Rachel Moritz, Sweet Velocity

Near Future

On the lilac, buds sharpen:

a quotidian green spring.

The sky is traceless,

nothing new

But these windows

with our names,

and patience shining like the glass

cleaned by hand,

vinegar and water.

Something transparent,

we know,

still contains.

Consider the heft of light

which has no face

but one worth dividing.

How its clear halo presses

as it comes,

how a transverse cut

could also be contrails.

Minneapolis poet Rachel Moritz’s second full-length poetry title is Sweet Velocity (Jackson WY: Lost Roads Press, 2017), a collection of short, sharp and exquisite meditations constructed out of direct and indirect statements, heartbreaks and hesitations, observations and queries. Hers is a poetry of inquiry, and her poems are sketched from point to point, thought to thought—akin to the English-language ghazal—creating a poetry of accumulation; less a singular scene or thought than a trajectory. Set in three numbered sections, two of which are made up of shorter lyrics (including three poems titled “Near future” that open and close the collection), and these sections bookend the third section, a sequence of poem-to-footnote poems, composed as a kind of “call and response” sequence. In a 2016 interview posted at Speaking of Marvels, she discusses the work-in-progress that eventually became Sweet Velocity, specifically the chapbook How Absence (MIEL Books, 2015), the poems of which were folded into the current book: “The poems in How Absence are largely concerned with birth and arrival. They were written in the first years of my son’s life. Among the book’s themes are the intense experiences of physical intimacy that accompany motherhood, coupled with the inherent experience of distance/absence that is conception via artificial insemination, as well as a C-Section delivery. Time is also important.” Further in the same interview, she writes:

The poems in this chapbook are part of a longer manuscript titled Sweet Velocity, which marries poems about my son’s birth with poems written in the wake of my father’s death, which occurred almost a year later. I’m largely finished with this project, but still tweaking individual poems, undertaking some final edits.

In Moritz’ poems, the “sweet velocity” of time only increases in speed and intensity, including a series of moments both caught and missed, attempting to pause when she can, and capture when appropriate, all while working to absorb as much as humanly possible. Writing as both parent and child, Moritz adds her voice to a list of contemporary poets exploring parenting, specifically motherhood, from Margaret Christakos to Julie Carr, Pattie McCarthy to Rachel Zucker. As Moritz writes in the poem “Depart”: “do you leave the child / to discover what it will feel like when he leaves [.]”

Rachel Moritz, Borrowed Wave

Your Nana was ironing sheets

      in her Lemon Joy kitchen.

Wings without body, linen snagged on the lip

      of her board. Was she a bird?

‘I can smell the rubbers in the front entry

      as I sat on the hall-tree seat and hunted

      for my galoshes,’ she wrote,

remembering how an object locates –

You were drinking milk from her blue Delft tea-

      cup. By the slice of window you lifted up

      her teacup, left a rim of white on blue flowers.

Little moths or butterflies, parting waves. (“BORROWED WAVE”)

After five poetry chapbooks under her belt (published through New Michigan Press, Albion Books, above/ground press and MIEL Press), Minneapolis poet Rachel Moritz’s long-awaited first full-length poetry collection is Borrowed Wave (Tucson AZ: Kore Press, 2015). Constructed out of three sections and an opening poem, the meditative precisions and flow of Borrowed Wave are grounded in a narration of place, self and body, attempting a cohesion and clarity against constant distraction, and the possibility of being swept away. Her poems are deeply felt, concerned with the important questions, and inherent paradoxes, of intimacy, human interaction and the landscapes of memory. In the poem “ASSEMBLY NOTES,” she writes: “I peered within the body of our house // where a simple blue ornament, // nailed below the eaves, /// made recognition of our lives / a little easier.”

A SUITABLE DURATION OF EXPOSURE

The face of the child, or how I said my motherhood was only metaphoric. How it rose against our unmade hill, kept turning to look where you said there was no one where sumac wizened on standing branches, we were pulled, you said, or how we found phrasing. Two paths traveling parallel, media of air following like an absent man. And what is a nearness like ours if we each remain, in our own way, concealed?

The narrative of her poems present an enormous density of information, allusion and reference in small spaces, built with such a remarkable pacing. “I’d believe the past is fragment,” she writes, to open “ANIMATE SONG,” “but for its narrow intimation of a door, // and the house waiting, all stucco and wet // where hummingbirds catch still // inside our kitchen tiles, and time // has no shape, in stasis; [.]” The narrative of her lyrics are built as sketches placed in open space, writing out short, accumulative bursts across a wide canvas, something evident in both her longer and shorter pieces, such as the opening poem “EMPATHIC OUTLINE,” a piece that suggests so much, as it opens: “Branches of the pine trees sway in this other season // like our apartment in the seventies, back and forth, typhoon – // Grapevines wearing cardboard shields, diagonal across a field [.]”

