The Geography of a Poet's Heart

There is a well-worth-reading interview in the Vol. 15 , No. 1 edition of the Raven Chronicles of Peter Ludwin, mostly regarding his book, A Guest In All Your Houses by Christopher J. Jarmick.

A Guest in All Your Houses

Peter Ludwin’s new book of poems, A Guest in All Your Houses, is now available from Word Walker Press and, shortly, from Amazon.com.

A good review of the book is online here.

I've just finished reading the book and expect to do a review shortly. Clue to review: it's a terrific collection of poems covering the geography of much of my own earlier peripatetic musings.

If you'll be in the Seattle area, I see online that Peter will be reading from his book on Thursday, May 28 at 7:30 p.m. at Open Books, 2414 N 45th St., Seattle.

poem

Sometimes a poem you've read before, like a person you may have briefly met at some crowded party, shows up alone and suddenly the conversation becomes more intimate and, with a little serendipity, a friendship is born. So it was with me and this poem. Peter has graciously allowed me to share it with you:

A Chance Encounter
-Peter Ludwin

Because she had once married a Greek
because I'd traveled to Greece in the '60s
because we were visiting a mutual friend
on the Upper West Side,
we had this conversation.
And though I protested when she sat down
that I had to get some sleep
she insisted on just one small glass of wine.
Which became two and then three
as we agreed that where Kazantzakis was transcendent,
Sartre was empty and Hemingway merely small.
Her hands spoke passion,
as if releasing flocks of doves into her voice,
a soft liquer blend of European Texas
that drew me into that old yearning
for the expatriate life,
for garnet angels
and mandolins raining down

on Russia

and I thought yes,
there's that chorus in the blood,
the one that's attended all our births:
to track the minotaur,
the iron tyranny of THINGS,
to find it and destroy it with the dance,
with epiphanies of water,
swinging up onto its head
like a naked acrobat
as the light pours in from the sea.

© Peter Ludwin

A Chance Encounter is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in 1996 in Lullwater Review, the literary journal of Emory University in Atlanta.

Peter’s new book of poems, A Guest in All Your Houses, is now available from Word Walker Press and, shortly, from Amazon.com.

poem from Peter Ludwin

The poem I found on the Internet and posted a few days ago was an early version of a now published poem:

Notes From A Sodbuster's Wife, Kansas, 1868
-Peter Ludwin

What really got us in the end--
we women who didn't make it,
who withered and blew away in the open--
was the wind. Space, yes, and distance,
too, from neighbors, a piano back in Boston.

But above all, the wind.

In our letters it shrieks hysteria from sod huts,
vomits women prematurely undone by loneliness,
boils up off the horizon to suck dry
their desire as it flattened the stubborn grasses.
Not convinced?? Scan the photographs,
grainy and sepia-toned, like old leather.
Study our bony forms in plain black dresses,
our mouths drawn tight as a saddle cinch,
accusation leaking from rudderless eyes, betrayed.

I tried. Lord knows I tried.
Survived the locusts and even snakes
that fell from the ceiling at night,
slithering between us in bed.
I dreamed of water, chiffon, the smell
of dead leaves banked against a rotting log.
I heard opera, carriage wheels on cobblestone.
Cried and beat my fists raw into those earthen walls.

The wind. Even as it scoured
the skin it flayed the soul,
that raked, pitted shell.
And how like the Cheyenne,
appearing, disappearing,
no fixed location,

not even a purpose one could name.

© Peter Ludwin

Notes From A Sodbuster's Wife, Kansas, 1868 is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in South Dakota Review and can be found in Peter's just published collection, A Guest in All Your Houses.

The book is available from Word Walker Press or, in a few weeks, from Amazon.

Peter Ludwin’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, most prominently The Antietam Review, Chaminade Literary Review, Coal City Review, Illya's Honey, Karumu, Hurricane Review, Lullwater Review, Midwest Quarterly, Permafrost, Raven Chronicles, Lake Effect, Small Pond Magazine of Literature, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review and Whiskey Island Magazine.

mining for gold

A poem found on the Internet, a poem written by a former army buddy, room-mate, friend, and confidant:

GREAT PLAINS, A FRAME OF REFERENCE

What really got them in the end—
those women who didn’t make it,
who withered and blew away
in the open—was the wind.
Space, yes, and distance,
too, from neighbors,
a piano back in Boston.

But above all, the wind.

In pained letters
you hear it
shriek hysteria from sod huts,
unutterable loneliness that boiled
up off the horizon
and sucked dry their desire
as it flattened the stubborn grasses.

You turn then to photographs
that confirm
the contents of the letters:
bony wives in plain black dresses,
prematurely undone, adrift,
betrayal like accusation
leaking from rudderless eyes.

The wind. Even as it scoured
the skin it flayed the soul,
that raked, pitted shell.
And how like the Indians,
appearing, disappearing,
no fixed location,
not event a purpose one could name.

The Cheyenne, at home
with the wind from birth,
had no pianos.

© 2005 Peter Ludwin