Jim Culleny is the Poetry Editor of 3 Quarks Daily. After a stint in the navy, Jim received a BA in Art Education from William Paterson University and did graduate work in art at NYU. He taught art for several years in NJ public schools in Newark and Bergen County. Taught a little bit of everything else during two years at a remote residential community school in New York’s Adirondacks. Was a social worker in Lower Manhattan before Soho was Soho. Made a living most of his life as a carpenter, designer, and builder. Did regular radio commentary for about 10 years during Morning Edition on WFCR.FM in Amherst, Mass. and some for NPR on All Things Considered. Played and sang his way from rockabilly to jazz in numberless band permutations over a period too long to believe. Came to poetry through songwriting. Has had work published in The Third Muse Poetry Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, Penthouse Journal, and in 5-Minute Pieces, a chapbook published in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. He’s also been writing a regular op-ed column for the past 12 years for the Greenfield Recorder along the beautiful Connecticut River, and is presently making a living as project manager for an Architectural firm. Jim lives with his wife, Pat, of 31 years, and his 17 year old granddaughter. He has three daughters and four other grandchildren. Email: jimculleny [at] comcast.net
by Jim Culleny I’ve done a number of things to make a living over the years, but my most protracted make-a-living venture has been as a carpenter. But I’ve not done that alone: without the right tools a carpenter’s as helpless as a musician without an axe. Tools are body’s extension, and mind’s. Which brings…
“What the earliest scriptural-literary texts . . . do is attempt to find a language to come to terms with . . . the contingency of being.” —Amit Chaudhuri, from Storytelling & Forgetfullness A Skeptic’s Critique of Storytelling what is a story anyway but a trip through landscapes inhabited by characters bent by other characters…
Imagine This thing shaped like a dish saucer moonspan wide in nightsky laden with milk for a cat a gesture of someone kind who is always more than this and ever less than that sun up moon scats have you noticed that in a miraculous way fully backed by science the eyes of truth will…
Einstein & Etta James (reading below) I’m fourteen when Einstein is in Princeton he’s old & heading out of breath as I am fresh and new at breathing in some but there the landscapes of the space between our ears divides Al used levers of mind to lift mass in time while mine took to…
My friend, poet Nils Peterson, sent me a new poem of his the other day. It moved me to spontaneously add a second verse which I presented to him and he liked. So this is a collaborative venture. The first stanza is Nils’, the last stanza, following the break, is mine. Two writers, one poem.…
Eye to Spirit every year I’m given the gift of her garden which she sweats over and in which is all color, lush, side by side soil to buds, roots to blossoms edge to edge eye to spirit beginning to end . Jim Culleny 7/17/19
Water Lilies At Lido saucers in space, a flock, a green gaggle of water lilies upon cool liquid too precise to be Monet’s, too crisp but let me lie upon your quietude let me swim among your green voids let me calculate the diameters of your circles with the calipers of my eyes yes even the…
Flight From Gravity …………… a story, a poem a recollection of 77 summer solstices bundled into a single thought of when a young carpenter with muscles, sweating, carries a 2 by 10 joist from lumber pile to house, its skeleton being assembled in the sun, a thought that segues into a later solstice down the…
Cup …—for Catherine Regec Mraz this is how I most remember her I’d have been maybe eight, I open the door to her house and hear the latch click, clock tick we have tea at her table I ask for grandpa’s cup which she brings from her pantry shelf and sets upon the table pours…
almost without metaphor clouds this morning cross two adjacent mountains tinged with bluegrey and pink, they move deliberately in a swift west wind not like anything but migrating water vapor held by hydrogen bonds, the cooler the better, they glide over pine, hemlock, oak, and spruce being networks of misted h-2-o. the pine, hemlock, spruce,…
“The stars are raining down upon me. I know this is not true, but it is the truth.” —Michel Foucault But it Is the stars are raining down on me I know this is not true, but there are so many, as many as every drop in a deluge, as many as if the earth…
. —Thoughts of 77 summer solstices, hopefully anticipating 78 At a Point When All Things Reverse . situated between a pair of equinoxes a blazing solstice— an apex of angles and ellipses; parabolas scribed by inertia and mass in a count of months governed by curves of gravity at a point when all things reverse I…
Which Just Makes Me Blue in the matrix of a prism is magic of two kinds, the inestimable and that which can be counted —the inestimable cannot be counted by definition if I say red is passionate hot sexy or if I say red’s the color of death in unstoppable bleeding or that its fresh blush…
Investment every day I am in vestment it’s morning I dress in sunskin cloudskin earthskin in the skin of a universe though I’ve hoped to slough them off, to be unveiled as they’re outgrown, I’ll always be, while I’m here, in vestment Jim Culleny 4/10/19
Attend . ahead, behind ? “behind” may be a metaphor for: ….. “lingering to catch what’s-up before you’re so far ahead you’ve forgotten what was on your mind when blood was running fast so that what’s-up is just a blur hardly worth remembering, a rush that didn’t last” attend— go slow so life is not…
Tool Series —Constructive poems for carpenters and other builders . ADZE I’ve never been a mathematician physicist or statistician but, as a carpenter who aspires to be a word magician I can fill you in on certain facz such as the irrational condition in which, at least from Mesolithic times, the framer’s friend, the adze, subtracz…
I’m Listening to Something I’m listening to something. I don’t know what it’s called but it’s Chopin. It’s a tune Alexa pulled from the high-capacity byte magazine of her small black canister which sits under a lamp upon a table against the wall (where most of us have spent at least a little time, in a…
Teach the Children About the Cycles . …… —on a poem by Gary Snyder in which Snyder is ……… visited by Lew Welsh Dead Lew comes to Gary in a poem and tells the thing that must be taught, he says, ……….. Teach the children about the cycles. The life cycles. He may as well have…
New Vinyl …..—elegy to take an album in your hands to feel its slight heft to free it from its clear synthetic skin to slip it from its cardboard cover to scan its art, to flip it over, read, then slide it from its paper inner sleeve with care (platter’s rim to palm just so)…
Did an Historical Christ Exist by now, does it matter? time and myth have done their work: hope anoints trying to get to the bottom of it would be like chipping Everest with a balsa chisel and rubber mallet down to a grain of sand or explaining to Icarus the practicality of an altimeter —by the time…