#G. C. Waldrep

[geryone]

The Opening Ritual, G. C. Waldrep

[noleavestoblow]

I cough up a tooth, mature and perfect.

It glistens in my hand. The chancel remains locked,

nursing its treasures with a dim milk. I can just feel the

tooth resting in the center of my palm; I shift it slightly,

its planes mazing the half-light. Is it broken, I ask myself.

Is it worship. Every century or four someone scrubs the

images from the walls and replaces them with new images.

A fish. A crown. A scythe. See, this special niche for

books from which pages have been torn. You may open

and close them: an almanac, a lab manual, a toddler’s

pop-up fable. In my hand I am still holding this single

tooth, which my body offered up. It is not, to my knowledge,

mine. I imagine the dark chancel full of teeth, a mouth

sewn shut.

G. C. Waldrep

[clatteriing]

I can write no more about bread than about tin, each of which the sunrise presents to me in turn: Tin or bread, bread or tin. I once held a gun while cancer rucked my blood’s cast-iron vein. I convoked a parliament of bridges, to which I pled my scabbed kinship. Bread or tin, tin or bread they chanted until, at length, I left that island. Nothing burned more brightly than the oldest ladder, its rungs silver with splinters. Are you not astonished, the sunrise demands, swigging its chalky nectar. I am a war is what I tell it, then. It nods, it has read the book, it can see time’s other motion.

Extract from Creation Myth Suite by G. C. Waldrep

[dreamlandine]

The soul is a nut God dreams of. He cracks it (in His dream). Shyly falling out onto the warm sand, every smooth version of us.

G.C. Waldrep

(excerpt from Suite for A.W.N. Pugin)

[theinwardlight]

Except from G. C. Waldrep, “I have a fever and its name is God” 

[wholegrianbread]

tommyinnit, before Everything.

most things have hidden roots, why not piety, that crow’s wing.

(castle woods, dinefwr, by g. c. waldrep)

!!! REBLOGS APPRECIATED GREATLY !!!

click for better quality

[onetwofeb]

You are astonishingly not alone, is the message daybreak broke against the thighbone of a saint. What if you pierce it. What if you make a musical instrument of it.

At the George Caleb Bingham House, Arrow Rock, Missouri

You could say: this is where a people’s art began.

Malaria; cicada whine. You could dress yourself up

in your wounds. You may walk in the center

of the road, as far as you like. Vanity,

to center the composition just so. You smile into it.

You wait for it to ask you a question. You could say:

the roughed-in portrait on the easel is a prop,

a mere prop. Beside the basket of vintage needlework,

pincushions, pins & needles rusted into the gay fibers.

If you are unable to walk then you might limp.

The question turns beneath your hand. It turns but it

does not break, & here you are. You could say:

marry me, pigments sprung from lead, from lapis,

from madder (a mere prop). All the blind heroes

from the past are clapping. The city is clapping, Zion

if you like. Whisper your signature into the variation:

the new bottoms through which the river once ran.

It is easy to imagine hunters here, so why not do it:

hunters. Cracks varnished over, you can see them

in this late light. The gardeners arrive & then withdraw.

You could say art sent them. You could say art

slew them. You could pioneer the use of red

underpainting, to confer a lifelike blush to human

figures, to a young nation. Overspreading

older nations, yes, the clamor sealed within the image.

You are astonishingly not alone, is the message

daybreak broke against the thighbone of a saint.

What if you pierce it. What if you make a musical

instrument of it. What then would you have waited for,

yes, I (is it time for the “I”) am asking you.

Who have glimpsed this world, & possibly others.

Speak with the thread in your hands. Cicada whine

upthrust from the depths, into the plane of desire

which is to say, of representation. You, you, you,

eyes shut, eyes wide, make your decision, this stroke

versus that stroke, assisted by the glistening hairs

of an animal, some former animal. The image alive

alive-o as it must be. Here is the body of a pelican

stretched on a strand, here is the body of a crow

stretched on a wooden table, here is a marmot, here

is a mink (with a human hand showing, bottom left,

as if reaching for it or perhaps as if withdrawing).

You may think of the heaven of images, if there is one—

you may think there is one. An infinite plane

of perfect representations. And every fourteen years,

or every seventeen, that desperate clawing up

through the surface, that seeking. The slit

harvested just so. Uninvented because it is closed,

as all conquest is closed. Now the docent has

returned to lock the room back up, & you thank her.

