The Other Room reading

Here's my (dimly lit) reading at The Other Room in April 2011. I read a couple poems by other poets in Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets before reading from my collection, Divining for Starters. Thanks again to James Davies, Tom Jenks and Scott Thurston for inviting me. 

Divining for Starters "finely wrought and immensely sensual"

Some favourite passages from Sarah Jackson's thoughtful review of Divining for Starters in the latest issue of New Walk:

"Carrie Etter’s second collection demonstrates a remarkable ear and intelligence. Combining lyricism and experimentation, Divining for Starters is confident, poised, and at times quite startling."


"What I find so notable, however, is not simply the way that Etter represents the desire for starting over, but the manner in which these poems perform their own coming-into-being."


"...these poems are also finely wrought and immensely sensual – the poet ‘fingering my small store of words / held on the tongue’ (‘Divining for Starters (53)’). Even as closure is endlessly deferred, the poems are gathered together by a careful patterning of sound and sense."


"This is of course not simply the hypnotic dream of a train moving through the night, but the drift of language from any fixed reference point. And it is this carefully controlled and haunting slipperiness that makes Carrie Etter’s second collection so extraordinary."


Divining for Starters is available with free worldwide shipping from The Book Depository.

Shearsman 91 & 92

I'm pleased to say I have three poems in Shearsman 91 & 92: two from the Divining for Starters series and "Orphan/age," one of my first finished poems about my mother's unexpected death last summer. I look forward to reading the poems by Catherine Hales, Gary Hotham, Rob A. Mackenzie, Sam Sampson and Steven Waling, as well as many other poets both new and familiar to me, including translations of Baudelaire. 

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.

Merry Christmas at Delirious Hem

An audio recording of my reading "Divining for Starters (77)" can be heard as the Christmas entry for the Delirious Hem poetry advent calendar. Merry Christmas, everyone!

A new review of Divining for Starters

appears in Poetry Salzburg Review's twentieth issue. Interestingly, Zoë Brigley reviews Divining alongside David Cooke's In the Distance (Night Publishing, 2011), David Morley's Enchantment (Carcanet, 2010) and Evie Shockley's the new black (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), which renders me "the most avant-garde of the poets discussed here," a position I rarely occupy. The review is thoughtful and appreciative, yet the essay is of such a whole, I can't excerpt it usefully. You'll have to see it for yourself.

A splendid review of Divining for Starters

appears on the Burning Eye Books website. Here's one beloved passage:

"This is a poet writing with confidence and surety. Yes we are at the experimental end of things, out there with the kooky fringe dwellers painting with words, but what words, what poise, what perfect balance of imagery from beginning to end."

Divining for Starters, Review 4½

On Intercapillary Space, Michael Peverett has reviewed a number of Shearsman Books' PDF samplers of new titles, including Divining for Starters, thus commenting on just the first six poems. However, he's gone into more detail and analysis than many a review of a complete collection. You can read his review here.

Divining for Starters, the fourth review

"One might want to state that Etter's work could be viewed as establishing a phenomenological lyric, as well as a poetic framed by ecological concerns. Etter builds upon (and challenges) the experimentations of an earlier generation of women poets--such as Lyn Hejinian's strategies of defamiliarisation, or Jorie Graham's testing of the reader with her long modulated and errant lines." --Nerys Williams in Poetry Wales' new issue, where the whole of the appreciative review can be read.

A third positive review of Divining for Starters

"Carrie Etter's follow up to her debut collection The Tethers (Seren 2009), Divining for Starters (Shearsman 2011), consolidates her growing reputation with poems that begin with a consideration of beginnings and origins and develop in elegant swerves of unexpected and precise delineation. [....] ...this collection alternates between a poetics of consciousness and one of the reflexivity of the body. At their base is a probing of self and identity, with an arc of origins from the American Mid-West via California to the edge of the West Country that realises some powerful poetry."

David Caddy, Tears in the Fence

The Book Depository sells Divining for Starters with free worldwide shipping.

Reading at the University of Notre Dame London Centre, 14 June 2011

An edited video (with the most unflattering camera angle) of my reading last week at the University of Notre Dame's London Centre is now on YouTube. You can skip the introduction to the evening by starting at the 1:30 mark. The editing removed a number of introductions and explanations, including mention of the poet who read the two "poems for two voices" with me, Rachel McCarthy.

If you like what you hear, the collection I read from, Divining for Starters, is available at The Book Depository with free international delivery.

Another epigraph for Divining for Starters

I came across this today in reading some of prose poet Killarney Clary's work and thought it would have made a good additional epigraph for my most recent collection, Divining for Starters: "We who could divine what is from what is, pull any one way with purpose, win or lose at dice, laugh in the mirror, wish through the tunnels. Risk is juggled into difference."

