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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819570512 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2012 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 68 |
| File size: | 948 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
HOW TO DROWN A WOLF
If your mother's like mine wanting you honeyed and blithe
you'll get drowned by getting evicted
since the mothers can teach with a dustpan the tons of modes of tossing.
And the fathers will lift your eyes too-early-too-open:
the fathers can creep up on anything when it's still too wet
to cloister with their weeping and strand you like a seed
or drown at the carnivals with the can-do caroling
and storefronts and foodstuffs and annulments and Scotch
and off-handed fucking and walking out and moving on
until you've got the drift of wanting a whole river up in you
and got pretty much the gist
of you needing your crannies hot with a good man's body-silt until your head is stuffed with a pining for diapers
and the most minuscule spoons made mostly of silver
and Ajax too and Minwax Oh
in this the dumbstruck story of the American female
as a shard of terracotta and some driftwood in a dress
while howling at the marrow of the marrow of the bone.
THE HOSPITALITY
It all started when I got the inkling my parents were odd. I mean, after I could feel it. I mean, after I got the eyes to see I was missing an Easter dress because I was missing a God because I was watching All in the Family on the trifling TV, though don't say we were lacking in turpentine. Oh, there were agents for anything we wanted! There was the agent for stripping
and the agent for bonding. There was the agent for cleansing when Mama washed our records in the sink while she mixed the marinade to douse the beef and somewhere upstairs Daddy mixed his paints and somewhere downtown Mama's new boyfriend mixed the finish for some antique and some lawyer's wife mixed the sugar to the salad for it was the South at the time and we were hot
were we not
and there was always something to saturate since this was the '70s when everything was always awash such as the boys on the news in so much blood the blood somehow left Vietnam to grow over my eye a monocle so magic that wherever I was I could see everything such as the agent with which my parents killed the weeds that ravaged the yard and the agent they tossed into the tub
when they were done with the lawn and wanted only to bathe so they could dress and drink the agents they mixed with the other agents when the ten or so thousand thirsty men and women came to that house that was singing almost it was so cordial I mean lethal I mean mannerly okay and courteous all right and good and decent and sweet.
THE THEATRE PEOPLE
As I remember, they were enormous, like countless cymbals striking, each one in sickly separation the whole show coming through the door
with me as nothing-but-epidermis in the tub back when I'm nine or ten bathing during my parents'
parties while eyeing the pink robe on the iron hook
since the actors, playwrights, poets, painters, and windfall ass-biters would always have to pee or vomit or put the lid down and smoke a joint
and take a breather, I remember they'd say, while I'd fill up my two palms and drink the tap water as hot as it would come since I guess that was my medicine
against how much they loathed the war and Phyllis Schlafly and Richard Nixon and each other if they were breaking up or themselves if they were drunk,
which they were, for I remember tumblers and I remember stumbling: I remember jingling at the wrists and stretched-out black eyelashes and somehow-hectic
Capri pants
because even if that wasn't really Anne Sexton in my bathroom swallowing pâté
so she could throw it all up so the pants would fit the next day, it always was
Anne Sexton and Dylan Thomas and their vaporous faces in there calling me little girl and weeping and mumbling and shivering and shaking
until I'd stand up and dry off and stroke their swollen hands until they were enormous again downstairs with the others singing loud enough
to wake a far-flung neighborhood. Don't wonder why or if the propensity swelled to other years in other rooms and kinds and types of sticky sex.
This is about the paltry heart that must get gutted sometimes and knotted and lit-up while sodden. It makes no difference to the story how ample is our fury.
ODE TO THE FISH FRY
I remember how the days seemed never to end, how tacky they got
at the rim, the sultry residue on the wild roses Mama and everyone
not only didn't wipe off but somehow cultivated with somehow the very breath
back at the farm when I was a child when everyone left town
to go to what people called anyway "the farm" to sit on porches and be
intellectual hillbillies
in peace I guess and drink wine I guess and smoke a little pot maybe
and play bridge and talk mutiny and riot and insubordination and defiance
and though I've spent my whole life missing the childhood I missed
while bitching about the fucked-up ways in which the fucked-up bohemians
screwed me over essentially with their atheism and aestheticism
and tribalism and alcoholism and snooty romanticized Southernism,
somebody needs to write an ode never-the-fuck-the-less
to the body heat of everyone at the fire pit
and the hundreds of little fish in a huge bucket in cornmeal
or flour or something
because there really must be an ode to the body heat of everyone at the pond
where in the not-quite-dark the fish were caught and reeled in
and thrown up on the bank to be skewered and thrown back into the water
to be allowed to breathe for a little bit longer on a string
because that froth or foam or whatever that was covering the rhododendron
and the goldenrod and the rye and all the plants in fact
covered the mothers and the fathers and the brothers and the sisters
as well as that old fort we climbed around in and the huge birch tree
and the outhouse lilies and the hand pump and the water that trickled from it
as this was before any of us went away and changed and died and such
and thus it is imperative that some kind of song be sung
about the time before the dread when we liked to stand in a circle in the dark around a fire and not know anything and not say anything
but just be there together to just together heed it.
ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES
There's so much happening I wake up running so of course I sit down and shut my eyes in the so-called library to think about how every good step forward
is really just a step during which there was no chasm below though Mama-the-optimist would dispute this despite her recent stories about a little operation
regarding her gall bladder in a plight she named herself after searching the Internet, she says, after two years, she says,
of a bothersome, but not fixedly horrendous ache. My mother,
she's happy not to be peeing accidentally in her pants:
she's happy for a certain kind of not-very-fancy-even sherry that she's happy to drink while she happily makes dinner
while I — I have something lodged in my eye that says there's a hole in the vessel on which I'm traversing or maybe a tatty place that's going to rip
or perchance some nefarious people thinking nefarious thoughts about me in order to set the vessel on fire with their mental ferocity in order to ruin my chances of surviving the sea
that I didn't even originate because I — I was just a child in my mother's kitchen, and she — she always had something baking or boiling in there: she always had the candles lit or let's say
the water, she got it humming, and then when my mother she left the glassware it broke and spewed across the crosswise sunlight and I became this vexed I behind a routine face — this obstinate and otherwise I
made just exactly why by what fair and fervent what? By whom?
WEANING ELECTRA
She's still sucking on smokes and sticks and the husband's aristocratic cock
and the roast beef and buttered bread. For when the mother can't love
the father: for when the mother thinks the father's mad and outrageous
because the father's mad and outrageous (and O the suckling's done and O
the fat breast departed), the girl-child with the father hair and father eyes
and his very brainstem and tilt of laughing head
will succumb to her thumb until the thumb is washed in turpentine
and the mauve coverlet in vinegar since that's what Dr. Spock
must have said to do in the mid-'60s edition of Baby and Child Care
to stop her from sucking on the tips of her fingers and the ends of her his-hair
though it didn't even work so what was the point since the local boys
got there soon enough with their own propositions for the purposes
of her mouth. All the same after she was older she sort of liked the hunger
since it got to the senses like for instance the cinnamon in the tea
and the keen, keen mountains that were so blue
and sometimes so purple and always so somber-satisfying she couldn't help
but commence to sucking on the noun and vowel and sentence sounds.
As if you didn't know this already! As if you weren't yourself
the victim of your own fissures that really must be filled, is what the father said.
Do not cross this burning world hollow and looted, he always said. Not hollow
and looted, he would say. God darlin' God darlin' God darlin' no.
SCHOOL OF THE ARTS
My father said the most wicked among us were the petty bourgeois
and the Republicans of the black lakes of all that filched money
and me sometimes was how it felt
when I was a kid in Daddy's slapdash house of divorce and dejection
with no way of knowing what kind of girl to be
and the point is Daddy didn't know either
and wept drunk on the porch because of it sometimes
until he remembered Rembrandt and Van Gogh and
woke up the buoyant maestro again
on the sexuality of the Hominid and the evil of the Klan
and the sway of Dada and the problem of Iran.
Now Daddy sits in bars in Spain and France
and drinks a beer in Venice and calls on Sunday from Ireland
to ask me to please tell him in a text or less
what kind of girl I am
and all I know is soon will come the contagion winter
and then the winter of the father departed
and he always promised we'd go fishing.
He would sit in his chair and he would light a cigarette.
He would curse the starlings for scaring the songbirds
and cross his heart and hope to die if I would ask him to
and I'm the kind of girl who would always ask him to
and he would do it and sing about the bones of chickens
in the bellies of foxes until the gorge got dark
so yes I am about the gist of that darkness and the buoyancy
of that very particular and faraway backwoods darkness
when my father would say to go to sleep
and dream anything I wanted like holding your breath
in a way it was, or like swimming
like some forever raggedy thing forever underwater.
