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.
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