November 2015
Steve Klepetar
sfklepetar@stcloudstate.edu
sfklepetar@stcloudstate.edu
I'm an old dog, a recently retired college professor who was born in Shanghai, China in 1949. My parents were Holocaust survivors and
refugees. I grew up in New York City and spent my teaching career in the Midwest - Wisconsin, and for the past 33 years, Minnesota. I've been fortunate to have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, including three in 2014. My recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press) and Return of the Bride of Frankenstein (Kind of a Hurricane Press).
refugees. I grew up in New York City and spent my teaching career in the Midwest - Wisconsin, and for the past 33 years, Minnesota. I've been fortunate to have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, including three in 2014. My recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press) and Return of the Bride of Frankenstein (Kind of a Hurricane Press).
Editor's Note: Click on the titles of poems for a SURPRISE... (info below)
In the Garden
Your phone rings and rings
and I imagine you
in the garden, picking
the last tomatoes
in chilly October sun.
Blue sweatshirt
sleeves dampen
as you work in vines
and dew, hair pulled back
in brisk pony tail, all business
today, brown hands raw
with the scent of last night’s rain.
Originally published in The Poetry Storehouse
Video collaboration with Othniel Smith
http://poetrystorehouse.com/?s=klepetar#smith
The Woman Who Drowned
Here is the story of the woman
who drowned: she was looking
for a hole in the moon.
Pity the boat rocking in river’s flow,
pity the rotting boards
and the cattails tangled in her hair.
Pity the boys skimming stones
who find her again and again.
She has lost her shoes, but each boy
hauls them from the river in dreams,
degraded hulls bobbing slowly
past saturated logs or nests
or branches ripped from trees by storm.
Originally published in Black Poppy Review
Film collaboration with Paul Broderick:
https://vimeo.com/133394563
Careless Child
Nothing. A doll. A plate. A bag of salt.
In ruins, in ashes smoking, among
bones and blackened bricks. And now
rain soaking rubble and remains into a
terrible stew, entropy as a melding gray.
What a place for a story to begin, red
lights flashing and camera crews in foul
weather gear, murmur of shocked voices,
pictures, pictures on all the TV screens.
Even commercials seem bright with
warnings, what you might lack, all the risks
you take walking from your door without
their particular pocketful of hope. Tonight
dawn seems far away, cold light caught
in some icy atmosphere, firefly blinking
in a jar dropped on the street by a careless child.
Film collaboration with Paul Broderick:
https://vimeo.com/138128004
ABOUT POETRY/VIDEO COLLABORATIONS
Steve Klepetar
I became acquainted with the lively poetry film (video) scene in 2014 through Nic Sebastian’s site, The Poetry Storehouse. Poets whose work is represented on the site agree to supply both text and a reading, and must agree to allow others to work with their poems to do readings or videos. Here is my section as an example: http://poetrystorehouse.com/?s=klepetar. Each poem includes not only the text, but my own reading. Some others, like Nic herself, or Bill Yarrow, have done their own readings of my poems, and a few have been made into videos, like “In the Garden” below, which was used by Othniel Smith, with a voice over of me reading. Laura Kaminski, whose work appeared in V-V last month also has a section, as do many other poets and filmmakers you may know of (Dan Wisely, Dave Bonta, Paul Broderick, and many others). The site is now closed for new submissions, but continues to be a source for collaborations.
Through The Poetry Storehouse, I became Facebook friends with Paul Broderick, a New York based filmmaker. On two occasions he has asked to make videos of my work and to send him an audio file of me reading. Of course I gratefully agreed; the two collaborations are below.
For anyone interested in getting involved in this kind of collaboration, you might want to join the Facebook group Poolword, run by the delightful Australian filmmaker Jutta Pryor. It’s a bit like the Verse-Virtual group in that you have to ask to join. Once you do, you can create a page with selected works that someone may use to make a video.
©2015 Steve Klepetar