IN THE ALMOST-EVENING OF ALMOST-CANADA
I'm stripping the paper of iris trailing iris when the word labia gets stuck to my labia
unless it's a vicious recollection of the brimming heads of infants or
a fat enclave of boys
in the back-when hothouse of no place for kids. By which I mean: they'd say cunt
when they'd need bitch because I had followed them around to the back
of the shack,
I had gestured for the bourbon and I had swigged it — I had swigged and
I had swallowed
and was about now to holler how they couldn't say nigger and could not also spit
here among the hydrangea of the enterprise of me at fourteen in Virginia
in the Blue Ridge
dead set against their hands and hair and tomato-canning Jesus mothers
and the part-leather, part-cloth athletic jackets they seem to want to wed or lick
and the automotive hi-tech stuff they won't stop talking the knotty virtues of
when what I require is the Oxford English Dictionary and a quilt in a meadow
since I'm nameless between the legs like the sketch of a girl
splayed out in a meadow
and nameless between the legs like the most minimal sketch in a most
nominal meadow
of the general shape of a girl sprayed down horizontal in a frail draft of the vibe
without any real account of what you'd maybe call the inside of the inside
of the very inside
when what I've got to say for myself in terms of what I know
because I remember is this.
NOCTURNE
I was born at high noon in June heaps too early and small so after the first menses I'd want the darkling opposite.
All I mean is, the night was everything back then
though obviously I was a mom. Always at Goodwill in the fiendish afternoon while pretending to look for boy shirts and boy pants and backpacks, I'd search out the night
in the shape of a black cape or sweater or tablecloth with the eyes of little witches painted on. It's how the babies showed up in the first place with their high screams
and daylight requirements — it was my time of great ignorance and I wanted to correct it — it was imperative that I shed the limpidness and decency that covered me at each fiery opening
slit. That's why I'd let some boy be conveyed through the night through what was called my body: he'd take me down with him via some vegetated shack of a supposed bed while I'd shut my eyes
against the very idea and ordeal of him and think I believe about the haybales out there and the marsupials snooping for little meats to bite and chew or bury in black holes I thought went down forever
to the other side of the earth where there were bound to be bees sputtering pollen on what I'm sure I knew was every single sweet and flaxen thing I remain in my rigidity too medieval to name.
FIRST FALL IN MAINE
Before we place the vein blue sheetrock against the stud walls and invite the brawny boys to take out their ballpeen hammers and their measuring sticks: before the men start cursing the job
in order to pass the time is my experience and to prove they're men
I want to say how I can't even find my own heart in this house.
It must be stowed away in the basement or under the winter clothes inside some storage boxes beside the furnace. I can't find anything
less than a heart around here, either. I went looking for a cocktail
and couldn't find the shot glass. I went wanting my childhood,
and it wasn't in the medicine chest. No, it wasn't in the wardrobe,
but there were sandals — leather ones with thin straps I may have worn
to a wedding or to one of those lawn parties they have back home
with girls in wide-brimmed straw hats and skirts that twirl.
I might remember a banquet, dulcimer music, and a bouquet of flowers, but couldn't that be a little pre-dawn wishful-thinking reverie?
Listen to how hard the rain keeps on coming down! I could depict
the leaves falling in big blobs of coffee-colored mini-splotches,
but instead of the umbrellas and the fleece and the ponchos I need I've got the baby teeth of my three kids in little bags in the middle drawer
of my dresser. I've got someone's dried-out umbilical cord stored there,
too. But there's no lute music in the meadow because there is no meadow left. There is no necklace or locket or reaping-season jig.
Just this shedding of the fucking lot, and the long wait for the mend.
LIVE FROM THE HOMESICK JAMBOREE
Here in the province of Fuck You we're really in the province of Fuck Me
since I hate my head since it involves my mouth
and hence the talk expressing no acquaintance with New England winter crops
or how to make a stew that's not my mother's soup
or find any other way to disobey both parents vis-à-vis the homeland they're so high on
because the mountains are not flat is how they like to put it
when the real reason is Daniel Boone invading our hometown in 1767
and calling it Wolf Hills to commemorate the massacre
of the pack that ate his dogs. Daniel Boone's in other words
the real reason my parents are not recovered from being from home
and the real reason I'm not recovered unless the actual predicament here
is just myself being myself and my husband being my husband
nine hundred miles away from where the tea is customarily sugared
and the dogwoods start blooming at the end of March
causing a delectable whiteness to pervade the atmosphere
and though the dogwood is a tree and trees should not be eaten,
the dogwood seems anyway to want to be devoured
since here in the district of The Gone Astray
I want to devour everything transformed by my distance
into yet another elegy, since what I really don't get
is what made Boone think the trouble and the hunger would stop
when he got his rifle and bent into the snarl and shot.
