. “When I lie down in beds of guttered leaves/I’m still able to stand back up.”

Honorable Mentions (alphabetical order by poem title)

“After Slaying the Dragons”—Jonathan Greenhause

“Annunciation on Rue Saint-Urbain”—James Crews

“Between A Mother and a Son”—Candice Kelsey

“Mythomania”—Howie Faerstein

“Over”—Tom Paine

“Post Impressionism”—Kathleen Holliday

“They Watched”—LQ McDonald III

“Thirteen Truths”—Michele Randall

“To the Brink”—Linda Haltmaier

“Transition Period”—Bill Glose

We’d like to thank the judge, Doug Anderson, and everyone who entered. We read many wonderful poems, and we’re hoping to find room for some of them in the Spring/Summer issue, so if your name is not on the list above, you may still be getting an acceptance from us after July 4th. And Happy July 4th!