From Field Rations, Poems by Melinda Thomsen

Aug 022011
 


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Here are new poems from Melinda Thomsen, a freshly minted MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, but already dazzling and prolific. Melinda Thomsen’s poetry and book reviews have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as Poetry East, Big City Lit, New York Quarterly, Home Planet News, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Alimentum, Heliotrope, and The Same.  Anthologies include Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews and Spring from Gatehouse Press, Great Britain. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook Naming Rights in June 2008. These poems are from her next collection, Field Rations, to be published in October 2011.

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From Field Rations

Poems by Melinda Thomsen

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Suppertime, December 28, 1944

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Every night his mind ticked on
at 1:00 AM while she was fixing supper.
Was it like last time? Biscuits, fried chicken

and bean salad they saved from noon.
She’s sculling water through some peas.
He felt cool air running around his hands

and his stomach pressed against the sink.
Movements of her fingers echoed in his.
His tongue moved around on its own

but what was it saying? His hand drifted
up her leg and across her back, over
and over like the touch of butterflies

that seemed to land on her shoulders.
He was kissing her when the pulsing caress
of her lips answered his, was she there?

Was she stopping to close her eyes?

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Melinda Thomsen on William Matthews at BigCityLit

May 312011
 

I just noticed this warm, appreciative essay by Melinda Thomsen on the poet William Matthews. Some lovely quotations throughout.

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This empathy governed his writing life. One of his essays in the collection CURIOUSITIES includes “Dishonesty and Bad Manners” (65), where he quotes W.H. Auden as saying, “A dishonest poem is one which expresses, no matter how well, feelings or beliefs, which its author never felt or entertained.” Auden then goes on to define a bad-mannered poem:

In art as in life, bad manners, are the consequence of an over concern with one’s own ego and a lack of consideration for others…. Readers, like friends, must not be shouted at or treated with brash familiarity. Youth may be forgiven when it is brash or noisy, but this does not mean that brashness and noise are virtue. (Curiousities, 65).

via BigCityLit.com: the rivers of it.

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