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Et in Arcadia Ego

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by Rosalie Frost

Such intense and persistent longings
for what we did or who we were
before this pandemic:
wasn’t life more antic,
with less panic?
Such nostalgic longings may be unwise —-
long-ago, old tales in many lands
tell of preturnatural worlds where
irrevocable acts cannot be unmade.

I
Orpheus, the magician and musician
escaping upward from hell, Eurydice
in his wake, turned around
and gazed back, losing all.

II
Eden’s benevolent god in a deathless
neverland banished disobedient creatures
whose descendants idealize a sinless existence
set within a false pleasure garden
where benevolence masked
truths spoken by a snake.

III
Mortals yearning to escape from
their unhappy, all too much
damaged world, are lured away by
Arcadia’s pastoral, idyllic landscape
seen within a shimmering sound
growing at the corner of one eye.
Into this unspoiled world dreamed
into being by gods and demi-urges,
mortals find refuge elusive:
rugged mountains with no footholds,
vast green forests where
light has little purchase,
roaring rivers and streams
never calm enough to ford.

Entering Arcady by misadventure, mortals
are drawn everywhere and nowhere by
a strange music played by Pan, who rules here —-
a rustic god with body neither
goat nor man but both, yet so
beloved by all on Olympus for playing
such sweet songs on his reed pipe —-
songs that if heard by trespassing mortals
cause them to walk in endless circles
with no way back but madness.

 

My creative writing is not tied to anything in any of the professional lives that I have lived. Writing comes out of my life-long devotion to reading beginning at about 7 years of age. That was when my parents took me for the first time to enroll in the local library, where they had to sign a form promising the librarian that they would be responsible for the privilege accorded me of taking care of books, including borrowing and returning them on time. Sometimes, I would stay in the library to peruse those curious adult books without any pictures, just pages of big words I could sound out but never really comprehend. My imaginative life grew and just seamlessly morphed into writing —-

No More Dreams

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by Mark Fischweicher

Dead of winter

xxxxxxxAll the leaves are brown and
xxxxxxxthe sky is gray

Pine needles carpet the woodland trails,
and, with its monochrome horizon,
the landscape unfolds and,
even as the days
begin to grow,
you never know where
the moon will be
but that the sun will rise above the barren trees
seems likely for a few more years,
or centuries, or maybe
a millennium or more, but,
at least, this year, I think
that spring will come
and so will summer

and so, for now, to keep them happy
every other morning, I fill the feeder with nuts and seeds and tasty
bits of fruit
and watch for black-capped chickadees
and purple finches, and
dark-eyed juncos,
and maybe one or two black-backed three-toed woodpeckers
or just a few, a trio or a chorus if they will of some black-throated warblers
with something smart to say or
mourning doves or all the Cardinals and their families
come to church just for the day
till evening when I take the feeder in
as once a bear had come in from the woods behind the house
and bent the steel pole it hangs on
like a twig, but
it is not the birds I think of now
who spend their days here, dependable as sun.

No dreams for me
My only two nocturnal visitors are just the two opossum that
come looking for the nuts and seeds and bits of fruit their feathered friends
have scattered in the grass and fallen snow.

I watch for them
am pleased when they return,
old friends should never be forgotten
I shave with Toby’s brush,
badger,
not so unlike opossum,
but he, no,
he will not return.
Ancient peoples, plagues and parents,
no monuments for these,
Perhaps some footprints in the snow will prove that they were here
and as it always seems,
the path leads to our home
welcoming the darkness as it falls
within it
A quiet comfort before the sleep I take alone,
and I,
with you beside me,

all aflutter

Mark Fischweicher has been scratching out poems since junior high school and still hopes it may become a regular thing.

