DAY 6 * DEBORAH POE * TSERING WANGMO DHOMPA *

DEBORAH POE READS FROM SIGNS Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections the last will be stone, too (Stockport Flats), Elements (Stockport Flats), and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords), as well as a novella in verse, Hélène (Furniture Press). Photo credit: Déborah Heissler.

DEBORAH POE READS Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's poem "Entry" from Rules of the House.Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s parents fled Tibet in 1959. Raised by her mother in Tibetan communities in Dharamsala, India, and Kathmandu, Nepal, Dhompa earned a BA and an MA from Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi, an MA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks In Writing the Names(2000) and Recurring Gestures (2000). She has published the full-length collectionsRules of the House (2002), In the Absent Everyday (2005), and My Rice tastes like the lake (2011), which was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Bookseller’s Book of the Year Award for 2012.  Tsering's non-fiction book on Tibet is forthcoming from Penguin, India in 2013.   (from Poetry Foundation)

DAY 25: Deborah Poe, Am Vladimir

DEBORAH POE

Am Vladimir

Am hard

am the heavy gut,

stomach verged at urge of television

am binary barrage of image.

Hand. Am the first song’s

fist, uninterrupted, the mainstream

love song. Am straight. Am the child

                                               my fucking became.

Am storming the familiar

sun seeks bodies to save

my kind thus struggling

& deserving.

Am broken.

Was light-crept exception just

next door, was same

like spirit-same, born of & heard.

Spoke English

as if unfortunate squirrel.

Am greedy.

Was holding wife, was angry,

misunderstood,

was ignorant and roof over head

was led to ninety ghosts telling me:

keep words forever for their aftertaste

in Vladivostok —  

of misfortune and smoke

To  groin-calling need,

was living creature.

Crave. Am struck.

Was skin & mowed lawn. Am a part.

Was bored as machine.

Was—why—for supper

and was not rented room.

Was moral & archaic,

Napolean & bush.

Am organic wanting,

was the craving man.

This poem is (heavily) after Lucie Brock-Broido’s “Am Moor.” Words italicized in the poem are from Osip Mandelstam’s poem to Anna Akhmatova, #235. “Poems from the Thirties” from The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (The New York Review of Books 1973).

Breath

Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats Press 2010), Our Parenthetical Ontology (Custom Words 2008) and several chapbooks--most recently a four-part edition excerpted from her manuscript "the last will be stone, too," as part of the Dusie Kollektiv (5), Poe's work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Peep/show, Bone Bouquet, Trickhouse, No Contest, Peaches & Bats, Horse Less Review, Mantis and Denver Quarterly. For more information, please visit www.deborahpoe.com.

[Click post title for audio.]

December 11th: Deborah Poe

Death and the Woman (Tod und Frau)

object exactly the size of any space
we occupy, shadowed against
a shadow as it is. if this is
to be being and to be being
in it irremediably without
refuse materiality how
do we remain silent, left
for deaf, how do we occupy
silence, how do we leave, do we

             -Jen Hofer, from One

muscle, bones, sinew—back’s arch leg’s fierce tendons

toes grounded behind the body—first figure, Mother—

as if to reject apparition or sprint, knee

lunged forward

skeleton—mocking monster

leg bone defies the lurch

arms bound behind by scaffolding

costas stacked upon skinless figure

second leg arrests Mother’s pitch

head reared back, the abnormal stretch

neck bared to the inevitable

child you climb a desperate branch—torso
of the body—hands reach above breasts

this gaze’s impossibility

shadow of three bodies, one violent mass—

your small right foot in the resilient light

Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats Press 2010) and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008). Deborah’s writing is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Fact-Simile Magazine, Peaches & Bats, Jacket, Sidebrow and Colorado Review. Deborah Poe is fiction editor of Drunken Boat and guest curator of Trickhouse’s “Experiment" door 2010/2011. For more information, visit www.deborahpoe.com. 

After The Book of Light | Deborah Poe

so many languages have fallen
off the edge of the world
into the dragon’s mouth. some

where there be monsters whose teeth
are sharp and sparkle with lost

people. lost poems. who
among us can imagine ourselves
unimagined? who

among us can speak with so fragile
tongue and remain proud?

“here yet be dragons,” Lucille Clifton

reflection

which woman with identity aches

possesses the goal of wanting less

is joy without presage of misery

antonym of light the American politic

language the loss

heavy the war company

broken bodies cockeyed promises

rattlesnake grandfather memory

loss’ tenacity, infinity of trees, the whole buried in

all the vowels (three stresses)

usual talk versus dancing tongue

language’s treasures still possibility in flight

song rhythm of song

lightning bolt

and light is so many things

what if reflected silent

belly of the under news

witnesses so many were, are

camera (images) as a history safe

(bring back the beauty)

not even superman could crack—

build something human

of anger and love

splendor

“your tongue splintered into angels”

lucent

your frequency of light



Note: This piece constructed from marginal notes taken while reading The Book of Light in 2006-2007. Lucille Clifton, your language a light dangling, falling, unfailing.

Deborah Poe

Day 2: Deborah Poe

Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats Press 2010) and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008). Deborah’s writing is forthcoming or has recently appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, Sidebrow, Ploughshares, Filter Literary Journal, Copper Nickel and Denver Quarterly. “broken sonnet” and “Fire, 3:15AM” were written between Kinderhook and Tsatsawassa creeks at Bernadette Mayer’s writing workshop in August 2009. “Radium (Ra), or Two Reactions” is in conversation with Lori Anderson Moseman’s “Reunion” from Temporary Bunk and Kate Greenstreet’s “new units of distance” from case sensitive. For more information about Deborah, visit deborahpoe.com