Gary Blankenburg has degrees from Illinois University (B.S., M.S.), Johns Hopkins University (M.L.A.), and Carnegie-Mellon University (D.A.). A retired English teacher, he is the author of several books of poetry and fiction and has published widely in small magazines, literary journals, and anthologies. He was a founding editor of The Maryland Poetry Review and edited weekly poetry columns for a number of newspapers. His doctoral dissertation treated the confessional poets: John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and W. D. Snodgrass. During the writing of the dissertation, he often met and consulted with Professor Snodgrass while he was at University of Delaware. He has begun to write again after a seven year hiatus. Mostly, nowadays, he reads Victorian novels, smokes cigars, grows fat, and waits for the rapture.
Winter 2012
Table of Contents - Vol. VIII, No. 4
Poetry Translations Fiction Non-fiction Reviews
Gary Blankenburg
The Pulitzer Prize Poet With a Funny Name
While civilizations come down with the curse,
Snodgrass is walking through the universe.
-- From "These Trees Stand..." by W. D. Snodgrass
He once told me that both he
and his new fourth wife
thought one of my poems
was “simply delicious.”
I remember the poem
was about a wife
Telling her husband
that he was
in all likelihood
a paranoid schizophrenic.
In that poem the husband
responded, guardedly,
that he was divided
on that issue. Funny,
how of all the poems
I sent him over the years
that one struck home.
Now, the poor fellow
is dead. But if
you meander through
a stand of trees
and listen carefully,
you will hear his spirit still
walking through the universe.
For Mark Sanders
I phoned a young poet friend
and asked him what he was up to.
He said, Well, I’m eating a baloney
sandwich, drinking a glass
of whiskey, and washing out
my good shirt in the sink
with dish detergent
because I have a reading
in the city tonight. I said,
You’re living the poet’s life.
You stay poor, stay lean, stay hungry,
shun the successful, keep at the work.
For Richard Sober
It was his graceful
flamboyance—
the ease at which
he found himself
when so intoxicated,
with the audience—
that endeared him
to me immediately.
Besides being a poet,
he was also a painter.
One of his paintings won
my heart
because it had
blue chickens in it.
After his reading,
he gave away his art—
lovely, flowing abstracts
sprawled on flimsy paper.
When he scattered them
about the room
they fluttered, then paused
for a moment
on the still air.
For Moira Egan
The words came to the girl in order—
bird, book, Daddy, bye-bye—
a foreshadowing each of things to come.
Bird—the feathered thing—
who lit upon the window sill—
who fluttered away at his own whim.
Book—spread across her Mommy’s lap—
magic words, pictures, and sounds—
closed at bedtime with a “sleep tight.”
Daddy—comes when he pleases—
so smart, so handsome, the Irish poet-man—
Daddy—goes when he pleases.
Bye-bye—the hand open, then closed—
open, then closed—bird fluttered—book shut—
and Daddy long, long gone.
October 1, 2012
Chris Toll, beloved
Baltimore poet,
died unexpectedly
on September 27
at age sixty-four
home alone.
His memorial was today
on his birthday.
I think Chris would
have appreciated that—
the rotundity, the circularity,
and, of course, the irony of it.
And so
the tribes
gathered and scattered
poems for him
as they came
and as they went,
although Chris
might have enjoyed
balloons and party hats.
© Gary Blankenburg
