postcard from Knox

The Caxton Club of the English department presents a poetry reading by Jake Adam York on Friday, March 3, at 4 pm in the Alumni Room of Old Main. The reading is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. Please join us.

Jake Adam York is the author of Murder Ballads, selected by Jane Satterfield for the Fifth Annual Elixir Press Awards Judge’s Prize. His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Oxford American, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, Diagram, Octopus, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, and other journals as well as in the anthologies Visiting Walt (Iowa University Press, 2003) and Digerati (Three Candles, 2006).

His work has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has placed in numerous competitions including the 2004 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize contest, the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award, and the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.

York is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center in Denver, Colorado, where he directs an undergraduate Creative Writing program and produces Copper Nickel with his students.

York is also a contributing editor for Shenandoah, a co-editor of the online journal storySouth and a founding editor of Thicket, an electronic journal dedicated to Alabama writers and Alabama writing. His work of poetic history, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry, was published by Routledge in 2005. His scholarship has appeared in The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and his literary essays have appeared in Shenandoah and Florida Humanities Review.

Other People's Noise

II.

Me: walking in the stuff tonight with a friend a block or so from where my car is parked to the local pub. I’d brushed the car halfway clear, regretting a little the transparent maw of windshield I’d opened when she found me, engine running, ice running, and said let’s go get a drink. My shoes are heeled, thin. The cuffs of my pants are wet and my feet are soaked, but the snow is beautiful. We walk arm in arm and step together to avoid slipping. I am near giddy; I am not yet going home, and I am with her. Our shoes sink through the slush and I talk to her, tell her I haven't been able to sleep for the last month. I am too wakeful, too intent on deciphering the sounds that wake me. A crash, then nothing for an hour while I walk around and check the windows and watch the ceiling when it creaks. In the driveway light, his waxed blue Caddy leaks its clean oil and stains the concrete path by the backdoor, rainbow, rainbow. Then a din in my living room, several voices. Shouting, escalating, scooting furniture, 2:32 a.m. on my bedroom clock set to go off at five, and I am in a state of alarm. A state of predicting all possible outcomes and of anticipating the worst. Waking is not the difference between sleep and consciousness, but is like hearing the spring meltdown running through the gutters and knowing it will soon be time for another time. It springs in violence. It weathers your winter coat which you carry in one arm one surprising warm afternoon—the sky clears, yawns, breaks into color—but it is not done wintering yet. Someone falls, that much is clear, and I call the police. How do you sleep these days, I ask my friend. She says the baby wakes her at eight in the morning after she’s been up all night, working. I sleep when he sleeps, she says. If I can.

corazon

Dinner with N tonight, my other N's husband,

while my other N is away at a writing retreat in Virginia. We eat the beautiful fish my other N cooked before leaving and finish a bottle of okay red table wine I bring with me. Bella, the blonde beauty with the pink-brown nose and mustard eyes is so eager to visit she puts her paws on my chest and barks from the other room when we've forgotten her. I am most like her in most things and wonder how anyone can tolerate such doggedness. So fixed in my working seclusion here that when N asked after the faculty meeting what I planned for dinner I didn't know, but thought, well, something I need to do, what? And couldn't say. I hadn't planned: I will take a long bath or channel surf CSI or brush my biting cat or wipe counters and dust, or sort papers to grade, or put on my silly slippers and black and pink satin pajamas and wind down with an antihistamine and Dante and sleep until 3 or 4 in the morning. Then prep for class, I don't know what. I drew the usual blank crisis that occurs to me each day when the rush of the long work day closes, when I don't know what I'm supposed to do. And what I thought was: write. Eat your other N's food with N, then send your other N another poem. The third this week? But N is such wonderful company, I am sated and looking towards bed. My other N will not yet get another poem before she returns from Virginia. Oh the grading I must do tomorrow before poems, but the poems are here again suddenly, and so puppy awkward and puppy innocent I can't wait to get home to them and see them list to one side and have their new feet fall out from under them. How long can you keep them as babies? I don't know--this is all new to me--but the right answer right now is for as long as possible.

Happiest congratulations to Estella Gonzalez on her acceptance to Cornell University's MFA fiction program!

Her note to those who wrote on her behalf:

I got the call today from Cornell. And from none other than Helena Maria Viramontes, one of the goddesses of the Chicana literary pantheon. She called me today on my cell while I was at work. I nearly fainted. She said she'd call me again on Monday to let me know about details on financial aid. It's like a dream and I know your recommendations really helped since the competition was so stiff (only 4 fiction writers accepted a year!)

Abrazos and more abrazos,

Estella

On the merits of your work, woman. Don't you ever believe otherwise.

Okay, who's going to AWP?

Gathering the party now...

Ironic Points of Light

He is gone. I miss him. Why are you not talking about it all the time?

Genealogy

Come d’autunno si levan le foglie
l’una appresso de l’altra, fin che ’l ramo
vede a la terra tutte le sue spolglie --Inferno II.112-14

wonder that it’s done. The sister’s legs move in the river and the light around her flaps in the current

on the round wet leaves, green and yellow, white seeds in the air, leaves in the water everywhere, branches, and you think, those are cottonwoods! then

the hawk catches your eye and you see the wind is good up there, and the view, though when you look past the old bluffs

into something else: the father where is he? And the brother, where is he? It does not know

after all these years, for years not a cottonwood among them. Wonder you’ve still got all your fingers and toes, every bare limb and its extremities,

your extremities, and your undue bone-pit, and for what? The father made more

daughters, thrust right through the brother and begat a son. And no, no accidental cause left anyone headless or lipless in any of the likely places, so far as you know, so by extension you are just as likely

—she pounded its bark between an anvil and a rock thinking papyrus thinking book and the skin split wide open—

to have been one of them as to have been you. The sister in the leaves leaves and rows. Read the spines: indeed there was a gate as well as passage. Through

(dig your hole)

me, it said, and now she is very small from here, very far. Wonder it’s done and it does not know the babies

are shadows in the water—find them—tricks of light in the sheer will of the current. Will? You must know. There will be no babies.


*****

Just as in autumn the leaves fall away,
one, and then another, until the bough
sees all its spoil upon the ground