Spotlight series #24 : Rusty Morrison
Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.
notes / statement about these poems
I’m working in a form that I created (seven-syllable segments; two segments per line; tercets; the final tercet has just a single segment per line and ends in a single syllable word; no punctuation).
Many poems in this long series incorporate quotes (in italics) from authors whose work has been provocation and inspiration for me. Those authors are referenced in the poems.
I’d wanted to write about limits. But I didn’t want to just write about limitation, I’d wanted to live inside limitation in the work and then see how I handled it. I’d wanted the poems to let me experience the act of writing as event, not aftermath.
Ann Lauterbach points out that the “convergence of subject matter with form releases content.” I’ve found that the forms of these poems have caused a contentiousness in my use of syntax that forces me to diverge from my more expected trajectories of thought, and so it exposes a content with more contextual resources than I’d had access to.
The poem titles (which repeat) are phrases from the essay “The Work and Death’s Space,” from The Space of Literature by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Ann Smock.
TWO POEMS
our aptitude for perishing
you buy disposable Bic / Highlighter pens in four shades
to suggest meanings vary / choose the sleek design for your
desk lamp heedless of wattage / as desolation expands
you fantasize the latest / planet-savior solutions
ignoring incremental / shifts it’s hard to focus on
the dove-sheen of shadow soon / you too will be shaded in
your own annihilation / it was Ernst Bloch writing his
hashish protocols who said / every thing teaches us but
what are you learning in your / busy use of objects you
yellow-highlight quotes on a
page as if that means you’ve been
changed
our aptitude for perishing
reach exhausted hands into / soil still freshly damp the smell
soothing as if you’re hearing / a chair gently squeaking floor
boards in an upstairs room where / someone rocks a child toward sleep
but doesn’t each poignancy / already seem posthumous
to consider its savor / is like saying to yourself
“forest” when you walk through trees / that are hemmed in on one side
by the highway your ears shut
to traffic-noise eyes nearly
shut
Rusty Morrison’s poems recently appeared in Colorado Review, Fence, and Iowa Review. You can find her creative nonfiction at Entropy and Harriet, and her reviews and critical essays at Kenyon Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Her five books include After Urgency (Tupelo; winner of the Dorset Prize) & the true keeps calm biding its story (Ahsahta; winner of the Sawtooth Prize, Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, Northern California Book Award, & DiCastagnola Award from Poetry Society of America), and her recent book, Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta; finalist for the NCIBA and also the NCBA Awards in Poetry). She is co-founder and has been co-publisher of Omnidawn (www.omnidawn.com) since 2001; her website www.rustymorrison.com.
