Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Tuesday poem #260 : Madhur Anand : Influence is Infinitely Circuital: a found poem



The formerly abused have moved
to action. Tabooed circumstances
matter. It is against my principles
to ignore it.  Nowadays the current
is instantaneous, a curl
of expression. Reversal arises.
The attractive repel one another.
A working agent follows
the bodies pushed together
by translational motion.
It may be worth distorting the lines.
There is only so much latitude.


There are the portions, vanishing, the necessary
smallness, the debatable
amount of needless pressure.
Mystery does not enlighten us in the least
and we are wasted by friction.
A single moving particle,
scarcely any physics in it,
suggests something better.
Personal identity lends itself
to great exhaustion.
Ignore it then by saying
we fall together.


Heaviside, Oliver. (1893) A Gravitational and Electromagnetic Analogy Part I, The Electrician, 31: 281-282




Madhur Anand’s debut book of poems A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (McClelland & Stewart, 2015) was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and listed by CBC as one of 10  “trailblazing” Canadian poetry collections to read. Her award-winning prose has appeared in a number of magazines including The PuritanBrick, and The New QuarterlyMore recent poems have appeared in The WalrusCarte Blanche and CNQShe currently serves as poetry editor for CNQ.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan



Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Tuesday poem #259 : Chelene Knight : Apartment 301 near the low track



When your house catches fire, I’ll free the dogs.
I’ll wrap your vases in paper and stop
fingers from shakin’. Look you in the eye.
I’ll consider pink-sheep-skin, I sleep in
the holes of my pockets, my hands dug deep.
No coins, no bills, but ain’t no poor one here.
I still got jewels in throat — embedded,  
planted well behind the voice, the word box,
and still the birds flock ‘round me, as they should.
We got things to get done they’d say. I’ll stand
there — solid. My face red, hot, wet, hungry.
Feed the hand, or the hand that feeds us all.
It don’t matter where you grow it, we’ll eat.
Black stones in a white fire, the flame— washed out.



Chelene Knight was born in Vancouver and is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at SFU in multiple genres. In addition to being a workshop facilitator for teens, she is also a regular literary event organizer and host. She has been published in various Canadian and American literary magazines. Chelene is currently the Managing Editor at Room magazine. Braided Skin, her first book (Mother Tongue Publishing, March 2015), has given birth to numerous writing projects including her second book, Dear Current Occupant (forthcoming with BookThug, 2018). She was also one of the judges for the 2017 Vancouver Writer’s Festival Contest Chelene is now working on a novel set in the Strathcona neighbourhood of Vancouver in the 1930s-50's known as Hogan's Alley.

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Tuesday poem #258 : Marty Cain : WORDSWORTH POEM




In the Prelude, Wordsworth narrates a story of walking to the edge of a river and seeing a pile of garments. The next day, he learns that they belonged to a man who drowned. Wordsworth describes seeing the dead man’s Ghastly face, a spectre shape / Of terror, but goes on to contend that, having had familiarity with the fantastical worlds of poetry and romance, he wasn’t frightened; rather, his understanding of poetry Hallowed the sad spectacle / With decoration of ideal grace; / A dignity, a smoothness. At the time, he was eight years old.

/

On one level, poetry mediated trauma for Wordsworth. But on another level, the “smoothness” he describes is, as far as I’m concerned, wholly absent from the narrative he relays in the Prelude. Like any Arcadian space, it's not one that is truly sanctified or idealized; rather, it is contaminated by anxiety and violence, both tangible and imagined: a meadow made from a drowned man’s face.

For the remainder of his life, Wordsworth revised the Prelude. He mediated the adolescent rawness; he made the edges eloquent, the poem more like a formal container for a feeling. Originally, he’d intended for it to be the first part of an epic trilogy, one whose length surpassed Paradise Lost.

/

But he failed. That motherfucker died.

And form is a feeling.

And form is a garment.

And in my mind, I return to the clothes. I return to the discarded excess, to the pile that signifies death before we know its name; I return to seeing my brother emptied and seizing on the living room floor, a shell I saw continuously dead and reborn, a skin like an Aeolian harp making music in the wind by the willing of God or an unbreathable word. I return to the garments. I return to the river. I roll up my pants and step in the water and feel the rocks along the bottom. I return to the Death whose face I felt in the basement and stroked his eyes and hallowed sockets and nostrils and indentation above the lip and the unwashed space behind the ears. He said, You can’t see me, and you won’t. When I turned on the bulb I saw a mass of garments and a plastic mask.

I return to my family. I return to the river. I roll cigarettes with my childhood friends and we sit in the woods on rotting logs and dream of a pond with a pale hand sticking out.

O, golden wound.

I feel more removed from my brother each time I come home.

I drink wine. I change the oil. I put snow tires on the car. I lie all day in my childhood bed with its unwashed sheets and decades of flesh and a feeling whose skin I’m unable to name.

/

I open the meadow.

The wind comes in.


Marty Cain is the author of Kids of the Black Hole (Trembling Pillow Press, 2017), a book-length poem, as well as www.enterthe.red, a digital supplement. His creative and critical writing appears in Fence, Boston Review, Jacket2, Tarpaulin Sky, Action Yes, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi, and is currently pursuing a PhD at Cornell University, where he studies rural poetics. With his partner Kina Viola, he runs Garden-Door Press, a handmade micropress.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan