Poetry at Gulliver's, Manchester, 24 June 2015

We had a small, attentive audience for our reading last night at Gulliver's in Manchester. The readers were Carola Luther, Brian Bartlett, Stephen Burt and I. So many good poems and such great company! Here are some photos of the evening--unfortunately I missed snapping a picture of Peter Riley as he had to hurry off for a train.

Neil Campbell, Scott Thurston, and Evan Jones

Nearly the whole gang! (I didn't mean to cut off Carola Luther!)

Jessie Bennett and Stephen Burt

Claire Thompson and Alec Newman

Evan Jones and Carola Luther

Steven Waling carrying a copy of Imagined Sons 


  

My former student Zoë Howarth-Lowe (on the right) and her dad

Peter Riley's Due North (Shearsman, 2015), third and final selection

My thanks go to Tony Frazer, editor at Shearsman Books, and Peter Riley, for allowing me to post so many quotations. Here's a final round of favourite passages from Riley's new collection:


...they asked us what songs we'd brought with us.

*

We'll evict ourselves when we need to.

*

from "VII. Lateral Spread and Forward March. Erwartung. Préludes."

Apocalypse too is lullaby.  

from IX

That name I was, blown away in cloud as this life must flit

with the winged seed driven under the stone, calling in vain for respite. 

*

Break the lifeline down to the pain and

desire that everyone knows. There is nowhere else. There is nowhere else

to be or speak. The earth enters you back into its folds unsatisfied, there

is no other song; there is only September, when the falling year offers us

everything there is, and teaches us to measure the distance. 

*

A network of bright lines falls over experience, like a field system, breaking

the grip of totality as the wave breaks on the shore or the air on the

mountain side. In and across these polygons we attach principles and

mitigate conflict. It is painful walking downhill on stones with exhausted

calves but script will bear us to the end.

*

Language failed him.

As it fails us all, and we tighten the cord on the tent flap asking sleep

come shine along. 

from "XI. The Ascent of Kinder Scout"

Who comes in the form of a black dove

and flies into the future?

*

How am I to resolve the contradictions? Parts of the brain

close down and the music touches the heart. But to rescue us

We need the mind entire. The mind the place the night the river

the stars the black bird and the wine. We cannot afford wine

Or toffee, or mother's milk. All flesh is as grass but

we can't afford grass. Yours faithfully.

from "XII. Angel Meadow"

Buy this book directly from the publisher here.

Peter Riley's Due North (Shearsman, 2015), second selection

Some favourite passages:


                                       Our old romances return

freshly laundered on the backs of migrant workers

from former colonies and recent war zones.

*

Take me into a war

where the compass point searches for the heart

and a continent gathers around a companionship of respite.

*

There is too much poetry, it infiltrates alien discourses.

The financial news is given out in metaphors and stage accents,

and only the initiated know what's happening

*

                                      ...when I consider

the termination of my life the owls call, meaning no harm,

and the northern windows rattle the windows.

A shrinking recess in the dark surface of place

holds such authenticity as is left. This stinking Eden (clarts etc.).

from "IV: Strangers Arriving. Soldiers Returning"

Like leaving school, a sudden cold field,

Yes/no questions: what are you going to be? (c1956)

*

Indeed we know we are nothing, our language is lies

       my sighs, my broken words, the sink of my passion

into inarticulacy, the everyday which is where we live

in which we are trapped

       Gentle shepherd, rain on the window

                 It is an honour.

*

Gentle fold in the hillside where we sit and sing

of the world's lapses....

*

                                                 We are not mad. Reality

is not hidden. We prove it, with our hands, at work, perfectly clean.

A bitter wind in the night, cold and damp infiltrates

the house through the walls

        hope through dreams of fear.

*

...the casual and cynical madness of the press.

*

...on railway bridges in Heaton Norris in wild

                     costumes of the soul with small notebooks....

*

                               We were told

          we were alone and refused to believe it....

*

I like this town                                    "I want to be remembered

I like its nervousness

I like being excluded                          as a blue cloud

I want to be forgotten

and melt back into company              in a white sky"

*

To reach the shining port of our melancholy

                  that levers us into a new world

                            through a darkness with an arch over the entrance

                                         reading "Work Makes You Tired".

from "V: Locospotters"

In sleep "we" is restored to the choral "I"

And the singing can start

the great chant of humanity suddenly unafraid

under contract, rights to offset duties

*

All' mein Wirkin, all' mein Leben

All my working, all my life

All my doing, all my finishing

                 devolves on you

attentive ear, shielded breast.

