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
… Solar Filaments the sun's intense but placidteasing this morning’s fog from the river,at least from this vantage, sitting as we areat a perfect distance from its orange fireboxsafe from its arcing solar filaments,the eruptions which suddenly uncoil like snakesand would reduce me to cinderswith their dragon breath if not forcertain equations like those that…
You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger. . WWBS? What Would Buddha Say, I thought, of all that flows from lips of wealthy oafs who claim to know the shortcuts on the highway to nirvana? I’d guess he’d sit in stillness, smile un-perplexed, knowing discontent and bile…
How could something so beautiful not be right —Margaret Wertheim, on Einstein’s equations……………….. for his General Theory of Relativity The elegance of the simplest things makes them right. The shape of a smooth stone cannot be argued against —one touch is testimony of its rightness. Its small heft says, I'm here. Its mass, snapped by…
Aging Face With mirrors the aging face became personal.It hung before only on the heads of others,but with realization that the still surfaceof a pond returned the image of the seer,when polished metals revealed a clear and troubling truth,when a silver-backed square of glassserved up serial images of hard fact so precisely denial was impossible,…
..Fundamental Misunderstanding — thoughts on Charlie Hebdo, and Kenya and Beirut …and Paris everything ever written or saideverything drawn or played or sungevery headline that cried or bledevery fresco, every poemeverything wrung from our cranial spongeevery inky insult flungevery instrument ever madeevery expletive blasted from lungsevery face on a canvas hungevery righteous canto prayed…. that…
October. when the night chorus ends its cricketed whine (gone overnight when first frost came) a new silence blends with pitch of pine and barks of trees ………………………… what remains when heat departs and dark descends is a resonate wake of love in heads of echo memories that will too be shed . Jim Culleny…
.Digging Potatoes with the Young ……….. — for George and Dacy last week I dug potatoeswith the young—granddaughter and son.I showed them how to sink the forkin ground a bit away from desiccated tuber stalksby leaning their slight weight in to force it downthen leveraging tines by length of haftto bring the harvest slowly from…
Gong and Pennywhistle.you can play a cheap pennywhistle or beat on a big gold gongdown here on earth in the soft grass or stinging thistlesnobody stays here for long those up on highand those way down lowbreath the same bitter airwe’ll just have to see how it goes you can bring down the house with…
Key .dangling from a ring my finger hookedand drew from a jean pocketis a burnished brass key warn smoothfrom the ten thousand timesI put it to this lock and turnedto hear the delicious clickof entering home,the place filled withyou. by Jim Culleny9/18/15
Football the sheer brilliance of this game’s hook amazes me— it’s an homage to collision,a demo derby of organs and bones,of fans psyched to see some player’snear-death experience, a feint gameof fine footwork leading tovictory through the skill to maimall underlain with clever strategiesand agile trickersbacked by large men and place kickers,a mashup of history,current…
. COLLECTING FIREFLIES I’m afraidI don’t understandthe death part of lifealthough at my ageyou might think I might,and not necessarilythe last death-partbut the everyday bits of itthat constantly intrudeThe only thing I can thinkto make sense of itis that its shadowover each tendernessmakes each tendernessmore rich and poignant,as if tenderness werethe only point of lightin…
Bidding Adieu. gimme a new piece of the big Mysterium —the words had barely left his lips when he died again in cognate delirium choking on the language of things clues science is a big Imperiumreligion is too but one (at least) gives credit to what the other calls g-o-d for having offered to all:…
Struck With Rust. from a chair close by the hydrangea in white, and a wheelbarrow old and purely struck with rust, the hydrangea’s lace planets in close galaxies of three-petal poems, the barrow’s hard, black tire and load of pulled weeds which, until the other day, into life were thrust now busted, heaped in a…
If you talk about it, it’s not TaoIf you name it, it’s something else What can’t be named is eternalNaming splits the eternal to smithereens Not tangled in desire you embrace the unknownTangled in desire you see only what you want But the unknown and what you wanthave one source. Call it no place No…
. . . . . . . . . The Horses of Chauvet the horses of Chauvet lope through a caveeloquently old and new true and lush as the love and lustour progenitors knew and craved. by Jim Culleny6/28/15.Chauvet Cave > >
““The best evidence we have suggests that early Earth was completely covered by oceans…(but) if you link two amino acids together to make a protein, you have to remove water.” And that would have been impossible if the amino acids were immersed in an ocean. Life needed some land—literally a beachhead—to get started.” —Tim Folger…
In the beginning was Ignorance, which, after seven days of metastization, took no rest, not even a nap, and saw that it was good —or, if not 'good', at least very effective.”……………………………………. —Fascist Bible 1:1 Yankee Disenlightenment it was once considered not good not to know to know nothing to be willfully stupid yet not…
right here put down the guitar andpuddled a cord at the base of the microphone standjust after there’d been music right here at hand. is it always here at hand?. just yesterdayin a field behind my housethe sun hove into view againas if it would never burn out Jim Culleny5/20/15
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” —Carl Sagan on a photo taken of Earth by Voyager 1 as it left our solar system. Pale Blue Dot pale…
Am I my brother’s keeper?…………… —Genesis 4:9 Not Abel At first I was able, then I was not Abel,I’d walked with Cain. I was battered off my feet—but before? Before I became a name of biblical proportionsI just tended sheep, then suddenlymy lambs stood bleating as I lay bleeding The world had changed. No longer…