 

The Worst Seat in the House

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by Stewart Alter

Fidgeting and uncomposed,
His coat in the way,
He wanted to leave his seat
When the performance began
To join the actors onstage.
He was drawn to the radiance
Of sequenced moments
And exposed intentions
Through lines ripened in memory.
He wanted to be a presence
Close enough to hear their breaths
Rounded into words—
Not, as he now heard,
Coughs in the assembly
Of shadows, in the role
Of the distracted, eavesdropping
On half-completed scenes.
His thoughts mingled and astray,
He turned them toward the vague
And disturbing muttering,
So bitter and blistering
And untransformed by artifice
That he was unsure what to say.
He wanted to leave
The darkness,
But someone had to stay
In the audience, to watch
And to listen,
With no role to play.

Stewart Alter, who joined LP2 in the Fall of 2020, has been writing poetry and painting intermittently before, during and now after a long career in business journalism and corporate communications.

Sleeping

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by Stewart Alter

I know nothing about my snoring self,
The loud beast whose breathing chills the village.
I have never heard myself, but have been told
My snoring is the terror of the night.
I know myself only as the dreamer,
Master of the quiet and private signs
Who slips nimbly through night’s animation.
But I have become the cave of the dragon
In which each day ends, the legions of Rome
Milling restlessly in the colonies, threatening
To stir up all laws and languages.
I know myself only as the dreamer
Who was prepared to face the senselessness
Of my own discomforts, not those I imposed.

I wish now that I had known success
Was the blessing of sleeping silently—
The foxhole fellowship of hiding unheard
Together for weeks to surprise the enemy,
The lovers’ afterlude when satellite minds
Regain their orbits in expanding space.

For I had envisioned a different end for myself:
Old man beneath a broad suburban tree,
Lying on my back, and pedaling from leaf to leaf
Until I reached the sky,
I would return outside one evening
To climb and doze off, undiscovered
Until a few mornings later,
Casually I would be spotted,
Huddled in the branches,
Dear old eccentric.

Stewart Alter, who joined LP2 in the Fall of 2020, has been writing poetry and painting intermittently before, during and now after a long career in business journalism and corporate communications.

Masthead – Fall 2019

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Charles Troob, Publisher

Lorne Taichman, Associate Publisher
Tom Ashley, Associate Publisher

Prose Editors: Mary Houts and Eric Roper

Prose Readers:
Eileen Brener
Mary Elwood
Mary Houts
Ruth Kavesh
Sharon Lewin
Sara Petitt
Eric Roper
Ira Rubin
Ettie Taichman

Poetry Editor:
 Mark Fischweicher

Poetry Judges:
Sylvia Brill
Mark Fischweicher
Carmen Mason
Carol Schoen

Photo Editors: Peter Houts and Jerry Vogel

Photo Judges:
Janna Amelkin
Harold Berkowitz
Bob Feinstein
Susan Herman
Peter Houts
Marshall Marcovitz
Gerald Reisner
Robin Sacknoff
Claude Samton
Susan Winston
Susanne Yellin

Meditation

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by Stewart Alter

She had not fed the birds for days
And missed the cardinal in the muddy yard,
The way he dropped down to the earth ablaze,
And slipped back up into the fog unmarred.

The more drab the day, the more color lent,
For he showed no signs of his search for seeds,
No traces marking a desperate descent
In a life consumed serving basic needs.

 

Stewart Alter, who joined LP2 in the Fall of 2020, has been writing poetry and painting intermittently before, during and now after a long career in business journalism and corporate communications.

Letter from Publishers – Winter Spring 2018

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Letter from Publishers–Fall-Winter 2018

Dear Colleagues,

This is the seventh online issue of Voices.   We feel honored to be able to present such interesting and beautiful work to you.
We would like to thank our editors, judges, and readers, who have selected this work and prepared it for publication.
Take some time with Voices—we’re sure that you will be as impressed as we are by the extraordinary talents of IRP members.

