In Caroline Knox’s nimble new collection Flemish, a poem entitled simply “They” begins: “They live in a mobile home/made of Adobe Caslon.” The elided antecedent here could very well be Knox’s poems; while maintaining a healthy awareness of themselves as constructed objects (“black and white graphic art,” Knox has called them), they simultaneously feel in constant, and deliriously unpredictable, motion. Vehicles, metaphoric, historical, or embroidered on pillows, abound in these poems. In “Harley Lyric”, Knox has somehow managed, with her characteristic wit, to conflate a medieval manuscript of miscellanea and the eponymous “chopper”—and with a tonal palette at once brassy and arcane. There is something playful, almost giddy, in these poems—they create the sense of setting out on a road trip, purposeless and hopeful. Flemish is Caroline Knox’s 8th poetry collection, her third from the excellent Wave Books. This year, six of her poems were included in the second edition [...]
Sarah Eggers
The Meaning Comes Close All the cognates. This knowledge we’ve invented. Refracted by motion. Disguised as the moon. Built of shells. All the stranger. And without a word for. Materiality has a fulcrum. Where these narratives move. As functions of the wind. _________________________________________________________ Sophie Sills‘ full length book of poetry, Elemental Perceptions: A Panorama was released from BlazeVOX Books in the winter of 2010. Her poems and literary criticism have appeared in various journals. She lives in Los Angeles and publishes the Peacock Online Review. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Wallace Stevens Poem of the Week: Emily Pettit Would you like a Signed Copy of Mark Strand’s New Book? Poem of the Week: Bernadette Mayer Poem(s) of the Week: M.A. Vizsolyi
__________________________________________________________________ Phoebe Giannisi is a poet and architect. She works as an assistant professor at the University of Thessaly in Greece, where she teaches design and poetics related to urban space and landscape. She is interested in the performative and acoustic dimensions of poetry, and she organizes in situ poetic performances in public spaces. In 2010 she was co-curator for the Greek Pavilion of the 12th International Architecture Exhibition (La Biennale di Venezia). She is the author of several poetry collections including Loops (Nefeli Editions) and Homerica (Kedros Editions), as well as the chapbooks Sea Urchins and Ramazan. She has also published numerous books on Ancient Greek poetics and architecture. Read one of her chapbooks . Related Posts Poem of the Week: Takashi Hiraide Poem of the Week: Aaron Simon Poem of the Week: Josh Hockensmith Poem of the Week: Dorothea Lasky Poem of the Week: Jason Labbe
The Scottish Play The Scottish play the bagpipes with dignity to escort people from here to there. You can read about this in Wee Gillis. An English teacher was teaching himself Finnish: “Every morning my wife and daughters ask me, Have you finished your Finnish?” Well, had he? Finnan Haddie! It’s an appealing idea, costumed musicians accompanying you wherever you go. Bath is an antithesis of Scotland, fount vs. tarn. Elsewhere, a mighty pinto was named Atlas not because he was strong (which he was), but because his markings described the Americas. Suppose you are headed up the crags to visit this tarn. In the US your car has bumpers; in the UK, guards. Bumpers is defeatist, isn’t it? As if you knew you’d crash. This text could be set in Helvetica. ________________________________________________________ Caroline Knox‘s sixth book, Quaker Guns (Wave, 2008), received a Recommended Reading Award 2009 from the Massachusetts [...]
Sad Indianapolis I go to the movie theatre to look at the rows of exit lights just to feel like I’m landing in my life. I tried to pull the world back from the explosion; but it is snowing; the sky looks like falling ash. Each morning I stitch together a moment, say, the muted light around a bowl of peaches, but soon the junior senator in me so timidly casts his vote for desire I can barely pour the milk. Sad Indianapolis, famous only for a race that comes once a year, the noise so loud it evacuates the head briefly and orderly like a fire drill; then it all returns: worries, regrets, Yvonne, the hilltop, endless strip- mall parking lots where I would sit as a teenager, the tongue of the world on my battery, and feel a huge, yet exact emptiness, as if someone were unfolding thousands [...]
On a recent gloriously sunny afternoon, I had the privilege of sitting down to talk over lunch with the poet Anne Winters, author of two critically acclaimed volumes of poetry and several translations. I was introduced to Ms. Winters’ work in graduate school and, ever since, have been an ardent admirer of her lushly orchestrated, yet intimate and searingly honest poems about the “big issues” that so many contemporary poets seem to shy away from: race, class, poverty, and gender. Or, more to the point, the intersection of these forces playing out in individual lived experiences, including those of the poet. Fittingly for a poet raised in New York City and for whom that city serves as muse, subject and mise en scéne, Ms. Winters chose to meet at Saul’s, a Jewish delicatessen incongruously nestled in the heart of Berkeley, CA, where she now resides. Over outsized latkes and steaming [...]
It was after an initial reading that left me intrigued yet oddly ill-at-ease, that a tidbit in Caroline Knox’s laconic introduction to her new collection of poems from Wave Books, The Nine Worthies, helped me, if not entirely to penetrate a body of work that at times seems to take as its subject matter the very notion of the impenetrability of language, then at least to begin to understand the cause of my own disquietude. The clue (an apt noun considering that Nine Worthies is perhaps formally closer to a mystery novella than to a standard collection of modern lyric verse) that Knox provides is this: that the eighteenth century New England “real life” characters that inhabit these interlocking prose poems are in the midst of experiencing the “end of [their] Englishness.” The year, we are told in an epigraph to the book, is 1756; the locations Boston and Newport. [...]