poems by

Georgia A. Popoff

Poetry book, 80 pages, $14 cover price

ISBN: 978-1-59948-106-7

Release date: 2008

As a teaching artist, Georgia Popoff has presented workshops at poetry festivals, in schools, after-school programs, adult education centers, community centers, women’s shelters, day camps, juvenile detention facilities, museums, and teachers’ in-services. Georgia has been a coach for the NAACP ACT-SO program for African American teens since 1994. In June 2001, she facilitated a week-long workshop for poets in Tuscany. Georgia is also as a member of the teaching staff for the Downtown Writers’ Center, the Syracuse chapter of the YMCA Writers Voice program, and for 2 years was director of a summer expressive arts program that she designed for the YMCA Camp Iroquois day camp serving nearly 1,200 children annually. Within the teaching artists’ community, Georgia is a board member of the Association of Teaching Artists (www.teachingartists.com) and is Central New York Community Coordinator for Partners for Arts Education (www.arts4ed.org), a Central New York agency providing funding and support for teaching artists, schools, teachers, and cultural organizations. Georgia is a senior editor for The Comstock Review (www.comstockreview.org) and was poetry editor for Central New York Environment for 5 years. She competed in the 1994 and 1995 National Poetry Slams; poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Asheville Poetry Review, Dharma Connection, Light of Consciousness, Midwest Poetry Review, Poetpourri, Red Brick Review, Salt Hill Journal, Worcester Review, as well as the anthologies The Waist is a Terrible Thing to Mind: A Wake Up Call (Breakthrough Press, 2000); Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (Manic D Press, 2000); 2001 Di-Verse_City: Poets of the Austin International Poetry Festival; and the Syracuse Cultural Workers’ nationally noted Women Artists Datebook in 1998, 2000, and 2003. Her first collection of poetry, Coaxing Nectar from Longing, was published by Hale Mary Press in 1997 and she has been included in the Pudding House Publications’ Gold: The Greatest Hits chapbook series (www.puddinghouse.com). A new collection, What Remains, is being considered for publication. Web-based publications include poets4peace, MAP of Austin Poetry, The Poet’s Porch, The Writers’ Hood, as well as moderating an ongoing on-line poetry workshop with participants from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia.

Georgia Popoff is a collector of discarded fragments, considered tarnished but envisioned anew in the palm of her words. She doesn’t clean or repair the shards. She moments deeply in what is there and exhumes footholds in sorrow. The action itself, when enabled with vast passion, is poetry. The Doom Weaver is “a shawl/on the warp of the night.”

Quraysh Ali Lansana

These poems of plain statement and often incandescent images, of ironic detachment and helpless commitment, offer canny assessments of life and lives, love and family. They move with a dancer’s grace out to the edge and back in again. The Doom Weaver is an impressive collection by a poet of real accomplishment.

Charles Martin

The Doom Weaver includes poems on a wide variety of themes. Georgia Popoff gives us a vivid portrait of children watching a one-armed man mowing grass: short sleeve flagging/the summer breeze. We see her great-grandmother who, rather than die a slow death from cancer, took control, wading into snow./Her nightgown sucked/against her ribs. We listen to a lover who wants to preserve a part of her beloved’s body like a relic from a saint: I kissed you/finger by finger like rosary beads./I wanted to lop one off, keep it in my pocket/for when I grow weak, like a rabbit’s foot. This is a bold and engaging volume.

Ellen Bass

One-Armed Man

He had worked on the railroad,
his arm snatched by the larceny
of an angry train.

Fascination slowed the children
hoping to catch him at a chore
as they passed his house.

Perhaps he would be stacking
wood or mowing the grass.
That arm possessed the strength of two.

He assumed a slim angle
pushing the hand mower
across his double lot.

The neighborhood children
most liked to watch him drive.
He’d walk to the garage

short sleeve flagging
the summer breeze.
Gripping the steering wheel knob

he’d slide the car back
then glide down the black asphalt,
chrome and whitewalls gleaming.

As a Rule

I don’t kill insects.
This morning I sat in the quiet sun
before the cicada had risen.
A gnat crash-landed in my cup,
drew a drop thick with cream,

a speck hoping its wings
would catch their breath.
Yesterday I saved two
bumblebees and a wasp
drowning in the kiddie pool.

The fat bumblebees
must have grown greedy with pollen,
their underbellies too delirious to fly straight.
I have no explanation for the sleek wasp
going so far off course.

One of the bees was spinning in terror.
I touched a rock to water.
He clung like algae as I placed him
in the grass and sweet clover.
This repeated until all three perched

on blades cleared of dew.
Narrow wings glistened like amber.
I will kill cockroaches.
I recognize the audacity of every person
who has hurt me as I raise my shoe.

Born Again

Every brash young poet is a martyr
conceived in the Age of Miles,
an oracle braying the news of the birth
of the cool like they knew the notes
before Miles even knew he’d blow them.

Like we never heard that shit before,
like we can’t hear them sucking prana
from the lungs of saints,
their amulets and karma
tarnished by applause.

Every slick young poet bleeds
reeds instead of red,
wet with Coltrane’s spit,
a moan of saxophone to measure
the weight and height of hip.

