Carrie Hunter, The Flow of the Poem’s Display of Itself

 

The light patched up later, after the fact.
The conversational you, interjected.

Bright, snazzy, fabulous slownesses, fantasticality.
Skipping a comma just to throw you.
The center disappears in the middle.
The furniture, what we walk around,
                            use’s communication
                came to be seen, comes, to seam.

If you view yourself from within the ecoterritory,
and no separate from,
there is no need to replicate the self. (““Finally, the Memory Became an Object””)

I’m very pleased to see a new poetry title by San Francisco poet, editor and chapbook publisher Carrie Hunter, The Flow of the Poem’s Display of Itself (New York NY: Roof Books, 2025), following The Incompossible (Black Radish Books, 2011), Orphan Machines (Black Radish Books, 2015) and Vibratory Milieu (Brooklyn NY: Nightboat Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Composed in four sections of poems—“Richly Flows Contingency,” “All Gabled Roofs Will Fall,” “Poetry’s Anti-Monument” and “The Flow of the Poem’s Display of Itself”—the accumulated poems read akin to a thesis, offering a book of poems on and around poetic structure. “I’ve heard that the subject matter is on its way.” begins the poem ““Glamour and Chrystoprase”,” “No saying exactly creates a space to pull meaning out of / vs                a specificity which is useless. // Memories mixed up, only recognized as such through changing pronouns.” These poems are nimble, punch-smart and quick, stretching out across a wealth of literary reference and citation, as Hunter offers a book on lyric and poetic form, even arguing poetic form as inadequate through those very structures. As she writes in the poem ““Gravity Isn’t About to Save Us””: “The difference between disintegration and return. / Awareness as a scientific measurement.”

Denise Newman’s anti-paradise, Dana Teen Lomax’s guilt.

Model of possibility, “your” possible situation.
An old “chromo” on the wall, innocent as a “lintel.”

Hate-filled cubicle jobs
             and how that leads to an explanation
                                           of what Osiris would do.

How snow is truth and how you show truth.
Against reinvention and for becoming more and more the self.
Votive angel gatekeeper’s actions at the gate. (““The Saga of the Sheepgirl and Her Friend / the Pelican Merchant””)

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Hunter, Nećakov, Logan, Thomas, Brandt + Buuck, (and 8th anniversary subscription sale!

Anticipating the release later next week of the thirty-third of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the thirty-second issue: Carrie Hunter, Lillian Nećakov, Nate Logan, Hugh Thomas, Emily Brandt and David Buuck.

And did you hear about our 8th anniversary (subscription) sale, running throughout the month of April (and featuring the above/ground press backlist)?

Interviews with contributors to the first thirty-two issues (more than two hundred interviews to date) remain online, including: Jessi MacEachern, Sue Bracken, Melissa Eleftherion, Valerie Witte, Brandon Brown, Yoyo Comay, Stephen Brockwell, Jack Jung, Amanda Auerbach, IAN MARTIN, Paige Carabello, Emma Tilley, Dana Teen Lomax, Cat Tyc, Michael Turner, Sarah Alcaide-Escue, Colby Clair Stolson, Tom Prime, Bill Carty, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Robert Hogg, Simina Banu, MLA Chernoff, Geoffrey Olsen, Douglas Barbour, Hamish Ballantyne, JoAnna Novak, Allyson Paty, Lisa Fishman, Kate Feld, Isabel Sobral Campos, Jay MillAr, Lisa Samuels, Prathna Lor, George Bowering, natalie hanna, Jill Magi, Amelia Does, Orchid Tierney, katie o’brien, Lily Brown, Tessa Bolsover, émilie kneifel, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Guy Birchard, Mark Cunningham, Lydia Unsworth, Zane Koss, Nicole Raziya Fong, Ben Robinson, Asher Ghaffar, Clara Daneri, Ava Hofmann, Robert R. Thurman, Alyse Knorr, Denise Newman, Shelly Harder, Franco Cortese, Dale Tracy, Biswamit Dwibedy, Emily Izsak, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Conyer Clayton, Roxanna Bennett, Julia Drescher, Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon, Trish Salah, Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey ,Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming thirty-third issue features new writing by: Howie Good, Jérôme Melançon, Genevieve Kaplan, Cecilia Stuart, ryan fitzpatrick, Benjamin Niespodziany, Maw Shein Win, Margo LaPierre, Sarah Pinder and Michael Boughn.

And of course, copies of the first thirty-two issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press 2022 subscriptions! We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

Carrie Hunter, Vibratory Milieu

 

As if the self were an herb you could gather.

I’m not a parade person.

ONE DAY THE INVISIBLE MANIFESTS.

The poor will die.

            “Pimples are the lords way of chastising you.”

Nothing’s really happened until it’s been described.

Prediscursive or postdiscursive poetics.

If true consciousness lies below the conscious level.

                                                            A duality that means both of us.

A small percentage of men only respect you if you yell at them.

The free packets of coffee stopped showing up.

