Norman Stock
Since I’m writing this on Sunday, let’s hope we don’t pick up our papers or turn on the news this morning to learn of yet another mass shooting. As poetry lovers, you were probably as horrified as I to learn that one response to the San Bernardino murders here in the U.S. was an increase in gun purchases.
Editorializing over for a time, here is a brief introduction to a fine poet writing from very close to home – Queens – which, for those of you elsewhere, is one of the five boroughs of New York City. Yes, there is more to New York City than Manhattan and Brooklyn (the new Manhattan).
Norman Stock is the author of two books of poetry: Pickled Dreams Naked (NYQ Books, 2010) and Buying Breakfast for My Kamikaze Pilot (Gibbs Smith, 1994, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Contest). His poems have also appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, College English, The New York Quarterly, Verse, The New England Review, Denver Quarterly, and many other well-known magazines and anthologies, as well as in textbooks.
Click Here to Purchase: Pickled Dreams Naked by Norman Stock on the NYQ Books website.
Among the many awards he has received for his work are those from Writer’s Voice, Poets & Writers, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange, Bennington Writing Workshops, and the Tenne Foundation. He was a finalist for
Poet Laureate of Queens.
After working as a librarian for thirty-nine years, mostly at Montclair State University (NJ), where he was head of the Acquisiti0ns Department, he retired in 2005. He and his wife, Lydia Chang, a clinician psychotherapist,
live in Jackson Heights, NY., where he has been active in the Queens literary scene and is on the editorial board of a Queens-based journal, Newtown Literary. Recently, after reading at a local series, he was interviewed by
DNA.info, a popular NYC website, which led to an article in the NY Times featuring an audio of his poem, “How to Become the Poet Laureate of Queens.”
Click Here to Read: Award-Winning Poet Finds Home in Jackson Heights’ Growing Scene By Paul DeBenedetto on the DNA Info website on September 27, 2012.
Click Here to Read: Poets Gather in Exile, in Queens By John Leland in the New York Times on October 26, 2012.
Here, at the beginning of a holiday season during which we all hope for peace, are three poems by Norman Stock.
–Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
What I Said
after the terror I
went home and cried and
said how could this happen and
how could such a thing be and
why why I mean how could
anything so horrible and how could
anyone do such a thing to us and what
will happen next and how can we live now
it’s impossible to understand it’s impossible
to do anything after this and what will any of us do now and how will we
live and how can we expect to go on after this
I said and I said this is too much to take no one can take a thing like this
after the terror yes and then I said let’s kill them
Published in Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, edited by Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Meranis. Hoboken: Melville House, 2001. Reprinted in Poetry: An Introduction. Fourth Edition, by Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003; Fifth Edition, 2007. Also reprinted in The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Seventh Edition, by Michael Meyer, 2005. Eighth Edition, 2008. Reprinted in Pickled Dreams Naked, by Norman Stock. New York: NYQ Books, 2010.
Homeless
he said he wanted to stay in the apartment
I said look dad to stay here alone you have to be able to take care of yourself
and you can’t do that anymore so you will have to go to the home
I don’t want no home he said I want to keep my apartment
so he went to the home and I said isn’t this better
you don’t have to struggle to stay alive they give you your meals they take care of you
I hate it he said I want to go home and he piled his clothes on the bed
listen I said you go home to your godamn apartment and you will never see me again
and I left and he went home the old coot where he couldn’t take care of himself
where he drove away the people hired to help him and made it impossible for anyone
to do anything for him
where he wandered the streets and acted funny and ate twenty six meals a day and
slept and slept and slept and generally made a mess of everything
finally he was back in the home then back in the apartment then back in the home
again this time for good
I visit him on saturdays I say you are doing fine
I hate it he says but I will stay awhile if you insist
we go for a walk we have coffee he says he enjoys the visit
the days go the nights go he is in the home and he hates it
after a few years he gets sick his leg hurts his arteriosclerosis has him and then he dies
now I think of his grave and the stone and the homelessness he never wanted
here on the lonely earth where we would not take him in
because of his old age craziness and his homelessness begs me to look at him
to see that he wanted a home but his craziness drove away everyone
here on the homeless earth where the final home is a stone and the bed of the grass
Published in Poet Lore (Summer, 1987). Reprinted in Buying Breakfast for My Kamikaze Pilot, by Norman Stock. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1994.
Still I Must
that I can’t
that I can never
that it is impossible
that there is no way
but I still have to
no matter how hard it is
no matter the consequence
yet I still must although it seems too difficult
even if the walls fall down even if the trees are against me
even if they laugh at me and call me a child
even if I am ashamed and want to hide from them
even if they look at me as not one of them even if they see me as something other
still I must no matter what they do to me still I must somehow get to where I allow
myself to be who I finally am