G. C. Waldrep

Exodus

—after Jean Dubuffet

You could have said flame but you did not.
You could have said roof but did not.
You could have said light-bearing roof
beneath which a house crouches
you could have crushed pearls into powder
you could have struck a match.
You could have said prayer but you did not.

Twombly

parallel descending motions
“insatiable little gardens”

a machine holds the tongue
by its root

 

it’s you, you’re the machine

—line 2 is quoted from Friederike Mayröcker, Études, trans. Donna Stonecipher

Poor Souls’ Light

where & what is green
the bone strikes, honeycombed
frost-crowned perigee
 

 
the womb has no bone
runs the thief’s rhymed ecology

& therefore no secret solace
 
 
 
I profess my blue coin
in the tine-orchard, my book
set into the crux
of the most ancient testimony

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and The Earliest Witnesses, forthcoming from Tupelo and Carcanet (in the UK) in January 2021. Newer work has appeared in APR, Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review, Yale Review, Iowa Review, Colorado Review, New American Writing, Conjunctions, etc. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 25)

 

Here we are in September of 2020, with millions of people sick and dying worldwide as a result of the confluence of two deadly pandemics, one biological and the other political, even as great swathes of the United States are burning or flooding, and the nation careens towards one of the most consequential elections in its history (so please, please, VOTE). So we thought you needed a little gift. Putting Posit 25 together has been a bright spot in our days, when those have sometimes seemed few and far between, and we hope it will have the same effect on you.

In times like these, when “the fires burn with bodies” (Darren Demaree, The Field Party #1) and “the carnage is everywhere” (makalani bandele, unit_84), art may be a balm, but it is no frivolity. As contributor Hiroyuki Hamada has put it: “As our world continues to be subservient to the hierarchy of money and violence, I believe the exploration of artists to perceive the world reaching beyond the framework of corporatism, colonialism and militarism continues to be a crucial part of being human.”

Each of the stellar contributors to this very special issue may be at a different stage of their trajectory – from previously unpublished (Marije Bouduin) to rising star (makalani bandele, Thaddeus Rutkowski) to celebrated master (Erica Baum, G.C. Waldrep, Hiroyuki Hamada) – but, as you will see, each and every one of them is at the top of their game.

The free-jazz-inflected musicality of makalani bandele’s prose units supplants even as it illuminates the bankrupt elitism underlying conventional distinctions between the erudite and the colloquial. Glowing with a bold and breathless energy, these prose poems are playful as well as unflinching in their engagement with the racism baked into contemporary American life, in which “the carnage is everywhere” and “people say ‘no one’ all the time, when actually they mean ‘no one white.’” Having “located this tributary about a stone’s throw away from some postmodernity,” bandele’s prose poems “vibing in a landscape of contradictions” “economize form to go faster” until their “stories are flames.”

A deep but light-handed resonance underpins Erica Baum’s celebrated series, Dog Ears. Baum’s photographs of folded-down pages from unidentifiable books tease us with what they conceal as well as reveal, tempting us to infer what we cannot decipher while frustrating the urge to uncover what they have made inaccessible. The textures and typeface in these photographs only enhance our awareness of the tactile quality of the printed page, even as they place it definitively out of reach. The artist’s loving disruption of her source materials leads the viewer beyond the urge to resolve the ambiguities created by their fragmentation to embrace the new wholes forged by her juxtapositions and syntheses. Baum thus transforms her source materials into indelible artifacts whose effect is to offer and withhold at once, giving us no choice but to accept and build upon the ambiguous and fragmentary nature of communication itself. These powerful new pieces, incorporating references to “tragedy” “prescription” “zoomed” “mask” “spectacle” “dark” “wreck” “Washington” “post office” and more, speak directly to the experience of living in a pandemic that is “getting to all of us . . . facing danger / and the not knowing”.

Celia Bland’s sensual imagery and powerful prosody forge brilliantly unpredictable connections between such apparently disparate subjects as fish and human sexuality, familial and racial identity, horse racing and gun violence, turbulent landings and the assassination of JFK. In ringing and rhythmic language, Flounder’s eponymous narrator speaks not only for the fish “drifting off in the currents,” but for any “flesh” which is “foundered,” which is “blunder.” EX considers skin to explore what is absent, unsaid, or concealed, like the ethnically revealing “sheen of my grandfather’s arms . . . beneath his starched white shirt” despite the traces it leaves on “every armrest, on every tray table, with every scratch.” like bundles of shudders explores the very notion of arousal to forge a chain of associations from one mythos of excitement to another, from the sexualized “horse opera[s] written for the adolescent girl / in the reign of RPM” to guns, both of which are “heart bursting.” Terminaire’s very title evokes both death and flight, going on to link flight turbulence and the suit Jackie Kennedy wore when her husband was assassinated, exposing the ominous threat of “this authentic turbulence– / This Dallas.”

