Wolf Centos - Softcover

Muench, Simone

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1936747790 ISBN 13: 9781936747795

Verlag: Sarabande Books, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Wolf Centos is comprised of centos, a patchwork form that originated around the 4th century. The form is one which re-configures pre-existing poetic texts into new systems of imagery and ideas. The author is able to place poets in conversation with one another across centuries and across continents. Though the poems are explicitly sutured together by the motif of the wolf, they are also linked by other elements, particularly motifs of language, loss, desire, and transformation. Wolf Centos is ultimately elegiac as it oscillates between transformation and stasis, wildness and domesticity, death and beauty, damage and healing, because ultimately our lives constantly shift between these polarities as well. The ultimate knowledge of the poems is that as we age and experience loss, we must retain our “wildness”—the wolf’s wilderness—inside us. In this way, the wolf becomes a symbol of a threshold, a transformative space.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Simone Muench grew up under the influence of Universal Horror films, Boone’s Farm, Southern Baptist sermons, and country roads. Recently the recipient of a 2013 NEA Poetry Fellowship and the Fall 2012 Black Lawrence Chapbook Award, some of her other honors include two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, two Vermont Studio Center Fellowships, a 2013 Lewis Faculty Scholar Award, and the PSA’s Bright Lights Big Verse Award. In addition to serving as an editor for Sharkforum and chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review, she is the author of four full-length collections: The Air Lost in Breathing (Marianne Moore Prize; Helicon Nine, 2000), Lampblack & Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Prize; Sarabande, 2005), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), and Disappearing Address, co-written with Philip Jenks (BlazeVOX, 2010). She is an Associate Professor at Lewis University in Illinois.

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Wolf Centos

By Simone Muench

Sarabande Books

Copyright © 2014 Simone Muench
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-936747-79-5

Contents

1. The question of the wolves turns & turns, 
2. Desire discriminates & language discriminates, 
3. Each letter a closed house, 
4. Every transformation is possible, 
Source Material, 61, 
Acknowledgments, 63, 
The Author, 67, 

CHAPTER 1

The question of the wolves turns & turns

All the poetry has wolves in it, Pam.

—The Doors screenplay

    Wolf Cento

    I saw my life a wolf loping along the road—
    a glint of bone, visible & then gone,
    a landscape altered.
    Ideas, hair, fingers
    fall & come to naught.
    A shirt blows across the field.
    A shrug of stars as flowers go out on the sea.
    Maybe the whole world is absentminded
    or floating. The flower, the weather,
    the room empties its mind of me,
    the sea-pulse of my utterance.
    I have stood for a long time
    at the edge of a river, unknown, nameless,
    hands groping for the shape of the animal.
    Not knowing what all the music had been hiding.


    Wolf Cento

    Sea-blue, shot through
    with the echo of a shadow
    that sleeps after its voyage,

    she sat with wolves & magicians
    in a corner of an empty house
    & saw someone coming

    through the whirling snow
    like a reflection from arson,
    emitting sparks, shaking

    the air as if to remind her
    of the animal life.
    A word, a whisper says this

    in the dark: you are feverishly hot.
    Forest stands behind forest.
    Under your skins you have

    other skins; you have a seventh
    sense. Don't you hear
    the sky ping above your eye?

    All of us are rain
    under rain, noon spin
    through bright meridian.

    Mind drawn on, drawn out
    like a little boat bringing
    the flame from the other shore.


    Wolf Cento

    I transformed into this thing, this beautiful
    black howl: wolves & storms
    of white trigonometries
    & along my veins sailor's flutes are singing.
    Body caught by knowing,
    like an inflamed throat, the immense
    perception of knees.
    This is the weapon: knowledge
    with its hundred corridors,
    its dark orange trees.
    I stop at the edge of my breath,
    as if beside a door,
    nobody comes, nobody weeps.
    How beautiful: indifference at midnight,
    light falling mute over the blue trucks.
    & when the time comes to die there will be
    only this syllable, this tongue
    that can no longer pass beyond its husk.


    Wolf Cento

    Outside the new world winters in grand dark
    like a young wolf in its blood leaping
    to snap the flower-flake as my shadow
    falls broken-legged down stony precipices,
    snowflakes falling more blue than subways,
    than astronomy—the body-clocks are stopped
    all over town. Your finger drawing my mouth.
    Sans teeth, sans eyes.
    When the mouth dies, who misses you?
    The kill of the wolf is the meat of the wolf:
    he may do what he will.
    Inside the wolf's tongue, the doe's tears.
    It was wet & we licked the hollow
    where a hare could hide.


    Wolf Cento

    Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf
    at a live heart, the sun breaks down.
    What is important is to avoid
    the time allotted for disavowels
    as the livid wound
    leaves a trace leaves an abscess
    takes its contraction for those clouds
    that dip thunder & vanish
    like rose leaves in closed jars.
    Age approaches, slowly. But it cannot
    crystal bone into thin air.
    The small hours open their wounds for me.
    This is a woman's confession:
    I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me.


    Wolf Cento

    When tenderness seems tired,
    the girl nestles down in me
    with her she-wolf's mask,
    places a word in the hollow
    of my mute being.
    Impossible to be alone
    in language, light of bird-laden
    lemon trees.
    We're between blue & good evening,
    heaving with brilliants: the mortal
    glitter of the naked beach,
    the glass horizon.
    (It is the human that is alien.)
    Even with her severed tongue
    the she-wolf bathes herself
    in the blue vertigo in my mouth
    where the planets flicker.
    The orange tree breaks into foam
    & no god comes.


    Wolf Cento

    Who will take the madness from the trees?
    The petals of dead planets broken.
    What do they matter now, the deprivations.

    Your voice will never recover
    what was said once, so when you hold
    the hemisphere & once more take up the world,

    I can see myself in you as though I were sitting
...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Sarabande Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1936747790
• ISBN 13: 9781936747795
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 72
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar