New chapbook, DARK WHITE, published this week

MY MARY

Does the rain have a mother?

Who made the drops of dew?

Out of whose womb came the ice?

She is hardened against her young ones

As though they were not hers.

The face of the deep is frozen.

Cover photo: Anonymous photographer, Palermo, 1924. 

     Friends who do not fail us

     Mary in our hour of

     despair. Take not

     away from me the small fires

     I burn in the memory of love.

           -JOHN WIENERS

           

     The maiden language all over.

          -ZORA NEALE HURSTON

My chapbook, DARK WHITE, will be published by Omertà this month. This little book includes the title piece, "Dark White," "Small Square" (ars poetica), "Feminine," "My Mystic," "My Mary,"  "Begin in Blue," "Words Looking for a Street," and "In My Girlish Days" (all of which have been published in little magazines, some of which can be found elsewhere on this blog). "My Mary" is an erasure+ of pages from The Book of Job (from a wet Bible I found in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, two years after Hurricane Katrina). 

I doubt that Omertà ("Omertà, as practiced by the Mafia: A Code of silence about criminal activity and a refusal to give evidence to the authorities") has ever published a book more relevant to its name. Thanks to Les Gottesman for adding my work to a list that includes chapbooks by Joanne Kyger, Diane di Prima, Donna De La Perriere, Denise Newman, and many other writers I admire. 

DARK WHITE is a small sampler of work from the full-length memoir with poems, WITE OUT, that Hanging Loose Press will publish in the spring of 2020. I’m extremely grateful to Robert Hershon, Mark Pawlak, Dick Lourie, and Donna Brook for making a home for a manuscript that was orphaned after the death of our friend and my first publisher, Bill Corbett.

For Bill Corbett, friend, publisher, poet, critic, memoirist, and teacher

                                           October 11, 1942-August 10, 2018

"We love to be with us."
      -- Bill Corbett, "Columbus Square Journal"


Begin in Blue

The blue of her robe . . . reads above all as a flat silhouetted shape—a deep infinite midnight blue, large enough to lose ourselves in . . . this very dark blue creates unparalleled effects . . . almost of hypnotic trance; it is as though we are being invited to worship not so much the Madonna as the Blue. - Timothy Hyman, Sienese Painting

I’m reading John Wieners' chapbook, Pressed Wafer, upstairs at one of the giant tables in the Bancroft when a visiting scholar asks for help with research in the archives where I work. And that’s how I learn that, in 1882, landscape architects at the University of California designed a eucalyptus grove for the Berkeley campus (a grove through which I walk once a week). Tasmanian blue gum trees were planted as a windbreak for the cinder running track. They grew and grew, non-natives making themselves at home. To those who’d never seen a eucalyptus tree, the grove smelled like cough drops.

            *

Wieners was a Boston boy. Later, in San Francisco he wore blue eye shadow and sold heroin packed in matchboxes the size of a palette of eye shadow—false eyelashes, glued one above the other on his forehead—cockeyed Caucasian—eyelids the color and shape of the leaves of the blue eucalyptus near the track where the beautiful athlete, also a Joseph, also a John, breathing hard after a sprint, does not look up at the plane from Boston passing over the track.

Boys in California know nothing of priests in long skirts shoveling snow, winters invented by Emily Dickinson.

            *

The Blacks and the blues,

the grove as artifice

          

In Berkeley, Robert Creeley recorded a version of “A Poem for Painters”:

            “With want of it”—

            “despair is on my face”—

            “showered by the scent of the finish line”—

           

The golden boys protected by tall trees

blue blood—blue eucalyptus—blue-lined paper

“beginning with violet. I begin in blue”

“My middle name is Joseph”

            *

Sanskrit “vaka”

“wat” (temple)

“grove” (copse, thicket)

A coppice—spinney—brake—for the broken

A grove: a stand of trees with little or no undergrowth—So here’s the floor, all clear and still, a thicket—“cold hell”

  Grave   Love   Leaves

       

Torn tickets in the eucalyptus leaves, pants in the trees

Who walks through the grove in winter rain? Pants decomposing in the decomposing leaves— pants and a dog

      

This was after the picturesque era, before Free Speech— “Books in the running brooks,” books in the trees

            *

Strawberry Creek roars with the snowmelt coming down from Truckee. The train back to Boston leaves at 3:00.

