The Poet's Press

10/28/2024

The next Poet's Press book will be "Bus Poems," by Pittsburgh poet Michael Frachioni. Critic Jay Nordlinger just featured one of the poems from the forthcoming book in his National Review online column (imagine that!).

Michael's poem, "September 12," describes one man's attempt to get through the day after the 9/11 catastrophe. In describing one person's small effort to do one normal thing amid shock and grief, this small poem has a stabbing power, I think.

September 12

By dawn’s tentative light,
determined to maintain routine,
he finds his shell in the boathouse,
lays it in the river.

Focusing on a distant point
he pulls oars through water.
The familiar cadence returns,
his work buoys him.

Whorls of mist
dance above his wake;
on either side, concentric circles ripple,
mark his beats, sigh

“I am here,”
“I am here,”
“I was here,”
then fade.

The heron stands in its accustomed spot
on the western shore,
quietly watches as he passes.
Their eyes meet briefly.

“God protect you,”
he whispers between strokes.
“God protect you.”
“God protect you.”

The tiny craft moves swiftly,
silently, tacking True;
his efforts an offering,
a hopeful prayer.

He fights to direct
a flood tide of emotion
into his arms, into his boat
into the river.

He pulls ever harder;
the oars now make
tiny, violent splashes
as they enter the water.

Of a sudden,
he gives a quick, anguished cry,
slumps forward,
releases the oars.

Coasting a while
in silence, head bowed.
The river still,
its reflection almost perfect.

The sky the same astonishing blue
as the morning before.
Despite exertions and prayers,
it is the only thing unchanged.

10/27/2024

In June 1871, the national French troops retook Paris from the Communard uprising, and began summary executions in the street of anyone suspecting of taking part. More than 15,000 French citizens would be killed by soldiers of their own nation in the span of only several weeks. One survivor found her way to Victor Hugo and told what had happened to her.

A WOMAN TOLD ME THIS

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted/translated from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, June 1871”

One who survived the massacres,
a woman, arrived and told me this:
“I had to run away.
I held my little daughter tight
against my breast as I ran.
She screamed, and I knew her cries
would give away our hide-out.

Imagine darting to and fro
with a baby only two months old,
loud as a siren though she
was as weak as a house-fly.

I kissed her mouth to quiet her.
And still, she howled.
Even her moans were audible.
She wanted her mother’s breast.
I had no milk to give.

A whole night passed like this.
I crouched behind a driveway gate.
I wept. I saw the shining
rifle stocks go back and forth.
I heard my husband’s name
demanded at every kicked-in door.

Perhaps I slept a little.
Dawn was near. No sooner
had some expectant rooster
than I tried to raise myself,
the babe still swaddled close.

And then I knew. No breath,
the child as stiff as an armful
of kindling. I touched:
my cold hand on a colder brow.

If they killed me right then,
I could care less. One hand
around the dead child, one hand
thrust out the closed-up gate,

and I was on the street. My eyes
must have looked like those
of a lunatic. Some others,
about their own business,
as desperate as mine, perhaps,
in the not-quite-breaking day,
knew me and called my name;
a few reached out
to give me aid.
I hurtled on. I ran.
The way to the countryside
was open, unguarded.

God help me, I don’t remember.
It’s just as if I walked in blindness.
I could never find that spot again
if I tried a thousand times, the place
where I dug with own hands a grave,
among tree-roots a shallow niche,

a hole just big enough to shove her in.
Oh, there was a fence, that’s all
I can bring to mind, a fence
angled behind and around me.

I came to my senses. My feet alone
had carried me there. My hands
were black with blood and soil.
A priest came along. He raised me up,
looked down at my inept burial
and stood and wept with me.
Then shots rang out,
close, and then closer still,
and each of us fled
in opposite directions.
He had never asked my name,
nor I, his.

09/22/2024

Even if you are poor, you can own Poet's Press books, or at least PDF exact versions of them.

Download complete text of poetry books & chapbooks by The Poet's Press and Yogh & Thorn Books. The Poet’s Press has a distinct leaning toward powerful, neo-Romantic writing with clear meanings, powerful emotions and humanistic values. In other words,...

