Jennifer Moxley's The Line (Post-Apollo Press, 2007), second selection

A little context from the blurb by Rosmarie Waldrop: "We're in the state between sleep and waking, where consciousness resists the tasks of reason and routine but instead views, from the perspective of darkness, the whole span from newborn promise to the old mammals, erosion of muscle."

"Morning after morning while you lay sweatily wedged between weary physicality and tedious selfhood the punctilious programs of the already dead tromp heavily through your mind."

* * *

"It is my belief that this tedium all started when the elusive present you so longed to possess at last became all that was left."

from "Mortal Aurora"

"Is this the reason old houses comfort you? Their sleep allows for mysterious things--filmy journeys over ethereal banks, star-by-star stone-stepping, beneath your feet soft waters of nothingness and centuries of hidden thought--events that work your defeatist will into a strange elation."

last stanza of "The Milky Way"

"The gift of minor eternity, on a brief mammalian scale, is not this relentless coming to be but the tale you will later tell about it. It is a kind of love, insofar as it moves you."

last stanza of "The Sadness of Old Mammals"

"I sleep with approximately 14,000 days sitting on my chest. A slow hour many years old pushes aside yesterday's appetites and enters as a whisper through an unmuffled ear: 'remember me, remember me, remember me!'"

from "The Periodic Table"

"What an idiot! Why did he choose inevitable defeat by picking the fancy solution?"

end of "The Mattress Raft"

"Why does this poem exist? Nobody knows. But it seems to be mourning the ideal."

end of "The Wrong Turn"

"The lives of the rich are so fabulous! The destruction of the poetical lies heavily on their hands, as on their swollen notion that we are always watching. There is nothing behind the mask. Nothing suffocating under its pressure, no human essence trying to get out."

* * *

"It is easy to lose, through meddling or neglect, an entire aspect of existence. And sometimes, to cultivate a single new thought, you need not only silence but an entirely new life."

from "The Atrophy of Private Life"

"You are plagued nightly by memory-pictures of a time that no longer exists. Admit it, some illogical part of you secretly believes you can go back. The place hasn't vanished, perhaps it even looks the same, but the angle of time that became what you laughingly call your 'experience' is gone. Except in the deceitful subjunctive."

opening of "The Cover-Up"

Jennifer Moxley's The Line (Post-Apollo Press, 2007), first selection

Jennifer Moxley's outstanding book, The Line, is one of the best books of prose poems I've ever read. I'd like to copy here the following poems in their entirety: "The State," "The Endless Conscription," "The Pitiful Ego," "The Interruption," "The Clock" and "The Railing." You'll just have to read those for yourself, as I don't want to infringe on copyright. Here is a first set of selected passages. This sentence from Alice Notley's blurb gives some useful context: "These prose poems tell the story of sleeping and waking, of this very bout of writing, of the search for the line of time and the poet's immortality."

"Newborn, palpable loneliness shakes you from even the deepest sleep. Against the cold air and shadowed darkness flooded with sudden consciousness the vulnerable flesh recoils. In the liminal all times converge. Severed memories long for the text, the comfort of dialectic."

first half of "The Promise"

"The heartbreak of time is not that it passes but rather the language yoke. By grace of grammar alone the moment's fleeting existence."

from "In One Body and One Soul"

"How many more days will you awaken? The flesh envies the word's longevity but not its delayed effects."

* * *

"You are asleep before belief, held captive mid-metamorphosis."

from "Awake"

"Yesterday was exhausting, yet there is no meaningful reason to think you are lost for good. Though sometimes you do."

from "Address"

"You have accepted that this repetition will kill you, though it remains your only hope."

* * *

"With no new experience to feed it your amulet mind seeks asylum in imaginary visions of a falsified past."

from "Experience"

"True faith does not need the state to enforce it. It makes neither hope, nor a shroud."

"You will walk out of the visible and learn to accept the darkness. You will find the line. It extends backward eternally into the past and forward into the future. The utterance cup, the gentle metric, old words new mind lost time and loves."

* * *

"In other words, write. Find time in words. Replace yourself cell by letter, let being be the alphabetic equation, immortality stay the name."

from "The Line"

"You step off the curb into nothingness where the line offers itself to your hands. Grab hold or fall. Happy in the thought you might never recover you consign your trust to this flimsy thread that nobody else can see."

end of "Mystical Union"

In the UK, Jennifer Moxley's The Line is prohibitively expensive. In the US, you can obtain it from Small Press Distribution, but its UK shipping charges are high because they use FedEx, so I have to recommend Amazon.com, which will charge $15 for the book and $3.99 for international shipping. So, who wants to borrow my copy first?

