Verse Wisconsin 105| Michael Kriesel

Two Poems

H.P. Lovecraft

(After Mark Zimmermann)

Love, leave the ochre
altar of the heart.
Prophet, call teal hate
to hover over all.
Avatar of vapor:
part eel, half parrot.
Echo of the velvet hoof.

—Michael Kriesel, Aniwa, WI

Elegy for Barns

Quite a world
one half fucks
the other

sunlight climbs the wall
grandpa’s glass of muscatel

40 years farming
those cows never
took a vacation

the starter just clicks
after an hour
he gets off the tractor

But if you say something
then you’re the asshole

it finally snows
dead battery
left on the lawn

—Alvin Kriesel
—Michael Kriesel, Aniwa WI

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Michael Kriesel is a poetry reviewer for Small Press Review and his reviews have appeared in Library Journal. He has won both the WFOP Muse Prize and the Lorine Niedecker Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. He’s been nominated for nine Pushcart Prizes. Books include Chasing Saturday Night (Marsh River Editions); Feeding My Heart To The Wind and Moths Mail The House (sunnyoutside press); and Soul Noir (Platonic 3way Press).

More work by Kriesel appears in the print issue of Verse Wisconsin.

Read his essay “Small Thoughts: Writing and Submitting Haiku" online.

Read his Encyclopedia of Wisconsin Forms and Formalists, published in VWOnline 104.

About "H.P. Lovecraft": This poem is a lipogram, a form of writing that excludes one or more letters of the alphabet. Wisconsin poet Mark Zimmermann has further refined the form by developing 1st-person narratives using only the letters contained in a literary or historical character’s name.

While assembling my "Encyclopedia of Wisconsin Forms and Formalists" article for Verse Wisconsin, I decided to try this form. For my subject I chose 1920s horror author H.P. Lovecraft, a writer whose work I’m very familiar with. I discovered Lovecraft in my teens, and still re-read his work every five years or so. His plots often involve a scholarly recluse who discovers or magically summons a world-devouring horror from beyond known space and time. Purple prose and tentacles abound!

I worked 7 days on this poem, 2 – 3 hours each morning. I spent the first four days compiling my vocabulary of words conjured from Lovecraft’s name—491. I highlighted 162 of these as promising. Then phrases began assembling themselves, independent of author intent, like crystals forming in a supersaturated solution.

The form meets the writer halfway in the writing. The poem is part artifact, conveying far less of the poet’s personality than other forms. Think of a pachinko game. Besides a certain inevitability of composition, the narrow word choice parameters result in a relative handful of similar words, which give lipograms such rich sounds—the process a sonic distilling.

About "Elegy for Barns": I came in a round about way to this Rengay, a collaborative form of haiku. I’d been writing haiku the last several years, sporadically. Though interested in trying Rengay, I never found a partner. Then last year, while collaborating on a few free verse pieces with Cathryn Cofell, the form came to mind and we wrote a couple. Shortly after that, some of my grandfather’s sayings came home in “Elegy For Barns.”