© 2023 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
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Recently, I had the pleasure of hearing Gwen Frost read at the Jefferson Market Library in collaboration with other poets who are published by Broadstone Books, a small press in Kentucky, whose owner, Larry Moore, publishes many New York poets and was there in person to introduce them.
Although Gwen Frost is from Oregon, she happened to be in town, and was able to join the New Yorkers. She is a poet who knows her poems so well, she can recite them, and though they conjure up some ugliness and dread, they are also beautiful.
Reading Self-Imposed Exile later, I thought about the end of the world, the end of myself, the end of life as I know it. And I thought about Rimbaud whose words can also make the ugly beautiful. It is part of the craft that I admire. It’s important to remember that the end also begins. Poetry always holds that promise.
In the Vimeo that follows, as you listen to Gwen Frost read some of her poems, you will understand what I am talking about. Enjoy.
Here is an excerpt from a poem in Self-Imposed Exile called “The Big Ugly.”
My teeth carve themselves into fangs,
dripping from sinking
into the flesh of words
whittled into weapons,
stabbing at figures I feel moving in the dark
……………………………………………………………… drip
………………………………………………………….. .. drip
………………………………………………………. ……drip
Here is a poem called
Passengers
The bile of my gut sprayed into a limerick across the pavement
The wind crawls like a sob
Tracking the meadowlark
as she hurls her body into the dying sun.
I erase the lines of her silhouette with my finger.
I let her borderless body become lost pieces of paper.
Without form, distinction reveals its own mediocrity.
The wind holds her breath like a question:
………………………………..Is it possible to come back from this?
I was falling before my feet left the ledge.
And here I will end with the beginning of another poem, the first three stanzas, that begins with a compassionate look at a bug that many would squash, but not the poet:
I’d Rather Blame God
There’s a bug on me,
crawling, exploring the dunes of my hand,
whispering into the indentured crevasses of wrinkle.
I intend to plan a better world for this bug,
to dollop the Great Lakes in the pocket of my thumb and pointer,
the skin once webbed in my past frog lives.
Of this intimate touching,
I am proffered a world of my choosing
to give unto this individual.
Self-Imposed Exile is published by Broadstone Books. You can check it out here:
