T. S. ELIOT’S FIRST WASTE LAND

by Susan Terris

Cabanne Spring, Forest Park: vintage undated image with unidentified children from the archives of Louis (1907-1999) & Georgia (1918-2009) Buckowitz via Urban Review: St. Louis.

—The Waste Land poem is 100 years old this month.

Twit twit twit... turn of the century, it's 1900, and Tom

born in St. Louis, not yet known as T. S., found his first
waste land: Forest Park, 1,371 acres of countryside.

In the middle of the city, wild but with street cars:
an amusement park and a steam-driven carousel
(yes, that 1944 Meet Me in St. Louie whirlabout).
 
Both Tom and my Nanna Edna, almost the same age,
lived nearby on one side of the park. Did they meet? 
Jug jug jug... Maybe not, and yet I begin to see
 
them one day on the carousel when he and Edna
were both eleven: Tom, in a tan jacket and hat, 
riding the lead horse with roses around its neck,
 
smiling down at her—a girl in white organza, in
the white swan chariot. Perhaps. But what came next?
Oh   jug jug jug  Tom left St. Louis, went to Harvard.
 
Edna stayed, went to Fontbonne, a teachers college,
studied math, grammar, poetry, was the first woman
(or man) in our big family with a college degree.
 
Shantih   shantih   shantih   A hundred years passed:
Nanna Edna gone. T. S. Eliot gone and yet still there. 
The Waste Land, a mystery, kismet, a search for selves

Susan Terris is a freelance editor and the author of 7 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist's books, and 2 plays. Journals include The Southern Review, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Denver Quarterly, The New Verse News, and Ploughshares. Poems of hers have appeared in Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. Her newest book is Dream Fragments, which won the Swan Scythe Press Award. Ms. Terris is editor emerita of Spillway Magazine and a poetry editor at Pedestal.

SONNET TO KEROUAC

on his centennial

by Bradley McIlwain

Kerouac@100: The Jack Kerouac Centennial Celebration in Lowell
The Jack Kerouac Foundation

The road narrows 

And widens again—

The horizon heroes 

Fill their flasks with zen;

Poet bums 

Seeking dharma 

In mountain slums—

Wisdom that Brahma 

Bore from the beating

Beautiful pavement of the road;

Slick syllables of sweat beading

From the body scroll:

When spirit meets sole

On the dusty paperback of the globe

Bradley McIlwain is a poet who seeks to capture the chorus and consciousness of the human experience. His work has most recently appeared in The New Verse News and the Origami Poems Project. In 2021, he edited the Arthurian literary anthology New Tales of the Round Table (2021). He is the founder of the independent  coffee project Roasted Poet Press. When not drinking coffee, he is hard at work on his first novel, an American motorcycle odyssey across the midwestern US. 

FULL CENTURY

by Howard Winn

In honor of Lawrence Ferlinghetti at one hundred years.

has receded into history
and the beat goes on
although by now all his disciples
have passed out of the San
Francisco air of what was
once the unfashionable district
until the boys and girls of
the computer culture in the
Silicon Valley began seeking
sophistication and superiority
leaving the famous bookstore
where world changing verse
and fiction issued forth
brightening the shop window
of that literary cradle of the hip
and the mind of the rebels who
have along with the city itself turned
on the lights of sensation and
changed the very character of culture
way beyond the aura of sophistication
that made the city at the top
of that green peninsula the center
of the new culture that swept
both state and country and the world
never to be forgotten or erased


Howard Winn's poetry has been published most recently in Evening Street Review and Adelaide Literary Journal.