Okay. Thank you guys all for coming today. I'm Melissa Mallon, the humanities librarian here. And I don't know if everybody knows, but it is National Poetry Month, I just wanted to throw that out there. And so to commemorate National Poetry Month through the month of April, we've got several great readings. Obviously, we've got a great reading today and then a couple more coming up in April.
Next week, we have Michael McGriff, our visiting poet in residence. And that's again, going to be from noon to one here on the lower level. And then on the 28th for finishing off this year's series with a collection of readings by the MFA Student Poets. So that's always a lot of fun to have the students here, so we're looking forward to that.
Before you leave, if you want, we've got Jessica's books for sale over here and she's going to stick around and sign some books afterwards, if you like, if you brought your own copy or you want to buy a book. And now I'd like to introduce Don Wineke, Chair of the English Department, and he's going to give us a little information about Jessica.
So enjoy.
Hi. It's my pleasure to introduce Jessica, who's been with us as a lecturer this semester is also a candidate for our permanent position in poetry beginning next year. Jessica got her B.A. at the, at the University of Texas at Austin in 2001 and her MFA in 2004. She recently finished her Ph.D. at Mizzou with an emphasis in creative writing.
Jessica has a number of poems in journals such as North America, Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly and as well as Fire Pond, which won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry for 2009, at the University of Utah Press. A reviewer for The Appalachian Review said of Fire Pond that it was "a dazzling meditation on the nature of otherness, desire, and the passing of time."
And just one more Carolee Sherwood, writing in Poets Quarterly, said, "Fire Pond engages me on both the cerebral and the instinctual level... At the same time it makes my logical brain salivate. It entices my heart most of all." Good words. I have no others. Jessica.
Thank you, Don. Those are good words. I forgotten about those words, thanks for reminding me. Finding a good place for my water here. Albert suggested it might be vodka. That's why I said that. So thank you everyone for coming. It's really nice to see familiar faces among the faculty and students, especially since I haven't been here very long. It's really nice to feel like there are familiar faces to come to this sort of reading.
And thanks to Margaret for setting up the reading and thanks to Melissa for for organizing everything. Oh, and I'm on tape now. So, that'll be on tape now. And thanks to the library, too, I think this is a very lovely kind of place to read. And actually a number of my poems deal with spring and April that I'm going to read for you today,
so this is a nice backdrop for that. Okay. So I'm going to read a couple, just two new poems and then a handful of poems from Fire Pond. So I'm going to start with the new poems. And this first one is called Invitation. It's about sort of, well, the starting point is anxiety over the idea of having a dinner party. Invitation, and has April Fool's Day in it, so we're seasonal here.
Invitation. A dinner party? I'm too temporary to hold a dinner party. What would I serve or say? How would I keep the walls from looking rented or turning to tent? Should the moon suddenly strike them as funny. It's spring. No time to change my dress from this wind love, this wind loved here I am, to the tailor made I am here. It's pricey, that new one, and hangs toward the middle of the future spring catalog.
I am here means making arrangements with the water. Settle down now, freeze, divide and tinkle into useful cubes that melt so beautifully into gin lit laughter. But it must not rise above our noses or much past midnight, if any work's to be done tomorrow. If we are to keep from drifting away. The candles too must be coached to lean and sway their flames in such a way that to see them is to feel their solid inner atmosphere, parlorized and cherry finished, not their weakness for breath.
But how will I keep the crickets from playing a creaky adagio on their limbs? They will sound like lonely children gathered at the windows too happy to explain. Maybe I'll give in, give up on the given the windows provide and welcome the jigsaw wings of the bats who swing on strings in the gravel alley, the raccoon who sits in the tree.
I'll invite the little girl who lives down the street and talks to me from her front yard on my walks to the park in the evening. She once played a joke on me regarding a cat wedged tightly into a box with blankets risen all around her like a swollen, peaked soufflé. I just found this cat on our doorstep and this box just found her, gonna keep her.