09/16/2024

The new book is out. Find out why I left Rhode Island.

Neo-Romantic American poet Brett Rutherford spent nearly three decades in the haunted city of Providence, Rhode Island, where the sad shades of Edgar Poe and H. P. Lovecraft are omnipresent. In this collection of poems, fiction, and journal entries from 2012-2014, the author covers the gamut of h...

09/16/2024

Going to press tomorrow.

Neo-Romantic American poet Brett Rutherford spent nearly three decades in the haunted city of Providence, Rhode Island, where the sad shades of Edgar Poe and H. P. Lovecraft are omnipresent. In this collection of poems, fiction, and journal entries from 2012-2014, the author covers the gamut of his literary and musical passions: mythology, Lovecraftian horror, political satire, classical music, and European literature from the Middle Ages through the Romantic era. Assembled as a “farewell to Rhode Island,” this volume is woven literary scrapbook. Horror fans get the worst of it in narratives about a special mental hospital ward for people who think they are Lovecraft, and a remote Pacific island where “Lovecraft” tourists inhale a mystery-drug to make contact with Elder Gods. Providence’s most famous writer is also honored straight-up in tribute poems such as “The Tree at Lovecraft's Grave” and “Midnight on Benefit Street, 1935.”

Few poets have such a range as Rutherford, as an extinct Trilobite speaks, the Titan Prometheus argues with Zeus and a Grand Inquisitor, the Empress of Mexico tells her story from a Belgian madhouse, a Chinese emperor sighs over loss and forbidden love, and a young Greek girl learns how to “play dead” when her mother goes on a murderous rampage. A group of poems in honor of artist Riva Leviten (1928-2014) demonstrate the art of “ekphrasis,” elaborate poems based on single works of visual art. The author and artist, near neighbors in Providence, shared a keen sense of coincidence and dream-based creation. Two short-stories set in Providence's historic East Side are sure to alarm readers who have to contend with attics, basements, and shadowy churchyards.

The extensive journal postings include “The Ho**ah Wars, or Why I Left Providence,” a harrowing account of urban decay, all this one block from an Ivy-League university. Writers and artists once flocked to Providence, but this journal reveals, cogently, and with some humor, why many have moved on.

08/20/2024

Almost ready for press, a surprise new book of my poetry and prose from my last two years in Providence, Rhode Island, including the full account of "The Ho**ah Wars." For the cover, I took the infamous "shunned house" on Benefit Street and made one of my photos into a polarized night-dream version. This is the house on the immediate right, whose cellar opens open onto the sidewalk. H.P. Lovecraft wrote a famous story about the house and its basement. Here is my first go at a cover.

08/19/2024

Just finished: the final cover for Denise La Neve's book.

08/19/2024

Denise LaNeve's book is officially announced, along with advance praise from fellow poets:

books, e-books, literature, poetry, horror, supernatural, Lovecraft, Poe

08/07/2024

The apex of my life in Providence as a poet is my 2012 collection, "An Expectation of Presences." It has some of my best work, some of it provoked or inspired by my studies at the University of Rhode Island and my friendships with faculty there as I stayed on and worked at the university. It has now been made available as a Kindle/epub edition for a pittance.

An Expectation of Presences: New Poems and Revisions

07/20/2024

My friend Emilie Glen, poet, actress, and pianist, had a lifelong
fascination with the Brontës. When a Brontë scholar named Norma Crandall decided to tour a lecture on the Brontës, she asked Emilie Glen to portray Emily Brontë, reading her poetry. This poem came from her experience "channeling" Emily of the moors.

