Author Archives: Jeff Schwaner

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About Jeff Schwaner

Poet: three published books of verse and two novels. Studied poetry at Cornell University, where I was awarded the Dorothy Sugarman Poetry Prize and George Harmon Coxe Award for Contributions to Creative Writing. Entrepreneur: Co-founder in 2000 of Booksurge, an author-initiated self publishing and Print On Demand (POD) site purchased by Amazon in 2005. Working guy: manager at LexisNexis. Family man: husband and father of three. New England native and current Virginia resident. Big fan of Blue Ridge mountains and hills and trees in general.

Readings: Bridgewater International Poetry Festival (1/15, 1:30 pm)

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January 15th-18th I’ll be one of a group of several dozen poets reading at Bridgewater College, just up the road from me in Bridgewater, Virginia, as part of the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival.

The festival pairs poets, who each read for 20 minutes, and then answer questions from the festival attendees for another 20 minutes. The poetry festival is the brainchild of fellow Virginia poet Stan Galloway, a professor of English at the college. My slot comes on the first day of the festival at 1:30 pm. The most up-to-date version of the schedule can be found at the link above.

The writing of poetry is a solitary type of thing, as we all know, and I’m looking forward to meeting with so many poets from different backgrounds and different parts of the world.

My plan is to split my 20 minutes between a selection of poems from the Mei Yao-ch’en sequence and a group of poems from the non-Mei output of the last year or so, all of which is on this blog. So here’s your chance to use your social media savvy to become an “influencer” and let me know if there’s a poem you want me to read on the 15th. I might even record a few as a way of practicing, and try to create some audio files to share. A few poets I know have done something similar, and I have always enjoyed hearing a poem read by its author. So go ahead, be a disruptive influencer of poetry, and let me know what you want to hear.

Attendees to the festival can buy one-day or full festival passes. So, fellow WP writers, if you happen to be driving down Route 81 sometime in the middle of January, feel free to swing on by and say hello. Leonard, I know you can make it for this, right–isn’t there a Greyhound from Turkey to Bridgewater? Dana? Robert? Esther? Come on, now. Being on the other side of the world is no excuse! O C, I do not consider attendance optional. This is one of the issues with WordPress–being merely a digital poem’s throw from a bunch of writers doesn’t mean they can meet you for coffee.  What about you, Ann? Anthony? Ron? Gunmetal Geisha, you on my side of the continent this month? Ah, well.

Besides my regular reading gig at the local writers’ open reading here in Staunton on the second Wednesday of every month, I also have a reading scheduled for National Poetry Month in April–I think that’s at the Massanutten Library, in the heart of the Blue Ridge mountains, and will have more information on that soon as well.

In other news: Over the next few weeks I’ll begin to design and format the collection of Mei Yao-ch’en poems, as well as a collection of other poems written in the past year, tentatively entitled The Drift.  I may post new poems in this time, and may post some work from my previous books, which have not been posted on this site yet. I hope everyone’s new year is off to a good start!

 

/Jeff

 

Conditional

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Conditional

 

Frost flourishes in the shade like flowers in the sun–
the gain may be temporary but isn’t the temporary

gain all that can be measured and for frost after all
isn’t the temporary a permanence itself? External

conditions set it stony and sharp, a marker
of the cold we feel—things being different

it might be the drop of dew in which
you glimpse the moon you’d otherwise miss

Walking in the Dark

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Walking in the Dark

 

Late night walks are making more sense
as I realize how little of my life

I am really seeing.  Making it home each night
through the black ink of every word of hope

and doom engraved into the emptiness
surrounding me—isn’t it much better

practice than bounding about in daylight
thinking I am understanding everything?

In the dark the actual tree spreads without end,
across time and space, and I begin to sense

that my blindness also travels a route
set in deep earth, exposed to the sky.

Setting Moon, with Constellations, One Night Before Its First Quarter, Late December

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Setting Moon, with Constellations, One Night Before Its First Quarter, Late December

 

When the moon sinks low in the western sky
I pour a day’s memories into its gold cup

as the old rules state. Evening is cooling off
but mild, as if between myself and

the stars there is an owl flying away while at the same
time a distant unknown bird is approaching.

When they pass each other I am finding the key
in my pocket and feeling blindly for the lock.

When the cup is locked in the cupboard
of the past for another day, in the quiet house

I take out the moments I withheld from the moon
and place them in the dark above me: your hand

on my arm, your head against my shoulder.
The phone ringing. The living warmth of you

like a foreign language I can suddenly read
as words pour into the room and we listen.

The Invisible

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The Invisible

 

Roads diminish and clarify. People disappear.
The skunk is just being himself on the edge of the dark sidewalk.

On a certain night even he can see the dog-star.
Not shaking off the weather. All last summer the stooped old lady

laid her traps and could not flush him out of hiding. All summer
I spent mornings freeing trapped squirrels and possums

before the noon sun dehydrated them. She never came out
to see and neither did the skunk in her crawlspace. Now, crossing

the road, he looks up to the house as if remembering
or as if seeing through walls and latticework: here’s a place

I could make a home beneath. Here is a place I can depart
and come back to. A place I can impart the secret:

How to disappear but never leave. How to settle in
when all you will do at this age is preparation for leaving.

I would kneel with you any hour and pray to find that place.
If we wait long enough the wind will move the invisible aside.

On This Rainy Night, Thinking of You

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On This Rainy Night, Thinking of You

 

Though there is far more space
between raindrops than there is rain

it is natural to feel the rain and not the dry space.
This evening: inside, dry, all I feel is the space

Fog, Near the Summit of Afton Mountain, Just After the Winter Solstice

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Fog, Near the Summit of Afton Mountain, Just After the Winter Solstice

 

We disappear into the unseen ahead of us:
Already built, a bridge will reveal itself

when we arrive where a bridge is needed.
We’re not the first to make this trip.

Poem 1

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Note: My 11 year old daughter Sophia wrote this poem earlier this evening.

Poem 1

Swooping down the sky
reaching what grasp cannot
through chiseled spaces
of interlocking earths
Gone to the time’s end
old darkest wrinkles
Voracious sounds of sight
always forward looking

What is never is now appearing
foretold futures swaying
on lines of pure balance.
Grains of gold including the factor

deepening eyes of she did swell up.
Raining waterfalls that did
forever secrets handling.

 

 

Primitive Resonance

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Primitive Resonance

I don’t want to believe it, either—
so I won’t, until the image clears.

Then there is only what there is
and I won’t have to believe anything

I can’t see, or in anything I can’t see.
Maybe belief is only what we practice

while waiting. I only know I’d kill anything
and hold it up to the sun to see you safe.

To the one missing her father inexplicably on a warm day after an ice storm

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To the one missing her father inexplicably on a warm day after an ice storm

Mid-morning snow after a night of sleet.
Ice is melting off the roofs, descending

faster than flakes can fall, but they go
only their own speed, unconcerned

with making up the distance