California Quarterly, Volume 51, Number 2, Summer 2025
Edited by Nicholas Skaldetvind and Maja Trochimczyk
TABLE OF CONTENTS
California Quarterly, Volume 51, Number 2, Summer 2025
In Quarantine I — Christina Pugh 7
In Quarantine II — Christina Pugh 7
In Quarantine III — Chrisina Pugh 8
Flap Studio — David Romanda 8
Essay on Paper Pushers, Yuppies, Bureaucrats — Sandra Simonds 9
Essay on a Remote Finnish Island — Sandra Simonds 10
Ink Inside Illuminated — Mathias Toivonen 11
Dead Sea Scrolls unfurl — Maja Trochimczyk 11
Stars: With, Not At — Lily Lewis 12
Temperance — Lily Lewis 13
To a Poet Caught in a Spring Snow — Storm Ambika Talwar 14
I Was Wondering — Jim Ellis 14
After Fenton Johnson’s “Revery” — Linda Saccoccio 15
Missing — Katarina Svedberg 16
Risk — Katarina Svedberg 17
Apocryphal Hypocrisy — Anthony Caleshu 18
Apparition — Ariella Ruth 19
Five or Six Islands — Irina Moga 20
Impossible Love Poem — Cecil Morris 22
Qualities of Air — Kymm Coveney 23
Where She May Wander — Don Heneghan 24
Hisayo — Jim Ellis 25
Salt — Kurt Hemmer 26
Charmless Vector—Vector Decays — Charles Bernstein 27
Zora Neale Hurston Considers Mary McLeod Bethune’s Chief Feature — Jon Woodson 28
Hope — David Romanda 29
Season of Ancestors — Linda Saccoccio 30
Luis 1968 — Jim Ellis 30
Fixing the Bishop’s Nose — Charles Bernstein 31
Eight Bells — Kymm Coveney 32
Hands on Time: An Aubade — Brian C. Miller 33
The Mechanics Of Mortality — Paul Schreiber 34
The Mechanics Of Mortality — Paul Schreiber 36
A Wet Velocity — Jade Lascelles 37
Tenderized — Jade Lascelles 38
A Poem on the Edge of Everything — Charlene Langfur 39
Horses — Byron Beynon 40
A Father’s Advice to His Daughter — Cecil Morris 41
Mona Lisa — John M. Davis 42
Buckeye — Raphael Block 43
Chef — Mark Belair 43
Looking for a Break in the Action — Charlene Langfur 44
Expectation — Claire J. Baker 45
Prairie Lessons — Margaret Rooney 46
I See a Dancer Leap: — Robert Hammond Dorsett 47
Commending the Wind — Russell Rowland 48
A Night of and for Rain I — Jeff Graham 49
Oak Peace — Raphael Block 50
Florilegium — Robert Hammond Dorsett 50
Night Blooming Flowers Become Her — Ariella Ruth 51
Orchids in Mist — Thomas Lavelle 52
To Be Remembered — Raphael Block 53
Summer — Alice Pero 54
Intruder Alert — Russell Rowland 55
Nocturne 8 — Jeff Graham 56
Miracles — Mark Belair 57
Waiting for the Light — Charlene Langfur 58
Cover Art: Some Colors of Water by Nicholas Skaldetvind, watercolor.
Contributors in Alphabetical Order 59
CSPS Contest Opportunities 60
CSPS Newsbriefs 2025, No. 1 by Maja Trochimczyk 62
Publishing Opportunities with CSPS 65
2024 CSPS Donors, Patrons, and Membership 66
Membership Form 68
Almost Picasso, watercolor by Nicholas Skaldetvind
EDITOR'S NOTE
A shared philosophy alone does not bring about unification. What does, perhaps, is the vertical investigation poets undertake, in language as community, those individuals who abstract from the muck and confusing murk a clattering of time, of place, of history, making the reader giddy with notions of the numinous, names, theories, dreams, dates, legends. A good poem rewards this kind of looking.
Poetic ages unite in a living memory. As Gaston Bachelard has written: “Poetry is never as unified as when it diversifies.” This common partnership is of veridical significance, as these poems transmute meaning. While some poems teach us the complexities of an individual’s consciousness by plumbing the depths of the singular self: Christina Pugh, John Woodson, Kurt Hemmer, Mathias Toivonen, while others teach by demonstration (and translation) that the singular poet can hardly ever be distinct from the social: Sandra Simonds, Ariella Ruth, Anthony Caleshu.
