March is the most interesting of months; not quite spring, but winter is coming to a close.  It is also the season of Lent.  I went to the Internet and came across this description of the season:
 “Lent is a season of soul-searching and repentance. It is a season for reflection and taking stock. Lent originated in the very earliest days of the Church as a preparatory time for Easter, when the faithful rededicated themselves and when converts were instructed in the faith and prepared for baptism. By observing the forty days of Lent, the individual Christian imitates Jesus’ withdrawal into the wilderness for forty days”

By Rev. Ken Collins
http://www.kencollins.com/holy-04.htm

    The Promise at the end of Lent is new life, but before that happens must come the time of soul-searching and reflection.  Another interesting point to consider is that March is the celebration of St. Patrick; the patron saint of Ireland and it seems, good times.  Celebration is always important to us, or to put it another way, any excuse for a party.  It is an excuse to party when I finally sit down and bang out another issue.  This has been a wonderful moment, a epiphany, if I dare use that word.  A renewal to recommence taking the time to put ezine together and enjoy the efforts of so many people to make it possible, after all, I owe it to you all.  
    I really have not much more to say now, it’s time to let others do the speaking.  See you at the end.



Poetry    

FALLEN ORANGES
 
Oranges fallen to the ground
Among skeletal branches, skeletal twigs.
Turn green, turn brown,
But out of a background of  decay arises
Thin curves of pale gold.
People, the few, who knew us
Called us “separated persons.”
Mondahlia, we are separated now,
But instead of a pale gold glow from our decay,
I see a black circle, your ebony bracelet
I also see your skin, its color, texture,
On each side of the darkness.
 
YOUR CAMERA
 
Your camera.  I watched your lips,
Mondahlia, as you help up the camera
To hide one dark eye.  You were
Photographing a horseshoe crab
That was a misty, pale brown
In the mother-of-pearl evening light.
Out in the distance, pink was spread
By a flock of wading spoonbills
Over the water that alternated
Between pale and dark greens.
You photographed the pinks and greens.
You left your camera on my car seat,
For you were in such a hurry
As you were late for your meeting
With your husband across town.
 
LIGURIA
 
In Liguria between Viareggio
And La Spezia, the sun so bright
The sea seems covered with knife blades
That dazzle and blind with their light.
The extreme brightness leaves afterimages
Of extreme darkness.  
It is as if some juggler dressed in black
Is juggling black knives at midnight.
We can hear the swish of the knives in the air,
But we cannot see the blades in the dark.
Mondahlia, our time in Italy together grows short.
Soon, we will be separated.
Look, in the distance is one of the Alps
With an extreme coldness covering the top.
 

BROKEN BRANCHES
 
Heavy summer rains have broken and scattered
Limbs from laurel oaks all over the yard.
The arms of the fallen branches have green patches.
Lichen, on their elbows. I, much to people’s
Consternation and disapproval have always loved
Fallen, broken branches and their curls of lichen.
Mondahlia, my twenty-year old, it is too mysterious
To understand the mysticism of why I love you so much.
You are not a broken branch.  You are young,
Too happy, too exuberant. You are vital life.
Mondahlia, you do not even know what my favorite
Philosophers, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lacan have believed.
Mondahlia, you do not even care if the postmodernists
Say there are no objects, only verbal constructions.
But Mondahlia, you do sense and respond with affection
To my love of broken branches
With green patches on their elbows.
Mondahlia, you are the only person who ever has.
 
CLOSED
 
Mondahlia,
I always see your shape
In all the shadows I see
Quivering on the walls
Of vacant stores.
I see the curves of  your breasts
In the shadows that cross
The strip of brown paper
In the broken, plate glass show window
That shouts in large red letters, “Closed.”

Duane Locke


Amazing to the Spring
one night
a great sky giant
drew a ring
around   around
the fulling moon of earth
to rim a starless clearing    
centering the plush
slow waxing moon
and as the ring glowed
huger than god's halo
some gaped in awe   
claiming they saw
a hovering mothership
aproaching
some feared rain for
forty days & forty nights
while others swore it was
a fiery beacon beckoning
from Atlantis     
in the center of a
still-frame ocean vortex
o're a topsy turvy world
so strange so unbelievable
that the next night
he upped and did it again
only bigger

And on that second nite
I let you take me flying
just like Superman and Lois
far beyond the moon ring
free   to no place   in the
stillness between stars
and I loved you timeless
wide eyed marveling
at every nothing
passing by us shining
in the lightless silence
did you hear
my fleshless whisper
wishing let this last forever ?
pleading won't you take me
with you please again   
again tonite
to fly here
with the giants
in the real world ?



