Poet and co-founder of the Continuum, Jim Allman graduated with degrees in biology and business but sees life neither dissected nor austerely economized; he sees it as a surrealist’s painting full of wonder, beauty, symbol, meaning, perplexion and sometimes, even, ghastly visions. His poetry—the sparks caused when the ideal rubs against the real—is marked by transformation through questioning; he is, as William Wordsworth describes, deeply “affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present.”
Jim is a longtime Memphis resident and graduate of both Crichton College & The University of Memphis. He lustfully admires the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Milton, Mary Karr, B. H. Fairchild & Charles Wright.
He has read his poetry at various events around town, most notably with organ accompaniment by Juilliard trained musician, Roger Lowther. He was named a semi-finalist in the 2009 New Millennium Writings Contest, and a winner in the National Poetry Month (2010) competition hosted by the International Arts Movement (IAM). His poetry has been published, or is forthcoming, in the following online and print journals:
Personal website: www.diatribalarts.wordpress.com
twitter: twitter.com/jallmanjr
[We are] children of nothing making gods from the voids in ourselves. Creating heavens from the seeds we were not patient enough to grow…
Sad Poems: Suffocating in Cures
—the alcoholic poet
Warm, soil rich…nail staining, crevice penetrating
Hand cupped earth…it reeks of decadence. It will grow
Anything! Anything will grow here (wild, brambled-
Growth if there is no care). Long rows of furrows, great
Wrinkles like a consternated brow…or deep sulci
Framed by mounds of grey matter that cry for just
A little seed. It is not the seed or the earth
That matter (the mind yields up it’s strength to both
Thistles or thoughts, alike). It is the dirt-caking
Labor that produces. It is not the green growth; it
Is the knees and the hands loam-brown tinted that stain
The lips and teeth tannic-red; it is the yellow-
Brown tinged rag anointed with sweat and toiling oils
That savory sweet floods the nose like a burnt off’ring
To the Lord; it is the spilt blood that waters the
Cursed mind to move sapling thoughts through the surface toward
Harvest as first fruits to cast on a living altar.
Snow globes have such a sad
reality; there’s never a moment
when a sun crests its heat
over plexi-glass ozone
to melt its delicate cold away.
It settles
snow-globe-slow
after a shake which scatters each particle
like the spectators at an opera house at intermission who float
back to their seats just
in time for the final act. It dusts
everything during that brief interlude
between the prolonged and deep silences
with ceaseless, long-lasting, abandoned
hope: a punctuation of each repeated fall.
When leaves drop in November there’s always a knock
at the door; someone who’ll sweep them neatly
into thirty gallon, black bags pulled
taut with bright red draw-strings to be carted away the very next day.
By December, already, we anticipate the Spring.
I’ve traveled often in the woods: noted that permanent
bed of leaves cast underfoot
(the ancient giants no longer nimble at the joint
don’t bend
to pick them up).
Come late summer they’ll still remain: deep
banks that shelter the decay.
In quiet the arbors
wait for the next season to stir the prolix of leaves
—the gossip of the trees.
I stood to watch the yard boy rake them into neat piles;
he was clearly of humble origin. He was strong and hard at work, reclaiming
each leaf from the threat of breezes. He sang gospel
at the wind.
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.
He kept sweeping up decay
How precious did that grace appear
when the leaves were raked away.
The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
but my decay was raked
away, bundled into bags and carted away.
First published April 30 on the IAM Global Blog (2010)
Continuum poet, Jim Allman, reads two poems: Wunderwaffen: Of Spit & Ash, as well as, Of Aquanauts (both to be published in the August 2010 issue of Writers’ Bloc).
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