For "Flashes Amid the Thunder," the featured poetry in the November issue we created for NYCpoetry.com before our independence, we culled (by a process reiterated in brackets below) 43 poems from the 246 published in the first four issues of RATTAPALLAX. For the present "Flashes Reillumined," we invited MFA candidates to shed their own critical light on those choices. Jack Shuler and Tina Dubois (both of Brooklyn College) examine Issues Three and Four respectively.

[To ensure that our selections would be free of the Louis Quatorze factor (see Editor’s Note to Issue One), and that each piece would have the chance to play simultaneously on the page and in the ear, we proceeded by the slowest possible method: We took turns reading them aloud without attribution, a total of 246 poems, over a period of three weeks, to choose the 43 which appear here.

To be included, the poem had to set off a dual chime. This is the poem that insists on being heard, and then, once silent, continues to speak the listener’s subtext, as the meaning of language is subsumed into the music and mystery of language.

Poems are arranged by issue, each prefaced by an abridged version of Editor, George Dickerson’s remarks. We have deviated in some cases from the original order of appearance, inasmuch our inclusion of some pieces and omission of others created gaps which obscured or altered the affinities between these "stones" as originally arranged by George Dickerson.

The reader has the option of hearing the poem read by its author on the CD provided with each issue. Biographical material about some of these poets appears on the magazine’s web site: <www.rattapallax.com>]

Time Out Magazine has called RATTAPALLAX "the visceral multimedia hit of poetry." While Nos. 1 and 2 have become virtual collectors’ items, Nos. 3 and 4 are widely distributed in bookstores (e.g. Gotham Book Mart & Gallery). Our excerpted Flashes are scheduled to be available soon in the archives. Also, many of the poets performed their work on November 13 in a live recording session sponsored by nycBigCityLit.com at the splendid Caffè Taci in New York, and our engineer is preparing that recording for release.

In his editorial note to Rattapallax No. 3, George Dickerson writes, "There was a long, low rumble of thunder at the shore, a faint rattapallax grumbling in concert with lightning that suffused the sullen cloud cover." The poems in this issue begin in this same place--a deep cavern emitting a low rumble. Call this rumble the awakening of the soul, desperation and despair or, quite simply, the human condition. Many of the poems in this issue explore this realm, this place called life, this place of despair and ecstasy.

"Corpus Christi Carol" by James Scannell McCormick, like the editor's note, begins with rain and takes the reader to a lonely place marked by the death of a loved one.

The clock is still, but the poet is troubled as death's hand sweeps over house and heart. All "goes dead." In this flood of pain, the detritus of the dead emerges, floating. McCormick writes,

These objects do not console the poet; they only serve to make matters worse. The poem ends with the low cry, "Where have you taken my love?"

In "Mud-Walking" by Richard Levine, water is again a source of pain, a reminder of sorrow, rather than a source of renewal or pleasure. Levine describes the dirty details of trudging through battle in the unforgiving mud, mud that made the ache and stench of death even more awful, mud that "sounded like chest wounds sucking." He confesses that after his return from Vietnam, the unsteadiness of trudging through the mud, stayed with him--a deep burden.

But he has never left that place. For thirty years, it has called to him "like a bell buoy through thick fog." Levine leaves the reader with the feeling that his pain cannot and will not disappear completely as long as he is so connected to the geographic source of his pain--the place that exists in his memory. He ends with the beautiful image of a man alone in the rain.

Lorraine Schein, in her poem "Bed," demonstrates that one need not have endured the trauma Levine examines, nor borne the loss of a loved one like McCormick, to come to terms with mortality. McCormick’s epiphany comes while examining a household necessity: the bed. In swift tercets, Schein peels off innovative descriptions for the bed, one after the other.

For Schein, the bed is more than a place for rest or sex; it is an acting "sculpture" which plays a supreme role in our daily routines. Ultimately though, it is only another vehicle that carries humans to death. It is a box for living specimens.

In the end, death is much greater than all our actions, desires or pains. We go to bed to rest from these troubles, yet never escape them.

Schein’s is not the only poem in Rattlapallax No. 3 that describes a simple piece of furniture. In a more lighthearted exploration of a household object, Laurel Ann Bogan writes about that which we sit upon. "Vocation of the Chair" begins with a romantic, sexy line.

Personifying the chair, the poet reminds us of the great task the chair must undertake--to hold, to bear its occupant. But the chair does not stop with this work; it praises its friend, the user and admirer. The chair supports "in the crude and faithless light."

In a subtle way, "Vocation of the Chair" points to the sweetness of our days, thus separating it from the other poems mentioned so far. This is to say that not all the poems in Rattapallax No. 3 dwell on the sadness of the human condition.

