Three poems from Peter Manos' To the Survivors: 

To the Survivors

 

“Wait without hope….”

          TS Eliot

 

I stand in front of the museum’s diorama

looking at the exact replica of footprints

 

the two of you made in the mud

while walking away from a volcano.

 

Fossilized in the eruptions’ ashes, they

show the path you took in Tanzania

 

thirty-five thousand centuries ago

and your footprints let us know

 

that the two of you walked side by side,

away from the volcano, standing upright.

 

We have no idea, as a factual matter

how accurately the scientists’ statues

 

represent what you looked like,

and your hairy ape-like nakedness

 

makes group after group of kids giggle

as they pass by on their class trips

 

but in the silences between their passages

I imagine we inhabit a sacred sanctuary

 

where I’m praying thankfully through

your statues, seeing past abstractions

 

and past scientific whys or wherefores

and past the volcanic calamity

 

to find something iconic

through this diorama.

 

I want to give you praises and thanks

and want to ask you many questions.

 

Thank you for standing upright

in the face of that vast calamity!

 

Thank you for your having passed!

Did doubts surround you, or reassurance

 

from feeling something resembling hope?

Whether it was hope or fear, what you had spans

 

Vast expanses after you, past eons

interlaced with successions of successes—

 

past millions of years of other unimaginable

calamities, and past stone-on-stone banging

 

and impossible accomplishments

like inventing the wheel or discovering fire—

 

past back-filling such acts as if the endless

train of painful failures were not in play—

 

as if unexpected successes were intentional

or stemmed from selfless efforts of inventors

 

or went with ongoing over-the-shoulder-

goading from some neolithic Jiminy Crickets

 

rather than passionate adamant irrationality

as the key to our species having adapted

 

we opt for optimism versus pessimism instead

or customary dichotomies to wallow in

 

not knowing what we owe you—

you who found or misplaced hope or fear

 

and, having never given up on waiting,

passed as we passed, and pass, and will pass.

 

 *** 

 

 

Pinnacle Point, South Africa

 

In the past if you had asked me which aspects of human nature I’d take to be the main keys to our species’ survival, I’d have highlighted high-minded ideals of certain men and women from our last couple of millennia. But that’s not enough for me anymore. Now, I would also include a view further back, because of crucial clues to who we are as human beings, given how close our species came to being completely wiped out around 160,000 BC, during an ice age.

 

Studies of Pinnacle Point, on Africa’s southern coast, show where our forebears may have taken safe haven from the glaciers’ devastation, in caves by the shore, near dense, edible vegetation, and clam beds. Evidence showing that better weapons were invented at Pinnacle Point has led to the theory that cooperativeness and competitiveness evolved to higher levels in us together, when our ancestors learned to defend their settlement’s precious, denser food supplies, by fighting in ruthless unison, better than the scattered nomadic hunter-gatherers of the past. Our great-great-grandmothers and grandfathers bridged this difficult gap back then, surviving the crisis and expanding beyond Africa by dominating all other hominids and then decimating predators on every continent.

 

We now cooperate and compete at high levels in how we buy and sell and work and go at it with games and sports and wars with each other, since with our conquests of all our competitors having ended, we are left competing against each other. And we are left with a certain human mind, a mind that finds it hard to bridge the gap back and see our species’ being here at all may have always been closer to impossible than certain.

 

Yet the word “certain” itself bridges this gap back, given what we are saying when we say the word “certain” this certain way: “Specific but not specified.”

 

Bridging this gap back in our species’ history, I specify the most uncertain ones. Before those who survived in one cave or another, I especially specify those who gave up the ghost before people had names. I specify them because they saw something our species lost when we wrapped ourselves up in our comfortable claim of dominion.

 

After Africa, we abandoned the Unfathomable. But our ancestors survived unimaginable calamities and catastrophes, standing upright in the face of ages of ages of uncertainties, shamelessly unaided by any explanation greater than their own naked existence. They survived life on a precipice—the same precipice which we’ve been unsettled over ever since. Restless. Owing to their settlement.

 

I mean we may only start to settle up, once we stop calling what we have been calling awe “awe,” when we only experience convenient, known, low, doses of it, between now and the moment before we give up the ghost. I mean the moment in which each of us may see that our being here at all may have always been closer to impossible than certain. I mean at a certain uncertain point. Like Pinnacle Point. The pivotal point.

________________________________________________

Inspired by the July 2015 article in Scientific American, "Clues to How Homo sapiens Conquered Earth Emerge from Digs in South Africa," by Dr. Curtis Marean

*

Sandpiper Surmise

Along the shore

a sandpiper

scuttles back and forth

with each set of waves

and each group

of humans going by.

