Bronwen Tate, The Silk The Moths Ignore

  

REPRODUCTIONS OF FRESCOS          

Travel back. Because of a misstep, I saw a crevice in a home’s knee in place of brigands. Play of light and color off their helms. Reading in the original French. Reading to be elsewhere. I look past it, first conception.

I read Proust. In wide-sleeved houppelande, she incarnates. Swollen fruit of her manly form a solid allusion. Prod that membrane edged with ribbons of watercress or cuckoo flower.

For each word, a word in another language means part of the same thing. When I look up “midwife” on the university website, the only reference is to Plato. Theaetetus, he suggests, is in discomfort because he is in intellectual labour. Socratic Method, maieutics without a uterus, the skill of drawing thought from a latent mind.

I too want to be a scholar. I want a new vernacular of milk.

Echo, echo, on my perch with my library. Well-stocked dictionary sends me Latin, lygeum spartum cultivated or not present here.

I’m very pleased to see the newly-released full-length debut by Bronwen Tate, an American poet recently transplanted into Vancouver for the sake of a teaching gig at the University of British Columbia. After the publication of a handful of chapbooks over the past few years, including titles published by above/ground press, Dusie Press and Cannibal Books, comes the full-length The Silk The Moths Ignore (Riverside CA: Inlandia Books, 2021), winner of the 2019 Hillary Gravendyk Prize. Through her book-length suite, Tate speaks of children, echoes, stories; writing from the inside of a curiously-paired bubble of text and pregnancy, each of her narrative threads swirling up and around the other. “Any creature with the head of a man will face you differently. Bind the book of autumn,” she writes, to end the poem “NEWS KNOWN / SOONER ABROAD,” “ember-leafed difficulty. Pea coat in the closed, embarrassed, left diffidently. // Can a heartbeat quicken? Mismeasured, I bargained, unmeasured, immeasurable. // Any foreign city can be a mellifluous note. // The true sky was grey.” There is such an interesting and intense interiority to these poems, writing through the blended swirl surrounding pregnancy and mothering a toddler, and reading and thinking. Through Tate, the considerations of writing, thinking and pregnancy are singular, shaping lyric sentences that are attuned to the shifts within her own body. “I could not say I had a daughter. I had a syndrome,” she writes, as part of “THE BEAUTY OF BEINGS UNLIKE / THAT OF OBJECTS,” “missing chromosomes nature mostly culls. A colleague tells me she studies what for me was a sentence. // I had that, I answer. Lost it. Her.” And yet, these poems were not prompted by such shifts, but through an entirely different kind of shifting perspective, as she offers as part of her “ACKNOWLEDGMENTS”:

Many of these poems began with reading Proust in French, which I read well but not perfectly, in search of words I did not know and could not make a confident guess at. I used these words, my guesses based on context, strange collisions, their etymology, French dictionary references (sometimes only to the Proustian sentence in which I’d encountered them), and the guts of my beloved OED for drafting material. While much of what this process generated has been trimmed away in revisions, I’ve gratefully retained some plants, some syntax, some atmosphere, and many titles.

I am fascinated through the way she shapes her poems, whether prose poems or her prose-attuned lyrics, attentive to the shape of the sentence and the accumulation of phrases, and the deep music of her flows and shifts and pauses, breaks. “Now bathysphere,” she writes, as part of “SWEET TEA,” “I house a slow advance. Brain and bone.” Or, as she writes to open the prose poem “AN EMPTY MEASURE IN MUSIC”: “That the dead could linger. Measure to the first knuckle of my littlest finger. Hand-worked guipure, light wool for a shawl. My body a shroud, lost all, lost all. Flicker, spark, and softest fall. // I count the beats in stillness.” Through Tate, we experience a lyric where language and the body intersect, and meet; a confluence of words and cells, each offering their own set of simultaneous possibility. She presents both an abstract and deeply physical and straightforward narrative space, one that articulates how perspective adapts, shifts, stretches and reshapes, from the immediate of the body to what that represents, moving through and against the language of Proust, and such a generous and affirming song of being.

