Two of My Latest Published Poems

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Following up on my last post—Three Poems to be Published—I can now post two of them, below. (Once a magazine comes out, the rights revert back to the author). The first is from the magazine Constellations; the second, from the British magazine Seaside Gothic.

The One-Time Grandma

Was only four
the one time ever
she came to see me

brought me a truck
filled with hard candy
doors opened, tires rolled

just this one gauzy image—
her abundant, smiling face
craning down to me

a face that held a theater
I couldn’t know
of cobwebs and cold corners

of unpainted pain in triplicate
and difficult wishes boiling in pots
on an ancient stove

ears that held the screaming
of her sister being raped
over and over
by a mob of men

and of distant death
and death too close
at the hands of thugs and militias

hate, rape, thievery and murder
in the pogrom of 1905
as it had been for Jews
for millenniums

What Happened When We Emerged from the Ocean, Anyway

What happened when we 
emerged from the ocean, anyway
returned from eternity
and the Moses shores

Reborn in the Jersey lights— 
the high sheen of industrial
blood and glitzy sin

Here on the boardwalk
where kids fly across lit towers
and lizard eyes spy from wild rides

The wooden coaster tattoos 
the horizon like a snake goddess,
great wheels topple to the music
of clatter and screams

A cavalcade of plush figures,
necklace of chance stands and fry huts,
where lunatic visages frame dark portals 
with invitations to cheap seduction 

Ghosts of Freud and Coney Island
yet watch from the grandstands
play Fascination with Madame Twisto 
and the Mule-Faced Boy

Ten-wheelers tear the ancient sands
flowers show from the boxes
of jeweled motels where Jews
and Italians once shared radio songs 
of Rosemary Clooney and Johnnie Ray

Three Poems to be Published

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Recently, a number of my poems have appeared or are forthcoming in highly-regarded literary magazines, including Constellations (The One-Time Grandma), the British magazine Seaside Gothic (What Happened When We Emerged from the Ocean, Anyway), and Slipstream (An Accidental Song for the Sacred and the Profane).

While I don’t have the rights to reprint most of these poems at this time, I think the stories behind them make for good reading, nonetheless.

The stories behind two of these titles surround my experiences as a four- or five-year-old boy.

In The One-Time Grandma, I recall sitting on the floor at age four with this gauzy image of my father’s mother craning down to greet me, offering a toy truck with wheels that rolled, filled with hard candies. Mysteriously, it was the only time she visited us. I never did learn why.

In An Accidental Song for the Sacred and the Profane, I’m playing in the little backyard of our two-story house in the Bronx, surrounded by brick apartment buildings. It’s a warm day in spring when I notice this beautiful woman in a diaphanous nightgown slowly brushing her long red hair at an open second-floor window, not 30 feet from me. What was a boy of five to make of such a sight? At the same time, an old Jewish man is davening at an open second floor window of another apartment building. When such a devout man is davening, he rocks to and fro while singing prayers, “nasal strains rising and falling and rising again.” Thus, An Accidental Song for the Sacred and the Profane.

In addition, I’ll post the entire poem What Happened When We Emerged from the Ocean, Anyway in a few days.

‘Gran Fury’ now on Juked

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My short story Gran Fury now appears in the highly-rated online literary magazine Juked. The posting had been delayed due to COVID-related issues.

The story behind Gran Fury is interesting. The title, as some may have guessed, is taken from the Plymouth model manufactured in the 70s and 80s. To me the name was always evocative, and I took to noticing how beat the surviving cars seemed to be—a kind of irony on wheels. The vehicle first came to star in a poem of mine by the same name. Years later, I had the idea of how the poem itself could be repurposed in prose as the opening of a short story. The rest of the piece practically wrote itself. Since then, I’ve used at least two other poems as the basis for short stories. It’s nice when your work keeps on giving.

Poems Published in Top Zines

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Recently, a number of my poems have appeared or are forthcoming in highly respected literary magazines, including Twyckenham Notes, the I-70 Review, the Broadkill Review, and the White Hall Review.

My poem Pale Pink Taxi Garage, Croton, went live today on the website of White Walll Review. The poems in Twyckenham Notes, Lansing and Sitting on a Guardrail in the Shadows of Early Morning are published on their website and include audio renditions. My poem The Road from Millerton appeared in the November/December 2019 issue of the Broadkill Review. The work In the Tire Shop is scheduled to appear in a print issue of I-70 Review.

Meanwhile, my short story Gran Fury is set to appear in October in the online magazine Juked.

The story behind Gran Fury is interesting. The title, as some may have guessed, is taken from the Plymouth model manufactured in the 70s and 80s. To me the name was always evocative, and I took to noticing how beat the surviving cars seemed to be—a kind of irony on wheels. The vehicle first came to star in a poem of mine by the same name. Years later, I had the idea of how the poem itself could be repurposed in prose as the opening of a short story. The rest of the piece practically wrote itself. Since then, I’ve used at least two other poems as the basis for short stories. It’s nice when your work keeps on giving.

