A Guggenheim fellow, Terese Svoboda is most recently the author of Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship, her seventh book of poetry, and Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet. She has also published six novels, a memoir, and a book of translations from Nuer, a South Sudanese language. Great American Desert, a book of stories, is forthcoming March 2019.
_________________________________
A Process Note
I don't see my poetry as difficult, I see it as playful. The mind wants to play. It wants, in its aesthetic experience, to return to a work of art and retrieve something more from it at every contact. Otherwise it will discard that glittering toy, bored. I'm currently playing with plays, getting on and off the stage of poetry. I'm also interested in technical language, and its poetics. Everything has already been written – or else nothing has been written, each moment its own possible play of sound and sense.
_________________________________
On the Aesthetics of Textual Difficulty
Poetry that requires interpretation is perhaps a show of dominance: you have to know so much in order to appreciate my work, e.g., Eliot and Pound. Enter Hope Mirrlees, her long poem “Paris” published by Virginia Woolf four years before “The Wasteland,” critiqued by TLS as “spluttering and incoherent statement displayed with various tricks of type...It is certainly not a “Poem.”
Verlaine’s bed-time…Alchemy
Absynthe,
Algerian tobacco,
Talk, talk, talk,
Manuring the white violets of the moon.
Here was a woman who knew six languages by the time she was twenty, including Zulu, friend of Stein, Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and of course Eliot, and she lived with a classics scholar. She was not lacking in cultural references. More contemporary evidence of different political and aesthetic pressures that have affected what is considered acceptable as experiment is the erasure of radical poetry of the 20s and 30s, with the conservative 50's and 60's emphasis on sunsets and in formal structure.
_________________________________________
A Folio of Poems by Terese Svoboda
Out of Ringing Ears
Renegade automated car says it can get us back
[automated voice: get us back]
Where?
Slip of paper crushed
still warm
thigh-curved from its sleep-upon
says
Called Forth ring ring no sympathy
the better the sooner get back
Whose renegade scalp do you see taken
in a world of get back?
The tonic someone (No, we have not met)
the invisible people on stage
clothes on hangers
the gin [the automated voice: get back]
well-dressed vs. ill-dressed she said
and Not this time beat time
[schottische] slow polka to you
and over the table, the bedspread
under which a house hides
the chair-rung entrance
and the costume
I wore her clothes all my life even now her blouse curses me from the closet
Pretend! Limp possum at the vet's
The chorus needs feeding
The chorus has broken the toilet
The chorus on its hind legs
The chorus, its back to Greece
Water deliciously advances
voices over it [stage mis-direction] under it
A canon signals The End
ring, ring [automated voice]
________________________________
Sandwich
Across the stage of the plains interstate inter state interstate dell and dell and plains, there is a scene where they run out of gas.
You — in the white shirt —
I'm just as scenic. Listen: There was a tremendous knocking.
Knock, knock. No joke?
They put him in a closet.
Not a dell.
They put him in a closet and the door, hung wrong, had a gap at the bottom where you could shove a whole sandwich through, though the bread got a little dirty. As for thirst, I don't know. No light of course except through the gap so the sandwich came in dark and dirty.
Whispering voices from the phone.
Can you get it?
There was a tremendous knocking across the plains, sometimes as if on a windowpane. Sometimes enough to break it, or else from below.
You don't know that.
It's a kind of knowing, just like the knocking you say you heard just after they ran out of gas. And who is the they anyway? The usual suspects, M and F, old while you're not and because of that, always running out of gas.
They wished there were windows. There were sandwiches they made for themselves, they didn't shove them all.
You need a window left open if it's going to rain. But that means mud will be tracked in by the gas-less, earning alienation. The door won't open.
Time gaps while they run away like that, after someone else finds him in the closet. Maybe the someone went looking for a coat, a winter coat that he thought he had hung in there. Pee-You.
M and F forgot their homemade sandwiches and they ran out of gas.
How do you know?
Someone called. Someone said Look in the closet.
It was you.
I was wearing a white shirt, easy to spot. I didn't need a coat.
They walked a long way before anyone picked them up, and it never stopped raining. The dell came up while they were walking. A farmer in the dell. A big Ford truck with 4WD.
