In this nuanced and moving new collection of poems, Brenda Coultas weaves a meditation on contemporary life and our place in it. Coultas, who is known for her investigative documentary approach, turns her attention to landfills and the odd histories embedded in the materials found there. The poems make their home among urban and rural detritus, waste, trinkets, and found objects. The title poem, for example, takes its cue from the random, often perfect, pigeon feathers found on city streets. In a seamless weave of poetic sentences, The Tatters explores how our human processes of examination are often bound up with destruction. These poems enable us to be present with the sorrow and horror of our destructive nature, and to honor the natural world while acknowledging that this world no longer exists in any pure form, calling to us instead from cracks in the sidewalk, trash heaps, and old objects. Check for the online reader's companion at tatters.site.wesleyan.edu.
In this nuanced and moving new collection of poems, Brenda Coultas weaves a meditation on contemporary life and our place in it. Coultas, who is known for her investigative documentary approach, turns her attention to landfills and the odd histories embedded in the materials found there. The poems make their home among urban and rural detritus, waste, trinkets, and found objects. The title poem, for example, takes its cue from the random, often perfect, pigeon feathers found on city streets. In a seamless weave of poetic sentences, The Tatters explores how our human processes of examination are often bound up with destruction. These poems enable us to be present with the sorrow and horror of our destructive nature, and to honor the natural world while acknowledging that this world no longer exists in any pure form, calling to us instead from cracks in the sidewalk, trash heaps, and old objects. Check for the online reader's companion at tatters.site.wesleyan.edu.
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Overview
In this nuanced and moving new collection of poems, Brenda Coultas weaves a meditation on contemporary life and our place in it. Coultas, who is known for her investigative documentary approach, turns her attention to landfills and the odd histories embedded in the materials found there. The poems make their home among urban and rural detritus, waste, trinkets, and found objects. The title poem, for example, takes its cue from the random, often perfect, pigeon feathers found on city streets. In a seamless weave of poetic sentences, The Tatters explores how our human processes of examination are often bound up with destruction. These poems enable us to be present with the sorrow and horror of our destructive nature, and to honor the natural world while acknowledging that this world no longer exists in any pure form, calling to us instead from cracks in the sidewalk, trash heaps, and old objects. Check for the online reader's companion at tatters.site.wesleyan.edu.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819574404 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/11/2014 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 68 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
BRENDA COULTAS is author of three books of poems: The Marvelous Bones of Time, A Handmade Museum, and Early Films. She teaches at Touro College and has served as faculty in Naropa University's Summer Writing Program, and she lives in New York City.
Brenda Coultas is author of three books of poems: The Marvelous Bones of Time, A Handmade Museum, and Early Films. She teaches at Touro College and has served as faculty in Naropa University's Summer Writing Program, and she lives in New York City.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
MY TREE
I found a pearl and wore it in my ear Deep ocean echoes sing like a seashell
A girl promised a purse filled with jewels, if I would be her friend Purses open secrets as priceless as pills in a jeweled box
Loose pearls, enough to imagine what a great loss that necklace was or was not
I like to see metal turn red and glow and to hear its hiss when it meets the water.
Leather bellows, suspended from the ceiling, pump air into the fire. Long-handled tongs and picks forge mostly nails. I open all the old purses. There might be change left in one.
I built you a tree of light to see by To listen to digital libraries in your palm.
Renamed myself writing this book, renamed myself after building this tree
I burnt candles all night to grow these leaves.
I fed books to the flame, to make a blaze to read by Mined libraries to power this tower of light
Built sparkling branches with flaming pages for leaves dense as the weeping willow's cascade of curls
On the mountain ridge my tree stands head and shoulders above the hardwoods. Along the roadway wooden poles, bathed in chemicals, hold up a network of wire
I built a tree, more cell than sweeping pine or black walnut, as natural as pink pine needles or a silver holiday tree. Glittery pine boughs glue-gunned on
No needles on the floor No forest smell
My gift is glittery and eternal even in synthetic shreds dumped on a landlocked city sidewalk it finds its way to the sea
A MASS FOR BRAD WILL
If I were a quill I'd write in bright feathers all about you bursting into flight over the heads of cops
If I were a handsome feather, I'd walk to City Hall in full plumage and release all of Manhattan's political prisoners
If I were a quill I'd give you life on this quiet page
On a four feather day, last one ruffled another grey with black-banded top
Then pinfeathers regroup to make a full on ...
