Widowhood
(from Notebook Mar 2022 – June 2024)
Why do I use journal page numbers as poem titles?
Journal writing has a quality of gesture and presence fundamentally unlike anything from a keyboard. For example I am instantly brought back to my mother's memory when I see a fragment of her handwriting, although she died 20 years ago. I like to honor the delicate thread connecting floating thought, physical gesture, and phrase. Referencing a piece of handwriting in a poem places the poem in that context and opens it up to life as it unfolds. Using a page number as poem title asserts that the lived context (and its handwriting) is not a ghost. It undoes a little of the abstraction of language while giving the poem a tenderness that comes from mortality.
As for how the pieces came about, I find that I can see the poem in the journal writing after a passage of some time (at least a year, or 20 years or more). It sort of jumps out. I recognize it. Then I need to do some extracting and polishing. This process has a quality of found rather than asserted intention which I prefer to work with.
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page 154
My own company is delicate fleece.
As sound turns in its socket,
I enter the long syllable
hall. Then a soft flattening,
a pancake purr, as speech
moves through the whole body.
When it withdraws, just
fibers are left over.
Someone rattles a dry gourd.
page 150
The poetry ladies advance
in phalanx.
A collection of unruly spirits
practicing their word.
Fillers, spillers, sassy skirts.
They have pranced with horses.
How did I evaporate
into a mist everyone walks through?
Just now the curious
snails & shrimps
located in my back muscles
have begun to travel.
Such interesting things happen
beyond the horizon
of pain.
page 159
Once was hawk
In a dream. High up I rose
as the scroll
of the land revealed itself.
I found my people
at the place after fire.
A place sufficient
for small creatures
but not for us.
As we were told, a storyteller
came through.
But he wouldn’t leave.
He convulsed in his tears.
A man named Salmon dug
up food that had been buried
under a cairn.
All that we could eat
existed.
Much walking in silence.
Someone found a gate and held it open.
The old perfection
of forms called us.
We have the vigor
of equivalence. Will build
a city from scraps of cloth.
Camille Roy is a writer of fiction, poetry, and plays. Her fiction collection Honey Mine was published by Nightboat in 2021. Previous works include Sherwood Forest, a book of poetry and prose from Futurepoem, and Cheap Speech, a play from Leroy Chapbooks, as well as Swarm (two novellas, from Black Star Series). She co-edited Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative, a book of essays by writers on their own experimental prose practices published by Coach House Books. Earlier books include The Rosy Medallions from Kelsey St. Press and Cold Heaven from Leslie Scalapino’s O Books. Recent work has appeared in Baest #9 and The Swan's Rag (Issue 5, Dirty Swan Projects). More information can be found at https://www.camilleroy.me/.