Interstate.
No trace of footsteps because of the rain.
Interstate gets into the car like a hum. You would think they were fleeing the site but no, they just ran out of gas.
What if guilt is free like the falling of rain? Instead of cooped up in a closet? He was crying.
I'm not related. I'm not the last or the late. I'm not — really. I say: there was a scene and someone went inside but whether —
A white shirt is easy enough to spot. Dirt just falls on it.
There was a tremendous knocking.
_____________________________________
Shame Helps
A sudden not-breeze fills the air.
Two men dressed in corduroy approach, one pulling a boat.
A boat of agony.
Heigh-ho. Greeting. Greeting.
Fleeting smile, both. The word smile left on the faces of the Fourth Wall.
How to read that?
The optic nerve gets it up.
What has been done weighs the Heigh.
The smarter of the men has a dollar hanging from a pocket.
Acquisitive or generous?
Balance implies a man out of sight removing his shoes.
Why a man is the question.
The philosopher in the second row wants to punch the usher.
Such restraint stupefies the audience into paradoxical sleep:
they stop worrying but their eyeballs still roll.
And if the heavens help with a hole in the roof above the lights: drip, drip,
the two men look to the exit, shamed, unwilling to follow one or the other without a speech.
Let us bury Caesar.
I hope we find some sand.
Creepy, the way birds in stillness sing.
______________________________
Fusion Construction
The sun shows off--
pocket it.
You saw electrons bloom on a newsreel,
let's have a timeline.
Six men
show, a nice number for progress
but which wears the dress?
(he's got courage like Turing)
They build its basket but
fuel must eat something:
time, this time.
Big logs
are lifted, an animatronics
of change, a mechanical buffalo
—nice Handel, hear it under
the voiceover?--but Babel bubbles up
e.g. irrational fear, unwarranted
code, another country's
penis.
Change requires copulation,
nakedness, pleasure.
Eat
the coxcomb and the sun will not rise.
______________________________________
What? is your line
I think I'm panicking
I think I'm panicking
etc.
crying practice
windowless
quick, a dream:
one of you holds the other
What? is your line
the gun is fake but you need a license
Miss Vulgarity comes forward in
a lack-of-bathing-suit competition
a different voice speaking “I”
to an “audience”
rants: and you and you and you
and it wasn't like that
brief interview with an innocent bystander
before the lover slash narrator finds his way over
an absent Noah leaves the room
floating along and then the queen says
women were at best queens then
WE
the chorus too loud
but that is opinion
answers back: the building is burning
insert choreography
where who keeps the extinguisher where backstage
but I or you end up in a boat
racing it's a matter of race
____________________________________
1718 – Nantucket Beach
1
I’ve seen boats as big as this whale. I’ve seen gryphons the same size, with teeth growing in even as they were taking their last breath.
You have not. And not a live one.
I’ve been to sea, I’ve seen all you’re supposed to, being at sea. I am sixteen, after all.
If you’d stayed at home, you would’ve seen to Ma. I’d be a pirate twice, with two voyages under me, if I didn’t have that.
Quit your carping. Go stand on its middle. Maybe it will release its wind if you jump on it.
For sure it will stink to heaven if I jump on it.
Let’s poke out its eye.
It’s a wonder you’re not tired of poking whales, a’roving on the ocean like you do, with all the new sail.
Here’s the stick—let’s do the eye.
Cap’n Peters says there’s luck in a whale’s eye. And money. Some men use saws on such as the eye, to examine the socket and take away the skull too.
You told this Cap’n Peters about this whale?
Cap’n Peters can see it himself. He’s anchored out beyond the neck, nearly done scouring the fresh-wrecked Abingdon. He’ll come.
Our greasy luck! Then the sooner it dies the better, and not for anyone else but us to collect it.
It’s alive all right. Look at the eye.
Help me with the stick. A donkey could haul it out, where could we get a donkey?
If we had a donkey I wouldn’t be walking the beach looking for rope to catch the mussels on, would I? If we had a donkey, you wouldn’t be shipping out every time the wind blew and leaving me here with Ma, myself only in short pants still and no cutlass.
