Return to SEEDS Poetry Magazine.
Return to Contest info.
Return to PRINT BROKER and CONTRACT PUBLISHING SERVICES
Return to the Hidden Brook Poetry Book Store.
Return to Books published by Hidden Brook Press
Return to Anthology Poetry Submissions Needed

Go To - Hidden Brook Press in Cuba

Contest Judge: Linda Rogers
Preface from the contest judge - Linda Rogers

the poems


Not long ago, before the swine of Fujian put me under house arrest, I was out walking with my husband. We were, as usual, watching the birds swoop, bicker and feed in the Selkirk Waters.
    “Where do they all go?” my husband asked.
    “South,” I said, stupidly, my mind wrapping a gift for the baby.
    “No, no,” he said. “When they die.”
    There are so many birds. By the first law of the universe, a million are born, a million die. The streets should be littered with birds. We have heard stories about a man who captures pigeons for a business downtown. He puts them in sacks and clubs them to death. Those birds must be hidden, unlike the road kill and the surgically eviscerated ones the cat proudly presents in the dining room. Do birds go into the woods like domestic cats when it is their time? Do they vaporize?
    There are so many varieties of birds, even their songs are beyond category. There are no definitive numbers for birds or words for love.
    A recent film teaches us the soul, or whatever leaves the body at death, weighs 21 grams, the weight of a hummingbird. Could it be love that leaves? How do we capture it? Why is it so hard to describe? How does it reconstitute itself?
    The idea of writing a poem about love in all its shapes and colors reduces most of us to mush. I expected a lot of mush when I started reading the poems in this volume, because that is what we make of our feelings. We too often add the water of our most abstract words and stir. The result is a thin paste. The world requires stronger glue to hold it together. bill bissett would say it needs “magic green things,” his ubiquitous Clorets. When I was asked to write a love poem for bill, I wrote about chewing gum.
    That is the thing. Love is ordinary, the more ordinary the more extraordinary. That truth was affirmed over and over again in the poems I have chosen. To love is never to lose. It is to regenerate the energy. These poems are about the transformation of lust into love, passion into reason, innocence into experience. Each one is a journey. There is a movement, like the flight of a bird that takes us toward that place we are incapable of describing, where love is light.
    All the poems I chose taught me something about being human. Some are more roughly wrought than others, but the impetus is always purely and keenly felt, a parent whose child has gone to war, a child, whose parent has disappeared into the silence of dementia, the loss of identity when love ends, the affirmation when it results in the birth of a child. These are the voices of experience, all of them swarming, vanishing and reappearing. Some were chosen for craft, others for substance, the best for that sublime marriage of form and content, the right image. Some are here for fun, because humor is the leaven of grief. There are three Judy poems because Judy is our household goddess and delightful muse. I fell in love with her eating strawberries, being her bossy domestic self. I have included a few poems that are not quite but almost good. They were brought forward so that you could feel as I did, “If only…” As poets we have to keep pecking, relentless as birds.
    What distinguished the winning poems in the first section? I imagine it was the ability to touch me with the indefatigableness of the survivor. The scapegoat survived with irony, the article pointed to attainable mysteries, the vicarious voyageur in “leaving me” found the dignity in staying behind, The old bugger in “Getting his Due” got it in sequins, the chicken soup in “Trickling” managed to stay warm in the long journey between generations, Judy got her strawberries, the lover in “Then and Now,” got to wear light. These poems made me laugh and cry.  That’s what poems are for. That’s what love is for. With poems like these, how can we lose?

Linda Rogers, January 2004

Cuba Poem Editor: Manuel GarciaVerdecia
Twelve Cuban Poets, Twelve Cuban Love Poems

Such as planets keep their connection and movement due to gravitational energy, thus human beings find support, hope and sense due to the overwhelming force of love. Either on the feeling arising from the beloved mate, the mother, a child, or life in its multiple occurrences, love is not only a unique and edifying human experience but also the way we subsist and are born again. The present sample brings evidence of this. Twelve poets from Cuba’s eastern part (the Orient) show twelve manners to approach this phenomenon. From the light of a loved one’s eyes, the memory of a shared summer, the creation of a space of special vitality between two people, or the despair brought about by abandonment, here we find matter to feel and think, to dream and remember. But above all to realise that love moves everything and makes everything possible. (M.G.V.)

Así como los planetas se mantienen en cohesión y movimiento por la energía gravitacional, también los seres humanos hallan sostén, esperanza y sentido por la fuerza inmensa del amor. Bien sea el sentimiento que despierta la pareja amada, la madre, un hijo, o la vida en sus múltiples manifestaciones, el amor no sólo es una experiencia humana única y edificante sino que también es el modo por el que subsistimos y renacemos. La presente muestra trae evidencias de esto. Doce poetas de la región oriental de Cuba muestran doce maneras de acercarse a este fenómeno. Desde la luz de unos ojos amados, el recuerdo de un verano compartido, la construcción de un espacio de vital singularidad entre dos seres, o la desolación a que reduce el abandono, aquí hay material para sentir y pensar, para soñar y recordar. Pero sobre todo para percatarnos de que el amor todo lo mueve y todo lo puede. (M..G.V.)

You can drop us a line
from  here  at
writers@HiddenBrookPress.com