G. C. Waldrep

[someones-reading-list]

Fall 2019: Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics

Cecily Parks - Texas State University

Reading list:

Ann Fisher-Wirth & Laura-Gray Street (eds.): The Ecopoetry Anthology

Joy Harjo: Secrets from the Center of the World

Rose McLarney: Forage

Harryette Mullen: Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary

Tommy Pico: Nature Poem

Brian Teare: Doomstead Days

Tung-Hui Hu: On the Kepel Fruit

Recommended reading:

Joshua Corey & G C Waldrep (eds.): The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral

Camille T Dungy: Black Nature: Four centuries of African American Nature Poetry

Barry Lopez (ed.): Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape

Ancillary materials:

Louise Glück: “Daisies”

Forrest Gander: “What is Eco-Poetry”

Robert Macfarlane: “The word-hoard”

Lisa Robertson: “How Pastoral: A Manifesto”

Jonathan Skinner: “Editor’s Statement” (from ecopoetics Winter 2001)

Tiya Miles: “Black Bodies, Green Spaces”

[idontknowmyblogname]

Analysis of “brief lesson on marriage” by G. C. Waldrep

I asked my wife to check the hive, to see if the hive were burning. (I had no wife, no hive.) Yes, she said, rising up from where she’d been embroidering a new wind. Then —Yes, she said again, only this time a bit more softly.

In this poem, Waldrep explores the ideas that The Bee Movie brings up by imagining the future that Barry has set up for himself by the end of the movie. When Barry says "no wife, no hive", he alludes to the reality that Barry has lost everything in his pursuit of humanity and his love for the one he calls his wife, Vanessa. In the movie, Barry falls in love with the corruptness of human society and the downfalls of capitalism, the original enemy he was fighting against when he sued humans for taking honey, and realizes that this alienates him from his original society, thus the imagery of a burning hive. However, because he's a bee, he can never actually be with the woman that he loves because there's no way she can love him back. When he asks if his hive is on fire, it's because deep down he knows that he's to blame for buying into the capitalist ideals and abandoning the beehive, and when he mentions the woman he loves "embroidering/a new wind" it's because she is a part of the human society that is fanning the flames that he set when he left them. When she says "Yes" the second time more softly, it's almost as though she's realizing that she's the one who has pulled Barry away from his life, from where he belongs.

[uglyducklingpresse]

A few more images from Other Presses Other Places, the exhibit of UDP-collected material from other small presses on display at the New York Public Library, featuring Peter Gizzi and David Byrne on Phylum Press (New Haven CT), Let’s Say Yes by Mary Jo Bang (Hand Held Editions, South bend IN), How Many tTimes the Lightening Strikes by Matthew Zingg (unknown), a Use Your Hands: A Simple How To Guide from the Philadelphia Buyers Market of American Craft (Philadelphia, PA), Into the Forest Engine by Garth Graeper on Projective Industries (Chicago/Houston) and others! More info on the exhibit here, on view through January 12.

[covertrook]

The family arguing in Welsh is not part of the permanent display.

G. C. Waldrep

[geryone]

The Opening Ritual, G. C. Waldrep

[poems-at-the-start]

G. C. Waldrep, “What Begins Bitterly Becomes Another Love Poem”

The earth has a taste for us, in its unknowing appetite there yet resides a hunger, incompletion that draws all life to its dark self. What, then, shall we say of the flesh’s own desire, distal thumb-brush at evening? There is nothing to say, the vowels cluster uncertain in the beautiful vase the throat makes, fricatives corralled behind ridge of gum and bone-splinter. Flesh and earth: fire is an illusion, to which water is the antidote. The day was a bright one, there seemed no need to move about with mirrors, the usual circumspection and indirect approach. The abundance of small life argued some measure of clemency, likewise the Jerseys lowing in the paddock breeze, tender shoots of cress and sweetpea spiraling upward. But fire is a cruel hoax: now you see it, now you don’t, the object of your affection cast in carbon on the hard ground which will, in time, receive. Roadside the irises bloomed two or three feet max above soil’s surface, rough tongue resting lightly on each leaf, each violet exclamation. In full sun your hand guided mine to the wound. A small one. Water and blood, like the nurse said: prestidigitation of the body. We stood without shadows on asphalt at midday. What we call patience is only fire again, compressed. I remember: your face flushed, stray petal lodged in the damp whorl of your disheveled hair.

[aumainerose]

G. C. Waldrep in A God in the House: Poets Talk about Faith ed. Ilya Kaminsky

[jrmilazzo]

<< the constitution the capillaries had signed, / their bold but tiny / paraphs: I conclude / all grass is as flesh, a friable burden: >>

[clatteriing]

Let the thirsty wedding launder our venous baptisms, let them dwindle in the city of shepherds where no shepherds ever come. I lay my ash against a myth & recite the catechism of pollen. My lungs are the dawn no sun will ever witness, a helm of trembling erasures. Like breath they fragment as they char into vows: vows, & all their lucid shadows.

Extract from Creation Myth Suite by G. C Waldrep