Poetry and Poem SamplerJohn Ronan's poems have appeared in scores of national journals and reviews. Among them are: Folio, Threepenny Review, Hollins Critic, New England Review, Southern Poetry Review, Louisville Review, Greensboro Review, Notre Dame Review, NYQ, et al. John is especially proud, given his Irish-American background, of poems in The Recorder, the journal overseen by Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and others. A new collection, Marrowbone Lane, was published in January, 2009 by The Backwaters Press. Copies are available at Barnes and Noble and at Amazon.
From back cover of Marrowbone Lane: "Like the crows he describes in one of his witty, wry poems, John J. Ronan casts a 'cold eye on life, on death.' These edgy, intelligent poems brim with emotion without ever nearing the sentimental. Ronan revels in life and laments inevitable time, but does not wallow. An Irish American steeped in dark joy, Ronan reveals roots in Yeats, Heaney, Mahon and others. 'To exist and then not to exist - it's a raw sort of humor,' he writes. In his work we see both the raw surface and always, always the humor. These poems are a joy to read." Linda Pastan, former Poet Laureate of Maryland, wrote of Mr. Ronan's work: "Very good indeed: original, assured, just a touch sardonic." And from Tim O'Brien, the National Book Award winner: "Terrific - tender and moving and beautifully written." John was named a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in 1999-2000 and has also been a Ucross Fellow and Bread Loaf Scholar. Among other writing awards are a Silver Cindy, Telly, Aurora Gold, NECTA, Mayor’s Poet, et al. His work includes many poems set in Gloucester. In addition, he translates and has published work by the renown Ecuadorian-French poet, Jules Supervielle. John used part of the NEA stipend to support a television program, The Writer's Block, and for other writing projects in Gloucester, MA, where he was appointed Poet Laureate in June of 2008.
Copies are available from Barnes and Noble for $8.95. THE CURABLE CORPSE The Curable Corpse appeared in December, 1999. The book's twenty-one poems had been published individually in San Jose Studies, California Quarterly, The Recorder, and other journals. Rhina Espaillat, author of Where Horizons Go and winner of the prestigious T.S. Eliot Award, says that "Ronan has a rare gift for the apt, unexpected phrase, the startling but accurate detail … Word of a new book … is very good news." Copies are available from Barnes and Noble for $8.95. JOHN J. RONAN: GREATEST HITS 1975-2000 Early in 2001 Pudding House Publications, based in Ohio, announced the appearance of a new volume in its popular Greatest Hits series: John J. Ronan: Greatest Hits 1975-2000. The Pudding House series, edited by publisher-poet Jennifer Bosveld, includes such nationally acclaimed poets as Gary Fincke, Carol Morris, and Mark Halperin. Each chapbook contains twelve poems, biographical notes, and the author's introduction to the work. The series is by invitation only. Ms. Bosveld is enthusiastic: "The series celebrates poetry's place in our culture. It honors artists whose lines elevate America …" John is very happy to be a part of the Pudding House stable of writers! Copies are available from Pudding House Publications for $8.95. An anthology, Sad Little Breathings, features two of John Ronan's award-winning poems: "Nuance with Moose" and "The Five Stages of Grief." The poems were chosen by Heather McHugh, who introduces the volume, from over 1,700 entries. The anthology was published by PublishingOnline in the fall of 2001. Poems are included on many websites, including Black Cat Poems, an online collection of fine poetry featuring poets from around the world. John Ronan's poems included here are: "Dying Aside," "Good Harbor, Home," "Man Crossing a Field, Cashel," "Beaux Arts, Boston," "Regarding Delacroix," "Elegy for Dick O'Connell," "H(WY)," "Casavecchia," "The Habits of the Rat," and "Experiment in Verse." ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
It's the adjustment to any death, really - doubt and denial, the questions. Entitled self, inflicted: Just who do these white cells think they are? Even as the news becomes fast fabric: the day sly and subtle science coldly prognosed, dead as the dickens, sooner than - your fervent hope, much, much later, the dark day you acquired anxieties worthy of your talent, the day your hard-on for sorrow and the canopic classes ended - Hem in Ketchum, Wilde witty in Paris, death as metaphor much, much flatter in a suddenly molested present, the desperate day, or such remaining days as you've got, that grace.
You could do with a little distance. Now, imagine naps in the past, affording boredom, or dying aside, vis-a-vis the great scolding notions, the feet-up feel of eternity.
In truth, you'll taper gracefully, decorum come in cold crescendo: calm, correctness, and regret. Bone-tired, pre-deceased by pride and green desire, turn finally to the disguise of piety and claim that dying made you wise.
~ ~ ~
(Gloucester inaugural poem, January 1, 2002)
Waves break on outcrop rock: granite, fire-formed and hard, headland granite - no coddled cape, no sandbar, and nothing soft in her city, no knickknack, Gloucester-by-God, attitude granite. The beaches are broken by wetland, woods of oak and pine, grace in paintscape chasms, coves, the harbor of ships, sailboats, a fishing fleet today inner-harbored, home from the beat-broth sea, moored safely to the Cape. And continent: cookie-cut, cradle states of the seaboard, rust-belt, Bible-belt, rivers and plains, pitch of the Mississippi, Missouri, corn of Illinois and Iowa, the Dakotas, Kansas, squared-away states stretching west to the Rockies, Cascades, a rival coast and ocean - our daily wake, the entire, entrained nation. Its originals: Ojibwa, Pequod, Agawam, Pawnee. Later, tribes of Irish, Latinos, Italians, Poles and Portuguese, Africans, Asians... We are the potluck people, power in this rare republic, experiment America imagined on the land, artless or brilliant, bums or brains, but rulers by right and by law, the law of nature and of nature's God, true believers in clamor and compromise, believers in reason, and so debating rights, wrongs, damning terror and terrorists in just seething sorrow, yet protecting loudly law, the process of law, stunned as the young to stagger and strut at once.
