Edward O’Dwyer’s Bad News, Good News, Bad News

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I met Edward O’Dwyer at On the Nail, in Limerick last October, after we had both read on the open mike following the featured readers. He was curious about my book, and I about his, Bad News, Good News, Bad News (Salmon Poetry, 2017), so we traded. His book has a beautiful cover, and he wrote a really lovely inscription.

I also told him I had a daughter who had asked me to bring home “an Irish boy,” and he said, beaming, “Well, you’ve found a single one.”

Reading his poems, he doesn’t seem very single. But as many of the poems appear to be persona poems, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, should he ever show up on our doorstep.

In the interview (to which I’ve linked his name, above) he talks about Bad News and its context. Here’s a poem that I especially enjoyed, the last poem in the book:

The Credits 

(for Naomi, 09/04/2014)

A man with a very large camera
snapped our picture on Downhill Beach
during a week spent in a cottage outside Bushmills.

He said we’d wandered into his shot
yet we are in the centre of the frame, making
it a picture of us, and the intrusion his camera’s.

We are walking away, our backs to him,
the sun setting in front of us.
Our shadows stretch out long behind.

We are two darkened shapes blending,
at mid-distance, but it’s us. We know
it could be nobody else walking towards that sunset.

Here’s the thing: that moment
would have been a fine one for the world to end.
You could easily imagine the four horsemen

sweeping into the frame, and us
taking no great notice, accepting what will be,
wholly content for such a last moment.

This thought I have jokingly shared with you,
coaxing you to imagine that sky coming down,
dropping emphatically on us,

then one of those cinematic fades to black
where, if this were all a film,
the credits would start rolling down.

Sarah de Leeuw’s Skeena

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Perhaps I should cop to my ulterior motive in doing this series.

I am a person who will spend her last dollar on a book. I have a house full of books, a number of them unread, and yet it’s difficult for me to attend a conference or a reading without coming home with … more books.

You know that expression, “like a kid in a candy store.” You can now amend that to, “Like a poet at a book sale.” My ulterior motive, then, is to finally create a good reason to actually read these books all the way through. I bring them home with the best of intentions, and I usually read a poem or two before they find their way to my shelf. Maybe I take them down now and then and read a little more. But I have a bad habit of not taking the time to them all the way through. So that, my friends, is what I’m doing.

Reading Sarah de Leeuw‘s Skeena (Caitlin Press, 2015) was, as with the other books, a surprise and a pleasure. It is not at all the sort of poetry I aspire to write; nonetheless, it had lessons for me in how one might think differently about what a poem is, and what it looks like.

Skeena is a book-length poem about the Skeena, the second-largest river in British Columbia. Leeuw is an award-winning Canadian poet, but she also has a Ph.D. in Geology, and the book is a collage of voices and textures, incorporating photographs, First People’s stories, the voice of the river, geologic time and details, and newspaper accounts. The book is not tidy, divided into ragged sections, and often exploding all over the pages, kind of like a river at floodtime. In addition to the artfulness of the poem’s execution, the dust jacket is a work of art. (Designed and hand screen printed by Briar Craig). Skeena was a finalist for the Willa Literary Award: Women Writing the West.

To hear part of Sarah de Leeuw’s interview with Cascadia Poetry Festival organizer Paul Nelson, including a reading of “Rain” (one of the most experimental of the sections) from Skeena, click here.

The blog does not accommodate poems (not easily) that are choreographed, so I’m going to cheat and share a picture. This is a book I would love to pass along to someone worthy, so let me know if you are interested.

Terrence Hayes’ LIGHTHEAD

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I was privileged to attend Seattle Arts & Lectures three years ago when Terrance Hayes read from his 2010 poetry book Lighthead. It was a performance to remember, and in a rush of gushing enthusiasm I stood in line to buy his book and get it signed by the poet his own dazzling self.

Lighthead is jazz and verve and sex and no-holds-barred, come-at-you-swinging stuff. Hayes plays and dances with language and gets very very serious about race and politics. It’s a book-length elegy for an American Dream of justice, liberty, and equality that died before it was born. He lets no one off the hook, not even himself.

You kind of have to read it — oh taste and see! — to know it. Like a couple other of the books I’ve read this month, this one at times had me wanting to swap it for something simpler. And I admit that sometimes I felt the poems were washing over me, knocking me off my feet. Then, the magic began to work.

