Guy Kettelhack is the author or co-author of more than 25 nonfiction books. Among his solo efforts are: “Easing the Ache;” “Dancing Around the Volcano;” “The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp;” and the Hazelden recovery book series, “First Year Sobriety,” “Second Year Sobriety” and “Third Year Sobriety.” His poems have appeared online and in print in a variety of venues and quarterlies, including Van Gogh’s Ear, Melic Review, New Pleiades, Malleable Jangle, WORM 33, Das Alchymist Poetry Review, the PK list, The Rose & Thorn, Heretics & Half-Lives, Desert Moon Review, Hiss Quarterly, Juked, Anon, Umbrella Journal, Loch Raven Review, Mississippi Crow and he Chimaera. Several of his poems have placed in IBPC competitions since 2004, his poem “Alter Ego” was selected as a quarterfinalist in the Lyric Recovery competition in March 2004, and he won the Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for Traditional Verse in November 2004. 20 of his poems appeared in the New Pleiades Anthology of 2005.
Artwise, a collage and art book of his appeared in a book art exhibition at Leslie/Lohman Gallery curated by Norman Shapiro in 2002. His drawings and poems have appeared in Mississippi Crow, Autumnsky Poetry, Loch Raven Review and Rattle. Some of his drawings will appear in an upcoming inspirational book by Barry Lipscomb. He’s currently working on the first of a series of his own poem and art books. 32 of his drawings and accompanying poems will be featured in an art show at Gallery New World Stages, 343 w. 49th St., NY, NY 10019, May 11 through September 2012.
Spring 2012
Table of Contents - Vol. VIII, No. 1
Poetry Fiction Translations Essays Reviews
Guy Kettelhack
This Intramural Sport of Thinking
Playing fast and loose –
cavorting with morphology –
is only part of it:
this intramural sport of thinking
in late afternoon.
while lying down,
attuned to dim late winter air –
gazing upward,
with your glasses off,
at rare myopic visions
which assume unconscious
light is naturally part of sight:
its mixtures and bold certainties –
its brave exposures –
curtains ripped wide open
on enfolding limbs and faces;
heads and fingers lingering
a moment – point to – hold –
new suppositions –
briefer in this ether
than the clunky calculations
you had labored over lately –
just this morning –
under rude fluorescent
lamps. Everything revamps:
regales. Color is outrageously
correct: until you get up,
and it pales.
my thinking’s
sinking
toward abstract
design –
as if the fact of line
were a sufficiency,
not a deficiency.
Perhaps
that’s fine.
I love to go too far when
someone tells me no.
I plot my heists.
I mutate less like Darwin
than like czarist overthrow.
Or poltergeists.
© Guy Kettelhack