Across the “enormous” country—passing a car filled with Beats, ascending, going where Beats don’t go.

         

Climbing into the mountains he leans out the window, his ears pasted back like a dog’s—like a dog, submissively free— submission is different when there’s no force.

In the Rockies they close the windows now because so many travelers have been decapitated leaning out to see the trees—but the windows were open then, so he looked—looked—looked—

Added September 3, 2018: Stan Mir's recollections of Bill in Hyperallergic.

For more about Bill and his work, check out Patrick Pritchett's essay, and listen to Jackson Braider's PRX interview with Bill. 

August 17, 2018: Here's Fanny Howe's portrait of Bill (and Bill's Paris Review interview with her); and here Jim Behrle and other writers remember Bill (at WBUR).

August 19, 2018: "There's no one I learned more from, not only about poetry, but also about how to live and how to be a good person,' said Fred Moten, a poet and critic who teaches at NYU."  Boston Globe obituary

Here you can read Thomas Devaney's Rain Taxi interview with Bill. 

And: "'Every day is poetry day': Remembering Bill Corbett," Sean Cole / pretty radio / WBUR. 

You can find books that Bill wrote and published at Small Press Distribution and at Pressed Wafer.

"Already fall's harsher / light cuts blown / leaf shadows into / sharp patterns. / There are fewer mornings / attending to the all / important loss column." - William Corbett, "September Song"

"Begin in Blue" was published in Ambush, a literary magazine, in 2014. 

Stan Mir's Review of THE PUBLIC GARDENS

Stan Mir's insightful review of THE PUBLIC GARDENS is online at Jacket2.

I like the way he takes into account my entire working life (as what my daughter used to call "a booker"), not just my identity as the author of my own book. 

Also nice: he refers to an interview I did with Kate Greenstreet, one of my favorite poets, in 2010, before I'd found a publisher for THE PUBLIC GARDENS.

 

"A Playpen in the Democracy of Art"

Sebastian Smee profiles Bill Corbett, "The Man Who Nourished Boston's Literary Scene"

     "Jhumpa Lahiri wasn’t sure she could be a writer. Although as a child she had harbored dreams of doing just that, they had gradually been eaten away by self-doubt — she could scarcely believe the books she loved had been written by real people.  “At twenty-one,” she recalled in a 2011 New Yorker essay, “the writer in me was like a fly in the room — alive but insignificant, aimless, something that unsettled me whenever I grew aware of it, and which, for the most part, left me alone. After graduating Barnard in 1989 with a degree in English literature, Lahiri moved to Massachusetts to take classics courses at Harvard. She also found work at the cash register in a Harvard Square bookstore with a friend of a friend, Marni Corbett, a daughter of poet William Corbett and his wife, Beverly, Marni’s father, a tall man with a commanding, jowly face and mischievous eyes, used to visit the store to say hello to his daughter and to buy books. Big armloads of books. . . . "

continue reading Smee's Boston Globe profile here

How many of us has Bill supported, encouraged, published, celebrated? Read this long and interesting profile to get a sense of the legacy he is leaving as he and his wife Beverly Corbett head to Brooklyn after forty-something years in their South End townhouse in Boston.

Here's a link to WBUR's interview:

Bill Corbett is Taking His Legendary Literary Salon to Brooklyn

Go here and here to see some of the books Bill has written, edited, and published.

John Wieners, Lee Harwood, Lewis Warsh, Bill Corbett at Walden Pond.
(Photo: Jud Walker)

Sebastian Smee's Boston Globe Mag profile

BOSTON, city of poets
including BILL CORBETT.
Read Sebastian Smee's profile of "The Man Who Nourished Boston's Literary Scene"
here