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:
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Origami Micro-chapbooks |
Selected Poem(s) |
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
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{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} |
Acknowlegments:
A Good Death - Prairie Schooner How to Read Crossing Brooklyn Ferry - The Briar Cliff Review
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{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.
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Tom Chandler © 2013
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Acknowledgments:
Be Thanking - Brown Literary Review
She Listened - Harvard Review
Hitchhiking into Oblivion - Eclipse
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{mooblock=Be Thanking} |
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{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.
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Tom Chandler © 2011 {/mooblock} |
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{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
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{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
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{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
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{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} |
