George Perreault

the new doctor

she looks up, the other guy he says here your wife’s spirit’s are pretty good, but her prognosis is poor, says you appreciate life’s inherent tragedy, does that about cover it?

thinking about basswood, big yellow leaves in the fall, better luck with grafts than seed, couple butternut trees by the gate open to a good-sized hole where the barn used to be.

once saw a milk snake slipping through its rock foundation, muscling deeper into memory, copperheads in Apalach, rattlesnake clattering the trail in San Patricio, officious lil bastards.

she liked it there, across the creek, porcupine now and then, falcons, bare cottonwood along the wash draped with sleepy vultures, wings spread warm and black in the morning sun.

turkeys fattened in the orchard, burbling as they followed her through the long grass where apples which had fallen lay unbruised at her feet, and guess, yeah, that covers it.

purple apple newspaper

i’ve aged along with my doctor until now she’ll assign me words for the exit exam, but

i’ve none of those wastings whose names are whispered into letters or names like Gehrig, and

with little to cover – my life’s a flat lake where any hooked trout lowers it one eureka at a time –

she asks about Belfast, its old cobblestone burble, the iron clankings between orange and green,

their dysfunctional government so like ours, and i confirm the ongoing bitterness, structured poverties

and murals for the dead, the tour guides outside the jail almost boasting of its wing for republican

terrorists, another for loyalist thugs, the calm in- between for our decent ordinary criminals, so

i ask about the neuropathy in her own foot, if the chemical shrapnel still shrieks in the night,

this old give-and-take between friends, until i wonder if she wants those words: apple, purple,

and something about the news, sorry to see her embarrassed how it had slipped from her mind,

nodding yes, newspapers, as if anything there was worth knowing, lifting a hand and letting it fall.

conversely so we were talking about ukraine, how the sky’s on fire in pakistan and no one gives a shit, all the hidden costs of human rule, and she remembers her first assignment, ICU recovery, two girls in a week from the same denominational school trying to sidestep their pregnancies,

and you know how it was back then, the alleys they had to sneak along. that first girl, the lucky one, she died on the table, but the second was twelve hours of surgery after the drāno douche, heavy sedation postponing the pain and the horror,

and who wants to be there when she wakes, who wants to explain what’s lost: you’ve melted the urinary tract, your bowels, all the organs in your pelvis, and then the bone, so much bone. these chemicals, they have no conscience.

even after two tours in vietnam, the things we do to each other, she remembers that second girl, the things we do to ourselves. they took her down a hallway to a room with solid locks. termination, my friend whispers, sometimes an elusive mercy

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George Perreault has served as a visiting writer in New Mexico, Montana, and Utah. His fifth full-length collection, lie down as you were born, was released in July 2023

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The Charles Simic Poetry Prize

We established the Charles Simic Poetry Prize to honor our late friend and mentor. We received 357 submissions from around the world. The editors worked to narrow the selections to 25 and passed those along without identifying the poets, to David Rivard, who selected our winners. David, a wonderful poet, taught at UNH with Charlie.

The winners of the first annual Charles Simic Poetry Prize are:

• First place ($1,000 prize): George Perreault

• Second place ($500 prize): Betsy Sholl

• Editor's Choice (signed first edition of Simic's The World Doesn't End): Claire Millikin

Of the prize winners, Rivard wrote:

Charles Simic had what can only be called “eclectic taste.” He was as likely to praise a poem by Tracy K. Smith as he was one by Basil Bunting or Ales Debeljak. He knew what he liked, but there wasn’t an ounce of narcissism or snobbery to his opinions. He didn’t need to hear the sound of his own unique voice echoed back in the poetry he loved by Dickinson or Vallejo.

This made talking with Charlie about poetry an adventure and delight—that I was lucky enough to do that week to week for a couple of decades was one of the real pleasures of my life. What Charlie was looking for in poetry was the intensity of one person’s presence on this earth—it’s what he understood the lyric was looking for too. Something like what Thelonious Monk meant when he said that a genius is a person who is “most like himself.”

So I used that notion of “presence” as a guide when judging this first annual Charles Simic Prize. I was looking for that intensity. I wasn’t looking for the second coming of Charles Simic. There won’t be another Charles Simic on this planet, at least not one who writes poetry—though I do seem to recall that Charlie had some hilarious ideas about his possible reincarnation in another form.

All twenty-five poets whose manuscripts I initially read had this intensity in their poems at times. The final five had it in consistently involving ways—I felt instructed and entertained by the language and feeling and thinking they made on the page. I kept coming back to those five. I wanted to read even more of their work. That I chose George Perreault and Betsy Sholl to honor with the Simic Prize probably has more to do with my personal needs at the moment. This is a thing your teachers don’t tell you: that the poetry you come to love is the kind that gives you what most need for your own life. Sometimes these poems give you your life.

I don’t think I’ve ever quite read anything like George Perreault’s poems (though I recognize some of their possible sources in the poetry of people like Merwin or Niedecker or—at a further remove—Williams). Perreault’s poems are collagist narratives, composed out of fragments. I loved how the poems moved, their pacing and jumps, how intimate their quickness made the feeling and thinking, even when it was oblique. His poems are grounded in a recognizable scene but range through other scenes and times, often at great distance. There’s something touching in the speaker’s vulnerability to his losses as he moves through memory and experience, but he’s too knowing to want to “perform” those feelings for us. There’s a hard-won emotional honesty to these poems. They have a quiet, if rueful, wit too—I mean, it is ironic when you have to remind your doctor to finish up a memory test she’s forgotten she initiated earlier in your visit to her office. Perreault’s tone conveys so much so subtly of who and what he is.