And I said, how remarkable that the cat stayed put so patiently. It must love you already. April fools, she yelled. She's mine. She's Mildred. But despite this revelation, Mildred is temporary, too, so the girl could bring her along to the party, if she liked, where I would serve nothing, would make time, not keep it or kill it. Not salmon or quiche or claws plucked from the floor of the sea.
Let us go then, not stay. We'll have a dinner that lacks all temporality, that's stuffed to its tender gills with humid, uneven space that makes us lopsided, walk funny, free. Okay, this next poem is called April 15, and I used to - when I lived in Missouri - I went for the last few, once I discovered this free text service from the campus at University of Missouri, I went there quite regularly to, or well, "regularly,"
once a year, to get my taxes done, you know, usually on April 15th or the day before, that kind of thing. So this is, and this is quite a group that gathers there, because it is free and is open to the public. And so it's a motley crew in there.
So this I was writing, I don't know with what sort, of what was the first kind of spark that made me start writing in my term, but I was sort of recording things as they were happening. And so this poem comes from that, from that record. It starts out it as two kind of two public matters.
It ends up with the tax getting taxes done, and it starts out with paying, paying parking tickets in the municipal building, different building. April 15th. The world that just yesterday felt sweaty and personal as a swamp with hands, I passed through today cleansed and free a mere attendant to public matters. The municipal building, so grand and out of place facing Lucy's Diner, received me this morning into its marble interior, and a slick thrill residing between sureness and humility frisked me as I approached the window, holding with both hands my bright yellow bouquet of parking tickets. I paid heartily, for
this morning I discovered a neon green sticker stuck relentlessly to my car's clear breast like an A, implying the town's power to drag her away and shame. After I paid, I peed, in a sunny, immaculate stall that made me I'm a little embarrassed to say, feel safe and contained, tucked out of harm's way. Perhaps because it, like me, was drawn to the human scale.
Outside, I descended the grand stone stair to the street. Now I sit in a very different sort of room in the basement of a building at the university, the one dedicated to the study of architecture. But today we convene for another, a national purpose, to get our taxes done at the very last moment for free. We've all waited longer than we meant to.
And for that, we'll wait especially long today in this long, narrow waiting room with a hodgepodge of chairs placed too near for us to feel separate from one another. Things rise irrepressibly to the surface like cream. A quite large handyman across from me, suddenly says to whomever might hear that he got his stimulus money, but it's caught in the revolving door, circling straight back into what he owes.
Now, he laughs and looks serene. Now, the young woman with the honey sparrow voice, which suits the green shirt perched at the ledge of her dark shoulders, flirts with the college student behind the desk, the one responsible for intake, and now the young blond guy, handsome in a sailboat sort of way, mentions to the intake fellow his desire to be taken in.
He has a voice and I can only guess it comes from deep within his body. Something about this space, its gray carpet, gray chairs, gray walls, and flimsy partitions, makes bodies seem more like bodies, more full of their own blood and movement, and suddenly from the nowhere hallway in walks my former student, Katherine -- the one who couldn't stand me because I asked her to stay awake. Look away, focus on the questions the guy is asking someone else
now they are calming and standard as water in a sunlit creek that melts something in my calves and moves upwards. But Katherine's up now it's her turn and she sits across from the gatekeeper, disturbing the water's flow. She didn't like me. That compulsion that punctures so much of our time until time begins to feel like a compulsion to be liked.
Did you know the root of time means to stretch or extend? Funny, Liz said just yesterday. We always think of it as a constraint. It stretches beyond us, leaves us out like a herd of girls leaves one girl's heart constrained by the middle school bathroom, like students who talk or sleep in class as if you are a TV plugged in at the front of the room.
It looks at us blankly and looks away and thumbs private messages on its cell phone. Or is that too contemporary for time? Maybe time's look is more like the sea. The sea, the illustrious consuming, unfathomable sea sounds so funny here, almost impossible, almost repealed by the sound of coffee machines, calm pleasantries, the tick tock of a stapler, giving order to each return, all of it free and therefore unhurried.
