Welcome to National Poetry Month and Gyroscope Review’s month-long celebration of poets – and their diverse Writing Assistants. Enjoy the audio/video works by previous Gyroscope Review poets and be sure to check out the Author and fun Writing Assistant Bio at the end of each NPM poet post. Don’t forget to tag the poet on Social Media and let them know you enjoyed their work!
The News the Rocks Know
The News the Rocks Know [Gyroscope Review, Fall Crone Power Issue, p. 51] Grand Canyon, Inner Gorge: A midsummer dawn. The deep luster of new-fledged scarab beetles bumbling into cliff walls and tent screens through which I trace the filmy edges of the morning star, visible through a gust-broken whirlwind snaking down the canyon. Part of me observes the staggering transformation as pillars of light invade the depths, revealing a template of angled crags bisecting the sky. Nothing soft. Nothing rounded. Understand the call of four hundred million years of perspective—news and clues locked in traces of ancient life, in deformed rock fabrics: the hardness of time, turning, turning, turning, calling me forward to explore to the last gasp. Grab hat, stick, daypack. Descend a path through the silence of millennia, the emptiness of ages, stolid, impervious. Below, the river roars—waves lapping landscape redder than the Supai sand collecting in the lee of sculpted boulders. I can’t imagine a life empty of this planetary exoskeleton, bronze-black mafic keel of bedrock. The overlying skin, fossils hiding within. The whole an eloquent pattern scorning short lifespans, rearranging understanding.
Lacuna
Lacuna [The Write Launch Journal June 2, 2023 (online: https://thewritelaunch.com/2023/06/the-magic-hours-tucson-mountains-lacuna-and-cenzontle/)] Standing in the cleft, fingers tracing the Great Unconformity. Missing time in the stone diary of seen, felt, touched, known. Farther afield we measure sections of rock strata, date them with fossils and decaying elements. Interpret, correlate, construct a fence diagram of overlapping columns—an elegant Parthenon that almost, almost succeeds in filling that gap in time. But within the remaining empty quarter—the millennia of eroded or never deposited earth history—lies the locus of imagination, of story.
WRITING ASSISTANT BIO
I metamorphosed from a geoscientist into a writer of fiction, nonfiction and poetry after moving to Tucson more than thirty years ago. The single most important influence on my poetry is the constantly changing Sonoran Desert outside my window.
AUTHOR BIO
Tucson writer and 2023 WILLA and Spur poetry awards finalist Susan Cummins Miller, a former field geologist, paleontologist, and educator, is the author of two poetry collections (Making Silent Stones Sing and Deciphering the Desert), seven novels, and an anthology of women writers of the American frontier. Her poems, short stories, and essays appear frequently in journals and anthologies, including the recent Trouble in Tucson and SoWest: Wrong Turn. www.susancumminsmiller.com
Don’t forget to read the Spring 2024 Issue of Gyroscope Review.
NPM 2024 Poets
April 1 – Cal Freeman
April 2 – Susanna Lang
April 3 – Marion Brown
April 4 – Melissa Huff
April 5 – Elaine Sorrentino
April 6 – Alison Stone
April 7 – Alexandra Fössinger
April 8 – Laurie Kuntz
April 9 – Dick Westheimer
April 10 – Wendy McVicker
April 11 – J.I. Kleinberg
April 12 – Ellen Austin-Li
April 13 – D. Dina Friedman
April 14 – Connie Post
April 15 – Georgina Key
April 16 – Judith McKenzie
April 17 – Jacqueline Jules
April 18 – Amanda Hayden
April 19 – Lisa Zimmerman
April 20 – Richard Jordan
April 21 – Beth Kanell
April 22 – Kari Gunter-Seymour
April 23 – Jane Edna Mohler
April 24 – Susan Cummins Miller