The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Tue 6/2/2009)

[RetroLounge]

Third Premonition: rue des Petits Hôtels

The wallpaper flowers
looked like foxes, sharp
noses pointed down as if
they were climbing
to the floor, although
really they were twisted
stems to make bouquets. I
pressed my hands to your shoulders as if
they might have joined there: what
did this crying sound like
in the next room? I couldn't imagine us
past that wall. But when you embraced
me as if I were something to be carried
a long way; and when you rose
to dress in the bathroom
adjoining and the tap
water struck the porcelain
and you said
while shaving Don't
you know I
love you, why don't you know
I love you-I knew
what day it was; I knew
how the sleeves of my shirts
were folded inside the shirts I had folded
into my luggage; perhaps I could even have imagined
the concierge downstairs, his hand hovering
over the racks of room keys
like pawnshop watches...

Richard McCann

**************



Richard McCann has been instrumental in making poetry that speaks to the AIDS crisis and gay relationships. His work has been included in In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic and The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories. His most recent collection of poems, Ghost Letters, received the Beatrice Hawley prize and the Capricorn Poetry Award.

McCann’s poems narrate a haunted world. The titles of his collections, Ghost Letters, Dream of the Traveler, and Nights of 1990, point to this poignant mixture of presence and absence, of imagination and fierce, unblinking reality. Poet Jean Valentine writes, “Richard McCann writes not about, but from, his losses. We listen to his ghosts and they are ours also.”

While the evocation of memory and death fills McCann’s poems with phantoms, both personal and cultural, they are undeniably focused on the body. Fiercely passionate and deeply elegiac, his poems are, as Mark Doty writes, “posted from the zone where mortality and desire intersect.”

McCann also has a deeply rooted sense of place. He was born in Maryland and has spent the majority of his life in the mid-Atlantic region, co-editing Landscape and Distance: Contemporary Poets from Virginia. Currently, he lives in Washington D.C., where he co-directs the Creative Writing Program at American University.


**************

:hi:

RL

[BlueIris]

1. I keep meaning to read, "In the Company of My Solitude."

But I haven't yet.

[RetroLounge]

2. I just bought "ghost letters" tis weekend.

Amazing stuff.

He's a really nice guy, and his reading this weekend was pretty damn good too...

:hi:

RL

[blueraven95]

3. morning!

:hi:

Are you still at the poetry workshop or is it over?

[RetroLounge]

4. Morning. I'm back in town, at work

:(

But I did manage to post a poem each day I was gone...

:hi:

RL

[blueraven95]

5. was it a productive workshop?

I kept missing your poems - and then not thinking to check your journal :dunce:

[RetroLounge]

7. Yeah, it was amazing and productive

I have 5 new first drafts to work on now.

I was definitely "in the zone."

:hi:

RL

[blueraven95]

9. awesome!

:bounce:

[Tuesday Afternoon]

6. &

:donut: :hi:

[RetroLounge]

8. ...

:hi:

RL