The blog and the press will go on hiatus for some time. Do not send work to either of them, it wouldn't be considered but put to the trash directly.
Previously sent work can be submitted to another venue, I won't consider it for now.
Check later for a possible awakening.
Thank you.
The poems which compose this collection are what I call poetry of landscapes, or geographical poems. Yet, as you well know, geography can also be mapping the mind, the life, the existence-s of anyone around. This is where the feelings triggered by these territories led the poet: the observation of the self. I was born in Normandy, France and have been travelling a lot and living in foreign countries and remote places: Bath, Manchester, the Indian Ocean. I settled in centre eastern France in June 2012, and I realised there had been a cycle in this long journey, that I had run away from a place (Normandy) because I found it an excruciating place to live in and felt as if suffocating, it had become my fetters; just to find myself in the same kind of place, twenty-years later, and in a role I quite despised at the time. What other way is there, then, than to travel and map the self, just to escape differently and farther, even if that means losing one's mind?
*****
Some poems lean toward the lyrical, some toward the narrative. On one page an elegy, on another an acrostic. A trio of prose poems turns up. One poem, The Horizon of the Poplar Trees, is bilingual. Running Cows delights with humor. You never can tell who or what will show up on the next page.
Throughout Crossing Puddles if we must journey toward our painful understanding, we do so in the soothing company of the weatherman who is also the man who paints landscapes. We experience a sense of wonder for the fog of Normandy, the cold and damp of the Center Eastern French winter. Not surprisingly, but certainly pleasingly, the man in all his iterations is firmly rooted in French soil. Indeed, the organizing principle of the book is a tour de France with sections titled Nantes, Normandy and Bresse.
Taken together, climate and geography become beauty’s antidote for
“those whose life has gone too thin” (Mamie).
I also think RUHLMANN intends for us to find relief in his lush botanical milieus. Poet as imp would have us meet the “Messy Messiah, moss in the missing mass (Making Zoran Come). Poet as shaman would have us worship trees.
Karla Linn MERRIFIELD, from the foreword to Crossing Puddles
As an artist of any stripe, it remains a constant duty to one’s vocation to keep questioning, researching, and refining one’s identity. RUHLMANN's Crossing Puddles pays homage to this courageous and ongoing process.
Marie LECRIVAIN, Al-Khemia Poetica, 2015
As its title suggests, Walter Ruhlmann’s Crossing Puddles is a moist, wet and sometimes drenched book. It’s sticky with fluids, supple with organicity, non-cosmetic – and, above all, funky. I mean “funky” in three senses of the term: the olfactory, the depressive and the existentialist a la philosopher Cornel West, who thinks of “funk” as “wrestling with the wounds, the scars, the bruises, as well as the creative responses to wounds, scars, and bruises.” Really, relatively few writers dare to scrape the underside of things, to plumb the profane as much as the sacred, and to pull back humanity’s foreskin to expose its shmegma.
David HERRLE, Subtle Tea, 2016
*****
Another Day Out
Decreasing the days from now,
revolution has its own way.
The sparrow flies towards its night,
wings covered with milky dust,
eyes opened wide,
crystal meth falls with its tears.
Clouds cover the landscape,
softly driven from the west;
winds erupt and blow them out;
the rain, the storm have gone astray.
From there
no minds are known
and there are
none left undone.
Forty thousand specks of dust and we count down
stones falling from the wall
the signal has been shown
the other side is our salvation – what salvation are you expecting?
The finding took longer than expected
the caterpillar and the spider mated in the dewy cobweb.
What way out can one find from this?
The green prints, foot steps on the dark soil,
on the other side of the garden
where the dragonfly landed yesterday
to meet the sprites hiding under the hedge row.
*****
What Hides in the Bathroom Drawer
Could there be anything wrong
when night comes?
Or when left alone in the dark
I visit the moister parts of myself.
I mentioned it to her lately.
I could see she was annoyed,
alarmed,
stressed out.
Should I lie and keep smiling
when I feel it all comes back?
This darkness invades my head,
it mingles with all my cells,
the whiteness of my brains only blurred by blood
in the veins and arteries:
small rivulets encircling neuralgias.
