#laurie sheck

[manwalksintobar]

And water lies plainly // Laurie Sheck

Then I came to an edge of very calm But couldn’t stay there. It was the washed greenblue mapmakers use to indicate Inlets and coves, softbroken contours where the land leaves off And water lies plainly, as if lamped by its own justice. I hardly know how to say how it was Though it spoke to me most kindly, Unlike a hard afterwards or the motions of forestalling. Now in evening light the far-off ridge carries marks of burning. The hills turn thundercolored, and my thoughts move toward them, rough skins Without their bodies. What is the part of us that feels it isn’t named, that doesn’t know How to respond to any name? That scarcely or not at all can lift its head Into the blue and so unfold there?

[mutar-in-lucertola]

The deer, BY LAURIE SHECK

The deer is patience, the deer is what we see standing in the woods, half its jaw shot off, just staring. You ought to kill it now but you lift it into the back of the pickup. At home you pack the broken bone with mud.

Healing she moves toward you. Shy, she rubs her head against your leg. What I love in myself and others

is in the dream I have of this deer though she was real: she came out of the woods bleeding, she knew how to die but healed. The deer that walked one day back into the woods

is standing by a pond now, alert, in a wash of sunlight. How quietly she stands there as if there were no way to not belong in the worlds, as if it were this easy.

[tinkercreek]

by Laurie Sheck

from Io At Night (Knopf, 1989)

as tweeted out by David Baker

[goreprofonde]

"Where do you end and I begin?"

- Laurie Sheck, A monster's notes

[xjmlm]

But how each thought hacks and scalds itself As if there were no settlement to return to anymore, Jealous of the sweeping rain and in night-season cold under it. I went on foot and careless. She, who once was traded for a gun. She, led away into Removes. The cut thread of her, the and with bitterness I carried...And then nothing but wilderness, And being taken by, and a sorrow that cannot.

The Seventh Remove, Laurie Sheck

[dk-thrive]

How possible love.

Distance is the soul of the beautiful, she had read, and she imagines an unknown planet revolving in deep space, blue waves in tender exile from the land. Remorseless. Without witness. If she could go there she would possess nothing. How beautiful the earth might seem again from that distance. How possible love.

~ Laurie Sheck, from “Nocture: Blue Waves”  in The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-century American Poetry (Penguin Books, 2011)

[cmplus-me]

A Monster's Notes

Il nuovo post è stato pubblicato su https://ebook-mania.net/a-monsters-notes/

A Monster's Notes

SUMMARY: What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein’s monster but had met him when she was a girl of eight, sitting by her mother’s grave, and he came to her unbidden? What if their secret bond left her forever changed, obsessed with the strange being whom she had discovered at a time of need? What if he were still alive in the twenty-first century? This bold, genre-defying book brings us the “monster” in his own words. He recalls how he was “made” and how Victor Frankenstein abandoned him. He ponders the tragic tale of the Shelleys and the intertwining of his life with that of Mary (whose fictionalized letters salt the narrative, along with those of her nineteenth-century intimates) in this riveting mix of fact and poetic license. He takes notes on all aspects of human striving–from the music of John Cage to robotics to the Northern explorers whose lonely quest mirrors his own–as he tries to understand the strange race that made yet shuns him, and to find his own freedom of mind. In the course of the monster’s musings, we also see Mary Shelley’s life from her childhood through her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley, her writing of “Frankenstein, ” the births and deaths of her children, Shelley’s famous drowning, her widowhood, her subsequent travels and life’s work, and finally her death from a brain tumor at age fifty-four. The monster’s fierce bond with Mary and the tale of how he ended up in her fiction is a haunted, intense love story, a story of two beings who can never forget each other. “A Monster’s Notes” is Sheck’s most thrilling work to date, a luminous meditation on creativity and technology, on alienation and otherness, on ugliness and beauty, and on our need to be understood.

