Carrie Lorig | 3rd Annual Poetry Contest Winner, Issue 6.1
Reading: Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian (Wesleyan University Press) + Motherlover, Ginger Ko (Bloof Books) | Currently on page: Pg. 106 of Spicer (This page has a photo on it which is always a delight. Was Spicer actually ugly? I don’t think so.) + Pg. 71 of Ginger’s Book (There is a picture of a new moon on this page!) | Favorite line so far: “The search for the perfect poem had been meaningless, because ‘there is no single poem.’ Poems belong together, in a book; inside a book they talk to each other, make love with each other, interact as words do inside the syntax of a sentence. ‘Poems should echo and reecho against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can.'” -“The Whole Boon of His Fertility” + “I have felt so much with these crusts.” -“Treespeak”| Books’ origins: Ginger very kindly gave me her book at a reading she did in ATL. This is the second time I’ve read it and have been thinking of how I can write about it. She’s just a really lovely / powerful / feeling person. Did you read her essay at The Offing? That + these poems in Motherlover have been churning in mind / building a cave + a crystal. I like Spicer and do read him often, but the Jack Spicer biography is something I’m reading more by chance. I read it on my lunch breaks while walking and before I go on an evening run after work (I hurt my wrist and can only run at the moment and ugh, sort of hate it). My husband was reading it on the plane to Ohio and sometimes I like to choose to read whatever he / or someone else is reading. As a reader, I’ve never been very interested in loyalty / lineage / following time or the dots. I do often let books come to me / I study it all / I’m always reading many things when I’m in the midst of writing. Gathering books to you / gathering poetry to you seems physically impossible. I would rather be surrounded by voices than try to gather them? So, I go another way. Books are impossibly wild beings. My friend Jared just sent me a manuscript that has a scroll named Jenny inside of it! I’ve also been thinking, while holding this Spicer pumpkin, I will read v. intensely for a year or two after I finish my second book. I would like to lay down in the Boiling Forest.
meg willing | Assistant Production Editor / Designer
(re)Reading: Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle | Currently on page: 91 | Favorite lines so far: “The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.” | Book’s origin: I can’t for the life of me remember how this book arrived in my life—but it arrived and keeps arriving / I return and keep returning.
Gigantic Sequins 