8:50 a.m., Thursday, somewhere over the South:
I’m on a plane to Denver, and the range of clouds below me appears carved and forested, their sides a sheer plummet of pale slate and their tops crowned in bunched leaves. This is my first year attending AWP, and my trip lands on a list I think of as “Stuff I Figured Out Long After Everyone Else Did.” The screed includes learning to drive stick shift, cooking the perfect hard boiled egg, getting engaged, discovering Pavement and Yo La Tengo, and writing some books.
On Monday, after hearing some good poetry news (tba), I realized – why am I not going to a conference stuffed with folks who love and make literature? Tuesday I borrowed a coat and booked my flight and hotel, Wednesday the super-shuttle at DIA. That’s pretty much how my life happens – late and fast. But if you’re summoned and are compelled to respond, shouldn’t you? I say yes.
we had plums & a handful of soda bread more milk a good ball of twine & we tossed the carpet onto the skiff & jumped on top
the river was
easy incomplete but it
took us
like twigs
polaroids
of the papier mache
wolves
you hear your name in
the current?
The line is from Selenography, by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, a book I was invited to share on Goodreads and one that I actually wanted to read because I loved the title, since I too study the moon from the modest perch of my balcony. But I was also intrigued because the collection included Polaroids by musician Tim Rutili. Polaroids! Just the word brings to mind some of my favorite things: instant gratification, the 70s, and, of course, the sound and feel of the camera, its kechuckety-clack after hitting the front red button, the shuhzzzzz slide of the photograph entering the world. The SX-70 is the child of the era in which it was invented – garish and oversized and fun.
Anyway, I emailed Joshua, who I do not know, but such is the beauty of online friendship, and he sent me a pdf. Read it. Loved it. Divided into sections with fabulist names such as “My Cautious Lantern” and “Wolf Dust,” the poems are untitled, except the accompanying imagery sort of serves as a title, a kind of diving board used to plunge into fluidity. The writing is dream-like, Merwinesque with its absence of punctuation (and pop culture pillars) and line breaks that keep reinventing meaning. So a reader just sort of floats along the surface of this gentle river of letters, which you can see is deep and filled with oddly shaped rocks and sponges, perhaps striped and diamond-stamped fish, and other sparkling flotsam you feel against your skin but can’t quite identify.
That’s what reading this book is like. The photos are just plain cool, not stylized or deliberately low-fi but more along the lines of "I liked the looks of this." At times the images are blurred or smudged with fingerprints, or furrowed with bluish greens and creases that resemble birds in flight. Other frames include a plastic T-Rex, a rotting armchair, a crow, a ghostly piano. Do you hear your name in the current? As a matter of fact, I do.
