Guest Curator: Gary Glauber
Inside Outrage
by Gary Glauber
Finalist for The Eric Hoffer Book Award: The Medal Provocateur
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Guest curator Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He was awarded this year’s Peter Heinegg Literary Award from Union College. He has five collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press), Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), Rocky Landscape with Vagrants (Cyberwit), A Careful Contrition (Shanti Arts Publishing) and most recently, Inside Outrage (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), an Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur finalist. He also has two chapbooks, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press) and The Covalence of Equanimity (SurVision Books), a winner of the 2019 James Tate International Poetry Prize.
Reading Words of a Troubled World
When Hayley Mitchell Haugen, Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Sheila-Na-Gig Online, first asked me to guest curate an upcoming issue, I didn’t realize how much it would change my perspective on the submissions process. It was a rich and rewarding journey that wreaked emotional havoc: I was sad when delivering rejections and elated when sending a thumbs up. But it was worth it – no regrets. And I am pleased with the results.
George Franklin and Simona Carini were my predecessors, the two celebrated poets who had curated recent issues. Knowing the fine job they had done, I was inspired to try and do the same.
Seeing the process from the receiving end truly was eye-opening. Perhaps the hardest part was having to reject the good work of some writer colleagues for whom I have the highest regard. However, their specific pieces did not seem to jibe with the issue’s developing zeitgeist.
What revealed itself as a truth early in the process was the way an issue develops a distinct personality. There also was an unspoken time pressure on decisions, considering that many were simultaneous submissions. Even with the relatively quick response turnaround, several poems were withdrawn for this very reason. That’s the nature of the business.
Submissions were read in the same order in which they were sent, and a succession of tough decisions gave me new-found respect for those that go through this process issue after issue.
Author bios were not a factor. Most who submit to Sheila-Na-Gig have amazing credentials, but age, race, gender, politics, religion, location, and past prizes/nominations had no bearing on eventual decisions– the only thing that mattered were the poems themselves.
As guest curator, my guiding influences were what had gone before. My role was to respect and continue to find the kind of well-written narrative voices that have made this journal so popular and deeply respected. In the end, always trust your gut.
My point is that these are difficult times. Sheila-Na-Gig is not an activist publication, per se. However, there is no way to ignore the strife and division that marks our current national and global reality. There’s a marked resurgence of hatred and fear. Dangerous and violent weather events affirm the reality of climate change. Educators battle smartphones and AI as attention spans shrink along with population growth. Horrible atrocities are reported from global wars daily. And an ever-aging population watches and tries to adapt to constant chaos and change. Welcome to our complicated now.
Popular wisdom states that troubled times produce more poems. We use the magic of language to try and make sense of our confusion and anger. While avoiding the blatantly political, subtle works can be wondrous, refreshing, analeptic. These poems were expressing the cultural temperature of this moment in time, via the thermometer of poetic expression.
Such chaotic times also breed nostalgia. Fall submissions included a wide array that looked inward, back to better days, focusing on family relationships, lovers, friends, passionate hobbies, inspirational teachers, favorite pets, exotic travels, and more. Several presented concerns regarding mortality, and the onset of dementia and other diseases that beset our weary bodies and minds.
The best of these offered nuance as well as narrative, and some were spectacular. Is poetry the answer to our long list of woes? I wish it were so. Poetry is not a panacea; rather, it’s a step in the right direction.
A good poem might offer a refreshing surprise or innovative wordplay, a captivating or heartbreaking narrative, or even just the comfort of shared misery. Poetry is our coping mechanism, or at least one possible pathway toward whatever comes next.
What began to take shape as I whittled and winnowed was a collection of poems that resonated as right for these times, even if not always therapeutic. They are intelligent, often playful, occasionally confessional, constantly caring and skillful. My thanks and gratitude to all who submitted to this issue – including those whose works did not survive to the final cuts. Your fine works enriched my life as a poet, as a reader, and as a human being. I am changed for the better. As I continue to reread these Fall Issue pieces, a feeling of pride that any parent or teacher knows well colors my excitement.
I remain ever-grateful to Hayley Mitchell Haugen for giving me this opportunity, and for the tireless way she supports poets through the Sheila-Na-Gig community. Acting as a conduit for this issue of first-class poems was a privilege and honor. As James Marriot noted in his UK Times article earlier this year, “those grouches who claim poetry is “dead” will always be wrong. As long as human beings use language and experience feelings, poetry can never quite die.”
I am hopeful that you share my excitement and delight with the selected content. Please savor each poem carefully – and may some of these wondrous creations resonate and provide comfort and help in the best of ways during these very troubled times.
Tale from the Heart
“The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased,
I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are
such sad things.” –Marcel Proust, from Swann’s Way
It’s impossible to sleep on the cardiac ward,
amid the relentless chaos of monitors buzzing and beeping.
This litany of sounds is offset for a time by my finding
a zen channel on the oversized remote, a soothing female voice
leading me on a guided meditation away from the reality
of this cacophony of electronic sounds anticipating crises,
the endless stream of nurses, doctors, aides, and supervisors
checking, rechecking, bringing medications and verifying
that I am in fact the same me as my bracelet declares,
re-emerged from my meditation into the small blue hospital room.
There is no privacy here, no sleep, no respite and no way
to reach the flimsy curtains that might offer an illusion of privacy.
Instead, I am at the mercy of this strange noisy environment,
and the fact that my new roommate is a talker and a moaner.
At perhaps three in the morning, he browbeats a P.A.
who answers the assistance call into hearing his whole tale.
A procedure done a week prior that did not provide improvement;
the unsettling feeling of getting winded after the slightest tasks.
This was my third time hearing it, small variations
not improving the allure of the pensive narration.
This sent him to the local urgent care, who happily
forwarded him to the hospital room where this older
captain-of-industry could be better beeped, buzzed, and
monitored, better apprised of why his ticker lacked oomph.
This had been his second major recent procedure.
He wanted to know next steps, what options remained.
Said P.A. tried his level best to better explain the past procedures,
along with what his current testing and observation might reveal.
This man wanted to know if the upbeat P.A. might be able
to get him a list of the hospital’s cardiologists, so that he
could select a new successor from among them to deal
with a very powerful man’s sudden lack of power.
The P.A. asked him who his current cardiologist was.
When told, he said that she was one of the very best.
“That’s the problem,” my roomie said. “She’s always busy,
never seems to have enough time for me, it seems.”
“Get me that list, would ya?” He inquired again as to
this P.A.’s name, as I watched him escape hastily, eyes rolling.
Next came a team to count the bills in this man’s wallet,
so that it could be stored in a safe. (It was $177 dollars.)
He asked every nurse and attendant to get him that P.A.,
as he impatiently awaited that promised list.
When my roomie’s secretary called the next morning,
he instructed her to cancel and reschedule all meetings.
“I’m in the hospital,” he told her, “but I’m getting out soon.”
The world of business waits for no man’s fickle ticker.
Time is money, they say, and his voice conveyed the sense
that he didn’t have time for these beeping, buzzing things
keeping him from his corner office, where he ruled
the world of entitlement he had built around him.
I tried not to hear any of it, but it was ambient noise
along with a series of deeply disturbing moans and sighs.
For a night we were roommates, seeking a morning
of better times and mutual release back into society,
me with my little poems about shared humanity,
and the old capitalist whose groans punctuated
an already endless symphony of distress,
because like some disappointing summer hire,
his heart had turned unreliable, and he had no
answers for this, his own body’s unexpected betrayal.