UMBILICAL

Blue umbilical pulse to cut, my last placenta
Stuck, the doctor scrubbed elbow-deep, that flesh
Suddenly neither of us, excess, would rot inside me.
I held him, purple still and scrawny, bawling.
Hot blankets, shivering, sweat-wracked, hormone high—
What is in the body, yours, mind, all mouth? We are
Our parts, not a self apart, grow new ancillaries, collaborate
On blood. My son nears three now, swipes and taps
Glass-faced watch-hands, asks if the umbilicus plugs
Into the wall. Charged up on Coca-Cola, wails, “hard peaches
Are my favorite.” He wants what’s unripe. I slice and macerate
With sweet and salt and mint, tired now beyond cheek’s fuzz
And bloom. New one, I made you a room inside my mind.
Still you’ll split my skin to quit me.

 

Announcing the winners of the 2016 Hillary Gravendyk Prize!

I recently judged the National Competition of the 2016 Hillary Gravendyk Prize (named after the late American poet; see my obituary for her here), counterbalancing the judge of the Regional Competition, Megan Gravendyk Estrella. As the Inlandia Institute posted recently on their Facebookpage, the winners have now been announced (I’ve included my selections in bold, although the list of finalists is a combination of lists by both judges). Congratulations to all! The two winning manuscripts (National and Regional) will be published next year. As I wrote of the winning (National) manuscript: “Traces of a Fifth Column,” the National winner of this year’s Hilary Gravendyk Prize, is a manuscript composed as of a series of dense, lively fragments across a wide canvas, each of which are more than capable of carrying the weight of the entire collection. “Traces of a Fifth Column” is a rich, meditative collage of essay-sketches that attempt to comprehend, through exploring meaning, language and being.

Thank you to all who entered. We are grateful for your words.

And thank you to our judges, rob mclennan and Megan Gravendyk Estrella, for choosing this year's books.

••••••••••

National

Winner:

Traces of a Fifth Column by Marco Maisto

First Runner Up:

Letdown by Sonia Greenfield

Second Runner Up:

In This Housing by Mary Wilson

Regional

Winner

Gods Will for Monsters by Rachelle Cruz

First Runner Up:

Eyelets Under Sun by Lauren Henley

Second Runner Up:

Wild Embrace by Tim Hatch

Finalists:

Medusa Reads La Negra’s Palm by Elizabeth Acevedo

Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live by Monica Berlin

Maybe To Region by Monica Berlin

FIGHTING EXILE by Terry Brix

Palace of Conferences by Andrew Cantrell

Nimrod in Hell by James Capozzi

Pity the Lifeboat Poems by Colleen Carias

Us Mouth by Nikia Chaney

A Feeling For Good Water by Elizabeth Chapman

Talking to Yourself Is Fine by Sally Dawidoff

An Aperture MC Hyland

Little Yellow Father by Kiandra Jimenez

Light Into Bodies by Nancy Chen Long

Brother Bullet by Cassandra Lopez

Reaper’s Milonga by Lucian Mattison

Of All Places In This Place Of All Places by Joe Milazzo

Working With a First and Second Language by John Miller

Yesterday It Poured by Tim Perez

Lostness by Cindy Rinne

Elegy with Trench Art and Asanas and Other Poems by Jane Satterfield

Generating the Wild by Tyler Stallings

[addendum] by B.P. Sutton

Whales in the Water Tank by Micah Tasaka

Ghost Limnology by Lisken Van Pelt Dus

brightness this by Franciszca Voeltz

Announcing the 2016 Hillary Gravendyk Prize (co-judged by rob mclennan,

Announcing the 2016 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, Sponsored by the Inlandia Institute

One National and one Regional Winner will each be awarded $1000 and book publication, and additional books may be chosen for publication by the editors.

The Hillary Gravendyk Prize is an open poetry book competition for all [American resident] writers regardless of the number of previously published poetry collections. The manuscript page limit is 48 - 100 pages, and the press invites all styles and forms of poetry. Only electronic submissions accepted via Inlandia’s Submittable portal. Entries must be received online by April 30, 2016 at midnight Pacific Standard Time. Reading fee is $20. The winners will be announced late Summer/Fall 2016, for publication in 2017.