NOVELETTE
With her one horrid eye persistently unfastened, a vigilant bird watched my grandfather during The Great Depression use each evening of one whole year to wander his corn fields knowing this world is just one pig after another
in one pen after another. Therefore, the bird heard him suppose,
shouldn't he with his best gun, machete, Buick, or rope terminate his acquaintance with the tiresome set-up of breakfast-lunch-dinner-dawn-dusk-fall-winter-spring-summer
blah-blah-blah? But his girls were good-looking and made such fine pies, so the bird watched him live wretchedly until he died more naturally of cancer too soon to see his people become the dopefiends, doctor-haters,
masturbators, insomniacs, sleep fanatics, shut-ins, and teetotalers the bird knew they would become, for the purpose of girls is to just ruin everything with wanton reproduction so that now now now it's really relentless — how heavy
his people got in their limbs and how torrential, thus,
the frenziedly wind, though beyond the eye of the bird is the small, ashen brain of the bird, and below that, a heart,
I swear, through which come the iffy notes of this cruel song.
Excerpted from "Live From the Homesick Jamboree"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Adrian Blevins.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
<P>How to Drown a Wolf<BR>The Hospitality<BR>The Theatre People<BR>Ode to the Fish Fry<BR>Origin of the Species<BR>Weaning Electra<BR>School of the Arts<BR>In the Almost-Evening of Almost-Canada<BR>Nocturne<BR>First Fall in Maine<BR>Live from the Homesick Jamboree<BR>Novelette<BR>Big Rain Day<BR>Country Song<BR>Semantic Relations<BR>Poem for My Daughter August Disparaging the Gossamer Depictions of the Women of Certain Southern Texts<BR>First Winter in Maine<BR>Why the Marriage Failed<BR>Firstborn<BR>Morning Song<BR>Jesus Saves<BR>Watching The NewsHour<BR>CV Rider<BR>Dream in Which I Find Myself Confronted Yet Again with Why The Marriage Failed<BR>Dear New Mothers of America<BR>Why the Marriage Failed II<BR>Dear Reader<BR>Hey You<BR>The Second Marriage<BR>Woman by Woman<BR>Sin City<BR>How We Talk<BR>The Way She Figured He Figured It<BR>If the Universe Sends Me a Grip<BR>The Waning<BR>The Imperative Sentence<BR>Now There's a River<BR>Acknowledgments<BR>Notes</P>What People are Saying About This
“Adrian Blevins is a transcendent poet of the family in all its discontent and turbulence. Hers is a world of crush and gorge. And that gorge is deep and beautiful, but there’s always a party brewing on the cliffs and dancing to be done on its crumbling edges, swords to be unsheathed, and words like stars to lasso and spin into her glittering lines.”
"This book is rich with words from every register, and they are roughed-up and sand-papered and worshipped and flung. The AC/DC-ness of them is nothing if not a mirror of what it is to live—which is awfully like what it is to love."
"This book is rich with words from every register, and they are roughed-up and sand-papered and worshipped and flung. The AC/DC-ness of them is nothing if not a mirror of what it is to live—which is awfully like what it is to love."—Ellen Doré Watson, author of This Sharpening
"Adrian Blevins is a transcendent poet of the family in all its discontent and turbulence. Hers is a world of crush and gorge. And that gorge is deep and beautiful, but there's always a party brewing on the cliffs and dancing to be done on its crumbling edges, swords to be unsheathed, and words like stars to lasso and spin into her glittering lines.""—Barbara Hamby, author of Babel
"This book is rich with words from every register, and they are roughed-up and sand-papered and worshipped and flung. The AC/DC-ness of them is nothing if not a mirror of what it is to live—which is awfully like what it is to love."—Ellen Doré Watson, author of This Sharpening
“Adrian Blevins is a transcendent poet of the family in all its discontent and turbulence. Hers is a world of crush and gorge. And that gorge is deep and beautiful, but there’s always a party brewing on the cliffs and dancing to be done on its crumbling edges, swords to be unsheathed, and words like stars to lasso and spin into her glittering lines.”