Slow Poetry in America, A Poetry Quarterly: #1-3

Knowing how to joke in the world

but not in a poem. The solemn

paintings are the ones that attract me,

& in some there’s a secret lightness,

a simplicity of heart.

If what I’m saying is true, it won’t

be “important.” Nothing knew,

not new. That I’m amazed

by the things I’ve seen in my life.

The world, its people, places. Lost

roads, traveled by pilgrims.

Ways of life, invisible traditions.

The last of so many things:

vestiges, whispers.

There’s the hint that is a rose.

What I became aware of once

in poems. Perhaps it was a song.

The scent left behind. Follow it. (Kim Dorman, “Ground”)

I’m fascinated by the first three issues of the pamphlet series/journal Slow Poetry in America, edited and produced in Toronto by Dale Smith, Hoa Nguyen and Michael Cavuto [they even have a facebook page]. American poets who arrived north a few years back, Smith and Nguyen are also the editors/publishers of the long-running Skanky Possum, a literary press which has since expanded into an occasional series of house-readings. As the website for Slow Poetry in America informs:

Slow Poetry in America is a quarterly poetry newsletter edited by Dale Smith, Hoa Nguyen, and Michael Cavuto. Each issue is printed in Toronto, ON and features one poet, and can be mailed anywhere in the world. Annual subscriptions ($10) are made on a rolling basis and will include the next four issues.

Bookstore/Institution Subscriptions are $25.00 annually and will receive 10 copies of each newsletter. Please email mcavuto@gmail.com for Bookstore/Institution Subscriptions.

SPIA subscriptions seek only to cover the costs of printing & publishing, and do not earn any monetary profit.

Reminiscent of the pamphlets produced through Rachel Moritz’ WinteRed [see her 12 or 20 (small press) questions here] or Sylvester Pollet’s infamous Backwoods Broadsides, a series which ended an impressive twelve-year run back in 2006, Slow Poetry in America is a self-proclaimed “newsletter” that shares a title with Smith’s own most recent title, produced in 2015 by Victoria, Texas publisher Cuneiform Press, as well as an ongoing poetry and critical blog. Given that, it would seem to be that the title becomes, then, an umbrella, stretching across a larger poetic, from his own personal writing, to a collective sense of editing, reading and participating.

TROUBLE

someone who’s

in trouble

sometimes

if i make

my trouble an

intellectual thing

then i can sit at the table

sometimes (Marion Bell)

The first three issues are “GROUND,” by Texas poet Kim Dorman, “8 Poems,” by Philadelphia poet Marion Bell (June 2015) and “Sound Science: Selections,” by the late Texas (by way of Panama and New York) poet Lorenzo Thomas (1944-2005) from his 1992 trade collection Sound Science (October 2015), all of which exists as an introduction to poets I hadn’t even heard of previously. It is curious to see how Slow Poetry in America, at least so far, works to bring the work of Texan poets north of the border (which makes sense, given the decade-plus that Smith and Nguyen lived and worked there), and if this series is one that works as an extension of their prior work with Skanky Possum, or if it will be working to also engage with the literary community around them, in their new home in Toronto. Either way, these are compelling publications, and teasingly small, which can only entice.

PROTECTION

Sometimes I’m saying I love you

Those words in English mean

I will not let anyone hurt you

But me (Lorenzo Thomas)

new from above/ground press: Moritz, Harris, Tokar + Gordon,

Many forms in water / Rachel Moritz / $4
See link here for more information

LIKE / Sharon Harris / $4
See link here for more information

ARRHYTHMIA / Janice Tokar / $4
See link here for more information

Fifteen Problems / Noah Eli Gordon / Images by Sommer Browning / $4
See link here for more information



keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April-June 2014
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

and did you see what we made in March/April? February? January?

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

Also available: Touch the Donkey #1!

Acceptance Speech: [poem]

I have two new poems in the first issue of Touch the Donkey, alongside work by Gil McElroy, Eric Baus, Hailey Higdon, Rachel Moritz, Elizabeth Robinson, Norma Cole, Pattie McCarthy and Camille Martin. Here is one of my two:

Acceptance Speech:


    I love the ology of clouds
        Mary Ruefle, Trances of the Blast


Disorient, a shape. Cohere. What matters would be, antibodies. Truth. I want this, ambivalence. Branches: allusions wrestle, wing. Says one: forbid, thoroughly. What would have been excluded. Coiled, hammer, anvil. Reluctant patterns, boundary. Says one: we dismantle, endlessly thorough. Biopsy: linguistic. I am not ambition: all my roads repeat, interior, repeat. Winning. Snow-branch weight a study, low to ground. This brutal, excessive heat.