They all become full of coal dust
cigarette ashes
thick ink
carbon.
So vintage,
black & white,
sepia
burning crosses,
naked men.
A pale moon invades the room.
Ogres crash in and gulp me down,
flesh and bones.
Big Bad Wolf and Beelzebub
dance together and collide,
they mate and they come.
They give birth in unison
to a devastating son.
He whispers close to my ear
filling my skull with strange sounds
that cannot be erased by songs,
or the birds, fluttering.
*****
Paperback - 71 pages - black & white - 10€ - £12 - $15 from the printer's website
From the author via Paypal with the mail address wruhlmann [at] laposte [dot] net
It is during a period of doubt and hard times that these poems were written. Some of them have appeared in various publications worldwide. The acknowledgement stands at the beginning of the collection after the content page.
*****
Walter Ruhlmann is a poet who writes with wit and intelligence. His poetry is vivid and accessible full of sharp bright images that invite you into his world and then takes you down roads that trick, amuse and surprise. He sits a little outside of mainstream in so far as his poetry is not trite or obvious, he is someone I enjoy reading and one of those names I look for when a magazine drops through the door.
Jim BENNETT, poet, editor of The Poetry Kit
Walter Ruhlmann is a poet of intersecting universes, a connoisseur and composer of watchful nights, a procreator and juggler of sensual and philosophical discoveries. The gravitational field of his poetry unfolds like the appeal of an ocean echoing the voices of never ceasing questions and restless doubts. His multi-faceted, simultaneously classical and avant-garde oeuvre is a constant impelling force to dedicate our lives to perfecting our perceptive and transcendental worlds while incorporating the tangible, bodily realms as well in order to become the carnal apotheosis of millenary poetical quests.
Károly Sándor PALLAI poet, former editor of Vents alizés
*****
Disgust
Disgust took us last Saturday
its vivid veil falling on us
and covering our lives,
the breaths we were given,
voluntarily or not.
Disgust is like the fog
invading the greenish moors around us
rocks and ghost trees, grey gloomy ghouls
guarding those implacable marshes.
The smell of it is like petrol
invading the nostrils of
this nine-year-old child
at the back of the car
sucking on the temples of
those sun glasses made of plastic.
The filling of the tank
exploding in his nose.
It can also be like the acrid odour
of puke
when six or seven years later
he entered the dark corridor
of lust.
Disgust is shaped like some misshaped
mass in motion.
Monitoring our senses
and our existences.
*****
The Loss
Why would I choose to loose when all I have to do is love?
Loosing can take the shape of flies
circling above your head
in the mid-summer moist air
in a kitchen filled with buzzing black beasts
falling down into the sink
getting stuck onto the glued strip.
The dark room where these straw hats hung,
the toilets of the chessboard queen,
these afternoons with beer or sparkling water
mixed with lemon juice, and chocolate chips.
The loss was there already in the air,
the spirit of it lingered in moist corners,
on the tombstones we would clean,
on the paths to the church they would drag me to,
on the roofs made of wood, made of straw, made of infinite nightmares.
I chose to accept loosing bits of me,
parts of my health, limbs and neurons,
organic cells, just to make sure I would keep you
forever
the space I've made was not enough
and though I held your hand in your last breath
the loss has taken all the room that's left.
*****
Philosophical Fellatio
I want to brush my sex against your cheek.
Do you feel the warmth and the tease?
The voluptuous elation of some undefined concept
from which the casual ways you learned to love erect?
Somehow the touch left me unharmed,
it made me close my eyes and whisper in your ear
some deafening words and secrets
the grapes and the barrel used to keep for themselves.
The fallacies the loons and the jesters share
are as many dead-ends for the pestering hare
the one with those large ears running, chasing,
the philosopher's stone.
I saw it waiting in this room only minutes ago
while all my jizz erupted in your eyes
and your wide-gaping mouth
encircled my penis lingering on your cheek.
*****
10€ - £12 - $15
from the printer's website
from the author, payment via Paypal:
wruhlmann [at] laposte [dot] net
