The Cruelest Poetry Month 2022

April is National Poetry Month, "launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996 to remind the public that poets have an integral role to play in our culture and that poetry matters. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K–12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, families, and, of course, poets, marking poetry's important place in our lives."

The Five-Two participates with an annual blog tour. Originally called 30 Days of The Five-Two, featuring guest posts about Five-Two poems, its new name, from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", is apropos of our crime theme but also reflects the tour's growth beyond Five-Two poems. It's a chance for anyone to post about any poetry and introduce themselves and their work (poetry or not) to a new audience.

We will feature four debut Poems of the Week and any guest posts contributed in preparation for or during the tour itself. If you'd like to join, email me a link to your entry or the entry itself (text, video, etc.) to post here.


For April 6, Charles Rammelkamp's commentary on "Susan Smith's Dream" by Sally Weston Ziph:

Sally Weston Ziph’s chilling poem, the retributive nightmare of a woman who drowns her own children, must be read with the knowledge of the crimes on top of the crimes Smith committed, in our racially charged society. It’s the national nightmare. Not only did she kill her children, she blamed a black man. Her motive? Trying to make herself more attractive to a popular local white man. But along comes justice, at least in her dream.

The blue van rises
from the bottom of the lake

tilts on its side and floats
back to the dock.

You can almost hear the nightmare movie music swelling as the impossible happens with the ineluctable logic of dreams. “Water pours

out of its windows, forming
pockets of air that release the screams

of her small sons strapped
into car seats.

At this point the horror movie music reaches a crescendo with the screams of the victims. The moral karma at the heart of the world, in all dreams of cosmic justice, rears up and slaps Susan Smith as with a giant flyswatter. She stumbles backwards, the way the guilty do in all horror movies, as the van rolls slowly, ineluctably, toward her. Yes! How satisfying, the mother who kills her children and blames it on a nonexistent black man, punished in the theater of dreams! Her guilt is plain to all, visible to all, “under the moon’s white eye.” —Charles Rammelkamp