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| Poet's Sampler: Jacqueline Waters Introduced by Charles North Jacqueline Waters is a young poet from New Jersey who has published very little at a time when it seems every young poet has accumulated, via electronic and other means, at least a Selected Poems by age thirty. I find her poems both ...highly accomplished and highly intelligent. I also find them in large part mysterious. Often starting off in medias res, they are framed as narratives complete with weather, significant surroundings, conflicts, crises—but almost instantly they shift gears, then shift again, so that it is clear that the narrative flavor is just that, and that the poems have to do with other things, in particular, the flow of consciousness (including its weather, stumbling blocks, break-ins, etc.). If high wires and modesty can be said to coexist, to me her poetry is a modest high-wire act whose magic lies in the apparent effortlessness of abrupt transition, not merely from one setting to another but from one sort of poetic attention to another, almost always convincingly.
Country of Lincoln-shaped Men
Spectators said wake up to yourself with the corollary that wakefulness is next to bodilessness not just a bunch of dry dates banked up in the ledger or a hump-backed bridge noted at odd hours by an unruly version of myself
In my opinion I have never left the field I look to the embankment beset by microphones Wind numbs the players and they stream away
It's hard to see the end clearly Instinct gives way to technique and like a pendulum I get a little bit at a time from a seemingly fixed perspective The whole contraption lurches along in a provocative coupling of gears You'll find it all rather suspenseful provided you don't pay close attention
2. As I said, I just couldn't On a day determined by calendar the waters rose and changed in color Their warmth evoked a geography strangely at odds with memory where solitude was less permissible nor did the truth rev itself up to be told just as it was
I began what could be a lifelong tantrum exchanging rational understanding for an undercurrent of slow purposeful clapping, as if my ideal coterie consisted of weary airline passengers
3. The backs of their heads as they arrive and scrutinize the backs of seats
As long as they smile we rest at ease with the altitude lulled by the enunciation of sonorous proper names
If an hour is the enlargement of ardor then as a place where visitors feel at home it is what its title says it is rehearsing what's always been done for what next there is to do behind a cameo with raised brows both camera-ready and camera shy
White Zombie I cannot choose one or the other: I am like the fork. The sky at the end of the powerline withers away in shadow. I retrieve the newspaper conscious of my pajamas and return up the driveway. These beginnings embarrass me. Like when I learned to play the pan flute— I thought if I cultivated self-control I would have an interesting, useful life… Now I don't get out much, edge from room to room peeking through the sashes, blunting urges. I climb a ladder to clear a gutter somehow knocking down a nest of a perfectly comfortable family of wasps. I am merely doing my duty, but find I disturb others.
When I was a child but I was never a child just as my boots had no life until I put them on this morning. Perhaps I ought to louver that elephantine window. Or the hut entrance where the wax plants wax. Then I saw a copy of the original in the living room across the street making me aware that I am not alone that others are watching from their beveled jewels and horns. Let's back up a second. A house must reflect the soul with castle-sized door knockers activity in the pantry walls that leap to the hands… I see I am moving away from my object but in order to contemplate it I must miniaturize it its circuits crossing the card and lighting, falling dark by evening. Look at the lights. Where's all that juice coming from? There's not a station around here for miles. Someone had better make it their business to see about that. All along I've been changing the details stuffing the book with anecdotes of the poodle high above the marbled bath… I wasn't sure what to forecast it was the noon of life a moment of choosing.
Many trees grew tall and turned to signage but I never forgot the future, even now I proceed painstakingly toward it in stockinged feet. I admire your fierce leaning on it. Really? It's all due to an editing error. I guess there are options, the things that crazy people cling to, and there is later to think it over, now to do it, if only in the sense of backing up against it, sinking into it, dying a little. You, at your most festive, barely quiver. I reach over in my sleep and pour the water on the floor. Young Nohejl at Naples How can property matter if I am not in the image of myself early and without relief pulled out the door by alarming winds whose hollows support the sounds of cans struck by falling water. The night is back with an elder blue. At the risk of reappraisal I am fencing off the stars, for though the name suggests a starling, it is used by any bird, as love is never honest or ambitious as seen by lovers settled down for battles. Loops of seagulls perform their noises, lulled to the rigidity of a mournful cop. Forever the cost of being human will be an affront to the means of being better as mysteriously as I repel you and am relieved.
Jacqueline Waters's first book of poems, A Minute without Danger, was recently published by Adventures in Poetry. She lives in New York City. "White Zombie" originally appeared in A Minute without Danger (Adventures in Poetry/ Zephyr Press, 2001).
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