Alison Luterman
Alison Luterman is busy practicing descending minor thirds, going to qigong, and teaching creative-writing classes. She lives in Oakland, California, where there’s a taco truck at the foot of her street.
Love Shack
The only room in the house we can heat properly becomes the only room where I’ll let you undress me.
March 2011Written On The Bones
Kim Rosen On Reclaiming The Ancient Power Of Poetry
To me a good poem is like a sacred mind-altering substance: you take it into your system, and it carries you beyond your ordinary ways of understanding. I call the nonconceptual elements of a poem — the rhythm, the sound, the images — the “shamanic anatomy.” Like a shaman’s drum, the beat of a poem can literally entrain the rhythms of your body: your heartbeat, your breath, even your brain waves, altering consciousness. Most poems are working on all these levels at once, not just through the rational mind.
December 2010What About God
The rabbi is coming to talk about the wedding. We lay out cookies, tamari almonds, stuffed grape leaves, hummus, crackers, and strips of sweet red peppers.
June 2010Selected Poems
— from “An Encounter” | We met naked on the sun deck by the / clothing-optional hot springs, / and I saw the long scar / like a smile across his furred abdomen
January 2010Baggage: A Love Story
I have never understood those personal ads that specify the seeker is looking for a person with “no baggage.” What does that mean, exactly? Who hasn’t accumulated regrets and scars — not to mention a storage unit’s worth of junk — by middle age? Show me someone with no baggage, and I’ll show you someone who forgot to pack.
January 2009War Of Words
It’s an evil day when there’s no coffee in the teachers’ lounge at 8 A.M. and it’s so cold outside I could see my breath in the parking lot on the way in. I’m a poetry teacher, and this morning I’ll be visiting two fourth-grade classes. I’ve brought with me a poem called “Sweet like a Crow,” by Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient.
April 2008
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