Ongoing notes: early September, 2013

[photo of the leather-bound limited-edition above/ground press fetish item, including thirty different above/ground press “poem” broadsides, produced in a numbered edition of ten copies by Christine McNair] Pearl Pirie was good enough to do a small write-up on the recent above/ground press 20th anniversary reading/launch/party at The Mercury Lounge. Can you believe it’s been twenty years already? I certainly don’t.

There are still a number of exciting announcements to occur for the twentieth year, including new publications by Rae Armantrout, Hailey Higdon, Hugh Thomas and others, and the 2014 annual subscriptions, to be announced in October. Watch for it!

And we will see you at the Fisher Small Press Fair tomorrow at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto? We'll be there with bells on.

Buffalo NY: Before moving into three sections of prose-pieces, Kristy Bowen’s small poetry book, the shared properties of water and stars (Buffalo NY: Noctuary Press, 2013) opens with the line, “There are 3 houses with 3 different ghosts.” Writing in that nebulous space between prose and prose-poem, Bowen’s book is an accumulation of small prose-sections, presenting a semi-fragmented narrative that wraps and weaves through fable. The first page of section one reads:

THERE are 3 houses in 3 different colors. Each owner keeps a certain kind of sadness locked in the cupboard. The tall man lives in the white house. The short man keeps rabbits as pets. The woman in her white dress drinks vodka and stays up late. The yellow house is to the immediate left of the white one. The woman in the second house keeps her sadness in a smallish box. The older woman with the violets on her hat lives in the first house. The girl with the blonde hair lives next door to the man who keeps rabbits. One summer the rabbits multiply and chew through the fence. Mostly, they all keep to themselves.

The back page tells us that “Noctuary Press is a small independent press that focuses on female writers working with cross-genre prose forms (such as flash fiction, prose poetry, footnoted texts etc.).” Bowens’ the shared properties of water and stars is the third title produced by the press, after works by Carol Guess and Eva Heisler, and would be would be interesting to see illustrated, as she paints a vivid series of small portraits. Her fables wrap and soar and weave their way through shades of familiar characters and stories, turning and twisting them to tell a different kind  story, one that exists alongside what you might already know.

LET’S say the blonde girl has something shadowy whispering in her ear each night. Hundreds of bears lumber outside her windows. Her mouth like an open seam. A small cut in the dark; club-footed, claw-hearted. The bears outside her window watch the boys climb, one by one, up to the roof to touch her face. Her murmurs are slender, silky, like the backs of calves. Let’s say the dark writes itself anew along the walls each night. The words like a bubble in the throat until they burst.

Minneapolis MN: From the few I’ve seen, I’ve become quite a fan of the WinteRed Press Chaplet Series, edited and published by Gabrielle Civil and Rachel Moritz. There seems something here reminiscent of the late Sylvester Pollet’s Backwoods Broadsides, which produced the one hundredth and final publication back in 2006 [see Ron Silliman’s note on such here]. Produced in runs circling one hundred copies, the two most recent are Purvi Shah’s “What monsoon is this” (number 20) and Caryl Pagel’s “Mausoleum” (number 21), and previous authors in the series include Mark Nowak, Fanny Howe, Rodrigo Toscano, Elizabeth Robinson, Juliet Patterson, Tiff Dressen and Kate Greenstreet, with forthcoming titles by Dawn Lundy Martin, Moe Lionel, RosamondS. King and Eric Leigh (a complete list of the series so far, including forthcoming authors, are listed on the back of each publication).

Sometimes it is not the answer that matters but the question, the ruffled spot left behind where question hangs in air. Can you steam the air into a smooth sheet? Perhaps: momentarily. But then the separation of cloud and rain asserts itself. Perhaps: you need not find answer. But then sometimes answers find you: sometimes even when you abandon, you cannot escape. Such is the justice of the world: moving. (Purvi Shah, “What monsoon is this”)

I hadn’t heard of Brooklyn, New York poet Purvi Shah previously, the author of Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press, 2006), and (according to her bio) “winner of the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Service Award in 2008 for her work fighting violence against women.” Her poem/broadside “What monsoon is this” is an intriguing sequence of startling fragments, some boiled down to the sharpest, startling points. Chicago poet Caryl Pagel is the author of the poetry collection EXPERIMENTSI SHOULD LIKE TRIED AT MY OWN DEATH (Factory Hollow Press, 2012), and her chaplet is made up of four poems constructed nearly as continuous threads, each small phrase-fragment built as a punch. The title poem “Mausoleum” opens:

The night behaved exactly as you

thought it would                      As you saw

it would                       As you saw it

unfold and unravel and pre-occur in

a previously—you now know—prescient

premonition                        The details are irrelevant

Back issues (I’ve been myself meaning to pick up the whole run at some point) are $1.45 US, which really does make excuses for not ordering seem rather lame. Send cheques to: Rachel Moritz, 2917 E. 22^nd Street, Minneapolis MN 55406 USA