*

                    Events, lives, spinning into light or dark through dream

The grammar of our quest a squaring

of this spin, lakeside cabin in snow

from "III: Water Songs. Schubert/Goethe.

Mayakovsky the Russian Scarecrow"

You can purchase Due North directly from Shearsman books here.

Peter Riley's Due North (Shearsman, 2015), first selection

Some favourite passages:



                    ...raising the head, learning wisdom

in a form of desire, a distance to be gained, learning to wait,

           absence of question-marks, Orphic stasis.

*

                       ...wood smoke drifting across the fields

         dividing thought                between love and duty

*

Tell me-- how from the vast emptiness of the million words

the short phrase strikes the bone between the eyes,

tell me how the world is altered, so little

tell me as little as possible, tell me falsetto

        tell me all night--


*

Then sustain it, tell me

        what you have, lost or left

        in a language beautifully linked

that you could tell the links one by one

like the links in a silver chain, a silver

        tested and coined, fixed in the moon's side,

                   over the end of the world

and we'll get there, reach

         the flowered arbor, the chambered tomb

                             crawl into it and read the stone

with difficulty (about honour).       Then answer


Where are you from?

*

Tenant farmers above Halifax,

world of clarts and slopstone

and the rain singing in the yard.

from "I: Housman's Question"

And another child is born,
somnolent in white lace
and always welcome (what 
is a sky without a star in it?) 1830s urban
infant mortality rate 50% (what is a sky
without a soul in it?) soul tugging at
soul under a black sky.

*

stations built of overlapping chords, where we

laid our heads on the hard wooden benches and

dreamed our own cathedrals, man woman and child.

from "II: A Lost Patrimony"

...as the year points to the stars chattering

in the morning sky with a lark's clarity, the stars fading away.

*

As I came into this world far from

any centre, pratensis "of the fields" so I

moved out, seeking a hand in darkness as 

a child against the wandering fires in the night fields

learning to breathe in the world's fullness

a single truth, that held a dying hand, far from any centre.

*

...consolation for a life of dread

as death is warmed to.

*

                                                          ...under the kestrel's path we moved

out and back, seasonally or daily,

                                                           going to Marks & Spencer's for a shirt

well beyond the northern limits of the nightingale.

*

...and wafts us out of our indulgences

to the waking place, the narrow cot, the birthing light

                          not far from the duties. Or Elektra's

                          sentence.

from "III: The Generations. The Dispersals. Funeral Duties"

You can purchase Due North directly from Shearsman Books here.

Peter Riley's Greek Passages (2009)

In the quotations that follow, the slashes are not line breaks, but punctuation the author's inserted in prose poems, because that's how Peter Riley rolls in Greek Passages (Shearsman Books, 2009). As all the poems are untitled, know that each new passage comes from a separate poem.

Small chirruping cries, echoed along the coastal cliffs.

*

Our sustenance dragged across our fear....

*

The light of our souls downcast / onto the stones of the shore / Money, what have you done?

*

Wake into fallen dark / the labyrinth cut into the open

*

...when I / catch that music, / tuned to the distant hurt, the small voice.

*

I don't make a narrative, I / await an arrival, a song.

*

Coachloads arrive wanting to buy something / something redemptive, though it might not last. / / Up in the windy hills the rain / marginalises us, serving / every cell of the landscape.

*

Justice that survives in the tales while the actuality lies ten feet down a shaft grave. There was no justice.

*

The mind is a cold and lonely place, its doors locked. Outside in the moving air is where things happen.... / / The orange butterflies speckled black or brown, that vanished with the first rain.

*

But there is an immediacy, a smoking chimney, somebody looks up from the news. The singing is unstoppable. A gecko runs across the wall-o.

*

We are reduced to a single moment, a shout of denial, a syllable in the night. Then we are finished.

*

The clear picture, the better articulation, the linear spread. Lord it is lonesome among poor remnants of success, struggling to recognise the world.

*

The answering, the brightened heart, a refuge because a resource, and a resilience, a burgeoning, a dazzling sanity.

*

...look / at it there, the plurality shining in the night / seeking questions for its answers. 

*

...the secular complexity devolving on hope / the lyric of everyday....

