ATPO 3: You Can't Take a Bus Up a Cliff (reprint)

REPRINT


ATLAS POETICA 3 – SPRING 2009

You Can't Take a Bus Up a Cliff

Atlas Poetica : A Journal of Poetry of Place was founded to provide a home for tanka that could not easily be published in the mainstream journals. It publishes long, including extremely long sequences, tanka prose, multiple author works, experimental works, and content that demands more of the reader than the comfortable sentimentality the characterizes much of modern tanka in English.

Through the medium of place the poets in the current issue tackle difficult topics, such as war, crime, racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, poverty, environmentalism, adoption, and more. These are topics that make up only a small portion of the published ouvre of tanka in English, yet they are vitality important, bringing us some of the most wrenching and demanding works of literature in the canon.

In describing his military training during WWII when Americans are fighting to end Nazism, Sanford Goldstein is still frightened that his comrades in arms might "shoot this “dirty-jew” me." Ella Wagemakers presents the other side of Amsterdam's famed liberalism when she tells her children "the women are selling / beachwear and lingerie." Kirsty Karkow promises a friend afraid of HIV "to go with her / to the inner city clinic."

Yet amidst the terrors of the real world, there are pleasures and sustenance for the soul. John Daleiden celebrates "our burden lightened / my sisters and brothers" in honor of Junteenth, the anniversary of the emancipation of the slaves in the United States. Vasile Moldavan takes heart from the song of a cricket and begs his minister, "give up the vespers service [. . .] to listen to this cricket song." For Amelia Fielden "ten dolphins" become a nursery song right before her eyes.

The poets of Atlas Poetica call things by their real names. They write about real places, real events, real issues, real people. The poetic imagination is unleashed by the challenge of telling the unnoticed truth. Stereotypes and conventions, knee jerk reactions and travel guide advertisements do not do justice to the complexity of our lives or the places in which we live. By grappling with reality poets are forced to dig deep into themselves. They must bear witness to all that they have seen—for good or ill. The 'controlled ambiguity' that is a hallmark of tanka includes moral ambiguity. They reach deep into the human soul and pull out something of lasting value, something that inhabits the mysterious wilderness deep inside our hearts.

You cannot take a bus to scale the cliffs of history. You must pull yourself up with your own hands, bark your knees on the rocks, and take the risk of falling. The poets of Atlas Poetica have abandoned comfort in the quest for truth, and what they have discovered is wondrous, frightening, and inspiring.

~K~

M. Kei
Editor, Atlas Poetica

Gosses Bluff. 142 millions years ago an asteroid or comet slammed into what is now the Missionary Plains in Australia's Northern Territory, forming a crater 24 km in diameter and 5 km deep.
Cover Image courtesy of USGS National Center for EROS and NASA Landsat Project Science Office


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial
You Can't Take a Bus Up a Cliff,
M. Kei 7

Tanka in Sets and Sequences
Old Memories in the Valley of the Sun,
John Daleiden 8
On the Beach, Marje A. Dyck 9
Sky Walker, Mary Mageau 9
Understanding the Patient,
Kirsty Karkow 10
The Black Straw Hat, Patricia Prime 11
generations, Owen Bullock 11
Vecernie / Vespers, Vasile Moldovan 12
war rubble, stanley pelter 13
Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Paul Mercken 14
Midday Lunch, Michele L. Harvey 14
Seamen's Bethel, Jeffrey Woodward 15
Pre-Holocaust: Growing Up in
Cleveland, Sanford Goldstein 16
Along the Way, Bob Lucky 18
I Follow Your Course, Alexej von
Glasenapp 19
Winter in de Gambia / Winter in
Gambia, Paul Mercken 19
Middle Lake, Sasakatchewan, Angela
Leuck 20
Lost and Found, Terra Martin 21
Tor House, Jeffrey Woodward 22
Death in the Afternoon, Bob Lucky. 23
Imagining the Space, Owen Bullock 23
Gippsland waters, Jo McInerney 24
Lime Tree, Magdalena Dale 25
Legs of Invisible Desire, M. Kei 25
In de Oostertuin genietend van
chrysanten / Enjoying
Chrysanthemums in the Eastern
Garden, Paul Mercken 26
Entrance and Exit, Terra Martin 27
Rewinding Fort William,
Guy Simser 28
Short Flashbacks of a Long-Ago Trip to
The Philippines, Ella
Wagemakers 29
On a Beach at Polillo Island, Ella
Wagemakers 29
remembering Do's and Dont's,
stanley pelter 30
surviving the Shadow,
stanley pelter 31

Topical Tanka
War and Peace 32
Mourning 34
Urban 36
Summer 38

Individual Tanka 39

Book Reviews
Cicada Forest, by Mariko Kitakubo 59

Announcements 61

Biographies 70

Index 73