Sunday, July 24, 2016

Poetry Squawks - at Indolent Books - a new weekly feature

from Harvard Museums' collection; what a beautiful squawking bird!; Jean-Baptiste Oudry, French, 1686-1755) 



The latest feature on the Indolent Books' website is a weekly-ish column - Poetry Squawk. A pretty great name, as is Indolent Books. In the column's first iteration, as "Writers on Writing," Poetry Squawk was intended to encourage poets to discuss means and methods native to their processes.

It still serves that function. But Michael Broder, Indolent's founder, broadened the scope of the column, if only by changing the name. Some squawks are loud. Here are links to a few poets' Squawks:

Jenna Lê's Secrecy and the Writing Life: "Like all kids who grow up to be writers, I was a daydreamer from the start."

Antoinette Brim's Why I Bury My Treasure: "I love trash T.V. Not the trash television of Kardashian fame. But, real trash—Flea Market Flip and Antiques Road Show trash—stuff found in dank basements."

B.B.P. Hosmillo's Towards an (Ins)Urgent Kind of Intimacy: "Once an American scholar in Japanese Studies shared a Japanese folktale with me."


To get Poetry Squawks delivered to your email, sign up on the Indolent site, here. Indolent Books is the publisher of Geographies of Soul and Taffeta, my second poetry collection.

Sunday, July 17, 2016

Carley Moore: The Phenomenon of Ecstasy :: poem


The Phenomenon of Ecstasy

after Salvador Dali

If you lay the chair on its back it does not look like a woman.
If you push the chair back and remember me sitting in it,
it will remind you of a woman who was shaped by a chair.
When you sit on the chair you make the woman into
the ghost of the chair. When you leave the chair
on its back, you see the way my neck rested on
the edge of the bed. You see the way a chair that
has fallen becomes the liquid of the room.
You see the way the pushed chair lives outside of its shape.
Like the head that insists on the edge of the bed,
the fallen chair is not the reason we break.
The chair that has fallen on its side is not for you.
It is for the small kings who will use it like a carcass.
Best when warm, but best not seen.
The promise of the chair is that it will fall back
over and over again. The promise of the chair
is that it will be like my neck on the edge of the bed.
The chair is the promise of falling.
I am falling in chairs.
I am falling.
You are not the chair.

By Carley Moore.
First published in Painted Bride Quarterly, Issue 63.
All rights belong to Carley Moore.