Featuring: Dan Rattelle, Isabel Chenot, Ryan Sliwa, and Monica Cooper.
We are voyagers, discoverers
of the not-known,
the unrecorded;
we have no map;
possibly we will reach haven,
heaven.
—H.D., from Trilogy
The Anchorite aims to publish brief gatherings of dynamic poetry on an occasional basis. If this were a print publication, it would be the size of a pamphlet or a church bulletin. Just enough for a single sitting, leaving room for the poetry to echo throughout your day or night.
I’ve enjoyed featuring poets other than myself in Dispatches from the Basement, but the time is right to have a separate newsletter devoted to slightly larger selections from poets composing illuminating work in a dim cultural landscape.
What do I mean by “illuminating”? I’m talking about poems that breathe beyond the merely political and the shallowness of self-help language—qualities that infest American poetry.
This little magazine aims to cast a clear beam of light—of charged, living language—through the cultural fog.
As Denise Levertov put it: “Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.”
—Joseph Massey
p.s. If you subscribe to Dispatches from the Basement, you are also subscribed to The Anchorite. This is a free offering. The Anchorite will never be behind a paywall. But if you wish to change your settings, here’s how.
Dan Rattelle Actæon to himself Intact but fragile, a wild azalea grows in stone. Obscure in blue hills, what fire but its own luster could illuminate my steps, populate this ground with shadows? Wicker Basket A basketful of wet linen to be pinned on the line, bleached in the sun, ironed, starched, and folded into the feminine: This twist of willow, chipped at the rim, knows the snap of wind, knows grief as love’s souvenir. Used to collect the summer fruits? Maybe once but now it knows its place – Its place beneath the cellar stairs, filling up slowly, utilitarian and adjunct to the machine.
Isabel Chenot North Fork Tuolumne River, Mid-July Between the places where the least breeze tries to feather water’s smoothed-out wing and the sub-lumined seams of noon where water’s just reflected air and hardly moves, the sun strikes shattered arcs from fringing trees and rocks— cross-oscillating rivulets, white onto green— plaiting the sheen. The fringe is soluble, and it distends, dilates the bottom of the pool. While prisms flit, skim multi-plumed, go dark and gleam— flickers of fish and mirrored dragonflies in iridescent nets. Here all that consciousness implies is limpid. I can peer down at grooves of sky and stratify the flecked silt of mind's watermark.
Ryan Sliwa Transitions after Ammons The sun swings lower from its equinoctial arc, again and always again. The leaves blanch and desiccate. A drought sucks the tension from the wheatgrass pulp and the meadow droops. But these stems of wildflowers, rusted by September, suspend the last late color: Yellow clustered nodules, the spindly fur of purple asters, and the silver dew-soaked tufts of false cotton. The ineluctable motion is conserved and unaccountably gentle. Amtrak The rained-on meadow is so far away From the city station I wait in tonight. The cold, manicured air, the false light, The pushed mop, and hollow footfall echoing. On the platform, grime and odors. Sometimes we are very far from what we love. These empty tracks run somewhere through the dark. The dogwood is alive with cicadas; Hydrangeas in the garden shake. The storm moves off. Anni Circulum The hem of August is Heavy with many rains. The lawn’s edge, the walks, Burst with weedy growth. Every last thing green. Tomatoes splitting on the vine. A thin line of moss At the bottom of the window panes. But October will shock again In yellow and red and bronze. Again and always autumn, Always the gentle ebb. November will coil up Air, light, and heat, And become another sacrament Of the inexorable things.
Monika Cooper Thirteen Haiku 1. parade floats idle in stopped traffic—clusters of crab apples ripen 2. goldfinch wets his wings. the plaster wolf sits still, charmed by the Saint’s fiddle 3. floral wilderness— bunched closed, false dandelions provide the French knots 4. distractions at prayer: tiny wings incandescent in the blazing night light 5. kin to the meadow kind to the milkweed: always the Monarch returns 6. a parking lot grill: flakes of snow kiss the charcoals and quietly die 7. the lake is always here but the water always has somewhere to go 8. crystal interlock of water’s piscine quills: each little wave, a leap 9. a rhododendron drink—and the hummingbird vaults himself over roofs 10. one crow bunched in a waste of cattails—maintains a hermit’s radius 11. water’s edge: spreading my skirt, I spread my shadow over the baby 12. sun on the surface: silent Roman candles in rapid explosion 13. Buddha sits under the orange daylilies with toddler equipoise
Contributor Notes
Dan Rattelle is the author of Painting Over the Growth Chart (Wiseblood Books). He lives in the Berkshire foothills of Western Massachusetts.
Isabel Chenot has loved poetry all her remembered life. Some of her poems are collected in The Joseph Tree, available from Wiseblood books.
Ryan Sliwa is a parish priest and Benedictine oblate who lives in Western Massachusetts. His poems have been published in places like Presence, New Verse Review, and Black Bough.
Monika Cooper studied literature and lyric poetry at Thomas More College and University of Dallas. She and her husband are raising and educating their four children in New England. Her book, Allegories of the King, is forthcoming from Cooper & Posey.
Thanks Joseph, this was a great selection. I particularly loved Siwa's 'Anni Circulum', but choosing a favourite would be impossible. Rare to find so much new (to me) work that I want to pursue and find more of!
Perfect first issue. All the poems blended beautifully ending perfectly with Monika's 13 Haikus.