Marije Bouduin’s debut poems celebrate the elusive power of love even as they lament its loss. Ultimately, they evoke the loneliness and isolation of being itself. In a compellingly direct yet lyrical voice, these poems take off from Plato’s theory of the bifurcated hermaphrodites to lament the limitations of connection, even while “[t]he way your hips move impulses an orchestra to form.” In these “collective econom[ies] of variables and adverbs” the poet skillfully “appl[ies] stress to the structure and see[s] what follows,” enticing the reader to “play a game of poem string by string.”

Raymond de Borja’s haunting, gripping epistolary poem to “Dear Jean” posits a “moth-eaten world” — “After Music” — proffering a historical yet alarmingly present intimacy we share as “[t]his very evening, Jean, they are ripping the square apart.” In the world of these poems as in our world, “the riot is our figure and ground.” Like the speaker in We Requested for Some Relaxing Forest Sounds, we too want to plead, “oh please disemplot, one, someone, anyone, point by point from nature…” As this poet brilliantly reveals, even in music and art, “[o]ur mind is the silent ligature between the glass, the ornamental grass, and an idea of enclosure.”

In these powerful and disturbing prose blocks from The Field Party, Darren Demaree returns to Posit with a series of short but breathlessly urgent works about the contemporary state of the United States Midwest, in which “fires burn with bodies as well as they burn with the furniture that once held the bodies” and children are raised “to not fear becoming part of that fire” in which “guns are tucked” and are “always pointed at something.” Meanwhile, Emily As We Let the Faucets Run offers a tightly coiled tribute to the understated and sometimes paradox-infused beauty of domestic intimacy, in which the fact that Emily “can erase” the narrator is “an actual gift.”

In Connor Fisher’s rich, tactile imagery of time present and past, the properties of memory and the distance between what we remember and what we are become something almost concrete, a “strange object.” Although the narrator of Autobiography III observes that “[e]ven shepherds” — whose work is calling as well as duty – “lose their sheep,” this poet’s rare and frank attention to the world he sings puts him in no such danger. An artist of the physical and tangible (“the body [which] smells a bit off,” the ewe and her “fatty, / sweet milk”), Fisher’s calling is to “join together the small pieces of whatever strange object you chose to muster up. . . an article, a partridge, the sweat built up under your arms, a child, the image of the moon in water.” In these poems, “[t]here’s always a rhythm” in which the observation that “the sun’s down” — “[l]ike all the rest” is all we know, and all we need to know.

Gloria Frym’s unique and provocative prose works function as both conceptual meditations and modern morality tales fueled by the author’s unflinching insights into human nature. In Sense, the elusive and persistent question of ‘what is to be done’ is considered from a psychological as well as moral point of view. Whereas the character who doesn’t “sense what needs to be done” and therefore doesn’t “do the thing that needs doing” remains stuck in the same vacuous and inert occupation from which he could not be bothered to budge, the proactive path of the person who knows what needs to be done leads them to a love story “that begins the rest of two lives.” In Recycle, the temptation to betray the narrator’s principles (against treating books with disrespect) gives rise to recursive rationalizations likely to become “the gateway to further moral lapses.”

Situated, by his own description, in a contemporary sociopolitical context of “corporatism, colonialism and militarism,” Hiroyuki Hamada’s imposing and mysterious sculptures are in some respects reminiscent of missiles and bullets, warships and fortresses. However, like ‘swords into ploughshares,’ the freshness and complexity of Hamada’s refined and polished conceptions incorporate these ominous elements into balanced, yet whimsical structures reminiscent of biomorphic forms and even flexible states of matter, like liquids and gels. These are painstakingly crafted sculptures of profound emotional as well as cerebral resonance, as compelling as they are serene.

Working in an extraordinary range of media, from drawing to sculpture to installation to video, Jean Jaffe draws on her interest in psychology, anthropology, literature, and cultural history to create new realities that are as recognizable as they are strange, as beautiful as they are disturbing. This enticing sampling of her output includes clips from her live-action animations of Alice in Wonderland and A Tribute to Tesla, her graceful yet distressing biomorphic sculptural chimeras, her delicate and moving drawings, her whimsical installations inspired by literature such as Remains of the Day and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and her disturbing reimagining of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf’s point of view. No matter the medium or subject, Jaffe’s work is informed by a probing interest in what it means to be alive, imbuing even the most whimsical of her creations with depth and resonance.

