Rae Armantrout

Telling

1.

I live as if
an angry woman
were shouting, “Say something!”

2.

Edges
of the vine-leaves

had a pink tinge,
a trick of the eye

one of us thought,
but we came back

to fully formed, hot pink
cup-husks

each one
with two yellow

eyes, protruding
on thin stalks

*

So this was
“the fullness of time.”

3.

We produce ourselves
by reading scripts

on current happenings.

(There is no telling
where I leave off

My Pleasure

Red brick pillars
prop the roof
of a corrugated tin shack.

*

It is my pleasure
and my privilege
not to understand this.

*

A swooping disc
of loud starlings
takes its evening spin
above the park.

*

Skinny horses
pulling carriages
bearing the logo
“Movistar.”

*

It is from this distance
that the object
resolves
into an image.

Going Somewhere

You have been incorporated
as a pass-through.

*

I like your style,
studiedly casual,

more yellow than green

and the green a slapdash
watercolor impression

of a leaf
on leaf.

You allude to yourself
in passing

and this works well,
if not for you
then for somebody.

*

Substitute optimistically!

The Wig

1.

As long as —

if —

a Harpo Marx wig

of virtual

adjectives

surrounds each thing:

a giddy frizz
of small round leaves —

why not? —

atop springy stems
rising

from the squat
fused trunks

of bursera
in the window

2.

Unclaimed,

expressions form,

unite,

and die back

on an infant’s face.

Turn

Even when not
searching for help
the eye turns
from yellow
tree to tree
in November.

*

The long, naked
gaze between old
woman and infant
is whole,
real as anything
will be now,
she thinks,
though she knows
the child won’t remember
this, will barely
remember her.

*

A locked gaze
is immersion;
she feels herself floating.
But now the baby
squirms.

Newborn

“Going to the chapel and
Gee, I really love you and we’re
Going to the chapel
of love,”

sang the Dixie Cups

to nobody
about no one

a long time ago

and a million people bought it.

The circular logic
already fully automated.

*

Some might say
this is (you are)
too convoluted, contrived,
airtight.

*

Small calm
amphibian,
your just opened eyes
see we can’t see what

Rae Armantrout is the author of 13 books of poetry. Her book Versed (Wesleyan) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Her most recent book, also from Wesleyan, is Partly: New and Selected poems. Recently retired from UC San Diego, she will soon be relocating to the Seattle area.

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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