My mind

along for the ride

is unduly self-satisfied

conjecturing

for a documentary

nobody but it is in:

“She survived

from the time

of the dinosaurs.”

At this pointless point

I finally stop trying to see

what tiny things

she might be eating

with her pointy beak

so fine

I see I

only surmise only

survivors make survivors.

India Meets New Orleans in Kirpal Gordon's Go Ride the Music

 

Ganga Ghosh, a jazz singer in Varanasi, India, hears pianist Ghost Wakefield on her radio. She stays up all night enchanted by his playing. Although it’s shut off, her radio tells her, “Go ride the music,” setting into motion these three interlocking stories: Ganga and Ghost meet in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; they build a duet in New York, then discover during a tour of the South that Ganga channels, through Ghost's haunted, New Orleans-flavored introductions, the voice and presence of Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and the other immortals she impersonates on stage. It’s a gift she returns to Ghost in a most unusual way and at a most opportune hour.

 

 

From Go Ride the Music by Kirpal Gordon

 

For more on the book: Go Ride the Music: Gordon, Kirpal: 9781508453154: Amazon.com: Books

 

For more on the author: Kirpal Gordon – GIANT STEPS PRESS

 

John Rullo's apocalyptic Planet Love

Sci-fic fiction from John Rullo that grows truer by the day:

 

Planet Love opens on a cold winter evening at a Long Island Open Mic. John is a member of the house band known as The Cocktails, and after backing up Big Vinnie on a cover of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” Vinnie tells John about his encounter with a UFO. Although John is skeptical, he soon experiences a visit from a supernatural entity that overwhelms him and turns his life inside out. Just when he thinks he has seen the full picture, a string of events unfold that leads to both the end of the world as he knew it and his role in Earth’s rebirth. Based upon real life events, Planet Love’s story of hope, intrigue and mystery speaks to our everlasting search for the ground of our being and our unity with all life.

 

From Planet Love: The End of the World as We Knew It by John Rullo

 

For more on the book:

Planet Love:The End of the World as We Knew It: Rullo, John: 9780615475806: Amazon.com: Books

 

For more on John Rullo: John Rullo – GIANT STEPS PRESS

 

Jim Cohn's ode to a field of sunflowers

 

The Sunflower Fields of Manitoba

 

The sunflower fields of Manitoba

Show me that each & every heart must bow

            From the weight of its own light.

 

Manitoba

(Undated, early 1980s

 

From Treasures for Heaven: Collected Poems 1976-2021 by Jim Cohn

 

For more on the book: Treasures for Heaven: Collected Poems: 1976-2021: Cohn, Jim: 9781958266007: Amazon.com: Books

 

For more on Jim Cohn: Jim Cohn – GIANT STEPS PRESS

William Seaton's touch of Borges: "Perhaps I am a video game"

 

Perhaps I am a video game

and someone is playing me,

with a small lever

moving me deftly right and left.

“Perhaps,” I said to Patricia

“we are competitors,

well, not us, but our operators.”

Suddenly I felt I had lost

forty points and still the game

rolled inexorably on.

It would not be so bad, perhaps,

if I knew some being somewhere

was doing it all:

trying to avoid disease monsters

and self-flagellation

and ugly ego pits

and seeking on the other hand

to accumulate wisdom

and money and the taste

of fresh berries -- ah! --

and thrills and love-kisses

and the premium prize

a quiet lake in the mind.

 

 

From Planetary Motions by William Seaton

 

For more on the book: Planetary Motions: Seaton, William: 9798696999210: Amazon.com: Books

 

For more on William Seaton: William Seaton – GIANT STEPS PRESS

 

For more on his blog: Poetry on the Loose

Nine Lines by David Cope: "Seven a.m.: Buffing the Floor"

 

Seven a.m.: Buffing the Floor

 

looking up, a boy’s at the door,

blood streaming thru his hands,

scalp laid open---numbchucks.

no, he didn’t know who did it.

                   on the nurse’s bed,

                   coldpack on his head . . .

he had to get out of there,

staggered to the door

didn’t want to talk to no cops.

 

 

From Moonlight Rose in Blue: Collected Poems 1971-2024 by David Cope, published by Grand River Poetry Press (Grand River Poetry Collective).

 

For more on the book: Moonlight Rose in Blue: Collected Poems 1971-2024: Cope, David: 9781968226008: Amazon.com: Books

 

For more on David Cope: David Cope – GIANT STEPS PRESS

Rubee Rancourt Interviews William Seaton on His New Book “Planetary Motions”

 

photo of William Seaton by Dan Wilcox

 

Rubee Rancourt: Giant Steps Press has just published your new book of poems, Planetary Motions. Would you to share what inspired you to become a writer and how your academic experience influenced your voice as an author?

