MARINA GIPPS

MARINA GIPPS Poems

An umbrella being dragged at the day's end.

A seagull churns its wings,
avoiding sunlight,
...

This stately home- I never see people there
but there's corn on the door most of the year.

An old lonely look to it
...

His night shadow moves slowly
& causes some more destruction
as he lights another johnny player,
making god go further in silence.
...

All the townspeople disappeared
except for a man with very rotten teeth.
Fetal positioned on his manifesto,
he can proofread in his sleep.
...

In paintings,
women in white dresses promenade,
picnic, recline on couches, converse
over tea, and sew in sunny parlors.
...

It was a man who disappeared and came back again;
somewhere in a dream, blinded by obscurity.
A man who walked in, sat down, throwing his coat
to the ground as the elves shook below the seat cushions.
...

Somebody died shamefully and left me all their money.
And so it was, I tried to live just like them
Only to die just as wrecklessly.
I was a ghost for Halloween
...

A hymn trapped in the wind
after countless Sunday morning mantra,
heckling me until losing a piece of soul.
My unpurged confession appearing finally in epitaph.
...

I was going to school at U of A
and all the classrooms were closed,
the libraries closed.
All the thoughts in books shut-out.
...

10.

Who needs words when the young run naked?
Don’t call it love, refuse, and call it nothing.
Watch and know without speaking
Like God or a Judas.
...

Because I watch you wake, I can never awaken.
Watching you sleep, I may never sleep.
And so sleep goes elsewhere to a place
too tedious to mention…
...

You weave in and out one last time.
A secret loneliness led you back to me.
I filled your void with more toxins
before you rose up on your moonlit spindrift.
...

Lanes of sky slag between telephone lines.

Broken roads burning off the day's
lingering heat.
...

Glass-bottom boats scanned warily by the far-off sun,
A lidless eye reflected on the waters of the frigid sound.

Mud by the shore molded by the imprints of many
...

The clock ticks back and forth
As an old woman swats a fly.
Her years of hunger are “shooed away”.
Her hands outstretched christ-like at times
...

O Catholic guilt!
His distant mother was cremated
somewhere in Italy.
...

He had a clean white shirt on
when he died.
The mystics were pleased-
No trail of saliva,
...

Where does that closed door go?
It mocks me, a small child,
my parents inside. They tell me
they are sleeping when I know
...

I feel the love of a flawed adoption.
A good enough reason to not go on living.
Dumb stork took a wrong turn as he broke his wing.
The saddest time for barren folk with no dreams
...

My mother gave me a silver pen
with Frank's name and birthday inscribed.
We never knew Frank but Father told us
he was a very lucky man,
...

MARINA GIPPS Biography

Born in Chicago, writer and filmmaker, Marina Pilar Gipps, daughter of an Argentine mother and British father was awarded a Master of Arts Degree from the English/Writing program at The University of New Hampshire-where she worked with Charles Simic in an independent study. Prior to her studies in New Hampshire, she attended the summer MFA Writing and Poetics program at The Naropa Institute (aka. The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where she studied with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Jackson MacLow, Anselm Hollo, and Andrei Codrescu among others. Her most frightening Naropa experience was giving a poetry reading immediately after Ginsberg in a coffee shop...thinking to herself...My God, how do I top that? In 2004, Ms. Gipps had a film short in the Phoenix Film Festival entitled, A Twist in Time. It was there that she had the opportunity of meeting several directors in the Sundance Channel Theatre of Harkins Cinemas where her film was shown. Most of her film work is Art Direction (Curdled 1991-student film directed by Reb Braddock that later was made into a feature produced by Quentin Tarrantino.) She feels directing and writing are oftentimes interlinked, that the best films are oftentimes poetic-often citing Ray Guerra's Erendira based on the fiction of Marquez. 'Having been raised in a bilingual household...my grandmother who did not speak a word of English would introduce me to different poets on a weekly basis. Neruda and Vallejo set the standard. College, however, opened an entirely different bag of worms: It was there that I started reading James Tate and Charles Simic. I was feeling quite alienated at the time and Tate's poem, The Lost Pilot, just resonated within me. Actually, the entire book was both a blessing and a downfall. I know that sounds crazy, ' Her poetry has appeared in Abraxas (Vallejo Edition ed. Ingrid Swanberg and Warren Wossener-her first publishers) , Aegis (literary journal of UNH) , Bombay Gin (Literary Journal of the Naropa Institute) , Exquisite Corpse, Rambunctious Review, Potato Eyes, Main Street (Magazine at UNH) , Poetry, Tray Full of Lab Mice, Tusitala (Undergraduate Magazine of Lake Forest College where she served as the Editor in Chief) , Willow Springs-among other publications. She has work forthcoming in Other Voices, Cross Roads Press Anthology of Works in Progress 2007 edited by Norbert Blei. 'Sometimes I slip away. Floating between persons and places, I search the migratory waves of existence for words: musical notes, brushstrokes, perhaps celluloid clips of memory-attempting to portray more than the ordinary in this extraordinary world. As a writer, I feel that bizarre turns on the street are worthy of investigation -and that your 'typical' souls are not your usual suspects.' The following 300 poems are from her currently unpublished collections: Hell With Three Dog Heads, The Hackneyed Road Narrows, Peace and Bridges: War Poems for Congress,13 and The Bad Book. A collection of sixty poems has been accepted for publication by Insomniattic Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now this sounds snotty but fan mail should be addressed to mjgipps at aol dot com with subject heading indicating where you saw my poems. I only want to hear from fans and prospective (non-vanity) serious publishers. If you don't like me as a poet, please do not bother contacting me as my life is sad enough as it is. Thank you. (photo credit: Vincent McGroary))

The Best Poem Of MARINA GIPPS

A Day At The Pink Beach

An umbrella being dragged at the day's end.

A seagull churns its wings,
avoiding sunlight,
the hard flight of Icarus.

Pink swimsuits blown in the wind,
in search of due course.

Time is needy, a bronzed babe walks by, a regular
statue of Liberty, her flesh turning to
green palor as the water cools.

In this empty beach dream of deepening sky,
the wet Kremlin and White House

are eroded as our childless hopes.

An old woman collects
seashells-caverns of poverty
to be sold to our deaf ears.
The ocean roars of stolen property.

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