Here is just a sample, the first poem in the collection:

Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy

Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state,
I am here because I could never get the hang of Time.
This hour, for example, would be like all the others
were it not for the rain falling through the roof.
I’d better not be too explicit. My night is careless
with itself, troublesome as a woman wearing no bra
in winter. I believe everything is a metaphor for sex.
Lovemaking mimics the act of departure, moonlight
drips from the leaves. You can spend your whole life
doing no more than preparing for life and thinking,
“Is this all there is?” Thus, I am here where poets come
to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice,
something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllables
of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words
and divide until our pronouncements develop selves.
The small dog barking at the darkness has something to say
about the way we live. I’d rather have what my daddy calls
“skrimp.” He says “discrete” and means the street
just out of sight. Not what you see, but what you perceive:
that’s poetry. Not the noise, but its rhythm; an arrangement
of derangements; I’ll eat you to live: that’s poetry.
I wish I glowed like a brown-skinned pregnant woman.
I wish I could weep the way my teacher did as he read us
Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes. When I kiss my wife,
sometimes I taste her caution. But let’s not talk about that.
Maybe Art’s only purpose is to preserve the Self.
Sometimes I play a game in which my primitive craft fires
upon an alien ship whose intention is the destruction
of the earth. Other times I fall in love with a word
like somberness. Or moonlight juicing naked branches.
All species have a notion of emptiness, and yet
the flowers don’t quit opening. I am carrying the whimper
you can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdom
of monkeys. Ask a glass of water why it pities
the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.
Brothers and sisters, when you spend your nights
out on a limb, there’s a chance you’ll fall in your sleep.

–Terrance Hayes

The wisdom of this poem — Lovemaking mimics the act of departure, Not what you see but what your perceive: that’s poetry, an arrangement of derangements — is uncanny and weird (and maybe this is just my own ignorance speaking). It’s hard to get away from, “there’s a chance you’ll fall in your sleep.” Here is a poet playing poetry the way a boy plays basketball, obsessively with a lunatic joy, out on a quaking limb.

Learn more about Hayes by visiting his website: https://terrancehayes.com/.

Alice Fulton’s Barely Composed

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[This post has been updated. 4/18/2018]

Where to begin? Well, after getting a comment (below) from Alice Fulton, I revisited my other books by her. And she’s right! So she didn’t give me a business card that said “word mechanic,” but she read a poem about some other poet giving her a business card.

Even so, reading her latest book, Barely Composed (Norton, 2015), I can still her crawling under the lines to tinker with the parts. She is a wordsmith of the first order.

Fulton has always struck me as unconcerned with making sense. (Though see the comments.) I think this is because I have always been overly concerned with making sense, with being linear, with telling a story. Reading her work challenges me to be more playful, to take more seriously poetry’s higher calling to something beyond mere “sense.”

And Fulton does play! She plays with  clichés and colloquialisms, tosses in science and politics, and somehow gets away with it all (masterfully). Although these poems predate the 2016 presidential election, their refusal to be linear seems to me strangely fitting for our times, and prescient. (As in “Peroral”: “It’s like a prison that makes itself at home in you, / like so not worth it, so not mattering, and so / fair King of Not, you self-release, secede, sowing / misgivings as you go.”) When her dying mother shows up in the book, even sideways references signaled to me the ways in which the poems offer an alternative way to understand what cannot be understood. These poems, in particular, depict for me a world that has been shaken and shattered and glued back together–maybe–but by a person unable to remember where everything goes.

Once you give up trying to make sense of the poems, the lines begin to sizzle and hum. My initial feeling was that I would not be able to read Barely Composed straight through; then I realized that reading it in one sitting was a very good way to read it–total immersion was what finally helped me drop through my resistance and into the sheer admiration that I felt for Fulton from the very first time I encountered her. The final poem, “End Fetish–An Index of Last Lines,” underscored and clarified for me how Fulton’s individual lines pop with emotion and nerve, and maybe some incantational magic as well.

So here is a poem for you to try out for yourself–a sonnet located near the end of the book:

There Are a Few Things I Need to Get

to sleep. A dreamboat of submersible iron,
a sea that rocks, narcotic clock. I need
our feelings to glide and turn in unison, silversides.
Snow gristle, stenciled trees, an ice-breaker
escort–who needs them? Spring’s your favorite season.
You like its green lotions. Touched by its soft tissues,
you don’t miss the jilted winter. Still,
the figure eight motion of lacing a skate
is soothing. A forever effect. Like everything
you do. I’ve plunged past my crush depth. I can tell
by the way paint flashes and my protective
rubber mask melts on my face. It’s not your doing
I like, it’s you. You and your green emollients. Now let us chill.
After we’re exchanted, we come all so still.

In 2016 Fulton was the Roethke reader at the University of Washington. She signed Barely Composed for me, and wrote: “With thanks for your generous spirit tonight, and gratitude for your presence across the centuries.”

You don’t always have to know what a thing means to appreciate it. And I do.