Excerpt from The Triggering Town::

The Triggering Town:: Richard Hugo

With the private poet, and most good poets of the last century or so have been private poets, the words, at least certain key words, mean something to the poet they don’t mean to the reader. A sensitive reader perceives this relation of poet to word and in a way that relation—the strange way the poet emotionally possesses his vocabulary—is one of the mysteries and preservative cores of the art…

If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions…

Your triggering subjects are those that ignite your need for words. When you are honest to your feelings, that triggering town chooses you. Your words used your way will generate your meanings. Your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary.

Dramatizing Everyday Subjects::

“First Kiss” :: April Lindner

This collision of teeth, of tongues and lips,

is like feeling for the door

in a strange room, blindfolded.

He imagines he knows her

after four dates, both of them taking pains

to laugh correctly, to make eye contact.

She thinks at least this long first kiss

postpones the moment she’ll have to face

four white walls, the kitchen table,

its bowl of dried petals and nutmeg husks,

the jaunty yellow vase with one jaunty bloom,

the answering machine’s one bloodshot eye.

Forced to close up shop: The owner of A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books (named after Hemingway’s short story) stated, “It’s the passing of an era. It may be that the golden age of bookselling is past.”

“Cold Reading” – Brendan Constantine

It’s really cold in here now,

easily forty below something,

and half the class is asleep.

Snow dazzles in the windows, 

makes a cake of each desk.

It’s really cold in here now.

I’ve been lecturing on the same

poem for twenty six hours

and half the class is asleep.

I want them to get it. I start

to talk about death again

and it’s really cold in here now.

One student has frozen solid, 

her hair snapping off in the wind

and half the class is asleep.

“See that” I say, “Lisa gets it.”

But it’s so cold in here now

half the class are white dunes

shifting to the sea.

:: Brendan Constantine