I have a certain love of slow sonorities. Yes, words really do dream beyond the hollowness of knowledge when pitted against understanding. The reward is this terrific group singing the relationship they share with the world: Kymm Coveney, Yunte Huang, Jade Lascelles, Charles Bernstein. Songs in which there is the recognizable sound of a human voice inducing you to continue reading. There’s an ordered movement of the experience, an esthetic quality au fond.
Reflecting on my sequencing of these poems, I am reminded of what the authors of The Bhagavad Gita stated: “Curving back upon my own nature, I create again and again.” Discovering how each poem continues the other’s story, my aim has been to place them into a shape of communal feeling. And, as with any decent anthology, you are able to open at random and Dame Fortune will enfold you in the language’s sheer beauty of resonance.
Etel Adnan reminds us: “Life is more connected than we think […] No, my work’s never about geometry […] Objects are anonymous like me, for there isn’t much to a name, a sound.” Lastly, thanks to the people involved with the Villa Lena Foundation for having made a space available to me. I’m also grateful for Maja Trochimczyk’s support in completing this issue. Thanks to the poets for offering such a rich assortment of verse. And thanks are due to you, dear reader. We are in society.
Nicholas Skaldetvind, Editor
Toiano, Italy
California Quarterly,Volume 51, No. 2
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NICHOLAS SKALDETVIND, EDITOR
Nicholas Skaldetvind is an Italian-American poet and paper-maker. He holds a M.A. (2019) from Stockholm University, Department of English and Transnational Creative Writing (thesis "The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac’s Letters from 1947-1956: Repetition, Language, and Narration.”) In 2015 he received B.A degree from Saint Louis University, Madrid, Department of Spanish Language and Literature, Department of International Studies, and Department of Ibero-American Studies. He is a recipient of numerous scholarships and grants, including Graduate ERASMUS Merit Scholarship (September 2018 – January 2019) at Bath Spa University. Department of English and Creative Writing in Bath, England; as well as scholarships at creative writing workshops at Berkeley, CA; Naropa University, Colorado and book arts and papermaking workshop at Wells College in Aurora, New York. He also was an undergraduate Exchange Student at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Sciences, English Literature, Spanish Literature, and Historical Linguistics (August 2012 – May 2016) and took a writing course in Danish in 2015.
Skaldetvind's research and teaching interests include: Twentieth-century American Literature, Transnational Studies, Epistolary Poetics, Life Writing, Literature of the American West, Papermaking and Book Arts, Fibers and Shrinkage, and Paper Drying Process. He is a multilingual poet and writer: native speaker in English, with advanced knowledge of Spanish, Danish, intermediate knowledge of Swedish, Portuguese, Italian, and French. He joined the Editorial Board in September 2023.
Summer Study - by Nicholas Skaldetvind
NEWSBRIEFS NO. 2, SUMMERY 2025
The Convention of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies subtitled “Enchanting Words” is scheduled for July 23-28 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We have not sent representatives to the NFSPS Conventions in quite a while, nor have we had any other California representatives in attendance. There will be a vote to change the Bylaws, so maybe someone would like to represent the CSPS. Please let me know, in order to become officially certified.
The cover of the summer California Quarterly is a watercolor by its Editor, Nicholas Skaldetvind, who does not like to place his own poems in the issues he edits, but rather selects his intriguing art. In the past, we featured his cover of a colorful paper he designed and made himself. Nicholas learned papermaking from Tom Balbo and Roberto Mannino. Of late, he is interested in the lives of painters like Franz Marc, Nell Blaine, Max Beckmann, and those who make Orthodox iconography in medieval chapels.
Both this and the previous issue of the CQ have my name added as Editor, since both issues did not have a sufficient number of poems selected by their respective Editors to fill all 52 pages with verse. Poems longer than two pages cannot be published in this journal and there is a limit of three mid-size (one-page) poems per poet. In this way, we can gather and present a greater variety of poetic voices!
The Spring 2025 edition of the Poetry Letter welcomed the season with a beautiful haiga of a weeping cherry by the featured poet, California haiku master, Naia. She submitted haiku, haiga, cinquain, and haibun. Her haiku-colleague William Scott Galasso, decided to share free-verse poems from his newest book, The Year We Never Saw Coming (2024).
A review of his impressive book was contributed by Joe DeCenzo. Two other reviews by Michael Escoubas present the poems and prose of Mark Fleisher (Persons of Interest) and of Pamela Miller (How to Do the Greased Wombat Slide). The final poet, Charlene Langfur of Palm Springs, often writes about her garden and “her” desert. The same desert is seen in a different way by featured artist, Polish American painter, Joanna Fodczuk-Garcia (seven paintings from the Desertscape series). The PDF of the Poetry Letter was sent by email, and the content divided into two on CaliforniaStatePoetrySociety.com blog. The June 2025 edition of the Poetry Letter will contain poems by winners of the 2024 Monthly Contests.
