Overheard in Chicago

Overheard in Chicago

Draft goes down in two days, maybe three, but silence, well, then 48 hours seems too long.

Home without a home

I'm hours away from returning to my hometown, but for the first time in my life, for the first time in the 23 years I've been living away, there is no family home awaiting me. It's been sold, and if I'd been in a position to buy it, I'd have considered it seriously. I can't explain how strange it's felt throughout my journey, making my familiar trip but without the familiar destination.

Having missed the downstate bus by three minutes, I have almost four hours to wait for the next one. I used to wait it out in the dreadfully overlit and uncomfortable bus center, but at some point I ventured into the O'Hare airport Hilton en route and found their sports bar. I'm no fan of sports bars, but here they make a decadent Caesar salad and have Sam Adams on draft, not to mention the free wifi. It gives me my first chance to blog (read breathe) in weeks.

I'm only in my hometown for three nights and two packed days before heading to Chicago for the AWP conference. I've fit in a little poetry, though; my nephew Brandon has arranged for me to speak to Olympia Middle School's eighth grade on Monday morning. I'll read a little poetry and fiction and answer the students' questions. I suppose that's to say there'll be small space for mourning, though already I feel I'm teeming with that and so much else.

A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens

As a former Victorianist, I'm delighted to have a poem in this new anthology, edited by Peter Robinson and published by Two Rivers Press. There's a wonderful array of poems here by the likes of Moniza Alvi, Alison Brackenbury, Fred D'Aguiar, Maura and Tim Dooley, Jane Draycott, Ian Duhig, Peter Finch, John Greening, Philip Gross, Alan Halsey, Alan Jenkins, Jamie McKendrick, Paul Muldoon, Richard Price, Justin Quinn, Deryn Rees-Jones, Peter Riley, Anthony Rudolf, Lesley Saunders, Elizabeth Smither, Julian Stannard, C.K. Stead, George Szirtes and others--how's that for range?

You can purchase a copy directly from the publisher here.

Six months gone

Click to see this picture enlarged and the wonderful expressions on their faces better.

My niece Ella White (formerly Katelyn Etter) with my mother, Bernie.

The shirt's she wearing is one of the ones I kept.

He had no idea what he looked like to others. He wasn't sure what he looked like to himself. He looked like what his mother saw when she looked at him. But his mother had passed on. This raised a question for advanced students. What was left of him for others to see?

Don DeLillo, Point Omega

The Camarade Project, London, 11 February 2012

Come one, come all!

D.S. Marriott's The Bloods, Part 1 (Shearsman, 2011)

Halfway in, I'm finding The Bloods a tremendous book, evoking and exploring questions about language, slavery, mortality, epistemology, and so on. Here are some samples from my reading thus far. (The spacing is at times incorrect, I'm sorry to say, on account of this platform.)

In a poem, silence sounds like a gunshot.

To the flame darkness is an offering....

from "Lorem Ipsum"

Beyond water

with its blue-black punctuation beneath

fraying charts of light.

* * *

And then, amid the pages,

syntax, weft, memes, no order or world. Suddenly the

illuminations burn, perish on the white page

with its pathos night after night.

* * *

Still later I think it makes sense that language should

lead back to death and silence

devote itself to the erased letters of the air,

a flight so inviolable it has little chance

of existing beyond the natural life of a poem.

from "Greeking"

Release the words from their trap,

but don't forget to nuance the meaning.

This is where true ownership begins.

A hand scratching worth from zero.

from "Hoerenjongetje"

...the sound of the wind

that is the sound of the mind falling....

* * *

Whatever it was, the dark

held him motionless, unheralded,

oblivious to the drugs and to the sex,

the false divinities,

the dead sleeping next to other men.

from "Acque Pericolore"

Now the truths proposed by truths feel like the prison of old age.

from "An Emblem Book"

...small chunks

of time instantly duplicate themselves

with brutal honesty....

* * *

oh to be a child again, dying without knowing it,

the dark so very quiet because ephemeral

and the void a stench almost too solid to touch--

from "Diglossia"

It is quiet as I stand watching the straw-red lips of a child, perilously perfect, surrounded by darkness. The world will choke me before this image fades. It rises sheer with a thrashing force. Time reels from the impact.

from "Fish--Apostrophe"

...how to speak the undamaged word.

from "Pot Kettle Black"

The gulls return through coastal mist, a raucous blur. As they veer past he hears a kind of cadenced longing hovering on the edge of his inner ear.

* * *

The fear . . . that the nausea he felt would bear down with a verifying force . . . .

* * *

The rain had slowed and the houses with their crested roofs looked stripped and ravaged in the greying landscape.

* * *

There was something in the life of a slave he thought, something similar to what the world owed him, a world that had forced him to wallow in spectacle and evocation. As he looks out over the hills to the sea, he thought about the power of imitation, but he didn't know that behind him the slave too was concentrating on creating a new form. He'd been cautious, watchful, but all the while he'd been learning how to shape the junk and miscellaneous things scattered all about them into new forms. And so, little by little, his dreams started to encroach upon the waking world.

* * *

If the moon went out, there would always be this light that feels unceasing, flickering below the flight of gulls climbing on divergent paths, over blackened fields.

from "Whittling, A Likeness without Shade or Shadow"

If you enjoyed these passages, I hope you'll buy the book from Foyle's (UK) or Barnes & Noble (US).

