In Artful May, by Charles Tarlton

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Here are thirty-one poems, one for each day in the Month of May. Each poem is in two parts, a beginning prose passage (call it the tenor) followed by a passage in verse (call it the vehicle). The inspiration for the form probably comes from Ezra Pound’s Cantos, where he patterns the poem’s metaphorical structure on the Chinese character – elements of rose, cherry, rust, and flamingo giving us the idea (and the character) for RED. Or think of Robert Burns’s love who’s like a red, red rose. The two elements (prose and verse) interact and each’s meaning is tied to the other.

The poems were written over the month of May this year (2025), one each day, sometimes wholly original and spontaneous, but at other times the poet reached back into sketchbooks and drafts for inspiration.The subject matter is disparate (if not random), from travel memories to paintings to the view of Long Island Sound out the poet’s window. The poems also represent the poet’s struggle with the line in free verse. Where do you break the line? Are there rules? This is worthy of mention if for no other reason than that the poet once had a poem rejected by an editor simply because he disagreed with the line breaks.  He should have responded, on reflection, go read Whitman!

Charles Tarlton is a retired politics professor who has been writing poetry on the Connecticut shore since 2007. He lives with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter, and their four year old white standard poodle, Jesse. Understandably, art has always figured importantly in his poetry, from efforts at a pure ekphrasis to poems less directly inspired by art. He writes his poems on a lapboard in a chair with a view of the water.