Copyright@2002
Jan Houston
All Rights Reserved

It devours me from left to right
Spread out on the width of my wings
and I find fear in not being able to fly
And joy for the new found flight of being
on my feet
Both condescending and really deep
A need for flirtation when involving
both depth and reality
A collage about the walls
and who is God ;bounces inside opinion  
Religion
takes form in what some believe but
never seen or really reached to endure
and I am neither committed or too far gone
Just in the middle spiritually
and I hope that its hunger keeps
a craving
forever for me
Cause without it I’d had never
known what it means to be living

Desmond Copyright 2002 All rights Reserved

    SCAR
1.
Beside water
light is fooled....
baffled down to a confused, sleepy collation of tone.
Sandstone verges rub shoulders like adoring grandparents -
croon over the newborn each-moment
of this clear pool drinking itself.

Beside water
a thin argument of smoke has the eucalypts
strung taut - agitated. He gathers enough
for a cup of tea in an old can/ "Farmland Creamed Corn"
then sets the billy to work.

The sunglasses were a GIFT.
Good luck left them in someone's bag at Bondi Beach
right beside the wallet.
& now a lens falls out startling him
as unfiltered light invades the sleep-hungry eye.
Another fucken hassle.

The national park, a public track
but not too bad 'cept
weekends, school holidays.

If anyone could get an answer
it would be that he was waiting.

With an appointment.

The rosellas are mocking. Brown snakes
are rolling in the aisles
through days as poor
as a lost string of rolly tobacco.

This busy, empty green parcel
beneath a ridge line of nice sewered homes.
For six months a bastard climb
for batteries, beer, cans. Milk.
Autoteller answering back
each pension fortnight.
Occasional unattended property,
a brick & the grab.

Then long rainy nights
cold in a cupped hand cave.
Radio muttering only to him.

2.
The 10 year old boy
came here regularly with his friends.
An ugly cunt
but cunt is cunt
& Fat Boy is here alone today, asking for a match.
He wants to build a nice little fire
just like the man.

They sit on opposing shelves of rock.
The boy is feeling the warmth, the importance
of his private conflagration.
The man slips off into the green
& even the gods are surprised
at what happens next.
An interruption, so random that the lizards
almost miss the history, scribbling notes
from the fork of a tree.

3.
Fish are feeding,
an unhealthy, hyperactive swarm of insect wings
disturb the whispers of the stream.
A ringtail is crying in her sleep
above a slash of early spring flowers.

The bush is unphased,
her processes orderly & complete.
Given time, all his trash
will be buried or reborn.
The man has gone
to the next scarred diary page

beside water.





                                 Les Wicks
REARRANGED

1.
The baby took his last drink.

    Across the flat riverlost land
    we are farming welfare families in neat street rows.
    Like alumina corn, the rooves sparkle
    under a flat malnourished sun.

Every night there were four beers/
one like a sunshower,
a hang-alone cloud on a croaking summer.
Two - light through moth-eaten leaves.
Three like laying clean sheets.
Fourth a kinda peace-
    slip out the window
        wash the feathers.

But the baby's taken the last beer.
Wife growls like the cat furballed
gag of twisted budgets & aspiration
in a damp shit/spew lounge-room.

The baby cries & eats all their money.

They never go out.
Sit here staring at the not becomes,
will never becomes, this day came in
with a few constructive pretensions....
sneaks out beaten & bald.

He is not shaking the baby,
the baby is shaking him.

2.
Refuges promise so much in that name
but she feels machine hum....
the stinking lubricants of processed lives.
She danced two years ago the school hall
audience cheered & all the friends hugging.
Thought that beyond stage light
was more brightness
& so on.

Back home again
but the word reconciliation
when you're 19 & aching
is only about taking
a little more, a little longer.

Baby asleep, make up sex.
A cheque from the parents, Stevie
gone out with the mates.

The kitten & a cockroach
play a game/war in the dark.
A part of her is still dancing
as plans hatch.
It's a letter to friends in Sydney.