During the summer, people have more time to scroll through short videos, read books on the beach, or listen to poetic voices. The former judge of our Annual Contest, Frank Iosue, of Tucson, Arizona, started a YouTube channel dedicated to poetry, ImUpToMystic. On this channel he posts “videos I've created that explore and showcase many of the great works of poetry by poets from across the ages (along with biographies, audio of readings, and text of the poems), all accompanied by attendant imagery and music I have included to enhance the experience. There's also other entertaining and informative arts-and-poetry-related content” Visit ImUpToMystic: youtube.com/@ImUpToMystic_FrankIosue/videos
PERSONALIA. An India-born author, wellness consultant, artist-educator and CSPS Board Secretary, Ambika Talwar is dreaming up new ways for the next stage of her life of serendipitous moments. Her mystical, whimsical, and ecstatic poems, which are a “bridge to other worlds” flow to explore love, sorrow, rage, separation, fulfillment. She is grateful to have received few accolades that include the Rabindranath Tagore Award for Poetry (2024 and 2025), the Poiesis Bharat Award for Excellence in Literature (2022–2025) for short story submissions, WE Illumination award for poetry (2024), and the Nissim International Poetry Award (2021). Last year while in India, she was informed of being gifted with others the We Illumination Award for Poetry, Participation, Inspiration and for being a Phenomenal Woman by WE Literary Dynamic.
Her works appear in various global print/online anthologies. A few anthologies include those edited by Maja Trochimczyk: Chopin and Cherries (2010); Meditations on Divine Names (2012); Grateful Conversations (2018); and Crystal Fire. Poems of Joy and Wisdom (2022). Ambika’s paintings provided the cover and illustrations for the latter volume. Her poems also appeared in compilations published by Soul Scribers and The Significant League, Kyoto Journal, and others. Twice Pushcart nominee, she proudly notes the presence of her poems in the California Quarterly. As member of the CSPS Board, she says with aplomb “this, too, is wondrous.” A Los Angeles resident, she visits New Delhi, Bharat-India when she can.
Alice Pero, our indefatigable Monthly Contest Judge, reports: “I am finishing up the year teaching children poetry at Fair Oaks School. in their temporary quarters. The Fair Oaks campus burnt to the ground in the Eaton Fire, but has been resurrected and will move into new quarters in Pasadena in June. I continue to run the Village Poets reading at Bolton Hall. My group, Windsong, made a returning performance to raves at the Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Granada Hills on May 3rd.”
One of our CQ Editors, Konrad Tademar Wilk continues to annotate his collection of 168 English-language sonnets, Trafficking in Time. There are many obscure references and multi-lingual quotes that, these days, need elucidation. Meanwhile, he published two chapbooks of Polish verse. The free-wheeling Troika gathers a panopticon of poems inspired by history, Wilno, moon, silence, Macbeth, skulls (Dia de los Muertos), and even a rough chunk of concrete seen on a sidewalk. The Poetic Samizdat z Los Angeles focuses on complicated Polish-Ukrainian-Russian relations and historical entanglements of these three Slavic “frenemy” nations, witnessed by poets and artists.
Your hard-working President, on 24 May 2025, had the pleasure of meeting our sister group in Tucson, Arizona, as one of two featured poets (with Pamela Uschuk) presented during the May edition of the Tucson Arts Poetry Series, organized by Arizona State Poetry Society. My next feature is at the Summer Gazebo readings in Oceanside on 16 June 2025. My poetry blogs continue to attract readers from around the globe. Since 2010, the Poetry Laurels blog has had 382,278 readers, including 45,400 last year: 12.7K from the U.S., 7.34K – Singapore, 3.92K – Hong Kong, 3.46K – Brazil, 3.45K – Germany, and 2.73K – Austria. The Chopin with Cherries blog, promoting an anthology of the same title, has had 391,090 readers; 50,100 – last year. Strangely enough, readers came from the same countries, even in the same order!
Meanwhile, the CSPS blog had 128,570 readers since May 2019 and 31.800 last year. Visitors came from the U.S. (12.8K), China (3.59K), Singapore (2.78K), Israel (1.31K), Brazil (1.21K) and Germany (1.08K). Machine-generated trivia can be fascinating, but reading and writing poetry is definitely more fun. So, enjoy your summer of poetry!
Maja Trochimczyk
CSPS President
Beyond the Door - Cyanotype by Nicholas Skaldetvind
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