You might think his body was blown to bits or burned to ashes
Thrown into a favorite body of water Maybe one of the great lakes
You might think he was made of feathers or of bird weight No, he was buried whole, perhaps with bullets intact.
Critical mass. Yes, he liked to say it.
Critical mass is a beautiful way to say we gather to shut down the system so bicyclists can take over the streets
Critical mass a way to say we gather so that it matters
When the bicyclists take over the streets and bring the city to a standstill, Brad said that is critical mass
I asked, "What happens when the city is shut down?"
He said, "Then we'll dance."
He liked a song about a drop of water. In this song, the drops came together to form a trickle, then a stream, a river, a body of water, the power of the water made us aware that we belonged to the earth, that we would protect her, and by the end of the song, the river was free.
THE MIDDEN
Blue stone quarries stone of touch stone marker or the stone left behind shell middens and clay pipes and passenger pigeons dressed in blues the stone that gazes heaven side up the day which is red and pink corners
Burnish the blue stone & quarry the earth dynamite time
Perfection is time's work or what makes bluestone blue or what makes a quartz crystal
Halo surrounds — core of labyrinth — glow departs from an ember
Opposing fire & fetching cool petals quietly foxed or bat claw unhinged cut from mussel shell or bone buttons lie underground
Walking through coals into a city within the fire entering the ember, encased in a protective suit to bring out handfuls of what that world inside burning wood is like
Flame in the air, gas fields full of devil's spit yellow eye of methane
When the flame is in the air and the night is eye & thigh high paper laid on an ember browns then flames
Walking inside the flame, or an ember of heated talk opening doors poured from the long-necked bucket or dug from a shallow seam
Standing in the doorway of an ember the door is a passage that my friend leaves ajar
Walking through embers: a marriage with its pleasures of heat and light and the pain of heat and light stoking the fire inside
Oil pumps in a corn field Satan's fires burn off the methane
Freestanding coal shack & packed trailer parks of burning coals overflow the double- wide with its cathedral ceilings, whirlpool tubs, and master suites
The landfill handed me a ball of paper, a washed-out small boulder of print. I cracked it open and read "Danny Kaye performing live." And I thought, How long has he been dead?
Like the midden of books and papers stacked by the bed, make of it what you will. I put my rage on top to cultivate later, the midden of paper and print, headlines and ink, mixed pulp from long ago industrial and urban waste will topple and release a flood of ivory and soft grays and blacks
Dust tops the PC, dot matrix printer, and typewriter in a thrift shop The Apple in the barn is boxy and hard Cords long gone Plastic phones turn a palm into light
The inside awash with take-out containers — driver's seat cleared of — cigarette butts, newspapers, plastic forks, spoons, and knives ready to go
The captain's logbook was inked heavy with stamps. I ask the long-dead captain, Is it like a wax cylinder or like tree rings or like grooves set in foil? Is it Thomas Edison's talking machine or Bell's telephone? Is it an echo chamber of the ocean or a talking drum?
There were the sounds that I couldn't carve, the blood I couldn't catch, dust fell, sprinkling itself over the glass cases of artifacts, over baleen piano keys, carved dice, combs, and mirrors. In his log book I silently entered how the whale's eardrums are as large as a child's head (how each is painted with a frisky portrait of a man and a woman.)
I carve an animal into the logbook, cutting through a hundred pages of sea notes, of sightings, of oil harvested and rendered. I cut through accounts of the sperm whale's death throes, of harpooners who froze as they closed in on the chase. With my pen, I carve another animal into the book. A tooth out of a tusk. Baleen into corset stays. Press breasts and penises into bone, I make fine canes for gentlemen.
Underneath the childhood clothing, grade school valentines, and schoolbooks my mother stored in a trunk, what shows? An arm? Toe? I like to stick my feet out. What gives my presence away? A rumpled sheet under the blanket? A barely perceptible ripple.
Sitting perched on letters and newspapers, under the mattress, tables, and on chairs and inside shoe boxes
Bread box Of the other books Leaf press Prayer-card holder Toast tray
I store neatly pressed handkerchiefs and hand fans embossed with bible verses and funeral home ads inside an encyclopedia Press a green spider into the book, cross-eyed and alive and already very flat
Press in a dream of living in the deep blue of space, like the planet earth. The earth, an eyeball of the galaxy
Press in deep blue space, a blue ball of light rotating through the black inky void around a larger system, a bigger star, a blue milky marble, moving. — Out of an ember cooling and firing again — gravity of milky puppy breath — milky marble home.