Kelvin Corcoran's Words Through a Hole Where Once There Was a Chimpanzee's Face (Longbarrow Press, 2011)

Kelvin Corcoran's pamphlet explores in poetry and prose his harrowing experience of a stroke and his recovery, divided between the sections "Going Down" and "Coming Back." His reading of the entire piece at the Hay Poetry Jamboree was a delight, taking us through pain, bewilderment, fear, love, laughter and literature. Here are some favourite passages:

Massing for blood honey sweet

the nations of the dead and you

sifting through my hands--a shadow.

end of "Book II"

These trees look designed,

them birds is on fire

in loops and swirls the sky ablaze.

from "He stared at death. Death stared straight back."

The chapter of the raising of the body,

of making the eyes to see, the ears to hear,

setting forth the head, of giving it its powers

coming forth from yesterday, coming forth by day.

end of "1.2"

...the mind making its own patterns

along a low horizon of muted light.

*

...to walk away from the buried life,

the trees designed and the light contrived.

from "1.3"

And if I was looking for that cold cold answer,

in the last brilliant compartment of the sun,

the church bell would ring out its contours on the air

compressing the water to picture a polar sky.

Rolling out the sound condenses over ice,

sea smoke trails the boat, twists of light letter the air,

a language holding low around the edges of the world,

empty and endless for the mind to lodge at zero.

end of "2.2"

Today Nansen you will study the sea running flush under the transparent shelves of vision.

*

You--pathfinder genius, limbs and head full of souls, lead us out on the thin skin of the unthought world, step by step to the oracles of snow; beat it out, beat it out and we'll follow.

*

Ptarmigan, snipe, seal--picture me dark night food; reindeer trot faster faster, sing it magical

from "2.3 Another Eight Things About the Arctic"

...a cantata

on the other side, deep in dark wood rising.

*

...the horizontal wind rolls up the European plain,

smacks the spire from the past into the future

to release a little aria dancing over Saxony.

from "3.1"

...the one word [love] to bring to that moment,

the only thing to hold onto at the dark door.

*

The air's a chamber of bird song and rain....

from "3.3"

Yesterday a girl atop a white bull

went swimming past, Europa, the fool.

What sort of prospect is that?

Oh his sweet breath, his low moan.

the end of "3.4"

Telemetry, telekinesis, Telemachus, holy shit.

Tell me another one, I thought him dead but he's back;

I thought him white bones cast on black sand,

his grin from the photo I inherit--and a world of trouble.

*

He smells of smoke, drops into deep sea silence,

controls his face at sudden sounds, eyes wide.

What does it take to hollow out a man?

Black bones on white sand, his voyage, my voyage.

the first and last stanzas of "4.1"

...when he sailed off,

I poured my heart into a hole in the air.

Every night I talked and talked to an absence....

from "4.3"

...the sea won't stop moving, the land now and then;

but here I am, I hold my nerve, I make it happen.

from "4.4"

You can pick up the pamphlet from publisher Longbarrow Press for a mere five pounds; add the CD of the poet's reading of the work and it's just £6.50.

The 3 A.M. Magazine's longlist for best blog of 2011

includes this one! What a delight and an honour! Here's the complete list, along with notice of the winner, Time's Flow Stemmed.

Geraldine Monk's Lobe Scarps & Finials (Leafe Press, 2011)

I've just finished reading the latest collection from Geraldine Monk, Lobe Scarps & Finials, and warmly recommend it. While some of the poems worked more for me than others, on the whole I relished its playfulness and good humour, its chattiness and range of register, and concur with David Wheatley's thoughtful review in The Guardian. Here are just a few choice passages:

Rock runs to slurry.

Earthquakes cakewalk the

globe and back.

dunder. earth. death. dearth. abide.

*

O.K. lamb--

meek it out...

from "March"

...everything was elsewhere and

being England it was cloudy.

*

Colder. Wetter.

Perseids a proper shower

hurtling a best-in-years

outta-sight and

being England it was cloudy.

from "August"

Vegetables must be

peeled eyes removed

hearts recovered. Fruit flesh

parted with gravity.

from "November"

In a late summer night courtyard illuminated

shafts of wet creaked a simmering up-deep.

*

How greener is the other side of the

body incorruptible?

*

Moderation didn't make the

universe burst into pentameters.

Extremes teem. Petals and

thorns. Throne of frowns.

from "Poppyheads"

I'd quote more if I could replicate the spacing. You can buy the book directly from the publisher here.

Good-bye, Annus Horribilis

The year began well: in February I brought out my second book of poems, Divining for Starters, and in April I moved in with my boyfriend, while continuing to write and teach (two of my greatest pleasures). But on 29 July my mother, my dearest friend, died too soon, most suddenly and unexpectedly, and August became the worst month of my life, full of family slights and betrayals alongside sorting through my parents' belongings and finances and suffering an incredible grief. In the last month I've started to feel a little better, feel myself inside a slightly lesser mourning, but it's hard to imagine what would make the next year worthwhile. I plan to read and write more, to try to write better, to continue reviewing and publishing, but I'm not excited by these prospects the way I used to be. I am waiting to be excited, I think. I am hoping and watching. And remembering my parents in their stunning absence.