Writers of the world unite in Issue 18 of Home Planet, which is off the chain with poetry by Christopher Barnes, Emily Bilman, Peter Cashorali, Ann Cefola, Douglas K. Currier, George Freek, Oz Hardwick, Llewellyn McKernan, Bruce McRae, Kirby Olson, & Mykyta Ryzhykh; fiction by Michael Flanagan & Madeline Izzo; a memoir by Ronald Fink; & artwork by Carl Scharwath. Many thanks to all our contributors!

A gazillion years ago or so, back in a bygone era of another millennium, a dark age when I was an undergraduate, I thought about changing my major to philosophy, an idea met with weeping & the gnashing of teeth by my mother, who prophesized, as was her wont, that if I were to pursue the philosopher’s path, I’d wind up penniless, working one shitty job after another. In deference to her wishes, I chose not philosophy, but the lucrative field of poetry, & that, as James Tate says in “I Left My Couch in Tatamagouche,” made a big difference.

While I still enjoy reading philosophy, I really didn’t mean to suggest that I wanted to work as a philosopher, a concept that sounds vaguely like an oxymoron to my ears. No, I was already on the road—or at least on the shoulder with my thumb poignantly out—to becoming a poet. Sure, as a teenager, I toyed with pursuing a career as a cartoonist (want to see my sketches?) & dreamt like any kid with a guitar of being a rock star, but I’d begun ever since popping my first zit—a nasty one on the tip of my nose—filling notebook upon notebook with poems, angst- & acne-ridden though they were. As time passed (as time must do), my mother, who grew up during the Great Depression, never understood why supposedly intelligent, college-educated adults would want to waste their lives on poetry. She saw poems as filler material, like the single-panel cartoons in Saturday Review.

Many years after Mom’s death, I wrote:

Like Marianne Moore

My mother loved Tricky Dick.
            She voted for him,

not glamorous JFK.
            She strolled to the polls, scuffed I’m
            For Nixon button
            covering up the troubling

hole in her woolen
            Republican coat. Standing
            up for him when he bombed Cam-
            bodia, head held

high as notes of the anthem
            sung before the Reds
            & Dodgers game on TV,

she, too, disliked poetry.

Playing off Moore’s “Poetry” & politics, the above poem, which appeared in The Legendary (now defunct), is a tanka chain sonnet. It’s comprised of three tanka (with the traditional pattern of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables per line), in which the 5-syllable title serves as the first line & the 14 remaining lines of the chain constitute the text of the sonnet. Here, as an extra kick, I employed a Shakespearean rhyme scheme, though some, such as “Dick” rhyming with “JFK,” are Dickinson-ish, if you’ll pardon the pun. As far as I can tell, the tanka chain sonnet, as I’ve described it, is my own creation, ditto the villanelle (4 tanka) & the sestina (8 tanka), for what any of it is worth—probably somewhere in the neighborhood of the $0.11 check I received as part of the Google Privacy Settlement if I had to guess.

That said, albeit in jest, I dislike the notion of slapping a price tag on art to determine its worth or, for that matter, equating value with price in general. As William Carlos Williams says: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Besides, at the risk of echoing my mom, if you became a poet to make money, you probably made a bad career choice.

I hope you enjoy this issue of HPN & find something inside that gives you a lift, the life-sustaining kind, but even if it’s for only a moment, that’s OK, too, because that’s what life is, you know, a series of moments.

Many thanks!

Matt