Les Wicks






SONG

In this life, we were only meant
for correspondence:
the slight, you might say jesting, note.
Chanson without its geste,
devoid of warmth and movement.

Mornings, I sing to myself
imagining you on the other side
of miles of light,
the way it touches your unseen
countenance.

It’s easier when two faces never meet
face to face, to see
if the features fit, and mesh.
But oh, in the last life, or oh,
perhaps, the next!

IN ANOTHER CENTURY

How many measures for him to ask
to take her hand, and she to extend it,
standing, and then the tentative
first steps together, joining a ring
of nervous couples, how many first
measures until they step together
judging the rhythm and hand positions
right-to-left then right-in-right,
remembering the curtsies and whirls,
and step, step together among so many
other couples now faster just focused
on each other’s feet and fingers as
the music changes tempo as it fills
with questions and their fluent
answers higher faster till they’re
dancing out of Styria in Austria
in the 19th century right off
the hardwood floor into a meadow
of small white nameless flowers
under this universal blue sky
that just keeps on dancing.

Taylor Graham
piper@innercite.com



Essays

Degrees of Freedom in Literary Genres

Richard H. Williams

          In the statistical sciences, the concept of "degrees of freedom" is a pervasive
notion. Suppose a set of  5 observations or scores are as follows: 10, 6, 9, 7, 8.         
These might be the scores of 5 students on a 10 item test. By summing these numbers
and then dividing by 5, one obtains 8, which is the mean of the distribution. Next, this
mean is subtracted from each of the 5 numbers to yield the following five deviation
scores: 2, -2, 1, -1, 0. Notice that the deviation scores add up to zero. This will always be
the case for any set of numbers. Because of this, if 4 of the 5 deviation scores are known,
the fifth will be fixed, since they must sum to zero. So it is said that 4 of these scores are
free to vary. That is, there are 4 degrees of freedom (df = 4). More generally, suppose
there are n observations. Then df = n - 1. Degrees of freedom, then, is a reflection of the
number of restrictions in a data set.
          In statistical inference, three of the most widely used distributions in both
theoretical and applied statistics are the Student t, the F ratio, and chi square. Each
of these is actually a family of continuous distributions and each member of each
family has its own degrees of freedom. The published tables of t, F, and chi square
that appear in the back of statistics textbooks are structured along two dimensions:
(1) degrees of freedom, and (2) significance levels and other useful probabilities.
If statistical computer packages such as the Statistical Analysis System (SAS)
or the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) are applied to data, both
degrees of freedom and the probabilities are automatically printed out.
       In literature one has certain well known literary structures or genres which can
be thought of in terms of degree of freedom, but in this domain, degrees of freedm
cannot be precisely quantified. Although writing a novel is a time consuming task, there
would be a great number of degrees of freedom associated with it. The author could
blunder a number of times in constructing such fiction, but there would be plenty of
degrees of freedom available to enable the author to continuously recover. There is also
great leeway in the selection of vocabulary employed for composing a novel.
        As one moves to the literary genre called "the short story," a considerable number of
degrees of freedom are lost. There is less room for error in writing a short story, which
usually ranges from 500 to 10,000 words. As Edgar Allen Poe expressed it, a short
story is a short prose narrative which usually requires from a half-hour to one to
two hours in its reading.
         Very short stories, which are called "flashes," require more discipline and skill on
the part of the author. Not many degrees of freedom are available. The logic and
structure of the flash must be tightly woven and each word must be carefully chosen.
A novella is a longer story of less than novel length. So as one passes from the novel
to the novella to the short story to the flash, degrees of freedom diminishes.
         Turning to "poetry," it is necessary to say that there are even different levels of
restriction or degrees of freedom within the poetic forms. The greatest flexibility is found
in "free verse," which has very few rules or restrictions regarding form, rhyme, or meters.
Some French poets of the late 19th century, such as Rimbaud, established the Vers
Libre  movement, which was a protest against versification. Free verse has its origin
in this French _expression. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is often pointed to as an
example of free verse. If restrictions are imposed on meter, in which case iambic pent
is usually favored, degrees of freedom are further reduced and the resulting structure
is called blank verse. Another way to decrease degrees of freedom is to impose rhym-
ing on the poetry form. It should be noted that introducing too many restrictions on
poetry may lead the poet to satisfy the conditions required without producing
meaningful, creative poetry. In other words, the result could be versification, which
attends to technical matters, but not poetry. Versification is necessary but not
sufficient for producing good poetry.
       A Japanese form of poem called "haiku" illustrates a different way of imposing
restrictions on poetic construction. Although the haiku need not rhyme, it must con-
sist of three lines, and the respective number of syllables in the lines are 5, 7, and 5.
       Dramatic writing, such as a play designed for theatrical presentation, perhaps
falls between the novel and the short story in degrees of freedom, although William
Shakespeare's dramatic works possess a poetic quality.