Download MOBI

[aaknopf]

This year, the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley, is a welcome occasion to ponder her art and life. The poet Laurie Sheck's cross-genre work, A Monster's Notes, is a compendious poetic novel, or perhaps an extended prose poem, that gives voice to Victor Frankenstein's monster. Sheck imagines his loneliness from the time of his creation and abandonment to our present day. During his far-ranging mental travels, the monster makes notes on all forms of human endeavor and on his own predicament; along the way, he treats the tragic world of the Shelleys from his unique perspective—he often hears their voices, or sees before him the hand of one of the family's famous sisters writing a letter. In the two sections below, the monster (in regular type) introduces the voice of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley's mother and the well known proto-feminist, who died shortly after Mary's birth. In the second section, Mary Shelley herself writes to her stepsister Claire Clairmont, recalling a scene in the St. Pancras graveyard near the River Fleet, where her mother was buried—and where, in her loneliness, at the age of eight, she first met a strange figure with "black lips and yellow eyes" who was, she notes elsewhere, "not like other humans."

from A Monster's Notes

And then this also comes back to me, a voice as from the graveyard—but before the graveyard—I can tell by what it says that it's her mother's, though I don't exactly hear it, it's more like shapes in air, though shapes more sensed than strictly seen:

William, my hands are cold—I'm writing this in my head so I know you'll never read it, I couldn't hold a pen if I wanted to—I know I'm going to die—The unfound of me the I told you "our animal" would be born today and she was—But there's something spreading in me I can feel it—It was all an experiment, wasn't it? I only ever wanted to be a continual experiment. They'll call it Sepsis or Puerperal fever. They won't let me nurse her, will say my milk is poison, put puppies to my breasts to drain them—You'll write the exact time of my death in your notebook, nothing more. You who have so many words—We thought we were going to have a boy, but we were wrong. So she's a Mary like me. Silence is a refinement on cruelty—A hawk's wing. A blade. A blank page. I didn't know chaos could be so serene—Delicate almost, but also fierce—When I gathered watercresses and thyme—Nevermind—My brain's on fire, I must go into the air—

**

Claire,

Remember when we kept our journals?—

"Tuesday 8th Letter from Fanny—drawing lesson—walk out with Shelley to the south parade. Read Clarendon and draw—in the evening work & S reads Don Quixote aloud."

That was October, 1816. Fanny died the next day. What was I doing when she died?—reading the memoirs of Princesse de Barreith? Drawing? Walking alone or with Shelley? Such ordinary things—

"Wednesday 23rd Write Walk before breakfast. Afterwards write and read Clarendon. Shelley writes & reads Montaigne—In the evening read Curt. & work—Shelley reads Don Quixote aloud." Days like that. Remember? But not a scrap of writing survives from the years I was a child. So much I didn't tell you. Yet I criticized you for being melodramatic, for your "Clairmont Style"—your conviction that some unworldly being was moving through your room disarranging things. And all the time I kept from you what I'd seen when I was 8 . . .

He stepped out of the bushes, partly shielding his face with his hand. He seemed a hurt presence. A presence somehow ashamed.

It's the ordinary that frightens: a plain white envelope, a sunny day in the mountains, reading, thinking, looking at a newborn's skin. The words: "infant," "Monday," "Leghorn," "July," frighten me.

When I was 8: stillness, trust, my own bed, thinking, frightened me.

I felt no need to turn from him.

I asked his name. "I don't have one," he said.

That seemed to me an extraordinary thing. I couldn't decide if it was wonderful or horrible, to have no name like that, yet to be a creature of language, a creature using words.

Why had no one named him? And un-named like that, did he know an aloneness much worse than my own?

He held a book in his hands. I could tell he didn't want me to look into his face. How does one calm another's shame? Then he stepped back into the bushes, head still deeply bowed, and started in a gravelly, hushed voice to read.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about A Monster's Notes by Laurie Sheck.

Browse other books by Laurie Sheck.

Peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

Enter for a chance to win a poetry library, sponsored by Signature Reads.

[violettesiren]

I suppose you are weary now of remembering, that being mortal you want to convince yourself you belong to this earth, and are anchored to the earth by love.

You lie by the river. The sky is still. If you could you would watch the roots of the grasses, the roots of the wildflowers hunger through the soil, how they would cleave, as if forever, to what they cannot finally hold. The river's skin is cold and smooth. When the birds fly up, a sudden panic of black wings, you turn from the strange dream of their going.

