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Tom Chandler is poet laureate of Rhode Island emeritus. He has been named Phi Beta Kappa Poet at Brown University and has been a featured poet at the Robert Frost homestead and the Library of Congress. His poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio on several occasions.  He is Professor of Creative Writing at Bryant University, and the founder and editor of The Bryant Literary Review

Tom's latest book of new & selected poems is Guitars of the Stars. (His website is here.)

 

His short story, A Fistful of French Fries, was featured in the OPP Newsletter. 

Watch this Poem-Video of his, 'So Much Depends Upon,' on YouTube or below:


Tom's Origami micro-chapbooks and selected poems are available below.  Cover artwork is by Tom.

Origami Micro-chapbooks

Selected Poem(s)

Hello Dali

 
Credits:
“She Listened” – Harvard Review
“How to Read Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
– The Briar Cliff Review
“A Kind of Lincoln” – Rattle
“6am Matins” – Roger
“Karaoke Night” – The Evansville Review

{mooblock=How to Read Crossing Brooklyn Ferry}

You will need a darkness well past midnight,
a single cone of desk light to guide you
sightful with its long white hand.
 
And you will need to need these words, spoken
across three separate centuries, his whispered
breath against your ear from narrow streets
of horse manure with drying sheets and longjohns
stretched between brick walls, spoken from
eyes that also heard these human musics,
saw the sky upside down in glinting water
and just like you knew the motionless wings,
soaring slow circles of the gulls.

No need to draw Walt closer:
he’s planned for this all along,
his yearning baffled curious brain
as good as looking at you from 1856
even as you read this, enjoying himself
right now at the very thought of you.

Tom Chandler © 2013

{/mooblock}

The Untuned

 
Acknowlegments:
A Good Death - Prairie Schooner
How to Read Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
- The Briar Cliff Review

{mooblock=Teaching with chalk dust on my back}

and car keys jiggling in my pocket
and a nagging crick in my right knee
I stand before the class
with Robert Frost in my mouth.
I can see the stone walls in my head,
the dark forest of which no saying will
quite be dark enough, tree line of pine
and birch as frayed as these sentences
I keep trying to mend, word placed
solid against word against the sweep
of snow across abandoned farms,
the ruined barns and broken glass,
ache of memory and why the gray
disguise of years could never hide
the aging boy who lived inside himself
and made this music out of pain
that walked beside him all his life.
Tom Chandler © 2013

{/mooblock}

Be Thanking

 

Acknowledgments: 
Be Thanking - Brown Literary Review
 She Listened - Harvard Review
Hitchhiking into Oblivion - Eclipse

{mooblock=Be Thanking}

Sometimes I am being like all thanking and thanking
like when I am alone in a field or looking at one
and sometimes I am looking at the fields of sea
and like thanking and thanking you for what is under
everything but darkness.
 
And when the goatskin is being empty
and I am inside my stomach swimming
in the red wine I am also being
like all thanking and thanking you
who hides behind the blue sky,
behind my aching
and then I am to lick my paw
and be thanking and thanking
because nothing tastes as good
or as bad.

Tom Chandler © 2012


{/mooblock}

The Red Edge Motel (& Ekphrasis)

 

{mooblock=To the Woman at the Red Edge Motel}

Some tourist of love
in his cheap suit of longing
will elbow the bar
in the lounge of no last names,
dip his cuff accidentally
in your seven & seven
and ask you to dance
to the faint moan of muzak,
perfume your earrings
with breath mints and gin
as the lights grow yet dimmer
as his hand on the switch
hovers inches away
from the slick red edge
of your hungover heart
with its faded no vacancy sign.

Tom Chandler © 2011

{/mooblock}

Oyster Envy

 

{mooblock=Lascaux}

The plot still unfolds from left to right,
an ancient comic strip in stone
still thicker than a blood clot.
Sixteen thousand years have passed
inside a single minute, but the bison’s
horns are still sharp as hunger
and the dancing shaman’s handprints
still as intricate as fossiled ferns,
each whorl where he carefully pressed his fingers
unmatched by anyone born before or since,
as if he is still trying to tell us
just exactly who he thought he was.
Tom Chandler © 2010

{/mooblock}

Cloud-Painted Ceiling, Mirrored Floor

 

 

{mooblock=So Suave}

Dance with me
on silvered water,
over bridges, up stairways,
on cloud-painted ceilings,
through giant ivory halls
with syncopated echo
where gravity is a feather’s touch
on a mirrored floor
and full orchestras swell
discreetly behind the potted palms.
My white-gloved hands
are always available.
My gleaming hair
is perfect.
I absolutely refuse
to fall down.
Tom Chandler © 2009

{/mooblock}

Beard of Stars

 

 

{mooblock=Alone In Leon Cathedral At 7 AM}

This thousand year old oxygen
tastes like the inside
of god’s morning mouth
his big snoring face pressed
against the vaulted ceiling
I stretch both hands above my head
to touch his beard of stars.
Tom Chandler © 2009

{/mooblock}

World’s Saddest Song

 

 

{mooblock=Sun Sfumato}

Anyone can stare
into the sun
when it brims pale
through the gauze
of a thinly clouded morning
and for an instant
explains itself:
beautiful
small white ball
naked as any fire
before it flares out
shapeless in the clearing sky.
When I wake first
I watch your sleeping face
explain itself to me.

Tom Chandler © 2009

{/mooblock}