*

Arriving at dawn in the foothills of Taigétos / the dark shapes becoming known, sense / unfolding from the eastward slopes, a little misty, beginning to breathe /

*

Whitethroated sea / discursive light / pale red wine holding / a gleam in the glass / Dionysiac calm

*

Conversing with the dead at another entrance to Hades, continuous with the sky.

*

And lyric redeems narrative, and hand in hand on the edge of the sand . . . / The small boat entering the harbour, turning the engine off, drifting to the quayside, carrying home, by the light of the moon.

Purchase Peter Riley's Greek Passages directly from the publisher, Shearsman Books, here.

Peter Riley's Chapters of Age (Open House Editions, Leafe Press, 2013)

A lovely skinny pamphlet with the subtitle, 'Stone landscapes of Inishmore and Burren, May 2010'. Here are some favourite passages:


Chapters of age: increasingly anxiety,
Histories beyond credence,
Massive stone forts in mist.

*

And sing still and louder sing,
Psalmic impulsions rolling over the moor
Seeking an imperfect cadence.

*

Where is the musician or architect
Who built me this weary smile?

*

Saw everything from there, the rich
And the poor, the cloud descending,
The cattle driven over the cliff.

*

For there are answers to fear, 
Common or garden,
That singing up the coast.



You can get the pamphlet for £3.50 by buying it directly from Leafe Press.
 

Imagined Sons (Seren Books, 2014)

I'm delighted to announce that Seren Books, which did such an impressive job with my first collection, The Tethers, will be publishing my third book of poetry, Imagined Sons. This is my first strongly thematic work, exploring a birthmother's consciousness through two kinds of poems: Imagined Sons, prose poems where the birthmother encounters the son in different guises once he's come of age (baker, hotel clerk, surfer, black olive, etc.) and catechisms, where the same recurring question provokes different answers over time.

I first completed a draft of the manuscript in 2006 and produced a pamphlet manuscript from it for Oystercatcher Press in 2009, The Son, which was named the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for that quarter. Poems in the book have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, The Iowa Review, Long Poem Magazine, New Walk, New Welsh Review, PN Review, The Republic of Letters and The Times Literary Supplement.

Reviews of The Son have been wonderfully heartening, with Peter Riley describing it as "quite startling--a serious work about loss through a terrific play of imaginative resource." David Morley wrote in Poetry Review: "Carrie Etter's sparkling, serious beating-out of prose poetry and catechism continues in a finely judged sequence, grieving and honouring and surprising on every page. 'It is time' (Etter quotes Celan) 'the stone made an effort to flower'. And so this fine book, its respect, sadness and subject." 

Over the next few days, I'll be giving the manuscript its probably hundredth read and searching for potential images for the book's cover. A great way to spend what's forecast as a rainy weekend!

 

 

 

Two Oystercatcher pamphlets: Birds by Allen Fisher and Twelve Moons by Peter Riley (both 2009)

On my travels, if I want a book that'll fit in my backpack-style handbag, I grab a pamphlet or two, and the last two such titles I took were Birds by Allen Fisher and The Twelve Moons by Peter Riley. While I'll include some excerpts below, as both pamphlets are composed of short lyric poems, many of the poems are most successful as a whole, so I have quoted only a portion of the pamphlets' best writing here.


From Allen Fisher's Birds:


until a swan opens his wings in my head

from "17"

look out on a culture too

late for recovery to

avoid narrative traps delineations

of low blow whistles to

demonstrate sonic coherence

or some parody of fairness

second half of "18"

ashen air

beneath scratches of bright sun

end of "23"

Peter Riley's The Twelve Moons consists of his versions of Chinese poet Li Ho, also known as Li He (700-816 AD):

for hundreds of miles bright wind in the vegetation

a warm mist blown down to earth

from "3rd Moon"

Cool at dusk and dawn, all the trees

a thousand mountains, green depths beyond clouds

faint perfume in the rain falling through greenery

*

old red flowers on the ground, glow in tree-shade.

beginning and end of "4th Moon"

The palace walls stretch into cold daylight

*

Bells! this wine has waited a thousand days

we drink against the cold, to the Emperor

from "11th Moon"

Buy these pamphlets directly from the publisher: here for Birds, here for The Twelve Moons.

Poetry, walking, and Peter Riley

Read Billy Mills on Peter Riley's "walking poem" and poetry and walking more broadly on his Guardian blog.

