George Held



George Held has published over 400 items, including poems, haiku, short stories, critical essays, book reviews, and translations. He taught English from 1958-2004, most recently at Queens College, and he was Fulbright lecturer in American literature in Czechoslovakia (1973-76). His writing has appeared in anthologies, such as Tokens: Contemporary Poetry of the Subway (2003), and journals, including Commonweal, Confrontation, Connecticut Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Notre Dame Review. Twice a Pushcart Prize nominee, he published three poetry chapbooks between 1995 and 1999, one of which, Open and Shut, was a winner of the Talent House Press Chapbook Contest. He co-authored a book of his verse and the paintings of Roz Dimon in 2000 and published a book of poems, Beyond Renewal (Cedar Hill) in 2001; his e-book, American Poetry (2003) is viewable at  www.newformalist.com/ebooks/held.html. His latest chapbooks are Grounded (Finishing Line Press, 2005) and Martial Artist (Toad Press, 2005), a collection of his translations of twenty-one of Martial’s epigrams on writing. Held co-edited The Ledge Poetry and Fiction Magazine from 1991-2003, and he edited Touched by Eros (Live Poets, 2002), an anthology of erotic verse. He reviews poetry books for The Philadelphia Inquirer and various literary journals. He also serves on the executive board of the South Fork Natural History Society and Museum (Bridgehampton, NY), whose annual publication, Biota, he co-edits. Held lives in Greenwich Village with his wife, Cheryl.

Grounded (ISBN 1-932755-89-6), a poetry chapbook by George Held, can now be ordered from

Finishing Line Press
Post Office Box 1626
Georgetown, KY 40324

or at www.finishinglinepress.com for $12 plus $2 shipping.


 
Split
 
It makes me grin to recall my innocence
When I set out on my red and white Schwinn.
High clouds grazed on the azure horizon.
The smell of lilacs promised permanence.
Hormones yet to achieve their dominance,
I was one with the world, ever in season,
With no split between the heart and reason,
No need to pray, I thought, for deliverance.
 
I was fishing at Sprain Lake when the storm
Hit, too focused on my float to be forewarned. 
When I lit out for home, my tires lost their grip
On the slick concrete, and I did a flip.
It was years before I got my balance back,
But I still smile at the smell of lilac.

Published in The Art of Bicycling, where it appeared alongside poems by  Seamus Heaney, Rita Dove, and Walt Whitman.



Elise


Hearing you on the phone forty-nine years
later, I can see you at fourteen, orange
hair pulled back in a ponytail, feel the fears
of a boy puzzled by puberty’s strange
pull. You appeared often in my dreams then,
naked and beckoning, desire incarnate,
yet we never held each other except when
we partnered in dancing school, kept apart
by the six-inch rule. What other limits
kept us from whatever consummation?
In your newly widowed voice are no hints
of the once shy girl, just resolution.
     When you say, I was in love with you then,
     I know that then can never happen again.
 
Published in The Lucid Stone



Honey
 
That was your nickname, Florence, and you were
A honey; at fourteen, vivacious tom-
Boy, carelessly feminine, you let your
Golden locks grow down over shoulders
Honeyed from summer sun and flashed me a smile
That made my face burn. At nine I watched your
Body round itself in menarche and felt
Anarchy in my own, longing to see
Beneath your sailor shirt or denim jeans
Whatever nature was accomplishing
With you. You still hit balls farther than boys
And swung the jungle gym with more agility;
And once, under Hussey’s big pine, I saw
You swing a branch, shirt belled out, gold breasts raw.
 
Published in Main Street Rag



Finding My Way

For C.
 
What does it mean to “find my way” at sixty-two—
that the path’s grown clearer, or my focus?
Who gets the credit—me, my shrink, or you?
Do I cheer, or lament the years I’ve lost—
that I was no DiMaggio or Bill Gates,
no Yeats, but one with time and words to waste,
an ex-Beatnik, ex-Hippie, at what cost?
But past’s not prologue; now I take my ease,               
content to be wakened by Euterpe’s
call or caressed to ecstasy by you,
who prescribe more play and lots less labor:
aging Sybarites, we indulge anew,
annihilating all thought death’s in store.
Have I found my way by following you?
 
Published in Confrontation

 

Some Editors
 
Some editors reject and chide me,
Send us no rhyme and no meter.
They’d turn down Frost, Yeats, and Heaney;
I pray they’re turned down by St. Peter.
 
Published in Iambs & Trochees



Father Phil

In memoriam Philip J. West (1936-1997)

Phil, you went too soon to your maker, God
The Father you served monastically
Five years, then doubted fifty-five.  How odd
Your course from cassock to Army khaki,
With sergeant’s stripes, to a Ph.D.’s hood,
A specialty in Anglo-Saxon: Bede,
Beowulf, Caedmon, “The Dream of the Rood”;
Quaffing each class as if a cup of mead,
The students your flock, the text Holy Grail,
You wore the collar in kind, though unfrocked;
A skeptical saint, patient without fail,
Yet quick to call a critic’s fad “a crock,”
You were the rock on which we built our cause:
To gladly teach and learn far from applause.

Published in Iodine



Correspondence

For Christopher Presfield
 
I write to an inmate, bound by his cell
yet a writer of poems, like me,
living a life in a version of hell.
 
Admiring his guts, his linguistic skill,
doubting the odds if the inmate were me,
I write to an inmate, bound by his cell.
 
The inmate writes back, water from the well,
drawn from the hole that is solitary,
salving a life that’s a version of hell.
 
Evading the question of how he fell
and how he now fends off insanity,
I write to the inmate, bound by his cell,
 
imagining things that he’d never tell,
imagining him imagining me,
living a life in a version of hell.

It’s others, wrote Sartre, that constitute hell—
can that be the truth, or just hyperbole?
I write of an inmate, bound by his cell,
living a life that’s a vision of hell.
 
Published in Home Planet News



At Sixty

As I slip into sixty,
Senior among my friends,
They say I could pass for forty.
Yet slipping into sixty
Brings with it the necessity
To contemplate the end.
For I slip into sixty
While dust commends past friends.
 
Published in Troubadour



The First Age
 
Golden, that first age, though ignorant
of laws, yet of its own will, uncoerced,
fostered responsibility and virtue…
 
                            —Ovid, Metamorphoses,
                                trans. Charles Martin
 
Though Creation conjures a place of plenty,
Of temperate clime, man, lion, and lamb
Living in peace, it wasn’t milk and honey
That gave the first age most merit but some
Innate sense of self-regulation, good
Welling up from pure heart or issuing
From pristine brain. No cops to quell the hood
Or EMS to cart off victims bleeding
Their lives away were needed then, for men
Lived in the bliss that’s known as ignorance.
If lack of knowledge meant that mild routine
Ruled, the gods themselves reigned through forbearance.
     So resist images of cornucopia;
     Good self-governance most marks utopia.
 
Published in The Neovictorian/Cochlea