Pardon Me, Poetry

Chapbooks. When in old bookstores, I've always got an eye out in the poetry section for these slight little volumes. They are printed by small publication houses intent on supporting promising everyday poets.

All this makes me think back to those "little magazine" days, in the early decades of the 20th century, where the writerly community supported each other by moonlighting as editors and publishers, creating their own alternative press with little or no regard for commercial gain . Grassroots aesthetics. (e.g. Harriet Monroe [founder of Poetry in 1912] Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap [Little Review, 1914-1929)] Marianne Moore [founded Dial in 1925] H.D. and Bryher [Egoist]).

I have chosen to share a poem from a chapbook by Mary Crow titled "I have Tasted the Apple". I found it somewhere... can't remember... might have been in Philadelphia at Big Jar Books, loved that place.

Swimming
say nothing for a while with a voice of
elsewhere in this
extended hereness . . .
--Judith Herzberg

Walking along the trail into the mountains
I was startled by the sudden glint of mica
in rocks, and my heart lurched back
into the here and now, faint russle of aspen,
high clean air, the light between trees
falling quilted onto sparse grasses.
My lungs gasped . . . . No, no I haven't
told you how it was: The air smelled green.
The aspens' scarred bark was a gnarled black
against mottled gray. A blue jay! The turf
springing underfoot. And. But. I'm
having trouble with my words: My motion
through stillness, a certain light: like
swimming. I moved and the world held still.
As if this place were a kind of acquarium.
Not part of the immense Rocky Mountians.
No! It was the light's shifting. As if blown.
A wind of joy. Something like a shudder.
Out there? I've stopped. Listen. You
can't hear the news. How many ranges
away -- the fighting of Kurd guerillas? A child
with attachment disorder? I pull the air
with my arms, I'm bucking. Into, out of
light? Toward