Poetry

“Heather Haley's poetry is tough, irreverent, and in-your-face. She asks all the questions that a nice girl's not supposed to ask. Down backroads and highways, her characters long to possess the past and harness the future. Cowboys, car accidents, broken hearts, dead lovers - and potential violence - hover like heat on the horizon. Whether they're gangsta girls or riot grrrls, roaming the range or pacing the mall, Haley's women are always in the forefront, in the driver's seat, crankin' the wheel in their direction.

“Like wild horses bustin' loose, or an explosion in the kitchen, Haley's women know how heady power is, how it lathers beneath a mount." Her characters bite life on the neck and take what they need; and just when they think it's gone, meaning happens. This is brawny and uncompromising language from a voice that demands to be reckoned with.”

How To Remain

How to remain
thin. Abstain. Abstain from eating
food. Calories kill
the fat rats first. If she could say No
and balance Belgian truffles
on her tongue briefly before spitting
them out, she might remain. Live
long. Enjoy fruition. By shunning urges,
she could linger-dainty as a colt's
foot-deploying her charms raw,
dogtrotting a straddled chocolate Arabian
through mazes of lane. She could retire
to her body.

Alas, ankles thicken, braids recede,
the old mare conjured whenever she dare 
to look. Fight back. She may be forced to
cover the grey, yellow, but refuses to swallow
diet pills. Amphetamines in the olden days.

Dinner in the garbage rouses niggles of guilt.
She snuffles it out before Buddy can,
barfing rather than blowing
calories on fusty pizza
or molding, olive oil-sopped arugula.

Read more poetry by Heather Haley

Find out more about Heather's previous book of poetry, Sideways
published by Anvil Press

Spoken Word

Selections from Surfing Season

You will be linked to the featured artists section of the Book of Voices at e-poets.net. (Thanks, Kurt!)

• Where Sins Are More Sinful
• Uranium Town
• Sum of the Parts
• Valentine's Day
• Shanghai Near Chinatown
• God's Country
• The Hollywood Sign
• and others

I am of the first generation to be raised with television, for whom it was prosaic. I cherish a photograph of my sister and I parked in front of a 21" screen watching The Jetsons. My world has always been inundated with moving images and I possess a "cinematic eye." Small wonder then that I am drawn to visual media, even as a poet and writer- a page baby with what I know, interpret my work through videopoems-ideally a wedding of word and image. -for it is what I know, intimately, and that is what we are counseled to do. "Write what you know." I try to write with what I know as well.

Poetry, a hard sell as a literary genre, is becoming visual and therefore, accessible, through film, video and the Web. Oral incantations-pre-historic and primal are transferred to video, the voice seen as well as heard. Poetry is ideally suited to film or video adaptation wherein image is metaphor. Long an ephemeral form, poetry will not only be preserved through visual media, but advanced by it.

I am drawn to video in particular because it lends itself to hybridization, its history of experimentation a fundamental aspect of the medium. Its populist nature appeals to me and of course, its accessibility and affordability are important considerations as well. Sans the cynicism and uber-commercialism of a rock video, a videopoem is employed to enhance the word and stars the poem, not the poet.

As a strong proponent of, and advocate for poetry and new media expression, I am grateful for the opportunity to see my vision executed with the help of the assembled artists-our goal has been nothing less than a symbiosis of word and image.

"Our extension of poetry into video seems only to ratify a deeper understanding, as poets and performers, that poetry rests in a continuous spectrum of expanded genres, each genre an amalgam, offering aesthetic expressions that conjoin text with some other creation. Poetry music. Poetry performance. Poetry theatre. Poetry film and video. Whole literatures in the cybernetic realm where the computer enacts by proxy the author's will upon the text.

The breakdown of psychological barriers from literature on the page to literature on the stage was the public's prelude to realizing broader rewards in media poetry of all forms. Poetry video is the public's first step beyond. Even in its most essential form, it demolishes the old assumption that page and poem are one. We now know poetry is where you find it, in the expressions the world offers. We construct, save, and transmit these experiences for the future. Images and sounds now operate as words where we had no previous literature because the symbols of our poetry were confined to paper in the reader's hands. So we have not the end of a literacy, but the construction of a new one: visible, audible, temporal, conscious, tactile, bonding author and reader by their gaze."

- Kurt Heintz, Director of Chicago's Guild Complex Poetry Film festival