ANIMATIONS
Coloring the glass with pee or peering at a blue dense enough to be alive or to influence a human or inhuman action, the feather death crown is a spiral, and in automatic writing, the spirals grow smaller and smaller before any actual communication.
Spiral, a tornado wind in the pen and on the page
Pressed glass hen on nest girls in frosted petticoats white darning eggs clear radio tubes cobalt eyewash cup talks of sand and heat speaks of tinctures and rubs soothing as a salve or as beauty the sand grains talk of rock and water
The feather crowns say, "There must be a better way to signify heaven or salvation." Those who gather crowns keep them under glass or in their best candy boxes and pass them on as evidence of afterlife.
This one gathers the living. The feathers having chosen a spokes-one. Earth shaken, pressed glass pink in permanent petticoats. Arms pinned. Returning items to the sea and beads to the wire. Pushing horseshoe crabs back into time in hopes of reanimation.
Meteorite in a field of pussy willows Rose crystal skull abandoned on a city sidewalk
Bottles swim into the sea, gather mass, and offer a lift, a flotilla for drifting hitchhikers. A spoon lifts cereal from the cranial bowl of a medical school skull.
A fossil is a fiction written by time.
Elephants bearing salt and pepper, trunks tied to the pony's back. Unyielding, brittle, and easy to snap, the bridled pony, bribed or beaten to walk at night, over canyons and valleys of green sleep, laden with packages, tied tightly with red string, yet some fall and shatter as if they'd arrived by post. Biscuit boxes and camping stoves are small, but heavy like stone houses.
Moving through woods, toward the big deep fragment of an enameled bucket. Depression pink tongue tip, thick and scalloped, radiates from the car in the woods. Hubcap pain-spokes outward from the center.
While sleeping in the woods, a matchbox cemetery turns to stone over time.
Shards of mirror given as a gift. Busty angel holds a dove aloft in her hands. Oyster shell middens replace teeth as eternal as the ball of a titanium hip. What remains is a pewter vessel, hard and grey, that serves better as a pencil cup than as a grog glass.
A GAZE
"Shale is incredibly complex. When it comes to finding the shale sweet spot and unlocking it in a cost-efficient manner, no one has more experience than Halliburton." Halliburton website
I
A man texts a photograph of his meal, but to who? Himself or others? Others too, texting in a crowd on 1st Avenue as glaciers recede. They do not feel the fading cold of the ice. Only the heat of the key strokes.
A man texts crystal water glass pixels to quench real thirst.
I texted forward a rumor of siphoned great lakes water to China. A Chinese bureaucrat texts images of fresh lake water to billions at home.
At the top of a mountain, where only small mammals live, the air is thin and gives me panic. I do not belong above the tree line even though I can drive there. Stopping to send a pic of the lichen sponge by the gift shop on the glacier, the phone lens: an extension of my eyes.
At times, I forget that I am not an extension of the machine until I burn my palms touching a hot metal pot: recoil and remember to use hot pads to protect the flesh fabric that covers the hand bones.
From the glacier tops, bodies of mountain climbers in the dead zone. Will their corpses sweeten or embitter the waters of the Ganges?
The leather shoes of the ice man texted forward.
Sometimes, the tap runs while I brush my teeth and empty bathwater down the drain.
The last glass of water sits before you, how fast or slow will you drink it?
We load the car on Highway 50, the loneliest highway in the USA. It winds through Nevada crossing the Pony Express route and ancient seabeds. Crinoid stems thirst for the ancient sea.
Last glass of glacier water boils in the kettle. Saffron threads of a Viking beard cloud the water glass.
Theft of water, relocation, diverted from its bed. Hydro-fracking. I never thought they'd use our water against us.
When we began with this full jug of water without thinking until the police chased us away from the creek of who owns the water. Or that satellite overhead, branded by a private owner over public space.
Wanted to absorb it, to get to the bottom and start all over again. A great anxiety about finishing and throwing it away, with an inch still in the bottom, the backwash.
Who owns the creeks and waterways of this valley? The only legal course is midstream so that anglers can trout fish without trespass. Into the last glass, I stir the reindeer scat with a herding stick captured from the thaw.
The water is an hourglass, and I write fast as I can before it runs dry.