The day's on fire! (literally and figuratively!)

A few months ago, Claire Crowther and I decided we'd take a week to write, enclosing ourselves in her and her husband's flat in Somerset (without said husband, lovely though he is). When I  submitted the leave form for work, I could hardly believe I was taking a week off solely for my writing--for years I've combined my visits home with writing rather than going to writers' retreats, but since my father's illness and death (that is, since February '07), it's been harder to set aside the time to do so given increased family responsibilities. 

So this is that week. Claire and I arrived in Somerset on Sunday night, made dinner, and talked about our plans. We'd decided to introduce one another to a poet who was important to us; we'd write from first thing in the morning till lunch, then get out for a while, then come back for dinner and to work; we'd comment on one another's poems; we'd read some of the books we'd been wanting to read; we'd get started on some reviews. 

And we've had three heat-ridden, exhausting, vegetarian (with the understanding that I'm not--yet--vegetarian), exciting, tremendous days.

We both came with different goals. I wanted to settle into work on my second book, Divining for Starters; Claire had many poems she wanted to revise; we both had reviews we hoped to start and finish for TLS. Because of mutual determination and reinforcement, we've both been successful. I read and took notes on Jennifer Moxley's Imagination Verses and reread Linda Gregg's Too Bright to See and have begun reading--and loving--Luke Kennard's latest, The Migraine Hotel; I drafted three poems on the first day, two poems each day since, pushing myself to experiment with form and style; and I'm well into my review for TLS, which I expect to finish by week's end. But the least measurable element has been the best--a steady stream of conversation about poetry, romantic relationships, family, and more poetry. I've never had a better friend.

Jennifer Moxley's Imagination Verses (Tender Buttons, 1996; Salt, 2003)

I could have grown tall,

but I awoke to no words and wonder left.

"Home World"

...equal measures

of air and earth

came to me

precious enough,

I wore them

well knowing

my thoughts

would think me

hollow, exiled

to the abandoning

company

of all

my illusory 

ends.

last lines of "Ode on the End"

(double spaced in the original)

down that rabbit hole my liege

I'm a camera gathering brightness

"Bi-coastal Fleshings"

Were we the land's

before we were landed?

"The Winged Words"

Where is my field of wheat,

my flock, my ocean,

my arsenal, my knight errant.

"Ode on the Son"

I dreamt

a petal's depth of hatred

            hovered at my ear

while vagaries worked

            to rough me up.

*

                  A girl,

I have seen tragedy

      consider being

such as we are.

"Ten Still Petals"

and know again

there's a place for us, and such

a country.

end of "Underlying Assumptions"

(double spaced in the original)

Come along, you can join us 

if you lose that proclivity 

for worship--any medium size

planet will do. Just think,

four walls and a microwave

could really keep us busy.

end of "Studio Life"

(doubled spaced in the original)

I grow phallic

with each dissemination

"The Removal of Enlightenment Safeguards"

It's as if to be real

you and I must garner backers

without a rib to call our own.

We make ripples

with daily effort and then suddenly

flood the place with anger.

opening lines of "Ode to Protest"

(double spaced in the original)

enough

ignorance

to fell unclouded truth, truth

like a tunnel to the heart

            fluttering

*

punished dreamer

failed redeemer

man, or country

"The Ballad of Her rePossession"

(double spaced in the original)

...in the frozen field of aim, beside the gift of all intention

            perhaps I'll cry away the day

            perhaps I'll choose a different wreck

perhaps I'll live this appalling destiny

                  in the economy of night.

the end of "Wake"

(double spaced in the original)

I suspect the water's edge is enamored of the water,

a quiver on the surface tells me not the wind

but the wish to drift will devastate the sand.

It is the future's focal infection, this insistence on death, 

like when my mother and father cradled me

as the answer to each other's desperate tread towards union.

For this is a universe where things are not apparent

in their cruelty, but continual, and the sweetness of order

is increasingly evanescent. If I could hide this day forever

from the pleasure of renewal and banish all contingency

from happening I would, but I have never seen planet X

or the wooden ships on the Eastern horizon.

Up until now my life has faced West, sequestered

reason reaching for an injudicious kiss.

second and final stanza of

"The Waver in the Orbit of Uranus Becomes Unexplainable"

...we have built what we imagine

others building. Behind other

summer-lit windows 

there must be wall paper

worth waking up to....

*

                                    It was

the year the phones went dead

on Mother's Day, though most mothers

preferred fully realized human potential

to letters home or regular calls.

"Lucky So and So"