Edward Smallfield : Elizabeth Robinson (Inventory)

 from Report from the Robinson Society, Vol. 1, No. 1

 

 

 

 

When I think of Elizabeth Robinson, I think of her amazing and unique work as a poet, of the EtherDome chapbook series, of the many young poets that Elizabeth has introduced to the world, and of the middle-aged and older poets she has supported. I think of innumerable readings and reading series that Elizabeth has curated, of her work as a teacher of writing, of her work with the unhoused, and of her current ministry. I think of my many, many conversations with Elizabeth about poetry—conversations driving across the Bay Bridge, in cafes and restaurants, in rooms and classrooms and backyards. My conversations with Elizabeth are not important (except to me, and to me they are priceless), but those conversations are multiplied and multiplied by the many, many poets to whom Elizabeth has meant so much. Elizabeth means and has meant so much to so many people—so many of us have benefited from her endless generosity of spirit, and her bottomless and abiding love of poetry, and of everything connected with poetry. To end, I want to return to where I began—more than anything else, what matters is Elizabeth’s amazing and unique work, which has touched and changed so many people, and will continue to work magic far into the future. Elizabeth, thank you, thank you for everything.

 

 

 

 

Edward Smallfield is the author of to whom it may concern, equinox, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (a book-length collaboration with Doug MacPherson), and The Pleasures of C. He is also the author of several chapbooks, most recently a journal of the plague year from above/ground press. His poems have appeared in Barcelona INK, Denver Quarterly, e-poema.eu, Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, Páginas Rojas, talking about strawberries all the time, Touch the Donkey, where is the river: a poetry experiment, and many other magazines and websites. He is a coeditor at parentheses and at Apogee Press. He has participated in poetry conferences in Delphi, Paou, Paros, and Sofia, and lives in Barcelona with his wife, the poet Valerie Coulton.

Edward Smallfield : short takes on the prose poem

folio : short takes on the prose poem

 

 

 

 

My Love Affair with the Prose Poem

My love affair with the prose poem was like any other love affair: intense and life changing. I grew up with the line as the essential unit of poetry. If others were writing prose poems and I enjoyed reading them, that had nothing to do with me. Then I found myself stuck and so desperate that I began to take creative writing classes. A teacher told me to write a prose poem, and I managed to eke out a few stranded sentences, not even a paragraph. It was like having sex for the first time—soon I was writing nothing but prose poems. My friends told me that I was addicted to the prose poem, and that I needed to kick the habit. Because the form was new to me, I had no idea what I was doing—always the best predicament for writing poetry. The prose poem and I had an affair, not a marriage, but we’ve never entirely broken it off—we still get together from time to time when the occasion feels right. That’s why I’m thrilled to see poets dedicating themselves to the prose poem, and also thrilled to see poets writing prose poems along of the other options for poetry—because chaos and disorder are always more fertile than the quest for perfection.

 

 

 

 

Calluses

My grandmother was a gardener. I remember planting a bulb with her. I remember the whiteness of the bulb, the darkness of the earth, the heat of the sun. This is a real memory, not something I was told, and therefore it has no context, except that I must have been very young. Oddly, I don’t remember my grandmother’s hands. I was going to say that her palms were calloused from working in the earth. That can’t have been true—she was an elegant woman, in spite of her old country accent, and I’m sure she wore gloves. Of course my mother never worked in the garden. The calluses belonged to my father, along with the grease embedded in the whorls of his fingers, the tattoos of his trade.

 

The Right to Bear Arms

In the thriller the hunter measures powder into a shell, the first step in making a cartridge. I knew a man who made cartridges. My closest childhood friend. A friendship that persisted through adolescence and perhaps beyond, because no one knows when those bonds finally loosen and dissolve. I remember the call informing me of his death, from my ex-wife, who didn’t know who he was. My aunt had called because she knew that the loss would be significant for me. I felt that I had escaped. A cartridge maker. A hunter. I was from a hunting family, and we hunted together, in a large group, with my father and my uncles and their friends. August heat in September. Trudging the charred hills, the slopes slick with oak leaves. He loved what I hated. Hunting, rifles. A pool of blood on the garage floor, the skin stripped in a single piece and discarded. Hard now to think of his life—his father regressed from incompetence and inability to hold a job into diagnosed mental illness and an institution. Of course we never talked of those things. As I write these sentences I realize again that I escaped from something.