A glass of water from last glacier sits before you on the table, you gaze at the logo of an abundant flowing stream or the name of the spring which somehow sounds pure and far away as an iceberg, calved off and lassoed from the warming world. Even though you know the source is a corporate tap of public water.
Fertilizer runs off into our family well. I used to picture a whale, a Moby Dick under the cornfield, a leviathan as the source of our water because only a vessel the size of a sperm whale could contain the water that flowed on command from the tap. Even though people spoke of the well running dry, ours magically replenished itself under the blanket of Monsanto crops.
The last glass of water sits before you, will you drink it slowly savoring the taste of the glacier?
It flows on the green logo and facsimile of a mountain stream of abundant water.
"Natural" is highlighted and in a yellow circle it is written, "contains 16 servings" and there are only two of us left since this now nearly empty jug was opened.
II
We might have swum to our seats in the crystal underground cavern or inside the whale. The water table is a banquette of the last supper, the clear plates as detailed as a sea monkey's anatomy or the vulvas of Judy Chicago's dinner party.
A centerpiece of lilies welcomes us. A waiter comes with his crystal water pitcher, wrapped in white linen. He bows and we watch our glasses turn a cool blue anti-freeze shade.
Some harvest and sell the rights to rain. Although the water said clear and running and cool and unstoppable glacier tops and blue stones and slick rock and kill is Dutch for spring.
We have arrived at this point where a water source has become diamond-worthy. The vision withstands the weight of platters laden heavily with fruit and bread.
Gazing at water through glass prisms Champagne with hollow stem Turkish tea blue and silver panels Crystal flute & jelly jar Coil pot Roman goblet Ancient clay fragments of a water jug Banana leaves Cupped palms Water rush Flow of public and private Locked website or paywall We sit down before the guards can catch us.
Wastewater, its chemicals pass through the tablecloth, and infect it with radiation. Inside pantry doors, mining deep into the cabinet, the heavy minerals are stored in the far reaches of the cupboard and on the top shelf out of reach
Who holds the crystal-clear machine guns?
Who fires the shocks of the invisible fence?
We gaze at the fence of ownership Once set for us Then set against us
Taking shelter in the watershed, I thought, This is untouchable, such a treasure, Catskill pure. Taking shelter in a house that once sat in a place now underwater, a house meant to be drowned under the Ashokan. I sit in a dry chair before the woodburner.
Theft of water from Bishop Falls Greatest heist of all Starts the flow downstream.
Marcellus Shale sounds gendered and plentiful like the Roberta Tar Sands.
Shalenlaires, farmers made wealthy overnight, like Motown music.
Not like "stimulate" or "industrial wild."
Drinking in the morning dust of last evening's air They use private forces against us Weapons to keep us away from our water.
THE TATTERS
I
Cleanly folded paper lying in street A job request for urine I close my eyes A broth of steaming piss
Transmission while walking briskly, slightly ruffled Before bed, round butter cakes After bed, devils' food Bright red between sheets
On growing a perfect wing I forgot about the purpose of flight or cloak of a peacock
A wet pigeon said, "Why don't I ask for what I really want?"
I have forgotten the purpose Of touching a child's hand Of pigeon shit on perfect feathers Of deep round cake pans
In taking it apart to see how it works I realized that I wish to control the means of production
Cast iron, pumped by muscle pulleys and rope
(This I recognize as cast iron circle and hemp)
linens climb in and out the window
Rum-soaked cake half eaten on the table to this we return
Dorothy Podber's belongings on the sidewalk. Charred wood, even though that building was never on fire.
Diagrams of electrical machines. I like to look and don't care that I don't understand.
I have lived a long time without knowing the names of the trees. Barely able to recognize a locust leaf, and yet I can recognize the sight of oak, even varnished or cobbled into a desk or plank. I have lived here, not knowing that a rock dove is a pigeon. Of my apartment, knowing only that the cockroaches are German and the rats Norwegian.
None of this is good and I worry about the scarcity of wood or if we will ever have enough materials to reassemble the object after taking it apart.
I took apart a hornet's nest after my brother had sprayed it with heavy chemicals. In pursuit of the natural world, I cut a swath. A giant lifting boards and logs, uncovering sleeping animals, or embryonic mice. Worms, snakes, and salamanders all call me an asshole.
Today, cast iron cooking stove pulled up from the basement. Pinball and bubblegum machine filled with crumbling candy.
