Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

In today’s short poem, the yes no, American poet Terence Degnan explores the idea of karma, in a slightly sideways sense. While I’m not one of those people who believe that for every good thing that happens to you, something bad will happen to even things out, some of the more pessimistic among us do.

Poets like the idea of balance, from a structural standpoint, and from the standpoint that much of poetry is about making comparisons - contrasts, similarities, elaborations, metaphors, analogies, etc. to add layers of meaning. Think of it this way: In the simplest sense, if you are reading or listening to a rhymed poem, you’re always waiting to hear what the rhyme is, and how it repeats. English is a difficult language to rhyme - at least compared to romance languages which have more uniform word endings.

So what is the conceit (that's the clever idea or elaborated metaphor) behind this particular poem?

Toledo has a sister city

in Spain

sister people,

sister pains

It is that, in these sister cities, things mirror each other. Not necessarily in an exact fashion, more like compensating karma. A long-distance version of the Butterfly Effect (taken in a wickedly literal sense, in this poem), or maybe a Murphy’s Law of Distant Unintended Consequences.

Terence’s writing style is well-matched to his well-humored sense of storytelling and observational irony. He has published two full-length books of poetry and is a co-director at the Brooklyn, NT-based Camperdown Organization which was created to increase access to publication and education as well as promote agency for underrepresented writers. Camperdown hosts regular online poetry slams and workshops.

Terence is also the founder of the monthly storytelling series, How to Build a Fire, which is now in its seventh season. HTBAF is hosted at Open Source Gallery, also in Brooklyn.

Terence’s published collections include The Small Plot Beside the Ventriloquist’s Grave, and Still Something Rattles, from which today’s poem is taken.

(The Yes No is © 2016 Terence Degnan, all rights reserved worldwide, reproduced here by permission of the author. You can follow him on Facebook https://m.facebook.com/TerenceLDegnan/)

Thanks for Listening

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