 

La primavera

For many months I haven’t touched or looked at these pages. What I remember of what I’ve written is jumbled and vague, and the rules of engagement preclude re-reading. What I’m most sure of is that I wrote far too much, and became completely lost in what I was writing. One way to experience the forest is to see nothing but trees: oak, ash, elm. I know that writing is a process in which history surrenders to language, and my characters—‘my mother,’ ‘my father,’ ‘I’—inhabit these pages, and ‘bear no resemblance’ etc. What remains is a process of severe subtraction. I wanted to make a work of art by erasure. I find myself sitting at a transparent table writing in a notebook with a pen on a spring afternoon. Not early spring, not late spring, not mid-spring. Deep spring. Above the city, an endless sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edward Smallfield is the author of to whom it may concern, equinox, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (a book-length collaboration with Doug MacPherson), and The Pleasures of C. He is also the author of several chapbooks, most recently a journal of the plague year from above/ground press. His poems have appeared in Barcelona INK, Denver Quarterly, e-poema.eu, Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, Páginas Rojas, talking about strawberries all the time, Touch the Donkey, where is the river: a poetry experiment, and many other magazines and websites. He is a coeditor at parentheses and at Apogee Press. He has participated in poetry conferences in Delphi, Paou, Paros, and Sofia, and lives in Barcelona with his wife, the poet Valerie Coulton.

Edward Smallfield : Notes from the Field : Stranger in a Strange Land

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poets live in language, and living in a country where the language is different from the poet’s mother tongue creates an interesting dynamic. Like everything in the practice of writing, what unfolds is specific and individual, never generic. A part of that process is the poet’s effort to maintain a connection with new work in the language in which her/his work originates.

I’ve always believed that poets have to be solipsistic in their reading, looking for work that feeds their writing, and paying no attention to work that doesn’t engage them, however objectively marvelous that other work might be. Anything I say will be completely idiosyncratic, a personal confession, and nothing more.

My wife (the poet, Valerie Coulton) and I have lived in Barcelona for about 19 years, so our distance connection with North American poetry has evolved over time. I said I would be idiosyncratic, and idiosyncrasy often involves rule breaking. I have to confess that one of my main channels of connection with new writing has been and continues to be publications from above/ground press, periodicities, Touch the Donkey, and rob mclennan’s blog. rob connects with such a wide range of poetry (not the entire range, but a wider bandwidth than my own) that I have to call attention to his publications even though this piece will be published on periodicities. I especially want to mention two new chapbooks from above/ground press: how to count to ten by Kevin Varrone and Autobiography by rob himself.

The second broken rule will be nepotism. Valerie’s new project palabrosa fascinates me. The project is only online: https://www.palabrosa.net. Valerie has posted two original chapbooks, Memory Yard by Stephen Hemenway and Three Efforts at Arrival and a Series of Departures by Elizabeth Robinson. A third chapbook, A Woman Reflected by Barbara Tomash, will arrive soon. Each of these poets has a unique voice, and the three voices are in an intense conversation with each other. Valerie also posted some translations from the Catalan poet Joan Brossa’s book Joan Brossa Made Me. Brossa’s work is almost completely unknown in North America, and these few translations would be a way to enter the fascinating labyrinth of his work.