They kneel at altars
they did not dress,
impounding truth in broken
backbeats wearing their hearts
like vestments.

Additional Information

As a teaching artist, Georgia Popoff has presented workshops at poetry festivals, in schools, after-school programs, adult education centers, community centers, women’s shelters, day camps, juvenile detention facilities, museums, and teachers’ in-services. Georgia has been a coach for the NAACP ACT-SO program for African American teens since 1994. In June 2001, she facilitated a week-long workshop for poets in Tuscany. Georgia is also as a member of the teaching staff for the Downtown Writers’ Center, the Syracuse chapter of the YMCA Writers Voice program, and for 2 years was director of a summer expressive arts program that she designed for the YMCA Camp Iroquois day camp serving nearly 1,200 children annually. Within the teaching artists’ community, Georgia is a board member of the Association of Teaching Artists (www.teachingartists.com) and is Central New York Community Coordinator for Partners for Arts Education (www.arts4ed.org), a Central New York agency providing funding and support for teaching artists, schools, teachers, and cultural organizations. Georgia is a senior editor for The Comstock Review (www.comstockreview.org) and was poetry editor for Central New York Environment for 5 years. She competed in the 1994 and 1995 National Poetry Slams; poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Asheville Poetry Review, Dharma Connection, Light of Consciousness, Midwest Poetry Review, Poetpourri, Red Brick Review, Salt Hill Journal, Worcester Review, as well as the anthologies The Waist is a Terrible Thing to Mind: A Wake Up Call (Breakthrough Press, 2000); Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (Manic D Press, 2000); 2001 Di-Verse_City: Poets of the Austin International Poetry Festival; and the Syracuse Cultural Workers’ nationally noted Women Artists Datebook in 1998, 2000, and 2003. Her first collection of poetry, Coaxing Nectar from Longing, was published by Hale Mary Press in 1997 and she has been included in the Pudding House Publications’ Gold: The Greatest Hits chapbook series (www.puddinghouse.com). A new collection, What Remains, is being considered for publication. Web-based publications include poets4peace, MAP of Austin Poetry, The Poet’s Porch, The Writers’ Hood, as well as moderating an ongoing on-line poetry workshop with participants from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia.

Georgia Popoff is a collector of discarded fragments, considered tarnished but envisioned anew in the palm of her words. She doesn’t clean or repair the shards. She moments deeply in what is there and exhumes footholds in sorrow. The action itself, when enabled with vast passion, is poetry. The Doom Weaver is “a shawl/on the warp of the night.”

Quraysh Ali Lansana

These poems of plain statement and often incandescent images, of ironic detachment and helpless commitment, offer canny assessments of life and lives, love and family. They move with a dancer’s grace out to the edge and back in again. The Doom Weaver is an impressive collection by a poet of real accomplishment.

Charles Martin

The Doom Weaver includes poems on a wide variety of themes. Georgia Popoff gives us a vivid portrait of children watching a one-armed man mowing grass: short sleeve flagging/the summer breeze. We see her great-grandmother who, rather than die a slow death from cancer, took control, wading into snow./Her nightgown sucked/against her ribs. We listen to a lover who wants to preserve a part of her beloved’s body like a relic from a saint: I kissed you/finger by finger like rosary beads./I wanted to lop one off, keep it in my pocket/for when I grow weak, like a rabbit’s foot. This is a bold and engaging volume.

Ellen Bass

One-Armed Man

He had worked on the railroad,
his arm snatched by the larceny
of an angry train.

Fascination slowed the children
hoping to catch him at a chore
as they passed his house.

Perhaps he would be stacking
wood or mowing the grass.
That arm possessed the strength of two.

He assumed a slim angle
pushing the hand mower
across his double lot.

The neighborhood children
most liked to watch him drive.
He’d walk to the garage

short sleeve flagging
the summer breeze.
Gripping the steering wheel knob

he’d slide the car back
then glide down the black asphalt,
chrome and whitewalls gleaming.

As a Rule

I don’t kill insects.
This morning I sat in the quiet sun
before the cicada had risen.
A gnat crash-landed in my cup,
drew a drop thick with cream,

a speck hoping its wings
would catch their breath.
Yesterday I saved two
bumblebees and a wasp
drowning in the kiddie pool.

The fat bumblebees
must have grown greedy with pollen,
their underbellies too delirious to fly straight.
I have no explanation for the sleek wasp
going so far off course.

One of the bees was spinning in terror.
I touched a rock to water.
He clung like algae as I placed him
in the grass and sweet clover.
This repeated until all three perched

on blades cleared of dew.
Narrow wings glistened like amber.
I will kill cockroaches.
I recognize the audacity of every person
who has hurt me as I raise my shoe.

Born Again

Every brash young poet is a martyr
conceived in the Age of Miles,
an oracle braying the news of the birth
of the cool like they knew the notes
before Miles even knew he’d blow them.

Like we never heard that shit before,
like we can’t hear them sucking prana
from the lungs of saints,
their amulets and karma
tarnished by applause.

Every slick young poet bleeds
reeds instead of red,
wet with Coltrane’s spit,
a moan of saxophone to measure
the weight and height of hip.

They kneel at altars
they did not dress,
impounding truth in broken
backbeats wearing their hearts
like vestments.