Whether working in dry pigment or acrylic and oil, Suejin Jo creates canvases of jewel-like beauty. Working with an intensely saturated, vibrant, and harmonious if often unpredictable color palette, Jo makes use of a wealth of lines, marks, and shapes which range from the geometric to the organic. Exuding a unique combination of order and energy, Jo’s dense canvases are at once serene and immensely dynamic. With their simplicity of composition and richness of detail, these paintings variously evoke nature and artifice, water and light, land and architecture, forging a sense of connection between the viewer and the artist’s quest for the beauty and meaning of what it is to be alive in this world.

Lesle Lewis is a poet of the physical and concrete, miraculously conjoined with the whimsical, like “bottle tipsy . . . sailboat muses . . . and miracle bambinos”. In these poems, teemingly alive in image and movement, the myriad contradictions of our lives are distilled: “I turn the heat on and off a thousand times. I make anti-gravity moves,” and the myriad things of the world need no explanation or irritable reaching: “Let’s let these things be by themselves, not goose-to-goose, duck-to-duck, dog-to-dog, person-to-person, civilization-to-wild, open-to -sanctuary.” Acknowledging the universal if impossible yearning “to float in an infinite present,” Lewis wisely counsels that we “talk about this now before it’s too late and two hour wars become three hundred years.”

Thaddeus Rutkowski’s tale of an evening bicycle ride has the depth of a life cycle and the velocity of the ride itself. Its brilliant, beautifully spare, and precise description reveals the inner and outer life of a narrator physically sure of himself as he navigates city traffic on his way home, avoiding a startled pedestrian who tells him to either “get a light” or “get a life.” Although he knows he does not need the former, he is not so sure about the latter, since even at the end of his journey, “when [he] pass[es] through the last obstacle, [he] will be more or less home.” On the way, near-accidents, misunderstandings, and a police stop chip away at the rider’s spirits, building a dysphoric atmosphere that functions as a subtle commentary on contemporary life – one expressed by the graffiti he notices, declining in hopefulness from “Sarah2 Marry Me” to “sadder words” like “Entropy,” “Self-Obsession,” “Mediocrity,” “Boredom,” “Conflict,” “Revolution.”

Tony Trigilio’s ornate, surreal, and witty prosody makes virtuosic sport of narrative and the language by which it is conveyed. This is the work of “an aesthete whose sacrosanct / observance prickles the highest vanes of clamor.” And yet his pastiche worlds have much in common with our own, on levels both personal: “the desperado inside my Outlook calendar,” and cultural: “The first budgets of the twenty-first century: the poke, the nub, their neo-liberalism.” Dare we hope for a time when “the dominant social group exhausts itself” — even as conditions become more dire, and “’Spontaneity’” [is] replaced by “constraint” in ever less / disguised and indirect forms, in outright police measures”? Even in a possible future world where “[f]rugal parents from Soviet Florida bicker in fumy saloons,” as Trigilio reminds us, “[w]e should’ve known swindlers can pose as subterraneans.”

G.C. Waldrep’s chiseled and luminous ruminations on the work of Jean Dubuffet and Cy Twombly offer a glimpse of their aesthetic affinities with one another, as well as with the poet himself. A potent blend of humility and sophistication comes to mind, as does a demonstrated faith in the power of the artifact to speak for itself. By considering what Dubuffet “could have said” in painting (and titling) Exodus, Waldrep elucidates the richness of suggestion inherent in the image, even as he highlights the painter’s choices: using his notoriously pedestrian materials when he “could have crushed pearls into powder;” depicting exile and displacement when he “could have said light-bearing roof / beneath which a house crouches.” In Twombly, Waldrep’s incorporation of a haunting phrase by Friederike Mayröcker recalls the painter’s search for what he referred to as “the phrase,” and Waldrep’s spare and cryptic lines nod to Twombly’s trailing lines and indecipherable text. By deploying language even while silencing it, Waldrep’s final lines suggest, might Twombly’s inscrutable and often asemic “insatiable little gardens” enact as well as reveal culture’s propensity to “hold the tongue / by its root?” Finally, by invoking the flames lit to remind the faithful to pray for the souls of the poor, Poor Souls’ Light makes its own apt and solemn offering of faith and value to all of us so sorely in need of “secret solace” in these harrowing times.