HILLARY GRAVENDYK (1979-2014) was a beloved poet living and teaching in Southern California’s “Inland Empire” region. She wrote the acclaimed poetry book, HARM from Omnidawn Publishing (2012) and the poetry collection The Naturalist (Anchiote Press, 2008). A native of Washington State, she was an admired Assistant Professor of English at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals such as American Letters & Commentary, The Bellingham Review, The Colorado Review, The Eleventh Muse, Fourteen Hills, MARY, 1913: A Journal of Forms, Octopus Magazine, Tarpaulin Sky and Sugar House Review. She was awarded a 2015 Pushcart Prize for her poem "Your Ghost," which appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She leaves behind many devoted colleagues, friends, family and beautiful poems. Hillary Gravendyk passed away on May 10, 2014 after a long illness. This contest has been established in her memory.

Contest judges: rob mclennan and Megan Gravendyk-Estrella

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan [photo credit: Stephen Brockwell] currently lives in Ottawa, where he has now lived for more than half his life. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014), The Uncertainty Principle: stories,(Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics, Touch the Donkey and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater. In 2015, he became Interviews Editor over at Queen Mob’s Teahouse. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Megan Gravendyk-Estrella is a Registered Psychiatric Nurse and Poet. Megan is a two time winner of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the author of the Seattle Young Playwrights prize winning short play "Good Evening Mrs.Gerfella". Megan lives in the Los Angeles area with her husband, Jose and his daughter, Sofia. Hillary and Megan wrote together their entire lives and most recently attended the Napa Valley Writers Workshop. Prior to Hillary's passing, the sister's work-shopped poetry and short fiction together, including many poems in Hillary's book, Harm.

The details:
One contest, two prizes, each award is granted publication and $1000: All entrants will be considered for the National Prize, and entrants who currently reside in Inland Southern California, the “Inland Empire,” will also be considered for the Regional Prize (Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, and any non-coastal Southern California area, from Death Valley in the northernmost region to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in the southernmost). If you believe you reside in an area that falls within the I.E., please select the “Yes, I reside in the I.E.” checkbox on the Submittable form, or if you’re not sure, please contact the Inlandia Institute at Inlandia@InlandiaInstitute.org.) In addition, the editors may select one or more additional books for publication.

Eligibility: Any resident of the United States of America or its territories may enter the contest, with the exception of colleagues, students, and close friends or family of the judge(s). Additionally, anyone who currently serves or has served in the past two years on any Inlandia Institute committee, its Advisory Council, its Board of Directors, or is a close family member of one of the above, is not eligible.

Manuscript Requirements: Please submit 48-100 pages of poetry through our Submittable portal as a .doc, .docx, or .pdf. ***Submissions will be read blind, so do not include any contact information on the manuscript itself.*** Do not include a cover page, and do not attach an acknowledgements page. No revisions to the manuscript are allowed while the contest is running; however, if your manuscript is selected for publication, revisions may be submitted at that time. Please use a standard 11 or 12 point font. If there is a significant amount of non-standard formatting, please submit as a PDF to ensure formatting remains intact. Individual poems may have been published in journals, anthologies, chapbooks, etc., but the collection as a whole must be unpublished.

Submission fee: $20 per manuscript. Multiple submissions accepted but a separate entry fee is required for each manuscript submitted. Simultaneous submissions also accepted. If accepted elsewhere, please formally withdraw your manuscript from consideration via the Submittable portal.

Each winner will receive $1000, 20 copies of their book, and a standard book contract.

The manuscripts will be screened by MFA students from University of California Riverside and California State University San Bernardino.

The Inlandia Institute is a literary nonprofit and publishing house based in Inland Southern California dedicated to celebrating the region in word, image, and sound. In 2014, Vital Signs, a collection of poetry and photographs by Juan Delgado and Thomas McGovern, received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. In 2015, the Inaugural Hillary Gravendyk Prizes were awarded to Kenji Liu for Map of an Onion (National) and Angela Penaredondo (Regional).