I’d been eager to get my hands on San Francisco poet, editor and chapbook publisher Carrie Hunter’s third full-length poetry collection, Vibratory Milieu (Brooklyn NY: Nightboat Books, 2021), following her prior collections, The Incompossible (Black Radish Books, 2011) and Orphan Machines (Black Radish Books, 2015) [full disclosure: she has also published a chapbook with above/ground press]. Vibratory Milieu is a high-speed polyphonic lyric suite that somehow feels simultaneously an extension of her prior work, and yet, leagues ahead in terms of structure. Composed in five sections—“Lysunekes,” “Carrie,” “Per Una Selva Oscura,” Oppositions are Accomplices” and “Vibratory Milieu”—Vibratory Milieu is a collage of fast-moving voices, quotes and directions that manage to pause, speed up, rush and hold still, eventually developing a hyper-focused through-line. “The red lettering has been painted over with yellow.” she writes, in the first section. “As we get older, we see history more clearly.” How does one read a poem that moves in all directions simultaneously? Hunter blends theory with pop culture, block text and exposition, running roughshod across narrative into seeming-chaos, a cacophony that bleeds into and across multiple references, including her Stephen King-created namesake, Carrie White, from his novel Carrie (1974), a character portrayed multiple times on stage and screen, most memorably by Sissy Spacek in the 1976 film, and Chloë Grace Moretz in the 2013 remake. As Hunter writes to open her second section, “Carrie”:

YOUR TENDENCY TO DWELL IN THE PAST COULD BE
USEFUL TO US.

Wanting something and insisting on it—into the void, forever, alone.

            “creepy carrie creepy carrie”

In the dream, the teacher says : just one class can turn your mind
completely vertical.

                                                                        His sexual noli me tangere.

Terrified as usual.

Maybe I can have my muffled heart back.

We had pigeon problems.

            “and the raven was called sin”

The word “Restitution.”

                                                            Maybe everything I dream is geology.

 

 

Ongoing notes: dusie kollektiv 9: gillian parrish + Carrie Hunter

Further to the latest iteration of the dusie kollektiv [see my prior notes on chapbooks by Bronwen Tate and Elisabeth Workman from the same kollektiv here; on C.S. Carrier and Adra Raine here; see the link to my own chapbook here], here are a couple of more chapbook-length works solicited by dusie maven Susana Gardner, produced in/as homage to the late American poet, editor and publisher Marthe Reed.

St. Charles MO: From poet gillian parrish comes cold spell (April 2019), a project, she writes, that began “in January 2015 shelved until January 2019, as other projects kept the roof overhead, as all the while life for our kin in the arctic keeps declining. The work was taken up again in answer to a call from DUSIE for chapbooks by Counter-Desecration anthology contributors written in honor of editor Marthe Reed and her call for work that acknowledges that ‘there is no safe distance,’ work that lives ‘somewhere inbetween self and other, near and distant, paradoxical poles resolving moment-to-moment… Meeting place.’” cold spell focuses its gaze on the north, on the chaos of climate change on the landscape and the wildlife, writing diminishing fragments and a staccato pulse along the path, writing out what has already been lost and what will soon also be lost: “come muskox come / with your curved horns / goat-hooved / nimble come singing / the old cold songs / pack back the ice / press it back in place / cool the world [.]”

Yellow eye for summer, blue for winter. To see at the end of the spectrum, sight sliding into scent. You scry in ultraviolet light; wolf piss and wolf fur, the filigreed lichen named for you, filling the forest floor, ghost corals, branching antlers, luminescent heedless one. Teach us to see in the dark. Knee-clicker, river-runner. You make the track, you are the map, become the drum. Teach us to be eaten. How the body is an offering. Snow-shveler. Forager. How will you feed through the ice? For we’ve made the rain start falling at the wrong time. A bad rain falling like glass. Far-ranger. Fog-bringer. Our old seers climbed the sky inside your skin. Become the drum to stop our dreaming. Trail-maker. Watcher. At the limits of our vision.

San Francisco CA: From Californian poet Carrie Hunter comes The Hyperobjective Marthe Reed (April 2019), a collection of exploratory lyric collages shaped as a single, chapbook-length poem. Throughout the collection, she weaves in a myriad of quotes from John Ashbery’s FLOW CHART: A Poem (Knopf, 1991), as well as from Marthe Reed’s essay, threading a series of observations and questions on mythology, ecology, memory and meaning. Ashbery’s FLOW CHART is constructed as an accumulation, what the Los Angeles Times referred to as “a book-length poem of more than 5,000 long Ashberian lines, which makes it one of the longest poems ever written by an American poet. All of the qualities of Ashbery’s recent poetry are here in amplitude or excess, depending on your point of view.” Hunter extracts from Ashbery’s excess to move in a multitude of directions simultaneously, while pushing a thesis built on accumulation and collage, utilizing as springboard into, around and through her own thoughts on human responsibilities to and around climate disaster. “Who survives is no better than who does not;,” she writes, “it’s just incidental.” Hunter’s is a large canvas here, and I would be curious to know if this project is self-contained in this form, or might become larger (it certainly has that potential). To end the poem “Like Hebe to the Rainbow’s Gauzy Showers,” she writes:

The “wildflowers in the wallpaper.” Taking it more internal than is meant. Not wildflower wallpaper, but a hybrid form of two thing which would never be hybridized.

The Yellow Wallpaper palimpsested over Ashbery’s wildflowers.

“Presto, no one was there.”

Memory of the ecosystem (genitive) collides

with lacunae of the individual.

Another empty room.

What Joan said too.

Ornery purgative exodus.

The father, and disobediences.

An injunction, chamois costume,

what about when it’s really too late.