Connie Voisine's Calle Florista (University of Chicago, 2015)

Connie and I are both graduates of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of California, Irvine, and I was glad to have her read to my students Thursday while she's spending her sabbatical in the UK. Here are some favourite passages from her new collection, Calle Florista:


There weren't flowers so much as
cats, at least a hundred, lounging in the neighbor's yard
while the bushes roiled with kittens.

from "Calle Florista"

Maybe the soul isn't a fussy eater--

still, it is ravenous

and expensive, like a defensive lineman.

from "I Admit that I Believe that Ideas Exist Regardless"

The book's perfume lifted as you touched it: must, dead clover, wood smoke. 

Your flesh became silk, limpid, luminous.

from "Annunciation"

The pond wants to be the sun that dumps its sugar on the grass.

*

The shoe wants to be the buckle that the girl shines with a cloth.

The buckle wants to be the magpie lifting what shines.

from "Testament"

The holy is 

otherwise,

nowhere. Where

the non-fog

waits in the 

no-cleft.

end of "After"

And of course night comes on

just as you desired. As do the wild pigs

snuffling in the desert, as do the wolves

spangled with hunger, and the hunger itself 

that lopes through my house.

Your desire is dark,

whoever you are, and igneously

formed by heat.

Cooling, it litters my slopes.

end of "Psalm to Whoever Is Responsible"

There aren't enough doves

in North America to fill

the gondola of you.

Onions are fallible, only

pretending to be infinite....

the opening of "A World's Too Little for Thy Tent,

A Grave Too Big for Me"

This country wakes to turn off the light,

and it's no other dark but yours.

end of "Prayer of the St. of the Hottest Night

in Las Cruces"

Remember, no matter how hard you tried,
there were no proper

shoes for this.

from "In the Shade"

In the UK, Calle Florista is available from Foyle's Books here.

Divining for Starters, or How It Began and Begins and Begins

"Divining for Starters (65)" is now up at Intercapillary Space. Edmund Hardy, one of the editors, asked me where the phrase came from, and here's an attempt at an answer.

My series of poems "Divining for Starters" began with the first two written in late 1999. I was in my third year of the Ph.D. program in English at the University of California, Irvine, and was completing my graduate coursework, which included an emphasis in critical theory. The emphasis involved a 3-course, year-long survey, and a required number of optional courses, which for me included Marxist Literary Theory with Rey Chow and Pardon and Perjury with Jacques Derrida. Anyway, in 1997 or '98 I read Derrida's seminal essay, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," and related writings, and began thinking about this Western compulsion to create/assert origins, and the way this compulsion is embedded in our thinking--it's a new day, new project, new year, new beginning, and so on, always suggesting we can decide such an origin simply by stating it (I know I'm getting away from the Derrida now; this is the direction my thoughts took me in when I thought of the work more abstractly later). That was the idea when I wrote the first, and hence unnumbered, "Divining for Starters," and I explored the idea more explicitly in "Divining for Starters (2)" a few months later. For me, the phrase divining for starters means trying to find a way to create a beginning, to originate while acknowledging one is always in medias res. I think many people, consciously or unconsciously, live by divining for starters, and each poem in the series considers the possibility of a particular new origin or the possibility/problem of deciding an origin more generally.

I'd be glad for questions that may help me clarify this answer further.