Betsy Sholl’s poems here also have losses at their heart, and on their mind. As in Perreault’s poems, those losses link up in compelling ways with ongoing troubles in the world (both these poets live in houses that history made). But where Perreault is all about compression and quickness, Sholl uses an expansive, accumulative syntax to bring us to that compassion that has governed her work for so long. Her personal losses seem insistently to make her sensitive to the suffering and injustices of the world (again, without performative moralizing or self-regard). These are supremely adult poems (good lord, thank you for that!). They are full of sorrows and pleasures, regrets and full-throated acceptances. Discursive narrative seldom seems as genuinely urgent to me, unforced, as it does here in Sholl’s work. I love how her poems end in what so often seems the inevitable place—inevitable but still surprising—she keeps the energy flowing past the closure. Her poems uncover themselves.

And that’s about the size of that, as Professor Simic might say. Except one more thing: both of these poets are wonderful image makers. They make it look easy, which it ain’t. For that alone, I feel sure that Charlie would approve.

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Editor's Choice Award - Claire Millikin:

the open

place in the mind where you know

what you’ve been offered

as a guiding light

is worse than darkness.

Claire Millikin writes in “The Nightlight”, a reverie from her childhood about a

Confederate monument and the “flame burning in its stone helm”. It was such startling

juxtapositions that drew us to Ms. Millikin’s poetry, the way she subtly directs the

tumbling mind one way and then another to the ultimate small nova of realization.

It was also the clean simplicity of imagery, as in “This Beautiful World” where we

find

The men living by the highway exit-ramp,

how fierce the light along their shoulders

as they try to sleep at midday.

It doesn’t strike one as odd to find out Millikin teaches American Studies and art history

at Bates College, as her poetry tells splendidly intricate, accurate stories that glow with

richly textured scenes reminding us of other artists like Wyeth, Homer and Hopper.

We received hundreds of great entries to the Charles Simic prize contest. While Claire

Millikin’s work was not chosen for the prize, we felt strongly that the quality of her work

deserved special mention, and so we created the Editor’s Choice Award.

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Charlie wrote: “I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it!” - from The World Doesn't End

Thank you to all poets who sent us their work for shedding some light on this beautiful mystery.

We are proud to present you with the work of all of our 25 finalists in the following pages.

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editor's notes

photo: John Cameron

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“If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.” - Charles Simic

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This issue marks four years of Hole In The Head Review. And I'm stunned. I spent a little time flipping through Our Back Pages and I just can't get over what we've accomplished. Each issue is alive and vibrant with poetry, painting, videos, photography, interviews and reviews.

We've published some recognized names and we've published many people just starting out. And in these digital pages, we draw no distinction. The work is the work is the work. That's the way we like it and that's the way we'll continue to operate.

This is normally the fun part of putting this ramshackle journal together. All pages look great, spelling checked. Sure, I know I'll get an email or two in the coming days pointing out something I've missed, spacing is off on line 19 or I've written "the brage slides downriver" instead of "barge glides upriver."

I expect that and I apologize up front to those whose work I've messed up and I pledge to correct promptly.

But this has been a strange few days in my little corner of Maine, 23.7 miles from downtown Lewiston. Many years ago I worked in Lewiston as a reporter for The Lewiston Daily Sun, the morning paper. I covered city hall and checked in with the police department, the sherriff's office, and the fire department. I sat through city council, school board, planning board, and a zillion other board meetings. And I wrote features on the people of Lewiston and its neighboring city, Auburn. I think I came to know the people there.

It was and is a tough town in a film noir sense. At that time in the late 70s, the city had a city manager who was as close to a "boss" as you could get around here. The mills that had produced fine blankets and fabrics were long closed and empty. But the "social clubs" that popped up around the mills were and are still busy with the regulars.

I once looked at a Google Earth shot of downtown and could see the roofs of three Catholic churches, including the beautiful basilica in the heart of downtown...so close to one another they could have shared a parking lot...and that didn't take into account the two parishes in the nearby outskirts.

Lewiston is that kind of town. And Maine is the kind of place where tragic events ripple outward and affect us all.

So I'm sorry if this isn't the normal editor's note. But right now, nothing really is normal around here.

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I DO want you to see where our readers are located this year. You'll note that we still haven't cracked the Iceland and Mongolia markets. We'll keep trying and if you know of poets and/or artists from there or from anywhere else in the world, please let them know they're welcome here.

And blessings to our friends in Israel and Gaza Strip; Ukraine and Russia; Berkeley and Birmingham. سَلَامٌ, shalom, peace, мир, 和平سَ, pace, paix and all good things.

Thank you all for four years of poetry and art and joy.

And thanks to the entire hard-working staff down at Hole In The Headquarters - Bill Burtis, Nancy Jean Hill, Marilyn A. Johnson, Jere DeWaters, Michael Hettich, and Tom Bruton.

We’ll be back with this hole thing again to start our fifth year on Groundhog Day 2024.

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Cover Photo: Ed Valfre

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What I'm listening to (and you should, too), Eric Whitacre, Voces8 performing All Seems Beautiful to Me, from Walt Whitman's Song of The Open Road:

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