Another celebration of beauty can be seen in Christine Boyka Kluge's poem, "Poem in a Paper Boat." This is a love poem addressing a lover from whom the poet is separated. The poet sends a candle on a paper boat across a lake.

In a season of decay and sadness, there is still hope and joy for the poet.

There is, indeed, a melancholic tone to this poem. Yes, the poet longs to be with someone else, someone far away. Underlying this desire, though, is love. In this light, the despair of the poems mentioned above, vanishes away in the brightness of this often-mentioned four-letter word. These poets struggle to find stable ground, this is true, but what directs them on this journey is love of life, beauty, and also, the poem itself.

(Jack Shuler is an MFA candidate at Brooklyn College where he teaches first-year English and works for the Wolfe Institute of the Humanities. He has written numerous articles on contemporary poetry for The South Carolina Review.. One of his poems appears in this issue.)

The fourth issue of Rattapallax truly captures the haunting spirit of strong poetry. The lingering emotions produced by the individual poems resonate throughout the collection, though the selection of writing is varied as much in content as it is in tone.

Veronica Golos’s "A Bell Buried Deep" mourns the loss of an infant son now gone eleven years, a pain still rich through its passionate imagery both of decay and desire.

The poem is shadowed in the blue light of death, yet refuses to succumb to the powerless language of loss. The speaker's grief remains strong, angry, and full of fervent longing, a longing that seeks temporary relief through physical union.

Naomi Guttman's "Accident at Windsor Station, Saint Patrick's Day, 1909" also speaks of loss, yet in the language of abandonment and relief.

Through Guttman's tightly honed lines, we can see that this loss is not altogether unwanted, or rather, that it is a loss unsure of itself. Throughout the second stanza, the man's hollering "like a horse gone wild" reverberates loudly, making the husband's absence increasingly mysterious and somehow shameful for its silence.

The role of memory serves most powerfully in Judith Werner's "Joust," sliding from past to future while shakily grounded in the unwelcome present.

The connection between the physical and mental is entwined in a kind of sexual (re)awakening recreated by the speaker. The second stanza speaks to a different form of conjuring, drawing a parallel with Merlin and his fabled ability to age backwards. The rapturous union of the first stanza is replaced by one more forbidden and suspect, yet still described with the same tender language Werner uses throughout the poem.

"Ixion at Mud" by Evan Eisman rewrites the myth of Ixion and the birth of Centaurus (and all the centaurs) in a vivid depiction of sexual aggression, survival and escape.

The tercet form works well to provide both control and rhythm amid the "piss-clay and sullied fetlock tufts." The passionate vision of creating a species more powerful than what's been before reveals that the speaker has all but "succumbed to the smell of sweating / mud thwacked by hooves and fresh-sawn / lumber oozing pine sap." Since Ixion is often viewed as a symbol of punishment for mortal sin, this unrepentant voice is both powerful and fearful.

"Self-Portrait in a Garden" by James Scannell McCorkmick could easily be read as an ars poetica, though its final prescription may prove somewhat daunting. How does one fully accept that to leave well enough alone is the best formula for any creative success?

Through this organic imagery and proverbial gardening tips ("crush/ A leaf of pennyroyal to keep off/ Yellow jackets"), McCormick creates a space both comfortable and humorous.

Charles Fishman’s "Nocturne with and without Stars" transverses a landscape reminiscent of the Romantic tradition while avoiding the hysterical mysticism sometimes associated with such styles. Its beckoning voice of discovery is calm, precise and patient.

A spiritual awareness pervades the poem, yet it is quiet, unassuming, and unnamed. Fishman’s lines seem effortless, moving to a rhythm inherent to the words themselves.

"Lay Sermon" by Ben Passikoff also evokes the tone of a spiritual calling, yet the language is more mysterious and sparse.

The poem reads almost as an instruction manual, barren, cold and unknowable. Passikoff's use of the line in each of the five quatrains is impressively controlled. Yet simultaneously, "Lay Sermon" works toward a fullness, uncharted and infinite.

Ron Price's "Carafe with Fruit" is similar to "Lay Sermon" in the way that it presents another sparse landscape. Yet this eerily sterile poem speaks to a greater, more complex ideology, mainly one of chance and balance, instead of a spirituality.

Why am I he and not she?

Why born here and not there?

The still-life reveals a consciousness not through movement, but rather, through its resistance to movement, thought, and body.

Rattapallax No. 4 contains many other poems which further explore, undercut, or artfully ignore the themes explored here.(*) Of course, all demonstrate a strong sense of craft and beauty, entering the reader swiftly yet leaving only in gasps. One looks with anticipation to the continued work of the authors selected for this collection of poetry.

(Originally from Southern Maine, Tina Dubois is completing her MFA at Brooklyn College.)