Tire Shop and Sitting on a Guardrail were both inspired by the same subject: a Hispanic man I observed, yes, sitting on a guardrail, waiting for the tire shop he worked in to open. He and his situation (as I imagined it) held my attention for months, as I passed him daily around ten-to-eight in the morning. He was always sitting idly holding a brown lunch bag. I had been in that tire shop and had also observed workers returning home after their shifts, their clothes almost completely blackened. I knew how hard the work was and how cold the drafty garage was in winter. I imagined that he might have been from a Central American country, come to the states to work and send money home to his family. So, fairly or not, I fictionalized a character based on him. I know there are some who would criticize me for making assumptions. But this is what writers do. They observe life and make up stories based on those observations.

I’ve also recently had poems published in Waymark, a magazine published by noted poet Roger Aplon that I and my longtime poet friends Joel Scherzer and his wife, the late Robbie Rubinstein have appeared in often over the years. The magazine publishes many of the poets who are members of CAPS, a literary organization that sponsors regular readings in New York’s Hudson Valley. At the same time, Waymark has included a number of writers who are part of the Pueblo Poetry Project, in Pueblo, Colorado. In addition to Joel and Robbie, the magazine has featured the work of PPP writers Tony Moffeit and Kyle Laws. I’ve had the pleasure of participating in PPP readings several times over the organization’s 30-year history.

Poems Published in Top Zines

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Recently, a number of my poems have appeared or are forthcoming in highly respected literary magazines, including Twyckenham Notes, the I-70 Review, the Broadkill Review, and the White Wall Review.

My poem Pale Pink Taxi Garage, Croton, went live today on the website of White Wall Review. The poems in Twyckenham Notes, Lansing and Sitting on a Guardrail in the Shadows of Early Morning are published on their website and include audio renditions. My poem The Road from Millerton appeared in the November/December 2019 issue of the Broadkill Review. The work In the Tire Shop is scheduled to appear in a print issue of I-70 Review.

Meanwhile, my short story Gran Fury is set to appear in October in the online magazine Juked.

The story behind Gran Fury is interesting. The title, as some may have guessed, is taken from the Plymouth model manufactured in the 70s and 80s. To me the name was always evocative, and I took to noticing how beat the surviving cars seemed to be—a kind of irony on wheels. The vehicle first came to star in a poem of mine by the same name. Years later, I had the idea of how the poem itself could be repurposed in prose as the opening of a short story. The rest of the piece practically wrote itself. Since then, I’ve used at least two other poems as the basis for short stories. It’s nice when your work keeps on giving.

Tire Shop and Sitting on a Guardrail were both inspired by the same subject: an Hispanic man I observed, yes, sitting on a guardrail, waiting for the tire shop he worked in to open. He and his situation (as I imagined it) held my attention for months, as I passed him daily around ten-to-eight in the morning. He was always sitting idly holding a brown lunch bag. I had been in that tire shop and had also observed workers returning home after their shifts, their cloths almost completely blackened. I knew how hard the work was and how cold the drafty garage was in winter. I imagined that he might have been from a Central American country, come to the states to work and send money home to his family. So, fairly or not, I fictionalized a character based on him. I know there are some who would criticize me for making assumptions. But this is what writers do. They observe life and make up stories based on those observations.

I’ve also recently had poems published in Waymark, a magazine published by noted poet Roger Aplon that I and my longtime poet friends Joel Scherzer and his wife, the late Robbie Rubinstein have appeared in often over the years. The magazine publishes many of the poets who are members of CAPS, a literary organization that sponsors regular readings in New York’s Hudson Valley. At the same time, Waymark has included a number of writers who are part of the Pueblo Poetry Project, in Pueblo, Colorado. In addition to Joel and Robbie, the magazine has featured the work of PPP writers Tony Moffeit and Kyle Laws. I’ve had the pleasure of participating in PPP readings several times over the organization’s 30-year history.

“Raceless,” newly released TV Pilot

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I just launched my new TV pilot, “Raceless.”

Here’s a brief synopsis:

Jimbo Dempsey was “too” white. In the year 2265, that was not good. In fact, it was much worse. If your DNA was more than 65 percent white or black — you’d be exterminated. Two centuries earlier a totalitarian government — the Administration — had come into power, predicated on establishing a “raceless society,” one that would “eliminate conflict among humankind — no matter the cost.”

In “Raceless,” resisters become fugitives living on a new Underground Railroad.

If you’d like to read the script, click the title: “Raceless.”

Winner in Great American Song Contest

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Just learned I am one of four songwriters who won an Outstanding Achievement Award in Songwriting (Country Music Category) in the 21st Great American Song Contest, for my song “Is It Love Yet.” Last year I was selected as a finalist for this award. I recorded the song in Nashville in the late Eighties. Trisha Yearwood sang the demo; it was signed to PolyGram (later bought by Universal). It was later released as a single by indie artist JoAnne Redding.

You can listen to Trisha singing “Is It Love Yet?” here:

I haven’t written much about my Nashville years on this blog, so thought I’d mention that I also had songs published by other major companies, including SONY, Tom Collins Music, Shedd House and Tillis Tunes.

The 21st Great American Song Contest received more than 1,800 submissions from 40 countries. Here is a list of this year’s contest judges.