I could stay here all day, all week. A beautiful Indian woman walks in now. Perfect timing, she says, since she arrives at just the moment her name is called. Perfect timing. Her shirt has a cartoon drawing to scale of ribs, forming an empty cage, a new cherry red forming an empty cage, a cherry red heart beating outside of them.
Katherine emerges from the back and she is, oh my. She sits down next to me. We speak and it's as though we are our long lost friends now. She tells me she will start reporting at the campus station soon. She's excited. Only one year of college left. We hold each other's gaze and feel, I think, forgiven. Perfect timing, says a young man in gym shorts whose friend will get to prepare his taxes due to perfect timing,
and now - oh it's something - the woman sitting with the gatekeeper. Her nails are like the long, curved rinds of a strange fruit fallen a long way, long ago from its tree. Really, they must be seven inches long, ten even, and are painted midnight blue with enameled stars bursting the length of them. She is looking for something, looking in her gray purse for something important.
And the nails they drag along the gray tabletop with an eerie animal sound, and they carve cosmic shapes in the space around her purse, around her tax forms, which rustle and slide on the table. I can't make them up, these figures floating against the milky gray screen, more body here in the free tax office in the basement of an ugly building used for the study of architecture, gotten to by hallways and stairs and doors that lead back out into the sun-waxed wind, the 65 degree context ribbed with trees, lined and blue silk and bells ringing from a tower meant to inspire grandeur and hope, a public dignity to time and its effortless reach.
It's kind of ballsy of me to read a poem that has a student falling asleep in class for my job interview. That's how it goes. Okay. So those are the two poems. And now I'll read a few from from Fire Pond and this first, this first poem is called En Route, and it's sort of about, sort of about airplane turbulence.
En Route. Trust me, airplanes want to stay in the air, says the man who fills the seat next to me with his physique, a fluid sort of flotation device. Charming, he thinks. My hissing nerves from their basket. The huge engine of blue serenity we see here, snoring cool cheek, pressed to our windows is not there. Instead, we hang among a salad in the making, the blue vegetable world being chopped and diced and tossed as only the invisible can, while the man's theorem chimes the chime of a grandfather clock with a benefit, I mean, of never sounding wrong.
A sound that sounds as though it's torn from the cosmic palette. I've always admired statements unedited by any timid echo, clouding up from the heels of an inner waffler -- and up here time, sound isn't encouraged to travel. What alien loveliness to hand something to the world and know the world won't shove it back. To be certain, your guts are gutsier than it's, or else more simply to believe a platonic marriage exists between your mind and the principles so vigorously underlined in the world's dog eared manual.
But can you blame a certain kind of stomach, home to a crowd of butterflies, or are they sheep, a crowd of sheep doddering harder and harder into the idea of herd for hunkering deeper and lurching on such a dare. Hanging operatically in the rafters is put to the wolves of circumstance. Surely, the plane can't pass up such a temptation to let go of the air, a retired engineer breathed long ago into the Arctic lines and openings of its blueprint.
Surely it's too efficient. Surely it's too efficient to be blessed or doomed to want more than anything, the very thing you're good for. To always believe in the circle. It's exhausting. The thrice checked fuel, the round trip, iron clad halves of expectation and delivery, failure is the natural response to such innocence and completion. How strange all the planes haven't fallen.
Okay. I'm going to read a poem now called Cogito, which means "I think" in Latin and it involves the philosopher Descartes and his meditation. But it's sort of about that. It's about reading that in a philosophy textbook, a used philosophy textbook. And then also the the marginalia that, that I find in the margin, I sort of imagine the life of that.
I probably just told you way too much. I should have just started reading it.