Summary

       The main categories of poetry can be described as follows: Blank verse is un-
rhymed verse with meter, the meter almost always being iambic pentameter. It was
introduced by Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, in the mid-16th century. Free verse
has very few distinct rules; it does not rhyme, but unlike blank verse, it is not written
in iambic pentameter. Incidentally, the iamb is the most frequently employed foot in
the English language. The word comes from the Greek lambos, meaning lame. This
implies a weak step followed by a strong step. It is a metrical foot of two syllables,
the first short and the second long. There are five iambs to the line in iambic pen-
tameter. This form is thought to resemble ordinary speech. The meaning of the word
"verse" often carries with it a higher prestige value than "prose." Prose possesses a
higher number of degrees of freedom and yet it is currently the dominant literary
structure. Perhaps this in unfortunate. Simply said, prose is a form of written dis-
course which possesses the sentence as a unit of measure. A novel is one type of
prose, but not all prose is fiction. Some examples of non-fictional prose are various
treatises, biographies, autobiographies, etc. Sometimes certain fictional works may
closely resemble factual works. This is seen in the autobiographical works of Thomas
Wolfe. If a writer were to attempt rhyming blank verse, so much effort would be
spent on versification that there would be little poetic quality residing in the finished
product. Said another way, most of the degrees of freedom would be allocated to
technical matters, leaving few for more creative endeavors.

Reference

McArthur, Tom (Ed.). (1992). The Oxford Companion to the English Language.

       New York: Oxford University Press.

BIO: I have published in the Journal of Modern Literature and in two dozen other
academic journals, have co-authored the book Modern Elementary Statistics, have
published in Above Ground Testing, Demensions, Indite Circle, Blue Rose Bouquet,
Starry Night Review, Dream Forge, Drinking Stories, Naked Poetry, Another Night and Day Alliance, and the Harrow, and have recently had manuscripts accepted for
publication in Apocrypha, Psicologia, Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly, Avant Garde
Times, and A Taste for Flesh. I am currently studying art, aart history, and Spanish.


POP GOES THE MUSICIAN

Todays popular sound of music has dealt a knockout
punch to a lot of musicians who play musical
instruments. Well, whatelse do musicians play? Lots!
The scene these days is all about musicians who play
turntables, groove boxes, floppy drives and whatever
it is that creates todays hip sounds of popular music.
Take the case of my talented musician friend Earnie
the songster. He's been hit by himself! Earnie was
amoung the first few guitar players who switched over
to keyboards with automatic bass/drums/chords,
starting a 'one man band' trend that rendered his
fellow band members redundant. The one man band scene
ruled and why not? Earnie had a family to support,
playing in a band could only pay half his bills,
'being' the band paid all his bills. Few years down
the line the popular one man band trend has given way
to the 'no man band'. One does not necessarily have to
be a musician to create todays cool sounds of popular
music. DJ'ing, programing, sequencing, sampling is
where it's at baby. Today a DJ or a computer
programmer creates the cool sounds that spearhead
popular musics evolution. So what does my friend
Earnie do now? You've guessed right! Alright peeps in
the house, please welcome DJ Earnie who's gonna spin
some mean disc while scratching the shit out of them
vinyl frisbees! And by the way, DJ'ing these days pays
even next years bills!

Colin D'Cruz
http://www.hullocheck.com



Closing Words

    This is not the closing few words I had originally planed.  It has been a time of renewal for me.  Here it is, for you to enjoy, the issue, number 52 and that means there will be a 53 and maybe a 54, 54….you get the pattern.  You work will be featured and that is my continual promise.  When I began this ezine a few years ago I decided to make it the means by which poets from all walks of life will find a place to submit and contribute.  Of course I now know that a number of very good, very well established poets and writers have used my ezine.  Thank you all.
    As always, if you wish to contribute send your work to: pabear_7@yahoo.com