Tonight, perhaps more of Dorothy Podber's belongings: a wooden storage chest from below the street level, earthy and soft. The color in the dark is dark. Caramel and full of the earth's products. Like the rats who live below us, a night shade of dark, not rotten yet full of the rot of newspapers, my contribution. I collect ephemera and revisit it gleaning when I am alone making lists and piles by color or subject or time.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Tatters"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Brenda Coultas.
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
My Tree
A Mass for Brad Will
The Midden
Animations
A Gaze
The Tatters
Note: Bradley Roland Will, 1970-2006
Acknowledgments
What People are Saying About This
“The Tatters is a real achievement—a recognizable and complex texture of feeling accrues through an organization of ephemera and idiosyncratic self-assessments bound up completely with lived experience in a shared and difficult if constantly surprising world.”
“Unlike most writers who are working in hybrid forms, Coultas creates a seamless enmeshment between poetry and prose, and this consistency of voice and tone is one of her great strengths. It’s her signature, really, a kind of magical occurrence where two things merge to become a third thing—something completely different.”
“In this beautiful new book, Coultas gathers the debris of our living, sifting through the midden piles to uncover ‘the heat of the keystrokes,’ the made world at the center of the hornets' nest or the human anatomy book. She takes apart the animal-made machines to show us not only the tatters at the heart of living, but also the ‘full glory’ of our assemblages (objects and bodies). In this ethical testimony, occurring at the boundary between the remains and the living, she shows us the only thing that will keep us going: how to share this world.”
"In this beautiful new book, Coultas gathers the debris of our living, sifting through the midden piles to uncover 'the heat of the keystrokes,' the made world at the center of the hornets' nest or the human anatomy book. She takes apart the animal-made machines to show us not only the tatters at the heart of living, but also the 'full glory' of our assemblages (objects and bodies). In this ethical testimony, occurring at the boundary between the remains and the living, she shows us the only thing that will keep us going: how to share this world."—Eleni Sikelianos, author of The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead
"The Tatters is a real achievement—a recognizable and complex texture of feeling accrues through an organization of ephemera and idiosyncratic self-assessments bound up completely with lived experience in a shared and difficult if constantly surprising world.""—Anselm Berrigan, author of Notes From Irrelevance
"Unlike most writers who are working in hybrid forms, Coultas creates a seamless enmeshment between poetry and prose, and this consistency of voice and tone is one of her great strengths. It's her signature, really, a kind of magical occurrence where two things merge to become a third thing—something completely different.""—Lewis Warsh, author of A Place in the Sun and Inseparable
"Brenda Coultas's supreme deftness at turning detritus into living aching contemporaneity takes on an additional register, here, every beautifully grounded line sounding, simultaneously, a kind of music of the spheres. From the firey innards of a blue stone (that is also the blue gaze of a doll), to the trailer that marks a burnt farmhouse, to the flaming eye of meth, to night's turning blue planets, Brenda Coultas delivers from deep within her midden of detritus, a 'city within the fire.' Which is our city, our burnished insides, our tattered time + its dead objects tagged with the history of human hubris. Not a list but a story, kaleidoscopic embers, spinning into a world of incredible, deeply menaced, wonder.""—Gail Scott, author of The Obituary
"In this beautiful new book, Coultas gathers the debris of our living, sifting through the midden piles to uncover 'the heat of the keystrokes,' the made world at the center of the hornets' nest or the human anatomy book. She takes apart the animal-made machines to show us not only the tatters at the heart of living, but also the 'full glory' of our assemblages (objects and bodies). In this ethical testimony, occurring at the boundary between the remains and the living, she shows us the only thing that will keep us going: how to share this world."—Eleni Sikelianos, author of The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead
“Brenda Coultas’s supreme deftness at turning detritus into living aching contemporaneity takes on an additional register, here, every beautifully grounded line sounding, simultaneously, a kind of music of the spheres. From the firey innards of a blue stone (that is also the blue gaze of a doll), to the trailer that marks a burnt farmhouse, to the flaming eye of meth, to night’s turning blue planets, Brenda Coultas delivers from deep within her midden of detritus, a ‘city within the fire.’ Which is our city, our burnished insides, our tattered time + its dead objects tagged with the history of human hubris. Not a list but a story, kaleidoscopic embers, spinning into a world of incredible, deeply menaced, wonder.”