Stay safe and well, and please VOTE as if your life depends on it — it does.

with love and hope,

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

G.C. Waldrep

first person

draw the empty frames
from their hope chest
(the folded gray uniform
long gone to dust)

wreathed in ash
I fletch the sky’s reed-sister
as if all human
wrongs were never-
helmsmen, never-priests

on Mount Monadnock
I tested the berries
(sweet in summer: True)
against flesh’s flame

the body’s silver specie
a music in my mind
ghost-music, -specie
can’t be your mirror, I
cheats death again

the root & its entourage
ark-in-the-forest,
zither-      lit & -strung

don your ghost-uniform
muster me in cyme-
light, marrow-light,
unbide my tender service

untitled (specimen dowry)

Pearl pearl be my docent—

the green wedge
attests—&, the singing cleat—

I have many secret debts—

The human body is a system—

the dream sweeps
through, & puts music away—

my life in the great courts

 

*

to address the least durable moment—
trace-protection
a mythos conferred, heavy gender
weighting the forest’s punctum—

faith’s
     same four notes in the understory—

manna

shelter-vessel, the medulla’s gray star

      the copper pit in which I face you
shifts aside, lobed with the literal—

extraction’s logic: adduce vs adjourn
—my tasting-garment, fragrant hyphae

stoop to murmur        in flood of thee

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are a long poem, Testament (BOA Editions, 2015), and a chapbook, Susquehanna (Omnidawn, 2013). With Joshua Corey he edited The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta, 2012). His new collection, feast gently, is due out from Tupelo Press in 2018. He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 13)

 

Spring may be imminent, but, as will likely be the case for some time to come, this issue of Posit arrives in less-than-optimistic times. However, once again, the work in this issue has the potential to address, and even salve, our pervasive distress, in ways that are no less satisfying for being indirect. Much of the art in this issue is about making — and all of it makes the case for the value of its having been made. Which is to say, for the value of art itself — not as luxury, as the current US regime might have it — but as emotional, intellectual necessity. One facet of which is its uncanny capacity to speak to situations that did not exist when it was created. Although the poetry and prose in this issue was written before the advent of the current political crisis, many of these pieces find a way to speak to it. Thus, that “we have somehow, / in haste and hubris, walked / into a deep night” is, unfortunately, incontestable (Matthew Burns, The Border). As is the fact that “even sanity ain’t sane today” (Anselm Berrigan, Degrets). Or that we are asked to believe that “once spoken, every word is true, even / all the words yoked to great chains of lies” (Gregory Crosby, The Marquis of Sad).

Happily, the works in this issue also have “a harmony that makes us forget the incontestable” (Dennis Barone, Vast Oculus). For one thing, we are reminded “not to fear the truth, to understand the neighbor, the houses, and this land” (Vast Oculus). And we are offered the grave and ethereal beauty of G.C. Waldrep’s “root & its entourage / ark-in-the-forest, / zither-lit & -strung” (first person). We are exhorted, with ringing, if enigmatic, energy, to “substitute optimistically!” (Rae Armantrout, Going Somewhere). Which I take the liberty of interpreting, at least in part, as an injunction to continue making, and imbibing, the arts, including:

Rae Armantrout’s tantalizing chains of Delphic utterances, guiding our gaze in “the fullness of time” from the spare beauty of the resonant particulars to the universes coiled within them, bringing to mind Bashō, W. C. Williams, Hansel and Gretel, and the inspiriting newborn whose “just opened eyes / see we can’t see what;”

Dennis Barone’s Vast Oculus, opening its generous aperture from the tangible familiar to “another world . . . beyond the armchair — like the point of a rapier” in prose that captures the ultimate essence of poetry, “leap[ing] from the enormous weight” of reality to “follow ideas without bodies;”

The urgent yet playful poetics of Anselm Berrigan’s Pregrets, Degrets, and Regrets, which may not expect “fragment bump” but delivers that and more, “revers[ing] the outer corners until specific arrival” of something very much like revelation “mandates itself / into existence” despite the possibility that there may be “no time for poems / with all this e-sociology poised to bite in disparate / need of absolute paragons;”

Matthew Burns’ lithe and slender verse columns exploring absence and corporeality, boundaries and trajectories, hope and despair: “zero / being nothing / but, like / the past: / still there / and affecting” as these spare and melancholy verses;

