The June 1 Poetry Hoot, sponsored by the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program, is the last of the 2010-2011 season. The Poetry Hoots will resume on Wednesday, Sept. 7. Featured readers for June 1 are Deborah Brown and Wayne Atherton. The Hoot is held at Café Espresso, 800 Islington St., Portsmouth, beginning at 7 p.m. Sign up for the Open Mike, which begins at 8 p.m. Check www.pplp.org for further information.

Aiming for economy in a poem, the poet strives for the exact right word in the exact right place, eliminating all unnecessary language. In his Open-Mike poem for the May 4 Hoot, SL (“Skip”) Manning gives his audience a complete image of a character in just three words. “Poetess” is a word designed to put women poets in their place as inferior to strong, manly male poets. The term was considered archaic and affected long before the current campaign for gender-neutral nouns, a campaign which has given us firefighter, flagger, mail carrier, police officer and flight attendant. (We’re still stuck with prince and princess!) A woman who designates herself, or allows herself to be designated, as a “poetess” creates a definite image in the minds of those who encounter her. Add “beautiful” and “elderly” and we feel confident in creating an entire mental picture of her—how she dresses, what she eats for breakfast, what kinds of poems she writes.

Skip continues the economy of his writing in stanza two, where he gives enough information to enable the reader to construct a chapter in a steamy novel or a series of episodes for a soap opera. The second stanza is a powerful analogy for the first. The poet who feels frustration and “performance anxiety” over his failure to write a correct villanelle remembers himself in 1967, also suffering from his inability to please a beautiful woman.

Slightly Entangled

The beautiful elder poetess
After listening to his apology for the flawed villanelle,
Told him to go home…
Study it. Work slowly on it.
Think about his craft…and fix it.
And he went home…and breathed on it
Until the milky sunrise. But never touched it
Because, even a flawed truth is sometimes acceptable.

You see…he had become stuck…
Remembering a raven-maned, brown-eyed beauty—
Back in the summer of ‘67—
Remembering how she told him to stay, start over…Go slowly…
Think about how much he hated changing a flat tire…
Do a better job this time…(No Pressure!)…
Just don’t make her go home to her husband like this…
--SLManning

SLManning is a N.H. lakes region native living in Strafford with his wife and family His poems appear in The 2008 and 2010 Poets' Guides to NH. He produces a daily literary email and a regular event calendar and reads at local poetry venues where he values the “‘Ah-Ha! Moment’ when the listener sees through the words.”
 

Pat Parnell, Stratham