Publishing the work of other poets is a wonderful way to engage with new poetry, and more poets should try publishing work by others. There are many more interesting poems waiting to be published than there are venues to publish them, so there is no lack of supply. With two amazing coeditors, Emilie Delcourt and Harriet Sandilands, Valerie and I collaborate on a magazine in Barcelona called parentheses. We publish work in English from both sides of the Atlantic, and we always include a number of Spanish and Catalan writers in each issue, so hopefully the issues are diverse (or a mess, as some might say). The engagement with the work of others constantly pushes us to keep our own work fresh. I also continue to work as an editor at Apogee Press, where I have learned so much over the years from the wonderful poets that we’ve published. So, poets—get to work! Start publishing the work of other poets. It’s a wonderful adventure.

I do want to mention one other press, Nightboat Books. They consistently publish astonishing work. I would especially note Cole Swensen’s Art in Time, published last year, and Tiff Dressen’s Of Mineral, which will appear later this year.

          There is another conversation about the way the local language begins to influence the work of a foreign writer. Because Barcelona is bilingual, two languages are involved, Catalan and Spanish. But that is another story, for another time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edward Smallfield is the author of to whom it may concern, equinox, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (a book-length collaboration with Doug MacPherson), and The Pleasures of C. He is also the author of several chapbooks, most recently a journal of the plague year from above/ground press. His poems have appeared in Barcelona INK, Denver Quarterly, e-poema.eu, Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, Páginas Rojas, talking about strawberries all the time, Touch the Donkey, where is the river: a poetry experiment, and many other magazines and websites. He is a coeditor at parentheses and at Apogee Press. He has participated in poetry conferences in Delphi, Paou, Paros, and Sofia, and lives in Barcelona with his wife, the poet Valerie Coulton.

 

Edward Smallfield : about a journal of the plague year

 

 

 

When I first heard the word “coronavirus,” my wife Valerie and I were visiting the San Francisco Bay Area, where we lived for many years before we moved to Barcelona. So much was happening; readings, visits with family and old friends, the good fortune of cool luminous spring days with everything in bloom. And, at the same time, in the media and in conversations, a developing sense of what coronavirus might mean to us.

When I travel, I usually write poems in a notebook, which is also what I do at home. I tend to think of the travel poems as “the London poems” or “the Mexico City poems” or “the Berkeley poems.” Last year, though, when we returned to Barcelona from the US, I realized that there would be a continuity between the travel poems and the “at home” poems because of the pandemic.

Whatever I wrote—on whatever subject—became (for me) a kind of journal of the epidemic because the effects of the virus were pervasive enough to color every experience. That included my dreams: one of the projects that I started to work on was “night void messages,” which involved writing my dreams as clearly and accurately as possible (even though many of them seemed to have nothing to do with the virus).

The other project, “meditations in an emergency,” (a title stolen from Frank O´Hara’s great book Meditations in an Emergency) had a more explicit connection with Covid 19. One of my habits is writing in public: cafes, park benches, and any other locations that seem possible. Then Barcelona was completely locked down. Cafes were closed, and, if I had started writing on a bench, a cop would have asked me to move on. So I started writing on our balcony, which had the advantage of being the same and different. The weather was different, and the action in the street and on the other balconies, and I could pay attention to those things or to what was in my head, and the virus could come into the writing directly, or not.

When rob generously gave me opportunity to do a chapbook, I was thrilled to be able to put some of the those poems together. What a gift it was to be able to collect poems from a moment in that moment! Of course the title had to be a journal of the plague year—because this isn’t our first plague, and won’t be our last.

 

 

 

 

Edward Smallfield is the author of The Pleasures of C, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (with Doug MacPherson), equinox, and to whom it may concern. He is also the author of several chapbooks: locate (with Miriam Pirone) and lirio and anonymous (both with Valerie Coulton) and, most recently, americana (from above/ground press). His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, e-poema.eu, Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, Páginas Rojas, parentheses, Parthenon West Review, talking about strawberries all the time, where is the river: a poetry experiment, 26, Wicked Alice, and many other magazines and websites. He has participated in poetry conferences in Delphi, Paou, Paros, and Sofia, and lives in Barcelona with his wife, the poet Valerie Coulton.