We need a donkey. The smell alone will bring Peters.
Do you believe in whales? I mean, that they talk?
Two fiddles can talk. One calls, the other says Yes and then some.
Whales dance when there’s boats coming with harpoon.
The way pirates do on the gallows.
Not all of them.
They’re crying whales, not singing. Poke here.
They swallow the pennywhistle and dance on the tips of their tails on top of the water. And sing.
Whales cry about their future like all creatures worth killing. There’s a tear now, with Peters coming. Look—I can make it dance without singing.
Let it be, it’s starting to bleed.
I’ll let it be with a cut of the knife. If only I had a good one, if only Ma hadn’t sold that bit of a blade while I was gone.
She’s sold all her brooches, down to the tin-and-garnets.
She sold the true baubles after you were born—or gave them up, cleaned out by whoever she had after you had a father, cleaned out clean as a pike in a trough.
They use beetles to clean the skulls when they’re empty. Cap’n Peters says so.
Peters, Cap’n Peters—would he be the one seeing Ma now?
He’s seen all of her, if that’s your actual meaning. How huge those skull-cleaning beetles must be, so big they can’t walk after all that eating, beetles that could eat all of every one of the colonies.
Slippery here, whoa.
Cap’n Peters has got his glass on us now. There, over the wave.
No.
Tease me like you don’t know he’s watching. Play foot-in-the-water. He’ll think we are but careless boys and won’t beat us when he sees us.
We are but boys. If I only had a knife—
If you grouse and slaughter the whale before him and he balks and whines, Ma will tie herself to the rafters and I will have to cut her down. It’s a poor revenge for her living from one man to the next, though she swears Cap’n Peters is her utter last.
I told you to get her set right, to take Ma to someone while I was off at sea, a woman with a cure.
She wouldn’t go, she said she’d have no business with someone like that, she didn’t need no one other than Father. She talks to Father from the rafters where you can see the sea out the little window, she talks to you out that window too.
She doesn’t know who Father is.
This be true, but still she talks.
This fish is leaking like a ship come ashore.
Whale, it’s a whale, not a fish. And if you would quit your poking at the eye, it wouldn’t leak so much. Poking it like that makes the sound it makes worse.
You talk like a sea captain with your “Don’t this” and “Fish that,” a bloody captain, the kind I don’t take to.
It’s the life of the sea, you said. Yo, Ho, Ho, you said.
I will give you another punch to match the first.
It breathes—hear it? Cap’n Peters says they are cousin to us.
I can’t hear anything while you blather on about Cap’n Peters.
I say we leave it alone because Cap’n Peters will pay us to chop it up. They’re bound to want the steaks and oil even if it be old, and some of the bone to hang their hats on, and bone for those who truss up the women.
That’s real work, all that chopping.
Aye.
The bone is all I want—I can carve “The Apostle on the Desert” into the bone.
I can carve that—one cut meeting another.
You are a stupid boy. Look—it thinks it is a creature of the land now, it wriggles so. It wants to walk about on its tail.
With the next big wave, let’s push it in with our backs.
Let’s kill it.
Die, die.
What’re you whispering?
Nothing. Die, die, or they’ll get you, you whale of us all, you fool whale.
You are whispering.
I’ll whisper if I want to.
The whale’s dead anyway. Why else would it be on the beach?
Not breathing like this it isn’t dead. Not yet.
Look, Peters is bringing his hooks and axes. And a cutlass! There’s a knife.
It’s soapy-feeling on the outside.
Pitchforks and pries. Let’s poke it through to the brain before they get here, let’s poke it to make it dead before they poke it, so we can claim it and get the bone. I am grown, after all.
Die, die.
Why do you cry like a girl?
I’m not a girl.
Whale-lover, then. Crybaby.
Listen to it breathe.
I can’t hear anything but Cap’n Peters and his men beaching loud like six blacks banging dishpans.
It’s breathing big.
There—I’ve got the stick through, no thanks to you.
It still breathes.
If I hang on it here and pull down, the whole side will rip and they’ll know it’s ours. Give me a hand—
Comments