Janet Kaplan

From Dreamlife of a Philanthropist:

   I’ve known great happiness. “Pound” abbreviated “lb,” the
   word “salary” drawn from “salt.” I’ve un- earthed a wealth of
   examples like these, shy ex- amples that don’t want to be
   discussed. Some people are happy lying low. They’re happy as
   foun- tains of Cambrian-era RNA. Others shake their fists. Their
   eyes well with tears. Shall I crawl beneath my mother’s feet
   because cabbages no longer grow on Broadway? It’s Sri Lanka
   now but the tea’s still called Ceylon. Some elements come together
   to form com- pounds; then you can’t get back to the elements to
   save your life. Not without the proper, very expensive tools.

                                THE EXAMINED LIFE


Two poems from Ecotones:


Internet Chronicle

Sometimes the internet’s a mental hospital, zeroes in one wing, ones in another. You can’t imagine there’s anything meaningful. But that’s family.

I dreamt about the Internet. Far vhus is diss hinternet? Grandma asked. We can go there if you like. She never came back.

Death, text me here!

I thought about the Carl Sagan movie, how they download instructions for a space module and Jodie Foster’s character gets to see her father again—or a digitized him. The others think she’s mental.

A voice was left with two digits, and with them it wrote to infinity. There’s nothing else it can teach us, not with any variation of the sequence.

Lost, crazy, I follow the digits, babbling like a baby. To connect! To be inter! To be net!

Friends and faces, pages and birds. Grandma preferred her snake plant, her fine-toothed comb. I inherited them although I wanted her zeroes and ones. Hers in particular. I want them ad infinitum. Connected, as promised.


Technopastoral

Platform for miniature figures, one outerboro block
          and a pocket park, muzzy analog decades found at

www.midlife.returnshome+survives=nostalgia.biz. Each link’s so
          forward-looking, highspeed-connectivity-like, bravura newest

satellite views hyped onscreen. I’ve just to adjust the language,
          navigate webplastic.lightguts, download this intersection—

and memory is memory-was. Concrete urns
          limning an overpass, pizza fronts, workaday bars,

signs for the famed stadium, bitsy lives like mine
          rounded with a snooze. Traffic snarls a powerless sky,

transient hotel façade’s granted landmark status, the park’s named
          Joyce Kilmer— bygone soul for such progressive applications!

The place zeroes and ones, and I place it—or I’m loster
          than time and won’t be found ’til I’m a pulse, a one, a pause, a no….

I think that I shall never see—O
          where have all the server tools gone,

root node hidden in the tree view?
          I’ll have a banana cream squirrel because I loved
the sound of it, damned emotional cripple because I love
          the sound, like code in the margins tragic

with errors. What’d I think I was, a poem as lovely as a tree?
          I refreshed and resurfaced with the crossing guard

in a Camelotty era—so remind me, dear browser of
          Ephemeris Time, search-engine ‘crossing guard’ and ‘Dodge

Coronet,’ the ‘Then’ mothers spent in bed, postpartumly
          sewing clothes for school plays that collapsed in production

and elders bemoaned Pop Art, weeping for poems that friended trees,
          a loveliness I learned from rascals singing offkey

in reruns. Summer’s measure of godly menfolk
          tuned their bongos and balalaikas on Dogshit Avenue,

for comfort, now I recall, a week after the hit and run
          <The hobbled boy grew up to fix cars>.

On such-and-such a date, registers showed negative balance, factories
          folded and were gone, Dios mío, Gottenyu, power outages shut

the drip and surge, sitters pinned notes to our sleeves, packed transistors and
          met up at Golden Star for chicken almond ding, talking class-war and tabs—.
Now a new tab gives me futuristic tropes, a portal to the real faux
          time and memory, pixie pixels on the click-here’s

that take me away, a fool like me’s harsh rasp.
          Hit save and my softwares crash.


About the Author

Janet Kaplan's poetry books are Ecotones (2022; shortlisted for the Sexton Prize and published by The Black Spring Press Group Ltd., London), Dreamlife of a Philanthropist (2011; Sandeen Prizewinner from the University of Notre Dame Press), The Glazier’s Country (2003; Poets Out Loud Prizewinner from Fordham University Press), and The Groundnote (1998; Alice James Books). Her honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Bronx Council on the Arts, and fellowships and residencies from the VCCA, Yaddo, Ucross, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies (An Introduction to the Prose Poem, Firewheel Editions, 2007; Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James, Alice James Books, 2012; and Like Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose by Bright Hill Poets & Writers, 2017). She has served as Poet in Residence at Fordham University and as a member of the creative writing faculty at Hofstra University, where she edited the digital literary magazine AMP. She is currently an editor and co-publisher of PB&J Books, a cooperative literary press. Forthcoming from PB&J Books in 2024 is & Then, a prose abecedarian in deadpan.

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