Okay. Cogito. The maple outside my window shakes its big yellow fever at me. Spotlight in the wind. I'm in bed reading First Meditation concerning things that can be doubted from a textbook with a neon used sticker glued to its spine. My throat is lemon peel sore, but luckily, like Descartes, I'm disturbed by no passions these days. I'm free in my peaceful solitude to draw the quilts up to my chin and think. Elsewhere
a wail of tires, the soft crush of metal on metal on an unseen street as fenders furrowed like eyebrows. The storm windows rattle. Descartes is seated by the fire in his winter dressing gown, the paper in his hands bearing the reason for doubting every belief in his senses' deceptive creed. For what if right now he was only his own dream, haunting the attic of his true body, naked, fast asleep beneath, the between the bed sheets in another room, the fire only a painted fire, drying on the twin fluttering canvases of his eyelids?
Descartes is locked in a vice, a bracket in black ballpoint pen. A boy named Adam owned this book before I did. He paid his money, read some of what he was told to read, then thrust it back into the world when the semester was finished hen-pecking him. Adam didn't like Descartes. He scrawled insults all sketched all in all caps in the white oblivion of the margins.
The delicate imagined hem of Descartes dressing gown did nothing to touch him. Instead, he wrote dick beside the fire scene, the letters large and hard as the clang of a grate, slammed shut in a silent room. I can almost see the tough grudge of his shoulders, fending off the intrusion of books which burdened him with the suggestion that he might not be everything or enough.
What was this book? Dead on the shelves of cinder blocks and two by fours, lining the blank edge of his room, compared to what he had suffered in the space of a single day. When he got dumped, maybe, and walked around like a long, thin paper cut before it bleeds? Descartes drew a diagram of pain to show how it was separate from the mind,
a resigned cherub of a man, one toe dipped in the furled cabbage of a fire, parting the skin, opening a hollow extension cord hooked up to the brain for the animal spirit to flow through and inflate the muscle, inviting the leg to withdraw. Adam withdrew. But his dream dreams stuck around like brick tenements blocking the view, the sun, his mind pale, packing up images of people and places, gluing them to 1989 to yesterday, to never, with a hot, tacky shame that wouldn't dry evenly or hold.
He woke each morning with half an erection aimed at no one, no place in particular. The constellation of acne scars on his roommate's back, a sign that nothing mattered, the closed curtains, a shade of green set the same as dim, beer-thin watts of winter light nudged them, the storm windows rattling. Descartes recorded only the three consecutive dreams, plotted clearly as points on a plane, arcing upward, that drove him to unearth the foundation of the wonderful science.
He was twenty-three at the time and had to believe in a divine destiny since his father called René his one disappointment in life, a son so ridiculous as to have himself bound in calfskin. So the son could do nothing but prove God, a God that made the real him. His parents were responsible for his body, that modest, restless curtain concealing the open window of his true, immaterial self.
There was nothing he could do about that, except doubt everything but what he thought they could not touch or ruin; nothing to do about that except to make them not matter, as perhaps Adam made Descartes not matter, made everything matter as little as possible in order to ignore the other edge of the life of the knife laid down inside him,
hopeful, threatening to try something new. How are you guys doing? Okay. I haven't read any of the sonnets that are from Fire Pond in a while, so I thought I might just read maybe the first three of those. The title poem of the book is a sequence of ten sonnets and I read them when I was at a writing residency in New Hampshire, and I sort of needed something to turn my, turn my attention to, because it was lots of time and lots of quiet
and I found that book in the in the library there of Marilyn Hacker's. And she had stayed before in my, in my studio where I was working. And so I thought, oh, I had read Marilyn Hacker and I went and got one of her collections. And I was really taken with the way that she handled her sonnet sequences.
So, so I started writing some and I ended up writing ten of them and ended up being the title poem of the book. So I'll just read the first three. Fire Pond.
Lately there's not, there's never not a reason good enough to call; though come on you -- you know, you're treading serious ground, the minutes low on your cell phone. No...low is being wooed like water by a stone -- hours of whir bending round conversation with a man who's married, who's your friend, who there again tickles the boundary from straight line to curve where silken almost not there feelers fringe the ground between the cloth of his marriage and you, out here, wheeling newish luggage around the weedy periphery...