Sincerely,

Charles Troob, Publisher
Lorne Taichman and Tom Ashley, Associate Publishers

Masthead Winter-Spring 2018

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VOICES: 2018

Charles Troob, Publisher
Lorne Taichman, Associate Publisher
Tom Ashley, Associate Publisher

Prose Editors: Mary Houts and Eric Roper

Prose Readers:
Eileen Brener
Mary Elwood
Mary Houts
Ruth Kavesh
Sharon Lewin
Sara Petit
Eric Roper
Ira Rubin
Ettie Taichman

Poetry Editor:
 Mark Fischweicher

Poetry Judges:
Sylvia Brill

Mark Fischweicher
Carmen Mason
Carol Schoen

Photo Editors: Peter Houts and Jerry Vogel

Photo Judges:
Janna Amelkin
Harold Berkowitz
Bob Feinstein
Susan Herman
Peter Houts
Marshall Marcovitz
Gerald Reisner
Robin Sacknoff
Claude Samton
Susan Winston
Susanne Yellin

 

Harriet Sohmers Zwerling 1928-2019

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Harriet Sohmers Zwerling joined the IRP in the Fall of 1996.   Her Wikipedia bio     describes her as “an American writer and an artist’s model.”  We knew her as an inimitable and indomitable colleague.   In her last years she required a walker to preserve balance, but she still went everywhere in her little red car.

Harriet spent most of the decade of the 1950’s in Europe, a period she chronicled in her memoir, Abroad:  An Expatriate’s Diaries.  She was associated with many of the most famous literary figures of the time, including James Baldwin and Norman Mailer.  She had relationships with both Susan Sontag and Maria Irene Fornes. and she appears in documentary films about both these women.

She then returned to the United States, married, and had a long career as a public school teacher in Brooklyn.   She is survived by her son Milo, a musician.

Harriet was open about her sexual activities and interests, and her writing was vivid and fearless.  She was a regular contributor to Voices, and her first book, Notes of a Nude Model, includes two pieces originally published in Voices.

Mary Elwood sent us the following remembrance of Harriet:
“Harriet went to Black Mountain College, a famous progressive school in North Carolina which lasted from the Thirties to the Fifties.   A few years ago, IRP offered a study group about the College, and Harriet graciously agreed to address our class about her experience as a student.   She was fascinating, bringing immediacy to a history that was already a bit misty.
“Harriet didn’t tell the class, but favored us coordinators with her memory of having Anni Albers look over at H. in the BMC dining hall, and remark to her husband, Josef (both were mainstays as instructors at the College for more than fifteen years),  ‘That girl herself is a work of art,’  “

Here are links to Harriet’s pieces that appeared in Voices Online.

Her prose:
https://lp2voicesonline.com/the-block/
https://lp2voicesonline.com/55-christopher-street-the-old-days/
https://lp2voicesonline.com/the-canal/
https://lp2voicesonline.com/beach-point/
https://lp2voicesonline.com/the-scorpions-tale/

Her poetry
https://lp2voicesonline.com/ode-to-stolichnaya/
https://lp2voicesonline.com/grasshopper/
https://lp2voicesonline.com/three-afternoons-at-beach-point/
https://lp2voicesonline.com/the-neverweres/
https://lp2voicesonline.com/artemis/
https://lp2voicesonline.com/dunes/
https://lp2voicesonline.com/bayscape/
https://lp2voicesonline.com/persona/

 

Poetry is…

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by Mary Padilla

Physics is what physicists do.
(Richard Feynman said this )
So poetry is…
up for grabs, perhaps, but
it does involve some constraints.
You need to use words.
Well, maybe not –
maybe just syllables
or even sounds.
It uses a verbal medium anyway
not a visual one – except
that there can be an impact
of how it looks on the page
and then there’s word-painting.
Is it like music then –
all about the rhythms
and the emphases
and the inflections?
Yes but
could it be more
about the spaces between the sounds
and the things left unsaid at the end?

Mary set out last semester to investigate poetry by signing up for two study groups on the subject.  When that wasn’t sufficiently clarifying the nature of the medium for her, being at TNS, the home of John Dewey, she tried learning-by-doing and attempted to write some of her own.