(“as an unintended part of a course of action”)
Joshua Tree at dawn
Really excited to be a part of the Studio One reading series, in its tenth year! See you there, Oakland~
I’ll be reading at the sema reading series next month, alongside John Myers ( Smudgy and Lossy, available from The Song Cave.)
Friday April 19th, 7 pm at Neckar Coffee in Boise
Come see Sara Mumolo and I read from our new books and chapbooks this December 13th, 2018 at 7:30 PM at Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco.
Read Woman with Her Throat Cut by Alisa Dodge in the latest issue of Cordite Poetry Review.
Hear this poem as read by the poet, & read it as written.
"The poet is not there only to share a poetic communication but to stimulate an imaginative speculation on the nature of reality."
The 20th anniversary issue of 580 Split is now live, and you can read my poem here. The entire issue is beautiful.
it's possible that I'll be reading some poetry at this on Thursday, & it's even more possible that I'll be having a drink.
As I was clicking through old drafts & applications of mine, I found the poetic statement I wrote for my Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship exactly one year ago.
Having to write statements are useful exercises. I could never hand you an "about-ness" for my writing, but a statement forces me to look at how I look, which magically always leads me to look with a newness.
It felt fitting to both share the statement, & finally launch my site, which has been a good six slow months in the making.
Please visit again & stay in contact: caroline.connor.poetry @ gmail
At the pith, language lusts peculiarly for the real, & would sooner draw blood than be ironized into oblivion. That I am female should not matter, though it seems to.
These are my materials, which others might have hemmed from me: Hunger (i.e. desire,) the thirsting Californian aquifer, female fluids, the sex & noise of our bodies together, homelessness, death.
Overhead, bus wires clip the city sky back. A bouquet of flowers comes wrapped in cellophane, then paper, & then a rubber band. We watch the neon of parrots race across the Embarcadero, their squabbling drowned by the bass of a Rihanna song from a passing car.
These are my materials.
Occasionally I regret that I have little time for nostalgia. But I’ve willingly witnessed every Kardashian spin-off, Trump-era press conference, & know the potential double-speak of emoji usage.
Like Keats’ grecian urn ecstasy, or Coleridge’s alpenglow trembling, ingesting is experiencing. Though now, the ancient & holy devices of sincerity & enthusiasm feel threatening as a knife. Still the satellite of my open face receives & filters, in stupefied awe of the landscape where I’m located. It could be eco-poetry, but it isn’t. The raw & specific terror of pop culture weds the I absent of distinction from you, & strikes out into an open neo-romantic field.
The small event-ness of each poem should find the blade not only an actual blade, but the boundary where its actuality meets mythos. Here, the blade is a tool used to protect, to (pro)create, to slice open the belly of something mammalian & warm, so that we too may know feast.
Written for 2017 Ruth Lily Fellowship application
San Francisco Botanical Garden Library, April 30th, 2017 11: 11 AM