O, cringe, no more, you. You're just where you've always loved to be -- the lover, skirting love, but moved. Gunfire in the woods -- just rifles, just deer. We wear orange vests when walking there, so no mistaking what we are. Discussed my poem on the phone today. Awareness like a rain that you've become the new coarse knot my child-etched wood grain aims its flow toward, dam-flown. Swallowing to join. That blue starvation game. No oar. A man's rib bone.
At dinner, I told a poet, I'm scared I think I might write for love. Seventy-one, she smiled, said nothing, and then, Well, why not. More was said. We're almost never done. Outside, the world dilates, puts on its night, puts on its night and wonders what today we took for sight. Today, I took a walk to Fire Pond. I brought the map, forgot the orange vest. Into the silence I made human sounds, coughs and heavy steps proclaiming, Yes, I'm here, but apart. I can't be folded in to whatever this is.
My steps pressed words onto my mind: Fire...Pond...Fire...Pond...which changed change to my own name. I let the cadence shield me. Early dark narrowed the spaces between pines. Still I followed the map's lines which trickled down toward that dark labeled place and inkblot deep in the woods. But no sign told what to do once there.
Oh, it said to no one. Oh, I echoed embarrassed, new. Okay, I think I'll just read maybe two more. Two, maybe three more. This is another springy, springy one and it's sort of, it's called Self-preservation Ode. And it's kind of an ode to spring and a sort of brute forgetfulness of spring, sort of in admiration of that quality of spring. Self-preservation Ode.
There's a curse word in this, just a warning. I've been trying all day to write an ode to Spring, to it's fuck you froth, dogwood and crepe myrtle, quivering from a lip-raised snarl, its cocky teenaged refusal to answer the insipid red thank you the plastic bag offers as it clutches the edge of the creek. Its defiance of those who would scold its green mind and lack of guilt toward those who suffer beneath its windy circus tent.
But how much of this is about the Spring? All day I've been observing myself, trying not to observe myself being weak, because screw being weak, being a tilled, fertile field, shrugging its crops away. I want to be the sun, preemptive and cruel, scorching the fields to husk and ash so the ground won't feel it when the sky won't rain.
What I admire in Spring is its focus. One needs a point to hone, to keep the peripheries at bay. So I'll happily close down those surrounding parklands where friends and lovers pitch their small tents, roughing it for a while before they pack it up for home. At night, flashlights bob and hold inside the domes. They look from a distance like paper lanterns, invisibly strung on the wind.
Still, I'll be glad when they're gone. Might as well be now. Here I record as the spring records. There will be no, this too shall pass, no cloistering of my throes behind stone till they run clear of whatever bile caused them to recognize really means to rethink events from a more reasonable point of view, not mine. But here, I record as the Spring records with attention to the details that matter to Spring, blotting out whole histories of hurt and wrongdoing with impressions of wind on a deep lake.
Okay, this, this poem is called Fascicle and I, uh, this poem started with me hearing about the scholar named R. W. Franklin, who was trying, he's a Dickinson's scholar, Emily Dickinson scholar, and he was trying to put the, reassemble her fascicles which are the little sewn pamphlets of poems that she made during her life. And so, but they were dismantled after her death.
And so Franklin, I heard this anecdote about the way that he tried to put them back in their original order. And I found it really kind of touching, which is that he was trying, he was looking at the pinholes that the needle had made and trying to match the cresting of the pin holes, and so I found that kind of this tedious and touching image, and then it sort of started to collect these other, these other narratives and and ideas.