Pamphlets

Homecoming

Dancing Girl Press, September 2013
$7 US plus P&P / £5 direct

Homecoming picks up on a sense of isolation in the American Midwest as well as its emphasis on the more positive attributes of family life. Thus when the father falls to injury and illness, his decline upsets the meanings of family, selfhood and home. Poems in Homecoming first appeared in Court Green, New Welsh Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, The Times Literary Supplement and The Warwick Review.

Positive reviews have appeared in Sabotage Reviews, Elsewhere and Luna Luna.

* * * 

Divinations

Punch Press, June 2010

$10 US / $15 elsewhere (SOLD OUT)

Twenty poems from the series Divining for Starters, originally published in Alterran Poetry Assemblage, Cannot Exist, Damn the Caesars, Gists & Piths, Great Works, The Liberal, Painted, spoken, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Wales, Shearsman, and Tenth Muse.

* * *

The Son

Oystercatcher Press, September 2009

ISBN 9781905885244

£4 including UK p&p

Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice

Peter Riley describes The Son as "quite startling--a serious work about loss through a terrific play of imaginative resource," while the selectors of the pamphlet choice remark, "There is something too, about how time moves, or how it doesn't, in a world akin to that nightmare in which you are running and running and your legs are jelly and you are getting nowhere. The fact that the poems in this collection are either prose poems, which can shuffle on the spot, rather than move along with a sense of narrative, or catechisms which go back and forth with different responses to the same question, adds to an overall feeling of being trapped. Indeed, these poems work by accretion, so the more you read, the more powerful that feeling becomes."

Other reviews include Alan Baker on his blog, Litterbug; three at Sphinx, by Rob A. MacKenzie, Marcia Menter, and Helena Nelson; and Rupert Loydell in Shadowtrain.

The Son evokes a birthmother's consciousness through two kinds of poems: Imagined Sons, prose poems which envision the now-grown son and birthmother in a moment of contact; and Birthmother's Catechisms, in which the same question--e.g., What day is today?, How did you let him go?--recurs with changing answers. Moreover, after Al Qaeda's attacks on the US in 2001, the anniversary of the son's birth becomes complicated by the fact that both occur on September 11th.

Many of the pamphlet's poems have already been published in Barrow Street, PN Review, The Republic of Letters, and The Times Literary Supplement.

The Son comes from a book-length manuscript, Imagined Sons, presumably forthcoming. It was launched at Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath on 26 October 2009, along with Janet Sutherland's second collection, Hangman's Acre (Shearsman).

* * *

Yet
Leafe Press, February 2008
ISBN 9780953540198
£3.50 (UK) / $8.00 (US) (SOLD OUT)

"Technically Etter often makes use of the arresting juxtapositions of new sentence writing (in both prose and lineated forms) but counterpoints these with threaded-through continuities that generate more settled overall arguments. This is used to great effect in 'Paternal', which hints at family illness, even death, but in a way which keeps pathos firmly at bay [...]. Elsewhere this technique simply allows more space into the poem, and for the mind to savour the relationships between images as much as the images themselves [...]. Yet is an excellent introduction to Etter's work for British readers and promises much for her new books due this year and next."

--Scott Thurston, Stride

"The eighteen or so poems here vary in structure, intent and layout—sometimes it seems perversely so, but Etter is a poet who knows exactly what she is doing. This isn’t in any sense an easy collection and I mean that as an endorsement. I was intrigued, impressed and ultimately bowled over by its hard-won lyricism."

--Eleanor Livingstone, Sphinx

* * *

Subterfuge for the Unrequitable
Potes & Poets, 1998
ISBN 9780937013793
$6.00 (SOLD OUT)

To “register the tongue’s torque,” Carrie Etter’s poems show great skill and a willingness to take risks, both rare things in a “first book.” This writing is simultaneously “out there” and always also immediately present (in the most literal sense of “with it”), an experience that is by turns centering and dizzying. It’s quite a ride.

Ron Silliman

Attention and compassion direct this finely chiseled work. Etter’s quick eye focuses on precise moments of change and of emergence—those crucial moments where life gets really interesting—and sculpts them into wholes with an unusually attuned ear, an ear that catches always a subtle music and often a marvelous oddity—what an agile vocabulary! These are poems that wake you up when you thought you were already awake.

Cole Swensen