Going on with new stuff

The news of this weekend was of course the release of my 21st chapbook Twelve Times Thirteen  through Kind of Hurricane Press. Appraisals, in private and publicly posted, have already come rushing, and that heals me a lot. It reassures me so much to know that people actually read my poetry, this blog, that I am not screaming alone in the vast darkness of this world.

The Loss published earlier this year, Twelve Times Thirteen just now, and in December Crossing Puddles, yet my writing never stops and I am ever so glad, and reassured even more to have more poems from Tamed Dracaenae & Some Orphans accepted and/or published in various publications.

Midnight Circus, Summer Anthology "Invasion and occupation" just published "An Eastern Threat"

Shadows & Light, July anthology published "Whipping Past"

Pyrokinection, will publish "The Rain Bows Down" & "A Bowling Bowl in My Stomach"

Finally for this summer so far, Perspective Lit Mag, a paying market, yes, my dear! will release their July issue including my "Urban Spell"

Knowing that these publications have already published or scheduled some of my poems is even more exciting. It finally seems that my she-dragons found some nice shelters unlike what I thought.

Two Reviews on Twelve Times Thirteen

Walter Ruhlmann’s stunning e-chapbook, Twelve Times Thirteen, has just been released by Kind of a Hurricane Press as part of its Barometric Pressures series: http://barometricpressures.blogspot.fr/2014/06/twelve-times-thirteen-walter-ruhlmann.html?m=1 The title derives from the book’s organizing principle: twelve poems, one for each month in 2013. Each poem also has a subtitle, connecting the piece with a song title that for the initiated mirrors, echoes and expands the poem’s theme. It’s intricate work, honest and at times harrowing. Ruhlmann confides that the first six months of 2013 were “about the worst I ever lived.” The powerful poems provide evidence of the scars, transforming them into art in the process:

"A virgin area, a dry land.
The fountains were emptied and the wine drunk all the while.
Too much food, too much laughter in such little time."

All is desiccation and desecration, wine like blood and laughter hollow as bones. Lucifer appears as Mother Lucy, with her pop chemical diamonds, as Lithium and Lilith. It’s a long way down, as Stevens said, “to darkness on extended wings.” And in that darkness, the excess of modern life – Quarter Pounders and mounds of sweets nourishing nothing but illness and guilt and the leprechaun’s laugh “…somewhere around the vineyards, west of Bresse. This is confession as descent and cleansing, a hard, hard fall (the reader hopes) to rise again. Read these poems: they will scare you and scar you, shake you and wake you with their witch-goddesses, demons and frozen rivers “…imprisoned in the ice and tormented torrent.”

Steve Klepetar, Poet

*****

Twelve Times Thirteen by Walter Ruhlmann is a powerhouse of graphic emotion.  Employing a fascinating format pairing the twelve months of his life in 2013 with the twelve tracks of a record, Ruhlmann has chosen songs by famous artists to reflect the theme and mood of each of his poems.  These poems are evocative of a wellspring of torment, the rawness and intensity of which are not for the faint-hearted.

Fern G. Z. Carr, Poet

Twelve Times Thirteen Available From Kind of a Hurricane Press

Download Here

About the collection – The Calendar Song, Boney M

This collection – Twelve Times Thirteen –  is about the twelve months of the year 2013 and how they inspired me: knowing the first six were about the worst I had ever lived.

The title of the collection itself is quite obvious and was also inspired by French film-director François Ozon's 5x2. http://www.francois-ozon.com/en

Each poem is subtitled with a song title which matches the theme developed and the mood felt at the time.

The themes found in each poem are the same as the ones you can find in the previous poems written since 1994 in French & English: sex, guilt, religion and myths, love, death, physical and mental illness, family, etc.

Some of these poems echo my two previous collections Crossing Puddles written in 2012 coming up through Robocup Press 2014, and The Loss in 2013, published this year in February by Flutter Press.