So it was kind of a proto love story, it's kind of about Dickinson. And there's a couple of quotes from or a couple of lines from Dickinson's poems in here to fill a gap, insert the thing that caused it, and you cannot solder an abyss with an air. Fascical. I come to your shores on a wave of disposable coffee cups. If you won't have me,
I understand. It's Easter morning, and clear. I gave up nothing this season. A few specks of snow drift past the maple's red buds whose birth and infancy you've remarked on from bed. I love that testament to time's fruitful passage. Not for nothing, these late attempts. Never mind. The trail of coffee cups leads not to consolation. But what about concentration on something that isn't you?
I wish to be that devoted scholar focused wholly on the perforations Dickinson's needle made when she sewed folded sheets of paper into bundles of poems, dismantled after her death by a hand brutal in its lack of clairvoyance. The scholar wholly focused on getting this crime undone, through his belief in retrospect, in the tedious alignment of absences, slant similes between the crested edges of pinholes that might stream together a past. Not just a past. A way of seeing down the impossible well into her mind, what she intended to make what she intended to make her poems into. To fill a gap, insert the thing that caused it.
But if that cause is gone? Resurrect it, says the spirit of the scholar. You cannot solder an abyss with air. Meanwhile, you, burrowing deeper into the space you've made, smiling because we're at the diner and I've just spilled ice water down my shirt while trying to simulate spilling ice water down my shirt. If I'd practiced giving something up this season, maybe I wouldn't feel so attached to way to the way you fill the space that will one day fill with something less fitting, something that won't even pretend to be you.
Is it a sin, or only a boring lack of faith to miss someone before they're gone, to compulsively reassemble what has not yet come apart? Your smile fossilizes in the wall of a duplicate diner that has no walls; it will live longer there. I'm laughing too, I'm there. Must not forget that the needle, leaving its blank wake is a point of fact, not thought.
You too are light sharpened and real. But I daydream all the time now when you're not here. Sometimes when you are. Sometimes I think I could stitch all the hours of my life into that element of blank between facts and happenings, between trips to the store, the bar, the library, Mass, if I went to Mass anymore. I could stitch all my hours into the airy, unowned pools that are the overflow, the glinting excess, of life's completed actions. Not isolated; connected by being left behind, apart.
I could give up everything, anything, a disposable coffee cup, traveling a current: filling, sinking, rising, emptying. Or else I could be like this plastic bottle of salty soda water, standing still in sunlight on the yellow table trembling. No, I suppose perhaps being self-centered and less like giving up everything then nothing. More like sinking so far in to the leaden season of Lent as to arrive in its dark reversal, an overripe underworld of moveable feasts, spring broken into through its absorbed wall-eyed mirrors, then lived in for good, as happy ghosts who love lovemaking better now that nothing, not even their bodies, can come between them.
Okay. And I'll just read one one last short poem called Farewell., as my farewell poem to you. I can't remember where it is. Farewell, with an exclamation point at the end. Out walking last evening, past stables, the fireflies low along the tree line, a brief warm gust quickening some current that repeated in me, I watched as I climbed over a blurred version of the fence and broke into a wild tear toward the horses dining solemnly together on the hill.
And, at first, as just after a dream, it wasn't clear which was me, the one who ran a cry dislodged like red magician's silk from her throat, or the one who continued to trace with her steps the simple intention of the fence, economical inside her life. It wasn't clear who was who until one let go the way a child lets go. A balloon after balloon, across years, and only with practice is able to watch that bright shape float away and not feel herself go with it.
Thank you.
Do you want to? Does anyone have questions?
I'm happy to take questions if anyone has them.
I just have a comment. I would like to commend you. A poet who also knows how to read.
Thank you. Thank you.
The meaning was so clear and it makes me think that's the best way to access poetry, is to read it yourself aloud. Perhaps. But you did a good job. Thank you. Thank you. I want to second that. We've only had one young man,
I've been coming here for
years, that could perhaps even rival a CD of famous poets reading their poetry. They're terrible. Thank you.
I enjoy reading. I'm glad that comes through. Any others? Anybody else? Questions or comments?
Lovely reading. Thank you. Thank you.