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Tag Archives: Versify

Verisfy #2: Cities & Memory

13 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Versify

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Versify

Versify #2 by Monica Wendel


Cities & Memory


I write this in the desert, reading Italo Calvino and visiting family. Las Vegas is in a valley, and the heat bakes us like the inside of a pizza oven. We spend the day inside, shades drawn, reading books and watching TV and eating, waiting for it to cool down.

But the mountains are visible from nearly anyplace a person stands, which makes me think a lot about inspiration. Here, I’m inspired by the things a person can see from far away: the mountains, of course, and the skyline of the strip, and the casino lights that flash on and off in patterns. The sky goes for miles and miles. When the sun sets, the sides of the mountains glow. Move away from the city, and you can see a haze over it, like a soft blanket. I’m not writing about this well, not getting at what I want to. Up at Mount Charleston, a sign said that the valley used to be full of lakes and marshes. The city just stops on its edges instead of fading away. Homes butt up against the desert. “Desires are already memories,” Calvino writes in Invisible Cities.

Invisible Cities

When you’re on a plane to Las Vegas, you can’t tell the stranger sitting next to you, I’m going to see my grandfather because he has Alzheimer’s. I mean, you can, but the person doesn’t want to hear that, they want to hear bachelorette party or 30th birthday or whatever. I didn’t even tell some of my friends where I was going, just saying, out west. “Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.” That’s also from Invisible Cities. And, “When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city.” There’s a half-finished shopping mall that we pass on the way to the home where Poppie lives. Was it that desire that pushed buildings up from the desert, with “spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third…”? In the rearview mirror, stopping at In & Out, I looked at the fake New York skyline, stubby buildings barely evocative of home.

The subject of this post was originally Inspirations, but it’s not like I’ve felt inspired to write. It’s more like, inspired to make memories, because there are things that I’ll never be able to ask because it’s already too late. The memories are gone. And it’s like we’re constructing another city around Poppie, made up of what he has held onto.

Why contradict. He doesn’t live here, anymore.

___________

Monica on Jack's steps

Monica Wendel (Episode 5, interview; Episode 49, interview; Episode 57, poetry) is the author of No Apocalypse. She is a visiting instructor of English at St. Thomas Aquinas College. Her poetry has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Forklift Ohio, Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals.  A graduate of NYU’s MFA in creative writing program, she is the recipient of both Goldwater and Starworks teaching fellowships, and has taught creative writing at Goldwater Hospital, NYU, and St. Mary’s Health Care Center for Kids.

Versify #1: Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Poetry, Recommendation, Versify

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Monica Wendel, Poetry, Recommendation, Versify

Versify #1 by Monica Wendel

In Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet (Alice James Books, 2005) some people don’t die, exactly; they are evaporated, or disappear as if they never existed, moving not from living to not-living but from something to nothing “as if even the idea of them were being / destroyed, stripped of form.”

Here Bullet

For this blog, I’ve decided to read a book of poems a week, and hopefully you, dear reader, will guilt me past procrastination into territories both unknown and familiar. This territory was decidedly unfamiliar. Turner served for seven years in the US Army, and as the New York Times Book Review described Here, Bullet, “Turner has sent back a dispatch from a place arguably more incomprehensible than the moon – the war in Iraq.” As the Long Island Rail Road train I was riding passed under grey skies, from the suburbs to Queens to downtown Brooklyn, Turner’s words became a reminder that we are still at war (Elsbeth Pancrazi has a great poem about the far-awayness of war over at H_NGM_N) and those words also served as an exercise in naming and thereby imaging and humanizing (for example, Aracelis Girmay’s “Arroz Poetica”).

Turner is not the first to write about war, or specifically, this war. But perhaps the strength of this book is best understood in his own words:

Still hanging in the air over Ashur Square,

the telephone line snapped in two, crackling

a strange incantation the dead hear

as they wander confused amongst one another,

learning each other’s names …

(from “2000 lbs.”)

… Late at night

when gunfire frightens them both,

Habib cries for his father, who tells him

       It’s just the drums, a new music,

       and the tracery of lights on the sky

he retraces on the ceiling, showing the boy

how each bright star travels …

(from “The Al Harisma Weapons Market”)

The book ends with “dreams burn[ing] in the oilfields of night.” And so, readers: which book of poems should I read next? What collection (full-length or chapbook) burns in your mind like the strange dreams of malaria pills?

___________

Monica on Jack's steps

Monica Wendel (Episode 5, interview; Episode 49, interview; Episode 57, poetry) is the author of No Apocalypse. She is a visiting instructor of English at St. Thomas Aquinas College. Her poetry has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Forklift Ohio, Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals.  A graduate of NYU’s MFA in creative writing program, she is the recipient of both Goldwater and Starworks teaching fellowships, and has taught creative writing at Goldwater Hospital, NYU, and St. Mary’s Health Care Center for Kids.

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