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Casting Away

Casting Away

            for Turner Cassity

 

What burning force
beyond the curtain
of all that’s certain
draws us out from shore
into solution?

What glitter over
twilit water parses
hidebound human
parts to droplets
in an ocean,

our needs made
slight and slender
as the reeds we were
surrender to
redemptive motion.

William Conelly

Born in rural Iowa in 1943, William Conelly attended and then quit the Air Force Academy in the early 60's.  He then completed both Bachelor's and Master's Degrees at UC, Santa Barbara, under direction of the much-acclaimed poet Edgar Bowers and, 1969, moved to Massachusetts.  Over 30 odd years in that state he held various jobs in passing or part time —sales, transportation services, research, advertising and freelance writing— before settling into teaching freshman comp at Westfield State College.

In Montmartre Cemetery

In Montmartre Cemetery

The seated statue on Nijinsky’s tomb
Depicts him in the role he thought his best—
The gentle, solitary puppet whom
A jealous impresario oppressed.
In his clown costume with its collar ruff
And tasseled cap, he rests with chin in hand,
As if conceiving  he might yet pull off
The sane and independent life he planned.

Timothy Steele

Timothy Steele has published four collections of poems: Uncertainties and Rest (1979); Sapphics against Anger and Other Poems (1986); The Color Wheel (1994); and Toward the Winter Solstice (2006). The first two of these titles were reissued in 1995 in a joint volume, Sapphics and Uncertainties. He has also published two books of literary criticism—Missing Measures (1990) and All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing (1999)—and is the editor of The Poems of J. V. Cunningham (1997).

Remembering Turner Cassity

Remembering Turner Cassity

Memye Curtis Tucker

Memye Curtis Tucker is author of The Watchers (Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Ohio University Press) and the prizewinning chapbooks Admit One (State Street Press), Storm Line (Palanquin Press), and Holding Patterns (Poetry Atlanta Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous print journals and anthologies. A MacDowell and VCCA Fellow, she holds a Ph.D.

Translations from the Persian

Translations from the Persian 1

           for Turner and Suzanne

 

If that full moon were true and good,
how would that be?
And if he feared God as he should,
how would that be?

I’d like to stay with him a while -
If he decided that I could,
how would that be?

I long to kiss his lovely lips,
And if he said he thought I should,
how would that be?

Dick Davis

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London, Dick Davis is currently Professor of Persian and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University.

Lines For Turner Cassity

Lines For Turner Cassity

Librarian with military bearing,
You’ve left us poems critics call unsparing,

A wit not merely clever but hard-bitten.
Sometimes I hear you utter, “overwritten,”

And even at this distance, there’s no choice
But hear the word in that distinctive voice,

Not circumflexing drawl, dipthonged legato,
But southern, brisk particular staccato—

Inimitable voice—for never cruel—
Impatient only of the pompous fool

A. E. Stallings

A. E.

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