 

William Seaton: Ah well, I was inspired by the poetry of Freddy the Pig in Walter R. Brooks’ children’s books and the scintillating display of the playful potential of words in Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strips.  As a child I passed a bit of time with the likes of Ogden Nash and Robert Service, but I was interested in everything then including the sciences.  By middle school I had decided that the likeliest professions I might follow were religious mystic (I loved the Evelyn Underhill books), socialist revolutionary (on the model of the Wobblies), or poet.  I suppose I selected the most practical choice of the three. 

 

Just as I was approaching adolescence, the Beat writers were attracting attention even from those who never read a word of their writing, and by the time I was in high school I was attending Paul Carroll’s Big Table readings at Second City in Chicago.  Then followed the hip youth movement of the sixties when I went to the Haight-Ashbury in the days when we wanted not only to write great poetry but also to transform society.  We declaimed poetry in the streets and strove to make each act of daily life into art.

 

As for academe, some may conceive the ivied halls as an isolated and remote realm, but for me it opened up the globe and the centuries past.  I spent an absurd amount of time living on pennies in graduate school, but that allowed me to study many languages, dead and alive, and to feast on the broadest variety of writing while living on scholarships, fellowships, and assistantships. 

 

The traditional canon is not, however, sufficient.  To learn the real nature of literature requires familiarity with work outside the English Literature curriculum.  To know what poetry can do one must know not only Keats, but Du Fu and Kalidasa and blues songs and anthropological reports of oral texts. 

    

I did not always fit in.  When I showed some Sappho translations to my Greek professor and asked his opinion. he said that he could not comment as he really cared little for poetry.  In the most advanced Classics seminars we never did more than translate, construe, and note unusual forms.  I am grateful for the knowledge gained through historical philology, but my goal was simply to read poetry.

 

Rubee Rancourt: You have been able to live what many consider a nontraditional lifestyle. Taking into account this unique lens on the world, what would you say has been the most impactful lesson or experience that has stayed with you throughout your writing career?

 

William Seaton: My inclination was clear from the start.  I happen to have a college application essay I wrote ever so long ago.  Probably imprudently, I said nothing about any specific career but simply said I wished to learn as much as possible and experience as much as possible.  I was quite honest – I despaired of ever earning a living, so I pursued other goals.  Although I led a gypsy career and never made much money, I cannot complain. 

    

When I graduated from university and married my dearly beloved, she and I agreed that our first priority, apart from my evading the draft, was to see the world, so we worked as long as necessary, living on the super-cheap, and then spent almost a year in Europe and North Africa.  Since then we have traveled all over and lingered to teach in West Africa.  The experience of seeing up close how other people live, checking out other cultures’ visions, is really akin to reading which can place your consciousness suddenly in another gender or country or era.  If there is a lesson available, it is probably “there are many ways to be human.”  Second lesson is “all those ways have a lot in common.”

 

Rubee Rancourt: One of the many things that I appreciate about your work is the humor with which you convey deeper messages to your audience. Where does the inspiration for your humor come from and how would you say your authorial voice has evolved over the process of writing your books?

 

William Seaton: I regret the decay of light poetry.  Poetry today is often passionate and loud when it isn’t too cool for any affect.  Humor is highly poetic, using multiple meanings, wordplay, and sudden realizations for effect.  Both the visionary and the comedian depend on poking and sometimes overturning preconceptions.  Looking around in a slightly pixilated state of mind, leads to goofing in the sense of Philip Whalen’s Goof Book, looking at the world agog and grinning, recreational living, one might say.  In performance, the most certain ways to stir an audience are transgressive sexual content, revolutionary social content, and humor.  The last has, perhaps, the best chance of lasting impact. 

    

Everyone has a unique voice, of course, and in the case of a writer there is the additional complication that the mind on the page is mediated by words and cannot be identical to the thought.  Since Shelley: “I fall upon the thorns of life!  I bleed!” lyric poetry has often been self-dramatization.  In Planetary Motions I have included several kinds of poems I had earlier excluded from collections as lacking gravitas.  Let multiple voices coexist!  I tend to shrink from the single continuous confessional voice, but language is such a subtle instrument that the ego always shows up on the page.  Think of Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet who wrote using dozens of personae with different names, styles, and ideas, but he is still discernably there behind each of them. 

 

Rubee Rancourt: When reading “How to be a Poet” I was most impressed with the line “Think of when you’ve been highest and lowest and what the colors of the planets smelled like then.” What would you like people to take away after reading your books? And what would you say to other aspiring writers who wish to explore the world of poetry?