I think of your wandering. White skin, white hooves, how you passed without touching what formerly you'd stopped to touch. The children picking flowers by the river seemed far away as stars. Allowed no rest, you moved within the stark cage of exile while you longed more than anything for hands. Did the earth grow beautiful then-

the lambs sleeping on the hillsides, the olive trees swaying where they stood? The world uttered its unstoppable fullness. And for the first time you saw it. You who watched it with longing from a distance unbridgeable as death.

To Io, Afterwards by Laurie Sheck

[allyourprettywords]

“What Is the Difference,” Laurie Sheck

Stein asked what is the difference. She did not ask what is the sameness. Did not ask what like is. Or proximity.  Resemblance. Did not ask what child of what patriarch what height what depth didn’t use a question mark but still wondered at the difference what mutinies it carries over what vast Arctic what far shore.

What is the difference between blind and bond. Between desk and red. Between capsize and sail. Between commodity and question. A lively thing, a fractured thing. To smile at the difference. 

(Such gray clouds passing over. Thick, wet sky.)

What is the difference between mutiny and dust. Between noose and edge. Between brittle and obey.

Between shunned and stun. What is the difference.

As now, Mary Shelley’s monster flees to the north, his sack of books his lone companions.

[therumpus]

One of the beautiful things about writing is that it offers an inner life that’s disciplined and at the same time wild. Not in any way servile or submissive. It exists outside of institutional and other forms of authority even when being affected by them. On what almost feels like a cellular level, it’s anathema to labeling and enforced divisions.

THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #72: Laurie Sheck

[elucubrare]

Laurie Sheck

[goreprofonde]

"Isn't seeing a wounding and a caressing both?"

- Laurie Sheck, A monster's notes

[xjmlm]

As when red sky

The morning’s raw and wet.

There’s something delicate and fierce that comes damagingly out of the mind

When the body’s ill. I feel the invisible boundaries of my life strike into me

From regions I can’t see, as when red sky assails itself

After intervals of blue, whiteshine, dullish grey. I sense crimson strokes at the edges of things.

And have burnt inside myself so many words in a bonfire

Unseeable but real as dirt. The worst fault a thing can have is unreality.

Here is a window, here is a chair. The air swirls with severity and

Hazard. The chair is white-painted pine, peeling in places, and carved with a five-petalled flower.

Laurie Sheck

[offthebeatenstacks]

Island of the Mad, by Laurie Sheck "Meticulously blending the concerns of her poetics into an exciting and mysterious work of fiction, Island of the Mad is the daring new novel by celebrated poet and novelist Laurie Sheck. This stunning lyrical mix of fact and fiction loosens the boundaries between past and present as it offers an intimate look into the peculiar life of a man named Ambrose A. and those he comes to know as his story unfolds. "Orphaned and hunchbacked since childhood, Ambrose has lived a reclusive life until one day he’s suddenly confronted with an odd request: that he travel to Venice in search of a lost notebook he can know nothing about. Though aware of the seeming absurdity of the task, he embarks on his mission. Once there, he is visited by the ethereal Frieda, a young woman executed as a murderess a century before who now guides him through the city and into the devastating Venetian plague of 1557. "His search eventually leads him through the Venetian lagoon to the small island of San Servolo, also known as the Island of the Mad, where rummaging through a drawer in the old hospital, he discovers a notebook containing the letters and notes of two of the island’s former inhabitants — a woman suffering from a rare genetic illness which causes the afflicted to die of sleeplessness, and a man who experiences epileptic seizures. As the sleepless woman’s eye-sight fails, she wants only one thing — that her epileptic friend read to her from Dostoevsky’s great novel The Idiot, a book she loves but can no longer read." CLICK HERE to request through SearchOhio (Note: Edition and cover art may vary.)

[ardor-mohr]

When he was nine, Dostoyevsky’s family bought a small country house in Darovoe. It was there that one day a peasant man, Marei, reached out and gently stroked the boy’s face. In prison, Dostoyevsky later said, ‘the memory came back to me and helped me survive.’

Laurie Sheck on Dostoyevsky’s Empathy