Divining for Starters' first review,

by Martin Stannard, is now up at Stride Magazine, and I'm pleased to say it's very appreciative. Here's a passage from the opening paragraph: "Etter has gaps, spaces and unfinished sentences and you know immediately why they're there and what they're doing. This is a poetry of elegance and grace, of things spoken and unspoken, the known and almost known and the intuited, and it's quite stunning."

"McLean County Highway 39,"

from Divining for Starters, is now up on Michelle McGrane's Peony Moon, at her request. It tries to evoke taking a bike ride through the prairie near where I grew up.

First words on the launch

come from Australian poet Laurie Duggan, who calls Divining for Starters "terrific"!

Divining for Starters, third bite

Today it's a prose poem written for my father, on events that occurred four years ago this month. I hope to see some of you at tonight's launch!

Paternal

A parent a plinth. The first week he regarded hospital as hotel. So the variables include the kind of stone, its consistency, the velocity of prevailing winds. What’s purer than an infidel’s prayer? How strangely, in the second week, the swollen limbs stiffened. And the effects of climate change: milder winters, more precipitation, two, three heat waves each summer. All American, non-Jewish whites are Christian by default. Incredulous, I realise his bicycle may rust and walk it to the shed. Such an ordinary act of reverence. The pulmonologist, the neurologist, the family physician. A bed is a bed is the smallest of bedsores. Blood doesn’t come into it. Ritual, of course, is another matter. A Midwestern town of that size exhibits limited types of architecture. I’ve yet to mention the distance. Come now, to the pivot, the abscess, another end of innocence. In every shop, the woman at the till sings, “Merry Christmas,” a red turtleneck under her green jumper. I thought jumper rather than sweater, a basic equation of space and time. Midnight shuffles the cards. Translated thus, the matter became surgical, a place on the spine. Each night the bicycle breaks out to complete its usual course. A loyalty of ritual or habit. “ICU” means I see you connected to life by wire and tube. A geologist can explain the complexities of erosion. The third week comes with liner notes already becoming apocryphal. Look at this old map, where my fingers once stretched across the sea.

The book is available with free worldwide shipping from The Book Depository.

Divining for Starters, second taste

So tomorrow's the launch, and here's the second sample, from the new issue of Free Verse. These "poems for two voices" may, however, be easier to read on the page than on a computer screen.

The book is available with free worldwide shipping from The Book Depository.

Divining for Starters, first taste

My second collection, Divining for Starters, is now out, and in the three days running up to the London launch, I thought I'd post links to online work from the book. First up is "The Occupation of Iraq," first published in Shearsman and later part of Delirious Hem's 2008 advent calendar, to which this link leads.

The book is available with free worldwide shipping from The Book Depository.

J.L. Williams' Condition of Fire, first selection

Fellow American expat J.L. Williams will be launching her first book, Condition of Fire, alongside my second, Divining for Starters, on the Shearsman reading series on Tuesday, 15 February in London. Here's a short selection. The book is inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses and the islands on which he wrote it.

Helios Retires

How pale the sea,

the pale of rain in pools.

Will the doors with the white whales ever be opened?

Will the horses that pull the sun

ever be harnessed?

J.L. Williams

Condition of Fire

(Shearsman, 2011)

2010

As I approach every birthday and New Year's Eve, I find myself reckoning the last year. Here's 2010 (well, the expurgated version for public consumption....):

This is the year I won the London Festival Fringe New Poetry Award for my first book, The Tethers (Seren, 2009). I cannot explain why it has meant so much to me, but it has given me greater confidence (don't let the American exterior fool you).

This is the year that two of my nieces, Katelyn Etter and Josslyn Casperson, were lost to me. Their mothers, my sisters, had signed over their rights to the state on account of the fierce intimidation and pressurizing they received from state representatives (following my sisters' struggles with drug addiction), and their other parents decided to cut off contact with the entire Etter family, both around early autumn. I long to hear from my nieces but have no expectations.

This is the year the anthology I began working on in August 2007 was published by Shearsman Books, Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, and widely reviewed as well as commented on in the Times Literary Supplement (3 times!) and on the London Review of Books blog. I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of truly positive reviews and only rarely disappointed by small-mindedness, when I thought the proportions would be reversed. Thanks again to all the contributors for their good work.

This is my first whole year without my father, but the lawsuit for medical malpractice against BroMenn Hospital drags on. I long for its settlement for the closure it will bring for my mother most of all, not to mention reimbursement for huge medical bills.

This is the year I was creatively devoted to my second book manuscript, Divining for Starters. After much work, feedback, and more work, I'm heartened by the result.

This is the year I had laser eye surgery. I began wearing contacts at the age of 15 and had to switch to glasses at 35 when my eyes would no longer tolerate the contacts. I've only had this new vision a matter of days, but I'm awed to see unaided for the first time in 26 years. It's--sorry, it's the right word--awesome!