 

William Seaton:  In my opinion writers have no privileged access to reality.  All anyone can do is to record flashes of consciousness accurately enough that the reader might sympathetically see through the author’s eyes.  A precise description of an experience of the world will be beautiful because people find humanity, the world, and the cosmos beautiful in the end, terrifying, too, but beautiful.  Somehow in the end even tragedy and suffering may be redeemed by art.  As the Buddha realized, we cannot alter the conditions of existence, but we can alter our own minds. 

    

As for advice to aspiring writers, I would begin with the old prudential cliché “don’t go into the arts unless you can’t help yourself.”  If you do, blessings upon you.  Poetry is a performance skill, like lifting weights.   Regular practice is the way to improve.  Reading and workshops may play a role, but writing is the way to get better at writing. 

photo of William Seaton by Celia Seaton

"Place de l'Horloge, Avignon" by William Seaton

photo by Patricia Seaton

Place de l'Horloge, Avignon

Beneath the fourteenth century Gothic clock

where animated figures strike the hour

the double-decked old carousel turns round.

Its horses' riders grin and laugh and wave.

Some ride above the others, some below,

some sit on steeds and some on frogs and some

on swans or pigs or ornamented thrones.

And all around are lovely painted scenes

of heroes, quiet ponds and mountain heights

that -- were they not so fine -- could all be real.

The riders speed along and go nowhere.

(Their motion by itself is motive too.)

Each face betrays a soul absorbed in what

is happening just then. This must be wise.

But when the music stops -- it always is

too soon -- the children know the jig is up.

They then descend a few more minutes old.

They've passed the time and I’ve done nothing more.

William Seaton, from his forthcoming collection, Planetary Motions, Giant Steps Press

Giant Steps Press Welcomes Two New Students to Its Internship Program

Giant Steps Press is pleased to welcome two new interns to its publishing and promotion team: Emily Rivera and Betty Araya. These undergraduates develop professional-level aptitude through learn-by-doing publishing projects with GSP co-founder Paul Kirpal Gordon. 

Ms. Rivera, a third-year senior at Hofstra University’s School of Communication, is a Public Relations major with a Photography minor. A member of the Alpha-Theta Beta sorority and its chairperson in Public Relations, she is also a member of the Yoga club; GiveKindness; SP!T, a poetry club; and WRHU, the campus three-time, Marconi-award-winning radio station where she writes, produces and broadcasts. 

Born in Queens and raised on Long Island, she brings skills in website and book design as well as marketing, interviewing, copy writing, photography and videography. Her essay, “I Dare You: Reflections on Identity,” is part of the curriculum of Writing Studies Composition 1 at Hofstra. It has been of great service for first-year, first-semester students coming to terms with their own identities as learners (https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2018/10/i-dare-you-reflections-on-identity-by.html).

Ms. Araya, a third-year student, is majoring in Global Studies and Journalism and minoring in Creative Writing. Born in Ethiopia and raised in the deep South, she is making her mark as the Assistant Features Editor for the Hofstra Chronicle, as a tutor at the university’s Writing Center, and as a peer teacher in the Writing Studies and Rhetoric Department. She brings skills in copy editing for Taking Giant Steps Press blog as well as interviewing authors and reviewing their works.

Her essay, “The Revolution Is Love,” is part of the curriculum of Writing Studies Composition 2 at Hofstra. It has proven to be greatly beneficial to students interpreting films by Wim Wenders, Jamie Uys, Lena Wertmuller and Nicholas Roeg (https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-revolution-is-love-20-by-betty-araya.html). More recently, she was the MC and co-producer of “Walt Whitman Meets the Great American Songbook” last Spring with GSP first’s intern Benny Gottwald.

Mr. Gottwald graduates this May. His four essays at Taking Giant Steps Press blog are part of Hofstra WSC 1 and 2 curricula, and his piece “El Chapin” has been featured in the undergraduate journal The Dangling Modifier as well as the syllabus of trans-lingual scholar Sarah Alvarez. In addition to his role at GSP, Mr. Gottwald is in the process of completing his debut novel, Looking Up, as well as his first album of original songs.

Since his introduction to GSP, Mr. Gottwald has taken on the role of Musical Director. In three campus concert performances (https://www.thehofstrachronicle.com/category/arts-andentertainment/2019/4/22/when-walt-whitman-became-a-jazz-artist) over the last three years, his insightful eye and ear to Whitman’s poetry, his band leadership as well as his arrangements of jazz standards and his own songs, have taken GSP-sponsored projects to new heights. An aspiring New York jazz musician and songwriter, Mr. Gottwald studies with Dave Lalama, a Hofstra music faculty member who has played with Buddy Rich and Stan Getz. In addition to being musically involved with GSP, Mr. Gottwald has worked as a freelance copywriter, book designer, and editor with various clients. After graduation, he is moving to Brooklyn when he will take up his diverse passions full time.