Robert Frank–Poet with a Camera–Passes

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Robert Frank, the master photographer who taught us to see photography and America anew, died on Monday in Inverness, Nova Scotia. He was 94.

Below, I reprise a former post on the this artistic giant:

The other day The New York Times covered the announcement of a treasure trove of images from the work of Robert Frank, one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. The National Gallery of Art has released a comprehensive archive of Frank’s work, including contact sheets and work prints, much of it never before seen by the public. It all comes in advance of Frank’s 90th birthday, in November.

As The Times says in it’s Lens Blog:

The cover image for the U.S. edition of The Americans, Robert Frank’s epochal book, spoke volumes about the state of the nation in the mid-1950s. The tightly-cropped photo shows passengers in the windows of a New Orleans trolley assuming their place in the social order of the Jim Crow South — progressing from a black woman in the rear to white children and adults up front (slide 4).

The contact sheet that contained the image showed that Mr. Frank had photographed the city from multiple perspectives, but he ultimately selected the frame that most dramatically and symbolically captured New Orleans’ racial hierarchy. Learning this photo’s backstory would be impossible without the ability to view Mr. Frank’s contact sheet. Now, such important archival material, typically reserved for scholars and curators, is just a click away.

Born in 1924 in Zurich, Switzerland, Frank took pictures in Europe and South America during his early career, but it wasn’t until he crisscrossed the seductive roads of America that Frank felt he was finally making art with his lens. With his U.S. travels in the mid-1950s, his work reached a new level, and 83 of his road images were arranged into the book The Americans.

It’s no surprised that Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction to the first U.S. edition of The Americans. The 1959 edition raised eyebrows in the media for its brute black and white candor. But The Americans, like Kerouac’s own masterwork, On the Road, opened the door to the loneness of the country’s heart and spirit and, together, they inspired a generation of artists, musicians and thinkers.

It’s interesting how foreign image makers like Frank, Mechelangelo Antonioni (Zabriskie Point, 1970), Louis Malle (Atlantic City, 1980) are able to capture the essence of the land better than most native auteurs. In fact, with the stir made by The Americans, Frank was compared to America’s original outsider observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1835 book Democracy in America helped to define the young nation’s unique character (Is it what America brings to you or what you bring to her?).

I believe a great artist is a conduit for “place.” His subject somehow finds him, speaks through him. The artist ultimately “sees” through time as the French photographer Eugène Atget once described it. I believe such artists also see through other dimensions, some of which elude us, some of which speak through intersections of light and shadow, artifact and art, quietude and cacophony, moment and mystery.

It’s hard to describe The Americans. Language could illuminate it, could degrade it. Perhaps it’s like the stuff of dreams, the magic of which begins to disappear upon transfer to the conscious mind. So much spills from the bucket on its ascent from that deep, dark well.

I was surprised and pleased when I discovered Frank himself had linked the worlds of photography and poetry in his description of his work:

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.

Moon Landing 50 Years On

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A decade ago, on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing (July 20, 1969), I wrote the following:

How strange it is that the venerable Walter Cronkite, who defined that very moment, should pass right now (he died July 17, 2009). It’s as if he and Neil Armstrong will somehow launch into eternity together, in a fitting orbit.

I was in a second-rate hotel in Eureka, California the day the Apollo 11 crew landed. I was with my own merry band of pranksters (my first wife, Carol, my sister, Alice, and friends) on a cross country trip in my 1948 Cadillac hearse. As we descended into the hotel lobby, Cronkite’s voice crackled from a TV, saying something like, “What a great county…I just don’t understand these hippies…” The TV was a table model that sat on a broken Sylvania console. Behind these proceedings, in a large picture window, a broken Native American shuffled along the street in the hot California sun. What an ironic scene. Could have been out of an Antonioni film.

To be fair, Cronkite, who had already helped turn the tide against the Vietnam War with his groundbreaking television coverage, eventually came to look upon the the so-called hippie movement more kindly.

My poem ‘Ghost Plaza’ in Gallery Show

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Emerge Gallery’s “Art & Words” Exhibit — a combination of art and poetry inspired by one another — opened last night in Saugerties, NY. My poem “Ghost Plaza,” inspired by artist Ellen Martin’s photograph “Abandoned #98 Plywood and Pleats,” appears in the exhibit. Both are shown below.

Ellen Martin_Abandoned #98 Plywood and Pleats (10-10-2015)

GHOST PLAZA

By Allen Shadow

Blanked and shadowed
once curtained and live
the cratered parking lot
the power lines to nowhere
the mismatched plywood for eyes
yet can see, smell the luxe drapes
dripping sad theater where once
little ladies with purses sat for hours
beneath bulbous dryers, unaware
of the traffic and teen terrors beyond

Are there still stray coins perhaps
amid the slaughtered floor tiles
ones that might tell tales of transactions
good and bad and heated, when there
was once the throbbing of life?

The show will culminate in a poetry reading on Sunday, April 28, from 2 to 5 p.m. Emerge Gallery is located at 228 Main Street, Saugerties. The show is curated by poet, artist and gallery owner Robert Langdon.