19th Annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival - Friday Morning, April 5

Once again, choices, choices, choices — 

I opted for the readers in Estep Auditorium for my 1st stop of the day. Benjamin Myers was the 2015-2016 Poet Laureate of the State of Oklahoma and is the author of four books of poetry. He read from his most recent, The Family Book of Martyrs (Lamar University Press, 2022), starting with “Decoration Day,” then the discursive, detailed “Listening to Reggae at the Nashville Airport" (that he dedicated to fellow poet Hank Jones, who was also here at Scissortail). As one would expect from the title of the book there were a string of poems about the older generation, such as “My Grandfather’s Fake Rolex,” & a trio about his father, ”My Father on the Diving Board,” “Storm Cellar,“ “What Peter Looked Like Walking on Water.” Ben is another poet that I met at my first Scissortail in 2011, & he continues to scribble out good, reflective poetry.

R. Anjum, center; S. Rhoades, right; D. Wilcox, left

Rubeen Anjum, from Dallas, TX, by contrast was new to me, & her work was quite different stylistically from most of what I’ve been hearing at this festival — more fragmented, less discursive, string of images & words. She began with a poem/essay “Blue Diamonds” about COVID-19, then on to a more recent piece describing a man in hospice. Some of her poems were from her full-length collection My Photo Album (Finishing Line Press, 2023), such as the sonnet “Journey” (with words from Robert Frost in her head). “Dervish from Dallas” was her
thoughts on a plane, like a list of words & images, & she ended with the brightly musical “You Dance with Me” (which I did the next day).

On to the next session, across the courtyard, to the Regents Room, where Josh Grasso was the MC. 

Andrew Geyer is a prose fiction writer, another whom I’ve heard read at previous Scissortail Festivals. He introduced his short story as from a cycle titled “All that is Holy,” with characters he said we have heard before; the story was titled “The Rainbow is Salty and Smells of the Sea,” from the point-of-view of character Anna about her near-death experience — it was like a riff on the story of Persephone.

Joey Brown is a fun person with whom to hang out at Scissortail — & elsewhere, I suspect. Her first poem titled “Making a Hand” is an expression that was new to me, it means one has done a good thing. Her poems were very much of place & the people living in it, “Drought” about an old house shifting; “Black Jack After a Fire” (a kind of oak); a poem about love, “Tributary;” & “Old Home Week,” about memory, Oklahoma towns & how/why she got there. She introduced a poem about a company meeting online by saying she was “reading a poem I probably shouldn’t.” And even though the eclipse was still a few days off she read “Missing the Eclipse” (she will be coming home from work). 

For the final session of the morning I was back at the Estep Auditorium. 

John Graves Morris lives in Lawton, OK & is a Professor of English at Cameron University, & is a regular at Scissortail. His poems often had long titles, some, as in his first poem, “This Is a Reply to an Internet Troll…” were longer than the poem (& longer than I could transcribe on one hearing), & all were descriptive meditations on the topic at hand. For example, a poem about long-term memory recalling faces, “All the Words There Are,” & an eco-poem about a severe drought & heat wave, “Bodies Littering the Floor Southwest Oklahoma, 2023” (imitating the poems of Arthurs Sze, who was a featured reader here in 2022).   There were poems for/about his father & a couple about birds, one responding to a line from a student, “Never say yes to a gas station Moon pie” — hmm?

I had mentioned Jessica Huntley earlier as a co-author with Britton Morgan of the mini-zine Cross Timbers (2022). She read a series of ekphrastic poems, often abstracting her emotions, a couple from Cross Timbers, “Still Life with Horse in Window,” & “Graduation into Surrealism” based on a Dali painting. Others with titles like “Lotus Blooming Under an Eclipse,” “Jungian Shadow,” & the rhyming “Rain Dance.” The thing about a good ekphrastic poem is that one does not have to see the art to dig the poem.

Quinn Carver Johnson is the author of The Perfect Bastard (Curbstone Press, 2023), a poetry collection about queerness and class in the world of professional wrestling. They began with a “perfect bastard” poem, then a grim description of of a declining city “Cheap Heat Action City.” I know that I’ve never heard any pro-wrestling Haiku but Quinn read 3 new "Death Match Haiku." Another new poem was titled “Dinosaurs,” in which the extinct creatures were capitalists, & “Ode to the Pink Cowboy Hat” was a response to the hit song “Boys Don’t Cry” & a tip of the hat to the wrestler Cowboy Bob Horton. Quite a wild ride indeed.