A Guggenheim fellow, Terese Svoboda is most recently the author of Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship, her seventh book of poetry, and Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet. She has also published six novels, a memoir, and a book of translations from Nuer, a South Sudanese language. Great American Desert, a book of stories, is forthcoming March 2019.
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A Process Note
I don't see my poetry as difficult, I see it as playful. The mind wants to play. It wants, in its aesthetic experience, to return to a work of art and retrieve something more from it at every contact. Otherwise it will discard that glittering toy, bored. I'm currently playing with plays, getting on and off the stage of poetry. I'm also interested in technical language, and its poetics. Everything has already been written – or else nothing has been written, each moment its own possible play of sound and sense.
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On the Aesthetics of Textual Difficulty
Poetry that requires interpretation is perhaps a show of dominance: you have to know so much in order to appreciate my work, e.g., Eliot and Pound. Enter Hope Mirrlees, her long poem “Paris” published by Virginia Woolf four years before “The Wasteland,” critiqued by TLS as “spluttering and incoherent statement displayed with various tricks of type...It is certainly not a “Poem.”
Verlaine’s bed-time…Alchemy
Absynthe,
Algerian tobacco,
Talk, talk, talk,
Manuring the white violets of the moon.
Here was a woman who knew six languages by the time she was twenty, including Zulu, friend of Stein, Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and of course Eliot, and she lived with a classics scholar. She was not lacking in cultural references. More contemporary evidence of different political and aesthetic pressures that have affected what is considered acceptable as experiment is the erasure of radical poetry of the 20s and 30s, with the conservative 50's and 60's emphasis on sunsets and in formal structure.
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A Folio of Poems by Terese Svoboda
Out of Ringing Ears
Renegade automated car says it can get us back
[automated voice: get us back]
Where?
Slip of paper crushed
still warm
thigh-curved from its sleep-upon
says
Called Forth ring ring no sympathy
the better the sooner get back
Whose renegade scalp do you see taken
in a world of get back?
The tonic someone (No, we have not met)
the invisible people on stage
clothes on hangers
the gin [the automated voice: get back]
well-dressed vs. ill-dressed she said
and Not this time beat time
[schottische] slow polka to you
and over the table, the bedspread
under which a house hides
the chair-rung entrance
and the costume
I wore her clothes all my life even now her blouse curses me from the closet
Pretend! Limp possum at the vet's
The chorus needs feeding
The chorus has broken the toilet
The chorus on its hind legs
The chorus, its back to Greece
Water deliciously advances
voices over it [stage mis-direction] under it
A canon signals The End
ring, ring [automated voice]
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Sandwich
Across the stage of the plains interstate inter state interstate dell and dell and plains, there is a scene where they run out of gas.
You — in the white shirt —
I'm just as scenic. Listen: There was a tremendous knocking.
Knock, knock. No joke?
They put him in a closet.
Not a dell.
They put him in a closet and the door, hung wrong, had a gap at the bottom where you could shove a whole sandwich through, though the bread got a little dirty. As for thirst, I don't know. No light of course except through the gap so the sandwich came in dark and dirty.
Whispering voices from the phone.
Can you get it?
There was a tremendous knocking across the plains, sometimes as if on a windowpane. Sometimes enough to break it, or else from below.
You don't know that.
It's a kind of knowing, just like the knocking you say you heard just after they ran out of gas. And who is the they anyway? The usual suspects, M and F, old while you're not and because of that, always running out of gas.
They wished there were windows. There were sandwiches they made for themselves, they didn't shove them all.
You need a window left open if it's going to rain. But that means mud will be tracked in by the gas-less, earning alienation. The door won't open.
Time gaps while they run away like that, after someone else finds him in the closet. Maybe the someone went looking for a coat, a winter coat that he thought he had hung in there. Pee-You.
M and F forgot their homemade sandwiches and they ran out of gas.
How do you know?
Someone called. Someone said Look in the closet.
It was you.
I was wearing a white shirt, easy to spot. I didn't need a coat.
They walked a long way before anyone picked them up, and it never stopped raining. The dell came up while they were walking. A farmer in the dell. A big Ford truck with 4WD.
Interstate.
No trace of footsteps because of the rain.
Interstate gets into the car like a hum. You would think they were fleeing the site but no, they just ran out of gas.
What if guilt is free like the falling of rain? Instead of cooped up in a closet? He was crying.
I'm not related. I'm not the last or the late. I'm not — really. I say: there was a scene and someone went inside but whether —
A white shirt is easy enough to spot. Dirt just falls on it.
There was a tremendous knocking.
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Shame Helps
A sudden not-breeze fills the air.
Two men dressed in corduroy approach, one pulling a boat.
A boat of agony.
Heigh-ho. Greeting. Greeting.
Fleeting smile, both. The word smile left on the faces of the Fourth Wall.
How to read that?
The optic nerve gets it up.
What has been done weighs the Heigh.
The smarter of the men has a dollar hanging from a pocket.
Acquisitive or generous?
Balance implies a man out of sight removing his shoes.
Why a man is the question.
The philosopher in the second row wants to punch the usher.
Such restraint stupefies the audience into paradoxical sleep:
they stop worrying but their eyeballs still roll.
And if the heavens help with a hole in the roof above the lights: drip, drip,
the two men look to the exit, shamed, unwilling to follow one or the other without a speech.
Let us bury Caesar.
I hope we find some sand.
Creepy, the way birds in stillness sing.
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Fusion Construction
The sun shows off--
pocket it.
You saw electrons bloom on a newsreel,
let's have a timeline.
Six men
show, a nice number for progress
but which wears the dress?
(he's got courage like Turing)
They build its basket but
fuel must eat something:
time, this time.
Big logs
are lifted, an animatronics
of change, a mechanical buffalo
—nice Handel, hear it under
the voiceover?--but Babel bubbles up
e.g. irrational fear, unwarranted
code, another country's
penis.
Change requires copulation,
nakedness, pleasure.
Eat
the coxcomb and the sun will not rise.
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What? is your line
I think I'm panicking
I think I'm panicking
etc.
crying practice
windowless
quick, a dream:
one of you holds the other
What? is your line
the gun is fake but you need a license
Miss Vulgarity comes forward in
a lack-of-bathing-suit competition
a different voice speaking “I”
to an “audience”
rants: and you and you and you
and it wasn't like that
brief interview with an innocent bystander
before the lover slash narrator finds his way over
an absent Noah leaves the room
floating along and then the queen says
women were at best queens then
WE
the chorus too loud
but that is opinion
answers back: the building is burning
insert choreography
where who keeps the extinguisher where backstage
but I or you end up in a boat
racing it's a matter of race
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1718 – Nantucket Beach