The noise of debate makes music. Now playing in this sacred city hall - haled for its mellow music - oaths of public office, friends elected in a free, local vote to swear, and serve, under one weathervane, minded by bright murals of good government, nothing abstract, far away or federal, servants and citizens balanced in the same boat.
The ship of state's a schooner, game as Gloucester, seaworthy, wise in the rhythms of salt water, and tied today in the good harbor, home. What matters happens here! As we - each of us proud, elect - the people of Gloucester, by law and by luck neighbors in a great nation, trust power for a term to others, themselves strong in our common strength, the idea democracy in time and tide, a city's lapstraked lives. And so blessed, confident of grace and granite, bear witness to America on the deep, abiding sea.
~ ~ ~
In the foreground, size and time: a farmer walks to a cow or pint appointment, ignoring cathedral and tower, orders of arch. Nothing needed - a man's the measure of history, reducing The Rock, the cairn of Cashel, to pub-impediment, illusion. And yet, the farmer too stays in frame, marking silence in slow time, himself become like stone, stately, a second foolish ruin. Fixture fails, the trompe l'oeil of lasting - canopic canvas will no more save than the Cross. Better thin slates in the graveyard, tabloids tilted by wind and drink, than art, effigy kings, the arrogant care that makes an act of sadness, trades a cow or stout, for empty, unredeeming fields.
~ ~ ~
Clever canvas. Duke world-weary to rudeness, resolutely first person, duchess in petite proportion to her powerhouse spouse. Earth color, simple line, and symmetry defining whole a couple, a caste - gall, at least in the titled, Morbilli family mold; a standing, an understanding, against the world, the late Second Empire's Bogart and Bacall. Degas deepens to brief, deceiving day, taken personally by both Therese and Edmund, the spell of self on a stretched hemp drum: his pearl-pinned cravat and lidded gaze, gold bracelets, lace, the lilac gown, limned out from a dark, indifferent ground..
~ ~ ~
At the Louvre, Guggenheim or Getty, the assignment's sit, rest your feet at a wide, attended wall, a riddled work by Degas or David, Delacroix... Liberty, say, Leading the People. Now, you see a cowboy toting pistols, now the armed dandy who holds on to his top hat in the middle of battle, occasionally Liberty herself, with flag and rifle and bayonet, breasts so buoyant they're really what she's waving. An ochre city's as distant and ideal as Oz, almost its own oil. Details, masked by traffic, seem complete, as focus, forced, catechizes the eye to limb and landscape. In this exercise, you will draw from Delacroix whatever life, liberty, breasts or death the crowd allows.
~ ~ ~
No hieroglyphs on the Heavenly Bed. No shawabti, tiny sailors equipped for fishing the Nile. No beer. No bread. Christians comb the hair, knit the lips, bury with lean, abstracted faith: "Happy are those who sleep in the dust ..." The unhappy shift their weight as one, the Paraclete picking us off: AIDS, cirrhosis, stroke, cancer's thin distinctions - you, a tumor, the catching self. Grief's lenient at the edge, the ring of cousins and fellow workers, a first wife - more surprised than stricken to be standing in weather on a weekday afternoon among angels, obelisks, and newer stones set low for easy mowing. "The Lord is kind and merciful, but the kindness..." A gaunt divine, speeding our friend from the midst of wickedness, sprinkled chrism like bubbly on the bright copper box: All the Best... Bon Voyage... Lucky You...
Cocktails later, mixed to precise personal taste, wash of memory and gossip - the delicious details of Dick O'Connell's cancer repeated with pride. Nuh-uh, no, not me, baby! I haven't died.
~ ~ ~
It might be anywhere, this dusty road winding from Ucross to Ulm. You hike its scrub and shale, later carving initials in the soft stone, lying back to dream under sizable sky - I'll be good, I'll live forever, bone-buoyant earth stretching off to Dakota and Montana, a drained Eocene ocean full of soil-swimmers shoaled up in mid-life, mid-stroke. It might be anywhere - a road to Delphi, or Deadwood, the Via Appia as it nears the Adriatic at Brundisium, wherever gravity is the cause of flat water. But it is the road to Ulm. Continuing then through Clearmont and Recluse, and likewise, all along in there, Wyoming.
~ ~ ~
Sandy
says a centurion worked this
farm, a fundus, booty-bought after
Actium. And Michelangelo when
the Buonarroti's owned it. Sandy,
the two boys no longer boys,
and our friends Mitch and Kate. The
chianti’s grown and aged on site by
Signor Buondonno, whose vines climb
the darkening hill, hedged by
fence from Bacchus-minded boars. Mitchell
says, "in veritas, wine." The
farmhouse terrace, thatched over,
opens on groves of holly, olive
and cypress, wind-worried shapes
in the rain. We're dry ~ ~ ~
The odor's beyond sweet, but begins there, like skunk. A dead giveaway - rat like a pall, belly full of yellow pellets. We nosed it in the stove - between the immaculate outer wall and oven, this harbinger of evil and disease, opposite of robins, decay accelerated by a baking day. The hands and feet were familiar from tracks on pans. The tail told the species - least dragon. Brooding over a treasure of tinfoil bits, pieces of potholder, one marble, and asbestos insulation kneaded like pillows, perfect. Imagine: the rat wakes to bacon and eggs, gazes at the soft glow of flame and speaks, as fabulous animals can: "What a warm house I've found for the winter," rubbing the cat's-eye like an amulet.
~ ~ ~
I wondered what the number would be Of lines I could rhyme consecutively, So I asked for a guess from my lovely Wife, whose wisdom I consult frequently. "Not more than four," she said. |
