From our spring 2011 issue, some poems from Julie Carr, one of my very favorite contemporary poets. These ones aren’t in a book you can buy yet, but you can buy her other books here, and should. — AS
from Think Tank
& I’m an O without a figure
no fool but an egg
with yolk eaten out
by he who swaps
the kiss of god
for a speaking tongue
at night’s noon. Blank
went the candle
*
A part of a whole, apart from a hole, is the pit of the soul,
the apex of soil. From you I might hang
babies, babies, babies
A mother’s gorges: her cheeks and her hair. Her hallowed
*
A man walks into a party
because poetry is a semiotic fortress
My sex is so quiet, it needs no song
At the Saturday playground:
O conscience, you florid surge
And poetry is an alphabet of hunger
The beast takes its pleasure, but what is pleasure?
Shoulders of the sick:
on the right and left
*
Ponderer:
Joyousness fled and sex fled: something had to restore these things
Civic volunteer plum trees,
like grieving orphans, defended nothing
“One has a secret self, a rather delicate pondering inner person
Much of poetry exists to communicate with this entity”
“Life is a plot to make me move”
*
I must effort to remember this
girl-baby on her back
Wind up and the water grew hotter. Her visage more
or less fair, fairly sound, sweetly fair
Where is my fool? I think the world asleep
In my mother’s mossy little mirror
the freedoms of fire
vaporized. We’ve altogether
forgotten her
Is this, then, the place?
*
One to two to one to two to one to two to one
goes regeneration’s
math. There, the door opens for: sun, road, behold
five–a perfect gaggle of kids
Apples, potatoes, pigs, and birds. Bread, milk, sugar, and eggs:
Feed my kids. The cow feeds my kids. The truck. The flame feeds
my kids. The bag feeds my kids. Plum and butter and nut and hen:
nothing so kind as a warehouse
*
& the windowpanes rattle in the bad news/good news format,
a way of displacing or troubling the triumphal narrative of the emergence of a rational-critical sphere
THERMOS 