James Capozzi’s eerily relevant evocations of the demise of the mighty, from Nimrod, “basted by the city’s voice” to the conquistadores, having lost the nerve to defend their “sham heaven” in the face of the “troubling questions” posed by the earth they have just torched;

Rob Cook’s sharp yet lyrical elegies to the existential divide between self and other, be they one’s own shadow or the companion of one’s dreams, until even “the wind is just my shadow / moving its weapons from tree to tree;”

Gregory Crosby’s aphoristic verses masterfully evoking the pathos and humor of existence in which “[a]ll this death [is] another sticky note: Live!” in a universe “so / magnanimous that it breaks your heart in two;”

Julia Leverone’s exploration of the paradoxical interdependence of creation and destruction, adhesion and repulsion, as voiced by an unregretful Medusa hoping “never to return to the beforehand” and a lover observing the “force of keeping / together against pulling away;”

Caolan Madden’s penetrating exploration of isolation, “[t]he silence, the league of witches . . . that unclaimed feeling,” along with the ambivalence of a mother who doesn’t “want to grow up I want to spoil” rather than “fold . . . up her I” “when [the baby] made [her] shape known;”

F. Daniel Rzicznek’s prose poems from Leafmold, an inventory of poetic makings, including dogs and doctors, hawks and herons, history and science, “[i]naccuacies and errata smuggled via alternate versions of this weird life” brilliantly assembled, not “to deliver something heinous . . . but a text like a free state, a paregoric of the brain;”

Alina Stefanescu’s high-octane prose pieces expanding from a sense of lived experience (insomnia, scars, selfies) to wider implications in “this era of anodyne-paradigms pocked upon our model houses” where “a promise might be less than an omen as a toothache is less than a broken jar as a head circles the room without one single landing strip in sight;”

and G.C. Waldrep’s elegant, emotionally charged jewels of melodic and depictive compression, “lobed with the literal,” in which “the dream sweeps / through, & puts music away–,” evoking worlds in each parsed and potent word — luminous worlds in which meaning and music are not only married, but inseparable.

I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome the newest member of the Posit team. Carol Ciavonne is an accomplished poet, teacher, editor, and past contributor, who promises to bring discernment, dedication, and generosity to her work as Associate Editor. We are delighted and grateful to welcome her aboard.

With thanks to you, our readers, for being here.
Susan Lewis

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Welcome to the visual art of Posit 13!

Nathan Brujis makes lyrical and luscious abstract paintings, loosely based on nature and autobiographical experience. Working in a rich palette of saturated colors, he weaves ribbons of form in, under, over, and around one another. These canvases hint at abstract narratives while always retaining their joyful exploration of the painting process.

The almost ritualistic patternings of Jeanne Heifetz’s drawings are hypnotic. They seem to meander across the page, yet there is always an underlying logic to the journey of her lines. Using a visual ordering system based on the branching of natural structures, her work investigates the organic growth of form and the movement of marks on paper.

Eva Kwong’s miraculous sculptures exist somewhere between the natural and fabricated worlds. Drawing upon her interest in the spiritual and visual interconnectedness of the universe, she creates beautiful objects that manage to make reference to many different realities simultaneously. Her animated sculptures delight the eye while defying categorization.

The sculptures of Greely Myatt build upon the notion of “transformation.” His impeccably crafted found and fabricated mixed-media sculptures are funny and provocative, playing with artistic and social conventions in an amusing and elegant manner. Myatt references everything from rural southern culture to contemporary art, creating both installation and intimate scale works that welcome the viewer in, with a wink and a nod.

And Brian Sargent’s deep dive photographic investigations into light and the landscape capture an eerie mood. The sky seems on the verge of dusk, the light fading… or is it about to dawn? They are full of mystery and quietude. The occasional flash of a silhouetted figure, a ghost or a vision? The choice is yours.

I hope you enjoy!
Melissa Stern

Posit’s AWP 2017 off-site reading

Co-sponsored by for Prelude, Inter/rupture, & Bone Bouquet

FEATURING:

Rae Armantrout, G.C. Waldrep, Amy King
Catherine Blauvelt, Armando Jaramillo Garcia, Lindsay Turner
Sarah Sarai, Laura Jaramillo, Dominique Salas
Eloisa Amezcua, Lucian Mattison, Caroline Crew
Hosted by Susan Lewis, Stu Watson, Curtis Perdue, & Krystal Languell

Admission: free

Saturday, February 11, 2017 3-5 PM
D.C. Arts Center, 2438 18th St NW
Washington, D.C.

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