NAMED EMILY

by Emilie Glen

Named Emily, playing Emily
Emily Brontë,
I swim the timeless sea
to her heathered shore,
Climb the hill to the parsonage
not telling her I am from
the Twentieth century
where I breathe her to life stage nights,
Know better than to startle her
with the terrible Twentieth.
(Still the Twentieth could cure her TB.)
This too might alarm her
in her gathering of death like heather

Emily offers me tea
at the table where the Brontës
write of an evening,
The two of us sit in Emily shyness,
our words in leaf bracts on separate trees,
I am keeping her from the moors,
from the fires of her white page,

I would suggest we go out to the "lone green lane
that leads directly to the moors"
only I can't let on how well I know her life,
her death on the very horse-hair sofa
across from us

Ellen Nussey says she plays the piano
with brilliance and precision,
I chord into Debussy,
swiftly finger back to Bach
expecting her to sit down at the piano too,
but she has nothing to play to me say to me,
I might as well be in the graveyard
outside her window
Aunt Branwell and her Father will be coming in
any timeless minute,
Such a dark little parlor and she doesn't
even bother
to light the lamp,
I'll drink her tea
and warm-swim back to my shore

Note: Ellen Nussey (1817-1897) was a childhood friend of Charlotte
Brontë, and a lifelong correspondent.

07/17/2024

Amazon has refused to carry the Kindle edition of my shocking collection of Silver Age Russian stories. You can get both the PDF and EPUB versions here:

Mikhail Artsybashev (1878-1927) and Leonid Andreyev (1871 -1919) both spent their last years in exile from Soviet Russia, and saw their works banned in their native land. Each had gained notoriety for shocking the reading public and alarming the auth...

07/11/2024

Sitting in Brussels, Belgium, in a house with his wife and two grand-children, Victor Hugo works on the poems of "The Terrible Year." Suddenly, a mob of fifty men arrive to kill him.

A NIGHT IN BRUSSELS

by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, May 1871.

It’s the little things
that get to you.
Here at my house,
someone came to kill me
yesterday. Imagine that!
What offended the locals
is that I said I believe
in offering asylum.
An indiscriminate crowd
(a band of imbeciles, really!)
rushed onto my property at night.
They made so much noise
the trees in the square
were shivering with fright,
but not one neighbor
came to a window to look.
Our climb to the upper floor,
for one of my age,
was long, and arduous, and horrible.
And little Jeanne was ill.

Here we concealed ourselves,
four women, my two grand-children,
and, out of breath, yours truly.
I admit I was afraid for the little one.
Just us, to garrison the fortress!
This was a dark fairy-tale: nothing
whatever appeared to help us,
as, by some magic, police
within ear-shot were rendered deaf,
and the records would say,
“They had business elsewhere,”
a rat-scare, or someone’s cat
that tumbled down a garden well.
A hard, sharp stone hit Jeanne. She cried.
In this cab-man’s night attack
they acted like medieval warriors
before some Black Forest stronghold.
They shouted: “You! Bring a ladder!
Go find a beam we can use! Victory!”

Amid the fracas, no one heard our cries.
They wanted to get it over by dawn,
so no one would see their faces.
The banging stopped, then started again.
They were screaming breathlessly.
Two men brought back from the Pacheco quarter
a beam some scaffolding surrendered,
but after some clumsy battering,
they knew it had arrived too late.
So, they stood there screaming, “Assassin!”
(Is this what you get for being a poet?)
“We want you dead, you brigand!
Bandit! The noose is too good for you!”
This chanting and shouting went on forever.

We waited in silence.
The little boy took hold of his sister’s hand,
to calm her. Outside, the black tumult
continued. The voices were not even human.
When I moved across the room
to comfort the women
who murmured prayers together,
someone made out my shadow
and the window was smashed with stones.
The only thing they didn’t do
was call out Long live the Emperor!
(Was my old nemesis behind this?)
The sturdy door below seemed made
to mock the beating it took,
and that was what preserved us.

There must have been fifty outside,
courage in numbers,
and from them my name
kept echoing in clamors of rage.
Bring him down to the light!
Take him with torch and lantern!
To his death! To his death!
Let him perish! We need this!

The violation came in waves,
attack, withdrawal,
a collective in-take of breath,
and then, with a mutual shout,
there were at it again. And then,
in the distance, there sang
a solitary nightingale.

Brussels, May 29, 1871